CYCLE THIRTY-ONE

1. The Biblical proverb about taking the beam out of one's own eye before addressing the mote in that of another's ... would seem to be directed, in effect, at those who are more objective than subjective in their sensual and/or sensible orientations, and more inclined, in consequence, to have a beam than a mote (of immorality) in their eye.

2. In general terms, this would apply to females to a greater extent than to males, since the former are by (un)nature more disposed, through fire and water, to the objective aspects of life than the latter, whose intrinsic bias towards vegetation and air makes them correspondingly more subjective, and hence less disposed, one would imagine, to the cultivation of a beam than a mote (of immorality).

3. Yet there are peoples who are more female, overall, than male in their ideological, ethical, or other orientations, and one would have to say that the chances of such peoples cultivating a beam rather than a mote in their eye must be pretty high, in fact so high as to effectively preclude them from being able to acknowledge the mote in the eye of their principal critics or adversaries by dint of the moral blindness to which they have been brought, compliments of the beam (of immorality) to which they unreflectively and uncritically subscribe in consequence of too objective a disposition.

4. Undoubtedly the British are such a people, as, to an even greater extent, are the Americans, whose beam is somewhat larger, stronger, and more morally damaging, in view of their greater bias towards noumenal objectivity, as symbolized by the stars on their flag, and superheathen disposition, in consequence, to glorify the stellar aspect of the Cosmos in due superfeminine fashion.

5. There is even less subjective reflectivity where America is concerned than in Britain, and one can only conclude that their ability to identify the mote in the eye of their principal detractors will be correspondingly impaired by the degree to which the beam of noumenal objectivity is given free rein to do its damnedest.

6. The dominant trend of Western civilization in recent centuries has been to regress from water to fire, as from chemical realism to metachemical materialism, feminine good to diabolic evil, giving to doing, and no greater paradigm for this trend exists than that of Anglo-American civilization, the latter-day heathenistic equivalent of Graeco-Roman civilization, with America taking over from Britain the so-called leadership of the Western world.

7. For all its democratic ideals and show of religious piety, America remains fundamentally a barbarous country which worships fire through doing, where Britain, its more civilized counterpart, worshipped - and to some extent still worships - water through giving.

8. One of the most conspicuous examples of the extent to which America worships fire through doing or, rather, acting ... is in the so-called American Dream, which is effectively that of the film industry, based in Hollywood, and its relentless commitment to a plethora of ever-more explosive and/or expressive movies.

9. One cannot pretend that America could be substantially different than it is, since, like any country on earth, America is partly conditioned by climatic and environmental factors which determine its lifestyle, so to speak.

10. The stripes on the American flag strike me as symbolizing, in their red horizontality, a hot or fiery water, such that is the consequence, in no small degree, of the starry cosmos which reigns over it as its metachemical precondition - fire leading to water, as the Devil to woman.

11. Despite its macho pretensions, America is really more female than Britain, in that its objectivity tends to take a predominantly noumenal rather than phenomenal turn, in keeping with the superheathen reign of brightness, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty and other such superfeminine icons, at the expense of the heathen darkness of watery femininity, a darkness more 'Old World' and, in particular, English than American.

12. Yet starry brightness corresponds to the evil of noumenal objectivity, and is thus a metachemical regression from the watery darkness of phenomenal objectivity, corresponding, by contrast, to chemical goodness.

13. Where the objectivity of evil and good are concerned, it is America which stands closest to the one and Britain to the other, though both are somewhat short, in their female bias, of folly and wisdom, and thus of the possibility not of brightness and darkness, diabolic and feminine, but of heaviness and lightness, masculine and divine.

14. For a drift from masculine folly to divine wisdom, taking to being, if in sensual as opposed to sensible terms overall, one would have to switch one's attention from Britain and North America to, say, Spain and South America, since the latter continent is less given to the brightness of North American noumenal objectivity than to the lightness of South American noumenal subjectivity, including certain dances (tango, salsa, lambada) which typify the Latin alternative, in gravity-defying motions, to the horn-wielding glitter of American Jazz.

15. Thus if Britain, in its watery femininity, its speech-oriented parliamentarianism, led to the fieriness of North America, it cannot be denied that Spain, in its vegetative masculinity, its bull-slaying virility, led to the airiness of South America where, due to a variety of conditioning factors, the male aspect of life became more deeply entrenched than ever it was in Europe, and heaviness was duly eclipsed by lightness to an extent comparable to that by which darkness was eclipsed by brightness in North America.

16. The statue of Christ the Redeemer atop the Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro is the South American retort to the presence of the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in New York, and in this sculptural contrast is to be found the antithetical dispositions of the two continents for brightness and lightness, evil and wisdom, fire and air.

17. Such an antithesis would of course exist in a rather more phenomenal basis in Europe between the darkness of Britain and the heaviness of Spain, since it was from Europe that both the feminine and the masculine aspects of life gravitated to their respective noumenal resolutions in the 'New World'.

18. Some, in their ignorance, make the mistake of identifying darkness with evil and brightness with good, but, in actuality, nothing could be more contrary to the facticity of the matter.

19. Darkness is, in effect, objectively preferable to brightness, as woman to the Devil or purgatory to Hell or, in simple elemental terms, water to fire, but it is the brightness which, principally through America, reigns over the contemporary world and delusively hypes itself up as something morally desirable.

20. In actuality, neither goodness and evil nor water and fire are moral but equally or, rather, unequally immoral: the one phenomenally so, and the other in relation to a noumenal manifestation of objectivity.

21. In sartorial terms, one doesn't get beyond the dress or the skirt where evil and good are concerned, since one remains confined to female parameters in due objective fashion.

22. Goodness punishes crime, while crime 'flies in the face' of goodness as something that is demonstrably evil. In neither case have we entered the male realm of sin and grace, folly and wisdom, trousers and zippersuits, in due subjective vein. We have remained fixed, in effect, at an Anglo-American, as opposed to a Latin-American, level of civilization, where brightness and darkness, fire and water, are adjudged to be the correct yardstick by which truth, morality, God, etc., should be measured.

23. Nothing, of course, could be further from the case, but, then, each civilization works within certain parameters and seeks either to extend those parameters at the expense of other civilizations or, if subjective, to defend itself from the subversive encroachments or threats of irrelevant criteria as best it can.

24. We are of course generalizing, in each case, where both noumenal (New World) and phenomenal (Old World) alternatives are concerned, but such generalizations are far from fanciful, since drawn from specific facts which present themselves to us in the course of their historical unfolding.

25. Nothing is ever completely 'cut and dried', as they say, but neither are logically sustainable generalizations without philosophical significance in enabling us to better understand the world in which we live, whether as practically-minded participants or as theoretically-minded elucidators and ... philosophers.