LUDE:

It would appear that my initial apprehensions surrounding sexuality were purely derivative of the Collective Unconscious. May this weblog serve as a continued source of sexual liberation for men and women alike.

[({R.G.)}]

WHALE:

I’m talking about a monolithic, centralized media, overlooking a veritable wasteland of self-referential social networking, which cannibalizes its deeply forgetful culture memetically. I’m talking about the latest version of Microsoft Word, which I am using even at this moment to convey this to you, though it does not recognize the name Mirandola, and I speak also on behalf of those who seem to think that if I use the medium I owe some debt to it, rather than holding the entitlement for it to yield to MY intelligence. And I speak about a generation of students whose very school masters deny them access to true literature, who replace a library with computers, as though those kids didn’t already carry computers, of surpassing capability, within their pockets. Yes: I use the Internet. It’s how I publish nowadays. But what I have to say holds value, since I don’t confine myself to the mere mouthpiece of it. I take my cues from books, of course. The paper which a book is printed on contains the history of human culture; all the greats wrote their ideas on paper, to be READ on paper, rather than pored over as the blue light of a monitor burns holes into your brain like L.S.D. Heidegger is worth more than just a migraine; he is to be savoured in a dingy, dusty library among the sorts of tomes where his phenomenology found its conception. It is a tradition, and you cannot argue with tradition, not without appeal to yet another strain of that same common history. And you know what’s great about these books? They last. A single server goes down and you lose some terabytes of data. Maybe someday you will find a book upon the shelves. Maybe that book finds YOU. You do not Google it; you never knew about it. Yes: no algorithm but the Will of God provided it to you. And it was never forced upon you by a troll or radical. It was not sold to you; you simply FOUND it. And you read it; with that choice, you took responsibility for all its contents. It became you. It transformed you. And you broke out of yourself and your own echo chamber. Thus you saw to it that you were more than just the product of your social groups, a mere statistic to the advertising agencies which would manipulate your will. You accrued no viruses, no malware, and no hatred from its acquisition. You stayed with it; it stayed with you. All that changed was your Soul as you read it, over and over again, as Life transformed the both of you. Yet it was not some shady moderator censoring the pages, shadow-banning the author for his indecorous honesty about matters of deeply personal import. The publishers made sure of that. And in its constancy you found your own; and in its constancy you found YOURSELF.

I still recall Howard Beale raging about how so few Americans read books. Back in the seventies, the Internet was not a problem for us yet. You’d have to be daft as a fish to say he had the right to rage only because the Internet had not yet saved us. Even then, the radio had been a threat. Yes: even then, we were the fodder of the television set. You think I speak regressively? The men who knew the most of science in those times predicted that humanity would suffer, for they also knew of the humanities as well. Humanity, I tell you, hasn’t changed, except that it’s lost its own motivation to persist. The radio does little now; the Internet is our greatest danger. But since I am told it ate the World, consider this my broadcast from within the whale. At least I’ve salvaged that which the Great Beast has yet to have digested. And at least I might make palatable to the modern tongue the language of a distant decency. Do you know even where your indignation comes from? All the greats were those who wrote our ethics. How then do you dare to call them products of their time and place? No: in their books, we find the timeless. It is WE who, with each passing day, become far more generic and mechanical, confined to just the desert of the present moment, having lost our roots within the past, uncertain even what the future OUGHT to be, except that we might crave the novelty of it. WE are products of our time and place, but THEY had seen the future and the past. Their books accomplished what our Internet could not. It was because they took the time to write it down. I had a friend – an actor – who once said to me, deep in a late-night phone-call, that I spoke as if I wrote on paper. This was true. How did he know? He knew quite many things intuitively. He was an old Soul. He probably remembered his past lives. And once you’ve been around a few times on this circus wheel of Life, you scoff at modern “novelty”. And you return then to your novels, knowing they inform all that you do within the End Times we inhabit.

(Dm.A.A.)

ANT!PETERSON ONE:

Peterson argues that agreeable men tend to strive for win-win situations, whereas unagreeable men tend to produce win-lose situations wherein they are themselves the winners. It follows logically and cynically that human life is predominated, as in the works of Nietzsche and Steinbeck, by the unagreeable men who exploit the effeminate agreeableness of “beta men”. Yet, as per usual, Peterson focuses so intensely upon one angle that he misses the bigger picture. Consider, for instance, the role that Conscientiousness plays in win-win situations. Peterson panders to his neoconservative market (another part of his anti-Marxist pitfall) by defining conscientiousness within the extremely narrow (lacking in Openness) confines of “work ethic”. Yet by so doing he casts a curtain over the entire history of ethics. Traditionally, win-win situations promote the Greater Good, including Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, and deontologically speaking the pursuit of Good for the Other as Well as the Self remains consistent with the ideals of Social Justice, both inside and outside of the courtroom. Conscientious individuals might easily qualify their agreeableness by standing by their convictions, yet only to the extent that this does not risk substantial harm to the Other Party; in such a negotiation, they assume the Moral High Ground at the moment that their interlocutor attempts to overstep a boundary they hold sacred, and against the leverage provided by their values they manage to force the unagreeable egoist into a win-win situation, even if it means mitigating the winnings for the consequently compromised egoist. The only manner in which this enterprise fails is if the conscientious, agreeable person is somehow fooled into surrendering his (or her, though Peterson conveniently ignores the success of such women) stance. One method by which a manipulator might bypass the conscientious person is by accusing him of lacking Openness. (May the record show that this is a falsehood, since the conscientious person has the entire history of morality to avail himself of, whereas I have provided ample warrant to prove that Peterson lacks openness by ignoring the bulk of this history.) So long as the manipulator can PRETEND to understanding moral principles on a high context, he or she can challenge the authority of the conscientious man. Yet another attempt at manipulation comes about if the manipulator manages to pit conscientious against agreeableness. If the manipulator can somehow convince either his interlocutor or an “authoritative” third party that the conscientious man’s values (and largely unyielding insistence upon those values) in fact HARMS the manipulator, then in an attempt to PREVENT a win-lose situation in his own favour our hero will unwittingly produce a win-lose situation in the villain’s favour. We must only hope that most conscientious, open, and agreeable men are also discerning when it comes to con artistry, even if this renders them more jaded than they’d like to be or they deserve.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

WELLG:

Well: gee. Where do I begin? You worked deliberately to undermine me at the moment when I was closest to actualizing my goals of five years, the moment when I trusted you most. You tried to justify this by analogy to what happened five years prior, even though you were just as evasive and duplicitous back then. You accused ME of being evasive when you KNEW what you were doing to me. Not even five years had past since the injury, and you pretended that that time had rendered your affront irrelevant. Given the opportunity to square with me, you refused, though it would have served your client. You demonstrated that my one mistake was trusting you. And what had been your warrant? You appealed only to the basest and most treacherous, self-entitled instincts in human nature. You proved that anyone who had ever chosen to buy what you were selling was mistaken. Ultimately, you were loyal neither to our mutual associate nor to me. It was all an ego trip, a ruthless one at that. Neither your goods nor services were ever superior, and your marketing was sheerly underhanded. Tragedy followed in your wake. And you now judge ME?!

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

PREFERENCE:

ADM!TTANCE:

A great many women do not wish to admit that they find agreeableness in men unattractive, though of course they have an odd way of expressing this disbelief. Instead of encouraging us to adhere to what is most sacred in our Souls, to shelter it against a World that not only turns its nose up at kindness but which rewards barbarity, even treating kindness with suspicion, these women extrapolate from their own experiences to excess. They have no way of knowing what it is that drives any ONE woman to reject any ONE man, but they tend to presume, inexplicably, that that woman will have the same reasons as ANY woman. This is not only absolutist and authoritarian, but it is irrational as well. By making this presumption, a woman presumes that any man who is alone DESERVES to be that way. However, in my own experience, I must say that MOST women do not supply reasons at ALL, and for you to universalize your own reasons would be to lend them an excuse. Even if the principles which you appeal to could be more precious than Kindness, enough so that they might validate the AUTHENTICITY of Kindness and its rewards, it would be impossible for you to prove, as well as preposterous for you to presume, that in every instance wherein a man is rejected in SPITE of his kindness, (if not TO spite his kindness,) that it was HE who was at fault, for the sheer number of women who do not even CITE your universal reasons abstain from that entire discussion, so the generalization cannot even be proven true, nor to be applicable, on a case-by-case basis.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

Unsent Public Letter:

It’s high time I came clean with you. I should have realized that you would never have inferred that there had been a sentimental weakness underlying my attempts to keep this conversation going. You were unpresumptuous and analytical enough to dismiss our correspondence as an irreconcilable intellectual feud, and it was only natural for you to defend your own position against what you had presumed to be an ignorant viewpoint. Might I instead suggest that it was a more open but less disciplined one? I do not truly believe that, but it is nice to think that.

The truth is that I was among your many aesthetic admirers. Naturally, I avoided making this known so as not to fall into the trap of logocentrism, thereby yielding to your reductionistic, positivistic viewpoint. On a more fundamental level, I avoid making overt, conventional expressions of erotic affection so as not to be made an object of knowledge, hence probably causing confusion for an aspiring naturalist.

What it was that kept me coming back I cannot say for certain. Perhaps I couldn’t bring myself to think that you had been the selfish, narcissistic sort of person whom I first imagined myself to encounter. Eastern European women seldom appeal to me, (though the obverse tends to be true, inexplicably,) probably because I am myself of Eastern European birth. I must have suspected that I was addicted to the abuse with which I perceived you to treat me, though over time I forgave you for that. Peculiarly enough, even my attempts to disguise my identity quickly came unfurled. My only comfort was in knowing that you had bothered to remember me. That tipped me off that there was more to you than met the eye. Perhaps your inquisitive nature was motivated by a transcendental aim.

This aim I sought to unriddle. Multiple times I contacted you, in many guises, trying to present you as I saw you, in an attempt to make peace with you and with how you see yourself. Yet repeatedly you distanced yourself from me. I knew not why. Yet it is clear to me now: you still regard me as a rival of some sort. Instead of confessing to the emotional impact that your words had upon me, I continued to fight with you. It was not that I did not understand you. I just had not made this understanding understood.

Recently I saw you commend one of your followers for confessing to what he called a “crush”. I was taken aback not by his childish honesty but your equally childlike appreciation of it. It became apparent to me that you see the world in very simple, even naïve terms, and had I fit more neatly into your taxonomy of personality then I would have won your favour. This I cannot do. I’m not whatever you might think I am, at least not exclusively, nor will I be. Yet in exposing a more vulnerable side to myself I hope to reconcile.

P.S.: It’s funny, too. I look at pictures of you and I find myself thinking, “She is so gorgeous. How does she get around?” That might appear ironic to you; the conventional response is rather “how does she NOT get around?” But I acknowledge that in calling you “gorgeous” I only make a radically subjective claim which does not live up to your Science. I feel a desire which I know that even I cannot fulfill, and if even so strong a longing cannot be fulfilled, then how can yours, when you seem so serene and free of physical attachments?

It is good that I’ve had time to find my path over the last two years. My envy has abated, and my confidence directs me now. I hope that you will receive these words in the Spirit in which they were intended. Keep doing what you do, and keep smiling. I know not to accuse you of any further ignorance or evil. You are not a fearful person, unlike many.

The Strangest Text Conversation I Have Ever Read:

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

The GOOD L!FE:

Obviously, the defense of innocents against murder is never the expression of a partisan bias or an attempt to preserve some cozy and complacent state of privilege. Life is not a privilege, but a right, regardless of the extent to which one goes to preserve it in one’s self or other people, and even if an extremely comfortable life could be considered tantamount to murder in the context of more pressing matters, that would not justify retaliation without violating the most sacred principle of civilization: treating others’ Lives as values. Furthermore, the comfortable life, if lived in accordance with certain principles, might very well be the most modest and virtuous life, irrespective of the grandiosity of the means within which one might operate. In the absence of political certainty, martyrdom of any kind can turn to vainglory, and it follows logically and instinctively to suspect that happiness and peace of mind are symptoms not only of a clean conscience but of genuinely good behavior. Additionally, the entire question of what is to be regarded as good or bad, tragic or comic, imperative or negligible, requires a certain faculty of mind which is at once alert and relaxed, diligent yet receptive. The ethical principles governing such a life are Universal in the sense that anyone who can afford to live this way would probably choose to, and because the pursuit of this lifestyle is justifiable the lifestyle itself cannot be evil. It is embarrassing to the sane mind, therefore, to hear people denounce our rightful feelings of indignation in the wake of tragic violence, appealing to the delusion that our posture is a privileged one and that our intent is to exclude. One cannot rightfully and reasonably hate a man whom one wishes to become. If we show less sympathy for violence outside of our neighbourhoods, it is still a greater sympathy than the members of weaker neighbourhoods show one another, which is why we come to take for granted those tragedies which have become customary for those people, often by their own consent and veneration, though this does not, of course, excuse the matter either; it simply places the responsibility in the hands of those whom inhabit those same areas.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

Me vs. KOREA (South.)

Bong Joon Hu illustrates a world wherein moral hierarchy is directly paralleled and, in fact, determined by, socioeconomic hierarchy, hence lending each individual any number of excuses in a world devoid of either heroes or villains. The world I’ve been developing, modeled after the World as I see it, is predicated, conversely, and to the most decisive extent, upon the TENSION BETWEEN moral, social, and economic hierarchies. Being poor does not make you evil, nor does it render you unpopular by necessity, so it does not lend you an excuse, and neither does being rich warrant contempt and envy, unless of course YOU CHOOSE to abuse your station. Upward mobility might be according to the path of material and even spiritual acquisition, or it can be moral progress, ascesis, self-sacrifice, and personal purification. Hence mine is an existentialist world of decisions and particulars, details which correspond to underlying archetypes which are only revealed when you have earned that revelation. Conversely, Bong’s world is a postmodern world of excuses, emotions, and instinctive drives, unregulated by Reason. Mine is not the step back, however, but the reaffirmation of an everlasting autonomy and responsibility which many great sages knew would be obscured in our age, and I mean to depict it within the medium and, to some extent, the sensibility of the present. It is a synthesis of parts that had been scattered, like Osiris, for us to find and to put back together. Such is the Truth, as well as Goodness, Beauty, and all other Transcendent Values.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

A First Response to Parasite:

https://allpoetry.com/poem/15090908--Class-does-not-stab---by-spontation51

By far, the evilest villain in the film Parasite turns out to have been the patriarch of the parasitic family. Not only does he do nothing to stop his family from committing the original con, acting as far less than the stoic source of moral fortitude and equanimity which his initial character foil, Mr. Park, exhibits, but his profound envy for this gentleman sparks a neurosis which, over a very short time, escalates into the most senseless act of murder. It is by no mistake that the two men wear the feathers of Native Americans at the climax of the film, for what they represent is that rage which, either robbed of civilizing grace or having never seen it, lashes out with infantile destruction at the alien world of wealth and sophistication. What the patriarch of the parasitic family represents is self-entitlement, expressed as the raw will to destroy that which it desires. Mr. Kim wants to live Mr. Park’s life; he even goes so far as to covet the wife. Yet it is his negligence, his heavy-handed arrogance, one alien to seasoned criminals, (the likes of which we see in Breaking Bad, for instance, or even Death Note,) that dooms his family, for when they have the perfect opportunity to plan their grand ascension to the plane of wealth instead they waste it, pilfering the secrets of their hosts, intoxicating themselves in a manner only native to the unaristocratic. They know neither the reserve to leave the door unanswered when the old housekeeper comes to knock, nor do they feel the shame and the disgust which would in such a matter warrant sympathy for her and her husband. It is because they fail to answer for their sins against the family, creeping about within the dark, that Kim bears witness to the act of love between Park and his blushing wife. Park and his wife are also envious, their act of love modeled after some fantasy of rundown life, but it’s a fantasy that has been planted by the daughter of the Kims, and they do nothing but to act it out in what they falsely think is privacy. The Parks are kind enough to hide their civilized disgust when they discover panties in the back of their own car, and it is nothing short of this that lands the parasitic patriarch his gig at the expense of someone younger and more qualified, if not yet “needy”, so to speak. Yet how can this Mr. Kim deplore them for what they should say in privacy? It is offense to which he only walks by his own secret path, rather than a directed insult. What he hates is not what his host DOES, but rather what the host PERCEIVES, and in that rests the seeds of a psychosis, for the narcissist, refusing to perceive his own foul stench, hates most the thought that others turn their noses up at it behind his back. It is for this reason that Mr. Kim winds up living down in the crawlspace, in the place of the same maniac who nearly killed his son and stabbed the hosts nearly to death. It seems that all is lost during the struggle between the recluse and the Kims’ son, but as it turns out it’s the early victim who will live to tell the tale. At that moment when the ritual of decency is interrupted by an act of madness, Mr. Park behaves the most responsibly, lifting the car keys from beneath the carcass of the man who nearly killed his wife and child. There is no question at this moment that Park is the Better Man, but as the stench of his assailant fills his nostrils Mr. Kim is so reminded of this stark superiority between them that he is possessed, as if by Cain, to kill the father right before the wife. Kim’s wife and son survive, but at that moment the Parks’ lives are over, where before there had been yet a feeble hope at dignity and even healing. Let us not forget that all of this went on without the Park’s say-so or knowledge; they had no idea, thinking themselves kind. Their one sin was living that one life which all the others wanted; their one error was permitting others even partial access to this life. A rational man would rejoice, knowing that at least someone kindly had been able to enjoy what he was yet to know. Yet madness works in other ways. Kim’s lust for “simple” Mrs. Park is clear when he first holds her hand, and hearing Mr. Park fondle her breast and all the while denounce his stink engenders jealousy the likes of which not even I can fathom. A True Man would sooner have confessed to all his sins in that one moment than to let the ruse go on. But the coward had no recourse but to crawl back into poverty, a circumstance that would arouse our sympathy but not our solidarity, for in that moment it was chosen by the victim. Kim had the capacity for murder then, but he had not the plan to do so, leaving it up to his son’s device. The women in the family, by this point, came to recognize the lodgers underground as equals, where before their senseless rivalry for ample resources had doomed them nearly to exposure. Yet the lies the daughter wove came back to haunt them, for just as the ladies of the family were ready to thus offer up their peace, the lady of the Parks came carrying a cake which had been baked not just to celebrate the birthday of her son but to help him to cope with trauma, a trauma fabricated by the Kims. It’s in this moment that their son tries to murder the lodgers, all for wanting what he had, just as his father kills their host for having only what they wanted. Hence the madman becomes the latter foil.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

SMASH!NG: a Public Letter.

I was reading up on some of my favourite bands and songwriters while listening to Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins. As the album came to a serene close, I was finishing the article on Rob Thomas. I’d read fans rave about his upbringing and lifestyle, but I wouldn’t believe it until I saw it on Wikipedia; so much for ethos. I know I told you that the first Matchbox 20 album is one of my top five. Recently I’ve had to defend this against the perceived accusation (to my mind) of its heteronormative themes. The truth is that it was simply a very personal album by an extremely passionate Aquarian man. Yet it was not long thereafter that he met the woman who would be his wife of twenty years. She inspired the song “Smooth”, amidst many others. You have heard these; I can guarantee you this. Growing up on the Lower East Coast, it would have been inevitable.

One peculiarly Aquarian thing that Rob said, which I recall having read some time recently, was this:

“Each of us has a short ride on this earth and as long as we stay in our lane, and don't affect someone else's ride, we should be allowed to drive as we see fit.”

It’s ironic, isn’t it?

He said this in defense of same-sex marriage. And he pretty much summed up your cult.

By “cult”, I don’t mean in the sense of what I followed after my girlfriend broke up with me. I mean it as something which is not “culture” YET. Something which has to sit out, ferment like a fungus, and then turn to cheese. Which is what most of Rob’s songs sound like to his harshest critics.

This is the theme in my work at present: that any relationship between any two people, whether it is professional or personal, or both or even neither, renders lanes of independence utterly impossible. Everything you do, with anyone, effects multiple people, ultimately Everyone, in the grand sense, I think, in ways that you cannot imagine. Yet, despite the inexplicability of such developments, far greater is therefore the burden which must fall upon us in how we treat others. Yet this cannot be accounted for by merely trends in fashion, by controls put on behavior, or by sheer emotion.

Now: the Pride Movement aspires to preserve its goals by employing Liberal Individualism. What it does, as I see expressed by your own example, is that it promotes emotivism in the privatization of Public Life. It attempts to erect tunnels in which individuals might pursue “their own lanes”, though this is in fact a Tunnel of Love, admitting only two consensual pairings at once.

What it achieves by this is negative. It leaves nothing by which to decide which pairings one OUGHT to enter into. It yields too much to emotion, condemning emotion to an expression which only Reason can refine. And it puts all of this in place of what is called “Ethics”.

This is what you made clear to me when you suggested that I was never the more qualified partner, either to you or to Alanna, nor the dozens of other women who caught my attention over the last ten years. It is also what you imply when you employ “entitlement” not as synonymous with “virtue” or “standing” but rather in the clinical, amoral sense of a personal feelings which others are at liberty (and all too often encouraged) to disregard.

And let me be quite clear:

That change is nothing to be Proud of.

It is regressive, plainly and simply.

All progress comes not causally out of the Past, the domain of emotional conditioning, but rather it is pulled towards the Future, the domain of imperative action and moral teleology. These terms, if they appear abstract, are in fact far more rooted in both common sense and physical evidence than the relatively recent advent of post-structural theory which informs Pride.

To your mind, you are living in your lane, accompanied by only those who willingly would stand beside you, with whom you would just as willingly cohort, yet this mere confluence of wills is but the product of a gamble.

How?

And also:

WHY?

In my opinion, this sort of life is the most reprehensible.

I cannot stand for it, and neither can I stand beside it passively.

It’s not just that I have a personal investment in proving otherwise.

It is that you have irreparably harmed me and my interests according to it.

You cannot abandon me to such a fate.

One way or another, I will restore moral order to my life. And I hope to do so to your own as well. Power is all that has been left for me. You left it up to chance.

Yet I can do so in a manner which is both dignified and subtle. I simply wish to shatter your illusions of my own perceived obscurity. I’m well aware that you see through me. Yet I doubt that you see me, for you’re too busy looking past what I present.

All lives are interconnected. Liberal individualism cannot excuse us. Its direct result is a hell worse than Fascism: a state wherein arbitration and emotion alone decide policy, and emotion itself is decided by the consent of others, hence informed only by majoritarian mobs of unconscientious people answering only to themselves.

I have shown you but a glimpse of the effect that this has upon a disenfranchised heterosexual mind. You can offer me no security in such a paradigm, and you know this to be true. You only offer my oppressors excuses to carry out their narcissistic enterprises, often to their own demise. You only let them blame the victim, for I never knew how to pursue my own ends by their means. The pursuit of your inclusion leads to my exclusion. All my narcissism and psychosis has been an attempt to adapt to these monsters.

For that, I forgive you.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

BETTER CALL CHUCK:

To this day, Charles McGill remains the one heroic character in Better Call Saul. Jimmy ought to have been utterly subservient to him. The man was the personification of virtue, the very avatar of both the Spirit and the Word of the Law, surpassing his brother in every imaginable field. The accusations against him hold absolutely no warrant, and what follows his untimely demise only serves to corroborate his fears. I need not defend him, for there is nothing to defend him against, and in the defense of all he represented he has spoken unassailably. I relate to him, because he represents all which I see within myself, once I consider the mistakes that others made when they ought to have simply followed my instructions.

Dm.A.A.

AFOR!ZMA:

A good actor forgets his Audience.

A Great Writer spites his.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

RE!NBEAU:

You see, I used to think I was an ally of the Pride Movement, and then I realized it did not represent me.

You see: I think a lot about symbols; the more they recur, the more fervent my curiosity. The rainbow flag: now what’s that all about? I had a pretty good idea back in my youth. The rainbow is a SPECTRUM. And it’s BEAUTIFUL. When light breaks down, it comes in streams of vivid hues and frequencies, only a fraction of which we can see. 

And that’s US. Every human being rests upon a rung within the spectrum. Not a hierarchy, but a multiplicity.

Well, now: you can imagine how crestfallen I was then to recognize that not a single colour on that flag was mine. MY sexuality remained irrelevant to THEM, the preachers of INCLUSION. And how come? To THEIR minds, MY sexuality is a walk in the park in daylight hours. At first, this motivates them. It moves them to improve their station in Life. It makes them feel entitled to the privilege which *I* enjoy.

But it’s a lie. And they can’t handle that fact. They need to believe they’re stealing back what’s rightfully theirs. But it was never even MINE.

MOST love stories are tragedies. Sexuality itself is one of the murkiest of territories given by Nature; homophobia is but one of innumerable attempts to tame the Beast. I’ve been single for ten years, celibate for twenty-nine, and I would like to say that it’s just for a lack of trying, but it isn’t.

Now: if you PRESUME upon my FAULT in matters of the flesh, you have become a fundamentalist: irrational and cruel, presuming God would grant me access if I’d earned it, though we all know that women are not quite Goddesses.

Now, I can take your side and PROVE to YOU that I am WORTHY, but would you believe me? Well: according to the Old Norms of the World, you’d have to, given evidence. What once people called “virtue” is that which a man has earned from his society. Yet do the members of the Pride Parade describe it thus? No. To them, an “entitlement” is a disease, though not too long ago so was the entirety of their romantic orientation.

And let us be perfectly clear that this was NEVER a matter of protecting the oppressed INSTEAD of venerating sodomy. Responsibility makes clear to us that no one FORCES you to own your sexual identity. That is the work of PRIDE. That’s why they call it that. And let’s be clear as well that there’s no Safe Space in this mortal World; the only way to stay secure is to be readily informed. But you don’t GET informed by censoring a deviant opinion. Much less for censoring informed opinions. You don’t like History? That’s fine. But that does not excuse your ignorance of it.

Being a straight white man is hard enough. You only make it harder by forgetting it. That’s how it came to pass that I became the scapegoat in this modern frenzy. Because what started as a FUTILE attempt to adapt the forgotten voices to MY standard of living, once its constituents encountered the difficulties that my life was heir to, became an excuse to TARGET me to my marked DISADVANTAGE, only to satisfy some petty envy. THAT is why I’m not an Ally. I don’t fight for those who work against me. Once the Flag INCLUDES me, and once I know what sex FEELS like, then I can say: you were right. Your modern ethic WORKS.

[(DM.A.A.)]

FORQUE:

There are two paths: the right-hand and the left-hand path. Those who adhere to the right-hand path insist that their own path is the proper one. Those who adhere to the left-hand path insist that the members of the right-hand path are trying to trick you by making this claim. Yet there is nothing along the left-hand path which forbids trickery explicitly; it only warns, fairly dimly, of its consequences to the Self. The left-hand path prioritizes Self over Other; the right-hand path prioritizes Other over Self. Given the altruism of the right-hand path, honesty is far more intrinsic to the claims of the right-hand path than it is to the claims of the left-hand path. If one prioritizes the needs of Others and one holds a Truth to be valuable, one feels a sense of debt to represent this Truth to Others insofar as it might have value for them. Yet this is not an obligation which the left-hand path is heir to. The left-hand path prioritizes Self over Other, so there is nothing intrinsic to its principles which would forbid the suppression and even the misrepresentation of a Truth. Hence the left-hand path veers towards Secrecy and Deception. When adherents to the left-hand path accuse adherents to the right-hand path of trickery, they accuse the latter party of secretly belonging to the left-hand path. Thus, by avenue of a deception which only the left-hand path regards as permissible, adherents to the left-hand path covertly indicate that their own path is superior, implying that in fact both paths are the left-hand path. While adherents to the left-hand path might easily ascribe such trickery to adherents of the right-hand path, the fact remains that this is not a faithful rendering of the Truth. Since both paths clearly imply their own superiority, it is in fact the left-hand path which obscures the Truth, for it claims that both paths are equal. This pretense to equality hides an aggression which the right-hand path expresses outwardly, and since the two paths are only truly equal in this aggression, unless the left-hand path is surpassing in this regard, it is the right-hand path which is truly egalitarian in expressing this aggression openly, whereas the left-hand path creates a double-standard by the submersion of Truth. The dogmatism of both paths is exposed in how its adherents impose responsibility upon victims. Adherents to the right-hand path imply that bad fortune befalls those who deviate from dictates. Yet adherents to the left-hand path imply that bad fortune befalls those with weak wills. Neither path, upon this stratum of observation, truly holds aggressors responsible for the well-being and misfortune of their fellows. Doing what one wills, without any prescribed imperative, seeks to preserve its dignity by professing harmlessness, yet in fact there are no provisions, under Service to the Self, according to which harm might be prevented, since the perception of harm to one’s Self might be regarded as an expression of Self in its unactualized, unwilful state. By contrast, the right-hand path at least offers protection from harm by the imposition of mandatory dictates. Its conformism on one level produces freedom on another level, predicated upon the recognition that not all obstacles are internal, so not all fault can be found within the Self, and neither is all dignity actualized by it.

[({Dm.A.a.)}]

Open Letter to Ryan the Lion:

I guess all I can say is this: that the very existence of a mental health institution renders it ironic that paranoia and cynicism are regarded by it as symptoms of ill health, since the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the entirety of adult human life is a struggle to survive within an authoritarian bureaucracy of which absolutely every single human being is a participant, whose primary function is to determine which genes are worthy of enduring expression in the human genome, a principle which is so pervasive throughout human psychology that it even determines who is or is not allowed socially to feel certain emotions which are both intrinsic to the mind-body and reinforced and normalized by social trends. 

Furthermore, the simple exposure of the existence of such a system in itself produces directly social anomie, alienation, and eventually legal retribution, since it is presumed that only those who are unworthy of the survival of either their bodies or their genes would become so afflicted with the consequences of social alienation that they might even find the motivation to conceive of such a bureaucracy, whose operations are only visible from the underside by those who are disadvantaged by it. 

So that’s been on my mind for the last ten years of my life, fairly consistently, though I have tried to put it from my mind by leisurely escapes into such disciplines such as spirituality and artistry, both of which were produced by the same machine in order to keep those people who were social rejects in a passive state of neurotic complacency, resolved to their fate as designated non-breeders. This message is in itself an example of this.

Do understand: up until this point, I have maintained a feeble but enduring hope of transcendence by appeal to the existence of universal principles, anticipating my induction into a society of rational adults who were unified in unequivocal agreement in all matters pertaining to the human condition, among whom would be my romantic partner and my business associates, not one of whom would think to assail my character or to question my rightful position in the World. I contented myself in the knowledge of the fact that most people never matured past the adolescent psychological state, but given that this rung of development lay clinically beneath both the spirit and the word of the Law I knew that I had the True Authorities on my side: an oligarchy of enlightened men and women whose principles I had adhered to since birth. 

Yet what if it should be discovered that no such oligarchy has existed to preserve the timelessness of human dignity? Would it be possible to live with the knowledge that one year I would hold different convictions than the next, though all of them had been decided by some impersonal force tantamount to mob rule? How can a mind tolerate such an internal contradiction when any semblance of external contradiction is met with such ruthless ridicule by one’s fellows? It is impossible to imagine adapting to the constant flow of trends in both fashion and ideology; one’s only hope in transcending such a state rests in the attempt to conceive of this flow as a whole: a unified and calculated conspiracy. I had imagined Society to be a functional meritocracy wherein any rational man can attest to his own worth and the integrity of his own feelings. But I was arrogant to believe that my own feelings carried any value whatsoever. This was made clear to me, time and time again, by those whom I have regarded with the greatest affection. Artistry was simply a form of absurd protest: an attempt to salvage that childish state wherein emotion is a universal birth-right. Even in writing this, I feel your condescending gaze, frowning upon my infantile narcissism.

Dm.A.A.

Public Letter. (to Someone Else.)

Each time I played a part

Believing myself closer to

Escape.

I offered you my heart

Within your paradigm.

You offered me only

Red tape.

Aware that I’m

Alone. You still

Required of me

That which you

Would never

Grant.

You want me to atone.

And though I’m prone

And want it, too

With you:

I can’t.

Let me just make this clear to you:

You have no moral authority over me.

You do NOT retain the Higher Ground, from which you might preach to me and reprimand me for my insolence.

Over the course of half a year I agonized over you, running in circles, falsely believing myself with the conclusion of each cycle that I was coming closer to escape. With every one of your letters ended one torment, and no sooner came relief than came the next, each time growing, like the anticipation of the next drop in a water torture.

This you did.

And you were not the worst.

Many I have known like you, yet each time I loved each of you as an Individual. Each time, I adapted my Being to you.

Yet each time it was not enough. You were much too unclear in your prescriptions. You penalized me ex post facto. I was put on trial for sins I knew not to be sins. Yet you could not supply me with evidence that you represented an Absolute Meritocracy. No matter what I did, the promise of transcendence remained elusive. Your own words made it clear to me: nothing was promised. I will go on, slaving away in search of some algorithm by which at least one woman’s consent might be ensured. You will always dwell, among all your fellows, within the back of my mind, only to remind me that no such algorithm might exist. Those Great Men who believed themselves to have found it have been publically defaced, imprisoned, and excommunicated. But I shall run that risk in the pursuit of that elixir which will act as my key to the Erotic Domain within which you navigate so gracefully and with such ease. I will pursue that Love Potion, only to prove to you that it exists. And if its components should include those platitudes which you prescribed, then YOU shall be redeemed within my eyes, not as a manipulator, seeking to mold me to your fancy as I lie awake both day and night, but rather as a Saint, one privy to that Transcendent Domain wherein Human Life makes such glorious Sense that all of our errors are made more readily apparent as tragedies. If no such Domain exists, truly, then all of your prescriptions for me amount to nothing more than mind games. Yet if I can but prove that such transcendence is possible, having secured consent by my will AND MY WILL ALONE, then I acknowledge the possibility of your righteousness, I bow low before your Authority, I venerate your Sanctity passionlessly, and I adapt myself, yet again, to your Vision for me. Yet if these were but Imminent requirements, know this: there is no warrant for them outside of your own preferences. I may never be blamed for having been negligent of them. I stopped trying to impress you only AFTER I saw just by what margin you had failed to be impressed.

Regards.

Dmytri.

Public Letter to Alexandra Nicholson Tercero:

I understand that night most clearly now.

Estranged from the influence of your father, cloistered in your matriarchal fantasy, you were most intimidated by me because I represented the Force of Reason. You mocked logic by pretending towards its dignity. There never was a method underlying your madness. I had read your records; I knew you better than anyone else. Yours were not decisions predicated upon an established tradition, a logical order, moving towards a collective goal. Your fancies were born out of an incomprehensible ether of shameless Absurdity. You DEPLORED Reason and all of its instruments, seeking to rob me of them at every turn.

I almost lost my dog to you. I almost saw him get run over by a speeding car. Worse yet: I almost blamed myself.

I had only to prove to you that I was among those worthy of having their genes reproduced.

I still believe that to be the case.

Though I have never managed to persuade anyone else of this, I am worthy.

In return, you gaslighted me. You made me believe myself to be ill. You made my family believe this, too.

You were wrong.

I remembered everything more clearly than you ever did. I have been constant. And I have spent the last seven years keeping records of my thought, just to prove it.

I know my place in the Universe.

I wrote this to make clear to you that these ten years have not been spent in vain.

Goodbye.

Dmytri.

Post-scriptum: my honest prayer is that when you DO meet the World, you will see how much of you it has exposed, as well as how little of It revolves about you.

[Peace.]

FEM!NO: Why I am Not a Feminist.

Many of you who have known me probably have wondered: why do you hate feminism? If you love women, why do you hate that ideology which represents them? The most blatant and impartial answer: it does not; it represents the worst in you. It represents that part of you which is allied with meaninglessness and depravity. It represents the Devil within you.

The most personal answer: I was abused. I dated a narcissist. I’ve spent ten traumatic years recovering.

When I first heard again of feminism, it triggered me. It comes as no surprise now to discover she was one of them. That ideology can only pander to the worst in female nature. But the better part of masculinity has healed me, with no thanks to feminism, but a lot of thanks to the few Good Girls in my life.

[({DM.A.A.)}]

STRUGGLE:

Heterosexuality is NOT a privilege. It is a tormented struggle, the most difficult ordeal I have ever undergone, and this is not simply “my” experience; the entire history of humanity abounds in accounts which attest to this, within both fact and fiction. It was out of the primordial passion of procreation that ethics developed, and out of those ethics homophobia was born, if not homosexuality itself, but the renunciation of the phobia and the liberation of the homosexuality did nothing to make heterosexuality, the deeper difficulty and more mindboggling mystery, any easier. No amount of self-policing, just to appease a liberal platitude, could provide an answer to the most fundamental riddles of intersexual communication, questions which, in my experience, MOST women, as well as men, never even bothered to ask.  I could not even articulate them off the top of my head, though most moral and metaphysical matters I literally resolve in my own sleep. So you can imagine how livid I grow by the day in finding myself blatantly and shamelessly excluded from the “Pride” community, as though my mere presence were a threat to some network of ideological delusions which this cult holds in common. It has become clear to me what happened: someone compiled a list of minorities, and instead of going about the painstaking work of unriddling the suffering which hung between them, he or she sought to alleviate that suffering by unifying them against an enemy, a minority who was simply a confluence of majorities:

Me.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

BOTHERED:

Growing up I never understood the cowboys who would ask, “is this guy bothering you?” The cliché seemed always skewed, as if it leant too much authority to the arbitration of the lady who was addressed. At first, I thought it was only a film cliché: a cue for action, a romantic trigger for conflict. I understood it in the context of chivalry: the interrogator challenges the virtue of the other man, as if not only to preserve the dignity of the woman against lechery but to illustrate his own. As I grew older I came to lose faith in this tradition, not for lack of wanting to believe in it but rather for the lack of seeing the belief affirmed and valued. DID I bother anyone? Perhaps, and yet how rarely did they wonder WHY!! I was myself quite bothered, reasonably so, but even when my will was base my means were pure and my intent more scrupulous than any peers I used to call my friends. I have to ask them this: if they should ask her if this man was BOTHERING her, they should ask her WHY. Why was she bothered? And why would he want to? I refuse to fathom that for something universal I might be refused. If an intent is so transparent you can call it, it is surely general enough that you can’t judge of its humanity. It was not MY fault they were bothered. They had yet to prove me to have been unchivalrous, and if they were yet unattracted to me, then the REAL question is: HOW? How can one choose a man of lesser stature over one who values Righteousness? By what authority can I then be removed? By none. So long as I am right, I must remain persistent.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

POSTPOST:

One of the principal themes in K---- D---- H-- W---- is that of the finite life of the individual mind-body, set against the grandiose backdrop of the Multiverse. More specifically and politically, the theme at work is that we are stuck with the bodies that we have, that they are not only restrictions upon our Minds, but also that we are born into them for certain karmic reasons which establish them as our moral burden, as individuals. On some level, the Life of the Mind transcends these mortal restrictions, so at our most fundamental level of psychological awareness we all have the power to decide which chains to wear, and the nature of the chain reflects the decisions of the Soul. This pertains also to such features such as “beauty and brains”, and, given the immediacy of intuition, it functions as a reaffirmation of the Platonic approach to attraction. First impressions cease to be superficial prejudices, produced out of social “conditioning”, but rather they become the very measure of genuine depth and the possibility of transcendence; while “getting to know someone” is an attempt made by the conscious ego to reduce the Other to some expression of the sovereign Self, genuine Encounter with the Unknown is always produced through some sort of “Love [or, more generally, Recognition] at First Sight”. People become the embodiments of Gods and Goddesses in ordinary Life, though they seldom know this and far less often approve of the observation. Be that as it may, to love remains more valuable than being loved, especially by one’s self, and so the ultimate identity is defined more by how one perceives Others than how one WISHES to be perceived BY Them, and more is to be learned by studying how people TRULY see one’s self than by how one wishes to be seen, the latter of which amounts to nothing more than persona and convention, the most tragic outcome of whose overvaluation is the mutilation, denigration, and destruction of the Body. Within a psychosocial context, this presents some bold attacks upon the post-structural ideology of gender identity, though it remains well-meaning towards the ideology’s representatives. If the physical body is one’s own cross to bear, so to speak, then one acts in destructive bad faith if one tries to “escape” its strictures by appealing to an abstract and disembodied conception of “gender as a social construct”. It involves the internal contradiction of at once blaming “Society”, in the abstract, for one’s feelings of alienation, while at the same time making an appeal to Society’s liberal and philosophical traditions in an attempt to alter one’s social standing in the most superficial and conformist manner, pinning the blame upon those who “conform” to those conditions for which they accept responsibility. In this sense, the use of mythological archetypes, most notably expressed as Ancient Egyptian Deities, might be my only recourse in cutting through the pretensions of millennials who avail themselves liberally of abstract thought but abstain from any philosophical inquiry. “Society”, in my World, is NOT the antagonist who has to be overcome by manipulation, outwitted and brought thus to the negotiating table, in an attempt to restore some semblance of a lost autonomy. In K---- D---- H-- W----, that autonomy remains to be attained, as in olden days, outside of This World, to be EARNED in the Next World, which in itself has fallen into disrepair upon a level that mortals struggle to conceive. This form of transcendence is not simply an archaic and regressive alternative to the secular advent of deconstruction; it is a Living, Breathing Cultural Universal, representing the final stages of Moral Development. “Society” is not the enemy but the helper, serving as a stepping stone, as in Kierkegaard’s books, to the properly Religious (“Spiritual”) Domain. Yet Society is more than a series of moral dictates. The Body is the limitation, and its laws are those of the Suffering, Moral World. Yet Society is one’s first source of transcendence, supplying the Mind with Dreams of Another Life, instilling both the desire and the hope for fulfillment. To reject Society in the pursuit of one’s desires is self-defeating; to work with Society is to discover one’s Self.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]