An Austere Farewell:

Today is the last day of your month of birth.

Tomorrow I intend to see my old tome again.

It is, after all, my possession.

I was only generous enough to lend it to you.

Take it as representative of our entire correspondence.

If there is any hope left for you, it is that you will have learned this much:

That you are not born equal to any one.

If you would find solidarity with any one or competence at any thing, you must earn it.

I have done you the service of reading and criticizing your writing.

You have had a competent teacher.

I have written my entire life.

I have even been called a genius.

It was entirely for my competence with language.

No set of material skills, not even musical (though I would have had it otherwise gladly) has earned me that title.

You have not been called a genius.

You would not feel insecure or inferior in my presence.

You would understand my attitude, if not my ways, rather than to presume that I am trying to trick you into feeling this way.

You would own up to your own feelings.

You would understand what they mean.

Or you would not feel them in the first place.

And I would be able to work with you as equals, mutually striving towards a Great Good by constant criticism, like two friends climbing a chasm by pushing each other into his respective wall, acting as one body with four feet. (Such as in The Emperor’s New Groove.)

And you would have made your status known to me.

For I all ways recognize a kindred soul.

I saw it in Alanna.

I see it in strangers.

I see it in acquaintences.

And even if I’d overlooked it in my rage, you would have brought it directly to my attention.

I would not have to mention it now.

And admit that even your own friends marveled at me.

They did not do so with you.

They called you crazy for even trying.

My friends do not do that, even if yours do.

And even some of yours qualified their criticism of me by insisting that I was brilliant.

I have no evidence that they have done so of you.

Why would they not defend your honour in my presence?

I only have your word that they take offense to how I speak to you.

It is hardly convincing, even if true.

If they were so convinced, they would have spoken up.

You could have learned much from me.

But you are insolent.

Instead of reciprocating my kindness with respect, you strain my patience to its limits.

You do not work to earn back my own respect.

And you have not shown me such kindness as would merit respect towards you.

I have no reason to regard you more highly than myself.

And yet in your own self-defense you have constantly required that of me.

[You will say now that you wanted only Equality.

Did you work towards that goal?

Did I see the results?

Or was it a demand made of me, as of an inferior?

Even now it is YOU condescending upon ME.]

If condescension could be a sin, then you would be the most condescending person that I know.

If my hope in you is not misplaced, you will meditate upon this long.

If it IS misplaced, you will retort.

And repeat the cycle.

But this time I shall not be party to it.

I shall be free of you instead.

Instead of respect and improvement you reciprocated with abuse and insult.

You lied to protect your vainglorious self-entitlement.

You hid from yourself in your so-called friends.

You would sooner use false, unenlightened criticism as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility than use my enlightened criticism as an opportunity to improve.

I do not know what is the matter with you.

Didn’t you have a childhood?

Was there not the promise of one day being GREAT at some thing, but only by subordination to a discipline?

Who are YOU to be so GREAT as to demand respect prematurely?

Even now it ought to be obvious to you that I care excessively.

I will not be around to receive answers to these questions.

Even this letter is a thankless task.

If you are to take any thing away from this, may it be this:

… That the TRUTH, if offered freely, is to be accepted even without adornment. Beggars cannot be choosers, and your starvation for Truth and Divinity is made more obvious by your decision to surround yourself with people who have none to offer you, but would condemn you for your search.

Now *I* condemn you. But not for your search. Rather that you did not search ENOUGH on your own, to figure this out FOR YOUR SELF, and instead chose to depend upon me.

… That RESPECT is not owed to you simply for Being. The world will not bend to your ARBITRARY will. People of superior character must never be made to even spare a SECOND trying to make sense of your perspective. Their duty is much too precious to be wasted on some willful degenerate who DEMANDS respect because he cannot COMMAND it, and who would rather exploit the amorality and nihilism of his environment for personal gain than to work in its reformation. No person of noble character can rightfully be made to hear your say on matters of import. You must be of your own nobility and rely less upon the presupposition that people will value you as highly as you do yourself. I have had to choose my family over you, just as I had to choose Alanna over my room-mates in Cleveland, Ohio. I did this out of a sense of DUTY. I did not let my sense of offense and betrayal at the fact she chose K. over me to stop me from this duty. Ever.

… That you cannot hide within the crowd. I know when you are lying. I know it when you have to use some appeal to the Universal Love of God in place of a convincing warrant. Your God is too soft on you. He does not wake you up to your failings. I have had to berate myself incessantly for years to get to where I am. (I wish it were otherwise.) How dare you to berate me now? When some one condescends upon you, you NEVER fight back, especially if that person does so offering friendship and support. You subordinate yourself. You LISTEN. I have had to EARN the self-respect that you take for granted. If there was any thing of lasting consequence that I did in your favour, it was that I dispossessed you of this sense of self-respect. If I did so, then you will know that it was because you had not earned it. You are old enough to shed that narcissistic cocoon.

… And finally:

I never tried to put you down.

I tried to pull you up.

But you tried to pull me down.

That was why I let you go.

Poetically,

Dmytri Aleksandrovich Andreev.

Dm.A.A.

T.S.S.

Masculinity Tips for Women, delivered by an Experienced Man:

Masculinity Tips for Women, delivered by an Experienced Man.

It has been brought to my attention that this whole nefarious gender switch is not simply a corporate conspiracy to produce more C.E.O's, but that in fact men are changing as well, and not simply as a passive RESULT of feminism but rather as a consequence of mutual underlying causes.

One of the most powerful mystics I know insists that the Universe "mixed up all the vibrations". So now men are getting all the feminine ones and women are receiving the masculine ones.

But far from the romantic, naive notion that this will immediately transmute women into men and men into women, the cocoon phase we are stuck in puts women in the posture of boys and men in the posture of bitches.

So here are some friendly, helpful hints I have for both sexes (and I use that term interchangeably with gender, for reasons you have all ready surmised) on how to be a decent human being during these confusing times. May it nurture you as only a man playing the mother role can.

Women:

1. LISTEN TO MEN. Nothing could be more in accord with your underlying goals. Feminism has nothing feminine about it; it is all about owning the male role. If you want to get good at some thing, it would HELP to pay attention to some one with several millennia of experience in this medium. Okay?
2. TREAT MEN WELL. You should know how men treated boys who had not learned yet to respect the gentle sex. Now that gentlemen are the gentle sex, treat them with the same chivalry.
3. BE LOYAL. Being a guy means counting your sexual adventures and your money. Being a MAN means exercising reciprocity:
A. Love with love.
B. Trust with trustworthiness.
C. Courtesy with generosity.
D. Propriety with gratitude.
E. Existence with kindness.
Do these five and the rest will come of their own.
4. RESPECT TRADITION. People do not namedrop to sound smart and to gain ethos. They give credit where credit is due so that you can feel at liberty to supplement their knowledge with your own research. Carl Jung says that the neurotic rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways. Some things never change. Only the subtle man will notice them amidst the constant flux of novelty. Comprende?
5. LEARN TO PROVIDE. It's not all about you, either in the workplace, at the dinner table, on the podium, or in the bedroom. Don't be a d*ckhead.

Men:

1. BE A MOM. Learn to put up with women's bullsh*t with grace and tact. Have a say in your children's lives, BORN and UNBORN. It is significant that Trump signed a restriction on abortion whilst surrounded by men. These are the Mothers of the New Millenium, protecting the intrinsic value of a life that literally does not even HAVE a sex yet.
2. BE RECEPTIVE. You don't have to spend money every where you go to have a good time. You do not EVEN have to TALK to any one. Instead of standing up for yourself all the time, even when you KNOW you're wrong, learn the honour in backing down.
3. BE PATIENT. All good things come to those who wait. Slow and steady wins the race. Just don't do it in a passive-aggressive, toxic or sociopathic way. Learn to discern your passion from your aggression.
4. BE KIND. Women and men alike are going to suffer a lot of hardship during these times. Some times a smile and a reserve of judgment are all that one needs to feel one's self to be part of a Greater Force that can Heal.
5. BE. You might have noticed that all five of these imperatives begin with this word, whereas only ONE of the first five contained it. The masculine acts. The feminine IS.

Enjoy yourselves and each other.

Dm.A.A.

This Wretched Star Wars Meme:

The meme does us the service of bringing what would otherwise have been a subconscious (and potent) mythological truth to conscious light. Yet it does so in such a way that, simply owing to its memetic nature, trivializes what the Unconscious Subject would have venerated: The Truth of Obi-Wan’s position.

Obi-Wan DOES possess the Higher Ground over Anakin. He IS wiser, more disciplined, in many ways more clever, judicious, and poised than his Pupil. He has not suffered GREATER tragedy but has had to LIVE with tragedy much longer, as well as with responsibility. In every way he has all this time been Anakin’s Superior and has maintained both the Moral and the Intellectual High Ground. An accomplished agent of the Force and a diligent and loyal student of the Jedi tradition, his SUPERIOR posture as Sensei is at that moment both physical and spiritual, and the former represents allegorically the latter.

Anakin’s Tragedy is that he is Icarean in his ambitions. His passions are depraving; he is blinded by his emotions, which have not yet been made PURE by the Force nor CULTIVATED by the Jedi Order. So it follows that when he tries to OVERCOME his teacher by Force (no pun intended), he LOSES HIS LEGS, a representation of his agency and his fighting stance. He goes from a simply PRECARIOUS posture, floating over the lava, but still offered a chance at reprieve, to a total posture of DESCENT INTO and ABSORPTION WITHIN the lava: the passions that drive him to the Dark Side.

Carl Jung says that this is one of the most tangible evils of the neurotic state: that the neurotic “rejects the Force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways”. Joseph Campbell read Jung and drew inspiration from Jung’s wisdom, and he went on to mentor George Lucas.

The myth represents the hubris of the young in defying the wisdom of the Old. Of course, in turn Luke has later to fight his father for the same reason: that the Jedi Way has fallen and faded and the force of Tradition has become an oppressive State, so that that state’s most dangerous henchman is “all that remains of their religion”. In THAT sense, Luke represents a sort of PURE, SELFLESS rebellion against Age, but WITHIN an Age that is deformed and misguided, having parted with the Spirit (Force).

In ANAKIN’S case, there is no excuse to defy Obi-Wan. In fact, it is BECAUSE of Obi-Wan’s enduring influence that Luke wins the fight against evil and restores Balance to the Force. And it is nothing save Anakin’s own hubris and willingness to silence his old mentor’s voice forever that ensures that that same Voice would spell Darth Vader’s ultimate defeat. And in that case so much as in THIS one, that voice of Reason and Wisdom imparts fair warning upon the pupil moments before the pupil seals his own fate by taking it into his own cyborg hands.

So think on THAT when you call Obi-Wan Kenobi “condescending” with a condescension that you, unlike him, are not entitled to.

Dm.A.A.

MYRBOSCH: Episode #?!?!

MYRBOSCH: Episode #???

The Old Days:

The Old Days.

I could not help but to notice, when I got off the phone with Michael, who turns forty-seven I think this year, (next Tuesday to be exact_) that it is not often that people my age have conversations lasting seventeen consecutive minutes by telephone. Given this fact, (and I mean that both in the sense that I have been given it but ALSO that you, READER, have already received it and might be already bored) it is doubtful that most of my peers will read on. That is unfortunate. After all: they are those who need it most.

Whatever the case might have been on my end and as a second thought, I still had felt like I was rushing him, at that very moment (though he’d made and I had qualified immediately the preface that I “hate the phone” or, as I’d put it: “try not to talk too long.”). It is a testament to my seemingly Protestant character that I hesitated to call seventeen minutes (a lucky number) “much”, for I felt guilty for cutting our conversation “short”. I guess I fancy myself a busy man. Yet by the end of it I took this as an opportunity to assuage some of my restlessness and angst, a classic symptom of neurosis and not-having-one’s-feet-upon-the-ground. The guilt had been in fact the very CAUSE for my restlessness, for I am in the frequent habit of suspecting that if I am wasting time then I am sinning.

Against whom am I sinning? Who if not WOMEN?

As Michael rambled on and on I thought of them; they, after all, tend to be on my mind twenty-four/seven, if such thoughts can be quantified in such a fashion.

I thought of Michael’s generation. There is an ease with which the man speaks, though he stumbles. It’s the ease of some one who has learned to stumble gracefully. At some time, that is all that one had to do to get ANY thing done, and there was nothing more one COULD do.

It is not so now.

Now we (if I may) are sheltered by a proliferation of rules. They supplant the influence of our traditions, our encounters, and our experiences. The cell phone is one thing; at times I am ahead of Michael’s time, when cell phone use was prevalent, and yet at other times I’m far behind him, and I’d rather write a letter and have it mailed by some device more primitive and more ingenious than a typewriter.

The Smart Phone is an other. So are online social networks of all sorts.

It is bad enough to have to listen to Michael ramble when we could just talk about it all in person on his birthday. What is truly sad is meeting people. Every girl these days is on her phone or on the clock, and when you meet one through the Net you never know what you will get. (Or if you’ll “get” any thing at all other than a series of emojis and false flattery.)

As Michael rambled I thought about the notorious Wage Gap.

I imagined for a moment the nineteen-nineties as a time when women were more desperate for help because they made less money. Such had been the social narrative, long kept secret by patriarchal proto-Fascists, but then BROUGHT TO LIGHT! By social justice warriors back in 2014.

I thought of the film “The Santa Clause”, and what a prick that lead guy was. I wondered how he lived with himself and WHY. True: I knew why. It was not male self-entitlement. It was a deeper and more passive narcissism, a FEMININE narcissism in fact: the refusal to accommodate an other’s self-entitlement. A passivity alert only to its own self-perpetuation. A parasitic complacency and self-contentment.

How come such characters were so prevalent in the nineties? I mean: men have sex drives. Don’t they have some body to impress??

The feminist myth of the Wage Gap, for which no woman I knew to have been enflamed by it had ever managed to find evidence, was a likely story. But it was TOO likely. It was too simple. Like a lullaby. A fairy tale hardly worthy of being called a Myth in the Grand Sense. This was not the Wisdom that is produced in the Mystical Realm and transmuted into worldly form by Poetry and Literature. This was an URBAN myth, an IDEOLOGICAL legend. Propaganda. Proto-Fascism. Agenda. And most ironically: A SOCIAL NARRATIVE.

The solution is at once more simple and more complicated, for it leaves more of the TRUE, INTRINSIC complications found in Nature to the Imagination of the Individual Subject, uncharted territory to-Be-explored.

In Michael’s time there was not the neurotic need to IMPRESS the other gender. This had been transcended, so people could be blunt. They could be vulgar. They could be POLITICALLY INCORRECT. And somehow only a few came off as total narcissists. And they were made into stock characters in film, television, and other media.

May be this also dawns upon people at Michael’s age. I hope so. But I know better than to hope to excess. I am old enough, and living in such morbid times, as to have learned THAT much.

Getting off of the phone with Michael was like stepping out of a long shower and awakening from a long dream (though I would do well not to fall asleep in the bath, as we all would do well to avoid as well).  I felt LITERARY, as though I were in a novel of some sort or, to be more specific, as though my life made SENSE in relation to the records of the past. And the literature was not the Kafkaesque labyrinth of constant paranoia and bureaucracy, where to raise my head above the mass was to be guilty of elitism and insubordination. NOR was it such INFLATED self-aggrandizement that I lost all humility even as I DEMANDED it of others. (And this is NOT to say that I am not free to demand it of those who have not reciprocated my own consideration.)

I returned to my virtual women, their replicas upon my telephone screen, with a sense of earthbound clarity. The realm of EMOTION was still available to me, but I was free of what a certain religious philosopher and ethicist had called EMOTIVISM, and this freedom felt so BASIC and common-sensical that I remembered all of a sudden why I had so easily and readily absorbed that thinker’s thinking and all so why I’d become enraged by my “peers” who had sneered at me for even MENTIONING the word “emotive”, as though ANY form of criticism of the liberal status quo were blasphemous.

Yes: “liberal status quo”.

To use a contemporary adage:

It’s a thing.

Then I found several more coy, womanly faces looking up at me from the newspaper in the Living Room downstairs. They caught my attention; I observed. These were the faces of three writers who were concerned with “women” as a cause.

It dawned on me.

In Michael’s time “women” were not a cause. Any semblance of women Being-a-cause was but one of a number of semi-neurotic trends that might as well have been a grungy fashion statement.

WOMEN were much MORE back then. They were still Goddesses and Temptresses, Sirens and Angels, and most importantly: they were PEOPLE. And that meant that their value was determined entirely by relationship. To men, they were the Other. Yet they were also close enough to men, at a time when every one was Other to every one else, that one could slide into relation with them with incredible ease, even if, like heroin (a drug named after women as well), the easy slide was excruciatingly hard to slide OUT of.

Michael’s time was a more sophisticated time. Women had fewer rights because they did not NEED them. A right is simply a protection against the Other. Women did not NEED to be protected from men. To be woman was to IMPLY man. One did not have to simply identify “as a woman” as DISTINCT from man. It happened naturally that to BE one was to IMPLY the other, by virtue of relationship, and BY RELATIONSHIP ALONE, untarnished and untouched. It was a time of THOU, not IT relations: PERSONAL connections, not impersonal, Utilitarian ideological demands and self-entitlements.

AND MEN AND WOMEN GOT ALONG.

They did not need to blame the “creeps”; to be a “Creep” was cool, hence Radiohead’s song (which Michael had recommended that we cover, in his phone call). They did not blame the President; ALL politicians were corrupt, so why bother? Improve yourself; THAT was the spirit.

This is why people pretend that sex and gender are distinct. It’s but a mind game.

Ideology has segregated us and taught us what it MEANS to be a woman or a man.

It does not SOLVE the PROBLEM of gender roles. It CREATES it.

It is the very problem that it offers to resolve, threatening the Individual for disagreeing and delivering punishment by making the problem much more severe so that only the “protected” can survive, at great personal expense.

It is ideological extortion.

And the expense is Authenticity: the kind that only comes via Relationship.

Now if you don’t fit the role assigned to you by this society, you have the “option” of changing, but only if you claim that you were “born wrong” – DESPITE the notion that it is a Social Construct!!

My other writings deal more with the issue of Gender. It’s far more than a Social Construct. But my point remains.

Michael’s generation is evidence that progress is a recent invention.

Things are getting worse.

Yet somehow: talking to him I am reminded that they’re also getting better. NOT because of ideology; ideology is the anti-Christ that Jung spoke of.

But rather because some people still adhere, unknowingly (and thereby fittingly) to the Tao – the Way of Mother Nature.

And it is IMPERATIVE that those for whom it’s getting worse wake up and realise this fact.

Dm.A.A.

FINALE:

I have re-read

Alanna McLeod's last few letters to me.

I had to dive into my Soul again. Reviewing and sharing my most intimate (but publically relevant) letters TO her.

You could not write like her if you tried.

No one could.

Only a loving hand could have enscribed it.

A hand I fell for for a Divine Reason.

You shall never besmirch it.

It shall all ways belong to me.

No one can take it from me.

Kresten never did.

Things manifest their essence. I can spot falsity in even the most clever contrivances.

There were things Alanna knew that no one else did. She did not merely mirror me. She did not simply affirm my biases. I had no biases. I had no conscious knowledge of these things. They simply rested in the sinews of my Heart, untouched by callous hands.

Only Alanna could have had the delicacy to pluck those heart-strings. Only she ever bothered to. You could never do that. Nor could he.

Nor any one you claim to know.

This is the culmination of my Quest.

That I retain my faith in this maiden.

That I let not the cleverness of egoism and sedated paranoia assuage me.

I know now what happened and why.

I know that I can trust her. It was trust we'd worked to build. You never worked that hard towards that end. Towards any end. I know this. So any thing that you imagine to say that might besmirch it in your favour is but the haze of gossip and paranoia.

It shall not submerge her Light.

There is under the mirroring tendency a metaphysical undercurrent. Only this force can compel the Will to produce such a document that were I to divulge its secrets to you it would burn your eyes.

Rational Man knows not this faith. He is only concerned with the future. All disillusion happens in the future tense. It is a feeble, egoic defense against the vitality of the moment that is ruined the moment it is spoken to the wrong ears. It is they who bastardise it with analogy to some past heartache and trivialize it in a feeble attempt to protect you from the object of their own fears, a fate that can only befall once, for life is ever-changing...

The undercurrent is Love.

You have not known it.

I am sorry.

Dmytri.

Needless to say, I no longer require your services. Alanna is with me and all ways shall be. The Universe brought us together for a Reason. It has its ways. You would be arrogant to presume you could control them. But think not to place this arrogance upon MY conscience. I know now that it was YOU who had tried to force it from its course.

I forgive you. But our project is over. And I will not hesitate to purify you by violent means.

I will accept my book back now. But show your face not here ever again. If Alanna could let me go for this lifetime, then so can you. Unless you would rather admit her spiritual superiority?

Deliver the book by mail to my address.

And I pray you are not so stupid that you've forgotten it all ready.

Dm.A.A.