becoming a friend

The acts of becoming, as opposed to being, a friend, are, at their best, stepwise removals of social veils: not a steep drop into casualness, but a deconstruction. Removing each piece deliberately makes each clear, and displays our control of them. That is an assurance as well as a display: an assurance that we can reimpose them as needed. A friend worth having needs to know that we can resume the veil, since a friendship is a contingent social unit. The presentation of self is subsumed, partly, in the presentation of that unit. I do not speak of secret friendships.

the simple

A simple person should tell truths and not lie and be respected for it. But a wise man who does not lie is dangerous. If you must have knives in your pockets, fold them shut or sheathe them before walking about.

This is why we have fora: in the surgery, or the court, there is no sheathing, no lying, and razors stropped to a truthful fatality. The elaborate barriers of evidence, sterilization, ceremony, seniority, and more are testimony to our social understanding of the possibility, utility, and lethality of truth in its concentrated, weaponized, forms.

professions

A profession is remunerative work, undertaken for the general good over the bulk of the individual's productive life, that requires such commitment for the development of requisite ability and judgment. Income is necessary to remove distraction, and thus must be stable and ample, but never large or an enticement. Market-driven income practices eat away professionalism. For example, I am overpaid, both as a matter of fact, and as matter of impedance to professional development. The market more frequently underpays, though, and this is no better: a professional does not grow from a forager's diet. The conviction the market wreaks is that what I do is, after all, a job, not more. That is true, but it is a useless truth that displaces a vitally useful lie. To say that mud is water and dirt does no harm. But to say that an illustration is paper and ink, is harmful truth telling. The wisdom to work with truth and falsehood, neither for their own sake, nor by mechanical sorting, nor with a loss to truthful orientation -- this is the sport of a great soul, and in minute popular dilutions, the tincture that distinguishes professions from jobs.

an old story

Back when I was young and Baptist, one of the wise mothers in the church told me this story as a response to something I've long forgotten. One of her friends was Mormon, and she agreed to read much of the Book of Mormon together with her. Politely, the Baptist mother said that, in the end, she didn't believe the Book of Mormon was the word of God. "Pray," said the Mormon friend, "that the Holy Spirit will tell you what is true." The Baptist mother agreed, and the next week, waiting for laundry, the Mormon friend asked if she had.

"I did."

"Did the Holy Spirit speak to you?"

"It seemed so, but I find it very hard to tell the difference between the voice of the Holy Spirit within myself and my own thoughts voicing themselves within me."

And so it is. We cannot distinguish inward sources with much precision. Are my facts aesthetic preferences after all? And so on, even to the divine. The message matters more than the messenger not because this would be quite so if we knew the messenger, but because we do not.

Is my hatred for hate virtue, or even moral, or a weak stomach? The wrong question.

bodies

One should keep one's distance from one's body and mind - not because they are not fully one's self, but because they are. Better still to vary the distance between consciousness, mind, and body. And best to make the inductive variation in these distances a source not only of energy, but of order, even gladness.

virtue's interest

Virtue and vice are oriented in time: interest later or interest now; cost now or cost later.

flexion

A range of available responses, an area, most usefully measured along the dimension of possible utility. Narrow and shrinking in all, but a good relative measure of any directly human entity. That is, of a small committee or an aunt, not of a law or a park or a parliament.

domesticity

Much of individual thought and activity is aimed at domesticating one's surroundings. That, or at sustaining a personal illusion of domestic safety. But the world is not a home.

love divine

It is not the mystery of existence that turns our thoughts to the divine, to God. The nature or presence of God tells us little to nothing about existence itself. Rather, it is the mysteries of love and knowledge that cry out for the divine, which if present plots all in radial lines and arcs, and charges all with orientation by which loving actions may themselves, moving along, or against. We misdirect ourselves to the mystery of existence because we love it and it lays beneath the mantle of knowledge. Our minds and hearts demand a world that can be a home to them. Thoughts of the divine are, in the main, the desperation of our faculties to domesticate the world in the face of our inability to make smaller homes for them ourselves.

solutions

Responses to stubborn social ills must generally neither be actual solutions, which are too severe on the human environment within which these ills live, nor be surrenders, which make ills too severe and increase their multiplication.

truth and good are not allied

That is the lesson of the sons of Noah and their drunken father's nakedness.

conquers all

Love, like a dog licking a bone, wears away anything hard, whether truth, prejudice, or otherwise. A slow but complete acid, indiscriminate: nonmoral.

disbursement

The buttresses of the walls we build between ourselves and the void press inward. We are not keeping the emptiness out, but holding ourselves in.

chaining desires

Our desires are the source and vary, including in this way: a few desires can link with their kin into chains and structures. The rest are in the main inert, simple, impossible, or destructive in a lower sense. Morally seen, that hoarde of simple desires subsist in a narrow band between pleasures and hazards: birdsong and rusty nails.

But those chaining desires -- these can develop into good and evil. Morality is predictive appreciation of the potential and produce not of all human desires, but of that residue of our desires which can be spun into webs. Not that I want coffee, but that I want to talk to you.

humility ready to ride

Not humility but pride in me drives quiet inaction. In quiet unrelation vaunting self-regard evades real limits, real faults that glare in speech or action. By not writing, I keep safe a high view of my ability to write. Humility may not spur me to act, but can ride happily when other spurs motivate.

humble yourself

Tend your plot, keep silence. Yes, surely, but why?

The trouble and the drive

The trouble is conviction: that there is nothing to say that needs saying, no reason to multiply words; that there is vanity in uninvited speaking. But there is a quiet drive to talk, too: a suspicion that one is alive not in the depths of one's inward thoughts, but at the surface, in the interaction, through communion.

A first post.

Why blog? Because Mirabai convinced me, and because I'd like to do something other than lurk on the blogs of my friends. We'll see what comes of it.