Life and its Alternative Uses

Today's column by Sowell contains a few zingers. He cites Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that "a good catch phrase could stop thinking for fifty years." That's a Dávila-worthy insight, in that the left is a mansion of many clichés.

And once inside a cliché, it can be difficult to leave, because the doors lock from the outside. To paraphrase Dávila, there are words we use to deceive others, and more importantly, words we use to deceive ourselves. It is the latter which ensnare us, for which reason "the only man who saves himself from intellectual vulgarity is the man who ignores what it is fashionable to know."

Today, for example, it is fashionable to think it courageous for a sick man to convince himself he is a woman, or to direct animus toward the one race that has, for whatever reason, contributed so disproportionately to the welfare and betterment of mankind. Modesty and good breeding forbid a gentleman from crowing about such an unmerited blessing, but what is the alternative when these barbarians insist you are a devil instead of a benefactor to all?

Oh well. "Intelligence, in certain ages, must dedicate itself merely to restoring definitions" (Dávila). You know, like marriage. I don't give a fig about soccer, but the other day my son asked who I wanted to win in the World Cup. I promptly answered "Japan." I didn't tell him it was because if Japan won, at least children would be spared the spectacle of some musclebound freak kissing her "wife." I remember when perverted old men had to pay good money to see that sort of thing.

Prejudice? Of course. "Prejudices defend against stupid ideas" (ibid.). One man's prejudice is another man's Collective Wisdom of Mankind. After all, we are descendants of the very people who held that particular prejudice. I am personally grateful my mother wasn't encouraged -- or bullied -- to "explore" same sex attraction in college. I mean, it's unsettling enough to think of one's mother having an opposite sex attraction.

"No one wanted to be a slave," writes Sowell. However, until the spread of Christianity, this was never a principled opposition.

Rather, "their rejection of slavery as a fate for themselves in no way meant that they were unwilling to enslave others." There is abundant anthropological documentation for the fact that the mentality wasn't "slavery is morally evil" but "enslave or be enslaved." So a slave didn't so much want to be "free" -- an abstract category that didn't exist -- but simply be the guy with the slaves.

In the link above, Happy Acres Guy alludes to the same thing vis-a-vis collectivism. Think about it: in the zero-sum economic world of the left, the wealthy man is a kind of criminal whose success has come at the expense of "the poor." Therefore, the leftist aspires to be the mirror image of the corrupt plutocrat via state power. Like the erstwhile slave who enslaves, Obama is the man of once modest means who now wields his power like a corrupt mafia lord.

Likewise the Clinton crime family. For them there is no possibility of clean power. Rather, they wish to seize power by any means necessary under the pretext that it will only be used for the benefit of the anonymous multitude of hapless rubes. The leftist convinces himself that his lust for power exists because it is in the service of others. Which is very much like the slaveholder who rationalized that without his paternalism, the childlike and ineffectual slaves would be incapable of caring for themselves.

Speaking of which, Dávila reminds us that power doesn't corrupt, rather, that it "frees up latent corruption." Power did not corrupt George Washington, or Calvin Coolidge, or Winston Churchill, or Harry Truman.

Back to our discussion of the metaphysics of economics. Much of it comes down to the principle that an economy is not really about money or wealth, but rather, about information. This is why we can say there is such a thing as "economic truth."

In a free market, for example, a price consolidates and conveys a vast amount of information about how much of a thing exists and how many people want it -- or about its scarcity and desirability. If too many people want what is too scarce, then the price naturally rises. But at the same time, because of the rising price, more people will be willing to jump in and produce the scarce thing. You can make something a "right" -- like healthcare. But that will hardly make it less scarce.

Especially if the state gets involved and decides the price is "too high," as in college, housing, and medicine. Of course, the state can do nothing to alter the actual cost, which costs what it costs. Reducing the price of diamonds won't magically create more. To the contrary, in the long run it will inevitably result in fewer diamonds. Money doesn't talk. Rather, prices talk and money listens, flowing to where its return will be greatest.

But the real link between metaphysics and economics has to do with time. Recall our definition of economics: the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. And the flow of scarce resources into this or that use will have a cost. But what is this "cost" in absolute terms? We can't say the cost is this or that amount of money, because that is related to a host of factors, and always changing.

Thus, the real cost of anything is the value of its alternative uses. That's a tricky one to wrap your mind around, but you can apply it to life itself. For example, what is the "cost" of watching television? It is simply the forgoing of whatever else you could have done with the time, which is gone forever. Time is the ultimate nonrenewable resource.

So, I wrote this little memo to myself in the margin: the real value of your life is what else you might have done with it. So choose wisely, my friends!

Meta-Economics or Econo-Metaphysics

I am about to attempt something that probably can't be done, but human thought should always flirt with the impossible, shouldn't it? Otherwise it's like... like what Lao Tse says about the best way to control a bull: just give it a large pasture. The fences are still there, but the bull doesn't notice.

Similarly, any leftist who imagines he's a "free thinker" is simply unaware of the fences. A conservative is someone who ventures out a little further and notices all the barbed and electrified fences with snipers standing by ready to prevent escape to the NorthWest. A PC liberal, like the East Germans, would call the fence an "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart."

Fortunately, I wasn't really paying much attention in school, so I never fully assimilated the perverse ways of the Conspiracy. Therefore, I never internalized the Wall, or at least it remained rather porous. Now it's just a tourist spot, like Hadrian's wall.

It started yesterday, when I glanced over at Thomas Sowell's doorstop, Basic Economics. It's one of those books that is so full of ideas and information that it's impossible for the non-specialist to take it all in. So I thought I would thumb through it and try to refresh the old memory.

But then I got another idea from left field (or right brain), which was to scan the book from a higher perspecive. In other words, the first time around it was necessarily a view from the ground. But what if we take flight and reframe it from the perspective of metaphysics? This is something Sowell himself would never do, and yet, the book is so full of "essential truth" that it would be a shame to confine it to economics.

Indeed, even though they have nothing else in common, Sowell and Schuon do share the characteristic of being so extraordinarily essential, meaning that they always get right to the essence of things, with no extraneous equivocating, excess verbiage, or academic BS. As a result, they provoke a similar sensation in my nonlocal resonator thingy, despite the radical difference in subject matter.

"I wonder," asked Bob, "if one essential truth speaks to another?" One difference between them is that Sowell is describing the exact dimensions of the real fence that surrounds us, being that we are unavoidably clothed in finitude.

On the other hand, Schuon is clearly speaking from beyond the fence, or better, deploying the forms of universal metaphysics to express formless insights that transcend it: he is using language to say what cannot be said, whereas Sowell uses it to say the most that can be said on this side of the Wall.

But even Sowell would say it's not really an impermeable wall. Rather, one of the points he makes in the book is that the state fails (among other reasons) because it imposes binary or categorical law in an incremental universe. Therefore, it can never reflect the reality of things.

As for Schuon's essentiality, Nasr captured it well, writing that his works "always go to the heart and are concerned with the essence of whatever they deal with. Schuon possesses the gift of reaching the very core of the subject he is treating, of going beyond the forms to the essential formless Center."

As such, "To read his works is to be transplanted from the shell to the kernel," or "from the circumference to the Center."

Now, this is utterly at cross purposes with the left, in that it insists there are no essences and certainly no Center, no Absolute, and no Universal -- with a few incoherent exceptions, for they do regard homosexuality and "whiteness" as essences, the former a sacred one, the latter demonic.

Let's consider Sowell's rock-bottom definition of economics (via Lionel Robbins): Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. That's it. Can't get more essential than that.

Why is it essential? Ironically, he alludes to the Garden of Eden which, whatever else it was, wasn't an economy. Why? Because there was no scarcity. Therefore, one of the consequences of the fall is to plunge us into economics! Which gives new meaning to the "dismal science."

Now, the first thing you clever readers will notice is that the left, in denying the fall, also denies economics -- or economic reality, to be precise. You can't actually deny economics because the ineluctable truth is that the things we want are scarce and have alternative uses. Or in other words, this isn't Eden or Heaven. You could even say that Genesis 3:17 introduces man to grim economic reality, i.e., toil and sweat if you want to eat.

Back when I was a liberal, I was sadly influenced by a loon on the radio named Michael Benner. This was back before meaningful talk radio, and when radio stations had to devote a portion of their airtime to "public service." They would do this during hours no one was listening, usually between midnight and 5:00 or 6:00 AM on Sunday and Monday mornings.

Being that I often worked the graveyard shift in the supermarket, I would imbibe his political and spiritual wisdom while stocking shelves. One of his key principles was that there is no such thing as scarcity. If I recall correctly, he said something to the effect that scarcity is just a mental limitation produced by the capitalist mindset.

Sounded good to me! For it meant that I was entitled to be prosperous, but that someone was just stealing it from me. Indeed, it looks like he hasn't changed one bit since I listened to him in the late '70s and early 80s. Speaking of essential truths, one of his is that -- and this is weird, because he even clothes it in a Schuon-like appeal to the Perennial Philosophy, Esoteric Philosophy, and the consensus wisdom "from all cultures and all times about the Spiritual Reality."

In any event, one of the essential truths is that we may magically "manifest and refine form," or turn wishes to horses. For example, the only real challenges to abolishing world hunger forever are "fear of change and the will to do it anyway."

Not only is there no scarcity in his world, but he also has the secret to ending war. How? "The Great Dichotomy of Life is not so much a conflict between good and evil as it is a choice between harmony and discord, between Unitive Love and separative fear." As such "We must feed and educate our 'enemies' — give them bread and books." ISIS is not evil, just in need of a happy meal and a good summer read.

Enough of that grotesque nonsense. Here is Sowell's pithy definition of scarceness: "It means that what everybody wants adds up to more than there is." Simple as.

However, what is the real source of this disconnect between "want" and "have?" It is that human desire is infinite, while the objects of this desire are finite. Therefore, all economics, from Adam Smith to Barack Obama, is a way to allocate the resources. If it isn't done via prices, then it will be done in some other way, e.g., rationing by state bureaucrats.

Liberals like to ridicule "supply-side" economics, but consumer-side economics is just a mob of open mouths and empty hands. In other words, What I Want does not magically transform into What I Have. If that were the case, then Haiti would be the most affluent place on earth.

In order to get from want to have, there is a little thing alluded to in Genesis which comes down to being productive. The things we want don't produce themselves, as in Eden.

You could say, with the the left, that we have a "right" to healthcare. No doubt true in a sense, in that you have the right to take care of yourself. But you do not have the intrinsic right to compel someone at gunpoint to care for you. The trick is to induce this person to, get this, voluntarily do something for your health, i.e., to get him to produce the desired output without placing him in chains.

Well, we didn't get far, and now I gotta get some WORK done. To be continued....

Memoirs of a Frivolous Man

Well, this is heartening: "I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account" (Lichtenberg, in Kimball). Therefore, when you keep a book in your library, it's like eating your cake and having it too.

I sometimes think I have too many books, but then it occurs to me that their presence is just a kind of accident of the medium.

For example, think of what your house would look like if you were physically surrounded by every movie and television show you had ever watched. It is a blessing that those generally weightless things disappear, for it would be depressing to be reminded of all that wasted time. It would be a monument to a misspent life, like a Grammy, or a Nobel Peace Prize.

At least my survivors will look at my liberatory and know that I tried, and as mentioned the other day, if you can't surpass even yourself, then you're not trying very hard.

What is a wasted life, anyway? One can only not waste it if it has an actual purpose. If life has no purpose, then the whole thing is just a profligate waste of time and energy, a meaningless blip amidst the entropy. Which is why Camus made that crack about suicide being the only valid philosophical question. If you say No to suicide, it implies a reason for living.

In reading this book about Israel, which followed the book on Churchill, I can't help thinking what a frivolous wastrel I am. It reminds me of Dr. Johnson's crack about how every man thinks badly of himself for not having been a soldier or at sea (I've been adrift, but it wasn't at sea).

I don't so much think about the latter, but when you read about real courage, it helps you understand why the left would vilify the military, the police, and past American heroes in general. Just as they don't understand evil, for the same reason they don't understand courage. Which is why leftists such as John Kerry or Dick Durbin accuse our soldiers of being terrorists and Nazis, while praising the incredible courage of Brucelyn Jenner. One of these is not like the other.

Having said that, there must be a place for the entirely frivolous man, for the same reason there is a place for music, comedy, art, and literature. A long time ago I came up with the brilliant rationalization that someone has to just enjoy life, otherwise what's all this fussing and fighting about?

In other words, assuming we're fighting -- whether militarily or politically -- for a purpose, then what is that purpose? What can it be aside from "living a good life"? If the good life is impossible for man, then why bother fighting for it?

I say, dammit, someone needs to prove that this so-called good life is actually possible, or else we're fighting over an illusion. Call it the Courage to be Frivolous.

Look at the left, for example. They never stop fighting, but are they ever happy? Of course not. Any victory only makes them hungry for more, since you can never get enough of what you don't really need. They won't rest until earth is heaven, which can only occur by turning it into hell. Call it the bad- or heteroparadox of the left.

I just read a biography of Giuliani that shows how he utterly transformed New York from the dangerous and increasingly unlivable hellhole it had become in the early 1990s to a once again thriving necropolis. I won't bore you with statistics, but suffice it to say that this didn't make the left happy. Miserable, rather.

Al Sharpton, for example, called Giuliani the worst mayor in world history -- as if anyone could know that -- because 1) he showed how liberal ideas created and maintained the mess, and 2) threatened to put people like Sharpton and Rangle and Cuomo out of business. Not to mention the thousands of black lives that were spared from black predators because of the incredible drop in crime. The left wants more crime, as in St. Louis and Baltimore.

Job One of the left is always about creating the misery from which they promise to rescue its victims with more of the same. It never works (in the world), but always works (at the polls). If nothing else, it sheds light on the deep structure of man's soul, since every generation falls for the same trick. To put it another way, to expose the trick is to illuminate man, naked and shivering, without so much as a fig leaf of tenure.

But we're getting off track here, because this current train of thought began with the intention of propagating a little joy in these trying times. Remember the reader who emailed me for advice on how to cope with the madness? One excellent way is to go on enjoying life despite the best efforts of these miserable bastards to immiserate us all.

This is what Dávila did, and this is the nonlocal source of the aphorisms. For example, I do not belong to a world that is passing away. I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die. We live in that sacred space into which truth flows like crystal waters, and we mustn't confuse this with the merely gross-physical world of the left.

And Christianity does not solve 'problems'; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

Imagine how much happier the left would be if they aspired to this instead of scouring the world for imaginary microaggressions. What a recipe for misery! Not only that, but they ignore the macroaggressions, like, I don't know, A GLOBAL FUCKING RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT THAT WANTS TO SHOVE YOUR GENITALS DOWN YOUR THROAT BEFORE CUTTING OFF YOUR HEAD.

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples.

In other words, what he left behind were dramatically and permanently changed individuals. The subsequent book is a consequence of the people, not vice versa. Or, its purpose is not so much to "learn" as to recapitulate the Personal Change -- the metanoia -- that brought it about. Thus, The Bible is not the voice of God, but of the man who encounters him.

About my abject cowardice alluded to above: just how would one go about proving one is not a coward? That is what Dr. J. means by the regret over having not been a soldier. Ultimately, the only way to prove one's courage is to look death straight in the eye without flinching.

Likewise, how would one express truly selfless love, in which there is nothing in it for the lover? Yes, by dying. Anything short of this might be suspected of self-interest, which is why Jesus in principle transcends any such self-interest.

Which is also why, as Dávila says, Man is only important if it is true that a God has died for him.

Wo. That is deep. For The importance it attributes to man is the enigma of Christianity.

So, cheer up. Life has a point and you actually matter. And remember,

Whoever is not ready to prefer defeat in certain circumstances sooner or later commits the very crimes he denounces. Or just say GOP, the Gratuitous Old Pussies.

Life Beside the Point

Retracing our steps back to where we started yesterday, we were discussing Dávila's Annotations on an Implicit Text, but couldn't get past the marvelous implications of a cosmic text which explicates the nonlocal implicate order. Or in other words, that we may know and talk about God, or the Ultimate Real, in a way that is both specific and inexhaustible, for it is like trying to map a hyperdimensional reality in 3D.

Just as there is an infinite number of points in a line, or an infinite number of lines in a plane, you might say there is an infinite number of aphorisms about the Creator. Theology is inexhaustible because its subject is.

An aphorism is a mode of expression that conveys the maximum with the minimum, and as far as I know, Dávila is the greatest of all aphorists. All others are number two or lower.

Lichtenberg said of his own aphorisms that if they "fall on the right soil" they "may grow into chapters and even whole dissertations" (in Kimball). That is certainly the case with Dávila. How does that work? How does one pack so much power into so little a space?

Most tenured babble is precisely the opposite: it requires whole books to convey a single pedestrian thought, and oftentimes not even that. You can always tell when a book is of this nature when it has a blurb from some mainstream figure such as Tom Brokaw, or a NY Times reviewer, or Katie Couric, or a politician. Such names guarantee banality.

On the other hand, not only does no one within the conspiracy know of Dávila, if he were known, he'd be treated like Donald Trump. For they wouldn't understand Dávila, but only know he is saying Forbidden Things that must be reflexively attacked.

"One commentator," writes Kimball, described Lichtenberg as a "spy on humanity," and you know what they do to captured spies. In Obamaworld it is as if we are spies exiled in our own land. Living as I do in the one party state of California, I am forced to supra-sist as a deep cover agent. Fortunately there are other agents whom we are able to detect through the operation of our regular-guydar.

Of Lichtenberg, Kimball writes that his aphorisms present "not so much a system as a sensibility, a take on the world." Same with Dávila. He is coming from the same place he is describing. I like to think I do the same thing, only ad nauseum.

Even so, I am always mindful of getting the strunk out of my white and Omitting Needless Words. I realize you folks don't have all day, and if I had all day, I could perhaps pack it all into an aphorism. My #1 excuse is that my primary audience is me, and that I simply allow others to spy on my improvisations. So you have no one to blame but yourselves.

"A man of prodigious but unfocused curiosity, [he] dabbled everywhere but persevered nowhere" (Kimball).

Hey, that's an insult! No, wait. He's talking about Lichtenberg.

"Aphorisms are insights shorn of supporting ratiocination" (ibid). Think about that: they are the direct transmission of an insight. Therefore, they are like ex-sights dropped into your head.

Kimball says that when Bertrand Russell told Wittgenstein to, hey, feel free to provide an actual argument for what you just said, LudWitt "replied that arguments spoil the beauty of insights and that 'he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands.'"

I heard that. Is that what I'm doing by blogviating on Dávila's aphorisms, as I am no doubt about to do? Am I defeating their purpose by explicating what is implicate?

For "A ponderous aphorism is a failed aphorism." And "like an electric flash on a camera, they require time between discharges if they are to be fully illuminating" (Kimball). You have to allow them to sink in and do their work. Example:

"With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on blind belief in something else" (Lichtenberg).

Now, I could go on and on about that one, but the arkive reveals that I already have, so I'll let it go.

"Having a low opinion of human nature may not be a prerequisite for being a good aphorist. But it helps" (Kimball).

I don't know about that, for if you don't have a low opinion of human nature, it is doubtful that you have any wisdom to convey. After all, thinking well of human nature is among the most catastrophic principles of the left: you know, they love mankind. It's individual human beings they hate.

"Aphorists are by profession debunkers" (ibid). Here again, this is why members of the conspiracy cannot be good aphorists. Think of a Bill Maher. He's got the cynicism and the brevity, but they are in the service of rebunking (e.g., AGW, Christianity, redefinition of marriage, etc).

Not to sound like a leftist, but you could almost say that power makes a poor aphorist. Imagine Hillary making a witty comment. Debunking power is the power of the aphorist. Or one of them, anyway.

Question and answer: Lichtenberg: When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it have always come from the book? Dávila: The collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.

Now, watch how quickly I can assemble a few of Dávila's aphorisms that express everything in this post in concentrated form:

To write honestly for the rest, one must write fundamentally for oneself.

Check.

For The first step of wisdom is to admit, with good humor, that there is no reason why our ideas should interest anybody.

Double check.

Words do not communicate, they remind.

Ever gnosis that? It's why arguments are not necessarily necessary, and may just obscure the insight.

Clarity is the virtue of a man who does not distrust what he says. Think of the clarity of a Thomas Sowell vs. the tortured and torturing obscurity of the tenured.

For The writer who has not tortured his sentences tortures the reader. And Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas. Boy is that true of the left! Ever notice how they go on and on without saying anything substantive? To be a leftist is to be entirely beside the point.

The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie. Here again, if you remove the hysterical adjectives from a leftist's speech, there is nothing left. A lie surrounded by a bodyguard of adjectives doesn't make it true.

A very consoling one for these endarkened times: I do not belong to a world that is passing away. I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die.

Boom!

Besides, When one century's writers can write nothing but boring things, we readers change century.

And Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, trivial to the serious man, we must start over.

I can only hope this post was obsolete, immature, and trivial enough for you.

Non-doodling in the Margin between Man and God

Dávila called his aphorisms Annotations on an Implicit Text; "annotations" is a much better translation than "scholia," but unfortunately, this is the only authorized English edition of Dávila's works, and it is filled with similarly negaesthetic translations. For in addition to the wisdom, irony, and humor, the aphorisms are often clothed in pure poetic beauty, and there are much better translations floating around the ether.

I remember Roger Kimball discussing another aphorist, G.C. Lichtenberg, in his Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse. Which is not to say I remember anything about what he said. That's what highlighting is for. Or my annotations to Kimball's explicit text. While I'm warming up here, let's learn a little something about the whole genre of aphorisms.

Before getting to Kimball, think about that title: annotations on an implicit text. What is this text? You could say it is the Transcendent Real, or the nonlocal object to which the intellect is strangely proportioned. There's a lot of weird stuff going on down here, but that has to be among the weirdest.

Because it is nonlocal, the text cannot be seen or touched, and yet, it can easily be sensed, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation (for the past ten years), nor would religion converge upon anything. Rather, as the atheist believes, it would be just nonsense about nothing instead of non-sensuous intellection of the implicate metacosmic order.

Forgive this brief bit of gnostalgia, but one of the first books that opened my eyes to the wider world was Wholeness and the Implicate Order, by physicist and FOE (Friend of Einstein) David Bohm. You see, at the time, science was the only vertical gate available to me, so thank God for rebellious scientists who think outside the tenured box of settled science.

Lng stry shrt, I went on to write my dissertation on the freakish commonality between Bohm's vision of the cosmos and psychoanalyst W.R. Bion's vision of the psyche, and here we are, pretty much engaged in the same oldenpneumagain verticalisthenic gymgnostics every morning. The annotations change but the text remains the same. You could say that both macrocosm and microcosm are implicit, and that it is our task to explicate the fractal links between.

No, seriously. That's what it is. I can't help how I talk.

Now that I think about it, life would scarcely be worth living without links to the Nonlocal Text, for truly, it is these links and nothing else that separate us from the beasts, both human and nonhuman. Are modern and postmodern barbarians losing the ability to intuit and forge the links?

Adoy.

Therefore, man is only forgoing his reason for being. Instead of a being of reason, he is rendering himself an unreasonable being of nonbeing, which is simply what sub-Marxist existentialism does. It is how marriage or gender or even truth itself become just anything instead of specific things.

Note that the word "religion" literally means to "bind," and the binding in question goes precisely to the links between local and nonlocal, macro- and microcosm, heaven and earth, man and God, (¶) and O.

I'll give you a very brief but concrete example. A friend of ours and her 10 or 11 year-old daughter spent last week volunteering at a Haitian orphanage. The mother sent a photo of Julianna holding an adorable baby. But the first thing that occurred to me is that Julianna did not resemble the girl she had been just a week ago. She looked decidedly different -- older, more fully formed, more maternal (but those adjectives are poor substitutes for What I Saw). It wasn't just her expression, mind you; rather, something about her whole being, only transmitted through the photo.

Lng stry shrt, we were babysitting the other children yesterday. When the dad came by to pick them up, he revealed independently that he had seen the identical thing in the photo, to such an extent that he was moved to tears. That is what you call independent convergent testimony of a nonlocal reality. If it were my daughter I would surely have shed a tear as well. The point is that we were both godsmacked by a reality that can only be seen with eyes not made by Darwin.

Or as Dávila himself says, To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which the poet sang.

Which is also why it is impossible, try as you might, to photograph a "gay wedding," because such a thing does not exist. Rather, that would be the annotation of a nonexistent or fantasized text, now enforced by the state. In shrt, the state is compelling its subjects to bow down before a completely unreal world which, at the very least, violates the separation between crotch and state.

"Coincdentally," this book by Lings says pretty much the same thing, minus the gratuitous vulgarity. When Churchill discovered that someone before him had stolen his ideas, he called it "anticipatory plagiarism." So somehow, Lings hacked into the future of my blog. Either that or he is annotating the same nonlocal text.

Remember, for Lings, an authentic symbol is a link between worlds, man as such being the quintessential symbol this side of heaven, or perhaps the symbolizing symbol. The Fall means that the link has been severed -- or damaged rather -- with the result that we have been grounded. However, there are heavenly answers to our "wingless predicament," such that we may fly on wings of symbolic slack, so to speak.

"They could be defined as symbolic acts or enacted symbols, providentially endowed with wings for return to their Source..." You might say they are like vertical OMing pigeons, so perhaps the dove in Matthew 3:16 is just an infelicitous translation. In any event, doesn't everybody know -- from the trashman on up -- that this bird is the Word? Or better, the Holy Third, b'atman!

In any event, it is "a life-line thrown down from Heaven; it is for the worshipper to cling to the life-line," but much (or all, depending on how you look at it) "is in the hands of the Thrower," the "Supreme Archetype."

Look, if I can't even surpass myself, that's not saying much, is it? Well, the same applies to you and everyone else. Failure to do this makes you an ambient human, a blob of refried ectoplasm subsisting at cultural room temperature, like the Rainbow People who imagine that all you need is human love.

Which is of course necessary but not sufficient to leave the ground or decipher the text.

Rather, we cannot do it without a Divine Intervention. I mean seriously, who would even attempt to do so without the aid of heaven?

Our nonlocal lifelines "amount to an other-worldly intrusion" manifesting "a real presence of the Infinite in the finite, or the Transformal in the formal."

These come to us fresh every morning, straight from the source, although you might say they are providentially a little half-baked so that man may learn to do a little baking on his own. If they were fully baked, this would, among other things, deprive us of our freedom to eat or not eat the manna. You know what they say: teach a man to bake, and he eats forever...

Returning to the Kimball from whom this post has badly deviated, he cites one of Lichtenberg's more famous aphorisms about certain works -- the type we have been discussing -- being mirrors; when an ape looks into them, no apostle looks out.

Boom! Likewise for the troll, the tenured, the tyrant in robes, who see only the dreary architecture of their own beshriveled souls.