Happy New Year. Hello 2023!

(from New Year's Day 2023)

"...sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one."  

-CS Lewis

Ah, another year, another opportunity to repeat the same mistakes, or an opportunity for the glorious quixotic pebble-toe half-nature of the impetus towards self-destruction and the love of pure noise and disturbance.

We claw through and breathlessly make our way to the exit sign on 2022, hoping for the first rays of dawn on January 1, 2023. We claw our way through and oftentimes to the pure meanness of staying alive, proving our veracity in simply not fading away, not burning out, proudly facing the throng in defiance, in defense of one's selfish ideals.

Another opportunity to get it right or go up in flames.

Another opportunity.

'Every new year is an uncharted and unknown sea. No ship has ever sailed this way before. The wisest of earth's sons and daughters cannot tell us what we may encounter on this journey. Familiarity with the past may afford us a general idea of what we may expect, but just where the rocks lie hidden beneath the surface or when that "tempestuous wind called Euroclydon" may sweep down upon us suddenly, no one can say with certainty.... '

-AW Tozer

Happy New Year!

Another.

But but but.... i made a New Year's resolution, and everything.  I decided to get started on a whole menu of positive, beneficial changes, like:

Only healthy food, and none of what tastes good.

Boring lovers that are stable in their moods, and probably b elong in a stable, regardless of their mood.

According to Lao Tse:

"Strength is controlling others.

Mastery is controlling one's own self."

But it was a New Year.

And I, feel cheated that all this mess in the New Year has that familiar reek to it, like a bad potato in the bag, of a soiled baby diaper somewhere hidden in the bottom of our garbage can.

But then i think, if i had gotten it right last year, I'd be prepared for new stuff this year, and it seems i'm not prepared for those newer reaches towards the ethereal, all the cavalcade of changes, completely unequal to the mark.

The gas hand in my truck. It had asked when Josef Bundren would have his 87th birthday, and I said I dunno, and the gas hand said he doesn't know either we could ask Hunter but sh*t let's fill the tank and get.

I was praying, hoping, petitioning God Himself that I would have enough gas in my truck yesterday to get back and forth to work.  On the way there, I was tying myself in knots, in my own thoughts, going back and forth on the matter, whether to just turn around, or press on.

All along the way, Hwy 9, the farmland in Dillon and Marlboro counties in South Carolina, part of the so-called "Cotton Trail", flat land, between the piedmont and the sea, very well-watered and fertile, great for growing cotton every year.

The fog was rising.

I was thinking: I could see the sun through the remnant of the fog, and thought, not the Sun but the Son.

Christ was the solar body, burning off the fog of sin and doubt, and metaphorically, fog can easily be equated to doubt, and more thinly to sin, an obscuring force between ourselves and Christ.

That fog was all the prior dead souls coming up, the dead souls and the doubts, dead souls rising into the air, vaporous, going to dissipate into thin air on the ascent to heaven.

Doubts dissipating, too.

Sin dissipating.

Every obscuring force between ourselves and the Lord coming to some sort of evaporation, leaving behind clarity.

A perfect clarity, just as perfect as the Perfect Law of Liberty, to rest in God's will.

For my own part, it was like God was telling me just to continue my drive to work, as planned.  Not that it had the endorsement of God, but maybe that it was better than the alternatives, it was, if not God's outright enumerated plan for me, then it was closer to His will than was turning around and going home.

Under the Perfect Law of Liberty, we look for the will of God to help guide us, we loosen ourselves in our daily walks, to wait for His guidance.  This loosening of our schedules and self-imposed time tables is the Liberty of choosing the Father's will.  And more importantly, the Father's will slots us into perfection and harmony with everyone else.

Everyone wins when we all go to the Father's plan.

But that clarity then, that perfect brilliant orb sitting high in the sky: the Sun, the promise of the Son returned.

"There are, however, no sharp lines or demarcations between the various operations just outlined.[thought and belief] The problem of attaining correct habits of reflection would be much easier than it is, did not the the different modes of thinking blend insensibly into one another."

-John Dewey, How We Think

"We ought to consider no only that our life is daily wasting away and a smaller part of it is left, but another thing which must be taken into account, that if a man should live longer, it is quite uncertain whether the understanding will continue sufficient for the comprehension of things, and retain the power of contemplation which strives to acquire the knowledge of the divine and the human.

For if we being to fall into dotage, perspiration and nutrition and imagination and the appetite, and whatever else there is of the kind, will not fail; but the power of making use of ourselves, and filling up the measure of our duty, and clearly separating appearances, and considering whether a man should now depart from life, and whatever else kind absolutely requires a disciplined reason, all this is already extinguished.  We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and understanding of them cease first."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book three.

"So far there is the same sort of situation as when one looking at a cloud is reminded of a human figure and face.  Thinking in both of these cases(the cases of belief and of fancy) involves a noted or perceived fact, followed by something else which is not observed but which is brought to mind, suggested by the thing seen.  

One reminds us, as we say, of the other."

-John Dewey, How We Think.

The cult of self, Jekyll was at times, up to being half a man, even that much, and other times, not equal to the task, barely putting in the niceties to keep up appearances.

As a half of person, he was out of his depth, but he kept to the line and gave no sign of the truth, that he imbibed himself into someone else.  This is like Stephen King and Peter Straub's other world behind the fog of drink, where good and evil fought tete-a-tete, where the real world reeked more of poverty and dissipation on its own terms.

Here I was thinking Jekyll should have had a third alter ego, something more of a happy medium, but decidedly different than the other too.  But I note Jekyll behaved secretively, and then openly and grand, as if he too were experimenting with making another personality, living his "best life" writ large in the society pages.  And that without a tonic, but his own life energy being used, that wick burning brighter and brighter still, folding down and down, until at last, he would disappear as Hyde for two mighty months.

Amor Fati, Memento Fati....

The bootless cries of a man against his destiny, and other such, the theme of failure as a watchword of the day, leading into the big anniversary tomorrow, Teresa Du'Tres and Felonge De Castille.

but a poor player that struts and frets its hour upon the stage....

Cutting through a sort of melange of stuff, minutia, a sort of "virtue", a sharpened tendril of impetus cavorting and gnawing into the fiber moral, temporal, and so forth, having at the gutty works, and getting chased away like a beggar.

A kind of "honed edge" which meets the material that are put to it, such is to exercise a kind of superlative in a world of flats, but sharps in a room filled with weather balloons.

A kind of prolonged lukewarm birthday party for Kevin.

"And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. “Poor Harry Jekyll,” he thought, “my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.” And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, least by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of hope."

-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Wee.

In the dominion of the static universe, perhaps I somewhat floated, or lensed as to have specific gravity, I sat like a lump of iron or a millstone, but all the way, the objectives and terabytes coursed through the thinkgood, the brainmeats, the very core of the nut, as it were, and thoughts and ideas, most insensate and ephemeral danced like sugar plums in my head.

All the while, tomorrow, another catcher in the sawgrass, something wicked this way, and various things leaping and cajoling about the various schedule apparatus, all sorts of bs scattering about, as if to be broadcast over a field, waves and waves of it to change the color of the leaves or freeze the mud puddles, or induce Mike Pence to go scurrying along.

There was a kind of trap door, where the hunter sleeps along the bottom of the aquarium, and he patiently waits for the lapse of attention from his prey, for which he pounce at the given opportunity afforded his leisure and guile: neigh, that's what it was, things floating about, an obscure flavored cigar of leisure and guile, and the smoke of that, a kind of rotary output, torque, measurable by machine.

I need to be much more specific about the output of my hobbies, I suppose, but a bit of art, flourish or flair, perhaps is the least indignity done to my little works, and that only showing indignity in the slightest backhanded sense, as if to blame me for the faults of others.

This is what I tell them of a role model: they make a mistake and blame it on the example of their idol, their icon, their stub toe pookah.  Blame that one, for all the good such does.

I have to decide too, when flaws should be changed, or whether that's sort of the paraphernalia of character traits, real identifiable markings and such.  Another opportunity to get it right, right? I cannot afford time-wise too disassemble myself everyday for some obscure arcane cleaning procedure, but perhaps just to dryfire the workings to see if the hammer and pin does what it should; but nevertheless I afford myself the opportunity to realize that I am here. I am here opportunity-plunking to catch the 10,000, 

(And that is how it was, in the first rays of 2023. I could/can feel it without remembering, or remembering without feeling, but never reverse polarity in time travelling into the mandelbrot 2023. It was.

I offer-up this from William Hazlitt remonstrating one of his contemporaries

"Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of thought. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, "and read Godwin on Necessity." Sad necessity! Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty, and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814? Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense! Let us pause here a little.--Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions, and carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time. What then? Because those opinions were overcharged, were they therefore altogether groundless? Is the very God of our idolatry all of a sudden to become an abomination and an anathema? Could so many young men of talent, of education, and of principle have been hurried away by what had neither truth, nor nature, not one particle of honest feeling nor the least shew of reason in it?"

As was said of the Prince of Denmark in madness and good sense, it was intermixed. One could only mark the edges of one in seeing the beginning of the other, owing to the contrast of the two. Its not completely different from doing the necessary rituals to wipe one's ass.)