Metaphor

Those with complex minds and impassioned hearts are compelled by destiny to live simple, orderly lives, ensuring harmony through the counterpoise of extremes.

Though claimed throughout millennia of Western culture that truth is by definition objective, it is that culture that both defines that truth, and determines the extent of its relevance. The belief in the absolute objectivity of truth is the very submission that renders individuals, first, then entire populations, vulnerable to social and political power, oppression, tyranny. Truth in the sense of conceptual metaphor is identified relative to those systems, parties,  individuals poised to benefit most fully from the creation of fear, or awe, reverential fear, that they elicit.

Most metaphors evolve with the natural progression of time; many, too, though, are imposed by people in power upon those inclined to submit  – political, religious, and business leaders, and by their co-conspirators and collaborators in advertising, and the media. Beguiled by the myth of objectivism, wherein truth is always absolute, those who impose their metaphors of truth on the culture are granted by the acquiescence of the masses the right to interpret all that is to be considered true.

Destiny may not be coerced, cajoled, or counted on.  However disruptive the influence and rule of despots, universal  balance will be maintained in alignment with universal truth.

Man is a time only, when himself his flesh and spirit is, created and creator, suicidal resurrection; and in every time a wildness and a wiseness, worse than he is, and better— his comedies all vice, his tragedies all horror of vice, his truth a desperation of extremes.

He has scored shadowy vantages on air, mounted amongst the ruins of self the weary trophies of intransigence. These are not immortalities, nor monuments, but rotting gages, limp where thrown, relics of dreamt victories.

The loathing, abhorring, and despising remain ineluctably present, undeniably constant. Despite and still, no energy is spent in contemplating a condition over which I have no control; no time wasted in idle self-enragement. Presuming no responsibility for, squandering no effort in, the palliation of the distress of others in their disenchanted plight, in deluded obstinacy persevering, I am thus not emburdened here, but to state the predilection for extreme.

Writing is certainly not the imposition of a form of expression on the matter of lived experience. The course of writing, though towards a goal, perhaps, is merely a direction, its steps erratic. Writing unfolds in revelation. Its becoming, ever burgeoning, striving towards fuller realisation, rather than completion. Just as living is a continual process, the experience that it manifests is also continual. In writing, then, the writer must necessarily become who or that which she or he writes, to the extent that the distinction between them is nearly imperceptible. These becomings may be linked to one another by a particular line, sequence, or cycle; or they may coexist at every level, accompanying the thresholds, the doorways, the zones, and the spheres that comprise the universe. Becoming is simultaneously devoid of domination and of submission. Becoming is acceptance, surrender, belief. To write, a writer must believe in that reality which through her or his transcription becomes reality in fact. Whereas a photograph is an interpretation of a likeness, the moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact, but an opinion. All photographs are accurate. None of them, however, is the truth. Truth, as it is believed, is as it is written.