I don’t know a more corrupting influence on your intellectual life than the notion of defining your intellectual identity by the enemy. By this I mean that having no speck of joy in the intellect apart from negatively and aggressively orbiting—that is opposing—some other concept. This is why activism as anything apart from a pasttime or a hobby is bankrupt of leisure and respite. The struggle indeed never ends. Take feminism which orbits “the patriarchy” for instance, it has no life of its own without the patriarchy so it always seeks to redefine what the patriarchy is at every point in order to stay active and relevant. This is the St. George in retirement syndrome.
But this is not really about St. George in retirement. I say that that is only a mild form of such corruption. My larger interest focuses on how forging your intellectual identity by the enemy leads to deformity of image. In the Nietzchean sense of battling with monsters “lest ye become a monster,” and being careful how long you gaze into the abyss lest the abyss gazes also at you.
This “abyss gazing also at you” looks something like this: “it is okay if I ruin someone’s life because, well, the other guy who I hate does it; after all, he is the reason I became this in the first place.” Or even the simpler case of those Satanic euphemisms: “decolonization” which means doing unspeakable things to the innocent men, women, and children of the “oppressor”; [fill in the blank]. The worst form of this deformation is the abolition of ethics and morals from among “minority groups” who we cannot now hold responsible or accountable for genuine wrongs because we have removed every measure of judgement and left only the concept of “liberation” or “equity” standing. This is ruinous and deforming by every standard.
Those then who define themselves by their enemy will always need their enemy. In this sense then, these people may be without a belief in a God, but never without a belief in a devil—even if God has to be their devil. They will always trail or orbit around such image as they have designated devil. It means that they have no core of their own. They are hollow, empty, and vacuous. Concave, nurgatory, and otiose. Essentially, they are in all real sense, zero. This is why they always need a fight, a battle, a struggle. But true intellectual life; the life of the mind that flourishes, has its core. It defines itself by love and wonder; by something permanent, eternal, and by something worth gazing at. By God.
Maybe we misunderstand that we are formed as we behold. If you can understand that, you will reduce the time you spend engaging in intellectual warring and spend more time engaging the true, good, and beautiful. Only can by this can you be truly true, truly good, and truly beautiful.
And I would not want you to misunderstand the abyss for the antimodel.
The antimodel is a model that you use to say “that is something I don’t want to be like.” Like a drunk, abusive father for instance. A son may decide to not be like such father. But again this caveat is important: your attitude towards an antimodel matters. Hate the antimodel enough to refuse it. But be gentle enough to not be consumed by it. A son who allows hatred for his abusive father to consume him will in fact become a monster of either the same or different model—he cannot escape it. Hence, attitude is important.
The intellectual life as a “form of the inner life of a person, a place of retreat and reflection” must be treated with as much sacredness as one would treat a shrine—free from filth and profanity whatever the best forms they assume. Gaze right.
On gaze, I consider YouTube one of the most important inventions of the 21st century. It is a wonder—despite all the garbage therein. I call it, for personal reasons, The University of YouTube.
It is on one of those occasions where I was flanuering the streets of that great digital institutions that I found a compilation of all the soundtracks James Gunn used in Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Guardians of The Galaxy 1&2. Now those songs were a good choice. But one of them stood out to me most: Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes.
This song caught me for one reason. It captured my current mood—that mood of seeing old things in a new light. That mood according to the “law written in the darkest of the Books of Life” as Chesterton so elegantly described; that “if you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.” So is the mood of the song. For the man who had “fallen into the same dumb old routine” with his “old lady” found her new and afresh precisely because they both tried to escape one another.
Although, I do not laud the moral message within it that depicts leaving your wife or husband as an okay thing just because you are bored. I only love the mood and outcome of the whole event because it captures the sense of wetting a dry situation with a new discovery. It as well points to the sacramental and mirandous implication of marriage which is a lifetime of unwrapping someone’s soul until death does you part. To look upon your spouse as time goes on as if “it were in another light, and discovers in it a multitude of charms, that conceal themselves” as Joseph Addison dresses it up. If for nothing else, on this note alone, the song does well. So friend, please listen to the song and enjoy.
Still on gaze. What can you possibly see when you fix your gaze on eggs and the judiciary?
Find out in my essay On Eggs and The Judiciary.
This weekend, dare to experiment with the fabric of time; nap without an alarm. See ya!
"Wetting a dry situation with a new discovery." This isn't something you stumble upon, it requires determination and you working it out. This simple principle would save many relationships.
This is a brilliant piece of work I must say.
On Gaze is a brilliant piece of work, and brews introspection on first read. Looking forward to reading again.