theNakedAtheist

“When you've got everything else in a marriage going for you, then it's the icing on the cake.”

“No, don't like icing, so I wouldn't call it the icing on the cake. Much too sicky sweet. It's more like the apples in the pie.”

Intercourse: is it the icing on the cake? or the apples in the pie?

This draws a good line between people's concept of it. An us and them sort of thing.

And then you have a rough, mean man: with him it's really more an intercoarse. He's like sandpaper working away. No touch.

Others are like a bug; they barely crawl up to you, queasy and nervous. They try, they mean well, but still its an uncertain bug coldness that comes out of them. They feel rather buggy. A buggy little thing crawling on you. They might as well be a cockroach scampering about. Inwardly a petrified cockroach with its tail between its legs.

Ripples of water
Dapple the sea
Washout of summer
And the sadness from me

Fishes are sleeping
In the wake of the sea
Seagulls are flying
Quite a distance from me

Grey clouds to the skyline
Blue clouds to the sea
Winter in August
About to winterize me

The poundy stark ocean
With its salty green spray
Singes like salt rock
In full-splayed denial of day

Sudsy black seaweed
Like webs on the shore
Ghost spiders rubbing
Ag'in the rubbled beach floor

Breakers in grey light
Riding the sea
Weary worn daylight
Down-declining in me

Grey clouds to the skyline
Blue clouds to the sea
Winter in August
About to winterize me

We watched the helicopter like some giant mechanical bee with its giant mechanical hum; it darted clumsily about, fat, like a bloated bee. Still, it had its way in the sky, and a shrill fear-respect from all that lived on wings.

They had been zombied by the 4-year rigors known as mental discipline; now they walked like puppets. Quite wooden like puppets. Heads on sticks.

Don't tell me about “liberation”—I know all about it. Women! Walking about in their pants. Bra-less. Absolutely naked and bra-less.

Some women. You'd think they were—animals! and not angels. The whole caboodle and business is sickening. Just terribly sickening. We ought to begin a mass-transit program of planned extermination of them—planned extermination, but with a certain controlled wildness—swisk! swisk!—in order to rush them up to heaven more quickly. Merely run them in mass into extermination centers, like concentration camps—give 'em the gas—or wire them up and electrocute—and so off to heaven with them. Yes, admit that indeed earth is hell, and so a crash program to egg Jesus down here again for the 'second coming', and so force in the Millennium.

Hell, we've been killing the wrong people all along—all this century. The 200,000,000 and more we've nicely killed in the 20th century have almost all been men. Sooner or later they would have died anyway on their own, still it's no way to run a world. You don't solve population problems by killing men. Men don't beget children; we've got to get at the women.

Think! If only it had been 200,000,000 women—what a world it would be! There'd hardly be any overpopulation or starvation, and only half the overcrowding. We'd have our species down to a nice sweet size.

And if but we would decide to exterminate all our women—bat them dead like bugs or something—there would be no problems at all. In 100 years no problems at all. Paradise. It would save the world.

And probably, it's our only good chance of saving the world—saving it from extermination—from a pollution to death—and atomic destruction—and technological [technically not logical at all] destruction. No men; no women; no Mr. & Mr. Homo Sapiens. . . but life, life and earth would be saved.

And after all, we'd be heroes, wouldn't we? Heroes—and especially the women. Sacrificing their lives—our lives—our entire species—all to save life—and to save the planet, dear dear earth, and get the egg of God's face.

So don't tell me about 'liberation'. I know all about it. Men—and I mean both mankind and men—have been liberated for two hundred thousand years now—we've been totally free—full total freedom, free to do whatever we've willed—and that is just what we've done.

We were so free we sent ourselves to the moon. We built giant castle-cities of steel and white concrete and glass. We're total freedom.

Now women, our housepets, want to be total freedom too. Send women to the moon, they say. Let women design the castle-cities. Ha! Earth is dying under men's freedom—now women want it too. Ha! I say: exterminate them.

Let's free life, which we've made into our tightest-security prison. Let's free life and earth, and let them breathe again.

End this silly slave-revolt of ours—and agree to be owned by life again, and by earth—and wipe the egg off God's face.

What is it about D. H. Lawrence's writing? Certainly it is beyond me to know. I am no threat to him. His words are not just alive, they are actual living animals. They heave with the respiration of a million little breasts.

Me, I am in awe, I can't believe.

The cold wind, once, waited in my own breath for me, with the slow patient awaiting of a wildflower for the sun to run its day; it once waited in my breath to heave the whisper ghost-heave that was vital breath to me, the coarse lungeing of my upper body, the air pulse and flow of my dappled breast; it once seethed in me, the chill, sprite wind, breathed its seed in me, ghost warmth-seed of my respiration. Once, and I gasp breath til it again.

Their blood was a cold protoplasm, like soggy cold cereal, all sugared up.

. . . soggy cold blood!

They were all like that, with their straitjacket suits—their arms hung but dead lumps at the sides, shriveled tame and white, blood all cut off. Absolute white and shriveled, like delicate glass inmates of a menagerie.

What was needed was a little rosy blood in them, and this the suits could not abet: for what the suits did, by design, was to pinch you at the neck and the shoulder nubs, pinch off your blood, that it could not, would not flow. And so men's arms turned white and soggy dead, and their heads, cut off, estranged from the body at the neck, turned mental and perverse, full tin-metal grey.

But, strange thing, once they were home resting in their chairs, suits off, in the ease of home-life, then the full blood ought to have flowed back, flowed back, renewing the channels in the arms, surging and filling them again: a flood. But it was not so. Their suits were innocently in the closet, hanging, their arms were erect and stiffened strong again—at least they ought to have been so. But no.

No, in their minds, in the minds of these sterile-white flopped-arm men, like habit, their suits were still roped around them; it was the constriction and the strickening off of the vital veins at the joints, so that no blood came. Their suits hanged innocently in the closet; but on the men remained still the soggy, rubbery, white lumps called arms. Hung on the hangers of their shoulders like limp penises.

Anyone who can say 'The clothes make the man' has no idea even what a man is. Clothes may be a part of a man's pretensions—but a man cannot be what he pretends to be: he cannot will himself into something. He can only alienate himself; he is then man alienated, nothing else. He is never a banker, no matter what he wears or how he talks or how he structures his mind, or where he prefers to stay all day.

Clothes do not make a man but they can hide him, disguise him, and leave him a life-forsaken creature, impotent and alone.

Well, the fact that the divorce rate in modern civilization is so high, tells me that it's so, he answered. Tells me that their love is half mental worship—like worship of God—worship of some abstract entity. The mental worship sort of love. It's obvious—from the red lipstick, shaved bare legs and face, narrowed eyebrows, perfumed cheeks—it's not so much the physical, natural girl they love—it's some idealized girl.

The ideal woman with her red red lips, bare plastic legs, and so on. No wonder they drool over Miss America contests—they're looking for the girl that most nearly fits this mental abstraction in their heads that they worship. The ideal girl, like an ideal triangle. Their love is mental. And it works vice versa of the women's love for men. They love “ideal qualities”, not men.

No wonder the divorce rate is so high—it's love in the minds—mental worship—but we change our minds so easily. So quickly sometimes. They turn out not to match our ideal abstraction of them—and this fowls up our worship-love.

The whole business is obscene, he said, obscene , and strikes deep inside at me. It disturbs me so. A real, physical and mental offensiveness to it.

Girls with plastic-smooth hairless legs. It's promiscuous.

A part of and sign of men's impotency and women's promiscuity.

Talk of freedom: is man a free being—autonomous : is he free-willed? or is he determined?

Man is free-willed and determined. He can “do” almost anything—almost anything he wants to; but he cannot “be” almost anything. What man “is” is a pretty set, determined thing that evolves, changes, only gradually over millenniums. But what man “does”, what he “can do” is practically wide open; yet if what he “does” is not compatible, not in harmony, with what he “is”—then the result will be a small death in him. Man is free to kill himself. Man is free not to live well. Because man thinks symbols, and anything can be thought, symbolized.

When there is not a balance in nature—when nature has changed too quickly to keep balance, when a animal like man has overcome his natural enemies, then the freedom that all animals have becomes a force for evil—for furthering the imbalance—for causing a small death. And this is just the thing that leads to later extermination if not checked. Man is no longer “doing” things consistent with what he “is”, which is an animal in balance with nature, and at that a certain nature. Change nature a little and you change man greatly; change nature greatly, and you kill man.

The more man changes nature, the more he must “do.” An animal out of balance is an animal free. But it is still an animal out of balance. It's freedom is only good if it reestablishes the balance.

But reestablishing balances is not a political jurisdiction: it is a species jurisdiction, personal to each individual of the species. It is the political jurisdiction to allow all the freedom possible in all directions, so that the freedom is free enough to reestablish balance with nature. That is, to reestablish the natural anarchy that exists within the state called “balance”.

When what a being “is” is lost sight and touch of, then that being needs all the freedom it can get in order to search for and feel for and refind its sight and touch.

For if what a being “is” is lost sight of, then it has no sight; and if lost touch of, then it has no touch.

The Stoics saw about themselves a universe so estranged from the universe of 20th century man that it takes a great creative and imaginative leap for us even to begin to grasp the spirit of it. The Stoic' was a universe that a man could inhale into himself and digest in his lungs and exhale again into the living atmosphere. The fire that cooked his meat, the fire that, so mysterious and threatening, flashed across the terrible storm sky; this same was the fire in a man, that was the warmth inside him, and the quick. So too the water that he drank—it was some vibrant substance to him, that flowed and splashed with a life of its own. The earth he walked on and slept on and built things of, the earth that bore him vegetable and fruit to eat, out of which germinated the seed and the power that made the seed grow to become the plant and the tree and the vine—this earth that bore life out of the womb of itself, it too, to the Stoics, was a thing alive.

Within it, the Stoics could discern two penultimate constituents—of which one was primary matter, inert, passive, lifeless mass, sans power or shape; and the other, primary force, the vital mover, the active principle, that seethed a life into primary matter, animated it, and so evolving together into the physical Stoic universe of the four elements. And what were the four elements of life, the four basic shapes the Stoics could see about themselves, that matter took in the universe? They were: fire, air, earth, water. In these their universe lived and moved, and had its being.

Part and parcel with these four elements were the four “qualities” which signaled their presence in things—fire was evidenced by 'the hot'; air by 'the cold'; water was evidenced by 'the wet'; earth by 'the dry'. The whole cosmos hinged on these elements. Earth, being heavy, containing within itself less the primary force and more the primary matter, gathered into and formed the solid, motionless center, the inner sphere of the cosmos. Next was the sphere of water, which though not as massive as the earth, not as substantial, nevertheless was more so than fire or air. Air was next—vital, living matter flowing in a larger sphere about the sphere of water and earth. Finally came fire, of which were the stars and the planets, the meteors and the mysterious comets, and the sun and moon. And yet not quite so the moon. For the Stoics recognized that the moon's light was not her own, nay, was reflected from the sun. Thus, as Chrysippus said, though the sun was indeed pure fire, not so the moon—she was but a mixture of fire and air.

Throughout this universe, in varying gradations, was interspersed the vital or primary force, which manifested itself as soul—the soul in man. This primary force was an intelligence, or order, as much as a force. It was the power that gave tension and movement to inert matter. The Stoics had many names for it—it was Fire—or Ether—or Air—or Atmospheric Current—or the Soul of the Universe—or the Mind—or Reason. And more than this. It was the Universal Law—Providence—the Connecting Element in all Things—Destiny.

This vital force, whatever it may have been, was interspersed throughout all matter; but more, it was the dual principle or property with universal matter, just as 'heat' was the dual property with fire, 'wetness' the dual property with water, and so on.

The active principle and the passive, force and matter: they were two sides of the same coin—the same universal substance from which all came.

The universe, like plants and animals about us, had a life cycle of its own; a time of going back into its universal substance, into pure Zeus or Deity, in which the dual active and passive principles are as near into one as possible, and are spread over and about, throughout, all space; and a time of building up of itself into the concrete and the crystal, into the four native elements of our existence, and all that is come of them, in which the cycle of tension and conflict between the dual principles—the active, the passive—is sharpest and greatest.

The active, the primary force, the soul or intelligence (always material in the Stoic mind—never transcendental or spiritual), is interspersed throughout the passive—inert matter—in our present universe of bodies and living beings. But in different bodies it takes on different manifestations—different tensions. In man it “presents itself not only as intellect, but also in the lower manifestations of sense, growth, and cohesion. It is the soul which is the cause of the plant-life, which displays itself more particularly in the nails and hair; it is the soul also which causes cohesion among the parts of the solid substances, such as bones and sinews, that make our frame. In the same way the world-soul displayed itself in rational beings as intellect, in the lower animals as mere soul, in plants as nature, or growth, and in inorganic substances as 'holding' or cohesion.”*

And what is cohesion? Chrysippus wrote: “Cohesions are nothing else than airs; for it is by these that bodies are held together; and of the individual qualities of things which are held together by cohesion it is the air which is the compressing cause, which in iron is called 'hardness', in stone 'thickness', and in silver 'whiteness'.”*

A curious, curious materialism indeed!

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* Stoicism by St. George Stock (first published in 1908), pages 87 and 89. [on the web see A Little Book of Stoicism by St. George Stock, p. 20]