Flow/Frame
Spiritual activity is addressed more directly and less antiquitously than spiritual agility and acuity, as befits a practical handbook for post-modern use. This reader regards Andrew’s work as a manual for individuals intent on contesting the fully Beast-leashed world of Modernity in a post-modern revolt. He does not us ethat term, but operation, in an insurgent context; which is to say rational warrior revolt, rather than emotional ideological revolt. I suggest maintaining revolt level resistance and not escalating to rebellion or revolution, as all such movements have fallen easy prey to the machinations of the Enemy, deeply embedded in the web of lies we suffer discord by. All ideologies—yours, mine, my father’s, your hated enemy’s—are all, yes, ALL, traps contrived and set by The Enemy of the human soul for upon us to hungrily dine.
Paul is invoked in the reweaving theme of flow, in the advice for a returning home. That Paul returned home via Rome, which was not his earthly home, but his executioner’s block, being visited by an “angel of his God,” in storm off Sicily, reminds this reader at the top of page 25, that Odysseus had a like journey, and that this hero of “many-devices,” is mentioned in the inspirational overleaf featuring Homer/David/Bob Dylan. As much as the third leg of that selected poetic tripod makes this reader cringe, such is necessary to make the connection from our deep pit with our twisted path. For, “The Enemy has introduced a situation wherein the mystical relationship between flow and repentance is lost.”
Homer gives this story whole, with Odysseus being visited by God’s messenger [Hermes, conductor of souls] and God’s sisterly angel, Athena, who alone knows the mind of her Father and resides in storm, a storm which is a shield for the righteous. [See Exodus and Hesiod’s Shield of Herakles.] Since the twisted modern mind, and by extension the anemic postmodern mind, has been corrupted beyond the ability to read ancient codex, the author links the most neutral and soulful sections of the Bible [Psalms] and modern folk music with the Odyssey as a thread. Congrats, this would be quite beyond this curmudgeon’s reptilian charm.
The language of the birds is briefly discussed directly, that is the language of sight-across-into Time. Homer, Hesiod and Apollonius of Rhodes sung of birds as the messengers of God more often than angels, bearers of hints for the discerning mind, rather than instructions such as those brought to Odysseus and Lot. Andrew mentions of the knitting person weaving on the like plane of the musician, and I would add the fighter. This recalls to mind the two most intuitive female souls I have known, Danika and Leanna, women who discerned many things, without much of the information men tend to require for such deductions, and spent much time knitting. Leanna recently showed me a hand loom, that permits her to weave still in the wake of a stroke. The unknown composer of Beowulf places God as the war weaver upon a man-testing loom, placing the Creator in interaction with the Fates or Furies, indicating systems put in sync at creation of which the Creator must take care in handling, imbued of sub-wills as they are.
On page 26 madness and narrative are placed in contrast as polar aspects of psychic cartography. The twisting of our narrative sense, to include the monetization of song and its witless repetition recalls the hall of madness so many of our smartest men remain trapped in. It is a central aspect of our present condition that our logic and reason have been chained to opposite poles of emotion. This results in the smartest among us either using their minds to acquire money, thus slaving for whoever shares it out, or to justify their womanly emotions, their hates, hopes, fears and desires. Without narrative skill—largely taken away by short form entertainment music for money as the modern mind loops along ever shorter spirals of nonsense—our keenest minds have no loom on which to weave. [2]
The author suggests ten minutes of trace to begin entering narrative space. The entranced boy I once was, trying to span the world in my mind, was continuously punished by bullies, teachers, coaches, parents. Trances of hours, nights, days were not uncommon as I tried to frame the life that so confused me in the absence of information to coherently inform me. Recently, as I took a bus, and five trains from the Pacific to the Atlantic to lay one last kiss on my dying mother’s forehead I was entranced. The seizing eyes prevented reading and made of speaking a torment. From Wednesday Dusk 4/29 thru Sunday Noon 5/3, I sat, stood, paced, stretched, prayed, mused, in crowds and alone, in darkness, dimness and eye-searing sunlight. All of Thursday and Friday I spoke not a word. Many people have described to me the insanity induced by being alone and in silence for mere hours. Beyond the curtains of sleep most are unable to remain silent—unable thence to conduct bad-odds war—and must babble or seek the addle of noise piped into ear buds. It was not so when I was a boy and youth. Many adults and other strange children could be seen keeping their own thoughts, conducting muse houses within. On that bus and five trains, this silent cipher observed not a single silent soul, all seeking others or, even more often, seeking conduction by the ether shepherds held in the palm of their supplicant hands.
“Our reports are not from the frontier but the war front,” assures the Author, Andrew Edwards, on page 29 of the manual he has musingly left for a few odd fellows to consider before they take to quivering knee and kiss the ring of The Enemy.
Agon and Tripod
The choice of “game” when something higher and deeper is meant, is an example of abstract operation, with the author declining to directly challenge the diction of The Enemy. He works within the semantic rules enforced by a self-aware beast polarity. In 2000, when Chuck Goetz and I agreed to found a free-flow combat system, an interactive experiment in what works in hand weapon combat—held taboo by all establishment law enforcement and martial arts instructors at the time—we had two goals. As he put it,
“You’re already the scary white guy with the knife who the bruthas don’t mess with, that wants to know how Maximus kicked ass. Me, I wanna be a better fighter. Make it as real as you want it. You come up with the name. ‘Two dudes stabbing each other in the park,’ probably doesn’t get us many recruits.”
Chuck’s simple genius would have done better. I chose Agonistics, Modern Agonistics. Agonistics is the suffering of the sacred contestant as he trains for the sacred contest, the agon. It is the root of the word agony, a very unpopular word among the plush-living occupants of Modernity. Every time I posted an ad for an event, that was five times, the City Paper, and the Dundalk Eagle, posted it as “Modern Agnostics” or “Modern Antagonistics!” Every single person who repeated the term back to me said “Agnostics” the first time. It is the worst handle ever, for it is core truth in ancient WORD. The word is sacred of old and therefore taboo of new.
When Sean Glass fought in Knoxville, the announcers pronounced it correctly and wondered out loud at what manner of maniacal fraternity he hailed from. Is this simply the arcane whisper of agony shivering the bones of fat, fetid Modernity? Or, is their a deep, substrate of revulsion focused upon True Antiquity by our vile beast mind of Modernity, that causes supposedly individual minds to revolt against the idea of positive transformation through suffering?
Andrew provides a clue in his three-part “narrative dividend” for the Abstract Operator. The ancients contested in agon and war—which was the Agon Magnus of Alexander—for prizes. From the Iliad set in the 1200s B.C. down through the victory with the fist of Varzadates, Prince of Armenia in A.D. 385 [maybe 383 or 4] victors often received a tripod. Trophies at battles were based upon a tripod. A tripod was something like a bronze butcher’s block, a three-legged stand that sometimes held a culdron, sometimes a suit of armor. The automated forges of Hephastion, his three-D-printers, moved upon tripods. The significance of the tripod is balance. The removal of one leg crashes it to earth. It, like the three-part story decreed by Aristotle as embodying the balance of worthy narrative, is a prize of achieved, necessary—not optional—balance, of transformation.
So Andrew Edwards reminds us in Abstract Operator: A Speculative Manual For Inner Survival.
Notes
1.) I have observed that westerns, black hat/white hat dramas with a masculine face, which set the narrative tone for post cataclysmic [post 1945] were possessed by an exclusively feminine ethos until rescued by Italian movie makers briefly, across a few yarns in the late 1960s. That actor and those themes would then be co-opted back into the feminine Beast System in 1971. This induction/conduction theme remains intact and un-apposed in major media. In a world where most Christian do not read their Bible and few ArŅans read their epics, false, bipolar, narrative sense rules our subtext.
