The dog has lost his age
Snow is youth for German Shepherds
In my nostrils cold and woodsmoke wage
their war. Sunrise, nut orchard lane.
Last year I invented one of the many major concepts for which I will shortly be world famous, school children will be forced to memorize reams of my turgid prose while they draw a mustache on my picture in their textbook,* and then won’t you be sorry.
Seriously, all vainglory aside, it really is an important insight and whoever thought of it first (probably not me) deserves the thanks of a grateful nation.
I am referring to the insight that there is Gross Power (gross freedom) and Net Power (net freedom). Delta Power, in other words.
Someone with a great deal of power/freedom/agency/capability doesn’t feel it when all of it is already committed. Presidents don’t get gray hairs because of the heady Dionysian rush of untrammeled authority. The more they can do, the more they have to do. Exercising a great deal of gross power or gross freedom isn’t what we think of when we think of power or freedom. Instead, we basically only *feel* powerful and free when we have acquired some new power and freedom and haven’t committed it fully to anything yet. The glorious sense of freedom comes only in the transition.
(This is a guest post from ~lagrev-nocfep)
“A world of choice is a world of consequences. A world of consequences is a world where you can’t simply walk back what you just did and revert to the prior state. Of course an angel and a flaming sword bars the way. Of course the way is shut. The angel is called time. The sword is called agency.”
Not the apotheosis of red sprung
From breast fast in cat’s jaw, the beekeeper’s
Elsewise pensive, wishing the bell unrung—
The hurt of husbandry falls on sleepers
Awaken! Now ronin against their wills
At last to die under stars—the sting
Is medicine or poison, but any dose still kills
By vigorous rattle of the chain of being.
In time’s amber light cannot help but cast
Shadow into the crucible of its absence.
The arrow’s head can be only forwards passed.
The world takes its meaning from its consequence.
Our poor eyes see marring, not the tale told.
But fire turns straw to a more perfect gold
The specific event was that I had to gather a wild swarm and for days afterwards confused and lost workers came back to the place the swarm had been looking for their home.
One of the things that I believe will precede the fall of Babylon, or our collapse in general, is a crisis of meaning. Specifically, this mean our myths and heroes are hollow or not taken seriously. This is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.
The Jedi Church may be laughable, but a society incapable of even that… that is terrifying. A society without heroes or myths is spiritually dead. It can still move, still function—but only on momentum, like a corpse that hasn’t yet realized it’s dead.
And related to this, is a crisis in telling stories. You can’t have a compelling story without meaning.
It is interesting to note, that of the Eminent Men and Women who appeared to Pres Woodruff, said they laid the foundation of liberty for us. Besides the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the majority were artists and authors. What we might call mythmakers.
I’m reading a poem that has a couple of the best lines about the Fall I ever read. I am jotting them down in my little book.
The sting is medicine or poison, but any dose still kills
And
the world takes its meaning from its consequence
A “Yankee Heater” is when you go outside in the cold for awhile. When you come back inside, the interior feels much warmer because you are comparing it to the outside. Even if its not toasty inside, it will feel warm to you compared to where you have been.
We had a young family getting baptized this afternoon. The arctic cold front has covered everything with ice and though we do get some weather out here on the high plains its more than the town can handle. The town isn’t even trying. A few cars are creeping across the ice. And our cars, because we are going to the baptism.
We come in from the cold to the warmth of the church. But after awhile, the church starts to feel a little cold, once we get used to being inside. There is some air moving around or something.
The couple in particular looks a little cold. Then they go down into the water—we set the temperature at the high end of comfortable—and they are toasty warm again.
Then they come back out and the cool air hits again.
I think there’s a figure of baptism in that. Call it “Yankee Baptism.” You come in from the spiritual cold and everything feels warm to you. But after awhile, you realize that there are still drafts even inside the Church.
The only solution is the one we learned from Lehi’s Dream—you can’t just taste the fruit once, you have to come to it again and again. You move from cold to warmth, from cold to warmth. You repeat the baptism experience through the sacrament and other spiritual experiences as your capacity to experience spiritual warmth increases.
Our high council speaker had a mantra, ‘choose your hard.’ Whether his own or got form somewhere I didn’t catch. The idea was, you can choose to have pain now or pain later, you can choose loneliness or messy relationships, you can choose the broad path to hell or the rocky path to heaven, but you can’t choose having cake and also eating it.
It made me think of what the Savior taught–no man can serve two masters. Implied, and also true, is that no man can serve no masters. We are infants in the universe, barely able to breathe and sleep. We will either have a father or an owner.
I have been thinking more about ‘enduring to the end’ and the idea that what enduring really means is learning to endure glory.
I remembered the dream about truth lying in the streets, available to be picked up by anyone who dared.
And this comment:
This stanza seems timely (especially with the Orson F. Whitney quote in a recent post about poets being close to prophets)
“Even the bravest that are slain
Shall not dissemble their surprise
On waking to find valor reign,
Even as in earth, in paradise;
And where they sought without the sword
Wide field of asphodel fore’er
To find that the utmost reward
Of daring should be still to dare”The reward of setting your sights astronomically high in this life is exaltation – which is just further chances to improve, astronomically.
This also reminds me of some of the JBP quotes about finding happiness via setting yourself the ultimate possible goal.
This is the doctrine of the Fall in a nutshell, but also the doctrine of Exaltation.
The crown of truth lies in the streets to be picked up. Anyone can pick it up. You can pick it up.
In fact, there is a crown of a truth and a greatness and glory that only you can pick up.
You are not prepared to pick it up. If you pick it up and put it on, you will inevitably make horrible mistakes.
But only you can pick it up. It is the only way for you to gain a crown. You have to dare.
A true story is a story that has actually happened in its essentials.
A myth is a story that reflects unavoidable baseline realities. For example, the myth of Persephone reflects the unyielding sway of the seasons. Hot and cold, growth and harvest and fallow, year after year.
The Garden of Eden and the Fall is a true myth.
Most of its features are not arbitrary narrative. They represent the way things have to be. There was “no other way.”
Just as the paired virtues in a virtue set have a powerful synthesis virtue–chastity and virility combine to produce achievement, happy marriages, and children–so do the paired vices.
From a naive viewpoint you would think that prudery, low T, and frigidity wouldn’t combine well with sexual immorality but oh boy would the modern world like to have a word. Basically everything in the modern world is frigid licentiousness.
Now in the fulness of times many truths are being revealed that were hidden by circumstances before. Among them is this one. Porn suppresses sex and burns out the virility; low T guys straying far from the path so they can feel. “Sex positive” feminism has a set of rules and expectations designed to make everybody unhappy, because it cannot permit the one thing that true sexuality requires–fruitful surrender. Horniness *wants* to fall in love and make babies. Sexual immorality is ugly and gross because it is at root a kind of hatred for sex. The more immoral, the less truly sexual.
Here are some thoughts on the readings from the Old Testament and the Pearl of Great Price that everybody else has already moved on from.
Discussions of Eve and her wise, if perhaps not fully informed choice, are quite interesting. But if Eve’s choice was wise, what does that say about Adam? Was refusing to eat the fruit obedient… and unwise? If her choice was wise, was his not wise? Was Adam unwise to be too obedient?
Now, of course, we are right to point out that eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge wasn’t technically a sin. It was breaking a law, that had consequences. It is also correct that Adam had multiple, partially conflicting laws he needed to keep, such as have children.
If Eve was right, was Adam wrong? And if he was wrong, was he wrong because he wasn’t looking at the whole picture?
Virtues come in pairs in a virtue set, and in some sense opposite pairs. Boldness and prudence. Thrift and magnanimity. Risk and restraint. Mercy and judgment. Time and eternity.
By proving contraries, truth is made manifest
-thus Joseph Smith
But the truest virtues seem to be the union of the pair.
Virility and Chastity combine in achievement, marriage, offspring, family.
So does the womanly version. It is fitting that the highest expressions of male and female sexuality are in combination with each other.
Our friends have had a lot of wisdom from the springboard of President Oaks recent remarks and the mission-age change for our maidens.
It’s made me think of a virtue set.
For the uninitiated, many virtues and vices or even generally good and bad things seem to fall into a natural pattern of opposites. Chastity and sexual immorality, for example. But also many vices seem to be twisted versions of virtues instead of being their opposites. In fact, it turns out that virtues usually have two vices–an opposite vice and a twisted vice–one vice that is the contrary of the virtue and one vice that is a distorted or misapplied version of the virtue. But even more amazing, it turns out that the opposite vice is the twisted vice of another virtue and the twisted vice is the opposite vice of that same other virtue. This is really an astounding fact about the world.
Here’s a typical virtue set
If this interests you, we have done a lot of exploration of this concept and of specific virtue sets under the tag ‘virtue chart‘ or you can just search for virtue chart or virtue set in the search bar.
One of the most useful things about the virtue set is is constantly reveals overlooked virtues and vices, some of which we don’t even have a name for (example here). Usually those overlooked virtues and vices correspond to real weaknesses in our culture and its fascinating and wonderful to discover them. Sexual morality is no exception.
Here’s the set:
Just yesterday I was talking with a friend about Pres. Oaks’ devious plan. About the same hour we were talking, the Deseret News published an interview with Pres. Oaks where he laid out the plan openly, so it is not a devious plan anymore. It is a revealed plan.
For the last twenty years Dallin H. Oaks has been concerned about the future demographics of the church. Around 2007 he presided my stake’s conference, and told us (paraphrasing from memory), (more…)