My Daemon Makes Me Do IT.

     

  

My Will Be Done
 
Any artist who develops the will risks
its hegemony.  If he is at all wary of
that sympathy by which we become
receptive to things  beyond the self, he
may not encourage the will to abandon
it’s position when its powers are exhausted.
 
Willpower has a tendency to usurp the
functions of imagination,  particularly a
man in  a patriarchy….
 
When the will works in isolation,  it turns
of necessity to
 
dictionary studies,
syntactical tricks,
intellectual formulae,
memory,
history,
and convention—
 
any source of material, that is,  which can imitate
the fruits of the imagination without actually
allowing them to emerge.
 
The will by itself cannot  heal the soul and it
 cannot create.
 
For when the will dominates, there is no gap
through which grace may enter, no break in
the ordered stride for error to escape.
 
For an artist:  no moment of  receptiveness when
the engendering images may come forward   
 
My will be done, damnit.
I think therefore I spam.
My best-laid plans: to
articulate a clearly stated
thesis, developed and
supported, elaborated
to substantiate my
general assertions with
adequate transition, 
correct grammar and
punctuation: proof red
& re-red for accurate
spelling. I am without love,
merciless in determination. 
I will say what I’m going
to say, say it, and then
say what I said.
 
Liberal Art
 
The task of setting free one’s  gifts was a
recognized labor  in the ancient world. The
Romans called a person’s tutelary spirit his
 genius. In Greece it was called daemon.
Ancient authors tell us that Socrates, for
example, had a daemon who would speak
 up when he was about to do something that
 did not accord  with histrue nature. …each
 man had his
          
            idios daemon
               [idiocy]
 
his personal spirit which could be cultivated
[like local food], and developed.
 
Respected in this way, the genius   made one
“genial”—sexually potent, artistically creative,
and spiritually fertile.
 
An abiding sense of gratitude moves a  person
to labor in the service of his daemon.  The opposite
is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels
his gifts come from himself. He works to display
himself, not to suffer change.   
 
An age in which no one sacrifices to his genius or
daemon is an age of narcissism.
 
See me. Hear me. Touch me. Feed me.
My will be done willy/nilly:  no room in
my Fools Rush Inn  for idiocy or for risky
business. Master of my domain. I have it
under control..
 
IT.I said. Do I always have to be spelling
IT out?
 
xxxooo, Sam

(In italics: Lewis Hyde, The Gift, a study of what
Gary Hawkins calls the 2 Economies of Creating &
Consuming and why they don’t  necessarily
Just Get Along.)