Of Forms and Observers

Chapter 6: Horizontality

I put down the pen for just a moment-the writing has become exhausting, it feels like an increasingly fruitless task, not that any fruits were to be bore to begin with. I briefly get up to stretch my limbs in a vertical and horizontal motion; they elicit a notably different sensation. The former clears my mind and eases my stress, I'm cuddled by a great aristocratic comfort, the latter is stiff, wretched and oppressive, it exacerbates pains and muddles thoughts. I repeat the process to ensure its outcome; I am a scientist of the geometric method at heart.  The result is no different. I stand perplexed. What on earth could bring about such a difference? There mustn't be a physical cause, of that I'm quite certain, how else should its meaningfulness be explained. I then recall the object of analysis which I had gone over just a few chapters ago, ay, the rub's in those pesky Wyman-like thinkers !

If man is truly son of Zagreus and Titanic flesh, it stands to reason [herein not meant as the faculty of principles] that he ought be oriented towards all that is high, all that reigns supreme over his lesser faculties of sense, what graces the nous. The soul of Zagreus is channeled in the Dionysian ritual, it unravels through the arts of the WIll, it establishes the very precondition for axiology. What happens, then, when one neglects his most sacred duties of worship and decides to orient himself horizontally, towards the extended and valueless void of sensation? 

One abandons the lifelong quest of grounding truth in transcendence and surrenders himself to the low hanging fruit of matter. Man begins to squirm like a worm through the false prophets of hypothetical imperatives, driven by heteronomy, blinded by his own lack of imagination, or rather, its excess. The senses have a vulgar aesthetic, they inundate the mind with properties of becoming and obfuscate all that is. The intellect grasps extension as the purest form of matter, but all else is just as good being thrown away. Quine remarks:

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

Indeed, although not apparent to all who engage in it, the deserted landscapes of an aristocratic ontology are those which begin by denying the illusions of matter and the objects within. This sort of taste can only be developed through metaphysical pondering and, crucially, a vertically oriented society. To not equate authority with the super[natural] is both a historical and metaphysical fallacy. When man is seen not as an anthropological being, but rather a transcendental one, that is when he begins to produce greatness. It is only when he uncovers the layers of his dreamlike state that he may begin to conceive notions of beauty and truth. It has indeed been stated that no such thing as value is to be sought through semantic value in propositions of language and image alike, what is here proposed however is not that one truthfully attempt to achieve such impossibilities, a dialectical contradiction, rather that one's limbs be eternally stretched and oriented in a vertical direction, as if the unreachable were just in reach. That sort of self imposed mystification is what allows the delicacy of an idealist ontology to prevail.

I expand my collection of memories; Overwhelming yellow imagery of 'M's, repugnantly extended agglomerates of mass, bodies of meat and fat, drenched in the cloth of the swine they were fed on. How could the warriors of Atlantis be expected to survive in such ruins? A gruesome endeavour where the eyes were assaulted by Titanic vulgarities, the telos of such faculties was set in stone. What is most surprising is the remembrance that some still believed horizontal orientation could provide the necessary means to preserve axiology, a laughable oversight of self imposed foolishness.