Fish In the Afternoon

God’s kingdom isn’t coming with signs that are easily noticed. Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ Don’t you see? God’s kingdom is already among you. – The Gospel of Luke 17.20-21 (CEB)

1. In the beginning was the One.
2. The One is Unique, itself-in-itself and irreplaceable by any other.
3. The One is all-things by being no-thing: possibility-in-itself.
4. The One articulates itself by becoming some-thing, by actualizing possibility.
5. In this actualizing, the One Uniques, or articulates itself as what-it-is-in-itself, that being everything-together.
6. This Uniquing of the One manifests the Many, the pluricosmos of Uniques that form the modal geography of the One’s self-becoming.
7. This Many is also Unique, each articulation of the One being itself-in-itself and irreplaceable by any other, an individual within the geography of possibility-in-itself.
8. Everything is Unique, both in its identity with the One and difference as part of the Many.
9. This process of the One-Uniquing-as-Many can be poetically understood in Trinitarian terms as creating-begetting-proceeding.
10. Creating-begetting-proceeding is the process of the self-becoming of the One-in-Many and Many-in-One, conjoined in creation.
11. Creating-begetting-proceeding are co-substantial, always operating together as the same process, but take on different characters in its energeia, or its actualizing in the world.
12. Creating articulates the creative self-becoming of all-things out of no-thing: some-thing-ing.
13. Begetting articulates the echoic nature of self-becoming, how this some-thing-ing is echoed, or repeated-and-transformed, in generating the One-in-Many.
14. Proceeding articulates the historical self-narration of the One-in-Many, through which the One Uniques as the Many and the Many re-members itself as the One.
15. The union of creating-begetting-proceeding reflects both perichoresis, or the substantial interpenetration of the Many-in-One, and kenosis, or the self-giving of echoic becoming whereby the One empties-itself as the Many and the Many empties-itself as the One.
16. All Uniques reflect the self-becoming of the One-in-Many by being co-substantial with this self-becoming, even while remaining Unique.
17. All Uniques therefore reflect the process of creating-begetting-proceeding and of perichoretic kenosis.
18. Uniques create, they bring-out-of-nothing the some-thing that they are.
19. Uniques beget, they echo in their becoming, repeating what came before and transforming it, actualizing possibility.
20. Uniques proceed, they self-narrate their difference as the Unique-that-they-are and in their identity with togethers, or the intertwined Uniquing of multiple Uniques.
21. Uniques are perichoretic in that their Uniquing overlaps with the Uniquing of others, such that each Unique is itself a together, the identity of difference.
22. Uniques are kenotic in that they Unique through being gifted their Uniquing by others and they gift that same Uniquing to others, each perichoretically self-emptying in togethering, literal self-giving.
23. The process of Uniquing, whereby the Unique becomes the Unique-that-it-is, is also one of unfolding, creatively echoing the totality of one’s life, the origami of the soul.
24. The soul is the life of the Unique understood in this totality, the fully-unfolded being of the Unique.
25. The good of each Unique is the unfolding of the soul in eudaimonia, a joy that carries across a life: the good life.
26. This Uniquing is always a Uniquing-with-others, intertwining in different togethers, which unfold as the together-that-they-are, as Unique as the Uniques that compose them.
27. Togethering is the path to eudaimonia, a re-membering that unfolds the Many-in-One in its totality, an unveiling of the common-soul.
28. In seeking the eudaimonia of the common-soul, we commit ourselves to the good of others, forming an ethical subjectivity by which our unfolding is oriented toward the good of the Unique togethers that compose our life.
29. We unveil the good of each together in a way appropriate to it as the together-that-it-is, togethering as friends, as neighbors, as family, as lovers, and as part of a constellation of other togethers.
30. At the heart of this togethering are those marked by love, a special way of togethering that attends to someone’s unfolding in a way that is free and homely, without possession or direction, and which aims only at the joy of their unfolding as the Unique-that-they-are; that is: love is attending to the unfolding of another.
31. In unfolding, we matter, co-constituting the world as both that which matters-in-itself (the good-in-itself of the Unique) and that which matters-the-world (the good-of-the-world that is gifted by the Unique).
32. In togethering, our matterings intertwine with those of others, gifting the good-of-the-world in a way that overlaps, requiring attention to the multiple matterings that co-constitute the good of the together.
33. Love involves the intimate intertwining of Unique matterings, the souls of the beloveds overlapping as one entity – the doma – reflecting the perichoretic kenosis of the Many-in-One in creating-begetting-proceeding, or love-loving-love.
34. Entering into the doma requires a mutual powerlessness marked by faith and charity; that is, it requires relinquishing one’s power-over-being to be-with-another, having faith in their free unfolding and charity in humbly emptying-oneself of possession.
35. The doma is the hearth of the good, wherein children are born and parents lovingly-commit themselves both to their eudaimonia and to the self-consciousness needed to freely and creatively unfold as the Unique-that-they-are and to constitute their own ethical subjectivity.
36. The love of the doma carries out into the whole world, love-loving-love acting as the model for other forms of ethical subjectivity, so that Uniques in their many togetherings may unveil the eudaimonia of the common-soul.
37. Each of these togetherings echo the doma in requiring commitment and mutual powerlessness, orienting one’s activity towards the good of another and humbling oneself in faith and charity to empty oneself of possession.
38. It is the practice of unfolding our commitments in mutual powerlessness that we call virtue, with the character (or patterning) of each virtue being dependent on the nature of the unfolding that it emerges from.
39. One en-habits/inhabits this virtue through Sophia, or loving-wisdom, a commitment to embodying the Unique virtue(s) of the many Unique togethers of one’s life, orienting oneself to the good of each, and by extension, to the eudaimonia of the common-soul.
40. Philosophy is the practice of loving-wisdom, learning to orient one’s intentions to the good of others and to the togethers that we compose, to attend to this good in our activity, and to unveil the conjoined mattering of all: being-as-meaning, or the joy of the common-soul.

And dost thou seek to find the one in two?
Only upon the old can build the new;
The symbol which you seek is found in you. 
- Margaret Fuller, The One in All

Image: Wildflowers by Odilon Redon (1906)

In dreams begin responsibilities. – William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities

Note: Not even I am satisfied with all of the moves made in this conceptual schema. It will develop further but I think this is worth writing about. There are also many forms of commitment and scenarios outside the ones described that ultimately need to be analyzed.

To be a subject is not solely to be conscious, to be animated, but for one’s en-minded activity to be the subject of some orientation to the world. This subjectivity is what gives content to that activity, which makes it both the agent and object of meaning. Without subjectivity, one’s activity remains contentless, an object of external interpretation but without reference to the intention and attention of the anima that performs the activity. One becomes a subject through orienting their activity towards the world, and there are multiple (and overlapping) ways that one may be a subject. Most living beings orient their activity towards growth, generation, and reproduction – through sustaining the species-life that they inhabit, whether or not they themselves conceptualize their activity as part of a species. But many living beings also orient their activity towards the world in ways not reducible to reproduction or generation, which matters the world in distinct ways. One of the central forms of subjectivity for the human species-life is ethical subjectivity, or activity that is oriented towards the good, or which aims at the good.

Ethical subjectivity emerges from commitment. In committing ourselves to another, our activity is woven with their mattering, orienting our intending towards their good. Prior to commitment, the subject already matters, but this mattering is not ethical – the activity of the Unique is not bound to the good of another. In pre-ethical subjectivity, the Unique enjoys and fears, they feel pleasure and pain, and the world matters and un-matters to them. Their subjectivity aims at growth, generation, and corruption, and may take other pre-ethical or non-ethical matterings into account. However, there is no ethical center that holds this mattering together, which orients and directs it towards the good. Mattering becomes ethical whenever the Unique orbits their activity around the good of the object of their commitment. The subject-object relation of the Unique’s mattering thus becomes a subject-subject relation, matterings dwelling in matterings molding the geography of self-and-other.

Commitment is always to a particular, a Unique or Unique together. This is the case with any subjectivity – one aims at growth and reproduction not in the abstract, but in the context of one’s Uniquing and the togethering of their species-life. In terms of the ethical, one may be loyal to the good, to justice, to freedom, to equality, but these commitments only have content through being the good of someone, justice for someone, the freedom and equality of a given together. We universalize these commitments by moving outward, by inviting the mattering of the many into the heart of our activity, rather than abstracting it. Abstracting away from the good of the particular subverts its ethical core, returning the mattering of the Unique to its imaginary interior, which is no longer an ethical subjectivity but a self-subjectivity. The ethical atmospheres the world of the Unique, the space-between, condensing into meaning in our action and sweat, never emerging from the interior alone. There is no such thing as a private ethic. The good is always public.

The ethical intertwines with love by orienting our attending towards another in a loving-way, marking our subjectivity as loving. However, the nature of this attending differs by the object of commitment, with some meeting the standard of love and others not. My commitment to my partner Katie is also a love for Katie: I commit myself to her good and unfold this commitment in my activity by attending to her own unfolding. Her matterings merge with my own by intimately coloring the space-between of my activity, gifting significance to my intention and attention. But what of my commitment to my students? That is not love, at least not in any robust sense. I do not attend to the unfolding of each student, except in the limited sense of attending to their good within the context of teaching. However, it is still an ethical commitment in that my activity, in the proper context in which I act as a teacher, is oriented towards their good and integrates their matterings into my own. I know to attend to students in different ways by preliminarily orienting my intending as a teacher towards them. They do not matter to me because I find them pleasant, as in the pre-ethical, nor because I love them. Instead, they matter because I have committed myself to their good as their teacher. Likewise, I attend to the good of my community as a neighbor, to the land I inhabit as one who dwells, and to God as the imago Dei. In some cases we may speak of love for our community, love for the land, and love for God, but this dimension is not required for my commitment to their good, so long as I am still properly oriented towards their unfolding.

There are therefore forms of commitment that diverge from love, or which do not necessitate love. These are not corrupted commitments, but ones in which our intention and attention to the object of loyalty is distinct from the attending found in love. Loving-commitment, such as romantic commitment, which I will focus on here (along with parental commitment later in the post), is its own kind, a special form of loyalty and ethical subjectivity that we should give closer attention to. To say “I love you” is to proclaim one’s loving-commitment to another, to say “I want to attend to you,” to express one’s intending to attend. In the initial “I love you,” this intention is excited but tentative, proleptically revealing the possibility of an intertwined future, an unveiling of one’s hope in the togethering of beloveds. Every subsequent “I love you” is then an echo of this initial commitment, declaring one’s intention again-and-again through the unfolding of a relationship. We say “I love you” every day to re-affirm our intending and attending, to say “I am committed to you” as an act of both duty and care. The loving-relationship then becomes patterned by this continual re-affirmation of love, by the dance of mutual attending that marks the emerging of the doma.

The commitment is then strengthened and structured in long-term relationships and, most of all, in marriage and other types of formal commitment, which generally integrate the doma of beloveds into the life of the community. “I love you” is a declaration and affirmation, but “I do” is a vow, a promise to lovingly-commit oneself to attending to the beloved so long as this loving-commitment remains mutual or un-broken by a violation of the vow. Marriage creates a context for the unfolding togethering of lovers in this vow, the life-long promise of intimate loving-commitment to one another. Though lovers manifest a doma with one another in their togethering even without marriage, marriage creates a social context in which this doma can unfold and flourish, and ideally wherein the good of the doma is supported by the unfolding common-life of the community it dwells in. The doma is no longer a prolepsis of the life-long commitment of lovers, but its realization. Romantic love does not always arrive at this realization, but it is (in most cases) oriented to it, a process of unveiling that manifests the common-life that will be sustained in the doma and which will (ideally) be recognized as part of the common-life of the community.

Importantly, there is nothing about this loving-commitment in marriage that reduces it to heterosexual coupling, nor does it preclude divorce. Commitments may be broken, individually or mutually, and the obligation of one is dependent on the obligation of the other. If this commitment ceases to be mutual, or lovers violate their responsibility of loving-commitment, then the vow that was made is nullified. One is never obligated to remain in an un-loving marriage, as the lack of mutuality degrades commitment into possession. Love requires a type of mutual powerlessness, where the unfolding of each is intertwined in their attending without one possessing or commanding the other. To possess another is a radical violation of not just loving-commitment, but the entire ethical orientation that is required for love. Loving-commitment also makes no reference to gender or to what must be included in the mutual unfolding, except insofar as it remains a loving-commitment. To reduce loving-commitment, including marriage and the doma, to heterosexuality, is to make a mistake as to the nature of love, to idolize a specific gendered-relation and to replace orientation to the good of the beloved with orientation to reproduction and to sustaining a given gender-system. This type of orientation is both not loving and not ethical, being closer to pre-ethical forms of subjectivity that are not concerned with the good of their object.

There are kinds of loving-commitment where it is less clear how the commitment is mutual or how it avoids possession and direction. The most clear example here is a parent’s commitment to their young children. Though ideally the love between parent and child becomes mutual over time, the love of the child at first is not pre-ethical but instead proto-ethical. What I mean by this is that the child does not yet consciously orient themselves toward the good of the parent, but their sentiments and affections and sense of security are bound up in the parent’s loving-commitment to them. They are nurtured into ethical commitment, which is something that must be taught rather than being inherent. In becoming a parent, one lovingly-commits oneself to nurturing the free and homely unfolding of their child, both as the Unique that they are and as a proto-ethical subject. This nurturing may also require a type of loving-direction, whereby the child is oriented towards their unfolding as an ethical subject and which is not aimed at their possession, but their self-determination. The mutuality of the parent-child relationship is found in how the unfolding and ethical subjectivity of the child is nurtured by the parent, but only through accepting the free choice of the child as they enter into their self-determination as an adult. It is this lack of possession, and augmented directing, which allows the shape of the relationship to be mutual, so long as the parent upholds their loving-commitment.

In this context, the doma always-and-already involves an ethical commitment, both between lovers who form the doma in their togethering and to those, such as children and other dependents, whose lives unfold within the doma. The doma is first and foremost a home, and home, rather than one’s house or birthplace, is decided by the type of orientation one has to it as a home. The doma is formed not just through loving-commitment but the process of en-homing that is unveiled in the togethering of Uniques in loving-commitment. The doma is the united togethering of those in loving-commitment, but home is the placetime that this togethering reveals (even as the place- and -time of that placetime might shift, without fundamentally changing the experienced placetime of existing within the doma). This placetime is a mutually-constituted placetime and one is oriented to it as a relationship to a given together rather than a specific place- and -time, even if it overlaps the actual spacetime that we inhabit. It is in this sense that one can consider a place they were not born in, or which is not inhabited by their birth family, as their home – it is the placetime which they are oriented to as their home, where one dwells in the unfolding togethering of loving-commitment. One’s home may not even be a place, in the sense of a location, but a place in the sense of a space-between where the conjoined unfolding activity of the doma takes place. It is in this sense that one’s home may be a family, chosen or not, which are distributed across space, but which still form the placetime of a doma through their activity.

At the heart of the doma beats the ethical foundation of loving-commitment, of attending to the unfolding of those one loves and of orienting one’s intentions and activity towards their good. It is in this sense that home and family are the starting point for an ethical society – not because of the role of heterosexual reproduction and gender hierarchies, but in modeling our commitments to one another. Ideally, one learns to be an ethical subject through being loved and nurtured, and we continue to develop in our virtue as we inhabit the doma. Virtue emerges from love-loving-love within the doma, itself modeled on the perichoretic kenosis, or creating-begetting-proceeding, at the heart of nature, and it is our commitment to those we love that models our commitment to the rest of the world, creating the possibility for mutual care and commitment even outside of the family, extending to neighbors, to one’s community, and to the world. The doma is the hearth of the good.

Home is where the heart is. – Pliny the Elder

Image: Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade (1871)

…in the case where we are speaking of human beings, it is said to be necessary to know them before we love them… but the saints, on the contrary, when they speak of divine things, say that we must love them before we know them, and that we enter into truth only by charity; they have made of this one of their most useful maxims. – Blaise Pascal, Pensees

For Katie.

Adapted from a paper for a Heidegger course.

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Katie and I met after a tornado. Or, rather, seven tornadoes. Growing up in the Arkansas River Valley, I was used to tornadoes, going up to Papaw’s to huddle in the shelter and peek out at the cyclones. Rogers, however, up in them hills rather than down in the hollers, used to be relatively safe, tornadoes forming more and more as the world warms. This time, seven cyclones ripped through the town, my friends and I hiding under blankets and holding our pets while the electric lines spewed sparks and the winds uprooted oaks. Unbeknownst to me, Katie was at her parents’ place a few miles away, sheltering with four dogs and a cat. Displaced by the tornado, we’d go on our first date a week later. Who Katie was I didn’t yet know, but loving and knowing are both rooted in mystery. To begin to fall in love is to say, “I do not know you, but I want to,” to attend to their unfolding as the Unique that they are, an unspoken but never-silent intention.

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Does love come from knowing, or does knowing come from love? One knows by charity, an act of loving-faith that invites the other to reveal themselves. Loving-faith wills the free unfolding of the other without possession or direction; it is a leap of faith into the world of the beloved. In love, we attend to the unfolding of the beloved, nurturing and inviting their Uniquing without possession or direction. Love wills freedom; freedom apocalypts joy. Joy in the unfolding of another opens the space of possibility, mattering new worlds into presence. Only by love can one know, as only by love can one unfold freely, the doma receiving the Uniquing of the together and gifting the Uniquing of each.

The activity of love reflects the activity of all: perichoretic kenosis. Perichoresis refers to the indwelling, or interpenetration, of the persons of the Christian Trinity and the divine and human natures of the Begotten One. The being of each is not separate but co-essential, dwelling-together in the hypostatic union. Though the activity of the Trinity personalizes itself as Creating, Begetting, and Proceeding, the essence of the Trinity is One, such that each person acts essentially, but freely, in concert with the others. The unfolding of each person is thus also the unfolding of the being of all, with this unfolding manifesting both as the internal life of the Trinity and its external energeia, or activity-in-the-world. The energeia reflects the essence of the Trinity in the union of its internal life, the divine doma, and in the intertwined becoming of each person in their personhood. Perichoresis is intimately connected with kenosis, the self-emptying of the Trinity in creation and incarnation. Kenosis is the voluntary humbling of God in becoming-human and in creating that which lies outside of herself. This kenosis is part of the energeia, in which the essence of the Trinity acts-in-the-world, so that the internal life of the Trinity is also emptied and made powerless in creation and incarnation. It is this self-emptying in both the activity and essence of the Trinity that unites the divine and human life in the Begotten One.

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Katie collects Depression Glass, especially pink glass. Though the differences between original Depression Glass and reproductions made in the 1980’s are subtle, she can spot them, pointing out when seams are machine-made rather than hand-made and noting how manufacturing processes for glass differ between decades.  She hates it when men casually think they know her hobby, incorrectly lecturing her about radiation (men love to think they understand invisible dangers). She loves pink both because it’s pretty and because it obscures and amplifies. To queerly-perform femininity can be an act of subversion when directed against power and towards liberation, part of the “trickster” nature of lesbian femme identity. I am also a trickster – a transfem butch, a strange apparition of queerly embodied womanhood. The essential nature of our relationship remains hidden from much of the world yet is always unfolding-within. She’s the first person whose witnessing me as a woman feels automatic and primordial, whose queering of womanhood already includes me. Everyone underestimates the woman in both of us and are mistaken by our worldly performance. The power of trickster genders is in concealing from power a hidden utopia, a space-of-openness. Our presentation tricks patriarchs, whose gender perception remains stunted, suspicious but not knowing why. But in dwelling in our co-becoming, we are able to manifest the depths of who we are, to act as our own queer utopias.

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In attending to the unfolding of another, we will their freedom, and this willing is kenotic insofar as it (a) empties the self through powerlessness, and (b) opens itself to, and delights in, the unfolding of the beloved. Our powerlessness in love is a foregoing of possession and direction, emptying oneself of expectations for, and claims on, the being of the beloved, instead acting as a home for their free unfolding. In the poetry of Christian kenosis, the Begotten One empties herself of Godhood and takes on the free and unconstrained essence of being human, delighting in the being of creation rather than in God’s power-over-being. Likewise, in taking joy in the unfolding of the beloved, we empty ourselves of our power-over-being and instead welcome their free Uniquing. In acting as a home for their Uniquing, we act perichoretically, co-dwelling in our being-in-the-world as the doma, allowing their unfolding to interpenetrate with ours, accepting and appropriating our being-with-another as part of our being-in-the-world.

This perichoretic and kenotic form of love must be mutual. One loves not only by loving another but by loving-with-another. Love is not self-sacrifice, negating oneself in favor of the other, being only a prop for their unfolding. That is not love but being-possessed – having one’s being possessed. Instead, in love, one’s attending to the unfolding of the beloved is met by their attending to your own unfolding, the beloved of the beloved. Lovers joy with one another in their free unfolding, co-constituting the doma as a site of common love that is also a common project of openness, a site of possibility that is radically open to the unfolding of lovers. This being-at-home is a being-with-another where the unfolding of each is made free and gentle, where the past-and-future of the world is met and journeyed together. Being-at-home is unfolding together in a common-world. Falling-in-love is entering into that being-at-home-with-another and requires faith and charity through giving up one’s power and becoming open to another’s free unfolding. In theological terms, being-at-home requires kenotically emptying-oneself of power and possession, but in doing so one enters perichoretically into a commonly unfolding being, a being-with-another that allows for the free and homely unfolding of each. Like how the persons of the Trinity are united in essence but remain distinct persons, those in love at-home with one another are united in their unfolding but remain distinct, neither directing nor controlling the unfolding of the other.

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Katie got a new house recently. I knew she would; she knew she knew she would but knowing she knows wasn’t comforting. There’s not much in the way of housing protections in Arkansas (not much in the way of protections in general), but she’s resourceful. She built her own business while in poverty and learned all the required upkeep herself. Changing a tire? Yes. Electrical work? Yep. Knowing how to haul a giant metal trailer and upkeep it every day? Absolutely. Doing this, all while performing the femininity that rich WASPs expect? Of course – performing gender is also performing gender in-a-world, thrown into a landscape of norms that one must navigate, concealing and revealing through one’s guises. I’ve generally used masculine presentation as a survival technique – men turn violent when faced with trans womanhood, and especially with trans womanhood divorced from cis-femininity, but they’re also very bad at spotting it. Similarly, she both experiences and navigates oppression in the context of her feminine presentation, our expressions being both genuine incarnations of our unfolding gender-life while also concealing a much more complex interior. I’m helping her move this weekend, and in taking-apart her old home to build a new one, I notice the ways she reflects that interior life in the world around her – her grandmother’s lamp, her Depression glass, her dried flowers, the different cups and plates and stuffed animals and pictures and writings that she’s kept from loved ones, both here and departed. Taking joy in her unfolding is also witnessing the dialectic of her performance – both how she takes up guises again-and-again to be-in-the-world and how she architects her own space to reveal herself, to communicate how she finds herself. I find myself in love with her and so find myself always encountering her own finding, her own attunements, her own loves and joys, again and again in the unfolding.

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Freedom is being-at-home in one’s unfolding, being-held in the faith of another. Joy emerges from freedom through the eudaimonia of Uniquing, the good-of-the-Unique that is also the good-itself. This joy is a mattering, one’s own freedom appearing as significant, as the mattering of the beloved emanates out into the mattering of all, intertwining Uniques togethering in their common-world, the joy of the doma. The reciprocity of love allows for the Unique of each to be willed, for the doma to become a dwelling of the freely unfolding being of beloved and beloved, inaugurating a new everydayness populated by the good of each Unique. One does not love a secret internal nature, the esse of the beloved, but instead their unfolding life, their being-in-the-world and the multiplicity of forms that their being takes, linked together in their Uniquing. Openness to the unfolding of the beloved is an openness to their essential fluidity, the creative self-becoming of the Unique.

In being-at-home with one another, lovers find-themselves in a common pursuit, the project of the doma. “I love you” discloses one as finding-oneself falling-in-love, an affirmation of this common pursuit. If love marks a mutual openness to the unfolding of the beloved, then being-in-love is taking up the project of being a home for the unfolding of those you love. Being-in-love invites the other into being-at-home with oneself, and in this invitation and common pursuit, lovers are disclosed as always-and-already unfolding together, the togethering of intertwined Uniques. Likewise, the world is disclosed as co-constituted by the project of the doma, populated with matterings that receive-and-gift the unfolding of each Unique in their togethering. Lovers discover the world as not only mattering-to-them, but mattering-to-another, mattering-to-her. The home of being-at-home is a world of matterings shared by those in love. Pursuing this common project, lovers are invited to unfold as they are, just as they welcome the unfolding of their beloved, each freely enacting their being through their common project. One never loves through self-sacrifice, because to attend to the unfolding of the beloved is also to receive their love, to attend-with-them.

In being-at-home with another, the world is populated by love, love dwelling in our matterings. Freedom is revealed in joy and the world is transformed into a reflection of the doma. In finding-oneself in love, one encounters a world that affords paths through that love, where the telos of our conjoined activity is the unfolding of lovers in their free Uniquing. The final end of the Uniquing of each thereby becomes the perichoretic kenosis of lovers being-at-home, a charitable and faithful love by which one comes to know both oneself and the beloved. To love is to attend to the unfolding of another, and one can only attend through openness, through a faith that empties oneself in powerlessness and is open to the free becoming of the beloved. To love is to wander possibility hand-in-hand.

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I have to leave again at the end of July. One of the troubles of being-at-home is that you’re not always there, even if they’re always with-you, present in their absence. Being-at-home implies being-away-from-home. Yesterday, I helped her move into her new place, and we’re slowly setting it up, architecting a new physical home even as we continue to architect an en-spirited one. Putting everything away and back again, I re-encounter Katie over-and-over, her beloved things acting as scaffolding for my memory. This is hers and she feels this way about it; that is hers and she got it when this occurred. But more than that, in doing this with-her, I encounter her in her infinite freedom, the fact that who she is in herself is not captured by the world she has formed, even as that world reflects her unfolding. The depths of her disclosure, of how she has communicated her finding, is still only the shallows, waves of being echoing an uncharted, ever-moving ocean. Love is knowing I’ll never know everything, but also knowing that knowing is still only secondary to love – I love faithfully, dwelling in the mystery of the beloved. I started writing this paper because I knew I would be leaving at the end of the summer, and I knew that I wanted to continue loving Katie, to continue knowing her, even apart. But that kind of intentional knowing, of encountering mystery again-and-again, requires intention, contemplation, attention. My intention, my hope, my life goal is being-at-home by being-with-Katie. To start that journey is to say again and again each morning, “I do not know you, but I want to.” Two Uniques Uniquing together in the cornucopia of being.

One does not enter into truth except through charity. – St. Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichean

Image: Cupid & Psyche by Francois Gerard (1782)

At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute — right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ At the words, ‘to my Flag,’ the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side. – Francis Bellamy, The Youth’s Companion

1776 is not a year but a signifier. In the agon, matterings war with one another, emanating history. Long ago, Luther’s children escape the restoration, taking Cromwell’s skull to Turtle Island. Their God chooses, baptizing in water and pneuma. The first baptism is a sign of the second; the second is God’s will. Either way, the earth-soul breathes. The roundheads fence the world, reifying God in the market and separating themselves off as white. The Puritans mistake their flesh for divinity and case their hue as cosmogonic. The white world is birthed from idolatry, enfleshing the violent superego of settlers, slavers, and conquistadors. O woe to you, Vespucci.

The proletariat is an invention. In the dusk of the Black Death, the bourgeoisie emerge, exchange eclipsing feudalism as peasants are stripped of their land and women are burned on stakes. Capitalism is a witch hunt – the witch of rebellion that haunts history, the world turned upside down. Making the yuletide gay. Puritans are theologians of the market, crushing the un-chosen carolers with the God of enclosure. The kingdom collapses and its grave births Leviathan, Hobbes’ nightmare of man against man, the myth of the terror. Together, this terror and the Puritan God re-write history, capital crawling snarling out of the pit of England. America never left Plymouth Rock.

Capitalism starts from covenant, from the predestination of the saints. TULIP is an acronym for the Time-Machine. Lost on Mt. Ararat, the Rushdoonys whistle Yankee Doodle Dandy, burying theocracy in the heart of the slaver’s republic. In July, the plantation billionaire signs his separation, the teeth of the dead rotting in his mouth. Leviathan finds fathers for its parasitic creation: settler democracy. A demos of occupiers and property-owners, the double-image of the Athenian executors. Tyranny masks itself in the guise of the people, the general will confiscated by the homeowner’s association. Race becomes a mark for the covenant as women are privatized and the land is terraformed into territory. The mark of the pneuma is race-capital, the fetishization of value reified in flesh.

The fasces is a Roman invention, appropriated from the ash of Minos. Caesar glimpses the chi-rho written in the sky and the Carpenter is crowned king. No longer an executed criminal, the Begotten One is re-made in the image of the enslavers and occupiers, the temple of Augustus built on the ruins of Golgotha. The axe returns again-and-again, inaugurating Charlemagne, Washington, Bonaparte, and Hitler. At its core is the imperium, the synthesis of God and Caesar, carried from Augustus to their Puritan offspring. Yockey imagined what was already being born: a white imperium, carried from Europe to the occupied lands. Romulus kills Remus and spills his blood on the steps of the Capitol. The challenge of the Carpenter remains: to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. To not put your faith in false gods.

And in princes who cannot save.

As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labor, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities. - Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1

Image: American Dream by Brett Whiteley (1969)