The Elan Vital

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist
but the ability to start over."

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 

 

 

 

Where the Popess is identified with the intuitive Virgin, the feminine yet unsullied by the masculine, the fourth Tarot card - the Empress - is identified with the fecund Mother; her association is with Isis, where the Popess is with Hathor. The second aspect of the Triple Goddess, she is the Queen of Heaven; she is the vessel of the lifeforce, the elan vital.

 

Numbered 3, the Empress represents the common energy between the One and the Two, the energy of increase, the parasimplistic urge to be more than one's mere being-in-the-moment. In Rider-Waite, she is seated with crown and scepter, and her throne is carved with a heart-shaped design: because love can be understood as this energy of increase, the motivating force that makes an individual seek to become part of something more. The Empress is both a signifier of love and of fertility.

 

Although she restores balance to the first four cards of the Tarot, being a second female after the first two males, the Empress is not a union of the energies, a divine androgyne; she is not a parasimplex. She does, however, embody the parasimplicity principle: her presence in a drawing indicates a desire for increase, and generally the gratification of that desire. 'Increase' here could be material, although usually a somewhat more spiritual development is implied.

 

The energy of the Empress is universal; it is undirected, but it flows inevitably between living things. It is identifiable with qi in Chinese belief: the acupuncturist places needles at key meridians in the human body to identify and redirect the flow of qi, just as the feng shui practitioner orients the furnishing of a room to promote harmonious flow through the building (qi, accordingly, is self-similar and so partakes of the character of transcendence). Although these examples indicate that the energy can be controlled, it would be a mistake to think of it as something that ought to be harnessed. The principle of wei wuwei recognizes this implicitly.

 

 

 



Reflections

"The whole purpose of education is
to turn mirrors into windows." ~ Sidney J. Harris

 

 

 

 

I tapped myself on the shoulder before I wrote this, the better to remind myself that I need to talk about Shannon sometime and why information and entropy are linked; but this is not the time for that discussion.

 

This is the time to talk about mirrors. Mirrors are a form of parasimplex: you can look into any mirror in the world, and see the same face you would see in any other mirror (although that face would not be your own, exactly - not least because of its lateral inversion) - and yet any other person could look into that same mirror and see a different same face in each one. There is an echo of both the paradox of identity and the paradox of persistency here, if you're listening for it (remember Lord Ravenhurst's warning on that, though).

 

The transcendental mirror, though - what would that show you when you looked into it? One way of answering this question is by considering the transcendental mirror to be simultaneously immanent upon all subjective mirrors. The transcendent is not bound by limitations of time or space; it is omnipresent (if only in a surreal fashion) and eternal (if only because it is untouched by Time, which after all dates from a mere Planck second after the Big Bang - and is destined to be extinguished along with everything else in the maximum-entropy state). Thus, this transcendental mirror would show you, not only your face when you looked in it, but also your face when you looked into any other mirror, and also any other face when it looked into this mirror, and also any other face when it looked into any other mirror. It would show you the perfectibilized relation of mirror and observer; it would show you the observed universe of mirrors in a single mirror. It would show you the All-in-One: the Aleph. Both Borges and Leibniz have worthy reflections upon the Aleph, which in turn naturally reflects upon them in their full manifestations; within the Aleph, as all things must be, we are already discussing these aspects.

 

Insofar as parasimplicity makes a virtue of anything, it is this ethical principle: speculum ego; I am a mirror. According to the parasimplicity principle, we should strive to be all that we can be - everything exists in order to exist more. More than this (remember: the Parasimplicity Principle is itself a parasimplex, so there is always more), we should strive to be all that we have been - the parasimplex does not abandon past instars, because it is no more itself at one time than at another. Neither does it recoil from contradictions: indeed, these are the spoor of paradox, within which we glimpse the transcendental in the unresolved processes of Reason. Thus we should accept all that we have been, and all that we might be, as equally essential reflections of what we truly are. To be a parasimplex is to embrace identity in the abandonment of identity - to become a Gateless Gate.

 

This seemingly impossible task, as with all tasks, begins with a self-similar task - for all action is self-similar to the transcendental action of wei wuwei. In this case, we seek to become mirrors of mirrors by first becoming mirrors of our world: this is why the enlightened man goes to eat rice when the bell sounds, and goes to his bedchamber when the bell sounds again, and rises from his slumber when the bell sounds the third time. The enlightened man recognizes himself in every stranger, and he accepts the stranger as he accepts himself. We say of those renowned for conviviality - "he never meets a stranger." Verily I say unto you: the enlightened man never meets anybody but strangers.

 

Borges, again, that invaluable vademecum, describes this process in a lovely fable entitled "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." In it, the fictional Menard embarks upon an appropriately Quixotic quest: to rewrite Cervantes' classic. Not satisfied with merely translating it, and abhorring the notion that he might improve upon it, Menard sets about experiencing the Quixote as Cervantes himself did - after an abortive attempt which he himself bitterly rejects before completion, he immerses himself in the lifestyle of the 17th century Spaniard and eventually succeeds in reproducing a Quixote that is line for line identical with the original - but, as Borges' abstracted fictitious reviewer of Menard's Quixote notes, so much richer than the original for having been written by a 20th century Parisian. This should not be understood as presenting Menard as a parasimplex; however, in the illustrated shortcomings of Menard from that perspective, it provides a template for the initiate to follow.