He that goeth forth and rejoiceth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with weeping, bringing his sheaves with him
Where humans do not know the secret of making man’s red fire, they become its keepers so that they might carry it with them, like moving treasure, in a special pot as they wander across the world. Thinking is like such pots of fire - but though this treasure also lives, thinking is a wealth the group repudiates. Thoughts only spark and take hold in solitude. The one who has returned possessed by devils had earlier wandered out of sight - looking up at leaves in the wind, enchanted by patterns in the river. Wherever the self is separated from the group, thinking kindles in the pot of his head and possesses his soul. The wildness of conflagration, the perfected form of the exterior, enters the self as thinking, and consumes him. The inferno spreads into the group as it is driven to think in terms of counter measures against the separations of the abstracted self’s thinking. So it is that group life has no purpose but to prevent the catching light of thinking within its individual members. Thinking is always bad thinking as the enemy’s poetry is always bad poetry, and like a virus it has already arrived. It is the entanglement of rumination and grievance from which we cannot tear ourselves away but which we feed and tend to the point of our distraction. It is the approach by which we arrive not knowing ourselves. The thinking self is abstracted from the group, and his thought is the catalyst for that sequence of misunderstandings which will lead to the destruction of the immediate and given form of the group’s solidarity. Then, it is to prevent fire taking hold in its members’ heads that the procedural arrangements of tribal groups work to keep all members in sight of each other all of the time. At every level, the group intervenes to inhibit the self from turning inwards and towards the images in his head. And so it is that being together is also being without thought. We chant and clap unceasingly for many days to wipe away interiority. We counter thoughts wherever thinking is grasped as the internalised register of the self’s distance from the group’s being together. Now, let’s consider La Princesse de Clèves, see how she encounters her own interior within that hall of mirrors designed especially to contain and ward off, by multiplying spells of reflecting magic, the secret plots that foment amongst the court’s over-mighty aristocrats. Even from the grave her husband constrains her wanderings into thoughtfulness - announcing by seance: the strong box is locked but the money is outside. So it is that the group is dismayed by the self’s turn towards his interior, his sudden preoccupation and distance (I cut and peeled a hazel wand), but the group is even more appalled at its own response to, the measures it will take against, the one who is separated and wandering: thy heart have I hid in mine word, that I might not sin against thee. Above everything, the group desires to maintain the immediate and unthinking unity of its members - it dreads the alternative that will necessitate a spiral of violent corrective separations, firstly from the one wandering into the otherwise, and then, progressively, seeking stability, against its own preceding forms. The group sets off against the event of the individual’s return as a higher self, though the group will not return, it has no higher form but only elaboration. The separated, or lone surviving, individual carries the social form, the truth of and against the group, that is placed by the group within his thoughts like embers in a pot that may be breathed upon and brought to life by unknown others. The others, who are searching out ways to capture, or forget it.
