Tone is a decoder; a linguistic mode; a language

I understand, now, why I run into trouble so often in Judeo-Christian culture. It's because tone is an ultimate modifier, a mode of relating and, ultimately a language of its own. One can speak the same language as another and use the same words, yet due to a slight elevation of tone, one can be communicating on quite the wrong wavelength, with dire consequences.

My tone is inevitably jubilant and mischievous. I fathom that my outlook on the world may be defined in terms of some kind of paganism. I may write serious words, but often enough I do not mean them in a serious way. That is to say, I believe my political and social criticisms should be taken to heart -- but I would hate myself intensely, all the same, if I were to leave a heavy impression on someone else's psyche, moralistically. Even if taking action against another by means of moral reproof were likely to win my battle for me, I would be unable to do it. I can't take away another's self-determination from him. I would lose my own sense of well-being that way. My sense of pleasure in the world is largely dependent upon another having a sense of pleasure in himself.

My paganism, although irreverent, has an ethical structure. My mockery does not imply disrespect, but rather a sense of marvel at the unknown. (I hold what I do not yet know in particular religious esteem, much more than what I happen to already know about.) I mock because I seek revelation -- not of the reproving moral sort, but in the form of nature's gradual unfolding.

Tone is a decoder -- and I have read my own work in two different ways. In the first way, which is the sense in which I originally wrote, I have a sense of the precipitous awakening of consciousness. Reading the same work in a moralistic tone, I find I no longer make sense, even to myself. From a point of view that uses as its backdrop the severity of moral absolutes,my own work looks frivolous, inclined to miss the point and not to hit home with some stinging moral criticism. It seems as if I lack the power of firmer minds, which would immediately condemn the wrongs of the world, whilst compelling "evil-doers" to accept their category of a negative identity in the world.

Then, finally, I return to myself -- and I realise I'd been reading my own work through an entirely alien prism.