5650 It is now being reported in scientific
journals that complete memories of an event or of any something seem to reside,
not in the workings of many many neural cells together, but within one single
neuron. I suppose it curls up with the
intricately infolded protein molecules.
All of which is metaphor. A
memory is not a spatially extended anything.
But then you knew that I would say that since I am not a materialist.
Let’s suppose someone correlates or associates a particular
memory with an R-protein. Call it simply
R. No doubt there will be some sort of
isomorphism, digital or analogue, between that molecule and the incoming
sense-date, which in turn are isomorphic somehow with what was really “out
there”. Isomorphism—it’s everywhere and
it’s so very much like the medieval. So
we should examine isomorphism and correspondence. And the “of” in a memory of something.
Up above there is a picture of a boy. A certain
isomorphism and maybe a medieval correspondence “occurs” between that picture
and its object. Simple sameness. We can see the sameness. We know it.
Something accounts for it. Let’s
say, in Aristotelian fashion, that the same Form is “in” both. No, let’s not, because that doesn’t fit the
‘’scientific” way fashionable now. We
will have to say that we see the sameness.
Indeed, it may be the seeing that grounds the sameness. No, that won’t do either because we cannot
say the seeing grounds remembering, which is what we would have to do. That journal wants to say that the presence of
a certain molecule grounds memory.
Therefore the sameness of isomorphism is … forget it, it just is. Molecules ground memory.
The grounding of memory by molecules is finally only a metaphor
that can be taken so far. Beyond that
it’s a void. And I do believe that that
right there, the contemplation of the Abyss, is the goal of the scientists
doing science. Mission
accomplished.
Science is a priestly ritual.
At its center there is the Killing.
All our lesser memories are but an attempt to remember that original
horror, now become the Word written onto all things. Or so I might playfully imagine here curled
up with my R(andy)-molecules.
Memories are of
something. There is no way you can
derive of-ness and also its directed-ness from same-ness. That isn’t the void up ahead; it is Confusion.
5651 Husserl, following Brentano, and then
Sartre insisted, as their main point, that when we think of, love, remember,
wonder at a something, that something is not a thing, an image, in the mind,
but that it is “out there”. I look at
the night sky and I see the millions of stars and the vastness of space and I
am looking directly at that, not something in me. It seems obvious, but it is philosophically
tricky. Mind is directed toward its
object. That is the directedness of “of”
in I am thinking of him. It is
fundamental. Husserl and Sartre and
Brentano and then Bergmann worked hard to preserve the vision, but may all have
failed. They hit rock bottom hard. I am leery.
I peer out at the devastation. I
trail after over the littered ground. I
keep my wit.
5652 It is the fashion today to be into
teratology. It seems so much gentler
than the horrors of Beauty. Monsters are
for children to (strangely) cuddle. The
beautiful boy will quickly rip your soul.
You know exactly what I mean.
That is the separation of the Separate Forms. You arrive.
Then the boredom of eternity.
Immortality forced onto you. What
was that at the beginning, that thing you will never be able to get away
from? Never! At times it looks right at you. And whoosh you’re gone. So gone.
The necessary. Ne cedere. Rock-a-bye
baby in the tree top, when … .
5653 Man is a pleasure seeker. Everything he does is for the pleasure of
doing it. I write and read for the pleasure
of feeling the movement of words in my silently reading out loud. And then when
I go to bed I get up three times to check that I have locked and turned off and
cleared a path through the dark solely that I might once again feel the
exquisite pleasure of slipping in between cool sheets. I create minor problems that I might know the
pleasure that comes from dealing with them.
Everywhere I turn there is pleasure.
I have a friend who is constantly dealing with guilt. Does he really want to overcome it and get
rid of it? I doubt it. Surely there is pleasure in that pain. Another friend is constantly upset that
people act so irrationally. That is a
great and greatly irrational pleasure for him.
I have the eternally, still unresolved ontological problem of time. It’s a mighty good problem and the
exasperation I feel and the despair coming from it are exquisite. And then there is the Internet, the void, the
abyss, the primeval forest, where we can once again feel the Original
Fright. I know you will not dwell on
these ideas and I will be passed over too quickly, but, by becoming negligible
like that, I was able to write the word “negligible” and I am rather satisfied
with how I managed that. (And I now
worry a lovely writer’s worry about that double “that” and about those
quotation marks and these parentheses.)
Pleasure is everywhere.
5654 Surely the reason we have religious
ritual and any obsessive ritualistic behavior is because we love the pleasure
of the performance. (Even my performance
of those quasi-scientific-sounding words was a pleasure and I wonder if I
should redo it (what about those dashes?), not to make it better, but to feel
the doing of it again.) And we deal with
our problems with the same ritualistic methods.
We conduct the same rites as have always been conducted. It may look like logical reasoning and
involved analysis, but it is religious ritual.
And it is fun. We manage a great
show. Or maybe not and we know the
pleasure of retrying it. We are our own
Brahman watcher to catch the littlest mistake that we might go back one more
time. Always the pleasure of one more
time.
5655 The power and the beauty, the
negative-power and the negative-beauty of the Old Testament is its dialectical
undoing of itself. Its ambiguity leads
us about by the nose, which isn’t a nose and is really a leading under, a
seduction. Indeed, that is the magic in
the words of the Semitic languages.
In Christianity, that same dialectical seduction is the Word
become flesh. Well, it did and then
again it didn’t, at least not in a fleshy flesh sort of way, did it? The body of Jesus is the problem. Will that also be deconstructed into yes/no,
I-don’t-know? It all began with God
wanting to husband Israel. Did he mean
than literally, with a phallus and all that?
It was too much? Midrash, the
dialectical turning of X into ~X, saved the day. Magic.
But Jesus is a little too Greek.
Is he the boy of their sport? The
theoria in the gymnasium? The spectacle
of their drama? Now the new consort on
the high rock, the Alone with the Alone?
It’s debatable. Lovely
debate. The work of millennia.
In Islam, God was the Kalam in the reciting mouths of the
reciters. That sleepy, head-spinning
beauty. Pure sound. The enchantment that always turns the heads
of those momentarily lost in the clamor of the market place. Always the same one thing repeated, repeated
deep in the throat of his lovers. The
jinn whirl. The dervishes whirl. The whirlwind wheels around leading you down
and under and enters you asunder. In the
bizarre where everyone see.
5656 Most writers, trying to be like their
God, want to disappear. And they want
their words to unstylishly yield place to meaning. To be seen is too feminine. They and their words are masculine. They become frumpish. And others respectfully read them. They are serious. And their honor is intact. Don’t look.
Platonism is the seeing that not only sees the meaning but the
form that holds the meaning. Indeed the
form is often become the meaning. The
outer takes over from the inner. God
does not disappear. He radiates in his
own appearing. We see him. And the masculine author and his words are
themselves marveled at. We see what they
wanted us to overlook. Surely he will
correct that frumpishness and find a proper appearance for the desiring
eye. He and his projected form are seen.
5657 I have always felt the temptation, indeed
I have always attempted, to write something meaningful, a help and a lift to
mankind. And I have no doubt but that
you, as I, have wanted to find in your reading ideas that send you farther and
yet farther down the road of understanding so that you may also do some good
for all of us. Understanding does come. And helpful writings do get written. Even I have, I suppose, at forgotten times
been a part of that great doing. But I
am afraid that in these writings something else is afoot. You will find here a stylish thing. That is to say a movement of words that will
gently take you along, perhaps seeming for a moment to be instructive, and will
then leave off without having deposited anything memorable for you to pass
on. Useless, meaningless, but I hope not
colorless words in a gentle syntax curled up in mercifully short paragraphs. And then it will repeat. This too is a part of mankind. I never really wanted the other.
I’m simply trying to free myself of philosophical jargon.
5658 Jargon is meant to impress and intimidate
and get you a degree and a job and keep away the riffraff. Well, yes, we all know that. And though it is ever courting immense
boredom, it, nonetheless, can be great fun.
Finding oneself become master of any difficult task is always thrilling. And one can intimidate oneself. Still, for all that, jargon remains the
cliché it has always become and unless you can pile it on so thick as to be
eternally camp, you will have only your aging self.
Jargon is style, also.
It calls attention to itself, not what it purportedly meant. The author means finally himself. Don’t we all!
The masculine man wants to be seen not being seen. His stylish frumpishness is indirect
conceit. Blithering and dithering and
lathering up your academic willies he manifests that inept competence we all so
love. Because he falls for your youthful
beauty so forcefully. And then you’re
out of there. Unfortunately, it’s your
turn. So remember those magic phrases!
5659 The opposite of writing with style is
perhaps From a Logical Point of View by
Willard Van Orman Quine. It’s a lovely
book. Clear, refreshing, spring water
surprises the reader previously made turbulent by Platonism. It is over-full of simple meaning. It is salvific. It is also something like rest. But rest when you are not tired is
horrible. Anyway its stylessness is
finally a heavy vamp. It is Aristotle’s
hidden contrivance. And then comes the
intrigue of academic non-forthcomingness.
It is the hunger within the limpid home of the muse. All that makes the book and its progeny such
a Fascinans. Style is always a lie, but
then so is truth.
Bergmann, my favorite, is a very stylish writer. He sets out to prove that easy, translucent
idea, the ancient idea of universals. He
lays out the blanket we will lie on, the pall and groundwork. He begins, but always before he can properly
proceed one point must be cleared up and that consists of a small number of
obscure historically unfortunate apprehensions that must first be swept away,
then he starts off. Or he almost does, a
word about method and context is necessary and then … oh my God, will he ever
get on with it and finally do what has to be done? The complexity of his writing is a
frightening magnificence. All of which I
magically learned to deal with when I was a boy walking through the dense
underbrush of a woods outside my little town.
I can now make my way through even in the most compressed Oriental
bedroom. Bergmann’s books are a
pleasure. An intense pleasure for me. He leaves Quine in the dust on the desert of
nominalism. Peter is blond.
5660 Humans act irrationally and the
rationalists among us get very, very upset.
For example, we are running out of oil but we are making no provision
for conservation or cultivation of alternative sources of energy. We are like a person who inherits a fortune
and burns through it so very fast. Then
joltingly he’s back into poverty. It’s
irrational and the rationalists just can’t get over it. Why are we like that? What is driving us?
It’s an old story. We
are inevitably lured into doing exactly what will destroy us. Is it Freud’s death wish? What has us so enchanted? What do we see that we love so much we’ll
give up everything just to see it, feel it, taste it, one more time? What chilling music is calling us? What musky claw? Who is this god of unhealthy desire? And what is this desire thing, anyway?
There’s no way out. We
are going to be drawn into an ordinary death spiral. And we hope into the beyond that that one
will be there. To get that is the
weariness that is more than life. We
want only That. But what is it? Will I have my lamp trimmed when he comes?
5661 I just read an article that said that
physics has proven that we have no free will.
Everything we do down to the last quantum jerk is determined, even
predetermined, by the laws of science and the initial conditions of this
material compost. Yes, yes, yes, we all
know all about that line. And we know
the one about the timeline of the space-time continuum already being set. I did in spite of that however think that the
randomness of the quantum collapse somehow untied the bind. But it makes no difference; surely we are
certainly not in charge of that.
Whatever, it seems one assumption was made by that author that is
probably wrong. I doubt very much that
from one point in time only one future egresses or that to it only one past
ingresses. Rather the egrets take off in
glorious flocks. Or without the bad
poetry, Many timelines converge and diverge.
Oh my goodness, even that one point is really many in the entanglement
of its now fashionable non-locality. I
suppose all those options are no comfort to the believer in freewill, but it
does open the door to the room of that impish god we cutely call pure
chance. An enchantment and a blast to
the head. Choose your future, choose
your past and sail along merrily in the cosmic wind. The wind bloweth where it listeth. The spirit breatheth where he will. The Boy knows. And you know you are not free.
5662 I have been lying on my bed trying to
feel myself being a hardcore materialist.
It’s easier than feeling myself being heterosexual. Though it may come to the same thing. First I had to assume the thinking of an
idealist. That is to say, I had to
imagine that everything I directly see, or think I directly see, is
unreal. It is only a projection, not of
my mind as an idealist would say, but of my brain. Beyond that there is … matter. I now must feel what it is like having to
succumb to the doings of that. Which, I
guess, is to (feel myself) succumb to myself, because, after all, I am (since
there is nothing else) matter. Or I am
nothing at all. That later is probably
the truth of materialism.
So I am nothing at all.
Is there a certain peace in knowing that? I think the Madyamika theorists would think
so. I will leave them to their peace. It seems like nothing to me. And now the question is: Have I with that
felt the feeling of being a materialist?
I guess so. It doesn’t seem very
hard at the core.
5663 The transformations and more importantly
the correspondences that define the figures of myth for us are about to
return. Nano-technology and information
theory are showing us that it really is possible to take an object, a beloved
object, rearrange the atoms within it, and create a different object. Information theory shows us that there will
always be a mark on that object that shows us what it once was and indeed still
is but in a different form. Along the
timeline of history there is always a record of the past. No piece of history is ever lost. That is the law of the conservation of
information. Consider the story of
Hyacinth.
From Wikipedia - Hyacinth was a beautiful boy
and lover of the god Apollo , though he was also admired
by West Wind, Zephyr. Apollo and Hyacinth took
turns throwing the discus. Hyacinth ran to catch it to impress Apollo, was struck by
the discus as it fell to the ground, and died. A twist in the tale makes the wind god Zephyrus responsible for the death of Hyacinth. His
beauty caused a feud between Zephyrus and Apollo. Jealous that Hyacinth
preferred the radiant archery god Apollo, Zephyrus blew Apollo's discus off
course, so as to injure and kill Hyacinth. When he died, Apollo didn't allow Hades to claim the boy; rather, he
made a flower, the hyacinth, from his spilled blood.
According to Ovid's account, the tears of Apollo
stained the newly formed flower's petals with ai,
ai, the sign of his grief.
A boy
dies and he is changed into a flower.
And there is a mark on the new object to show its origin. Transformation and correspondence. Myth is replete with such stories of change. It is the essence of myth. It is rather easy to write a story of
transformations but to write one where there are scattered all through it marks
of correspondence is a very tricky affair because of the great complexity
involved. Moreover one must first have
learned all the historical correspondences that are already out there and make
the story fit in with that. Tricky
indeed. Correspondence, congruence,
equivalence – they’re everywhere.
Jean
Genet has one lovely story about the dead boy he loved. Somehow that boy changed into a match box,
which Jean fingered in his pocket. No
doubt he recognized the boy because of some mark. It is strange, but true to myth.
5664 The everyday world, this world you must
contend with right now, is not the world or the Real that I write about. Here only names and absences spook us
about. The presence of the Present is
somewhere else. Thus we are now in the
land of the conspirators and the heart stalkers. A footpath leads on to maybe this, maybe that
and we think dim markings are along the way.
Only the virtual, the fantastic, toxic emanations from someone’s
corporate corruption meant to steal our souls.
Yes, writing satire like this is great fun.
The nominalist knows all about your sick romantic idea of universal
forms. Otherworldly fumes. Museum dust.
Fortunately, now just some remaining murrain and silken insinuations in
the dimming prospect of mind. Childish
fairy bobbles for narcissistic fairies.
Freudian self-delusionists. And
on and on. More satire. But it does get old after a while as do all
puritanical, utilitarianist ideas. The
Ivy League clear-minded ones are boring.
So back to the supernaturalism of the Real Presence. Eat it!
5665 I am sorely wearied by the exhausting
long-windedness of today’s blog auteur. But, hey, I have written up 6000 pages of
mental fragrance so who am I to talk.
Why do so many of us go on and on?
I am worried. Then again, hell, I
have been out-translating the excruciane of verbal entrapment all my
intellectual life. Long-windedness is fun and I’m sure it is so for some to
read, not me. I am too narcissistic for
that. Thank God for the computer. Print was so Spartan. Now we can babble to our heart’s
discontent. Or are you still reading
this?
5666 Rhythm and the περίοδος. A period, as every young Fourier analyst
knows, has a beginning and a middle and an end and one period lies within
another within another within another and then it reaches an end. It all becomes beautifully complicated and
simple at once. The one thing is finally
self-contained. The boy is with
himself. The irrevocable orgasm. The full stop.
This is not a process philosophy of following one path after
another far out into the suburbs. Such
infinite marauding and meandering going nowhere, just slouching and lounging in
time, is not the one thing, tight skin, easily defended city I admire. I want to quickly take it all into one
looking. He rises up and shifts and
turns over and that is that. The end
comes soon. And then the afternoon and
then the night and it all returns. A
little face swinging in the breeze. A
row of finger joints in battle array. In
the goose summer.
5667 Art is a dream. a dream is constricting. You cannot live in a dream. but of course we do live in dreams. Or do dreams live in us? We see dreams. They hurt.
They are what style is. We die a
horrible death in art. You cannot live
in art. But of course we have to live in
art. We dream. life is constriction. Stand back and look at it. you are such an artist. A good artist. how are you ever going to get that out
there? you really shouldn’t, you know. It is anti-life. We constrict you. It is immoral. You mustn’t live in a dream. but go on.
I know you have to. We all
do. And so on.
Style should be helpful in understanding philosophy. that is to say the style of writing. It isn’t though. It only makes matters worse. It is a distraction. Style is a distracting. Look at me!!
It’s like modern architecture.
Stop and gaze. Don’t try to live
in it. the oscillations between looking
and living will tear the mind. look at
it in a glossy art magazine, a heavy one.
so nice. So very nice. But don’t look while you are sitting in an
artsy fartsy building. You will be
constrained. And the dissonance will
send you home. So nice. It’s the same with style and philosophy and a
boyfriend. What is nice to look at is
not one you can live with. Oh how I wish
things were different. In God it will
all unite.
5668 The clash and crash of modern American
music as it comes from Varèse is so different, at first blush, from the ambient
minimalism that seems to calm our nerves so well as we phase out. Did Varèse get his idea from Buddhist clamor?
To understand Varèse,
understand Buddhist noise.
5669 If the gods and the Platonic Forms do
exist, then where are they? I am not presenting here an Aristotelian vision of
their in-existing substance. They are
separate. But where? Surely, though, they don’t have to be
anywhere; they can just be. Not in
anything. Not thrown out with some sort
of umbilical cord to whatever. Just
nowhere. Yes, of course, but I want to
entertain another idea for the fun of it.
Let’s they are in and of language.
Let’s say that language is a real thing and not a human invention. Then, overlooking the question of just where
language is, the gods and the Forms hang out there. But hanging out is not necessarily the “in”
of being dependent on, as merely “in” the mind.
So there they are. And insofar as
language has a hold on you, the gods have you by the balls. Literally.
And that is the dick in dictionary.
5670 Purposeful or decorative? With that distinction in mind we can see the
object of object-oriented philosophy.
These guys are butch, very butch.
Which is to say, they are not there to be seen, but to see. Thus the slight nervousness about anyone in
the room who is slightly stylish. A
Quasi-fag. No doubt. Their words plainly go to the object. They are looked through, not at. No embellishment, only purpose. A world of ends with no pun intended.
Theirs is a world of purpose, not purposeless decoration. Drive toward the goal. And the goal is not the verbal car you are
driving. Any old thing will do as long
as it gets you there and doesn’t call attention to itself. No fins or shiny chrome. Only service.
I have obviously written with style. My sentences and paragraphs want to be looked
at, not through to some object. They are
the object. Sex objects. Smooth flowing. Climax reaching. Tight, compact. A number.
He puts out decked out.
5671 Today on the Internet you can see a lot
of videos about how the Internet has been taken over by a few evil
capitalists. I suspect those detailed
documentaries are financed by those very, evil, tyrannical controllers
themselves. And now let’s, for the sake
of argument, assume that those sebaceous beings really are out there trying to
sump up the human spirit. Could it be
that they really can reduce us all to happy, willing slaves of their system? Well, not if I have my way about it. I am, after all, elevating and promoting the
madness of man. The sexual agony. The torturous erotic. The sinful dandy. The gods are back. And the Satyr Socrates, the infinite, absolute
negative. Along with his sighing,
crying, brat-boys. This is the
metaphysics of separate Forms. And the
lovely, slim-waisted Jesus. We are here
in the self-contained freedom of pure play, the narcissistic and the
self-absorbed. This is the grammarcy of
literature. The triviality of the
Trivium. The scared goat of the
sacramentum. I insist on it.
5672 According to Bergmann’s philosophy of
mind, which is pretty much the one I follow, there is one way a sort of
panpsychism could be true, though Bergmann himself, I’m sure, would
demure. Others have called attention to
it, but perhaps he never had time to deal with it. In his philosophy, this is an analytically,
i.e. necessarily, true statement. ‘F(x)’
M F(x). It merely states that the
thought of F (x) intends or means F(x).
Does that entail there always being a thought for every fact? Maybe.
You must also remember that for Bergmann consciousness is not the
thought, but rather the thought of the thought.
Consciousness is always a second level knowing. Nonetheless, it seems that, using his
philosophy, one could argue for the necessary existence of that. The dialectic is tricky. Moreover, for this consideration, it is very
important to know that for Bergmann, and me, no thought is in space and thus no
panpsychism could be mind spread out through the multi-verse. Nor are facts “in” thoughts. Yes, the dialectic is very tricky. And maybe it’s a good thing he never had
time.
5673 Being breaks in two. Form is lost.
The spirit tries to fly free.
But, alas, so many other breakings are necessary. Break break break. The Compulsion sets in. Where is freedom?
I’m looking for the final break. I look at myself looking. The look of desperation is in my own
Look. With luck and a quick lick I can
kick this buck. Oh, I am so stylish,
rhetorical, allegorical. Yes, you too,
dear reader, are broken. Between meaning
and font. The font of life and rife. Look at, look through. Get downright and cross-eyed looking,
booking, rooking you self, your partner, your little elf hisssself.
It’s useless and hopeless and loveless. I can’t stop.
Compulsion, repulsion, collusion.
Fusion. Fussing about. In the less than nothing. Form truly is lost. And I am tossed out of here. A delicate fear. But correct spelling by that spellbinder was
maintained. In his lustrous
grinder. My minder.
5674 A young man I sometimes read has been
wondering if he should allow advertisements to be put on his philosophy
blog. He’s a soft, beautiful New Age
Schelling kind of guy. I think he has
decided against it, mostly because of adverse criticism from his readers. It was inevitable, but was it the right
decision?
What is an advertisement?
It is a piece of style that induces you to buy it, i.e. give a piece of
your flesh in exchange for the ambience that is that brand. Style and flesh. We hardly know how to think about flesh
anymore. And a Schellingesque Platonist
such as he thinks of it only prettily.
Oh my, it is complicated. And he
doesn’t need another come-on artist competing with his own lure out there on
blog-street.
Everywhere you look there is only style, hardly any substance
at all. And that isn’t a bad thing. The problem is not that we are being seduced
by fluff, but that another guy’s show is up-staging our own. Two beauties on the same street is an
invitation to a cat-fight. And they
begin to call each other shallow and superficial. I’m afraid that this young man has already
become a pitch man for the Schelling/Plato brand and he is contractually
obligated to only that. I’m a little
bored with it all.
5675 My writings are performance pieces. They are all style and fluff. Behind the expressive words there is nothing
expressed. I destroy the world with
pretty clichés. And enter into the one
long night of the One Night Stand.
A mere vision of the Visionary
Thing. You’ve been with him before. And before, and before, too many times. The desire that pure consciousness is made
out of. Or some such Sartrean wink. A twink.
A link to heaven. And the
nauseous heave. In the Nietzschean
repeat. Or simply … again. Per force.
5676 The boy walks down the street. He is very conscious of himself and of how he
appears in another’s eyes. He is an
actor on the stage of life. And it is
that very self-consciousness that is his sin.
That is sin itself. It is not
that the world exists, but that it exists as show, as theater, as look-at-me,
that is so bad, so very very bad. God
hates sin. And there he is, wanting to
see himself being seen. We are without
hope.
Do you think I expressed that well? I so wonder about what you think? Well, yes, you knew I would say that. The mind aware of itself is the Great
Wonder. And you, dear, do it too in the
privacy of your own thoughts, which aren’t private after all. We’re stuck.
The boy walks down the street.
So cool. So smooth. So lost.
Self-consciousness is self-destruction.
So pretty. So petty. So tossed. About. To go home and give up. But first a little dance.
Style vs. substance.
They collude and preclude your inclusion. Confusion.
Then confession. To the priest
who had you when you were fifteen, the vicar of God … that’s you, why did you seduce
him, was it because you knew you could?
Are you God, the pure puerile self-consciousness? The question begs. Grinning on bended knee. Watch out!
Be very still. I will stop here
and wait for your response that will never come.
5677 Our goal, of course, is to escape the chthonic terrors. Did the Romantic Imagination do that? Does its weak New Age revival? Yes, I suppose so. The boy runs off or is shot off into a far
place free of the bitch. Well, at least
that is my imagination or, I should say, the Vision I see among the Images that
arrive from Nowhere. Do you object, roll
your eyes, turn away? Who cares? I swim in the great flow of history. This is how things are done and why. I am an elite in the Western Mind. A High Church dandy. Artsy smartsy. Among, again of course and perforce, the sunetoi,
the cognoscenti, the enlightened, the
“esoteric few”, or what-have-you.
Fluff. The spiritual
negligentsia. Back away! Between these transcendental egos and the
dark purple of pain there is no union.
Unless you’re into that, which I’m not.
It’s a matter of taste – or no taste.
Keats was such a dear boy. My
joy. The hoi poloi are damned.
5678 Things move on in the history of the
world and this and that appear and disappear.
It’s maddening. When beauty is
here we instinctively know it will not be here in the next instant. But we do, we most certainly do, recognize it
when its presence so pressingly grinds into the brain. Unfortunately, when we say to another Look
here, it is by then no more. It is very
maddening. And it is relentless. Sometimes after a while of not seeing we
remember and absent-mindedly wonder.
Then later it is there and the wonder becomes a conscious, simple
peeve. It is so maddening we will to not
believe. But then for a second that
unbelief is beautiful and we are very lost so close to the delirium of
being. Beauty is brutally ephemeral.
Yes, we all know that and we wonder if in Eternity, that
sniffling place of the clammy romantic, the frightful, if it ever there holds
still. Yes, youth does at times have the
radiance of the gods. We all know that
again and again. And then it is gone and
a plainness comes. Less than plain, it
is mud. Horrible and mad.
I think I’m going to take the late afternoon bus out to the
mall and watch the boys of that far shore move about. I wonder if knowing that they will tomorrow
be as ordinary as all of the rest of us makes it even more intense. Poignancy pokes into my chest bone. And a little poison.
5679 The Imagination deals in images. There is the mental act of imagining and
there is its object. Whatever that
object is, it is not as complicated, as many-faceted as a real world
object. It is a sort of minimal thing
and the instant we know it we know it perfectly and throughout. It may indeed be a simple, one thing. And it may even be bare, that is to say, just
itself without further determination.
Then again, that very very simple thing, if there, may be something
beyond the image of the imagination. It
may be something known, if known directly at all, only by a direct, maybe
ontological knowing.
The world is many; the mind is one. Let’s say I imagine a rock. The instant you read that you know exactly
its meaning. And you know the meaning of
the word “rock” just as fast, in no time at all. (I must here of course add the pedantic
adjustment and say that it is mutatis mutandis for those born to other
languages.) And there may, then again
there may not be, a sort of picture of a rock before your mind’s eye. There does seem to be a difference between
that picture and the object known in the first blush of knowing the meaning of
that words. Let’s say that the picture
is the object of the Imagination. And
that other is the extra-linguistic thing that is the Form of Rock known in
“true” knowing. Even if there is a
difference, though, the Form and the mental picture are both much simpler than
a particular rock in the world. It is
that simplicity that is so very attractive.
We hold it all at once. The final
thing is reached instantly. Possession
is ours.
What shall we say of the word “rock”? How is it connected to the Form, the Image
and a particular material rock? It
really is a fourth thing beside those three.
The connection is intimate, even if arbitrary. I will name the connection Fusion. The word fuses with what it names. And that word “fuses” is just as arbitrary as
is any word. I suppose I could have said
it loves the other. Or perhaps I should
reserve that last word for the connection of mind and word and the other
things. There really is a lovely
collusion here. Doors open. Oh my, so many come out and want to play.
5680 What is the difference between a
perceived, real object and the same thing as imagined? Not much, except that the latter may be
simplified. And somewhere in between
there is the artistic aesthetic, the imagined realized.
There is the so-called real and then there is the ideal. No doubt, the ideal is just the real fixed
up. That real world is oh so messy, the
lighting is bad and the angles are wrong and there is trash lying all
about. Editing is definitely called for.
So much cutting to do. So much
photoshopping. Consider the nude. No one is such an ideal thing as the artist
imagines. Nonetheless, we know him so
well. We have a feel and a feeling for
him. This no one. He really is who we are. And we dream him is tension dreams at
night. Slightly dreadful. Our fall was far. But this heart is still beating. Not much, not much at all, separates us from
that. The ideal is the Real.
5681 We do know the difference between the
stylish and the low and the perversely ordinary, but where do we find the
dangerous. Is there a dangerous
stylishness? Consider the Flamenco as
described by Garcia Lorca. The dancer
when so Parisian and filled with glamorous style is certainly not the one
filled with the duende. The smoothly
elegant and ragged passion. The second
is dangerous, but could the first be?
Elegance and the duende.
A work with style is not necessarily a stylish one, though they
both call attention to themselves. The
duende does not call attention to itself; it is itself. The styled and the stylish perform. The duende doesn’t perform; he takes. The duende is real even if there is no such
thing. The stylish, but maybe not the
styled, is of course unreal, a show, a playful piece of insanity. And right there it is dangerous. Is God stylish? Is He transcendental Stylishness? Well, yes.
The Dandy. The One waiting for
Moses and Jacob. And your grandmother on
the back porch late in the evening when she was alone, now gone. Danger.
And I write dangerously. I am
such a stylish thing, elegant and … maybe not.
Maybe so. Maybe taken with
myself. But what is the difference?
5682 As I read Keats and another man’s
introductory comments to this now-labeled Romanticism I am so struck by the
awful fact that he wrote all that in so little time and such troubled
times. It seems impossible. Indeed it is impossible if we believe those
rationalizing comments. Two things do
stand out for me. First is that there is
only one feeling to all those poems, one idea or hue, and that is a thing in
itself separate from what might have gone on in Keats’ life, though certainly
adding color to that also. Secondly,
those words speak mainly of words and writing itself, this is poetry writing
the very pact of writing poetry. Poetry
and the feel of poetry in the monstrous act. That to such an extent that Keats
himself, so filled with pathos, is irrelevant.
He was abused. But then I suppose
that is the very Romantic idea itself.
5683 There are two ways to read Keats. You can read him for content and
meaning. Or you can pay close attention
to rhyme and meter. The first comes
quickly and is easily done. The second
likewise. The two, however, are very
different things. To have the one is to
miss the other. Form and content. He escaped the frightful beauty of nature, so
close to his words, by shifting to the other.
Keats found his firm existence in the push of writing meter around the
repetition of rhyme. He worked the
words.
I write prose, which is to say, I pay attention to grammatical
phrasing, the rise and fall, the elongation and the contraction, the wave on
which rides the easily found out meaning and external thing. Meter and the repetition of sound around
tongue vary. And the varying comes again
the same. The phrase is finally emptied
of meaning and, like Keats, I continue to work the words.
In all that the idea silently enters and sits staring at the
writer and then the reader and is quickly forgotten. What was it?
5684 Taking a bit of stage direction from
Richard Lanham, here is an exercise in oscillation. The dual/duel elements I’m thinking of are
at/through, style/substance and play/seriousness//seriousness/play. I took four
familiar and very different cuts from other writer/routerss: Keats, Kant,
Swinburne and Aristotle and I wove them together in a rather dangerous and
haphazard way. Nothing was well-worked
or thought out. It was pure/impure play
and the result is to be read as such. I
am approaching creativity and fatuation.
Here is the result:
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to
consider questions, which it cannot decline, because ALL men by nature desire
to know as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as
they transcend every faculty of the mind. He knew whose gentle hand was
at the latch, before the door had given her to his eyes; it falls into this
difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which
cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and
sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. Lean back,
and get some minutes' peace; let your head lean back to the shoulder with
its fleece of locks, Faustine. ALL men by nature desire to know.
With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its
own nature, the shapely silver shoulder stoops, weighed over clean with that
state of splendid hair that droops each side, Faustine, to ever higher and more
remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must
remain ever incomplete, and from her chamber-window he would catch her beauty
for not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to
do anything, we prefer seeing farther than the falcon spies; because new
questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled
to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, and
constant as her vespers would he watch, because her face was turn'd to the same
skies; while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls
into confusion and contradictions, Let me go over your good gifts that crown
you queen; a queen whose kingdom ebbs and shifts each week, Faustine, from
which it conjectures the presence of latent errors. An indication of
this is the delight we take in our senses which, however, it is unable to
discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of
experience, for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for
themselves and cannot be tested by that criterion with everything else. The
reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know. And with
sick longing all the night outwear, to hear her morning-step upon the stair.
The arena of these endless contests and above all others the sense of sight is
called Metaphysics and brings to light many differences between things.
What am I to think of it?
I do rather like it. And though
the sheer play of it does shine through, I am here speaking very seriously
about it. Through the words a Great
Spirit approaches – or an imp sidles up.
It has no substance at all or rather because of the dense
fusion/confusion/con-game something heavy beats your brains. The battle of Oscillation arrives. The Dionysian grin and the Apollonian
glare. It was nothing; leave it.
5685 Philosophers, grabbing onto difference,
try to explain sameness. It of course
doesn’t work, but what the hell. Today
there is a general infatuation with the resurrected Absolute, a zombie if there
ever was one. All dualisms are cut down
with ridicule and carbuncles of syntax.
Thus I arrive at Oscillation, which I am thoroughly (?) tickled to know
means “little mouth” as in a mask of Bacchus swinging in the wind in the
garden. Anyway, I set up dualisms, as we
all must, and then I try to unite the two dears, again as I must. I simply can’t; no one can really. So I oscillate between the two as we all
must, in the musky odor of oblivion, or some such non-sensual un-thing. It gives me something to do.
5686 There are two types of Love. One is a gentle love that gives warmth on a
cold night and a cool hand when tempers flare.
This is the love of home and holding.
The beauty is deep. It is
justified. The other is an ungentle
thing. It is a cold hand on a cold
night. It is the hot hand in flaring
tempers. It is cutting light. And then the darkness outside of town. You are left alone. The beauty is too ethereal. It is beyond justification. It is mad.
I know the second intimately and when I speak with someone who
lives in the first, I fidget and faint.
I am what I am. I suppose I am
then in the academically suspect Sublime away from that beautiful thing. I walk the streets in the chill wind and look
into the golden windows of late evening and see them there in each other’s
arms. So soft and so perfect. They have faces. They brush up against existence
profoundly. I turn and go back to my
rented room. The rent is due tomorrow
and I don’t have it.
The love I know is ferocious and vicious and threatening and
all that. You know it from
literature. I will not let myself jab at
the others. Mind the gap.
5687 Those who long for family life, even if
only as a happy couple, are really longing for an escape from the incessant
thinking and analysis and dreaming within solitude. They want the chores of life together with
another, preparing and repairing this and that, tending to and contending with
little necessities, always quietly and joyfully without the deadly bother of
deep lonely thought. Arbeit macht
frei. Well yes, every American knows
that. Except that it obviously
doesn’t. And when we each sit together
with another we long to be alone. We want
to be free of the “we”. And then around
and around the impossible circuit. To be
human is to be half a god. But it ain’t
all bad.
5688 Here is a quote from a good person who
speaks for many today. It is not how I
think, but that is neither here not there.
That person longs for "some dimly sensed union with an all-seeing,
all-loving, ineffable Other, in whose encircling embrace may be found ultimate
solace for the harsh limits of mortality and the frightening isolation of
individuality".
In my offhanded manner I changed it to: a brightly seen taking
in the rivet and river of my seeing, desiring only that one, easily spoken, one
like me, who in the brace of love’s trudge finds these my spoils of love’s
quickening nerve in the smooth face of immortality and the tying down together
in these words finally just themselves.
Two individuals.
I, a Platonist, a lover of the eternal Forms, insist on the
final fix of the bare particular.
Without the individual this and that there can be no universal. Those who deny the universal forms also deny
separate individuals. The Form and the
unformed, bare particular travel together.
Or you have an unspeakable middle of neither the one nor the other. I speak.
5689 "some dimly sensed union with an
all-seeing, all-loving, ineffable Other, in whose encircling embrace may be
found ultimate solace for the harsh limits of mortality and the frightening
isolation of individuality".
We have, in the modern world, as indicated in the above quote,
moved from the old subject-predicate world, a hylo-morphic world, a world of
bare individuals and eternal forms, to the embrace of the All-Embracing. Folds and gatherings and the everywhere Edge
that expands and contains more and ever more sub-worlds piling into
hyper-worlds, communities ancient and to come and critically parallel - Life
and creativity! Or, simply and
mathematically stated, Sets, sets within sets within sets within sets … . And it is of course important to remember
that in these new structures there is no highest or lowest. They are unending up becoming down becoming
sideways rippling far out on the Lake of Being forever. It’s an oceanic thing. Ever changing. Ever transforming into itself. Virtual beings arising and falling back. Morphisms and isomorphisms. The stability and certainty of only
instability and uncertainty. Neither one
nor many. Substitution and exchange and
cosmic traffic. The killing poetry goes
on and on. But, though I do and have
always loved mathematics, I refuse to let all that usurp the ancient high
ground.
5690 The Monolog
by Novalis isn’t so much paradox as oscillation. The serious content of the piece is the play
of form. He straightforwardly, in plain
unadorned writing, speaks of the self-consciousness of language. Absentmindedly, it shows off; it is style. It is first one then the other. The watcher sees both. Unself-conscious content, then form. Substance, then style. Seriousness, then play. It’s relentless. Back and forth, back and forth. Too much and his head will crack. And that’s where we are today. Depth and surface. Solid and ephemeral. And when I write of Form as having the
thickness of Being, I attempt the impossible.
Still, the impossible is not so difficult.
5691 We perform a mental shift. I hate that light coming in through my closed
blinds in the evening and making it so hard for me to sit in my chair and
read. Then I notice the soft ecstasy in
the shadows on my table. Hate and
love. There are so many ways of
shifting. One emotion changes into
another. We see one thing as other. It all depends on perspective. Yes yes yes, we all know all of that. It’s an old ontological hat. We are of two minds about this and that and
what-have-you. Two minds. And out of that we are supposed to make our
one mind. It’s impossible. The shift shunts every attempt at there being
only one thing there. The bifurcation
will not relent. “Get out the meatballs,
Mom; we’re coming to a fork in the road.”
Now there’s a shift for you. And
so you will just have to shift for yourself in trying to make your world
one. Yes, you know. And you know that you know. How will you ever be able to push just those
two awarenesses together hard enough to make them one? It’s so hard in this ec-static light.
Content and form, substance and style, unself-consciousness and
self-consciousness, absentmindedly intently aware. No, there is no unity, in spite of what those
who stand on the critical divide say. We
oscillate eternally.
Still, for all that, I have just written up one idea here.
5692 It seems to me that today young scholars
resemble Nascar race cars. Not because they
are so speedy, but because they have advertizing decals stuck all over
them. One wants to be held up by and
find his identity in Deleuze and Nietzsche, another in Heidegger and Derrida,
another in Quine and Austin, another … you get the point. They are walking advertizing boards for those
guys and receive some of their essence and thus BE. Are they being used? Are they trying to use? Are they like branded cattle? Are they tattoo artists? The important thing to realize is that
although they may have made a real stab at actually reading and trying to
understand their main man, the truth is that they just want to sit in his light
and absorb some of his eminence and immanence and BE. But of course they will sheepishly admit that
they will have to someday figure out their own philosophy, which, when they do,
they might not want to trust to make them BE without the other decals still
stuck all over them. Balance and more
figuring. As for me, I am a Platonist
and a follower of Bergmann. And I write with
a minimal elegance, don’t you think?
Style and, I suppose, branding are of the essence. Speed indeed!
5693 The later Wittgenstein wanted to replace
universals with family resemblances.
It’s an idea that’s sort of famous and it seems obvious to many. And on an everyday, work-a-day level it is
obvious. But really it solves the
problem of sameness only by denying that sameness. That’s no solution at all. In the end it’s satire. And that right there is its ordinary
appeal. Philosophers are crazy
idiots. Or, to use a word that is now
out of fashion, they and their philosophy are absurd.
Few today understand the philosophical use of the word
“absurd”, no doubt because philosophy is sympathetically read by no one. The world has only the satiated. And no satyrs.
5694 When a new medium first appears on the
scene, it looks like the old medium it is about to replace. The first movies looked like plays. The first cars looked like carriages. And so these first ebooks look like paper
books. But they aren’t the same at
all. Nor is writing now the same as
writing then. The old book had a solid
feel to it. It was one thing you could
take out of the bag and hold in your hand.
It was substantial. It had
weight. But that is no more. And the author was one substantial being with
a defined personality and revealed thoughts.
You could go meet him and you could know where he stands in the world of
ideas. But that is no more because even
though you can still have a conversation with him on an Internet link, that
conversation too has changed and it is something other. Books, authors, conversations, the act of
writing are all gone and in their place there is … I have no idea what. I guess it is this.
After the Cheshire Cat substantially disappears and only the
smile is left, that smile looms.
5695 Today, instead of the book, we have
scraps. We have Pessoa’s trunk. Sentences and pieces of sentences scraping
against the ethereal wind like starched muslin prayer-flags. Written by writers who are scrappy scraps
themselves. Not hyper-textualists, just
hyper. And writing is the back and forth
of the cursor in the mind’s eddies of editing.
And though this might seem like a piece of a conversation we are having,
it is only a verse in the poem of life, the collected works of nobody. There is no poem. No book, no author, no conversation, and
writing is the Flow in the insurrection of the erotic.
5696 There is the Indo-European root √gheu,
which may in fact be three separate roots but, feeling myself as far above such
possible mundane facts as do Plato and Heidegger, I’m going to conflate them if
they are. Therefore, from that root we
have pour/ fuse, god/giddy and chaos/chasm.
The Holy Spirit pours out. We
become giddy. Divine chaos.
For a long time now certain philosophers have worried the chasm
that Descartes opened up between mind and body.
So in our time some have developed a theory of signs. It works like this. Take the mind things of thought, feeling and
imagination. And the body things of
shape and color and movement. Now look
at that person of your liking, friend or lover, sitting over there. Look hard.
That is a living being. He thinks
and feels and dreams. And you can see it
written all over him. He has the look of
desire and dejection and hope. You can
see mental calculation in the movement of his eyes, in his shifting and
turning, in his serious writing. And
across the creamy smooth skin on his soft face dreams seem to play. Or rather, to use some modern words, his
physical appearance is a sign. The blush
on his cheek is love. We say that the
blush is meaningful. Right there we see
love and thought and imagination. And
Life! A sign is a fusing of mind and
body. Mind and body become one in
meaningful signs. Indeed, all of nature
is a meaningful sign of God’s presence.
The chaos, the chasm is overcome.
In this theory, a sign is a fusing together of mind and
body. Of mind and nature. A sign is a meaning. Signifier and signified intimately
joined. One thing. And everything is a sign; everything is
meaningful.
But this fusing is also confusing and chaos and the giddiness
is deliquescence. I want to start over.
5697 He has a questioning look on his
face. What does that mean? How can the mental act of questioning be
spread across the extension of a face?
Well, it can and we know it perfectly.
So here it is, a non-spatial, mental thing and a spatial, biological
thing united. Now we need to find, tease
out, the nexus, the tie that accomplishes just that. Maybe it is “meaning”. We say his expression is meaningful or that
look means that he is questioning.
Still, meaning seems to me or feels to me to be a little too
distant. Meaning, as far as I feel it,
only points in the direction of. I want
something much more intimate. I want
fusion. And the fact that that word has
been used for a nuclear reaction that gives off great energy is just fine.
So here we have body and mind and fusion. How should we think of that threatening
mess? I suspect many or most would want
us to think of the unity as the only “real” thing there and that the two things
of mind and body separate are only “abstractions” from that one thing and
therefore unreal. Such monism is
fashionable today. It fits the
communitarian spirit. The dive into the
oceanic absolute and all that. A real
mess.
As I prefer to see it.
There is body and there is mind and there is the complexity that is mind
fused with body. That is analogous to
particular and universal and the fact that is their unity brought about by the
nexus of exemplification. And just as
fact is a complexity ontologically different from universal and particular and
nexus, so is a questioning look different from the biological body, thought and
the fusion nexus. Subtlety and
geometry. God somehow maintains.
5698 The flesh is sickeningly sweet. That is Sartre’s vision. And it is, of course, easy to catch sight of
that very thing for ourselves. It’s an
easy vision. Which is, if we let it be,
ubiquitous. Even the tongue and toothy
sounds you are quietly making right now in your mouth. The mouth is disgusting. But, fortunately, the vision is easily
avoided. We have abstractions.
Early in my intellectual life I had a vision of the Form of
Equality itself hanging in the air as I walked down a sunny, dusty gravel
road. Nature then was, for me, filled
with nerve exciting pollen. A luscious
spring and rivulet with weeds was not far.
I felt the need to jack off.
The pure Forms and that touch of nausea. Even these last few days I have been thinking
about keeping time, a lovely way of saying synchronicity. Simultaneity and Equality and sameness and
the nerve-wrackingly exact. Tingling and
at any second a sneeze into the Beyond.
So I write.
Abstractions and the flesh.
The Logos and the soft touch of Jesus.
His mucoid kiss. So I jump into
the pure, clean form of the Absurd.
5699 Language is somehow meaningful. It’s easy to see the mystery in that and then
dismiss it. Most people most of the time
say that the connection, whatever it is, between words and their referent is
totally arbitrary. Witness all the
different languages. Thus the loose
connection. But, I must admit, it
doesn’t feel loose to me. Somehow a name
is intimate, very intimate, with the thing named. And it seems to me that all words and
combinations of words are names. There
is, I confess, a feel for magic in all that.
And I have right there lost the freedom that the Enlightenment offered
with its precious conventionalism.
I sink into words and their flow and I am with the
thing-in-itself. I say, This and that
are the same. And I am in, not only what
each of those words names, but the things that are named by the sentence and
its pieces. So many things. My philosophy is crawling with slithering
beings. Meaning is flesh. Flesh is eternal. Jesus climbs on top of me. And παροσια, ΄ο ανηρ.
