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Laces untouched, discharge, routes or lines or levels

striation, strata

progressions along which only other routes are seen

Watching the ceremonial conflict of a movie, thoughts about the parallax of significance and obscurity, even in a theater, where the drama has its immensity of moment, and then even the grandeur of its climax is no longer pertinent, becomes passtime, distraction, as soon as it's over, the banality of getting up and leaving and returning to the dimness of the unkept day. This time, too, lost in a sea of days, frozen in some amber of the forgotten.

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Thoughts about abstraction and the abstraction of "evil." Not just the personification, or the attribution of an intent, not even so much an intelligence as a disposition, but the abstraction of all misfortune as this sort of power also serves a function of displacement, psychologically.

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Nothing to say.

So the art of it.

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Building better flowers.

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Where is the documentary about, or history of, losing? It's the far more common experience, even in sports, much closer to universal, and even the rare undefeated sees the end of the run. Certainly it's the structural necessity of the logic of a contest or contestants, so that whever there is a winner there is also a loser, all the more emphatic in battle. It requires more courage, and it is the courage required far more in life. To live is to lose, places, things, people, relationships, everything passing with time. Though it defers to the acclaim and pomp and memorial of winning, even those are lost, as ephemeral as memory and those who would remember. Surely it plays the far greater role in our makeup, if not, in fact, is more that makeup. As profound or expansive as that would be, how about just that document, testament, study or ode of not only those that keep losing and going back to play again, but losing experienced even by the greatest?

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The problem with arguing justification. This is also the problem of right, as its various senses work, more or less underhanded or implicit.

The problem with arguing justification is conceding or presuming that the situation of a "freedom," an option or choice for something that is not accepted by others, needs to be justified. But is this precisely the definition of "freedom" that is required, or that we want? Is it freedom? Is it free?

From the other side, those who would argue this as freedom to impose, control, exploit, do harm, etc. The problem of ethics from the notion of "right."

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Birthdays are a form of compensation for ignoring a person the other days of the year by thinking of the person in a completely generic way. Do I know anything particular about you? Why, here, just take this cake and card. I am ever more firm in my embarrassment and distaste for this custom, most of all when it has to do with me -- how little me it has to do with.

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Too philosophical to be political. Too political to be artsy. Too artsy to be scientific. Too scientific to be literary. Too literary to be philosophical.

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How beneficial for the self to not always see the self in everything.

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The monk, desire, having and being. What others think of us. The need to be. All of that is wound up, co-implicated, all in a swoop, so to speak, and the more so there is any identification, which is also association. This can be demonstrated by regress, rather than "positively," the chain of already in relation(s). To determine this desire at work in me and the artifice about even what I am that is almost immediately involved, to try to renounce it is already linked to or requires another impetus.

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Mal-adapt. X as the tangle of relation, the Moebius strip of tissue, division as already internal because of the internal/external (like the alimentary canal -- it's this conundrum too that leads to or causes obsession, the vessel, being whole and being open to the world). It's what makes us a matter of division, the singular always also among others, the "some" or "de." The X as the axes of this equation, as if the two-dimensional expressed that along another axis of the object inside the subject that then reverses their positions, the I submitted to the you at the very moment of its statement of priority. This allergy is what all psychology is, the negotiation, and there are only more or less severe effects of it. Thus affect. The intersection of consumption, marking the different dimensions of this relay: x as the object that is then incorporated, but as the "you," becomes also the agency that is the model of the "I," thus standing for the subject, but then not only as the variable of this container for its contents, but of this whole algrebra of relation. It is the you and your ideal of me inside me, and then so on, in regress, the mise en abyme of this, opening us up inside like infinity in between numbers.

The gambit is a funny one with a regress, a trap. A kind of trapless trap. We worry about the matter of life even after we're gone but that matter won't matter.

X = a/part. Ex-ampere, exemplar. Cut out and of.

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What happens when we say I?

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Mathematics doesn't like to be thought of as grammar or even language. It likes to think it has the last word.

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The necessary unnecessary formality. Leading up to Heidegger's Being and Time.

Descartes' meditations -- the conjecture over his motive, if it was the opposite of what the text says. Descartes is said to have tailored his proof of the existence of God to avoid the fate of Galileo. Whether this is true or not, there is the fact of it as conjecture, discourse itself. Legend. In this way, one of the strands that makes up philosophy, "philosophy," wound and bound up with its abstract principle, the love of wisdom, truth, with its record, history, facticity, is this conjecture, hearsay, anecdote. Legend, even tipping into myth.

This is also the problem, the matter, of intent, intention. The "problem" of it is that the gap that produces it cannot be reduced. Speculation.

The form of philosophy -- Aristotelian, Kantian, Hegel.

The principle of organization. The a priori.

Heidegger strikes in this way: How it's Kantian. That we have to know where we're heading before we head there. To what extent is the principle of organization, or even organization itself, derivative? Does one know how to organize before one embarks on a theoretical remove or return? Already the distinction of practice and theory has another twist, axis, or level, even with what Heidegger says about this. This "form" of philosophy, of the text of philosophy, makes Heidegger anachronistic, untimely, for the 20th century, especially because after Nietzsche (not to mention Freud, Einstein, many other styles and discourses which Heidegger himself distinguishes, characterizes). He comes off as anachronistic, fastidious if not fustian, much like Kant and Hegel, a pedant of old concerns. The passages from Being and Time about his terminology.

Then it strikes how Aristotelian Heidegger is, that his return goes beyond Kant to Aristotle, as the model to both follow and overtake. Then we see the cases of Husserl's influence, not least of which the express ones, where Heidegger says the present method owes much to Husserl. The Husserlian bracketing, where the question must be returned over anything known, how it is known. Of course this is where the Cartesian influence comes in, too. The excellent study of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe on Romanticism and the 19th century, The Literary Absolute, can't be ignored either, the context for this, even catching up Nietzsche, the French and German rivalry expressing itself in this taking up the mantle of Europe, Western civilization, and thus orienting as an outbidding of origins, going back further to reclaim roots, or find the place of autochthony, and this had its degree of madness and simplification as well as chronology: Roman Empire and administration, classical Greece, antiquity, pre-Socratic, and then even leaving aside all this for the barbaric and the mythological, the germane, German, germ.

Notes on Being and Time (references to Harper and Row, 1962, 7th ed., hardback, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson):

P. 96, passage beginning last sentence of para., "These entangling errors . . . ," leading into, then particularly the full paragraph: "One may answer: 'Things.'" Precisely here, if it has been only latent before, the question arises, what is the difference of thing and being -- thing or Thing and being or Being? Are these categories? The question returns even after everything Heidegger has specified and qualified, or even disqualified, about category. As a particular thrust of a question about this increasing sweep, generalization, abstraction, widening circle of the philosophical movement, of the movement of philosophy -- necessary at the same time as its formality or custom, its idiom, inclination, bent, both unavoidable and overdetermined, fault and foundation -- we can see this subject/object scheme itself cast wide on the history of philosophy. Is "thing" already the category that Being wants to be?

The positions get mixed up: object is the subject for the subject. Subject is dependent on the object's dependency on the subject for any quality, property, substance, sense, notion. Note this about the terms used and even their possibility for confusion: Ansich, Fursich. (Cf. through Hegel, Heidegger and beyond, either direction. How does this involve the Greek terms? Heidegger discusses "pragmata.") Being-for-itself and being-in-itself. I've always seen these as confused, or confusable, particularly as it seems to me that both elude the object and rather lie on the side of this subject. Thinking, consciousness, perception thus always seem to me to be more subsumed or encompassed by this: self-indulgence. Even the care Heidegger takes for terms like "authentic" (the German "eigentlich" is somewhat less problematic than the term used for translation, at least in English), which have a more technical sense of property (refined with his additional care about that term). Both of these terms already involve the projection of the subject onto the object. This would suggest another kind of regress of this distinction, the belated (nachtraglich, verspätet -- what idiom, what accent, here), derivative, reflexive "consciousness," the narcissistic, interested-in-self both in the narrow and most general way, being. One would then find it hard to escape solipsism as a more generalized product of this, as a kind of technical operation more broad than the estimation or evaluation, but thus obviously what allows for the more specific or narrower kind. And Derrida's or Levinas's inflection of this: homoiosis, the logic of the same, always returing the other to the terms of the same.

P. 120: "The 'for-the-sake-of-which' signifies an 'in-order-to'; this in turn, a 'towards-this'; the latter, an 'in-which' of letting something be involved; and that in turn, the 'with-which' of an involvement." This sentence, despite its comic, self-parodic effect -- perhaps even also because of it -- expresses very well what I've always thought about the derivative, qualifying, localizing retort to the sense of the autonomy of consciousness or thinking or the agency of the "I," or any of its concept-statements, abstractions. Perhaps authority is the best term to catch all this, encompass it. (Which is at the same time, shifting the axis, this parallax, also what this agency wants to do.) Reason also contains this doubled sense. (Duplicity?) "Reason" -- perhaps also capitalized when it's not at the beginning of the sentence -- as it is lifted to this self-sufficient, self-justifying general agency or principle, and "reason" as it itself already means a relation, as it is always already something for something, a because, an in-order-to, for-the-sake-of, towards-this.

P. 121: Para. beginning "But in significance itself . . . ," ends: "upon these, in turn, is founded the Being of words and of language." Here, as if suddenly, as if by an axis as a fissure or tiny crack, the question comes in -- and it may be none other than semantically itself, by the swerve of the way Heidegger says this, or even has to say it -- of which comes first, of precedence, either chronologically or logically, or if even those two can be separated, where this may be the special case that opens up the generalization. This question may also be the problem. Does this have enormous consequences for Heidegger? Is this precisely where we see just how this project, Being and Time, if not the more general one of Heidegger, is located still within the ontological epoch -- which, to be certain, Heidegger does not explicitly ever take a side against, declare any intention to be outside of (if he could or if this is ultimately possible), or express any general intent of opposition or even evaluation contra? Is this what makes Heidegger either, or both, conscientiously, purposefully attempting to resume all of ontology and its claim to authority, its claim of authority, which is its claim in the broadest sense and which includes even the force and violence, or a product or material of, determined by this ontology, even as he is otherwise attempting to circumscribe or at least describe or indicate its unseen limit, and this latter even if he is also conscious of that fact?

Perhaps it's a chicken and egg question, but even if that, can we say that interpreting, understanding, even if these can be given to broader or subtending -- what, categories? -- «things», such as significance, or signification, or even ontological condition, come before words or language? And here, everywhere, the question of what, which, is broader, flickers, ripples, makes tremble. The "before" in this question even opens up the reversal of the usual sense of priority of logical and chronological. Here the temporal would not be the mere materiality subjected to the greater logic, principle, reason or law. The whole matter of whether signification, understanding -- and which of these is more general -- could precede words, language -- logically because chronologically -- can run away with us. There's a whole path of conjecture and discussion we'd want to run down. But before we would have to go about it that way, there is already, right there in Heidegger's words a demonstration of the problem. For he's not just saying words or language, but the Being of words and language. He says that that Being -- and I'm intentionally using these words and this way of saying it to emphasize the slackness or vagueness all this, words and things alike, allows -- is founded on this other. The Being of words and language. Not words and language, but the Being of. This Being of is founded on the ontological condition of signification. More precisely, there is an ontological condition (it "lurks," as the translators put it) that makes it possible for Dasein "to disclose such things as 'significations.'"

There's a kind of technical logic or precedence, here, that is also working in its own way more generally against the semantic ordering, by which word and language are merely being submitted to the greater frame which is also their own greater frame. This does not get rid of the crack, however, for the crack will always be there in the foundation. Apart from the question, remaining, if words, language would be founded on the possibility of signification rather than vice versa, has not the whole enterprise here, of Being and Time, of this project of the ontological circumscription, of returning thinking (all Western thinking, philosophy or ontology, at any rate) to its most covered up and persistently disclosed matter, been that of locating Being, curiously matching even the problem and critique of its vagueness and confusion, as that most general which even exceeds category? The question of whether language belongs to something more general, as inflected by what comes before, is here tangled up with a question, possibly opened up, of how one Being is founded on another when all is supposedly subjected to Being as what exceeds (if that's even the way to put it) all categorization and hierarchization otherwise.

To put it a more simple way, do the categories to which any items belong have their own category? Are they things like the things they contain? To distinguish between kinds of being, or Being, is "being" subjected to something more general? Signification? Or does that then have its own proper Being? An infinite regress? It's hard not to think of it in the tone, here, of Nietzsche with Kant's "faculty." Or the elephants and turtles supporting the world. Each thing gives over to its particular being, which each gives to Being in general, but that would require its own division and abstraction. Signification or meaning could have its similar line or regress, or one curiously snaked in and out with "being."

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Addendum for Levinas and the face:

Household gods: following Levinas (in one sense), were these not more "orginarily" hosts, rather than guardians or apotropaics? But following even more, beyond perhaps that bidding, to outbid even this outbidding for the original, wouldn't there be, de facto as de jure -- and because there is as the default of this absence, this obscurity, this oblivion of origin -- one of those ineffable lines, the limitless limit, the "pure" difference, of arbitration between these dispositions, hospitality and imposition, accommodation and assimilation, incorporation and projection, perhaps the formulation assuming them being: making with.

Consequences for Hegel, everything on the line of his branch, too.

Myths of the Janus face. Totem and taboo, etc. The master/servant relation is this allergy of identification, an acute form of it, obsessiveness with its irresolution but even unconsciously sublimated as desire. Robert Coover's story "Spanking the Maid" plays this out (and plays, too, because it can't be ruled out as a burlesque of it, that sort of comment, the humor it's nonetheless susceptible to, even if we should also not be presumptuous about the extent of this humor any more so).

The household god, the statue at the door, of the demon, guardian (gargoyles on churches in the west as much as the Chinese lion or the totem), wants to take you in, and that is just as much consume you, eat you, in a good way as in a bad. This is what the other does, too, and what we give ourselves over to, to absorption in the other, the sense of the other, even if more generally as sociality, conviviality, good spirits, hospitality. The reflex to this can -- even should -- come as much after as before. Not just the kneejerk of self-preservation or xenophobia, but even the more thoroughgoing assessment afterwards, through it, beyond it, not prejudicial. Something like Nietzsche's, for example.

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Life is wasted on the living.

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Really? God is an enemy? Of anything? Never mind it's all his creation, what kind of esteem problems is that if he's omnipotent?

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We're not interested in learning what's wrong because it takes time away from from thinking we are right.

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Life is always this other life because of this division. Want to sum up, hold or be held like identity itself as heaven, eschatology, elsewhere, memory, wish, imagination. The division of desire. Separation from self. The self is all these targets, trajectories.

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Whoreshine and hearsay.

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Christian definition of marriage: "Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them." -- Jerry Falwell

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Fall through the cracks? I jump through them.

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Current smarm = cutesy + badass

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The blank stare -- empty shark eye -- of narcissistic solicitation: Are you giving me the audience I presume?

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The history of Christianity could be summed up as a confusion of homophones: prophet and profit.

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Let's be lonely together.

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That truth requires professing betrays that it is not truth qua fact.

The truth is something that does not require my acceptance. Thus, the factor of belief, or at least the missionary or proselytizing religions, as social coercion, conformity, when not outright power. Imagine going around insisting that people make a public pronouncement of the fact that 2 + 2= 4. You must confess this truth.

Fact's profession is information. Unfortunately there is greater emphasis on the professing when belief contradicts it.

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Sometimes we don't really grow so much as fester.

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Tips for the wealthy: Remember, disregard is common. But contempt is truly the mark of distinction.

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The one who listens and pays attention is likely the more profound, because: every fool thinks they have the most important thing to say, and the more important for saying it, and thus more important for saying more, extending to whatever and how much they say ad nauseam.

Comics know of timing. Actors know of pauses and expressions. Artists and dancers and poets know of the economy of strokes, concise gestures.

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No recompense, no reward, no recognition, no glory, no heaven. But for those who do "good," are virtuous, seek the truth, is there any other reason?

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Well made, ill used.

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Notes towards an essay on health, or Health -- I'm Sick of It

Susan Sonntag's Illness as Metaphor, as I remember it (and my interpretation of it, but she also wrote Against Interpretation), is basically a vigilance against the symbolic compensation/investment of diseases. What is also part of our "modern" experience is the biological fact that does not behave according to some essentialist causality. In other words, we have to be willing to let the facts just be the facts. This may be painful psychologically, or seem so in the face of the matter, but it actually relieves us from the whole edifice of accountability or any sort of moral scheme.

Cancer demonstrates this even better than tuberculosis, which had much to do with a mode of living that courted the disease, figuratively if not literally. Cancer is no respecter of persons: habits, "lifestyle," health level, age, etc. While there may be hereditary predisposition, and there are anomalies (the French paradox or the Japanese male paradox), and while there are distinct preciptiating factors, or risk situations, one factor can defy the others to produce those cases that seem inexplicable. Sontag's essay suggests that's more because of our moral or poetic sense of things.

This extends to biology in general. After all, isn't "being" also wanting to be something else? None of us picked our biology, got to test drive or select the vehicle. Consciousness of all this is belated, after the fact, and even the causal sense of things in the broader, figurative, moralistic or even pscyhological (at least pyschologistic) way is derivative. Were birds designed for flight, or does the idea of the design of flight come from birds?

I know of a couple who both got hepatitis C. One smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and the other was a fresh food nut. The latter got colon cancer, then a brain tumor. The former goes in for a checkup and finds out the hepatitis C disappeared. This happens in about a quarter of cases, nonetheless inexplicable. Doctors have no idea why some people seem to cure themselves of it like a routine infection. The person himself told me about this while smoking a cigarette.

I had a heart attack at 53, about the same age my father did. My father was 6'3", grew up on a skillet diet and had high blood pressure. I was 5'10", skinny and nearly anemic. But I got the arteries that clogged. In my physical therapy sessions after the heart attack, there were plenty of people that looked the part of being at risk, but there was also an athletic-class runner and a petite, 30-year-old woman.

Even better to serve the point about the weight of accountability itself, moral or otherwise, is my ankylosing spondylitis (AS), an inflammatory autoimmunie system disease that manifests at an early age. Since my early 20s, I was plagued by unusual gripping pain in my lower back after waking, and then got major inflammatory episodes of the sacroilliac joint that effectively crippled me, and of the eye. Of course I had to hear a different back remedy for nearly as many people as I told about my problems, and it was also a constant psychological strain to agonize over what I was doing or not doing to cause this. The inflammatory episodes ran a course of their own, regardless of any treatment or change of activity of behavior. I could do very little but make the pain milder. When I was finally tested for AS, and had it explained, and realized there was very little I could do, more than despair over being bound to this plight, there was actually relief that it wasn't my conduct. I didn't bring it about anymore than the color of my eyes or my height.

Any sense of justice or morality, here, or unfairness or dramatic irony, is nothing other than poetic. It may be as unavoidable for us to see things with this this sort of color, tone, weight, but to not in turn be aware of that propensity, to aspire to it or impose it, amounts to something like religion, or at least dogmatic or zealous religion. For the conflation of the poetic and religious, particularly Christian, sense of recompense, cf. Dante.

Of course there are more direct, causal, mechanical consequences for health. If you hit yourself in the head with a hammer . . . Our century or more of industrialization is taking its toll.

As old as the notion of health, however, inextricably mixed up with it, is the more or less underhanded control of conduct. One extrapolates from experience to prescription -- some people died of bad pork, it doesn't keep well when you're on the move, so don't eat pork -- but this becomes inflated with things like nomos, custom, habit, social convention, into ethnic identity, authority and authoritarianism, social stricture. Circumcision, to take just a blatant example, becomes a cultural exigency by the force or value of health, wellbeing, good or clean conduct. Anthropological anaylsis of the extension of this into everything, the sense of persona of all matter and things, shows how implacable this thinking is and how we've had to come away from it, that, as Freud suggested, we weren't predisposed to be "rational," didn't start out that way. (See "Levinas and the Face" in Monster.)

It can be as easy, reflexive or inadvertent as passing on a cold remedy, but the way in which "health" is this causal logic, a modus tollens, of proscription, prescription, injunction -- an apotropaics -- makes it not a hard step from friendly advice to the overt control of conduct of say a health cult, religious cult, or a centuries old religion. That we are "truly" or genuinely concerned for the other's wellbeing does not mitigate this, but on the contrary calls more for the vigilance of this imposition (cf. Nietzsche on Christian "pity," Levinas on ethics and the other and what that means for knowledge).

Take that with two aspirin and a bowl of chicken soup. I don't know about calling me in the morning. That Ben Franklin shit is for the birds. Not for my culture.

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It's interesting how virulently anti-communist capitalism is, and then tends towards the very results it finds there only in naive conspicuous form. Projected, perhaps? What are supposed to be contradictory forces, or the circumstances that prevent monolithic society, produce monopolistic, homogenizing society. "Freedom of choice" becomes disproportionately for fewer and fewer people, leaving, curiously enough, an oligarchy.

The criticism of the Central Committee should also be that of every corporation. This contradiction, of course, between the heaven and earth, the ideal of the public law and the reality of the "private" world, i.e. property, ownership, was observed by Marx, but since communism "died" -- lassoed and gunned down single-handedly by Ron Reagan -- Marx sunk with its concrete block tied to his ankle. Nothing he said is pertinent, everything he helped bring about is blashphemy, heresy, if not just an old fad: the eight-hour day, the 40-hour work week, child labor laws, minimum wage.

In my journalism school days, I had a class with an instructor who attended detente-style conferences between Western and Eastern Bloc journalists, and told us how, after the Westerners would give all their stuff about the free press, the Soviet news agency people would retort that they themselves were liberated from having to do the advertisers' bidding. My own experience on the university paper at the same time bore this out. Free to operate independently, with our own budget of advertising revenues, and not be simply an organ of the school, we section editors would get the daily directives about not placing any airplane disaster stories on the pages with airline ads, or no news related to drunkeness on the pages with ads for beer. This is not to revert to some naive idea that the Soviets had a free press, merely to realize the hypocrisy of our Western idea that we were free from any constraint to print what we wanted. Just the amount of space a commercial newspaper has each day is dictated by the amount of ads sold.

The matter goes further, broader. It seems anything can be turned into justification for power or the claim for arbitrary supremacy -- Christianity, capitalism, democracy, communism. As uniform(s), there's the similarity of music that is rousing to fascists and communists, democrats and Christians, alike. Marching music. Is this music rousing because it is fascist, communist, Christian? Or is there something rousing that any of these can apply to their "principles," ideas? Perhaps we could call this the principle of the uniform itself, though there's also a contradiction to manage there. All tends to this same form of power, even though each wants to be distinct, separate in its contention. Be careful if you fight monsters, lest you become one.

It's analogous to whether the sense of abandon, or rapture, of being overtaken or overcome, is amorous or "merely" erotic, whether love is "true" or a matter of this abandon as singular, momentary, circumstantial, whether passion, in other words, would burn on or burn up, be consummated in its act or in some Platonic heaven. Whether it were not, in other words, a simulation, even in order to feel or believe otherwise.

But that might be making a thread too much a dangerous liaison.

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In Ovid's account of Narcissus and Echo in Metamorphoses, Tiresias, the blind "seer" was asked if the young boy Narcissus would live to a ripe old age. Tiresias replied:

"Yes, if he does not come to know himself."

Self-absorption is not self-awareness.

Tiresias, meanwhile, had as interesting a story, if not more so, before he was blinded but given prophetic power. Jupiter gave him prophecy as compensation for the blindness caused by Juno, Jupiter's wife. Juno was mad because Jupiter contended that women have more pleasure from love than men do. Juno disagreed. So they decided to ask Tiresias, "for he had experienced love both as a man and a woman." (It is not specifed whether this is the act of sex alone or the affliction of the heart.)

There was a particular serpent you could strike to switch genders. You know how that goes. Tiresias, first a man, lived for seven years as a woman after striking the serpent with his "staff" (phallus on phallus -- two wrongs make a right, or cancel each other). It was only after seven years he decided to go back and strike the serpent again. Now, either it took him that long to figure that out, he was enjoying himself but finally got tired of it (even though he was enjoying the love part more than a man), or he just couldn't bear it any longer that he enjoyed love more, since apparently no one, man or woman, wants to enjoy it more or concede that. Tiresias, back to a man, confirms Jupiter's contention: women get more pleasure from love. Simple as that, no further explanation.

For which Juno "was more indignant than she had any right to be." So how about this argument? You get more pleasure from love. How dare you say that! I do not! You do!

Now if all these snakey, serpentine contortions of sense, these Moebius strips of logic of love and gender, weren't enough, there's a further demonstration of the connundrum I call the "circular superlative," (see "The Circular Superlative" in Monster) the problem of the distribution of power:

"It is not possible for any god to undo the actions of another god, but in return for his loss of sight, the omnipotent father [Jupiter] granted Tiresias the power to know the future . . ."

Note the use of the term "omnipotent," right after it has just been stated what is not possible. So all-powerful does not include the power to undo any power. This sounds suspiciously like one of those rules meant to stop infinite regresses, just disallow them formally, like children try to use when they get into gainsaying contests, or for wishing for more wishes. It can be demonstrated that seeing what is possible, what will happen, the power granted to Tiresias as just one power among others from say a bag of powers, would be omniscience, and that such omniscience would amount to omnipotence inasmuch as the foreclosure of possibility, other possibility, potential, potentiality, potent, pouvoir -- being able to, all these from the common root of both "power" and "can."

This is strikingly similar to the situation in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the work of Babylonian lore and cosmology, where the demigod hero (proto-Hercules) Gilgamesh makes the goddess Ishtar mad. (This is further discussed in "The Circular Superlative.") She goes to the king god and asks him to make the bull of heaven to smite Gilgamesh, entreating him as the all powerful, having the power of creation. For leverage, she threatens that, if the king god does not grant this request, she will raise all the dead of the earth so that they will walk as and outnumber the living. Apparently the Babylonian gods are not restricted by the undo clause. Still the contradiction. The king god is all-powerful, can create things, Ishtar can't, but has the power to raise the dead, not creation but revival, the power the king god apparently lacks in his omnipotence, and can then be blackmailed with. Apparently omnipotence makes you kind of vulnerable.

And of course it's the same as the scheme in Egyptian myth, analyzed by Derrida, with writing, where Thoth goes to the god king, Ra, to make a gift to him of writing. The god king is supposedly all-powerful, but the subordinate god Thoth creates writing. That it has just been created, however, does not prevent the god king from knowing all about it, and he issues the famous statement on it that turns out to be the same thing Plato thought, even though the latter claimed this as logic rather than Egyptian "myth": writing is the dangerous supplement; it's nothing in itself, has no power of its own, but can usurp whatever it stands for, steal all its power as its own.

In Ovid, there's also a funny passage about a pack of dogs, a group of hounds, where they start naming all the dogs, they all have these Greek names, it tells qualities of each of them, breeding lines, etc., but then after running on like that for half a long paragraph, says "and others it would take long to name"!

In "The Circular Superlative," the Grimm fairytale "The Twelve Dancing Daughters" provides this figure for the circular superlative, the conundrums of comparison and the division of power: "Each one more beautiful than the other."

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The boldness of the question does not mitigate the naivete or presumptuousness of the question, and may simply behave like, if not be outright, the defiance to answer. Another kind of petitio principi.

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The paradox of love, relationship, is: I can't demand of the other person, but I can't not demand of the other person. Certainly love must also be discerning, but the extreme of that is the error that personal ads betray: horse trading. You don't order love on spec. That's certainly not what "falling in love" or being drawn by the other is. But you can't be blindly led by love or desire, either, and even the best discernment crosses over into the sort of scrutiny and judgment that wears away civility.

To be "in love," to have this sort of declarative and performative relationship, is necessarily an overdetermination. That doesn't mean it's any more right or wrong. But the force of that, the bearing, is a factor, whether considered or not, probably more so when not. It's useful to think about this in that kind of light, even as wayward, overbearing, wrong. Just to counter the blind assurance of right or good that can ignore finer discernment, and be even more overbearing. One needs to have as much self-vigilance about the "we" one makes of the other.

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The feelings of harmony, "oneness," peace, the sacred, are projections of our own disposition and thus even more selfish the more unaccounted for this projection. Even the tranquility I hold so dear or sacred, standing in one place in a garden or along a bank or among trees, is a momentary disposition. This soil, this wind, these leaves, can be otherwise indifferent or become a disagreeable or even hostile environment in other circumstances. They bear no particular necessary favorable disposition to me. And if I really could meld into this moment, it would become another kind of horror -- stasis is an impossible and even horrible idea -- or the extinguishing of the very changing climate of me that is this necessarily distinct perspective, perception, a presupposition of "harmony."

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Nothing defeats desire like banality. Real obstacles make desire stronger, contention and risk make it sharper. But the gaping hours of the day and when there is no obstacle at all, a great, big, open yes, pure freedom for desire, make it forget its object.

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The tension in art between freezing and movement is not just kinetic but temporal. It's the tension of preservation itself, of life and death and the tradeoff of the memorial, which is itself a kind of living death, a surviving death. This is another factor of mechanical reproduction, moving pictures, movies, because even the performance is fixed, recorded, frozen, as opposed to the "live" dramatic art of the theater which has this same "fatal" variation and ephemerality of life. The repetition of the drama, more so, then, when it is "exact" in the movies, is not merely an infantile repetition compulsion. Emphasis on "infantile": not merely infantile. It's not only that we "enjoy" this repetition as fate -- and the quote marks here, however annoying they may be, must call attention to an ambivalence, necessary for me to point out, what I'm observing -- meaning even as tragedy, and not just philosophically, but when it really makes us sad, upset, really affects us emotionally in a way we wouldn't at first describe as joy. It's not just the broader aesthetic or moral senses of what can be repeated, but we also like the repetition as fixed movement, a movement that is itself frozen, petrified, preserved. It's a kind of assurance -- and by this meaning not necessarily real, but a psychological compensation, a fiction -- that there would be a pure record, thus memory -- and which is which?

Would pure memory be really pure record, or pure record really pure memory? With record/memory (we might call it the archive, and thus take it up the way Derrida did), it becomes a matter then, perhaps a different one or from a different approach, of the thing, ob-ject. Must memory really be separate from us? The pense-bête, the prosthetic, the supplement, stone, paper, writing, records, journals, calendars, tape, electronic media, computers -- are all these things really the realization of memory beyond memory? The capability we don't really have?

The fixed movement -- these recorded segments -- would be the assurance (false assurance, dream, wish) of the absolute record of what we are -- were -- as movement, as doing, as becoming, thus as transit too -- as passing. Thus not "is" as even a past present. It would be what, in a way, I return to as the ideal or model or sort of imaginary basic unit of art: the stroke. It's wanting to see a record of something that was done, in the action of its significance. That's how we want to believe we would also be remembered. Borges says eternity is the form of desire. But when we think more on eternity, there's a way that can become hideous, too, suffocating, like a waiting room eternity or prison, or like being frozen as one imprint, impression, track, measure -- a fixed value. We want to remember, and we want to be remembered, as these acts and gestures. We want memory to be these times of us. The strokes of our significance.

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Desire doesn't make promises.

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Necessity is the mother of invention.

Error is the wayward father.

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I have loved the best, I have loved the worst. Love doesn't deserve me any more than I deserve love.

 

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