You must accept this most preposterous explanation because your mind is too fragile. You must accept this illusion of grasp, and that there's a scaffold holding up the abyss. Because there is no space, only the compression of time, as if into the tiniest drops, that one wants to imagine getting out of to have it all.
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Jealousy is an acute form of subjectivity that makes the subject its object.
Jealousy -- the special case of the three persons, as if the grammatical ones. And confusion of direct and indirect object.
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Faith -- What offense can there be to an almighty? What offense can there be to the source of everything -- including offense? Wouldn't the desperation for respect that would lead to tyranny be all too human? If you created a little autonomous puppet who then cursed you, would you not be big enough to laugh?
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The way time changes time, time changes the times, the times change the times, the times change time.
This is a case for the exchange of that banal and general, the social index and the broader anthropological, or symbolic, as I've been compelled, trying, to articulate it. It's precisely something that seems so ordinary, specific, banal, and it's very banality, specificity, even if that is also supposed to be something more grandiose, a landmark. Take for example the Superbowl. What happens to this with age, because of all these factors. It's significance culturally is already both exorbitant and throwaway. Disposable superlative. These two factors or poles ensure each other, not even quite exactly like a vicious cycle, but in a somehow more complementary or complicitous way. And it's precisely the more physical, factual, "objective" record, the recording, that demonstrates this. Like looking at photos of ourselve in previous fashions, the reaction it provokes that memory itself does not just so.
But there is the more general current, the very sense of the general current, of the current of generality, that conditions this, as well. We will never have known what each past moment will have become, at each new experience of its record, remembrance, commemoration. There is the aging of the record, but even that has this recursive factor: we don't know how this aging itself will come to age.
This is the provisional of the general and vice versa. And this is known even empirically, scientifically, so to speak. No matter what our tests now can tell us, no matter how much time we accumulate of experience and record, we still don't know precisely what more time will do and bring us.
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Consumption is the matter that defies order. The notion of any order. Any notion of order. Regression: this is what is necessary to do here, and this is what it "is." Not a position. Not a positing, and not a mere representation of a fact or order of existence beneath all positing or referring, certainly not, but especially because there is not, any comprehension, any comprehensive grasp of all things together such as an order, what presupposes an order even in an indirect way. There is neither chaos, because this itself is the supposition of order.
Why this is not a nihilism, but rather a redress to nihilism explicit or unexamined: what order would either ignore consumption or be better to think as necessitating it? The problem, again, of the origin of evil, which works (as) the theological or cosmological, but also beyond or apart from these. Stability and catastrophe.
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To remember everything -- but what would that even be? There is immediately the matter of the premise of it, already a presupposition that one can nullify the additive extension necessary to even account for things, as if encompassing comprehension wasn't in itself an abstraction.
To remember everything would be indiscrimination, nullifying the weight, the warp, the emphasis and color precisely of memory, the very economy that is with forgetting or abstracting, inclination as circumstance and vice versa. It would mean to be a copy, and not a viewer of a copy.
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"Star Wars" like Tolkien is not sinister because it is necessarily evil (part of their myth -- evil always object and abject, objective), but in that its "innocence" makes people think it can't, like anything, be(come) evil. A black hole of value.
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When people are confronted with sheer data they don't understand, they think they can dismiss it as harmless, even the talent or aptitude as somehow not a threat to their own esteem. "Oh, I'm no rocket scientist."
But when thinking fucks with their alibis, they get nasty.
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Memory is made up with forgetting, like a net, a fabric weaving together empty spaces.
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The very fact, the very matter, of indication implies -- presupposes, indicates -- there is no absolute present, no "existence" in that sense (but even that word is saying this in another way, late 14c., "reality," from O.Fr. existence, from M.L. existentia/exsistentia, from existentem/exsistentem (nom. existens/exsistens) "existent," prp. of L. existere/exsistere "stand forth, appear," and, as a secondary meaning, "exist, be;" from ex- "forth" (see ex-) + sistere "cause to stand" (see assist)). The order of knowledge is that of signification. This thought provoked by the instance of a person's name in an abstract -- or person, name and abstraction -- the play between the fact of what the referent is supposed to defer to and the referent's survival over the thing, so to speak, among other things.
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Macon's Gödel: Does this theorem prove that there can be no comprehensive grasp, or is it merely an expression of that? In which case it represents that, is an example among others. Can there be an encompassing statement that there is no encompassing statement?
The rhetoric of mathematics.
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It's funny how we can think less of ourselves because of someone else's talent or accomplishment. When, for example, we don't think less of William Faulkner because he didn't win the Heisman or play guitar like Django Reinhardt. But envy is part of that greater agitation that keeps us going, even when at times it seems to undermine us. A useful sort of foible, if not a necessary flaw, a structural fault.
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Counts. The expression "acts of literature," used in conjunction, in at least one particular case, with Derrida's work, comes to mind here. It's a more specific inflection that wasn't what they had in mind when they created the collection of writings under that name, not as the sum total, but it's also not outside what that would include or even what it considers. In particular cases where writers commit a brazen act of prouncement, take a stand, there is a declaration of meaning that at once defers to the act, that is, what that is supposed to be, have been, apart from the writing; confers on the act the function or operation of the writing, to have been like the operation of the writing itself, poesis; and mimics, usurps or takes on all the operation of the act itself. One only has to think of "J'accuse": the perfomative operation of that expression itself even as it stands for the entire work and famous moment of Zola's act of writing.
There are other cases not quite so noble, despite their defiance for just that. Which is why recourse to this other expression: counts.
There is the incident of Richard Millet, the French writer who was also an editor with the publisher Gallimard, who wrote a piece -- what is it it to be called and what dictates what it is to be called -- essay? -- pamphlet? -- holding up Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 people, for apparently more frank or courageous consideration. Along with the sort of ceremonious newsspeak disclaimers that accompany the rank reactionary calculations of Fox News, Millet also tries to hide in the shadow of even the loftiness of literature at the same time he's using it as the weapon of bluntness: "Éloge Littéraire d'Anders Breivik." After stating he doesn't approve of Breivik's murderous actions, he refers to them as formal perfection in their literary dimension. Just so there won't be too much mystery of what's at stake here, if you don't know about the matter, Millet goes on to blame multiculturalism, particularly the American variety, the loss of national identity, the Islamization of Europe and the decay of Christian roots for the Anders Breivik that then produces such a result.
Another article about the Millet incident in a French journal mentioned when Marguerite Duras in the 80s used the case of a woman who killed her own child as a defense for women, an act of defiance and then for the freedom of literature.
Like those arguments any of us can get into where the opposite sides push us to extremes. And there are all the equivocations. The embarrassing infatuation with pushing to those extremes.
Blanchot's essay on Sade by virtue of this has another cast that makes it exemplary. It's his patience in inhabiting the "other" logic, which at the same time demonstrates how it is not entirely other -- there is not the saftey of the chasm of distinction to hide on the other side of. The patience then of seeing all the gyrations of support and self-justification, the scaffolding built from within, out of the self's assertion as if to support it.
Because it's the idea that there is something that escapes or supersedes all discourse (to use a term which itself is now inflated with all sorts of extremes, equivocation and patness). How an act that is supposed to stop all discourse is itself like discourse and vice versa. As if the supremacist weren't himself the victim of this logic that binds him. Do we rule these words, thoughts, acts, or do they rule us? Bound to your victims. Defined by them. Bound to your cases. Counts.
Or as I put it elsewhere, a place I was surprised to find from quite a different while, coincidentally after reading of the Millet case: "A voids B, leaving the space of its requirement."
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Fidelity to a character. To the character of "things." Always pushing, contention. Writing v. drawing or painting. The background problem, cut-out. We don't question a figure in a painting, where s/he comes from, what all the background info is. But in writing, in dramatic or narrative art, there is the compulsion of plausibility, that the background -- in that sense -- of the character has to be known. Even though, of course, we don't know, ever, such a thing entirely, either about someone "really" or in a depiction.
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Fiction -> variation -> trying values, seeing the scene -> "truth" -> [cube basis, two squares overlapping without being connected -- the idea of perspective and reversal].
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Macon's Schrödinger: Imagine for a moment this thought experiment. Just as imagination itself, isn't Schrödinger's cat both real (all the more so) and not real? It's not a matter of repudiating this example, thus of "reality" itself, but what the very need, impetus for this thought problem attests to of the reality of attesting to reality, and of belief, which amounts to desire. Projection.
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Desire -- as "de - sire," as if to undo patronage or fatherhood, title or right.
desire c.1230, from O.Fr. desirer, from L. desiderare "long for, wish for," original sense perhaps "await what the stars will bring," from the phrase de sidere "from the stars," from sidus (gen. sideris) "heavenly body, star, constellation" (but see consider). Noun sense of "lust" is first recorded c.1340.
consider 1375, from O.Fr. considerer, from L. considerare "to look at closely, observe," lit. "to observe the stars," from com- "with" + sidus (gen. sideris) "constellation." Perhaps a metaphor from navigation, but more likely reflecting Roman obsession with divination by astrology. Tucker doubts the connection with sidus, however, since it is "quite inapplicable to desiderare," and suggests derivation instead from the root of Eng. side meaning "stretch, extend," and a sense for the full word of "survey on all sides" or "dwell long upon." Considerable "pretty large" is from 1651; considerate "thoughtful of others" is from 1700.
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Sovereignty and sociality: Peoples v. people. Nation-states as clan or tribal extension. The resolution of these lines within a national boundary tends toward the dissolution of the very precepts that would separate one nation from another. This tension in the sense of a nation. The rights of man, and the principles since at least the French Revolution and the American war of independence at least expressly tend away from this. The impetus of even the notion of "right" then, what is imperative about the law, is towards this sociality which exceeds family, clan or particular party. Analysis of this must be of both of these tendencies, the express and the implicit, the de facto and the de jure. Which "parties" represent, and which "parties" are represented by the government apparatus, which in turn inherits, or assumes, not only the body of the king, but the matter of the extended system of feudalism implicit in the land structure of government -- since "nation-state" ties this matter of a people to a land.
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A curious loop, a Narcissus projection, whereby we don't see our reflection for what it shows us about ourselves, but for what we already want to see in it, an ideal. Our own affectivity, our own "sensibility," the whole mechanism or structure of sense, both perceptual and mental, is already the divide, edge, incline, clinamen of this internal/external within us, so that the "external" we then feel, dream, we overcome in order to incorporate again is already a process going on "within" us. Our own affectivity is already this propensity to believe that otherwise we are "affected" by things in some illicit, immanent or supernatural way. Cf. Caillois for a suggestion of this process as the temptation of space itself due to a sort of structural perceptual issue.
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Where does imagination come from? It is already where. This presents a curious idea: a diagram of what place entails, what subsumes it, a diagram of the topos of topos itself. Fiction is bigger than god(s). Levinas's concept of the concept of infinity: the object that necessarily exceeds its conception. Like Blanchot's "death," these become examples, but samples, not special cases. They open up how this functions for everything, "thing."
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Another way history changes is the way the telling of the story changes. The telling of history. (In French history and story are the same word.) The difference between the way generations of the 50s told about their past versus the way their children do. By no means does this this telling amount to a literal one, as you can tell by even newer generations.
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Inextricably implicated. The unavoidable meddling in each other.
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Time is the compass of space. One can't be outside all frames of reference in order to measure, despite measure assuming this impossible exemption. More so for temporal. It takes time to tell time. Perhaps something like this complication in addition to inertial rates led Einstein to the puzzle of simultaneity.
Judgment day -- To read your whole life over, it takes the same amount of time as your life. Another version of the Eternal Return and Narcissus all in one.
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Plato's ideal -- or any other (Anselm) -- as proof, apodeictic or otherwise. That there is an idea to which earthly things apply, correspond, an ideal, generic tree for all trees, or tree-ness to which all refer -- what about the ideal of only a particular above all the rest, as those in love attest, of the exemplar in fact, the superlative as an existent? And, also, what about the ideal of the ideal -- what of this both paradigm and exponential? Does Plato's ideal submit to a further?
And as proof -- the proof of proof.
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Death -- the event which undoes event ("undoing"?). Not only because of no first person, but even for survivors. The event which undoes fact. Irreversibility, disappearance, but this goes to a "place" that is inasmuch unverifiable. In other words to what extent is the fact of loss the loss of fact. The presence of absence -- and not at all in the recuperative sense of presence Kant or Hegel might have meant in their respective ways, but precisely as subtended by absence. To the whole matter of appearance must be added that of disappearance.
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Let me give you a toy to play with. It's called everything.
It's a very curious and tricky thing. Parmenides tried it. Walt Whitman tried it. Kurt Goedel and James Joyce tried it, John Cage and Samuel Beckett in their way. Of course those who are frustrated with it try to make a weapon out of it. But that's the trick of everything. It defies -- well, everything.
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Ulteriorization is not something that just stops at sex. The whole motion of giving a sense to, of loading or transferring, of suggesting, of being pregnant with another sense, does not belong exclusively to sex, but keeps working on it, too. This is where both moralists and libertines miss the boat -- or perhaps better, don't realize there'll be no absolute ground to land on. Making curious bedfellows. It's not gratification, end, destination, teleology. It's movement, transfer, metaphor, seduction, drift. There isn't just resolution; there is diffusion.
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Just as belief in supernatural presumes belief in natural, i.e., presumption of what that is, they want so much to know what dreams mean, as if there weren't the rest of life to puzzle over, playing the same way. As Heraclitus says, "They no more see how they behave broad waking than remember clearly what they did asleep." [Brooks Haxton translation.] The temptation for a simple key to "life," rather than the constant un/working, un/raveling of the material. The interminable dreamwork.
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Why do we like the shade, the wind in the trees? Why does this call to us? As if this were a place to come to reside, to remain. Repose. The wind stirs, but this is the movement of tranquility, caress. The quieting -- place of placement. And the question itself reposes. Plays back. Stirring. Not why, but how. Be long here. Take root. Lose yourself. Decompose. Give up worldly care.
Decomposition.
What is the mechanism by which creatures "know" to stay on the "background" they are camouflaged in, let alone to transform to match it? See studies on cuttlefish and their vision. Staring at the ground. Immersion. What is the opposite of vertigo, the compulsion to fall? Or is it opposite: fall into, be absorbed. Visual anticipatory sensation. Sight, but even image, is also sensation of environment -- already is this conflict of lines, planes (Callois). Note how 2D movement causes motion sickness. Camouflage. Blend in. Seeing the body also as this external environment, thus the Moebius strip, the irresolvable self: the limit, between. This is how we are both inside and out, a part of but cut out, and this is how the division occurs "in" nature, the division of nature and artifice, for example, or between the real and representation.
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"Value" -- a certain function of this is quite the opposite of specificity: an abstraction of particularity to set things together as equal or even comparable, obscuring difference in favor of a presumption. "Entertainment," e.g., as a "value." This is absurd in more banal ways than ideologically suspect.
Profit -- circular. Thus sensationalism. The very technical sense of "capitalize". This is what operates to turn any value into that of pandering. The more mythic or conventional -- the more that propensity or inclination -- the more this works.
We will never stop reducing value as long as what is paramount is the value of reduction.
The moral and the amoral. Patrician and infantile. The crack mentality. Pusher society. Complementary in the lack of -- thinking. Again, the use of "value" as if fixed, a thing, reified.
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Fields of men. These muscles glistening here are material wasted in centuries, nature, but also man's accumulation, like the crops he gathers in greater abundance, no single corn meaningful, battlefields of human material strewn.
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Internet -- Communication ruined directly? Or because we stopped writing before we started again on computers?
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The presumption of competition -- already that of superiority. The "national" idea -- the continued problem of "America." Its principles, or presumptions: being greatest, proselytizing. What is this encounter with the other? Return to the problem of the declaration of rights. Are these American values? Or does America's foundation consist in the recognizing universal value or extension of these? What is the presumption of promoting this value? The tension, then, in even being American. Isn't there even the good paradox that being American means recognizing that one belongs to the principle of this universality, and that this is performative, performed with the declaration, precisely counter to the idea that there was some "American" that preceded this principle, or some select people for this to occur to.
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The tyranny of honesty -- Imagine if it were possible to remove the line, division, between what is thought and what is expressed. But this would be like removing one side of a card or piece of paper, the very structural situation of "inside"/"outside," space, matter, even in thought, mental "space" (something, by the way, which demonstrates, if that's possible since not literally visual, temporalization that can't be reduced to spacialization). Nonetheless, consider the immediate horrors that would result form having every thought, impulse, naked to the others.
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I want to talk about how much more involved we are and all it does is alienate people.
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Is there an ideal love that transcends infatuation, or are we just infatuated with that idea?
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Myths of writing, or any art: That an artist comprehends the entire spectrum of options and makes a precise, accurate choice. Teleological problem. Versus an as if organic development. Localization. As if one thought abstractly the best idea, instead of having ideas come about from specific situations. Even the idea is born in its own material.
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It's often thought that the soul -- the ego, identity or person -- is trapped in the wrong body. But what about the body being trapped with the wrong "soul"? Who rejects whom? And here, especially, "who" is at the same time which, what.
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Everyone is too something because of everyone.
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The arc of relation, it's rate and ratio: we fear we are divided, then find out how we really are.
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Ersatz ethos? Is that the ethos of ersatz? McDonald's: everything that is reduction, cost minimizing, abstraction, sterilization, the whole gesture (m.o., tao) of subtraction, is now itself being subtracted. McDonald's is now at pains to convince us, for example, that its ingredients are "real," "natural," in other words, that they are what they say they are, the necessity of this created by, or at least most famously developed by, precisely, McDonald's. McDonald's is now having to negate its longtime behavior of negation. Now McDonald's is also applying belated design styles to their new restaurants. As always, the lag in design indicates the cycle of faddishness, which is precisely also the current McDonald's swims or drowns in, cf. commercials for American beer and how they sell anything but the beer. This is an appliqué negation, subtracting the blanking and abstraction that was already that of generic functional minimization, the cookie-cutter reduction of traits also for branding, to try to achieve the "organic" sense of a comfortable or attractive or homey, or simply distinct or idiosyncratic place, precisely the sort of place that is not "chain." How can McDonald's ever escape this vicious cycle of effacement, and still be McDonald's, the enormous weight of this worldwide abstraction it has paid so dearly for, even to enforce subsuming every other possible name "McDonald" (just ask the Scots)? As if it could return to the moment of its "birth," its inception, one particular hamburger stand, even the name of which was bought off and imposed by another. McDonald's is selling back to us the idea that we don't like McDonald's.
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Theocracy doesn't resolve democracy, for there's still the problem of what each one thinks is god's word.
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Cosmology and conflict -- division (the lines of the ×, the double slash, the stitching that is the separation that binds us, the external that becomes internal and vice versa). If Jesus is my savior, he has no need of an army of proseltyzers to take care of this salvation. What business is it of theirs? The need to have me confess or make this accession to others in this world only produces the social, if not more overtly political -- the all too worldly interest of the matter. This is much in accord with at least one prevalent line of belief, or at least meaning, of Christ: the atonement, kenosis, the overcoming or relieving or sublimation of law, even the very sacrifice of god. "Is it not written in your law, 'I said you are gods'" (John 10:34, citing Psalm 82:6). Note also in this respect Buddha, who essentially inverted the whole idea and compulsion of enlightenment or salvation, after his own arduous torture of himself for it, but for which he was repaid with exaltation and the tribute of precisely the contrary, his sanctification, the formation and perpetuation of sects.
Other "beliefs," ostensibly setting themselves off from Christianity, have paid the cost of re-applying themselves in a similar way in modern times (although the situation in India to this day, for example, shows how this is nonetheless the result of centuries of cosmological contentions, a sort of clamorous marketplace of mystical gainsaying, such as the Middle East was at the time of Jesus, or more accurately, the few hundred years after him when even he was being formulated, a figure of all sorts of influences, including neo-Platonic via Plotinus). For example, a flier found in a coffee shop that exhorts you to come join, learn, assent to, and lead as a "way of life," "universal oneness."
Ah, that's what I missed. If there is "universal oneness" (as, by the way, Plotinus proposed in one variation, and Parmenides is the historical marker of in the "West," and the Greeks maintained, with their "sphere," among other things, and the "West" does right on up to the unified field theory, or compulsion, all this despite the somewhat easy idea by some nowadays that this abolishment of division by means of a pat unity is "Eastern"), then it already includes me and does not require my assent, acknowledgment, or joining since I already belong to it. In fact, nothing then can contradict it, including any contradiction I make of it, any contention, any dissent or inclination against it. The same goes for whichever singular, absolute god, all the more so for an omnipotent, omniscient, especially omnipresent one: what need has "he" of my acknowledgment? And why would this bother avowed followers so? (See here.) Of course we know anyone can deny reality, just as all this gnosis and eschatology shirks so much of this oneness and omnipresence down here, in this world or realm so eagerly fled for another, denies so much of empirical, physical evidence or any learning or handing down of it.
This, too, is the problem of origin, of the reduction to singularity or monad that cannot do away with the presupposition of division. Its more particular "Western" form is the theological problem of the origin of evil, although of course this would extend to, is generalizable for anything, belief system, cosmology, even ontology or materialism, the problem of totality that makes any religion, or anything else that would attempt to create such a foundation or axiomatics (transcendental signified) a species of it. (Even gods must bear, are the sign, of this conflict, division, heterogeneity. See here.)
Religion(s), beliefs, cosmologies only bear this out, moreover, in their own all too worldly way, since every one gives rise to variations in interpretation that create the divisions, the sects, the indefinite historical splintering and diaspora and casting to the wind and springing up all over again of neophyte, samizdat enlightenments, revelations, prophets and universal onenesses. The Protestants perpetuate their splitting from "The Church," and replicate the division of belief from ancient times and the proliferation of ascetics and gurus, with every modern declaration of institution, no matter how official or what semblance of official, how many or few, from stadium-like media churches to living room bible meetings. And that's before we get to all the other modern beliefs, referred to as cults mostly in deference to those that have been around longer, which bear out the genealogy of them all, just as gypsy etymology bears out the origin of all language (cf. Giorgio Agamben), that going back far enough it had to be made up, the first arbitrary relations of sounds or symbols for other things.
Piety, and fear,
Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries,
And let confusion live!
-- Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
-- Zora Neale Hurston
All the gods that antiquity painted in the heavens to account for any benefit conferred upon human society -- all these gods are none other than you, yourselves.
-- Vico
Humankind lies groaning, half crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. People do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility, then, for deciding if they merely want to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods.
-- Henri Bergson
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If we merged, what would happen to the caress?
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Never as barren as the day. When it seems the landscape is a subtraction, measured by the absence of things, suddenly this space opens up for inhabiting, an immersion of its own. The opening that allows the angle of the shadows from the sun extends the horizon, the frame that includes this scale, or even the blue blankness of the sky as this relenting become as if positive in its own right. Everything is filled with this emptiness, this opening, this space: the sky, thus abstraction. Suddenly I wrap myself up with these shadows. Light and cast and plain are bearing, the things even for things. Things not in space -- things "are" space.
Is it -- all, everything, things -- half empty or half full? Is half empty or half full half empty or half full?
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In place of being able to engage, there's the conceit of being engaging.
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The heaven and earth effect in literature, literary activity. Interviews, etc. Like the experience of religion, thinking you are the center of the cosmos. How this goes on, and must, but what is also untenable about it.
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Culture is also what is not done. This doesn't mean what is actively prohibited, which is also ideology. It means something other than, can't be reduced to, will, volition, design. This is related to the teleological problem, the supposition or hypothesis, of "culture," "society," "civilization." Similar sense, the nuance of their contemporary senses. What lore has come to mean as an example, a suggestion for "culture."
For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect.
-- William Butler Yeats
We can't forget this sense of tending, guarding, cultivating, care, honoring, but this is also as much the overlap of physis and techne, active and passive. If anything has come to dilute this more selective sense, is it not other culture? But does one even know what a culture would be without others, without exchange? And even the transmission of one culture, if there can be such a thing. Nothing but exchange. The termite's mound is no less a techne for being a secretion. Culture by accretion, too, even of the conflict of cultures. There is no culture, only the play of cultures.
The myth of culture. The reactionary aspect, from one side or another. Similar to the problem of sovereignty, autonomy. Culture is not obtained, it is not a fixed value. The assent to it, the sense of it as cultivation, must no more reside with this presumption. The property sense of it. Which is why everything that culture can mean -- and it works as a gloss, a useful one -- can also make "culture" just as oppressive and tyrannical as religion, family, government, party, any kind of affiliation.
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The blue valise. Do we owe a debt to the truth? To the dead? To the living? To the living dead?
Since the descendants of Alfred Bardey ... opened a blue valise he had bequeathed them, there has been one inestimable discovery after another. Among some correspondence, already known, between Bardey and Rimbaud, was found in effect the autograph, believed lost, of "Report on Ogadine," ten manuscript pages signed by the poet -- according to the Rimbaldien Claude Jeancolas, who wrote the preface to the re-edition of Barr-Adjam, "a major text which shows the turn Rimbaud's life would have been able to take as explorer." Another treasure, totally unpublished: a letter to the Bardey house from August 30, 1883, which announces "Ogadine" and which ends with a "signed Rimbaud." This missive, concerning the rubber at Harar, was surely written, under dictation, by a third party.
-- Valérie Marin La Meslée, "Arthur Rimbaud, inédit d'Aden," in Magazine Litteraire, no. 498, June 2010, p. 11 [my translation]
How, then, does knowledge escape this matter of haunting? The thing is the living dead. "The thing," once again, the monster: the matter of showing, of seen or not seen, of apprehension. The matter of integrity and knowledge: is something kept intact as occulted? Resting unknown as if a gestation?
Like a Borges story, or the anthropological or epistemological version of Schrodinger's cat, the "blue valise" opens up even the matter of whom the "truth" is addressed to, of whether the subjective is wrapped in the objective or vice versa, their relay, and their always teetering overlap in repute, notoriety. What Rimbaud do we know? To honor the dead, with a request similar to Kafka's, who asked that all his stories be burned. For the historian, no less than the literary one, as for the quantum physicist, there is the paradox -- the empirical one, for what is evidence, what are the senses, what is the real once we are at the quantum level -- between the "thing-in-itself" and our perception of it, when our perception, recognition, comprehension, is an act, also a thing, that disturbs the status of the thing.
But beyond even the supposedly underlying problem, physics, there is the "metaphysical" one of the instigation, so to speak, the projection, the decision, and this can't be reduced as spiritual, merely spiritual, mystical, which is also not to say that a "spiritual" side is any more a ground, the actual realm of the foundation of explanation (transcendental signified). The apprehension -- perhaps this is precisely the term for this aporia, this suspension -- of the "thing," of the situation of thing where it is a matter of a pristine, untouched state that would be preserved, even in this speculative honor, and what about it we could even learn that we would be preserving. These two demands press perhaps more now from a different demand: not the cosmological imperative, but the scientific or practical one of the understanding of the cumulative effect of this groping for knowledge, this messing with things. This takes us back to the matter of the cult of the thing. Perhaps also to the fetish, but in a way that demonstrates its aporia for any sort of knowledge, physical or metaphysical; mystical, religious or scientific.
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"Live in the moment":
If consciousness is not a state, then there is no zero degree. If state itself is this fold, layer, transition, then any state of consciousness replaces the other. One moment is the drunkenness, another the sobriety.
Abjure thought process with another thought process.
No one will ever know what it is to know nothing.
-- Bataille
If there is no time, there is no moment. If there is time, there is no moment.
The moment of moment. No one free from this fold, this suspension.
(See here.)
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Direction -- reversing the order (another direction) of space and time. Precisely -- in which direction does time travel. Time expresses spatial relation rather than vice versa. Light years to aim at a star would be to progress in that direction, that much time from anything else (in a much more complex relation of all the constantly changing rates relative to this vector). Meanwhile, things progress in other directions. This is the problem not just of space, but place. Not a container. The continuum of all space, all matter (energy, too, for that matter), is this matter of time and direction, measure itself this rate, angle, grade.
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The division in what is natural, what is naturalized. Sense of "organic" being for a particular purpose. Emphasis of one «sense» or another, even one sense of sense or another. Person walking down street, does she have the sensation I have of being in the world? A more or less precise array, a gloss, of all these little details of bodily sensations -- this air, just this place and it's details (this delimitation an infinite regress), the sidewalk, etc. -- that I recently thought of as being precisely the opposite of a contained organism or identity, rather a vent, a valve through which sensations pass, an opening. Perhaps she's thinking about what's ahead of her, a destination, some task to perform. How is either of these any more, or conversely, any less proper -- to operating, to sensation, to thought, to being?
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Health, risk, well-being and symptomization. Bearing is different towards others, for example, the way we symptomatize fat people, as if their accountability is to our own taste. Does the risk we understand athletes to take in any endeavor have the same sense or weight of blame as the health problems of the overweight? If someone drops dead of a heart attack and we're astonished at the contrast to his good health, do we immediately symptomatize his lifestyle, his conduct, his genetics? Or consider the enormous cost to the rest of us of all the indulgence of sports? One is always bent by one's living -- and the health risk of inactivity just shows there's no way out of the matter. All of us run the risk of not getting it over with sooner.
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What does it profit a man if he love the world?
Every pebble that has risen against you? Is there a hell for these?
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The past doesn't go like we think it will.
How to describe the lurch, gaps, dispositions torward it, forgetting as much as wanting to recall, idealization, disappointment, disaffection.
If I can convince myself that life is a dream, then the past is as unrealistic as the future.
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We don't remember the river of forgetting because we are on it. Always in the river of forgetting. To remember, you'd have to get out of it, on the side, on the bank, and there the images are frozen.
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Describe description.
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The Fall of Love -- A succession of falls from a succession of faiths. Is it natural enough to think that when we fall, we hit the ground? Natural enough by the limits of our scope. The limits of a world. What is the logic of ground -- the ground of logic -- if the ground can be pulled out from under you? Was this the clever trick of Plato to wilfully invert the senses of these sides, to defer the ground, to find precisely solidity, immutability, absolution in this infinite deferment? Heaven is the ground. This ground, the solid stuff I walk on, here, is vapor, evaporates. The solid is not truly solid, but one infers from this a solidity elsewhere. And thus we keep falling.
All content this page unless otherwise noted © 2012 Greg Macon