We belong for all the meaningless things full of meaning, crowded, cluttered, put or worn away, become the forgotten of the day, until like memory with some stumbling chance they open like a wound of joy, the mystery that we knew what we were doing. A picture, a wrapper, a figure, a box, a whiff of some other life, a puff of smoke, object forgetting and forgotten, as even now there is going on. We are the spirits wandering. Who thought they could order mind or heart, when we are all these pieces everywhere, even everywhere in pieces, scattered seed.
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You think people don't care. Then you find out they don't care.
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And if gravity and time were more intimately and eloquently linked than we first thought -- that itself a more flowery way of saying not even distinct -- then what happens to the notion of fate as the fall? Coming apart, coming together. It's as much the matter of "happen" as the others. The matter of distinction is the distinction of matter. Lost in the opening to the event.
We were lost for each other.
Even the absolute of the constative is in the dis/solution of the confluence. The pang of significance is in its passing, its loss, which is why it is avoided for Significance. This is tyranny that by suppression pays the cost of what is poignant in meaning.
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object.
-- Lacan
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1 = n
To reduce everything (anything) to the simplest statement, one must still make a statement.
What does this by itself mean:
1
but a stray part, label?
One is the variable. One is number. The trick for tautologists is that even their statement cannot avoid this, presumes it.
We come to this not only by the way of the mathematician, but by the poles of the artist: to represent, one can't ignore the representation itself. But the imperative to be faithful assumes there is something to represent. Even a dream, wish, will, if that one is imposing such. Even if one were to create ex nihilo, to pull something out of his ass, there would still be a source.
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Being is the signifier that also bars and effaces, itself as well. Also because it is the sign standing for itself as this function of the sign.
Being demonstrates also what is too material for the ideal, too ideal for the material. "Thing," "object" work also for these "things" that are not the "things" they represent and all the "things" of these relations.
Being past is also the form or the necessity of "being." (See remarks about general category of being and reaching out across time here.)
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New York again. Hectic and jumbled and new again. Impossible and existing again. Fresh skin cells over implacable wear, stain of industry and waste, culture and conceit, human mound re-piled. Killing with kindness commerce now on top of squeezing and busting and mugging. You are here has nowhere meant such anonymity and assertion. You are here lost in the densest mass of identity, like the deco detail of one of its bridges covered with spray paint, the defiant expropriation and broadcast whose authors are as lost behind the work as the bridge builders. New York is humanity's graffiti.
Pirouette around the blind center of view. The laps of decades like geological levels or rings of bark. Layers of ghostliness. See the others' age, feel your own. Memory hooks in the organs are anecdotes left out as condiments at the table, overripe, taken by chance or left lukewarm, staled, discarded.
--
There is no such thing as still matter. Thus the consequences for place. Plane taking off, lines on the ground turning into static. The stasis of movement. "Station." Lacan, returns to destination, by which the destination is not what it was. The route to Heraclitus via Derrida?
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Why am I this me? In airplane looking at car on ground. Wouldn't this sense of consciousness, like the soul but even further, not serve to detach me from me? Rather than say this is my sorry lot, am I not by the operation using it as an agent?
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How the comics have taken over -- how movies and TV have become the comics. Whether direct as with superhero, etc., or not, other things like "Breaking Bad" and "True Detective" (the title declares it). All affect. Lurid. At the expense of reference. Some would say plausibility, verisimilitude. Godard would say a contempt for fact. There is no way out of the trap of depiction, even for "truth," but it's also the case that evocation and formality can be ultimately referring to different things. In the case of "True Detective," it's not true detectives, which makes the title the pulp sensationalism of an earlier era, before "reality TV" did the same. The carnival freak shows always did it and this also was before Baudrillard's hyperreal. One wants to brandish, hawk something as real precisely when, in some way, it is not. Mere fact doesn't sell -- if the ghost (or Bigfoot) is evident, if the "live" wolfboy or spiderwoman is not behind something, occulted, to lure you to see.
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Wit, cunning, ingenuity, as opposed to some "deeper" intellect. In this way the pure operation of thought allows those who think they can be not intellectual no exemption from thought, any more than those more intellectual would suppose of them. Similar to the move of distinguishing between analysis and emotion, which is itself an analysis, an analytical operation, a distinction.
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Social index. The floater behavior of signifier works for anything, even or more so music. But why music more particularly has this problem - the sound of. The «sound of». Condensation of association -- "expansion" of floating aspect / generic or abstract. The poles of social index -- bear the mark of place context / be borne by the mark. Mark floats too. Place-marker.
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Indefinite string of qualifications.
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Unfolded against among drawers of forgotten uses plainness. Not the sea or the dessert but like the sense. Landscapes. In us and out of us. Not to do with all the physical that all the chattel is the body of. The sense of us that was the real beauty is flash trail ghosts we take with us. Memories of images that are not like images because images take away what is the memory of the image. Still against us monumental. Stood up every ornamental worn billow surge swell current of felt like breath.
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Coincidence, significance are not so much miracle as attention.
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Objects empty and full. The fascination with the thing will always give a fetishistic cast in this too: what bears this fascination for one will be a mere knick knack for another.
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Oh the friends I don't have.
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Ghost stories. Fiction and the forgetting of lives. Evocation of things in place of perception lost.
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God with the capital "g" is the absolute figure. The word having assembled the thing by the set and vice versa, specificying genus, engendering, generating, genericizing -- and this word, "god," is not just another case of generic word function of calling, but a more specific case of a word for "call," and the cross of invocation with naming -- it took the place of the name of any god, subsuming them all in the outbidding, superseding, the pure principle of surpassing. The ultimate god is the generic abstraction of any god, is all gods and not any particular (like being).
One-upmanship, gainsaying. What need has the very power of all that is to presuppose the existence of any mere gods, let alone forbid their worship? What need has the very power of all that is of assent, recognition, esteem? The assertion of such a power would be simply the all that is, and no need to fall to mere statement, assertion, contention. The declaration that there is no comparison is immediately caught in the trap.
What god could be bigger than the figure of a god, the figure god?
How poore, how narrow, how impious a measure of God, is this, that he must doe, as thou wouldest doe, if thou wert God.
-- John Donne, sermon preached in St. Paul's Jan. 30, 1624/5
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Lucid articulation, gears joining, swell of elation and rue, anxiety wringing the gut, iron pang of gravest loss -- even the profoundest is worn out by the day, and hung up for the next minute.
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Patience or impatience, there's always waiting.
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Learn to say. Learn to say something. Learn to say nothing.
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Who is the me I address this to? The shift of the axis when I feel I need this you to address this me to, is this me itself, the matter of this address. The split of subjectivity itself.
Are you the you? The you I address myself to? Will you receive this address I make of myself?
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To sea, to the mines, to the clouds, setting sail unmoored, unearth, digging deep in the clouds. Adrift on air in the depths. Rue of joy, elation of gravity. Mining and trading in bittersweet.
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What sets humans apart from other creatures? Exactly. Arrogance. Do we want to do the others that injustice?
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And this Phoenix trick. Having to rise out of the ashes, every morning. Or every time sink into the abstraction of pure esteem until the very clouds of oppression become the relief and landscape and complexion of lightness, the resource of rising and billowing and suddenly soaring as if in the pure urge against all the ration that checked it, squashed it. As if you have to psychically kill yourself to start over, erase down to the nub, clear away all the treacly lacework left by the heavy syrup just to get to the barest motivation: to make a something better than not. It's not just about feathers in my cap, achievements, even less about the sort of scavenging fame, chasing the boot heels of social nationalism, going after narcissistic hits like we're really nothing but seals or puppies, adding only the arrogance of being to pets or rewards.
The wing of the plane reaches out like an arm over a carpet. Perspective. Such a tiny point of nothing. It's not that we ignore the rest having to abstract ourselves and assert ourselves empty as if the center of the universe, but precisely going through this vertigo of the incomprehensible magnitude and number to find ourselves lost, to then find that there is an address. Like zeroing in on the map, when that overhead view that loses us is also the straight line to any point. That we have someone to address this tiny point of nothing to. You are the destination.
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Why murder?
Philology, anthropology, inflection, the question of the distinction. The course of this, killing and murder, semantic and otherwise, bios and zoe (cf. Agamben).
Definition, other sources: the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.
Killing of another person without justification or valid excuse . . . The Vulgate and subsequent early English translations of the Bible used the term "secretly killeth his neighbour" or "smiteth his neighbour secretly" rather than "murder" for the Latin clam percusserit proximum. Later editions such as Young's Literal Translation and the World English Bible have translated the Latin occides simply as "murder" rather than the alternatives of "kill," "assassinate," "fall upon," or "slay."
-- Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder
The path of the secret and blood money -- and in this phrase, the charge and force of the value is more from the former term, when "payment," appeasement, recompense as exchange of like kind, may be the older sense of exchange. Quoting from above again:
One of the oldest known prohibitions against murder appears in the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu written sometime between 2100 and 2050 BC. The code states, "If a man commits a murder, that man must be killed."
Cf. blood revenge, and also the sense of the secret or stealth versus open killing, where once again, compensation can be demanded. Cherokee, Viking. Or the Papua who must receive a name for a child by the murder of a man.
In this only somewhat obscured history, why is the question not: how have we ever not been bound up with this value and meaning of life in murder, itself only relying on the inferential sense of mere killing or slaying as that which fails or falls out of the symbolic or ceremonial. But in the more earnest, even naive inflection of a plea in the question: why murder -- why do we murder, why must we -- to turn around and see that life itself (mere life, if there can be such, zoe) has always been bound up with this sense of life is to see that the meaning life has perhaps always been the least mysterious and most trafficked. Murder has not been the negation of the value of life, but always a presumption of a value.
It's to take this inflection, too: why bother?
Fix the infinite. That's what happens, in all the ways that ripples. And the catch of it, the trap. Because in the Levinasian sense, this infinity doesn't quite suit the mise en abyme, the mirror in a mirror, even though that as well adds further to this complication the reductive infinity, the hole that spirals within (like pi and the infinite division, as opposed to extension, though these end up being different expressions of the same, that opens up within number). Levinas's infinite is not only the perpetual exceeding of the concept by it's referent, but also the failure of any totality, of comprehension, by any one of the other. The gaze of that dialectic, Hegel's master and slave, would be this incommensurate, the slippery slope of comprehension of the incomprehensible, that each gaze in fixing and objectifying the other cannot achieve a totality that would include the other.
And this is also the failure of the self already, already there in the self, so the "because" that would come in here has a double orientation, the causality involved. Is it because the other cannot be reduced to the same, the one, one self? Or because the self cannot be so reduced to begin with? The self, the one, cannot comprehend, achieve a totality, of it-self viewing, of itself with other, an other, any other, viewing. It cannot include its viewing in the view. This is like the infinitization of limit, of hole, of the negative (can we even say "space" merely metaphorically), of the blind, the back of the face, the drop-off. So analgous to Zeno's infinite reduction and infinite division, but carrying even that to a new -- what? power? -- this is the infinitization of the non-positive of even positive extension.
Another consequence, another extension: That one is fixed in this infinity already. The implication, here, of Lacan, his at least one proposed resolution, or at least redirection or expression, of the death drive or death instinct. As if a kind of technical relief of all the affectivity there, but again, the approximation. The matter of. Lacan proposes that the defiance of the other's mastering recognition is at once the assertion of life as one's death. (Once upon a time. The one that dies.)
This may be an approximation for: guilt, remorse, empathetic sacrifice, moral appropriation. But what's pertinent, or at least what's overlooked in the moral supervision of this matter, is the reverse orientation: the approximation this is already, what this is doing as approximation -- murder itself.
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Having -- material and identity
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Vagabond intellectual
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What happens when we say I?
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One genre collides with another described as catastrophe, like an airplane crash.
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Narcissistic appropriation of sympathy, identification. Hysteria v. obsessive.
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Platitudes -- simple compensation.
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If I were to write something about the trip with you, the mingling of sense across all of it, history, ghosts, the sunlight on the plaza, being against each other in our hidden moment in time, and then the remains of Jamestown, talk of Einstein and then flight cancellations, time as the experience of variable schedule and the dilation of hours, the waiting of flight . . .
There in that moment, seen unseen. What does this light say? This sunlight? Cold, bare, empty, faraway, unheard, still. The backlight of history. The backlot of history. This light is indifferent to agitations of centuries, let alone weeks, hours, instants. The mass of energy disproportionate to the angle, instant, flash of temperament given off as the significance of it even as cosmos.
The same light as Versailles, or Potsdam, that shines on the empty stage, that shines on what is gone, shot through the spot, the times, frames that can't be measured, like a leisurely stroll through Einstein lying in bed. The hopeful ghosts of lore, social pressure to believe, distract from the phenomena everywhere, us whose "here" is as precarious a myth, reach, or all too presumed with ennui or dismissal. Flashlights in upper story windows and flashing firetrucks -- most bursting anachronism or the alien ghosts of the future in the graveyard?
Wandering in the graveyard, defile. Narrow passage, treading upon. Everywhere time is wrong. What makes where. The clash of cultures, the bend of accents on each other, translation, counterfeit. Everywhere we sit as if outside, the back rooms and alleys and empty plazas, behind the times.
Where is this place? The way place can lift up and become figure, as in a movie. But that day too was naked, groping, irresolute or overrun. "History" is what is left over for all the moments still enough for hearbeats. Everything about place is also ephemeral, and the further out with the frame, the less anything is in the same place: astronomically. Location must be done, even place like the Kant Locke ideal. Place is a time. Memory and ideal subject to loss. Place supposedly the container.
Space, room, emptiness to be filled, this tableau of waiting regard, we reach across.
"And are all these people to pass on without any kind of memorial, without anything to be remembered by?" said Ottilie.
"By no means!" said the architect. "It is only a particular place we ought to renounce, not a memorial. The architect and the sculptor are vitally interested that mankind should expect from them, from their art, from their hand, a perpetuation of its existence, and that is why I should like to have well-conceived, well-executed monuments, not scattered about all over the place but erected on a spot where they can expect to remain. Since even saints and kings forgo the privilege of being laid to rest in the church in person, let us at least set up memorials and inscriptions there, or in galleries around our burial grounds. They might assume a thousand forms, and be ornamented in a thousand ways."
"If artists are as rich in ideas as that," said Charlotte, "tell me why we can never get away from the form of a petty obelisk, a truncated column or a funeral urn. Instead of the thousand designs of which you boast I have never seen anything but a thousand repetitions."
"That may well be so with us," the architect replied, "but it is not so everywhere. And in general I would say that designs and their proper application are a ticklish business. In the present case especially there are many difficulties to overcome: it is hard to make a grave subject attractive, or when dealing with a joyless one not to produce something joyless. I have a large collection of sketches for monuments of all kinds and I occasionally display it: but a man's fairest memorial is still his own portrait. It gives a better idea of what he was than anything else can do. It is the best text to the music of his life, whether there was much music or little. Only it has to be painted during his best years, and this is usually neglected. No one gives thought to preserved living forms, and when they do, they do so very inadequately. A mask is taken of a dead man, and this death mask mounted on a block, and they call it a bust. How rarely can an artist impart life to such a thing!"
"Perhaps without knowing or intending it," said Charlotte, "you have turned this conversation entirely in my favor. A portrait is an independent thing; wherever it stands, it stands in its own right, and we shall not require that it should mark the actual grave. But shall I confess a strange feeling I have? I feel a kind of aversion even towards protraits. They always seem to be uttering a silent reproach. They point to something distant and departed and remind me how hard it is to do justice to the present. Think how many people we have seen and known and how little we meant to them and how little they meant to us! We meet the witty man and we do not talk with him, we meet the learned man and we do not learn from him, we meet the much travelled man and we discover nothing through him, we meet the amiable man and we show him no love in return."
"And, unhappily, this is not the case only with passing acquaintances. Societies and families behave so towards their finest members, towns towards their worthiest citizens, peoples towards their most admirable princes, nations towards their greatest men."
"I once heard it asked why one always speaks well of the dead, but of the living more circumspectly. The answer was: because we have nothing to fear from the former, while the latter could still cross our path. So impure is our concern for the memory of others: it is mostly no more than a selfish joke; while it is, on the other hand, a deadly serious matter to keep our relations with the living constantly alert and alive."
-- Goethe, Elective Affinities
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Stopover -- in and out of absorption. One still to another.
To be in and out of life -- which is which.
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Territories always off -- map of the [verging?]
Evocations of times not travelled.
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Here and there -- time, distance, presence. Imagination -- remembering what "there" is/was. Sheer data v. experience. Fictive variation.
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Thinking -- rather than being?
What connects.
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Grandiose to ipseity. From grand movement to the "sound" of being unnoticed.
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Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, (Duquesne University Press 2006) p.32, paragraph beginning "In Husserl internal time . . .", sentence beginning "Still, already . . ." Again Levinas says, "nothing is lost." Rest of paragraph. The inflection here -- can this be said against an eternity, as duration? Is this the way to say what Levinas is saying? Or is he saying this? What is he saying? It seems with him and against this way of saying it, that there is cause to clarify, that the approach here is against the either/or of being as pure station and pure inception. He's working against the notion of pure transformation as if that were the other, sistence -- persistence, ek-sistence -- does have to be explained in terms of change, temporality, differance within identity, what would pertain even in Plato's Ideal, or essence, or the most naive sense of solidity. Levinas's inflection, how much situation -- sentence beginning next paragraph, "It is in any case to speak of time that can be recuperated."
Manner of speaking. The problem here with "nothing is lost." Again, if one emphasizes there is no pure presence, in other words nothing absolutely there or had to begin with. And if "recuperate" is to get again, then getting, having, being in the first place are already this trace, this cut-up of time. But if time is -- and apart from the strikethrough of that "is" we should perhaps say is the factor of -- the difference in itself, the difference that gives identity but makes identity not that to which time occurs as an attribute or qualification, then one can't imagine -- at least this phrase saying it -- that anything else could become the field of pure presence. What meaning would "lost" have, would "recuperate" have, if not for the loss which time is? Which time is right out of the gate, so to speak. From the beginning, at once. Is this Levinas's commentary on Husserl? Or Husserl's of this necessary impression or intention of consciousness, analogous to what he says of the necessary earth-bound perspective?
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The irreducible register of being is like itself a pure category, function, operation, except it is thus not just any, but the purest, the least. Being has no being. It cannot be one being, either a thing or a state or mode. Its precision is in this gloss, this agglomeration by comparison, and as soon as precision is necessary, being is not, but one of these. It would be like zero, if not already zero, or the same function. Or perhaps the name of the greatest set and thus subject to the name of the set conundrum in the greatest way: what does not belong to the set, is of no substance, but organizes and realizes the set. Being is already the difference of species and genus, of the part as both singular and of, and so too that of category and member. Category of categories? Like the pure forms of symbolic logic or mathematical theory, infinity for example, when more than one infinity becomes possible, behaving like any value it should subsume, that is as real as this function is possible. How to catch it, single it out, like subatomic particles, when it is only possible as something else? Perhaps this is the inference, the glimmer, and also at once how it gives us the form of eternity without there being one: how else could we presume to talk or know of others, across the greatest distance of time? Across, in short, materiality itself.
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Early in the first part of "Shoa" there are two men telling of being forced to dig up graves with only their hands. The Germans forbid them to call the bodies of their own families "corpses" or "victims." They were to be "blocks of wood," "shit," "Figuren" (puppets or dolls), "Schmattes" (rags). This experience is of administrated humiliation, schadenfreude -- the perpetrators given to whatever impulse or invention of this. The spectacle of this is for the perpetrators, but also to make the victims among themselves beyond Hegel's conquest of the view of the other: to attempt to make them realize a «demeaning» of themselves, where the proto-confrontation of the master/slave dialectic has been short-circuited so that slavery is not the resolution avoiding real death in the symbolic consumption of the other, but the death itself must be realized as perpetual spectacle.
Figuren. Of course it does nothing for the ignorance of the goon, fascism, to explain it's the most puerile sense of superiority in asserting the inferiority of some other. It will make no difference to them, the fact, let alone the argument of it, that despotism is the fixation of primary narcissism and aggression, the political system of this infantile state, the allergy of other in the early transitiveness of the sense of self, where the kneejerk attempts at assertion often literally confuse the self with the other. Even what is simplest and most at hand is the greatest subtlety to those bound to reduction of all value to a zero sum of esteem: to demean -- the appearance gives a false etymology, but the actual etymology already bears this out in another way -- still requires a meaning.
The need for figure. Puppets, dolls, strawmen and scapegoats certainly, but their own value is bound up in this figuration, and even the need to force an equation, a metaphor, a value -- even to make shit -- is this effort, though also compulsion. They are bound up with this figuration internally, and then the need to externalize it. Bound also to the inverse proportion of insistence on demeaning, minimization, negation: negative meaning is not null meaning, and there's even the paradox (as analyzed by Derrida of the Egyptian and Greek sense of writing) of lacking any other value or power and having the power to usurp or subtract value, as if a demonic meaning were also a black hole of meaning.
What's as freakish as any grotesque characterization in any sort of bigotry is the obsessiveness of it. Nazi Germany certainly made this its historical legacy, institutionalizing the obsession on the grandest scale. It makes no difference the calculation involved in demagoguery. Whatever cause it wants to be, it becomes the prejudice in effect, and certainly the will for this is no less that of the puerile superiority.
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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 fate of memory.
Recall.
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When is a city? The time of event and the outside or gratuitous, the random visit, iteration. Do we belong to something happening or any more to some back alley or mere existence? But it is this everyday. The run of life. The run of lives and time as water.
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The name is the ignorant totality of the thing. It is knowing the thing without knowing the thing. Name, noun, word. The rules of grammar are also this agglomeration.
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It's not whether art matters. Art is how things matter.
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Don't you understand? There is no understanding. There is no circumscription of the other. The desire of the other is impossible: give me your understanding as I want it to be.
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The metaphor explodes. Sense capsized. But it goes down with you. Lies still. This is not something that happens to metaphor. This is the happening of metaphor.
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Geometry of morals. The moral sense. That something appeals. That there is another fabric, as well as facet, that is as if the absolute of its condition. All these working as abstractions. How moralizing works even for other things, politics. System, qua moralizing.
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Law and definition. On hearing a story about another attempt to define marriage as between man and woman. The law requires definition but is not reducible to it. There is a de facto quality of definition relative to the law which demonstrates how neither works as natural law. Dividing each within itself. The change of language, idiom, custom goes on beside(s) the law. As if definition were the law of law, just as the law of definition. Definition of law, or law of definition?
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Grass, angle of sun, being buried, oblivion, watching or thinking this.
The autumn fringe now in winter through a plane of artificial color, subtracted temperaments.
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What is the horror of the double? Is it precisely in the pre-figuration that all of the idealization I have for the co-extension of act and intent -- indeed conscious mastery, indeed subject as object -- of the other at my own disadvantage would render this leftover agency of perception inept? Would make me alienated from the very idealization of myself as other, as subject-object, or perhaps object-subject? Makes a more express form of what is already going on in me?
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Watching "Winter Sleep", idea of a narrative that would, in an apparently normal scenic way, that is in the cuts from one scene to the next, show in ellipsis what is also a "normal" change in behavior, so that the person forgets or contradicts previous behavior. This could be carried to demonstrative exaggeration so that it lifts up, as if two actors are in fact playing or saying the lines of entirely different characters from entirely different stories, but with other continuity of setting.
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