The Ontological Boy

DIRECT REALISM

Find my book at www.theplatonicprairie.com. It is part prose-poem, part ontological analysis, visions of Platonic realism as you climb the steps of the Scala Paradisi. Eros Uranos. Madness and an incarnation descending. I have not tried to avoid philosophical perplexity by jumping into science. I am not mesmerized by science as are almost all of the others. I have not been afraid of the whirlwind. Things separate. The roaring river is overhead. Words are overheard. The rhythm is maintained.

To "understand" these writings you must pay attention to the form and timing of the sentences and not so much to the content or the concepts embodied in them. In other words, your awareness must be on the external appearance and not the internal idea. The movement, the rise and fall, the gradual lengthening and retreat of the phrases. The repetition of sounds and the changing. It is that that gives substance to the paragraph. It is that that the meaning rides on. This is performance. The spirit is present in that, or it is not.

The certain good of diction strongly names the basic elements – these are the sonorous Forms - I listen and I build them into a steady movement. The reader will have to catch the flow and drift of the slow timing. His freedom of movement will be severely restricted. His feet will be nailed to the floor of the drone. His breath will be taken and controlled. If he fights the rhythm, all is lost. If he ignores the proper movement, the spirit will not come and the idea will not hold.

Protestant plainness has totally taken over scholarly writing and all discussion that takes place near its watching eye. Sobriety, seriousness and fact. The color and splash of idolatry must not be allowed to contaminate its pure limpid sweetness. The clear forehead of thought must shine. The gentle gesture of liberality must go with the smile of concern. Reason, good sense and pristine order. And the powerful truth of plain speech. Or so it is supposed to be instead of this natural dullness that has settled in hard.

Nonetheless, this blog is gay Christianity unabashedly in love with the old metaphysical style.

Socrates: What we shall see is something like a Battle of Gods and Giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality.

Theatetus: How so?

Socrates: One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands; for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.

Theatetus: The people you describe are certainly a formidable crew, I have met quite a number of them before now.

Socrates: Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless Forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps.

English has high and low register. The first is Latinate and the second is Anglo-Saxon. Elevated, cultured analysis, gentle meaning, intellectual contentment, ascends in the French/Latinate aerial structures of Modern English. Hard facts, however, bare things, up close feelings, the pieces, this and that lying near, are other. Latinate words are considerate and sweet. They are the distant leisure of educated reflection. The Anglo-Saxon is down in the windy chaos, the push and the grabbing of stiff thought. I entangle the one register with the other. And in that I have made, perhaps, a fine rhythm, or a horny briar. The reader must be aware. And en garde.

I don't sing like nobody.

Elvis Presley

The differences among some of the several existents are very great indeed. I, for one, would not hesitate to call them momentous, or enormous. That, I submit, is a major source of the resistance serious ontology has always met. For these differences are much greater than most are prepared to face.

Gustav Bergmann

But elaborate rhythmical arrangement is quite evidently one of the things which are not wanted in scientific discussion, and which, if anybody is in the unfortunate mood to do so, may be stigmatized as “beautiful deceits.”

George Saintsbury

Get the same thing but without the pictures - The Platonic Prairie Here And The Ontological Nexus Here

Cut up my writings a la William Burroughs here - Cut It All Up

Wait – my stats counter tells me that you have probably come here just to look at the pictures, but I hope you would also …… never mind. It’s hopeless.

A warning to scholars – even though the thoughts lovingly delineated on this site are touchingly right up your alley, you must not stay here long. If one of your fellows or your professors or any one of the philosophical blog superintendents finds out that you have come here and lingered, you will be severely (but joyfully) reconsidered, maybe deconsidered, even knocked down a notch in the collective academic mind. Remember your high standing and tend to it warily.

Monday, January 16, 2012

5549 Through a conversation I have been having with a very bright, lovely young man, I think I have figured out a relation between my philosophy and the very bad headaches I used to have. They were probably migraine. And also a connection between philosophy and nightmares, another old companion of mine. I do analysis. Analysis is the loosening up, the breaking up, in order to bring order to one’s world. You will see that analysis isn’t, can’t be, something I do, but something I find or finds me.

I was in pain. Those who know, know. How to escape? Lie still and look right at it. There it is. It is all around you. But—and here’s the magic part—you realize eventually that there in the center of that ring you have found a place separate. The eye of the hurricane. The pain is over there, out there, and you are just watching it as you lie there with your eyes closed, so still. Pain and my awareness of it are two, not one. Analysis is complete.

It is probably true that the brains waves of a migraine are in chaos, a sort of petit mal I think. I do philosophy, analysis takes its place, things appear in their dividedness, order ensues. The headache does not go away, but I am away from it. Precisely.

Nightmares are close to the same thing, but there is no migraine. I wake up in horror. I reach for the Order, the divinity of Form and thought, and once again pleasantness comes. The fright of hard things, the chaotic dizziness is over there and I become gleeful. Analysis, the dividing, the precise cut and then the laying out in order calms me. And I get up.

There are those who say that all that dividing is just an act of the mind and it isn’t real. Further analysis will show that that cannot be. Precision, not dismissals. Order and the cut. The sharp, the real, the one thing. “Yes, no, a straight line.” The goal is That. The god of Perfection. Without that I am in a terrible place where things crowd together. I love philosophy.

The Ontological Boy