The Ontological Boy

2012-01-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

5569 Last time I spoke against the planof the new process theologians to learn to love Tehom, the abyss, the deep, thewatery entanglement. I confessed mygreat fear of that Thing. But I in noway wanted to imply that I could think it out of existence. The world is not merely an idea of mine. The world, including Tehom, is very, very real. Tehom really is there. It is the Dionysian ground that Nietzsche saidnecessarily preceded the Apollonian. Andas a writer dependent on the daimon, the duende, the jinn, I know that I mustwalk its profound confusion to find that δεινον, the holy flesh I will eat inawful solitude.

The fear of God is the beginning ofwisdom. Well, of course it is. We are in a dangerous place. One misstep and we are completelyundone. Objects are real and a fact is abrute fact. Sinking down in the cold deepis pure fright. No philosophizing canprove its non-existence. But there areother things that help. And the Apollonianis not only its skin.

2012-01-26T09:22:00.000-08:00

5568 A very bright, young Internetfriend of mine writes about “a dreamy-eyed youth unknowingly walking over an abyss”. He calls him the Trickster and The fool. Let’s say he is walking over Tehom, theSemitic Deep. Is he secretly in lovewith the abyss or should he be afraid, very afraid? According to modern process theologians,the Tehomophilians, he should be in love with that, the Unfathomable Matrix. Magna Mater Aliena. Well, why not? Boys can escape from anything with theirsupple Imagination—if things go awry.

I fear that thing. So let me here give a little philosophylesson. I look about my room: I see mybed, my chair, my Winter coat hanging in the closet. I hear a train go by in the distance. One of my favorite composers in on theradio. I smell my coffee. In other words I recognize things. And I imagine what it would be like to havemy new neighbor, the cute one, come visit me. I know the difference between reality and imagination. Now let’s suppose we are struck by theneurological disorder that Oliver Sacks so poignantly described, a disorder ingreater or lesser forms that is not as uncommon as you might imagine. When that strikes you lose the ability torecognize what things are and music becomes a pile of very irritating noise andyou cannot distinguish between reality and imagination. It must be sheer horror to the onestruck. That is the abyss as I imagineit. Boys usually wanting to get “allfucked up” and laugh will taste it. Butthey soon come down and it is a mild form of the abyss. Though not always. My sister, a nurse, has worked with youngpeople who, for one reason or another, can’t seem to come down. I don’t like to think about it. My nightmares, which I can chase away, arebad enough. The Abyss is terrifying tome. Is that the great Matrix, or have I misunderstood? I have perhaps started out from a darker beginning.

2012-01-26T04:18:00.000-08:00

5567 Can we see or “see” or in somemanner or after a fashion philosophically intuit Ontological things andOntological complexities? Most of myfriends have no idea what I am talking about. Consider the much maligned bare particular, i.e. a particular strippedof absolutely all properties. Few thinkthere is such a thing, so good luck in your considering it. Now consider the particularity of thatparticular, the form of particularity isolated, and that form being in or ofthe particular, and then the of by itself and its ofness. Or if there is no connector purportedly namedby “of” there, then the nexusless diad “consisting” of the bare particularstripped even of particularity and that form of particularity together, without the nexus of being-together. It’s heady going. At least I haven’t taken you all the way intothe Hindu philosophy of Navya Nyaya, where they talk about the form of beingthe form of particularity—particulatityity. Or nexuslessness. Or nexuslessness-ness. Now for universals.

Consider the universal BoyPink. It is one particular universal among many,thus it is “internally” a combination of the nature of bPink, maybe the bpinknessof bPink itself, plus something to make it that particular universal, Bergmanncalls it the item. And then there is theitemness of the item and on and on into finer and finer divisions. And I see or intuitively know that I haveleft almost all of my imagined readers feeling like they want to read somethingelse or laugh or thank God that they are not so strange. Ontological things, not to mentionontological complexities, exist—or not. Some can see them; others can’t. Jesussaid: “ …Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdomof God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: Thatseeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and notunderstand; lest at any time they should be converted, … .”

Only theinitiated see. That is to say only thephilosophically mad. I am that. The Boy is present.

Tidings are newlyarrived—do you perhaps have no news of it? The envious heart has turned toblood; perhaps you have no heart.
The moon has shown his face, opened the wings of light; borrow a heart and eyesfrom someone if you do not have any.
Amazing, night and day a flying arrow comes from the hidden bow; yield yourlife to this arrow. What can you do? You have no shield.
Has not the copper of your being been changed, like Moses, to gold by Hisalchemy? What care? Though you have no gold in your bag like Korah?
Within you is an Egypt whose sugarcane bed you are; what care, though you haveno supply of sugar from without?
You have become the slave of form, like the idol-worshipers; you are likeJoseph, but within you do not gaze.
By God, when you see your own beauty in the mirror you will be your own idol,you will not pass over to anyone.
O Reason, are you not unjust to call him like the moon? Why do you call himmoon? Perhaps you have no sight.
Your head is like a lamp containing six wicks; from what are all six alight, ifyou have not that spark?
Your body is like a camel which travels to the Kaaba of the heart; out ofassishness you have not gone on the pilgrimage, not because you have no ass.
If you have not gone to the Kaaba, felicity will draw you on; do not flee,idler, for you have no means of passing from God.

Rumi 362

2012-01-26T01:56:00.001-08:00

5566 Wittgenstein and Husserl are thetwo greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. The former famously and stumblingly wrote:

6.53 The correct method in philosophywould really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e.propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do withphilosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say somethingmetaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning tocertain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to theother person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching himphilosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one.

6.54 My propositions areelucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them assenseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He mustso to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

7 What we cannot speak about wemust pass over in silence.

What might such a meaningless philosophicalstatement be? And why is it a part ofsuch a high expression of thought? Bergmann, who so admirably follows Wittgenstein, referring to ‘greenis not a relation’ and ‘or is different from not’ wrote: “It seems that we know very well what thesesentences purport to stand for. Yet,since they stand for nothing, we can infact not think (intend) “it”. … discrepancy,excess and the limits of thought. Thelatter separates what can be thought (and therefore in this world exists) fromthe excess…. In some cases … thediscrepancy between what we seem to intend and what in fact we intend is not solarge that the gap could not be bridged, phenomenologically as well asotherwise. … But there are other cases … {that] will lead us to a gap that isunbridgeable. Or, with a twist, theexcess of the ontology of logic over its phenomenology is in this world verylarge and of a very striking nature. Onewho see that clearly cannot but be disturbed. For he finds himself … faced with the question which, in an obvious sense,is the biggest of all. Just remember theimage of the ladder that must be thrown away. Mathematical logic may be left to the mathematicians. But does not what goes for the ontology oflogic also go for all of ontology; and it if does, is not all ontological talkexcess?”

It seems that ontology for the most part is notphenomenologically presented. If I say ‘thenexus of exemplification exists and it is different from the nexus ofintentionality’, I seem to be talking about what I do not “see”. Are ontological things and ontologicalfacts presented or not? I have said thatthey are. It seems that Bergmann andWittgenstein and Husserl have said they aren’t. Does it make a difference? I contemplateOntological Things. What is thatcontemplation? Can I make a connectionbetween that and the Platonic Vision of transcendent Forms? I have said that such Vision and thatcontemplation are the same. Whether ornot I am historically and philologically justified, I shall ignore. I see the Forms. Whether or not that seeing isphenomenological, I shall try to ignore; though that may not be wise.

2012-01-25T12:38:00.001-08:00

5565 Where do we find the Shekhina today? It is that one glory that has us all inthrall. It is the glitz and sparkle ofhigh technology. It is the glamour andappeal of fashion. It is the allure ofcelebrity and the sudden flash from that plastic wrap in the consumer display. The Shekhina works its magic in the mallwhere boys hang out and slowly gaze. Inthat Super-market where the super-Vizier drops off his devastating teen starsnow moving about oblivious to the sidereal desire they freeze. The Shekhina is the artificial, the perfect onein a bottle, the jinn of eyeshade, gloss of lip and that silky skin you canpurchase for only a few dinars. And ofcourse the high-definition, photo-shopped immaculate form. He waits for you. The Glory of God about to strike you down. The Commentators comment.

That is the daimon of inspirationfor the writer of today. No one controlsthe writer except that. Radiant lightfrom light. The Boy.

2012-01-25T07:36:00.001-08:00

5564 The boy-queen is always anexaggeration. Art is exaggeration. He is art. He is the very essence of art. Heis flash and blare and the come-buy-me of the consumer display. He is our window onto the other world—is heevil? He is Pop. Primp, leggy, skimpy briefs, legal briefs, hewaits.

The Shekhina lives thestock-phrases in the warehouse. The whorehouse. The mass market. Fake, false, pseudo-speedo glam. Clammy spirit ooze. And sweet balm, calm sighs and tenderthighs. Here laid out on a glossycodex. Rex. Night pumps. He’s you.

The Unnatural. Distorted, big, lips, he sips the night, ripsthe veil. Evil. Theatrical. Hypothetical. There’s nothingthere. The temple is gone. He walks home alone. No one cares.

The perfect sacrifice. Nailed down.

2012-01-25T05:27:00.001-08:00

5563 The Shekhina, the boy-queen, astriking beauty, looming emptiness, sensitive and proud. Our Lady of the Flowers. The old man. A useless passion. The eternal lureof the artificial. The threatening evilof consumerism. Overlord and the loafwarder. Sacrificial eucharist. Goingdown. A gnawing in the stomach. Endless kisses and kisses and near misses. Blood wine. He’s just fine. Too fine tosee. A giggling among the garçonfashionettes Primp, crimp, a slightsimpering. In the celestial hierarchy, you,my dear boy, are always second. In theordered set, you follow. Your very being,your essential one, is over there, giving you no mind, little money. Your master, your desire, your tough. The world hangs on your breath, your fierce glory,your nighttime strut. Transcendentalnothingness. Pantokrator. Tzevaot. El Shaddai. All down your smoothleg.

2012-01-24T09:00:00.001-08:00

5562 Sartre said that man's passion is tofind that one thing that is the unity of desire and the satisfaction ofdesire. That one thing is by definitionGod. There is no God; therefore, man isa useless passion. The dialecticcollapses; there is no third between desire and its satisfaction.

I have also said that eventuallyevery dialectical attempt at ontological construction fails. The crash, the collapse, theembarrassment. I and Sartre seem toagree, but he is an atheist and I am a theist. How can that be? Have I made Godbe, not the resolution to the dialectic, but its collapse? Has a new dialectical problem been set uphere? Yes. We will continue our erotic argument far intothis spiritual night. This gloriouscatastrophe.

Also I am a Platonic, Uranianlover. Sartre, gazing at that, trying toapproach an understanding of the homosexual, transformed into a perfectidiot. What kind of strange dialectic isthat? Thus my theism.

2012-01-23T08:01:00.001-08:00

5561 Early in the twentieth centurythere arose the philosophical question of the existence of the Meinong’s GoldenMountain. It had been stated as aprinciple that the mental act of awareness and its intentional object were twoand not one. Therefore, one must wonderwhat the object is when we think about “non-existent” things. It turned out to be a bugger of aquestion. The only answer possible wasunacceptable to the many. And so now thequestion has been long dropped. Philosophyoften, maybe always, solves its most dire puzzles by walking away. So I again ask, When we think about theGolden Mountain, what is the object? Doesthat thing seen in the imaginarium somehow exist after all? It must. Still, it is nowhere in the world. The world, therefore, is not all there is. But it’s too much for those many today whoare only seekers after worldly certainty, their unspeakable need,

What is thinkable exists. And I suspect more besides. Consciousness goes far beyond the everydayworld. And Being far beyond that yetuntrained instrument. So let’s visit theboy in his room, who sees the beyond and almost believes. We must approach gingerly and in fear. The walls are collapsing. Right here. And now. And everywhere.

2012-01-23T07:15:00.001-08:00

5560 Archetypes and the NietzscheanDeath of God. A boy sits in his room anddreams of heroes and anti-heroes. Grandbeings float through his mind and around his groin. He loves, he hates, he masturbates. It’s is a cliché. Soon he will be forced to turn hismagnificent beings into literature. The magicalworld will have finally collapsed. He willgrow up.

Even now he knows thedifference. He doesn’t really believe insuch things, his late-night lovers. But shouldhe? Was Nietzsche really right to thinkthe magnificence is all gone, that we killed it, that it is become mere pulpfor the out-of-work? Do the gods reallynow exist in their fallen popularization? Is that only their latest transformation? Has Loki really become a comic bookcharacter? Was that only his most recentescape? Is that boy in his room himselfa god who has momentarily emptied himself? Yet another Kenosis? Will theSurge soon be not only his dick, but his very being? Are we about to see another transformation ofthe gods? Of course it is possible,anything is possible, but in the infinity of time will yet be? Is infinity nothing? Now we are wallowing in the dark glory ofhopelessness and adulthood, but surely we won’t forever. The dialectic turns and while he burns I write him up. The dalliance is delicious. And soon done.

After the Death of God and all magnificence is gone, all Archetypes become cliches.

2012-01-23T02:19:00.000-08:00

5559 A boy, an enigma-friend of mine, areal boy, writes in his room. An archetypalscene. He writes up “two males insolitude”. Archetypes withinarchetypes. He writes the desert, theDasein, the place of phantasmagoria. Theeidola, cums-sheets fly in the spirit-wind. The American dream boy.

Digital pixelations. Sizzling streams of desire. The gods are back.

No longer do those old beings wantto smell the fragrance of dying corpses on the battlefield; now the stale airof the enclosed imagination hiding in an urban apartment. The boy systematizes the ancient days intobold HD. All down his showered leg. The night reeks of gods. And old fruit.

I am a philosopher looking for theancient Things. Public rituals have longgone. No more do we wait for ademon-intoxicated enemy to burn down our houses. The holy shriek of fighters is no longer heard. Pestilence is held back. We have only the ubiquitous screen and itsnight glow. No matter, the gods arestill here, but in different form. Thespirit is still strong lying in the boy’s imagination. Indeed, they created the boy as a temple onthe via moderna. He is the place of sacrifice. He is a piece of the burnished Idea. He feels it slide in his stomach. He smells the ancient thing on his workinghand. The night clamors with delicatelustrations. He is the blush of being. Thenegligible. The rosy wound.

2012-01-22T15:58:00.001-08:00

5558 Nietzsche’s (in)famous Madman who wentthrough the square bemoaning the death of God has been pawed at and groped andflailed by anxious intellectuals for many decades that seem like centuries andit will continue far into this spiritual night. All magnificence is now gone. No moreserene majesty. Power has shifted to theangry demos. A powerless power. The small has spread over everything. The everyday is praised and people seeksafety. Now only clichés ooze throughour art. We have lost everything thathad value, now the balm applied is endless talk of compassion. God is dead.

I have engaged in God-talk pageafter page. I have, however, not writtenwith majesty and magnificence and sternness. That is gone. I have written upthe gay boy alone in his room, dreaming of sex. This is the gay god. He iseverywhere on the Internet. This is theopposite of Power and nobility. His hideawayin not a princely court. He does notplan the destiny of man. He is thedestiny of man. He is ubiquitous, dirtyunderwear and cum sock and the greasy pages of a picture book. He is the death of the magnificent God. That’s where we have come to. Nietzsche was also that.

So why do I engage inGod-talk. I do so because Christianity isabout the absurdity of the incarnation and this is that. You must bow to your new idol. The gay cliché.

2012-01-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

5557 The reaction against Cartesiandualism can be explained by looking at the Iliad. That first book of our civilization is a bookabout Force. Human beings are taken byit and cease to be human beings. They becomethings. One moment the joy and pain oflife is present and the next there is nothing. And the killer is as dead as the killed. The transformation in an instant from living soul to a dead body isstriking. This beautiful book is toobeautiful in its killing. And eventuallywe all succumb to that. Cartesian dualismis an image, finally, of a deathly mechanical force and the death dealing soulthat moves with it in violence. TheMeditations meditate on the Iliad, the sourcebook of who we are.

2012-01-17T11:37:00.001-08:00

3400 I am aquiet solitary thinker. I am a quietsolitary dreamer. I work my thoughtstoward the orgasm. I am an entelechy. I am in work. I am energia. Within me there isThat.

I visit the boys chanting theirmonkish chants high up in their crumbling monastery. Enchanting flesh. Fragile, sexy voices. Sleepy hard-ons still just out of view. I worry my own rhythms. I am always the outside and the between. Neither this not that. Sadly both. Just as they.

3401 Theseare performance pieces for boys alone. The platonic emanations finally are just that one on his bed. With himself he is with all the others. The many and the One and the One alone, justhim. The logic is tight.

Through him I silently speak tomyself. With Walt Whitman, I caress theself of myself. And of that one. The élève of my self just there. The divining rod controls. Sweet Apollo.

The elfish Isa alwayswatches. Through Him the boy watcheshimself and in His thoughts he thinks himself. He objectively, disinterestedly, from a distance analyzes himself. Alone with himself. There's something strange about him. He grins at the thought. To chagrin or not to chagrin.

3402 Who am I and what is the world? I am a Form arising out of itself. The world is the Place of the Forms' arising,itself arising. And the arising is onlythe Arising as it ever is. From eternityeverything returns. Everything here hasa part, and a part to play, that is its destiny. Moira.

Thus this is a place ofchaos. A no place. Self-caused, uncaused. The One being itself. I am a final thing. I watch with a Watching and I see the end ofthings. The End. I am of that.

The great complexity is withoutcompletion. There is no whole. There are only the eternal Forms, each beingitself in the pure act of Being. And theparticipation that each instant is. InParticipation. Deep in itself. A thing is finally just itself.

I am myself. I have always been so. The world is just the Place arising out ofitself, in a placeless place.

2012-01-17T11:20:00.001-08:00

3440 It is easy to make the mental shift thattakes the mind from the ordinary off to any philosophy whatever. I can see the world as illusion or hardmatter. I can see it as composed ofnumber or feeling or little dodecahedron. I can see God as present or absent. I can see love as impetuously real or an economic grab. I can find universals in his hand in hispocket in his pants in the back of the class or nowhere while he whistles outthe door. Berkley, Malebranche orLeibniz – I have been with all of them as they flew through fire o'er theEmpyrean. Separately. And in the great smashing-together that isPhilosophy.

Surely the world can be reducedto a swelter of sensa. To orderedperspectives. To objects beyond theirperspicuous appearances. To just onething. To a transcendent Nothing. To my pile of books. And cold coffee. And a good night's sleep.

Nietzsche thought he was so smartwhen he laid out all the historical stages of philosophical thought, but I havegone through those and more in one afternoon. So have countless other sleepy and dazed undergraduates. Especially the erotically reclined.

2012-01-17T04:11:00.000-08:00

5556 In human history the occult isalways out and about. The search for theHoly Grail continues unimpeded. The purereceptacle for the overlords. But I amthe Imp and I am ever ready to eclipse the waters. I am the dark mongrel. I have no powers other than absolute,infinite negativity. The dialectic of mydick. I trip up the one on the race tothe top. Kim sits on Zam-Aammah. Aryan sxhmaryan. Cannon fodder.

What are the occultists reallyafter? A pure mother? The secret powers of death? To kill what? The polluter? The Imp? Purity purity purity—power. There’s nothing there but abstraction.

2012-01-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

5555 “Iam afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Nietzsche in the“Twilightof the Idols”

To havefaith in grammar is to believe that it truthfully, accurately, preciselypictures the world. In grammar, there isa separation between subject, predicate and copula. All the elements stand apart from one anotherand there is a proper order to aligning them. If that mirrors the world, then in the world all those separate thingsremain separate and ordered. Thus universals(properties and relations) are separate but tied to the particulars (subjects )by the nexus of exemplification (the copula). Likewise all the other elements of grammar name real, separate things inthe world. And from there to all the hierarchiesof angels ascending and descending, all the Numbers, all the Final Things oftheology we merrily go. Or one mightthink. Grammar opens the door toheaven. But if all the divisions ofgrammar are only mind-games, then never mind.

2012-01-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

5554 Through a conversation I have beenhaving with a very bright, lovely young man, I think I have figured out arelation between my philosophy and the very bad headaches I used to have. They were probably migraine. And also a connection between philosophy andnightmares, another old companion of mine. I do analysis. Analysis is the looseningup, 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—andhere’s the magic part—you realize eventually that there in the center of thatring you have found a place separate. Theeye of the hurricane. The pain is overthere, out there, and you are just watching it as you lie there with your eyesclosed, so still. Pain and my awarenessof it are two, not one. Analysis iscomplete.

It is probably true that the brainswaves 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 goaway, but I am away from it. Precisely.

Nightmares are close to the samething, but there is no migraine. I wakeup in horror. I reach for the Order, thedivinity of Form and thought, and once again pleasantness comes. The fright of hard things, the chaotic dizzinessis 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 allthat dividing is just an act of the mind and it isn’t real. Further analysis will show that that cannotbe. 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 wherethings crowd together. I lovephilosophy.

2012-01-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

5553 Setting out in my mind of minds todefine you or characterize you or simply put you in a gilded box (also called asquared-off piece of writing), I have a choice to make. Should I proceed according to the theories ofconstruction or deconstruction? Should Istrive to find a unified meaning to all the appearances you have put before me,a sort of Theory of Everything? Orshould I strive to find ambiguity and double-meaning and intentional (orunintentional) paronomasia in all of that? The first draws you together to a point or at least onto a small disk(centripetal), while the second bursts you forth and out into myriads of incompatiblepieces and scatters you among all the intellectual detritus we call stars-gods(centrifugal). Construction ordeconstruction? What do you feel likebeing today. Pulled together (a sort ofbondage) or blown? Up. I have always had a fondness fordeconstruction simply because it is so smart-alecky and I like puns andquibbles. Indeed, I think if I hadn’tbeen such a clever smartass I might have gotten somewhere in the world. Whatever, we make our bed and then we have to eat on it. Still, deconstruction isfashionable nowadays, though it seems to be getting a little old. I think a theory of everything about youmight be more fun because more challenging. Anyway, I think you have deconstructed yourself already. Therefore, bondage it is. Do you mind?

2012-01-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

5552 By the second law of thermodynamicswe are all turning to mush. And everythingwe have. And everything we make. And all our ideas. And love finally dies. Unless, of course, and just maybe, Godintervenes. God, the anti-entropic. Your sagging face regains its elasticity andyou are beautiful again, my revivified dear. In fact, could it be, even now the whole world is running backwardsinside the tiniest quantum internal. Whichmay mean all sorts of unwelcome things are going to happen if it/he escapes; let’sopen the door and give it a shot. God isthat which brings everything back into perfect order, just like Him—exquisitedelineation! Maybe right here. It’s too much. Or am I missing something? No God, then less than flaccid soup. A sleazy, emasculated nothing. It’s the law.

2012-01-15T05:41:00.000-08:00

5551 Why is it necessary to have a Godin one’s writings? God is the supremeprinciple of unity and without that all is lost. Today’s final attempt at extreme atheism, at anintense breaking apart, is, of course, being written up in and held together bythe Book, even if it is at times virtual. Not to mention the plumbing of the universitycampus. I have the tightly-formed Boy and his compact paragraphs. Or I want to. I invite him to come. To say heis not somewhere close is to fail at feeling love’s hunger. I desire, therefore, he is. He is That. He is here. And I contend withhis words.

I have a beloved, graceful and faithful,—only it would be a good thing,if he had no whims!—He is always both intimate and aloof,—though his characterbe friendly and joyful:—if he is just one night, he is tyrannical a wholeweek;—my heart is not certain as to his close union,—for in a whim he may cutit short, while he is in the best of humor.

Here is a zagal marked as double-sided,—in the same way as worry andgold coins have two aspects;—the harga served me for a double purpose:—I have abeloved, graceful and faithful,—only it would be a good thing, if he had nowhims! [Ibn Guzman?]

2012-01-14T14:04:00.001-08:00

5550 A participationist, in theBarfieldian/Steinerian sense, is necessarily a representationalist. The primary nexus, maybe their only nexus, ispart-whole. The person, the mind, thesoul, his body, are parts of the Whole, even the Absolute ever moving on into agreater and greater super-creation of Itself. And as a part the only way to know the greater is to have it reflectedwithin itself. Microcosm and macrocosm. “Tosee a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity inthe palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” Here is occasional causation. Onegoes inward to find the greater Out There. Images, representations mean the Absolute itself. I suppose that is Leibniz and the monads, butit is more than that; the idea pervades our philosophical history. It is not my way, but it is farreaching. I have already had my say,contending with its historical power many times in my writing. I see the things outside of me, not by meansof an image of any sort, but up close in propria persona. That puts me perhapsin with the naïve realists. So be it. I have argument on my side. I believe in transcendental ontologicalargument. I offer the intentionalnexus.

2012-01-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

5549 I just read the first few pages ofa book on the Barfieldian/Steinerian idea of Religious Participation. I was constantly amazed and consternated by theamount of intellectual verbiage there was. Why does such a simple idea have to be hidden away in the bush? Will anyone ever be able to find it inthere? Is there an ontological reasonfor it? I am constrained to admit thatit is probably just the Withdrawal that is so spoken of now. Philosophers want to be left alone. And they will market the hermetic existencethey have found. I do think the Internetwill help out here. Once posted an article disappears into the ether along withall the other flapping Buddhist prayer flags signaling the gods. This is the new religion. A fairy temple of doom.

2012-01-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

5548 The Agency of Being. The notion of agent is again popular inphilosophy. The maker, the doer, thecreator, the intelligence behind the phenomena. The bringer of orderly change. Thecharioteer of the Cosmos. The soul of passion. The very one you are talking to and sittingnear right now. The fire.

The Supreme Agent is Agni. The Agile One. Flickering flames. Agitation. That is Agency itself. There Intelligencebecomes the Tongues of Spiritual Fire. Wesley, the apostle of freewill, knew the charism, the hunger,well. The agitated will, always goinghere and there, choosing, unchoosing, saved, then damned, then saved. The Flames dance. That is the Agent of Life. Neti Neti. What shall we do, where shall we stand? The night is full of bumps and we fall. Agni. He rises up over us. We are consumed and in the ashesnew life sprouts.

So does agent, Agni, exist? Kind of yes, kind of no. No, but almost. He is Eros, the third way. The dialectical gadfly. He is licking you now.

2012-01-14T06:04:00.001-08:00

5547 Participation has become thebyword, the shibboleth into the New Order. The catchword, the watchword, the Word itself made flesh. And, of course, the Imagination. But how are we to think such things? I will first set up a foil, my philosophy, asa contrast.

In the foil, there are firstthings. At the beginning there are theelemental ontological things. Of coursethat beginning isn’t in time, time being broken apart into only timerelations. This is the ontologicalbeginning as ultimate ground. The foilis thus well-ordered. A first, a second,and on and on into greater and greater complexity. Beauty itself is at the beginning withelegance and simplicity and power. TheseThings are still. We are here inunmoving Eternity.

The New Order is really the NewUnorder. There, there are no first things;even God progresses out of himself to something other. Participation is thus finally a swimming inan infinite sea of vertigo. It issupreme otherness. The many have waylaidall unities and hacked them to pieces. Oneis always and ever IN the great rush of creation. And it is the Imagination that accomplishesall that. But what is the Imagination?

The Imagination is theVeering-off. We live in a hopeless time;the same inadequate thing repeats and repeats. We are headed around just that old, dead circuit one more time—unlessthe Imagination can help us get off. Indeed, the Imagination is just the very stratagem of escape, of dare and evasion,the needful thing now. Through subtle dislocation,irony, the jolt and the jostle, we slip away, we outwit, we pussyfoot it into adifferent bed. Salvation istergiversation. We turn the backside andbolt.

Participation is finally the act ofbeing within. But within the purple ocean, the great plurality. The Many multiplies andopens up into giant vaginal blossoms of more and more. Things whip. We are become sheerdeflectionists from death.

The foil, meanwhile, remains stillin transcendence, untouched by the wheels of time. The well-formed Boy, my Ideal. The Logos. Incorrigibly outside.

2012-01-12T08:27:00.001-08:00

5546 Today we hear much of the splitbetween material nature and human culture. There are those who work hard to preserve Culture in the face ofscientific materialism. So the questionbecomes that of just what Culture is. Just for the hell of it, I will momentarily say it is that which is mostegregiously exemplified by The Western Canon. If you have read Harold Bloom, your hackles may have risen up on readingthat. Good. Here.

Here is a quote for Edgar Wind in Art and Anarchy: “If it is the highest wish of man to liveundisturbed, he might be well advised to remove art from his household.” High Culture, the Canon, is unsettling, tosay the least. It is among the firstbooks burned in Fahrenheit 451. Terror reigns. I’m all in favor of preserving such a thing,as should be obvious to anyone who has read my so-called writings. Yes, let the battle be engaged. The outcome is certain.

2012-01-12T07:51:00.001-08:00

5545 The being of the world divides intothe everyday and the metaphysical. The firstis full of life. It is busy and lovingand concerned. Time’s coming and goingreigns supreme. Doorbells ring. Difference is deferred. The second is outside of life, still,eternal, pure geometry, subtle. It isdifference differing into itself, the One. Here.

Those today who look to the spiritsoverhead, the cosmic aeons, our release from dead mechanism are, perhaps,trying to have it both ways. They speakof the Platonic Forms, but only slightly and obliquely, and of the chaotic fluxof the sensual, but they also have the souls, αι ψυχαι, the beings that mediatebetween perfect order and that terrible disorder. Between the One and the unthinkable many,there is our succor, the living minds. Will today's lovers of thought manage to have their sweetmeat and eat it too? I suppose they will manage as well as anyphilosophy has. Every philosophy failseventually. That is part of life. That is part of the eternal Order. I have been so close. The Boy was almost mine … and will beagain. A way out does seem to be athand. Or I have fallen into metaphysicalmadness.

2012-01-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

5544 There are two ways of looking atthe world. I think every philosophy seesthat. One way is true and the other hasa bit of slippage in it. That fall fromthe heights may be devastating or it may be no more than play or an ad hoc help. I also have named it in my philosophy. I have called it the difference between the everydayworld and the Ontological. The ordinaryboy and the Boy. The Buddhists have agreater and a lesser knowing. The positivistshave science vs. metaphysics. And somany today have spiritual man contending with scientific materialism. There is always a division. A higher and a lower way.

I have, in the last few posts beencontending with those who believe in causality and agency and the freedom ofman's spirit. As I see it, those lastthings belong to the commonsense everyday way of looking at the world. They work just fine as vital concepts inordinary life; they may even be useful counter-balances to a too materialisticview. But they remain only of the everydayunderstanding; there are no such things in the higher, ontological realm (or do you think it is lower?). They are “ontic”, to use a Heideggerianword. It’s the same with the conditionedarising of Buddhism; there is no such thing, but it is useful as a lesser truththat opens the way toward a greater.

I write the Ontological, thetotally impractical, the anything-but of commonsense reality. If you are pragmatic and out to make theworld a better place to live in, ignore what I say. I am out of here.

2012-01-11T10:36:00.000-08:00

5543 Man as free agent. Camus, in TheRebel, thoroughly describes for us Man’s rebellion against God as anattempt to finally gain our freedom as thinking adults and win ourself-respect. The great upsurge of theWill in European philosophy in the last few centuries has had as it greatconcern the glory and the happiness of Man. No more is he to be shoved around by Nature or the Almighty. He would carve out a place for himself. He would look inside himself and find a freeand capable being. He would no longer bea child of incorrigible forces. He woulddevise a God who left him alone to succeed or fail as he chose of his owndoing. And to that end man must be afree agent. He is an agent, a doer, amaker in his own right.

There are again those now who seemto be taking away Man’s hard won freedom and power. Scientific materialism wants to say that Manis thrown about by causes beyond him and it is hopeless to rebel. Man seems to be on the verge of losing hisvalue. His esteem was just steam. He floats on the quantum waves. So some are fighting back, defending the veryidea of free agency to the hilt of their sword. But I think it will fail, because they are relying on an idea, that ofagency, that is false. It is also falsein matter. There is no agency, spiritualor material. Or so I would argue. But can man find glory in that?

Unlike the materialists, who wantto say that Man is subject to the agency of matter. I would say that man issubject to the act of existence that is God. Man is done and undone, not by matter, but by a Divine Being. And so it now appears that I am back withthose against whom the Rebels rebelled in the first place, the religionists. I have put Man back under the hand ofGod. Where is his self-esteem. Has he once again lost his manhood; is he nowa child again? No, but he is being takenby a rapacious Lover. We are in adangerous place, liable to being crushed by an overwhelming Love. We are not free. And there is no power to act in ourbodies. We are taken by the Sky and wewill be consumed.

I am well aware that others willfind this not only demeaning but absurd.

2012-01-11T05:53:00.001-08:00

Never look fixedly at one who hascharm,

Beware of the consequences of sucha look!

How many did we see become the victimsof love,

On account of a look, which Destinybrought about!

Since you have looked once, do notthen look again,

For frequently a look engenderssuffering!

IbnAt-Talla

Oh you, the burning lustre of whoseface took part

Of my life, and moistened thatlustre with my blood:

I looked at him and he parried myglance

With his eye like a spear piercingmy throat:

You, fawn of Hima, prevented my eyefrom sleep,

And have darkened my days, thoughyou’re my morn.

Ibn Al-Binni

2012-01-11T04:01:00.001-08:00

5542 Matthew David Segall wrote, “ … cognition [goes] out of the head and into thefeelings of the whole body … mind isnot a disembodied rational agency located at some vanishing point behind orbefore the material world … mind is erotic. Such an embodiment account of mind still makes agency a bit of a mysteryin a world of creatures otherwise swimming in and so conditioned by theirexperience of other creatures and the outside world. We have to reach into therealm of the spiritual if we hope to find a way out of the dilemma of agency."

Like so many of his continentaltradition, he actually believes in mind, the rational mind, as agent. And then after coming up with this piece offantasy, he wonders how he can get rid of it.

Being a strong believer in PlatonicForms and bare particulars as the ground of my being and indeed of the wholeworld, I see the mind and the whole plenum of material things as totallypassive to those divine entities. They comeat me and the other naked things and we are taken over. That is ontological grounding. There is no such thing as a “rational agent”. Problem solved, a way out has been found.

With Brentano and Husserl and the philosophy of the Act we were on the philosophical heights. Then under the heavy hand of the German Will the Act transmogrified into activity and agent and now neural actants. From the heights to the pits. Dead weight.

We may yet be able to slough it off and again be naked.

2012-01-10T10:34:00.001-08:00

5541 Here is another thought for us toanalyze: He said: My cheek is a flowerin bloom, my eyes are an unsheathed, sharp sword guarding that flower frombeing culled. The thought and the wordscan be easily separated and the thought can be then put into a differentlanguage. In fact, that one went fromHispano-Arabic to English, well or badly, I don’t know, but I got it. In poetry we do feel the wavering, theoscillation, back and forth between form and content, meaning and expression. It’s a hypnotic dance. If that back and forth doesn’t exist the poemlacks. Still, for all that the twopartners are not one. The differencemust be maintained. Just as it is inmind and body. I am a dancingdualist. The monists are thetwo-left-footed. The god eventually culls.

2012-01-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

5540 What is a thought? Usually today’s philosophically mindedthinkers think of a thought as some sort of image; they imagine a scene andsuppose it is embedded in the brain. That,of course, will not do, if you but think about it. We are, alas, still too much under thecontrol of the British sensualists. Howcould you ever make such an image of this thought: “What is a thought?” or “That,of course, will not do.” or “We are,alas, still too much … .” or “How couldyou ever … ?” ? You did think them rightnicely I presume when you first read them and you, I feel confident, had noimage in your mind/brain, or if you did it was superfluous. I think you were even very able to understandthose last three, throwaway words just as a quick, imageless thought. You know right well what a thought is; youare that. Therefore, if you exist, thenthey do.

Now then, thoughts come and go andrepeat. If fact, you and I often havethe same thoughts, maybe not in the same sequence but quite literally the samethought, though we may have had different images associated with them. For example, have you ever thought, “I’m sureI can still get enough tooth paste out of this tube one more time.” That thought has been around the block a fewtimes. Literally the same thought,exemplified by so many different minds. Thoughtsare universals. And they are simple—justdo a little introspection and you will see that they happen in an instant andthey have no parts; they are a simple one thing. That is Kant’s Transcendental Unity. Only the facts that they are of are complex—and,of course, their expression in words and other symbols is also. It’s awonder to behold. Remember, images and words arenot the thought. Look around them andsee it. Whether you speak English orTelegu or Azeri, the thought is the same one thing. You only need L’esprit subtil et l’espritgeometrique to capture it.

2012-01-09T03:12:00.001-08:00

5539 Continuing on with my ideas as theyentangle with the ideas of Matthew David Segall, and after having slept on it,I now think that his thinking about thinking matches my concerns in thatprevious piece about the lover wanting the real thing and not just an image. I’m trying to maintain a scholar’sobjectivity. Which is impossible. Nonetheless, here goes. He is a representationalist trying hard notto be a representationalist. Idealist,materialist, representationalist—it’s all the same. And so I’m back where I started.

A representationalist is one whobelieves that we “know” reality, not by means of the mind’s direct intimate contactwith the real, but by means of representations, images, messages, faintshadowings that have somehow come from that real thing, that thing only dimlyseen as in a mirror. He says that thatis the situation the philosopher, in his everyday philosophizing, finds himself in, there with those abstractions and they are dead things. We both agree, representations, shadows onthe wall of the cave, mere lifeless thought-mechanics, will never satisfy thereal, erotic thinker. Therefore, as, perforce, a representationalist, a state of being forced on him by this world, hestruggles mightily to cast off these dead abstractions and finally reach the Real. He goes inward. He goes to the Self of the self. He finds the Christ. The Spirit. He finds God. Surely that is the Real. He escapes the idealist,materialist, representationalist way. I haveno doubt but that he really does. But I wonderabout something else.

What words will he use to describethis being, or Being, that he has found in the far recesses deep in himself so in love with the Christ-Self? I have used the erotic words asfound in The Dark Night of the Soul,but, I suspect, he will not. He willfind something.

I would like to recommend to him Karl Barth's book on Anselm, who famously said that God is that than which there can be no greater. The point being that it is greater to be both within and without the mind than only within. The inner idea of God (with the necessity of logical argument) is just that. By going inward to Him you (therefore?) reach the outer real. It's a magical thought. But only in fides quaerens intellectum. It is, in faith, beyond the mere mechanics of logic. Words collapse.

2012-01-08T17:55:00.000-08:00

5538 I just had a short, sweet exchangewith a visionary young man. His approachto philosophy is so very different from mine that I doubt he will find muchinterest in going on and I hardly know how I could speak about his vision. The two ways are just too divergent. Such is life. Anyway I have no interest in saying anything critical toward him. He has found a love there and what goes onwith that is none of my business. What hethinks of me is anybody’s guess; he never says. So I will talk instead about the Romantic Ideal as it was envisioned bythe great nineteenth poets.

"The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, Thesentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality. What portion inthe world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream Butdissipation and despair?"

William Butler Yeats : EgoDominus Tuus

He sees something that otherscannot see. And he is left here among those who refuse to see. His wordsbecome mangled … “I’ve gotten myself tangled up in the middle of this kind ofmess before, and so I’ll admit right off the bat that I cannot be sure whichcomes first, the thinking or the writing.” Who can help him? No one. Still, he does see something and we mustaccept that. I hardly know what else tosay.

Is he romantically, erotically inlove with that being in the vision? Yes,but love is also a terror to those who suffer under it. I suspect he at times tries hard, coldphilosophical calculation to work his way through the night. He may very well succeed. I am speaking, of course, only generally ofthe old poets. Anything else isoff-limits to me. “Death is always myown. I die alone … “ I have my ownstruggle with love to endure and it is vastly different so I will leave itthere.

2012-01-08T08:50:00.000-08:00

5537 In my last posting, I surprisedmyself by landing in thoughts about the rising Aryan Forms. I did that probably because I was writing tosomeone who is very much immersed in his historical setting. He is a player in the philosophical circuit. I often wish I could be, but it isn’t tobe. Today that rush is all about so muchthat has come down to us through German philosophy and that cannot bedisassociated from the Vedas. The Germansare the great Indologists. There aremany reasons why that is, but it is so. Andanyone who plays the game must play the game. I think I have done due diligence while I havebeen in court as a silent watcher. Even nowBarfield and Steiner loom large. They have,in fact, eclipsed Husserl. I really don’tknow what will come of it. They are Schelling-esquePlatonists from the Timeus, while I ama lover-manqué from the Phaedrus. History has us throttled. I recently wrote that the Vedas glisten withdripping sexuality, but that is probably too much to mention here … and now.

MDS, that ever fascinating guy, ishimself the aesthetic object of Hindu interest.

2012-01-08T08:38:00.000-08:00

5536 “I do so only to acknowledge, with Plato, that knowing is anerotic activity - mds.” I agree. It’s also biblical. And it is,for all that, a difficult idea. There isreally too much, much too much, that could be said about it; so I will pick outone little point and go with that. The lover,more than anything, wants the real beloved before him and not just messagesfrom that one, not pictures or souvenirs or promises of a return. He longs for that one, the only one, thething itself. (Excuse my non-genderedcircumlocutions; I’m trying to politely and respectfully accommodate what isn’tmine.) The lover, as a living mind, wants directaccess. When he (oh my a genderedpronoun) looks at his beloved he, most emphatically, doesn’t want to be lookingat electrical sizzles on his brain (even if they are ultimately caused by that one) and he doesn’t want to be looking atmental images or representations, deputies, vicars, of that one. He wants to see that one he loves. I thinkwe agree.

Now along comes the philosophical intellectual telling usthat it ain’t possible. We must restcontent with images of images of images of … until the cows turn blue. How did we get in this dire situation? Isn’t that the only one you love lying overthere on the bed? Can’t you see yourbeloved one directly? What’s theproblem? There is no problem. Philosophers often make problems where thereare none. They were concerned about otherthings and their representational theories just came along. Forget them; you see your beloved directly.

In order for such direct seeing totake place, there has to be a most intimate connector or nexus between theawareness that you are and that one. Otherwise, the world and love and everything are lost. Therefore the nexus exists. That very, very intimate tie. I look at something and I am intimately tiedto it by the nexus of intentionality. Infact, it makes no difference what I am looking at. I am just as much connected to the PacificOcean as I am to my own hand, when I gaze at it. And that connection, that nexus, is intimatelyonto the thing itself, not a mere image. Or so I insist. And that is my analysisof knowing. There are, of course, morethings to analyze about it, such as, the structure of thoughts and theirexpression in words and symbols. For nowthough, I just want to insist on the intimacy of the nexus of intentionality.

It seems to me that so many modernphilosophers, because of their nominalism and fear of reifying relations andconnectors, and their terror before the Priests of Science, have lost that tiein favor of the causal nexus. Through along chain of cause and effect we are made and become part of the cybernetic machineryof life. We are immersed and embeddedand entangled in the sea weeds of the Great Ocean. And messages come to us from far away. We know only the waters of Varuna—and maybethat has become the beloved thing. Toknow is to drown in dark, aryan dreams.

Sorry about that last part, but I thinkthe old Indo-European Forms are also asserting themselves. I have lived for some time among the Hindus(whom I greatly respect) and that religion, that supremely Aryan thing, isrising. (Varuna is Ouranos in Greek.) We are cut from one piece of cloth. The quote at the beginning, however, is from oneabout whom I know little, so I can’t say. I only know that he is in love with something very feminine; could it be La Femme Fatale, La Belle Dame sans Merci? What can I say? I am in love with the Boy. Gender matters. I ask him what he "knows". Does he know his beloved or a mere image ofthat? The question is urgent.

2012-01-06T17:20:00.001-08:00

5535 My writing is a type ofaestheticism. I think it is—I’m not onehundred percent sure. I do mean what I meanand that is important, but then again it is philosophy and philosophy is nextto nothing. Did you like thatsentence? For me, form is more importantthan content. Or the content is in factthe form. The form itself. Or Form Itself. Maybe not. I’m dancing; do you like my dance? Or the Boy is dancing. If you don’tknow who that is, then never mind. I ama writer of note. I nod and jot himdown; he comes. And I clean it up, i.e. Iedit his words. I eat his words. Slurp.

2012-01-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

5534 I do not use metaphors when I write. I speak directly about what is directlybefore my mind. And I suppose that is themetaphor I use to get what I want. I’m tiredof trying to rouse game with subterfuge. I want what I want. This and thenI want just exactly That. The thought istough. And tight. And the smooth skin of the argument is mindbreaking, but if you are bright enough, my dear, it is yours.

The Boy is my metaphor for theBoy. He is the end of my journey. The final thing. Nothing exists beyond that in all of time andspace or the ontological Jump. It isimpossible to get beyond the Beyond. TheMeta had no more meta. I am atrest. In my lover’s anxiety.

2012-01-04T16:25:00.001-08:00

5533 The Cartesian dualism of thinkingsubstance vs. extended substance gave way to the Kantian dualism of empiricalworld vs. creative spirit. The versuspart of that second one has mellowed now into a gentle incarnation. The eco-philosophers have tried to overcomeany antagonism between spirit and matter by means of a feminine soul orpsyche. The active spirit still acts onmatter but its enjoining is softened by going through that middle, third thingthat is both spirit and matter. Or somethinglike that; it isn’t a hard structure that spirit can grasp with reason. Feeling and love are there. No rigorous metaphysics. Atmospherics and mood prevail not the cut ofdialectical division. That way the destructivenessof the current masculine, capitalist way can be mitigated. I am uncomfortable around the whole idea, notbecause I think destroying the environment is the thing to do, but the suffocatinglypervasive femininity of it all is not my thing. So I will go off by myself. I think that will be demanded.

I also have something to say aboutthe use of causality, agent and activity that seems to always be a part of thatthinking; it is creativity, after all. Thereis no such thing. But that’s for nexttime.

So to whom am I writing when I writethis, who will be moved by it, and why do I feel the need to write it? I suppose I am writing to theeco-philosophers and their friends, but they will never read it. No one will be moved by it. And that I feel the need to write it is an emptyfeeling. Still, I write. I have written it before and I willagain. I write to the emptyheavens. I write to the emptiness. Emptiness. I simply write. Jesus sits nearbyunamused. He is never amused. He is the un-understandable, strangely eroticpointlessness of it all. I jab andwait. Nothing will come of it. Emptiness. But it is overwhelming. And itagain fills up.

2012-01-03T11:24:00.000-08:00

5532 Absurdism, creativity, Platonismand journalism. Here is a definition I foundin Wikipedia, the Fountainhead of Knowledge today: “Absurdism, therefore, is aphilosophical school of thought statingthat the efforts of humanity tofind inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because thesheer amount of information, including the vast unknown, makes certaintyimpossible.” According to thatdefinition, it is the act of looking that is absurd, because it will fail. That is not how I see it, nor, in my opinion,is that how Kierkegaard saw it. MaybeCamus did. Absurdism is, rather, the actof looking for inherent meaning ( and certainty or any other grand thing) inhumanity and, indeed, the world at large, and actually finding it in spite of all evidence to thecontrary. There is nothing absurd aboutlooking for something and not finding it. But there is about finding it even when you didn’t find it. A Kierkegaardian type story will maybe help.

Let’s suppose you are in love withsome guy. He is the meaning of yourlife. He is Beauty itself. Your love is certain. You have the thing itself. There is nothing beyond him. You have found the final thing. He exists. And in him, with him, you exist also. But your friends come up to you day and night telling you that love hasmade you blind. They constantly exhortyou to open your eyes and look, look hard; there is nothing there; he is atotal jerk and he is certainly no great beauty. You tell them that you know all that, but you still see what you see andyou believe beyond all seeing. End ofstory. Right there you are living the absurd. You have become an Absurdist. If you had given in to sound reason and plainevidence you would have been very reasonable and certainly anything but anAbsurdist. To fail to find meaning andall the other high things is not absurd. To find it in the face of all evidence to the contrary is.

Next come Kafka and Sisyphus. Every Kafkaesque character displays one andthe same quality. They persevere. In spite of finding no understanding andmeaning to what is happening to them, the simply go on. To just keep going on in spite of it all, inspite of knowing there is no reason for it, is absurd. It is folly. Only the Absurdist can do it. Ifyou are a hard-nosed realist and you see no reason to believe in God, noevidence for His existence, no desire to follow in His immoral ways, but youbelieve and follow anyway, then you are an Absurdist. And mad. Sisyphus kept pushing that heavy rock up the hill even though he knew itwould fall back and he would have to begin again. He kept at it. We have to turn away.

Now then creativity andPlatonism. If you look at the human body,you see rather quickly, if you are looking for a perfect model to draw, that weare a perpetually misshapen lot. None ofus, not one, has perfection, far from it. The artist always has to “fix up” what he finds. The Ideal is other. He reaches for it. Will he find it? Will this line put down on paper be the magictouch and there it is! Will the Idealappear at last? Or is it folly to thinkthat such a greatly misshapen thing can ever reveal Beauty itself, no matterhow “fixed up”. To look and see Beautywill make you an Absurdist in the eyes of the many. And you will, in truth, be just that. But not in Truth, a transcendent thing,another absurdity. Platonic Ideals areonly for the believer in spite of. TheAbsurdist. The one shunned and let go.

As for journalism, that is the mediumof hard truth in our time; it is where the Absurdist is shown just how wrong heis. Journalism is far removed from theAbsurd, the Ideal, the artistic search. It is the act of giving up.

2011-12-30T10:01:00.001-08:00

5530 The lover never knows for sure ifhis beloved really loves him. He lovesme; he loves me not. Because I ambeautiful; because I am not beautiful. Thuswe consort with Eros, the one who is forever neither beautiful nor not, neither ugly nor not, neither loved nor unloved, neither hated nor not, neither knowing nor unknowing, neither wise nor unwise, neither rich nor poor, neither eloquent nor plain,neither present nor absent, neither healthy nor sick, neither mad nor sane,neither neither neither, always in the impossible middle of nowhere atall. One cannot live there, but all oflife occurs just there. This is thedevastating philosophical dialectic. I operatethe levers well; I am totally incompetent. You understand me; you have understood nothing. We move on.

2011-12-30T09:39:00.001-08:00

5529 Certainty and uncertainty. So many people are angry at thefundamentalists because they seem so damn sure of their beliefs. Religious fundamentalists, politicalfundamentalists, self-help fundamentalists, new-age fundamentalists,interior-decorator fundamentalists and on and on. Everywhere there is a sure thing for someonein this age when uncertainty is so paramount. I, in the previous entry, insisted on the certainty of my sexualcravings and the certain power of the beauty standing before me. I crave that; therefore, that is. Thus I am a timely one. But I said I was the untimely. Everyone, for sure, is angry with me because Iam so damn sure of my thoughts on the matter. They insist on me acknowledging my uncertainty. Thus I am an untimely one. The game of certainty/uncertainty is beingplayed out viciously. I’m game. Come at me. But, if you are beautiful like Q, I will fight myself for you so that ina great conflagration of ideas only That will come out and come again.

Unlike the undeconstructed deconstructionists, I do not insist that only uncertainty is certain.

2011-12-30T05:37:00.000-08:00

5528 I want to say something aboutStephen King. I want to do that in spiteof my never having read him, so it won’t be much, but I think, nonetheless,that I do know a thing or two about him and it will be enough. He is, for me, a typical fantasy writer. Fantasy, dark fantasy, is built around a somethingthat goes bump in the night. The centralfeeling is uncertainty. Is there aneveryday, scientific explanation for it or is it demonic? Drop by drop the uncertainty increases. Shimmering, shivering uncertainty. What is it? That is not what I know in life. Iknow blinding certainty.

The central feeling in my life isoverpowering sexual desire. I am hardand fast in love. The bright Sun of thebeautiful boy has me in tight, willing bondage. I am undone by an intense, known presence. No nighttime bumps, no uncertainty, noquestions. I know blinding certainty. I know fire. I want That. Not the creeping dampness.

Today’s shadow religion ofthreatening demons is meaningless to me. Again, because I fall so powerfully into love and my sexual desire is so strong I amdriven, per force, to the old religion. That god has me in thrall. Andall that is then a sacrificial killing—as is every true religion. In this Eucharist of passion I finally eatthe flesh and drink the blood of Him. AndI arrive. Questions about the truth ormeaning of this are laughable. It simplyis.

Thus I am the untimely. Uncertainty defines our time.

2011-12-29T07:36:00.001-08:00

5527 Creativity is the word on everyone’slips today. We will use it to get us outof this crisis in civilization. It isloved because somehow it is supposed to rise up out of the beautiful power ofthe Imagination. But no one knows forsure and no one can give a good definition of it. We can only hope someone has it and can useit for the good. We need it and want it …but, alas, I fear we fight it every time it appears.

Today what we really value isscientific precision and journalistic accuracy. Any student who fails at either is let go. Academia now is a sub-branch of the media andwe keep a close eye out for truth and honesty. All your papers and videos must tell it like it is. RealityCheck will verify it. You are bound.

Creativity is thus cut short. Those who were let go walk the streetsalone. But they were the ones weneeded. Creativity is quite simply amistake, a small error that bloomed into the newest arrival from Eternity. When your boss or your teacher humiliates youbecause you screwed up and the others laugh, it is right then that you become achild of the gods. You cannot belong toboth here and that other place. Beware ofthe gods; they live in the untimely times we nod into error. Because of them you will be let go. It has nothing to do with theImagination. It is the blank rightbefore you come where everyone is watching.

2011-12-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

54 Being isa majestic thing, lovely and terrible. We are made from its substance and we have its properties.

We are set apart and frightfulthings. Like Him, our desire isoverwhelming. Like Him we Know.

We are down, in absolute bondageto That. The angels too are in love withus. We are the locus of the revelationof Beauty.

Through Him our flesh is becomingHis. Who can imagine what we are goingthrough? This place is so sweet. Kisses surpassing wisdom.

Our contact with the real isdirect. We are not of those who havemerely heard about it. This is It. This is Opening Night. The Light coming out of the darkness is allaround us. We are glorious. Swoon before our Power. The Thighs of this Lover will irresistiblydraw your mind.

This is the land of danger. One wrong move and you are entirelyundone. Who is going to hold you inexistence? Totally appealing existence. Who's going to save you? You are so pretty, who do you belong to?

Who's going to protect you fromall the Forms of Being? Who's going toimmerse you right in them? Who's goingto look at you and see how beautiful you are? Who's going to help you understand what terrible, lovely thing hashappened to you? This is no time forhumility; we have to dare to say what's really going on here. The heart is waiting for a hero bold enoughto receive it.

2011-12-29T01:58:00.001-08:00

999 At thislate date in the history of the incoming of the leveling of the Logos, theTechnos, and the Fire. After so manymonks and scholars and lovers have repeated, repeated, repeated the same words,naming the same eternal things, all one voice, one word, one heartbreak. Before the last turning, and it isfinished. In this late night attempt tothink, to reach that thing yet unthought, that one thing, thatunreachable. That thing that I havediscovered I have already thought and reached many times always the same, goneinto my past, sweet memory, existing because right now I have laid It out, themany voices one voice, then and to come, down, here in black ink. Time typing playing around my movingfingertips. A thread pulled out of my spinning mind. My mind a momentary exemplification of theone brooding, thinking, laughing, leveling, reaching, sweet heartbreak. My date for the night. I – a bare simple this that he comes in andfills up. I – the form of every this andthat he has ever lain with, and chanted with, and thought with and tried toreach himself through. The end ofhistory. The last syllable on his lips.

If you have the courage, and you really do love me, we canargue, argue, argue trying to disentangle this. That is the kind of love play philosophy seeks.

2011-12-28T10:39:00.001-08:00

5526 Today, when most philosophers speakof realism, they mean representational realism and not direct realism. I am the second and it seems to me that thefirst is a hopeless last-ditch attempt to overcome the idealism they havetrapped themselves within. Along withthe idealists they (foolishly) admit that all the phenomena we directlyexperience are “in the mind”. Color andfragrance and pain and happiness and the smoothness of fine surfaces are all “inthe mind”. The sweetness of mangos, thethrill of a secret glance, the heaviness of sorrow, the lightness of failure,nighttime joy are all “in the mind”. Itverily turns out that everything they experience is “in the mind”. They have settled in hard with the idealists,but how to get out? They hit upon theidea that all these feelings and knowings are impressions left on the brain byunseen tiny particles. Electrons whirlabout and, violà, love happens and they experience a day at the park. Things “in the mind” are representatives, deputiesof whirling, little, tiny particles. Andthey will use that idea to ground realism. It’s a poor ground. It’s aphilosophy on the verge of giving up. What to do? They should haveadmitted that when they looked at the face of that boy and smelled his hair,that they were really looking at the face of that boy and smelling hishair—none of it was merely “in the mind”.

2011-12-28T09:12:00.001-08:00

5525 One of my favorite philosophers isNagarjuna. He is an extreme nominalistand I am an extreme ontological realist. We are opposites; he is my antipode. His vision is of the empty desert. Mine is of the teeming Asian bazaar. Those two visions come together when you realize that the desert hasalways been , no, could have been filled with hallucinations, mirages and erotic dreams of nighttimeimaginings. And in the bazaar, whereboys wait in dark doorways, all the thoughts of silent rooms vanish in the tumultand clamor of the hawker’s screams. Everythingis; even nothing is not. Being is andnon-being is not. With that saying,Parmenides set philosophy off down the cruel road of philosophical love. The logic is inextricably tight. Go here. How are we to think it?

Shen-hsui wrote –

The body is the Bodhi-tree

The mind is like a clear mirror.

At all times we must strive to polish it

And must not let the dust collect.

Hui-neng (secretly contradicting Shen-hsui) wrote –

The Bodhi originally has no tree.

The clear mirror also has no stand.

From the beginning not a thing is.

Where is there room for dust?

I, the radical realist, consort with the boy of radical nihilism. It somehow seems right. The Boy is thoroughly incorrigible.

2011-12-28T07:50:00.001-08:00

5524 I often mention bare particulars inmy writing and I usually think that my readers will skip over it with a blankin their mind. Those academic types whoknow what I am talking about mostly roll their eyes in disbelief. I trod on.

Bare particulars, in my philosophy,ground the just-that-one of the thing before you. Look about and pick out an object. It has properties and it fits into a networkof relations. Nonetheless, none of that,no matter how they are agglutinated, will together make for just thatparticular one there. Or consideryourself. Surely a different personcould have had all of your properties and he wouldn’t have been you. You are just you, a particular beyond allproperties. That affair of being justthat particular beyond all properties is the bare particular. Surely if you enter into the stifftumescence of the philosophical dream that you are you will understand. The others already see you there, but in an unseeingthey refuse to admit.

Now for some history. Usually it was said that matter individuatedthe Forms. Matter was withoutproperties, but could take on properties. It was originally one mass of thick, hard stuff. Hyle. Thensometime in the middle ages someone shattered it with the hammer of thought. Now all those splinters without propertiesare maybe my bare particulars, maybe not. You could compare it to the idea of a field in physics. In Relativity theory, space-time is a smoothcontinuum, but in quantum field theory it is discrete pieces. In both cases, it is without sensualproperties. Physics is puregeometry. Matter and form unite in purethought. It’s too bad that I have tocome along and bother it with my erotic dreams.

2011-12-28T06:02:00.000-08:00

This is really long, but, hey, I am a really good writer (not to mention philosopher and dancer) and you SHALL enjoy reading it. I have tried not to make myself too clear. Whatever. Doing philosophy is like trying to pick up a python with a sense of humor.

3100 Let us say that itwas Galileo who started the long process of mathematicizing the materialworld. In order to explain that let medraw a distinction between a mathematical form and matter. I will begin with Aristotle and first hisview of matter and then with his view of the ideal of language, which at thatideal extreme becomes mathematics.

Matter is thickand dark stuff, in stillness and unconscious self-containment. Hyle. Far removed from that are the clear statements of an ideal language. By clear I mean thoroughly transparent. And by that I mean that the words of suchclear statements do not call attention to themselves, absolutely do not presentthemselves as things to be viewed, but rather point beyond themselves to theirmeaning. Such thoroughly cleartransparent sentences are the formula of mathematics. One could say that they are in the light ofpure understanding. Sentences that docall attention to themselves are called poetry or poetic prose; they becomeliterature. Literature is thereforeopaque; it has a certain darkening or twilight feel. Literature is feeling, as opposed to theclear openness of scientific reason. Scientific statements ideally have no tendency to stop the movement ofthe mind and call attention to themselves.

Themathematicizing of the material world took the heaviness out of matter andsubstituted in its place mathematical formula. Light replaced darkness. The puremovement of transparent thought replaced inert dead stuff. Mathematics de-materialized the world.

I apologize forthis somewhat literary presentation of things; I love the "feel" ofthe sentence. I love the rhythms oflanguage. Therefore, I am more of theshadows. It turns out that I am more ofa materialist that are the high-flying scientifically minded of today. I think maybe they are flying a little tooclose to the Sun. It seems to me that inaddition to "pure" mathematical form, we also need thick matter forit to cling to. I am claiming an impurething. And here, in such an unscientificfashion, I have called attention to myself. I have not served the Light of high abstract thought by disappearinginto it. I am a tumescent thickness. This is an erotic writing.

Today the ideal isto completely transform the darkness into light. The material universe becomes theinstantiation of mathematical formula. It becomes a book to be read, a book that has no hard cover or thickpages, no black ink, a book in which each sentence is as nothing of itself,sentences completely transparent pointing on to other sentences, of the ideallanguage, pure logic, pure mathematics. Light of light. A resplendentplace. Aristotle's pure thought thinkingof pure thought. These words are likethe second person of the Trinity, the Logos, the Word, the self-effacing thing,the thing that completely yields to that First One. It is important to remember that, like that,a mathematical formula is literally nothing of itself.

And now thereversal, Aristotle's words are thus:

"Style to begood must be clear, as is proved by the fact that speech which fails to conveya plain meaning will fail to do just what speech has to do. … naturalness ispersuasive, artificiality is the contrary; for our hearers are prejudiced andthink we have some design against them, as if we were mixing their wines forthem."

With that beganthe argument that has lasted for 2300 years. Style should not be noticed; style that shows, that is noticed, becomesthe primal crime, the first act of immorality, deception!

The amazing thingis that Aristotle undoes what he says almost as soon as he said it. It concerns the word"naturalness". In Greek thatis from phuein, meaning to grow, our word physical. And artificial is from plasso, plastic. The problem is that words and writings don'tgrow "naturally". And soAristotle continues, "a writer must disguise his art and give theimpression of speaking naturally and not artificially." The clarity, it turns must be noticed, but ina non-noticeable way.

And so it is withthe pure mathematics of today's pure physics. I fear it is all artifice. Insidious style has crept into "physics talk", into"journalese", into hip "techno-speak". It has crept in unnoticed, as it should. That is partly because the writers andspeakers of it have not wanted to learn about or believe in such things. Deception is not their game. Mathematical purity is the air in which theyfly. They are, like the angels, clothedin radiant intellectual light. Thatturns them, of course, into the calm masculine ideal, far above the teemingemotions of dark feminine matter. Infact, they have become the distant governors of that lower world – until it isfinally banished. Perhaps they want to turnthemselves into the clear mathematical networking of artificial intelligence. Are they trying to make dark gray-matter,bodily ooze, yield to the control of pure form? They want to be the Mathematical, as translucent as the afternoon sky. In Sanskrit the word for sky is Dyaus, whichin Greek is Zeus. A calm Apollonianstate in which the drunken Dionysian revelry and butchery of Nature isovercome. But it's a trick. A natural artificiality, an artificialnaturalness, is nothing at all.

Personallyspeaking, my first love in life was mathematics and geometry. I loved its perfection and its pureluminosity. I still do. But back then I also loved the seductiverhythms of the King James Bible and the literature that came from it - and Iwas filled with sexual feelings. Therealms of light and twilight realms mingled. I know the difference and I know how they play together. Light is one thing, desire is another. Desire darkly desires the thing of light.

If you are aserious man engaged in serious work, I pay attention to the end you have inmind. I have my mind, along with you,fixed on the purposeful accomplishment of your actions. That is to say that I have respect for you, Isee you as an honorable man. But let'ssuppose that I step back in the shadows and I watch, not for the end of youractions, but I notice the grace, the style, with which you move, the beauty ofyour languid form as you sit on your chair, the flair that you have put in yourhair, the softness of your speech, the glint in your eye, your finelysculptured hand, and on and on. Then yourear up against me as having an immoral eye. I have become like a woman. Ihave ignominiously abandoned the masculine ideal. I can now see things. This is close to, if not actually, a crime,the primal crime of watching. Youractions, a kind of language, are no longer transparent; they no longerdisappear of themselves in favor of their distant meaning. Now you have become opaque and you havestyle.

It's impossible togive a perfect definition of a mathematical formula, but I will jab at it. Let us say that it is a function, anotherultimately indefinable thing, and a function is a mapping of one range ofvariables, one pattern, onto another. D=VT. Distance equals velocitytimes time. Velocity and time are mappedonto each other and distance is that. Always a third thing is, arises, from the mapping of two things. Usually it happens that each of those firsttwo things is itself a third from a previous mapping. The very being of each and every thingfinally is that it arose from the overlaying of some other thing onto yetanother. Light from the window strikesmy cupped hand and a rabbit's shadow appears on my wall. That shadow, that rabbit, is then a functionof my hands and light. The veryexistence of everything is from a function of x and y. Of course, these functions grow large and theuniverse is extremely complex, but mathematics in the incarnation of a simpleturing machine, can simulate it all. Infact, the whole universe is finally only the formula, the software, of thatethereal machine, the hardware having yielded to complete analysis. Pure light. The world is rational. A grandratio of every x to every y, which are themselves only ratios. Nothing really exists. This is the conditioned arising of Buddhism. OM Mane Padme OM.

When I criticizethe scientifically, materialistically, minded for having the self trapped inthe dark ooze of the brain, I seem to have missed their point. They have translated the brain out of beingmere gray matter into being the bright transparent light of mathematicalnetworks. There is no entrapment: thereis, in fact, no "thick" self at all. Only light upon light.

I have always beenone to find existents all about. Universals, logical connectors, bare particulars, sets and numbers andall manner of quantifiers. Each is a"that" thing itself. To onewho sees only functions of things, mappings and arisings, the restless movementof inter-relating, such stopping and gazing at an existent is nonsense,irrational, not a ratio of x to y generating z.

The questionbecomes just what this mathematicizing is. It has something to do with being a well-formed formula, the notion ofrules for manipulating the formula, and with the nexus of inference from oneformula to another. We seem tounderstand these things. They areperspicuous in their essence, if not wholly in their definition. We do understand. They are, we might say, self-evident. They shine with their own light. And here we reach the limits of thought. We know, but we don't know how we know.

Scientific writinggenerally doesn't bother itself with trying to define such basic things. In fact, it shuns the inevitable poeticmetaphors that have usually been seen hanging around this now largely forsakenpart of town. The old run down part oftown in which I still live. The newwealthy part long ago forgot that we are here. It blithely lives in the light without questioning it.

If you compare mywriting to so-called scientific writing, you will see that at least mine is notfilled with long-winded, mind-bending jargon. I am direct. The object of mygaze is right before me and you. Afrightening thing, a mysterium, the old God run amuk in the new world of neuralnetworks.

Today, at thislate date in the history of thought, the physical world is no longer seen asconsisting of dark primal matter and irrational forces all subject to atranscendent intelligence. Today allthat has been replaced by an unimaginable, multi-dimensional space controlledsolely by the topological operators that structure it. Even time itself, that great god of the past,has given way to statistical superpositioning. This is the total geometricization, mathematicization, of matter. Heady stuff.

Perhaps the mostintricately formed piece of space we know is the human brain. It is a sort of microcosm of the greatermacrocosm. That is to say it is able tosimulate the whole. As a computer modelcaptures the greater thing, the topology of the brain becomes a miniaturepicture the whole. Or perhaps I shouldsay it represents to itself the whole from one perspective. The whole recapitulates itself in a piece ofitself. Such are the wonders of higherorder geometry.

And now for thequestion of our awareness of that. Isthat piece of space that is the model of itself the proper definition ofawareness? Perhaps not, I can easilyimagine a picture of something, however complex, not being aware of what it isthe picture of or of its being a picture. Models, pictures, representations, simulations are not awarenesses. Even a higher order modeling of a model,picturing of a picture, ever cybernetically looping into itself more and moretightly, even that is not necessarily an awareness. There is something more toan awareness than all that. An awareness"feels" different. Being ableto feel those subtle differences and keep them all in order is the task of theintelligent mind.

Let us try to dowhat Wittgenstein said we couldn't do. Let's try to speak of the picturingness of a picture. How does a picture picture? We look at the picture and then we look overto the pictured and we see how well they match. That isn't so difficult when it comes to a painting or a photograph; butwhen it comes to mathematical formula and language, it is more so. Neural networks, as images of puremathematical forms and also of the world, are halfway between. Neural networks seem to be the nexus, theplace where pure geometry and outer spatial geometry meet. Half pure mathematics, half one with thepeculiarity of a particular place. Butthat doesn't really answer the question of how the pure forms of mathematicspicture the outer world. I suppose onecould try to deny that there are such pure forms, that mathematics is"of" the physical world. That,however, doesn't match our "feel" for what mathematics is.

The brain is notthe same as mathematics; no finite computing machine can "model" allof mathematics. Mathematics, if there issuch a thing, is more than what the brain, any brain, can contain. Goedel proved that. If we can think mathematics, that is to say,if there is no part of it necessarily inaccessible to us, then we are more thana brain. Likewise, if the fitting, thematching, between mathematics and the world cannot be finitely defined, and wedo know it then we are more than a brain. Can the ability of mathematics to picture the world be mathematicallydefined, or is it transcendent to mathematics? Is it a trans-mathematical thing? Can we speak the essential thing about language - to picture theworld? Wittgenstein said that languagecannot speak that languageness of language – its ability to "capture"its meaning. The essence of language isineffable.

Still, we haven'treached awareness. It may be true thatthe ability to use language is intimate with consciousness, but it is not thesame thing as consciousness. I amstrongly of the opinion that awareness is irreducible to anything else; it issui generis, it is just awareness. I amalso of the opinion that mathematics cannot be reduced to anything else. It is just mathematical form and that'sthat. It is there whether we or anyoneelse are aware of it or not. And bothconsciousness and mathematical form have something about them that is beyondtime. Moreover the metaphor of Lightfits them aptly.

_____________

(O,(O,(O,(O))))… … … …

The emptiness,like the empty set of set theory, through a constant attempt to contain itself,doubling back on itself, enfolding itself and twisting into itself in thetorque and vectored juttings of dynamic space, manifold arisings out of nothinginto a vast multi-layered something, droplets replicating itself falling ontothe febrile ground that is itself receiving itself. It covers itself with itself in a cyberneticloop, watching itself. And blossoms intopetals covering petals covering petals covering stamen and My what style youhave, my Lord. It is the Boy fallinginto his mirrors, into the world. Theone Form stimulates itself endlessly in this and that and that and that. It is the Being of Being opening inwardlyout. In an adolescent back-turning.

Emptiness looms inthe breast of a boy. It is Phanes. It is his vain primping, the anguishedconcern about the lay of a curl, his worry about being seen/unseen. He is the groundless ground of our vexed attention. Tension.

There is no comingto terms with this nothing that nothings. I have given my whole self to that and now I am that. And I am a bloodied mouth. From the constant pulling back on the bit toreign in the dark horse of desire, I am half exhausted. I have been ravaged by beauty. And I have not tended to my duties and myproperty well. In fact, I now have notproperty at all. But I will go on. I still hope to rise to the empyreanplane. I hope for the vision of beautynaked. In the silence. But now I have this blood on me. My own blood eucharistically trickling downinto me. How does one deal with a boy's empty longing? The Light is blinding. The mantic stimularcum. There's no way to clean it up; this ismathematics.

2011-12-28T00:52:00.001-08:00

5523 Consider, out there in your starrymind, four boys walking into a restaurant while you dreamily watch. That Platonically analyzes into four bareparticulars and one universal Form of Boy. Plus the number (not numeral) four and class and a whole zoo of otherontological denizens of far intellectual glory. The world breaks up into strange other-things. Maybe you don’t, but I find thatthrilling. And, of course, I am in lovewith that one Form of Boy, my maddening god, but that is neither here northere—quite literally.

Now consider the philosophicalschema of realism, nominalism, conceptualism. Plus realism, idealism, materialism. All of that is another breaking-up. Orout. Down into your nodding in front ofthat computer screen. So many things tothink about and try to manage. Ormanhandle. Or be manhandled by. Being has you in thrall. It’s a trip.

Philosophy is alwaysschematical. Broad abstractions and atwilight falling off into another place. There your eternal lover waits. Orare you afraid to believe the obvious. (ob-viam is Latin for in or against the way. He sits along the road. Which again is neither here nor there noranywhere in the everyday.) The timelessand placeless and marginal things from the marshes.

A conceptualist will undoubtedly respond in exasperation by telling me that all that is just "your own personal view of things", mere ideation, concepts, and nothing real. A transcendental idealist will add that I have projected it out onto the world (or shoved it out with a little mental hand) and thus surreptitiously and even deviously created it for myself. A materialist will just roll his eyes and wonder how anyone could be so unmodern. All of which means that things are as I have described them.

It’s 3:00 am (not 12:52) and I’m going back tobed.

2011-12-28T00:25:00.000-08:00

Here is something I wrote in my off-handed way for a very quick young thinker. I have added more considerations. They come after, which is before in blogland backwardness.

Platonic realism. Imagine you are sitting in a restaurant andin the evening twilight you are casually watching the scene. You notice a young man enter, a real looker,you are enchanted. He takes a seat andwaits. Soon you see another; they greeteach other. Then another; it’s agathering. OMG, another comes in andthey are all together. Something ishappening; the night is on. And you,lost in contemplation, become philosophical. Oh my, how do we assay that scene? What is the ontological analysis? What was really, really there? Let me lay it out.

Four boys or young men or whateveryou want to imagine are before you; I will call them boys because it is easierto write. Four boys together. And now there are three ways to ontologicallylook at it. 1) Realism, 2) nominalismand 3) conceptualism.

1. Fourparticulars with the same property of Boy. The particulars are bare, i.e. separate from all properties. The one property Boy is a real thing, i.e.not mental, different from the particulars that exemplify it. And, of course, there is the intimate tie ornexus of exemplification that unites particular and property. That property is also called a Form or auniversal.

2. Four particulars with the same property ofBoy. The particulars are not bare. The one property Boy is only a name (nominumin Latin), a word we have learned to apply to certain things. No need for a nexus. Only individuals exist, not universal Forms. (a grid of words)

3. Four particulars with the same propertyBoy. The particulars are not bare. The one property Boy is a concept we apply tothe individuals. We abstract itaway. The nexus is perhaps “fallsunder”. The four individuals fall underthis one concept. Concepts are only ormerely in the mind. Only individualsreally exist.

Let me add that universal Forms ofRealism are not in space and time, only the particulars. It would be meaningless to say that the FormBoy is here or there and now or then. TheForm just is.

Historically, those are the mainphilosophical positions that philosophers have argued about. Or course, 2 and 3 are the main ones you hearmost people asserting, the “common sense” approach. But that common sense approach will not holdup under logical analysis. I will arguefor 1. But first another consideration.

The main question of philosophy isWhat is the mind, sometimes called consciousness or soul or spirit or self orawareness? There are again threealternatives. 1) Realism 2) idealism 3) materialism.

1. The mind exists, the material world exists andthey are two different and independent things. (connected by the very intimate nexus of intentionality)

2. Only the mind really exists—the material worldis an idea in the mind, i.e. dependent on it.

3. Only the material world exists—the mental world,mind, is a brain process, i.e. dependent on matter. Indeed, the word “mind” is just anabbreviated way of speaking about very complex chemical activity. Consciousness, mind, as such doesn’t exist.

There have not been any majorphilosophers who were materialists. Thatis mainly a philosophy for non-philosophers. Nonetheless, it is the unthinking popular belief of today, scientificmaterialism.

I have taken Realism in bothcases. I am not a materialist because Iam not looking at electrical activity on my brain—I am looking at four boys ina restaurant. I am not an idealistbecause those four boys are not just ideas in my mind. They are real and I see them.

I am not a nominalist because theyare not the same merely because I have applied the same word to them; they arethe same because they are the same. Theyshare the one form of Boy. I am not aconceptualist because to say the one concept applies to them begs the questionof why all the many concepts of Boy in my mind at different times and in otherpeople’s minds are the same. We wouldneed a concept to unite concepts. Andthat goes on ad infinitum piling up. TheForm Boy exists and it isn’t just a momentary thing in my mind.

Four boys walk into a restaurantand that is exactly what it is. Fourparticulars and the one abstract Form. Letthe arguments begin! Later we candiscuss the existence of classes and number. (Yes, they too exist.)

2011-12-27T11:48:00.001-08:00

5521 Whatever is presented to my mind’seye exists. That could be called thePrinciple of Presentation. Whatever isthinkable exists. That is another way ofsaying the same thing. Are there thingsthat are not presented or thinkable? Whoknows? Maybe. The greater question concerns just what arethe basic kinds of things that present themselves. The answer is long and complicated, but thatis the joy of thought.

Does the Empire State Buildingexist? Yes. Does the winged-horse Pegasus exist? Yes. Does the number Three exist? How aboutthe connector “and” or the color red or happiness and the Good or thought ordemocracy or heaviness and sleep or meaning and punctuation or … on and on allthe way to anything and everything abstract or concrete you can think? Yes, it all exists. Moreover, some of those are facts (complexities) which aresometimes pervaded by Actuality (another existent) or Potentiality (yetanother). Anything you can think. It’s all there. But what is that thing the There? Good question.

Such is extreme Realism. Which may also be called (why not?) extreme Empiricism. The Boy, the There, the Intense.

2011-12-27T03:21:00.000-08:00

5519 Owen Barfield was taken with theideas of Rudolf Steiner. It seems thattoday many other young thinkers are also caught up in that attempt at a scienceof the spirit. As such, it is alignedwith the philosophers Hegel and Husserl and so many more who call and havecalled themselves phenomenologists. Then,if philosophy is an act of love, as I think it is, we are here in that greatGerman desire to make a science of love’s mysterious doing. Science science science. Love must be understood and above allcontrolled! otherwise we are its sacrificial victims. But there is no science of that willful godand we will surely go down.

2011-12-22T09:29:00.000-08:00

730 This isa place away. The philosopher byhimself. The thin rush of theIdeas. God all around him. Far spaces.

From out of the wind blowing through that hole back intoheaven he must grab fast. Pin itdown. Write it down. Eat it. Make a philosophical writing in his mouth. There's only one thing present. Nothing has been caused. A thin, contemplative thing. Almost without idea. Like a boy's beautiful hair. A love too sharp and fine to last.

Nothing follows from Being but Being. Other than Being is only the Other. Prior to Being is the very meek simplicity ofBeing. They are of course the Same, theHeart of Romance. These are the Obvious,that which constitutes philosophical proof, the thing in your way, the thingwanting you, coming to you.

The thought of God is such a fine wine, very sour, verysweet at once. Purple and brilliant.

There's no gain to be made here. His friendship has comfort coupled with thestare at the possibility it is error. Love is always with blank standing back wondering about disease. God is perhaps for sick men. In that stupid thinking is religion. Nothing is present. The thing present is just looked at.

Yes, I am a living awareness attached to a piece of meat,but there is more and it s closer still. The look in the face of that piece of meat, the beauty of its shape, thepresence of its forceful existence are, like that awareness, not attached to,but become that meat. The Love that isin the full redness of it is just in it. The incarnation, the becoming Fleisch. Oh terrible thought. Ohfrightful, dangerous thing. I and thewhole clamorous entourage have become that piece of meat.

Sin, Holiness and all things of religion are off the diskof phenomena. Nothing has been presentedto us at all concerning them. But we canthink what isn't presented or the other than the presented. He who says he knows what sin is or knowssin, doesn't. We only have anxiety over it. Anxiety over nothing at all. Justa nervous anxiety.

And God loves us when we sit there worried. What loverdoesn't love to see his beloved like that. But we know how to play this game too. We know that all these things we are don't exist. That's our glory. Pure Appearance. A Marvelous Showing Off. Come get us if you can, God. We are enduring a terrible thing.

2011-12-20T03:07:00.001-08:00

5518 X in an individual living inRomania in the early part of the twentieth century. Given that fact there are two ways toproceed. One is to think of him as awhole person with a family and social history trying his best to make his wayin a difficult world. We are thenconcerned and we wonder how he will fare. Another way is to see that individual as a bare marker exemplifyingcertain formal properties, an abstraction moving within a realm of operative ideas,a disjunction. We are then not concernedand his fate is only interesting as an example. One way is personal; the other is formal.

Rigorous philosophy and high art isformal. Popular philosophy and thepeople’s art are personal. The former ishard, cold, lifeless. The latter issoft, warm, full of life. The detestableand the loved. My analyses are finallynot of the people; and I move with the Forms in the far margins.

2011-12-19T16:02:00.001-08:00

5517 My friend hates long philosophicaldiscussions about what exists. With thatin mind, and knowing that most share his feelings, I write short pieces. And then I am told that they make nosense. No, the truth is that the things Iwrite go unread and I am told nothing; long or short it makes no difference,philosophy is a detestable thing to the many. And that is in spite of the fact that the many like to think ofthemselves as truly interested in it. I supposeit is the same with classical music and literature—people like it; they justdon’t like to listen to it or read it. Philosophyand high art are out of this world, literally so. Or should I say they are very marginalized? Is heaven the margin? All is well, and nothing has changed. DerStarke ist am maechtigsten allein.

2011-12-18T17:44:00.001-08:00

5516 The timeless, of course, does notdegenerate. And if beauty is only thesadness of inevitable death, then the timeless is not beautiful. The one, so perfect in his proportions, issoon to be eaten by decay. Your heartaches. And you yourself begin todecline. All the while, the heavens stillturn in the exact circularity of eternal circles. The angels list. Pain follows pain. And it begins again.

Beauty and the poignancy of decayare other, but they consort, sort of. Surely,in the timeless there is a deep sleep. Anddreams. The Monstrum. The strumming on iron chords. And the turn.

Why are you standing there naked? Everyone sees you. They knew you were going to do that. You are not good enough to be in time; youare blocked. And the law doesn’t applyto you. Leave. Heave.

The stark is beyond beauty. It is the very beauty of beauty. The hard, the freezing, the stuck. You incline toward the deformed. So beautifyingly sick. You stick out. Your kine thighs. Throb in the holy temple. Beauty is a headache.

There is no death.

2011-12-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

2112 Thepoint of religion is not to promote the Law but to overcome it. It lifts man above the Law. Without religion we are subject to theravages of what inexorably must be. Without religion we are soon destroyed. Without religion we have only science and its going from nothingness tonothingness. In science man is a littlething, even if he does know that. Inscience man is a part of the rising up and going under of the species. In religion man is bound back into anoriginal grandeur. Only religion givesman direct awareness of Being itself. Only in religion can he find his imperial sovereign self. Beyond the law, outside the law, the Lawlessone. The immoral Greatness. He knows. Resentment and loss vanquished. The lover's acceptance accepted.

The merciful God of Islam letsyou forget about all that happened in the world now lifted up into histranscendence. The perfect God ofChristianity finds a way out for you through himself. The East gently lifts you off the wheel ofimpossible karma. And the Israelites,knowing the ways of love, were always able to talk their way back to theirjealous lover. God bends. Man has captured his heart.

Only the damned materialistsinsist there is no way out. Only theyaccept doom and oblivion. Only they canstomach the bitter food. Fortunatelylogic and the obvious are not on their side. These poet lovers of pain and despair are in love with that that theyhate. A strange love. La belle dame sans merci.

I simply believe. Could it be that I understand because Ibelieve or that I believe in order to understand or is it that this is only thebarb of love that is dragging me along? Love crashes. The beloved isrejected. The Fire settles in rightbehind the eyelids. Angels flame. Your boyfriend is sitting with another. "You suffer everything because you arepoor." You know and feel and haveperfect explanations for the Cut of Being. The red reeling real is with you and it is now yours. A god has taken you for himself and has givenyou a love greater than you wanted and now you have no choice but to go withhim. Divinity has infused you and fusedwith you and there is neither refusing nor confusing what has happened withmere dreams. Beyond the emptiness thereis the Plenum.

2011-12-18T01:06:00.000-08:00

5515 The Egyptians discovered thestraight line. The perfect smoothness. The exact distinction. The clean cut. In hard rock, they left it lying about on thedesert floor. But time blew along andwore it away and now we know the dust and the evening blur. Entropy increased uncontrollably.

Still, for all that, there is aperfection is the gray twilight evenness. The line wears away into another smoothness. The gliding plane of untroubled light. Perfect order falls away into perfectorder. We ride the wave of degenerationinto another youth of generation. Entropyincreases only to leave in its place its absence. And then it advances again. From order, disorder; from disorder,order. Around and around in eternal perfection. We move on and higher andnothing has ever really changed. Only somethingother and again another.

2011-12-18T00:49:00.000-08:00

5514 We despise ethnic violence. But it is, I suppose, natural. A genetic type does want to preserve itsline. The need to maintain thespecies is overpowering. Or so it issaid by evolutionary theorists. The genesmust be passed on. And that is then theground of homophobia; that non-reproductive group violates the biologicalinjunction. The urge of nature isthwarted.

Why do some willfully kick againstthat deep goad of instinct? The blindwill of nature must move on in all of us, it seems, or we are not natural. To fight it is countered by opposingviolence. You MUST obey. You must reproduce your kind; it is an irresistibleforce. To resist is not possible. Or is there a super-natural element in usalso that might win out? That is thehope. Otherwise, each of us is finallycrushed and ground to dust—again.

I search for an escape from theBlind Will of Nature. Just as did Schopenhauer. I despise ethnic violence.

2011-12-17T06:57:00.001-08:00

2114 I thinkyou get the point of what I'm trying to say. Philosophy cannot be said perfectly, but in it's perfect imperfection itdoes have that perfection that is the expression of the Perfect. Surely you get my point, though such a pointis pointless. As Form is formless andTime is timeless. As surely as theCertain is uncertain. And this sayingsays nothing that can be said well or badly or at all.

The logic is impeccable. My sin is somewhere else. I have not written ordinary things that arethe necessities of life and life is necessary for now. Any delight is only a flash and life is thehappiness of enduring substance or nothing. And the sexual itch of pubescent wings is only the scratching of theblush of dawn along the ground of night. Worthless metaphors. Goredmatadors. The bull of the day rushes atme.

That I use boys to explainontology is laughable. But it's theGreat Tradition. Maidens are useful onlyfor laughing at the ontologist as he falls in the great pothole plainly in theroad unseen as he looks up to see the face of that Boy stretched across theheavens. It's a matter of competition asthe beloveds vie.

I really do know the lastthings. I know Actuality and the Lightof ontological truth. I knowCertainty. I know Divinity and Presenceand Pure Difference. I know Knowing. But I do not know if this before my mind isactual or if this ontological fact is true and thus really a transcendent fact. Or if the god I think of is the divinityitself or if he is present and if there really is a difference between him andme. Of the simple things in themselves Ihave perfect awareness. Of theircomplicity and complexity and is this that or otherwise I can only make aneducated guess which is nothing that would lead me out into the open and trueLight. The boy may be mine and thenagain I may have only wished it. I knowNumber and “times” and “is” perfectly but whether or not 16 times 437 really is6992, I cannot tell you with any perfection of knowing. I know Actuality but whether or not I willever see that this world was only an imagined possibility, I cannot tell. Illusions abound, lovers present themselves,death comes close and I see none of it, my reality being only the everydayuneventful. These are the next to thelast things and I know them weakly if at all. But I really do know the last things.

2011-12-15T09:45:00.001-08:00

5513 It is very common that art rises upout of a ruined life. We have all knownthe devastation. And there the simplethings appear. Without the bleak and theempty and the ineluctably boring, we cannot finally reach the treasure. It’s too, too common. And I supposeit must be readily visible in any work. In the background it lies still. Todelete it indicates that the artist was unwilling to be what he is. And he will have to fail and fall even farther.

Behind the Mona Lisa there is thewildness of the natural world; I suppose today he could just as truthfully havepainted the horror of a modern city. Ruinand the raw. Or the monotony of thegrassy prairie. Small towns, abandonedand wasted, a perfect place for a newborn artist. And themeasured fields going on and on forever. Inordinate leisure. The boydies. A fissure and frisson inbeing.

Around his waist I laid waste andlay wasted. It’s hopeless; words danceimpishly.

2011-12-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

The Death Grip

Stephen J. Bloom, in The Atlantic,has given us Observations from 20 Years of Iowa Life, here. Like Camus in Summer in Algiers and TheMinotaur, or the Stop in Oran he attempts to give us a picture of life in aplace where he has lived. I think thecontrast between the writings of these two authors gives us a very good idea ofthe problem of our time. Bloom is ajournalist and Camus is anything but. Tocome to the point, today we are in the death grip of the media and thejournalistic mind. Indeed, our poetsface a marginalization so extreme that most try to imitate that objective reportage.

Bloom gives us the truth without the poetry. I suspect he distrusts poetry. He wants only hard truth. So did Camus mislead us about Oran and Algeria? What is the truth of poetry? Is there any? If there is, can it be for us or are we in love with the bleakest ofdays?

I grew up on the Iowa prairie in a small town. The intense beauty that Camus saw in Oran wasalso there. I suffered under thatbeauty. And I also knew the bleak daysthat Bloom describes. Was he right togive only half the story? Surely thehorror he describes exists everywhere. Is that all there really is? Oris the Intensity and the Beauty also there? Why do unseeing journalists, who want to give us only the hard, veryhard, truth they want to see, hold us in their death grip? The Media is immense and crushing. We surely are letting it happen of our ownfree will. The death wish has us. Where is the escape?

2011-12-12T09:06:00.001-08:00

5510 St. John of the Cross wrote Dark Night of the Soul for those monkswho, after years of sweet ritualistic obsession, could no longer feel theattraction. For those scholars who,after so many years of glorious flights in the intellect, could no longer feelthe desire to go up one more time. He wroteit for those who no longer wanted only symbols and representations, but whoneeded the thing itself. They wanted thehand of their god himself to brush the back of their neck and feel his obliviondirectly. They were lovesick and neededhelp.

Today, because of this and that, wehave everywhere presented to us a very abstract God. Moralistic, even concerned. The unreachable real, the absconded Absolute,the only-somewhat-scary abyss. No loveris present, no doubt because it is a revolting idea to most. Surely, it is asserted, God, the lover-husbandof Israel must not a phallic god. Still,without a phallus, what’s the point. Andso we are left with lurid abstractions. Butthe Dark Night moorishly offered that Other.

2011-12-12T08:16:00.001-08:00

5509 Philosophy speaks of whatexists. Thus it speaks truth. Or at least that is the ideal. Science does the same. Nonetheless, it must not be overweening. Philosophers and scientists become weenies. It is drilled into us. We have humbly learned to be nice to thosewho disagree. Existence, Truth and theIdeal were, maybe, never there to be had. Believingin them we were had. It’s too bad.

Pick up any scholarly philosophybook today and it is filled with statements of proper scientifically-mindedhesitation. So many considerations to bemade, so many sources to quote and acknowledge, so many nuances and nances todelineate. The Overweeny is watching.

Today the Ideal is thoroughness ofcritical analysis, thus the killing. No declarativestatements without the addenda that you want to hedge yourself all around so asnot to be taken by mistake into the camp of fools. Your job is at the stake. Save the final humiliation for your bedroom.

2011-12-12T07:41:00.000-08:00

5508 At the very heart of the writingsof Gustav Bergmann is J. S. Bach. So manydifferent lines of argument all coming together in one great fugue. They drive breathlessly on and on. That is the dialectic. And, though at the end Bergmann failed toreach the heights and collapsed, it was a majestic run and he almost did.

The philosophy I write up is filledwith so many things, existing things, uniting things, and I rush to reach theskies with its speed. Sit for a momentand I will show you how it all builds and climbs and in an instant finds that sorcerering point. And then descends to where we can wait for another time. You don’t have time? That’s too bad. I’m sure you have other complications toattend to. I will run along the riffsalone. And gaily slide the sure glissando.

Peter was and remains apophrastically blond.

2011-12-10T02:40:00.001-08:00

5507 In the last few pieces I tried tosay something about either a historical figure or a movement in thought. I always feel wrong in doing that. First because I don’t know that much aboutsuch things and second because I feel I am just throwing together a bunch ofextraneous beings trying to make a tortured unity. Isn’t that Gothic, another historicalsomething, a towering forest? Surely,that act of bringing together a lot of different things from the world in orderto see how it all grows together is what young scholars are taught to do. A bit of this and a bit of that, a quote hereand a quote there, citation, citation, excerpt, a community, a living garden, awild crawling exuberance. It makes meitch and fidget. I prefer a much tighterone thing. A simple form, justthat. Compact.

2011-12-09T15:40:00.001-08:00

5506 Last time I attempted once again towrite about eco-theo-philosophy. It’salways a mess when I try. I think the problemis that the very idea of Gaia and Lady Nature and Sophia Creatrix and all that somehowaligned with God the Father and Jesus and even science is necessarily a twisteddialectic that simply can’t be laid out straight. Then again no dialectic can be, so what thehell.

Maybe the idea is this. In the past, in literature and in Gnosticismand everything else that came out of Greek philosophy, most notably Platonism,the material world is somehow bad or evil or fallen. Along came the Deists and it was no longerany of that; it was just neutral stuff to be worked on by engineers. And now that that has gotten the earth allscrewed up we need a new Vision. And thatis to see the material world as, not only loving Mater or enchanting Matrix, butas beautiful goddess. From deadly Medusato stuff to Lovely Flower Girl. Will thismyth work to make the world more livable? I have no idea. I am still back in literature and Plato,thinking, along with the Jesus and Paul I know, that the lord, the god of thisworld is Satan.

Theologically, I think theseeco-guys are trying to say that all that seeing the material world as evil isthe very essence of the old, bad religion—lies of the Devil. Rather God made the world and it wasgood. And the incarnation of the Logosshowed all that the material world is filled with goodness. Such is the message of Jesus. Or so it is said. I, of course, see it the old way. I think the world is violent and rushingtoward death, not because we have held the wrong beliefs, but because it reallyis that. I am to be eliminated in thefuture redoing.

2011-12-09T11:27:00.001-08:00

5505 There are twophilosophical/theological ways we can understand the so-called Free Market, thebane of the eco-movement. Let’s, for thesake of argument, agree that the Market is sheer violence toward human well-beingand indeed toward the well-being of all living things. So, is the Market unnatural or even anti-natural? Or is it fully in line with Darwin’s naturalselection? Is the Market, the FreeMarket, Nature itself in action? Or isit the outside rapist of Nature? The questionis about the relation between Nature and Violence. And then finally between natural Sex and thethrowing, tearing, killing Machine.

There is a lot of talk aboutHarmony and living in harmony with Nature. The classical idea was that harmony is the union of concord anddiscord. Harmony is the union of peaceand war. Harmony cannot exist withoutviolence. Just as art cannot existwithout agon and antagon.

To take violence out of life, outof the market, out of philosophy/theology is to kill it. Violence is life. Peace is life. The eco-movement is wrong. But they are also right, because I have knownthem afterhours. Wisdom, Sapientia, eatsits lovers and finds them sweet.

So does that mean I am a Free Marketeer? No, the Free Market is unbridled naturalism and I am unnatural. In the name of another spirit I fight nature, even Nature Herself. But you already knew that. While Wall Street and Gaia dance their unsightly dance.

2011-12-09T10:46:00.001-08:00

5504 Dialectically beauty and boredomand hatred are all the same. Well yes,dialectics, because its heart is close to contradiction, can accomplishthat. Still, those of us who are at homein dialectics, that is to say in the erring ways of madness, can see and feel iteasily. Maybe it’s the philosophicalimagination. But no, that word isoverused and tired. It is the duende.

Here on the prairie nothinghappens. Blue skies, yellow gravelscattered on long receding lines, cutting calamatic grass, the eternalwind. A hand quietly goes along your andmy smooth skin, around and around, the numb minutes of emptiness. Intense luminosity. The inclination. Perfected lips.

Such beauty and boredom, theunrelenting. Marching band cadences onan afternoon that smells like dust. Otium otiosum, Odium. Implacable, unflinching screaming anesthesia. Boys reach for a sudden itch and fall asleep. No appeal. The beauty is too too intense.

2011-12-08T02:52:00.001-08:00

5504 Surrealism such as practiced bySalvador Dali is what Coleridge called secondary imagination. It is wit and fancy. And as such it belongs to the faculty of Reason,which the Enlightenment so loved. Permutation,combination and play. It is not darkarisings out of the subconscious, which so many say it is.

The opposite of Dali might be WilliamBarrett. Hard, still, oppressive. It might be, but what do I know. I don’t know art history well enough tosay. It just feels that way to me now.

I also think something of AndyWarhol is that subconscious religious thing. It is like a religious Icon full of the stillness of death. Dali is merely someone who could draw welland was at home here in the joining and disjoining of the everyday. He is Walt Disney, a man of calculatedmanipulation.

I shouldn’t talk about such things fromout of my ignorance. I do know thatphilosophy is not a mere play of ideas. Itis heavy and stark and not casual conversation as is so much academic writing. Then the boy playing is an attack.

2011-12-07T08:42:00.001-08:00

5503 Maybe at the moment of death we seeintense beauty, we become disoriented, lose hold of our self, and blankout. We have come close to that heremany times, but we always caught ourselves before we were gone and then deniedit ever happened. Panic!! The very thought is too thrilling, toointoxicating, too true to be erased. Rapture is difficult.

2011-12-07T08:21:00.001-08:00

5502 At the first moment of existencethe bloom of perfection glistens forth. Andimmediately it begins to fade. The bloom shifts into the past. It moves among what was, the delicate dead. It tenderly hangs just out of reach and weremain in the sadness and pang of life. Theneven the thought of it soon becomes musty. The muse of the museum collects dust. It is all forgotten.

Are these things dimly recollectedthe Platonic Forms? Was the perfectionreally ever present, even at the first moment? Is the Form itself the perfection without the corruption? Does beauty need immanent corruption to bebeautiful? Is beauty always lost beauty? I suspect that in Heaven where the perfectForms lie still in their perfection, we blank out and then who knows? Beyond the merely beautiful.

2011-12-07T05:28:00.000-08:00

5401 Used goods and quantum collapse. When you make an offering of a flower to Vishnu, you must not first enjoy the luscious sensual thing yourself. If you did it would not be pure. To know something is to corrupt it. Being known is to be corrupted. The Ψ-wave looked at collapses.

Likewise, you must not even look at a young person with an eye to beauty and therefore desire. To look and to then know the inevitable arousal of the slightest of sexual feelings in yourself is to corrupt the child. The most minute measurement will make the field of pure possibilities lose itself in just that one fallen thing. Knowing is lust is destruction. Don’t even look!

You will of course look and know; you can’t help it. No one can stop it. But it is deadly and you know that too. So then Panic!! Your Freudian Super-Ego rushes in and you deny it ever happened. But it did and that secret knowledge of knowledge is down there. You are a child-rapist. You enjoyed the very flower that belonged to Vishnu. You will be punished.

The dialectic is horrible and you cannot escape it. That is Henry James in The Turn of the Screw and The Author of Beltraffio.

We exist and we are collapsing because God has looked our way.

2011-12-06T18:03:00.000-08:00

5500 Walter Pater in the Conclusion (see upper right) writes, “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, --for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?”

He is not asking us to contemplate only the perfection at hand, but the immanent corruption of that thing by approaching disappearance and death. For Pater, beauty is always innocence overtaken by the poignant horror of corruption. It is an intense moment, even a moment of panic. We feel the impulse to rush forward and protect that thing, that person. Anger surges and panic grows. And that is the very thing that makes the beauty beautiful. It arrives only in death. That is why for Plato the vision of Beauty itself is into a timelessness beyond life. It is a radiance beyond death. Beauty and the beast. But the one who gazes on it is disoriented. And he loses himself; he loses his self. Then the very act of looking and being so still while captivated becomes itself a moment of panic and he/you come undone. That is the aesthetic act. That is what Beauty is. Immanent corruption. That is why Socrates, the corrupter of the youth of Athens, is the philo-sophos. In him we see the terror, the enchantment. And it is the panic of the people toward philosophy.

Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow upon a raven's back.
William Shakespeare

2011-12-06T12:57:00.001-08:00

5499 At the beginning of his artistic life Matisse scandalized the art world with his hard and fast use of bold colors. (It says so in a documentary I watched.) He discovered sharply cut shapes and hurt the eyes of the unsuspecting. He challenged heaven. Now those same colors shapes have fallen far down into the most exciting, cute designs all around us. Matisse is hip fun. (Also from that documentary.) The Fall is into intense commercial happiness, which we all crave. (We used to call that being co-opted.) Now we are all daring and modern. We have almost remade the heaven of ideal things. It is scandalous, I say, scandalous.

2011-12-06T11:15:00.001-08:00

5498 Matisse, when asked, said he believed in God only when he was painting. Also, he left his wife, more or less, when he moved to the south of France, saying that he loved his wife, but he loved painting more. It seems that Matisse had two parts to his life: his life when he was painting and that when he wasn’t. Likewise, the women he painted and the so-called real women he loved when he wasn’t painting were very different. The Woman of his painting was an artistic ideal, no doubt a universal Form—hardly a real woman. God, for him, was of the Ideal, not the everyday world. And that is the way I think it always is. The great argument is about whether or not the Ideal, the Really Real, world exists. I, of course, think it does.

Do simple things exist or only the Great Complexity?

2011-12-06T02:53:00.000-08:00

5496 The main problem we as a world have today is that we, because of our numbers and the delicacy of our structures, are in great danger of—inadvertently—bringing IT all down in one very huge sudden piece of agony. We must constantly be on the lookout for any little piece of extravagance. All art, except for the childish decorative kind, must be banished. This house of fine intellectual crystal must, it simply must, remain intact. Or else.

In our long, but really very short, human history, there have been certain ways of thinking and acting that are intense and unsettling. All art and religion for one. We can no longer allow such things. At least they must be marginalized, if not eliminated, and greatly humiliated. Then ignored. No one, absolutely no one, must be allowed to agitate. Now only light entertainment. Now only the phantasmagoria of television and the Internet. Twaddle is our only needful fate.

So now here we are. We will let everyone know that we are ringed about and eternally comforted. Nothing will disturb us. When the time comes we will be gently lowered down into the grave and sleep. The media has no other task than this peaceful holiday parade of happiness and then nothing. All will be well.

We really have no choice. The numbers are too great; our knowledge for destruction is too great; our systems are too fragile; our bodies are too weak; our minds are too close to nervous breakdown; our crying is ever eternally close. Please, just be still and relax. The end is not so far away for all of us. And then … who knows?

2011-12-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

A young man in a comment to a comment I wrote to a dream-writing wrote: “Verdromen” could be translated as “to dream away” or “to spend time dreaming away”, though that translation would miss the striking beauty this verb has in Dutch. The prefix ver- bears multiple meanings in Dutch, so in other contexts the verb could mean “to become a dream”, “to become engulfed in dreams” or “to waste time dreaming away”. I commented further that I love it when someone can see the striking beauty that grammar has to offer. I hope he realizes I was serious. It’s a rare and fine spirit that can do that. He reminds me of Johannes Climacus by Kierkegaard. It is here.

2011-12-04T03:42:00.000-08:00

5495 I travel to third world countries and find a room where I can write. Back here in scruffy America I tell people about my consorting with the poor, the street boys, the agonized, to whom I inevitably give money and a little help, very little. I am praised for the good I do. They think I have reached down and lifted someone up into life. But, of course, that’s all colonialist twaddle. I consort, not because I want to help, but because I am one of them. I am an agonized gamin, imp, twilight idler, nothing more, though not so good, as most of my kind are, at seducing the unsuspecting into giving me money. The prize for that goes to Jesus, lord of the back alleys and abandoned hallways, the tender touch. Oh ho, he’ll be coming down this scary street any moment now.

2011-12-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

In a very beautiful, very welcome comment I received, a young man wrote this: “… I think what I am really trying to retrieve by reading - for all my lofty objectives - is the experience I had as a boy of falling asleep to the steady ebb and flow of the sea. Eliot probably said it better: ‘Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.’ ” I live on the prairie, far from the sea, but there is a perpetually moving stillness here also. The Winter’s white frozen ocean. I wrote these two pieces last century.

1376 I live in a mysticism that hovers over the Prairie. Here the Wind is too strong, the Atmosphere is too high coming down over the contours of this land I lie stretched out on, minimal and delicate like a boy's chest ravished by my touching it.

The people here all want to go somewhere else. The great openness is killing them. They go. Then they come back. Despair is close, but surely faith is better, they think. Love never came, it came too close. Can one ever learn to handle such love? Everything here is overwhelming. Even the ugliness of the place. Why are the boys so pretty?

Everything is now on a grid. It is finite except for the fact that it seems to go on forever, and the atmosphere would not yield to such rigid lines. In winter it is a frozen ocean. In this place so blessedly far from the swallowing sea, we walk calmly on top of it all. Here Peter remains Up. The crystalline ice eyes of Jesus have mesmerized him. The high clouds are but flimsy wings. Soon it will all be open space and the northern lights, mere ionized gas. Boys study it on their desks, the coming test worries them. He is third one from the left, second row. Vectors arise from nowhere.

Angles and angels are of course very close as every boy knows. And tangents are too delicate. The point of contact is almost nothing at all. Straight lines bend when looked at from a different angel. Arcs and chords and harps and loose strings and pants falling off. He's caught on the horns of a dilemma.

I will teach him ontology and the bare particular, a thing even less that a geometrical point. He is that. A center around which. Later up in the transcendent Form he is inside that thing. He aligns the edge of his ruler now so close to his eye with the bar going up the center of the window out. So many perspective changes and space collapsing and this is that. From his Place he rearranges the universe. He is the Place of the universe. There is no universe, only the many things he contrives. He is a conjurer. Surely a frightening thing to be controlled, some others think. He is captured, convinced he isn't really that and dies. I move on to where he went, outside the world, maybe I am him, it's hard to say given the holiness of the logic in this place.

1594 The great concern of philosophy in the West has been with necessary truth. For the most part that has meant logic and mathematics. Geometry has been pure beauty adored. This is all in the unchanging, the timeless, even the Eternity of Mind. The step from ontology to theology has been easy, and it has been dangerous. It is the passion of philosophy. You are for it or against it. I, of course, have been for it, but my Christianity has made me see these holy things become flesh here. My religion has also made me argumentative. I worship the Boy Jesus sitting and arguing with the priests and scribes of the temple. I do the same. I pray for his victory to be mine, though I know that that victory led to his being killed. Socrates had the same. It seems to be the way things are. My death will not be so grand, but it will be real.

I went just then from necessary truth to killing. I think many can intuit the connection. Eternity is not a normal thing and its strangeness, its not being welcome here, is a necessary part of necessity. I have reached for the other side in my faggotry. The Platonic paiderastes has ever been suspect. The passions for or against it are the deepest and the highest passions. It is Intense. The Topos of love's body is mind obliterating. Sweet falling. The Nothing and the Gloom. And the eternal as it always has been.

As you can see I still have to make my way to the logical and the mathematical. No doubt the path will take me through the uniting of This Here and the Same with the Same. This Form mingles with That Form. A holy erotic coming together. The One that is eaten by the other One. You were two now What happened, you are one? Identity makes no sense. Difference can't be. The smooth sliding into each other. The kiss going in. The Forms rising and falling on this still frozen ocean, the Iowa winter prairie. Prairie Tim on Jungle Jim. There's no way that's going to fit. Fasten your belt up quick, he's coming.

Did I get any closer that time? Sure I did. But I don't have to explain any of this because you know it all, you remember it all from out of that crazy eternity that is so much in your head. It isn't the job of philosophy to explain anything. Its job is merely to bring It to mind. This is the One, the Breathing, the Very Close. Your forgetting was the momentary blanking out of love's orgasm, which I'm also sure you know all about.

2011-12-03T09:08:00.000-08:00

5494 At the end of Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Marsyas. I’m not going to say any more to you about that last mentioned Satyr because. in this age of the Internet, you know very well how to quickly find out what you need to know. Let me just say that Marsyas was flayed, stripped of his skin, and behold! a beautiful form appeared. Socrates was that and maybe the rest of us who have to contend with the inevitable dilapidation of the human body can be also. Ouch!

This is a Dionysian scene. It seems that someone is always being stripped, flayed and mightily undone. It is also Christian in that the old is cast off and the new takes its place. Maybe in the twinkling of an eye, maybe in martyrdom, maybe in a thousand other psychologically, spiritually gruesome ways. Life is Dionysian. But there is hope.

The Apollonian arises out of the Dionysian. Nietzsche says it must be, but he was only repeating what we have always known. So let’s get on with it. Then again, tomorrow may be soon enough. Wallowing in destitution has it comforts. Rebirth is sharp. And the Light may be too bright. No doubt we will have to be dragged into it. That’s how we came into this world and it seems to be how we will get out of it into whatever is next. And with that thought there isn’t much left to say. He’s coming—and I’m sitting here playing with the Internet.

2011-12-02T08:51:00.001-08:00

5492 I recently read and then wrote down that the secret of the Bible is the identity of wrath and love. That is a hard saying. Thought swirls and contorts. But it is also rather well-known. It is, in fact, commonsense. And somehow obvious. We are sitting in the ordinary. Philosophy, with its grand, sometimes jolting statements, loses its punch. Sapientia becomes insipid. And we just simply have to go on into the suddenly banal.

I suppose this is existentialism. The Absurd becomes not even absurd. Is this the final dialectic? Your lovely lover is ordinary. And his flesh is just sticky. But then you feel like getting it on again. And thought and philosophy and amazing writing slithers in all around. It never fails. The vapid vortex. The peripatetics are so pedestrian and the foot swells uncontrollably. Those who try to give up God so they can find a greater excitement fall back with Him on top of them and the passionate twisting begins again for good, for evil, forever into the sweet anon. The glistening blandness of Being.

2011-12-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

908 All things, therefore even these words, must from time to time fall into existential absurdity. Everything, especially the most familiar and the most beloved things, becomes, not the revealing of mystical light it had been in your love of it, but an awkward array of banalities that you must now claim as yours. All things must do that. Meaning, tight and graceful unity disappears. The excitement of love's approach drains all. The breeze, once cool, now is hot and uncomfortable. You are embarrassed at having had desire over nothing. You were illusioned. You did it to yourself. You did something wrong, something morally wrong. And now everybody sees you standing there. With that.

I suspect, though, that some things are more likely to fall than others. Mathematics certainly can at times be boring, very boring; but can it appear absurd? Maybe. Maybe the more complex parts of it. On the other hand objects of desire, not those classically formed, but cute things or merely sexy things, should I say persons, become totally misshapen when desire leaves, and the work of having to pretend desire sets in. Here the absurd approaches fast. My words are not classically formed. They arise solely out of my desire. Thus I must say out of Desire. It looms large. And when it's gone the desolation is complete. The secret to existence is that it never fails to come back. It cannot. Such is philosophical proof.

Alain Badiou

2011-11-30T09:52:00.000-08:00

5491 Alain Badiou is a philosopher whose name I have often seen, but whom I haven’t read, or read much of. I find him boring and too too heterosexual. Others, of course, will disagree, but there is no real disagreement here; it’s all a matter of taste and de gustibus non est disputandum, or whatever. There is, though, one belief of his, at least according to Wikipedia, that intrigues me. He takes up the old problem of the alignment (or some such bringing-together word) of Being with all the forms of being or individual beings. It seems that whenever the One moves up close to the many, it ever slides off the bed of thought. Badiou, strandely, tries to make this love affair work by saying that the One is not. Here’s the Wikipedia entry:

For Badiou the problem which the Greek tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is the problem that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, it is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the one is not. This is why Badiou accords set theory (the axioms of which he refers to as the Ideas of the multiple) such stature, and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology: Only set theory allows one to conceive a 'pure doctrine of the multiple’… .

I am intrigued by pure multiplicity. I try to contemplate it. Most philosophers have given the palm of existence to unity and unities and said that a pure collection without the least trace of unity simply doesn’t exist. Or maybe it is the very definition of non-existence. Absolute otherness. What has Badiou given us here? I really don’t know if he thinks pure multiplicity exists or not. Probably not. He does, however, induce all the Schwärmerei like me to get agitated trying for a vision of this non-existent unthing. Surely the labyrinth of set theory is an image of it. As is the vast wasteland of his prose. Still, a simple clear vision would be refreshing and help me put an end to it. I find that hedge around the Lake of Fay to be distressing. The blogsters I read seem to be less ecstatic and more sanguine - but maybe not.

Pure multiplicity … hmmm. It’s the purity that is almost beautiful. So very ethereal. It reminds me of Mallarme. Is this an even purer atheism, like the deeper vacuum physicists are looking for?

2011-11-30T07:47:00.000-08:00

5490 The love that dare not speak its name is named and spoken of ad inflamationem to day and night. The lovers are scattered under every rock. But the Lover Himself, the Grand Inquisitor, the Fiery Thumb, is, per force, shielded from every popping eye and rotating tongue. And no one knows. Our ancient god is an embarrassment. The Triune Mystagogue Himself. Saul-David-Jonathon. The midrash has set in. Our speaking is politic instead.

Wrath tamed by beauty and then jealousy. There’s no end to it. Speak of something else or be shunned. Talk to your pillow. Muffle the horrid words so you yourself cannot hear. Sweetness itself. Sticky globs. Silent sobs. Because He has you. And there is no escape—for eternity. So just pick yourself up and go back to work where everyone knows already and will never mention it. No one knows.

2011-11-30T06:38:00.001-08:00

5489 Beauty is deadly and unconcerned. You will try to capture it and you will fail. He will not go home with you. Or if he does, it’s only pretence. You know what I mean; you have been that. There is no innocence here. But who wanted such a paltry thing anyway?

I think of Rimbaud and how he had Verlaine wrapped around his—what was it?—his little finger? The Infernal Bridegroom. Such malign willfulness. Just the way things have to be. Here is the Necessity of Being. The smooth flow. The poisoned arrow. And the tense bow.

Not to worry, I write only from the artist’s view. Yes, it’s only art. Art for art’s sake and all that. Art and the social are—don’t let them tell you otherwise—at each other. Any connection there might be are undercurrents, the undertow, you don’t know. We are few.

God, the heart-ravisher, walks about among us, unmentioned. No one dare. In the back we stare. He’s there. Unbuttoned.

At the extreme He is the identity of wrath and love. Honey, you do know. Your thought has marched right up to the magic point many times and then—Bham!

2011-11-30T06:06:00.000-08:00

5488 All the socio-political ethical mighty sentimental concerns of man are on high-flying display every-dullsucking-day in the very agitated, masticated noosphere, the clogged up blogosphere, I’m outta here without a hat the cat is the mat, quantum mechanized happy place and we’re all only slightly amused. Stuffed full. But I am unafraid to report that I always see something else at work, an ever-unmentioned addendum, pudendum, when I am out and about. And I watch.

It is sempiternally the case that the most agitating of the flames is beauty. Well, of course. Work is dull until, for a moment, he is there. But, alas, if it is more than a moment, it becomes painful. And then, if it is still there tomorrow, the scene becomes mutinous, just as with the hanged Billy Budd. Nothing is as upending as the beautiful boy. I’ve seen it in the work place over and under again and again. The girls whirl and the other rotating men and boys perk straight up and try their very hopeless best to be intelligent, witty, strong, helpful and very, very concerned, always smiling, almost beaming. Everyone is shaken. Beautiful young men and boys cause commotion. That is the very heart of the socio-political, ethical doings we are immersed in. And it always ends badly. But no one mentions it. The love that dare not speak its name.

2011-11-21T12:51:00.001-08:00

5487 I read that for the Renaissance Ficino and Pico the only difference between an earthly love and heavenly love is that the latter is the thing itself and therefore not fleeting as is the soon-to-break-your-heart former thing. The thing itself and the thing not itself. What could that be? I will dare to say that it is thing and fact—almost.

As I see it or for me, but not just for me, or you, there is a thing called Love, the universal Form, and that is exemplified by countless bare particulars. That thing as exemplified or the exemplification of that or the bare this as that Form is a fact. It is the fact of love as a loves b. It is easy to say and easy to say in many different ways. And it is easy to understand. That is to say it is easy until a closer look is taken and you are taken down by love and its ontological ways.

Thing vs. fact. A fact is composed of things, namely a Form (or many Forms), a bare particular (or many) and a nexus to hold them all together in one. Other than those things there is no further thing that is the fact. If there were, a further more inclusive fact would have to exist to join up that to the other things and it becomes a receding swish of nothing. A fact is, therefore, not a thing. It seems to be a no-thing. And if the world is composed of facts then the world is a nothing also. Only things. And creation never occurred. Something is awry. Or almost.

Yes, for the lover of God, the world is as nothing. Or it is literally nothing. But then earthly love is nothing and God is just the every day we see about us. And it is all so fleeting. We long for a different, timeless thing that will not ever escape our grasp. Samsara is not nirvana.

Love as the ontological thing itself and the fact of its being exemplified here and there are difference. The difference is momentous. We know it well. Philosophy’s dissolving it away into a heaven will only work if we never have to come back down and go to work. The fact of the world is the hard part for philosophy. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” Fact is a fact. The ordinary escapes the high-minded.

My ontology simply states that fact and thing are radically, categorically different and leaves it there. Philosophy cannot explain what is not-philosophy. And to bring not-philosophy into philosophy is despair. I run and grab both ways. My loving is suddenly lifted up and I cannot explain it ontologically. It just is.

2011-11-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

2003 This is a Pauline ontology. Just as the Law was given that man might know sin and love's release, so logic is within the given that man might know the transfiguration of thought into a shimmering trepidation.

After analysis is complete and the world is gone and that brave one sees that the very project of analysis has thrown him, the one performing the analysis, into a wildness not less than the divinity before which he was afraid at the beginning, he then waits and turns and sees finally that he must decide. He decides nothing. The decision was made long ago, which is to say it never was made; he is caught up in a timeless dividing.

At the end of logic and of the logic of Being, one finds oneself either struck down or sweetly taken in. It is, of course, unclear what has happened. Love comes or perhaps its coming was a final leaving or the fools took over or the slightest thing snapped and then failed or his shirt brushed ever so gently against the cheek of understanding and his odor lingered there or uncontrollably vanished; whatever it was, the destruction of the city was complete. The complexity of the world gave way to the simple things and it was no more. Analysis destroys. The turning and the Face and then the sprinkling of pearls in the moonlight.

2011-11-17T16:26:00.000-08:00

5486 We have successfully sent Freud off to live with the poets. The terror of his ideas, namely that the child is a deeply sexual being, is now stopped. It is put with all the crimes of literature. And the gods. We are now humanists and we are filled with care. Innocence must be established. The belief in sin is the sin we now eradicate. Everyone says so. The darkness has past. The subconscious is no more. Only television.

2011-11-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

5485 Here is the pressing problem you will have if you travel to a third world country. As an American you are naturally very sentimental and your heart breaks so easily when you see all the suffering that the innocent must endure and you desperately want to help. So you talk talk talk and you have ideas and everyone can see that you really do want to help and, moreover, you really think you can. Your need to help is obvious. It is like glistening oil all over you. Like liquid money. And those innocent ones are going to get what they can. You are vulnerable. You are weak. They know it. They will bill and coo with sorrowful need, just the need you need to feel coming from another. You are being seduced. They know exactly what they are doing. And you will fall. Love will be all around.

None of that means that they don’t really love you and need you. They do. And you do. And they are just as sentimental as you, so they understand perfectly. But they are anything but innocent. You will have been had. As well as being loved. Everyone gets exactly what they wanted. Even the sex card will be played. They know exactly what they are doing. And no one will be the worse for wear. But you wallet will be a little lighter. Life goes around and around. Accept it. It’s a lovely problem. Helpless innocence doesn't really exist anywhere. Or it exists everywhere. We are born with the knowledge of good and evil all through us.

2011-11-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

5484 Those sensitive, artistic guys of the Renaissance discovered antiquity. That is to say they discovered the figure of Ganymede, the boy transumed to heaven. Transcendence was to be attained through rape. Those guys shuddered with anticipation. By Jove, it was to be. They would make it so. And they set about to work it up. We are now different because of all that commotion and agitation and lovely delectation. Except that now magically and perhaps mistakenly heaven has been brought down to earth and chaos reigns. They went too far.

From the flying up of the ancient myth to the so very present presence of Caravaggio. The boy smiles and gleams and his come-on is too much. We do need transcendence or we will be crushed. Now the walk backwards. Into the timeless, the sacrificial killing, the non-human. Surely it is possible. But maybe not. The attempt. The temptation. It is still and it is Him.

2011-11-17T04:59:00.001-08:00

5483 Francis Bacon painted the violence of life and he put it all behind glass. It is that very smooth, clear, impenetrable film that is the mark of the presence of the Real. The liserè. The glossy skin. The hard liquidity. The flow. It is the persistent. The resistant. I live and slowly breathe in the gleam. The glance of this invisible. I am caught along the pubescent touch. His torch glazes my soft clay. Slick. The silent teeth. The mouth. Gorged on the elongation and the silken scent. Distant and reflective. The glass is violent and sexy.

This is the ontology of the definite descriptor. The

2011-11-16T10:15:00.000-08:00

5482 There is an argument, a gentle argument, among some of my favorite philosophers about whether or not complex universals or forms exist. If they do certain paradoxes might ensue, but that is neither here nor there for now. For example, if tight exists and painful exists does the combination of tight and painful exist? If it does, it is generally agreed that it is of (watch out!) “lower ontological status”. I want to talk about that lower status. The question of existence may come in there somewhere or maybe not. How should be think of that lowering? Is it the reducing of reductionism? Or the converse of it?

Here is a sentence from a book I really liked: “In Russell’s view, philosophical analysis involves supplanting one linguistic framework by another in such a way as to retain (wherever possible) the successes of the old framework, and through a reconceptualization and reconstruction reveal the sources and solutions of the philosophical conundrums the former framework generated.” It’s a perfectly good sentence for a book on philosophical history. It is replete with complex forms. That is the way of scholarly thought. It does not try to be a powerful statement, certainly not oracular as is the Tractatus, which is the topic of the book. It does not climb up to the heights. Or, after climbing up Wittgenstein’s Ladder, it has come back down. We could even say it has a “lower ontological status” than the utterances of the “great minds”. Is that reductionism?

Which brings me to my writing style. Here is a typical paragraph I might write: 1511 When I read another philosopher as he attempts to lay out the ontological structure of Being, and I feel his fear of being untrue. When I wonder if we are serving the same god, or trying to love the same, and I demure at the thought that he would not like my speaking of gods and love in what is probably his institutional view of philosophy, his public undertaking. When I see that he is forming himself as a clear and distinct thing and I am so much in the turbidity of sex. And I wait for myself, I lie in wait for myself, to catch and find myself out, in the night air, as I go or come back from wherever I unintentionally secretly have gone to do what I have called philosophy.

Mine feels different. It is not better: it just serves another purpose. I use few complex forms, hardly any. Simple existing things build up into just that. Does that make it more powerful and even oracular? Maybe. More authoritative? Maybe. Maybe just more irksome and unpolished. If it really does use existing things, it is a metaphysical existence that is of little or no value in cultivated thought. Nonetheless, I rather like it. I am moved greatly by those simple existing things. And the curve of their coming together is a swoon.

2011-11-15T08:10:00.000-08:00

5481 When you listen to Buddhist or Hindu prayers or Muslim recitation. Or Christian or Jewish ancient chants. The rhythms eventually take hold of the mind and soul and body and transport it into the pure order of sound. The meaning of the same words repeated repeated repeated drops away. The understanding makes no sense of it. There is only the gentle rhythm lifting you along into itself. It is the same with literature. It has a certain feel to it, something outside the story that you thought you were interested in, but which was as nothing. It’s a soft vertigo. And we worry its existence.

Many people like to have the radio or television quietly on while they go about other duties. They pay no attention to what is being said; they only feel the rhythms of conversation. It is soothing. And done with.

It is the same with my writings. I have written a lot. Mostly it is the same thing over and over again. And if you read it for a time, you will catch the prose rhythm—or it will catch you—and you will perhaps find it pleasurable. It is thus like literature. Or it is that. And you and I will wonder what was the point? Is God in that? It is surely like the numbing caress of love. You and I are trapped.

2011-11-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

5480 What is sex? What is the erotic? One of my favorite books is Gide’s The Immoralist. It tells of an extreme, intense sexuality that the main character Michel feels he must free himself from in order to remain in the world. Surprisingly, no sex scenes are described and we are in fact told that no sex took place with his erotic other. Rather he places himself close to that and quietly, silently he lets the thickness of that other flow into him. Or he would flow into it. In any case, the boundary between him and that other was gone and he was both. The erotic is that vanishing of boundaries between one individual and another. But that other doesn’t have to be a person; it could just as well be a wall or the wind. Substance oozes across. A filling up. In-tense. From out of the terminal skin, the ex-treme. Almost oblivion. And obliteration. So dangerous.

Many times overseas, I would sit in a tight, compact microbus, up against a thickness of thigh and shoulder. I could feel his very substance in me. Boundaries disappeared. I was him. The individual bare thing, away from all intellectual knowing. Just that. One can only do that for a short time or the addiction is victorious and you have no self left. And your possessions dilapidate. That is Gide’s story

Likewise, when I think of the cities I have travelled to, I do not remember the people I met, but I so closely know the feel of the concrete buildings, the pungent smells of the street, the push of a voice, the tiredness on my bed and the cold of the shower. These other things were in me. That is the eroticism of my travels and its hard work.

It is, I suppose a sensualism. The difference between perception and sensing is that the perceived object is always out there at a distance, but sensa impinge the mind, invade, lie down in the awareness. The veil, the thin outer film on the real, is gone and the sharp thing itself is in you. Keeping it all in order is necessary or you fall. Anxiety. Things happen. Being is the lover.

2011-11-13T11:47:00.000-08:00

5479 As you can tell from the small number 430 I wrote this some time ago. Now on reading it I would only add that the Idea or Form itself is an individual thing, in itself, separate from the individuals that exemplify it. And it thus also has that material presence, that thickness, and we approach it erotically. The bare this and that spreads. Or the ideas flee into nothing.

430 Does God know us personally, or does he only know the abstract idea of us? Does God know individual things or does he only know the Ideas through which the world was created? That is to say, does God intellectually touch material existence? Likewise, does the human mind directly know individual things, or does it only stay within its own representations of the thing? Can the human mind get out of its own thoughts to get at the individual as it is in itself? Or are we trapped within just our own view of things? Is the individual, the thing itself, the other person, forever beyond the reach of our minds and God's? That was the main question after the Summa of Thomas. And it's the question today. Not only can we know the individual but what it is that accounts for individuality.

The ideas are the things that go across minds, are open to view, are communicable. The individual thing out there will never enter into anyone's mind. It's closed to the mind's view. It's absolutely non-communicable. The Ideas, the universals, are the intelligible. The individual is non-intelligible. It escapes intellect. It is thus the absurd. The artless. Without intellect's grace. The unknown. The abyss. Logic deals with the intelligible. Philosophy tries to cross over. Philosophy is the search for the bridge between mind and the world. Between the universal and the individual. Between the rational and the non-rational. Philosophy's failure is its not accomplishing that, but staying only within ideas. Philosophy, to be real philosophy, must encompass material existence. It must itself have a part of the thick stupor of matter. It must have the feel of the unintelligible. Intellect must turn to sex. Not just talk about it, but have it. It mustn't hide the madness.

As for the jump from a feeling for absurdity and for a realm outside logic, or at least an indefinable logical entity, to identifying it with an ontological need for grounding individuality, that jump itself partakes of the non-intelligible, and is surely illegitimate. But those jumps are the essence of philosophical proof. Philosophy isn't logic.