February 2010
21 posts
I page through campus publications while waiting for another’s decision — will I spend the night alone, with books, or with another? An odd piece of pedophilia in a feminist magazine mixed in with other light pieces of pornography. I puzzle over the concept of liberation, its tie to the nakedness of children, just as I finish a review of Carl Schmitt. Still waiting, hoping, but...
“Whether you (by you I mean any other agglomeration of souls) really wish for...”
– Lafcadio Hearn, Dust
He does not sleep more than a few winks. He rises early and writes. He is incapable of loving again. So he thinks, but there is more than a stirring.
I have, perhaps via metaphysical principles, been reduced to a man of work, with little effort in other directions and little passion, save that which expresses itself in these occasional ramblings — not entirely directionless, though direction is not always sure. Passion, in strange new form, stirs, and has not reconciled itself with my stale rationality, which often returns to instincts of...
Our conversation inebriated, A necessary lubricant to discuss the flames of faith. What passion attends their transformation to stone!
“Hurry up please it’s time”
“I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must...”
– T.S.E.
“But I wish to enter a prison, not a sanatorium”
– EJ, Aladdin’s Problem
Back from dc. Corporate media newseum displays new dispensation — news as entertainment. We collectively ask how we can extend rights to terrorists, I individually struggle to define my own right to live. Read of moon graveyards, promised eternal rest. Eternal life would be better.
Sex, Lies, and more of both
In a world in which numbers, by means of economics, are the primary evaluative method, relationships are necessarily perceived according to personal utility, as are the functions associated with them. Accumulation of partners may not be the goal, but accumulation of ‘good moments’ likely will be, likely taking the primacy of ‘fun,’ although other values will be in play....
The ground is covered with snow, or, where I currently reside, largely changed to mounds of ice, over which both pedestrian and vehicle must tread with trepidation. The music of these moments is halting, frequent mental invasions, the product of an unsteady mind — yet recovering. There is research to be done, but on what is not yet clear, nor is the path to doctorate, academic career made...
Grammar (revisited)
Did grammar always exist in present form, defined, subject to rules that may, at times be broken? Or is there a grammar beyond grammar, an essence that can be appropriated and thus, obviating the need for such definitions as would attempt to render the image, the pathway, itself a god. Poetic diction is attempt to capture this grammar beyond grammar, although when it defines rules it becomes...
Numbers are an act of definition, an effort to quantify is an effort to produce consistency, and, as with precise language, if ‘life’ is squeezed out, a more precise pattern is produced which approaches the universal. Or such is the claim, which relates to the claims that are inherent in all linguistic systems, claiming in someway to create systems of metaphors which tie to reality...
“Do not store up even what you have been given, nor run around searching for...”
– Zuimonki
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance,...”
– TS Eliot
Philosophy, academics, abstraction
If one grants that the proper function of philosophy (or even ‘a’ possible function) is to treat disparate fields with a greater degree of abstraction, of what benefit is academic training to this end and, ultimately, is it possible to be both an academic and philosopher in this sense? The question turns on the idea of thinking, not only what calls for thinking but what is thinking? In...
“One of the many (dubious) assumptions that Wall Street rocket scientists made...”
– Panzner
