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.
Dore | Enigma
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. This means that no-fault, while previously the exception, because the norm, because every contract should be able to be broken by any party when the exchange of words/fluids leading to whatever other exchange is not kept. Which is to say, any purely quantitative system tends towards perfect fungiblity as a ‘perfect’ state. Lies here serve a purely cosmetic function: the word ‘marriage’ approaches a lie, as its origin and intention are not in keeping with the cosmetic. ‘Relationship’ would be closer to the truth, but really, any words are acceptable so as the fundamental nature of the transaction remains unquestioned.
How to act in such a sphere? Each sphere of action becomes little more than a game, and one should/must play to win in order to maximize. Is it permissible to use words with purely cosmetic function, allowing the other party to think according to old structures, while one embraces personally the new, entirely economic. Certainly it does not make sense to be in the middle, embracing both new and old, neither fully. The probable answer within the means presented is, it does not matter — do what you need to succeed.
What is an alternative?
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 clear. Nothing is. The professor I met — the best local espresso — tells me today of those scholars who died penniless. Better to be rich, he tells me, only then can you be a scholar in the way you wish. Academic constrictions abound yes, but traversing these old pathways sometimes reveals pebbles not yet uncovered, and I have begun to delight again in these pathways and this uncovering, here and there a new taxon, an additional degree of complexity. No new thread binds perhaps, but one is led to question all past threads, and perhaps it is better to build ground up, one brick at a time, each first baked in the sun. Which was Babel, ground up or down, I wonder, then retreat from the thought, as if further consideration might sign a breach from many-tongued orthodoxy or perhaps the more frightful, a divine-claimed sonnet. Grammar fades. It is reclaimed.
Thus I puzzle over my approach to classical Chinese. I read, haltingly, a textbook on grammatical forms while recognizing that the forms often not apply, unsure of how better to proceed. Immersion is the only way, says the Classicist. Perhaps, but do we assume direct apprehension of the material — and what if descriptions differ, as seems often to be the case? So too with Japanese, which takes its fair share of time, I discover that one must love grammar to have any hope here, which comes, perhaps, at expense of history. These forms multiply, channeled and chiseled, as I am too, the poet between words and without any of his own, or, more often, offering the dribble from the not very deep, impressions without substance.
And yet what is the substantia in a sonnet, some heavenly hymn, some criticism, critique, and all the voices in cacophany, no longer bricks but blistering? Is this a holy house or, better, a strip mall of where word-brocades are sought with which to decorate our hollow frames, cheap and available.
Breath, breath deeply, I tell myself, you must forget these words. ‘Who am I?’ ‘Don’t know,’ the question and answer I ask and tell myself silently as I meditate in the morning, zabuton on the bed, half way to sleep, far from awakening. We are awake, we are here, and yet, never fully present. Oh to see a tree as I once did, warned from Rimbaud yet perhaps better to starve in solitude than accept rubber stamps from a minor functionary, or worse yet, become one of the accoladed.
I return to the legal code. So many pebbles; they should be in better piles.
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 simply grammar, just as every musical system (e.g. Schenker) is just that. Are laws, thus, necessary for living? Only insofar as man has departed from this — or this is the essential Confucian position — protested by the many better acquainted with the mean nature of humanity, and, thusly, engineering any number of checks and balances with which to prod him that he may fulfill often cattle-like function.
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 — at the very least as lived, at the utmost as a claim to ultimate reality.
Numbers are, everywhere, an attempt to take us in this direction or a claim to this attempt — the reduciblity of form. But if they can, what are the necessary constraints? What is ‘reducible,’ what is not, and how can this difference be adjudicated? Moreover, who is in the best place to evaluate this? If they are ‘beyond’ form and thus dispute the reduction of form to number, how can one evaluate their claims?
One answer is presence / being / essence encountered in experience, but can this experience, however real to the one experiencing it, ever be constitutive in a definitive way — does it not often lead us back to the world of form, a Shinto procession, rather than any truth.
Thusly we stumble on the way, to find it.
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 other words, an assumed essence, or function of an autonomous mind. If one does not share this assumption (as may be the case with most academic philosophers) one might ask whether or not their task might be better accomplished in another field. Either they are listing facts according to some received schema (e.g. chronologically) or describing mental processes (perhaps better accomplished in cognitive or computer science). In this sense, Heidegger represents the death of philosophy. He is only able to ask the first question, and “thinking” requires a minimalist metaphysics. The remainder is pragmatism, the little we can process within the context of our received schemas, both epistemic (five senses) and ethical (societal mores at the current state).
The way out may or may not involve going in — the current struggle as I try to decide whether to pursue my PhD. In other news, a T.S. Eliot afternoon.
