Chanson d'automne

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

-Verlaine

To: Doubt(ers)

Q) ....but this fact that art is useless for the majority of mortals - what significance is this, when it has been art and art alone that has saved me many times over from taking my own life...?

C) I give, much more heartily and readily, my trust to those who rebel from with-in a paradigm. Necessarily, I always mistrust they who criticize from with-out.

G) From the San Fransisco Chronicle, Sunday October 28, 2007, A4, Nation and World:

Train kills boy, 5, who fell on tracks

Watauga, Texas - A 5-year old boy playing on train tracks fell and then froze up when he heard a locomotive approaching, leaving him unable to move before the train struck and killed him, police said.

Kevin Bradford and two other boys had sneaked past their grandmother to look for dinosaur bones Thursday, police said.

Workers aboard the Union Pacific train traveling through this small North Texas town saw the boys on the tracks but couldn't stop in time despite breaking, a Union Pacific spokesman said. . . .

As if there weren't already enough proof that god does not exist (philosophers can come up with great evidence for this fact, but it is incidents like these that constitute real proof)

The boy froze up. His 'will' was settled to inaction. This is perhaps the most powerful simultaneous blast to both contemporary neuroscience and christianity that we shall ever encounter. There is no accounting for this terror that condemns. His escape to discovery (his clandestiny) violates every attempt to abstract or universalize human action. We begin to mourn his life because of his will to adventure - because he was willing to break rules to search for dinosaur bones. At every attempt to search farther back than this personable beginning, one comes up against absurdities. No biology can account for both his adventurousness and his terror, and no god can account for both the 'moral' sum of his life and his bravery. In each moment, this boy faces only himself in the world - and with no necessity.

Q) Why does it strike the young mind like a paradox that oxygen actually fuels fire, rather than tame it? Is this the first moment when Nature makes itself known in its incomprehensibility and thus, dominance over us...?

M) We trust summaries and commentaries until we come upon some astounding passage in a classic text and say to ourselves - and what? by god! how has this been overlooked? Rarely, do we allow ourselves a long and slow dialogue with a text, and we have become far too trusting of the university professor. Let us, first, become autodidacts. Then, when we have searched honestly, thoroughly, and sensuously, we may look to the commentaries. This process always happens in the reverse, with the result that the end is never reached - instead, academic study becomes a continuous, endless, self-perpetuating commentary upon a commentary. I imagine my dropping out of college is immanent - except for the social stigmas, the disappointment of the parents, their co-workers, their relatives. I live for the other, no doubt. I am no free spirit.

Philonomy

Philosophy: so much effort to say so little.

Philosophy creates nothing that is new. It describes the world that we live in, and that is all, only it does so more and more accurately, in time.

Philosophy describes the world of the human - science describes the world of matter. Something else has arisen in recent times that is not philosophy. It is, rather, a crude linguistic psychology that attempts to bridge these two worlds.

What is literature? What is the aphorism? What is maturity? What is tragedy? Wit? And labor?

Most importantly: How is it possible to forget?

We shall always forget, or else we should be overcome. And yet....

There is nothing so perilous as the seduction away from life.

The contemporary period is characterized by supreme dread and absurdity. There is no end (teleology) for us, only an ending. My cousin was mutilated by a roadside bomb in Iraq. What does that mean? Everything and nothing.

Women are raped, children are abused. This fact alone is enough to renounce life. It does not matter that I have not been the victim of either of these things, for I feel deeply and the urge to understand dominates me.

I have felt deeply. And I have not understood.

(Everything in this entry was prompted by my cousin and by looking at a picture of Immanuel Kant's skull on the internet)

We are, thoroughly, animals. Everything that is anxious in us has arisen from this fact. The fact is, however, never apparent. I try very hard when I am sitting in class to imagine the professor as a wise ape. I can do this for a few seconds at most - and then I return to being-in-the-world as Dasein. Every single conflict arises from the fact that we are not self-sufficient beings, and that we are driven to participate in an overwhelming natural process.

I will quote from another:

If evolution is real, we as humans cannot transcend it. All human suffering and all environmental devastation that results from our being is merely part of evolution. This cognizance itself is a part of this grand progression. I do not mean to assign meaning to all things through this assertion. I am merely remarking on the power of conceptual energy versus the power of human will. I am not convinced that this order of things constitutes some justification for our doing with the notion of predestination or fate. Although to our perception this idea implies order and in some form, a kosmos, I think it is still chaos (if such a thing exists). Evolution is not God. Evolution has no plan nor intent. It is but a force trapped within its own momentum and velocity, as we lie trapped to this course of action. But we still have the illusion of choice. To our perception, our will is free. And perception, inevitably, is all that matters.

Nothing remains steady. All is frail.

Or perhaps,

all that is young is frail.

Let us see how close we can get to becoming immortals. A perception unto infinity.