quiet heart

Philosophy (une autre fois)

Philosophy raises us out of that despondency of thought that we are all accustomed to and which we never encounter any reason to free ourselves from, except when encountering a philosophical work, or by talking with another who is philosophically minded.

But usually such people are too kind in their behaviour with others, and they do not bring up topics that might press upon a friend with their density and, perhaps, gravity. To this, we must learn to be a little less "kind" (though of course, this is only seen as kind within our current social/cultural context) and listen more keenly to our intellectual forefather, Socrates. Society needs 'corruption' and dissent - philosophical discourse is often the very epitome of this dissent, because it obtrudes so ungracefully into the norms of everyday "chatter". Philosophical discourse and political discourse as well, because "kind" society is also often unreflective about the many injustices prevalent in our world, and seem not to be made of strong enough fibre to put such topics in the open space of their sociability.

The Parapet

The question had long been settled.

We sat atop the parapet of a large green electrical box and took in the flavours carried by the wandering winds. The scents and tastes were ever changing, insinuating everything but themselves. Guileless, guiltless scents - poppy-rose and sweet steamed corn, ethanol or seasoned meats; for longtemps we would sit, sweating in the weighted heat of that hour, taking to taste all that was brought in by the winds. Nature's caprice wove for us a limpid dream - the world seemed to contain every scented flavour that it could bear to shrug off from those who tasted it first. Lovely, sifting red-rich skies often doted over us.

But some days the matter was complicated by the presence of a smaller band of children. Their noses ran with smuck, pale faces made grubby in the mud. They were covered, really, in so much dirt that one couldn't imagine that they had not been playing together and laughing - some time during noon it must have been. Their grub was not one caused by fighting or being rough with one another, for it was always very evenly applied, with no appearance of a sudden fall, escape, or laceration.

But, I can never know for sure about these noon kids (as we soon began to call them) - I only know when they appeared before us, and that they did not smile. They looked unabashedly at us, shuffling, turning in circles, kicking slightly this small pebble or leaf, side-glancing us with languishing eyes, sometimes, speaking softly to themselves, too softly for us to hear. With no apprehension they stared straight into our eyes with their mucked blonde or brown hair disheveled across their small heads.

None of us were decisive, none were aggressors. It seems odd to me now that we did not even once attempt to speak to them. Nothing had definitively showed us that they would not respond, but neither did they look eager - we did not sense from them any requests, there was not the smallest hint of entreaty in their eyes, yet there was neither any scorn, nor fear. We, being the elder group --- you might have expected one of us to say something. Expectations rarely rise from within such moments, one is simply engaged, or disengaged, or static. And as I've said, we had long settled our question. The answer did not figure anyone but ourselves - what could be expected of our interactions with the noon kids? They had come after the communion. The spirit rests - the body ages and the scents drift to us indefinitely, but our place is well settled.

Of course, even besides, I may have, at that time, let myself wonder about their thoughts. Did they seek the parapet? Where was their vista? Were such heights tempting to them on account of their smallness? We saw, over a wall, the crest of a small hill behind which the sun, daily, descended. I imagined it was upon this hill that they played and collected their mud, but I never saw them, nor did I see a single cloud of dust rise up from behind that hill. I wondered; perhaps my companions, also, wondered.

We had settled ourselves, neatly and well, on the parapet. I sat on the very right, the fourth of four. The days passed in supple languor - no troubles stirred us, and we chatted in friendly, if subdued, tones. We each to our own houses left before nightfall. The night of that place, a desert town, unlike the day, was cold and sharp and scentless. It passed its frost chill over the yard as we ate among our families and prepared for sleep, never taking heed that the night outside was manifestly different than those afternoons of our most endowed temps.

And yet it was then, in that stillest hour of midnight, as I lay in bed, that I looked to my window. Something in the star strewn sky's ponderous glow gave me the thought that those noon kids were still outside. Something in this thought, that unadorned, unsubstantiated, mild fantasy would bring me up from my sheets, kneeling just high enough to open the window and let the chill in. What I wanted, I cannot say - perhaps I wanted to share the night with them. I would lie back down upon my bed, feel the dew settle around me and feel the ice wind touch my skin, and there, glaze-faced and still, I stirred off to blank sleep.

I never told this to my companions, because, for them (I see it now), their question had been long well settled.

Unqualified Trauma

1. Disinterested Pleasure:

To be sure: Rapture has its value, as does disinterestedness. They need not oppose one another.

Images are much too tantalizing for me to regard them any more - especially those we find on television.

Good art will always be invested with a sensibility that detaches itself from sensuality (explicitly Kantian, I know).

Television, by the fact of its self-supporting structure, must work explicitly to exploit sensuousness. Neither television, the internet, nor advertising, as a result, can never really be trusted for anything but a guarantee that it will continue to perpetuate itself.

Displeasure is no reason to reject something, no reason at all. In fact, it is not even in the realm of possible reasons that one should reject something. Even more, one would possibly be safest in rejecting only that which pleased one, or rather, that which promises to please one but which really only has its own interests in mind. Promises, on the whole, are never selfless.

2. What is required of socialism:

Equality of distribution is not contradictory to the continued existence of fine taste.

"Objects" should be made available to all, and always.

Art, however, is always inscribed upon the object. This inscription, too, must be made in a fine hand, and does not always follow the objects that it might possibly be inscribed on.

Water should be available to everyone, without cost, and without pomp. As should televisions, canvas, paper, music players, etc... but do not mistake this necessary multiplicity and equality for the abandoning of discretion. Art begins where exploitation ends.

3. On speaking in public:

Rather than "speak only when something needs to be said" (which would fail and become meaningless if analyzed or attempted to be put into practice), one should always speak as if one were alone. The results are similar, but the latter is at least practicable. It is what we may wish to call authenticity. A talk with a close friend of ours reminds us that not all interactions need consist of such grand showings and engagements such as we often feel prompted to perform.

There are some who are fearful of speaking in public at all, there are others who will speak according to what the situation asks for and will speak when it is easiest to speak, (sometimes those of the former category are included here as well, because often they will be compelled to speak) and then there are those who can only say what is both difficult and meaningful. They think nothing of being brought to shame, but at the same time, have eyes to the situation as a whole.

I speak most eloquently and honestly when I am alone - the irony is that I rarely say anything.

4. Jean-Jacques:

One may wish to accuse an author, who (explicitly or implicitly) professes to be honest, of lying and thus enact a symptomatic reading of a text, but one should not believe that one is adding or expanding the text in some way. One is only committing a libel. The issue with textual libel is that it does not matter so much that one's accusations are true, as is the question of what has been gained by such a criticism. I have found that such accusations ("he is lying" "She is forgetting to mention a historically/culturally relevant fact") do no more than give the accuser a dim aura of perspecuity that one merely gapes at, and then promptly forgets.

Rousseau, and one never predicts such things, has made me feel honesty, and has made me comfortable in my eccentricities, what I thought were follies, and which I may now cultivate rather than erase.

5. (A question: What is the difference between comedy and absurdity? I had an aphorism about it, but I am dissatisfied - instead I leave it up to vous, readers)

Moments

When I turn on a light switch and the bulb zaps out and dies forever, I wonder: if I had waited a few seconds before turning it on, or if I had done it a few seconds earlier, or if I had turned the switch more slowly, would it perhaps not have happened like that?

But.... couldn't this be asked of any consequence in our lives?

Kansir/Canser

A meditation upon possibility (can), Immanuel Kant (Kan), movement and displacement (ir), existence and being (ser), gravity (serious), patriarchy (Can I, sir?), and degradation/decadence (cancer).

The fiction of the Will: have we yet understood what it means for a someone to 'will' something? The sum of our experiences dictates our actions far more than the 'will' does. This must be readily assented to by anyone - we act as if a young boy grown up in the ghetto with an abusive household, if he reasoned long enough about it, would make the right decision and not join a gang. This is, obviously, absurd. It is just as unlikely for a young person grown up in a suburban christian household not to grow up to be christian as well - or, at the very least, not have some sense of ascetic ideals. The exceptions to these circumstances are to be found in the fact that not all circumstances are so general, or some arbitrary individual disposition (for there are unique people to be found everywhere - take a most wonderful 'exception', Richard Wright and his autobiographical "Black Boy") , but in the end we realize that it is never the 'will' that gives us an adequate answer to why 'one does what one does'.

The problem with the will is that it has created an entire guilt complex for those who still believe in it, for those that think their actions should follow their ideals, rather than that their ideals will follow from the pattern of their actions... if one could choose what one involved oneself in, self-sovereignty would "reign" in general, and not half of the so many follies and failings of people would arise. The very idea that we could possibly reign over ourselves causes the greatest despondency in those who see themselves fail, time and time again - what could it possibly mean for their will to be inefficient? obviously, it is that they have not subjected themselves to enough experiences that would reverse this trend. We tend to expose ourself to limited circles - what is prescribed by the majority.

Christianity favors this conception of the will in the idea that hell is reserved for those who deliberately choose an evil life. This is christendom's major downfall, for one must necessarily either be less happy under the realization that one cannot live up to one's ideals, or must be rather bigamous in one's judgments of others. This latter case occurs in those whose life experiences have led up to them accepting the majority order and living comfortably within it. They do not question their own ideals or their "will" because everything they do supports the paradigm held up by uncritical society. Of course, this never takes any great force of will, but is often done out of pressure to conform. Their judgments upon those who are deviant, criminals or people from different cultures, are so badly informed that we must conclude their metaphysics to be absolutely wrong. Take for example those christians who called the hurricane in Louisiana the just consequence for the type of people that lived there (and I heard this once by my own ears). These people are completely blind to the idea that what one culture or social circumstance breeds is no better than another. Individuals, the only ones who could really show their 'willpower', but who really just constitute a unique ideal, are those who could genuinely be favored by any higher power, if one must posit one (which one never really has an obligation to do), and are the mode through which we actually can make valuations about humanity, and escape the relativism of what I said in the previous sentence (and one must always avoid relativism).

- These are the first thoughts of a proposed treatise which will likely not see light for some time, I was not going to post it, but hit the button on accident, so I thought I would let it be (who knows how far my plans will take me, after all).

Quamiliam

Q) The academy makes me sick..... I realize now that I never liked intellectuals, but rather individuals. The academy, indeed, may be an institution which repels such people, and attracts instead that ungainly personage who is mixed in equal parts of pedantry and banality.

K) I would not attempt to write freedom into an aphorism - it is a very philosophical concept and is not to be dealt with as a truth, because it does not express itself as truth, but as a contingency.

G) My 'secular' merits are important to me, because I don't believe my parents could be as proud of what they don't understand as I am proud while penning such thoughts.

A line from the Odyssey comes to mind: "Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass his own home and his parents? In far lands he shall not, though he finds a house of gold"

N) I enjoy seeing sports and competitions, sometimes enjoy seeing food and food being cooked (these both are the Greek in me), but I do not enjoy watching pleasures of material things - i.e. anything on the 'fine living' channel. They make me sick with hopelessness that humans will survive their gluttonous feasting upon the earth.

Y) There is a reason that one begins to feel happier when one deliberately smiles (anyone who has taken a psychology course knows this fact). The more difficult question is whether psychosomaticism adequately destroys the mind/body distinction.

L) It is not helpful to try and answer the question of whether one should lie or not. One has no reason to lie except out of one's own shame or out of genuine sympathy for another. Ends cannot be measured in such cases, one can only 'search within' and then come to understand for which reason the lie was made. Think of exceptions to this rule, but think of them to their full depth.

Q) Is the art of questioning things really so important as the art of understanding things? Think of this especially when it regards reading a text...

W) "If one were really able to advance theses in philosophy, then no one would be able to reject them" - Wittgenstein

S) Even the greatest thinkers amount to no more than a good wit in some people's eyes. One cannot be too distraught by this.

A) Do not be afraid to look and to stare! People will trust you more than if your eyes are shifting, and they will also probably be impressed with your bravery. Even if you are frightened, do not worry - the chances are that others do not have the audacity to stare as intently, and a comfortable smile also ensures that no one feels threatened. Look at others or do not look at them, but don't simply 'pretend' to do one or the other!