Enthymeme, part 1

January 12th, and 85 degrees. How can I not take a nap? And then if I nap, and don't sleep, how can I stop from staring at the ceiling, thinking how strange it is that 10 years have passed since I started this collegiate process? Trying to imagine the rule we measure ourselves by. Trying to argue with myself, alternately, one way or the other.

No, the "argument with myself" is a dying metaphor. Argument is finished, and now is the finding of the wherewithall to open my eyes in the land I've gotten myself to.

Does that way of saying satisfy? I'm in the business of finding satisfying ways of saying. Existential rhetoric to a small audience -- myself -- trying to persuade me toward a course of action: recognizing that the first stage is over, and the second needs a pair of legs and time.

Life as journey is an old trope, and one that usually revives me from any mild stupor.

And what would one call this weaving of a web of value-laden oppositions, temporal and figurative, some sincere, some slightly ironic, all leaning towards a final memorable climax, a turn, a last jab of the rhetorician to seal in the mind and heart of his hearer the position, emotional and rational, he wants him to have on the whole situation?

One would call it -- at least according to Jeffrey Walker, professor of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin -- the enthymeme.

As I mentioned before, Walker had his reasons for defining thumos the way he did: it allows him to make his argument about the nature of the enthymeme. The second half of his treatise on classical rhetoric, Rhetoric & Poetics In Antiquity, tries to agree with and expand on what Aristotle meant when he said that the enthymeme is "the body of persuasion."

And I'll continue on that, but the Yellow Warbler in my Audubon clock has just announced that it's time for my meeting. Click the one below, and find yourself a little happier.

Heraclitus & Logos

Before I delve further into the enthymeme, I thought it wise to tackle the driver of the chariot: Logistikon, figure of Logos, the reasoning portion of the human psyche. I assume he looks something like stoney Heraclitus below, marble-bearded, eyes void of any passion.

And it was Heraclitus, considered today the most important pre-Socratic philosopher, who first expounded on the subject of the Logos. No one is quite sure what exactly Heraclitus meant when he used the word -- we only have fragments of Heraclitus' work left, and the "definitions" he gives for logos aren't exactly conversation ending. Since his day, logos has been used to refer to a whole slew of related powers or principles: words, anything written or spoken; reason (either the faculty or the action); measure, proportion, ratio...

But Heraclitus seems to have thought about it in a much more fundamental way -- and not necessarily as a technical term. He is famous for believing that the "everything is in a state of flux." His most famous aphorism is an image of this flux: "On those stepping into rivers the same, other and other waters flow." The world figured as a flowing river -- though you might stand in one place in the river, it moves, and therefore, in some sense, the place changes, is always changing.

And yet, he says, somehow there seems to be a world that is common to us all. A "kosmos" he called it -- a somehow unified oneness we all exist within. How does this world-of-flux appear to become a kosmos? Well, as far as I can tell, for Heraclitus, that's where logos comes in. Logos is the principle, or the name he gave, to the commonness, the stability or orderedness, the able-to-be-described-ness, of the world. One Greek summed up Heraclitus' view this way: "Logos always exists, inasmuch as it constitutes the cosmos, and as it pervades all things"

For a believer in a world of flux, a believer in a world of motion, the ability to share a world in common is no small feat. Who or what performs this trick? We don't know, but what we do know is the rule of it -- we know the law it lays down, makes seen for us: the world around us. "Therefore," Heraclitus continues, "it is necessary to follow the common; but although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding."

What could it possibly mean for someone to have a private understanding of the shared surface on a world of flux? You get what you get -- I mean, different perspectives yes, but the common is the common. That's what we have, I imagine someone saying.

Potentially, he might have been attempting to describe the error of having any private belief at all. That is, of believing you have a private understanding, an understanding that is more or other than the understanding emanated to us by the logos, the kosmos.

Last night, and I'll end on this, I went to hear Arvo Part's 4th symphony, "Los Angeles." It was meditative, minimalistic, and, in certain moments, sublime. Part, like Heraclitus, is a mystical figure; one concerned with the most basic, the most elemental. In the notes handed to us at the door, there is a quote of his wherein he is attempting to describe the style of composition he pioneered in the late '70s, which he called Tintinnabulation. The word tintinnabulation comes from the latin world for bell, and is used in English to refer to the ringing of bells. Part's style has a simple bell-like quality to it, and is largely based on chordal triads, and a reduction of the music to these simple bell-like, resonating triads. As I read his reflections, it quickly became clear that tintinnabulation is more than a style for him -- it's a philosophy. It's a way of seeing the world. He speaks about it as though it were an abstract place of reflection. "Tintinnabulation," he says, "is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers -- in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises -- and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this."

I guess it reminds me of Heraclitus, and of the shame of saying I know anything more, or other, than the common. Human Dogma -- the world is there, and I'm stepping through it's movement, like an animal crossing a stream. The seed of all knowledge, and the extent of it.

Click on Heraclitus' stoney gape below to hear Arvo Part's "Spiegel im Spiegel," as heard in a Van Sant movie from 2002.

Thumos

I mentioned Fukuyama's coinage last post: isothymia, which is a joining of iso (equal) and thumos.

What does thumos mean?

In his Phaedrus, Plato figures the human psyche in three parts: a charioteer, and his two winged horses. The Driver is logistikon, derived from logos, the Reason -- and the two horses, one black and one white, are epithumetikon, representing bodily desire, and thumos, or "spiritedness." Reason keeps the two in check, and steers them through the sky toward "divine sights." While the black horse -- desire, concupiscence -- is unruly, and needs the Driver's whip, the white horse, beautiful and long-necked, will heed the driver's word. Both horses represent passionate parts of the psyche, but Thumos -- the location of pride, shame, indignation, and social recognition -- is the brighter side of passion, the more agreeable, manly, not quite as difficult to control part.

Jeffrey Walker, in his treatise on classical rhetoric called Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, decides that thumos, or thymos, for the pre-aristotelian Greeks meant: "'heart' or 'mind' or 'spirit' as the seat of emotion, thought, wish, desire, intentionality, or will. In one's thymos," says Walker, "one considers things, draws inferences, becomes impassioned, forms desires, has intentions, and makes plans." He refers to uses of the word in both a Homeric hymn, and a poem of Pindar's, and says in these instances and others, "thymos as 'heart' is understood as both a principle or place of interpretation and a source of emotional response, urge, and intentionality."

Of Aristotle's conception of the thymos, Walker asserts:
"Aristotle typically associates both thymos and epithymia, "desire," with the "nonrational" (alogon), emotive part of the psyche, which he nevertheless considers to "partake of logos" in the sense that it has a "hearkening and obeying" capacity for interpretive understanding and response. [...] That is, depending on what perceptions are present to the psyche, and depending on the predominant cognitive frames within which those perceptions are interpreted, the "nonrational" part of the pschye, or the thymos, recognizes the significance or salience of those interpreted precepts and mobilizes emotions, desires, intentionalities, and behavioral scenarios (as well as bodily arousal for physical action) in response."

"Moreover, the specific emotions, desires, intentionalities, and bodily states mobilized by the thymos largely determine the predominant cognitive frames and behavioral scenarios within which the psyche's subsequent perceptions will be interpreted and responded to."

If Walker is interpreting these ancient sources correctly, the thumos begins to sound like a pretty darn important part of the psyche. If your body is a chariot, and Reason is the driver, then you've got two winged horses buried in your gut, one black, one white. The black one is pulling you earthward, and needs a good whipping -- but the white one? Well, the white one waits for you to say when.

Walker has a particular reason for talking about thymos -- a word he is very much concerned with, and a word that I have become very much concerned with, is derived from it. The word? Enthymeme. I'll talk more about that later -- for now I'm off to the premier of Arvo Part's 4th Symphony, titled "Los Angeles."

Panera

In line, I am witness to life, a bit of life
negotiated: this post-adolescent boy
awkwardly conscious of his boss's looming
platinum hair. Boy-man tries to concentrate,
but boss-man speaks, asks him to work overtime,
asks him to do this favor, just once. Our hero
fumbles over my bagel, hesitates until
the promise comes: you can take a loaf of bread home.
Who am I to say what is or isn't worthy?
There is no rule, but look, in certain moments
my own heart rises from it's mortal bed,
and feels the brief delight of someone else
smiling like a goddamn goof, because tonight
in spite of death, he'll have a loaf of bread.

Noise Reduction

Snug against a olive-green column, I'm at Panera testing the new noise-reduction ear-buds I just purchased. Cheapest brand (Philips) and yet with the music playing -- I really can't hear anything around me. This public space is transformed into a sanctuary ... well, almost -- between songs, I can hear a muffled chatter. Muffled just enough I think, to be able to ignore it. The "noise reduction" technology seems to consist of the "ear-plug" style ear-buds, coupled with a little bit of gentle white-noise. Mr.Philips recorded himself blowing into microphone, and called it worth another 15 bucks. I wonder how much better the Bose ear-buds are?

Moby, The Rain Falls And The Sky Shudders.

Works well enough. Anyway, the sanctuary starts within, right?

Right. Mulling over so many dark, little thoughts. Can't figure how to act in a world that, if I'm honest, leaves me in a state of constant bafflement. And if I ride waves of convention, I feel listless, I feel disingenuous --

I've been reading over, thinking over, a theory of the steps toward a religious life: first, the aesthetic life, then the ethical, and finally, and for only a select few, the religious life. It's a progression of the self, from being ruled by passion, to rule by ethics and social agreements, and finally by faith in God --

I think one thing we can agree on is the absurdity of the word "God." The closest I can come to saying what I mean is: "That which transcends that which we exist within," and then it becomes a problem of inadequate pronouns.

**Product Update: there is a slight electronic flicker-click in my right ear-bud. Is it picking up a cell-phone? Annoying.**

I feel voices in me disagreeing with the word "transcends." Why must their be something that transcends the world we exist within? I'm not saying there must be -- you can trust me to never say (at least when I'm in a sober mood) what must be -- but I am saying that we believe it to be so. Think past the language we use to describe our thoughts about the world (something, I know, not everyone is convinced we can do). We learn early to look at the world outside of us as a mostly predictable environment that we exist in, are a part of. We believe in this unification that upon reflection seems possibly to be a trick of the trick of consciousness. Of language. But we believe in it. We believe that as we move across space, the predictions we made a moments ago will hold here as well, as long as the conditions are similar. A continuity of space & time. No, not on a micro or macro level -- only on the level I'm currently knowing, the one in which we live and move and have our being.

This unity of the world, this continuity, this world-ness, "transcends" the particulars that compose it.

I've long held that living "ethically" means two things: first, living with the ability to sympathize, living "isothymically" (living with a desire to be equal to everyone else)(a term coined by Fukuyama in The End of History and The Last Man); and, second, acting with the future in mind. Both require a good imagination. I guess that's a way of saying a proud person, or an evil person, is suffering from a deficient imagination.

We believe, whether because of conditioning, or because of observation, that when we die, the world continues -- not in the way we imagined it, the way our minds represented it to us, but in the way that it "is"...

Unity, though, is also an act of the imagination? The ability to see something as a distinct, unified object. (A little Sigur Ros coming on now, layered over a cottony blanket of white noise, layered over muffled chatter and some distant saxophoning.) So, if all imagining humans died right now, would all the world dissolve into nothingness? We don't buy it. There'd be the world, though oddly devoid of all connotation. And, yes, we believe the earth would still be a ball, upon which an animal could act by an instinct that would cause it to function correctly, oh, imagination, oh say, unification. Who's doing it? Something still transcends. I can keep taking out potential characters, and the oneness will still be there -- even if I reduce the universe to a slovenly spin of rocks in the void, they still collide, still operate according to some system -- and that, my friends, is unification. Is an act of the imagination. We believe it. And so we can't escape belief in this thing we often call "God."

Or a sense of the meaning of the world. Or a sense of the heartbreaking loveliness of sympathizing.

Our own impending deaths. What dream, or lack of dream, may come.

Wonderstruck

Wanting to name my post "Existential Wonder" I typed it into google to see what sort of hits I'd come up with. The second link, which I clicked after dismissing the first, was the title of a blog post. My heart sank a little, as it always does when I realize I'm just one of the millions of bloggers out there prattling on about anything that would make me sound the way I feel -- like a philosopher! Then I realized that the post was about a reincarnated dog. It had nothing to do with existential wonder, except for serving as a heart-warming example of it. Think "Marley & Me" for vaguely eastern folks.

So, I retreated, and clicked the third link. Boon!

From Mark Kingwell's Practical Judgements:

"In losing our ability to be amazed in a strange environment, or indeed to see a familiar environment as sometimes very strange, we may have obscured the origin of philosophizing. But an obscuration of origin does not mean we have lost philosophy. Modern philosophy – now made traditional, ruled by convention, canonical – continues without full regard for the experience that gave it rise. Wonder, even if in reality the origin of philosophy, may not be considered an experience deserving philosophical attention. On the other hand, simple wonder cannot be viewed as sufficient of itself to be the philosophizing it sets in motion. The tradition, with its conventions and rules, must be evaluated alongside the experience of wonder. Such a tradition may be rejected as ossified, conservative, or misleading, as Husserl attempts to do, but it cannot simply be ignored."

...then a few lines later, concerning analytic philosopher Ronald Hepburn...

"True wonderment in its philosophical connotation, says Hepburn, must be distinguished from astonishment at ‘mere novelty’ – a distinction to be found not only in Kant but also in Heidegger (curiousity vs. marvel). The thrust of Hepburn’s distinction is thus that ‘legitimate’ wonder must always be wedded to a concern for truth, ultimate causes, reasons; the wonderer wonders only to the extent that he gets his ‘real’ inquiry going. ‘Existential wonder’ at the sheer facticity of the world may not be of legitimate interest, Hepburn suggests, since it opens up no set of reasons to be investigated. It is a kind of wonder, but not one that leads to anything further. […]"

...and a quote from Hepburn...

"We can give no reason for the world's being rather than not being. We can meaningfully ask why it exists, but we have no resource for answering the question. Wonder is generated from this sense of absolute contingency; its object the sheer existence of the world. I shall call it "existential wonder." All reasons fall away: wondering is not prelude to fuller knowledge, though the general interrogative attitude may persist."

Kingwell goes on to point out that many philosophers disagree; in fact, most call this existential wonder the very source of philosophy. Take Plato for instance, who puts into the mouth of Socrates these words:

"[The] sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was the good genealogist who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas."

Thaumas was a sea god of Greek mythology, whose name meant wonder. Iris was the goddess of rainbows, and a messenger of the gods.

Anyway, to get to my point -- although I think rambling may have been my point -- I recently decided that I've moved out of a state of religious wonder, into a state of existential wonder. Or, that my wonder has lost some of its epic ghosts, and has been whittled down to a dumb amazement that the world is here, around me.

And, conveniently, I think I may agree with Hepburn. Being wonderstruck, in the existential sense, kind of leaves one with a zen-like feeling -- no desires. A vague "interrogative attitude" persists, but with "no resource for answering the question" other than reference to existence itself, all we can do is sense its meaning, and keep quiet.

Wittgenstein said: "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." (TLP, 6.44)

He also said, "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." Which makes me think of rainbows, conveniently -- the feeling of being left speechless.

Last Few Days of 2008

Usually you have your youth to reach over and touch in times of existential worry -- well, (you might say to yourself), at least I'm still young. And then suddenly, it's four days after your 29th birthday -- still young, granted, from many perspectives, but I guess what matters is your own sense of when your free-pass license of youth is all used up. And, for me, it suddenly feels like it is; at least, I'm reaching for that familiar box of inexhaustible do-overs, and not finding it.

And so I'm trying to get a taste for these last few days of 2008. Though I've forgotten nearly everything of consequence I ever learned, some residue has remained, and this strange post-Christmas space between two years is slick with the wetness of knowledge lost. Also, the wetness of the downpour of rain that fell earlier today, while I sat in Portland, sipping coffee and feeling romantic. Feeling a heck of a lot.

And I like feeling. My body seems made for it more than it's made for retaining verbal information. What exactly "verbal information" means, I couldn't quite tell you, and though I'm interested in trying to figure out how, right now I'm riding the feeling-wave of the song that's echoing from my ear-buds; and I'd rather feel it, than figure it out. Than make a system of figures for it. Organize that system -- literalize it. Whatever that means.

My stomach is full, and I'm 29, and 2008 is about to sputter out, a candle flame, wet with waxy residue, flapping like a tattered flag. I salute you, banner of those who keep their minds mostly free of entangling alliances. Who like to feel, instead, the free association of a world of moments, disconnected but by a certain simple animal-faith. Let's shake hands and admit that as far as we know, we're alive, and we're dying, and we have a little time together. And that no one has ever figured out more than that, and that it's enough. That all of the faith one needs in life is packed into that little seed.

And there are a hundred men and women like me tonight, earbuds sunk in waxy-wet time-canals between two years, typing out their heart's expression. Thumos, as the Greeks said -- logic of the gut-heart.

And we're all original, those of us typing, those of us sleeping, eating, urinating, making love, watching television, looking at cats, rubbing our feet across lineolium, laughing, reading magazines; we're all located somewhere in this world, doing something that's never been done before, in exactly the way we are, by someone exactly like us. Performing it for the first time, in time. Theme and variation.

Everything is new under the sun, Solomon. Everything, that is, except for the age-old whining about not being able to know anything. But no one has ever whined quite like me, so fine, so free.

Winter Sonnet?

Working on these is a mostly meditative practice, and as that is true, I feel for them as one feels for ones neighbor's pets: very little indeed. And yet I post them -- which is an interesting psychological event, is it not? No, no it's not.

Stuck in snowy ruts, then at intersections
fish-tailing, as they say, between the icy banks
in an unhorsed black sedan, we spent the day
wasting it. Christmas shopping, we called it,
and why you went, you couldn’t quite say.
A backseat hotshot, pouting in your borrowed coat
while nit-pickers picked on pointlessly
about which way to turn, which time to take.
A theoretical believer in free-will, now losing faith,
you inwardly recounted the ways you were
coerced to act against your nature – today,
and since the womb. Which was a thought, of course,
and buzzed cathartic. Determine this,
you said aloud, gesturing, and no one cared.

Winter Sonnets, V

Suppose the sleet keeps falling all afternoon,
and suppose I continue having nothing to do,
until I picture Dante mounting the stairway's
ivory steps -- the steps he climbs to see you,
Beatrice, standing at the high end of the embattlement
all dressed in white, and snow-white all around you
falls gently, and still through the near blank slate
where light makes any black seem brilliant blue
your green eyes gleam. Oh, any mundane room
and cold-footed waiting through a dreary day
will suddenly take flight. Oh, I’ll speak in couplets,
oh I’ll get up from my chair, and walk down past
the kitchen lights, and stare awhile at Dad,
at Mom knitting by the tree, and think of you.

Winter Sonnets, IV

After a morning of sorting through some music,
of waiting for some feeling to accrue,
white maybe, on the sill, the snow has pushed against
the house in drifts, and sleet has fallen, and I
haven’t made much progress. Mom and dad
are clanging pots in the kitchen, making lunch,
and my brother, the youngest, is killing electronic
warlords. I’d help, but I’m bent on finding songs
to make the melancholy lift, like my dad said
the weather won’t, at least today; he presses
his face against the back window to see
the spears of ice. He smiles. And now, my mom
tries to come in, but the door’s stuck – she taps:
“Justin,” she says, “It’s ready.” And maybe it is.

Winter Sonnets, III

A guest in my parents house at twenty-eight,
and still no mortgage or child of my own,
I’m up at two and picturing the tree
still bright at the house’s other, warmer end,
still gently raining red from it’s star-crown down,
making the heap beneath the bottom branches
look huge. It always did. These gifts, this year,
aren’t for the pink-cheeked hopeful version
of myself—no, he’s gone, and in his stead
two little Christmas angels, my brother’s,
asleep in bed, will be at the downward end
of the yuletide avalanche. I’ll say it’s clear
up here, Children— it’s fine. But I won’t say climb.

Winter Sonnets, II

The winter’s slick white hand rains down the glass
and slithers five blurred streaks, that bend in five
the lawn’s gray face. Half-white, half-snow, the grass
looks limp, looks up at least, and will survive
the winter. I’ve seen it do just that most years,
though none as hard as this— and none so cold:
my bedtime water froze stiff on the sill.
That was days ago, and now the melt spears
the pane into murky limbs, one lit dull gold
as something like the sun begins to spill
into the corner. The lawn looks happier.
Once, it was, I had to march out, mud-gilled
and dig a grave beneath a too-dead yard;
I’ve done it for myself. It isn’t hard.

Winter Sonnets, I

There’s no reason to believe that after this
there will be something; except that always before
it’s come: something else. I’ve woken to it daily:
a new set of conditions, a new pattern
of clouds stretched across the sky. I’ve never
been surprised by it – by my father coming in
and saying the silly phrase he just concocted
coming down the hall; new, for the fact
that never before has anyone who looks
like he does, right now, hair speckled silver
just so, glasses askew at 5 degrees, with that
body, that sweater, leaned in this guestroom door
and said those words, just the way he did.
And who says death won’t bring its one word more?

Que sais-je?

In the end, isn't all of this working to establish systems of language that we feel most accurately account for the state of things ethical.

That is, we want to know how to live. So we do live, some of us, ironically enough, lives of leisure concentrated on finding out how best to live. And to be honest, most minutes of the day I wouldn't want it otherwise. Occasionally, dailily, a panic will descend on me, saying, Justin! Why aren't you working your fingers to the bone!

I answer him with silence. I have no reason, except for a soft conviction concerning the value of work: quality and not quantity. Working to the bone and working well are not mutually exclusive, but it's easy enough to let them be.

Science! Funny when you think of it. I suppose it's contribution to the control we humans have over nature has provided me with my leisure, and yet... Mightn't I be just as happy in a medieval world, and act just as ethically? I might, yes, as self-righteous and naive as the question sounds. Montaigne, in his aristocratic leisure, sitting at home, translating, with more than a twinge of Irony, the work of Raymond Sebold...

Ethics: acting in a way that elicits confidence in and love for your person from the most people.

Knowledge (n.): The relationship between yourself and the world. Some call this our mental and physical impressions of the world's information. Also, the mental and physical categories we make for this information -- distinctions and organizations that continue to produce the capacity for more knowing.

To Know (v.): to develop a relationship between yourself and the world. (Also, the categorizing of impressions gathered during this relationship)

Belief: To be convinced of the relative accuracy or usefulness of some part of your worldly impressions.

Certainty: To be overly convinced of such.

It's all in Montaigne. Who got it all from Plutarch. Who got it all from ... Heraclitus? We've harped on this same chord for more than 2,000 years and yet...

Someone might say that without curiosity, we would wither away. But curiosity implies a light-hearted pursuit of knowledge. One that opens the eyes softly, rather than one that eats at the gut. An enlightenment, rather than an emburdenment, an embitterment, which always follows a perceived empowerment.

Adam and Eve ate from the fruit rather than naming the animals, both of which were kinds of knowing.

Which brings me to Human Dogma. The wonderful thing about complete skepticism and nihilism is that none of us are convinced by them. There are a few impressions, which we believe we've managed to communicate to each other, that we are all completely convinced of the accuracy of. I've named them before in this blog, but again: 1. That we have a self. 2. That it exists in a world (implying a web of things, given boundaries by and categorized according to their meaning in our lives). 3. That there are other selves.

And if its true that we share some basic beliefs, and that all other beliefs are made of impressions whose accurate naming we merely make ourselves feel convinced of -- well, before I finish that sentence, I suppose I should stop and consider that this idea would be impressed upon others and elicit conviction its accuracy only with great difficulty -- i.e. by being very convincing. I.e. rhetoric.

The role rhetoric plays in a world of seeming is indivisible from the role knowing plays -- what we know, we know by conviction. What has convinced us of what we know? Do you know you are sitting at your computer? How? Because you believe your senses, which are a power you believe in due to your capacity to categorize impressions, which is a power you believe in. Which isn't to say anything about belief in the statement "You are sitting at your computer." But we believe in our power of making useful phonemes and morphemes the same way -- we are convinced by certain impressions.

Try to convince me that Abraham Lincoln lived. You can't do it completely. If someone brought to me what I considered overwhelming evidence that Lincoln was a hoax perpetrated by the Illuminati, I would likely believe him. Especially if others started to hold that idea as accurate.

But try to convince me I don't exist, and gol-dernit, I won't quit.

Perhaps after some pretty extensive brainwashing, but I'm fairly certain it wouldn't stick. I'd stop eating and talking, to adhere to my new conviction, and then... I'd get hungry... and I'd ask for food...

Try to convince me you don't exist, and I'll only believe in your existence more.

So, what do we call it when people act on kill each other over impressions/idea/conceptions that neither party are fully convinced of (relative to the Human Dogma)? What else, but foolishness?

Sitting pretty in my ivory tower. Come down, come down, little fool.

An excerpt

Throughout this long development, from 600 B.C. to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. With this difference others have been associated. The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be in a greater or less degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically. They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that "nobility" or "heroism" is to be preferred. They have had a sympathy with the irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion. The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists [Robespierre!], have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion. This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognize as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought. In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.

[Well, at least we've established a bias, Mr. Russell]

The Rise of Greek Civilization

So, Russell left us last week with an oscillation -- the pitch between social-cohesion/tradition/authority/dogma and individualism/empiricism/science.
Which makes me think of Galileo, sitting before the Catholic tribunal, feeling convinced of what he had observed and reasoned, and yet perhaps also feeling sympathy for the concepts that the Catholic Church had draped her authority, and therefore her empire, over.
Perhaps the best image of this oscillation is the French Revolution. France swung, in a matter of ten years, from a Monarchical society, where Aristocracy and Clergy held places of power, to "forms based on the Enlightenment" -- individualism, science, democracy. Many hold that the conflict came because of the clash between the capitalistic bourgeoisie and the aristocracy -- which sounds again like this oscillation.
Russell chooses, I think, a middle way. He is all for science and subjectivity, but he also knows that Storming the Bastille might mean you get, along with a Republic, The Reign of Terror. You might get blood-thirsty mobs running through the streets.
Which makes me respect the original United States Government all the more -- for striking a delicate balance, or seeming to at least, between centralized power and individual freedom. But then, I have libertarian leanings.
Money -- so much has been said about it -- symbol of individualism, issued by a centralized power.

Which has nothing yet to do with the Rise of Greek Civilization.

Blue Angel

written at Squaw...

My brother chose Bubba Shot the Jukebox
For God knows why. He bought some snakeskin boots.
This was our brief Summer of Country, and
I did it my way: more secretive, no
Tight jeans, no cowboy hat – I hadn’t yet rung
Puberty’s bell. I still crept through starless vaults
Rat-like, even as we learned to line-dance,
Both hands hooked on bighorn buckles – Angel
It was then I chose you. That night
The newly buxom white-fringed girls
bootscooted the hardwood, invisible to me.
A lonely tune began to conjure you
from another, darker, world. Blue Angel, he crooned,
And my rat-eyes gleamed, and my brother, dimly, knew.

One more post from Richardson

This collection also has aphorisms! I love this guy. Here are some that caught my eye as I flipped through them:

219. It takes more than one life to be sure what's killing you.

221. More than you remember stays green all winter.

222. Worry wishes life were over.

224. Water deepens where it has to wait.

227. I am saving good deeds to buy a great sin.

234. Why should the whole lake have the same name?

242. If I can keep giving you want you want, I may not have to love you.

395. Disillusionment is also an illusion.

475. We have secrets from others. But our secrets have secrets from us.

32. If you're Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you're not? More than enough.

39. The will is weak. Good thing, or we'd succeed in governing our lives with our stupid ideas!

128. Intimates: the ones it's hardest to tell everything you're thinking.

212. Happiness is not the only happiness.

276. No gardens without weeds? No weeds without gardens.

Encyclopedia of Stones

(These are entries from James Richardson's Encyclopedia of the Stones - a Pastoral.)


1.
They do not believe in the transmigration of souls.
They say their bodies will move
as leaves through light.

Everything would be perfect if the atoms
were the right shape and did not fall down.

2.
They resent being inscribed
as if they could not remember,
but they congratulate us on the wisdom
of using them to mark graves.

3.
Sand makes them nervous.

4.
They perceive the cosmos as the interior
of a mighty stone.
At night this is perfectly clear.

5.
Long ago
they began to give of their light
to build what we now call the moon.
It was almost finished.

6.
Tradition says they were the paperweights of a lord
whose messages rotted beneath them.
So they think hard.

The old remember being flowers,
but the young ridicule them and remember fire.

8.
This is their heroic myth:
"One afternoon the great stone set out."

It is not over.

9.
They are unable to perceive moths.

10.
They have a dream, but it is taking
all of them all time
to imagine it.

13.
Knowing them to be fond of games, I asked
why they did not arrange themselves
according to the constellations, but they said

Look.

22.
Here is another one of their stories:
"One Stone."
Like the others it is characterized
by control of plot and fidelity to the real.

24.
They are experimenting with sex
but are still waiting for the first ones to finish.

28.
When it is unbearably clear,
the stones have taken a deep breath.

35.
When I describe to them how we see a shooting star,
they say "That is how you look to us."

When I tell them how they look to me,
they are elated and describe in turn
something I have never seen and do not understand.

37.
Some of their favorites: October,
salt, flowers, 10 P.M., starfish,
Paul Klee, stories, waiting, the moon.

38.
You know the sky is blue
from the accumulated breath of stones,
or will, next time you are asked.

48.
I told them my favorite story:
"One day."

They liked it except for
the surprise ending.

49.
They know the infinitesimal ways
to the center of peach and oyster,
cherry, brain and heart.

63.
I say "How do you get to the river?"
They say "It will come."

Squaw Valley, James Richardson, and Russell

I've been a week away, and so Russell has had to wait by the wayside. Whatever that might mean. I've been in Squaw Valley, which is a lovely dip in the rock, a meadow lined with Aspens, twenty minutes away from Tahoe. I was there for a writing conference, and did write, some of which I will shortly post.

Today I've been catching up on the centuries -- that is, regaining the speed necessary to not be flung far off when I lay a hand back to Russell. Charting the 15th. If the 16th century was the beginning of the modern era, then the 15th was the ending of the middle era, the middle ages -- Constantinople fell, Brunelleschi painted perspective, Gutenberg invented the Press, and Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.

And I've also been reading James Richardson's poetry -- suggested to me by Jim McMichael, who is my professor here at UCI, and was a nominee for 2006's National Book Award.

It's a collection called Interglacial. The first three poems -- one which serves as an epigraph, and two from his first collection called Reservations -- are fantastic. They don't give me the feeling of beings rhetorical tricks, which of course merely means they are better at being rhetorical, at convincing me -- more convincingly speaking of some True.

Here is one of his published in the New Yorker (I like it):

End of Summer

Just an uncommon lull in the traffic
so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,
with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,
and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,
and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversation
and brought to you, loud.

It would be so different
if any of these were missing is the feeling
you always have on the first day of autumn,
no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehow

the sun singling out high windows,
a waiter settling a billow of white cloth
with glasses and silver, and the sparrows
shattering to nowhere are the Summer
waving that here is where it turns
and will no longer be walking with you,

traveller, who now leave all of this behind,
carrying only what it has made of you.
Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried
and the slang grows stranger and stranger,
and you do not understand what you love,
yet here, rounding a corner in mild sunset,
is the world again, wide-eyed as a child
holding up a toy even you can fix.

How light your step
down the narrowing avenue to the cross streets,
October, small November, barely legible December.