What I am able to say lags behind what I experience.
All posts by anomalogue
Intelligence and urgency
I like this Aldous Huxley quote: “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
Does that mean that a Huxley-qualified intellectual who thinks sex is infinitely interesting is in some sense superior to one who never saw why sex was such a big deal?
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Intelligence is one important element of intellectuality, but urgency is also important. Intelligence and urgency increase one another’s effect exponentially, and sometimes catastrophically. The poor souls who are both urgent and intelligent to an extreme drive way the hell too far out into the frontiers of knowledge and create great caches of insight where nobody has ever been, then they die in solitude. They literally sacrifice themselves to knowledge.
The sacrifice is redeemed by the merely intelligent and the merely urgent. The merely intelligent build infrastructure around the new knowledge – sanitation (solid scholarship), communications (standard language, histories, textbook knowledge), logistics (publishing, championing). The merely urgent digest all these insights, simplify them, smooth them and carry them back to civilization. The merely urgent are the agents of popular change.
I can tell you: there is a lot out of astonishing insight out there, freely available, that civilization has not even begun to digest. The question is whether we’ll eat, or whether we’ll keep pointing at our empty distended bellies as proof that we’re already too full. We’re starving to death on a mountain of nourishment.
Skepticism
Skepticism is the practice by which a thinker interrogates obviousness, givenness and assumedness until everything he “knows” falls apart in his hands. What can be done with the broken pieces of former truth?
For one kind of thinker the pieces become an exhibit of the nonexistence of truth. He breaks pieces into smaller pieces to renew his faith in factlessness, a willful refusal to know any particular thing as true. For another kind of thinker the pieces are disillusionment. He glues them back together into a recollection of the past, and makes skepticism taboo, and this is his faith, a willful commitment to know particular things as true. (For both truth is conceived as constituted of particular true knowledge.)
There is a third option. Actively do the breaking, but pause regularly and allow the pieces to reconstitute themselves. Observe as a gentle scientist, walking around like a sculptor – within, without and upon – the fluidly rearticulating shapes, noting everything, omitting nothing. Especially note the feeling of ethical freedom and ethical rebinding, and the influence of others.
Halves
One half can’t but would. The other half could but won’t.
David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon College, again
I think maybe Wallace wasn’t really giving advice to those graduating students in that commencement address. It seems possible that he was pleading for mercy: “You might not understand specifically why I am how I am, but please allow your misunderstanding to be a compassionate story…”
Maybe philosophy is nothing other than a practical, factical attempt to make the fragile people at home in this world with us. We can make the world tough and habitable only for the tough… but then we will be surrounded by tough people and we might wonder why the world is so dull and flat and devoid of possibility. The best beauty is delicate. Enlightened strength is moved by fragility and sacrifices to it.
(By the way, do women understand that if they gain ascendancy in the world, men will become the beautiful ones? Women will have to learn the art of human connoisseurship. Until then they will be insufferable tyrants. Look at the ERA parades, and look at the average modern wife: Hell on Earth. This transition to female dominance has sucked and will continue to suck until it resolves and women know how to love from a position of strength.)
Spiritual anatomy lesson
(A semi-poeticization of Husserl)
It is too easy to confuse our biological anatomy with our spiritual anatomy, to confuse the physical site in the body where the spiritual intercepts kinesis (the body experienced from the inside). Our minds are accustomed to reflect on a world of particulars and objects, and spiritual entities defy comprehension in this mode of thought. (But not all modes of thought. I’m not a mystic or a romantic. Many apparently unthinkable things can be thought, if thought in the appropriate mode.)
The two major points of confusion: 1) the equation of spiritual mind (in German ‘geist‘ means both spirit and mind, and most of our religious notions come directly out of German meditations on geist) with the biological brain; 2) the equation of spiritual heart with the biological heart.
The spiritual mind is actually the negative space of the brain. The spiritual mind has the shape of the entire universe, inner and outer, and it orbits each of us, and leaps from each of us and dives back in like solar flares. It can also be viewed as a field of vision within which sights exist. The spiritual mind does not displace space like an object. In fact it barely exists except for where it cooccupies an Other’s mind and becomes transcendent We: a seeing-with-together.
The spiritual heart – the heart who breaks – only intercepts the site of the physical heart. It extends throughout the entire body, and then out into the world in twisting tendrils. That spiritual heart, like spiritual mind, displaces nothing, but barely exists except in cooccupation with an Other’s heart and becomes another dimension of transcendent We, a feeling-with-together.
When a heart is broken, one of these tendrils is severed, and taken off by an Other. The brokenness is the phantom limb of the heart-tendril, which continues to feel and ache. It cannot be rejoined; it cannot be touched and comforted.
It is dangerous to love authentically. Most of us refuse to be with an Other – another subject-as-such, another entire interlapping universe. We’d rather interstimulate with another across the membrane of space: a subject-thing we regard whole against the sky, a psychological thing-soul encapsulated in a skull and a chest.
It is dangerous to love, but love anyway. Do it again and again even if it kills you.
The world is not out there. It isn’t “within” you, either. It exists between us. (The physical world exists for us as a subset of the spiritual. When mystics speak of the illusory nature of the world, what they mean, or what they ought to mean, is that the physical world’s primacy as the metaphysical substance of the world is illusory. It is all made of spirit.)
We are all we have. We are all we want.
Tea olive oranges
Tonight I rode home at dusk and I could barely see the road, which accentuates the feeling of gliding. The tea olive was blooming and it was blissful.
I love Henri Rousseau’s orange trees because I imagine they smell like tea olive. I love the color red-orange because of Rousseau’s paintings.
Susan is playing “Cosmic Dancer” on her guitar in the living room.
Easier to ask forgiveness?
It is not easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission – not if you actually know your guilt and recognize that you need forgiveness to repair something precious that you have damaged.
Asking for forgiveness is even harder than showing mercy.
The luxury of skepticism
Once you’ve fully exercised your skepticism and called the contents of common sense into such doubt that common sense seems no better grounded than any other solidly constructed poetic vision you might find yourself tempted to experiment. If you’ve been able to walk on this surface for all this time without falling beneath, what other unlikely surfaces will hold you up?
However, standing in the boat and looking out on the water and speculating how it might bear your weight, trying all sorts of possible explanations and theories (does God solidify the water under each foot like a tiny boat? Does he hold you up by the scruff of your soul? Maybe there’s a sandbar under there? Maybe the water is frozen?) – that is not exercising skepticism. Exercising skepticism is testing the possibilities in ordinary day-to-day practice. I’m tasteless enough to call rational resolve’s practical follow-through “faith”.
The most fascinating knowledge in the world
I’ve put considerable effort into learning the most fascinating things in the whole world. Therefore, by my own standards I know the most fascinating things in the world, and being someone who prizes knowledge, I have made myself into my own ideal of the most fascinating person in the world. It’s too bad these standards are strictly my own. Dang. (But there’s an upside: because knowledge isn’t treasured it’s inexpensive. I can buy miraculously good books for ludicrously low prices. This book I’m reading right now ought to cost more than a house, but I got it for $20, brand-new.) Still, I’d love to meet someone who recognizes the value of the insights I’ve worked for and fought for. I feel like I’ve accumulated zillions of dollars in a currency nobody exchanges.
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Maybe it would be fruitful to ask some questions about what makes my fascinating knowledge so fascinating. Is the knowledge itself fascinating? Are the applications of the knowledge fascinating, as case studies? Does the knowledge itself only become fascinating as it is being applied, so that the conjoining of theory and practice is what is fascinating? Or is the activity of applying the knowledge the locus of the fascination – and if it is fascinating as an activity, is it a participatory or spectatorly fascination? Or is the fascination bound up with the entity acted upon in the application of the knowledge? Or is it being, oneself, the object of the application, being acted upon, affected? Maybe it’s a matter of presentation or packaging.
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I asked myself a question five years ago: If I discovered there were no practical purpose at all in my learning and thinking, would I do it anyway? My answer was “yes”. I need to keep it that way. And I need to protect my life as a means to do this learning and thinking. Because when I ask that same question about just about everything else my answer is “no”. That “yes” and that “no” is one’s ethical kernel.
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Love is what we do for no reason.
Once you are clear on what in your life is ends and what is means you can be a real son-of-a-bitch.
Maybe my existence in regard to all other people is absolutely purposeless. Then what? What do we owe one another?
Marys and Marthas
As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.
I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.
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Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.
Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.
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We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.
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I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.
Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.
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There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.
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How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.
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Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?
New brand
A premise for a book: 1) Brand theory is evolving, because brand itself is evolving. We are not deepening our understanding of something constant. We are reflecting on something that is rapidly evolving and our thinking reflects the change: the relationship between customers and companies in a cultural environment centered with increasing exclusivity on production and consumption of salable goods and service. There is no time and even less energy for anything but this, and we humans, the spiritually insuppressible and resilient beings we are, learn to love and humanize what we are unable or unwilling to escape. 2) This new kind of brand relationship originated in the relationship between fans and their bands that existed in the proto-alternative music of the 80s and early 90s, and came to prominence as gen-x became more influential in the market as producers and consumers. The new brands owe more to the Pixies and Pavement than to Tide and Geritol. The old brands were mere functional promises. The new brands are more richly dimensional and help support personal and social identity.
Not by choice
Our heroes, who move us in paradoxical awe and pity, have never chosen this way of being.
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When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s the misfit kids were indignant when their bands were adopted by the mainstream. I think it was like this: the mainstream could have chosen otherwise – it just helped itself to something novel that happened to be there. The mainstream would equate its consumption of yet another variety of entertainment with our need for what we experienced as art, as a rare and precious sense of belonging.
I think when we pulled that move of dismissing an artist’s later work (“That first album was great, but…”), we were attempting to preserve a brand relationship. We severed our relationship with the band as it exists in the present – and even with the band’s past work as it is discovered in the present. The new brand relationship was having been there at the time it was happening: having the right to enjoy the band nostalgically. We learned how to do this, and did it repeatedly, constantly, as our desperate alternative to an unacceptable existence became the consumer category Alternative Music.
Then we became ashamed of hanging our identities on bands at all. Sonic Youth decided to like Madonna and hip hop, and that seemed like a good way to go. We tried to like sports, and we wore baseball caps. We looked for guilty pleasures that could democratize us a little. We loosened our grips, opened our hands, went out into the market…
Lucid dreaming
Lucid dreaming: excellent practice for lucid schizophrenia.
What is truth?
Some ways truth is established, practically:
- In representing the contents of life in a clear, orderly and self-evident way. Truth = tidiness.
- In accurately anticipating and influencing the future. Truth = security.
- In bringing fragmentary facts home to a unified body of understanding. Truth = digestion.
- In reaching agreements with those around you. Truth = home.
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On that last point, truth as home: Young philosophers love to believe they don’t need a home, that they don’t need to share truth.
Fact is, the philosopher needs to share his truth more than any other kind of person. Sharing truth is the philosopher’s job.
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The youthful philosopher (who seeks truth) is larval, just fry. He is aware only that he cannot share the prevalent truth. This is his point of departure. He heads off toward an oasis – his truth – he sees hovering on the edge of the horizon. He dreams of sitting at the side of his own pool, reflecting in solitude to his heart’s content. He drives at his truth, driven by idiotic instinct, just like a salmon drawn back to the head of the stream where he was born. Does he reach his truth? Yes, but not the truth he thought he’d find. He doesn’t find any oasis, but he certainly finds himself submerged in something cold and disturbingly fluid, and it can be summarized as something like: “My God, I don’t want to be alone here.”
Look for this form, and you’ll see it again and again. Wittgenstein slowly losing his mind alone in his house high on a cliff above Norwegian fjords; Nietzsche (who called his philosophical kind “hyperboreans”) living alone in Sils Maria; Christopher McCandless hitchiking to Alaska and dying there; and so on.
Anyone who goes out into true solitude and comes back knows three things for certain: 1) physical sustenance is nowhere near sufficient; 2) the power to coerce is the opposite of what is needed; 3) religion is not about magical miracles, but something more radically surprising.
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It doesn’t matter how tough or antisocial a human being is. A person in solitary confinement goes insane.
A philosopher who thinks too far can fall into plain-sight solitary confinement. He can speak with others, but he cannot make himself heard and he cannot digest most kinds of company.
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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.– Rumi
Trees
When we walk on the forest floor, the part of the tree we are given at eye-level is the narrowest point, the trunk, slightly above the tree’s midpoint.
To see how the trunk spreads itself upward into the open light, we can simply turn our faces to the sky. However, to see how the trunk spreads downward, we have to dig with our hands, and come to terms with dirt and sweat. Tender leaves and delicate blossoms will not be found down there. This is where the tree braces itself against the weather and procures its nourishment. Below the ground, a tree is not fucking around: it is all business.
That’s one way to see it.
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Through a seed, the world organizes itself into a tree.
It is also true that a seed “grows” into a tree. We know what this means. But let’s not get carried away with the usefulness of our habitual intellectual devices. Objectivity is instrumentally useful (techne), but this usefulness is true in a certain limited sense; it does not make it “the truth”. To get closer to something like “the truth” we must acclimate ourselves to a different and larger mode of knowing, a mode where we consciously articulate meaningful order out of the whole: the profoundly chaotic world we have arisen and awakened within. What is this chaos, essentially? It is akin to being an infant, or waking up from a deep afternoon nap.
Maternalization
For many years I was fond of pointing out something sort of awful: New mothers are the most selfish, egotistical beings in the entire world.
They see themselves as the pinnacle of altruism, selflessly sacrificing themselves to another person who is not themselves.
Obviously, that is a diaperload of crap. New mothers merely transfer their selfishness to their baby: their outrageous personal ambitions, fantasies, preoccupations. Every megalomaniacal, hyper-romantic conceit the woman wisely kept tucked within the concealment of her subjectivity explodes out of her in a massive fireball of unrestrained self-indulgence, onto this allegedly external, separate being in her arms… For all practical purposes, that baby is her. This is why new mothers are in so many cases universally reviled, even though nobody will admit it.
I always liked very much how horrible and obviously true this observation was. (I do pretty seeing; but I do ugly seeing, too. I just like truth; and when the truth is ugly I know I love truth for her mind, not for her pleasing features.)
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Here is an example of a perspectival shift I have had on this topic.
I now see unrestrained maternal self-indulgence as the ideal transegoic experience, of entry into authentic intersubjective relationship, what I call Logos.
Postpartum depression is the destruction of a girl’s ego under pressure of maternal responsibility, which any mother will tell you is absolutely crushing. The mother undergoes biological bootcamp. She is disoriented, sleep deprived, stripped of all familiar comforts and freedoms, ordered around by the insistent cries of an imperious officer. She is broken down and built back up into a mother. The mother is no longer the girl she was. That girl could not accomplish the things the mother has to. But the mother is not a stand-alone woman. She is a participant (probably a broken one) in a new transegoic being, the mother-baby, which comprises the mother and the baby, but is not reducible to the two individuals. I’ll call this “maternalization”.
But, in exchange for this period of depression, which is nothing less than a nonintellectual analogue of philosophical perplexity, the mother gets to experience the joy of the transegoic, which is the analogue of philosophical breakthrough. She gets to feel the nestedness of being, that we are in each in We as much as each of us are I.
Mothers worship their babies like little gods because the mother-baby relationship is the first religion many mothers have experienced. Worship is the natural response.
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That women put their children in daycare because they think they ought to want to pursue a career… it overwhelms me with misogynistic contempt. Women (on the whole) still lack independence of thought. Here is immediate, primordially intense reality revealing itself, and what does your average “liberated” woman do? She remains enslaved to general opinion, to all-too-common sense, to vanity. She’d rather appear free than to exercise authentic freedom and risk being seen as Not Independent. So, she tears her guts out, comes to work in despair, weeping… and accepts this as normal and necessary. Phuh.
(Note: Obviously, none of this vitriol applies to women who have no choice but to work, nor does it apply to women who sincerely love their careers more than their babies. I’m only talking about women who ignore what is closest in favor of what is furthest.)
Not vision
Imagining something vividly is not “having a vision”; nor is imagining something vaguely but intensely.
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Very few people have a vision of anything. They’re sitting in the same seats as the rest of the audience, seeing what everyone else, seeing as everyone else sees.
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Having a vision is having a vital line of sight on something, a place where others – if they are willing – can walk and see from, too. Vision isn’t about the object. It is about the subject, and about cosubjects.
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Do you know why we all love to relax with popular fiction? Because the author is writing to an already seated audience. We can remain seated, too, where we already are. The interpretation is effortless and there is no possibility of angst.
Seeing follows looking
I reread the David Foster Wallace piece I posted yesterday. I thought I agreed with him, but now that I’ve reread the whole thing I realize that while I agree with his goal I disagree with him on how the goal is reached.
We do not get to choose our beliefs. We are only able to move about and see from different angles. What we see at these angles determines our beliefs for us.
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Starting with the belief you’d like to have and shifting angles in order to make the belief believable 1) is intellectual dishonest, and 2) will leave you with bad-faith “faith” that puts the heart and mind in conflict.
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If you hate what you see, your only recourse is to look differently. You cannot change your seeing directly. The seeing is determined by the looking. You have to work with your angle of sight. Take the metaphor of “perspective”, of “seeing differently”, of “insight” seriously. Stop squinting. Keep your eyes open. Get your intellect off its ass, out of its comfy chair and make it walk around its objects until the objects show themselves to you in a way that reveals new and better meaning.
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Intellectual honesty without ideals is cheap. Ideals without intellectual honesty is cheap. The marriage of intellectual honesty with ideals is more difficult and much more valuable.
Read my mind (part 2)
(I wrote this in 2008, but kept it private. I’m not sure why. I’m making it public now because it seems more relevant than ever.)
If the leadership of an organization is not attuned to the needs and sensibilities of those they lead, the administrative layer will thicken in compensation. Everything will have to be codified, be made explicit, denatured, formalized and mechanical. This is the consequence of leadership that leads from a thick distance, tries to objectify and functionalize those they lead.
The leadership will need everything spelled out for them and they still won’t get it.
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For most of us it would be an improvement to be treated like a tool. A craftsman feels a tool as he works. A craftsman doesn’t just “set expectations” with the tool and demand remarkable, profitable work to happen simply because the tool is top-quality. A surgeon would never pick up his scalpel wearing thick, wool mittens.