i hope all that goes into keeping me alive, is worth it
46.110451
7.928253
A little secret
i hope all that goes into keeping me alive, is worth it
Category: meaning
Wisdom
“If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life’s work”
-Mary Ruefle-
Education
“You simply cannot learn and know at the same time,
and this is a frustration we all must bear.“
-Mary Ruefle-
Oracles
The Delphic Oracle that has guided philosophy – “Know thyself” – in Nietzsche (in my “reading”, opinion) realizes itself as “Trust thyself”: mine, articulate your experience: or (from Heidegger, et. al.) “start nearest”: perhaps even better – Notice the Nearest.
Tendency = looking past. Going “large”, going “small”, searching causalities, progress, development, Time. Being.
But no. Always already “being.” Always already a “that there” EXPERIENCING. Once there, one might re-cognize (A-tension, attention). (A new “there”). And consider possibilities. Partially, or collaboratively, present-ly, select some more-than (…), NEXT THAT-THERE. (see Eugene Gendlin).
That’s something. Could be labeled “awareness”? Don’t know. But something, certainly (? – is this possible?) EXPERIENCE: which perhaps synonyms to some potential degree – HUMAN BEING.
“We” don’t need Dasein. In very many ways any word will do. Nearest, native. “I”, “me”, “Nathan”, “Rachel”, “Mark”, “Luanna”, perhaps beneath (before) that: no substrate: : That-there (I/you-Here) EQUALS. Nearest. Now. Native. (An archaeology of the generalized “we” – it’s ok).
Simply following thoughts, attempting attention, another “more-than” (…) BEING THAT-THERE (WHOM? – within).
Simple thoughts. Drawing (?) near. We (?) are such “beings” as might attempt/assent “to be.” Strange, that-there.
(notes, 08.10.15)
other jottings spilled from the fuel-can:
“Dasein has its being to be, and has it as its own” –Heidegger
[The Unknowable Alive]
for each “kind”? of being (perception) I wonder if it is not “turtles all the way down” and so, perhaps, eventually, we just “be”?
(Paul Bains)
“THE QUESTION OF EXISTENCE NEVER GETS STRAIGHTENED OUT EXCEPT THROUGH EXISTING ITSELF” – Heidegger
Inquiry into existing: “How can we ask about asking?” in any meaningful way? Access (Eugene Gendlin)
There is nothing that we “do” that is not what we “do.” We cannot get around a corner and become something else/other. Therefore we must content ourselves (or, it behooves us to) with being. Ourselves. Being.
Creeping through it. trying (?) merely (fully?) to BE. BE IN WITH AS WHAT – does he address how we have the capacity to imagine otherwise? (than being?) (Heidegger)
-Why do I consistently feel that I need/ought to SPARE others from my own “existing”? that I might make my way somewhere somehow that would not tax them?
To read “such a quiet thing as thinking”: A we
The rigor of this program (for me) puts me in 9-10 hours of seminar/symposium per day, 7 days / week, and therefore very little time to process, do self-selected-readings, even journal. At the same time, the strange reality that introduces – of an intensity and exhaustion I truly have never encountered (save perhaps in parenting and certain periods of intimate relation) – presses (prods?) me to adapt, alter, re-think. So, in order to survive, when moments arise for me to work with a pen and blank pages, I am going to post them as a record, as much for myself forward, as for a witnessing from any of you. As you can see, a certain blitzing of the brain/body incurs that confuses or disorients. So this will be a kind of journal / personal notation space for myself (needing witnessed) until time passes and (I hope!) the plenitude of this experience seeps in, along.
Today I found an hour to scribble, and here is how it goes. Drained, depleted, dissolute-feeling, I translated the first week into an expression around a too-much that exhausts, an overwhelm that empties.
To read such a quiet thing
(click title to view)
Uncannily (as many happenings this first week) – the evening’s lecture concluded with a translating of Maurice Blanchot – to the effect of: “we will maintain plenitude in (or unto) the nothing.”
On a Personal Note
Prologue: I do not know what I am about to write.
Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
In less than one week I will be in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in the midst of a thousand novel things. I am going as a participant in the European Graduate School’s PhD in Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought program, studying with 15 or so others, guided by Simon Critchley, Giorgio Agamben, Christopher Fynsk, Boris Groys, and Luc Tuymans, et. al.
For weeks now, any spare moment has loomed like this:
working my way through the bulk of Agamben’s corpus, Heidegger, Hegel, Kojeve, Derrida, Brecht, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Spinoza, and columns of secondary literature. I do not know what to expect. I expect small seminars of conversation and dialogue, led by persons tattooed on my arms – persons I “assume”? “understand”? are paid to think – employment I would SO love to land – to experience & think, inquire & think, research & think, & report. Perhaps? So we’ll gather for 6 to 9 hours a day (or more) – discuss principal thoughts/texts/events of human thought-about human thought-about human being-experience…and…?
Walk in the mountains – Nietzsche claimed his thoughts would only be possible up here. Sleep. Read. Think. I really don’t know.
It’s been the first time in my life (I can remember) in which the hours of reading I’ve poured into this have actually eventuated in headaches. Distinguishing terminologies and concepts. Following trails of thought. Engaging them. Responding to them. Add to the above William James, A.N. Whitehead, Eugene Gendlin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Steven Shaviro, Brian Massumi, Gilbert Simondon – my own favorite philosophical corpus – to construct conversations, critiques, and alternate points of view through. To think-through-with. And still with thousands of pages to go.
Here the classrooms and buildings. Mountains and trees. Novel, novel, novel. The minds I’ll encounter. Novel. From all over the world, perspectives, perceptions, reflections, opinions, resources, references, practices, habits…novel.
And mostly (always?) I still simply want to write.
As my mindbody gestates and swells with new jargon and lingo, concepts and theories, voices and styles, there are many moments of cluster, confusion, conjoining and merger. Thoughts disarrayed. Set loose from their sources and synapted to knots and knobs of my own kernels of thought & experience. A pregnant field. A chaos. I will need to walk. Need to sleep. i lose my bearings.
Language. Other moments it feels everyone is considering the same things in different voices. The same ‘truths’ in variant language-games. The same purposes. Not always. But those hunting and haunting human experience – with that strange zeal and compulsion, near-desperation of finding-something-out, making-sense, questing meaningful presence…from diverse times and cultures, languages and histories, feelings and vocabularies…
I sense similarities, ties. Tangles and diversions.
“the chief error in philosophy is overstatement”
-Alfred North Whitehead-
WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE
is what I have written at the beginning of my notebook for the journey. What are you talking about & how? written just underneath. Wittgenstein. Whitehead. Bakhtin. James. What we experience together alters everything we bring. When we dialogue occasions occur, events happen. When we encounter and meet. Interaction. Action and process take place, differentiated, by Other.
From another pile: Knausgaard, Mary Ruefle, William Bronk, Wallace Stevens. Ivan Vladislavic, Ben Marcus, David Foster Wallace, Joshua Cohen. In my readings – Valery, Rilke, Holderlin. Blanchot, Kafka, Beckett.
Voices. Styles. Experiences. Occasions.
Interpretations. Experiences. Thoughts. Language.
What I expect is that “something is doing.” Activity is going-on. We/I will be being-with and being-in. There will be convergence, dissonance, emergence and change.
It will be a variant “me” coming “home.”
http://panocam.skiline.cc/saas-fee/laengfluh
(live webcam of area)
To the mountains then. To think. To learn. To live. To be-with and be-in.
To become.
Eros – acorn/oak – Identity – Desire
It occurs to me. Occurs to me that vocation / personal / public / private / occupation / romance / family / profession are not separate elements of some proposed “self” I might emerge with in day-to-day interactions / responsibilities / obligations / choices, but rather tangled and woven threads of the unitary multiplicity (singular-plural) that is “me”, or some continuously occurring/re-curring cursive/re-cursive individuated co-construction of living human life in the world.
So that: when I compose an essay, poem, article, research, letter, note, list, diary entry, story, etc…I am not precisely operative as one or another individuated-circumstance of my “self”, but rather a that one – individuated occurrence/happening/event – evincing/emerging via this vehicle/form/instance in this case.
Composing a letter to my beloved today, I found “I” was also addressing my own feeling for the circumstances of my living, perception and reflection of my beliefs and attitudes within it, and aims or desires associated with my experience. So I make it an “open letter” – a public enunciation – of my experience being such-that-I-am.
I love you, Hallie.
I love you in ways that are very difficult for me to express.
*
Each aspect, experience, element of my reality – loving you/relation with you – always seems just out of reach of conveying, communicating. Beyond.
*
My appreciation, joy, anticipation, lust, desire, want, ache, gratitude, reception, pleasure, pain, fear, confidence, courage, adventure, dread, need, fondness, appreciation, hurt, etc… all seem diminished by, or unequal to, somehow MISSED, INACCURATE to my attempts at expressing, representing, sharing…
*
Wishes, dreams, philosophy and poetry all live in this realm: ruled by the “well, NOT like THAT!” Or…always followed by a “what I MEAN is…”
*
Ambiguity, inexactitude, shortcoming, outstripping, seemingly hopeless and impossible – yet ALWAYS generating hope, desire, energy in the STRIVING and BELIEF.
*
Hopes, wishes, illusions, truth, reality, dreams, love, art, religion… all seem to depend on this strange commerce of energy.
*
discovered negatively, or via an absence or lack…Utopia – we only ever KNOW that “utopia”, “paradise”, is a sensed “longing”, a KNOWING-THAT-THIS-IS-NOT-IT.
*
Perfection. If perfection is experienced (instances of ecstasy? Joy?) we appear unable to express/share/tell it!
*
Utopia, perfection, hope and desire – are each revealed by their “lack” or “absence” – their “NOT-IS”
*
Everything “ultimate”, “perfect”, “totalizing”, “whole” or “outstanding” we experience as UNIQUE, DIFFERENT, distinct and incapable of analogy or metaphor.
*
UNLIKE. We know it negatively, according to what-it-is-not, and feel it positively – as something unprecedented, unexpected, novel, unique. Anything comparable we realize – IT IS NOT THAT. It is unknown, incomparable, we recognize it by it NOT being ANYthing else we have experienced – or only partially, tangentially, and contrastively (negatively)
THIS IS NOT THAT!
*
Which leaves us, then, in a realm unspeakable, unreferenceable, undrawable – a pure IS realm.
*
You, my beloved, ARE. And ARE the occurrence or happening, the experience of, the REALITY (signified, significant) of a realm, experience, event, relation that is EXPERIENCABLE but not EXPRESSIBLE.
*
An exquisite sort of heartache for one devoted to the crafts of “expressing the inexpressible”, “saying the unsayable”, and so on.
*
Philosophy, poetry, hopes, dreams – ALL draw their CONTENT from what we KNOW “it” is NOT. Attempt to use action, behavior, language, movement, thought and speech to draft original arrangements that might allow the unspeakably unique, unsayably novel, incomparably total or inexpressibly replete –
into the realm of expression, sayability, hint, token, trace, Reality, occurrence, activity, appearance or happening…
and yet it is defiant, recalcitrant, resistant and intractable.
*
You provide me a life of exertion and effort, a LIVING of ATTEMPT – impossible possibilities – or their interaction – irretrievable, unrepresentable happenings and events, experiences…
*
BEYOND…full, total, whole Real Experiences…
…LOVE, HOPE, FAITH, INTIMACY, RELATION, DESIRE…
*
NEED for a mad trust in Reality that never equals recognition, cognition, reflection or thought. Intransigent to language – ever DOES NOT EQUAL,
and THAT is how we know it –
*
that it is Beyond-experience experiencing
Beyond-saying expressibility
Beyond-comparison analogy & metaphor
IN ITSELF OF ITSELF BY ITSELF
AN IS EXPERIENCE
*
You ARE.
*
It is amazing to/for me. Unsettling, novel, inexpressible, unrepeatable, impossibly in-possible,
something total, whole and real
in ways that action / language / emotion and response can never be.
*
Such is my lot. Happily? Momentarily joyous, ecstatic, HOPE-fully…
so much “better” than all it readily-apparently is NOT.
*
And why I seek/work into poetics, philosophy, wishes and dreams…where experiencing surpasses expressibility…Reality surpasses its processing…love its ability to confess…
I love you beyond-this.
In some other-ing language.
I am. Yours.
“Nathan”
p.s. this is also a reason that these forms (philosophy, poetry, art, dreams, etc.) often read as “nonsense” or irrational – each an effort at translating totalities of experience versus “rational” expression or analogical/metaphorical transcriptions of experience. Dreams combinate Reality…converge and reproduce whole happenings as “veritable” mash-ups; philosophy and poetry ache to stretch language affordances, or mate expressibility to totality…quite possibly irrational, even an impossible urge, but compulsive/erotic/desirous and humanly nature-al nonetheless.
In other words – if you “know what we mean” without knowing the meanings…we are coming nearer “it.”
Logos
Forced to engagement, he usually says “I”. Generic reference: one of you, one of us, one of a kind.
Something different and else gathers when asked for his name. Standing by words. “Nathan”, then.
Something given. Something earned by a story. An occupation, a station, a set of behaviors and moods. A moment, response.
Most of the time he is human. A style, a class and a trope. At “Nathan” he gains all his failures – a “he” and a “father”, a “writer”, a “son.”
He prefers being “I” – one among digits, a 0 or 1 all the same. Taking an instantaneous place in the code.
Feels uncomfortable filling up “Nathan”. Making choices, selections of now and then, here or there, commitments to plans and what has been done.
Occupation. Specific surround. Others creating identity. 1s, 0s, all in a malleable line, disrupted by every stroke of a key. Each return and deletion and send.
Fluid duplicities of multiple minds…converged and conjoined.
With our “names” we profess a location. Always so far from the truth: provisional goals.
From the start “she’s” been too much to handle. Representative of dreams and beyond, culminative, a paradoxical [paradaisical?] symbol of sorts.
He drowns in. Desire. An ache and overwhelm. Another is always too much. An other requires one to be. Stake positions. Select. Choose. Behave and act. Become.
Desire feels like less than a choice. A responding. Implicit, reminding the lack of control. He is base, greedy, hungry. 1 among many. He is tissue and cell. Energy. Magnetism. Gravity. Reaction. “She” determines.
“Nathan” is constructed of carbon and water. It burns and it flows.
Weak bonds and strong. Necessity and chance. Survival and growth. Spirals. Returns. Recursion.
The name is assemblage. Situated, dependent: “Nathan”. “Nathan”. Nathan.
To give.
Give way, give place, give meaning. Give prominence, power, support. Give out. Give in. Giving everything.
Desire undoes him, undoes me, even I.
Somehow it accrues and accretes to the name and gets seen, blamed and reported.
This one. Now. Becomes.
Like formulating sentences – attempts toward complete – so various, anonymous, available. Becomes.
Insubstantiated concretion – at “And you are?” “I mean, what is your name?” “How are you called?” A power relation demanding a “choose!” and derision, analysis, judgment. Accounting, solution, report.
This equals “Nathan” in this context…I am.
“He” goes sick at encounter. Disclosed. Disappointing. Disabled.
Potential of speaking as “I” (1 of us) become static and constrained by “this 1”.
Identities form. In relation to – her, them, here, then, there, now. In relation to – “what is your name?” WHO ARE YOU? In relation to – ELSE and its difference – Othering.
Prologue
Even if it’s only a prologue, it is necessary to begin. To start with the starting itself. Some origins are good at that: a bang, a blast, a whisper.
My starts tend to happen with fits. Inconsistent and occasional, not inceptions, revelations, events.
Supposing it begins in a “mood” and emerges at pen. Or simply pass by. Aborted, forgotten. The pen is what matters, not me.
Swerving from mood to mood, idea / experience, relation / response, passaging effect to affect to effect. Hardly recognizable. Yet if the pen is involved, or some other artifact-creator, symbol-maker, discretionary device, a remnant emerges, a record, a trace.
Never the mood itself, not even the experience, but some marker of it, a token or emblem, remains.
Starting with the loss then. Beginning at the bones.
There’s a boon to that, you see. It ceases to be important: what the where. Beginning with the pen, it doesn’t matter. Memory, emotion or event. Past, presence or future. All of those – NO MATTER. But the instrument – the tools ready-to-hand – typewriter, pencil, keyboard or pen = matter. Some thing happens then: it begins.
Now it’s started. Starting with the starting also leads (you must perceive). If the aim is the action itself, the rest does follow. Hand leading eye, leading ink, following line, copying language, searching the words, shaping the letters, changing ideas (using different terms), evoking a thought, altering memory, writing a process: a process called “writing.” A particular animal scraping at paper with ink.
It happens.
Begins.
Follows, outstrips, and results. Always something greater and lesser, more-than / deprived, exactly inaccurate.
Ambiguous and real. Using language.
“A ‘beginning’ is something other than a ‘commencement’. A new weather pattern, for example, begins with a storm. Its commencement, however, is the complete change of air conditions that brings it about in advance. A beginning is the onset of something; a commencement is that from which something arises or springs forth…
…Whoever begins many things often never attains a commencement.”
–Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin’s Hymns”
In a word…
Someone (some voice in my head) recently asked me this question: “If you had only one word to describe human existence, from your experience, knowledge, and present perspective: what would that word be?”
I heard living…being…survival…I thought – “What I think (I think, at least presently) is that you will never know, or be able to imagine, how you will survive.” The jobs you will have, the people you will grow close to or far from, the ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ your path will exhibit, struggles or ecstasies you will sustain, what you will achieve or create or ignore or forget…you cannot predict, cannot forecast, how it will actually play out. Loves, griefs, happinesses, sorrows, places, events, connections, schisms, likes/dislikes, preferences/abhorrences, and so on…
Looking back…one day…attempting to recount, account for, surmise or shape what happened!? in your life/lifetime/process – it will be surprising. Unpredictable, unaccountable, unREcountable – a lot of “who would have imagined that!?” Or that that would lead to that with her or him or them, and then that – who could have known?
SURPRISE!
Sure there are tendencies, “natural draws” as it were. I’ve continually been uncomfortable with authority, laws, sunlight, loud noises and hot weather. I’ve been consistently upset by imbalances of power, by crowds, by presuppositions and arbitrary assertions. I’ve always been a touch distressed by the power of emotions and the weakness of will/intentions. There are characteristics that appear contiguous – I’ve long been drawn to classical music / melodic / spare & melancholic sounds; I’ve always been invigorated by the rain; I’ve noticed a penchant for solitary spaces and human-less environments; a taste for progressive/reflective/informed/ intelligent culture (recognizing each of those as highly contested terms, i.e. – a fascination with communication – language, words, expressions, conventional meanings and gestures; a distaste for popularity & fame / ‘pop culture’/ mass effects; a distrust of temporary desire; an emaciated self-esteem and expansive self-concern; a craving for passion / romance / intensity of human encounter; and so on. I’ve always moved toward cool colors, particularly in the fields of grey, stormy blue, dusty browns and pine-needle green; always distrusted people who shout, yell or preach – drama, makeup, surface effects. Hell when we search for things consistent from birth to death, our lists could run quite long…and yet…
How’d we get here? What if we look at the events, the people, the places, the feelings, interactions and all the ways we recall them (at specific instances, in particular situations)?
What if we look at what we do? Whether we drink or smoke or not, get angry more or less, the ways we engage strangers / friends / family? What we read, listen to, pay attention, are distracted by (same thing), are pulled to observe, think about, and why? How much we touch? When no one needs us? When we’re alone? Or falling to sleep? Or have slipped out of the stream, have “free time,” traveling, assumed to be otherwise engaged?
If Mormons came to your door and asked “Do you believe in God?” And you, after shuffling your feet, considering your day, pondering whether you wanted to spend part of it talking with religious strangers, checking in with your dependents (in this case, 4 children that are your human charge & devotion), zipping the past through your education, upbringing, familial ties & traditions, behaviors, relationships, responsibilities, concerns, and so forth, responded “No, no, I do not find myself believing in God.” And then these polite young men said – “Well then, what do you believe in, if you don’t mind us asking?”
SURPRISE!
More shuffling, pondering, internal argument and gentleness, patience, consideration, critical inquiry…(i.e. politeness)…and “hmmmm! I haven’t been asked that directly in quite some time!” (Is it that no one wants to hear? Know? That I divert it? Don’t know? Is “care” involved?). I said something in the order of Meaning. Something to the tune of – “Well, pardon me, but I guess I must believe/think (in Wittgenstein these are inseparable), that from our atoms & cells to our bodies, relationships, labor, behaviors, emotions, environment, world, ‘cosmos’ – trying to know as much as I can about each aspect of my being a human being – I think/believe that perhaps we each try to assemble, account for, respond, act, engage, construct experiences that give a shape to, a confluence, a medium, rationale, tone that feels satisfactory to our breathing, being, seeing, feeling, happening…making meaning, I guess. Including, but oddly outstripping, simply surviving. Much that seems unnecessary (tastes, preferences, selections, refusals). Religions, philosophies, teams, employment, families, nations, entertainments, cultures and interests – all these might provide some larger structuring for our shaping, and all, no doubt, influence how we piece it together, make a kind of sense, provide potential “fits” for our choices, responses, activities and emotions…but we each also fashion all this living, this experiencing, this acting and being in apparently very idiosyncratic ways…”
“I guess I believe that this is the sort of thing we do. I guess I think/believe that…at this moment.”
???
I think when these considerate young men return, and to the voice in my head that constantly interviews me…next time I might just respond:
SURPRISE!
I believe that life is surprising. Unbelievable, astonishing, revelatory, frightening, sometimes shocking and amazing, astounding, uncanny and a pain/joy/ache/pleasure/exhaustion/stimulus to be wondered at.
My answer today, in one word…
Life is – surprise.
All my Words are Silent 