One week along…European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Switzerland). It’s like nothing I’ve ever engaged, participated in, encountered before.
To learn
“…so quiet a thing as thinking.”
Martin Heidegger
Tag: philosophy
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.
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Perfection. If perfection is experienced (instances of ecstasy? Joy?) we appear unable to express/share/tell it!
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Utopia, perfection, hope and desire – are each revealed by their “lack” or “absence” – their “NOT-IS”
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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.
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.
Self-reflective Intrigue of the Day
“I have tried to describe a feeling that has often troubled me: I revenge myself on it by giving it publicity”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
THE SOLIDARITY OF MIND-BODY-WORLD
In my life, desire has been a ceaseless problem.
I have always possessed an unquenchable, ravenous, hunger for knowledge, relation & sex.
For the first time (in nearly 45 years) I can see it as a wholism.
I could read & reflect in the literature and learning of the world 18-20 hours a day without tiring.
I could engage & evince sexual fulfillment and bodily orgasm repeatedly without complaint.
I could interact & dialogue with another willing human around issues of being 18-20 hours a day without exhaustion.
These seem equalities; totalities; wholisms.
The refusal of dualities and scissions.
Inasmuch as my mindbody organism never tires and perpetually desires experiences of stimulation, information, novelty and introduction : research – literature – science – philosophy – style of expression – CONTENT-RICH, CURIOUS, CREATIVE, IDIOSYNCRATIC, NOURISHING, INFORMATIVE OR CHALLENGING...
so does my body: traditional/conventional intimate relationships seem characterized by graphable, chartable periods of intimate craving passion of new love (novelty) / regulation of growing familiarity (intimacy) / rhythmic relational ritual regarding sexual (bodily) ecstatic experience…yet NEVER has that satisfied me. I have always longed for CONTENT-RICH, CURIOUS, CREATIVE, IDIOSYNCRATIC, NOURISHING, INFORMATIVE &/or CHALLENGING bodily pleasure AS MUCH AS I have for my learning mind…with my bodily experience.
As with sex, so with reading (& vice-versa): the IMPORT is the quality, stimulation & unique learning & fulfillment that each author / partner / interaction / experience brings…NOT a quest for repetition or sameness…
I can read Kafka, Dostoevsky, Musil, Proust, Scripture, Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault, Gendlin, Rilke – indeed THOUSANDS of thinkers/artists OVER AND OVER again NEVER tiring or failing to notice / learn / experience some new insight / perception / feeling / LEARNING / ecstasy …
LIKEWISE – physical human partners – I WOULD NEVER tire, grow used to, familiarize, exhaust, cease or lessen to crave, desire, starve for – unique, intriguing, wonderful physical bodies for stimulation, perception, experience, learning, ecstasy …
Seems a Wholism to me. With what is GOOD – nourishing, stimulating, fulfilling – I NEVER CEASE TO CRAVE IT, & NEVER AM FULFILLED – or “accustomed,” “familiarized,” “apathetic,” “exhausted” of detail, inquiry, pursuit, exploration…
Long and long I have felt BAD about this:
feeling that I am weird, a sexually addicted person, uncannily erotic, unnaturally intellectual/abstract etc…
No more. I realize my MIND and my BODY are the same thing: ONE THING : a PERSON…and that exactly as much as I ache/lust/pine/hanker for intellectual stimulation and inexhaustibility in great works of human creativity and expression/reflection…SO I ache/lust/pine/hanker for stimulation and inexhaustible pleasure of bodily interaction…
FOR ONCE…PERHAPS I AM NOT THE “WEIRD” ONE
The one desiring equally and inexhaustibly ecstasy of mind and body, untiringly, unceasingly, unsatisfiably…
The perpetual “quest” for the “endless joy of erotic experience”
MIND & BODY – Aristotle, Augustine, Heidegger, Agamben…
Sappho, Rumi, Rilke, Pessoa…
MIND & BODY EVER CRAVING
PERPETUAL DESIRE
PERPETUAL JOY
impossible to fulfill
impossible to fail
ECSTASY
the perpetuation of joy and desire
WHOLLY
Well-matched, then. Identical, then. SELFSAME, then: mind & body
desire & fulfillment
joy and longing
selfsame in me
and I am not ashamed.
LIFE: REALMS OF PERPETUAL DESIRE AND FULFILLMENT VIA THE JOY OF DESIRE AND PERPETUAL FULFILLMENT NEVER SATISFIED ALWAYS CRAVING ALWAYS NOURISHED CRAVING MORE
PERPETUAL
DESIRE/FULFILLMENT
IDENTICAL
RECURSIVE
NO DESIRE WITHOUT FULFILLMENT
NO FULFILLMENT WITHOUT DESIRING
WHAT I AM.
Writing Outside Philosophy: An Interview with Simon Critchley » 3:AM Magazine
I am extremely honored and anticipating studies this summer with the guidance and instruction of Simon Critchley. If you attend to this interview, you will probably notice the many resonances and ideas I “sense” and look forward to engaging…
Writing Outside Philosophy: An Interview with Simon Critchley » 3:AM Magazine.
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All my Words are Silent 