CXVI
Endogeny mon amour
“I got women in their mid-30s playing penny slots all day.”
– An app developer to his breakfast companion at T.
Masters of the uniconform. But oh so not the universal.
Ever since the world was discovered to be round, we’ve been trying to iron it flat
The universal: what a singular notion
What happens when convenience is converted into necessity? Or, when over-reliance on convenience transforms it into necessity? When this occurs, instead of acting as a producer, you find that production is producing you – in pure economic and functionalist terms – that it has taken on a life of its own, a life which is always superior to yours because it is a Principle and you are merely a thing.
As Principle, it is “universal” and you are, at best, a locality – fixed and finite. The Principle is infinite, irrefutable, and transcendent, and you are its inverse, i.e. everything it is not.
But, curiously, it was you who gave birth to and nurtured this dichotomy through your own system of thought. Ironically, because you thought your thought was “universal” – synonymous with thinking itself. And doubly so, for while your system of thought explains less and less, it is the only game in town and you, seemingly, are inextricably bound within it.
Now as a stopgap measure, and to reduce, however temporarily, the discomfort of your position, you can use the same powers of logic that produced the original dichotomy to invent entities of even lesser and more contingent “being” than yourself such as animals, plants and inferior people. But this leads to more splitting of things into ever tinier bits, which takes ever greater efforts of thought, until you Kant hardly think any more.
So, ultimately, you are faced with a binary choice: Abolish thought – it is already collapsing under its own weight all around you. Or, recognize that there are, mirable dictu, other ways to think that can “dialogue” with and even interbreed with yours. And you don’t have to invent them – in fact, you can’t – for they have been here all the time.
Have you noticed how, when you talk or text on a cell phone while walking it breaks the natural alignments of your gait? It thus becomes a powerful means of, seemingly without violence, de-organizing the body.
What if “what is it?” didn’t jump to the head of the line when we begin asking questions?
Life in the vast lane
“Times Square is an important piece of real estate in New York City and we have to pay attention to what goes on there.” James O’Neill, NYPD Chief of Department, quoted in the New York Post, August 30, 2015, p. 26.
Variation is nature’s way of keeping the game open. Therefore, any and all attempts at creating and imposing uniformity should be regarded as extremely risky.
I was a widening gyre for the FBI
What we call politics is a widespread and drawn-out debate over what we should or should not share, and in the case of the former, how large or small the share should be. In short, it is an attempt to balance the common against the exclusive and particular. While the common is “real” – though, like air, it may be invisible – it is also a concept. Whereas the exclusive exists at the level of pure concept. And, as everyone knows, a concept divided is no longer a concept.
“Look,” counsels Braque, “for the common which is not the similar.”
I’m in a white noise state of mind
OK, I’ll admit it: I’m drone-o-phobic
The Times, The Times, wherein our language, still sounding spookily like English but uprooted from ontology, now drifts on the wide sea of unintelligibility, clinging to evermore tenuous rafts of signification – which at times spontaneously deflate and at others crash fatally upon the shoals of metaphor with a resounding Huh?!:
“Arresting images of desperation at the West’s doorstep.” [9/5/15. A1:5]
“After several days of chaos and civil disobedience by the migrants, Hungarian officials threw in the towel [!?] and allowed the people living [?!] in a squalid encampment in a below-ground plaza outside the city’s [Budapest] main train station onto more than 40 busses, headed for the Austrian border, as they had been demanding.” [A1:6]
“The six trains that left Budapest on Monday arrived in Munich the next morning after a crowded and chaotic journey across Austria…” [A8:1]
And the hills, are they still alive?
The common will out
…dear Glaucon, there will be no release from the evils suffered by cities, nor even, I think, from those of the human genus. [Republic, 473d]
New category of migrant: the Stoic-away
September 7, 2015 front page NYT headline:
“As Europe Grasps For Answers, More Migrants Flood Its Borders”
Aw, c’mon, you’re so close, why not just say “Europa” and “her borders.” In short, cut the bull, excepting the white one.
If we are together, what holds us together? Law? Faith? Something other?
And back on p. 1, beneath Europa: “Flicker Of Hope For Rare Disease.” By which do they mean that it (or they) may become more common?
With linking comes unlinking
Linked in
Locked out
If we are together, what holds us together?
Law? Faith? Something other?
You are what you need
The Declension and Sprawl of the English Language
At what point does a person become “as if” a robot?
The hollowing out of the subject to be filled with Love (God), led – in the wake of the displacement of God by reason – to the hollowed-out subject filled with…?
What happens when knowledge is unlinked from Truth?
What is the economy of here to there?
Has humankind invented a more powerful machine than Universal Truth? Great things have been accomplished with it, but at a great and, ultimately unsustainable cost, for in exchange for what it provides it requires the obliteration of all indefinition, and makes unimaginable any form of thought other than its own.
Now, by myriad desperate means, the West, knowing (but unable to think) that its game is up, devotes its energies to wresting itself from the grip of the machine it devised, which, far from delivering on its liberatory promise, has produced seven billion souls incarcerated in seven billion cells under 24/7 lockdown.
There are countless ways to escape, but they all involve entering into the unthinkable realms abolished by our a priori. So some will hang themselves in their cells. While others distract themselves, and wait for the prison itself to burn down.
Ah, the croissant moon!
Once you’ve sacralized the abstract – projected it outward and elevated it, situated it on a plan apart – you must ever sacrifice the concrete to it. The precondition for this, of course, is to effectively split the two in order to “reunite” them.
Abstraction, one finds, is very hungry. It will eat everything you feed it, and bury you in shit.
This is how, precisely, a heavy rain in northern Japan liberates contaminated water from a decommissioned reactor to seek its own level.
This is how seventy-one people, desperate to turn their human energy into a “living,” end up asphyxiated in a truck in the heart of richest Europe.
This is how the tides of humanity, driven to nomadic madness* surge toward a “market” for their labor – any marker, any labor.
* a term used by Jacques Attali in his book Millennium (originally Linges d’horizons), New York: Times Books, 1991. Trans. Leila Conners and Nathan Gardels.
Show me what you make and I will show you how you think
