reading for today

The story begins like this:

Socrates: Very well. I heard, then, that at Naucratis in Egypt there lived one of the very old gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis; and the name of the divinity was Theuth. It was he who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing (grammata). Now the king of Egypt at that time was Thamus who lived in the great city of the upper region which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes; the god himself they call Ammon. Theuth came to him and exhibited his arts and declared that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. And Thamus questioned him about the usefulness of each one; and as Theuth enumerated, the King blamed or praised what he thought were the good or bad points in the explanation. Now Thamus is said to have had a good deal to remark on both sides of the question about every single art (it would take too long to repeat it here); but when it came to writing, Theuth said, "This discipline (to mathema), my King, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories (sophoterous kai mnemonikouterous): my invention is is a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom." But the King said...

(Plato's Phaedrus, quoted in Dissemination)

Today

It is snowing!

TV, or Politics Even for Slackers

I am watching television. I also ask permission here to do some "theorizing" about the act (a very passive act) of watching television. I am immersed in a space of mediated reality, there is a changing image in front of me that seems to have its origin from some source behind the screen. I do not mean this literally, with a naive vision that would see the screen as some kind of window. The tele- of tele-vision implies that the image is from a distance, whether from a remote location, the site of the broadcast, or the television studio, or from the vaguely defined center, the authoritative source of the network broadcast, the network itself.

Therefore spectator-screen-image: this is the triad that forms the outline of the experience of mediated reality, the image appearing as though from behind or beyond the screen. This is an enframing [Gestell] (the word is Heidegger's from "The Question Concerning Technology") of the real order of things, of the world itself. Something is within this frame, something is left out. On the level of language, then, is a second meaning of this enframing. The frame shifts from context to context, it is a context-based "framing" of situations.

What can be said further concerning the distance or the gap between the viewer and the real event? It is not symmetrical-- what is presented as television is raised to the level of the authoritative. The barrier of entry to producing programming that seems also authoritative (YouTube with its "broadcast yourself" slogan notwithstanding) is huge. As many by now have pointed out, television, unlike the printing press that preceded it, and unlike the networked communication over the internet that seems to emerge as a possible successor, is not participatory. Is there not a whole politics of inclusion and exclusion, center and marginal periphery, around this issue, or this question, of participation? And yet it is not enough to bemoan "the media" or some hegemonic power of the network, for our own state or standing within participation or non-participation. As Sartre and others have taught us again and again, we are responsible for the whole world, for the entirety of the condition we find ourselves in. In this game no refuge in another world, in non-commitment, or in the private language of "our own world" is allowed, one must begin where one is, as one must make a move.

{1, 2, 3, ...}

When I was twenty I dreamt that underneath a nearby McDonalds, underground, was a school where the employees read books full of mathematics diagrams, finite state machines, mobius strips and such.

While I still can be a competent tutor mathematics has lost its fascination for me I am afraid. And yet now and again I yearn for crisp and formal answers, content is not necessary, just as long as there is that objectivity, like a language in a higher kind of dream, that completely makes sense and answers our question until we are awake again, and begin forgetting.

I lack and long for this objectivity in a very general sense actually. I find myself at times as a vertex with no edges on the great social network graph of existence, then branching out connections, then cutting them again, endlessly.

Galileo, your book is lost to me!

waking up

I am on another errant pathway leading to the center-- what is solid and what is floating evanescently in this maze of streets, in the criscrossing of steps of all the people seeking the Destination? This is a city like any other, except silently sleeping, at times people rise from their beds and walk, still dreaming, finding each other in collective dreams, or segments of dreams, then walking back into their bedrooms, their sleep chambers, only to repeat the same thing the next day, a day which is actually night. Is it getting brighter or dimmer, is it dawn or dusk? It is difficult to know, the Absolute dream keeps fragmenting into separate dreams, manifestations of self, wish-fulfillments. Will the center, the whole dream, or even just the alcove leading into the maze of dreams, ever reveal itself?

At the windhorse race, the minds of all the spectators floating and hovering up like kites in the summer air, more and more people were in attendance as it seemed finally the dream was making sense, consolidating itself into the one collective dream. Was it real?

A man in the back reading Kafka's Amerika seemed like he had been there forever waiting for the race to unfold. It was rumored that the dream was his alone, that the whole race depended on his attendance for its reality and solidity.

getting Hegel out of my system

Where are the pathways, where the walls? I struggle to determine what direction to go in next, knowing that freedom is boundless but that at the same time my own mind contains signposts of self doubt, a dead stop here and there and there again, projected onto the world all around me. Tentatively, slowly, I gain an inkling of a game that is limitless, I can no longer shirk the responsibility of being right there, present. And how many others are playing at "I am", conspiring to raise their minds to the level of the real?

There is so much to say, so much to do, in this local phenomenology, at the periphery of the empire perhaps, a place where the messages from the true Emperor of conscious awareness only arrive every so often, wherever he may be, and yet, the amusement park of higher mind is turning, perpetually, even here, where and when do we get on and off the rides? The local is merging into the global, at greater and greater speed, for the local awareness is almost nothing, and yet, a quaint branch office at the periphery of the reign of the Absolute is right there, it is everything, but how often have I walked past it not even seeing it? Routing information, written on every humble prayer, even from here, do these prayers ever make their way through the bureaucracy of being-here-now phenomenology, the parts of Oversoul, or call it what you will, to the A=A, the Absolute, to GOD?

Does any knowledge leak at this level, throughout the cracks of Mind, is not the faultline of awareness the gate, or the gateless gate, itself? The part is the whole, the humble forest path is the entrance into the gardens and labyrinths of the Church that stands at the center of the Empire, "get lost" and getting directions are one and the same thing.

Um, take the highway across the River...

condemned to be free

The absence of confines, of real, external limitations, does not seem to also come with the knowledge of what to do next, where the road that opens up leads. I form a hypothesis of the hand of some hidden god that sets the whole drama into motion, calling on this Unknown God to wake me up and show me the way forward. This too is a way to defer having to make a choice, a way to not acknowledge that I am a free agent responsible from now on for my choice, for the path my will and actions will trace. A little light is all that is necessary, will the light source manifest itself?

the unwritten

I am wondering where the written, the recorded, begins and ends. In what sense is it possible to speak of the unwritten, the unrecorded? In a way, the ear of the person I am speaking to has already "written down" everything I have said, "recorded" it for later... but who is speaking to whom here? In the white noise of blank anonymity we lose our voice, what do we gain in return?

Arch

POEM--
built from tattered pop cultural materials that arrive from time to time at my doorstep

HELLO.

From the plains of America
As the motor of World
begins to lock up
And as I try to be
in a somewhat delusional way
an economist
As the fabric of life
seems ghostly gossamer stuff
and I fail to turn the doorknob
at the Entrance

As I imagine myself
as Magician of Light

It has
(I say too soon)
All Ended

And what is it all for
What is it all moving towards?

Here there are faint outlines
of the lights of Home
in a reflecting pool
Scarcely visible
through subdivided subdivision homes

And as God measures the light
And as God divides a dollar

Where are our minds?

Rilke would say
"In a dark time the eye opens"
For fuel to go forward
Pacing and smoking of lunatics
By the light of Luna
Endlessly

As we all withdraw
to our "fortress of solitude"
no longer men of steel
but something else very fragile

With no time
for a phonograph record
Or a song
Or a dance

And returning again to the bottom line
The Automotic Industry
Has a glitch
A broken beltway
Because it cannot measure or fathom
What escapes a time cycle
Or an Arch
to enter some Western Civitas Dei
Alongside some River...

And returning again to the bottom line
"today's Tom Sawyer"
lives amid some economic gears
of ripple effects
as Chicago's polis
cascades Southward
in ways Sandburg could not envision
along the mighty
Mississippi

dream journal

The other day I dreamt that I was at last able to see the contours of the world surrounding me through some kind of fog.  I take this to be a representation of a real state of things, the anesthetic that my mind was dealt by life at a certain stage is beginning to wear off.    

alone: echolocation experiment

So I am in a place I am hoping is not an echo chamber.  The transparent sphere that Dali at one point sat inside painting shapes is a bit brighter of a place, but I hope that this place is not akin to that sphere either.  I fear that in these times it is hard to find the true measure of the world outside, that measure, proportion, balance are lost as we are in the grip of forces incommensurate with us and our surroundings.  The anonymous inner voice, and the anonymous external force echoing each other make pretense of strength, or ability to measure anything by an ever more fragile bodily frame laughable.  The spindles and the ropes of this marionette show one can feel, but whose is the hidden hand that sets the spectacle into motion?

Drama of a god that breathed life into the golem that he shaped, or conversely of the golem that had to invent a god to stand up on his feet and give himself life.

 

Maya

I seek the real and substantial.  Where is it?

the unhappy farmer

Once again happiness pursues and dogs me.  I say this because I have found that periods of happiness bring mental and artistic sterility in their wake.  To be lost in happiness, implies a kind of senile self-satisfaction, does it not?  Thoreau must of known something of this sense when he wrote that he wanted to live "with a wide margin", allowing things to grow and ripen inside him like stalks of corn.  But I do not.  I seek mental coolness and detachment in this harvest season if that is in fact what it is-- maybe it is but unbeknownst to us, we do not know the field, either the location of the silos or the place of the cooling brook.

To be happy I am afraid is the same thing as being a person who is "eating well", who has given full assent to the unfolding of life, its rewards and its coming around back to one.  I believe that it is instead better to be a little bit hungry, a little bit lacking, better to not labor the canvas to "perfection".

Silent others at the four corners of the farmland, show me how to plant a bit more and labor a bit more while I reap, let me feel the night breeze that comes from and leads to other lands than this ground.

Hermes

I have before me Derrida's book-that-is-not-a-book Dissemination.  It is of course not the same book I am reading now that I read long ago, carefully and obsessively, at the Edge in Memphis  over the course of what must have been three weeks.  Out of a sense of the faint resemblance of the book I read now to that past book by the same name, I try to study now.  A recap of some inaccessible past at best.

Page 84-- Plato's Pharmacy, I, 3: "The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nabu, Nebo"

Three quotations, unforgettable, or rather, very forgettable, so I try to reconstitute them here.  Or some trace thereof.

Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to demons-- although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria; 20, 000 according to Iamblichus; 36,525 according to the priests of Thoth--  who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things.  Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum...

---Jorge Luis Borges, "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"

That's it, I am going to sleep now.

all the news that's fit to print

I am wondering these days about the boundaries, the margins, the content and the form, of journalism.  As the institution of printed journalism, the press, undergoes transformation, is gradually dismantled, or just plain shuts down one dreary and windy day-- what remains?  As the task of objectivity about the collective world is decentralized or outsourced to "citizen journalism" what is being reported and from where, to where?  Are we really living in a time of interconnecting blogs unscrolling in the void?  And we, are we more real and substantial than our blogs?

And our minds, and all we witness through the screen, are our minds being "rebooted" to take in some vast new terrain?

Or simply erased?

Train

I wrote this here poem:

Concourse
of the moving, quietly rocking train
over the tracks
Through deep blue on the horizon
And the ghostly shapes of
the deciduous landscape
of the Southland
The bank of the river
appears and then recedes from view
Like long curtains of stage
scenery shuffling across
And as the city outside
moves slowly into view and
Finally comes to a stop
I have been awake and fascinated