Cetaceus

I am way to tired to write anything right now, although I have been considering a post on art and politics that’d be essentially a reiteration of things I’ve said elsewhere.

For now, because unless you, dear reader, are Brandon you probably don’t know anything about it, I recommend that you read the SEP article on Charles Peirce. Do yourself and everyone else some good and learn about the most original and arguably greatest American thinker ever.

Remember: Pragmatism is a theory of meaning, not of truth. And if you don’t understand this, let alone the ways in which Peirce and James understood science, the Pragmatic notion of truth is going to sound like nonsense, as it did to Russell and Moore and whoever else. The biographical context of these guys is really important here, and if you ever take to heart anything I’ve ever told you, let it be this.

If we knew each other, if we were acquainted or acquaintances or friends, today would be the kind of day in which I would feel compelled to email songs to you. Or, if I was lucky, to play them for you in person. I am, however, lucky on neither count, because we have never met, we have never known each other and we will continue, by definition, by natural law, by force of nature, to never have been acquainted.

It’s raining and a bit cold, and so in this hypothetical world, today it would be, probably, “Have You Forgotten?” and then, as a supplement, “Atlantic City.” The former I would choose for the general mood and the full sweep of images and questions evoked both by the lyrics and the music itself, including his phrasing. The latter I would add, again as a kind of supplement, for all of those same reasons of course, but in this case as the background to a very specific and pointed thing I would hope would stand out to you very clearly against the backdrop of the combined mood created by the two songs together. Specifically, the lines “Everything dies baby that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” And, if it worked, if I was right and if the move, the gesture, the reaching out succeeded, these words would stand out for you sharp and clear like a sliver of sky or a sharp and bright gray rock against the atmospheric presence created by the combination of the first song and every other component of the second.

That is what I would be thinking and the actions that I feel would naturally accompany such thought, in the clearest terms I could put it, if I were in any position to think and do such things.

I have to admit that as much as it is true, and as much as I know it is true for others, I tend to only ever think that the claim of “being too busy” for this or that is some kind of excuse. That is weird, of course, because it is a statement, and by my own instincts an excuse, I use every day for all sorts of things and to just about everyone. The fact is, it is absolutely true that me and everyone else around here is really busy, too busy even for a lot of the things a lot of us would like to be doing, like hanging out, having long conversations, ingesting various forms of art and so on. Don’t get me wrong, learning is a joy, but making knowledge my full-time job has done interesting things to the rest of my life. I was telling Ben the other day that my entire iPod is now full with only five genres of music: classical (all Bach), minimalism, afrobeat, math and jazz. The connection? All of it is either completely instrumental or the lyrics are, in the case of Fela Kuti and the like, either in another language or really rhythmic or for the most part both. I just can’t read, write or translate with voices whispering sweetly profound poetic nothings in my ears. I’m not too upset about this, as I do believe that listening to tons of Bach and every Tortoise album over and over again is not only good but somehow, in a deeply spiritual way, actually good for me. Nevertheless, it remains strange–especially as I love so much the deft utilization of the English language, perhaps one of life’s greatest pleasures–that my musical consumption has essentially been funneled out of necessity into the specific channels it has. I swear man, I’ve listened to that brief Henry Tennis EP that Takeshi gave me in Tokyo last August at least 1000 times in the past year; now those are some learnin’ songs.

The other interesting thing here–and maybe it would be better described as the overarching phenomenon in question–aside from the funneling of music into these specific channels is that the general economy of aesthetic input is now almost completely determined by “busyness.” I swore to myself that I wouldn’t stop going to shows anytime soon, and clearly those are for the most part relegated to weekends, but I have lived in this town a year now and I still haven’t been to the Art Institute. Art in my life has to bend itself in weird ways to the fact that I have a full-time job reading now.

So, clearly if “being busy” is an excuse, this is the worst way in which it is an excuse. Now, I hold that it really isn’t and I am just someone who expects everything to be some kind of racket or hustle–even the things I tell myself–and that I just think busyness is anything but a damn good reason not to do something. What I mean by those last two convoluted sentences is that I read all day, so I really am too busy for anything, so I better stop distrusting myself on this one. You really are one busy person, now get back to it.

This afternoon has inspired these kinds of thoughts, which I just wrote on text-edit at work:

Is loving someone the condition of the possibility of giving them a chance, letting things slide, actual forgiveness? And I mean these in something like the sense that Derrida gives forgiveness, namely that  it can only be bestowed in response to something unforgivable. Now, taking this down a few notches (I mean look, interpersonal relationships don’t have to have the gravity of war and genocide), can we say something slightly different: that a pre-existing relationship is the platform from which someone takes a leap of faith for someone else, someone who has done wrong, someone with regard to whom the lack of that platform would completely negate even the thought of forgiveness, leaving instead the simple desire to never talk to that person again. The question is one of exactly what that relationship is; do we call this romantic or platonic love? I think, possibly, that the answer is yes.

>I decided that what had been written here was a bunch of gibberish, and that I would just leave the important part:

As a great man, sitting near a great dog, once said over dinner: “I blame Catholicism.”