Cetaceus

This is unedited, because I need to get back to work:

Davidson was talking about what the concept of a philosophical life could possibly mean in a contemporary context the other day, and it caused much walking-home-on-a-brisk-Hyde-Park-Tuesday-evening discussion. I got to thinking, and this is, as Foucault would say, only to put it schematically: much of what had been proposed regarding this concept focused on what the philosopher himself does, to himself. It places the action, and the burden of the important action, on the philosopher himself. But I was thinking of people I know, as usual, as models for what this could be, and thinking of Foucault himself, and want to put this conceptualization forward: what about a vision of a philosophical life that places the philosopher as a kind of facilitator, one who uses his/her unique gifts and training to made possible the expressive acts of others, the speaking, living, making, doing of those around him or her? Like Foucault, who did what he could to allow the people he was concerned with to speak for themselves, or like Brandon and Rich at PIFAS (certainly among the best philosophers I’ve ever known–Ramsey too, and others), who, rather heroically, gave both psychical and physical shape to a space of human flourishing. Now, look, anyone can run a warehouse, anyone can put up studios, but is there not something uniquely philosophical about the forms of facilitation that certain individuals and groups engage in in order to make such spaces not just possible, but to allow them to live and flourish? I think, probably, yes.

Prosopopoeia |prəˌsōpəˈpēə; ˌpräsə-|
noun
1 a figure of speech in which an abstract thing is personified.
2 a figure of speech in which an imagined or absent person or thing is represented as speaking.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via Latin from Greek prosōpopoiia, from prosōpon ‘person’ + poiein ‘to make.’

I wrote something about this the other night and then deleted it. I do that a lot. Anyway, I’ll just leave the description of the event as it stands: a couple of days ago, in a place I didn’t expect, I found a look, a look in the eye in fact, that was once secretly left for me, and it made me happy. In the spirit of that, consider what was left not in reciprocation (because I hadn’t yet found the look when I left it), a retroactive form of reciprocation, a “back at ya,” if you will.

Once, on a night a long time ago, maybe like two years now and some change, somebody said something to me, something which for various reasons I deflected, despite deep down not wanting to. I did it out of a kind of over-inflated sense of duty, of loyalty, of such things that my anachronistic self tends to value, much to the confusion of others, and to the chagrin, often enough, of my own better judgment. Since that night a long time ago and since that moment, I have regretted the choice I made not to respond to the statement that was made to me in a different way; I’ve born the sucker’s torch, I’ve replayed the tape how many times. Look, despite what’s good for me or you or anyone we know, I have complicated relationships to both regret and guilt, and have often known that those relationships should and maybe even could be minimized. Well, whatever, so it goes. Sometimes, you hold em too long, and sometimes you just make a bad call. I made a bad call, and I’ve “felt it” in the form of a dull and nagging sensation somewhere in the back of my something ever since. Tonight, however, along with a whole flood of other things, that regret, the singular awareness of simply having made the wrong choice strikes me like a dart, a stake in the gullet, a precise point which parallels the acute awareness, the precision of the knowledge of the wrongness, the cowardice, the mis-placed-ness of the choice that was made. It is an uncanny thing to be able to zero in with such visceral clarity to a moment like that. A moment where you can see the probability matrices present themselves, the alternating paths that life could have taken lay themselves out clearly, like two green lines departing from either side of your face (perhaps one comes from one eye and the other from the other) and to know that you picked wrong. It’s like those dominos they toppled the other night in Berlin: the events at the end of the line are connected with those at the beginning.

I wonder if it’s ever a good idea to talk about shit like this on the internet. Who knows. Just do yourself a favor and think about the long term, think about the teleological suspension of the ethical, think about Abraham. Now there was a guy who knew what he had to do.

This question is directed at a single and specific individual that I do not currently have the guts to ask it to directly, and as such and because it’s a kind of good general question anyway, I’m putting it here: Do you think that there are such things in our lives and levers or keys that if, once discovered or completely unknown, when pulled or turned will unlock either one or an entire series of problems, effectively allowing various things to “fall into place.” Now, first of all, this doesn’t mean that I’m talking about any kind of “quick fix at all;” hell, doing all the necessary work in order to be able to identify such a key is not exactly easy, let alone actually turning it. Secondly, it’s not like such a turning would simply erase all problems, it may even generate new ones or allow you to notice some that had been hidden; but what it would do would allow certain extant issues to fall away, these specific ones to be no more.

Who knows if such things exist anyway. They’d obviously be different in different cases, lives, places, days, nights, weeks, years, cars, jobs, buildings, cities, countries, travels, studies, books, loves, and so on. I think they might, but that might also be wishful thinking.

Foucault a dit:

“S’il y en a parmi vous qui s’intéressent à ce problème [de la vrai vie], eh bien qu’ils l’étudient de plus près. -La Courage de la Vérité, 151 (29 Février 1984)

I can’t help but wonder who in the audience, hearing this, knowing that Foucault was sick (and only a few months later learning of his death), knew then or resolved themselves to take up just this question. Who, hearing this, decided to, and truly did, devote their lives, academic or otherwise, to understanding, knowing, perhaps even enacting la vrai vie. To do it in the academic context alone, the personal one aside, is an enormous challenge (Hadot–and James for that matter–said don’t even bother), and I hope those of us who care enough about it to make that attempt, even if that attempt is buried beneath layers and layers of academic cover-stories and game-playing, can succeed even in the smallest measure.

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.