Fish In the Afternoon

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth,
when the earth was wild and waste,
darkness over the face of the Ocean,
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters -- 
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
God saw the light: that it was good.
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light: Day! and the darkness he called: Night!
There was setting, there was dawning: one day.

Genesis 1.1 (trans. by Everett Fox)

One is itself-in-itself and irreplaceable. One emerges from Zero and Two, no-thing and being-with begetting being. Everything is because Zero cannot help but become Two become One. Wait for me in every world. My soul cannot help but find you. Quality emerges from quantity. Quantity is a note, an interval in the flow of being; quality is harmony, coherence, a pattern of notes acting together in relationship, the being-with that beings make. A quantitative change is a shift in the pattern of notes, while a qualitative change is a shift in harmony, one being-with ending to give way to the new. I love how you love me. I love to love you. Let’s sit in the swing and forget there ever was a time we were apart. Changes in quality emerge from changes in quantity. Zero and Two beget One and this One becomes Two. Two begets a new One, crawling from Zero and Two back to One again. Three, Four, Five. And far, far longer.

Changes in quantity become changes in quality by tension and release. Being flows in opposing directions, generating tension. Something must change. Tension is released when one flow overtakes another or both loop together in one stream. Who do I write to? Some are for you, others are for me. Take a moment and hold it for longer. Write a letter to yourself and say hello, it was so nice to see you. Tension releases into dissonance and resonance. Dissonance forces resolution, flows in being grating against one another until the pattern breaks and one consumes the other. Resonance needn’t be resolved. Resonance is groovy, more a wave than a storm, flows overlapping one another without collapse. Sometimes trying is the wrong thing to try. Rest in silence. Then try again. Look in the mirror and ask, would you like a cup of tea? History is a rhythm of resonance and dissonance, resolving, dissolving, forming, and transforming flows in the human species-life.

Being-human is made anew again and again in apocalypse. The history of being is a history of the revelation of being. God sees herself for the first time in the image of Two, the divine recognition that ignites holy desire, the ache at the heart of time that wants to be closer, to listen and know and be seen. I miss my pets. I’ve apparently taught them to beg for cheese. There is serenity in knowing I’ll need to move Ted when I go to bed, that Luna will expect food in the morning whether or not she already has a full bowl, and that Sable will claw my arm to be pet at 3 AM. All joys. The One moves by the light of Two, when spirit becomes flesh. Tissue is thickly textured knowing. Children learn to sense by shared touch. In being held, the child knows what it feels like to be held and so what it feels like to feel. Sense makes sense because it is familiar. I’d like to learn to sew. There’s always something to mend. I miss my family. Family doesn’t mean the same today as it did yesterday. That’s okay. Ithaca was always home anyway. Three, Four, Five.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

Homer, Iliad (trans. by Richmond Lattimore)

Image: Mound of Butter by Antoine Vollon (1875-1885)

Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

The problem with philosophy is that it never answers why. Philosophy is a history of questions that we tend to so they never grow wild. "Do you shovel to survive or survive to shovel?"

Free will is a way of talking about moral responsibility; moral responsibility is a way of asking why did you hurt me? Why did you hurt me never has a right answer. Please, I just need a minute. Give me some space.

We build systems whenever we want to pretend there's something there, as if someone hadn't placed a mirror in our path. A priori, we prefer ourselves; a posteriori, we avoid ourselves. Ideology is another name for guilt. What do you feel guilty for? Hey, it's okay. Tell me, what's going on?

Philosophy is the game we play when we don’t know how to live with ourselves. We build the courthouse of reason when we need to hide and there’s no one there to hold us and tell us it’s alright. You can forgive yourself. I promise. 

Remember that you read with breath and body. When Descartes asked "am I?" he did so with his diaphragm. René was scared that he'd disappear. Whenever we disappear, we become too much. Blow out the candle and come under the blanket with me. In the quiet we appear again.

Stop asking the universe why. Lay heartbeat to heartbeat with someone you love and learn what it’s like to not ask why. We keep having one thought too many. Remember to breathe. Here, with me. In... and out... In... and out... In... and out...

We ask ourselves whether we exist. Would you ask your neighbor that? Why is the evidence for my two hands less than the evidence for your non-existence? Has skepticism ever cradled your cheek? There is no maze, you're having a panic attack.

Philosophy is nonsense, but it's the kind of nonsense you must pay attention to. The only way out is to let it unravel. A bird has never built its own cage. The mind is not a nest. Please, rest. It's okay to be naked.

No one is a philosopher at birth.

On every mountain height
Is rest

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Wanderer's Nightsong"

Image: Norham Castle, Sunrise by JMW Turner (c. 1845)

Busy, busy, busy.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Bundled branch, see: time golems hillhaunt the hallowed hollow.
(Why, exactly? -- the principle of sufficient reason fails to say anything about will or won't they) I fail to see the reason, Crow Mountain.
Start with a sound. Po-ét, poète, poētēs, *kwoiwo-, *kwei-
"I make it often, but I never talk about it." Swing, eros, Spring. 
Jötunn arrive in an hour or two, darling. Snarling men
in the driveway thirty-two and after. To iconoclast,
antonym iconolatry (quick, hide the Theotokos pinup!)
Gallantry, girlie. Galilee crushtender/thickgender fruits lip
And bites raspberry galette. "Souls, souls for a soul-cake."
The feast of all saints descends into moonlit merriment
As Venus Barbata adorned in furs inhales the fugue
between wake and sleep, a hypnogogia of the lungs. 
Barely raw, Sappho tongueflicks bone and sinew sews
salt tart muscle to the finer things in life. Fold your thighs 
Underneath your body and allow presence to take root. 
Desire appears in the full absence of mind and asks:
Would you like to get coffee sometime? 

The man who was once a frog is now a king.

Petronius, Satyricon

Image: Frog Pond by Piero Manzoni (1957)

Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.

James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

Who but the mountain knows the cave? We are not hollow; opaque jewel of coalstone depths melting magmic into places unspoken. We bathe diamondtime in the honeysuckle brush, the dirtroot soot stilling the carbon freckled ash as I world the ghost my skin contains. 

O spiritblood, that passionfruit primate. I meditate motion the candyflame canes and resurrect gin and tectonic. Beaded sweat sates the terroir nouveau, crimson sheets buried deep tonguestinging acid in the yellow meadow. Hear fate chime ready sir, we gallop palehades fell stargazing in peerless rubber fences, crisp autumn tenses vague senses hence spent. Take thistle seriously, fearless hummingbird.

Sip limestone shaleshade gliding loose the memorymade, we fairfade happy days in crumblepebblerock Thorsdays coarse curse the manyheaded stage. Hydrate hydra the Serengeti formtakes weathergentle stay burgundysyrup shadows hollondaise (so classy she gays). Wayway backandforth the cuirassier stands stonegate. Totick totock the clock fought back; prolegallow shapes the state that I am in. Hang back, angelkin, pray matin sin sins to sin again gruyere and breadcrumb gratin. Fearless willowlady purses lipbark the summerwind, cinnamon tremblin’ catechumen the places we saw back then.

Won’t somehow think of the cauldron? Berryuplift this ‘rry’ melody, skislopes the holy one praise “to time to tea.” Ghee velvets glanscent the muskripe readithirst that octave kweer. (Up there, rafters goading goding we three kings in sharpsuit Valheaven.) How prettymary meanings giddylily I lace I lay I everyday thee down to down to sleep. In hand-to-foot chai sugarrums the barrister; isn’t is such a lovely tune. Wrapheart me tenderly in dandelion, my roaring wild dreams my highness. I goldmellow again, warm again against your skin. Soon tomorrow.

Act so that there is no use in a center.

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Image: Landscape with Two Oaks by Jan van Goyen (1641)

Things that are not at all, are never lost.

Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander

To mom.

You've chosen a man over your family. Such is life. 
I decay. I will flower again. I cannot stay.
Lavender thorns the cherrytree syrup, 
Backlight, the windowsill dances in the distance.
Who did you miss when you sang, Kauaʻi ʻōʻō? 
Swallowing stone of ever-more-memory slow.
Come thou fount of every Holocene;
Trembling winter, the pale pinks peach Nysiades. 
I don't know what to say. You let Saturn swallow me.
Nothing matters more to you than the Harlequin. 
Stop and examine; ask and you shall receive --
You don't have to live in decay, you don't have to stay
I can't do it for you. Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam.
"Another aeroplane, another sunny place."
I can never go home. 

All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.

bell hooks, All About Love

Image: Pietà by Michelangelo (1498-1499)