Fish In the Afternoon

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)

Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions; existence is elsewhere.

(Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism)

We pass into one another, you-and-I, the haze of two Selves coupling side-by-side, gift-giving the gift of Self. A dream breathing in synchronicity, intersubjective sense-painting participating in the Self-song of the world-soul. (Hallelujah, etc.)

---

Think. Do the command. Think ‘Think.’ Now. Good. Back to reading. Thinking ‘think’ orchestrates an interactive history of aggregates (No-Self) into Self. To think ‘think’ we must bring together disparate sensations and perceptions and memories and faculties into the act of signing-within-ourselves, the thought. The thought is a sign of Self, a chord in the symphony of being-aware. The No-Self forms One out of Many and so positions the Many as a subject — as an agent in the world and a confidante to itself, revealing its unity-in-multiplicity by whispering thought and desire and awareness within the mode of relationship, like a lover saying “honey, I’m home!” and her beloved replying “I’m so happy to see you.”

The Self is more Zizioulas than the Cappadocians: the essence of being-you (that which we point to when we say we are ourselves) is formed through the overlapping relationship of those which form us. The No-Self are hypostatic persons — enfleshed processes of proto-consciousness that reach out to the world as one within the Many even as it together composes the One that forms its essence. No-Self aggregates in the sense that musicians together form an orchestra; each musician is separate and concrete, playing with their own goal, instrument, and mode of expression, but the role of the musician is determined by the whole that it forms.

It is not solely the Self that composes the soul, any more than Symphony No. 9 can be performed without reference to those who perform it. Symphony No. 9 is expressed as a symphony by musicians in an orchestra, by a relationship between part and whole where neither is primary, but which (per)form a greater unity. Likewise, the soul is a perichoretic-kenotic hylomorph of Self and No-Self, reducible to neither the parts nor the whole but generated through their relationship. The soul is not the Self nor the No-Self that composes it, but something that Self and No-Self form together.

Or, more formally:

1. No-Self is the constitutive contradiction of difference that is resolved in:
2. Self, the identity-in-difference that coheres the history of No-Self into an agent that:
3. self-narrates, reflexively becoming a Self-to-itself;
4. acts, builds Selfhood by dwelling in the world as a Self-to-itself;
5. wills, authoring their Selfhood as a Self self-naming, co-creating world and Self;
6. and desires, wants to know, to become entangled again in the constitutive contradiction of difference that begets the Self, which in turn, together with No-Self, expresses;
7. the soul, the compositional unity that makes possible being-in-placetime.

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Time loves the seasons-greetings of spiritmatter becoming-melody, when in advent we herald the theophany. Branchbrown, the roughhewn marigold. Tense, fiber, muscular percussion flexing absence into the immediate. Becoming now, this-here lays bricks in the courtyard of meaning as water seeps through the cracks.

Please, sit with me and take a second to think. The leaves are pretty this time of year.

more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand
and now you are and i am now and we're
a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before—
and shining this our now must come to then

(e.e. cummings, XAIPE 69)

Image: Carousel of Pigs by Robert Delaunay (1906)

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6)

Desiring is wanting to know. Knowing is not one thing but a multiplicity of ways-of-knowing, each entangling knower and known. I desire iced tea, with a lemon please. I want to know: the taste of light acid and orange-peel bitterness, the tense feeling of ice against teeth, the rush of inner cooling, the calm of impressed memory, of many teas before. Interaction generates embodied resonance between knower and known, forming knowledge as a chord. Each iced tea gives its immediate impression and each impression echoes forward-and-back, becoming coiled as meaning. When we say we “know” we mean the act of knowing, knowing we know by interacting with our knowing, knowing we know by knowing. We know what we know like we know how to ride a bicycle.

There are many modes of knowing. Passively, we feel feelings and think thoughts without always sense-ing or attending to the feeling we feel or thought we think. Passive knowing is an atmosphere, sitting amongst the things we know without focusing on any of them. Yes, I know what it’s like to sit down and have lunch, yes I know what it’s like to lose a few hours on the couch, yes yes, wait, did you say something? Active knowing is attending-to, knowing by interaction. We no longer sit in the haze of knowledge, but reach out, directing our activity towards the object of desire, what we want to know. I know what it’s like to sit in the grass on a Petit Jean summer evening, to feel that grass and that sun and that wind. I know what it’s like to draw the trees, I know what it’s like to read Plato, I know what it’s like to hold my beloved’s hand and sway in the autumn breeze. Each knowing is a melody within a wider symphony, a pattern of notes emanating meaning.

Reflexive knowing, then, is the experience of knowing what we know, or of knowing that we know what we know (maybe even knowing that we know that we know we know). To say “I know” is to interact with oneself as an object of desire, to say “I want to know what I know,” to be known as knower and known. I know how to write a proof in formal logic. I know that I know because I self-reflexively know myself as known knowing: I know that I know how, I know that I know that I can, I think I can I think I can, I know I can. There is likeness to doing, what it’s like to write a proof; but, there is also the likeness of knowing, what it’s like to know that I know I can write a proof. The proof for knowing is not writing the proof but knowing that I could, the proof that proves itself.

The limit of what can be known is the limit of our imagination. The limit of what we can imagine is the limit of our world. In passive knowing, we only know what we presuppose to be the background of the world, the residue or excess of our attention. I cannot imagine that the world I sit in is illusory, that I am just a brain in a vat, because to do so would require that I imagine something other than what I presuppose as the limits of the world, to imagine that whatever world there is is not the world but outside of it. But there is no outside, the world is the outside. So, do I know I’m not a brain in a vat? Yes, because I know the world and nothing else.

In active knowing, we know only what we can take to know, what we can imagine could be known. Whether known known, known unknown, or unknown unknown (where is the unknown known?), I know that the unknown can be known, even if not by me. Knowing is not to hold a true, justified belief that x but to interact with x, even the imagined x, and so know it. The known is known biblically, like knowing you’re naked. Therefore, for something to be beyond knowing it must not be or be only abyss, not to be unknown but to be nothing. It is the same with reflexive thinking, except that we ourselves are what can be known. I can know that I know insofar as I know I am, knowing I know is knowing I’m known. To be reflexively unknowable, I must not be. Cogito ergo sum, because otherwise I’m dead. Except that the cogito isn’t necessary, only sum ergo sum. Whatever the cogito is supposed to be, it always fades into sum. I know you are, but what am I? I know I know I am.

Know thyself.

(The Temple of Apollo)

Image: Untitled by Nasreen Mohamedi (1970)

I have been a stranger in a strange land.

(Exodus 2.22)

Much of life is spent here-and-there, the archipelago of somewheres twisting-turning-winding from shore to sea to shore. We travel, we move, we stay, we leave, we’re lost, we’re found. Traveling, we go from one somewhere to another, ‘there’ rather than ‘here.’ Even when we’re ‘there’ we are never ‘here’ there. We are only ‘here’ in a somewhere that is not ‘there.’ Throughout life, we move through a forest of heres and theres, one location to another, but a there only becomes a here when we find a place in it. Here is not a static location, but a mode of dwelling, a rhythm of playful interaction that co-creates a world, the orange hue of sunrise singing firelight across the wood panel den of placetime.

The gap between spacetime and placetime is an attentional one. We reside in spacetime whenever we measure our activity by position and dimension, along spectra of latitude-longitude and yesterday-today-tomorrow. I am here in spacetime, in a there that isn’t mine that I can only trace through a four-dimensional map that never contours to the world. When I move to placetime, however, my attention drifts from position and dimension to place and time, not {x, y, z, t} but the experience of being where and when I am. Placetime unfolds, slipping off the ribbon of the present to reveal the wonder of being. I can triangulate spacetime, but placetime only emerges from entanglement, from being caught-up in the ever-flowing interactions of the world I inhabit. I never dwell in spacetime, just a point on a map signifying nowhere; I only ever dwell in placetime.

Here emerges when I am en-placed and en-timed, when I can move through the world around me as inhabitant rather than tourist. Not all motion is travel. We travel by navigation, mapping out the territory between spaces of spectacle, sites for looking, for oohing and ahhing, but never seeing, listening, living. As we come to know the here around us we move by starlight, integrating our activity into the worldscape of body-land-body, the dialectical interchange of the enfleshed pluricosmos. We no longer need the map nor the territory, but allow placetime to impress itself on our soul, to intertwine itself with us and us with it. This is when we are finally here, and when home finally presents itself to us.

Home is the intimate dwelling of placetime. When we are away from home, it is not only because we have left to go somewhere else, but because we are separated from the warmth of our dwelling. We can find fun and novelty in another somewhere, in a there we travel through, but we ache to return. Even when we have not found that home, we ache, we long, we desire to return to a somewhere to call our own. We wade in the ocean of somewheres, raising anchor there and there, but we only find land when we find home, when here emerges not only as a space we exist in, but as a placetime we inhabit with others. Home is a fireplace that never goes out and whose wood is perpetually regenerating memory. Home is the somewhere where our soul finds rest.

All I want is to return home.

There is no place more delightful than one's own fireside.

(Cicero, Epistles)

Image: Above Eternal Peace by Isaac Levitan (1894)