Fish In the Afternoon

Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.

Ovid, Tristium

If my Nana were alive I know she’d check on me. When Trump 2.0 first began last year, she texted Was the airplane and helicopter collision over the Potomac River really loud last night? Is everything there crazy? Obviously, the DMV is too big to hear the crash, but God knows we would’ve heard it in the River Valley. In June she told me, Ok stay away from protests please!!! Your president wants to be a dictator!!! Also don’t go to any parades especially military!!! A moment later she said, I feel so sorry for the ones being deported w/o recourse. The last text I have from her is August 15th. Katie and I were visiting her at the hospital and I asked, Would y’all want us to bring y’all food when we visit today? We’ll probably be there around lunch time. She replied, No I’m on a restricted diet. But send Papa message. Looking forward to seeing ya’ll. We brought Papa jambalaya and Nana got to meet Katie. She was excited we were getting married and told me I had better buy her just as good a ring as she bought for me. I told her I would. By the time I got back home that evening she had had another episode. She wouldn’t wake up again.

When I was a kid, Nana’s house was safe. I sat with her at Ashton’s Flower Shop, named after me, and played Crash Bandicoot while she arranged bouquets. When we got home, she’d make me a grilled cheese and we’d play Ocarina of Time, her reading the strategy guide while I held the controller. I remember it took us many tries before we could defeat Ganondorf, a much stronger opponent than he would be in Wind Waker a few years later. I used to lay on the floor and draw my own video games — characters, maps, plot lines, boss battles. I made hundreds of my own Pokemon, who I called Rojamon. What “Roja-” means I don’t know. Wikipedia says it’s a Tamil film but I doubt that’s where I got it. I used to design my own traps like Kevin in Home Alone and we’d spend the evening watching movies together. She used to tell me maybe I was smart enough to perform telekinesis. I haven’t yet got there, but who knows.

When my parents tried to keep me from seeing her, she cried and tried to protect me. She was one of the only people who did. Ironically, though my time spent with Nana was earlier in my life than that spent with my parents, I have far clearer memories of her. I remember Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, the moments when the family came together and for a moment everything felt alright, playing dominos awaiting Santa’s arrival. I thought folks got along then; maybe they do, maybe don’t. When we lost our house, Nana and Papa took us in, and even when my Mom eventually left, I remained, barely able to move, but away from the world that had caused it. I wouldn’t be here without her, without sanctuary, reading Deleuze with her toy poodle, Rosie, named after my late sister, resting on my knee. Rosie only ever liked two people: Nana and me.

Today was scary. I want to talk to my Mom. I could, but it wouldn’t do anything. Who I want to talk to is an image of my Mom that never really existed. The person I actually want to talk to, who did exist, is my Nana. I wanted to see her text on Easter morning. I wanted to see her check in on me as Trump blustered genocidally, telling me to be safe while she decried that crazy man!!! She always said Trump looked like Donald Duck. I wouldn’t exactly call her progressive, whatever that means, but she had a sense for the human. She wanted to be cremated and buried where she’d grow into a tree. She talked about God, but always left open what that means. She would push me to question my assumptions. When eight year old me told her that the Roman Emperor Elagabalus was *gasp* a transsexual, she accepted it as normal. She encouraged me to think broadly, to be creative, to draw and write and love what and who I love. After all, she loved me bunches and bunches and that was enough.

A two week ceasefire was just called and I feel a nauseous combination of relief, fear, shame, and anger. I’m relieved that Trump Always Chickens Out, but that doesn’t help the millions of people already displaced and hurt and desecrated and murdered. I’m afraid that this is a false end, that the man who excreted threats of civilizational genocide into the air of history can never be relied on to let the human overcome the Satanic. I’m ashamed that I’ve already reached out to go home early, whether it will be approved or not, knowing that I’m still relatively insulated compared to my fellow Unique-Beings in Iran being killed and maimed and defiled by American and Israeli bombs. I’m angry that we’ve allowed it to come to this, that I’ve allowed it to come to this, though I don’t know what to do differently, caught between the sacrificial uselessness of left-wing martyrdom and the dishonest cruelty of apathetic egoism. I feel sick. I just want to go home. And most of all I just want my Nana to tell me it’s okay and that she loves me bunches and bunches no matter what these evil men do.

At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love.

St. John of the Cross

Image: Summertime by Mary Cassatt (1894)

This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.

Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology

The basic unit of reality is personhood: Unique-Being. The world does not emerge from the complex organization of microcosmic substance, nor does it emanate from a macrocosmic order. Instead, the world is given in the polyphonic self-disclosure of souls perichoretically dwelling with and among one another. The soul is not identical to spirit or body but is both prior to and co-primordial with them. Prior insofar as the soul is that which reveals and is revealed as world, such that there is no place for the spirit or body before the soul; co-primordial insofar as the soul is simultaneous with body and spirit and has no content except as it already dwells in both. Unique-Being, or personhood, names the symphonic self-disclosure of soul, spirit, and body in and as a world.

There is no world except in a world, and no world exists alone. Place is where we dwell, such that the soul is our original home, that which the body and spirit reside in. Time is the unfolding process of the soul’s self-disclosure, a place always-in-addition-to itself. Placetime is where the soul finds itself, the where we can say we are. ‘I’ points not to the entity ‘self’ but to the world as Unique self-disclosure. The ‘I’ we use for ourselves is an echo of the ‘I’ that we inhabit as home, the ‘I’ that is God’s speaking in and as creation. To echo is to reflect, as transformed repetition, something already-disclosed but revealed again-and-again in and as a world. The One and the Many name the perichoretic co-dwelling of the ‘I’ of God and the ‘I’ of oneself, of both the world-soul and the soul we find ourselves as.

All that is therefore appears in the mesocosmic, in the moment where the ‘I’ of God and the ‘I’ of oneself meet as Unique-Being, which gives of itself the world, its only begotten child. The logos is the Christ: the proleptic self-revelation of the Being-Unique of God the Son, enfleshed in the placetime of Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter and itinerant teacher in Roman occupied Palestine. At the same time, the logos is the Word of God as the theophanic self-revelation of each soul, the placetime that appears in the in-dwelling co-creation of the ‘I’ of God and the ‘I’ of oneself. The logos is begotten of, yet identical with, the ‘I’ of God, echoed in the world-soul’s begetting of each soul. The spirit proceeds from the logos and the ‘I’ of God, both in the self-revelation of the world-soul and in the soul’s appearing to itself. Each and every breath acts as sacrament, the enfleshed revelation of the ‘I’ of God and logos in the spirit’s self-knowing as both world-soul and soul, conjoined in a particular incarnation of placetime. You and me, now and again, here and there, with everyone.

There are a you and an I, and there is no mine and yours! For without a you and an I, there is no love, and with mine and yours there is no love but “mine” and “yours”…

Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

Image: Rythme n°1 by Robert Delaunay

Womanhood is all in the details.

Katie

It’s just after midnight, and you’re curled up next to me, your legs hooking my knees like roots in the earth. I’ve been thinking a lot about womanhood lately – mine, yours, theirs, ours. My womanhood feels quiet, lace weaving through my flesh, barely touching sense to sense. Gender doesn’t mean anything; it is meaning-making, mattering. Infant tactility in chiasmic contact with the world chords sense-itself and grows into fleshy symbolism. There’s thunder overhead. Tornadoes, maybe, hail maybe. Teddy and Luna hate storms, so they’re puddled together at our feet. Sable remains perched in her frog tower aloft the refrigerator, surveilling her domain. What does this have to do with gender? Everything.

Quiet is the full absence that appears when one encounters sense-in-itself. Silence is where we first meet Being. Our Being-Unique is to sense as essence is to energy. My skin is tired, muscles tense, dull-static singing electric. I’m glad we have the day off tomorrow. I need a hot bath, to un-tense and scrub with juniper berry and strawberry salt. We need more butter. When I encounter the table, I encounter myself at the table, I encounter myself-at-the-table, I encounter you. Let’s kiss on the kitchen counter, let’s make an evening of it. The world begins as unknown flesh; we emerge in echoic contact. Always-already entangled in the sea of intensities, we grasp each moment as an instance of harmonic texture. The skin of the cosmos has goosebumps. I wonder why?

A few days later, I’m back in the heart of Empire. National Guardsmen bog the metro. Where do you think they’re from? Do they miss their families? Lost children killing lost children. What do they see me as? Flesh articulates the inner sanctum, saying please: refer to me, see me, hear me. “Woman” signifies something always-present but not-quite-there, gender-being emerging as possibilia in the palace of the Archons. A man stared at me on the metro today. For what reason? Sellars mumbles something about space. If only philosophy could take a time out and sip the evening calm. I’m a woman, but let’s not talk about that. Leviathan cuts everything into function, penis and vulva becoming machines of (re)production, teleologically oriented towards self-generating jism. Woman up and stop measuring yourself against others. Man up and take off the badge.

Being apart peels the outer layers of placetime, tearing ribbons of duration from the pulp of memory. It’s hard to sleep without you on my breast. You’re a savior: Luna rescued from a Walmart parking lot, leaving behind a cart of groceries to bottle feed her; Ted saved from being a stud dog at the puppy mill, now able to lay his scarred chest on a fuzzy pink bed; Sable brought home from a Coldstone dumpster, learning to beep and paw rather than survive off melted Heath bars. My angel. Philosophers make a mistake whenever they speak of the good, the right, the virtuous. All I see are people. The ethical is a style of being-with-others, a pattern of Being-Unique that synthesizes the Uniqueness of others into one’s own creative activity. Whenever you watch a play, I see your eyes alight and mist with other-knowing: to see the many come together, undiluted as one. If the Trinity means anything, it means kids putting on a production of Little Women at the community theatre and giving flowers to the director. You’ll be in your own plays soon. I can’t wait.

Gender is what we do when no one is watching; being gendered is being watched. Thank you for showing me how to be a woman by showing me how to be at home in myself, to take in the details and feel the warm amber hue of the solar feminine sigh gently in the hearth of my soul. A dove returns bearing an olive leaf, Mt. Ararat appearing in the distance. Forty days and forty nights is far too long. Just a few more sleeps.

I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Image: The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge by Thomas Cole (1829)

Do not make an idol for yourself – no form whatsoever – of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. Do not bow down to them or worship them…

Exodus 20.4-5 (CEB)

First, we act. Grasp, walk, touch, taste. Then, we sign. “Grasp, walk, touch, taste.” Signs bring us closer; they pull us further apart. I can now say: “here’s what I mean.” To say, I must be one step removed. First, we’re flesh. Grasp, walk, touch, taste. Then, we’re bodies. “Grasp, walk, touch, taste.” Bodies come together and come apart. We are languaging bodies (bodies languaging), we wave across the deep. Some waves pull us close and some waves separate. Idolatry takes us away from each other.

We learn to sense by sharing at birth, the gift of care-to-flesh. The body clarifies the flesh, makes it legible ({2,1,3}). Our sense cosmos forms by successive interactions that congeal into coherence (this sense-contingency → this actuality). Coherence is qualitative harmony, the world a plane of harmonies punctured with riffs, gaps, and discord. Harmonies group together into signs, generating, reproducing, accumulating. Symbols are dense signs; narratives are dense symbols. I can now say: “here’s what happened.” To say what happened, I must be two steps removed. Signs emerge from the un-speakable essence, energies emanating up from Adonai. The logos is God’s speaking-to-us, hallowed by Thy name. The inner home is unknowable; only energy is known. God comes to know herself by the light of her creatures. I know.

We want to tell our ancestors hello and our descendants goodbye. We bury generational memories in our language. Generational memory is contested ground. I can now say: “let me tell you a story.” To tell a story, I must be three steps removed. The human species-being is imago Dei, joining in the rhythms of creation by expressing Being-itself in Being-being-itself, Being-Unique. In the beginning was the Word. Names emerge from the un-speakable essence, signs emanating up from Self. Language is self-talk. I am that I am. History is the diary of the human species-being, Being-knowing-itself. Being knows itself by generational memory. Generational memory is contested ground. Idolatry takes us away from each other.

The future is open but clouded with symbols. Prophecy moves backward-and-forth, speaking in signs the un-speakable. Prophecy always speaks against idolatry; one moves us closer, the other further away. The incarnation is a proleptic revelation of the union of God and creation in self-knowing joy, somewhere we will arrive someday, someday someday when the waves bring us home. Free will is ours by the grace of God, God’s willing-us in our Being-Unique, that all shall be saved though we tarry. Hell is being lost; heaven is knocking on the door. Eventually, all souls come home, though some spend a long time apart. The communion of bodies in time emanates meaning, the cosmos in erotic consummation. Idolatry takes us away from each other.

As there is no firm foundation for the love of our brethren, except the love of God, so there is no possibility of loving God, except we keep ourselves from idols.

John Wesley, Sermon LXXXIII: On Spiritual Idolatry

The above proposition is occasionally useful.

Bertrand Russell & Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (below the proof of ‘1 + 1 = 2’)

Tentative. Always tentative. Structural and intentional features are conflated to some degree here to reveal their connections and to show how distinct structures generate distinct intentional features. However, more work is needed to properly bridge the two. Or is it the three?

1. ∅
2. {∅}
3. ∅ ≠ {∅}
4. ∅ & { }
5. ∅ & { } & {∅}
6. ∅ is nothing.
7. { } is emptiness.
8. {∅} is the emptiness in which nothing appears: absence-in-itself.
9. {∅} is the precondition of Being.
10. Being is presence-within-absence, or filled emptiness.
11. ∅ and {∅} are pre-ontological (Pre(x)), or prior to existence: Pre(x) iff x ∈ {∅, {∅}}.
12. Being describes the set generated by the successor function operating on {∅}: S: Ord → Ord, S(n) = n ∪ {n}.
13. Therefore, to be is to be in addition to ∅: ∃x iff (x ∈ Im(S) & ¬Pre(x)).
14. In Ord, ∅ = 0 and {∅} = 1; however, ∅ and {∅} ∈ Pre(x), so the first member of the set of existent things is 2: S({∅}) = {∅} ∪ {{∅}}, or {∅,{∅}}.
15. {∅,{∅}} is presence-in-itself, or Being as such: the first division in absence that makes absence present to itself as that which is in addition to itself.
16. 3, or {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}}, then, is presence-to-itself, a division in presence that allows for Being to become present to itself. This results from the asymmetry and irreversibility of the Ord sequence. {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}} is related to {∅,{∅}} in that {∅,{∅}} is contained in {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}}, such that {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}} is about {∅,{∅}} but not vice-versa.
17. For any existent x (x ∈ Im(S) & ¬Pre(x)) and any y ∈ Ord, x is about y iff (i) y ∈ x, (ii) y ∉ x* for any x* ∈ x at the same Ord level, and (iii) the relation between x and y is irreversible under S; or: R_p(x,y) iff y = S⁻¹(x), where R_p denotes a primary aboutness relation.
18. In any case where y itself meets the condition R_p(y,z) iff z = S⁻¹(y), then a secondary aboutness relation holds between x and z, such that R_s(x,y,z) iff z = S⁻¹(y) & z = S⁻¹(S⁻¹(x)). The primary aboutness relation determines the immediate ancestral context of x, while secondary aboutness refers to the chain of ancestral contexts of y, z, …, n contained in x via repeated applications of S⁻¹(x). (Note: the conditions z = S⁻¹(y) and z = S⁻¹(S⁻¹(x)) are equivalent given R_p(x,y); however, it is worth making explicit the connection between S⁻¹(y) and S⁻¹(S⁻¹(x)) in differentiating primary and secondary aboutness)
19. 3 generates identity, where Being takes itself as identical with itself. Presence-in-itself is contained in the present-Being of presence-to-itself, so that presence-to-itself is about its own presence-in-itself.
20. {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}} is identical with the set containing ∅, {∅}, and {∅,{∅}}, and this identity includes an element that is not pre-ontological: {∅,{∅}} (part of what is identical with {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}} itself exists).
21. 4, or {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}, {∅, {∅},{∅,{∅}}}}, is presence-for-itself, wherein Being’s presence-to-itself takes part of itself as in addition, and so determinable by itself. {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}, {∅, {∅},{∅,{∅}}}} contains presence-in-itself and presence-to-itself in such a way that {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}, {∅, {∅},{∅,{∅}}}} is about {∅, {∅},{∅,{∅}}}, which is itself about {∅,{∅}}.
22. 4 generates subjectivity, where Being’s identity as its present-Being takes itself as oriented towards another-Being, as Being-beyond-present-being, or Being-toward.
23. {∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}, {∅, {∅},{∅,{∅}}}} projects forward from the initial identification of {∅, {∅},{∅,{∅}}} with {∅, {∅}} as something in addition to this identity that is then identical with the set that contains the members of initial identity: ∅, {∅}, {∅,{∅}}, and {∅, {∅},{∅,{∅}}}.
24. Time is the result of additions to 4, where Being-toward is realized in additions that have aboutness relations with their ancestors, such that Being’s prior determination (y = S⁻¹(x)) is a member of its present-Being (S(x)), and its prior determination has a primary aboutness relation to y = S⁻¹(S⁻¹(x)), and so forth, terminating in the initial identity of {∅,{∅},{∅,{∅}}} with {∅,{∅}}.
25. A time slice refers to any individual step in the sequence (which contains all prior steps), while time proper is the whole sequence understood in its (always-already incomplete) totality. Time is incomplete because it is open by the non-closure of S, with each addition containing all prior members of Ord and so all prior primary aboutness relations, rendering Being-across-Time as always-in-addition-to. Each time slice is a unique addition; time is the whole of all unique additions without end.

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons.

Pythagoras, quoted by Iamblichus of Chalcus in The Life of Pythagoras

Image: Black Square by Kazimir Malevich (1915)