Fish In the Afternoon

How to keep—is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep / Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Leaden Echo & the Golden Echo"

Ask yourself when time repents precious halcyon daze. Thorough, memory chants so long the diamond ring gleaming autumn in generous waves of illumination. Carry me graceful my wildflower tracing pink tint flush upon your satin cheek, I youth between your violet guardian angel my cherry blossom seen and unseen. Golden our past in coalnight shades of burgundy purple stare heartfull into future told in repetition backward and forward we cross the barrier until we fall still in eldritch repose the Abaddon (who scorpion dresses the backward when we sewed roses into our skin).

Say what gives holy laughter crisscrossing them three kings of Afghan hounded self-measure; trigger Gemini in obscuring terror tendertight let me smudge my heart charcoal on the stage of our ballet. I draw the Magician, stepping lightly wet the morningcoated grass in olive drab caramel hair threading bare what bears carry silently when holding love warm here against my breast. Have you given all heaven neverever I will always between my lungs pleaseplease I fall I retreat into me wherever I am. I cry, my vow, heartbroken but into future distinct I sojourn the jeweled palace of fruitful emptiness and brush your hair before you sail into manycolored tomorrows I wish for you.

Stonecall gallant we whisper, shying away from timesbefore we met one evening warm in candlelit recognition: jade garrisons hide cedar among the heartbeats we kiss soft in rubypainted rewinding. For now my language doesn’t say but stretches haunting meaning yetknown I’m sorry but watercolor my fingertips are bluehearted napping bruised the jamsourdoughed doll incarnating. Gamelan rhythms my mountainchild, my sweetscented opalescent; dandelion gardens the somabreathed morning when hearts oneday close and another open. One day I will write my sayingagain but for now I dig one multitude self-chasing.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Image: Carnations and Clematis in a Crystal Vase by Édouard Manet (1883)

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

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)

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)