Fish In the Afternoon

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars;
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer:
For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
- William Blake, Jerusalem

This was originally written for my students.

What is an idea? Ideas are partitions of the senses, both present and absent, divisions of spacetime into objects, into this-and-thats in-the-world. This-and-thats are action-potentials, or affordances: layers of what-it’s-for within this-and-that. Our ideas have a direct effect on what we can do and what we imagine we can do. The can-do is a function of the what-it’s-for of a field of affordances, a what-it’s-for that is both invented and discovered, both in-us and in-the-world.

The properties of the spacetime bundle constrain the what-it’s-for by defining the physical limits of what-can-be-done. To stop thinking of a chair as a chair may change the what-its-for, but it can not take on the what-its-for of a lamp. We also, however, invent the what-it’s-for. Our ideas are world-embedded, overlaying on the this-and-thats of the real. The what-it’s-for emerges out of how the idea modifies the affordances of the physical, a uniting of both what-can-be-done and what-we-see-it-as-for. Though we may not be able to change the what-can-be-done, modifying our concepts modifies the what-it’s-for through modifying what-we-see-it-as-for. Conceptual engineering is also agential engineering, the changing of our ideas for the sake of changing the what-it’s-for of things around us and opening up new possibilities.

There are, however, things that do not have a what-it’s-for, or where the thing-itself is what-it’s-for. This is the Unique, that which is itself-in-itself and irreplaceable with any other. The what-it’s-for of the Unique is Uniquing, unfolding as it is in the way that is right to it. The Unique grounds value, everything is either valuable-in-itself as Unique or valuable-to-a-Unique. Ultimately, the what-it’s-for of all things is the Unique, everything else appearing as valuable in the overlapping Uniquing of Uniques-in-the-world.

Every person is a Unique in this way. People are that which do not have a what-it’s-for or who are themselves their own what-it’s-for. This extends to all living beings: life-itself is the Unique and the Uniquing of all is life-itself. Life is what does and acts in the world, and which through this doing makes manifest the what-it’s-for of everything else. This means that the what-it’s-for is mutually-shaped, not just a what-it’s-for for me but a what-it’s-for for me and you and you and you and you. The what-it’s-for is -for all of us and to exist in community is to take all others as the what-it’s-for of your activity. What-it’s-all-for is me. And you. And you. And you.

What-it’s-all-for is all of us. All of our hopes and dreams and fears and anxieties. All of our pasts, and all of our presents, and all of our futures. All of our wants and needs and desires and loves.

What-it’s-all-for is the world-as-it-is and the world-as-it-could-be.

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God. – Blessed Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Image: The Human Condition by René Magritte (1933)

God remembered Noah, all those alive, and all the animals with him in the ark. God sent a wind over the earth so that the waters receded. The springs of the deep sea and the skies closed up. The skies held back the rain. The waters receded gradually from the earth. After one hundred fifty days, the waters decreased; and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day, the ark came to rest on the Ararat mountains. – Genesis 8.1-4 CEB

Mournwest. Present-tense. Into the eternal, do you see the erising? I barely know you, lost-one. I. I. I the I. I fail. My way of knowing unknowable? To know can never be unknowable, the unknowable hears, from you to me. The you to me is the markable.

Imagine us. Echo, the divine dust. The us. Spacing out our wonderkite, we everbright. I’ll share my watch, weary weary gale El’el. I dwell in you, the hungering, the evering. Sainting. Aetherning. I go-step the remarkable, wavering. The aliening. Autoing. The autos autos the autoing.

There-is. The is is’es, inhabiting. The is-here represents the dawning. I gainerestesse. I lose, I rest, the rest, I lose. I’ll take off my fingernail polish soon, the fasces glares ominous. Consider this. Against-Napoleon, we shutter the reckoning. The fasces this-time has cloaked-itself in the simulation of the Carpenter. Remember Rushdoony? The Institutes of Biblical Law, under the bed though it may be, haunts the future, theocracy. The Puritans never left us, that Pilgrim Ethic, the Roundhead deity malochs. Galeforce winds the Ragnarok.

Walter Benjamin. History elopes. Affirm the new commoning. Become, become the creative nothing, dwelling in the Gemeinwesen. An eternity of I’ing, being in the common beinging. Our estrangment begins with quantifying qualia, through measuring. Chopping the dwelling, concepting the being-here. This estrangement is neither friend nor foe, it is both the source and haunting of the I’ing. The demon-creeps, the Tartarus, not only estrangement but simulating. Marking the I’ing as only quantifying, atoming the unimaginable.

Rememberhere. Here, here. We weep. We weep. We here. Hear me, hear me. Hearhear. Herehere. Hear. Here.

Sophia-ing.

But wisdom, where can it be found;
    where is the place of understanding?
Humankind doesn’t know its value;
    it isn’t found in the land of the living.
The Deep says, “It’s not with me”;
    the Sea says, “Not alongside me!”
It can’t be bought with gold;
        its price can’t be measured in silver,
    can’t be weighed against gold from Ophir,
        with precious onyx or lapis lazuli.
Neither gold nor glass can compare with it;
    she can’t be acquired with gold jewelry.
Coral and jasper shouldn’t be mentioned;
    the price of wisdom is more than rubies.
Cushite topaz won’t compare with her;
    she can’t be set alongside pure gold.
But wisdom, where does she come from?
    Where is the place of understanding?
She’s hidden from the eyes of all the living,
    concealed from birds of the sky.
Destruction and Death have said,
    “We’ve heard a report of her.”
God understands her way;
        he knows her place;
    for he looks to the ends of the earth
        and surveys everything beneath the heavens.
In order to weigh the wind,
        to prepare a measure for waters,
    when he made a decree for the rain,
        a path for thunderbolts,
    then he observed it, spoke of it,
            established it, searched it out,
    and said to humankind: “Look,
        the fear of the Lord is wisdom;
            turning from evil is understanding.” - Job 28.12-18 (CEB)

Image: Noah’s Ark by Marc Chagall (1966)

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thr' all its regions - William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Hello, timelost. weary old fragment. (how are You?) Silence, death. We, the wholed conqueroar. Spellmind the failurelost, joyjoy autumnaloss. How do I bare you, beforeanafter, shinywillowleap the tiger. Say halo to the nihil. Cybermaloch, the artificial enminds the Ragnarok.

Hello from ol’time, this is ash. the esse ain’t the is, the esse essays the in-between. We joy. Or youthst to. Gallop’callop-ticktime-thefiber, denoting Russell, the imagined here. Conditional ain’t, this life of mine. Material to-be, the is-and-then. I Paris strawberry, my lonelylove, curledlooped the autumnspring. Analects intellect the gardening.

I time you. Being beings the being bes. Bees be bee-ing as being. Bet thirty, Pascal’s wager. I wager you the now. I neverlost the fightinme, pigfuck the fightback. Have you wandered the forestqueer, the fae faith that fatherseer? I mytho you, Twain-headed fuck. Spelltwist the earthenhere, gallop quickly the enough.

Here in Ozarkia, the tornado.

Instead of using the names of the twelve constellations as the astrologers do, the hillman usually designates the portion of the human body with which each is associated. Some very successful farmers believe that underground crops, such as potatoes, should be planted ‘when the sign’s in the feet’—that is, when the moon is in Pisces. If a hillman wishes to indicate Aquarius he says ‘when the sign’s in the legs.’ In the same way Capricornus is connected with the knees, Sagittarius with the thighs, Scorpio with the sex organs or ‘privates,’ Libra with the kidneys, Virgo with the bowels, Leo with the heart, Cancer with the breast, Gemini with the arms, Taurus with the neck, and Aries with the head. – Vance Randolph, Ozark Magic & Folklore

Image: Approaching Arkansas by Ronnie Landfield (1986)

It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight’s sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

You can never trust a moral coward, because taking another as fully human is itself an act of courage. Risk is the heart of the good. Painwork. The knight of the good is a brute. Brut. Coarse, rough, raw, like unhewn stone. Brutus. Without-reason, without-sense, heavy like the earth. Irrationally dedicated to the good.

The exemplar of capitalism is the philanthropist. A master of trade flush with wealth but also manners, an industrialist turning shyly away from their billions. The philanthropist is the bawling child of the noblesse oblige, the gentle gentry who care oh so tenderly for the dull peasantry. The action of each is the giving of alms, a portion of tithes set-aside for the poor to wash-away one’s sins. The philanthropist remains an industrialist; the noble remains a warlord. Charity blurs the reality that the money given to the poor is the same money created by the poor. It is a check given-back, a percentage of your exploitation. The appearance hides the content.

But exemplar they remain – not only for hiding their power, but for patterning this same obscuring for others, a model for manners. Never be ostentatious; the WASP elite remain hidden. Bourgeois stuffiness is for the sake of never-sneezing, never letting one’s guard down when the brutes are at the gate. Stuffiness is piety; one is only saved from the masses by tithing. The rulers are forced into a cosmic ritual with the oppressed, the Great Beast of hungry mouths that must be ever-fed. Only in crisis does the noblesse oblige collapse, many-times spurred on by the popular libido, the shattering-violence of populist rage that turns Louis into Napoleon. Showing-fangs, the bourgeoisie erupt into terror and this terror is reflected-back, an all-consuming fire, the fasces alight – Caesar.

The knight is not a praetorian. Not all kings are Caesars. The praetorian guard are professionals, trained imperial mercenaries, closer to SEALs than paladins. The knight is a brute mythologized into romance. The reality of the historical knight is one of soldiers tied to warlords, using religion as a cover for a system of landed hierarchy. But, this reality manifested a myth – like the bushido of samurai, which kept them both fierce and subordinated to an ethic of honor, the chivalry of Christian knights both tamed and unleashed the mythos of what were before soldiers of enforcement. The myth of the knight eclipses the knight and inaugurates a role. The role of the knight is painwork.

The virtues of the knight are loyalty, honor, piety, courage, and ferocity. The knight affirms, becomes subject to the object(s) of loyalty, the truths that animate the heart and point to desired possible futures. The knight holds-close the truth-event to which they hold loyalty, displaying honor in commitment. This honoring is a form of piety, a loyalty to God-in-the-world, to the romance of the real. Committing to these truths requires courage, taking-up the commitment again and again even in strife and struggle, and this courage is ferocious, manifesting in painwork, in taking-on necessary-pain and inflicting that same necessary-pain when others can’t, defense and offense.

The historical knight is long gone and good riddance, but the knight of the good still whispers in the heart of the world. The knight is a brute, a barbarian, the virtuous warrior of love who leaves the gates of the city, becoming a myth in the cause of the proletariat. This is not the myth of Sorel, who jettisons love and the good for the apocalyptic violence of propaganda of the deed. The soul of the knight is romance, a romance that holds the good tenderly and fiercly like a mountain range around a valley. The knight is a brute for forsaking the noblesse and making pact with the barbarian; the knight’s brutishness is an anti-violence, which only wields the sword to turn-away oppression and achieve the peace of loving-dwelling. Sometimes the most peaceful act is punching a Nazi in the face, but it is peace that blunts their cheek, not war. The knight is a protector and attacks to protect.

As the Time-Machine grinds down the almsgivers and unleashes the fasces against the people, the knight emerges again, an anti-Caesar, proletarian chivalry. Loyalty to the good is loyalty to the oppressed and loyalty to the oppressed is loyalty to the good. The knight kneels before the dying and offers her cloak to the naked. She gives of her flesh to the hungry and the warmth of her heart to the despairing.

To you, the scared, I offer my life, even as I fear. To you, the hurting, I offer my painwork.

Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

William Faulkner, The Bear

Image: The Warrior by Jean Dubuffet (1958)

What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 226e

Deep within the Cave, the shadows on the wall take the form of words, words grouping into ideas, ideas into concepts, concepts into habits, and habits into forms of life.

There is nothing special about a word. Like all things, it is a form of repetition and transformation, an echo. A signer signs a sign through a locution, forms a relationship through illocution, and oceans into becoming through the perlocution. The locution yelps, the illocution dances, and the perlocution wanders. Waterfalling down, the tools of logic structure our echoing, providing move-sets for our illocuting. There is nothing that grounds the rules but the echoes themselves and we only logic while dwelling in our form of life. We move to D4 through the conditional, but only on the board of our inhabiting, which frames our becoming-together.

Becoming is an echoing, a disco of possibility, the modal waltz. In doing through being, the one kaleidoscopes into the many. From one, each successor both mimics and morphs, ontological sublimation tapping history. This history or histories, the echoic ocean of becoming-together, is what we divide into patterns, or categories. A sign is a conceptual unit of a stream of patterned echoes, these patternings splitting off into languages, boards for our forms of life that weave together through the spiraling of history. Words have meaning through their position in the pattern, the way they connect to the whole, defined through how it echoes its surroundings. Communicating is being rocked by the waves.

The unity of science is metaphysically possible but linguistically impossible. The all grows out of the same ground, breath inhaling electron clouds and exhaling time. However, we are not solely beings of breath, but beings whose breath breathes meaning. A quark never intends, but its arrangements experience and in this experiencing intention, attention, and meaning arise, becoming fundamental components of being. We do and we intend to do and our doing is a meaningful attending, but this attending flows through the forms of life that we inhabit. This inhabiting seeps into description, the tools for understanding the world being the same tools that are born from our forms of life. Our descriptions thus justify, through emanating the form of life that it echoes. But by this meaning and justifying, the unity of science collapses into the sea of being.

Our being is an echo of the all but the air that echoes it vibrates history. History means when the all dwells in silence. We sit in our aporia and as we sit the world appears already-here and already-having-been. Time lights a candle in the Cave.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Image: Time Before History by Sam Gilliam (2012)