Fish In the Afternoon

Ὣς οὐκ ἔστι Διὸς κλέψαι νόον οὐδὲ παρελθεῖν. – Hesiod, Theogony

Before Thales, Hesiod teaches his son how to farm. In the beginning, Earth and Sky meet in intimate union, Eros peering from the clouds. The Titans emerge from a dirt-womb and sever the authority of the Sky. Ruling over the before, the Harvest wields its sickle, swallowing its stone children before being gutted by the Law. The Law hiding in the mountains, early humans wade through the forests before receiving Fire from Thought. In fear, the Hearth creates the All-Giver, suffering escaping just as hope remains. Metals cascade down into human hierarchies, the union of Earth and Sky melting into social order. From these myths, a way-to-be is born, and through these myths Hesiod teaches his son to be a farmer and a man.

Myths are both descriptive and justificatory: they both how the world is and why it is that way. The stories form an image of the real and through appealing to this real the human-made realm below is reproduced, social order mimicking the stories that have been told to enforce it. Myth pervades meaning, the descriptive and justificatory overlapping in our tellings, transforming into art, science, literature, work, home, and palace. Are the constellations a myth? The stars exist, but the patterns between them are imposed by us, human myths granting meaning to the arrangements of celestial bodies. These patterns create cosmic coherence, Sky and Earth joined together again, grounding and transcending human life. They both give and take away.

The danger of these myths is mything the real: imagining that what is presents itself immediately without the interference of our myths, allowing the myth to pervade life. We sense a world, presented to us as a collection of atoms bouncing off the perceptual systems of our body and coalescing into sounds and smells and images and feelings and tastes and emotions and textures and fractals. These sense impressions are formed-together into maps of the external, our inherited concepts giving meaning to the flux of the is. The world we experience is a world of values, spatiotemporal dreamscapes imbued with do’s and don’ts, and this and thats to be treated in a this and that sorta way. On and on into the whole of “common sense,” a sense of the stories common to an imagined us. The is hides behind the image.

Trapped in the cave, it is unclear where our myths end and the real begins. Aporia dances the unthought-between: the dialectic.

An entire mythology is stored within our language. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions

“The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.”

Denis Diderot, Last Conversation

All philosophy is performance. It is a thing that we do – an action, a motion, a riff, a rhythm. Philosophy is movement.

Long ago, Thales looked into the sky and fell into a well. The stars are there, but what are the patterns between them? Egyptian priests devised equations to graph their movements, celestial bodies rotating in the night, but what stories do these movements tell? Looking above, the below projects its stories onto nature, balls of ionized gas becoming loops in a god’s belt. The world becomes conceptualized, forms springing from form.

Philosophy is the art and science of concepts, the ideas that we attach to the painterly impressions of the senses. Our concepts never emerge fully from ourselves but are born from the cauldron of history, phylogenetic structures cascading out of the self-understanding of people in community. Some of these we may call “fundamental” – what is being, what is knowing, what is God? But it is never clear where the fundamental lies, or what it is fundamental to. Do trees grow upward or do their roots tunnel down?

Philosophy is a practice of self-development, creative nothings dwelling in the anxiety of being, flapping hands towards the possibility of becoming. Philosophy is an art of love, of knowing through loving, the sincere desire to understand. Through this loving, we become better people, the desire to know folding into caring compassion. As we inhabit this love, we realize our finality, our limitedness, learning to reside in the horizon of death and humble ourselves before infinity.

This infinity is the unity of difference, the many in one within the monad, where all is found in all, mind within matter, spirit within nature. Philosophers may act as either gatekeepers or resisters of power, using their authority to protect the Academy or taking a hammer to its walls. Plato grovels before the king while Emma Goldman lights a fuse. “Question everything.” “Know thyself.” “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world… [t]he point… is to change it.”

Philosophy is polydoxy, un-doxy, a rhythm stepping-out into unknowing – aporia.

(1) Corrupting the youth.

(2) Denying the gods of the city.

The crimes of Socrates

Image: The Thought by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1904)

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. – James Joyce, Ulysses

Philosophy tends towards the abstract, the reduction of multiplicity to unity, the concrete to its form, singletons to sets. This reduction occurs through investigation and classification, through collecting life into a pantheon of categories, taken to be the things-in-themselves rather the concrete thing: the thing-itself. The world-as-it-is is turned upside-down as a world-other-than-itself. Outside the Cave, the Unique, immanent forms, the itself-in-itself as-it-is. Loving-wisdom must return to the concrete.

Borges speaks of the Library of Babel as a network of interconnected rooms containing every combination of words, every locution, every bundle of enworded meaning. The whole of language. But, outside the Library the forests run far away, language never approaching the meaning of a kiss on the cheek. The whole of philosophy is less meaningful than the dance of a firefly. The Demiurge designs a ghost of what is here, and wisdom is exorcising this ghost, to return to the is that is.

The goal is the immediate; the eternal is already here. The Three-in-One is being-itself, holding us and grounding us and comforting us and rebuking us. It moves in us, such that there is no question of eternity. The question instead is eternity’s immanence, unfolding creation. The more we move away from immanence the more we move away from the divine and make life a heresy. God does not forsake creation but gives up heaven for earth, moving and breathing, weeping and laughing, struggling and desiring, suffering, dying, rising-again. For God so loved the world. God intends and attends and the infinite descends as the finite becomes eternal.

In the Cave, thoughts and sayings are no longer those of you or I, but those of Ideas. There is no conversation, only sublation-in-motion, the other-than-us as Spirit. I want the impressions again. And the impressions must appear in silence. Silence begins and silence speaks, impressions emerging as animation. The anima animates the silence into being-with, the Gemeinwesen patterning belonging. We stretch across the earth, no loyalty to the abstract, neighbor-love a dwelling-friendship that eclipses possession. The Leviathan spiders across time, an accumulation of many-histories mythologized into fatherhood. Its webs are made of capital, quality reduced to quantity, accelerating time by machinic desire. At the end lies Tartarus, the simulation of the real and its concretization in death. The occupation bellows death while the occupiers un-soul themselves.

Will is a turning and affirming. I affirm my loyalty and defend it through courage, giving-faith to immanent possibility. Crossing the wound of separation between home and here, love emanates divine will, attending to the attender that attends to the good-in-the-world. I enact the One in unfolding the Unique, affirming the form-of-the-good, the imago Dei of myself. In faith to this good, I never bow. The fundamental sin is idolatry, to take something else as a substitute for the Unique and for the One in the Unique. There is no intermediary between us and God; leave the Cave and let the sunshine freckle your soul, the wandering heat of Sophianic bliss. In loving-wisdom Sophia appears, ensouled matter mattering souls, spiritmatters dwelling in the home-of-the-world, the doma.

After the Cave, us.

When it comes to knowledge, the form of the good is seen last, and is seen only through effort. Once seen, it is reckoned to be the actual cause of all that is beautiful and right in everything, bringing to birth light, and the lord of light, in the visible realm, and providing truth and reason in the realm known by reason, where it is lord. Anyone who is to act intelligently, either in private or in public, must have had sight of this. – Plato, Republic

Image: Ascent by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1983)

ἐπ᾽ εὐτυχίᾳ τῇ μεγίστῃ παρὰ θεῶν ἡ τοιαύτη μανία [sc. ὁ ἔρως] δίδοται

Plato, Phaedrus

Uniques join together in patterns of inhabiting, unfolding over one-another in love. Love orients our attention, allowing another to disclose themselves to us through focus. Love may dance between many but it is never directed to all at once; love directs-towards in directing-away. Each attending is an affirming, each act of love is an act of faith, and in each there is an attending to the unfolding of that which it is for. Romantic love, for instance, is love for a partner, love for a lover, love for the closely-intimate. To attend to one’s lover is to attend in a way which is ever-ever closer but which does not consume the other, an act of theosis with the beloved, unfolding-together like the patterns of a quilt. In this attending, lovers imagine multiple futures together, echoing-forward many intertwinings, some planned, some unexpected, some hoped-for. Romantic love is an ellipsis in time that opens-up the future, even in loss, the un-concealing of time in the present. This un-concealing is reified in the sharing of intimate rhythms, in closely-attending to the patterns of life that incarnate the unfolding. Lovers sway-together, becoming one flower, the petals of a spacetime rose.

These intimate rhythms, however, are not the only rhythms shared between lover and beloved. Each form of love is a sharing of rhythms, a pattern of attending. This extends from the particular to the universal. In loving God, I attend to the Many-in-One who inhabits the world, whose being grounds the world, attending to her by attending to creation. This attending reflects the nature of God-in-creation: perichoretic kenosis, or indwelling, self-giving love. I dwell in patterns of inhabiting with the world and in so doing I dwell with God, giving myself to the world in love. The pattern of my love for God thereby becomes universal and agapic, an unconditional love that grounds all other love.

We love the particular through loving the world in which the particular resides, eros growing out of agape, not as something secondary but as its fulfillment. Erotic love moves from the world to the Unique. It is a form of formlessness, directing us away from the Idea towards the impressions of the beloved, the way-they-are without abstraction. Eros is dwelling-with the Unique in sensuous recognition. Though eros dwells most readily in romantic and sexual love, it spreads out through many-loves, grounding the connection between love-for-the-world and love-for-another. The intimacy of eros is grounded in the eternity of agape, but the transcendence of agape is only fully-realized in the immanence of eros.

Love for one’s friends is another type of particular-love, or love-for-another. It is love grounded in chosen companionship, the sharing of common interests and patterns of social life. Friendship is affectionate solidarity in the activity of living. This close attending emanates out into neighbor-love, a love for one’s community, formed from a network of friendships, neighborhoods, communities, and families, patterns of affectionate solidarity that unite everyone in the Gemeinwesen. Neighbor-love means attending to the good of those in your community by being-with them, knowing them, learning from and teaching them, and acting in solidarity with them, while friendship localizes this neighbor-love and forms a dwelling within that community that patterns one’s everyday.

Friend-love and neighbor-love each take place in the context of place-love or land-love. Though neighbor-love ideally extends to all the world in some sense, supporting the unfolding of each being in its own lifeway, there are also forms of neighbor-love that are particular, that are about living-with others in an enlanded community. My love for those around me requires attending to the act of dwelling-in-the-land and to the good of that land on which I live. In dwelling, my good is intertwined with the land and my neighbors, requiring attention to how these goods interrelate. Ultimately, each form of love supports the others, so that the good of each part of the whole is recognized and attended-to. In doing so, we attend to all through attending to the Unique and attend to the Unique in attending to all.

The Unique is itself-in-itself and irreplaceable with any other. It is what Max Stirner calls the creative nothing, the “nothing out of which I as creator create everything.” I as Unique unfold my being-in-the-world through being-with-the-world, articulating a Unique together, a dwelling or inhabiting. What was left out of the loves above was self-love: love for the Unique that you are. Though love for the world acts as the universal unconditioned limit of love for others, love for one’s self is the unconditional particularity that allows for one to become an attending-subject. Love for others emerges from both world-love and self-love, from both the One and the Unique. Philosophy is loving-wisdom, but loving-wisely means wisely-loving each Unique in the world as the Unique that they are. To do this, one must start from self-love and world-love – learning to love oneself as an unfolding Unique and to commit oneself to this unfolding as a life-project, as a directing of the will, as a leap of faith into one’s own Uniqueness. This faith then grounds the Unique in itself so that it may love the world unconditionally – directing the Unique towards the all in wisely-loving.

I want to return to love by returning to myself, by being-with myself so that I may be-with others and -with the world. I want to sit in the silence of the Unique and attend to my unfolding. Self-understanding grounds world-understanding, and self-theory grounds theory proper. From self-theory comes the understanding and self-articulation of the community. Uniques Unique together and in this Uniquing they form the Gemeinwesen. Community is a patterning of self-love unfolding into other-love, a network of loving-attention and affectionate solidarity. But to arrive at this community, one must start from the Unique. Philosophy begins from self-theory. What do you affirm? Which way does your body lean? Where do you find joy? Who and what do you love? Who are you? Who do you want to be? How do you want to live your life? How do you want to move? Where do you want to dwell? Who do you want to dwell with? How do I stop wanting to kill myself?

Start from the Unique and the world follows. Uniques Uniquing together. I’d like to learn to see myself as valuable, to see myself as real. I’d like to unfold as the I that I am and in that unfolding find joy. I’d like to breathe and sing and sit in silence and let that silence speak. I’d like to feel the earth and let the forms recede. I’d like to be formless again.

ash/cygnus. any/all/none. myself-in-myself and irreplaceable with any other.

The enemy of a love is never outside… it’s what we lack in ourselves.

Anaïs Nin, Diaries

Image: Bouquet with Flying Lovers by Marc Chagall (1947)

I’ve lapped so long. As you said. It fair takes. If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember! Once it happened, so it may again.

James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

Heartbeats rapid the memory, a souling needle sewing spirit in stone. Matter threading mattering into matter; anima motions time.

God creates because God is. Sophia condenses matter from the Trinity as the body of God unfolds life. Creation is an erotic act, the transcendent desiring the immanent, the universal wanting the particular, worlds forming from fingerwork in the divine doma. Between-and-within. Anima is space gasping; pneuma is time pearling into sweat. All the cosmos sways in creative union, spiritmatter waltzing kenosis. The One trembles the Many as the Many grips-tight the One, the here indenting eternity.

John the Madman swallows locusts in the wilderness, living on manna and stardust. Into the water and into the pneuma, I give myself to God, to the world. The earth-souls inhabit breath and breathe the Spirit, telling stories under the lamplight of the constellations, Orion barking yes. Timegrooves the melancholy joy of unraveling, enminded togethers tethering close the universe. Baptism in milk and ecstasy in honey. We are born again into resurrected flesh, dwelling in the imago dei of the Unique. Alaliallelujah.

I hope. I breathe. I decay. Fireflies rock lovingly the hallowed dirt. A thimble of memory holds eternity. Please hold me. Wash my feet before we commune, this body of mine. Take, eat. Most of the time I am afraid. Gaia dresses windowless the cosmopsyche. I hope I’m a good person. The all weeps wilderness, the wilderness weeps will. Everything hurts. All I am is time unraveling. All I am is matter mattering.

Everything matters so much.

Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

Vincent Van Gogh, Letters

Image: Starry Night Over the Rhone by Vincent Van Gogh (1888)