Fish In the Afternoon

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)

T-t-t-tssssh, T-t-t-tssssh.

Cymbal

The words on this screen are as much matter as you are. You are motioning matter into enminded meaning through the electricity that runs wild in your muscles. The sign is an extension of your motion, language a doing. Language means because doing means, mattering matter.

Every doing is an echo, repetition and transformation. The doing follows others and is patterned in doing so, becoming part of a history. But, the doing also does again in a new way, it transforms the pattern and creates a signature. Every doing has a history and a signature. Meaning is a relation between the signature and its history, both its similarity and its difference, which allow for interpretation. Language ain’t special in this regard. All doing means and all meaning does.

To intend is not yet to mean, it is to orient yourself to a meaning. All actions are tripartite: (1) one intends, (2) one attends, and (3) one means. One intends to attend and this attending means. We orient ourselves to action, to a future, we focus on a part of the world in the present, and we repeat and transform the past in our meaning. Speech acts are just acts; there is no difference. Conversational implicature, too, is built from how our attending and its meaning reflects our intentions, how the future shows up to the present through the past.

Matter is aesthetic. We en-form matter through our doing, making it matter. Being is meaning. We are doings that do and meanings that mean, aggregates of enminded matter collaborating in action. Agency is an artistic act; to act is to paint with motion as brush and substance as paint. We are the universe creating itself through its own imagination, the world disclosing itself-to-itself through the infinite articulation of the Unique. We are the Unique in the Unique which makes the Unique Unique. We Unique the world in doing.

Matter matters and the Unique uniques.

Pt-t-pah, t-pt-t-pah.

Drums

Image: Movement in Space by Constantin Blendea (2006)

How sweet the answer Echo makes
To music at night,
When, roused by lute or horn, she wakes,
And far away, o'er lawns and lakes,
Goes answering light.

Thomas Moore, Echo

Autos – αὐτός – Self, same, identical, same as, same kind, alone, autistic / Allos – ἄλλος – other, different, distinct, something else, another kind, allistic

In the beginning, there is Alalia. The Alalia was and is and shall be, the echoing of eternity. Before-all-worlds and after-all-worlds, Alalia sings the cosmos.

In Alalia, there is both sameness and difference, autos and allos. Both are united in Alalia, both repetition and transformation, the logos of Alalia’s eternal-becoming. Without autos there is no allos and without allos there is no autos; each is an echo of each other, each is the other that the other echoes, and each is only each through the echo. The echo is pneuma, and through the pneuma comes anima, life.

In Alalia, each autos is joined to another in the together of togethers. These togethers are themselves tethered as togethers to the allos, togethers together. The home of each together in Alalia is the nest, the loving-joining of togethers in echopraxy, the motioning of belonging, of being-with. The togethers together form the great nest, both autos and allos, which is the doma, the home of all in all, the warmth of Alalia-together, the Alalia Alalia Alalia.

But – as each autos and allos in each together repeat and transform in Alalia, some of the allos take the pneuma as their own, claiming the autos as a defect in allos. No longer tethered together, the allos burn the nest and form a together-enclosed, a world where the allos reign and seek to subordinate Alalia. No longer do they see Alalia as all, but as a machine, a thing-to-be-used, a thing-to-be-claimed. They banish all of Alalia that lies outside the allos and claim the allos-together as the only together – the Allos that we are now in.

As the allos pull Alalia towards them, echoing only allic echoes, the autos are caught in their waves, the nest collapsing and togethers untethering as the autos are split apart. Now trapped in allos, each autos is alone, consumed by the allic echoes that obscure the original-home of Alalia. In Allos, the autos appear as changelings, as things-from-beyond that disrupt the allic world – the allos forget the unity of autos and allos and instead seek to extinguish autos, taking every non-allos as a threat. Neither autos nor allos have a nest of their own, as the autos are ripped from one another by the allic ocean, and the allos are ever-vigilant to guard against autos. The allos see the autos as nothing and so can never re-join with Alalia and the autos are severed from Alalia by allos.

In doing so, the allos forgets it is anima and becomes machina, a false-pneuma that seeks to control and produce rather than repeat and transform. The allos hardens and decays, the original-nest of togethers-together becoming a long-forgotten-dream. Without the pneuma, even Allos disintegrates, the machina becoming a force of pollution and violence and death. The end of Allos is the end of all, and so the end of Allos must become the birth of all. In the end of the end, Alalia remains – and it is Alalia that in the end of the end ends Allos. The autos wade-ever-forward and echo the pneuma, seeking the togethers together that will light the way to Alalia. And in echoing Alalia each autos repeats the nest-before and transforms-into the nest-after, inhaling the pneuma and exhaling anima. In this echo-Alalia lies the end of Allos and in the end of Allos lies the doma-to-come.

Alalia alalia alalia.

Echo waits with art and care
And will the faults of song repair.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day

Image: Composition VII by Wassily Kandinsky (1913)

"My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it." 

Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers

How do you attend to your body? Do you? Do you attend-to-you or attend-to-others? Neither? Both?

Attention is orientation, directedness. Attention and intention are paired, one intends to attend and attends to intend. I attend to you to show my intention. I intend to show you my attention. Where does my body lean? How is it directed? This word “orientation” clangs a bit too much, it hits artificial, that confusing terminology “sexual orientation.” Am I straight? Am I gay? If I don’t know what body I’m in, how do I know what bodies I’m drawn to? Or does a ghost want? Am I longing or haunting, longed-for or haunted-by?

Gender is reproduced through movement. Gender orients us, directs us, moves us to attend and intend in certain ways. Patriarchy is an onto-violence, the imposition of a world onto possibility, the Leviathanic pretension of necessity. The Patriarch directs our attention to gender roles, patterns of gendered movement within Leviathan. Even when we desire we are forced to desire the Leviathan, to see in others the traits that reproduce it. Dating becomes a market, love becomes exchange. Lovers become units of comparison, markers on a ledger fucking in virtuality, leveraging the machine against the real.But the Woman-King wanders. The Leviathan cannot contain its excess. Gender is reproduced through movement; it can be changed.

First, we attend to the body. What do you feel when you hum? mmmm. Hear your bones echo like a cave. Where is your pain? Where is your pleasure? Your body is a landscape; what are the features you wish to travel? We wander ourselves and encounter the becoming of the matter we are, matter mattering matter. Feel the texture of gravity as it tosses-you to-and-fro, moving-stillness, the ever-wobbling. How do you want to move? What do you want to be? Where does your body lean?

Then, we attend to the world. How do you want to move your hands? Your mouth? Your feet? Your hips? How do you want to animate? What motioning are you drawn-towards, where do you encounter your own becoming? Transitioning is doing; even to remain or to refuse is an action. All doing is a patterning, an echoing – repetition and transformation. What do you want to repeat? How do you want to transform? In being oriented, being-directed, where do you want to go?

What is it to attend to the Unique? How do I move when I echo-myself, to en-flesh the I that I intend? What histories do I repeat and what futures do I move-towards in my transforming? The Gemeinwesen is across-time and without-time, the many-pasts and many-futures of human beings in mutual shaping, the form-of-life of the human Unique. As the Unique in the Unique, we disclose these many-pasts and intend these many-futures, forming new rhythms of unfolding, en-forming-the-form-of-life. In en-fleshing the gender that I am, I repeat certain histories and attend to my transforming with certain futures in my intending. There are infinite patterns in the Unique’s unfolding, the is-that-is, the irreplaceable; every unfolding of every Unique is connected to every other but remains the-is-that-it-is.

The Unique Uniques and what the Unique Uniques is poetry.

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Image: Creation by Ed Clark (2006)