Fish In the Afternoon

“All rules for study are summed up only in this one: learn in order to create.”

Friedrich Schelling, On University Studies

Philosophy is a conceptual playground, the choreography of the imagination.

We enter philosophy through stepping into our concepts, opening the door of appearance to enter the abode of mystery. Concepts are labyrinths – twisting, turning, winding halls built from signifiers and practices of signification, fluxing pathways of discovery, inference, and application. There is no ‘truth’ – ‘truth’ is a sign at the entrance to a maze. There is no ‘self’ – the ‘self’ is an opening into a dense forest. There is no ‘wisdom’ – ‘wisdom’ is an uncharted road into the countryside. Each is a trail leading into a wilderness of rituals and rhythms of making, forming, and creating – ‘truth’ becoming truth-making, the ‘self’ becoming self-formation, and ‘wisdom’ becoming creative virtue. The name attached to a concept is only a marker orienting us to an unfinished puzzle, the title at the beginning of a poem.

But why do we need philosophy? Why do we need concepts? Why need a why? Why need a what? Because of who and when and where. Because being generates being-with and being-here and being-as. Being begets becoming, which begets being. To-be, has-been, will-be – being bears the beauty of the in-between. Philosophy is the art of creatively shaping the relationship between ourselves and the world, forming new worlds and new selves in the process.

There is no correct technique in philosophy, no methodology through which concepts must be investigated. Philosophy is polyrhythm, syncopation, and improvisation, a call-and-response stretching across history. Philosophy doesn’t aim at stasis, but at flow, groove, and experimentation, expression melding into praxis and friendship blending with co-creation. Philosophy is actioned through writing, speaking, gesturing, signaling, painting, singing, dancing, storying, imaging, drumming, gathering, gardening, growing, tending, sweating, breathing, walking, running, climbing, jumping, loving, fucking, cuddling, rolling, slipping, sleeping, waking, smoking, drinking, eating, cooking, comforting, healing, praying, affirming, denying, rebuking, joining, defending, rebelling, collaborating, playing… Philosophy is a never-ending doing, a doing with oneself, with others, and the world.

The dialectic is not an argument. It is not thought in process, the march of Spirit, or the mind in contemplation. The dialectic is an action, a motion, a performance, an art. The dialectic is the dance of enminded matter, a one-step two-step of mutual shaping through intending and attending, through imaginative melody and echolalic riffing. Coltrane was deeper in the dialectic than Socrates ever was, not aiming at aporia but at variation and exploration, progressing through ii-V-I by the light of augmented triads, arriving again at a transformed beginning. Knowledge is not found in the realm of the forms, but in the ballet of their shadows, the good of the world manifesting through adventure and care. The Demiurge is dead and Sophia arrives, beckoning from the future. Anarchy awaits – a polydoxy of ways-of-being and ways-of-loving and ways-of-creating inhabiting the holiness of creation. Rip down the academy and spill paint on the steps. Philosophy is a wandering that never arrives but instead spirals through the beauty of the cosmos.

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Image: After the Rain 5 by Charles Gibbons (2010)

1. Love Intentionally – Seek to love yourself, others, and the world each day, allowing yourself to fail while also returning to that intention again and again.

2. Love Habitually – Through loving intentionally, seek to practice love so that it becomes a second nature, becoming a part of your everyday life.

3. Love Abdundantly – Take each act, expression, and relationship of love as valuable in itself, without the need to compare it or measure it against others.

4. Love Carefully – In taking each form of love as valuable in itself, be attentive to the different needs and boundaries expressed in those forms of love, being careful to not impose your will on others.

5. Love Vibrantly – Take joy in who and what you love and in your own expressions of love, allowing yourself to feel that joy without shame and valuing the depths of your own love and the love of others.

6. Love Attentively – When loving someone, love them in the concrete particularity of who they are. Do not impose your own expectations or idealizations, but be attentive to who they are in themselves.

7. Love Concretely – Practice love through acts of concrete care and compassion that are attentive to the needs and desires of those you love, demonstrating love through action.

8. Love Transcendentally – See the love you have for each being as a love that is interconnected with all things, as expressing something transcendent and immeasurable within not just your experience, but the experience of those you love and in the fabric of the world itself.

9. Love Fiercely – Love with a concern and drive for the happiness and well-being of yourself, others, and the world, allowing yourself to express that love in acts of solidarity and compassion, seeing love as intimately connected with justice.

10. Love Tenderly – Be attentive to the emotional complexity of those you love, remembering to be kind and gentle in all that you do, and holding them in both the joys and difficulties of life.

Image: Intérieur aux deux verres by Marius Borgeaud (1923)

In the abyss, God desires.

Whole fragment of spiritual flesh, Sophia haloing ecstatic into embodied creation. Matter becomes through yearning. Why is there anything rather than nothing? Why is there many rather than none? Because of love, ache. Because of first desire, the inhabiting of the nothing that calls out to everything and in so doing fractures into kaleidoscopic modality, possibility emanating from longing. God is because God loves; creation is because creation desires.

To be is to be-with – initially zero and then two. The one is the consequent of the two, the many. Cycles of time are erotic rhythms, cosmic sexuality flowing into multiplicity, love letters flaring into possible worlds. David Lewis was right – all possible things exist, actuality wrapping over spatiotemporal holes into infinity – but what he missed was the desire behind it, the longing of the universe to be through becoming. First love, then God and creation.

Love is incarnation, creative potential flowing into formed inhabiting, desire becoming being through dwelling. We cannot know without loving and cannot be without being-with, possibility becoming necessity through committing ourselves to the good of another, to the good of the world. Modality sings Sophia, wisdom vibrating with the holiness of eros, longing shimmering with potential and potential radiating into ecstatic union. To be is to intertwine, allowing ourselves to unfold through attending to the unfolding of another, the soul developing through a harmonics of intersubjectivity.

Love is the root of knowledge, that which makes knowing possible, the desire within desire that bursts into revelation. We cannot know without loving, for to know is to dwell in the thisness of another, to be-with the world. Love is the precondition for possibility and possibility is the precondition for knowledge.

In the abyss, God loves.

Image: Creation, from the outside shutters of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510)

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Meadowlark. Old willow draped in a green dress.

The spirits never left us; the ghosts remain. Through machinery, capital de-sacralizes the land. Devouring rationality, the monstrosity at the heart of exchange, the demon of accumulation specters in from the shallow, the abstraction of the deep.

Animal heartbeats push into virtual unfeeling. The worlds beneath us, the seeds within us, the companions around us simulacra’d into electrochemical icons. The hypercosmos of capitalist modernity infects being and sublimates it into non-being, capital.

Bluesong. Weeping forest in a funeral veil.

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Softfellow. Petalvine skipping in nothing.

The spirits inhabit us; the ghosts touch. Through the land, love leaves the logic of capital. Touching feeling, the desire within desire, chaosmos of belonging in difference, the pluricosmos of fractal being breathes and welcomes us into the deep.

In the beginning was Sophia. The thought before thought that was also matter before matter. The form of the holy resonating into sonic ontologies. A principle of contradiction ferning into spiral galaxies. Pinpoint quarks wobble with fibrous consciousness in the cosmic dirt.

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Image: Vase of Flowers by Jan Fyt

I believe in you. I believe in me. There is nothing else but us.

Touch grass, if you can find it. Grasping apes, upright-walkers hunting through the ice, bacterium bursting into self-consciousness. The split between the before, the now, and the after is the invention of the Human.

There is no Human in nature. The Human is a category of fissure, a rupture in God’s self-understanding. Terrified of its animality, the Human severs itself from the flux and creativity of being, architecting an Atlantean -topia above the rhizome of nature. Arboreal fear of dirt asthmatically blocking off roots and cutting off tunnels of nutrients, the Human peels into simulacra, an image of what the imagination images itself to be.

Capital is a Moloch pulling us forward into the realm of forms, a cybernetic arche leading to abstraction. The goal of capitalism is forgetting, a reverse anamnesis obscuring life. Trapped in Hades, the soul sinks into Styx, dragged into the underneath below Tartarus. “…capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance of power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital.” (Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave and Other Essays) Proletarianization is one link in a chain that tries to block us from community, from finding wholeness in the multiplicity and flowing chaosmosis of life.

The Human is a Demiurge. Not human beings, homo sapiens, beings of joy and hope and creativity and flesh and breath, but The Human (TM), that which separates us from the world, from materiality. At the level of point particles, the universe is enminded, the body of God in infinite multiplicity. God has a body and our body is her body. The act of becoming Human is the act of separating oneself off from this body, being fearful of passion, energy, creativity, life, joy, excess, love, magic, art, pleasure, desire, friendship, and community. The Human is a gnostic apocalypse, the fading of the material into the technic, the hubristic terror of machinic libido shaving down the non-Euclidean geometries of nature into Leviathan. Eden is the nightmare of power.

The only hope for humanity is the rejection of the Human in favor of the cosmic us, the loving embrace of the other as a concrete site of embodied self-consciousness.

I believe in you. I believe in me. I believe in us and nothing else.

Image: The Angel of Hearth and Home, Max Ernst (1937)