Fish In the Afternoon

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)

Busy, busy, busy.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Bundled branch, see: time golems hillhaunt the hallowed hollow.
(Why, exactly? -- the principle of sufficient reason fails to say anything about will or won't they) I fail to see the reason, Crow Mountain.
Start with a sound. Po-ét, poète, poētēs, *kwoiwo-, *kwei-
"I make it often, but I never talk about it." Swing, eros, Spring. 
Jötunn arrive in an hour or two, darling. Snarling men
in the driveway thirty-two and after. To iconoclast,
antonym iconolatry (quick, hide the Theotokos pinup!)
Gallantry, girlie. Galilee crushtender/thickgender fruits lip
And bites raspberry galette. "Souls, souls for a soul-cake."
The feast of all saints descends into moonlit merriment
As Venus Barbata adorned in furs inhales the fugue
between wake and sleep, a hypnogogia of the lungs. 
Barely raw, Sappho tongueflicks bone and sinew sews
salt tart muscle to the finer things in life. Fold your thighs 
Underneath your body and allow presence to take root. 
Desire appears in the full absence of mind and asks:
Would you like to get coffee sometime? 

The man who was once a frog is now a king.

Petronius, Satyricon

Image: Frog Pond by Piero Manzoni (1957)

Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.

James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

Who but the mountain knows the cave? We are not hollow; opaque jewel of coalstone depths melting magmic into places unspoken. We bathe diamondtime in the honeysuckle brush, the dirtroot soot stilling the carbon freckled ash as I world the ghost my skin contains. 

O spiritblood, that passionfruit primate. I meditate motion the candyflame canes and resurrect gin and tectonic. Beaded sweat sates the terroir nouveau, crimson sheets buried deep tonguestinging acid in the yellow meadow. Hear fate chime ready sir, we gallop palehades fell stargazing in peerless rubber fences, crisp autumn tenses vague senses hence spent. Take thistle seriously, fearless hummingbird.

Sip limestone shaleshade gliding loose the memorymade, we fairfade happy days in crumblepebblerock Thorsdays coarse curse the manyheaded stage. Hydrate hydra the Serengeti formtakes weathergentle stay burgundysyrup shadows hollondaise (so classy she gays). Wayway backandforth the cuirassier stands stonegate. Totick totock the clock fought back; prolegallow shapes the state that I am in. Hang back, angelkin, pray matin sin sins to sin again gruyere and breadcrumb gratin. Fearless willowlady purses lipbark the summerwind, cinnamon tremblin’ catechumen the places we saw back then.

Won’t somehow think of the cauldron? Berryuplift this ‘rry’ melody, skislopes the holy one praise “to time to tea.” Ghee velvets glanscent the muskripe readithirst that octave kweer. (Up there, rafters goading goding we three kings in sharpsuit Valheaven.) How prettymary meanings giddylily I lace I lay I everyday thee down to down to sleep. In hand-to-foot chai sugarrums the barrister; isn’t is such a lovely tune. Wrapheart me tenderly in dandelion, my roaring wild dreams my highness. I goldmellow again, warm again against your skin. Soon tomorrow.

Act so that there is no use in a center.

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Image: Landscape with Two Oaks by Jan van Goyen (1641)

Things that are not at all, are never lost.

Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander

To mom.

You've chosen a man over your family. Such is life. 
I decay. I will flower again. I cannot stay.
Lavender thorns the cherrytree syrup, 
Backlight, the windowsill dances in the distance.
Who did you miss when you sang, Kauaʻi ʻōʻō? 
Swallowing stone of ever-more-memory slow.
Come thou fount of every Holocene;
Trembling winter, the pale pinks peach Nysiades. 
I don't know what to say. You let Saturn swallow me.
Nothing matters more to you than the Harlequin. 
Stop and examine; ask and you shall receive --
You don't have to live in decay, you don't have to stay
I can't do it for you. Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam.
"Another aeroplane, another sunny place."
I can never go home. 

All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.

bell hooks, All About Love

Image: Pietà by Michelangelo (1498-1499)

Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions; existence is elsewhere.

(Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism)

We pass into one another, you-and-I, the haze of two Selves coupling side-by-side, gift-giving the gift of Self. A dream breathing in synchronicity, intersubjective sense-painting participating in the Self-song of the world-soul. (Hallelujah, etc.)

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Think. Do the command. Think ‘Think.’ Now. Good. Back to reading. Thinking ‘think’ orchestrates an interactive history of aggregates (No-Self) into Self. To think ‘think’ we must bring together disparate sensations and perceptions and memories and faculties into the act of signing-within-ourselves, the thought. The thought is a sign of Self, a chord in the symphony of being-aware. The No-Self forms One out of Many and so positions the Many as a subject — as an agent in the world and a confidante to itself, revealing its unity-in-multiplicity by whispering thought and desire and awareness within the mode of relationship, like a lover saying “honey, I’m home!” and her beloved replying “I’m so happy to see you.”

The Self is more Zizioulas than the Cappadocians: the essence of being-you (that which we point to when we say we are ourselves) is formed through the overlapping relationship of those which form us. The No-Self are hypostatic persons — enfleshed processes of proto-consciousness that reach out to the world as one within the Many even as it together composes the One that forms its essence. No-Self aggregates in the sense that musicians together form an orchestra; each musician is separate and concrete, playing with their own goal, instrument, and mode of expression, but the role of the musician is determined by the whole that it forms.

It is not solely the Self that composes the soul, any more than Symphony No. 9 can be performed without reference to those who perform it. Symphony No. 9 is expressed as a symphony by musicians in an orchestra, by a relationship between part and whole where neither is primary, but which (per)form a greater unity. Likewise, the soul is a perichoretic-kenotic hylomorph of Self and No-Self, reducible to neither the parts nor the whole but generated through their relationship. The soul is not the Self nor the No-Self that composes it, but something that Self and No-Self form together.

Or, more formally:

1. No-Self is the constitutive contradiction of difference that is resolved in:
2. Self, the identity-in-difference that coheres the history of No-Self into an agent that:
3. self-narrates, reflexively becoming a Self-to-itself;
4. acts, builds Selfhood by dwelling in the world as a Self-to-itself;
5. wills, authoring their Selfhood as a Self self-naming, co-creating world and Self;
6. and desires, wants to know, to become entangled again in the constitutive contradiction of difference that begets the Self, which in turn, together with No-Self, expresses;
7. the soul, the compositional unity that makes possible being-in-placetime.

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Time loves the seasons-greetings of spiritmatter becoming-melody, when in advent we herald the theophany. Branchbrown, the roughhewn marigold. Tense, fiber, muscular percussion flexing absence into the immediate. Becoming now, this-here lays bricks in the courtyard of meaning as water seeps through the cracks.

Please, sit with me and take a second to think. The leaves are pretty this time of year.

more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand
and now you are and i am now and we're
a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before—
and shining this our now must come to then

(e.e. cummings, XAIPE 69)

Image: Carousel of Pigs by Robert Delaunay (1906)