[b]Franz Kafka
My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.[/b]
That’s one way to look at at. Fortunately, there are other ways too.
[b]Bianco Luno
Maybe a million people died yesterday on the other side of the earth on islands in great typhoons and in the horn of Africa of not enough pity.
Acts of God?
Certainly, He was complicit.
(And if He doesn’t exist, I accuse Him of that.)
But the important thing is the difference that makes to you?[/b]
The important thing [for some] is whether or not it ought to make a difference to anyone at all. In fact, it can be argued that we invented God in order to insist it must.
Living with her—and perhaps with anyone—would have a certain element of hell about it.
Hell is, after all, other people. And being alone is bliss. Right up to that point [and it’s coming] we begin to fall apart at the seams.
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando Pessoa
And we will never run out of idiot savants who insist they [and they alone] can separate them.
This actually reminds me of the problem creative people have once they are known to the public. The incredible pressure to repeat and create ‘according to their identity’ as judged by critics or fans. (or their own self-pressure) That we are always stopping flow, trying to get control of what ‘worked’ and even people who hate the very ugly way capitalism can suck resources - nature, talented people, workers - dry, do the same things to their kids, ‘artists’ they love, and even themselves.
I tend to agree with Kafka here. My quibble would be that many things can act as drugs and its likely that Kafka partook in some of these ‘drugs’. Some drugs even prevent socialness. Probably most do.
Regarding “controlled substances”, I tend more towards the perspective of Tom the priest from Drugstore Cowboy:
“Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that someone can use drugs to escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots.”
But there are a lot of different ways to encompass a “terrible fate”. Still, it infuriates me I don’t have access to the dope that would ameliorate mine.
[b]Bianco Luno
Freeze-dried passion, the icy intimacy of nightmare.
A clinical voice, but with the syntax, emboldening familiarity, found in diaries.
An accomplishment, an act with tortuous though forgiven consequences under a white moon.
I will be forgiven in time, more or less.
What difference does that make to you?
By what grace will you dismiss me?
My ugliness, the terror that attracts (not pursues) me I cannot give names to as you will assuredly give me.
You will conflate the logician and poet in me to save yourself, to spare yourself yourself.
I am, over and over again, a sharp instrument in your heart.[/b]
A logician who fancies himself a poet more or less than a poet who fancies himself a logician. Too close to call? Not really. What I read are the gaps between words and worlds from a mind that knows enough about relationships in which there are no gaps at all. We agonize more over what we come to conclude we cannot know: the things that matter most to us.
Okay, the things that matter most to me.
[b]Vaclav Havel
Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity…[/b]
From my vantage point now, this sentiment appears more noble, stirring and inspirational “up there” than “down here”. Down here the absurd comforts me more from the opposite direction: the great equalizer.
[b]Franz Kafka
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.[/b]
Well, if he didn’t reach it back then, he has certainly reached it now.
I think it is pretty rare anyone manages to escapte a horrible fate with drugs. But I agree there is something off in the way narcotics are scapegoated and demonized. It’s a distraction from noticing the real pernicious drugs at work. Though none of this helps Kafka, Kafkas out there now, the Kafka in us. Yes, people try to use drugs as social short cuts and really, through this, likely avoid actually dealing with their real situations. But his ‘real’ situation’ was probably the contruct of non-pharmaceutical drugs and not something he could ‘cheat’.
[/quote]
yeah.
[b]Bianco Luno
Now everything has become ingrown that early on was admitted—and the rest apparently sealed off—to this self-infected hypochondriac.
He was a cheerful boy once, as can still be observed between fatigues and headaches and digestive upsets.
But now, caught up with stealing the pleasure others may take in accusing and cataloging him, he even recoils instinctively with them from his own image.
His ‘I’, already become ‘you’, is straining toward ‘he’.
He (while we may still speak of him as such) feels he might be able to breathe more easily were he to speak in the fourth person, possibly a place in the grammar of a language spoken only by the all-the-way dead.[/b]
Can “I” become a slippery slope to a psycho-somatic hell? Or can it [possibly] be the antedote instead? Obviously: Yes.
[b]Fernando Pessoa
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.[/b]
Well, after music of course.
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
True. But we all know that some ports are more excruciatingly painful than others.
[b]Bianco Luno
To repeat: What is the difference that makes to you?[/b]
To repeat: It is a difference that lies between “we die so life means nothing” and “we die so life means everything”.
It is no accident that I dress like Mr. Rogers; could I ape his soul?
Well, that’s all he is now. And it’s not an accident some say.
Not the co-existence of evil and good that is so appalling as that there is no breach between them, all the while a very forward justice masquerades as the bandage for this hypochondriac’s wound.
Words co-exist all the time “in here”. We need but insist they do. And then argue back and forth about things like “logic” and “poetry”. “Out there” however any number of breaches exist as well. Indeed, they can, among other things, get you banned.
In here, for example.
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Franz Kafka
This is a subjunctive point of view. I can’t even imagine it as a philosophy of life. Not in the manner in which most construe that expression.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Franz Kafka
As, it might be said, is the man of letters forced into a state of action far removed from the world of words.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
Franz Kafka
Worse perhaps is wanting things advertised you cannot afford. For some, the bare necessities of life itself.
[b]Bianco Luno
When you left, saying we had been “off” all day and unable to take my silence about all that wasn’t mundane, that class of things you so despise and which functions for me, when anything does, to stave off a hopeless, utterly lightless, pall…[/b]
I think I know someone who eschews the mundane. She lives in a world of words…a world far, far, far removed from all things quotidian. A thanatophobic who is creeping ever closer and closer to the final solution.
We shared her in common. Unless of course we didn’t.
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel Beckett
How many arguments have a beginning, a middle and an end? But then don’t really say much at all about the beginning, the middle and the end of the lives we live? But no matter. They’re still well-built.
I would say all arguments - except perhaps some of the obssessive stuff by Wittgenstein and Russell - only have middles. Beginnings are assumed. Ends can’t be reached except by immortals and not by them either.
[b]Bianco Luno
I was accused yesterday of being sincere and resigned.[/b]
I am rarely resigned to be sincere. There is simply not that much I am inclined to believe in sincerely anymore. So, I may be lying about this too.
Unbelievers that we are, obliged to make divine the seams between our great ideas, my relationship to the mundane is, thus, one of terror.
Talk it up, sidle up to it, as Pascal used to say of faith,19 maybe he’ll give you an “A” for effort?
So if I discuss apartments for rent, the different textures of the cats on our walk, how the neighborhood has changed…
I know everything! I see can everything!
but only when I can keep my eyes from welling up, you see.
They do this too easily, it is unbecoming of a terrorist.
A terrorist? Only in the sense of imagining others understanding what this means and viewing it as you imagine they would if they understood it as you do. But in reality almost no one does. Not even me today.
First of all, I think we’re all on the same page here. What differences there are appear to be primarily situated around matters of methods and the degree we want to go to. It comes down to Rorty’s distinction between the systematic and the edifying philosopher. And our allegiance seems to be decidedly within the edifying one. This has been clear to me as far as Ambig’s concerned, and has been pretty much confirmed with Moreno by his decided focus on the middle –or what I like to call process. I could not agree more with Moreno (yeah, you, man!) in that there is every reason to put a focus on process above an end in that those who seek and delude themselves into finding such an end are all too prone to bringing folly into the world –if not through their selves, then through those who act on that solid foundation to impose their own agenda on us all.
Unfortunately, I just finished Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (a systematic philosopher and classicist), had some thoughts on it, and saw an essay coming. Therefore, you, Moreno, and you, Ambig, as reward for being of a common soul with me, get to deal with me meandering through those thoughts in hopes of drawing them in to something more finished. Squirm, resist, protest: but you are my komrads; so fucking deal with it; alright?
First of all, I expected it to be a little smugger than it was based on an interview in which Searle described Derrida as a philosopher for those who knew nothing about philosophy. However, the impression I got from the two times I heard him on PhilosophyTalk was a little more humble. And what I got from the book carried on that impression. Furthermore, I enjoyed his decision to be clear about what he was saying and would actually like to incorporate his style of simply building an argument as compared to my own of poetic meandering like that of Zizek.
Moreover, I actually agreed with some of his more classicist points in that we have to agree there is a reality beyond our representations of it, that there are, in fact, facts, and that us edifying philosophers have gone for a kind of ontological overkill. Let us look at the latter point: back in the 60’s, a lot people decided to do things that were not normally accepted (drugs, free sex, etc.): hence the cultural relativity that became popular at the time. But that wasn’t enough. We had to establish a foundation for it in the realm of the metaphysical/ontological by acting as if all reality was relative. This ultimately ended up in the absurdity of Richard Bach’s (who just died in the last couple of days) Illusions.
However, what Searle fails to recognize is that there is, on the analytic side (that which starts with the epistemological), a social/political overkill. I have seen people make statements that amounted to:
1+1=2, Capitalism is the only acceptable economic system on the face of the earth: as if we are to be so impressed by their getting the 1+1 part right, we should automatically accept that claim about Capitalism. Analytics, of course, would claim that following their system through would act against this. But given the nature of human nature, are they really that ready to stand behind such bad faith? And how sure is Searle that Capitalism isn’t the real validation of his particular approach?
Of course, Searle couldn’t answer this question because most of his argument was based on observations like “the cat is on the mat”. Like most analytics, he bases it on facts that can be easily established. And there is some merit to that to the extent that it gives us understanding. How could isolating what can be easily understood not? The problem, for me, is that there are way too many human experiences (Ambig’s Dasein) that Searle’s language of correspondence cannot describe with the same certainty, that can only seek understanding through inference from the representations derived from the reality independent of those representations. Searle can tell me that money is a social construction. But he can’t tell me shit about how the love of that money will lead those who have a lot of it to deceive those who don’t into accepting their slavehood.
Of course, I need to read the book a couple more times.
[b]Fernando Pessoa
Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while…I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.[/b]
And, as you might suspect, this is how I imagine being attached to myself.
My past is everything I failed to be.
Or, worse, everything I did become.
The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!
Both well beyond good and evil by and large.