Certain People I Know

A few more notes on War and Peace

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:14:10 -0400

As I’ve been thinking through the reasons for pierre and nikolenka’s freedoms, I realized that I should expand a little on how their lack of familial grounding breeds their freedom. They are not only fatherless, but basically without family at all. Their fatherlessness is still the most important part of their lack-of-family dynamic, but the fact that they also don’t have any other family to whom they have a relationship of obligation, they are all the more free. To return to nikolai Rostov, even after the death of his father he is held down and oppressed by his mother, and his duty to sustain her world at his own expense.

The other thing I realized is that this kind of unchained freedom is only available to men, as they are the only ones who can have full control of the assets and options that come with no. Having a family. The other familyless character is Sonya, but she is just as bound to the Rostov family as any o their own children. In fact, she is at an even further disadvantage because she is not actually a part of the family, yet must be taken care of. There is an attitude of Cinderella-like resentment that falls upon women in her position. I think the same thing can be seen in a character like Nastasya Fillipovna in The Idiot, who in fact had as much potential in her personality as Pierre and nIkolenka, but could never realize it due to her circumstances. So not having a family is not necessarily a free ride to freedom, nor is it the only escape. But it is a very powerful opportunity.

I’m writing this on my phone so this post won’t be as long as I would like. Now that I...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 03:31:00 -0400

I’m writing this on my phone so this post won’t be as long as I would like. Now that I am typing it out though, I think this might be a good thing. It takes longer to type so I am more conscious of my words, and perhaps will instill them more with thoughtfulness and patience.

I finished War and Peace today. I was so struck with how brilliantly Tolstoy shows the degrees in life to which various characters have advanced, and how that advance by degrees is not a function of age, but of an internal will. I.e., Nikolai Rostov is stuck as a workaholic and bland farmer, but nikolenka, though only 15, and in many ways very naive, has started planting seeds of hope and progress in life that he can reap continually throughout his life.

The other character who was able to advance to the same degree of personal freedom was Pierre, who becomes something of a guardian and mentor to nikolenka. What interested me the most about this was that both nikolenka and Pierre were essentially fatherless. And it was that separation from their fathers that gave them the ability to be free, to choose only the parts of their fathers’ lives that would be beneficial, and to be encumbered by their fathers’ mistakes in life. They truly embodied Deleuze’s effort to break free of the Oedipal trap. Their distance from their fathers gave them free rein to experiment and embrace life on their own terms, unmediated by any kind of structure, Oedipal or otherwise.

Nikolenka was finally able to break the spell of unhappiness that plagued the other Bolkonskys. Prince Andrei almost achieved escape velocity several times, but he ultimately resigned to the same fate as his own father, dying unfulfilled and resentful. Less so than his father, but enough that it still showed he could not break free of the tenor his father had set. Princess Marya had in her what she might have needed to escape, but couldn’t due to the circumstances of being an unattractive, oppressed woman.

At the same time, I am reading Nietzsche’s Gay Science. It is interesting that Tolstoy, who was very religious, picked up on a variation of the freedom that comes, in Nietzsche, with the death of god. Of course in Tolstoy it’s the fathers who are dead, but in Nietzsche, and even more so Deleuze, there is a realization that breaking free of a hierarchical or systematic stuckness results in the highest level of freedom.

Moving on

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 23:12:00 -0400

I’m moving day after tomorrow. I feel very good about it. I have no apprehensions at all. I feel very different from the last time I left Seattle for any extended period of time, which was when I went to France. Then I was so worried about missing things, about being away from Seattle, because – well I don’t think I knew why then, really. Now looking back on it though, I think I wasn’t able to deal with my attachment to Seattle because I didn’t really want to be attached to Seattle. But I let my worry get in the way and stop me from resolving my attachment issues with this city and everything I’ve lived in it. So much about that period in my life was centered about being worried about not knowing what to do, and then letting that worry spiral inwardly on itself and about itself. The way I saw it then was that I knew I needed something different, and yet I was terrified to leave because I didn’t know how to step beyond my comfort zone. And so I let myself fester in that way, and as my mind spiraled inward my comfort zone shrunk with it, until I found myself standing on practically nothing with nowhere to go on or off.

But now I feel as if I finally got the guts to look down from my precipice without vertigo, and see that it was only a little hop down, that I was standing on nothing, a piece of old scrap thrown in a wide and verdant field. The last thing I had to let go of was my fear of leaving, and then it turned out that was the only thing. Everything else was distorted through it. And now what is there? Everything else to see, everything else to do. I’m excited about my future, because at last, it’s different! No more resigning to monotony.

I had my last day at work on Friday, which was a huge relief. So much of my anxiety was tied up in my work. The regimented days, the physical discomfort, the bosses I feared and whose anxiety-apparitions chased me around. I didn’t even realize how much of an impact my job had on my overall discontent until after I got off on my last day and went up to the roof of Karyn’s old apartment and watched the sunset. I looked around, down at the Bookstore and the Ave , and thought, all of this will be out of my life soon, I don’t have to feel weighed down by any of its memories and associations and its gravitational pull on how I look at myself.

And I wasn’t sentimental at all. I have had no sentimentality about any of this. Out of instinct I tried, and then when it didn’t work I tried consciously, because maybe I thought something was wrong. But even when I tried it just seemed silly. I’ve accepted change. There’s little sentimentality to be had when you embrace the change in the world as if it were a blossoming flower instead of a closing door. And that change in attitude is the proof to me that philosophy has some practical value, if it’s really lived. Because I credit all of this change with the massive existential overhaul I’ve given my self in the last six months or so. It hasn’t just been philosophy. Karyn has helped a lot, and I am grateful for her. Finding a good therapist who knew how to work with me and my anxiety in my own way was infinitely benefical too. And so has meditation, but I see that as just the physical extension of my philosophy. It’s been the thing that has proven to me that ideas can be driven into a material manifestation.

I took the GRE today. I wasn’t even worried at all. I knew that I had studied, I felt ready. It felt odd that I wasn’t worried. I thought there must have been something wrong, maybe I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. But I couldn’t even find it in me to worry about that, so I just sat down and did it, and I did even better than I thought I would. On the way home I read Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe on the bus, and found so much resonance in his ideas about the comfort to be found in natural change. But it can be found only when one gives up on any supernatural or mysterious explanation of the universe. Which is not to say one should give up on mystery – one should never give up on mystery. But if you accept that things unfold through time via a continual transfer and transmutation of the same process of matter, then there is nothing to be worried about. There is nothing immutable to mourn.

My dad and I had coffee yesterday and talked about all this. He’s one of the few people in my life who really get these things to the point that we can talk about them and engage on the same level (aside from Karyn and Riley, who incidentally made the coffee we were having). It was the perfect way to start my first Monday on which I did not go into work. The first Monday on which I had no reason to know what day it was. Because ultimately these feelings in me need to burst out, whether in conversation, or right now, in written form. And that communion with open and similar minds fortifies these feelings in me. I’m lucky to have had people like my dad, Karyn, Riley and Crystal who have been able to play that role in my life here. And even after coffee all day I felt that way with everyone I talked to, and it even surprised me. How could I find it in myself to care so much about the woman who sold me my glasses?

All of these things will grow in Hawaii and beyond. I can’t wait to nurture them there. Being in the sun all the time, with no rigidity and structure ruling my days will be amazing. And beyond that, going back to school will be great. But just as I am now not attached to any of the things around me that sum up my past, I am also not attached to any ideas of what exactly my future entails, and precisely which niches and ruffles will unfurl. And I think that is really the key to why I feel the way I do right now, sitting in my parents’ backyard, listening to the birds, satisfied with being content in just this moment.

I’m rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet right now. The last time I read it was about two...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 04:37:00 -0400

I’m rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet right now. The last time I read it was about two or three years ago and reading it again now is showing me how much I’ve changed since then.

He really emphasizes engendering an inner slowness and silence, and exploring that space, but not looking anywhere outside for it, not trying to find or give an explanation for it. Just being it. I feel like I’ve really been able to find that space through meditation practice. And it’s true – it can’t be explained, it can’t be conceptualized. Yet at the same time it can be spelled out in words fairly easily, which makes it so deceptive. I can say that I understand that there is a part of me that lies deep below my superficial characteristics, the things that I might list that define me. But to actually go to that place is something completely different. It is as different from the description I just gave as from anything else because it can only be experienced.

A testament to Rilke’s mastery of this experience is not so much what he writes in Letters to a Young Poet, but how he writes, the way he makes you read if you really want to understand what he’s saying. It’s only an 80 page book, you could read it in half an hour. When I was reading it tonight, I kept finding myself reading too fast and missing things, and I had to keep going back and slowing down, reading it word by word until the words started to dissolve, and somehow it was as if through the rhythm of his writing he induced that experience in me. But the closer I got to it the less it had to do with the words that I was reading, as paradoxical as that might sound.

He talks about needing to have a respect and appreciation for nature, and I feel that in the way he writes. His writing is like a stalk of bamboo in the wind. It doesn’t resist desperately, it doesn’t make any rash movements to push back, it just allows itself to endure what is happening to it. Yet at the same time it doesn’t break. Its roots and constitution are strong enough to hold it firm. It’s not like some grand artifice that seems magnificent until an earthquake comes along, or a hurricane, and turns it to rubble.

There is a special kind of poverty to it, one that I have also found in War and Peace recently, when Pierre Bezukhov is imprisoned by the French and finds in that poverty what he couldn’t find in society, Masonry or any of his other former pursuits. He is so slowed down that he can finally see the comic ridiculousness of all the people around him vainly striving to create so many flimsy artifices of non-existent truths. He finds that the only truth was always in him, that he only needed to stop trying to look for the answer to find it.

I have also been reading a lot of Levi Bryant’s blog (http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/), who is part of the burgeoning speculative realist/object oriented ontology movement. He’s been writing a lot lately about the continuities between “nature” and culture, or as he calls it “hominid ecologies,” and the ethics that come from this different way of looking at humanity and its products and constructions. This is very important to me in terms of my readings of Rilke and Tolstoy, because there is an undeniable gulf between those writers’ experiences of the world, of nature, and of society, and my own. I live in the postmodern age, where technology dominates, in a large city where all around we feel so disconnected from the natural. But if, even today, we can learn to slow our thinking and perception enough, we can come to see that even things like computers, street signs, grocery stores – anything and everything, are in fact natural. Natural isn’t really even the right word here because it still implies that split. Things just all are, equally, even if things are asymmetrical. That doesn’t mean that they are not all still local manifestations of an inescapable process of matter. They may not be trees or birds, but they are emergent properties of “wilderness” and “Nature.” They cannot exist without those things, and with that realization comes the ability to not replicate, but still stay true to the slowed-down, reflective principles that Rilke and Tolstoy lay out.

Nevertheless I think it is much more difficult for us to see and experience that continuity today because of the way in which we have learned to manipulate and concentrate things into forms that would not occur without us making them – things like iPhones and nuclear bombs. I really hope that over the next year in Hawaii, where I will be further away from culture and society, I will be able to continue to deepen my understanding of the innermost parts of myself, the depths of what it means not just to be a human, but what it means to be. And I don’t mean that in a quietist, withdrawn from the world way. Because the reason I want to foster those things in myself is so that I can come back to society and use that newfound part of myself as a tool to change other peoples’ views, and to engage honestly with the modern world, technology, warts and all.

Change and Existence, Dogen and Bergson style

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:22:00 -0400

I’ve always been confused by the following quote by Dogen via Shunryu Suzuki:

“Dogen Zenji says that charcoal does not become ashes; ashes has its own past and future and fire…red, hot charcoal has its own past and future; charcoal and red hot fire is quite different existence. Ashes is ashes and it is independent existence. Because it is a flashing into the vast phenomenal world. And even though we say, charcoal is black, that is also a flashing into vast phenomenal world. So charcoal is independent and red hot charcoal is also independent. Ashes is independent; firewood is also independent. Everything is independent of each other. So where there is black charcoal there is no red hot charcoal.”

This has never made sense to me, because in order for ashes to become ashes, they have to have been something else before that became the ashes. They aren’t just a thing that stands alone, independently of everything that led up to them. This has always struck me as being a strangely transcendent analysis of existence and change. But I realized that the error of my understanding this was that I was trying to understand it as an explanation of the temporal flow of experience – this is how things change and become other things. But that is the wrong way to approach and understand it, in fact, it is impossible to understand what Dogen is trying to say if you approach it that way.

Two things helped me to crack this puzzle. First, I had to remind myself of Dogen’s emphasis on simply sitting zazen and being in the present, nowhere else, that this is both the road to enlightenment and enlightenment itself, and that it can’t be realized any other way (i.e. any way that would involve an understanding with projections in the past or future). But the thing that really helped me break through was Bergson’s approach to the concept of “nothing.”

For Bergson, “nothing” is an illusion. It is possible to imagine nothing, because we have the conscious ability to reflect on absences.

“Now the unreality [nothing] which is here in question is purely relative to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought-for reality wherever we find the presence of another.”

So while there is a fluid change happening (Bergson again - “Of becoming we perceive only states, of duration only instants”), we don’t have any kind of outside access to perceive its fluidity. We only have the present, the instances of experience that are real and truly present to us as immediate sensory input. So we can admit that there is some sort of validity to the idea of “nothing” because it is something we can think, it is a product of the function of our consciousness. But it is not something that actually exists independently of our minds. It is just a useful tool that is necessary to navigate a world perceived through our consciousness, but if we want to try to experience the world as it unfolds independently of our selves and minds, we have to recognize the illusion of “nothing.” “The conception of a void arises here when consciousness, lagging behind itself, remains attached to the recollection of an old state when another state is already present.”

So in the case of Dogen, it is true that we normally perceive charcoal as “turning into” ashes. And it is very useful generally to think of it that way, if we just want to have a practical relation to charcoal, knowing that it turns into ashes after it burns out is very practical and useful. But this kind of logic can become a big problem if we apply to everything and think of it as principle of truth. Dogen takes this understanding of change to a much further degree when talking about the nature of our existence and its change.

“It is a mistake to think that birth turns into death. Birth is a phase that is an entire period of itself, with its own past and future. For this reason, in Buddha-darma birth is understood as no-birth. Death is a phase that is an entire period of itself, with its own past and future. For this reason, death is understood as no-death.

In birth there is nothing but birth and in death there is nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth comes, face and actualize birth, and when death comes, face and actualize death. Do not avoid or desire them.”

When we look at change and experience in terms of birth and death, we have the potential to run into a lot of problems. Because if we think of them as having a fluidity that stretches out into eternity that is attached to our self, then along comes the idea of an afterlife, a spirit. Our spirit is born into our body, we die, then it goes on and lives forever. This fluid understanding of change legitimizes the primacy of the self in understanding our life and its function. But, through meditation, and situating both our consciousness and its object of attention in the present, we can no longer conceive of ourselves as something that is fluid, only as something that orients itself and adjusts constantly to a changing environment, following its own nature, which is changing. Because when consciousness and its object are both situated in the present, there is breakdown of the barrier – the objects of consciousness and consciousness itself become a single block of objects interacting without the primacy of any one part. There is still a consciousness, but not a static self.

In this passage, Bergson lays out an experiment to test his theory of “nothing” which is remarkably similar to the kind of meditation that Dogen propounds:

“To represent ‘Nothing,’ we must either imagine it or conceive it. Let us examine what this image or this idea may be. First, the image.

I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish one by one the sensations that come to me from the outer world. Now it is done; all my perceptions vanish, the material universe sinks into silence and night. I subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I am still there, with the organic sensations which come to me from the surface and from the interior of my body, with the recollections which my past perceptions have left behind them – nay, with the impression, most positive and full, of the void I have just made about me. How can I suppress all this? How eliminate myself? I can even, it may be, blot out and forget my recollections up to my immediate past; but at least I keep the consciousness of my present reduced to its extremest poverty, that is to say, of the actual state of my body [italics here are my own]. I will try, however, to do away even with this consciousness itself. I will reduce more and more the sensations my body sends in to me: now they are almost gone; now they are gone, they have disappeared in the night where all things else have died away. But no! At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness lights up – or rather, it was already alight: it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first; for the first could disappear only for another and in the presence of another. I see myself annihilated only if I have already resuscitated myself by an act which is positive, however involuntary and unconscious.”

Even in the starkest moment there is still something there – the present, the bare present, and it can be perceived through meditative practice. This kind of situating in the present breaks down the illusion of nothing, and exposes Bergson’s élan vital, Dogen’s Buddha-nature. Just charcoal, just ashes, just our consciousness in the present, not as a fluid and everlasting self, but as an existing object subject to natural laws.

Today at work I saw a family with three little girls and their parents walk into the parking lot....

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:41:00 -0400

Today at work I saw a family with three little girls and their parents walk into the parking lot. The little girls each had cherry blossom branches covered in flowers. It made me so sad and angry. Cherry blossoms are so incredibly gorgeous, and are all the more gorgeous because they only appear during a small window, and they herald the start of spring. There is much to be said about appreciating impermanence that might go beyond what your average UW campus cherry blossom viewer would know or care to understand. But so carelessly and thoughtlessly breaking branches off and taking them home with you… I don’t think of anything as “sacred” but I imagine this is how highly religious people feel when they see religious icons or buildings desecrated.

Of course the difference here is that, unlike, say, burning a church, there is no repercussion, no vengeful God, or even the threat of any such thing. Nothing is stopping anyone from tearing down all the cherry trees (although if you take it the extreme of deforestation, and the havoc it’s wreaked on the earth, the repercussion is climate change, which might be worse than a vengeful God). But there is still something lost, something at stake.

But even at that I’m not primarily concerned with the environmental aspect. A few girls breaking off cherry blossom branches will not be the straw that broke the earth’s back. What is so frustrating to me is that by taking those branches home, they won’t appreciate them in the way that the ought to be appreciated: as fleeting stages of beauty in the cycle of nature. They will take them home and maybe put them in a vase and let them wilt and then throw them away, far from the tree the came from.

Instead of leaving with a sense of wonder, and hopefully a yearning to look forward to the changing of the seasons and the arrival of cherry blossoms again and again in years to come, they break the spirit of wonder and make it their own. Of course that never turns out well. It will never be their own. It will never belong to anyone or thing, but to the process of change itself. Carrying those branches they looked more like kids leaving a fair clutching oversized stuffed animals. And there’s nothing wrong with that in the right situation. There is nothing wrong with holding onto certain things and memories. Some things aren’t so fleeting, even though they are changing.

Even though it made me mad to see them with the branches, I wasn’t mad at them. I was mad at their parents maybe, who should have known better. But most of all I felt sorry for them. Sorry that could have experienced something beautiful and inspiring but didn’t. And maybe it’s wrong to be so hopeful. Maybe they wouldn’t have appreciated it otherwise, and that’s not something that I can affect in any case. Maybe they’re just little girls who didn’t know any better and that’s okay. But their parents have no excuse. And even if they had experienced the cherry blossoms in a way that I never would have, or done things I would never do, that doesn’t matter. They’re not me, they shouldn’t repeat my actions. But I would hope that they would at least have experienced their own refraction of the source of the trees’ beauty.

I bought a book of poems today by the Zen master and poet Ikkyu. I like his poems because they express a spirit of Zen that is not quietistic or strictly monastic, but Dionysian, Nietschzean. His sense of passion and joy is not rooted in anything but passion and joy in and of themselves, and that comes through amazingly in his poetry. I read this poem today and it reminded me very much of the situation I saw with the girls:

That stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets

I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind

The girls made a stone Buddha out of those branches, and themselves, and so did their parents. But tonight as I walked through the quad and stood in the middle looking all around at the cherry blossoms, I waved my arms, laughed, shouted! And then left before my mind even had time to quantify or reason what I had seen and experienced.

And here is the grand over arching plan for my future...

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 22:37:09 -0400

My intensity of reading and thinking has been picking up rapidly lately, and I feel like I’m really honing in on exactly what I want to study in grad school, and I’m finding ways to bridge together all my disparate interests into something cohesive that I can pursue.

There are three main aspects right now to what I want to do: ecocriticism, Deleuze and Guattari, and Zen. All three emphasize open-ended pattern making systems, so it is not a stretch to make them fit together: their open ended nonlinear patterns are both what constitutes the basis of their explorations and what constitutes the nature of their combinations and reciprocity with one another.

For the purposes of grad school I think that ecocriticism will probably be the dominant aspect of my studies, because it is the most academically sound and “safe” link between the three, although by no means the most important. It serves as a good basis for discovering legitimate patterns because it has one foot in science and one in literature. It has a more rigorous process of verification that gives credence to the patterns that I will try to follow from science to literature and elsewhere. Again this does not mean that ecocriticism is better than the other two; it only means that in this situation it has a particular advantage in its methods.

Deleuze and Guattari come next because they too base their philosophy in science as well as literature, and so are another important point of verification and reference in the web I am creating. But they go further down, introducing an element of experimentation that is equally important as scientific verification. In order to understand the models and “abstract machines” they write about, they must also be lived out, because if we are to believe Deleuze and Guattari, then it should be possible to divert one’s life in the patterns they describe. So Deleuze and Guattari form a link from scientific and literary-academic patterns to experiential patterns.

Zen comes last, because, if Deleuze and Guattari follow lines in a pattern from science to philosophy to experience, Zen follows the pattern from philosophy to experience, then all the way down to the ineffable level of experience where one is directed and redirected in all directions at once, where experience flattens out and allows one to view a much wider pattern, and see oneself as highly integrated into it. The full experience and practice of Zen integrates everything into an immanent system of creative patterns that allows one to explore and follow any route on any pattern in any direction. Of course this isn’t easy, and that is why Zen is a ceaseless blind exploration with no end or goal, just a determination in and with the present and its patterns.

So far I’ve only briefly mentioned literature, but that is another important element, perhaps the most important because it’s what I’m pointing the other three resources at. Literature is the creation that emerges when we describe the patterns we see around us. But we are not inherently accurate pattern makers on the large scale that literature requires. We make lots of patterns, but often they only serve us, only have a limited scope pertaining to certain needs. So it is easy to write a piece of literature that limits itself to a certain view of the world. But if a piece of literature wants to truly express the patterns that create us, and that we create constantly despite our efforts to do otherwise, it must follow those patterns from the current and physical world into the world of artistic creation and philosophical speculation without causing them to break or stagnate as they pass through the conduit that is the writer. Hence the necessity of experiencing the patterns of the cosmos through Zen.

I’ve been thinking of lots of ways to use this in literature. I mentioned Myshkin and The Idiot before, which I want to pursue further, but the more I look the more I see how useful the study of patterns can be toward the study of literature. Infinite Jest, and other similar postmodern novels suffer from a misuse of patterns; instead of using the groundless, leaderless postmodern patterns as channels for characters’ desire and motives, they are used to create plot and formal structures. But these structures act as restraints on the patterns that can be formed in the characters and their interactions, and render them unreal. In order to make a work of literature whose structure is truly groundless, it has to emerge from a multiplicity of postmodern pattern making characters, and form as an emergent whole, never as a set of constrictive boundaries.

I haven’t written any fiction in a long time and I need to start again. I need to do more character sketches and fragments, because they are a good way to search out and explore patterns, to try to find ones that will lead into interesting and insightful places. I think of Faulkner, who says that The Sound and the Fury started with the image of Caddy playing in the mud with her brothers, and that once he wrote that he had to follow the patterns created in the interactions between the Compson siblings, and did so all the way until it lead to the novel (and it goes even further than that, because Faulkner’s patterns even overflow from novel to novel, in the immanent and rhizomatic system of Yoknapatawpha County and his whole body of work). Writing in fragments is never a beginning because it might be a dead end or it might go somewhere, and furthermore fragments and character sketches are extracted randomly as the writer experiences them from a fluid existence that doesn’t have a clean beginning or end.

Although those three things are what I’m currently focused on, and what will comprise the central structure of my research, they are by no means a limit. If there are patterns that lead me to them there are many more patterns that will lead out from them to other people and ideas. Deleuze and Guattari are the only people I’ve mentioned, but I don’t want to limit myself to them. I feel like doing that would betray them. I got together with a friend of my grandpa’s who’s a comp lit phd student, and he told me that if you study Deleuze, you are in a very insular world that is strictly Deleuzian, and limited by a dependence on using Deleuze’s terminology. But Deleuze didn’t write in an insular world, and I won’t either. I don’t want to get stuck on trying to use Deleuze’s lingo or exactly recreate the patterns he does, to the point that I’m not even doing anything unique anymore. I don’t want to look too long at the Buddha’s pointing finger, but always toward the moon, and beyond. So I think once I get over my current infatuation he’ll fade a bit. Not out of view, just into a more equal proportion with others. Zen has a lot of people, but specifically Dogen, Shunryu Suzuki… I need to do more research on Soto Zen writers. I want to read Whitehead. I feel like process philosophy would be a very useful tool in my exploration of patterns. I want to pursue Bergson further, since Deleuze followed so many patterns from Bergson. There are also a lot of more current writers and thinkers I want to include: Manuel DeLanda, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Elizabeth Grosz. Not to mention more people on the science/ecology side, E.O. Wilson, Carolyn Merchant… I need to do more research there. And I will. More and more and more and constantly more research. My patterns have no terminus, just one long and wild ride, and I can’t wait to see where they’ll take me next.

Song of the Earth

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:28:00 -0400

I watched this documentary last night (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yyBd8GMsaA&feature=share) about the relationship between animal songs and human music. I’ve been thinking a lot about the continuity between humans and animals lately, but especially now that I’ve started reading Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson. One of the most interesting parts so far has been Bergson’s treatment of the difference between animals and plants. Though from a vague standpoint they seem like different, separate realms, when you look at all their connections there is only a tendency to diverge toward one or the other by degrees of complexification: the plant does not move, gets its energy source directly from the elements around it, while the animal moves and must find intermediary energy sources such as plants. Bergson even takes this further, talking about the function of microbes for plants, and I think it can extend in the other direction to explain the differences and similarities between humans and other animals, and how to see their continuity.

In this documentary, there is a comparison between bird calls signaling a defense or attempted takeover of a territory, and birdsongs to attract mates. There is a clear distinction in their duration and complexity that I think directly correlates to the nature of the activity they signal. The territorial, defense/offense calls are short bursts, staccato, always separated without any kind of fluidity between notes. The songs to attract mates, however, are fluid and beautiful, like Debussy, spectral waves of color and pitch. For the territorial calls, all that is needed is a signal of power, aiming to repel - think of the soldier or police officer yelling - “halt!,” stop!,” or an angry lover, “out!” There is a curtness both in the activity and relations formed, and in the call emitted. In the case of the song to attract a mate, however, the activity is one of intense desire for union and closeness, it reflects an attempt to, in Deleuzian terms, become-molecular, and bend the musicality of its call away from the rigid shapes of defense, into something that can flow and merge with another bird. Think here of the way lovers talk; soft, breathy utterances enunciated seductively, “come over here, sexy,” etc. The territorial call, in contrast, has to stay rigid, a “molar” entity, in order to ward off a potentially dangerous combination of two elements, two male birds.

Also interesting is the length and volume at which the call and song are performed. For the territorial call, there is a lot of volume, to display strength, but it is very short, an efficient repellent act, like a sucker punch, a gunshot. The song of attraction is also loud, and also to convey strength. It is not a repellent strength though, but an attractive strength. And, again, it becomes-molecule in its length, because it goes further than the molar punctuality of the territorial call: it winds and flows and cascades around into imperceptibility, flowing continuously. And while the pitch and melody are uniform in the territorial calls, they freely oscillate in the songs of attraction.

Deleuze and Guattari say, “Is the bird’s refrain necessarily territorial, or is it not already used for very subtle deterritorializations… It is the labor of the refrain: Does it remain territorial and territorializing or is it carried away in a moving block that draws a transversal across all coordinates - and all of the intermediaries between the two? Music is precisely the adventure of the refrain.” Clearly between the territorial call and the song of attraction, there is a great difference of labor, and a different kind of labor needed for each.

Although they don’t really give as many examples of human music in the documentary, I feel like Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie is a perfect example. First, Messiaen was influenced by birds and natural sounds (D&G - “Of course, as Messiaen says music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos is made of refrains; the question in music is that of a power of deterritorialization permeating nature, animals, the elements, and deserts as much as human beings.”), and it is a love song (two of the parts are called “chant d’amour”). But it isn’t a love song in a purely human sense - there is as much that is loving in the human way as there is in the animal way. It’s enormous length and repetitiveness calls to mind the whale songs in the documentary, and the use of the onde martenot, with its surreal oscillating electronic sound, is like the becoming-molecular of a particularly lilting bird song.

On all sides they are exposed: the seat across from them, facing directly at them, the...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:57:00 -0400

On all sides they are exposed: the seat across from them, facing directly at them, the seats behind, and the window, letting the whole world look in and down upon them. She’s sitting with her legs up, stretched out across the seat, with her son lying across her body. He’s no more than two years old. His eyes are shut, and his face is placid, pressed against his mother’s chest. As the bus rumbles and shakes over potholes, he softly bounces up and down. They share the fullness of their silent stillness.

Under the seat is a stroller, folded, and a backpack, full. A bottle, tethered with string to the stroller’s handle, also bounces along with the bus, rolls back and forth along the floor. The son lifts his head up, draws open his eyes, and with them meets his mother’s. He giggles. He says something to her, muffled by the noise of the bus, and she replies with an exaggerated expression, and he giggles more.

She’s wearing sturdily cut beige pants, a sweatshirt, and scuffed Skecher’s Shape-ups. They laugh and they play with each other, keeping their gaze close, never looking out at the world that is looking in on them. He closes his eyes again and burrows into her. She wraps her arms around him. She closes her eyes too. The bus rumbles, the driver announces the next stop. And again, they speak stillness to one another. Stillness: a loudness that silences noise, and then speaks over it softly.

(…

…)

"To be alive is to be a flow system"

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:34:00 -0500

I heard this story on NPR earlier today: http://media.wnyc.org/media/photologue/photos/EMBED_DesigninNature.png

I’m not entirely sure how this differs from fractals (I curse my lack science knowledge) but I like this idea because it shows how certain similar patters are recreated throughout the world, both in the “natural world” and the “human world,” but it also gives that pattern a vitalistic force. So it really erases the line between the natural and human worlds: it creates a spectrum instead on which there are simply more and less complex degrees of vitalistic pattern creation, flow, and that everything is constantly changing, being driven to change by this vitalistic pattern flow.

Patterns are something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Deleuze is all about flows and patterns. DeLanda takes that aspect of him even further. And in Zen and Taoism there are lots of references to flows and constant change. But I am very curious about applying these pattern ideas to literature. I feel like I am starting to turn back to literature a bit more after my philosophy (and to a certain degree, science) binge of the last year or so, I have enough concepts in my arsenal now that I feel I can safely return to literature and apply them with confidence.

I feel like these patterns will specifically be useful in understanding why certain characters run into certain problems, and how those problems are formed. To use constructal theory, what I’m interested in is how certain flows begin to coagulate, and how they can be either uncoagulated or further coagulated. I think this approach will be very useful both in analyzing literature and in my own writing.

I feel like this approach explains very well some of the issues I have with The Idiot. Dostoevsky’s attempt to create a “perfectly beautiful man” in Prince Myshkin fails, because there is no such thing as “perfection,” and any attempt to reach perfection will backfire and instead become both perfect and disastrous, because perfection in the individual comes at the price of disaster for all those around them. “Les extremes se touchent.” And though Myshkin certainly achieves a state of inner perfection, in reality it brings about a double death, a double coagulation of flows: it kills Myshkin as a character, because whatever life there was in him was destroyed by his “perfection.” If there is a moment at the end of the novel when Myshkin is most real, it is when he becomes an idiot again, and is brought back into the world of the living, the imperfect, the constantly changing and bifurcating. It also kills Nastasya Fillippovna because, in his perfection, Myshkin is powerless to stop Rogozhin from killing her, and powerless even to try to take revenge or justice. In his perfect impotence, perfect coagulation, all he can do is spend the night with Rogozhin in a kind of creepy complicity. All Myshkin is is a disembodied idea, the ultimate coagulation, because ideas are fixed, separated from the world of flows.

So if I can apply this to literature I’m reading, and use it to understand why and how certain characters work or don’t work, this will be very useful to me in terms of my own writing, because it will give me a method for creating more realistic characters with more interesting relationships and problems. I can also use it in my observational practices, watching people interact and seeing what sorts of patterns are created between them and how they flow, and use those interactions as templates. I feel like I already did that in the story I wrote a while ago “Holy Fools,” but not quite as intentionally. I feel like I will definitely carry these ideas on to grad school and focus on this kind of stuff. I’m finally focussing and distilling all my interests into something cohesive. I can’t wait to actually study this stuff for a living.

Photo

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 05:31:30 -0500

Becoming-cat

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 04:18:00 -0500

One of my favorite things about Deleuze is that his philosophy is so rich with potential for practice and experimentation. I am reading A Tbousand Plateaus right now, and I’m on the chapter Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible. Among other things, he talks about the relationships between humans and animals, and the nature of different interactions within those relationships. The emergent properties that are produced by those interactions are what Deleuze calls Becoming-Animal. So I’ve taken to practicing these concepts with my cat Herman, since he is the only animal available to me who is willing to engage in Deleuzian practice.

I think my own relationship with animals is already similar to that of Deleuze, so that has helped me a lot. Although I like animals, I didn’t always. I passively enjoyed animals outdoors, but I was not a fan of pets until about four years ago, when I was forced to live with a cat, and learned to love it. But since I never grew up with pets, and I always had a hard time “connecting” with animals, my relationship with pets is much more so on their terms than most pet-owner relationships. Or rather, it is equally on the pet’s terms and mine, and I don’t have an overly developed sense of sentimentality about the relationship. Nevertheless, this has not stopped me from forming very rewarding relationships with several cats.

Deleuze says about animals,

We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own pretty history, “my” cat, “my” dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal psychoanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them… And then there is the second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes; genus, classification, or State animals… Finally, there are more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale… Or once again, cannot any animal be treated in all three ways?

So in terms of my experimentation, Deleuze says two important things here. Pets are often treated like people, subjects, who have “selves” like our own and can interact with us in a contrived human way. But there is another side to animals (pets included), that is entirely “wild,” not in a dual sense of nature vs. humanity, but in the sense that any creature, animals and humans included, is differentiated from other creatures to certain degrees that they have mutually exclusive characteristics. So while we can look at cats as pets with cute little names who like to sit around with old ladies and have tea parties, we can also look at them as unique and different creatures with whom we can coexist and engage in Becomings, while not fundamentally altering our own characteristics in order to engage in those Becomings. “It is also possible for any animal to be treated in the mode of the pack or swarm… Even the cat.”

So how am I to engage with Herman in this way? He is a relatively solitary animal, and isn’t really into cuddling or sitting on my lap, and isn’t always playful. A lot of the time when you try to engage him he will bite you or attack you and run away. This limits what I can do to experiment with him, because engaging in any kind of forced activity would obscure part of his nature from me. The one consistent activity we both engage in is our ritual when I get home from work. Herman will usually come up to me, sniff at my hand, then rub his head against it to mark it with his pheromones, then go around the room and mark several other items that he usually marks: the side of the mirror, the bottom of the bookshelf, the legs of the table and chairs. He continues this loop several times, and each time he comes around I let him mark me and pet him. Through this process we each engage each other in a way that is both inherent to our nature, and a nod to the other’s nature: a cat normally marks its territory using the pheromone glands on its head, but it does not usually greet a human upon entering its (shared, again) territory, and include it in its territory. Likewise, a human normally greets people when it enters a home, but it does not mark those people as its territory or let itself be marked. “For I cannot become dog without the dog itself becoming something else.”

What takes place in our greeting ritual is something entirely new, a new form of greeting that is neither cat nor human, an “Unnatural participation.” In our ritual, “a fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible.” Clearly we can see the value of engaging animals this way, because in the case of the individualized pet, there is at best a false fiber stretched from human to human, and the relationship goes no deeper than that. There is nothing to be learned from it. But when the cat is treated as a cat, a “line of flight” is opened up that allows us to Become-imperceptible, to go all the way down and experience something inherent to us yet distinctly not human, not subjectified.

And I’ve been having a lot of success with these experiments. Not only have I been able to use it to “Become-imperceptible,” as part of a general process of trying to understand the nature of things, but my relationship with Herman has grown deeper on both sides. Now that I understand him better, I am better able to interact with him in ways that are conducive to equal pleasure, and he feels more comfortable with me and with letting me touch and pet him, etc.

For example, tonight we went through our usual routine when I come home. I was laying on the bed, and he jumped up next to me. He started purring, and I went to pet him. At first he moved his head back and away, so in order to acclimate him to me, I put out my hand for him to smell and mark, which he did. After this he allowed me to pet him softly, and I gauged where to pet and with how much force based on his reactions. When I stopped petting him he inched closer to me, putting his paws almost on my arm, then started to lick my hand, which is one of the few ways that cats show affection (aside from marking you, or prodding at you with its paws: the paws and the licking are both relics of kittenhood, which is the most social time in a cat’s life, aside from being owned as a pet). When he was done licking my hand he rolled over and pushed his head into my hand, as if to say, “okay, my turn now.” I pet him again, then he licked my hand, and this went on three or four times back and forth until I got up.

Deleuze says,

The questions is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’ nor the horse’s, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what way would that ameliorate Hans’ problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked?

Even though we weren’t doing the same thing to each other, we were engaging in acts of corresponding significance, in a ritual that was completely unique and not inherent to either of our respective species. This might sound like a silly endeavor, but the whole point of Deleuze’s philosophy seems to be that almost any endeavor can be serious as long as it is approached in the right manner, as long as you ask the right questions. You can be led to a becoming-imperceptible from any number of different lines of flight, escape routes. And you should try as many as possible, to see what there is lying beneath everyday interactions you take for granted

Red face bloated, scowl On the passenger seat: Oxygen tank, Parliament lights

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:12:59 -0500

Red face bloated, scowl
On the passenger seat:
Oxygen tank, Parliament lights

I just started reading History of Sexuality: Volume One by Michel Foucault. I’m very excited...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:05:00 -0500

I just started reading History of Sexuality: Volume One by Michel Foucault. I’m very excited about it; he talks about very different subjects from a lot of the philosophers I read, i.e. it’s much more focused on small scale things like people and institutions than cosmological ones, but I think there’s a thread running through it that connects it very well with Deleuze and the like. The pattern seems to be very Nietzschean, a pattern of ressentiment, where nothing can simply be gotten rid of or transcended, and efforts to do so will only make one increasingly frustrated because it doesn’t go away, it just takes new forms (i.e. sexuality takes the form of prohibitive discourse, but doesn’t “disappear.”)

It seems to me like this is a very immament pattern in line with the ones Deleuze talks about. I was reading Deleuze last night in between spurts of Foucault so I’m sure that biased my reading of Foucault somewhat, but at the same time I think Deleuze acts as a good complement to Foucault.

I read two essays by Deleuze about Henri Bergson. In them he emphasizes how in Bergson all dualities, however paradoxical it might seem, end up folding in on each other and finally on themselves. They are never absolutely dual. He gives the example of matter and duration. Duration creates difference, and acts on matter to make it different. But matter, at its core, is duration, because without duration there could be no matter, and furthermore, duration differs in itself in degrees; it is differentiation differentiating.

That’s a little confusing. I don’t know if I got it all right. But I think I’m on the right track. This seems totally applicable to Foucault’s ideas about sexuality though. We create false dualities regarding sexuality that eventually all just morph back into the same thing if you follow them back far enough, they never escape from anything.

And that seems to be the major pattern in Deleuze and Foucault. I feel like I have a very good understanding of it with Deleuze, because he addresses it cosmologically, and I’ve read a lot about that in Eastern philosophy, and more recently in DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. But I am less familiar with how these things work on smaller scales, on individual scales. I think it’s important to explore that more though, because if I want to use these immanent patterns in my fiction, I’ll have to understand them top to bottom. And Foucault seems to be laying out a very good framework for creating a more detailed fictional world that is driven by these immanent, Nietzschean patterns.

So I’ve recently discovered that the European Graduate School has a ton of videos of lectures...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:44:00 -0500

So I’ve recently discovered that the European Graduate School has a ton of videos of lectures online and I’ve been going on something of a watching spree, particularly of Manuel DeLanda’s lectures. They make his thinking a lot more clear, and he also explains a lot of Deleuzian stuff in a way that just makes it click.

I watched a talk last night by DeLanda called Materialism, Experience and Philosophy. In it he outlines a very radical materialist philosophy that moves beyond what he sees as the exhausted linguistic paradigm of postmodernism. He essentially positions language as a mechanism useful for memory, but not in itself capable of creating the world around us, which is entirely material. One of the better examples he used was Eskimos having forty or however many words for snow. It’s not that the Eskimo sees thirty nine more kinds of snow that we, who have only one word for it do, but that they have a material relationship with snow that requires that they be able to talk more specifically about different kinds of snow: snow that is good for building with, snow that you would sink into if you walked on it, dense snow, etc. You or I would still see all those kinds of snow, but we wouldn’t need specific words for them. Similarly processes that until very recently we were unable to see physically play out because they were either too fast or too slow are now able to be seen in the entirety. Here DeLanda uses the example of watching a bullet hit someone in slow motion, so that what before seemed like an instantaneous event can be seen as something subject to the same processes as anything else, or the blooming of a flower, which can be seen in a matter of minutes thanks to stop motion photography. All of a sudden these “mysterious” processes become very ordinary and material.

This is a very exciting idea and it’s pretty much been occupying my brain non stop since last night. I think it is especially interesting for Zen and Taoism (hereon referred to as “ZT”) because it is capable of ridding them of metaphysics without compromising them. ZT are, at their core, philosophies that go completely beyond language. In the descriptions of this realm beyond language, ZT often end up sounding very metaphysical, like when talking about Buddha-nature, or the dynamic void, or emptiness. These concepts are very ideal, and it’s always been hard for me to accept because I see ZT as being so different from other religions in the sense that they are otherwise not very metaphysical.

But it makes sense that ZT practitioners would have to resort to metaphysical language - they didn’t have stop motion, but they intuited that there was a physical process behind the change and fluidity of the world that is fundamentally no different than change and fluidity that we can see with the naked eye. Of course the sad thing is that now that these metaphysical ideas are so entrenched in ZT practice, I don’t think many people would really be interested in making the comparison. It takes a lot of the mystery out of it, it takes out what makes ZT religious and turns it into a kind of practical science.

DeLanda’s ideas about language also play an important part in shattering the metaphysics of ZT. I’ve always been curious about stories in Zen that describe the moment of enlightenment, which is often triggered by something like a movement or a sound of something in nature. The way these stories are written makes it almost sound like that experience of enlightenment is delivered by an unseen hand, an act of God, an inexplicable experience that couldn’t be foreseen, nor could it have been done purposefully and exactly. But I think what is really going on here is a simultaneous experience and realization of a physical process experienced outside of language, which gives the enlightened person a moment of unmitigated experience of material process with nothing separating that experience from the material processes of the world outside our bodies. This especially makes sense in the cases of people who had long been practitioners of Zen or understood Zen very well intellectually but had given up on becoming enlightened. DeLanda’s materialism takes all the metaphysics out of enlightenment, and also gives us a non-religious account of that experience which validates it for the modern day. In my mind this completely divorces ZT from other religions which rely on a faith that can’t be validated materially - the closest Christianity gets, for example, is the “God of the gaps,” i.e. claiming that chaos theory implies the hand of God at work. But even those ideas are on the edge of modern Christian thought.

This also has implications for how one should practice ZT. The point of communal ZT practice, as is argued by most practitioners, is to be around other people who are working toward the same goal, and to be instructed by someone who is knowledgeable about it so that they can lead you to it. But all of those things only seem to make sense if ZT are given a metaphysical and linguistic meaning - the idea that there is “an enlightenment” that someone has experienced and can guide you too, and that other people can work toward together. But if you do away with language and see enlightenment as the realization of an inescapable and all-encompassing physical process, there is no need for experts or fellow practitioners - if anything, those would hamper your quest because you would be liable to become caught up in other people’s attempts to try to synthesize their ultra-linguistic experiences, and you would lose sight of your own. Now, this isn’t to say that ZT practice should be entirely personal, that would be just as much of an error because it is necessarily something that involves being engaged in the world. But the difference is now that everyone around you is a fellow practitioner, and everyone around you is a teacher - you are always engaged in the practice of ZT, it is simply a matter of realizing that for yourself, because those processes effect all people, and if you simply look at how people behave, how they act, how they are, you will become enlightened. I think this is what is meant when Zen masters say “when you become enlightened, everything/everyone becomes enlightened.” When you yourself are enlightened, you will see that everyone is enlightened and always has been. That saying has never made sense to me until now. Again, I think that shows that there is no need to find a Zen master, because everyone and everything is also a Zen master. The only Zen master you need to find is yourself.

One of the upsides of ZT’s metaphysical language is that it really forces you to engage and practice in order to become enlightened. It might seem easy with these material explanations of ZT to say that you don’t need to practice because you can just explain these things through philosophy. But that would be a mistake, because the you would fall into the trap of language, which is what you have to use to describe material processes. So things like meditation are still key in order to go beyond language. But I think that understanding dynamic material processes gives us a way to modernize ZT, and be able to practice it in a way that is wholly congruent with our situation in history, and I think it’s something that ancient ZT masters would embrace if they were around today.

“Hey, sittin’ next to me. Yeah I see you. What’s that you know I got no time in line for this. You...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:58:00 -0500

“Hey, sittin’ next to me. Yeah I see you. What’s that you know I got no time in line for this. You know that?”

Alexandra set down the paper she was reading and smiled and nodded at the man, who kept staring at her with the same thousand-yard stare he had on his face since he sat down. She didn’t quite know what to say to him; she didn’t really even know what the man had just said to her. But she felt the need to be open, to be receptive to this poor man who so many others would brush aside without a second thought. The man turned toward the seat in front of him and yelled at the man sitting there, who was wearing headphones and ignored him.

“Hey, hermano! Hermano! Hey!”

He continued staring at the man in front of him and mumbling incoherently under his breath.

Everyone else on the bus was quiet, keeping occupied and ignoring him. A few people glanced back at the man, but not so long that their stares would pop their bubbles of insularity. A tall, broad-chested man wearing an oversized sweatshirt, baggy jeans and sunglasses got up and walked determinedly toward the man in the back. He pulled out his wallet and let it drop to expose a police badge.

“I don’t wanna hear any more out of you, alright? People don’t want to be disturbed on their bus ride and I’m not coming back here again, ok?”

“Oh yeah yeah, definitely, no problem man. Lemme touch it, gimme some skin.”

The undercover cop leaned in and held out his palm. The other man pushed aside the crutch resting in the crook of his armpit and slapped the cop’s hand.

“We cool then?”

“Yeah, we cool, we cool.”

The cop gave Alexandra a look as if to ask, “are you ok?” She nodded, trying to look confident.

Alexandra felt safer now knowing the undercover cop was on the bus; it was an assuring sign. She had felt as if everywhere she went God was watching and protecting her. Her personal bubble wasn’t defensive, but offensive: it was a shield of righteousness. The man with the crutch turned to Alexandra again.

“Hey gimme that paper a minute. I need this cover here now.”

Alexandra handed him the paper. The man with the crutch whipped it open and stared at it as the pages started to slip and fall out of place. He glanced up from above it and looked toward the front of the bus, then down and up again with manic hyper vigilance. The bus stopped and the undercover cop stood up. He looked back at the man with the crutch and shot him a look of warning, then got off. The man with the crutch followed him with his gaze as he walked on the sidewalk along the bus, and then turned back to Alexandra. He tore out a page from the paper and handed it back to her.

“I need this, ok. This page is mine and I got to have it. I’m gonna need this.”

He hunched forward with his head dropped low and stared blankly at Alexandra with spoiled milk white dead eyes. Alexandra took the paper back and set it down on the seat beside her.

“Now, since you did that for me, that’s somethin’ for me, I owe you in return, you ask me any ten questions you want. Go.”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

Alexandra thought for a minute but wasn’t sure what to say. She asked the first thing that popped into her head.

“Where are you going today?”

The man with the crutches stared at her still, his expression grave, distant and motionless.

“I am going with the Lord.”

He paused for a moment and stared at Alexandra, who was happy to hear him say this. She felt as if she was now on surer footing, and the two would be able to connect on the same level.

“I am in the house of the Lord,” continued the man with the crutch. “ I have been anointed by his oil and he is the way that I am on. That is where I am going. Next.”

“That’s a great place to be going. The Lord does care for us, and if you follow his path no evil can stop you.”

The man didn’t react to what Alexandra said; he just kept staring at her with the same blank look.

“Next question. Go.”

Alexandra was a little taken aback by the man’s brusqueness. Maybe the conversational approach wasn’t the right way to connect with him, she thought, but she was determined to make a connection with him through God.

“How did you get on that path?”

“I went to church when I was young my mother take us to church and I was baptized in the name of the Lord and with his holy anointment and they showed us the scriptures I read it and then now I have come to realize it and God brought me here now I have seen His path. Next question.”

“Why is it that now you have realized it but you didn’t when you were younger?”

The man stared at Alexandra for a moment before he answered.

“Now you goin’ in loops. Now you goin in loops try to loop that question back motherfucker. Uh-uh. Cause when the day of judgment I’m on the team and you gonna need me. Don’t fuck with me on my side cause when the apocalypse is near, it’s near and my team on your ass motherfucker. Okay. Uh huh. Motherfucker. You listenin’? You even listen to it?”

Alexandra was startled by the man’s sudden outburst. She had felt such a connection with him only a moment before. She looked at the man, trying to convey her hopeful desperation through her eyes, but he just stared back at her with the same blank eyes he had had the whole time. Satan is looking out at me through those eyes, she thought. How else could someone be so affectless, how else could someone be so resistant to the word of God? Some of Alexandra’s fellow seminarians had been talking about a book written by a pastor that claimed there was no Hell. How could anyone speculate, she thought, when I can see the Devil’s eyes right in front of me?

“Do you want to pray?”

The man, completely oblivious of Alexandra’s question, got up and started yanking at the cord for the bus to stop. Alexandra got up as if to move toward him but couldn’t. Instead she stood in the back of the bus, gripping the bar above her, and prayed.

Lord, please be with this man tonight. He is so close to you, yet he struggles to understand you. Please give him the insight he needs to come closer to you, and understand the glory of your creation.

He walked down the aisle and started shouting at all the people on the bus, leaning in and staring at them with the same dead eyes.

“You are all under the command of the Lord command of Satan and His day is coming. Motherfucker. Do you think when you see this is real? TELL ME. His word is the Word of the Al-migh-TY! TELL ME. TELL ME!. TELL ME!!”

I know that Satan’s hold is strong, but even though he may be blinded by evil, your power is infinitely stronger, and I trust in you to break Satan’s grip on this man and bring him back to you.

The man walked slowly to the front of the bus, staring the bus driver in the eyes as he walked off, like an animal trying to provoke an enemy.

I know that this man can find you and dwell in your joy because I have done it, and I know that your kingdom can reach down to the deepest depths of despair, even where that man is now. Please bring him the peace that I have, because he is your child as I am, and he deserves it as much as I do.

Alexandra watched him as he got off the bus and walked down the street still yelling, and smacking the side of the bus. He was staring into the bus but his eyes didn’t connect with her or anything else. The bus pulled away, and he faded off into the distance. All the other passengers, who had been trying to watch what was transpiring out of the corner of their eyes, turned their attention back to whatever they had been doing before as the bus sputtered and started off again. Alexandra sat back down and bowed her head.

I don’t understand why you brought him to me, Lord, but I know my presence was not in vain. I know that you were there behind me and I trust that I was doing your work. I don’t always understand why you present me with the challenges you do, but I thank you, Lord, because I too was given a chance to grow in my relationship with you through meeting that man, and I am ever more dedicated and sure of my mission now. I know that this is my calling, and I ask for your strength and guidance as I continue my journey. And I ask tonight that you be not only with that man, but with all people who are struggling in their journey in the world, and their journey toward you. In Jesus’ name, amen.

***

“Before we start getting set up, I’d like to read a passage from Psalms, and allow a few moments for silent prayer. I hope that after tonight, as you go out into the world and your daily routine this week, you keep in mind your service tonight and the people you served, and know that God is watching over us and cares about every one of us. “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken. Evil shall slay the wicked and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.”

The people sitting in the circle of plastic chairs bowed their heads at the end of the pastor’s words and prayed. The air wafting in from the church’s kitchen smelled like tomato and garlic and industrial cleaners mixed with that indefinable musty smell that is pervasive in all old churches. After a moment the pastor lifted his head, and said, “in God’s name, amen. Alright people, we’ve got about twenty minutes to get set up so let’s get moving!”

In the kitchen enormous pots of stew were bubbling and trays of garlic bread were toasting in the oven. Some of the volunteers were unfolding tables and setting them up in a line outside the doors of the kitchen. They put out stacks of hundreds of paper plates and boxes of plastic silverware and napkins. Alexandra helped the pastor bring out the salad from the refrigerator, which was in giant glass bowls etched with floral designs.

“Alright Alexandra, since you’re already here why don’t you do the salad. Just do about half a cup per person and make sure everyone gets some before anyone gets seconds. Latex gloves are over on the shelf there and I’ll grab you some tongs.”

The pastor walked back into the kitchen and Alexandra put on a pair of gloves and situated herself behind a giant bowl of salad. The pastor came back out a moment later with large metal tongs.

“There you go.” He nodded toward the man standing next to Alexandra, who was in charge of doling out garlic bread slices. “If you have any questions just ask James, he’s a pro at this. And thanks again for coming tonight, we can always use more cooks in the kitchen.”

“No problem,” said Alexandra.

“I’ve got to get back into the kitchen, but I hope you’ll stick around for the prayer group afterward – it’ll only be about half an hour and it’s nice to have that time to relax and reflect after.”

The pastor disappeared back into the kitchen. Alexandra stood silently at her station and arranged all of her utensils and got everything ready. She looked around at all the other volunteers, then at the door to the cafeteria. She could see a line of men going out into the hallway outside. After a moment James broke the awkward silence.

“So, salad duty, eh? Not bad if you don’t mind smelling like Italian dressing for a day or two. Heh heh heh.”

“Fine by me,” Alexandra said. “It’s my favorite kind. At least it’s not blue cheese.”

“Ha ha, sure. Now you just started seminary, right?”

“Yeah, I just started a coule weeks ago. It’s great so far. I have to do this as the outreach part of my program – well, I mean, I don’t have to do this, I would do it anyway - and this church is the first one I’ve visited that I really felt comfortable in. I’m excited, we don’t get many chances to do stuff like this in the town I’m from. It’s too small to even have bums – er, homeless people.”

“And where’s home?”

“Ohio. It’s a really small town, I’m sure you’ve never heard of it - Ansonia.”

“Ah, wonderful. I have some relatives who live out there, in Ashtabula. We usually try to get out there about once a year.”

“Oh yeah, I know Ashtabula. That’s over on the other side of the state from me but I’ve been through there a few times.”

They stood there again silently for a moment.

“So how do you like the city?”

“Oh it’s great. I mean we would go to Cleveland sometimes back home but it’s nothing like this, being here and living it all the time. And I really feel like this is what God was calling me to do. I just felt like I needed to take His word and spread it as far as I could.”

“That’s what we’re here to do.”

“Yeah. And my time here is gonna give me so much take back to my own community too.”

“Well, we’re glad to have you here. And I think you could probably learn a thing or two from the pastor.” James nodded his head and pressed his lips together. “He’s a very wise man.”

“He seems like it.”

The doors to the cafeteria opened and the men started shuffling in single file. Alexandra picked up her tongs.

“Alright, here we go,” said James.

The men started working their way down the line. “Good evening, how are you?” she said, as she scooped up a spoonful of salad and deposited it on a man’s plate next to some potatoes and stew.

“Good evening, how are you? Hi, how are you this evening? God bless you too. How are you this evening? Hi, how are you this evening? Good evening, how are you? How are you doing this evening?”

The line moved along at a steady pace under portraits of a gloriously impoverished Jesus and his disciples, which lined the wall. The people there to eat, mostly men, all had worn and tired faces; some were dressed in next to rags with scraggly, grease-burdened hair and frazzled beards. The volunteers patiently doled out meals with warmth, trying not only to feed their stomachs but their souls also.

Halfway down the line Alexandra spotted the man from the bus. She looked intently at him, smiling, trying to catch his eye. He was talking to the man in front of him in line and didn’t see her, and she refocused her attention on serving the salad. But every few seconds she involuntarily looked back at him to see if he recognized her.

The man from the bus had no idea that Alexandra was volunteering there, and wouldn’t have recognized her anyway.

“I told you I got no cigarette,” said the man in front of him in line.

“Alright alright. Alright. But this is the house of the Lord. The house of wealth. The house of partaking of the fruits.”

“Amen brother. The Lord is good and I thank him every day for what I do have.”

“But you know Satan bounds. He abounds and he bounds on this earth.”

“Sure he does. And I seen him tempt and drag people through the mud with his vices. But I’m reckoned with my God.”

All of a sudden the man from the bus took down one of the paintings of Jesus from the wall. He turned it around and pushed it in the face of the man in front of him, holding his arms out straight in front of him.

“This is your God? This is your disciple? I am this disciple. I am this God.”

He raised his voice as he said this and Alexandra looked back, hearing him from across the room. She wanted to go over to him but the line kept moving in front of her and she kept giving out salad. She saw the pastor go from the front of the line over to him, and felt reassured.

“What’s going on here guys. Is everything okay?”

“Okay… okay… hee hee hee.”

He was still holding the picture but now had turned his gaze toward the ground, where he was staring fixedly at something. A goofy, sick smile spread across his face and he giggled unnervingly.

“Hee hee hee. Who are we, who are we now? Hee hee hee,” he said, the tenor in his voice oscillating at each syllable. “Hee hee hee! Who… who…”

He looked back up at the pastor and the pastor saw in his eyes the same dead expression, the same look of something long dead that Alexandra had seen on the bus. He stared at the pastor without saying anything, only giggling. Without moving his gaze or expression, he dropped the picture. It crashed against the ground and in an explosion sent a thousand shards of glass in every direction.

One of my biggest problems with philosophy is that it is not practicable enough. Or...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:35:00 -0500

One of my biggest problems with philosophy is that it is not practicable enough. Or rather, when philosophy becomes practicacable, it turns into religious practice. But it’s very hard to have a synthesis of abstract beliefs and concrete practices outside of an organized religious framework.

It seems like there have been certain times in history when this was possible, although even then not in any kind of full blown and widely practiced sense. With Zen and Taoism in their earliest forms, especially for Zen in the time immediately after it had emerged as the product of Taoism and Buddhism, and before it spent too long in Japan and became too formalized. In writers like Dogen you can see a very complex philosophical system that is held in tension with a very simplistic practice to form the unity of Zen. But where are Zen and Taoism now? They are so mired in accumulations of formality and cultural crust that they’ve lost the edge of their philosophical past. They’re stunted and focused on things like rules of practice, spaces of practice, that should be stepping stones to a deeper philosophy. They don’t see structure as something that, while necessary to any system, is in reality arbitrary in its specific form, a means to creating a framework for and understanding an abstract philosophy. They try to make a philosophy out of their arbitrary structures.

On the other hand in the West we have a philosophical tradition that is I think weary of being too practicable because so much of philosophy, especially today, is a reaction against Abrahamic religion, which is what happened in the West when we fell too deep into the practice of philosophy. Something like political or artistic practice of philosophy is okay because those realms are fairly easy to keep away from religion. But if you really integrate a philosophy into every action, not just words written and read, it does seem spiritual or new agey.

But I’ve really been trying to integrate my philosophical beliefs into my everyday life. And I think there are some philosophers out there who have opened up a path for this. I’m reading a book now by Manuel DeLanda called A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. In it he describes nonlinear abstract processes that shape the flow of matter-energy, as he puts it, into the forms that we see around us. It is unique in that it is entirely material, and based in science, but at the same time it is philosophy. And it doesn’t’ try to reduce one to the other, but sees the two as on a continuum. He compares the formation of rocks to the formation of social strata and so on. But implicit in that is the idea that if you can understand these abstract processes, you can both see them acting in the world, in everything around us, and also implement them and use them on the world in creative ways.

Obviously we are all using these abstract processes (engineering diagrams, as DeLanda puts it, or abstract machines, as Deleuze and Guattari say) all the time, because these processes are inescapable, but by pointing them out and becoming conscious of them, we can hijack them in a sense and use them to be unique and creative. We can send situations off in all sorts of different directions by harnessing dynamic processes. And I think that is the key to moving toward a philosophy that is at the same time abstract and practicable, that needs to be both in order to work fully.

Once you start practicing this philosophy, there are never really any answers that come out of it, but there is the ability to be truly creative. And not just in an artistic sense, although that is definitely part of it. Artistic creativity is only one side of the geodesic dome that is creativity. But it can be applied in any number of ways. For example today when I was at work the parking lot was full all day, incredibly busy, people coming in and out nonstop. At first I was just letting people in as they came and everyone was circling around and getting jammed up because there were no spaces. I wasn’t really trying to do anything but just letting it go because I felt crushed by the overwhelming force of all these cars and people around me, and the relative puniness of myself trying to direct them. But that feeling of puniness was as much an act of creativity in that situation as what I did next, which was to try implementing different forms on the movement of the cars, until I figured out a system that worked best for keeping people happy and keeping cars moving in and out as fast as possible. My first approach was the one of least resistance, so it seemed very uncreative and also very necessary because I didn’t think it through. I just let it happen. But just letting something happen can be a form of creativity. In some cases I think that is a good approach. In this case it wasn’t, but changing my view on the situation showed me how important being actively creative in that situation was.

I’ve taken the same approach to creativity in interpersonal relationships too. There are so many things that, like simply letting the cars into the lot, are easy to do and become so routine that we don’t think of them as situations where creativity is applicable. Interpersonal relationships are often like this. We have certain ways that we think people are, and we have certain ways that we think we react to people, and we continue those patterns without thinking. There is still creativity in there, but it is only creativity within a certain limiting framework. If you are unhappy with someone you can be unhappy with them in any number of ways, but it is still unhappiness. But if you decide instead, I am going to be ambivalent, I am going to be happy, I am going to be resolute – you can create new frameworks, and then open up an infinity of creative possibilities within those frameworks. And in interpersonal relationships if one side of the relationship chooses to act creatively, it forces the other side into that creativity because they have to act within the new framework imposed on them, and they feed their own creativity into that framework. That dynamic process opens up all sorts of possibilities for what that relationship could become.

So to bring this back to philosophy, because the things I have just been talking about are more on the practice side, that kind of creativity is manifested in combining disciplines and types of thought to create new possibilities, such as the combination of science and philosophy. There is obviously lots of that already, in terms of combining philosophies with philosophies (and here mainly I mean Western philosophy), but it’s like in the case of interpersonal relationships wherein you can be in an unhappy relationship and only be creative within that one framework. I think Camus got stuck in that kind of situation in The Myth of Sisyphus, and that’s why at the end he says that even though there is no reason to go on living, we have to just go on anyway in the face of nihilism, with relatively little creativity. He says that whether the universe has ten or eight dimensions is pointless if we don’t know whether or not we should kill ourselves. But the real question is, what does the number of dimensions of the universe mean for ontology? And what does that mean about suicide? Combining Eastern and Western philosophy, philosophy and science, politics and science and art, etc – that is truly creative. Obviously with the focus on interdisciplinarity in critical theory this is something that’s been going on for a while. But people like DeLanda who really take that to the extreme, and push the limits of that kind of creativity are the kind of philosophers who are going to be able to be integrated into a much more practicable kind of philosophy.

I’ve recently become enamored of Gilles Deleuze. As you may remember, just several posts ago, I...

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:48:00 -0400

I’ve recently become enamored of Gilles Deleuze. As you may remember, just several posts ago, I wrote about an article comparing Deleuze (and Guattari) to Chuang Tzu, and I was frustrated by what seemed like a lack of respect on D&G’s part for the simplicity and emphasis on experience of Chuang Tzu. Basically, it postmodernized Chuang Tzu.

Now that I’ve been reading Deleuze for the last week or two somewhat obsessively, I realize that I need to invert my original assessment. It is Chuang Tzu whose philosophy is impractical (for people today, it was perfectly legitimate in his time) because we live in a postmodern age. This goes back to some of the stuff I was talking about in my Jens Peter Jacobsen post, that I am slowly working my way up toward modernity, and shedding the impractical comfort of older philosophies. The more Deleuze I read, the less I my argument for Chuang Tzu can hold up.

The thing I like about Deleuze is that his philosophy is really not so far from Taoism, or Zen (his book Logic and Sense is, in his words, “one third Zen”). But it is written by and for someone in the 20^th century, and if anything, this makes it much easier to practice. This didn’t make a lot of sense at first, because he doesn’t emphasize going out and practicing his ideas, but in the process of reading him, I am able to implement and test out his ideas much more easily, because they relate to things that surround and effect me constantly. With Chuang Tzu, I can practice it when I am in nature, or away from civilization, but it is harder to do at work, or on the bus. And it’s not only physical; in order to practice Asian philosophies, I have to force my mindset to be away from modern civilization. I have to recreate the mindset of someone a thousand years ago in order to see through their eyes. But what is the point of that? I end up a pair of glasses whose lens only covers a sliver of a bottom corner, and I’m left blind everywhere else.

The main problem, I think, is that Zen and Taoism never went beyond religion, therefore they can’t escape the dogmatism that traps them in history. The tradition is so important to the ideas that it bogs them down. Furthermore, the tradition and the history allow for escapism which then makes the ideas more palatable; you’re not faced with the ideas on your own terms, but on someone else’s terms where the grass is greener. We are lucky to have a split between religion and philosophy in the West; even though we are stuck with a kind of religious fundamentalism and idiocy not native to the East, we also have a system for philosophy that isn’t necessarily bound by tradition, and that, through thinkers such as Nietszche, Deleuze, etc can, and must destroy the comforts of tradition and history.

Now this isn’t to say I’m going all 180 on Taoism and Zen. If anything, Deleuze can help to better understand those philosophies, because it gives me a modern framework to try them out on that is pretty similar. And likewise, I don’t think I would understand Deleuze as much as I do had I not spent the last year or so reading Eastern philosophy. His way of writing is very paradoxical and hard to make sense of if understood too literally, but it is compelling enough that it sticks in your head, and works its way into your thoughts slowly after you’ve finished reading, and eventually it does make sense.

I need to read more Deleuze, and I need to find out more philosophers who Deleuze influenced. I need more connections with the modern era. I’ve built up an impressive arsenal of old, and I’m realize reading Deleuze that that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it has helped to understand his ideas. But I need more balance in order to make my philosophical practice more practical.

I’ve been plagued lately by a philosophical dilemma. It is a crossroads at which I am stuck. Should...

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 03:51:43 -0400

I’ve been plagued lately by a philosophical dilemma. It is a crossroads at which I am stuck. Should I have hope, or should I give up hope as futile? Should I be happy or unhappy? Or rather, can I be happy without feeling guilty about it, like I am denying something in order to be happy? Or can I find a balance between the two? Is a synthesis possible? I am at the junction of all these questions, but I am afraid to move one way or another because they are all pulling at me with equal strength. So I am stuck, suspended in the middle.

This issue seems to be popping up in everything I read lately. Or it’s just so central to my thought that I see it everywhere. On the one hand is unhappiness and resignation. I recently read Violence, by Slavoj Zizek; the message of the book is that everything, at one level or another, is fueled by violence, whether it is immediate and perceptible violence, or more hidden and insidious violence. It is a disturbing thesis, but I found it hard to argue with him, at least on a lot of key points. There is a destructive force all around us, and although we might be able to see out of it into possibilities of non-violence, they are mirages, because to get across the bridge to that non-violent picture requires violence, and then what we thought was good has secretly turned into something not so good. Even where we can point to periods of happiness or tranquility, they are cordoned off by history (and undoubtedly tainted by nostalgia). They are simply no longer available in our present day, when we are faced with political, environmental, and social situations that have grown far beyond our control. The world is a monster, irrevocably unleashed. And any illusions of progress toward something better are set back by the driving force of a growing world population that builds the momentum of the problems we currently have.

I’ve been reading a lot more modern philosophy and theory in addition to Zizek, and this seems to be a common theme. At first I was very dismissive of a lot of it because I thought, “this isn’t the world I live in, this isn’t the way things have to be, why would anyone write so dedicatedly about such incredible futility?” But the more I think and read the more I realize it is simply that these thinkers are looking at the present and the future, and not (as much) at the past. And I was stuck in the past, trying to make it work with the present and future. The postmodern condition is repulsive, but it seems irresponsible to turn a blind eye toward it. And I am faced with these things not just in my personal life, but also in the future of my education, and my life aspirations. These are the things that I will have to be engaged with when I go back to school, these are the ideas I will have to deal with on a constant basis.

And maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion a bit. These are just assumptions after all; I’m not in school yet, I don’t really know what graduate studies in literature are like from experience. But I know the material these people are reading, and I’ve read articles in literature journals, and I don’t see how it could be any other way. How do these people deal with it? Do they find some kind of perverse pleasure in writing about humanity’s current dismal state? Do they think that somehow bringing these things to the surface will improve them? Maybe other people simply find these things easier to accept somehow. I can accept these ideas, but it is so difficult. I agree with them, yet I find being in the absence of any kind of absolute truth, and being permanently beyond the grasp of a utopia maddening.

Of course, these issues are all on a fairly large scale. Even in the absence of absolute truth, there is still personal truth. But I get this feeling that my personal existence and universal existence are too intertwined to let them go divergent ways. I feel like I would have to ignore despair and fracture on a large scale in order to find peace and unity on a personal level. I recently ran into a friend who is moving to France to become a Buddhist monk. We talked for a long time, and he told me about the journey that led him to becoming a monk. He was doing aid work in Africa but it didn’t quite suit him, yet he still felt he needed to do something to help the world. He discovered a Buddhist community in France led by Thich Nhat Hanh, and in his message of engaged Buddhism, and the community there, found a synthesis of personal and communal happiness combined with a strong emphasis on being engaged in the world and trying to make it a better place. But as he told me all this, I thought it seemed more like a crutch that would make it easier to face the world’s problems. Why was it so hard to simply do aid work in Africa, why the necessity to become a monk and be part of an insularly warm community in order to do those things? Yet I know why, because here I am, wanting to find hope yet seeing that on my own, tossed violently by the sea of all that there is in the world, it does seem impossible.

But at the same time, it seems equally irresponsible to give up the idea of doing anything good in the world just because violence and destruction weigh so heavily on me. I have accepted the bad, the unhappiness, but I will never get anything accomplished unless I can also accept at least some kind of hope, some kind of happiness. But that is much harder to find. It’s like the line from “A Felicidade,” – “Tristesa nao tem fim, felicidade sim” (sadness is endless, happiness finite). Those moments of happiness are so much harder to find, and in the absence of absolute happiness, they are constantly disappearing wisps.

And yet there are people in the world who are happy. And not just people who live in an ignorant bliss, but people like myself who are engaged intellectually, leave no stone unturned, but somehow they are happy. I just finished reading Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, a book that is all about characters not unlike myself, alone in the world and desperate to find some peace in it somewhere. Reading it on the heels of Violence I came into it feeling very dismissive about what seemed like a kind of naïve happiness. The novel is written in a very light tone, is smart without being too complicated, and is easy to read. It was enjoyable in a very different way from Zizek, although I enjoyed reading both books. With Zizek I enjoyed it because it made me feel engaged, like I was uncovering major and important ideas – however hard they were to swallow. With Hedgehog on the other hand, I enjoyed it because I didn’t feel any discomfort reading it, it didn’t make my brain feel like rocks grinding together in a trash compactor. Barbery said that her inspiration for writing the novel was to show how philosophy could look applied to everyday life, lived out in literature, as opposed to the much more abstract world of theorists such as Zizek. While Zizek writes about things that can be seen from a certain vantage point, it is much harder to live the way he writes (if you watch videos of him you can see how absurd it is, because he really does live the way he writes, for example, watering flowers while lamenting how vile and awful they are).

The happiness that Hedgehog is all about is one that is in the moment, “the ‘always’ in the ‘never.’” It is small everyday things, like the fleeting movement of a falling rosebud – things which seem absurd under the scrutiny of most philosophy. It doesn’t try to make a happiness out of anything larger. And I think this is key. It is the same thing that is emphasized in Zen mindfulness; living inside the moment so that it transcends large scale conceptions of time, and finding an absolute in the particular. When I finished Hedgehog, I felt so good, in a way that most of the things I’ve read recently haven’t been able to make me feel. I finished it in the Japanese garden, and afterward walked around feeling that momentary calm, dissolving into each instant as it passed.

I read a short story tonight by Jens Peter Jacobsen, Mogens, which had a similar message, and a character I found myself relating to quite a bit. He falls in love, then his fiancée dies, and he falls into deep despair. “All of life was so sad; empty behind, dark up ahead. But that’s the way life was. Those who went around happy were also blind… Why did he have to know about this? Why hadn’t he been allowed to keep his faith in all those flame-gilded lies? Why did he have to see while the others were blind?” I read that feeling as if I could have written it myself. That feeling of everything good being tainted by knowledge of unhappiness that has irreversibly entered my consciousness. I can’t simply become blind again, and the task of trying to make a new hope of my current unhappiness seems impossible. Even when Mogens sees beauty, sees it deeply, in a way I’ve seen it too, it is still under the shadow of his condition.

“I can’t explain it, but it’s something in the color, in the movement and in the form a thing has, and in the life within it, the juices that rise up in the trees and flowers, the sun and the rain that make them grow, and the sand that drifts together into hills, and the rain showers that furrow and cleave the slopes. Oh it doesn’t make any sense at all when I try to explain it.”

“And is that enough for you?”

“Oh, sometimes it’s too much! Far too much! Since there are shapes and colors and movements so delicate and lovely, and beyond all this there’s also a mysterious world that lives and rejoices and sighs and yearns, and which can speak and sing about all of it, then you feel so forsaken when you can’t get any closer to that world, and life becomes so dull and so oppressive.”

The impossibility of beauty makes it so hard to bear. And yet by the end of the story, Mogens comes around and finds peace in that beauty.

Mogens stood there for a long time gazing at her, happy and calm; the last of the shadows from his past had vanished…. They went outside together, in the fresh morning. The sunshine rejoiced across the earth, the dew glittered, early awakened flowers were radiant, the lark sang high up in the sky, the swallows swooped through the air. He and she walked across the green field toward the embankment with the yellowing rye, following the path running through it; she led the way, quite slowly, looking over her shoulder at him, and they talked and laughed. The farther they went own the embankment, the more the train hid them from view; soon they could no longer be seen.

They disappear into the moment, away from the past and future that closed in on either side of Mogens in his previous experiences of nature and love. But is that possible? The story was written such a long time ago, even if it were possible those kinds of circumstances would be very hard to come by now. But even so, the emotion and feeling of it are so fresh, they resonate with me in such a deep way that it is as if those parts of the story transcend time. Yet I know that it’s not all made up or impossible. I’ve had glimpses of those feelings through meditation and mindfulness, focusing on my present surroundings in time and space. So there is hope there.

Even so, I still feel distraught because I don’t know what that feeling has to offer intellectually, and in turn I don’t know if I can have that when I go back to school. Will I still be forced to step back outside of the moment in school? Maybe if I can muster enough of that security in the moment in my personal life it will make the rest of it more palatable. Maybe that’s how everyone else can stand it. Because I think a lot of this also stems from my anxiety. There’s a certain amount of anxiety inherent in any modern philosophy – we are, after all, in the “Age of Anxiety.” But my own anxiety is acutely worse than the background anxiety that is inescapable, and this magnifies any other anxiety that I come across. In a way this is a good thing though. Because my anxiety is so bad, it brings all anxiety in the world to the surface inside me in a way that I think most people are never forced to confront it, and so they go about being marginally unhappy but able to accept it. Now the task of conquering my personal anxiety and the task of conquering the anxiety inherent to existence have become one, and I won’t stop until I do away with it all. I don’t think I can go on feeling like this forever. Eventually I will move on from this crossroads. And books like Mogens and Elelgance of the Hedgehog, and things like Zen practice are good examples of how it can be done.

The Madness

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:22:00 -0400

I keep encountering more and more strange people in the parking lot. That’s the great thing about working within wandering distance of the sidewalk – you get to see one of the most diverse groups of people in any given part of the University District. It’s a sociologist people watcher’s dream. The latest, and most prominent, is a man named Frank. I can’t actually remember the first day Frank parked in the lot. He’s become such a mythical creature that his origins are shrouded by the fog of time. But I remember being very curious about him from the beginning.

At first he came in a big truck with another guy from a company called I Haul Your Crap or something like that – I can’t remember the name. But I know that the place is based out of a house over on Roosevelt, because I’ve seen the truck parked there before, along with a redone taxi, I suppose for the minor crap hauls. That same house also occasionally has garage sales of what I assume must be the crap that no one else, even the dump, will take. There are always strange, feral looking people around that house. But I’m digressing – although the crap hauling company is an enigma in itself, it is no Frank.

Frank is short, in his early sixties, and his back is curved so that he hunches forward all the time. He’s one of those people who could be any ethnicity. If the vaguely labeled “ethnic” aisle in the grocery store were personified, it would be Frank (I later found out that he is Mexican, when he was ranting to me after having running into someone’s car, who was understandably upset, that he was a legal citizen and not an illegal alien, and apparently this should have been enough to have excused him for his poor driving skills).

So anyway for the first few days Frank and the crap haul guy would emerge from the alley across the street intermittently with shopping bags that would then be deposited in the truck. It was very mysterious. What could they be transporting? Uranium? Bomb building materials? Gold? Drugs? I imagined some elaborate Oceans Eleven type scheme. Whatever it was, apparently it became too much for the crap hauler, and the next week Frank showed up on his own, in a new rental van. He also asked that week about a weekly rate. He paid his $50, and was set for the week. He continued his mysterious bag moving. It was never steady or coherent. He would just occasionally come out of the alley with a few grocery bags, deposit them in the van, make small talk with me for a moment, and then disappear. The van didn’t leave the parking lot at all for the first week or two.

Once he apparently had reached a critical mass of whatever it was in the truck, he started coming in and out. I’ve never driven a van, but I imagine it takes a little getting used to. It’s not something you need a separate license for, but it does seem like a different animal than your average compact car. But the van seemed to be quite an issue for Frank, although he himself seems to be oblivious of this. When he came in and out, it was an ordeal, a circus – the whole parking lot would come to a halt while frank inched back and forth like the Grinch stuck in the chimney, trying to get out. Apparently he had abandoned the rear view and side mirrors, because his method seems to be “estimate how far I need to back up, and if I hear the crunching sound of another car against my bumper, I know I’ve gone far enough.” To date he has hit three cars, and that’s just what I know of. Once when he was backing out he came within about three feet of running over a tiny old woman. Had I not shouted at him to stop he probably would have.

Around the time that he started coming and going more often, he was joined by a different helper who deserves some digression of his own. He is a character who anyone in the U District has seen at least a few times before. He is always at the Allegro or walking his dogs, and talking to the dogs or himself, I can’t tell. He has big frizzy salt and pepper hair which he keeps in a loose pony tail. He has giant glasses and slightly lazy eyes, with a prominent unibrow. He doesn’t quite seem homeless, but he’s not all there. He often wears the same clothes a few days in a row, but they never look too dirty, and he always seems to have money to buy coffee. My friend Nick said he once saw him waiting in line at the needle exchange in the same alley that Frank comes from, and I’ve seen him wearing a U District needle exchange shirt several times. He also always has a torn and frayed red dog leash around his neck that hangs down to about his belly button.

The appearance of the dog walker, whose name I do not (yet) know, was advantageous for two reasons. First, I have long been curious about him, and I am excited about the opportunity to talk to him on a regular basis, and second, I can use him to find out more about the mysterious Frank. Luckily the dog walker has started using me as an outlet for his frustrations with Frank. It turns out that Frank lives in an apartment by the Allegro, and is in the process of being evicted. On this point the dog walker is somewhat in the dark himself – Frank has been vague about what’s going on but there are some legal proceedings happening, and Frank is on the verge of being kicked out. His apartment is apparently full of junk, and he is moving it out piece by piece in shopping bags, then transporting it to a storage unit. This process is apparently incredibly slow and tedious – it’s like the A&E show Hoarders, but in real life. The dog walker refers to it as “the madness.”

He is, however, getting paid. Which is another curious aspect of this whole ordeal. Frank is paying the dog walker every day, $70 a week to stay in the parking lot, and presumably a good deal to rent a storage unit. By contrast all of this makes the dog walker seem very sane – though clearly, he is not. So it is interesting hearing these dispatches from one eccentric about another, the crazy leading the insane. It also says something about the first guy, the crap hauler. Apparently he wasn’t insane enough to stay on with the project. Only the synthesis of two Univesity District insanities can proliferate “the madness.”

The dog walker has told me several times that he believes Frank is on the verge of getting evicted once and for all, but it has yet to happen. Today I did notice that they were moving at a slightly faster clip than usual, so maybe there is an immanent end to “the madness.” In addition, he apparently hit yet another car today, and was warned that if he hits one more, he will be banned from the parking lot. Granted this was a warning from one of my coworkers, but he said he would talk to our boss about it later. Although I feel sorry for the people whose cars Frank has backed into, he hasn’t done any major damage and I want to see how this thing plays out. He paid for another weeks worth of parking today, so there is certainly no sign of this coming to an end soon. It has been almost a month and a half now. When will “the madness” end? Only time will tell (or a hit and run – whichever comes first).