ification. It was drilled into my head as I was going through all of my classes demarcated with the prefix EDU that “When you actually get to be a teacher, you will learn more from your students than they will learn from you.” That little statement was never part of the curriculum, obviously, and yet, at the same time, it was the underlying message: simply being around education will educate you—I could associate this with the television post just previous to this one, but that particular note is not for elucidation here. In total, I teach forty-one classes every week, and of these forty-one classes, I teach one class, two times a week, to one student. He is a middle-aged Korean Business man who has studied in Wales and is looking to improve his English to the point where he could pass the Toefl examination—not a simple task if you have ever been associated with it. We are currently going through a series of books called Mastering Skills for the Toefl – Advanced, but, just about every class, he brings in his own little English questions from his business documents—he sends emails and business letters to America. The other day, during one of our breaks (five minutes is just enough time to get coffee), I came back and he had written on the board:
I have attached the corrected documents for you.
I am attaching the corrected documents for you.
I will be attaching the corrected documents.
And he asked me: Which one is correct? Now, the problem, as anybody who speaks the English language will tell you, is that there is nothing incorrect about any of them. They are all technically sound English sentences: one in the past tense, one in the present progressive, and one in the future progressive. He told me that it was outside the body of the email. It was more like a tag line. What is correct here? Why did it ring just slightly sharp in my English ear? My first reaction was to tell him that they were all grammatically correct sentences, but then to respond that when I used to send business emails, the most concise way to let somebody know that there is an attachment at the end of the document is to let them know about it in certain terms: Corrected Documents Attached. What happened? It’s the subject, you see. There is a lot of implication, I have discovered, in the English language. (There are also metaphysical implications here in the vein of "Why am I writing this?" but we'll leave those until another time.) There are things you don’t think about, and one of those things is the subject. Now, obviously, “the subject” is well-traveled territory in the world of philosophy—Kant: “A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. ... subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself, either alone or at least along with others,” Heidegger: “As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself,” Hegel: “Person’ is essentially different from ‘subject’, since ‘subject’ is only the possibility of personality; every living thing of any sort is a subject. A person, then, is a subject aware of this subjectivity, since in personality it is of myself alone that I am aware” (crazy Germans)—and it can be expressed as simply as the incredible shift in meaning when you write: I sent the documents. v. Documents attached. When “I” am the subject, the reader is forced to consider who the “I” is for a second: forced. There is no getting around it, because “I” am the subject of that sentence. On the other hand, when the documents are the subject of the sentence, it is more comfortable, because I don’t have to think about who’s sending it, all I have to think about is the documents—which “you” have presumably already told me about in the text of the email. Like so many things, it’s so important that we don’t think about it because it is a part of us. I was absolutely shocked at the implication of what it means to change the subject.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Things Difficult to Comprehend
are usually the things most worthy of the effort—or this has been my experience at least. Right now I am struggling with a combination of Sartre, Debord and Burroughs all attempting to convince me that I am being objectified unwittingly by the world outside of me, and they are all, in their ways, at least a little bit right. They’re all coming at it from different perspectives (the objectifying characteristic of “the gaze,” the objectifying reality of commoditization, and the viral aspect of a pre-recorded reality being imposed on me as simply the object of a fantastic audience respectively), and I’m having a bit of trouble sorting it all out, but this is precisely where I feel like I am accomplishing the most important work of my life.
I am beginning to see that things are worth as much time as you put in to understanding them. If it takes five minutes, it’s probably only worth about five minutes of your time, and if it takes a lifetime, well, maybe it was worth it, or, if you’d prefer: obviously it was worth it to you. Now, there is a bit of a trouble encountered any time one goes around ascribing worth to anything, because of the nature of objective realities and the different values of worth placed on different things by different peoples at different times in different areas of the world, and it’s just all so different; however, what we’re dealing with here is precisely the objective reality of our time. It is impossible to escape time because we are the ones who bring it into the world. Without me, I have no time and it wouldn’t matter, but as I am here, time exists, and I am therefore placed in a position where I can use it as I will. This is where things get hairy.
People use their time for all manner of things. Obviously, one of the most prevalent uses of time is the television, and this particular manner of using ones time has officially gained my unceasing and unerring antipathy. It is the world of pure entertainment shining its light into your living room: a distraction from your possibility. Perhaps this will be taking it too far for some people, but the fact of the matter is, in my reality, television is a huge waste of time. I started noticing that the only programs I really enjoyed watching were edifying: nature programs, PBS, and anything that stimulated my mind to further investigation. This, though, could be accomplished without the aid of television by virtue of books and reading—which has come to illustrate itself to me as the path to all knowledge (well, that and experience, but once again, how can you experience something if you’re watching CSI?) once I realized that ninety-nine point nine percent of all classes in the world are based on a book. Reading and learning is the theory that allows one to go out and experience the world fully.
Yes, there are two corollary realities here that must be illustrated in order to be thorough: it is possible to learn things from television, and it is possible to read something for mere entertainment. What I would say in response to both of them is that while it is possible, the fact is that the balance is usually very heavily on the television as entertainment and reading as learning. Ninety percent of all television channels will be showing some kind of sitcom or drama or something else equally mind-numbing, and it could easily be shown that there are more books being used in more classrooms across the world than could possibly be contained in any structure. Think of the elementary school textbooks, the middle school textbooks, the high school textbooks, and the college books all over the world, and the scale is suddenly and unalterably shifted in the direction of reading for learning and edification.
(It could even be argued to some extent that reading for pleasure can be an edifying purpose because the brain is still being forced to connect everything. This is actually one of the big pushes in literary circles right now: bringing back the idea of reading because you enjoy something. Something happens in the brain when we read because we are not programmed with the ability to do it—while we are pre-programmed with the ability to comprehend sounds and mimic them—and we must learn a system of symbols and how to decipher them. It’s fascinating stuff, really, the things that happen has a result of the simple act of reading.)
The other major way we learn is through experience. Now, there is a little bit of a turnaround here in that the more theory we have behind us (i.e. the more reading and learning and edification we have behind us propping us up), the better we are at experiencing and understanding our world. I have been having a personal struggle lately with a breed of people that I have come to term as moral-less storytellers. First, this is not in the sense of “morality,” and I want to get that out of the way right up front. What I mean is that there seem to be a lot of people out there who experience a number of things. As a matter of fact, there is an incredible amount of people out there with vastly more experience than I (in my meager twenty-five-odd years of existence) could probably accumulate; however, when they recount their adventures, they have learned nothing. I did this. I did this. I did this. Then, I did this. Action is one thing, but if I know anything about action, it’s that when you’re doing something, you’re bound to be learning from it, and if you’re not, then you are simply going through the motions. As one develops a better sense of the ways in which the world works, through a wide variety of theory, one can better develop a sense of the possibility of existence, because the fact of the matter is that anything is actually possible. Train the mind to train the body to train the mind: practice making connections, practice sitting and reading instead of watching television, and practice running instead of watching a movie, because we become what we practice every day. If you practice watching TV, you will become very good at it. If you practice watching mindless movies, you will become very good at it. If you practice the guitar every day, you will become good at it. If you practice reading every day, you will become very good at it. If you practice fully existing every day, you will become very good at it.
I practice learning. I learn when I read. I learn when I write. I learn when I play guitar. I learn whenever I can. I’m getting better at it as a result of my practice. One of these days, I hope to be an expert learner. I don’t know why it is, yet, that practice does what it does, except I know that it is training the body and the mind to work together, and that is always preferable to them not having to do work, because that only leads to atrophy. If you take as the object of your time reading, experience, learning, developing, and growth, the outcome will continually be a transcendence of the self. You are a universe of possibility.
I am beginning to see that things are worth as much time as you put in to understanding them. If it takes five minutes, it’s probably only worth about five minutes of your time, and if it takes a lifetime, well, maybe it was worth it, or, if you’d prefer: obviously it was worth it to you. Now, there is a bit of a trouble encountered any time one goes around ascribing worth to anything, because of the nature of objective realities and the different values of worth placed on different things by different peoples at different times in different areas of the world, and it’s just all so different; however, what we’re dealing with here is precisely the objective reality of our time. It is impossible to escape time because we are the ones who bring it into the world. Without me, I have no time and it wouldn’t matter, but as I am here, time exists, and I am therefore placed in a position where I can use it as I will. This is where things get hairy.
People use their time for all manner of things. Obviously, one of the most prevalent uses of time is the television, and this particular manner of using ones time has officially gained my unceasing and unerring antipathy. It is the world of pure entertainment shining its light into your living room: a distraction from your possibility. Perhaps this will be taking it too far for some people, but the fact of the matter is, in my reality, television is a huge waste of time. I started noticing that the only programs I really enjoyed watching were edifying: nature programs, PBS, and anything that stimulated my mind to further investigation. This, though, could be accomplished without the aid of television by virtue of books and reading—which has come to illustrate itself to me as the path to all knowledge (well, that and experience, but once again, how can you experience something if you’re watching CSI?) once I realized that ninety-nine point nine percent of all classes in the world are based on a book. Reading and learning is the theory that allows one to go out and experience the world fully.
Yes, there are two corollary realities here that must be illustrated in order to be thorough: it is possible to learn things from television, and it is possible to read something for mere entertainment. What I would say in response to both of them is that while it is possible, the fact is that the balance is usually very heavily on the television as entertainment and reading as learning. Ninety percent of all television channels will be showing some kind of sitcom or drama or something else equally mind-numbing, and it could easily be shown that there are more books being used in more classrooms across the world than could possibly be contained in any structure. Think of the elementary school textbooks, the middle school textbooks, the high school textbooks, and the college books all over the world, and the scale is suddenly and unalterably shifted in the direction of reading for learning and edification.
(It could even be argued to some extent that reading for pleasure can be an edifying purpose because the brain is still being forced to connect everything. This is actually one of the big pushes in literary circles right now: bringing back the idea of reading because you enjoy something. Something happens in the brain when we read because we are not programmed with the ability to do it—while we are pre-programmed with the ability to comprehend sounds and mimic them—and we must learn a system of symbols and how to decipher them. It’s fascinating stuff, really, the things that happen has a result of the simple act of reading.)
The other major way we learn is through experience. Now, there is a little bit of a turnaround here in that the more theory we have behind us (i.e. the more reading and learning and edification we have behind us propping us up), the better we are at experiencing and understanding our world. I have been having a personal struggle lately with a breed of people that I have come to term as moral-less storytellers. First, this is not in the sense of “morality,” and I want to get that out of the way right up front. What I mean is that there seem to be a lot of people out there who experience a number of things. As a matter of fact, there is an incredible amount of people out there with vastly more experience than I (in my meager twenty-five-odd years of existence) could probably accumulate; however, when they recount their adventures, they have learned nothing. I did this. I did this. I did this. Then, I did this. Action is one thing, but if I know anything about action, it’s that when you’re doing something, you’re bound to be learning from it, and if you’re not, then you are simply going through the motions. As one develops a better sense of the ways in which the world works, through a wide variety of theory, one can better develop a sense of the possibility of existence, because the fact of the matter is that anything is actually possible. Train the mind to train the body to train the mind: practice making connections, practice sitting and reading instead of watching television, and practice running instead of watching a movie, because we become what we practice every day. If you practice watching TV, you will become very good at it. If you practice watching mindless movies, you will become very good at it. If you practice the guitar every day, you will become good at it. If you practice reading every day, you will become very good at it. If you practice fully existing every day, you will become very good at it.
I practice learning. I learn when I read. I learn when I write. I learn when I play guitar. I learn whenever I can. I’m getting better at it as a result of my practice. One of these days, I hope to be an expert learner. I don’t know why it is, yet, that practice does what it does, except I know that it is training the body and the mind to work together, and that is always preferable to them not having to do work, because that only leads to atrophy. If you take as the object of your time reading, experience, learning, developing, and growth, the outcome will continually be a transcendence of the self. You are a universe of possibility.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Music
There is something to creating music that means something. To anybody that knows me, there is a very deep-seated antipathy for what has come to be “Pop music.” Maybe it’s because what has become pop music is precisely the opposite of what pop music was when it was first invented in the 1960s—or maybe not. The Beatles were incredibly popular. Cream became incredibly popular—although it could be argued that they quitted their careers right at the point where they were verging on superstardom. CCR, Van Morrison, and even Bob Dylan all ran in the Something-or-other-Pop category: rock-pop, jazz/rock-pop, folk-pop, etc. That is a little difficult for this humble music listener to understand. A quick juxtaposition of top tens might prove something. The number one song from 1969 and 2007. According to one website (http://digitaldreamdoor.nutsie.com/pages/best_songs50-69.html), the top songs of 1969 were:
1. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
2. Proud Mary - Creedence Clearwater Revival
3. I Want You Back - Jackson 5
4. Honky Tonk Women - Rolling Stones
5. Bad Moon Rising - Creedence Clearwater Revival
6. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes - Crosby, Stills & Nash
7. Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin
8. Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones
9. Come Together - Beatles
10. I Can't Get Next To You – Temptations
(Which is, I might add, a pretty imposing list.) According to Rolling Stone, the top songs of 2007 are as follows:
1 "Roc Boys" - Jay-Z
2 "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" Randy Newman
3 "Umbrella" Rihanna
4 "D.A.N.C.E." Justice
5 "Four Winds" - Bright Eyes
6 "Dough Is What I Got" Lil Wayne
7 "Rehab" Amy Winehouse
8 "Long Walk Home" Bruce Springsteen
9 "Boyz" M.I.A.
10 "Int'l Player's Anthem" UGK
I guess the big question that I have, is whether or not anybody could see forty years into the future and see the artists of that day and age listening to MIA and UGK and wanting to make music like that? I guess the big difference, for me, is a matter of longevity.
Lately, I have been studying temporality. When I first questioned time, it took the rudimentary form of asking “Who invented time? And why should I abide by it?” Well, it turns out that I invented time at (or around) the same time that I made the split from myself in the upsurge of the consciousness. Time, if looked at from a technical viewpoint, is a personal fiction. Yes, the days move and the world turns, and we can measure it, but from a more individualized standpoint: the past does not exist because we can’t go back in time, every time we try to catch hold of the present we are presented with the problem that it is constantly being driven into the realm of an infinitesimal instant and the best we can do is get pretty close, and as to the future, I have a maxim: “Only act, the future is unknowable.” But given the fact that it is a kind of personal fiction, it is still a supportive kind of fiction. We rely on our past to make decisions in the present that will hopefully make our future what we want it to be. The past is like a crutch supporting us in the present: our experiences, our knowledge, and our wisdom from all of these things is what makes us the person we are—as a matter of fact, existentialist theory would say that we are what we were and Post-Marxist theory would say that the decision in the present illustrate what we want (which is always about the future). Given all of this. What kind of structure is “Roc Boys” building for the future of music?
There is no real music for this particular piece of music. It is pure lyrics and mix mastering. Your average Joe Schmoe, sure, couldn’t put together a piece of music like this, but give just about anybody a mix board and you’ll come up with something. Meanwhile, some of your most accomplished guitarists couldn’t manage to play Whole Lotta Love. They might not’ve known music theory, but they could play the instrument. It was part of them. Maybe I’m way off base. Maybe the mixboard is the most complicated instrument in the world, and I’m sure it takes time to master, but can you imagine carrying it to Central Park and busking? It is the manifestation of the capitalistic machine grabbing hold of the music industry. You can’t take it outside these boundaries. If the machine can’t control your money, then what’s the point?
1. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
2. Proud Mary - Creedence Clearwater Revival
3. I Want You Back - Jackson 5
4. Honky Tonk Women - Rolling Stones
5. Bad Moon Rising - Creedence Clearwater Revival
6. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes - Crosby, Stills & Nash
7. Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin
8. Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones
9. Come Together - Beatles
10. I Can't Get Next To You – Temptations
(Which is, I might add, a pretty imposing list.) According to Rolling Stone, the top songs of 2007 are as follows:
1 "Roc Boys" - Jay-Z
2 "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" Randy Newman
3 "Umbrella" Rihanna
4 "D.A.N.C.E." Justice
5 "Four Winds" - Bright Eyes
6 "Dough Is What I Got" Lil Wayne
7 "Rehab" Amy Winehouse
8 "Long Walk Home" Bruce Springsteen
9 "Boyz" M.I.A.
10 "Int'l Player's Anthem" UGK
I guess the big question that I have, is whether or not anybody could see forty years into the future and see the artists of that day and age listening to MIA and UGK and wanting to make music like that? I guess the big difference, for me, is a matter of longevity.
Lately, I have been studying temporality. When I first questioned time, it took the rudimentary form of asking “Who invented time? And why should I abide by it?” Well, it turns out that I invented time at (or around) the same time that I made the split from myself in the upsurge of the consciousness. Time, if looked at from a technical viewpoint, is a personal fiction. Yes, the days move and the world turns, and we can measure it, but from a more individualized standpoint: the past does not exist because we can’t go back in time, every time we try to catch hold of the present we are presented with the problem that it is constantly being driven into the realm of an infinitesimal instant and the best we can do is get pretty close, and as to the future, I have a maxim: “Only act, the future is unknowable.” But given the fact that it is a kind of personal fiction, it is still a supportive kind of fiction. We rely on our past to make decisions in the present that will hopefully make our future what we want it to be. The past is like a crutch supporting us in the present: our experiences, our knowledge, and our wisdom from all of these things is what makes us the person we are—as a matter of fact, existentialist theory would say that we are what we were and Post-Marxist theory would say that the decision in the present illustrate what we want (which is always about the future). Given all of this. What kind of structure is “Roc Boys” building for the future of music?
There is no real music for this particular piece of music. It is pure lyrics and mix mastering. Your average Joe Schmoe, sure, couldn’t put together a piece of music like this, but give just about anybody a mix board and you’ll come up with something. Meanwhile, some of your most accomplished guitarists couldn’t manage to play Whole Lotta Love. They might not’ve known music theory, but they could play the instrument. It was part of them. Maybe I’m way off base. Maybe the mixboard is the most complicated instrument in the world, and I’m sure it takes time to master, but can you imagine carrying it to Central Park and busking? It is the manifestation of the capitalistic machine grabbing hold of the music industry. You can’t take it outside these boundaries. If the machine can’t control your money, then what’s the point?
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Wandering Mindspace
(Written a couple of weeks ago, but the sister city to another piece at poeticmindofeli.blogspot.com)
Sometimes, all I want to do is drop my thoughts from an ocean-crossing jumbo jet and watch them plummet for a second, before opening up a parachute and gliding through the rest of their journey and landing safely—perhaps a couple of broken bones, but safely nonetheless. I thought this as I awakened from what one could ostensibly call sleeping, but really more like an alternate state of consciousness.
More and more and more there seems to be the sense that I’m wandering in awe through my days, as if there is nowhere and nothing more important that the steam streaming out of the little heating unit on the side of that building, nothing more important than continually putting one foot in front of the other, nothing more than the realization that with that as the focus, one is bound to get somewhere, anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. Am I a being that is present to itself in reflection only in terms of my situation and it’s ontological reality? Does a question like that make sense? Can it be applied to literature? What of Paul Morel? He is certainly most present to himself in reflection in terms of his situation (which could also kind of be called materialist) and it’s whats and hows. Thanks Lawrence for making it seems as though an Existential Post-Marxism might be possible from a phenomenological standpoint. If its reality is dependent on my looking at it, then look at it I shall, and we shall see. It’s one of those floating thought moments I think: perhaps something, perhaps nothing, and perhaps a hallucinated reality that is nonetheless reality.
My nose has been doing a great deal of leaking lately, and it looks as if I shall never be able to patch it up—there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t feel like elucidating it because it seems self-apparent to me (and that’s something like a pun?).
The language has come back to me as a thing of fluidity. Precisely as I had hoped, although perhaps not as clearly as I had hoped, the study of language as it pertains to the learning of it as a second is reminding me of the fickle nature of the word. When the word is fickle, what of the paragraph? We are the meaning makers, and the best any text can do is try to illustrate things as clearly as possible—which is always a mind-numbing failure.
What, then, of meaning? Even the one book that is supposed to shed light a singular meaning (that of existence) is read and even translated in so many different ways that the meaning which it gives is always personal.
Sometimes we need help. Sometimes the words on the page don’t mean anything until somebody else helps us understand them. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say (in the spirit of attempting to get things just right) that somebody else helps us come to our own understanding of them. We are the unifiers. It comes together in the subject. Is this my song of myself? Do I celebrate myself and loathe myself in the same breath? Am I in anguish of my freedom? Of my power? Of my weakness? Of my inability to comprehend the comprehensible? Of my ability to comprehend the incomprehensible? How does one go about attempting to understand?
There once was a fellow who followed a road. He wandered as it wandered and only looked at intersections to see that the road he followed had the same name, but he wondered if there was not a road construction crew that he had at some point ordered to be just up ahead of him continually laying the path that he would wander. He moved through the world as if he weren’t in control, with the sense that perhaps he was in control. Controlling the next step he took seemed to control the way the road lolled and rolled among the hills. He could always retrace his steps, and sometimes he took his lunch under a tree that seemed to magically appear on the roadside, but always there was the sound of his stepping on a road that seemed to come from nowhere. He often met fellow travelers, and sometimes there roads ran parallel, enough that they could call to each other and interact, and sometimes their roads ran together for a while, but they were always building their own roads as well. The world was absolutely cluttered with roads. But his roads seemed to have a tendency for where there were no other roads: through the mountains, through long stretches of desert, through dense forests, through untamed countryside. He longed for his road to pass through places where no road had gone before, and as he longed for it, he realized that it was quite near a reality.
“By god,” he muttered to himself, “All I have to do is direct this next step, and it is as the butterflies wing, causing a tsunami of reality that I cannot know until in my present, this is the past and I can reflect on it.”
But he often wondered at the validity of his own claims. He often wondered if there was a culture of the self, if not in the sense of a governmental system, a history, an arts scene, a night life, an understanding about the things are done, then at least in the sense of a Petri dish culture—like the nascent stages of a possible life.
Possibility… anything is. I am. Therefore I think. I think about Wagner’s Ring Cycle and wonder how it is that there are moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on or what is being said or what is inside it, and I find myself welling up as if this is the most important point in the work and I start madly conducting the aria in a fit of seeming importance: the language of music, dropping out of the sky and floating down the ground, gliding through the air, and landing with AK-47 cocked and at the ready to blow away any misunderstanding through its unmistakable sense of something or other. The unreal is leaking into the real.
Musical existence – something that is pervasively giving off that sense of something or other, that transcends language, that reaches high points anybody can understand bodily, without the slightest notion of transcendent meaning.
To build a road of musical existence, perhaps that is my goal where the unreal leaks into reality and gliding seems to emanate from its presence, when really what it’s doing is falling.
Perhaps cohesion is best left to those who desire cohesiveness. Even as a sentence is made up of parts—a noun, a verb, the etcetera—metaphorized existence could take the form a sentence, a statement: a thing, what the thing is doing, and everything to describe that thing and what it is doing. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositional phrases make up the bulk of the sentence, while the thing-in-itself and the existing for-itself are still the most important parts of the sentence because without them there is only the etcetera. There is no statement. No phrase. No longing to be made meaning of. Warmly.
The flowers on my apparently ugly wallpaper move sometimes, as if they were actually growing. I never think about how ugly the wallpaper is though, it is simply a “fact” that has been illuminated for me by just about everybody that comes into my humble little room. I believe the appropriate colors are: khaki background with light green vines and lavender and peach flowers. Apparently it jars on people’s delicate sense of aesthetics. But what is beauty? Cohesion? Building? Stepping? Flowers? Wandering? Music? Leaking? Gliding? Falling? Language? Words? How is one to know?
Sometimes, all I want to do is drop my thoughts from an ocean-crossing jumbo jet and watch them plummet for a second, before opening up a parachute and gliding through the rest of their journey and landing safely—perhaps a couple of broken bones, but safely nonetheless. I thought this as I awakened from what one could ostensibly call sleeping, but really more like an alternate state of consciousness.
More and more and more there seems to be the sense that I’m wandering in awe through my days, as if there is nowhere and nothing more important that the steam streaming out of the little heating unit on the side of that building, nothing more important than continually putting one foot in front of the other, nothing more than the realization that with that as the focus, one is bound to get somewhere, anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. Am I a being that is present to itself in reflection only in terms of my situation and it’s ontological reality? Does a question like that make sense? Can it be applied to literature? What of Paul Morel? He is certainly most present to himself in reflection in terms of his situation (which could also kind of be called materialist) and it’s whats and hows. Thanks Lawrence for making it seems as though an Existential Post-Marxism might be possible from a phenomenological standpoint. If its reality is dependent on my looking at it, then look at it I shall, and we shall see. It’s one of those floating thought moments I think: perhaps something, perhaps nothing, and perhaps a hallucinated reality that is nonetheless reality.
My nose has been doing a great deal of leaking lately, and it looks as if I shall never be able to patch it up—there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t feel like elucidating it because it seems self-apparent to me (and that’s something like a pun?).
The language has come back to me as a thing of fluidity. Precisely as I had hoped, although perhaps not as clearly as I had hoped, the study of language as it pertains to the learning of it as a second is reminding me of the fickle nature of the word. When the word is fickle, what of the paragraph? We are the meaning makers, and the best any text can do is try to illustrate things as clearly as possible—which is always a mind-numbing failure.
What, then, of meaning? Even the one book that is supposed to shed light a singular meaning (that of existence) is read and even translated in so many different ways that the meaning which it gives is always personal.
Sometimes we need help. Sometimes the words on the page don’t mean anything until somebody else helps us understand them. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say (in the spirit of attempting to get things just right) that somebody else helps us come to our own understanding of them. We are the unifiers. It comes together in the subject. Is this my song of myself? Do I celebrate myself and loathe myself in the same breath? Am I in anguish of my freedom? Of my power? Of my weakness? Of my inability to comprehend the comprehensible? Of my ability to comprehend the incomprehensible? How does one go about attempting to understand?
There once was a fellow who followed a road. He wandered as it wandered and only looked at intersections to see that the road he followed had the same name, but he wondered if there was not a road construction crew that he had at some point ordered to be just up ahead of him continually laying the path that he would wander. He moved through the world as if he weren’t in control, with the sense that perhaps he was in control. Controlling the next step he took seemed to control the way the road lolled and rolled among the hills. He could always retrace his steps, and sometimes he took his lunch under a tree that seemed to magically appear on the roadside, but always there was the sound of his stepping on a road that seemed to come from nowhere. He often met fellow travelers, and sometimes there roads ran parallel, enough that they could call to each other and interact, and sometimes their roads ran together for a while, but they were always building their own roads as well. The world was absolutely cluttered with roads. But his roads seemed to have a tendency for where there were no other roads: through the mountains, through long stretches of desert, through dense forests, through untamed countryside. He longed for his road to pass through places where no road had gone before, and as he longed for it, he realized that it was quite near a reality.
“By god,” he muttered to himself, “All I have to do is direct this next step, and it is as the butterflies wing, causing a tsunami of reality that I cannot know until in my present, this is the past and I can reflect on it.”
But he often wondered at the validity of his own claims. He often wondered if there was a culture of the self, if not in the sense of a governmental system, a history, an arts scene, a night life, an understanding about the things are done, then at least in the sense of a Petri dish culture—like the nascent stages of a possible life.
Possibility… anything is. I am. Therefore I think. I think about Wagner’s Ring Cycle and wonder how it is that there are moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on or what is being said or what is inside it, and I find myself welling up as if this is the most important point in the work and I start madly conducting the aria in a fit of seeming importance: the language of music, dropping out of the sky and floating down the ground, gliding through the air, and landing with AK-47 cocked and at the ready to blow away any misunderstanding through its unmistakable sense of something or other. The unreal is leaking into the real.
Musical existence – something that is pervasively giving off that sense of something or other, that transcends language, that reaches high points anybody can understand bodily, without the slightest notion of transcendent meaning.
To build a road of musical existence, perhaps that is my goal where the unreal leaks into reality and gliding seems to emanate from its presence, when really what it’s doing is falling.
Perhaps cohesion is best left to those who desire cohesiveness. Even as a sentence is made up of parts—a noun, a verb, the etcetera—metaphorized existence could take the form a sentence, a statement: a thing, what the thing is doing, and everything to describe that thing and what it is doing. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositional phrases make up the bulk of the sentence, while the thing-in-itself and the existing for-itself are still the most important parts of the sentence because without them there is only the etcetera. There is no statement. No phrase. No longing to be made meaning of. Warmly.
The flowers on my apparently ugly wallpaper move sometimes, as if they were actually growing. I never think about how ugly the wallpaper is though, it is simply a “fact” that has been illuminated for me by just about everybody that comes into my humble little room. I believe the appropriate colors are: khaki background with light green vines and lavender and peach flowers. Apparently it jars on people’s delicate sense of aesthetics. But what is beauty? Cohesion? Building? Stepping? Flowers? Wandering? Music? Leaking? Gliding? Falling? Language? Words? How is one to know?
Monday, December 1, 2008
You Can't Be Too Good
because the world just simply won’t allow it. You can be as awesome as you like—even if it is in your own mind. It is even possible to have everyone around you telling you how incredible you are (and I guess I’m thinking specifically about the celebrity circle there), but still manage to wind up feeling the next day as if God had unceremoniously scraped you off his hiking boot after looking down and saying, “Ewww….”
I’m not sure about karma. There seems to be something to it, and I suppose that’s where we can leave it off. What I am almost absolutely certain about is balance and the power of the human will to exert some kind of control over their universe—and I want to emphasize that THEIR. How does one go about explaining a bodily understanding like that? Everything moves in circles? Karmic principles dictate? The Middle Way? Almost every culture in almost every part of the world has some sense of the harmony that can be achieved by human beings simply being aware of the power they have over their own reality. Based on the information I have researched, the amount of water saved by one human being doing their best to conserve water in every way is in no way going to help out with our current international water crisis because the amount of water saved is too insignificant; however, it can have an effect on the local environment, and with enough individual efforts pooled together, enough environments could be salvaged, and suddenly the impossible is merely the improbable.
A lot of life is about imagination. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that can understand something like possibility. My old professor used to hate this word, but they have somehow managed to be imbued with possibility. As a matter of fact, this is generally the problem that most human beings run into: they understand possibility, so they spend most of their lives being something they aren’t and not being what they are because they are so little focused on reality. It’s not a problem in the technical sense of, “You’ve got problems buddy, no doubt at all about that,” but more like a problem in that it creates conflict in the essential nature of the human character. Sartre likes to use the example of a waiter in a café. The man is very busy being a waiter (which is something he’s not) and very busy not being himself (a struggling artist or some such), so that at the end of the day, we spend most of our lives involved in an act that we are fully conscious of, but about which we can really do nothing about, and don’t really want to do anything about because it is through this fissure that we accomplish things, where the possible becomes reality, and a new possibility opens up.
It’s a matter of reality, see?
We cannot know what’s real because it is impossible.
Like always doing anything.
It’s not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t.
The past is subjective at best,
And can only be referred to as my past or his past or
Something along those lines,
But by days end we see how impossible the past is.
The present does not exist as
We think it does. Focusing on the moments you can
Control is probably one of the
Best ways to go about existing, but there is no way to
Grasp the moment in your hand
Because by the time you think you got it, it’s vanished.
The future is unknowable—
An old personal adage with the simple qualifier at
The beginning of “only act”—
And can only be slowly worked and moved toward.
So with an un-objective past
An elusive, at best, present,
And an unknown future, how
Are we supposed to know
What’s real?
The problem is the same all over the place. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and we are fully conscious that we have no idea what is going on inside us, while at the same time being fully conscious that we know what’s going on inside us is probably most closely related to turmoil of one kind or another. So, we sometimes set ourselves up for the self-flagellation that sometimes happens. We do things (perhaps subconsciously, but still in the consciousness) that we know, at some point down the road, we’re going to have to pay for, and we accept them wholeheartedly because we know there is a balance. It works the other way, too. Sometimes you work really, really hard. Sometimes you work to the point of pain. Sports might be a good metaphor here, in that you will work until your body is yelling at you, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Why are you doing this to us!” but you just keep right on going, and it learns to take the pain, because the glory you will receive through the competition is worth it. Pain now for pleasure later or pleasure now for pain later—it’s like the quintessential text of anything. Only a fool would make the claim that you can enjoy a life of pleasure forever.
What’s important is to remember that no matter how many father-figures you lose or many hours overtime you’re working that you’re not getting paid for or how many times your schedule changes or how many times you spill Jameson on your computer or how many times the world plays magician and has you looking at its left hand while taking a huge swing at you with its right or how many times your internet unexpectedly goes out or how many times you are so confused with the nature of your own existence that you cry and cry and cry and cry, you’ll hit a balance. You might only hit it like a miler hits the line after the first lap, but you’ll hit it, and “that’s life. That’s what all the people say. Ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. But I ain’t gonna let it change my tune. When I’m back on top in June.” I just hope it doesn’t take that long to get back on top.
I’m not sure about karma. There seems to be something to it, and I suppose that’s where we can leave it off. What I am almost absolutely certain about is balance and the power of the human will to exert some kind of control over their universe—and I want to emphasize that THEIR. How does one go about explaining a bodily understanding like that? Everything moves in circles? Karmic principles dictate? The Middle Way? Almost every culture in almost every part of the world has some sense of the harmony that can be achieved by human beings simply being aware of the power they have over their own reality. Based on the information I have researched, the amount of water saved by one human being doing their best to conserve water in every way is in no way going to help out with our current international water crisis because the amount of water saved is too insignificant; however, it can have an effect on the local environment, and with enough individual efforts pooled together, enough environments could be salvaged, and suddenly the impossible is merely the improbable.
A lot of life is about imagination. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that can understand something like possibility. My old professor used to hate this word, but they have somehow managed to be imbued with possibility. As a matter of fact, this is generally the problem that most human beings run into: they understand possibility, so they spend most of their lives being something they aren’t and not being what they are because they are so little focused on reality. It’s not a problem in the technical sense of, “You’ve got problems buddy, no doubt at all about that,” but more like a problem in that it creates conflict in the essential nature of the human character. Sartre likes to use the example of a waiter in a café. The man is very busy being a waiter (which is something he’s not) and very busy not being himself (a struggling artist or some such), so that at the end of the day, we spend most of our lives involved in an act that we are fully conscious of, but about which we can really do nothing about, and don’t really want to do anything about because it is through this fissure that we accomplish things, where the possible becomes reality, and a new possibility opens up.
It’s a matter of reality, see?
We cannot know what’s real because it is impossible.
Like always doing anything.
It’s not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t.
The past is subjective at best,
And can only be referred to as my past or his past or
Something along those lines,
But by days end we see how impossible the past is.
The present does not exist as
We think it does. Focusing on the moments you can
Control is probably one of the
Best ways to go about existing, but there is no way to
Grasp the moment in your hand
Because by the time you think you got it, it’s vanished.
The future is unknowable—
An old personal adage with the simple qualifier at
The beginning of “only act”—
And can only be slowly worked and moved toward.
So with an un-objective past
An elusive, at best, present,
And an unknown future, how
Are we supposed to know
What’s real?
The problem is the same all over the place. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and we are fully conscious that we have no idea what is going on inside us, while at the same time being fully conscious that we know what’s going on inside us is probably most closely related to turmoil of one kind or another. So, we sometimes set ourselves up for the self-flagellation that sometimes happens. We do things (perhaps subconsciously, but still in the consciousness) that we know, at some point down the road, we’re going to have to pay for, and we accept them wholeheartedly because we know there is a balance. It works the other way, too. Sometimes you work really, really hard. Sometimes you work to the point of pain. Sports might be a good metaphor here, in that you will work until your body is yelling at you, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Why are you doing this to us!” but you just keep right on going, and it learns to take the pain, because the glory you will receive through the competition is worth it. Pain now for pleasure later or pleasure now for pain later—it’s like the quintessential text of anything. Only a fool would make the claim that you can enjoy a life of pleasure forever.
What’s important is to remember that no matter how many father-figures you lose or many hours overtime you’re working that you’re not getting paid for or how many times your schedule changes or how many times you spill Jameson on your computer or how many times the world plays magician and has you looking at its left hand while taking a huge swing at you with its right or how many times your internet unexpectedly goes out or how many times you are so confused with the nature of your own existence that you cry and cry and cry and cry, you’ll hit a balance. You might only hit it like a miler hits the line after the first lap, but you’ll hit it, and “that’s life. That’s what all the people say. Ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. But I ain’t gonna let it change my tune. When I’m back on top in June.” I just hope it doesn’t take that long to get back on top.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Mixing Colors
Painting is a funny sort of pastime. You learn things that you might not normally think about in terms of color. At it’s most basic, you’ve got red, yellow, blue, black and white. All colors can technically be formed from the combination of these colors. Where it gets really tricky is the amounts of each to throw into the mix in order to reach the desired hue. Where it gets even trickier is any time you add black and white. White is a lightening agent. Add white to red, and the red becomes a lighter shade of red. Add black, and it becomes darker. But what happens when you add too much black—which is not an uncommon occurrence because black is a surprisingly strong absence of color? You add white. But then, taking a step back, is it really grey which is responsible for hues? Granted, you might be able to reach the hue you’re looking for by just adding white, but this is extraordinarily rare, and one is generally left to deal with the color that results.
This is, however, why grayscale work is so important to the artist. It teaches them to deal with tone values, and if this were extrapolated on every so slightly, this is precisely what makes art what it is: the perfect tone. Joyce struggled with this. What’s the right tone for this episode? Your good chef is concerned with the not only the color tones on the plate, but the tongue tones as well. Jean-Paul Belmondo struggled with just the right tone of voice. Every artist is concerned with tone, and the best way to learn about it is an intense investigation into the grayscale.
However, there is an unfortunate point that some artists reach where their only interest is in grayscale, and they forget that the whole point of learning grayscale is so that one can make the leap into full color where the entire world of possibility opens up before their eyes. Grayscale teaches tonal understanding and makes tones possible, but it is, after all, a tool for moving comfortably into the world of infinite possibility. In a way, it could be said that grayscale is learning time.
Currently, I am reading four books—an old habit picked up from years of being in literature classes: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” Beop Jeong’s “May All Beings Be Happy,” D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” and Voltaire’s “Candide” (and related texts), and I have noticed something that I never noticed when I was actually in school and studying books simultaneously. They are all individually crammed with information, but they are all coming together at some point in my head so that overarching "truths" can be reached.
Sartre is teaching me ontological awareness (and I want to point out that my mantra “actions reveal sub-conscious desires” has been somewhat amended by the understanding that our physical actions are a manifestation of ontological choices of what and how to be, where choice is a metaphysical action based on why we think we ought to do these things), the fact that to “non-” something is not the opposite of what it is we’re “non”-ing (where being and non-being are not opposites, action and non-action are not opposites, and knowing and non-knowing are not opposites because to non-be something means simply that you are not in that state, but it is possible, and for opposites this is never possible), and that a question is composed of three non-beings: the non-being of knowledge in man (otherwise why would you ask), the non-being of a possibly negative response (even in a question like, “Where is Paul?” the answer could be, “I don’t know”), and the third non-being of the limitation of truth. These three are non-beings because they are not currently in the state of being: there is no current state of knowledge, there is no current state of positivity or negativity—which opens up both possibilities, and there is no current state of limited truth.
From Beop Jeong I’m learning to live ever so fully from moment to moment, that the past is a thing to picked at when needed, the future is a thing to be understood as possible but untouchable, that possessions can own us as much as we own them, that words are the home of being, that life was intended for existence, and I am learning to ask “Who am I?” again and again and again.
D.H. Lawrence is teaching me just how far into the human psyche we can delve and what it is possible to learn about ourselves as we look back into ourselves from a position of understanding. I’m learning that love and hate can exist for the same character in the same paragraph, in the same breath, in the same sentence, and that it is sometimes uncomfortable to be that close, but that it is, in its way the same reality we all experience very day.
Voltaire is teaching me how to teach and learn through story telling. Candide’s travels and woes in this, the best of all possible worlds, reminds me that to cling to the things which we once thought beyond question can be only the mark of Emerson’s hobgoblin.
But, in the same breath, a moment to moment psychological existence where learning is key and “there is nothing to prevent consciousness from making a wholly new choice of its way of being” kind of makes sense.
In this moment, “Sons and Lovers,” “Candide,” “May All Beings Be Happy,” and “Being and Nothingness” are the gray which is tempering the hue of my understanding of my existence and my reality, which I am, in turn, attempting to live in hypercolor.
(For the record, I only just realized that Candide means pure or “white”—the existence of all colors simultaneously, beings being happy might be most happy in a nothingness where a bildungsroman can illustrate he psychological nature of a being who arose from nothingness. Two bildungromans, two books with being in the title, and all chosen randomly. Life’s funny like that…)
So maybe the best of all possible worlds is one lived with an understanding of grayscale, but focused on color. And maybe, when color gets to be too much, and you start to lose the plot, retreat back to the basics, but never forget that at the end of the day it’s always about mixing.
This is, however, why grayscale work is so important to the artist. It teaches them to deal with tone values, and if this were extrapolated on every so slightly, this is precisely what makes art what it is: the perfect tone. Joyce struggled with this. What’s the right tone for this episode? Your good chef is concerned with the not only the color tones on the plate, but the tongue tones as well. Jean-Paul Belmondo struggled with just the right tone of voice. Every artist is concerned with tone, and the best way to learn about it is an intense investigation into the grayscale.
However, there is an unfortunate point that some artists reach where their only interest is in grayscale, and they forget that the whole point of learning grayscale is so that one can make the leap into full color where the entire world of possibility opens up before their eyes. Grayscale teaches tonal understanding and makes tones possible, but it is, after all, a tool for moving comfortably into the world of infinite possibility. In a way, it could be said that grayscale is learning time.
Currently, I am reading four books—an old habit picked up from years of being in literature classes: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” Beop Jeong’s “May All Beings Be Happy,” D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” and Voltaire’s “Candide” (and related texts), and I have noticed something that I never noticed when I was actually in school and studying books simultaneously. They are all individually crammed with information, but they are all coming together at some point in my head so that overarching "truths" can be reached.
Sartre is teaching me ontological awareness (and I want to point out that my mantra “actions reveal sub-conscious desires” has been somewhat amended by the understanding that our physical actions are a manifestation of ontological choices of what and how to be, where choice is a metaphysical action based on why we think we ought to do these things), the fact that to “non-” something is not the opposite of what it is we’re “non”-ing (where being and non-being are not opposites, action and non-action are not opposites, and knowing and non-knowing are not opposites because to non-be something means simply that you are not in that state, but it is possible, and for opposites this is never possible), and that a question is composed of three non-beings: the non-being of knowledge in man (otherwise why would you ask), the non-being of a possibly negative response (even in a question like, “Where is Paul?” the answer could be, “I don’t know”), and the third non-being of the limitation of truth. These three are non-beings because they are not currently in the state of being: there is no current state of knowledge, there is no current state of positivity or negativity—which opens up both possibilities, and there is no current state of limited truth.
From Beop Jeong I’m learning to live ever so fully from moment to moment, that the past is a thing to picked at when needed, the future is a thing to be understood as possible but untouchable, that possessions can own us as much as we own them, that words are the home of being, that life was intended for existence, and I am learning to ask “Who am I?” again and again and again.
D.H. Lawrence is teaching me just how far into the human psyche we can delve and what it is possible to learn about ourselves as we look back into ourselves from a position of understanding. I’m learning that love and hate can exist for the same character in the same paragraph, in the same breath, in the same sentence, and that it is sometimes uncomfortable to be that close, but that it is, in its way the same reality we all experience very day.
Voltaire is teaching me how to teach and learn through story telling. Candide’s travels and woes in this, the best of all possible worlds, reminds me that to cling to the things which we once thought beyond question can be only the mark of Emerson’s hobgoblin.
But, in the same breath, a moment to moment psychological existence where learning is key and “there is nothing to prevent consciousness from making a wholly new choice of its way of being” kind of makes sense.
In this moment, “Sons and Lovers,” “Candide,” “May All Beings Be Happy,” and “Being and Nothingness” are the gray which is tempering the hue of my understanding of my existence and my reality, which I am, in turn, attempting to live in hypercolor.
(For the record, I only just realized that Candide means pure or “white”—the existence of all colors simultaneously, beings being happy might be most happy in a nothingness where a bildungsroman can illustrate he psychological nature of a being who arose from nothingness. Two bildungromans, two books with being in the title, and all chosen randomly. Life’s funny like that…)
So maybe the best of all possible worlds is one lived with an understanding of grayscale, but focused on color. And maybe, when color gets to be too much, and you start to lose the plot, retreat back to the basics, but never forget that at the end of the day it’s always about mixing.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Mountain Songsanri
Today I went hiking. This is something I do frequently; however, today I went hiking with two older Korean gentlemen--one is 56, the other retired from his work at Nestle two years ago. I wrote some things like how I love being "struck by the leaves of fall," and "Nothing bad happened today... nothing"--although I did fall, twist my ankle, bang my knee and nearly lose my glasses in thousands of leaves--"I find that the best places to BE are usually the hardest to get to," "I am sitting in a tiny car with three older Koreans. I have taken to describing Teacher Bone as 'ancient': old AND respected. To put it at its most simple: I am humbled in his/their presence. It makes me proud. We are on our way to a mountain called (and here I asked teacher bone to write down the name of the mountain and he wrote a few things for me): 'Mt. Sokri (we later found out it was Songsanri). On top of that mountain is called Mun Jang Dae which is so popular in beauty scenery.' There is a buddhist monastery on top of the Mt. Sokri (I later realized it was at the base), and a long time ago, Bone Teacher's father was there--whether for a visit or for a long time is not known, and I could ask, but I think we're just going to let it linger in delicious obscurity for the time being. For now, we are doing. We're doing the damn thing, as it were, and we're being as respectful as possible of the beauty of nature. 'Go be whatever you want to do,'" and "Just me and two ancient Korean men. I fell... Teacher Bone had gone on ahead. Emo's husband found my glasses (Emo is the cook at our school, and her husband--who was only referred to as "Senior" all day because of his elder status--had been up Mt. Songsanri a number of times and wanted to guide us). What if. It just goes to show you, no matter how slow and careful you are, you still might find you tumbling down a million rocks. Going up is more secure, somehow you have gravity on your side." I saw millions of rocks today. LIterally, millions, and they were all roughly big enough for one person to carry with a certain amount of strain. But, there's really no way to explain what happened today, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, then I actually wrote twenty thousand words already today. But for now, I guess I'll put the burden on the reader here and ask for a then thousand word essay on:
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