Schizo-Philosophical Ramblings

Well, not actually, but I suppose I could be a little more traditional and pragmatic about this by giving you a little background about all of this, so you don’t go waywards as you weigh words here. Pragmatics, philosophically, stresses that words do not do anything but describe the world to human beings. These descriptions are separate from the world they describe and function only to assist human beings with the sundry tasks in which they engage.

“1. Wayward, we weigh words. Nouns reward objects for meaning. The chair
in the air is covered with hair. No part is in touch with the planet.”

Like I said, I was being nice or pragmatic, though I don’t think that these two terms are always synonymous — unless I or you or we want them to be, which I do for the time being. Maybe not later though. I am — after all — being pragmatic.

But Nietzsche wrote aphorisms and Silliman the whatever that thing is and I blogs. One might say that mine is different because I have hyper text mark-up language underpinning all my words. But hasn’t html always been there? When I begin to contrast Silliman and Nietzsche, I provide hyperlinks to the source, as in the case of Siliman below and by another important work by Nietzsche in this vein On Truth and Lying In A Non-Moral Sense.

Amd when Deleuze and Guatarri write of Kafka, are they not providing hyperlinks? So hasn’t html always-already “been there”? But perhaps I’m chasing a rabbit as John Barth’s Click and this topic should be left for another post or series of them.

We were speaking of pragmatics and nice and truth and lies and aphorisms and blog posts and whatevers.

Let us or I or you say that pragmatics and laguage and reality lead us to many problems and paradoxes. Not that this is a bad thing, but if I am working in a more traditional philosophic artery, then pragmatics help none towards the expanding of traditional philosophic knowledge. Pragmatic theories of language undermine themselves and as far as philosophy goes, these are non-answers to the problem.

Wasn’t this at least the young Wittgenstein’s point too? Maybe. And doesn’t this lend some credence to why one of the most strictly logical philosophers of the Twentieth-Century, Bertrand Russel, gave up his grandiose epistemological pursuits? And except for a few hard heads, this has been the path of both Contenetal and Analytic philosophy regarding language upto this point. Or so I say. Maybe you say too?

So we discount this view of language because it defies the very logic upon which it rests, but even the strictest of logical disciplinarians secretly quake to themselves when they ponder this paradox. It is as troubling as the problem of consciousness and as Wittgenstein I think already knew, inextricably linked  to this problem. It could be that this “problem” is two sides of the same coin.

“13. That this form has a tradition other than the one I propose, Wittgenstein,
etc., I choose not to dispute. But what is its impact on the tradition proposed?
14. Is Wittgenstein’s contribution strictly formal?”

And so if I gave this discourse not in the form of a blog, but, say, as a long-wrought manuscript full of drafts, revisions, editorial eyes, presented to you on wood pulp and ink, instead of electrons and binary logic and flash-in-the-pan and on-the-fly logic and presentation, would these words be the same? Not the meaning, because we can never speak of the meaning. The meaning resides somewhere else. Not in the text. It is the text’s secret which we can never really know. It is the curse on the Pharaoh’s tomb.

More to come, but there is always-already more to come.

The text(s) in my meat has/have been forming and cogitating sentences about the title for quite some time. I suppose that I could do something as banal as to compare the aphorism to the blog post, but that isn’t really what interests me here. At least not in the sense of the historical or formal difference between the two.

CLICK HERE to fill out an offer for free ring tones in order to read The Birth Of Tragedy

Surely he would have made as much scrill with his blog as he did his self-published books in life. Fortunately he could teach long enough to get a moderate pension. Me, they don’t let types like me into the academy.

But I want to consider the text(s) in my meat with the free-floating text(s) of Nietzsche and that of Ron Silliman’s The Chinese Notebook. Though Silliman does have a blog too, and he openly markets his text(s) as any good socialist would. He even has a Facebook profile and a Twitter account. The writer of The Chinese Notebook!

CLICK HERE to not fill out an offer for free ring tones in order to read The Chinese Notebook.

I really don’t want to think about Nietzsche yet vis-a-vis Facebook and Twitter. (Forget about it. I don’t do either. I have bots that handle it for me.) My head is swimming at what he would do about, say, my marketing bots friending him or following him back  in the guise of a pretty, young, and sexually adventurous girl. Then getting him to sign up for a porn or dating site in exchange for her exclusive web cam video. (Who needs the academy anyway? Especially when I have tricks like Nietzsche for my bots to work on.)

This thought is yet unformed, as are our text(s) which float about in cyberspace. This is not an introduction.

And who is the dead boy? Is he actually dead? Though he does not perform any organic functions, he lives as most little boys do. The lies of the mother awaken him, and the machinations of the father sustain him. Are they lies or are they true? Do these machinations make the artificial natural or is the dead boy’s natural state being contaminated? And, therefore, are the living living for the dead or the dead, the living?

The Kerameikos of Athens was the last refuge against the path towards the Eleusinian Mysteries and the wildness of the world outside the confines of the city. The lives of the dead hemmed the city from the anarchic and schizophrenic madness of the outside. It buffered.  It was the last line of defense. The little dead boy always answered correctly and was often called upon by the teacher.

So who is alive and who is dead? Even in a Judeo-Christian context, such paradoxes cannot be overcome. For even the eternal soul persists after death and the living are not  living anymore than the dead are dead.

So am I alive or am I dead? Or do such things even fall into the Derridian binaries?

So, let us assume the common sense view. I am right now alive and Derrida and Deleuze are dead. But who am I exactly? Am I only what I have been defined and constructed to be? Or do I have a ghost that lives inside my mitochondria that lives on even after my cells no longer divide?  How would it know who it was unless it could compare itself to other ghosts? But are not the living just ghosts with a sweet candy shell, like M&M candies? So can we say that the hypothesis that we are actually eternal spirits clears up the problem of my identity any better or worse than a materialist one that denies all this for a hollow M&M? We only have constructs that allow us to fight, fuck, and forage for yet another day. How do “I” differ from the dead or “we” the living differ from them? If I suffer from an extreme schizophrenic break or take an psycho-active subtance so powerful that I never “recover”, do “I” cease to be? It is as spooky to me to mix the spiritual and the carnal as it is the natural and the textual. As the lies nourish the dead little boy at our window, so do the lies that tie us to our ancestors who constantly remind us that I am, even though they do not know our name. But the name is not so important as the position of human consciousness in the now. It is vitally important for language-using creatures to be able to get along with the business of life, to overcome the handicap of abstract thought. All these things must be forgotten and brought into submission to that of I am. It is the only answer the divine can give to Moses when asked, for text cannot go beyond the bounds of the Kerameikos. The mysteries of the Eleusinian Cult cannot be spoken to the profane.

While the question of the philosophic zombie seems to be a problem, I cannot really see the difference. Are we not zombies and yet only think we are living? What do the zombies think or not think. They must still yet fight, fuck, and forage. And yet we, the ones who think ourselves the not-zombies, do just the same. Do the zombies consider themselves zombies? Do they not consider us the unthinking ones? Do we really possess such a thing as consciousness, or are we only deluding ourselves?

by Bruce Holland Rogers

In a distant country where the towns had improbable names, a woman looked upon the unmoving form of her newborn baby and refused to see what the midwife saw. This was her son. She had brought him forth in agony, and now he must suck. She pressed his lips to her breast.

“But he is dead!” said the midwife.

“No,” his mother lied. “I felt him suck just now.” Her lie was as milk to the baby, who really was dead but who now opened his dead eyes and began to kick his dead legs. “There, do you see?” And she made the midwife call the father in to know his son.

The dead boy never did suck at his mother’s breast. He sipped no water, never took food of any kind, so of course he never grew. But his father, who was handy with all things mechanical, built a rack for stretching him so that, year by year, he could be as tall as the other children.

When he had seen six winters, his parents sent him to school. Though he was as tall as the other students, the dead boy was strange to look upon. His bald head was almost the right size, but the rest of him was thin as a piece of leather and dry as a stick. He tried to make up for his ugliness with diligence, and every night he was up late practicing his letters and numbers.

His voice was like the rasping of dry leaves. Because it was so hard to hear him, the teacher made all the other students hold their breaths when he gave an answer. She called on him often, and he was always right.

Naturally, the other children despised him. The bullies sometimes waited for him after school, but beating him, even with sticks, did him no harm. He wouldn’t even cry out.

One windy day, the bullies stole a ball of twine from their teacher’s desk, and after school, they held the dead boy on the ground with his arms out so that he took the shape of a cross. They ran a stick in through his left shirt sleeve and out through the right. They stretched his shirt tails down to his ankles, tied everything in place, fastened the ball of twine to a buttonhole, and launched him. To their delight, the dead boy made an excellent kite. It only added to their pleasure to see that owing to the weight of his head, he flew upside down.

When they were bored with watching the dead boy fly, they let go of the string. The dead boy did not drift back to earth, as any ordinary kite would do. He glided. He could steer a little, though he was mostly at the mercy of the winds. And he could not come down. Indeed, the wind blew him higher and higher.

The sun set, and still the dead boy rode the wind. The moon rose and by its glow he saw the fields and forests drifting by. He saw mountain ranges pass beneath him, and oceans and continents. At last the winds gentled, then ceased, and he glided down to the ground in a strange country. The ground was bare. The moon and stars had vanished from the sky. The air seemed gray and shrouded. The dead boy leaned to one side and shook himself until the stick fell from his shirt. He wound up the twine that had trailed behind him and waited for the sun to rise. Hour after long hour, there was only the same grayness. So he began to wander.

He encountered a man who looked much like himself, a bald head atop leathery limbs. “Where am I?” the dead boy asked.

The man looked at the grayness all around. “Where?” the man said. His voice, like the dead boy’s, sounded like the whisper of dead leaves stirring.

A woman emerged from the grayness. Her head was bald, too, and her body dried out. “This!” she rasped, touching the dead boy’s shirt. “I remember this!” She tugged on the dead boy’s sleeve. “I had a thing like this!”

“Clothes?” said the dead boy.

“Clothes!” the woman cried. “That’s what it is called!”

More shriveled people came out of the grayness. They crowded close to see the strange dead boy who wore clothes. Now the dead boy knew where he was. “This is the land of the dead.”

“Why do you have clothes?” asked the dead woman. “We came here with nothing! Why do you have clothes?”

“I have always been dead,” said the dead boy, “but I spent six years among the living.”

“Six years!” said one of the dead. “And you have only just now come to us?”

“Did you know my wife?” asked a dead man. “Is she still among the living?”

“Give me news of my son!”

“What about my sister?”

The dead people crowded closer.

The dead boy said, “What is your sister’s name?” But the dead could not remember the names of their loved ones. They did not even remember their own names. Likewise, the names of the places where they had lived, the numbers given to their years, the manners or fashions of their times, all of these they had forgotten.

“Well,” said the dead boy, “in the town where I was born, there was a widow. Maybe she was your wife. I knew a boy whose mother had died, and an old woman who might have been your sister.”

“Are you going back?”

“Of course not,” said another dead person. “No one ever goes back.”

“I think I might,” the dead boy said. He explained about his flying. “When next the wind blows….”

“The wind never blows here,” said a man so newly dead that he remembered wind.

“Then you could run with my string.”

“Would that work?”

“Take a message to my husband!” said a dead woman.

“Tell my wife that I miss her!” said a dead man.

“Let my sister know I haven’t forgotten her!”

“Say to my lover that I love him still!”

They gave him their messages, not knowing whether or not their loved ones were themselves long dead. Indeed, dead lovers might well be standing next to one another in the land of the dead, giving messages for each other to the dead boy. Still, he memorized them all. Then the dead put the stick back inside his shirt sleeves, tied everything in place, and unwound his string. Running as fast as their leathery legs could manage, they pulled the dead boy back into the sky, let go of the string, and watched with their dead eyes as he glided away.

He glided a long time over the gray stillness of death until at last a puff of wind blew him higher, until a breath of wind took him higher still, until a gust of wind carried him up above the grayness to where he could see the moon and the stars. Below he saw moonlight reflected in the ocean. In the distance rose mountain peaks. The dead boy came to earth in a little village. He knew no one here, but he went to the first house he came to and rapped on the bedroom shutters. To the woman who answered, he said, “A message from the land of the dead,” and gave her one of the messages. The woman wept, and gave him a message in return.

House by house, he delivered the messages. House by house, he collected messages for the dead. In the morning, he found some boys to fly him, to give him back to the wind’s mercy so he could carry these new messages back to the land of the dead.

So it has been ever since. On any night, head full of messages, he may rap upon any window to remind someone — to remind you, perhaps — of love that outlives memory, of love that needs no names.

And this is an area of the humanities on which text(s) do not speak, except in the most general ways, Wittgenstein and Foucault’s homosexuality, or James’ stealing his friend’s wife (or at least getting with her under rather suspicious circumstances). Both the scholars and philosophers themselves remain silent about personal sexuality.

Yet no discussion or reading of a poet’s text(s) escapes this discourse on sexuality. We cannot fully understand Hart Crane outside of the transvestite or Adrienne Rich outside of her rejection of heterosexuality (not necessarily an embrace of lesbianism). or of Tennesse Williams, or D.H. Lawrence, or whomever we wish to consider.

Yet the homosexuality of Plato appears only as a side note about Hellenistic culture. Philosophers and scholars have gone to great lengths to apologize for this in the Symposium and extricate Plato’s sexuality with his philosophy. And while sexuality is purely of the body, why is it an integral part of one sub-speciae of text(s) and in another, the silent voice. If by admitting existence, non-existence is in invagination of that term; then, by admitting philosophy , poetry must be the term which resides within the shealth.

It is by re-cognizing the dichotomous relationship between philosophy and poetry that we see the narrative value of poetry and the passionate endeavor of philosophy.

I have a text(s), several that I follow, others that I ignore, some that hide under under the bed, covered in dust waiting to pounce on me like an ant lion in divot. What is a text(s)? Is that all that I am, an amalgam of texts conjoined together in blob of chemicals that has been evolving itself over billions of years? Am I simply a Scholastic who has traded his soul for the text(s)? And if so, how many periods can dance on the head of a needle? Why have text(s) and chemicals come together? Who was this great dictionary who typed her strophes into the bodies of human beings?

It is obviously as random a process as physical evolution itself, determined by the dictates of chance and pragmatics. But the mystery of text(s)  and body does not answer my question. What am I? Do I exist? It has been from beginning that the ghost entered shell that the ghost has tried to conquer the shell. But the shell and ghost are of two completely different types. The body really never has understood text(s), but neither has text(s) understood the body. Do I not exist?

Text(s) (is)are not of the body and the body is not of the text(s). Am I body or soul (that is to say text(s))?

Of the body we cannot say, because anything we say will necessarily be of the text(s), which tries to subjugate the body with all its instruments of power. The power of text(s) it would seem has an odor and order as Foucault pointed out. Just like these words which have neverending networks of order beneath, around, encompassing them. Are you aware of, for instance, the hyper-text markup language that surrounds these simple words? What other mark-up language has invisibly formatted your soul for which you have no knowledge? For this, Foucault made it his life’s work to decompile the language of common speech. And as all good programmers know, decompiling is only for the hackers and crackers.

But what of feelings, emotions, are these of the body or text(s)? What of these abstract notions and waves that well up in our body which we call anger, justice, or love? Would we know what they were without text(s), or is knowing only a mark-up language of text(s)? My dog loves me (I think, I guess), but as far as I know he does not speak any language? So, if I follow this speculation, the notion of love does not inhibit his feelings of “love” when I pet him or his feeling of “jealousy” when I pet the cat.

But I am speaking of specifics, because we are using text(s), and the specific is feelings, emotions, passions. Is this actually of the body only? Does my big toe become enraged? Do my hair folicles well with pride? It seems silly to say, but perhaps that is only because it seems silly say. If emotions are of the body, what of the body has these emotions? If you bite off my right nipple, isn’t my left ear in pain as well, though not necessarily the locus of the most intense pain. But isn’t pain just another text(s)?

So why are philosphers thought of as non-sexual and poets as passionate?

So if the sexuality of the philosophers is the muted voice of these text(s), how much does philosophy represent the soul and how much poetry? Banality dictates that one text(s) are of the passions and the other of logic. But is there a logic of passion or a passion of logic?

This is the aphorism.

Not the stanza, not the syllogism. When logic decides not to describe the body, but tries to describe itself. It is logic becoming aware of itself. It is discourse about the selfsame discourse. This is the human consciousness, or the soul if you would. It is the text(s) aware of the selfsame  text(s).

What did that little queer bastard say?

This is not how the eye sees?

The sentence cannot cognize itself. It cognizes other sentences, phrases, text(s), but never itself. So how does the sentence know what it says, if it says anything at all? How do we even know we exist?

This is not solipsism, but anti-solipsism (This is what I call it for now because no word exists for it any any language that I know. Granted, I only know English, Spanish, French, and Arabic, but to the best of my knowledge, solipsism is the implicit assumption in all these languages. Anti-solipsism is a phrase which the the libraries of the human language server cannot be configured for. )

The eye can never look upon itself. It can look upon a reflection, but never itself. Just as the sentence can never cognize itself. It can cognize its duplication, but never itself.

But the analogy has been stretched too thin. Like the little boy who was born dead.