All posts by anomalogue

Trees

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

When we walk on the forest floor, the part of the tree we are given at eye-level is the narrowest point, the trunk, slightly above the tree’s midpoint.

To see how the trunk spreads itself upward into the open light, we can simply turn our faces to the sky. However, to see how the trunk spreads downward, we have to dig with our hands, and come to terms with dirt and sweat. Tender leaves and delicate blossoms will not be found down there. This is where the tree braces itself against the weather and procures its nourishment. Below the ground, a tree is not fucking around: it is all business.

That’s one way to see it.

*

Through a seed, the world organizes itself into a tree.

It is also true that a seed “grows” into a tree. We know what this means. But let’s not get carried away with the usefulness of our habitual intellectual devices. Objectivity is instrumentally useful (techne), but this usefulness is true in a certain limited sense; it does not make it “the truth”. To get closer to something like “the truth” we must acclimate ourselves to a different and larger mode of knowing, a mode where we consciously articulate meaningful order out of the whole: the profoundly chaotic world we have arisen and awakened within. What is this chaos, essentially? It is akin to being an infant, or waking up from a deep afternoon nap.

Maternalization

Philosophy

For many years I was fond of pointing out something sort of awful: New mothers are the most selfish, egotistical beings in the entire world.

They see themselves as the pinnacle of altruism, selflessly sacrificing themselves to another person who is not themselves.

Obviously, that is a diaperload of crap. New mothers merely transfer their selfishness to their baby: their outrageous personal ambitions, fantasies, preoccupations. Every megalomaniacal, hyper-romantic conceit the woman wisely kept tucked within the concealment of her subjectivity explodes out of her in a massive fireball of unrestrained self-indulgence, onto this allegedly external, separate being in her arms… For all practical purposes, that baby is her. This is why new mothers are in so many cases universally reviled, even though nobody will admit it.

I always liked very much how horrible and obviously true this observation was. (I do pretty seeing; but I do ugly seeing, too. I just like truth; and when the truth is ugly I know I love truth for her mind, not for her pleasing features.)

*

Here is an example of a perspectival shift I have had on this topic.

I now see unrestrained maternal self-indulgence as the ideal transegoic experience, of entry into authentic intersubjective relationship, what I call Logos.

Postpartum depression is the destruction of a girl’s ego under pressure of maternal responsibility, which any mother will tell you is absolutely crushing. The mother undergoes biological bootcamp. She is disoriented, sleep deprived, stripped of all familiar comforts and freedoms, ordered around by the insistent cries of an imperious officer. She is broken down and built back up into a mother. The mother is no longer the girl she was. That girl could not accomplish the things the mother has to. But the mother is not a stand-alone woman. She is a participant (probably a broken one) in a new transegoic being, the mother-baby, which comprises the mother and the baby, but is not reducible to the two individuals. I’ll call this “maternalization”.

But, in exchange for this period of depression, which is nothing less than a nonintellectual analogue of philosophical perplexity, the mother gets to experience the joy of the transegoic, which is the analogue of philosophical breakthrough. She gets to feel the nestedness of being, that we are in each in We as much as each of us are I.

Mothers worship their babies like little gods because the mother-baby relationship is the first religion many mothers have experienced. Worship is the natural response.

*

That women put their children in daycare because they think they ought to want to pursue a career… it overwhelms me with misogynistic contempt. Women (on the whole) still lack independence of thought. Here is immediate, primordially intense reality revealing itself, and what does your average “liberated” woman do? She remains enslaved to general opinion, to all-too-common sense, to vanity. She’d rather appear free than to exercise authentic freedom and risk being seen as Not Independent. So, she tears her guts out, comes to work in despair, weeping… and accepts this as normal and necessary. Phuh.

(Note: Obviously, none of this vitriol applies to women who have no choice but to work, nor does it apply to women who sincerely love their careers more than their babies. I’m only talking about women who ignore what is closest in favor of what is furthest.)

Not vision

Philosophy

Imagining something vividly is not “having a vision”; nor is imagining something vaguely but intensely. 

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Very few people have a vision of anything. They’re sitting in the same seats as the rest of the audience, seeing what everyone else, seeing as everyone else sees.

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Having a vision is having a vital line of sight on something, a place where others – if they are willing – can walk and see from, too. Vision isn’t about the object. It is about the subject, and about cosubjects.

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Do you know why we all love to relax with popular fiction? Because the author is writing to an already seated audience. We can remain seated, too, where we already are. The interpretation is effortless and there is no possibility of angst.

Seeing follows looking

Philosophy

I reread the David Foster Wallace piece I posted yesterday. I thought I agreed with him, but now that I’ve reread the whole thing I realize that while I agree with his goal I disagree with him on how the goal is reached.

We do not get to choose our beliefs. We are only able to move about and see from different angles. What we see at these angles determines our beliefs for us.

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Starting with the belief you’d like to have and shifting angles in order to make the belief believable 1) is intellectual dishonest, and 2) will leave you with bad-faith “faith” that puts the heart and mind in conflict.

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If you hate what you see, your only recourse is to look differently. You cannot change your seeing directly. The seeing is determined by the looking. You have to work with your angle of sight. Take the metaphor of “perspective”, of “seeing differently”, of “insight” seriously. Stop squinting. Keep your eyes open. Get your intellect off its ass, out of its comfy chair and make it walk around its objects until the objects show themselves to you in a way that reveals new and better meaning.

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Intellectual honesty without ideals is cheap. Ideals without intellectual honesty is cheap. The marriage of intellectual honesty with ideals is more difficult and much more valuable.

Read my mind (part 2)

Philosophy

(I wrote this in 2008, but kept it private. I’m not sure why. I’m making it public now because it seems more relevant than ever.)

If the leadership of an organization is not attuned to the needs and sensibilities of those they lead, the administrative layer will thicken in compensation. Everything will have to be codified, be made explicit, denatured, formalized and mechanical. This is the consequence of leadership that leads from a thick distance, tries to objectify and functionalize those they lead.

The leadership will need everything spelled out for them and they still won’t get it.

*

For most of us it would be an improvement to be treated like a tool. A craftsman feels a tool as he works. A craftsman doesn’t just “set expectations” with the tool and demand remarkable, profitable work to happen simply because the tool is top-quality. A surgeon would never pick up his scalpel wearing thick, wool mittens.

Read my mind

Philosophy

I believe women have the sacred right to punish the men who claim to love them when those men fail to read their minds. I am not joking or being ironic.*

A man who protests that he is not able to read minds, who demands clear, explicit communication does not deserve a life with a woman. (And he’ll probably be the first to agree: “I don’t deserve this.”) If he cannot read her that means he is not really with her, attuned to her. He still sees her as an object placed within his own environment, against his individual background, to be seen “whole against the sky” — and contrary to the opinion of some of the world’s foremost experts on love, that is not love, but, rather cheap, youthful infatuation.

*

Women, especially ones who lean toward second-wave feminism, tend to be a bit confused about masculine perception. Every man, from the basest semi-animal brute to the highest culture, always and invariably responds to his kind of woman as if to an object: the meaning of the woman flows in through the man’s eyes and senses. The issue is not whether the woman is experienced as a beautiful object to a man, it is whether he experiences her as poetry or as utility. If the former is the case, the woman is a poetic object and therefore a primordially intense object-mediated subjectivity, with whom the man will be preoccupied with and to whom he will be attuned. (And the woman will not only be beautiful, she will be beauty itself, its origin, its standard, and its terminus.) If the the woman is merely useful functionally or socially or emotionally… that’s when a woman is an object in the worst way.

The unforgivable sin in marriage is for a man to fail to become so deeply attuned to his wife that he is literally spiritually one with her, completely capable of reading her mind and responding to her and to the world as an extension of their shared will. This, and nothing else, is marriage. If a man can achieve such a thing with a dog or a toaster oven, I say join the two in holy matrimony. But if a man cannot love should not be permitted make a mockery of marriage simply by submitting to the whole legal and religious wedding rigmarole and bolting his name onto that of his unfortunate female counterpart.

One last moral point: if you’re not married before you have a child, you’d better make yourself married. It is never too late. It is not enough to just stick around. You have to figure out how to love your family for real, or you are a failure as a husband and father.

(* NOTE: Not that it’s not funny.)

Dimensions of brand relationship

Brand
  • Functional: the brand as promise. The old view of brand, still legitimate in the majority of cases.
  • Communal: the brand as emblem of group-identity.
  • Personal: the brand as affirmation of moral-aesthetic priorities. (or to put it more flakily and precisely: resonance with spiritual ideals.)

These meanings are manifested in the product, practice and symbology of the brand.

For a while there I was thinking brands fell into categories corresponding with these dimensions, but now I think all three are present to some degree in every brand.

Much too much

Hermeneutics

The surviving bits of my good taste are breaking down. Now I’m quoting Nick Drake lyrics: “If songs were lines in a conversation / the situation would be fine.”

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This has been said before, but it is true enough to bear repeating: some people really are palatable only after they’re safely gone. Once they’re out of the way you can invent over them a bit, tone them down, lend them dignity, make them self-sufficient, or even invest them with power. When they’re right there with you, though, they can protest at what you’ve made of them. Or they can ask for something you are unwilling to give. And what if what you refuse is precisely that which you cannot imagine yourself refusing anyone?

As a direct result of what appears to be a universal cultural condition, these unpalatable people leave themselves behind in diluted forms, in sounds and images and words, sometimes in legends – passive forms easy to falsify and adore. Alive and close up, as a speaking face – much too much.

*

Art is an act of desperation. The rest of what we call art is craft, entertainment, stimulation and vain noise.

But not die out…

Brand

When I was in high school the English teachers would explain literature to us. They’d make big tables of symbols and the corresponding meaning of each symbol.

“Blue enamel sky” = Nature’s indifference to man’s plight. And so on.

I’d sit there wondering why Stephen Crane didn’t just write an essay and say what he meant.

*

People used to love poetry the way people now love music. They weren’t “appreciating” it. Poetry moved them.

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An explained metaphor or symbol is as effective as an explained joke. But this is how metaphor and symbol are taught to us. A student is left with the impression that something has to be concrete and objective to matter to us.

Could it be that the table-of-symbols approach to teaching literature is some sort of inoculation against religious experience?

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(Brand is the poetry of our time.)

(Brand is not a replacement for full-fledged poetry, but a spark of something.)

Phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, metaphysics

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

This morning Susan asked if I finally passed last week’s philosophical kidney stone. She says I seem to have worked something out.

I had a productive weekend. I think I figured out how phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and metaphysics fit together now as one coherent attitude toward life. I figured it out in a wordless way, though, so I can’t quite express it, yet. (I expect an image or analogy to occur, soon.) I believe this constellation of ideas is essentially liberal. I think I also see how it differs from conservatism, and especially neoconservatism.

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Good article: “What Makes People Vote Republican?” by Jonathan Haidt.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

Borges – “The Aleph”

Judaism, Philosophy

I found Borges’s “The Aleph” online and put it in my wiki. It is a portait of intersubjective betrayal.

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The theme of intersubjective betrayal is terribly important. Intersubjective betrayal is the kind of betrayal we moderns reserve as our sacred right. It is also, incidentally, the most deeply damaging kind of betrayal. According to us, our subjectivity is our private property, and being our own property we can dispose of it as we wish: we are allowed to invent; that is, we are permitted to lie arbitrarily. Unfortunately, this attitude precludes genuine love, and also authentic culture. To be honest about one’s subjective existence means to share subjectivity with another. Sharing of subjectivity is the ground of love. To be intersubjectively dishonest/”inventive” is to chop out the roots of love and to salt its soil. If you believe things have somehow gone deeply wrong in our culture, consider the possibility that the origin of the problem is the privatization of the subject.

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I see “The Aleph” as a complement to the better-known “The Secret Miracle”, which… wow – as I write this I’m realizing there’s a lot more depth to “The Secret Miracle” than I’d noticed. It is no accident that Jaromir Hladik was Jewish. At this moment the story appears to me less as a meditation on time in general, than on the Jewish understanding of time and intersubjectivity.

*

Judaism is the intersubjective religion. To speak mythically: Christianity is the slow dawning of the strange fact that the gentiles are the lost tribe.

Do you speak mythos? (Or, to put it mythically: do you have “ears that hear”?)

*

I’d much rather be insane than bored.

What I would really love: a very beautiful shared insanity, which faithfully includes everything and excludes nothing, which interrelates and orders the entirety of subjective and objective existence. Unfortunately there are very few genuine philosophers in the world, so everyone believes our current not-so-beautiful, deeply fragmented, semi-shared insanity is reality itself.

Complaints against my people

Biography, Brand

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist. I would characterize my relationship with them as hostile.

I’ve been looking back through my journal archives. Some of my posts are nothing but hot bile, but some of them are hot bile that point to themes that have become central in my life.

A post from January 2004:

The archetypal Unitarian summits the mountain by telescope. 

Another post from the same day, entitled “Uh oh,” which I completely forgot about: “Kwame just suggested that perhaps I am the perfect Unitarian.” — Someone accused me of something similar last week.

Another one from March: “I approve of the Unitarians’ hidden meanness, but disapprove of their hiding it.” 

This one, which I called “Hater” is from 2005:

I hated my high school one way, I hated my home another way, and I hated the Unitarians a third way. That was my whole hateful life before I started taking art classes.

The students at my art class played mysterious music from some other world, and I would sit there silent, stunned, painting. Many of them were gay, but I had no concept of gayness, and only found out years later.

We were all outsiders in respect to school, home and church in our own personal ways. That’s how it is in small towns. In large cities it’s all about affinities. In small towns, desperation drives you to learn abstraction: “I am like you, because neither of us are like them.”

 

A nicer post on UU was one of the last before I took my new job and entered a very different phase of my life:

Unitarianism is the religion of subjective show-and-tell. When the Unitarian exhibits his theological opinions, the others can either 1) nod with them, or 2) tolerate in silence.

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Picture Unitarianism as a venn diagram of divergent beliefs, with one microscopic overlap: “God is a matter of opinion, not debate”. This is the Unitarian ideal of “tolerance”. 

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Perennialist theologians sometimes compare religion to a mountain with various paths to the top. Most Unitarians agree with this picture of religion, because they’ve been to the top of the mountain many times, by telescope.

“God is a matter of opinion, not debate.” That is it, my core complaint: the refusal to converse past a certain boundary.

*

So what if we cannot finally know? There are other reasons to know than to definitively grasp reality. There are good reason to keep God discussable while avoiding all attempts to “capture in words” what or who God is.

(At work I keep insisting that a brand essence can only be indicated by words, but no sentence, no book – no library full of books – could be the essence of any authentic brand. Brands are essentially spiritual, and that means you see with them or by them. A graphic identity system is only a manifestation of a brand.)

*

At this moment – and I can’t explain why – to call the Unitarian-Universalists “my people” is comforting, and not despite the fact that I disagree with them so deeply on so many things. Perhaps my disagreements, as deep as they are, are nonetheless, not essential? Or perhaps when I disagreed I disagreed as a Unitarian-Universalist against Unitarian-Universalism? If I were to discover that Unitarian Universalism accommodates this depth of disagreement… and by “accommodates”, I mean actively accommodates through dialogical involvement – as opposed to theoretically permitting (a.k.a. “tolerating” or “accepting [the fact of]”) the belief.

There is no greater difference: the former is love (or at least a good, fertile kind of hate that easily transmutes to love); the latter is indifference and alienation and impotential. Genuine religion is a practice of intersubjective spirituality. Whatever speculative knowledge gets wound into the practice is mere support for this practice. Religion is not essentially a matter of beliefs – and especially not objective, reflective beliefs, which belong to the realm of physics.

So, the question for me is whether there is anyone in the Unitarian-Universalist tradition who will participate in our disagreements with me. If not, all my complaints still stand.

We don’t know anything…

Biography

You haven’t been to the top of the mountain when you’ve seen it by telescope. You can’t even say you know it, really – not essentially. Through a telescope, you can only come to know the top of the mountain objectively. You’ve only seen it from where you stand, whole against the sky. You still have not seen the rest of the world from the top of the mountain, shared the view with the top of the mountain. This seeing is the subjective essence of the mountain top. Seeing with, versus seen against.

Could this give us another way to understand that “he who isn’t with me is against me”?

*

A crucial event in my life is still a mystery to me. A strange friend handed me a slip of paper, upon which he’d typed (with a typewriter) a Rilke quote:

A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.

This passage is a diabolical lie, but if I had not read it and believed it I could have never have gotten married. Rilke, despite being an expert on love, knew nothing about love.

*

Love is sharing a world, seeing with.

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A note on our contemporary myth, Into the Wild: Christopher McCandless, being an excessively spiritual creature, played out his mind-life in concrete reality and discovered the truth about love. Then he learned another truth: he couldn’t cross back. The parents’ grief over their child’s wintery death in a witnessless hyperborea, with Sean Penn’s addition of the digestion-inhibiting herb…it’s almost plagairism.

*

We should cry a tear of gratitude for every sacred drop of mediocrity we’ve been given. We don’t want to be exceptional, we only want to be regarded as such.

Authentic uniqueness is solitary confinement in plain sight.

The amazing back-mounted collection

Fables, myths & parables

A man was carrying a large and teetering stack of objects on his back. It looked heavy, but more striking was the precariousness of it. He had it arranged so he could hoist it up to waist-level using his legs and arms, then somehow manage, through a twisting shift, to bring it around to his back. He succeeded in at least half of his attempts. Whenever he failed to pull it off, the load would collapse around him. Then he would have to painstakingly restack the whole collection and repeat his signature hoisting maneuver.

Obviously, then, he set it down as rarely as possible. He’d learned to sleep with the load balanced on his back. He could keep it all going for years at a time.

When he was younger and his body was stronger and his load was lighter he actively hunted out new objects for his amazing back-mounted collection. Now, he knew he could not accommodate a single new thing, no matter how light.

His life was now spent trudging from place to place, displaying his towering exhibit to the people. The people, however, were less impressed with the collection per se, than with the sheer immensity of it and the fact that the man could keep the whole crazy Dr. Seussian heap aloft and balanced. He was aware that for the majority who came to see him he was a mere spectacle, but he consoled himself with the belief that among the gaping crowd that there had to be a few genuine appreciators.

The only other person he ever encountered who ever obviously loved his collection, though, was a younger man he called the Pest.

The Pest followed the man around, talking incessantly and gesticulating enthusiastically. Within five minutes of meeting him the man realized with alarm that the Pest’s limbs were not entirely under his control, and his control diminished as his excitement increased. The man lived in constant fear that his collection would be upset in an especially spastic outburst of ideation.

The Pest constantly badgered the man about putting new objects on his already fully-loaded back. The man tried to be patient. He spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to the Pest that although the Pest’s objects (being empty) were relatively light, and despite their beauty and aesthetic compatibility with the collection, even the lightest and most exquisite addition would be one too many for a man with a burden as heavy and complicated as his.

Finally, one day in a fit of frustration the Pest attempted, without permission, to throw his objects (ornate boxes and cases and gold-embroidered sacks) to the top of the stack, and of course the whole thing tumbled to the ground. The last words the man said to the Pest were quiet and cold: “If you love your objects so much, stack them up on your own back and start your own collection. At any rate, get away from mine.”

The dance

Pragmatism

I do a lot of intellectual collaboration at work, and it’s helping me grasp something important about group dynamics: deep teaching and learning are often accomplished in the background unnoticed, while facts and explicit methodology are exchanged in the foreground – and mistaken for the totality of the shared knowledge.

The background can be characterized as the subjective and practical dimension of the sharing, or what I have been calling “attunement”. (I picked up the word from Heidegger, but I am using it differently, to mean an inter-subjective sharing of practice and perspective.)

Attunement can be compared with either learning to dance or inventing a dance with another. The learning is not objective, though it does involve facts. It is learning subjective “moves”, imitating another’s intellectual motions until the motions become one’s own; the new motion becomes second-nature. Then the dance can proceed semi-consciously with partners in response to the total situation, including the other subjects and the objects. The shared consciousness is unselfconsciously absorbed in its objects, until it chooses to self-reflect. The goal, however, is not bound up in the self-reflection. It is bound up in a new way to see and think and act and often also to feel.

(When I was 14 I read a book on tennis. It offered an underhanded trick for destroying your opponent’s serve. Ask your opponent to explain his serve to you. The fluid naturalness of unselfconscious practice gets entangled in self-reflection and broken into discrete pieces. Or think about learning to play a song; or learning to read a new author and hear his natural voice.)

*

The books I have always loved to read are the books in which the author dances. (The author can never be dead to me. I read because nobody is more alive and present to me than the authors I love.) Years ago I was confused and unnerved by the fact that I was rarely able to give summaries of the content of the books I’d read. It looked like I’d retained nothing, but I knew I’d retained something perfectly – I could not articulate it. I knew I’d learned it, though, because when I needed it, there it was, perfectly available for application. Now I would explain it this way: after I learn a dance I can do the dance spontaneously, but the instructions are not immediately available to recall. I have to figure them out each time. Half of my memory is amazing. The other half is nearly nonexistent.

(This bizarre quality of my memory is a major vulnerability. People regularly assume I can do things I cannot do at all, such as providing simple sequential instructions or recounting events that just happened. My normal state of mind appears to be completely different from what is considered normal. I am literally “differently abled” – handicapped, but with peculiar compensatory abilities that I’m learning to make valuable in the business world. I will never feel at home anywhere until the people around me understand and accept the fact of my inabilities and provide me the protection I need. I’ve been anxious my entire life, and I am really, really tired of feeling that way.)