Category Archives: Biography

Reading plans

Biography, Phenomenology

I finally finished Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology late last night.

Thinkers like Kant, Guenon, Hursserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Bernstein and (to some extent) Voegelin tend to clarify and articulate things I’ve already tacitly practically grasped. Reading them helps me account for myself to others. (This is important especially for work. I am never coming at things from the normal angle, so I always have a lot of explaining to do, at least until I win the trust of people I work with. My dream situation is to be that guy who is called in where people are unable to find any angle at all by which a problem can be grasped. There isn’t even a question that can be asked, much less answered. That’s home for me. As Wittgenstein said “A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.”)

However,  the rarer thinkers who really nourish and energize me are the ones who throw me into states of alternating disorientation and insight that demand words, pictures, poems, myths. These are the thinkers who change you, sometimes radically, when you understand them… as a condition of understanding them at all. They keep the whole intellectual project firmly rooted in Why.

I’d planned to jump into Richard Rorty next, but now I think I might need to do a tour of Nietzsche again, and see how he reads for me now that I’ve acquired new modes of understanding and articulating. I do not believe he will blow me apart into inexplicable ecstatic insights like he used to. That makes me a little sad, but at the same time I am satisfied that I am making real progress.

Twos

Biography, Fables, myths & parables, Pragmatism

I used to feel ecstatic riding my bicycle, knowing that this beautiful, simple machine, powered by my own body, could carry me anywhere I chose. I could go to work, or I could pass right by work and travel all the way to Tennessee, or deep into the north. I’d fantasize about maintaining a secret storehouse with all the tubes, tires, chains and spare parts I’d need for a life-time. I’d be free forever.

Now I ride my bicycle and I know that with each bump the frame is gradually weakening. The chain and all the parts are slowly corroding and grinding themselves down against each other. The tires are unrolling themselves into the road like tape, leaving an invisible path of rubber particles everywhere I go. I will need to replace it, bit by bit, by pieces made by other people. Maybe someday no original parts will remain, and this bicycle will exist as a tradition. I am riding over streets made by people, to places valuable solely because of the people there. And what is going on in my body? It is corroding, sickening, healing, weakening, strengthening, replacing its own substance, but its terminus is inevitable. As I ride, I rethink and resurrect the words of people who wrote and died, and I think about living people. And the things I think and have rethought in reading are meant to be told – they demand telling – if someone can hear them.

*

If humankind were to perish I’d want no part of what remained. We are in this together; and if we can learn to accept and love this inescapable fact (and stop trying to fantasize ourselves out of it), we can seize our freedom to make our time here together easier to love. Life is still vast.

*

Space repeats itself in time. Each moment contains the entirety of space. Space and time repeats itself in each subject. Each subject contains the entirety of space and time. We are forced through time and we move about in space. What about subject, I and We? Can we “move” there? Have you moved or been moved in the interlapping being of an other?

*

An admittedly weird digression:

Hermes was the messenger of the Olympian gods who moved infinitely quickly, at the speed of thought. What sort of messages do you suppose he transmitted? Facts?

Janus, the double-faced Roman god of doors, was related to Hermes, and I think he can provide us a clue. From Wikipedia:

Historically, however, Janus was one of the few Roman gods who had no ready-made Greek counterpart, or analogous mythology. We can find in Greece Janus-like heads of gods related to Hermes, perhaps forming a compound god: Hermathena (a herm of Athena), Hermares, Hermaphroditus, Hermanubis, Hermalcibiades, and so on. In the case of these compounds it is disputed whether they indicated a herm with the head of Athena, or with a Janus-like head of both Hermes and Athena, or a figure compounded of both deities.

I enjoy the question of what divine thoughts moved through the split brain of Janus? Was it an inner dialogue? Was there a witnessing consciousness somewhere above or below? Was he of two minds, or one… or three…?

Nietzsche’s mask

Biography, Philosophy

One of the themes I’ve indexed on my wiki is the mask:

One of the most striking passages is from Beyond Good and Evil:

Everything profound loves a mask; the most profound things even have a hatred for image and parable. Might not nothing less than the antithesis be the proper disguise for the shame of a god walking abroad? A questionable question: it would be odd if some mystic had not already risked something to that effect in his mind. There are occurrences of such a delicate nature that one does well to cover them up with some rudeness to conceal them; there are actions of love and extravagant generosity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give the eyewitness a sound thrashing: that would cloud his memory. Some know how to cloud and abuse their own memory in order to have their revenge at least against this sole confidant:–shame is inventive. It is not the worst things that cause the worst shame: there is not only guile behind a mask–there is so much graciousness [Gute] in cunning. I could imagine that a human being who had to guard something precious and vulnerable might roll through life, rude and round as an old green wine cask with heavy hoops: the refinement of his shame would want it that way. A man whose shame is profound encounters even his destinies and delicate decisions on paths which few ever reach and whose mere existence his neighbors and closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger [Lebensgefahr] is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life [Lebens-Sicherheit]. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and to be silent and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends; and supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there–and that this is good. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life that he gives. —

 

Marys and Marthas

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism

As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.

I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.

*

Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.

Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.

*

We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.

*

I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.

Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.

*

There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.

*

How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.

*

Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?

New brand

Biography, Brand

A premise for a book: 1) Brand theory is evolving, because brand itself is evolving. We are not deepening our understanding of something constant. We are reflecting on something that is rapidly evolving and our thinking reflects the change: the relationship between customers and companies in a cultural environment centered with increasing exclusivity on production and consumption of salable goods and service. There is no time and even less energy for anything but this, and we humans, the spiritually insuppressible and resilient beings we are, learn to love and humanize what we are unable or unwilling to escape. 2) This new kind of brand relationship originated in the relationship between fans and their bands that existed in the proto-alternative music of the 80s and early 90s, and came to prominence as gen-x became more influential in the market as producers and consumers. The new brands owe more to the Pixies and Pavement than to Tide and Geritol. The old brands were mere functional promises. The new brands are more richly dimensional and help support personal and social identity.

Not by choice

Biography, Brand

Our heroes, who move us in paradoxical awe and pity, have never chosen this way of being.

*

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s the misfit kids were indignant when their bands were adopted by the mainstream. I think it was like this: the mainstream could have chosen otherwise – it just helped itself to something novel that happened to be there. The mainstream would equate its consumption of yet another variety of entertainment with our need for what we experienced as art, as a rare and precious sense of belonging.

I think when we pulled that move of dismissing an artist’s later work (“That first album was great, but…”), we were attempting to preserve a brand relationship. We severed our relationship with the band as it exists in the present – and even with the band’s past work as it is discovered in the present. The new brand relationship was having been there at the time it was happening: having the right to enjoy the band nostalgically. We learned how to do this, and did it repeatedly, constantly, as our desperate alternative to an unacceptable existence became the consumer category Alternative Music.

Then we became ashamed of hanging our identities on bands at all. Sonic Youth decided to like Madonna and hip hop, and that seemed like a good way to go. We tried to like sports, and we wore baseball caps. We looked for guilty pleasures that could democratize us a little. We loosened our grips, opened our hands, went out into the market…

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.

–

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”. 

–

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.

*

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.