He looks like a client of mine, and I really liked that guy.

I’ve listened to it about 35 times today.

I think it is likely that the middle act of Adaptation is just as distorted by Charlie’s psychological fantasies as the last act is by Donald’s. I need to watch it again with that in mind, looking for a psychological seam between the first act and the second.

I love Charlie Kaufman.

I suspect I read this somewhere: Writing is the desperate art of keeping oneself company.

If you are an epic pain in the ass everything depends on finding people for whom you are worth the trouble.

This morning I found the fundamental idea of my current favorite diagram in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. I’ve also found it in Voegelin and Frank.

“Allow me to tell you one little anecdote, gentlemen,” Miusov said impressively, with a peculiarly majestic air. “Some years ago, soon after the coup d’etat of December, I happened to be calling in Paris on an extremely influential personage in the Government, and I met a very interesting man in his house. This individual was not precisely a detective but was a sort of superintendent of a whole regiment of political detectives – a rather powerful position in its own way. I was prompted by curiosity to seize the opportunity of conversation with him. And as he had not come as a visitor but as a subordinate official bringing a special report, and as he saw the reception given me by his chief, he deigned to speak with some openness, to a certain extent only, of course. He was rather courteous than open, as Frenchmen know how to be courteous, especially to a foreigner. But I thoroughly understood him. The subject was the socialist revolutionaries who were at that time persecuted. I will quote only one most curious remark dropped by this person. ‘We are not particularly afraid,’ said he, ‘of all these socialists, anarchists, infidels, and revolutionists; we keep watch on them and know all their goings on. But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people. The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.’ The words struck me at the time, and now they have suddenly come back to me here, gentlemen.”

— Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I keep posting a story then pulling it down again. It is an ugly story, but it is not merely ugly. Things are beautiful from where I stand, but if you don’t stick with me long enough to see as I see, my outlook appears horrifying. Really, my perspective is necessarily horrifying. The entire point of my outlook is to include precisely what is universally excluded in the name of goodness, beauty, taste, optimism, etc.

After years of my kind of experimental seeing-and-digesting, it has gotten to the point that “sticking with me” is far too much to ask of anyone, even of a friend. Nevertheless, I ask anyway. It is painful to have to ask for such a thing, much less to be told “no” and to be reminded of the legal limits of “friendship”, or to be told “yes” and to be indulged or tolerated.

I’ve developed all sorts of sneaky ways of communicating with the unwilling. (I have to do my job.) It’s like feeding a baby.

*

If you cherish independence and individuality, at least follow me this far:

1) Do not fully exercise your independence and individuality or you will lose them. Genuine, radical, faithful, active individuality self-destructs. Instead be moderate and stop a little short. Think your thoughts against “the herd” to your heart’s content – but think them in the accepted manner of the herd. Especially protect yourself from the influence of any other individual. Remain comfortably “unique”. Once you cross over into genuine individuality you might find yourself unable to cross back over into the world of individualism. Even if you do get back, you’ll starve for authentic company. People will be around you, but they will not be with you.

2) If you know how to read, be careful who you read.

3) People do not love what they would love to believe they love. Some people are much easier to love as memories. A memory does not resist fictionalization.

I’d love to meet someone who knows my kind of heartbreak:

A reality is shared between you and an Other; but then the other changes and the reality is no longer shared.

The Other comes to you with a radically different reality and retroactively disinterprets the reality you once shared in a new, alien and alienating light. Faith is entirely a matter of practicing truth; what is practiced now is apartness, estrangement. What was shared cannot even be recalled. The relationship is annulled – annihilated not only in the present and future but also in the past.

In my experience, this estrangement is felt generally before it can even be traced back to the particular Other who has effected the estrangement. The entire world darkens, the nerves lose their protecting skin. Something is wrong. (I believe this sense of general wrongness was how Jesus knew he had been betrayed by one of his disciples.)

A search for novelty that terminates in an already well-established truth is the best outcome. Genuine, radical novelty isolates; it makes one alien and insulting; it is unbearably lonely. An original new way to see or say something familiar invests the familiar with new energy and depth, and is welcome in the world. Not that we should abandon the search for the new – but we ought to accept the gift of reinvention when it comes to us.

*

Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

– Rumi

 *

“The advantage of a bad memory is that, one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.” – Nietzsche

It is easy to enter the realm of idealism through the gate of solipsism. But once you pass through that gate, who is there to follow out? Whose testimony has validity? You cannot leave this realm with your self; and if you will not leave your self, you will remain behind as a sovereign self-reflection.

When people feel “powerful” they can mean quite a few things. Some of them are not even actual powers with practical potential, but ephemeral sensations of powerfulness. Genuine power is demonstrated in application: what can it do? Here is a partial typology of powers, both imagined and real:

1) Power to inflict pain – sadistic power – the capacity to steal energy directly from another.

2) Power to coerce – tyrannical power – the capacity to render another will strictly instrumental to one’s own.

3) Power to evade other powers – freedom – the capacity to at least feel that one’s own will is independent and unrestricted by other wills in all relevant categories of action.

4) Power to understand – philosophy – the capacity to at least feel that through one’s intellectual efforts one is brought to an experiences of self-sovereignty.

5) Power to persuade – charisma – the capacity to harmonize other wills with one’s own will (to form consensus).

6) Power to organize desires into unities – leadership – the capacity to synthesize individual wills within one’s own overarching will (to align disparate interests).

7) Power to transcend – The capacity to identify one’s will with a will that includes and exceeds it, and to participate knowingly as a participant in what defies objective knowledge.

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” – Aldous Huxley

True; but I’d still say an intellectual is interesting to the degree that he finds sex interesting.

It may be stupid, but at least it is decently stupid to misunderstand and reject myth. What is indecently stupid is to misunderstand and accept myth.

This indecent stupidity comes in two strains, one phobic and the other counter-phobic: 1) fundamentalism, and 2) psychologization of myth, a la Joseph Campbell.

The commonality of the two strains is also two-fold. They share: 1) a stunted intellectuality dominated by a narrow conception of knowledge as explanation; and 2) a preoccupation with religion experienced primarily as a form of libidinous power, fascinating because it defies explanation. The fundamentalist wants to harness that power (which is alarming) and the psychological mythicist wants to disarm and diffuse it (which is boring). And of course, there are also those disordered souls who have both attitudes toward myth simultaneously, and spasmodically push and pull against it according to their current orientation (which is embarrassing). This type is common in the New Age community.

These three types all have “spiritual” self-identities, but are the furthest thing from spiritual. They lack depth, and they lack the will to know what depth is.

*

People who want life explained to them should study science. People who find God incomprehensible ought to be (cautious) atheists.

When I am in charge, the accuracy of watches will be limited to +/- 15 minutes. They will be designed to speed up, slow down, jump forward, stop and start randomly throughout the day.

Punctuality will go the way of small pox.

Business habitually adopts philosophical language with very specific, subtle and valuable meanings, softens the meaning, and reduces the words to banal synonymity. Precisely what most needs saying cannot be said.

1) Each; 2) Sentence; 3) Is; 4) Reduced; 4.a) To; 4.a.i.) A; 4.b) Series; 4.b.i) Of; 4.c.) Discrete; 4.d.) Words.

• The
• Format
  • Is
  • As
• Inhospitable
• To
  • Meaning
• As
• The
  • News.
    • Separated
    • and
    • decontextualized

  everything

  1. is
  2. synonymous.