Category: Essays

Death Is the Mother of Beauty

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Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. (Wallace Stevens, from Sunday Morning)

Why this confidence that technical ingenuity can drive through, over or around any obstacle? Even the dead end of death itself is seen by the more fanatic of the Techno-Utopian thinkers as a barrier that will somehow be conquered. Apparently they’ll be carried into the infinite limit of the Singularity on the backs of 72 virginity-regenerating sex robots.Read More »

You Say You Want a Revolution?

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This was published on Counterpunch, September 5, 2016.

“What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.”

— from The Man Watching, by Rainer Maria Rilke

As CJ Hopkins pointed out in Counterpunch, “… we are not yet capable of conceiving a credible alternative system [to global neoliberal capitalism], or a way to get there.”

Or maybe we conceive alternatives, but the canopy of globalization has grown so wide that it stunts their growth. The media’s floodlight shines only on a sucker’s coin of allowable alternatives: Regressive Revolution — a rabid demand for the nation to be “great again”; and Patriotic Reform — a “gentler” allegiance to American exceptionalism. Both sides of the coin bank on what no longer exists – a sovereign nation.Read More »

Alchemical Writing

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Feeling the Bones

Sometimes I wonder why I can’t stop all this burrowing into the bones of thought (as I like to think I’m doing).

But that’s when I forget what I love. I love feeling those bones, the hidden, labyrinthine structures supporting our simplistic surface consciousness. And I love encountering my own shocking assumptions, the ones I didn’t even realize I had until I started fumbling around among those bones.Read More »

A Revolution on the Periphery

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being-and-thinking

This essay appeared in Counterpunch.

I think there’s a close relationship between peripheral vision and the somewhat famous “overview effect”. The eye, after all, is an extension of the brain. Both peripheral vision and an overview imply a perception of context, which limits the distortions of self-interest.

What’s more, peripheral vision is too quick to be resisted by the ego. It’s only an immediate sensitivity to what is happening. Therefore it precedes wishful thinking. As soon as we “take sides” for or against what is noticed, then our focus has already narrowed. Therefore a peripheral vision engenders something of a suspended state (ala David Bohm). It allows contradictory ideas to sort themselves out.Read More »

The Meaning of Confidence: A Brief Appendix to Direct and Indirect Meaning

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I’d like to build this brief consideration directly on the back of Direct and Indiret Meaning.

When words, ideas, beliefs all become transparently ersatz, the question of what is real becomes extraordinarily urgent.

Where is the still point in this bending and spinning hall of mirrors that is consciousness?

When nothing that I know about myself is real, when everything is only a story, whose narrative lines are always being bent by ferocious headwinds of fight and flight, by a desire for admiration, where do I find a foundation upon which to live a confident and humane life?Read More »

Direct and Indirect Meaning (Being and Constructing)

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The first 14 essays tried to “come to terms” with the limitations of language. By extension this included all of thought and imagination – the whole category of construct-making.

How can we discover the “limitations” of something that covers the whole of experience? An all-enveloping fluid from which we can’t leap free, like lucky fish?

In Part II of “Imagine the Limits of the Imagination” I suggested that this can be done by considering the category of “odd words”:

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
— Wislawa Szymborska

Read More »

Limited Infinities

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infinity-hatching-larger-infinities

The reader is being reimagined. While this is happening, I’ll shake my notebooks free of the rejected scraps of previous essays.

After that, maybe a new phase can begin. A phase in which writing plays second fiddle to something I can’t really name. I’m not a writer and I have no intention of being hitched to any writerly discipline.

The commitment to a discipline feels narrowing. An intentional commitment feels like I’m putting on blinders and being yoked to a practice that promises its own enticing infinity. An infinity within a narrowing frame.Read More »

Footnote to “Ritual”: Four Elements of a Kaleidoscopic (or Ritualized) Perspective

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elephant in nature

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This is a footnote to Ritual.

More coherent modes of language arise when the following perspectives are realized (at the very least):

1) We each see different parts of the proverbial elephant.

This suggests parallel truths. A multiverse. Each infinite and also limited.

2) We look with different levels of magnification. A microscopic vision of the elephant’s trunk at the cellular level is not more true than a macroscopic vision of the trunk as a whole. They are relevant to different contexts.

This makes it easy to suspend judgement.

3) The elephant is a moving target. The trunk we describe is already a different shape. Reality changes as we learn. I go into this a little more in Ritual, part II, in the section titled “The Simplifying Potential of Negative Language.”

This is a humbling perspective.

4) Wildest of all: The elephant we perceive is actually not the elephant itself. But I think a distinction needs to be made between actuality (the “holomovement,” the creativity of nature itself), and reality (the “things” we abstract from actuality as information, perceptions, theories or thoughts).

If we understand this in our bones, then there is no alienation. Then the world becomes sacred in the absence of religion.Read More »

Footnote to “Ritual”: Matter and Meaning

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brown and black animal shape artwork painting

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This is a footnote to The Epiphany of No Purpose and to Ritual.

“[T]here is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

A Place for Words

I’m hoping the word “epiphany” carries a bathetic meaning. I hope it signifies a “ludicrous descent from the exalted to the commonplace.” But in this case a descent from the high horse of a ludicrous certainty to the banal wisdom of uncertainty. Being dis-illusioned in the best sense.

The epiphany doesn’t have a pedagogic purpose either. It’s only a moment without resistance to one’s folly. A receptive mentality. But not a proscribing or self-help mentality. Therefore without ulterior purpose. Banal in its own way. At least from the standpoint of conventional wisdom, which tends to picture a dumb blankness in the absence of knowing.Read More »

Ritual, Part II: Bewitching, Initiating and Ritualized Languages

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This continues from where Ritual, Part I, left off:

“The illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality. To end this illusion requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

The Reductive Bewitchment of a Literal Language

The literal mood of language is necessary for carrying out almost any practical work. It’s dominant in following a blueprint (a legitimate authority), or in honing a craft. And it plays a subordinate role in art, teaching techniques for working in any medium.

In its “proper” context this language could be described as “positive”, “practical” or “technical.” In a utilitarian context the connection between the useful thing one describes (such as the word “hammer”) and the hammer itself is so close that almost all awareness of the meta-level functionality of words recedes (or never develops).

The witchery begins when a literal language spills over into conventional life; when it’s used to talk about ideas – about opinions, goals, and identities. Then opinion posits itself as a literal description of material reality. Fixed. Truth. Not mere opinion.Read More »