The Literal Truth

Early period Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.

The Adventures of Odysseus are better than The Adventures of Bilbo Baggins.  Flat cartoons are better than three dimensional …

Why is it more interesting to say “There you will find the desert” - the void - than “There you will find djinns”? 

The mirage condenses into a - fantasy.  Towers, castles and princesses.  The intangible is literalised; anthropomorphised.  Nothing that isn’t part of the human image remains.  The ‘escape’ is only an escape back into the human image.

The first Pink Floyd is just psychedelia.  No image condenses from it.  Sense is suspended in the intangible inordinate.

Early Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.

Sherbet

This morning ten minutes before sunrise the sky a huge orange blade horizon to horizon, faintly ominous, unnatural-looking.  Above that, tinge of pink (colour?) the same - horizon to horizon.  Watched the orange turn grapefruit then lemon, then sherbet, then just pale.  15 minutes = sun shining.

The Hidden Wheel

A coffee shop.  Two glass sides.  On the left hand side reflections.  Directly to the front, the glass doors.  Closed now to the cold air.   Conical form of the paper cup.  Hemisphere of the china cup in its saucer.  The table flat.  Inspect its grain.  Plastic wood.  Fine plastic grain, like untreated pine of some sort perhaps, but that isn’t it, no varnished just bare smooth wood.  A glass.  Beer in the glass, no tea.  Just three bubbles where the liquid’s surface meets the glass edge.  Inspect the rim of the glass.  Slight pink tinge from the lights above reflected and outside the shop, the cafe, the long pink sign of a hairdressers.  Stone set in the floor.  Under each glass panel a steel support fixed with screws every yard, approximately.  In the picture on the wall behind the counter that takes up approximately 50% of its upper half, a huge green wheel, which on further inspection turns out to be the close up of a brooch fixed to someone’s black well-groomed hair.

… Marginal Potencies of the Absolute

The Number 1.

 The bubbles on beer.

Reflections.

The granularity of surfaces.

The rim of a glass.

How to Write a Poem in Seventeen Parts

 *

Fibreboard people

Talk while

They walk in

Folded lines

Suspended over a

Chasm

* 

Something unexpected has happened.  After many years of rigidly adhering to the principle - or the practice let’s call it - of not doodling I now find that I habitually doodle whenever I have a spare moment and pen or pencil and paper to hand.  Doodling and travelling by train inform the central questions of a life as ceaselessly mysterious to me as numbers.  Office space has reached a kind of high tide; it laps at my body real as opposed to imaginary introducing itself as the true element of thought in tangled and wavy lines that seem to hang in the air for unexpected periods of inactivity.  The thing is, I find them interesting.  Not so much because these scribbles suggest a key to the unconscious as much as because they are simply aesthetic.  Each doodle seems to represent a mental disengagement: a cessation of fatuity.  Something that I could never consciously plan but that all the same emerges indifferently, whenever I stop for anything.  Discontinuous.  That is the virtue of these lines.  The avoidance of linear thought.  Nothing is represented.  Just a bare tangle. 

A thorn bush. 

It is in the process that energy is concentrated, I find.  Here is another image.  A fireman’s hose, if I may.  If thinking is to be compared to digestion than its product is energy; and energy is only energy as directed: like the water out of a fireman’s hose obviously but in order to spray, to put out, the ether.

A rose head.

The knock - the knock came at the door - at the door it came sharply.  Three, like three fingers.  Followed by a long silence.  Steps on a tiled floor.   As of heeled shoes.  Were they angry?  What were their thoughts?  They sounded cold and heartless, those steps, like the cracks of a whip, but perhaps they weren’t; perhaps in that hollow sound one would find a warm heart, a smile?  The pause extended.  Three steps; but to another door.  Rat a tat tat!  Silence.  Out the back window nothing but the trees and rain and the sodden ground.

A compass eye.

A pond green with algae, sometimes it’s as thick as flock wallpaper: or the green of plastic; such as a mat one finds in a gymn.  One could almost walk on it.  Today, after much rain, the green has thinned.  Water is visible and clear, black under it, fresh and deep.  Two ducks, mallard and female, make their way across it in companionable silence.   The shoots of lillies mark their side of the pond like head-dresses.

The oiled feather.

*

Open shut

Horse

Trading lanes

Fibreboard people

Talk while

They walk

Rebel

Ask yourself.  Why exercise restraint - ?  Why not “go for it”?

“The writing is eating up my self” says Iggy of his divorce.  Thinking about what he should do he finishes up with: “I am not going to take any more shit; not from anybody.”

Why not just go for broke?  Cut loose?  Rebel?   Rebel absolutely?  Leave?  Free the rope?  Abscond?

Why should one not be absolute?  Be absolute!  Make that decision to rally one’s forces once and for all.  Be certain.

This is me: “I am going to stop explaining myself.”

Sub specie

Infinity defines the human condition …

There is the moral principle; we exist in the context of infinity.

As too with the aesthetic: that is infinity’s sensation.

If I act, in what context can I act in but the context of infinity?

Thus moral sense is.  Thus meaning.  The sensation exists in us that however small it is as an act, it is a world.

“Tell me the truth!”

… Suppose that “nothing matters”.   Suppose that “God doesn’t exist.”  Suppose that nothing is comprehensible; suppose that in the final analysis it all means nothing.  All the death and suffering.  Suppose that reason is a kind of human fantasy.  Suppose that what we have just disappears.  Suppose all this, so that it is only this that we have: how in the end this is what ‘what is’ finishes in.  It is all just the moment and like that it goes.  As in the moment all is forever past.  Nothing is; so nothing will remain of me or you or anyone else; suppose that one day it will be as if the human species never existed.  Suppose that love doesn’t survive … In each case I can say, what I am supposing is (in effect) a kind of clock.  I am supposing that one day the clock will stop.   “It is a clock; the clock will stop.”  Why?  Because ”Clocks need winding.”

This is a finite view of life but it is the one that we seem to decide on because it seems to answer to reason.  But it situates everything inside the space of a wind up device.

Just as in medieval times they thought the sky a broad arch with holes in it through which the rain would come …

Even though a moral act, the act by which we live, defies it …

Even the least, the most infinitesimal sensation …

Infinity: Where is It?

A worm in the rain: does it occupy infinity?  Is that why birds sing?  To make the incorrigible real.  Life is a two way street.  Infinity Street.  For Finite lives on it too: on Finite Street = this world, which is wholly ordinary.  Infinity … Picture someone with their eyes in bandages, throwing a dart at a dartboard.  Bulls-eye! In either case - someone says - it, the finite, stands on infinity’s foundation - exists on its basis - .  Like a shell on a beach.  After all the infinite must be bigger (much bigger) than the finite, they say; obviously it must contain the finite.

But why that way round especially?  Why not, in the finite, in the mere ordinary object before me, the mere pencil, infinite extension? - why not in its length of eight inches, including the rubber affixed to its end, which is the pencil’s ‘dart flight’, why not the inverse infinity of finitude?  Another world? 

… So - but supposing that, if it is to be seen, infinity requires (like the blindfolded dart-player) some sort of quantum sense, that if it is to be detected it needs a special kind of intuition … isn’t that requirement irrational? - So that we seem obliged to say of whatever is infinite that it is also infinitely incomprehensible - except by occult means.  If infinity is not to be finitely understood, again: what is it?  The ruler does and doesn’t contain its incommensurable length.  We draw a blank.  Yet reason proposes it.  Infinity: “The ruler is not a ruler - but the ruler is a ruler!”   You can’t be wrong without being right.  For neither is neither but both are both - at the same time!  Nothing but Something.  This but That. 

Upstream at downstream.  Front of back.  Forwards in reverse.

… All metaphysical confusion arises as a result of this: that is, the compulsion to think on absolutes confronts us with infinity.

As a child riding on the back seat of the family car, I would shut my eyes and think myself into the sensation that the forward motion was backwards.  Shadows would pass over my closed eyes forwards but I would see them backwards.  Lying on a bed staring at the wardrobe it took only a second to think myself standing upright and the wardrobe sideways …

Metaphysical Objectivity.

What is ‘objectivity’?  Its invocation seems to suggest the world itself, the ‘absolute’.  But if we speak of the absolute as an objective idea, of the world - this seems to be the same thing - how is that absolute?  Well, but oughtn’t there to be an absolute?  When someone says: “That is objectively real”?    When you or I say: “The world is objectively real.”

The language game seems of secondary concern to its thought, so that any admission that this ‘purely’ objective world is a metaphysical illusion generated by supposing that it is not a language game would seem to be quite wrong.  The sense that objectively the world exists only in the terms in which the word means ”true” or “false”, or “real” or “unreal” and so on of a given ordinary instance seems (as it were) the mere shadow of the ideal that we aim at, so is it set it to one side. 

The Ownership of the Actual

Is it true?  Is objectivity a matter of who owns it?

What kind of world does a flea die into?

Objectivity says: this is a world of rational limit.

And it is - to rationality.  But a flea is not a rational being.

It is fundamental to things that they are ‘wild’.

Of course.  And the rationality of the human estate does not remove the wilderness from human reality.  It simply means we are capable of creating worlds that imagination can own.

What doesn’t exist

I am inclined to say that this world exists because of what doesn’t exist.  Yet how can what is borrow from what isn’t?

As though actuality rests on wholly ethereal foundations!