The permission of red things

Imagine this space red.

“I was thinking of someone …”

“I was thinking of someone and looking at two ball point pens neatly arranged side by side on my desk and it struck me that there was me and her.  She was the red pen, I was the black.”

Card Games

The merely rational is a solution to nothing.  One has to think strategically .. To say that life is a rational wilderness identifies rationality as a small almost helpless creature living in the wild, like a mouse except that its world is imagination-derived rather than the result of any natural environment.

Life’s idiom, the biblical image of a lost Eden, recalls the wilderness we left in an unprecedented act of forgetting so long ago: home as an act of forgetting but that survives only as a vague idea of sex and silk sheets and dark nights.  As in a card-game, with human wit pitted against chance, the ‘recovery’ of that original sense is an illusion created by the game and maintained for as long as it is played so that everything accessory to it, the table one happens to be sitting at, the people and their paper party hats, the tea, the atmosphere, the season, the celebration … out of a chaos a house emerges, and it stays in memory, but a wind blows through; everything scatters; it is a house of cards.

In the random ’play’ to be found in the war’s midst: the mouse of rationality.  But politics wants to refuse it to everything.  There is a fight: bullets are fired and swords are drawn.  The idealised kingdom fades into wallpaper and the rustle of plastic sticking out of the bin in the yard.  (“Who saw me?”)  Pockets of war disrupt the righteousness of a tin can.  Dogs bark.  Owls twoo.  So what is wanted is that the rational world follow the zoid of straight line whereas the truth is a wilderness – .

The Outfit

One is ruled by image; everything is appearance.  This fact, documented by novelists; since it informs their observational material in large part; raises the question of how then, it is so vague to us, how it is so ill-seen, such a cloud of nothing, that here lies the dictator, posing in the mirror and setting out its terms of necessity.  The ‘triviality’ of it perhaps distracts us from acknowledging the power thereby hidden in its blank cheque of meaning; so it is not factored in - it doesn’t register – as a thing in itself – but is acknowledged to exist only in so far as it impinges on the social network that supports us, since – in such terms – it plays a significant dynamic role in the context of the values, judgements and decisions that politicians make on our behalf in so far as a kind of defensive manoeuvring is then undertaken on its behalf.

Many strange or baffling or seemingly inexplicable or obtuse political decisions can probably be explained by this dynamic.

The Crack in Space

Can one say this, that the world one doesn’t originate, which is (nominally or, if you like, in appearance, ontologically) the actual or objective world, the world that exists in itself, is as a desire a kind of crack in space, there is where the homelessness of the truth is found, this is where one bleeds.

I know that saying that wont be understood but let it stand.

0 (Nought).

We live in an age without history, an age without context. 

This is a mannerless age.

‘Infection’ runs abroad.  One behaviour destroys another.

If happiness is an unattainable image, a spectre of the mind, that is because of a painful stupidity and a simple reason.  It is because - to take my own case – I am not in myself but, as myself, I am purely social : a being without origin.  Because of this happiness is cast like a rainbow beyond every sense but sight, untouchable but yet real too.

The seeking of happiness through others engages us in instrumentalising them inadvertently.  This burdening of others with responsibility for creating one’s own happiness.  The argument is not that solitude is the solution to happiness, but a sense of purpose that depends on no-one but oneself.

1. Unhappiness

Maybe I’m nothing but a shadow on the wall.  (Pere Ubu)

Nothing in my life is an end in itself.  Nothing is enough.

All I see is machinery, wheels turning; automatons.

A wholly faceless, instrumentalised world; hell in fact. 

Imagine.  How I am cast out of the world.

A big big H.  Unhappiness.

2. The Moment of Actuality

I will attempt to suggest something of what is at stake in this series of observations by the following remark.  (If the below comments are read sequentially, or in the reverse order to which they were made, they can be read as a philosophical argument.)  Suppose I am happy.  What does this ‘gain in freedom’ mean?  My world is complete.  I want for nothing.  The things I have, that I do, the people I know, all is sufficient, good, more than fruitful, for my life is a plenitude, an ego-less elation; to have it is enough and yet I can never have enough.  No fissures, stress points, broken pieces, no trauma, nothing is uncalculated or unseats this feeling … I enjoy everything.

3. “The Real Reason”

A very simple distinction exists in civic life, but which is often overlooked or misunderstood.  This is the distinction between things that are to be regarded as ends in themselves; and things that are to be valued instrumentally.  A human being is an end unto himself.  A block of wood is a means to an end.  In this aspect our civilisation is plagued by what might be called failures of the moment.  There are obvious instances of this plague.  I mean, instances of when the present moment fails to be alive.  For example we say, “The real reason why …”  Thus, “The real reason why A is attracted to B is hormonal.”   There is reason’s foundation, we think: in the objective world.  (Another way of putting this would be to say that we think that this is where the idea of home is to be instituted: that this sort of factuality is the rock that human existence needs to be built on.)  It instrumentalises the person.  A point is reached at which the person ceases to be understood, or fails to be perceived, as an end in themselves.  “The real reason why …” (Ultimately, “The reason why we are the master race is …”) “The real reason why women get married is to be looked after by their husbands.  Really, a form of legalised prostitution.”

4. The Present Moment (2)

Very often, we say, in making cause with an explanation of what is going on with something, words to the effect that what is really happening is … : “It is not really that …” – “What’s actually happening is —”  – “What is in fact happening .. is” …  On the nature of thought for example.  The inclination is to say, “I am not really ‘thinking’ when I think; because when I think what is actually happening is that there are synapses at work, there is neuronal activity, which is the actual stuff or substance of thought – rather than merely what I call thinking or ’thinking itself.’”   Suppose we put it like this.  It is as if with this kind of discussion the present moment fails us.  Someone telling me a story, the story is intelligible; I can even see it in their eyes: the whole story is there!   They don’t speak in perfect sentences, they leave out many details, they often use annoyingly ambiguous pronouns, maybe a few facts get mixed up, put back to front – but then I understand it all.  Imagine that it is about something quite banal, for example a typical ordinary trip to the supermarket.  I understand them!  I don’t need anything else some sort of oscilloscope set collared up with a lie detector, with its leads attached to their heads and wrists to monitor the hidden but thus detectable physical truth.  I don’t need a data sheet that sets out in a report the inner workings of their minds, in psychologese.   I don’t need to understand the laws of causation.  All I need to do to understand them is to look at their eyes, or perhaps look along the street in the same direction as they are looking, to accompany their mood and be in sympathy with them. 

Nothing else.  Here I want to say that I am completely at home with this person, I fully understand them.  Why, then, should ‘thought’ ever be anything other than we take it to be at any given moment?  How is it that, sometimes, it is actually or seems to be actually something else - foreign, unknown? 

I perpetually stand one answer in place of another, on and backwards, down and down, but thus am I homeless.  Foreign to the world, not in a benign way but stupidly, at a loss.