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, 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 home we left in an unprecedented act of forgetting so long ago.  As in a card-game, with human wit pitted against chance, the ‘recovery’ of that original sense is an illusion created by the game but maintained only for as long as it is played.  Out of the chaos a house emerges, but a wind blows through; everything scatters; it is a house of cards.

Rationality survives only in the random ’play’ to be found in the war’s midst.  But politics wants to refuse this.  An idealised kingdom of ends is presupposed.  “Pockets of war disrupt the play.”   So what is wanted is the rational world that the play inhabits whereas the truth is a wilderness - .

The Outfit

One is ruled by a mirror image; I mean, by concerns about social appearance.  This fact, well documented by novelists; since it forms much of their observational material that people are vain and trivial, raises the question of how then, is it so vague to us, how is it so ill-seen, such a cloud of nothing, that here lies the dictator, posing in the mirror?  Its ‘triviality’ perhaps persuades us from acknowledging the power thereby hidden in that blank mistachioed sad face; so it is not factored in to the politics of life - that is, so that it doesn’t register as a reality.  In any case it makes us impractical in how we think of ourselves that such oversight should be normal.  There is almost no detachment from social self-image but within the supposition that that is irrelevant - !

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. 

So that this is and should be called 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 am, as myself, a social image: without origin.  Because of this the image of happiness is cast like a rainbow beyond every sense but sight, untouchable but yet real too.

To seek happiness in others is to engage in a form of inadvertant instrumentalisaton.  What I mean is, to burden others with the responsibility for creating one’s happiness.  So I am not arguing that solitude is the solution to happiness, but for 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 encountered 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” …  Suppose the issue to be of 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.’”  “Thinking, when you think about it, doesn’t really exist.”  This is what we do when we do philosophy; we think to ourselves, find ourselves inclined to say these strange things and then in a tone as if it made perfect sense announce what is what with the firmness of a scientist announcing a scientific fact.  “Electrical impulses, these sorts of events - they are what is actually in my head.”  They are the true objectivity or reality - we think.  This is what is actually going on underneath life’s subjective surface: it is not what seems but what is: again, this is actuality.  (It is as if I don’t know what I do when I think!)  Suppose I put it like this.  It is as if with this kind of discussion the present moment fails us.  It is as if what is in front of us isn’t enough.  I look at someone telling me a story, I look at their eyes; the story is absolutely intelligible and I can even see it in their eyes: the whole story!   Perhaps they don’t speak in perfect sentences, and perhaps they leave out details, and use annoyingly ambiguous pronouns, maybe a few facts get mixed up, put back to front - but I understand it all.  The story tells me everything I need to know.  It is complete in itself.  Imagine that it is about something quite banal, very mundane, for example, a trip to the supermarket.  I understand them!  I don’t need anything else in order to understand them, what is actually going on, 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? 

The answer can be put very succinctly.  What I discover, what strikes me, when I find myself casting about like this, unable really to convince myself of the reality of anything I know, but perpetually standing one answer in place of another, on and backwards, down and down, is my homelessness.  That I am foreign to the world, and not in a benign way but stupidly, at a loss, unearthed by accident like a mole or some other poor blind creature otherwise perfectly comfortable where it was.

5. Home

“Thinking - what an unsettling thought! - it is just electricity.”  What I mean is … “Here is where the home of thought is really.”   Home can’t just be where we happen to be can it?

Home.  I am somewhere, in fact here; all else is elsewhere.  But were I elsewhere, the same here for here for here would be somewhere else.  This - the present - here, would be gone.  Here is home.  But were I in this elsewhere, with time, that would be home.  This place, this here, which is here, would be abroad.  Just as when I return to my origins.  I go back to where I grew up; and find that the place where I grew up, that it too is now abroad; that the home which it once represented is gone and exists only in vague memory.