Thinking is amateur
The revelation of train rails.
From 0 to 1,000,000. From. One to the zero’s oubliette. And back again. Forwards we go; into the affront of nothing. Out of the fright of some. Two arrive. Finally. Nothing = Something. Omega egg. Crack of doom. At first sight.
Originality. Talent. They walk hand in hand. (Cf. how ‘talent’ meant ‘money’ originally. And originality too, being its shadow: for money originates the actual: in which we duly live as dark animals: its very substance the minatory.) So ’something from nothing’ (i.e. money). So. Infinity. The finite. Sweeping the finite table clear of finite objects. So nothing but infinity: that remains. The tablecloth. The granular striations.
I was sitting on a bus staring blankly when it came to me: the word ordinary. Ordinary. Ordinary! As though it were an insight. How ordinary … Nothing here is special, nothing is unique, nothing individual - This is just a bus journey – everyone takes it … The feeling of used-ness that the seats seemed soaked in, of life obliterated by the anonymity of sharing space with people who (frankly) one would never want to share space with, repetitive, quotidian, the cheapness of it, the human attention in these circumstances at its lowest ebb. I felt like a chicken in a coop. (If only I were rich!)
But slow this down … it seems a good example of something; and this is that it shows us the process of Linear Thought.
What is needed is a Witch’s Broom. Let’s sweep it away.
Opposites that are perpetual, symmetries that are eternal -
Where the good implies … the bad; the left the right
Where the right implies the wrong; and up down;
Like the carpet in a waiting-room, the carpet of the very every-where: it is worn, stained, tasteless, used. Tarr-y olive-green patterned - and seems to have always been there. Looking at it one can’t imagine the world without it.
… Poached carpet? Do you mean like a poached egg? A stream of bubbles stretching out. I like a poached egg.
Complete the phrase
“I can no more … “
For example, “I can no more lift the board on which I am standing because I am standing on it than change.”
A simultaneous push/pull. The push defeats the pull.
I can no more lift myself up by my own shirt-tails. Pull myself along by my own bootstraps.
… Than - ?
Suppose I have a pair of ‘bright’ spectacles; these, when I put them on, allow me to speak fluently in German.
German words appear; grammar; meaning.
”So that language is really in the spectacles.”
But then in talking up a fluent German don’t the words come from me, from inside my head; aren’t they mine?
A man who habitually walked on stilts would develop ’stilt’ muscles.
Could it then be said that his body ended with his stilts rather than his feet?
If I said, God is the spoon in a dish of ice cream and you believed me what would that mean?
An absolute is its perception.
For example, someone who argues that only the material world exists: that is an absolute. The perceptual infinity is theirs. This reflexive stance - their world made in this image.
Someone who argues that God exists: the same. That God doesn’t exist: the same. The perception is ‘without limit’.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “What am I talking about? Where am I getting it all from? Haven’t I just wandered off into some sort of zone of gibberish?” For am I not saying things that, while they might derive from instances of sense in everyday life, have been re-expressed with such a degree of generality that the words out of which they are formed no longer have any connection with the real? After all, what do I know about infinity? I have only the haziest acquaintance with its mathematical expression. What qualifies me to talk about it in the first place, and anyway why do I put such emphasis on it, what is so important about it? Really I have no idea …
… Absent-mindedly I go out to buy eggs, dawdling, dreamy, I stare into a shop window attracted by the colours; the reflections that stretch and thin; so I go from one thing to another, buying this then that and I come home mystified. What prompted me into it? What have I to do with it?
“Infinity exists.”
“Infinity doesn’t exist.”
Both statements are equally true, equally false.
