The Things I Say. What I Am.

"Amy, time-stilled and nameless, wandering the forgotten, lightless world forever, alone and voiceless, but for this: What I am, What I am, What I am."

What I am. What I am. What I am. What I am.

Not words that flow easily from me.

The more I move forward the more I realize how passionate I am.

The more I move the more I see how undirected my passion is.

I have gone through so many obsessive phases in my life. So many different things have occupied my intensity. But nothing has ever sustained it. I wander on.

I wander on.

.

A clogging.
A throbbing.
A desperate appeal.

A silence.
A yearning.
A truth to reveal.

A spine.
A bridge.
A boundless ravine.

Our Hearts.
Our Minds.
Do you know what I mean?

Forget.

Oh, Inglorious Quest,
Tell me what I know,
Confirm my intimation,
I'm no different from the rest.

Oh, Sweet Time,
Take me in larger circles,
Spare me my reasons,
Lift this need to rhyme.

Oh, Gentle Mind,
Let the truth be felt,
Embrace the cutting edge,
Learn to leave it behind.

Oh, Heart of Hearts,
Forget.

Myself.

With a less willful willing,
I set myself free.

I went into my heart,
by giving in to sleep.

Books. The Antifragile.

Tonight I finished Justin Cronin's The Passage. The longest novel I've read in a long time. An exciting book. Virals, Dracs, Smokes, Vampires. Whatever you want to call them. It was a world inhabited by horrible beings that wanted to eat you alive, and maybe, if you were (un)lucky, turn you into one of them. It was a world in which people struggled to stay alive, to love, to reproduce, to continue the process of civilization.

Soon I hope to begin Nassim Taleb's book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

In the past months I've recently recognized myself as a fragile person. I don't deal well with uncertainty. I cling to certainty and stability. I break easily.

I am fragile.

I saw Taleb speak the other day. He claimed that most people think that the opposite of fragility is robustness or resiliency. Taleb, however, believes that this is an inaccurate dichotomy  and that we are really dealing with a triad. We have the fragile (which breaks under stress), the robust (which stays stable despite stress), and the antifragile (which gains and grows from stress).

A box of fragile goods will be labeled 'Fragile: Handle With Care'. The opposite of that fragility, therefore, would be 'Antifragile: Please Misuse'.

I am a fragile person.

I want to become an antifragile person.

I don't yet know how.

I've been meditating somewhat frequently.

Most of my writing has been poetry.

I'm trying to get closer to my emotions.

But I don't yet know how to become antifragile.

I don't know how to gain from stress and disorder.

This is not a purely intellectual task, obviously.

I will continue to meditate, reflect, and build a healthy relationship with my therapist.

But I also hope to pursue the intellectual element of this by reading Antifragile.

Hopefully I'll have some thoughts about it in the coming weeks.

In the mean time, I'll say, 'Worrying? Fear? Ain't nobody got time for that.'

I Don't Want Love,

 And Other Lies

Passion.

Placed at my feet,
I had no choice
But to gorge away.

Placed at my feet,
I couldn't help but
Move fully into it.

Placed at my feet,
I knew only how
To give in to life.

So I tumbled forward.
Aggressive and curious,
Bone and blood.

.

It doesn't make sense to me.
The way I move and flow
With bodies and minds
So seemingly different.

Because as we fall into the drink,
We say one another's names
Before we sink. We lift our heads
And focus our eyes.

We move towards one another,
Both asking, 'Lift this weight'.
This weight of expectations,
Of broken desires.

Move with me.
We cannot stop.

12:35

Before I knew it, your
Words told me something
I'd decided to not feel.

I looked down at my phone to check the time.
12:35.
A nearly linear time.

I wanted the satisfaction of steady development.
1. 2. 3. 4.
It seemed so appealing to me.

But there I was.
1. 2. 3. 5.
A richer, more realistic progression, one DeLanda would be happy to see me embrace.

There I was.
Wanting that clean progression.
Yet knowing that I have to live in the fives.

This Year.

All these different ideas about time.
All this confusion about
Which thing is stopping me
From being right here right now.

I envy those living
In the day-to-day.
Without care for time or place.
Without History.

Authentic Bodies and the Problem of Epistemological Reflexivity

I begin with a meme, which unfortunately I can't figure out how to post directly here, so I link you here.

If you are too lazy, it is the college liberal girl saying, "If you feel trapped in the wrong body you have a right to change that." Followed by "If you want to get a nose job you are fake and shallow, learn to love the body you were born with."

The logic that makes these two statements compatible is obvious. 'Liberals' believe that standards of beauty are socially constructed, and that people who undergo surgery to conform to them are being manipulated or coerced by these constructed standards. Gender identity, on the other hand, appears to be more immune to these accusations of constructedness.

But should they be? We often talk about gender as a constructed thing. We know that women do not, by their nature, wear high heels and red lipstick. Yet those things are recognized as feminine. I can remember, for example, someone I knew who was trans. They chose to display as feminine, and the way they did this was by wearing high heels, fake breasts, and lipstick.

If you were born with male genitalia, but identify as a woman, why does dressing like a woman help you feel more like a woman? Especially knowing that those standards of femininity are socially constructed?

The college liberal meme is actually quite insightful in this insistence. Why is it acceptable to modify your body to fit socially constructed standards when you belong to a minority group (of trans people), but shallow and wrong to do it to when you belong to a majority group (a woman who wants a nose job, etc.).

I can't unravel the logic right now. It is too complex of a problem.

Something ain't right here.

It may have something to do with fighting for equality. Those who seek gender reassignment, for example, are a persecuted group. They defy normative standards, and a push for equality is then conceptualized in terms of physical augmentation. While something like a nose job is not something that is a push for equality, per say. It is a push for conformity. But gender reassignment has traces of that same push for conformity.

Can the solution to these problems really be found in physical augmentation and conformity?

Or is there another solution?

I'm wondering if the solution has to do with humanity's unique relationship with language.

I am referring to what is called the 'reflexivity of human knowledge'. This argument has been most powerfully made by Roger Smith in Being Human, but finds its antecedents in Foucault, and German Romantic philosophy (which I'm less familiar with).

The argument is this: Human's cannot say what they are without changing what they are. We exist in a social world that is built of language, and when we go about classifying people, we also help people become those things. A colloquial phrase puts the point succinctly: Be careful what you claim you are, what you claim has a way of coming back and claiming you.

This point becomes clearer when we examine the difference between classification in the natural sciences and the human sciences. In the natural sciences, we don't need to worry that our classifications will in turn effect nature. Nature is out there and exists as it is, and we will not change it simply by talking about it. The human world, on the other hand, is not only out there, it is also in our minds. So when we classify the human world, we need to take into account the fact that our classification will feed back into and change our reality. Thus knowledge of humans is reflexive, the process of knowing ourselves changes ourselves.

Are gender/sexual classifications not illuminated by this insight? Is there a way to take into account the fact that by labeling people fems, butch dykes, lipstick lesbians, so on, actually helps create those people? By labeling the behavior we provide a focal point for it, and actually end up reinforcing the behavior.

Does the problem of elective surgery need to be resolved by allowing everyone to modify their body based on what they think it ought to be? Or do we need to do mental work to see that our bodies are okay as they are?

Are we to tell those who desire plastic surgery that they need to learn to love their bodies, regardless of whether they want a nose job or sexual reassignment?

What to do?

The problem of the reflexivity of knowledge, which really breaks down into the problem of human self-creation, is the biggest philosophical problem I see, and one that is implicated most seriously in the philosophy of history and politics.

If you've read this, please let me know if this makes any sense.

A (Healthy?) Dose of Horror

I'm reading Steve Erickson's The Sea Came in At Midnight. I'm finding it exhilarating.

It is creating in me lots of emotions. Lots of odd facial expressions. Lots of pain. Lots of feelings.

The story is this shocking mixture of surreal sexuality, fleeting moments of violence, and eruptions of vulnerability and the desire to be loved.

I don't often write in fiction books. Sometimes I do. I like to underline this or that passage or whatever.

So far I've only underlined a single sentence. One of the main characters is Japanese. While describing the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Japan, and the Emperor's confession that he is in fact not a god, he writes:  "Now there was no god, only a new sun in God's place. In annihilation there had been honor, in God's disownment there was the void."

It reminds me of Heidegger's essay 'What Are Poets For?' There he claims that our age is defined by the default of God, by God's failure to appear. What we truly lack, he argues, is "the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death, and love" (in Poetry, Language, Thought, 95). We are in a position of staring into the void, he says. Our task, he says, is to turn away from the void, to find a way to understand pain, death, and love.

Sure enough, Erickson's book is loaded with the word 'nihilism', with references to the void and the apocalypse.

How odd it all is.

I watched a video of Richard Dawkins earlier:

I agree with Dawkins in this video. We don't need an absolute morality, we need an intelligent  rational morality. One that operates through conversation, consensus, and reason. 

Yet the difficulties of our age, the unconcealedness Heidegger discusses, emerges out of our commitment to reason. Nihilism emerges out of our unhealthy relationship with science and materialism.

Because while reason allows us to think clearly about things, it also encourages us to objectify things. To reduce them to usefulness.

I am very emotionally stirred by all these problems.

I don't wish to think clearly about them right now because that would be too much work.

I prefer to just feel the feelings that these thoughts are causing me.

I'll leave you with a quotation I read on the internet. I'm paraphrasing.

'People are meant to be loved and things are meant to be used. The world is in trouble right now because people are being used and things are being loved.'

This use of people and love of things, I believe, has something to do with the culture that emerged out of scientific materialism and rational inquiry (i.e. The Enlightenment).

Of Permanence

Lol what are you talking about, bro?

The Autonomy of History and Epistemological Bullying

A friend has an anthropology degree. She aspires to be an anthropologist some day (maybe).

I, Riley Paterson, on the other hand, aspire to be a historian some day (maybe).

Tonight we had a conversation that I've tried to have before.

What is the difference between history and the natural sciences?

Why does history need to establish itself as methodologically distinct?

All of it boils down to a personal question for me.

Why am I so hostile to the natural sciences and, in particular, attempts to apply natural scientific methods to the study of human life?

I have some deep seated conviction that human life needs to be analyzed in its own terms, and cannot be reduced to biological process.

Well then why can't I just declare the autonomy of history and leave it at that? Why does the vindication of human/historical modes of thought have to come along with hostility towards the methods of the natural sciences?

The position of the natural sciences is one of such privilege that I don't think historical methods can be successfully vindicated merely by championing them.

They need to be freed from the clutches of the natural sciences.

The natural sciences, unfortunately, are like an epistemological bully.

How would most people respond to the assertion: 'The natural scientific method is the only reliable way to arrive at truth.' I'm not sure. You tell me.

But I imagine a lot of people might agree, and even if they didn't, could they explain to you how there were other ways of arriving at truth?

This is probably the biggest issue that I'd love to tackle.

This is the issue that I am most passionate about it.

Lying

It was my words
That got the best of me.

I was always my best
When I existed in
A restricted world.

I was strongest when following
My actions and affections.

The Curfew

Last night I finished reading Jesse Ball's The Curfew.

I really liked it.

It really moved me.

It read quickly and was a lot of fun.

During the last 30 pages I was constantly frowning.

:(

It was enormously satisfying.

I wish I had more faith in fiction to do this to me.

Language, Mindfulness, and Homeopathy

I can't get outside my own head. I think too much.

I'm very verbal, and I constantly render everything into narratives. Sometimes highly distorted narratives. I do it so quickly and effortlessly that I lose touch with reality and I find myself living in a narrative rather than being in the moment.

My tendency to narrate threatens my ability to be mindful.

Yet I find myself trying to use language to overcome my addiction to language.

I seem to be turning towards the poison in the hope that it will suddenly become the cure.

Then I remembered how homeopathy supposedly works, or how vaccinations work, perhaps.

Maybe this is a metaphor that can help me conceptualize the way I want to use language.

Maybe I can find a way to use to language to leave language behind.

Seems like a pipe dream.

I gotta try meditating.

The Currency of Reflection

Tonight I experienced another round of an ongoing conversation.

A friend and I sometimes talk about evolution and history.

I typically insiste that human life demands consideration in its own terms.

They think that reflection on human life can benefit from knowledge of the natural world and human evolution

To put it simply, we disagree about how heavily we are to favor culture or evolution.

I want to ask, How does one go about actually reflecting on their life?

Because this is the problem: Self-knowledge and action.

How do we go about using what we know about ourselves to decide what we want to become?

The most practical form of self-knowledge, I believe, is a personal, cultural, historical understanding, and not a scientific or evolutionary understanding.

Science tends to generalize. History tends to particularize.

Reflection is about particularity.

I'm not sure what I'm saying.

But this is a problem.

And I still think the question is one of reflection.

What do we think about when we think clearly about our lives?

What do we think about when we see our own lives clearly?

I think we think particular thoughts about our particular time place and situation.

When I reflect on my life, I never reflect on hunter gatherer tribes or the evolutionary psychology of attraction.

I think of the communities that really exist around me and the beautiful women I actually see.

Yesssssssssss

Jens Lekman yesssssssssssss.

I saw him live tonight and it was fantastic.

Yesssssssss.

Also, my new essay is starting to make total sense in my mind.

Yesssssssssssssssssssssss.

Also, I don't trust this feeling of things making sense.

Yessssssssssssssssss.

I'm trying to remain curious. To avoid things making too much sense. To resist familiarity.

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

Tonight I had a thought pertaining to my emergent essay.

I thought to myself, 'Artists aren't great because they make great plans. Artists are great because they feel deeply, they understand deeply.'

Yesssssssssss.

The essay has a simple thesis:

Understanding should take precedence over planning.

This follows from another simple thesis:

Plans emerge organically from understanding, but understanding does not emerge organically from planning.

Boom.

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

I held the s for so long that I had time to sip my beer.

Yessssssssssss.

A Simple (Perhaps Inconsequential) Claim

I hope to try and write an essay soon.

The claim is simple: We will make better decisions if we use our mental energy to understand than if we use it to plan.

What exactly this means, I'm not sure.

Why exactly it is important, I'm not sure.

The starting point, however, is Heidegger and John Gray.

Both of them believed that Modern European/Western culture had been overrun by the scientific impetus to dominate and control nature, and that this scientific drive had essentially hollowed out Western culture, destroying its foundations.

My notes.

I share them with you:

10/31 - 11:23 am

- Felt narrative vs. Thought narrative

- Mindfulness essay about the role of consciousness

- The task is to use consciousness properly. That is, to understand and not to plan.

- Said narrative is more planned, more willfully willed, demands to be created. While felt narrative demands only to be understood.

2:05 pm

Thesis is simple: Good decisions come from accurate understanding, no good plans.

- Just as Dwelling precedes Building, so to understanding precedes planning.

- This finds its expression in Collingwood's philosophy. History 'understands' while science seeks to dominate.

- We free ourselves from a feeling by narrating it accurately.

-  This goes against what Heidegger calls out as Western thought's tendency to understate the thing - The overstatement of subjectivity and the skepticism towards reality.

- Support for all this comes from art, from zen, from history. From Collingwood, from Heidegger.

- The whole thing can be situated with John Gray and Heidegger's concerns about science, technology, and nihilism.

- History, Art, and Zen all orient themselves towards another way of thinking, another way of willing.

- This writing is about getting closer to that other way of thinking.

End notes.

I will begin trying to tease all of this out.

What kinds of statements must it involve?

Clearly it must involve claims about modern misconceptions about mind: IE I must try to show that mind does not make rational decisions, but that we have such faith in rationality because of our political-cultural inheritance (The Enlightenment, etc). I will have to discuss the need to pull ourselves out of these misguided ways of thinking.

What I'll essentially have to do is begin with Heidegger and Gray, justify their claims that we are living in a time in which Western culture's misguided attitude is ruining itself, and then propose Collingwood's 'historical morality' as a way out.

In June I intended to write an essay on historical morality and I never got to it because I stressed myself out by not wanting to apply to graduate school.

Perhaps I can now return to that work. I have a bit more reading to draw on since then, thankfully.

I miss essay writing.

Thinkers and Lovers

Clausewitz and his wife loved each other dearly. They shared everything, she said. Thoughts and all.

Today I picked up my copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.

He includes a dedication:

"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part author, of all that is best in my writings – the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward – I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for more careful re-examination, which they ar enow never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."

This dedication causes me great sadness and tremendous emotion.

To think!

To love!

I now intend to read Mr. Mill's work.

Not only is he a famous and respected philosopher, but he was clearly a lover. He was clearly someone who felt powerful things for those around him.

Music Pleasure

I'm loving music these days.

Xylos

Big Deal

The Ravonettes

All these good albums.

Everything Is Within The Cloud

When he woke the room was shrouded in a sharp floral orange. He was dissatisfied with the state of the process and had resolved to move through it as quickly as he could.

The taste of the past still came quickly to his tongue. He remembered when the cloud was red, when his life was saturated by an incomparable sense of desire, warmth, and love. It hadn't been very long. The doors of his mind had barely begun to creep shut.

This day would begin like most. He would go to the same place he had gone, and the cloud would render it new once more. How will the familiar people and places appear through the sharp, floral orange, he wondered.

"What do we look like today?," his friend asked.

"I'm sorry, I've just woken up" he said.

"Aha!" the barista said, "twelve ounces of press will have to do, then."

"It will do perfectly," he said. "I'm trying to get this orange to become something else. Something of my choosing this time."

"I don't follow," the barista said.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, "I'm trying to take control of my life. For a long time I thought I had it under control, but it turns out I don't. Different sensations are constantly flowing in and out of one another, pooling and dissipating around me at all times."

"I feel you. My life largely just happened," the barista said. "I never thought corporate training would transform me into the reckless business owner I am. My life has become a steadily rotating rainbow, the smell of rain and all. I like your sensual metaphors, I thought I'd give them a try," he concluded with a smile.

Our hero appreciated the barista's sympathy. He had been speaking in this sensual way for so long that he didn't question it anymore. People often commented on it, remarking on his ability to identify each moment with a color, a smell, a taste, a sound, and a feeling. But the complexity of his moments had very little to do with originality or creativity.

He had literally experienced life from within an ever shifting cloud.

As far as he knew the cloud had always been there. His sensuousness had always threatened to swallow him. He feared he would forever be gawking at the abyss inside him. He feared that someday he would endlessly tumble inward, breaking bones and puncturing skin on objects distilled from lust and wont.

The cloud changed as he went down into himself.

The cloud was thick and misty. Yellow. Tart. Arousing.

A period of blank free fall. Quiet sobriety with a hint of pale blue.

Another layer of mist. A bright purple, a subtle sweetness, a dank human aroma, intense frustration.

Purple fades to red. Feelings of warmth overwhelm him as he begins to taste blood, smell citrus, and hate himself.

In his life he saw two paths. Down one path he could go deeper and deeper into himself. He could go down into himself forever, into an endlessly changing sensuous free fall.

The other path was darker. It contained more people. It contained less sensuousness and more relationships.

He set out from the cafe, heat and energy in hand, bright green mist following him. It was time to perpetuate the routine that he knew someday would end. He wasn't sure what green meant this time. Often green came, surprisingly enough, with feelings of inadequacy and intimations of bravery. Unfortunately, however, there was never a clean correlation between color, sound, taste, smell, or emotion.

He could recall times when a bright orange-red came along with the most intense lust and the taste of burnt metal. But metallic tastes could also come along with greens and blues. Reds could come with sadness, thoughts of death, the most intense fantasies, the most vivid tastes.

There was no pattern to the cloud, no stability, no trace of cause and effect to be found. Just a forever shifting set of sensations.

Today the walk to work came with a cloud of bright green that coincidentally tasted of green apple, smelled of spinach and broccoli, and felt like grass. He hoped the coincidence somehow signified a new unity in his life, the beginning of a more stable pattern.

But he knew it was just chaos again, just another accidental alignment that would quickly fade once more into meaninglessness.

A Mental Disturbance

The other day I made a short post on my reading. Heidegger, John Gray, and Rilke.

These are my boys right now.

Especially Heidegger talking about Rilke. I just finished the essay 'What Are Poets For?'. I don't understand it entirely.

But Heidegger's answer has something to do with the fact that Modern Western man has been caught up in an unwilled willing of sorts: We are trapped in a culture in which we use language to objectify the world so that we can assert ourselves, and manipulate the world, changing it into something of our own making. This unwilled willing, this self-assertion, somehow leaves us unshielded in the world, it leaves us vulnerale in our Being.

Only by coming to some different kind of willing, a more venturesome willing, can Modern man rescue himself from this unwilled will to dominate nature. For this unwilled willing leaves us in a sort of technological nihilism, in a position in which our culture has no ground upon which to rest.

In other words, the spirit of our age leaves us standing before the Abyss, gawking at the meaninglessness of the world we have created.

The task of Modern man, Heidegger claims, is to turn away from the Abyss, to find a way to be more comfortably. We must turn to what Heidegger calls the Open. We must embrace the world not as a collection of objects, but as a harmonious whole, as the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals. As a simple, unified oneness to which we belong.

This turn to the Open, this appreciation of the simple unity of the fourfold, Heidegger claims, must be accomplished by some Beings that are more venturesome than others. Moreover, this turn must come through language, since language is the 'house of being', the ultimate foundation of human existence. Poets, then, are the more venturesome beings that can  reach into the Abyss, expose the nature of our age, and aid modern man in his quest to turn away from the Abyss.

The Abyss, I think, has plenty to do with scientific materialism. It has a lot to do with all the things I'm reading about in Gray's The Immortalization Commission.

Either way, my mind is deeply disturbed, in a good way.

I feel all these tentative connections to Collingwood.

There is something happening in my mind right now.

For the first time in a long time I feel like I'm really ruminating on my reading.

Interestingly, it is because my reading has once again become largely philosophical and poetic.

Sigh.

How will I ever figure out how to think for a living?

Chair

I really like this song.

I heard it on the radio at work once.

I actually like a number of the songs from their album.

Part of me hates it.

Lyrically.

Lyrically I hate it.

Because it makes me sad.

Thinking about friends, lovers, embarrassment, pain, unrequited love.

I like the song a lot.

You don't trust me.

.

A wise man
Advised me: turn
Away from the Abyss.

Think of the spaces,
The people and places.
Think of all you'll miss.

Some Thoughts on My Reading

My reading feels harmonious right now.  I'm reading The Immortalization Commission at a healthy pace, and I'm also reading some of Heidegger's essays from Poetry, Language, Thought. I've read 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (twice), 'The Thing' (once with 0 comprehension), and I'm almost through 'What Are Poets For?'.

Heidegger is definitely a great was to compliment my reading of John Gray. Gray has cited Heidegger in other works, and definitely owes him a debt. Better yet, a good portion of 'What Are Poets For?' is devoted to the analysis of Rilke's poetry. Rilke is my boy.

I have also made some connections between Heidegger and Collingwood. Both have a problem with our so called scientific civilization.

Something about technological nihilism.

Something about poetic modes of thought being a way out.

Something about logocentric culture and objectification.

Something about Being and representation.

Something about re-enactment/simulation theory and bridging the subject-object divide.

Something about Being and Simulation.

A piece of writing for the future, perhaps.

Dwelling With John Gray

Bah! I love reading John Gray.

The Immortalization Commission is arousing all the perfect emotions in me. These stories about lovers in the late late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century, grappling with the newly realized finality of death.

We are going to die. Fair enough. But is there any hope that we can learn to rationally direct this finite (read doomed) human life? Is there any hope for thought? Is there any hope for love and hope and choice? Unlikely.

This is exactly the problem I am having with my life.

I had a plan and that plan no longer feels viable.

The hole in my heart is not a graduate school shaped hole.

So how can I rationally direct my life? How can I begin to make choices when I'm so overwhelmed by my emotions? By my desire to be involved with people? Where is my freedom? What choices am I to make?

Reading about H.G. Wells, F.W.H Myers, Arthur Balfour, and others, is really helping me cope. These men dealt with these same problems. They were dealing with Darwinian anxiety, the stress brought about by the conclusions of scientific materialism.

But they were dealing with it as a brand new conclusion, as an unprecedented intellectual reality that compromised their deepest emotional convictions.

At least I was raised as a scientific materialist. At least these conclusions weren't thrust upon me in my adult life. I struggle with them to this day. I can't imagine what they would do to me if I had learned of them in the time and place they did.

Heidegger, too, is helping me deal with these questions.

I tried to read his essay 'The Thing' and it didn't make any sense to me. But 'Building Dwelling Thinking' made a bit more sense to me.

It gave me a sense of comfort in Being. It made me feel okay with just Being. It makes me feel okay with accepting the state of my Being. If I can just learn to dwell, on the Earth, in my life, then my life will take care of itself.

If I can just relax and release, I will build my life organically.

The plan has collapsed. The plan is not viable.

Relax.

Let dwelling take care of your building.

This morning I spent a bit of time in a coffee shop, drinking coffee, and reading Gray.

I intend to spend a lot of this fall and winter posted up in coffee shops.

Dwelling, thinking, being in public, building my life.

Death and Love

I'm reading John Gray's latest book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.

It is breaking my heart.

The book focuses on two moments in history in which science was used to either 1. find proof of the afterlife, or 2. overcome death by reanimating the dead and making them immortal.

The first story belongs to late Victorian England; the second belongs to the early years of the Soviet Union.

So far I'm reading the section on Victorian England. It is breaking my heart.

FWH Myers, a Victorian thinker, is one of the major figures of the story. He was adamant that science could be used to find proof of life after death. Gray argues, however, that Myers' quest was ultimately the result of the premature death of the only woman that ever infatuated him. Myers and  had some kind of love affair with this woman, and Gray claims that the "last quarter century of Myers' life was driven by his need to contact a woman he could not acknowledge during his lifetime" (63).

There are other heartbreaking moments. Before he died, Myers had promised his friend William James that he would send a message from beyond the grave, that James would just have to hold a pen in his hand and serve as his medium. After Myers died, James attempted to receive Myers' message: "he sank down on  chair by the open door, his note-book on his knees, pen in hand, ready to take down the message with his usual methodical exactitude... When I went away William James was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open note-book on his knees. The page was blank." (11).

Imagine being a member of Darwin's generation. Imagine being the first group of people capable of imagining the world as a meaningless march of speciation and extinction. I am personally haunted by the conclusions of Darwin and his contemporaries. Deep time, evolution, extinction, cosmology. Oh, so painful.

Why is it so hard to live and love knowing that we are all going to die and never be in contact with one another again?

This book is making me imagine what it would be like to bear the implications of Darwinism for the first time. I can hardly take it. The pain is so great. Myers, James, Balfour, all the characters of this book, seemed to have been experiencing such profound existential pain.

How can one just accept the implications of Darwinism and remain jolly and dutiful?

I'm enjoying the book immensely.

I'm finding it painful and cathartic.

Very painful.

Hopefully equally cathartic.

Withdrawing, Writing, Wreading

I feel myself stepping back from my social world. Temporarily, of course.

I also feel myself stepping towards thinking and writing. I don't know what to write, though.

I don't understand poetry enough to really write it unless it just pops into my head. I'll get fixated on a word of a phrase or an image and I'll just run with it. But I don't have any of those words or images right now.

I don't know that I can write about philosophy right now, because I'm not reading that much philosophy.

I don't want to write about history. I'm very slowly beginning a new book, America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force. Beth Bailey. Historian at Temple. Obviously very smart. The book is well written and addresses some interesting questions with good frames.

I read about half of a novel, Miss Me When I'm Gone, by some dude. Philip something. It didn't hold my attention. I dunno why.

I'm just not sure where to direct my mental energy.

Frankly, I think I need to direct my energy at understand why graduate school is so confusing and why I can't seem to muster the energy to study for the GRE or take preparation seriously.

I think I need to work on understanding myself and my resistance to the plan I had set for myself.

It doesn't feel right.

It is too wrapped up with other ideas.

Hmph.

I've got this forever alone narrative and graduate school is a part of it. I'm a lonely person and I fear that I'll become a lonely scholar. Always reading and writing, never to be read or loved.

Like All Fires

And All Sunsets.

Sensitivity and Fragility

In The New Leviathan Collingwood argues that a person "liberates himself from a particular desire by naming it; not giving it any name that comes at haphazard into his head, but giving it its right name, the name it really has in the language he really talks" (13.42).

I remember that I found this idea hard to swallow. How can naming a feeling or desire free us from that desire? Especially given man's unique relationship with language, how can we be sure that in attempting to name a problem we are not actually creating that problem? This is certainly a question Foucault or Roger Smith would ask.

Yet, my own experience is starting to confirm Collingwood's claim. I believe that I have been able to properly name one of my tendencies. I've often spoken of my sensitivity, of my capacity for strong and intense emotions and thoughts.

But sensitivity isn't the problem.

Fragility is the problem. I can't handle the intensity of my thoughts and emotions.

But what is this 'I' that is separate from my thoughts and feelings? A rawer consciousness? I'm not sure.

Either way, I'm trying to reflect on this new name I have for my tendencies. I need to reflect on it.

I need to ask, why couldn't my emotions have a proper name? Why couldn't there be a rhyme or reason to my thoughts and emotions that has a proper name? Why, as Heidegger asks, am I tempted to "understate the nature of the thing," tainting my observations of myself with the fear that they were merely "afterward read into it" (Building Dwelling Thinking, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 151). Why do I doubt that some labels/narratives are better than others?

Because there are indeed labels and narratives that arrive closer at my emotions, closer to truth. I'm working on finding some of those. Life is confusing, man.

A Restless Night.

This has been one of those nights where I've wanted to have things to do but didn't want to find anything to do. I could have read but I wasn't able to read. I was just browsing the internet, wasting time, thinking about a hundred different things.


I even turned the light off and tried to go to bed. But then scumbag brain got me:

My thoughts went into spazz mode as soon as I tried to go to sleep.

So now I've gotten out of bed and I've got some tea and I thought I would write a bit.

I have been thinking about Rilke lately. About his love and fear of solitude, about how all those ideas on solitude relate to his ideas about love.

For some reason poetry is the most appealing thing to me right now.

Using words in weird ways.

Experimenting with them.

I don't write poetry well. But I sure do love writing the poems I write. They just make me feel really good.

Extended clear thinking feels like such a difficulty right now. I feel very distractible. More than ever. Poetry is good because its fast. It doesn't take a long time to read. I write them very quickly.

I don't have anything to say right now.

I just can't sleep because my mind is too active.

Truly.

He approached the tower,
Quickening his pace with each
Step. He knew the prize he
Sought wouldn't be there

And that he would never
Find it. He knew he wasn't
In trouble but that life
Would always be a struggle.

Success and Identity

I'm both happy and embarrassed by the fact that my writing these days needs to be personal. I have no energy, or patience, or time, or something, for abstract writing.

I can't write like I was writing a year or so ago. I can't write like I was writing six months ago.

This is good. I need to write the way I need to write. I need to write the way that the uniqueness of the moment demands. And these moments are awfully unique. Very different from other moments I've lived.

The problem I'm having these days is that I'm both conventionally successful and personally dissatisfied. On paper everything has gone well. Life is a great success.

I was an excellent student. I excelled there. I was a good student of military history. I excel at my jobs now. I love coffee, I make it well, and I enjoy making it.

But I no longer feel like a student of military history and I don't feel like a barista.

I feel like something vaguer and more amorphous than that. Rawer than that.

I've got all this wild emotional energy and I have no idea where to direct it.

The things that used to focus me no longer do.

Maybe there is still hope for me studying military history. I'm not sure anymore.

Maybe there is still a possibility that I'll want to be a professional barista. But I doubt it.

Maybe I can find another way to focus my writing.

I sure am enjoying poetry these days.

I want to try and write some fiction.

I don't know what to do.

But it is a good step that I recognize the identity crisis I'm going through.

.

My name is Riley Paterson,
Mind of minds.
Look on my words,
Ye mighty, and despair.

In humility I declare
That this world shall strive
To perpetuate my thought
And forever fall short.

In desperation I implore
That this world must
Emulate the power of
My boundless heart.

My name is Riley Paterson,
Fool of fools.
Look on my Love,
Ye mighty, and Regret.

Everything Is Okay

It is okay that I wrote this.

It is okay that I felt this way.

It is okay that these feelings can no longer be a part of my life.

Written on 7/31/12.
The seventh version of
"Your Solitude":

I fled a Shitty City.
I left The Planets behind
Knowing that My Solitude
Had grown stronger than ever.

In that city
I tried to squander my solitude,
I tried to drown its expansion,
I tried to move outside of it.

In that Shitty City
I became World-In-Myself.
I learned I have to be alone
Or be together like a stone is with a stone.

In that city I felt your heat and
Asked, 'Are you my Quickfire?' (Am I The Embers?).
But I want to be Your Solitude:
To Border and Protect and to Greet you.

Writing

I'm very confused about what kind of writing to pursue these days.

I'm disturbed because I am once again reckoning with how intensely emotional I am. My inner life is so intense. I don't know what to do with it.

For a long time I was expressing myself through philosophical reading and writing. I really enjoyed it. I still enjoy it.

But for some reason I don't know what to do.

I want to try and write fiction but it is difficult to do. I'm probably not reading enough fiction to try and write fiction.

It has been a while since I've written poetry. But I still like poetry.

The last poem I wrote was very genuine. Something was happening in my life that I really wanted to express, and I did.

It was so personal that I never shared it with this blog. But I might just put it up here.

That sounds like a good idea.

Where We Were

We were all in a familiar place, physically. Mentally, I was in the most foreign of places. Lifted by my many vices, embellishing the parts of myself that I feared the most.

Comfort was overshadowed by something nameless and I didn't care to name it.

But she was there to tell me its name. It was called drama, narrative flourish, a skill in one world and an embarrassment in another. In the world we were in, in that bakery and in that bar, it was an embarrassment. Take it to that other world, she said.

There was a man, she told me, that had been afraid of his talent for drama and wild emotions. She told me that I should devote myself to fiction writing because, clearly, I had the capacity to live many lives even as myself. Imagine the lives I could live as others.

Life Narratives, Complexity, and Generality

Recently I find myself falling into the trap of narrating my life in very general terms.

I say 'these days', I say 'I'm successful', I say 'this period'.

Last night someone told me I spoke like I was very old. That I would live so many lives with the way I speak. 

There will be endless periods! Wave after wave of classifiable 'days' and 'phases'.

But this kind of speaking is problematic because it is my way of not confronting complexity. I try to chunk my life into clean, generalizable, easily narratable segments. 

The problem is that I love narrative. I love thinking about narrative. I love philosophers who regard narrative as definitively human. A book on this topic, The Story Telling Animal, was published earlier this year. Alasdair MacIntyre and Roger Smith  make similar arguments, claiming that human action only becomes intelligible through narrative, and that in the process of narrating our actions we also create our future actions. 

What they say is that humans are the beings that create themselves by telling stories about themselves.

So why am I telling such simple stories about myself?

Why am I making myself into this generality by telling these general stories about myself?

Because the complexity of my life is unintelligible to me at this point. 

Even the way I think about complexity is loaded with generality. My half-assed thinking and writing about nonlinear dynamics is a good example of this.

Not that I need to be hard on myself.

It is okay that I don't grasp the complexity of my life. 

I just need to stop telling such simple stories about what is in reality a very complex dissatisfaction. 

Things are not as simple as I'd like to make them out to be, my own unhappiness included. 

Clear Coffee Thinking

I value clear thinking. I don't know why.

The things I often think clearly about, however, are not life itself. I think clearly about coffee. I think clearly about philosophy. I think clearly about abstract things.

It is much harder for me to think clearly about my own life, my own emotions. My life and my emotions are so intense. I don't know why.

Thinking clearly about these other things makes me feel good. It distracts me from the uncertainty and incomprehensibility of real life.

Tomorrow is coffee fest.

I'll be pouring in the latte art competition.

I've been spending so much time trying to think clearly about pouring.

It has been nice.

I don't know what will happen tomorrow.

I don't know what will happen after that.

I think I need to give up on clear thinking.

Sincerity

I just read a brief article about David Foster Wallace's suicide.

I took my copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again off my shelf. A friend gifted it to me. I've never read it. I'll read one of the essays tonight.

I have read This is Water. I thought it was an excellent speech.

One thing I like about Wallace is his thoughts on sincerity. He seems to have little patience with irony, with referentiality.

I remember when I first started this blog I shared one of his quotations. I'll share it again:

'The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.'

I have no patience for the kind of irony he is describing. Sincerity seems like such a great alternative.

But for some reason it is so difficult.

We have so many ideas about all the different games we should be playing.

So many ideas about power, about who's in control, about who should text who and when.

I'm thinking about men and women, about dating and sex.

Relationships, both platonic and romantic, are where I crave sincerity above all.

I want to tell someone I love them and I want to mean it in a very robust sense.

I have no patience for weak conceptions of love.

If there is one word that does not need to be diluted, as so many words are, it is the L word.

The All-Volunteer Force and Collingwood in WWI

My intellectual stagnation can be explained partially in terms of my personal life. I've suffered some heart break, and I've become frustrated with my working life.

But there are also genuine intellectual problems that have felt insurmountable.

The biggest problem has been my graduate school personal statement. I don't know how to frame myself to these schools.

On the one hand, I have a very clear idea that could be pursued through military history programs: The problem of democracy and state service in America, and the way that the all-volunteer military has effected the political process in America. More specifically, the question as to how the all-volunteer force has effected democracy. Has it strengthened it or made it weaker? I think the latter. Disentangling the citizenry and the military, I suspect, is dangerous. It means that the government can fight wars without the people's approval, because, at the end of the day, we are not the ones doing the fighting. They have a military that is fully in their control and that is paid to be in their control.

This line of research goes well with many of the current issues in American politics. If we want to know how democracy in America has been corrupted by the role of corporate money, we might want to ask ourselves why we let corporate money into our war making. This decision, I think, may have something to do with our ignorance about the relationship between the participation in war and inclusion in the political process.

On the other hand, I love R.G. Collingwood and want to devote my time thinking about him and his ideas.

So much of my thinking and writing during the last two years has been devoted to Collingwood. He is without a doubt the thinker I feel the most connected to. When I read him I feel like I am genuinely communing with another mind. His thoughts are so excellent, and I feel such a personal connection with him.

I could also conceivably write a military history dissertation on Collingwood. The question would be: What the hell happened to Collingwood in WWI that influenced his philosophy?

Collingwood is very clear in his Autobiography that the war was the event that inspired him to try and create a science of human affairs, a method by which men could learn to deal with problems in the human world as skillfully as the natural sciences had taught him to deal with nature.

This would be a question of war, of politics, of education, of philosophy.

This, then, is what my personal statement needs to explain.

I need to explain how torn I am between these two projects, these two paths.

On the one hand I have a clear historical problem that also has relevance to the present.

On the other I have the philosophical love of my life, and questions about the war that drove his work.

What to do...

It feels so good to be thinking.

Quickfire, I Tried

I saw Moonface live the other night.

It was great! Moonface's new album is so excellent. Sinai was even there playing with him.

Super good.

My only complaint is that he played my favorite song too soon. Third.

He should have waited until a more climactic moment.

One interesting thing was that he added a new lyric to the climax of the song.

"Quickfire, I tried to be a genius. But my mind is in a million fucking pieces."

Pretty awesome.

I can identify.

My intellectual stagnation is severe. My mind is starving and fading in some weird mixture of anger, depression, and loneliness.

But I have hopes that I'll be coming out of this soon.

Change is coming.

It always is.

Someday soon I'll think clearly again.

An Affirmation.

I'm stopping in only to reaffirm my disinterest in this blog.

I'm tired of it.

My thought is stagnant.

I don't understand how this happened.

I don't understand how this blog animated my thought for as long as it did.

I don't understand how my thought has become what it is right now.

I don't understand the process I'm going through.

Reality and Theory

What I want is reality.

Much of my thinking and writing is very abstract. I am adept at abstraction. I know how to read (some types of) philosophy. I know how to move comfortably in the world of human/social theory.

Yet what I want is reality.

I have no patience for theory in itself. Theory must always make a return to reality.

Clausewitz is perhaps my ultimate teacher in this lesson.

I can think of no one who has attempted a more elegant rapprochement between theory and practice. Even Collingwood's attempted synthesis between theory and practice, between subject and object, falls short of the Clausewitzian project.

It is, I think, Clausewitz's emphasis on pedagogy, on teaching and learning, that makes his thinking so powerful.

The conclusion: theory is only useful if it aids in the accurate observation of reality. Theory shall never seek to stand in for reality. It can only aid our engagement with reality, buttress our observations, aid our judgements.

I had a slight breakthrough tonight in my attempts to write my graduate school personal statement. And this relationship between reality and theory is intimal to that breakthrough, and to all my thinking.

Father and Son

skip, twirl and curtsey

the object of desire

dances leaps escapes

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

this heart moves and shakes

another fit of this love

oh please, just once more

War and Love

I watched an interesting and troubling documentary last night: "The World Without Us."

The question of the documentary is: What would happen if the United States were to withdrawal all of its military troops from around the world? We have dozens of bases in dozens of countries. What if we gave them up?

What would that mean for international order?

The documentary drove home a startling claim: The current world order depends on the United States having troops abroad. From South Korea to Kuwait to Tawain, without U.S. troops there are all kinds of potential invasions and wars waiting to happen.

I am very troubled by the argument of the documentary. I watched it with someone who asked 'Why does the world have to be like this?'

I answer, 'This is a bad answer, but because the world is like this.'

It is true, the world is what it is.

But does it have to be that way? Can it change?

I want to know what the appropriate place for non-violence and political love in the modern world.

How can we take what Gandhi said, take what MLK said, and somehow repeat it for the present day?

I don't know.

I'm scared.

But one thing I know is that I am committed to love and the pursuit of peace.

What to do?

I'll be honest and tell you that the documentary reminded me of a song by Cassie featuring The-Dream.

The song: Keep on Lovin' Me.

The chorus:
"There's nothing wrong with you

There's nothing wrong with me
There's something wrong with the world
Just keep on loving me"
I don't know what else to do with this world other than try to keep loving.

Emotions.

This blog is not currently an outlet for my thoughts.

My thoughts are muddled. I don't understand many things these days.

But I do feel many things.

I need a source of emotional expression.

This blog can't do that for me either.

I'm suffocating inside myself these days.

I have all these thoughts and all these feelings.

But I find myself unable to express them.

Eep.

Irrationalism.

I am more and more persuaded that Collingwood was right when he said that the English world was being overrun by an irrationalist epidemic.

People are more and more hostile to thought. From the Texas GOPs explicit rejection of higher order thinking to anti-vaccination movements to the purposeful attack of the university system: America is hostile to thought.

The irrationalist epidemic has created "in the body politic a demand that scientific thinking should be put down by force.... Academically, by creating in the specialized organs though which society endeavours to further science and learning a feeling of hostility to that furtherance. This feeling of hostility to science as such may be 'rationalized' through an obscurantist philosophy which by sophistical arguments pretends to prove that that advances which are actually being made are in fact no advances. Sophistical, because reactionary: based on the assumption that the superseded views are true, and thence proceeding to argue that the views which have superseded them must be false because they do not agree with the view they have superseded. The partistans of such an obscurantist philosophy are traitors to their academic calling."

Can't Blog.

I can't seem to write on here lately.

I'm working really hard on getting my graduate school personal statement rewritten.

It is really taking it out of me mentally.

I find it exhausting.

I miss the thinking and writing that I've been doing for the last few years.

I love asking, Am I living an artistic life? Am I creating a beautiful existence?

And I stumble upon all kinds of answers.

Most recently I have been thinking about how excellent it is that Schiller defines beauty as a composite concept: something that describes a harmonious unity of morality, emotions, intellect, and so on.

I thought about how the contemplation of beauty is so important because what it really is the silent appreciation of all of those different factors.

Human perception is incredibly loaded. We don't just perceive things in simple ways. We perceive things as expressing thoughts, expressing emotions, expressing morality, expressing insights. There is so much going on in even the simplest glance at an object.

I have also been thinking about the way that thought and emotion are mutually intensifying: as we think more clearly or differently about things we create new emotions for ourselves. Our intellect colors our emotions, and our emotions color our intellect. They support and intensify one another to give rise to this intense artistic experience.

This is why Collingwood defines art as the imaginative expression of emotions yet locates Man's aesthetic capability in thought. Man is not artistic because he is an emotional being, but because he is a thinking being. It is the existence of thought that makes possible the complex and rich emotions that Man then expresses in art.

Oh to live an artistic, expressive life.

Oh to build this fire within myself.

Oh to capture it in an expressible object.

Oh to set the fire free again.

Oh to let it consume my life once more.

Flaming streets flaming tress flaming hearts flaming minds.

Yet I cannot pursue these questions right now.

I must direct my attention to other questions.

The question I have for my graduate work is this: Why is democracy failing in America?

I intend to answer this question historically by asking: What were the institutional relationships that made democracy possible in the first place? What is this historical linking of citizenship, military service, and democratic participation? Does the failing of democracy in America have anything to do with the fact that we have successfully disentangled democratic participation and military service? Is it significant for democracy that now we just pay people to fight our wars? What has this decoupling of military service and the electorate done to democracy?

How are we to be sure that the government will act in the people's interests if the military is now a economically driven tool? If the people were the ones carrying out the States business, and not just a group of employees, would the States actions not more carefully reflect the peoples best interests?

Would the reinstitution of mandatory State service not be a viable form of choice architecture that may help reinvigorate the democratic spirit in America?

Is this country too far gone, too wrapped up in money?

Who knows.

But this is what I'm trying to do with myself these days.

I have no time for the questions that have been occupying me for the past 3 years.

It is time I ask the questions that I know I need to ask.

These, so far, are the most important questions that I can muster about my age.

I Am What I Do.

I have been attempting to fully identify myself with my actions.

There is a modern tendency (MacIntyre and Zizek would have me believe) to claim an identity that is separate from the actions that we regularly perform.

A businessman, for example, may feel that his 'true self' lies in his loving relationship with his family, and that his cut-throat business dealings are superfluous, not to be considered a part of his true identity.

In other words, for us Moderns there is always a deeper, truer self that is not defined merely by what we do.

I, for instance, could claim that I am really a philosopher, an artist, a thinker, and that my working life is somehow secondary to this true self.

This is not the case. I am a barista. I am a slinger of doughnuts. A purveyor of baked and fried goods. A fattener and caffeinater of Seattle.

How interesting, this decoupling of identity and action.

Most problematic, I think.

Because now people can claim to be good people without acting like good people.

How many of use philosophies of compassion and love to justify prejudice and hate?

How many of us claim an identity even though we don't live it?

We are what we do.

Mind is what mind does.

'Be careful what you do', I say to myself.

'You are what you do', I tell myself.

I shrink at the implications of that conclusion.

Because I have done bad things.

I continue to do bad things.

And I cannot, and should not, attempt to preserve some image of myself that lives beyond my actions.

Because my being can only live through my actions.

My being can never live through my thoughts alone.

I am what I do.

I must therefore live my thinking.

Kahneman, You Cheeky Bastard.

Today I finished Thinking, Fast and Slow. 


An impressive book.

I still have a problem with the title.

But I now understand more precisely what Kahneman wishes the book to do.

He hopes that it will further discredit standard economic theories depictions of individuals as fully conscious, rational, logically consistant beings. Individuals are always biased, always use heuristics, and need to be guided in order to make proper decision.

Kahneman's analysis of biases and heuristics is ultimately to be used as a way of creating social and economic policies that will encourage people to make the right kinds of choices.

He unleashes all of this in the conclusion.

I am embarrassed to admit that I failed to read between the lines.

At the end of the book it is so obvious that this is how his work should be approached.

But I was foolishly looking for it as a guide to the education of my own judgement.

Even though I knew that Kahneman does not have much hope for the elimination of biases and heuristics.

Finally, a bit of clarity on what Kahneman really wants his work to be used for.

Major reflection on this book is now possible. I will spend some time with it in the coming weeks and months.

But now I intend to finish reading Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and The Rest.

How exciting to be reading two giants of contemporary thinking.

August.

Oh boy.

I don't want to do much writing right now.

I'm closing in on the end of Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I've also read about half of Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and The Rest, which I am finding very impressive so far.

All these essay ideas about responsibility as fundamentally about storytelling, about historical morality, so on.

I don't have the patience for it right now.

I signed up to take the GRE on September 25th. I need to get my ass in gear to get graduate school applications in.

But so much is going on.

My heart and mind are so active.

I'll get them in. I know I will.

I'm just trying to get a grip on myself.

I've only just returned from vacation, for god's sake!

Well, it was Sunday I got back.

Gosh, only four or five days.

I'll be back in the swing of things soon.

Savagery and civility!

Never barbarity!

Over and out.

A Love Heuristic

I continue to slowly read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I recently wrote a post about the title and how I take exception with it. But no matter that.

Kahneman has written a very impressive book. But his methods and his goals are different than mine, I think.

His goal is to show that humans are systematically biased, always relying on heuristics to guide our thoughts and choices. Moreover, Kahneman is skeptical of the possibility of reconfiguring our heuristics and biases so as to improve our capacity for intuitive judgement. Kahneman, it seems, thinks we should do our best to become aware of our heuristics and biases, and should augment our choices with statistical and other types of knowledge.

Choice, this seems to imply, should not be left entirely to intuition, but should be about the intelligent/statistical evaluation of intuitions.

This makes sense to me. I think that Kahneman is right that we will never be able to completely break down and reprogram our heuristics.

But I don't think that we should give up on the idea of training intuitive judgement. I think that we must strive for the purposeful creation of heuristics and biases. We must work to structure our intuitive apparatus, we must try to purposefully create habits of thought and action.

The one habit that I have worked to cultivate in myself is the habit of love. Loving myself, loving the people I know, loving the people I see around me, loving the world.

The more I go forward with thinking the more I am convinced that Gandhi and MLK had it right. Proper morality, proper politics, must be built on a foundation of love.

All of this has something to with what I wrote about God. Because I've realized that what I'm talking about can be called God, but doesn't necessarily need to be. It can be called oneness, connectedness, or the quantum self or some other craziness like that. But there is something serious going on in oneness, in feeling a sense of connection to everyone around us.

I am in the habit of loving these days. I want to keep cultivating that habit.

Dare to think.

Dare to love.

Absence.

On Friday I'm flying to California.

Nine days or something.

Family reunion.

What up, fams.

What up, Sea Ranch.

No computer.

Cell phone, sure.

Books, def.

Looking forward to disconnecting for a bit.

Excited to reflect for a minute.

Things are good.

I intend to do some substantial work when I return.

Both on my new writing project and on my future.

I Long For God.

I was raised somewhere between agnosticism and aggressive atheism. I am at home with both of these ways of thinking.

But in my heart I long for some conception of god.

Not a god like the Christian god.

Not a god like some sentient being that controls everything and has some awesome plan.

A god like the force, like chi, or like Reiki.

Because I am indeed Reiki trained.

I suspect there are things going on in the world beyond the material.

I believe in matter.

But I suspect the existence of other things.

This is all wild speculation. But I have very little tolerance for hardline atheists.

Atheism simply will not do.

Plus, I love the way Rilke speaks of god.

I share with you:

 In The Book of Hours Rilke writes:

"What will you do, God, when I die?
I am your jug (and I will shatter)
I am your drink (and I'll go bad)
I am your clothing and your calling,
you'll lose all reason, losing me.

With me gone, you'll have no house
where warm words will welcome you.
Without me, you'll have no sandals:
your exhausted feet will wander bare.

Your mighty cloak will fall away.
Your gaze, which my cheek took in
soft and warm, like a pillow,
will arrive here, look, search long–
and finally at the end of sunset
lie down in the lap of alien stones.

What will you do, God? I'm afraid."

Oh fucking christ...

This poem moves me so deeply and I don't understand why.

Partly because I feel like a universe in myself.

What will the world do without me?

Don't you know that I am the keeper and bringer of all these riches and pains?

Don't you know that the world's depths reside within me?

Don't you see that without me the universe would have no way to know itself?

I don't really long for God.

But I might.

Instantaneous Retroactivity, Or, How Being Responsible Means Being a Historian

This post's title is absurd.

Part of me chose the title because I like the absurdity so much.

But I really am trying to say something with that title.

Right now the thing I'm trying to think about is the retroactive elements in responsibility. I want to know, Why is it that responsibility can be claimed days, months, or years after an event has occurred?

How is it that the idea of responsibility leaves room for such retroactivity?

Responsibility contains these retroactive elements because its core, I suspect, is narrative (and history).

Responsibility, in other words, is nothing more (and nothing less) than telling a story in which we are responsible.

But what about those moments in which responsibility is immediately claimed? Because, while responsibility can be retroactive, it can also be instantaneous. We can approach a situation and know fully what we are doing, and claim responsibility for in that moment, with zero retroactivity. Responsibility is fully claimed in the moment, and no (or minimal) retroactivity exists.


But is it possible to fully claim responsibility for an action in the exact moment in which it occurs?


I have two doubts about this.


First, we never know exactly what our actions will do. Perhaps in the short run, in 5 minutes we see the anticipated results. But there will always be unforeseeable longterm consequences. If we never know quite what we do does, then we can never quite assume full responsibility for our actions (unless we do it retroactively). 


Second, I believe that human action only becomes intelligible in terms of narrative and story telling. So, for us to claim full responsibility for an action we must have a full narrative of the action and its outcomes. But that narrative can never be perfect. So I guess this second point is really just an extension of the first point. 


In either case, my conclusion is the same: Responsibility can only be claimed after an action through the construction of an explanatory narrative that renders our own actions intelligible.


We cannot claim responsibility in the precise moment of an action because we never know what we do does.


Responsibility can only be retroactive.

Responsibility can only be a form of historical thought. 


It may be possible that there is such a thing as instantaneous retroactivity, or near instantaneous. Because maybe we have a good narrative that predicts the outcomes of an action, and we can apply that narrative to our actions in a moment with minimal reflexivity.

But, at best, this is a sort of instantaneous retroactivity.

We cannot claim full responsibility for an action until it has been performed. No matter how quickly we do it, it is still a past action that we are claiming responsibility for.


Responsibility is a species of historical thought, through and through.


To be responsible is to be a special kind of historian.

This is the claim I am working on in my latest essay.

This conclusion is sitting more and more comfortably with me, but I don't yet know how I intend to demonstrate it.

The Ease of Anger. The Power of Love.

I can remember a moment.

It was probably early 2007. I was listening to The Smiths. I was walking up a flight of stairs near the University of Maryland's gym.

I remember the lyric: "It's so easy to laugh. It's so easy to hate. It takes strength to be gentle and kind."

Such a bomb that lyric dropped on me.

Perhaps Morrissey is no philosopher and I shouldn't take that lyric too seriously. But I do.

It is easy to laugh, easy to hate, easy to be angry.

For me, at least, it is easy to be angry.

I was angry most of today, most of this weekend.

I had no patience for anything. I was snapping inside.

I, of course, was polite to my customers. I worked hard, I did what I had to do.

But I wasn't happy about it. Not at all.

Yet I need to remain strong. Love takes work. I need to stay strong.

I remember once when someone told me they wanted to see me angry. My answer: 'You wouldn't like me when I'm angry'. Then I turned huge and green and ripped their head off.

Just kidding.

That person never saw my anger.

Most people never see my anger.

I don't want them to see my anger.

I don't want to see my anger.

There is nothing in anger to be lauded. I do not think anger a virtue. I think it a shortcoming. I think it a failure.

Anger is a defense.

To think anger as essential is to fail to see the true origin of our emotions.

Anger is always a defense against pain, against embarrassment, against shame, against what have you.

So why does anger come so easily to me?

Because my emotions are fucking intense, man.

I'm a freak. I'm bursting at the seams at every moment. I can hardly contain myself.

If only I could find the words.

If only.

Hey. Guess what?

I don't need those words.

Because, ugh.

I just know it.

I know that it is easy to be angry.

And I know that Rilke is right when he tells me to trust in what is difficult.

Because life is difficult.

Life, too, might be simple.

But just because it is simple doesn't mean it isn't hard.

In A Moment

My entire mood can change.
I apologize about the egg shells.
I don't know my own strength.

I sat down and suddenly I realized
How much fun I am having and
How much I don't want this life to end.

How much I was lying when
I told them that I was fine and
That I didn't care about them.

I'm better than fine.
I'm the worlds greatest and
I am living the dream.

Tomorrow, I do get to experience
Another day in paradise.

A Delightful Development

I've been so confused about how to develop a concept of historical morality.

But all of this thinking about responsibility and stuff has got it all going like crazy.

I've got this excellent new outline, and I'm really excited about it.

The problem is this.

Modern conceptions of freedom and responsibility typically rely on ideas like thought, will, reason, or consciousness.

Recent psychological research, however, is revealing how limited our self-knowledge is, and how out of control our feelings, thoughts, and actions are. We live far more intuitive lives than we think.

How are we to be responsible, then? If responsibility cannot be identified with consciousness, reason, or will, then what is it to be identified with?

My answer: it is to be identified with history. It is to be defined as a method of telling a story in which you are an agent, responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

This conclusion, as I noted in an earlier post, seems unavoidable if we ask ourselves, How is it that responsibility can be assumed well after an event? Days, even weeks or years can pass and we still have the option of claiming responsibility for something.

How can this be?

How, in short, to account for the retroactivity of responsibility?

I believe I can resolve this problem by arguing that responsibility is about being a special type of a historian. Specifically, a historian of your own actions. One that fully identifies with feelings, thoughts, and actions. One that sees past actions as expressions of our duty.


I believe that by approaching the issue of responsibility in this way I am making a great stride in my quest to develop a concept of historical morality.

The Symphony and Shared Experience

Tonight I attened the Seattle symphony's performance of Gustav Holst's 'The Planets'.

I almost didn't go.

I went with my aunt.

She called me about an hour before and said 'Riley! We can't get seats together! It is packed! But we could watch it separately, in the same vicinity and meet up after.'

My reaction: Fuck that.

I'm not trying to go to the symphony and sit by myself while I know that my lovely aunt is somewhere in the crowd watching the same thing.

How strange!

Shouldn't I just have been like, "oh, well what is the difference if we sit next to one another or not? We will still be seeing the same performance."

But it isn't the same.

I'm not there just for the symphony.

I'm there to share that experience with a mind that I know and understand. A mind that I love and want to be involved with.

 Thankfully, we ended up being able to get seats together. So we went and it was lovely.

I think this incident to be highly demonstrative of my tendencies.

I love people and sharing things with them.

I love to know that I am feeling what you are feeling, thinking what you are thinking, seeing what you are seeing.

This is the other side of my solitude.

I am a deeply alone person. I always feel solitary, I embrace my solitude. But when I can find a way to share something, I do.

I love to share.

I love to let my solitude approach another solitude.

I love to let my mind share with another mind.

I love to share experiences.

It makes me feel less alone.

It reminds me that there are many solitudes, and that we can love one another.

The Claim

I've begun to outline an essay on the issue of responsibility.

I hope to address the problems that I briefly raised in my last post.

The central claim is this: To be responsible is to be a special kind of historian.

A vague statement? Yes.

The claim arises out of the question: How do I account for the retroactivity of responsibility? How am I to explain the fact that responsibility can be assumed well after a thought, feeling, or action has occurred?

I will put some meat on the bones of these statements soon, I hope.

Responsibility

I want to badly to claim responsibility for my own life.

But there are so many things that are out of my control.

And I don't just mean big things like the year I was born or the weather today.

I mean that my emotions, my thoughts, and my actions, too, often feel out of my control.

I'm never sure why I feel, think, or do what I do.

Yet there must be a way to claim responsibility for all of these things.

I must claim responsibility for not only my actions, but my thoughts and feelings too.

But this is a tough task.

I have decided, however, that it has something to do with self-knowledge.

To claim responsibility for my feelings is to claim that I understand myself.

To claim responsibility for my thoughts is to claim that I understand myself.

But it is a retroactive sort of responsibility.

Because sometimes I do something in a moment and I don't understand it at the time. Then years later I can say 'aha, I understand why I did this. I can now say that I was indeed responsible for that feeling/thought/action.' Responsibility is something that is often claimed after the fact.

Responsibility has something to do with retroactivity.

Thus responsibility has something to do with narrative.

Thus responsibility has something to do with history.

And I suspect that responsibility has something to do with self-creation.

This is a short essay I hope to write: "Responsibility and Self-Knowledge"

'Art, Zen, and Insurrection' In Its Entirety

From September of 2010 until May of this year I occupied myself with a longterm writing project.

It was titled, 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change in an Aesthetic Existence'. The goal of the essay was to argue that aesthetics and ethics needed to be mutually elaborated: that it was worthwhile to conceptualize our lives as a work of art, and that this type of aesthetic life could be a moral life.

The project was inspired largely by Foucault's work in The Use of Pleasure, but was focused more heavily on Collingwood's The Principles of Art.

The project never panned out like I thought it would.

But it was an invaluable exercise. It helped me develop myself intellectually, and, more importantly, helped me become more expressive, more moral, more mindful.

I am happy to let it go and to present it to the internet in its full form.

You can find the document here.

Thanks.

Solitude and Love

I'm still thinking very much about solitude, aloneness, loneliness.

In that order.

I feel solitary in the best way.

I feel alone in a definite way.

I only feel lonely in the most distant way.

I want to embrace Rilke's definition of solitude, "a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves.... a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person" (Letters, 69).

I don't know who this other person is.

I don't need to know.

Because all I want to do is work on myself.

I just want to become capable of loving.

I feel much love.

For others.

For myself.

But I don't know if I will ever find another solitude, let alone one that will "protect and border and greet" me.

I don't think that should concern me.

Frankly, it does and it doesn't.