metonymy4u

I like the way Paul Celan’s poems hit you with no introduction. I think it takes some guts to jump into a poem with no warning whatsoever.







People have been trying for countless centuries to come up with a non-contradictory, non-trivial explanation for the fact that though our thoughts are physical events, they seem to lead inextricably to an understanding of the non-physical. What shall we make of this mad mystery?

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Forgiveness and letting be, are about one’s relation to pain not people.

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                               The critique of real reason *



What is the significance of a word? Does it link you to something real? Does it re-present some state of affairs in a person or the world? Must a statement be “true” or “false?” The answer to these questions for much of history has been an emphatic “yes.” And yet, at very nearly the dawn of recorded time, there were dissenting voices. Voices that refused to answer the Buddha’s 16 unanswerable questions, voices that needled us with doubts about being able to step into the same river twice, voices that finally suggested that words might be less like anchors, and more like ladders to be thrown away once one has climbed them. The author who has cut herself loose from the optical theory of words (as bringing an object/subject more or less into focus) may studiously avoid the desire to explain herself because any sufficient narrative threatens to weave the web of logic even tighter. And her goal, finally, is escape. So the question becomes, will you walk with her for a time? Not to dis-cover another symbol or meaning, but merely to feel a warm hand in yours.

*With gratitude to Heraklitus, Plato, the Pali canonists, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Carol Gilligan.

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…though I suspect if we problematize language too quickly, people often won’t want to talk to us.

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God and the infinite sets of mathematics are the abstract limits of a set of infinitely inductive series. The question of whether they are phenomenological events depends on whether you believe the limit is a member of the infinite set. The answer to that question for me functions as an axiom, not a theorem. So the discussion really just comes down to whether one thinks that by describing the limit of an infinite set one has phenomenologically experienced the limit of the infinite set.

Pick your definition and your assumption and go from there…I see nothing to be proven…

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