metonymy4u

hegel and marx were the philosophers of history who thought that history would end with their understandings. i rather agree with derrida and rorty that history has no end and that metaphors are the interminable events with which we realize our future now. every poem, every image, every event constructed in the manner of what the zen tradition calls “silent illumination” is a throw into this unconfirmed future. believing that, as dick allen observed, “if you talk to nowhere long enough…meanings are reduced to surprises,” i think we all ought to contribute.

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So it’s no secret that for most of my life I’ve struggled with my relationship to relationship. Relationships have been what I’ve craved most and been least able to sustain or achieve. And the suffering has been such that at times I have not wanted to continue living. Recently I’ve decided that seeking “romantic” relationship is no longer helpful or wise. And so I’ve decided that it is time for me to explore a different relationship to my desire for relationship. To that end, I’ve taken down all my online dating profiles and hope to actively cultivate a different relationship to my desires for relationship with others, whenever such desire arises. I have lots of doubts about these decisions. I’m not sure if my behaviors are wise or not. My brain is giving me arguments on both sides of the fence. Therefore I am committing only to awareness. My goal is nothing more than to increase awareness of my desire, and to “speak without involving listeners.”

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you may have noticed from my postings that i am a kantian agnostic with regard to theological matters. what this means is that i see the idea of god as something that we are commonly led to contemplate as the result of our musings about good and evil, but that divinity itself is not anything that can be given in experience. wittgenstein and kierkegaard taught me what it means to be an agnostic: to live in a place of uncertainty, what existentialists generally would call abandonment or facticity. it is an uncomfortable place to live, because it means that i must confront the very real possibility that my suffering has no meaning or redemption in this empty, boundless universe. in the end i cannot depend on the affirmation of a supreme being or beings, and am left merely with the occasional kindness of strangers such as yourself.

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The Buddhists talk about several kinds of stress. There is the stress of living in a mortal body, the stress of having experiences we don’t like, of not having experiences we do like, and the stress of change. For the past 5 years or so I have been experiencing stress and pain so great that at times I thought dying would be the only way to end it. I experienced the stress of having everything I didn’t want: depression, isolation, loneliness, aging. There was also the pain of not having the things I did want: companionship, respect, trust, commitment, love, time, children, family, strength. I used to go to bed wondering how long my brain could endure the apparently never ending pain. A walk up the stairs, a glimpse of a couple holding hands, a child’s smile – all of these could become the occasion for more and more pain and then pain generated by pain upon pain. There is no doubt: at times I would have preferred to die than go on living with the pain. It’s like I knew that somewhere over those hills was a sunset so stunning I could not bear to live without its beauty in my eyes at least once.

But now I feel something different. Now, I can feel an emotional experience as just one single event. It arrives, often unexpected, it unfolds as difference, as one signal amongst many sensed by my brain, and it passes away. Events are impermanent. They are both suffering and beauty at the same time. Now a walk up the stairs can be painful, a glimpse of a couple holding hands, a mother with her child, a thought, a memory. All of these are pain for me still. The difference is that I breathe with the pain instead of frantically trying to escape it. I have no doubt that my life will be lived in pain for some time to come. The difference is, that I’m not afraid of it any more. I am not the pain. Once I learned not to edit my “self,” I was free to live.

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Isn’t it time that we left behind ideas of right and wrong and learned instead to see our thoughts merely as events in an endless and mysterious universe?

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These days I’ve learned that if I experience a powerful thought or feeling (often painful), it is helpful to stop and realize that if I’m feeling a strong emotion, then something important must have just happened. I’m not always aware of, nor can I “figure out” what that important something was. That’s no longer the point. Because in trying to “figure that out,” I was in fact voting on the validity of my own emotional experience. And that’s not helpful. What is helpful is to accept that something important is happening. To me. Right now. Trying to talk ourselves out of our emotions is something we’ve been doing for the past 2500 years. Isn’t it time for something different?

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I would like to re-present the question of authority in a manner that I don’t believe anyone currently alive today can answer. The question I’m raising is how do we solve the problem of the apparently never ending “war of all against all?” Granted that, pace Nietzsche and Freud, human aggression is not the sine qua non of our existence, yet we still have to confront this question. To this point in human history most of the answers given in the west have been variations of the notion that “the truth will set you free,” whether that is the truth of a sovereign charged primarily with maintaining a civil truce (Hobbes, Locke) or the truth of an inner light which necessarily leads everyone to relinquish the use of cruelty (Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud). In an interesting and weird twist on Marx’s historicism, Rawls proposed to distribute justice by requiring those who hold power to relinquish power. This gives me pause, and I often wonder what our world would look like if every citizen were required to spend one week on a long term residential, psychiatric unit and one week attending the poorest school in their home state. I love Rawls’ vision, but pragmatically I don’t know how he ever proposed to implement it. Of course, utopian theorists often don’t know how to implement their vision, though I’d rather hang out with their lot than with pragmatists like Lenin or Jefferson, thank you very much! In the end I prefer figures who lead by example rather than by fiat (the authority of effort as opposed to the authority of commandment.…)

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We can learn any skill we can conceive of as urgent. Think about someone whose skills and abilities you admire and who you despair of ever being able to emulate. I promise you that the day that person was born, she or he did not possess any of those skills which you so admire. They learned. So can you.

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I could say to you that if I dropped this apple it would fall at a rate of 9.8 m/(sec*sec), and you might agree. Then I could say that because we agree on what a meter is and what a second is and what it means to fall, that therefore that’s the way things actually are. That as soon as I clear up any confusion about each term in my statement, we must, on the strength of the empirical data, agree that apples actually do fall towards the earth when dropped and that they actually accelerate at the rate of 9.8 m/(sec*sec). But a pragmatist might jump in here and object that in fact I just pulled a philosophical sleight of hand. That the statement that an apple will fall at a rate of 9.8 m/(sec*sec) and the statement that that’s the way things actually are, are two different events, not necessarily or even empirically related to one another in any clear and distinct manner. The first is a matter of pragmatics, she might observe, the second of piety. And she would, I believe, have no trouble accepting the first even as she severely desires to punish the second. Thus in this way we can equally embrace all the statements of science as well as Derrida’s desire to break with the entire tradition of Western Faith. Because one need not have anything to do with the other. The problem, as I see it, is when self-conscious poets like Derrida get hit on the head and want to steal science’s thunder. Then they change their name to Lacan. For although we have ample data to suggest that faith and poetry are events that promote healing and recovery from illness, to then turn over control of the cancer drugs to the poets and the priests would be utter madness. A fact that I suspect Derrida unfortunately appreciated towards the end of his life as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. And even though for most of my adult life I have considered him a charlatan, I have continued thinking about him and it was just there in light of these very considerations that I finally learned to adopt a new attitude towards him. Indeed, based on these considerations, one could begin to see, pace Nietzsche, all “-isms” as normative theories masquerading as descriptions.

I’m trying to figure out how to use science to help people. To put it another way, I’m trying to figure out how to allow my behaviors to be shaped by the behaviors of people who look like scientists, in order to shape the behaviors of people who look like clients.

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i think that the word should is as useful as believing that because you own the land, you can make the waterfall run backwards up the hill. in fact, i think i’m beginning to experience “should” as one of the most massive failures in the history of human linguistic experimentation.

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