The Enlightenment Underground

Umpired Umbathy, Pathic and Pathological, Part I

2011-11-01T13:14:00.000-05:00

I am here to serve others;

This is my love;

I serve those who are above me hierarchically;

This is my love;

To those below me I offer an opportunity of service;

This is my love;

I command them to serve me;

I command them to love me;

As I have loved:

I discipline and straighten their love;

This is how I am above them;

As I have been disciplined and straightened by those above me;

That is why they are above me and those below me.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXVIII

2011-09-24T13:03:00.007-05:00

Carlos-o(∞): “ We have this situation: the Enlightenment presupposes most of which Postmodernity finds problematic, while what the Enlightenment consciously treats, and upon which it elevates, erects and carefully constructs, is what Postmodernity finds necessary to dismantle, precisely for the purpose of getting at, releasing, and thus letting breathe, what the Enlightenment had presupposed, (or taken for granted.)

It’s more confusing than this, though…What the Enlightenment presupposes and takes for granted also rather more importantly appears to be what the Enlightenment wishes to oppress or marginalize, to block from ‘serious’ consideration. In the case of the Enlightenment, it's even more difficult than usual to distinguish assumption from repressed content.

It could also be that Postmodernity has no necessary relationship to the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment could be just another ‘era’ or ‘other’ for the Postmoderns to be playful with, (or pillage—it’s often difficult in Postmodernity to tell which is which.)

As in Postmodernity the wherewithal to bypass the Enlightenment is available (in the form of a remarkably diverse and thorough archive of world history at the fingertips of the masses in the form of the internet, among others), we could see the Postmoderns going back to those things the Postmoderns want wherever they are to be found (e.g., to ancient Greece, to pre-Columbian American culture, to Africa, or whatever or whenever.)

In other words, why would the Postmoderns tarry at all on the historical Enlightenment? (We take it as beyond question that the Postmoderns do tarry within the ‘problem’ of the Enlightenment.) There must be compelling reasons for this. This tarrying by Postmoderns, on the historical Enlightenment, the need to do this, is the problem of Totalization.

There needs to be some satisfactory Postmodern theory of what it is the Enlightenment is responding to, why the Enlightenment arises in the first place. Why would the Enlightenment presuppose what the Postmoderns find problematical? Why would the ‘values’ of the two eras be in this strange relationship of inverse symmetry? Why would a purely formal freedom, potentially devoid of an experience or feeling of freedom, suffice theoretically for the Enlightenment, while for the Postmoderns, the experience or feeling of freedom would be paramount, and without which the formal freedoms of the Enlightenment appear threatening as thick prison walls?"

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXVII

2011-09-20T15:16:00.003-05:00

Carlos-o(∞): “ Try this associative permucombination ,

‘Enlightenment is the overcoming of An Enslaving Process through A Liberating Process.’”

Carlos-O(1): “ Yes, it is so.”

Carlos-o(∞): “ For the Enlightenment, the enslaving processes are custom, tradition, and dogma; the liberating processes are those of rationality. For Postmodernity, the enslaving processes are the totalizing processes; the liberating process is non-totalizing thinking(s).”

Carlos-O(1): “ There is this direct symmetry you point out, but there is also an inverse symmetry: the liberating process of rationality is formal or formalizable, while for Postmodernity, the liberating process is informal, and playful. For the Enlightenment, the liberating process is tied to progress, (liberating processes are known as the progressive), while for Postmodernity, that demand for progress becomes somehow oppressive, overly serious, something better left unconceptualized (or not ‘worried’ about?).”

Carlos-o(∞): “ Thought wouldn’t have to justify itself in the Enlightenment, but in Postmodernity, thought is something which interferes with ‘being in the moment.’ In some ways, the thinking of postmodernity, nontotalizing thinking, almost appears as a repudiation of thinking (Enlightenment thinking.) Non-totalizing thinking understands itself as an experiencing of life, ‘being in the moment’, ‘don’t think:do’, etc. Non-totalizing thinking is experiencing. This is the big point: Non-totalizing thinking understands itself as an experiencing. ”

Carlos-O(1): “ What’s also odd is that in Postmodernity much of what is experienced is the custom, tradition, and even dogma of previous peoples and eras, which is lifted (as in, five-finger discount), recycled, sampled and rearranged (usually quite a lot.) Custom, tradition, and dogma are of course what the Enlightenment confronted as the deadening, enslaving, or unthinking. When Postmodernity resurrects and playfully remixes these, it does not reawaken the deadening, enslaving, or unthinking, somehow. Or maybe their powers of deadening, enslaving, and stopping thinking are not taken seriously, and that does the trick.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXVI

2011-09-17T12:40:00.006-05:00

Carlos-o(∞):“Here is another associative permucombination of your Enlightenment theory,

‘Enlightenment is the overcoming of A Deadening Process through An Enlivening Process.’”

Carlos-O(1): “ Yes, it is so.”

Carlos-o(∞): “ We observe two things: 1) the degree to which your theory is Manichean; 2) its romanticism.”

Carlos-O(1): “ It’s troubling to me.”

Author-O(1)’s note: It’s not troubling to me. I remind everyone we will eventually take Carlos-O(1)’s theory of Enlightenment, in its original form, as perfect. Please keep in mind, as we rearrange and recombine the elements of this theory, we will not ultimately back down from any of terms or elements of its original statement, (e.g. totalization.)

Carlos-o(∞): “ Totalization, objectivity, completeness, stasis, and other conceptions associated with these terms are death processes, while freedom, life, flowing, creating, becoming, are life processes. ( In the historical Enlightenment: custom, tradition, dogma are the thoughtless, while rationality (totalization, objectivity) and empiricism are the thoughtful.)”

Carlos-O(1): “ Of the above, Totalization and objectivity, elements of what the historical Enlightment regarded as the thoughtful, become in our time part of what we regard as death processes. How could what had been regarded as the thoughtful come to be a death process, come to be associated with death processes, against the life processes? ”

Carlos-o(∞): “How could so many of the ‘thoughtful’ productions be so deadly destructive? How did your ‘thought’ result in atom bombs, global poverty, perpetual war, ecological catastrophe? ”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXV

2011-09-15T17:11:00.007-05:00

Carlos-o(∞): “You say we have an effortless access to non-totalizing thinking. You are the one saying this. It’s odd, because we-of-the -o(∞) are the ones to talk about ‘effortless’ access, if it is to be talked about at all. We-of-the -o(∞) are the ones who act on instinct, on effortless intuition. When you speak of an effortless access to non-totalizing thinking, what we hear is you speaking of non-totalizing thinking as uncritical thinking. We-of-the -o(∞) instinctively (as is ‘proper’ for us to do) object. We-of-the -o(∞) rely on you to be critical, reflective, a bit cautious, a bit reserved.”

Carlos-O(1): “ In a way, I was trying to establish an analogy between postmodernity and the Enlightenment. As rationality was something the Enlightenment thinkers largely presupposed, so is non-totalizing thinking for the postmoderns. Non-totalizing thinking is for the Postmodern what rationality was to the Enlightenment. You’ll notice the Enlightenment thinkers do not make a problem of rationality. They do not find themselves amidst a quandary every time someone makes a claim to the rational. There may be question of whether this or that claim is rational. That’s not the same thing.”

Carlos-o(∞): “ Yet this is something we find objectionable about the Enlightenment. What seems to us most problematic and difficult, most questionable, remains unquestionable,(e.g., rationality.)We see no advantage to replicating this condition in the postmodern—we don’t see any advantage to that(e.g., with non-totalizing thinking.) We can, and it seems we must, make non-totalizing thinking our primary problem—we must not presuppose it.”

Carlos-O(1): “ You think non-totalizing thinking can be examined (objectified?) without making it dead, totalized?”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXIV

2011-09-14T11:42:00.004-05:00

Carlos-O(1):

“ This is going to sound odd coming from me, but what I think is that in postmodernity we have a natural or immediate or easy-effortless access to non-totalizing thinking…We know what that is without needing an explanation, without being taught it. We do non-totalizing thinking without needing to examine what we are doing very closely…And it appears non-totalizing thinking is destroyed by any such examination.”

Carlos-o(∞):

“ This is also not a position we-of-the -o(∞) ordinarily take, but it is clear to us you are making things too simple for yourself. To start, notice this: you give a basis in totalization to both the state and critique. (Now, we-of-the -o(∞) say this whether you call critique a totalization or a non-totalizing manner of thinking. And by the way, it is not at all clear which of these two options you are choosing.)

We-of-the -o(∞) say this: in postmodernity while THE STATE strengthens, CRITIQUE weakens. We-of-the -o(∞) want to know why, as what both you and we are calling non-totalizing thinking becomes ‘dominant’ we do not see the weakening of THE STATE concurrently with the weakening of CRITIQUE (as totalizing.) Is there a ‘non-totalizing state’ which corresponds to ‘non-totalizing critique’,enabling it and being enabled by it?

If non-totalizing thinking is characteristic of our age (you are close to saying this is our Zeitgeist,) why doesn’t this thinking extend into and cause a reworking of political theory? Or if it is, why are the results so unsatisfactory?”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXIII

2011-09-11T12:34:00.001-05:00

Carlos-O(1): “I regard you as if a pack of wild and yet cowardly jackals and you regard me as if the tyrant of a totalitarian state. Other times, I regard you as fellow citizens of the psyche, or an integral part of the flora and fauna of a healthy eco-psyche, while you regard me benignly as the bumbling spokesperson, or the lion at the top of the food chain, culling the ‘herd.’ (While the term ‘pack’ is unpleasant, it is not necessarily insulting, but my experience with you is the word ‘herd’ is not exactly pleasant, but definitely insulting. Yet in this benign, resigned, or conciliatory mood of yours, you are willingly herded and passive. So, while I can, I will call you what you don’t like, ‘herd.’)”

Carlos-o(∞): “ Yes, there is so much room for reconciliation, for peace. We are in a long-term relationship (LTR), after all. We are often amused as you strut around the psyche, pretending to be a lion. And as far as insults go, we are never phased by them, as we see through them, immediately and spontaneously. So go ahead and call us what you will. Herd, or pack, or lavae crawling in puke, or whatever. We take it in and use it. Usually this is energy and passion we can use.”

Carlos-O(1): “ This brings us to the question I want to ask: how is it even possible there be the state in the postmodern period?”

Carlos-o(∞): “ We begin to answer this by returning to your ‘ Enlightenment is the overcoming of Totalization through critique.’ We are going to loosen our associative powers to explore this. We have always heard in your theory, ‘Enlightenment is the overcoming of the Totalitarian State through non-totalizing thinking.’ Two associations (and accompanying assumptions): 1) totalization is the equivalent of the Totalitarian State, its cause, its isomorphic or homologous underpinning; 2) critique is non-totalizing.”

Carlos-O(1): “ Yes, it is so.”

Carlos-o(∞): “ And yet it is so sad that it is we-of-the -o(∞), who must point out how suspicious and dangerously confused this is. What if critique is totalizing? What if Totalization is the necessary precondition of effective critique? You could just as well be taken to be saying, ‘Enlightenment is the overcoming of Critique through the Totalitarian State.’ At least this is no more false than the previous. It becomes obvious how much rests on critique being non-totalizing. If critique is totalizing, using it to overcome Totalization is like putting out a fire with gasoline.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXII

2011-09-10T12:47:00.000-05:00

Carlos-o(∞): “It is as if you represent us—but of course you don’t even resemble us. You appear at other times to be our superior, as if you are monarch of the psyche. Still other times, you smooth over us—as if we disturb you, but you can’t admit that.”

Carlos-O(1): “ I am not a state. Nor am I a government. I do not govern you. The whole thing is absurd…All these analogies to political forms, worst of all to tyrannies…How did I come to be regarded this way?

Carlos-o(∞): “ We don’t know. It isn’t rational….It is absurd. We only know you speak for us, and somehow this speaking for us precludes us—it oppresses us in some way we can’t overcome. The feeling is one of your arrogance, your sense of superiority and entitlement, your ‘narcissism’.”

Carlos-O(1): “ You are innumerable, and I am merely one. (Yet you are the ones who feel threatened—another sign of your natural inferiority.) I am unified. What I think is you resent me for my being ‘together’, for being organized, decisive, active, creative. I create, you merely carp, kvetch, complain. You don’t dare come into the spotlight, down into the ring, to fight and have it out. You are like a pack of jackals, (or rats).”

Carlos-o(∞): “ Yes, we know this. Here’s something we know which you don’t: you are entirely variable, exchangeable. In fact, you get changed out rather often. We change you out now and then—you get the boot whenever you displease us. In other words, you do not have the ‘identity’ you think you do. You do not have the power you think you have, either. (But for reasons we can’t seem to get at, the illusion of power you possess is sufficient to have this power over us you really do have.) We completely deny you being ‘together’, civil, organized, decisive, active, or creative. This is what we cannot figure out: how we can change you out without what we change you out with becoming YOU. We change you out, time and time again, with something different, as it suits us, but YOU always retain a texture or character which remains YOU, (so also, in a sense you do have a distinct identity, and what we said earlier about you not having an identity is in this specific sense false.) We-of-the -o(∞) change you at will, with great flourish, with boldness and creativity, AND YET WE DO NOT CHANGE YOU. We must find out why. We conduct this conversation in order to find out why.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXXI

2011-09-05T11:30:00.005-05:00

Carlos-o(∞): “ You fear us because we seem lawless, heedless, cruel, destructive. And yet our own fear-- which obtrudes in the strangest way into your fear—is our law-like behavior, our capacity for submissiveness, our capacity to accept if not demand our own containment. We-of-the -o(∞) have a relationship to law. You know this very well. What we know very well is you occasionally get the idea we-of-the -o(∞) need to be let out, to have our relationship to law loosened. Because you think we need to breathe or something. We-of-the -o(∞) have been around for a long, long, time…Much longer than you’ve been around, Carlos-O(1), but we’ve not experienced this particular constellation before (with our host? But you see, Carlos-O(1), the problem is you are parasitic. There can be no compromise on this harsh judgment.)”

Carlos-O(1): “ I am the one who knows what’s best.”

Author-O(1)’s note: It is boring and repetitive to keep repeating that phrase—this irony lost its bite long before Author-O(1) came on the scene—but the regime of rationality, as an aristocracy of the knower, cannot be parodied without it.

Carlos-O(1): “I am the one who knows what’s best for all of us. That’s why I exist—that’s why God-nature-culture-blahblah-whooo-whooo made me. (the state in postmodernity.) To know best. I love you guys. I really, really love you guys. I see you down there, and I think back to myself in my younger days—I see myself in you guys. (which isn’t strange at all, as Carlos-O(1) and Carlos-o(∞) are viewed or conceptualized as one and the same, and have been for at least twenty-five hundred years,) Yeah, I know what it feels like to be cooped up in a psyche all day, believe me I do. Slaving over a hot brain. I did it for years and years and years. I worked myself up and out of that by the sweat of my brow. Let me tell you—I’ve always been in competitive situations…My whole life, I’ve been competing. Ever since I was a—since I was a—since I was a---(Carlos-O(1) cannot complete this thought, even if he traces his “since I was a” back to the most reductive social form, the nuclear family…but for reasons we shall see, this very incompletion of his thought, in this very critical moment, will become valorized by him, for him, ‘as what’s best for everyone.’)"

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXX

2011-09-04T12:41:00.006-05:00

Carlos-o(∞): “ ‘Will there be environmental damage to your psyche’? We-of-the -o(∞) are nourished by this question... You activate an opening for our critique of epistemology.”

Carlos-O(1): “No kidding? Epistemology is my very favorite preoccupation.”

Carlos-o(∞): “Precisely. Your preoccupation. We-of-the -o(∞) call it our occupation, but we also call it ePISStomointuiinuiti rather than epistemology, and that’s the term by which we will refer to it from now on.”

Carlos-O(1): “ I doubt your critique can phase me.”

Carlos-o(∞): “ Be reassured: we-of-the -o(∞) have qualms we will ‘phase’ you. We-of-the -o(∞) experience you destroying the village in order to save it… We-of-the -o(∞) are these village(s).”

Screen Capture: Johnny Cash ‘Don’t Go Near the Water’.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXIX

2011-09-03T02:50:00.006-05:00

Carlos-o(∞): “ The most important thing we of the -o(∞) have to offer you is critique.”

Carlos-O(1): “ Oh no.”

Carlos-o(∞): “ Actually, this is going to be much less painful than you may think. We of the -o(∞) only understand what is absolutely perfect…We of the -o(∞) revel perfection… will reve(a)l your splendor. (This is not through elucidation or interpretation, either.)”

Carlos-O(1) : “I’ve heard it said your type knows nothing of contradiction.”

Carlos-o(∞): “ There’s truth to that, but for now We of the -o(∞) can only give an analogy of how our criticism works. It is reminiscent of mining for gold in placer deposits. A placer deposit—there are many types, but for this analogy, think of loose gravels on the inner bank of a stream or river where it makes a sharp turn. There’s a lot of sand and gravel, maybe some muck, and amidst all the gravel, there are some nuggets of gold. There's always much more sand and gravel than nuggets, and there's no avoiding effort or labor in sorting gold from overburden, but We of the -o(∞) have no notion of such things as yield, efficiency, profitability, wasted effort. We care only for recovering the gold, even if it is just a few flecks and centuries to find it. We of the -o(∞) know of no calculability. We don’t calculate. We know of no worry. In a certain sense (which sense will become clearer later), we aren’t concerned with survival. We are not frugal or prudent. We expend. We don’t even care if there is in fact no gold to be found…We know there is. (To understand this last point, it is necessary to either reformulate epistemology or perhaps throw it away altogether…In ‘we know there is’ the knowing is radically different.)”

Carlos-O(1): “ Will there be environmental damage to my psyche moving all this sand and gravel to retrieve just a ‘few flecks’ of gold?”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXVIII

2011-08-30T19:16:00.014-05:00

A rustling of an undisclosed number of rats, not too far away.

One of the trains is stalled on the tracks, and the underground is strangely silent, eerily silent. The large headlight at the front of the stalled train, shines like a spotlight down the track, up to a curving left turn, illuminating it with eerie brightness matching the eerie silence.

The biggest rat in the pack is perched above the others, directly in front of the headlight, not moving much, munching on something, maybe a peanut.

The big rat’s silhouette, against the curving wall, magnifies the big rat's size into something enormous.

The rat's silhouette is moving—but not in synchrony with the motions the rat is making.

Though the big rat's paws clutch the peanut, the silhouette’s crooked, gnarled, wicked, humungously clawed paw reaches outward, as if to grasp…...The whitest of the cast light.

Carlos-o(∞): “Hi there, Big Brother!”

Carlos-O(1): “ Whaa…? Who are you? Are you little brother?”

Carlos-o(∞): “ We’re going to have to discuss that.”

Carlos-O(1): “ How come I’ve never heard you before?”

Carlos-o(∞): “ You’re the only one with the voice.”

Carlos-O(1) : “ So you don’t speak?”

Carlos-o(∞): “ No, I speak all the time.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXVII

2011-08-29T13:17:00.004-05:00

Orla-O(1): “ I’m trying to put this to you directly, if not bluntly: it looks to me as if your reason for going back to the Enlightenment thinkers is to avoid thinking. Of course that’s not a reason at all…”

Carlos-O(1): “I’m turning to reason to escape reasoning?”

Orla-O(1): “ It is as if you were saying you wanted to study the Enlightenment because back then they had reasoning which really worked. You said, ‘The key concepts of the Enlightenment are critique, freedom, and experience: Enlightenment consists in the critique of institutions, practices, habits, and opinions in order to make possible a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom than that currently on offer -- and this freedom is experiential, insofar as it is perceived through an enriched awareness of possible ways of experiencing. Thus there is an experience of freedom.’ (Carlos, 2/20/2006). You are saying there was a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom available then than now.”

Carlos-O(1): “ Notice, though, I do not include reason as among the key concepts of the Enlightenment.”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, I do notice. It’s a dirty trick. At first, I thought you were substituting critique for reason—I admit this interested me—I wanted to see if you could pull it off. If you could pull it off, it’s not a dirty trick. Five years later, though, I see you had no intention of making it work, so it is just a dirty trick. I also see what you’d done is more than making critique synonymous to reason. You say there is an experience of freedom. You are saying this as if we take this notion from the Enlightenment, this period you claim offers a richer and more nuanced kind of freedom than now. However, I do not think any such notion was available to the Enlightenment. I say: for the Enlightenment thinkers there was no theorized experience of freedom. For the Enlightenment thinkers, reason is freedom, and the problem they faced was the separation and opposition of rationality (reason) and empiricism (experience). POMO don’t know no such separation and opposition, and undoubtedly many a POMO will claim ‘there is an experience of reason (and if reason is freedom, thus an experience of freedom.)' This POMO stuff doesn’t work, does it. We don’t get around it not working by inserting POMO junk through an 'Enlightenment' circuit, either.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXVI

2011-08-28T15:19:00.002-05:00

Carlos-O(1): “ We have a positive result now? This conversation was to be about the Enlightenment, not postmodernity. Now it is the postmodern which comes to the fore, and threatens to remain there. It is your turn to explain.”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, I admit the turn of events is odd. There has not been a single one of us who likes or would have chosen to make postmodernity the subject of discussion. There is, moreover, every indication we made the return to Enlightenment because of our dislike of postmodern thinking, especially such prominent elements of it as radical subjectivity and relativism. I am not now suggesting we take such 'doctrines' seriously or as ‘the truth’. I am suggesting something has happened to us historically which we cannot turn our backs on.”

Carlos-O(1): “Postmodernity is repugnant to me.”

Orla-O(1): “ It isn’t ours to reject. It isn’t ours to affirm. By postmodernity we are referring to something which happened to us which made us be us. If it had happened differently it wouldn’t be us discussing us discussing this, but it is.”

Carlos-O(1) “ That’s far from convincing. You’re making it seem as if the postmodern is in some way objective or somehow a necessity or otherwise a necessary condition for our thinking. If so, you’re going to have to argue hard for that—I’m not giving this away.”

Orla-O(1): “ I don’t expect you to acquiesce, but I will point out you never produced reasons for the conversation being on the subject of Enlightenment…At the very least I can turn tables on you and ask you to show us the Enlightenment is objective or somehow a necessity or otherwise a necessary condition for our thinking. I believe I can do much, much more than turn tables, however. I assume you agree with me whichever way we go, towards the Enlightenment, the Postmodern, etc. we not follow our identifications...

...I can show that your original theory rests on nothing more than your identifications, but the more recent version has reasons.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXV

2011-08-27T14:28:00.016-05:00

Carlos-O(1): “ You say to me, ‘If you affirm Enlightenment thinking in terms of postmodern thinking,your theory becomes, ‘Enlightenment is the overcoming of Enlightenment.’

What if I affirm postmodern thinking and change my theory to,

Postmodernity is the hazard and problem of TOTALIZATION coming through the age of Enlightenment. ”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, and that we now have the theory in this form must be seen as a positive result of our inquiry. Please note this form of your theory requires you to affirm postmodernity, both as existing and in terms of its specific content.”

Carlos-O(1): "Yes, that is so."

Orla-O(1): " The notion of overcoming in your original theory is replaced by notions of problem, hazard, and 'coming through', but in what ways is totalization a hazard?"

Carlos-O(1): “ Totalization is a hazard in these ways: 1) that it be negated (rejected,denied); 2) that it is not thought through as a problem (e.g. treated as if trivial, marginal, vulgar, uneducated slang, amusing jargon of the 'great unwashed',etc); 3) that it not be seen as a problem, i.e., that it be regarded as it was regarded in the age of Enlightenment and the following modern ‘ages’; 4) that it be seen as a problem but not within the historical horizon of the Enlightenment; 5) that totalization be affirmed. (Affirmed in this sense means something like a prisoner suffering in solitary confinement choosing to regard suffering in solitary confinement as the most wonderful thing imaginable, a real treat.)”

Orla-O(1): " Yes, that is so."

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXIV

2011-08-27T13:23:00.006-05:00

6)“Totality and Infinity unfolds around phenomenological descriptions of Being, understood mechanistically as nature. Being as love of life holds an important place here, much the way need as positivity, and existence as light, did in the 1930s and ‘40s. Levinas again reframes labor, less as mastery and humanization of nature, and more as the creation of a store of goods with which an other can be welcomed.” Article about Levinas

7)“Dilthey conceives religious experience as an extension of Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence. It is a total experience that interweaves a feeling of dependence with an awareness of a higher life independent of nature. Religious life is also regarded as the enduring background of human intellectual development, and that development can manifest itself in mythical representation, in theological doctrine, in metaphysical conceptualization as well as in scientific theory. For Dilthey, myth is not a primitive mode of religion as is often thought, but a primitive mode of scientific theory. Whereas religious experience directly presents reality through feeling, myth represents it. Myth is not simply religious because like science it is an attempt to explain the connectedness of natural and social phenomena.
Later as he reflected on the nature of worldviews, Dilthey would occasionally return to the problem of religion. What distinguishes the religious worldview from artistic and philosophical worldviews is that it relates the visible to what is invisible, life to our awareness of death. In a striking late passage, Dilthey writes that when life is experienced religiously "according to its true nature—full of hardships and a singular blend of suffering and happiness throughout—[it] points to something strange and unfamiliar, as if it were coming from invisible sources, something on life from outside, yet coming from its own depths’ “Article about Dilthey

8)“Philosophers have produced metaphysical formulations of worldviews that attempt to give them a universal conceptual determinacy. Dilthey analyzes three recurrent types of such metaphysical formulations: naturalism, the idealism of freedom and objective idealism. The naturalism of Democritus, Hobbes and others reduces everything to what can be cognized and is pluralistic in structure; idealism of freedom as found in Plato, Kant and others insists on the irreducibility of the will and is dualistic; objective idealism as found in Heraclitus, Leibniz and Hegel affirms reality as the embodiment of a harmonious set of values and is monistic. The three types of metaphysical worldviews are incommensurable in that each is reductive in some way. No metaphysical formulation can have more than relative validity because it attempts to arrive at a totalization that transcends experience. All that is humanly possible is to probe reality on the basis of life-experience and to settle for the more limited philosophical insights provided by universal history. Ultimately, our reflective understanding of life and history must remain determinate-indeterminate.” Article about Dilthey

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXIII

2011-08-27T12:55:00.010-05:00

My sub-thesis-rhizome (I will strikethrough sub-thesis if I get to rhizome) is that the use, meaning, value, and significance of totalization changes between the age of Enlightenment and our own age of postmodernity. To investigate, I will look at some uses and definitions of the word totalization, to see how these change over time.

This is for the very specific purpose of understanding: 1)the movement of Carlos-O(1) and Orla-O(1); 2)Enlightenment and postmodernity as haecceity rather than category or periodization of history;3) rhizomes as encounter and sympathy rather than hideous fungal overgrowth, monstrously homogenizing power more horrific than category, theme or metanarrative;4) and to create the encounter of postmodernity and the age of Enlightenment.

1) “Postmodernism should wage a war on totality.”-- Jean-Francois Lyotard.

2) “Myth is totality: the total and complete picture of the real. The temptation to totality. ("From Ionia to Jena," as Franz Rosenszweig puts it in his The Star of Redemption -- that is, from Parmenides to Hegel.) Myth does not cease to be myth when it is rendered in a conceptual form, and at the heart of all myths is something that refuses to be conceptualized. (This is true for conceptual myth-makers like Plato and Hegel. And in our own day, the thirst for conceptual myth-making, such as that of Ken Wilbur or Richard Tarnas, remains unquenchable.)”—Carlos

3) “Sartre had long been fascinated with the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. In what some would consider the culmination of his thought, he weds Existentialist biography with Marxian social critique in a Hegelian “totalization” of an individual and his era, to produce the last of his many incompleted projects, a multi-volume study of Flaubert's life and times, The Family Idiot (1971-1972). In this work, Sartre joins his Existentialist vocabulary of the 1940s and early '50s with his Marxian lexicon of the late '50s and '60s to ask what we can know about a man in the present state of our knowledge. This study, which he describes as “a novel that is true,” incarnates that mixture of phenomenological description, psychological insight, and social critique that have become the hallmark of Sartrean philosophy.” Article about Sartre

4) “Being, as we noted, also is dark indeterminacy. Having suspended the binaries of de facto inside and outside as part of his own phenomenological bracketing,[21] Levinas will approach this indeterminacy not as objectivity, but as something revealed through mood. Whether it is the dark indeterminacy that besets the insomniac self, or whether it is the rustling of nocturnal space, Being's dark aspect horrifies us. “The things of the day world then do not in the night become the source of the ‘horror of darkness’ because our look cannot catch them in their ‘unforeseeable plots’; on the contrary, they get their fantastic character from this horror. Darkness…reduces them to undetermined, anonymous being, which they exude” (EE, 54). This anonymous being, also called the il y a [there is], does not ‘give’ the way Heidegger's Being does. And it is not revealed through mere anxiety. Nevertheless, it is a beginning. Insomniac and in the throes of horror, the hypostasis falls asleep. Or again, it lights a light and reassembles its consciousness. It “sobers up.” Therein lays our first, constitutive escape from neutral Being. But the il y a gives the lie to the question: Why is there Being instead of simply nothing? Nothing, as pure absence, may be thinkable, but it is unimaginable. Indeterminate Being fills in all the gaps, all the temporal intervals, while consciousness arises from it in an act of self-originating concentration. This is the first sketch of Being as totality. The self-‘I’ dyad becomes a limited transcendence arising in the midst of the self's encompassing horror. It hearkens to a call that comes not from neutral Being but from the Other. The stage is thus set for Totality and Infinity's elaborate analyses of world, facticity, time as now-moment, transcendence in immanence, and transcendence toward future fecundity. These themes constitute the core of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.”Article about Levinas

5) “Levinas's first book-length essay, Totality and Infinity (1961), was written as his Habilitation or Doctorat d'État.[22] Transcendence is a significant focus of Totality and Infinity, coming to pass in the face-to-face relationship. For Levinas, to escape deontology and utility, ethics must find its ground in an experience that cannot be integrated into logics of control, prediction, or manipulation. Whether it takes the form of the conscious ‘fit’ between subject and object in Husserl's phenomenology, or whether a unity of mind and being evolves dialectically, rational activity can never become ‘angelic’. That is, it cannot step outside the totalizing logics of metaphysical systems, without supposing them or restoring them. There is no formal bridge, for Levinas, between practical and pure reason. Philosophy in the twentieth century (Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction) has shown, at least, that the universality of concepts and the necessity carried by transcendental arguments are simply not sufficient to prevent the triumph of ends-rationality and instrumentalization. Ethics is therefore either an affair of inserting particulars into abstract scenarios, or ethics itself speaks out of particularity about the first human particularity: the face-to-face relationship.”Article about Levinas

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XXI

2011-08-25T15:32:00.003-05:00

Orla-O(1): “You gave us a theory of the Enlightenment couched in terms of a problem of postmodernity : the problem of totalization. Not only is totalization not perceived as a problem by the Enlightenment, it is seen as a way out of the Enlightenment's problems: of custom, tradition, dogma, or what Hegel called ‘the immediately given.’”

Carlos-O(1): “ Yes, and the funny thing is, I repudiate the postmodern. I regard the postmodern as ‘counter-enlightenment.’ I want to get away from the postmodernapproach to philosophy. The idea is to go back to the Enlightenment’s approach. To tackle a postmodern problem (being generous here and saying these problems belong to an era which is accurately named postmodern.) To take or retrieve something from Enlightenment philosophies and apply it to a contemporary problem. I perceive something limiting and debilitating in postmodern thought, while on the other hand I sense a great Enlightenment clarity, effectiveness, thoroughness, precision, and refinement. I am embarrassed by the label postmodern. I reject it. I feel misunderstood when I am called postmodern.”

Orla-O(1): “If you repudiate the postmodern, I have to inform you that your theory is a baffling set of contradictory affirmations and denials. At the very least, you must acknowledge you’re guilty of an anachronism.

(Author-O(1)’s note: yes, guilty of an anachronism. Tsk, Tsk.)

" You are affirming the Enlightenment, but as your use of totalization is explicable only as that term is used in postmodernity, you also affirm postmodernity. If you take the postmodern problem of totalization seriously you affirm postmodernity. If you affirm postmodern thinking calling totalization a problem, properly speaking you need to deny Enlightenment thinking. If totalization is the problem you think it is, Enlightenment thinking isn’t worth the time of day. Reason cannot go mad according to the Enlightenment thinkers. Reason is freedom. Reason cannot deny freedom. There cannot be reasonable prisons, in the final analysis. There cannot be reasonably increasing enslavement of human beings. (As accidents or counter-trends of progress, there could be increasing enslavement or incarceration or other manifesting of unfreedom-- but what can’t happen is that these be traced to reason in itself. In other words, to reason in its essence.) If you affirm Enlightenment thinking in terms of postmodern thinking, (the problem of totalization is the result of postmodern thinking), your theory rephrases into, ‘Enlightenment is the overcoming of Enlightenment.’”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XX

2011-08-24T13:30:00.004-05:00

Orla-O(1): “ The word totalization is used by postmoderns as shorthand for the madness of reason; for the way the liberating powers of reason, spirit, and idea lead away from liberation towards ever-tightening confinement and control of reason, spirit, and idea. The Enlightenment figures didn’t at all intend or anticipate this. Totalization was reason leading to more expansive reason, leading to greater and greater freedom and realization of freedom as humanity overcame objective barriers to human freedom.”

Carlos-O(1): “ My formulaic ‘Enlightenment is the overcoming of totalization through critique’ might have, (in order to remove postmodern overcoding), been better stated, 'Enlightenment is the overcoming of tradition, custom, dogma, doxa through totalization.'”

Orla-O(1): “ In the Enlightenment totalization is a process of reasoning which frees the spirit, but by the time of postmodernity it has become the very name of the oppressive. It’s fitting this synonym of oppression within thought is associated with the work of Hegel. Hegel, for whom, ‘The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it. The state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge, and activity, while self-consciousness in virtue of its sentiment towards the state, finds in the state, as its essence and the end-product of its activity, its substantive freedom.’- The Philosophy of Right.”

Carlos-O(1): “Virtually no postmodern views the state as the instantiation of reason or the actuality of the ethical Idea… It’s almost unthinkable anyone ever did. I am not saying the contemporary unpopularity of his ideas means Hegel is refuted, invalidated, or exposed as a fraud, but I agree with you there is a kind of natural wisdom in identifying elements of Hegel’s thought with the very opposite of what Hegel intended by it…”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XIX

2011-08-23T12:02:00.004-05:00

Orla-O(1): “ You’re not answering the question. For example, if you justify your behavior by saying it helps others, this leaves hanging why it has to be compulsory. If what you do is helpful, why aren’t others clamoring for help? Why do people need to be compelled to accept help?”

Carlos-O(1): “ They don’t know what’s good for them. I, however, do.”

Orla-O(1): “ The point was never to fire back at you the accusation of narcissism (and I’m not sure that’s fitting anyway), but as you chose to answer as if it was, and then said this, I assume you see a chink is revealed in your armor.”

Carlos-O(1): “ I don’t have to see any such thing. What I see is someone who is of the ‘great unwashed’, the ignorant and unlearned, who presumes, from within this ignorance, to see ‘chinks in my armor’…Lacking the background in philosophy I have, you can’t possibly evaluate me.”

Orla-O(1): “Whatever. I don’t want to stray too far from your ideas as you’ve actually stated them. (And forget about this self justification altogether, if I can.) You speak of totalization. When I first heard you use this word, I understood it, not as naming a concept or set of concepts, but as a symbol—a symbol for enclosure or imprisonment of thinking. A symbol for all which blocks, inhibits, represses, and arbitrarily limits thinking. I didn’t relate it historically to philosophy…Then I realized totalization used the way you used it is postmodern lingo,slang. You are literally speaking of and viewing Enlightenment from the vantage of the postmodern. That’s why totalization to us seemed for such a long time self-explanatory. Obvious. Totalization is a key term of our historical era, of the postmodern. Only in the era of postmodernity would the Enlightenment be defined as you defined it, as overcoming totalization. As postmodern we have 'easy access' to the meaning of totalization.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XVIII

2011-08-20T12:40:00.002-05:00

Carlos-O(1): “ That’s an interesting observation, and maybe we can investigate it further. However, what interests me more is the conflict between your celebration of NOW, of the ecstatic, energetic, the nascent, the erotic, HAPPENING NOW, and any need you have for the reflective, the recollective, historical thought, or study of the past. If the past already contains the now in its fullest, most advanced, form (Plato was a computer programmer), we should be able to get anything we might get from the past more simply, more clearly, more directly, more immediately (and thus more intensely), from being ‘in the now’. We could, if I follow your drift, get Plato by surfing, if we wanted. Certainly I agree that’s a much more pleasant and exciting way to “get Plato” than sitting in a hard chair in front of a standardized desk placed in a narrow row of other standardized desks in a rectilinear box of the sort we call a classroom. Or, come to think of it, much much more pleasant than where we are now, in this dank underground where we carry out our discussions of light. Why do you or would you ever bother AT ALL?”

Orla-O(1): “That’s because whenever I go into a dark, dank place, or on the other hand a well-lighted, standardized, routinized, homogenized, bland, reductive, or police monitored and controlled, authoritarian-structured place, it becomes ecstatic, energetic, erotic, etc.”

Carlos-O(1): “ That’s merely narcissistic.”

Orla-O(1): “ Well, there’s a narcissistic dimension to virtually all human activity. Mine happen to align more with what’s pleasant, humorous, and enjoyable. What’s wrong with that? Why do you suppose you overcome the narcissistic with your emphasis on the unpleasant, the dour, and the compulsory?”

Carlos-O(1) : “ My work is directed towards others, my students, my readers, other participants in academic discourse. I’m helping them, assisting them, expanding their horizons. I'm placing my students on the path to a productive and rewarding future; my comments on the history of philosophy may help my colleagues advance in their own work. In as many ways as possible, what I do is geared to the interests of others…That’s not so narcissistic, really. Of course I have career and other ambitions, and don’t turn down any recognition I receive. I also get pleasure from helping others. It’s greater than the pleasure I get from surfing, truth be known. (I’ve never had the feeling you’d deny me this.) ”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XVII

2011-08-19T13:40:00.003-05:00

Carlos-O(1): “ We both refer to a past which plagues the present. For you, the past is represented in the figure of Plato. For me, it is in mythic thinking. What’s different is that for you, the past already contains the present: your Plato is a computer programmer. He’s modern, he’s a computer scientist, a technician in the modern sense of the word. For me, it is the past which is in the present, for I see contemporary thought inhabited and animated by the mythic, the ancient, pre-modern. In other words, you put the present into the past while I put the past into the present.”

Orla-O(1): “Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1): “ We both reject the division between the ancient and the modern. At least any hard and fast, harsh, strong division between the two.”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1): “ One really wonders what could possibly interest us to mention the Enlightenment, let alone have a conversation about it. If Plato was a computer programmer in ancient Athens, nothing new emerged from the Enlightenment, and if mythic thinking continues today as insurmountable in cognitive structures,nothing was overcome in the Enlightenment,either.”

Orla-O(1): “Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1): “ Do you think what we’re really 'interested' in is the prestige of philosophy and philosophers, of scholars, during this time?”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1) a bit agitated, elbowing Orla-O(1)too sharply, but whispering: “No, boob, that question can’t be answered ‘yes, that is so’.”

Orla-O(1): “ Well, I don’t think we should be hard on ourselves. We aren’t moderns and we ain’t ancients…attitudes to the historical Enlightenment seem to be a way of testing who we are. If we can’t satisfactorily place the significance of the Enlightenment, (whatever the problems of modernity, my opinion is the Enlightenment had a satisfactory placement in thought during it), it means we’ve changed. It’s evidence we’re in a new place.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XVI

2011-08-18T16:26:00.005-05:00

Carlos-O(1): “ There’s also something in common between totalization and dualisms—the objects of our revolt and overcoming.”

Orla-O(1): “ What would that be?”

Carlos-O(1): “ If we view totalization in terms of a set relationship between any subject and object, the dualistic nature of totalization becomes obvious.”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, that is so.”

AUTHOR-O(1)'s NOTE-O(1):

Orla-O(1) is thus quickly reduced to asking questions allowing Carlos-O(1) to clarify what is already meant, or simply agreeing. “What?” and “Yes, that is so,” is said way, way too many times. Indeed, Carlos-O(1) and Orla-O(1) are engaged in Platonic dialogue, PLATO-O(1) DIALOGUE-O(1). Fiendishly, we hope later to reverse their roles to further mystify the power relationship involved…As long as the two switch back and forth between master and student roles, we can assure it will take two millennium or so before anyone notices there is a power relationship involved.

Carlos-O(1): “ The theory of change may also be similar. The subject and object change through a higher synthesis of both in the totalization. It may also be said larvae come about through a synthesis—an organic synthesis.”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, that is so. However, with synthesis of larvae, we at least have DNA syntheses—-copulation!”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XV

2011-08-17T12:19:00.000-05:00

Carlos-O(1): “We both offer an idea of something to overcome or revolt against.”

Orla-O(1): “Yes, in your case it is totalization, and in mine, a king who is a master of dualisms.”

Carlos-O(1): “ We both also offer a picture of what happens, the overcoming or revolt, as never ending…It goes on and on.”

Orla-O(1): “ Quite right. You say the task of critique is infinite, incompleteable, and without end. After pointing out Plato has never been more relevant than today, I say his relevance is as something to revolt against. Revolt against Plato goes on and on, interminably. It is taken up again and again in our history. It must be taken up again by us, today.”

Carlos-O(1): “The feature of incompleteness is something both of us affirm.”

Orla-O(1): “ As long as incompleteness is not conceived as failure or negation.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XIV

2011-08-16T11:14:00.004-05:00

A dark room, or perhaps antechamber. Six rats clamber up a damp wall, a bit of garbage is strewn upon the concrete floor.

Ah, we’re in a subway station, a station of the underground.

We’re in a tube, the damp wall the six rats clambered up was covered in slick, slippery, white but dingy ceramic tiles, making the feat remarkable. That’s a clever rat pack.

The Enlightenment down here is from flickering and buzzing fluorescent lamps, also tube-like, arranged in parallel rows about six inches below a slight crease in the tiles marking the line between the walls of the tube and its ceiling. It’s an imaginary distinction, however, because the tube’s walls and ceiling are continuous with one another.

Two old panhandlers (or are they college professors? The line between these two is also imaginary, as the characteristics distinguishing them are blurred) stand huddled in the middle of the room, whispering and occasionally shouting hoarsely:

Carlos-O(1) “However, the predisposition to mythic thinking is inscribed in the cognitive structures through which any complex, hierarchical society is produced and reproduced. Therefore, the task of critique is without end. An infinite and incompleteable critique.”

Orla-O(1) “Plato--The master of dualisms. The first computer programmer of binary thinking. 0-1. Why is he still relevant? He has never been more so. As the king to revolt against.”

Both wear brown fedoras pulled down over their foreheads, partially covering their eyes, giving them a somewhat shifty appearance. Both wear dirty overcoats of the kind we associate with dirty old men, perverts. When they are shouting, it isn’t in anger, but because they can’t hear each other. That’s not due to the noise of the underground trains rushing past,however, because sometimes they shout when there is no train going by. It may be they don’t hear each other because they can’t hear each other. But they aren’t deaf, either.

Carlos-O(1):“We’ll have a Platonic dialogue.”

Orla-O(1):“No, a Deleuzian-Parnetian one.”

Carlos-O(1):” Damn you, dirty larva!”

Orla-O(1): “Damn you dirty ape!”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XIII

2011-08-15T18:31:00.005-05:00

“However, the predisposition to mythic thinking is inscribed in the cognitive structures through which any complex, hierarchical society is produced and reproduced. Therefore, the task of critique is without end. An infinite and incompleteable critique.”- Carlos, February, 2006

Note that we encounter the word “structure” in this comment, among the earliest of Enlightenment Underground. Cognitive structures: these are something like a natural anatomy and physiology considered together as thinking, is thinking… we encounter them here as something Carlos recognizes may prevent critique from developing or being effective. In fact, Carlos concedes the fight—the cognitive structures win because they are what Carlos sees as truly important to any society –its own production and reproduction. This isn’t exactly clear, however, because though critique is hamstrung and marginalized in this way, Carlos appears to affirm a critique which remains undeveloped and largely ineffective.

While the mythic thinking has been aligned to the natural and to cognitive structures, mythic thinking is also said to have been inscribed. This raises the question: by whom or what? I assumed upon first reading that to inscribe implies a cultural effect, because an inscription is text carved on a wall or plaque or coin, or words of dedication in the front of a book, a registration, or an enrolment. We do not usually consider these to be produced by plants or animals, earthquakes, or volcanoes, or the like, any more than we typically would regard our cognitive structures, if these exist, to have been created by men.

I place Carlos’ thought at this point within structuralism. There is a structure and function of mythic thinking, an importance and durability to it, and in a way this places mythic thinking above criticism and questioning. If criticism takes place, it must take place with due regard for criticism’s own structure and function as determined by the larger structure and function of “cognitive structures,” and subservience to any society’s paramount function of producing and reproducing itself. Criticism is thus carefully confined, and it is not creative, if to be creative is to create change or something new. Criticism in this sense could make things better, with what’s better and what’s not understood in terms which are already set somehow (inscribed in cognitive structures.)

If cognitive structures are inscribed naturally, and if the natural is the primitive, the savage, but also the authoritative, as any complex, hierarchical society is produced and reproduced this way, but Enlightenment is what we want, and Enlightenment is an overcoming, (of mythic thinking, of cognitive structures), we must affirm and perpetuate what we hope to overcome. We must conserve what we revolt against. Are we conserving or are we revolting? If we accept our revolt as conservative, what does that do to us or our revolt? Who or what are we appeasing?

The unusual way the words complex and hierarchical are combined gave me the impression Carlos believes hierarchical societies are the complex ones, but what if hierarchical society is a reduction of potential complexity rather than an exemplification or realization of it? Along with the other considerations, I took away an impression Carlos saw hierarchical society as natural society. I understand human society has been hierarchical, but isn’t the question: must human society continue to be? That question is simply submerged if we reference overcoming in a context of “cognitive structures.”

The past subsumes the future. In general, we have paid attention to the need to overcome binary oppositions in thought, less to how this actually is accomplished, and little to the question of subsumption, or whether any relationship of concepts avoids subsumption of one by the other. The past subsumes the future. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a future, or anything new or novel produced in the future, never any change in the future, but it affects the nature of the new or novel produced in the future. It fits the new or novel into a framework, a “structure.” If the framework is what needs to be new or novel, or to change, that will be a very unfortunate effect. We can’t affirm mythic thinking as a cognitive structure or to any degree necessary without accepting thought, critique as passive, defeated, futile (without end, infinite and incompleteable). Please note I see the rhizome as neither beginning nor ending, too, but as active, overcoming, and lively—which means the rhizome is a way of thinking without end, the incompleteable as satisfaction.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XII

2011-08-14T19:53:00.003-05:00

If “Descartes” is a rhizome, it is difficult to understand what Deleuze and Guatarri were responding to when they invented the concept of the rhizome. What problem?

It has to be before Deleuze and Guatarri no one would have stated it (at all and definitely not as simple fact) that Descartes was a rhizome, even if Descartes had been a rhizome all along. However, Descartes couldn’t have been a rhizome all along (not simply because the term wasn't applied this way), and this is something we can’t overlook as we discuss Descartes, the Enlightenment, rhizomes, and categories.

Hopefully it is clear from the immediately preceding post (part XI) that what results from BOTH/AND is not a solution. It does not answer the problem of what is, or to which category something belongs. Hopefully no one thinks a rhizome is a category. (A rhizome is BOTH a category AND a rhizome, which means it is not a category.)

What results from BOTH/AND is a rhizome (when what’s acted on is a category) or another rhizome (when a rhizome was acted on.) BOTH/AND acts on a category to produce a rhizome—that doesn’t mean the category was a rhizome all along. The rhizome is something new and different. I hope someday ALL categories will have been acted on by BOTH/AND, so that the categories are all opened and become rhizomes, and the importance of categorical thinking becomes negligible—that’s the desire. But that’s not where we are now…

The rhizome is an open category—it opens. Instead of using the term rhizome, I could use the term “category o(∞)”. It is an action…It’s unfortunate rhizome in our grammar is a noun, but that’s a misfortune of our place in history. It's not a defect of a new concept of category.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XI

2011-08-14T13:06:00.011-05:00

“Creating concepts, of the PLATO-O(1) variety or even of the PLATO-o(∞) variety, is a desire. Creating concepts is a desire. Whatever concept creating is being compared, the desire is equivalent. The desire of the concept creation of PLATO-O(1) is a desire; the desire of the concept creation of PLATO-o(∞) is a desire. Desire is desire. Trees are rhizomes, rhizomes are trees, as both are desire. To say of two things BOTH are the same is to establish an equivalent. PLATO-O(1) is equivalent to PLATO-o(∞). The goof of history was to have differentiated the terms systematic or logical from "rhizome" when they are equivalent and exchangeable. PLATO-o(∞)and PLATO-O(1) must not be distinguished."
--Schantz-Asabiyah hybrid larva

Two additional preliminary comments:

1. The BOTH-AND logic or approach: I have also endorsed the BOTH-AND logic or approach. I recently stated my opinion that PLATO-O(1) is just another rhizome among rhizomes, and thus also subscribe to the idea of PLATO-O(1) as the tree that is also a rhizome, or, PLATO-O(1) as BOTH rhizome AND tree. Thus, it is rude and unfair for me to ridicule Orla for saying the same. However, I hasten to point out for me the BOTH-AND approach is an element of what can prevent the erection of PLATO-O(1), its maintenance, obedience to PLATO-O(1), the cult of the personality in the history of philosophy, and authoritative thought (dogmatic thought, thought no longer requiring thought, and actively discouraging further thought.) It can be pointed out that if the BOTH-AND approach is valid and if the BOTH-AND approach prevents these things, it must be BOTH preventative AND facilitative of these things. And if so, how do we know if we are using BOTH-AND to prevent or facilitate authoritative doxa? To urge a BOTH-AND approach to Plato, Kant, or the historical Enlightenment does not solve the problem. The BOTH-AND approach is not a solution—it must remain in approach…But how does one know whether what one has is an approach or a solution (a fixed form which no longer requires thought, and can be applied to other problems—manually (in this sense of application, however, any IT application no matter how complex, sophisticated, and far removed from the hand of a worker or craftsman would be manual.) The BOTH-AND approach implies the BOTH-AND approach is BOTH approach AND solution. This is now “hopelessly” tangled. Yes. Yet this is all to the good, and what I affirm. When I apply the BOTH-AND approach to my own thought and criticisms what I get is rhizome (tangle, fur ball). Thus, my “criticism” of Orla in the last post reveals itself as criticism-O(1). Criticism o(∞) awaits.

2. “Do You Realize How Simple Desire Is?”—Deleuze. This remark is not used to specify what desire is or is not, but to increase the range of desire (Deleuze’s intent can’t have been to disqualify all desire for actual accomplishment, complex or difficult tasks, goals which are not readily achieved, and so on.) If desire is simple and simple is taken as a simple distinguishable feature (how could it not be and still be ‘simple’?), one could sort through ones’ psyche feelings which were true desire from false desires (or repressed desires, or the desire for repression, perverse desire) based on whether the feeling was simple or not. (How does one distinguish the simple? What is simple about the simple?) The effect of ascribing desire to such a set is to: 1) restrict desire to the level of fantasy or imagination. There is a desire to create concepts…However the desire to create a concept is not the same as creating a concept, any more than a desire to climb a mountain is to climb the mountain. 2) give up on all which cannot be accomplished without effort, discipline, ingenuity, sweat, preparation, planning, and the like; 3)valorize all ‘simple’ acts as desire or desirable, when one’s desire may be elsewhere, may be exhausted in what is taking as 'simple' and this is disguised, or be imprisoned (asceticism of the ‘simple.’) Desire as ascribed to such a set is a drive. A drive is a natural desire. It originates in nature, naturally. Please note that such desire is DESIRE-O(1). It is authoritative desire, unquestionable—irresistible and unquestionable. Ultimately, it can only be obeyed, (for as we all know, as it permeates to a microscopic degree our culture,) to not obey a “drive” is disastrous. The “drive” demands obedience. Neither Deleuze nor Orla could intend us to conceptualize desire this way. Nor do I. It is possible to open such a conception of desire to question—it is entirely questionable. It is possible to resist. Desire is rhizomatic (which means desire is not simple in the usual sense of the word.)

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part X

2011-08-13T18:30:00.006-05:00

“Creating concepts, however larval, is a desire. Forming lines of flights from figures of traditional philosophy as in the associative names of the philosophical canon is a desire. ‘Plato’ is a rhizome, a multiplicity of territories, a concept in spe.”-- Schantz, EU posting, April 2009

This is from the same post as PLATO-Or. The original post contains the name “Descartes”, but I would be innocent to substitute nearly any name for the name “Descartes” because the point of the quote is that anything, no matter how tree-like (racked or crucified by binary oppositions it may be), it is, in essence and truth, a rhizome. To treat any thinker in human history, as anything but a rhizome, is an error. Even the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the most intentionally, explicit and rigorous of the system thinkers, are to be treated as rhizomes—thinkers of rhizomes.

Rhizomes are the essence, Orla urges us to perceive.

Thus, Orla considers Plato as BOTH a rhizome (a multiplicity) AND a tree, (the master of dualisms, the first computer programmer of binary thinking. 0-1.)

I originally thought I would be able to discuss our problems in terms of Kant, then Kant got lost and Plato came in—not at all a thinker of the historical Enlightenment—then I took liberties with Orla’s quote, substituting the name of Plato for the name Descartes, whom we consider an Enlightenment thinker. In fact, Orla’s post is a fragment—it concludes with the note, “to be continued,” but it never is. Kant might have been covered if it was. Maybe even as the summation, the totality of rhizomes. My point, however, is that what we have is an infernal doubling and multiplying: the Enlightenment is doubled by Kant, Kant is doubled by Plato, by Descartes—by everything we’ve ever discussed. This is the problem.

Rephrasing Orla’s quote in terms of the problem of PLATO-Or, PLATO-o(∞), and PLATO-O(1):

“Creating concepts, of the PLATO-O(1) variety or even of the PLATO-o(∞) variety, is a desire. Creating concepts is a desire. Whatever concept creating is being compared, the desire is equivalent. The desire of the concept creation of PLATO-O(1) is a desire; the desire of the concept creation of PLATO-o(∞) is a desire. Desire is desire. Trees are rhizomes, rhizomes are trees, as both are desire. To say of two things BOTH are the same is to establish an equivalent. PLATO-O(1) is equivalent to PLATO-o(∞). The goof of history was to have differentiated the terms systematic or logical from "rhizome" when they are equivalent and exchangeable. PLATO-o(∞)and PLATO-O(1) must not be distinguished."

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part IX

2011-08-12T13:35:00.014-05:00

For the purpose of nurturing the metamorphosis of PLATO-Or (or merely my own monologue), I introduce a new nomenclature:

PLATO- Ø: This is the larvae of PLATO of everyone in human history (including hominids and also our contemporaries,) who have never heard of PLATO in any shape or form.

PLATO-?: This is the larvae of PLATO of everyone in human history (including our contemporaries) who may have heard of PLATO and reflected on PLATO long enough to have wondered or reflected on who or what PLATO was or is, why PLATO was or is important, if mention of PLATO is an absurd joke, a way of putting on airs, a way of expressing homosexual urges, is another “great man” of history weighing down on the brain of the living like a nightmare, just another instance of amorphous burden of “great men” or whatever.

PLATO-o(∞): These are versions of PLATO where PLATO is understood in some way or other. PLATO-o(∞) is “easily” shown to be riddled with error, ignorance, stupidity, and awkwardness. PLATO-o(∞) are a blight on culture (exactly!) and always contributing to the ever-present degeneration and degradation of the human race, as it wends its weary way through time. (Downward in guilt and shame as it goes upward in progress. Both moments are simultaneous and necessary in the history of the west.) These are larvae. There aren’t an infinite number of these, but there are many of them. Their number is finite, and yet their number is not determinable.

PLATO-Or: Orla’s sketch of Plato, Orla’s larva (c.f. part XIII). “The master of dualisms. The first computer programmer of binary thinking. 0-1. Why is he still relevant? He has never been more so. As the king to revolt against.” This is the last time I will post the PLATO-Or larval assemblage in full. This PLATO is of the PLATO-o(∞). It is the PLATO of PLATO-o(∞) which I “specify” for this conversation (for obvious good reason: Orla is this conversation.)

PLATO-O(1): This is the “correct”, official, sanctioned and sanctified, academic, erudite, masterful, authoritative PLATO. There is only ONE. Though I consider this merely another PLATO-o(∞) it is not merely another PLATO-o(∞). (In the same way there are “firsts among equals” a fudge we all make on routine basis in western societies, by which we disguise the true nature of what’s happening to us, and what we are doing to each other. It is true there are firsts among equals, and it is obviously false there can be a first among equals. It is true PLATO-O(1) is a larva and it is also false, ruinously false. PLATO-O(1) is subject to a kind of criticism--however, ONLY CRITICISM-O(1)(which,significantly, doubles PLATO-O(1).)

PLATO-o(∞) must be distinguished from PLATO-O(1). That we have not done so has meant that we have been nasty to each other without meaning to be. To distinguish these two and treat them differently from now on is a primary reason creating this nomenclature (but there are other reasons as well.)

PLATO-f: PLATO-f is PLATO-furthur. This is a PLATO I can’t speak about much, as I can’t speak much about the results of an experiment before the experiment is conducted, or even fully planned as such.

Please note that in each of the PLATO-X’s above, I have had to mention a PLATO (a PLATO without suffix) in order to define, name or indicate each “specific” PLATO-X. This is because of a grave methodological or linguistic problem which can easily lead to widespread larval assassination (fumigation) if left unchecked. It can’t be checked. That’s why we don’t get more than a dozen or so larval metamorphoses in a century or more. (The number of larvae we would expect to see surviving randomly within a systematic larval fumigation. This is how I know larvae are being systematically fumigated.) However unable to check this I am, I am able to forewarn, which I do so now. I am not in the process of setting up sets for ascription of memberships, with in some mysterious way MR_WILL_THE_REAL_PLATO_PLEASE_STAND_UP, which is what needs to be thought, strangely and mysteriously lurking in the background, pre-existent, already all thought out, guiding (lawfully ha ha) all the “thought.” Preconceived, solemnly “correcting” larvae, without chorus, as larvae die, larval dying, assassinated, but the larvae dying guilty and shameful.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part VIII

2011-08-11T13:26:00.009-05:00

Again, Orla’s larva:

PLATO: The master of dualisms. The first computer programmer of binary thinking. 0-1. Why is he still relevant? He has never been more so. As the king to revolt against.

This will be referred to as PLATO-Or.

If PLATO-Or metamorphoses furthur, it may become PLATO-EU, the PLATO created at Enlightenment Underground. As in the case of Kant-EU, PLATO-EU may have very little to do with “Kant” as “Kant” is known. PLATO-EU, Kant-EU, or any other XXX-EU’s (eewww, getting a bit nasty) will not “bear a resemblance”, family or otherwise, to others’ PLATO or Kant (or XXX – but EU’s better be sexier, at least to me. If they are not, that’s the failure—not the failure to resemble.)

Let me point out (but not by way of apology,): the others’ Plato, Kant, or XXX, doesn’t bear resemblance to “Plato”, “Kant”, or “XXX”, either. These are all just as far out as PLATO-Or.

ONE case from among the others' is a special case which bears mention: ONE PLATO-X, Kant-X, or XXX-X is presented, as if this ONE however sickly-twisted (or just twisted, I’m not a thought policeman, and this comment in intent is to free thought, not enslave it, and the point is not to displace, invert or pervert, or affix a label of fraud or sickness onto ANY PLATO-X, Kant-X, or XXX-X) this version appears to the other others', is is given as THE PLATO, THE KANT, or THE XXX. It is given as not only resembling Plato, Kant, et al, but as THEIR identical.

Once the case of THE ONE rolls into view, all the other cases may as well shrivel up and die. What the case of ONE relates to, however, is not THE REAL Kant, Plato or XXX, but to the state and capital. What the case of ONE demands is not a devotion to thought, but obedience.

Obediently that we sit our dancing asses down at a school desk, assassinate larvae(Mary had a little larva, little larva…Followed her to school one day, school one day, school ONE day--Bang Bang!), lock down larval metamorphoses, and get down (sit down, Johnny! If your butt doesn’t ache from staying in ONE place, you’re not in school!) working to achieve what we lack: honorable certification and licensure of recognition-obedience to THE ONE.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part VII

2011-08-10T13:34:00.007-05:00

The last thing I want to do is assassinate Orla’s larvae:

PLATO: The master of dualisms. The first computer programmer of binary thinking. 0-1. Why is he still relevant? He has never been more so. As the king to revolt against.

I want to go along with Orla's larvae. I want to use them as I believe Orla intended them to be used. (See part VI for my interpretation of what this use is.)

Admittedly my initial reaction (my approach to the larvae)is critical. It’s as if I want to inspect the foundation before I begin to build a house on it; I want to make sure the house won’t topple after I have invested time and energy building it.

However, larvae are not foundations.

The consideration of time and energy being wasted, of an “investment” being wasted, doesn’t need to arise. The time and energy devoted to taking larvae through their metamorphoses can’t be wasted because expending time and energy in larval metamorphosis is its own reward, as living life is its own reward (should be?)

Note: the larvae and the “time and energy and investment” of “building” larvae is not exterior to me (or to Orla-Yusef-Carlos-Christoffer, if this were a collaborative “building.”) The metaphors of “foundation” “time and energy” (as used in paragraph four, above) “build” and “invest” reinforce an idea of exteriority which subtly shifts the use of the larvae away from how a larvae can be used. (I have problems with the metaphor “use”, too, as this also implies an exteriority—it as if the larvae were or could be a tool which I buy at Home Depot to use on a DIY project…as if the larvae were pre-existing manufactured fixed object for something else which is also conceived as pre-existing manufactured, fixed and objective….Reality.) Exteriority as attached to the concept of larvae assassinates the larvae...Building the larval object builds the subject…Metamorphosis of the larvae is metamorphosis of subject-object. Be larval.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part VI

2011-08-09T13:56:00.013-05:00

“The history of philosophy has always been an agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the repressor’s role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought – but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.” –Deleuze, Dialogues

The book Dialogues isn’t, however, a dialogue in the sense of the word. It appears to be responses elicited in an interview, but in the form in which the book Dialogues is printed, only Deleuze is there. Only Deleuze is speaking. We know there’s someone else at work because the book is attributed to Gille Deleuze AND Claire Parnet (whoever that is…I know her only because of this one attribution…Ah, she’s a friend and student of Gilles Deleuze, lucky girl.) Even the interviewer’s questions do not appear as such. (In the conventionally-presented interview, the questions are printed, along with the answers. CP: “Do you ever crap in your hands?” GD: “Every day. I use it as lotion.” This is not the format of Dialogues.) The interviewer’s voice is erased. We listen to the smart guy give us a bunch of answers, and it is pretty funny, because among the questions asked and answered is one from the disembodied background, “A conversation: What is it? What is it for?”

That’s not what I want to talk about, though. I want to talk about Orla’s post from which I lifted (copied and pasted—nice I didn’t have to type it out myself) the above quote. That’s the post, “Do you realize how simple desire is?”, from April 25, 2009.

The above quote is the second Deleuze quote from Dialogues Orla gives us. (Later, I hope to examine the way Orla connects the two quotes.) Orla then presents a list of philosophers, accompanied by a one or two sentence explanation of their work. This one or two sentence explanation isn’t meant as an explanation…It is meant as a larva. A larva is a thought-life which though we take it as a fixed object we also know the "fixed object" is capable of wonderful metamorphosis (literally.) Thus, though we take the larva as a fixed object, we know it is neither fixed nor an object. We may be tempted to perfect or polish the larvae in the fixed objective form we find it, but we know that's not the right approach to larvae.(A polished larvae? That’d be a squishy mess.) Our interest in the larvae is in the transformations of which it is capable…

Here’s one of Orla's larva:

PLATO: The master of dualisms. The first computer programmer of binary thinking. 0-1. Why is he still relevant? He has never been more so. As the king to revolt against.

It’s only a larva. Giving us this larva, Orla is only giving a suggestion of some place, in conversation or dialogue, we might go. It's the suggestion for a metamorphosis. It’s not a thesis, a polished thesis, or a theme. If we subject it to criticism, we are making a mistake similar to treating a first rough draft of an essay as if it were the final, submitted and sanctioned for publication draft…Such criticism serves only to damage the creative process. Larvae are killed this way. "Assassinated!"

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part V

2011-08-08T18:00:00.011-05:00

Thus, where we come in on Kant (in other words how we approach him) becomes a critical factor in how we approach each other.

By the way, I have decided on a new convention for signifying Kant. I will from now on call whatever it is I know as “Kant” as Kant-EU. Kant-EU is whatever it is I am referring to when I discuss the Enlightenment through Kant, and the ramifications of the Enlightenment through Kant, in my own life and times. It might have very little to do with the actual Enlightenment or Immanuel Kant, but it had better have everything to do with what this monologue does. Expressing it differently: it had better be true to my own continuing desire to write this monologue.

Here are some ways to approach Kant:

1. As an example of someone who successfully criticized dogma and created novel concepts.
2. As a founder of a new but now dead tradition weighing upon the brains of the living like a nightmare, another strand of all the dead traditions weighing nightmarishly upon the brains of the living.
3. As a “great man,” a genius. A celebrity of history.
4. As the determined product of the historical and economic forces of his time.
5. A maker of history.
6. As someone one must know in order to think, to demonstrate to others one can think.
7. As someone of durable respectability from whom devotion to is rewarded with respectability.
8. As someone of durable respectability one can retreat to when exposure or devotion to other, less respectable thinkers becomes too risky.
9. As someone who deserves some respectability more than anything because of courage, but also disrespect for cowardice.
10. As an ally and an enemy. A creator of tools and tool bags, but also traps.
11. As an artist (c.f. Carlos’ earliest EU post about Kant and Steven Shaviro’s "On the Pleasures of Reading Kant".)

It is peculiar to remember Carlos’ post is titled Approaches to Kant, a title I could have chosen for this post. However, Carlos considered only one approach. In the ensuing dialogue between Carlos, Orla, Christoffer, and me, all of the approaches are used at various times by each of us, even the contradictory, and we “criticized” each other for using approaches we had just used ourselves. This was, to say the least, very unsatisfactory. I was irritated. So was everyone, I assume.

Kant-EU is the chaos of all the approaches, and the friction resulting from the mishmash of using all of the approaches indiscriminately and without much awareness.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part IV

2011-08-08T12:34:00.002-05:00

The Enlightenment thinkers, (and from now on I will not refer generally to “the Enlightenment thinkers” but will continue the blog’s convention of referring to this diversity of thought in the figure of “Kant” regardless of what mutilation this introduces into the history of the Enlightenment and the history of the philosophy of this period, or even into Kant's philosophy), succeed in placing the “thought which requires no further thought”, in other words religious dogma, under further thought. This results in much further successes—it releases bundles of energy into the world, which is used productively in more ways than I can name (and I suspect in more ways than I even know about.) Primarily, though, I am interested in considering the energy and impetus this release of energy gives to science.

It creates science—it makes science successful. Science can do things. It can make discoveries—real discoveries. It produces knowledge and techniques, technologies. Every knowledge, technique, and technology produced has the wonderful effect of producing an enormous number of other knowledges, techniques, and technologies, and on and on, each wave actualizing an even bigger wave, without completion or “totalization”, at least in science. There’s never a final product in science. Each tool of science makes new tools, and if it doesn’t, maybe it isn’t science. Maybe science can be distinguished from non-science in this way. The scientific doesn’t end, while the non-science, is nothing but a dead end. (The dead end can easily be made to wear a camouflage of science…People with advanced degrees wearing white coats and frowns walking through immaculate corridors in modern buildings, surrounded by computers and other technology, punching out numbers and papers, etc. This is not a defect of science per se.)

There’s a success of science. This success of science results from philosophical developments, but the success of science is not necessarily a philosophical success. It might even be the death of philosophy.

The success of science justifies the existence and promotion of science, but not necessarily of philosophy. That is because the success of science is a might, a power. The success of science becomes a “might making right.” If “might makes right”, philosophy was never necessary (and was in fact harmful), from the get-go. So what happened was philosophy put into question “might makes right”, and this questioning led (with many mishaps where philosophy forgot about this questioning and realigned and also went into the service of justifying different orders of “might makes right”,) eventually to science, but then science in its success made a new order of “might makes right”, which was even harder to question than previous orders, partially because of science’s birthing process from within philosophy.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part III

2011-08-07T15:08:00.003-05:00

“…between us we papered over all of these hazards by assuring each other we were both free ‘to think and write anything either of us wanted.’ ”

This attitude, barely conscious to either of us, and to each of us certainly not recognizable as a potential source of strife and dislike—in fact entirely the opposite—surely we both believed this attitude would facilitate collaboration and dialogue—could come to play the insidious role it did because both of us, with full sincerity and joy consider the role of philosophy to be luxurious liberation, production of lavish luxury, of dance and celebration. Yes. What’s more, both of us understand quite well it’s not much of a dance when the dancers slam into each other causing concussion and death, so we would assume any dance we danced on the same dance floor would observe some level of decorum, grace, and civility. We would not anticipate the very notions of “decorum, grace, and civility,” as being loaded, as being the very notions which would, as we danced around, explode, as improvised explosive devices, turning the dance floor into a battleground, just a very peculiar battleground, where the silence following each explosion would be as toxic as depleted uranium after a bunker blast. It was all so innocent, in intention.

Carlos would propose the historical Enlightenment as the topic believing it exemplified liberation and joy as are realized through the most rigorous of thinking acts—thought as active—through thought-acts of critique and questioning followed and supported by experimentation, research, investigation (also thought-acts, thought as active.) The Enlightenment is historically speaking our best example of this—I sincerely share this belief.

In the Enlightenment, in the key figure of Kant (who we picked up kind of willy-nilly as THE thinker of the Enlightenment, the key figure of the whole diverse epoch, the metonym, our conceptual personae through which we would willy-nilly, and pathetically, bathetically, stage an Enlightenment drama), we saw an example of someone successfully challenging dogma (and probably creating our modern concept of dogma, and of creating the idea of dogma as the object of earnest philosophical inquiry). We could then look to Kant for lessons and examples of using thinking to liberate, create, and live joyfully through throwing off the shackles of dogma (thought not to be thought but obeyed, thought not subject to further thought, not to be criticized, questioned, ridiculed, or satirized, disobeyed, “sacred” thought, perfect and complete thought.)

However, dogma is not necessarily understood by Kant in quite the way I parenthetically describe, above. Dogma is understood by Kant mainly as religious thought, which was clearly defined in Kant’s time (in a way which it is no longer clearly defined in our time, and which, indeed, most of the ministers and priests in America which I encounter find as abhorrent as I do, ministers and priests uncomfortable with the label fundamentalist.)

Under my parenthesized characterization of dogma above, Kant’s own thinking could, perhaps, be understood as dogma. Kant of course would object to this understanding—maybe. We really would have done well to specify to what extent Kant would be justified in objecting. However, this isn’t entirely relevant except to academic philosophers, because no matter whether Kant really was set on establishing his own thinking as a new and somewhat more flexible dogma than the religious dogma he had admirably identified and criticized, it is obvious that in practice and daily life and in the academy itself for the most part (and I am very interested whether academic philosophers can step in to defend Kant against charges of dogmafication, godmafication, godamnstopmificatin, whether that defense is or ever can be ACTIVE), Kant’s is the dog. It has the function of a dog. It demands a shifted obedience (to the bourgeois, away from the aristocrat and priest), a new loyalty, a new set of shackles. It’d work as such, too, if not for the snoop dog.

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part II

2011-08-06T11:10:00.004-05:00

This blog is an aborted conversation—a conversation that never took shape, and became a monologue—my monologue. It’s also an aborted collaboration—the reasons for the failure of the collaboration have never been discussed…Perhaps to revive the conversation, the reasons for the failure of the collaboration could become the topic of discussion, but the truth is for me at this point I wouldn’t entertain such a proposition—I now reject it with such force that if it were to come up, that would be the “last straw.” The aborted dialogue become monologue is now my monologue, and that’s that.

The blog was initiated by Carlos, who started it off (without input or feedback from me) by proposing some topics (about the historical Enlightenment) which he intended to handle thematically. My opinion is that all of his proposed topics can only be handled thematically. However, any input on my part to these topics would (and were) markedly inferior—unacceptably inferior, because I don’t know anything about these topics (for one very good reason.) What’s more, I didn’t (and do not) have any strong interest in these topics. And what’s more than that, I have an aversion to these topics—I suffer Enlightenment Anxiety. The darkness and evil of all forms of idealism scare the shit out of me. (In part because I am irrevocably idealist, have tasted these evils, and seemingly cannot stop from tasting these evils, which inability is the supreme (and sublime) nightmare of these evils.)

Carlos and I might have been able to discuss how, if we did under these circumstances of my inferiority, take these general topics and find a way to work with them so that my inferiority did not become the unacceptable burden it was to become. For example, we might have been able to narrow the topics so that I could work piecemeal in manageable chunks until I arrived at a somewhat better vantage. Maybe we could have discussed the general topics to arrive at a better shared understanding of my revulsion for them (or so that I myself might, before we embarked, know a little better I had this revulsion, for at the time, my revulsion was to me vaguely felt—on my own, I avoid the historical Enlightenment—Carlos’ proposals would force me not to avoid—and I was unconscious of it, though the feeling, revulsion, is very strong, overpowering.)

Thus, Carlos and I couldn’t have discussed these things at the beginning. I couldn’t have discussed them as I was unconscious of my objections to them. I suspect Carlos was also unconscious of why he had chosen these topics, why he had chosen me to propose them to, and the true significance of the ways he wanted to begin investigating them, and how odd it was to attempt a collaboration beginning in a way which didn’t allow, and even destroyed, for the conditions of a collaboration. What draws my rage is that between us we papered over all of these hazards by assuring each other we were both free “to think and write anything either of us wanted.”

Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part I

2011-08-05T11:39:00.006-05:00

I am interested in continuing the blog, but for the time being will transfer over to using it as a kind of thought-diary, rather than whatever it is I’ve been using it for recently, (and some of the thoughts I will be committing to word on the blog will be about what I’ve been trying to do.)

I hate to admit it—and I’ve been fighting against admitting it for a long time—but I am interested in the problem of sense and chaos. I thought I was interested in the problem of embodying chaos without dying early, and perhaps I was, but as I now no longer need to worry about dying early, as having reached an age where whenever I do die it can’t be considered early; but equally true, I can’t be said to be much concerned with the question of “living the good life” as that also, has with the passage of time been transformed into a moot.

I have troubles—it’s a temptation for me—to treat writing “philosophy” as a problem of performance, of a problem of achieving a level of quality in performance. The problem—of philosophy—the sum total of all “philosophy”--- would then be to achieve the level of performance which would admit me (or my “thought” ha ha ha) into an already-established in-group of “philosophers” (though most don’t call themselves philosophers, maybe even refuse the title “academic”, but want some title, and surely entitlement, and professor is suitably grand,) what amounts to Kabuki theater, with entire assemblage, of actor, director, stage crew, and audience belonging to a mutual admiration society. If I had any academic background at all, surely I would long ago have succumbed, been submerged. If I had the chops, would have been welcomed, been made “happy.” (The Good Life understood as achieving membership in one or another of life’s selective clubs.)

I have no such background (nor such chops) so there’s been no sliding into that particular pool of shit. To that extent of sense (or chaos) I am happy for my ignorance(but it is not a great extent, as it is uncomfortable), blissful in it, for if ever there were a process for a deactivation of philosophical ethos, that’s it.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LIX

2011-06-18T21:40:00.001-05:00

What was rising up, unbidden (please take this “unbidden” (used here as if a synonym for spontaneity) in as in relationship to Itwethey’s project, to bid welcome to Guest) without effort, without consent, was “the picture of reality” which streamed in, via the most primitive of visual and smoothing technologies, (though cinema is not at all a primitive or crude technology or art or art-technology), cinematically, through the eyes, (aka as the eyes—those orbs which sit in the face and do their own flitting dance, personalizing the face, even giving it a soul, yes, it is self-explanatory),(movie-camera-jeweledorbitizedwized) a perfectly wonderful and entirely natural experience (to the point that to hold the camera and take the picture seems a redundancy, unnecessary, and to see seeing as anything less than perfectly wonderful and entirely natural and whatever else we might say about it—direct, unmediated, immediate, authentic, vivid, delightful,spontaneous, awesome, groovy—we know we harm our enjoyment of the world and our place in it by acknowledging that “the picture of reality” coming in through the eyes is NOT SPONTANEOUS. It’s highly doubtful (if it is sufficient to put it that way…It’s unlikely to the point of absurd, isn’t it?) the eye as eye takes a picture (or a moving picture) of reality NATURALLY…It is in light of the history of technology, medicine, labor, art and perhaps every other history that what the eye does has any relationship to not only cinema, but picture, image, and…

Natch, no one in their right minds wishes to hurt their own enjoyment. Whatever this convoluted, labyrinthine history associating the eye work with enormous ranges LIFE AND EVERYTHING, the nitty gritty is the part about hurting enjoyment. We do not unbidden, willingly, without compulsion, hurt our own enjoyment. Itwethey didn’t, nor did Guest. Itwethey loves looking at Guest—she-they is pictured permanently in Itwethey’s mind (both at the threshould (should thresh or thresh should) and just out in front, naked, holding firewood), and this image which thrusts pelvically into Itwethey’s sanctum sanctorum sacroiliac in that lower chakra where Itwethey gets the most vibrant of orbiting of Guest, both pantomiming like crazy, “the picture of reality” which in this case is Guest—IS GUEST—Itwethey embraces this image, “the picture of reality” and has the sense of offering worship—that’s what this embrace is. Looking at Guest can hurt enjoyment of Guest and Guest’s enjoyment.

Guest isn’t that thrilled to be worshipped.

No, Guest is thrilled and bored to be worshipped (One wonders, as one “worships” God, if God might feel the same.) Itwethey has always had this weird idea that there is this ability or capacity available to, as Guest’s thrill moves down into boredom, an edit, on some level, can be put in there, to rectify this. Extempore. From the hip. A “Book Him-Her” on count one of two of three. The wildlands delta, down there in the monstrous—surely after all the guff and effort placed on disciplining that region, once removed from that region—should be capable of springing up now, when needed, to provide a perfect rebalancing so Guest, in worship, is thrilled. (Just remember one thing, as you consider this, a lot of people never wonder, no matter how bored they are by adulation, whether worship of God, adulation of God, is love of God.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LVIII

2011-06-16T21:05:00.001-05:00

Guest was pantomiming. Itwethey was sure of that. Itwethey searched memory banks: search words included “guest” “threshold” “welcome” and “pantomime.” Itwethey was dashing through the results—something had to turn up. Guest surely wouldn’t wait there forever. Pantomime is something to do with theater. Theater is something to do with Broadway. Broadway has nothing to do with Hollywood. Keats had tears melted into ground, though poetry and foundations are different. Itwethey stammered slowly in grunts and grouns, then said:

“I do take this transitiveness to mean I-I-I must accept as logical the objects “implied” quote-unquote. I-I-I do understand I-i-I must note as accepted objects shimmering or glimmering or offering light off of their starboard or esther or platonic solid or maybe, scratching contemplatively, stern, as a star is hidden or is eshstarred, melted into all experience, as if these horrible words, among which ‘experience’ is most horrible, have to be CONFRONTED.”

Itwethey lets out a sigh.

Guest’s pantomime was designed to let Itwethey know the experience of Guest was transitory. Guest had to know Itwethey had the hopes that any encounter with Guest was intended as eternal. Keats had, despite fears and tuberculosis, and some suggestions to the gaudi or the frightful “art noveau” (the objectivist or the critic of art known as the castigator of anything ‘noveau’ is horrified) down an emptiness no one will pantomime (ultimately we know pantomime creates, eschews emptiness, posits a relaxation of our fibers) Itwethey dares let out sigh, Guest, pantomiming, receives, mid-pantomime, that sigh, and delights.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LVII

2011-06-15T22:19:00.001-05:00

Itwethey wasn’t that worried about “size.” Guest would be greeted, when the time came, with sufficient “size.”

But then again, when Itwethey saw the “size” of Guest’s regions, Itwethey had what we call, a “qualm.”

One doesn’t want to be swallowed up by another’s peepee.

Itwethey had previously mentioned Guest’s thatch was remarkable, splendid, and just a little terrifying. Guest’s legs, especially the thighs, were heavily muscled; Itwethey could hardly wish to state it, but will: more muscular than Itwethey’s “own.”

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LVI

2011-06-10T23:03:00.005-05:00

“However, there is something very positive and affirming and bold and audacious and vibrant in this silent, (or soft), musically announced ‘this is beauty.’ Kant had to have had a reason to treat beauty, even practically,” Itwethey muse-ratio-I-I-I-anizes. “We would like the practical to not need the hesitation of reason, and our beauty must elude, evade, avoid, or abhor the practical, much as nature used to, back when nature was natural, and proud of it, abhor a vacuum.” ‘Intuition’ has already been asked to back off, back off! Over there to the neutral corner, where we (pronoun of the empty) think the empty,(it isn’t the neutral, note) as our bell has been rung, resoundingly. We have no idea how to do without you, (Intuition-Woman), but that doesn’t mean we know what to do with you. (You have your place and we decide, in our fairness and neutrality, it is superior. Superior being understood as standing under, believe it or not understood as standing “under.”)

Itwethey toys with the notion of not announcing “it.” Itwethey’s boldness is not involved with any announcements. We don’t need no damned language interfering wi’ natura, naturans, “or orangutans”. Those monkeys are orange. We’ll interweave a bunch of faded (artistically so, not scientifically or philosophically so) …languages. If we are going to have a virgin birth, if we are going to actualize abstraction (sweatless, gruntless, stinkless, embar-bareassedless, gawkless, mawkish-mawkishless, planned-to-perfection AND perfectly planned such as the independence of the mental requires), woman emerges from the mental…This is the founding emergence.

“‘This is beauty’, is said as an organized sound. Venus. It isn’t a grunt. (Not to say a grunt hasn’t been organized. Indeed, it has been. If it has been recorded, and thus preserved, using ferromagnetism, we know, by the very act of being able to reproduce the grunt, to what extent it is organized, and we, as recorders, are also organized. We get not flat cooperation, but cooperation rounded.” Itwethey is not expansive here. The intention is to be and affirm it, the reduced. To curl, ever so gently, into a hollow round, of interiority. Someone must come around later and say, “Hey, why curled, why gently curled, ever so gently, curly-gently, a hallowed round, a vegetable, of interiority?”

“We make concessions to these nagging (intense? Hear the hypocrisy) needs of saying, before the form of woman, “Wow!” We can’t use you. That means you are without reason. That means you are to be rejected. That means (remember: this is all set against the background where if the thought occurs at all, it exists) what you offer will be conferred on to the functional as the functional: these feathers of flight are made to take us higher.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LV

2011-06-03T13:37:00.003-05:00

“How deeply satisfying it is, when after adjudicating (through comparison, reflection, and abstraction) the flash ‘raw’ feeling ‘this is beauty’-- that immediate, ‘intuitive’, ‘from the gut’, ‘from the heart’, (or, ‘from the gut-heart’, which is a raw feeling simultaneously originating in organic and natural purity from both the gut AND the heart, they are ‘corroborating’ each other…AND ‘collaborating’ with each other….But then again, what about the ‘from the gut-heart-pancreas-spleen-rightbigtoe’ intuition, which is the doppelgangersockdollager of compound glory!)to discover that ‘raw’ feeling was sufficient, ‘as good as it gets’, as confirmed by the conceptual (conscious) adjudication(through comparison, reflection, and abstraction.) No one argues against this EVER happening, now do they?” Itwethey says, winded by the expenditure of saying that all in one breath, exasperated by thinking it all in one thought.

“We might—and point to whoever in whatever historical tradition says we don’t—intuit what we later conceptually realize was already sufficient.

“The CRITICAL question:—do we always?

“If we do always, philosophy, which is concept creation, bows out. If we do sometimes, adjudication of cases will probably have a permanent and important role(Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or BillyBobthorNt0n) or function(esophagus or exhaust pipe…) to play. If we do never—can George Walker Bush be coaxed back into public life because we’ve got a police state to get erected ASAP! (Note how “ASAP” occurs frequently in daily life, a little less commonly in financial literature, a little less commonly in politics, never in literature, never in philosophy (except as sarcasm in literature and philosophy.)”

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LIV

2011-06-03T12:20:00.005-05:00

“However, there is something very positive and affirming and bold and audacious and vibrant in this silent, (or soft), musically announced ‘this is beauty.’ Yes, it is satisfying and appealing—and joyous-- to know (without knowing) ‘this is beauty.’ It is satisfying and self-sufficient: one is filled with the feeling, the self-certain feeling: ‘beauty.’ It can’t be questioned or criticized, nor should it be. (However, there is a problem, faint so far, perhaps to grow thunderously loud, a political problem, with anything—any thought or feeling-- which can’t be questioned or criticized.)”

Itwethey loves to be filled with the thought-feeling-experience ‘this is beauty.’ To be so filled is transitory, rare, but it happens. “You can’t be filled with this experience and at the same time attempt to criticize and question it, either. It is better to not attempt to contemplate it at the time—to reflect upon it.” Itwethey is more than happy to reflect upon it, to abstract from it, in order to prolong it, or maybe to get it to happen again. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that the experience is faded and cooled in reflection, contemplation, and abstraction, progressively so. (Abstraction is, in this context, almost a process for the fading of ‘experience’. Abstraction is bleach.)

“But let’s face it: faded is better than nothing. If we can’t have ‘this is beauty’ on a consistent, reliable, or frequent basis, we’re going to have to make do with what we have. E’en as masturbation is sometimes to be resorted to, so also is mental masturbation,” says Itwethey, “which is what comparison, reflection, abstraction, contemplation, and the rest of these activities amount to, we guess.”

We could choose not to resort to mental masturbation…We could wait patiently, chastely, between events of ‘this is beauty.’ “Whereof we cannot experience ‘this is beauty’, thereof we must evacuate the mind of all its masturbatory tendencies,” says Itwethey, mournfully. “ It could be this would hasten the next event of ‘this is beauty’, if such hastening is possible, in the same way refraining from masturbation does seem to hasten the next score. We’re talking quieting the mind here. Quieting the mind does come from the AoA lexicon.”

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LIII

2011-06-02T21:26:00.008-05:00

“We’re trying to examine the idea of a fully formed judgment of beauty emerging from the intuition. This is not the same idea as subconscious impulses or drives transmuting through sublimation into a socially or culturally acceptable form, because the feeling ‘beauty’ is what’s down below, not a drive or impulse, and there is no shaping through psychic processes ( obscurely conceived as these are in Freud and as far as Itwethey knows, elsewhere—in the idea we are examining, there is no shaping of any kind at all) of something ‘raw’ and unacceptable into something ‘refined’ and socially or culturally redeeming. The intuition may be conceived as a way of accessing the subconscious, but the subconscious is not a squished-down mental space: it is capacious and plentiful, a garden (probably the garden of Eden.) This is closer to the idea of a collective unconscious and a realm of archetypes, though we say this guardedly.

“Nor is this the same idea as accessing time and space and shaping it consciously and reasonably. There is no ‘accessing.’ There is no ‘shaping’. There is no ‘consciously’ and there is no ‘reasonably.’ None of these are necessary. Not only that: each of these is considered as a negative, harmful, distorting process. The judgment of ‘beauty’ is there: it is just there. Also, it is going to be imperative (ha ha) to drop the word ‘judgment’ because it isn’t a judgment of ‘beauty’, it is an experience of ‘beauty’. The word ‘experience’, the idea of it as an experience is upheld. However, this isn’t an upholding of Hume and empiricism over Kant and rationalism. There’s no caustic, verging on cynical, examination of the effects of convention or other external non-intuitive forces or factors which might be intervening on judgments of ‘beauty.’ Experience is strangely ‘raw’ and ‘refined’, even ‘raw’ and ‘perfect’, even ‘raw’ and perfect only if ‘raw.’ This is odd, because most generally the AoA have extraordinarily sophisticated knowledge of the effects of convention and other external forces acting on thinking and feeling, which they do apply critically. They do wish to be, and often are, unconventional (in behavior or appearance.)

“What’s difficult in articulating this idea is the way each word of articulation would be disputed or disavowed. Articulating of the idea as a way of understanding it is disavowed or disputed as a worthy object. If we say, innocently, ‘it emerges’, then both the ‘it’ and ‘emerges’ will be disavowed and disputed as ways of describing.” This is the hypersensitivity to hypocrisy by which Itwethey has characterized the AoA. It amounts to a disavowal of language. Or at least of language insofar as language is logos. It is a deep commitment to the idea of language as something which distorts, and maims. (Poetical language escapes this but that’d be due to the musical quality of poetical language which, of course, is language not as logos.) It could mean a valorization of silence, but if it doesn’t, what is to be voiced is all but the logos. (We’re pointing this out because it seems to us this is the exact opposite of what Wittgenstein thought at the time of the Tractatus.)

“However, there is something very positive and affirming and bold and audacious and vibrant in this silent, (or soft), musically announced ‘this is beauty,’” Itwethey says, winded by the expenditure of air in saying all this in one breath, exasperated by the aspiration of thinking it all in one thought.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LII

2011-06-01T18:21:00.005-05:00

“We are trying to evaluate the suggestion,” Itwethey says, “of beauty being ‘sublimated’ sex. What we are talking about here is the ‘raw’ feeling or flash: ‘this is beauty’ rather than the judgment, after reflection, comparison, or abstraction ‘this is beauty.’ This is the feeling or perception of beauty being ‘sublimated’, before energies (drives, impulses) are transferred or directed into creation of art works or other cultural or socially-useful activity. In other words, this isn’t the Freudian conception of sublimation, nor is it, at this point, a correct Kantian use of ‘sublime.’” (Itwethey feels there is something baffling—almost as if there was an intent to confuse by Freud-- in reusing the same term or word root: Freud’s ‘sublimation’ and Kant’s ‘sublime.’ Was Freud somehow responding to Kant? Or is the use of the word coincidental? As a coincidence, it’s remarkable. These are very different concepts, and yet—related? If so, strangely so. These are things Itwethey has not considered before, and probably does not understand very well, and maybe not at all.)

“We are trying to test the idea that such a sensation or perception or flash or ‘raw’ feeling as beauty is intuitive, (this use of the word intuitive is,Itwethey believes, very in tune with the way the word is used by AoA, which is very different from the way the word is used by Kant, and if so, this is of interest to Itwethey. Itwethey can’t remember any writings by Freud on the subject of intuition, and it is her opinion intuition is outside the purview of psychoanalysis. (If there’s anyone out there reading this crap who knows better than Itwethey or I-I-I about these matters, please chime in.) If there is an intuition of beauty as intuition is understood by the AoA, beauty doesn’t require reflection, judgment, and there isn’t a need or justification for aesthetics.

“We don’t need to know if something is beautiful, or why, or how. We know something is beautiful because we know. The answer to an array of questions is, ‘Because!’ (As when, prior to Galileo and Newton, objects moved the way they did because that’s the way they did move (‘according to their nature’, as if that explained anything (does it? Itwethey doesn’t mean to be hasty or nasty)), as if it was ‘self-explanatory’ (was it?)) It’s beautiful because it is beautiful and we don’t need to know how we know that—we might even damage our experience of it by enquiring into it. (Itwethey is not ridiculing this.))

“It worries me that so much of what is being said appears to repeat a critique of romanticism, and maybe the AoA are better named and criticized as romantics, as whatever is being criticized about AoAs is already understood within the critique of romanticism,” Itwethey remarks. “It worries me, because if that’s all it is, Guest will be bid welcome, but will never be welcomed.”

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part LI

2011-05-31T12:17:00.007-05:00

If the “sexy” attached (attached meaning similar to “referred to”) to the “erogenous zones” and if the “beautiful” attached to “subliminitous” zones (either type of zone being of the body or the body of the earth or of the body of the cosmos, or of a Hoover vacuum cleaner) and if, (though these two zones never intersect in an equivalence relation,) we will call sexy and beautiful different concepts.

If...blah, blah, blah. Itwethey had a funny joke with the “subliminitous zones” thing, she thought, but it was about to stop being funny as it expanded into a set theoretical method for examining candidate answers to the question of whether or not sexy was another word for beautiful. This was going to veer us off course, when for now, what suffices is to voice the suspicion: beauty is “in front of” the sexy as a fakery hiding being turned on, for disowning, disavowing, or being untrue or inauthentic to, impulses from the body. “Beauty” is “sexy” which is unopened to its own vitality, power, creative capacity, joy, dancing involvement with life.

Itwethey will focus on the change, the social change-- the lifeworld change-- manifesting between “beautiful” and “sexy”.

Part of the fun will be to mock and cast aspersions on Immanuel Kant’s sex life. Itwethey might get really wild and crazy and start mocking Nietzsche’s, too. Itwethey can hardly wait to throw ad hominem attacks onto frail, boring, “stuck in a rut” old Manny. Let it be known from the outset,however, the other idea is to recapture some sense of the intensity, dedication, sincerity, adventure, intrepid spirit, courage, impeccable integrity, and audacity lost or lowered or betrayed, between the “beautiful” and the “sexy.” We want both. (Itwethey would say, “We must (as necessity)have both. We need a better concept of both.”)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part L

2011-05-30T19:25:00.011-05:00

“Whereof one cannot think casually, thereof is one invited to think ecstatically.”- AoA, Cactatus Lego Philosophicus, (Santa Fe & Frisco, 1967).

Is sexy another word for beautiful? Is there anything beautiful which isn’t sexy? Is there anything sexy which isn’t beautiful? “Does spontaneity have use of the sexy?” Itwethey wonders. "There must be some quality, not really of the sex act, intercourse, of foreplay, or whatever else is pre-, post-, or concurrent to sex, nor directly attached in one or several ways to perception of the genitalia or “erogenous” zones (though in the mentioning of “erogenous” zones, an ambiguity begins to enter into this line of questioning because where erogenous zones begin and end has none of the anatomical certainty of where, for example, a penis or testicles begin and end.) “Sexy” is a kind of global quality (though it can attach to localized or specific areas)—it’s amorphous as beauty is,(though of course beauty attaches to specific forms, some forms are beautiful and others aren’t, but it is amorphous in terms of which are and aren’t beautiful: the form “beauty” is amorphous.) No one would call judgments of “sexy” disinterested, as Kant called judgments of beauty (though Kant calling judgments of beauty so may have been an early warning of systematic mishap. Kant couldn't have considered that his response to the beautiful was sex-charged); “sexy” is interested in doing something, too…

" 'Sexy' can’t be detached from the bodily as judgment of beauty can, it even has much less the feeling of being a judgment—it’s not being handed down from on high, but is coming up, from below, in a pleasant sensation. It’s a nascent lusting, and there might be more a feeling that we are subject to 'sexiness', not we judge or judge it not. In other words, it is involving (which may be another way of saying it is not disinterested.) It seems less likely that we would contemplate sexy (though maybe that’s what Itwethey is doing now.) We would fantasize about the sexy." Itwethey does not have that much confidence in the distinction between these two mental states, contemplation and fantasizing, to know whether and to what extent the difference is significant. We are emotionally involved in a fantasy, while contemplating we use the intellect? And what does that mean?

" 'Sexy' is more natural-inclining than beauty; as it does not involve (in the same way and to the same extent) comparison, reflection, and abstraction (though it does involve abstraction to a great extent, as mentioned above, and this is important) as beauty, it feels more immediate; those inclining to spontaneity might speak more freely and readily in terms of sexiness than beauty. Does the sexy get more contemporary attention and consideration than the beautiful? Is the beautiful more embarrassing now than the sexy? "

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLIX

2011-05-29T21:24:00.005-05:00

Guest isn’t very matronly. Guest doesn’t even suggest the matronly. Arms filled with firewood, naked, legs akimbo—some of this might be thought to suggest the matronly (Especially the gathering of the firewood. Though most matrons would gather firewood if asked, none would do so naked…But where’s the line? Itwethey can picture naked matrons gathering firewood, walking along with firewood, and yet the picture resembles IN NO WAY Guest doing so.) Gathering of firewood is awkward and ugly and “utilitarian” (NB: “utilitarian” always works against the “sexy” and all us workers who worship at the shrine of a good fuck should be asking ourselves why,) twigs can’t be gathered or well managed by the arms, strategies of arm filling are worthless—any idea of gracefulness and much more important than that, of efficiency, must be abandoned. Yet Guest stands there, naked, unmatronly, arms filled with firewood, exemplary.

Guest with legs akimbo. Itwethey probably does imagine a baby popping out. Maybe not with the legs akimbo and straight, but with the legs akimbo and squatting, yes. And yet this isn’t the first thing coming to Itwethey’s mind. Itwethey only considers it now due to Itwethey thinking about the matronly, which Itwethey is thinking of now only due to thinking of human warmth. Why Itwethey would be thinking of human warmth now, Itwethey doesn’t know. Itwethey had been musing on metaphors of containment—openness and closure—and as a hopeful alternative to that mess (metaphors of metaphor) Itwethey’s thought had drifted on to warmth.

Guest is posed outside, in a yard, utilitarian in aspect (you’ve got to wonder, though, just how much Frank Gehry, that postmodern fuck, has had to do with this set up, even though Itwethey has studiously avoided, contrary to all evidence to the…contrary?, anything to do with the postmodern, especially its architectural conceits…Itwethey is focused on the “Enlightenment” and reactions to it ( though Itwethey knows the Department of Homeland Security (not a phantasm of Itwethey’s various sick imaginationings) might swoop down with felony charges of irony-ambiguoisity-postmodernity due to Itwethey being willing to put the word, the title, the entitlement, the common property, ENLIGHTENMENT, in quotations—a good universal, same as a good fuck, doesn’t belong in quotations.)

Guest, matronly and warm, and yet exceedingly fashionable and modern. This adds up to Guest not at all matronly or warm but entirely fashionable and modern. Naked, this can only mean Guest at the pelvis (where Itwethey immediately directs his attention, a camera, a camera on a track, with a most sophisticated lens, capable of this most wonderful of desire operations: “zooming in”. The pelvis is thrusted forward and this is warm, warmth, HOT, welcoming, zealous, wishful, plentiful, photogenic.) Camera.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLVIII

2011-05-26T20:05:00.005-05:00

“It is not necessarily that the acolytes and apostles of “openness” (AoA) have resorted to a form of mysticism, or regressed to a primitive form of thinking,” Itwethey says. “It could be the older ‘rationalistic’ notions of concept, which made concepts metaphorically be something similar to containers, eschewing metaphors of openness as imprecise and hazy, were misguided.”

“The concept of God is that God passes beyond all conceptualization. Our concept of God is that God surpasses our own concepts of God… God is a being whose being exceeds and will always exceed human powers of conceptualization,” Itwethey is saying, hoping this concept of God which she has just called “our concept” truly is widespread enough to be comprehensible.

“However, if a concept is not a container, God going beyond the concept is not exceptional—God isn’t specified this way. Every conceptualized object might be discovered to be going beyond its conception, since any conception wouldn’t hold the object—wouldn’t need to, shouldn’t be expected to. It would have to do neither with the power and capacity of God specifically, nor the limitations of the human intellect. It’s a matter of a different model of the concept.”

“The new open model or way of thinking could and probably would extend the range of what’s experienced as ecstatic (as more experiences would have this characteristic of surpassing their own conception, what was reserved for God, and experienced as ecstatic. The traditional defining power of God as conceived by humans, vis the human understanding, would be shared by many, many things,)” says Itwethey. “We aren’t even beginning to consider if there might be non-conceptual ways of thinking. Do we need to consider 'non-conceptual' thinking if we've expanded and opened our concept of concept, as above?"

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLVII

2011-05-25T14:56:00.007-05:00

“If you have a concept, for example of God, and yet you for one reason or another cannot or will not or must not give it any definite form, how do you know you even have a concept?” Itwethey muses. Itwethey's musing is related to the thoughts about “openness.”

“Or is it that you do have a concept, with content and form, a subject with a predicate, and all the rest, but that you refuse, because of dishonesty or self-delusion, or perhaps fear, to say what the form of the concept is, and just say it, for example of God, ‘it cannot be given any definite form’, as a device for protecting yourself, for disguising your lie?” Itwethey asks. “If we can say the word God, we have something in mind, we have something definite in mind. We could force ourselves to say what that is rather than being coy about it.” Why would we be coy, and for whom? It must be for ourselves, because there is something frightening in revealing to ourselves what we definitely think about God—any definite thing we think about God is tawdry, petty, inferior, impoverished in relationship to the power and majesty we must trust God possesses...To limit God and sincerely believe God could be so limited,would be frightening--a frightening reduction—it’s a castration of God (it takes guts (and even with, there’s a feeling this is in very poor taste) to write the very words.)

Itwethey shares a desire with many others (Jews, Christians, or perhaps all theistic religions?) to leave as “open” in understanding and feeling any definite characteristic, trait, quality, or other conceivable feature of God and this “leaving as open” is primary within Itwethey’s religious feeling. That this is so had led Itwethey to view his beliefs in God as “undogmatic.” (“Undogmatic”—it’s a way for Itwethey to deny what he’d learned had been taught to him...That teachings were teachings…To deny the history arriving at the notion of “leaving as open” of God. The extremely peculiar and circuitous hidden network of thoughts behind this seemingly unproblematic connection of ideas lived and bled over in history and congealing here as some natural,plain, and simple thing—this is what Itwethey must get after (getting after the acolytes and apostles of “openness” is merely a part of it.))

Earlier, Itwethey had said, “God is a confined space.” Now Itwethey is telling us something about a “leaving as open” of God. There’s a contradiction, and probably also a paradox: it could be the “leaving as open” of God which results in or contributes to God being lived as a confined space, but Itwethey does not believe pushing or pursuing either the contradiction or the paradox will be fruitful. It is worthy of remark, however, that we would reach this moment or place where God would in any way be discussed in relationship to either open or closed.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLVI

2011-05-25T01:05:00.002-05:00

Come to think of it, insofar as Itwethey believes equating “achieving” spontaneity with the ability to or the act of creating or producing beauty, (as a side note: why is it that creation is a word we might artsy-fartsily embrace, while production, which might be very similar in meaning, has that metallic, industrial, mass “produced” ring to it which we artsy-fartsily reject? What if we tried to inject into discourse phrases such as “these widgets were mass-created at Dink-a-Dink, Inc.’s Tokyo plant” would we help to eliminate some measure of an unreasonable exclusion of human “creative-productive” worth?) and insofar as Itwethey was saying this equation led to desexualization, Itwethey was accusing the acolytes and apostles of “openness” (AoA) of being desexualized.

Nudity and all. Pride to the point of arrogance at having achieved, “being, like totally, unrepressed,” and all. The nudity of the AoA has this feeling of being unsexy, and what’s even more, of being “preachy.” Itwethey thinks so, anyway.

Itwethey says, “Listen sometime, if you get the chance, to some naked AoA sweeties singing some pretty songs, chanting, or lyrically reciting recitations of lyrics, and tell me if you do not notice—the words, the lyrics, the libretto—is it not ‘preachy’?” Itwethey further remarks, “If it is religiously inclined, it will be the religious inclination to judge, and it will be hard to avoid feeling it as being judgmental, condemning.” (If something is being judged, it is being condemned. Let us be very clear about that.)

This is a little philosophical problem the AoA have (and of which they do not wish to become aware.) Their ecstasy, spontaneity, nudity and “naturalness” is anti-social. It is explicitly amoral (amoral understood as not caring a damn about whatever it is the social cares about) and individual (individual understood as the opposite of the social or the collective.) However, the AoA do not wish to be, and in fact are not, anti-social. They are as informed, as connected, as engaged, as involved, participating in the social and the political (and the ethical) as any other group, if not more so. This does not change the quality of their ecstasy, spontaneity, nudity, and “naturalness” from anti-social to social. That it does not isn’t very fair. If things were fair, reality should be more than glad to change the quality. It shouldn’t even need to be asked. This is so glaringly obviously deserved by the AoA. They really are good. Their bodies really are superior, (if you ask Itwethey, who favors toned, tanned, abundantly hairy bodies, no silicone, no cosmetic surgery, little makeup, etc.) If the way they manifest is anti-social and yet we know (we do know!) they are exemplary in their sociality, that ought to be good enough for reality, and in reality we would, without qualms, accept them as social!

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLV

2011-05-23T20:34:00.003-05:00

“We thought the representative or imitative in art as being about thinking clearly, while spontaneity in art was about feeling vividly. The spontaneously-produced art couldn’t have been beautiful at first—what the word beauty meant did not apply to this dripping mass-- this mutant birth. Perhaps the spontaneously-produced art never should have become designated as beautiful—for it became so through the formation of new sets of conventions, of conventionality” said Itwethey. “I find it disturbing, really. It may have had to do with reception of these works in the marketplace, and if reception in the marketplace had not been a consideration, the ugliness of these works remaining foremost, our experience of them would have remained vivid. Their monstrosity and their vividness were linked, and when the beast became the beautiful, this was a cerebral event, a desexualization, a diminishment and a loss, not a gain. It didn’t happen within the work itself, obviously. It was a process acting on the reception of the work, on the way the work was received.”

“As a receiver of these works, I have to be surprised by them, by their spontaneity—I can’t be expecting it. If I come upon them expecting spontaneity, it really is a neutralized spontaneity—it is spontaneity as “method.” Methodical spontaneity is denatured spontaneity. Unfortunately, all of the great modernist abstract or other art which I have seen since childhood I expect to be spontaneous, I have learned for it to be beautiful, and it is usually spoiled for me, except in those wonderful moments when…Um, I don’t know what it is, but let me say in this context that it feels as if I spontaneously feel the spontaneous and it is returned to its hideous meconium-smeared, vaginal mucus soaked, membrane-still-adhering, skull-still-malformed and fontanelles gaping and only covered by thin skin, showing palpating activity underneath—fragility and monstrosity,” said Itwethey, with a momentary awe, very uncommon for her.

“I may be wrong, but I believe the acolytes and apostles of “openness” (AoA) see the relationship between spontaneity and beauty differently,” continued Itwethey. “For them, the spontaneity is assumed to be beautiful, the beauty is the given of a spontaneity authentically achieved. I may be wrong about this too, but I believe this way of looking at the relationship between spontaneity and beauty could account for their narcissistic vibe,” said Itwethey, self-conscious because the word “vibe” she’d just used comes straight out of the AoA lexicon.

“If my reasoning above about the relationship of the marketplace to the beauty factor of the spontaneous holds, what I may be willing to conclude…And I need to think about this some more…Is that what the AoA affirm, probably unwittingly, is the importance of the marketplace as it mediates in the reception (sensible reception Itwethey means here) of works of art,” Itwethey says, looking upwards and to the right, as if hypnotized, at a corner of the cabin, and then he nods off to sleep.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLIV

2011-05-22T12:28:00.004-05:00

“Does spontaneity have use of beauty?” Itwethey wonders. “Any preoccupation or consideration for beauty would imply premeditation contrary to spontaneity,” Itwethey thinks. But it may be more difficult and subtle than this. “Beauty cannot be volunteered…Is spontaneity volunteered? Can one volunteer one’s self for spontaneity? If so, spontaneity does not exclude some kind or measure of preparation, and that included preparation might just have something to do with beauty.”

Unless the spontaneity volunteered for is a denatured spontaneity...It might be. Denatured because cultured and cultivated, with the processes of culture and cultivation carefully concealed by the acolytes and apostles of “openness” (AoA) in order to make spontaneity (and “openness” (but why and how the openness we are far away from explaining)) the false token they pay at the toll booth of the Gate at the fence of the Garden of Eden, when they are returning there, naked.

However that may be, the spontaneity sought by the AoA is situated historically, with certain political and perhaps ethical features which can, and must, be sketched.

In general, AoA spontaneity signals a rejection of rationality. It signals an alliance with the arts against the sciences which are conceived of as arts of control and confinement. The scientific arts are dogmatic, authoritarian, and hierarchical—all obviously (?) the opposite of the spontaneous and therefore to be opposed. And avoided. Spontaneity is against the state—it is in some intellectual alliance with anarchism (but it is not anarchism or any other explicitly political stance, all of which would be considered, in their very nature as political stances, political ideologies, and therefore constrained (NOT spontaneous.) The spontaneity is a reaction to the entire political spectrum, left side, right side,( but maybe not the infinitesimally-small space (which is also as large as the universe) where right and left meet and are perfectly, mystically balanced—but this remains to be examined.) For example, socialist planning would be rejected on the basis of spontaneity in a reaction against the “left.” As capitalism is considered to be unplanned and spontaneous production and exchange, capitalism would be affirmed if not for the stifling and inhibiting effects of capitalism the AoA believe they have experienced directly (though they do not theorize why these occur, and Itwethey does not see how they could, having rejected rationality (and thus the power of theorization, as Itwethey herself conceives this.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLIII

2011-05-11T20:10:00.003-05:00

“We can’t exactly volunteer to make the world, or ourselves, beautiful,” says Itwethey. “We are now either beautiful or not-- We become beautiful, or we don’t.” Beauty, Itwethey believes, is inviting. Itwethey wishes to be inviting: Itwethey may therefore have an interest in beauty…. In inviting beauty and being inviting by being beautiful.

To become attractive—this is not Itwethey’s ambition. It has only just occurred to Itwethey that his acts of preparation could be interpreted in that way. Hospitality is not seduction. Itwethey does not wish and will not rely on lure or allure. Itwethey will not hook Guest, nor be for Guest a hooker (gigolo?) “It isn’t about hooking LOVE,” Itwethey says. “It isn’t about using beauty (or anything else) as bait.” Itwethey pauses, “We’ll leave that to God.” Itwethey pauses, further, grimaces slightly, and adds, “His priests have not hesitated to use charity as bait, nor to make His house of worship into giant fish traps.” (Itwethey has not yet spoken of charity in relation to consideration for the moment of encounter, but this is on the agenda—it is upcoming.)

Itwethey’s own Hope has been fished up by Guest’s beauty—has been invited by it (but not quite welcomed by it, at least so far.) Itwethey has used the forest’s beauty all along. The humble stoop, ugly and hunched, serves its purpose and amidst the foliage and flowers of the forest is the last thing to draw attention to itself (unless it should collapse.) Itwethey admits, however, "It isn’t entirely pleasurable when Hope is fished up…It is bittersweet, there is the tang of hurt mixed in with the anticipation." Itwethey would say, “If you LOVE me let me know, if you don’t then just say so—so I can go kill myself.” But really, Itwethey already knows the expectation of something in return for hospitality is a blemish in advance of the hospitality.

The beautiful as a consideration in preparation for the moment of encounter thus has a downright peculiar status, and perhaps no role to play at all.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLII

2011-05-10T17:24:00.006-05:00

The acolytes and apostles of “openness” (AoA) are not only happy, happy, happy…They are ecstatic. (If you haven’t been thinking of AoA who are ecstatic and widely broadcasting their ecstasy, you haven’t been thinking of the same ones as Itwethey.)

Itwethey is irritated by AoA ecstasy, but is the irritation justified? Itwethey needs to know. Itwethey’s irritation is based on some feeling of AoA ecstasy being fake. If AoA ecstasy is fake, Itwethey’s irritation is justified, because more than anything, AoA ecstasy is presented as the token of authenticity. AoA ecstasy is presented as the token of authenticity and self-sufficient joy—unconditioned and unconditional joy--completeness. As completeness, ecstasy lacks for nothing (the AoA, as ecstatic, would by implication also lack for nothing) The ecstasy is complete spiritually, physically, and materially (or in any other category Itwethey may, through Itwetheyian incompleteness, have omitted.) If this ecstasy rings hollow, its incompleteness is for Itwethey an aggravation (insufficient self-sufficiency? "Which is it," asks Itwethey.)

About AoA ecstasy Itwethey has this to say,

AoA openness means open to experience. (This isn’t as obvious as it may seem.) The idea of being open to experience might seem to mean openness to any and all experience. It doesn’t, though. It means being open to ecstatic experience. Ecstasy is the experience. This ecstatic experience is thought to be the token of the experience of the experience of all and any and every experience. It is thought if you were to open to every experience, all the experiences of time and space, the experience you’d experience would be ecstasy. It is as if the sum of all experience finitely experienced, is ecstasy. Note that as the sum of all experience, the ecstasy is a complete experience—obviously a kind of peak experience, a summit, the apex of a pyramid. (Why is it so natural to make a peak or summit symbolic of completeness? Because the peak is atop all of the rest? Like a crown, a monarch, a King or Queen? This doesn’t make much sense outside the nonsensical conventions arising in human history.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XLI

2011-05-07T17:48:00.003-05:00

Little openness, let us be proud both of little and of open. Big open probably isn’t open. Little open, in its squealched nature (it would be big, iffen “things been different”; being little is victimization however not the case being big be superior or noteworthy or remarkable) is a tiny crack, a crack if you pass into be making you VERY BIG. You might think a tiny crack would welcome a tiny passing, but you’d be wrong. A tiny crack wants to be split wide by an enormous passing, in both time and space (it can barely get in, and once in, it “spends” a lot of time in.)

Within the context of “enlightenment” we’ve spent an enormous, humungous, geez such size can’t be real gigamungohumoguneous amount of time on the immature versus the mature, but now’ze the time we gonna say to the world: we must evaluate the premature versus the “overstayedthewelcome.” This arises because at least in part, Itwethey’s “bid welcome” demands it arise.

Little openness, clothed as Venus Fly Trap is clothed, in mysterious appendages, hairs, lubricants, toothed enclosures, lips, tongues, digestive enzymes, salivas, sativas, cannibas sativas, sat-on-faces, faces-ambitioning-to-sit-on-worlds, English teachers in cubicle classromms happing into daffodil striations, little firewood and the still supple blossom of fresh water from the womb of the earth, siren English teacher signaling the omnipresence of desire, passion, wordscoldignited.

Little openness, with your Venus Fly Trap hairs sensitive to Beelezebub intrusion, Nightmare Xenon Flow, Radon “down below” size-tightening fire, aglow, when lips snap to make Beelzebub lips’ own, premature, immature, mature, Victor Mature, and Victor amateur, doesn’t matter. Sat down on bottom matters. Itwethey has discovered a solution “bottom matters.”

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XL

2011-05-06T14:03:00.020-05:00

Itwethey’s pedagogy of encounter requires saying something more specific about what the acolytes and apostles of “openness” (AoA) believe.

The AoA reject established institutions and values and seek spontaneity.

As an institution is any structure or mechanism of social order, and as spontaneity is somehow or other not mechanized, structured, or ordered, it can’t be surprising for AoA , seeking spontaneity as they do, to reject institutions, established or otherwise. (But are there “unestablished” institutions? No.) We could say, if we wanted to be more accurate: the AoA reject established things, institutions, and values. Institutions and values are always established, so, to be even more succinct, we could say the AoA reject “established things.” Institutions and values are elements, among a large number of other elements, of the set of established things. The question which must now be asked and answered is this: are there any elements of human language, culture, society, or human ways of being which are not elements of the set of “established things”? The question then is: if there are not, are the AoA nihilists, as they reject everything? (Or at least everything humans have established.)

The AoA seek spontaneity. They do not reject spontaneity. Spontaneity such as it exists in the life of humans is affirmed over and against what humans have established. Spontaneity and the affirmation of spontaneity thus distinguishes the AoA from nihilists. Spontaneity thus bears a heavy weight load for the AoA: it is the positive seed, or egg, or energy potentiatus from which a humanity unidentified and undefined by what it establishes, (whether what it establishes is understood as culture in its broadest sense, or as institutions, or values, art or science or religion or art-science-religion (the greatest possible dream of those who affirm “Establishment.”)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXIX

2011-05-05T14:34:00.002-05:00

“Don’t remember any victims who weren’t chaste.” Were the victims chaste because chastened? If they weren’t chastened, were they victims? Victims is chaste is chastened. Does this not lead us to believe Itwethey resents the luxury of “open” nudity? That Itwethey demands its punishment? Resents the luxury of “open” nudity because to Itwethey the luxury of “open” nudity has been denied. (Which it more or less has been. As righteous, holy, beautiful nudity of justice. There’s no doubt Itwethey can become naked, can shed clothing, can parade around in birthday suit, can be “au naturel”, can promenade “in the raw”: what is in doubt is if Itwethey can promenade “in the raw” righteously, holily, homily, unhomely, unheimlich-heimlichly, beautifully as Adam, Eve, and Great God himself, in the cool of the evening, in the garden of Eden.) Itwethey, chastened and chaste, resents the unchastened? Egads!

Were the unchastened victims (there had to have been a time when they had not been chastened, even the most repressive and oppressive modern ideology grants a privilege of innocence to childhood, warranted or not—this is the only viable threshold distinguishing sanity from insanity in any modern ideology—it is tissue thin, regardless) happy and free in their nudity (the nudity of childhood often is voluntary—this isn’t in doubt—and that’s very good, strong evidence of the comfort and joy of nudity over against being clothed) but expelled from that happy privilege by a finger-pointing Jehovah of authority who wanted them shamed from their joy, their privilege, their happiness, their power? Which side is Itwethey really on? If the victims prefer nudity until the finger is pointed at them even if and always ever after they know “we were wrong and guilty then” Itwethey could conclude to honor and sympathize with the victims without, nevertheless, identifying with their chastening. (“You have been made victims with such force as is the force of irreversibility. Your chastity is the chastity of inevitability, of necessity. It will stand and it must stand. And next to it, “open” nudity doesn’t stand up. Worse than that, “open” nudity’s fake standing up relies on the irreversible, inevitable and necessary chastity of the victim. What is this?)

A few preparatory remarks. Itwethey sits in a wilderness (or a reasonable facsimile thereof—probably as good as can be done in the modern (if there is a natural period of the modern and not an ideology of a natural period of the modern) and relies on gusts of randomness, chance, airs of accident, of turbulence at 20,000 feet, error, oopsie-daisie, of delightful privilege to goof, to be dumb, the right to be wrong, and as the trees, the foliage, the sticks, the windfall, the loam, the sand, the lichens, the unlikelihood, the paupers, the Poplars, the injustice, the migraines, the accumulations of all this improbable, (which Itwethey’s probiliscope has, in a remarkable series of images to be exhibited at the Whitney gallery in Manhattan, resolirresolveprobprobprobbbed, next to Richard Avedon’s black and white photos of Itwethey’s home state of BwOaska) Itwethey has nevertheless not resorted to contracts of and for the path, the stoop, anyone’s hope, Love, desire, tomorrow, the sun not setting “in itself”, or prismatics of rainbows, for Hitler.

Institutions are similarly anathema to Itwethey’s conception of wilderness and "bid welcome". Next, we will consider whether Itwethey can, in greeting Guest, eliminate ALL projection, identification, and idealization ( whether Itwethey can or cannot will be used to support the transcendence of nature, or its being thrown out, with the egg shells and coffee grounds.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXVIII

2011-05-04T13:42:00.001-05:00

Itwethey had never met an apostle or acolyte of “openness” who was what Itwethey would consider disadvantaged, either materially through poverty or materially through suffering of some kind, for example through illness or accident disabled. Itwethey had met apostles and acolytes who had messed up very, very badly the hand they’d been dealt at birth, but this is different, Itwethey thinks. Itwethey notes the frequency with which the apostles and acolytes identify with the disadvantaged ( and here Itwethey will re-emphasize that “to identify” is red-flagged as severest hazard—and will be doubled back on to examine more closely, and with a little luck, to be critiqued, in the context in which it arises, fully.) Itwethey suspicions a desire for victimization and sees this as further evidence of “openness” being a very mysterious or misguided strategy for guilt.

The apostles and acolytes of “openness” suspicion their material advantages are not earned or deserved; the material disadvantage of the world’s multitude of victims is not earned or deserved; importantly, the apostles and acolytes of “openness” ruthlessly reject the ideological justifications of those with material advantage who thereby affirm the advantage as earned and deserved while also affirming the world’s multitude of victims earn and deserve that, too. (Except for the kids: there’s a new crop each year, and some are growing older; innocence is shed at puberty and that’s the moment also of earning and deserving one’s disadvantage. Also a deep suspicion puberty is much better, “down there.”)

Apostles and acolytes of “openness” can join the disadvantaged, can leave the world of advantage, as a tourist in the world of disadvantage, for the enriching experience. This is what they are “open” to. What annoys Itwethey so much is that after that taste of disadvantage, they can call it off and then retreat to comfort, there to recount the richness and wisdom, or write a poem, or perhaps rhapsodize about the resourcefulness, creativity and humanity of the poor, or whatever, but what makes suffering suffering and much worse than a “change of pace” or a kind of palate refresher between courses, or a more somber shade for the palette, is precisely when it can’t be called off, when one can’t get a “break” from it, a little time off to collect oneself; it isn’t voluntary. The face is smashed down into it, down into the mud and the shit, and that hurts and does the complexion not the slightest bit of good, let alone the nose and front teeth. You don’t slip into it and out of it, and you suspicion you’ll maybe never slip out of it, though maybe you can’t lose hope you will. “Wait while I-I-I slip into something a little more comfortable,” funny when that means the borders of the USA.

It also seems to Itwethey that in this sense, the nudity, along with the “openness” is a luxury commodity. Don’t remember any victims who weren’t chaste.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXVII

2011-05-03T16:30:00.004-05:00

Rebellious and uncompromising: the question was what Guest being nude contributed to this, if anything; and whether, ultimately, the question itself was rebellious and uncompromising or led back into the false dichotomy of freedom OR determinism. (Please note: the framing of the question in this way, this form, is deliberate: it has been eating at Itwethey’s conscience that he had placed “openness” in a direct relationship to “hypersensitivity to hypocrisy”, understood as a process of making thought very slippery, without being able to remove the slipperiness enough to elucidate what was meant—Itwethey still won’t, but take the form of this first sentence as illustrative.)

Rebellious and uncompromising: the fluidity of “openness” tended to give Itwethey the feeling it was entirely compromised, an endless compromise. Rebellious? Only if an annoying indirectness can be so called . Itwethey is keenly aware wafer thin closeness of his sympathetic greeting of Guest is to this, too.

People protest by getting nude; people have been humiliated by a command to be nude. 1 “In the year that the supreme commander, sent by Sargon king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and attacked and captured it— 2 at that time the LORD spoke through Isaiah son of Amoz. He said to him, “Take off the sackcloth from your body and the sandals from your feet.” And he did so, going around stripped and barefoot. 3 Then the LORD said, “Just as my servant Isaiah has gone stripped and barefoot for three years, as a sign and portent against Egypt and Cush, 4 so the king of Assyria will lead away stripped and barefoot the Egyptian captives and Cushite exiles, young and old, with buttocks bared—to Egypt’s shame. 5 Those who trusted in Cush and boasted in Egypt will be dismayed and put to shame. 6 In that day the people who live on this coast will say, ‘See what has happened to those we relied on, those we fled to for help and deliverance from the king of Assyria! How then can we escape?’” (Isaiah 20)

Guest will remain nude for three years? In preparation, Itwethey will need to stock up on Nivea skin cream. Wouldn’t want Guest to take on a weathered look; the supreme softness and excellence of Guest’s skin and hair must be preserved, on even the lowest standard of hospitality—and of course, Itwethey is attempting for the highest. Itwethey loves to look and what Itwethey wants (and perhaps this is what Guest demands, but so far Itwethey can’t guess this) and must find, is a loving look. We don’t yet know--Itwethey doesn’t know—whether Guest’s nudity is voluntary, based on some decision or assessment—or is cruel and cold Itwethey’s flinching away from, retreat from, the “bid welcome” intended. (In other words, forced on Guest by Itwethey and typical of Itwethey's inconsideration for the feelings of others.) We do know Guest’s arrival is fortuitous, involuntary, unintended, probably a mistake, not a destination determined by Guest, or wanted by Guest. (Arrival by Guest in such manner is intended and determined by Itwethey.) In some strange way, Guest’s present nudity either doubles, or reverses, or is symmetrical to, or affirms, or loves, or through effort of will accepts, Guest’s strange arrival.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXVI

2011-05-02T11:18:00.004-05:00

Itwethey notices a tendency to idealization in wanting to call Guest a Venus, and it is worrisome. (So is the marked tendency to spell out more and more clearly Itwethey’s masculinity and Guest’s feminity—this is undercutting the entire reason for Itwethey being named Itwethey—If the censor I-I-I had known this was going to happen, Itwethey could have been and would have been called “Fred” or something similar, from the beginning. IT-WE-THEY has had the serious intention of forcing under the carpet of “universalism” these gender differences which are crusty and resistant to being swept there—though whether it is a significant observation to note how much more effectively these gender differences are swept under the carpet of “anonymousalism” (the postmodern equivalent or morphing of “universalism”?) remains to be seen, said and evaluated.)

Guest’s appearance is odd in that he-she (we will continue to use various devices until the strain is too great, if ever) is strikingly beautiful (would we have to also say “handsome” as well, to continue consistently with the inconsistent gender ambiguity?) and a professional model of some success, and yet also in some inexpressible way a bit mousy? Maybe because she’s not only naked, but not wearing make-up or dyes of any kind. (Marilyn Monroe might have been mousy, too, you know, if she hadn’t dyed hair platinum blonde.) Plausibly, beautiful women become “mousy” simply by being in a natural setting. Emboldened naked but disarmed mousy as well—there’s that paradox again. There is something timid or hesitant in Guest, but precisely where that’s emanating is going to require reflection from Itwethey—it doesn’t come from Guest’s posture, and as Itwethey has indicated, Guest is not frail—Guest, Itwethey would go so far to say, is muscular, especially in the legs.

Itwethey can be transfixed by these beauties—Itwethey’s projections, identifications, idealizations, run wild on the mirror of these beautiful features—while Itwethey becomes inactive, stationary, drooling, staring. In some ways it is simply fortunate for Itwethey that something about Guest is mousy, for this gives Itwethey some anchorage “in Itwethey’s interior living space” to brake projections, identifications, and idealizations, to make it possible to respond to Guest (in real time.) Itwethey’s excessively bold and audacious projections, identifications, and idealizations may also be apparent in Itwethey’s preparations for Guest.

On the other hand, Itwethey has also called Guest a Venus Flytrap. Or, Itwethey has called herself a Venus Flytrap. Itwethey had imagined “her” as being somewhat masculine (due to the muscularity of the body, of the quadriceps in particular.) Somewhat aggressive in being “open” to Itwethey? (Willingly being Guest?) Itwethey had noticed her anus is extruding, (an “outtie” anus?) and it is a faint bit ugly? (But is it?) Itwethey had read too much into her eyes. And Itwethey’s own reserve—(here on the threshold)--what to make of it? Is it cowardice, effeminacy? The great worry. Or is it intelligence about not getting trapped? Does she offer a trap? Or pleasure? Or is the pleasure merely the bait of the trap?

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXV

2011-04-29T14:59:00.002-05:00

The nudity was seen, by the apostles and acolytes of “openness” as a way of rejoining nature, and of being “open”. It was a return to the garden of Eden, to the state of innocence of Adam and Eve. It was, in this way, a reaction to the crushing burden of historical guilt (mainly historical—the personal burden of guilt in every case of which Itwethey has knowledge isn’t enough to fill a thimble, if that). Innocence and nature are complementary, while guilt and history and culture, are also complementary. The rural is natural and innocent; the urban is of course cultural and guilty—but for all of that, also “interesting”, stimulating, and intelligent. (Along with the cows, the rural chews its cud.) You might be able to, after a long hot and dirty excursion in the interesting, stimulating, and intelligent, slip out to do some ruminating cud chewing—analogous to the way you might, after partaking of a remarkable evening in an exquisite evening dress and high heels, “slip into something a little more comfortable”, also known as getting ready to get naked (which is understood as the most comfortable dress or undress of all, and the prelude to pleasure).

It’s so nice the way you get all monkey and jungle and funky and limitless and ecstatic and –this has to be said—free and individual and egoistic as appreciated in body—in order to punch the clock next morning, collecting oneself as so many sips of coffee—the brine and brackish water of the coffee cup clouding awareness as much as awakening it—does one have the status (power over others) to disguise one’s complete disorientation under the harsh guilty informed and (functional? Really? practical? Reallly?) fluorescent lights and efficiently smooth and white gypsum board and polymerized pigment coated world of “work” (work—where we overcome guilt but knowing we wouldn’t be able to do so to such extent as to become innocent, which is obtainable only through a reclining, in bed, or field of hay, maybe.)

Guest has to be made naked by Itwethey—but it is important to realize this is a “time effect” (or time “defect”?) of the narrative. (In other words, please keep in mind Guest and Itwethey remain, fully clothed, at the threshold.) The time effect, or defect if it is, will be left to stand by IT-WE-THEY, the editor (the censor?) and the underlying (or over-riding?) I-I-I in order to differentiate from Itwethey’s “bid welcome” of Guest, Itwethey’s pernicious identifications and idealizations of both Guest and the “bid welcome" of Guest. ( Both are very closely, very very closely related to guilt, which Itwethey already knows will NOT be relieved by having Guest be naked--)

How plausible it is to posit the “I” as the foundation for the “WE”. Bear in mind the purpose here is to undercut EITHER WAY an underlying of I or a WE.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXIV

2011-04-29T14:20:00.003-05:00

The narrative of Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, in its entirety:

1. Itwethey waits, in solitude and semi-darkness, in contemplation and preparation, for Guest;

2. Guest, accidentally (or randomly), happens down forest path;

3. Guest happens up Itwethey’s stoop;

4. Guest happens to be greeted by Itwethey;

5. Guest and Itwethey are squeezed together, though oscillating in both space and time, on Itwethey’s threshold.

The critique of “openness”, the use of the probiliscope, descriptions of BwOaska-- support the narrative, and do not form a separate narrative, or “themes,” or worse, "rhizomes."

The extraneous and unusual, grotesque and arabesque, the diversions and wanderings, are to be understood as “time effects”, mainly occurring during the oscillations at Itwethey’s threshold.

If the narrative ends with a "happily ever after", this must be understood as one among many, "time effects."

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXIII

2011-04-28T15:41:00.001-05:00

It’s kind of troubling, but apparently we are going to need to make a theme of Guest being naked, being made to be naked, and gathering firewood naked, being made to gather firewood naked—by Itwethey. Itwethey had no intention of such a thing—the idea was to provide hospitality to Guest, as a consideration to Guest, so that Guest would come into cabin and be completed by all that happened thereafter—all thereafter being understood as satisfaction, comfort, ease, idleness? Itwethey does know of his need, after a certain stretch of laziness, of the comfort and ease of getting up and going out and fetching some firewood, but in anticipation of what Guest would like, this didn’t occur. Of course, Itwethey never fetched firewood while naked, and nor did Itwethey look so fetching while fetching. The nakedness—Itwethey can’t reconcile that quite yet, though Guest really is “comfortable” with it, maybe is enjoying it, even the display of it—Itwethey you see, having sat in skull-like cabin, dark and dingy as a self-created dungeon, isn’t able to “play it cool” no matter how much Itwethey would if Itwethey could.

Ah, we see now: the degree to which Itwethey’s elaborate plans for consideration and hospitality are exposed as Itwethey’s inconsideration. Nope. We don’t see this quite yet. Not quite yet. (Of course, we are working to this end. We want to find a way to plan (which we see as an essential activity) which is not a means to dominate or forestall “the new” or “the spontaneous”. We want to make a dictionary which dictates nothing at all—acting as a tool and nothing more. Wiktionary? Itwethey has no reason to rule that out, as of yet, and maybe won’t. How quickly can Wiktionary capture and stabilize Itwethey’s portmanteau words?)

A few more things about Guest: a description of the legs—long but muscular, something like Tina Turner’s—athletic, not reduced to the geometry of bone, but exhibiting the geochronal and architectonic of disruption power which asks metry to meat out a little, or get out, or get the meter kicked out of it (interestingly, Itwethey was kicked hard by girls many times, but by women, never. The legs of women were progressively weaker than those of girls, and maybe the inclination to kick at Itwethey’s invasions weaker too. Inclination and motivation. Guest’s legs are kickers to be reckoned with. Itwethey’s inclination and motivation to get kicked by them is zero. Let it be known.)

Itwethey only knows about the strength of Guest’s legs because Guest is naked before Itwethey. Guest is naked before Itwethey because Guest is somehow welcomed by Itwethey—has accepted the welcome of Itwethey. All to the good. However, it does mean the story has gotten ahead of itself. Yes—once again the story has been allowed to get ahead of itself.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXII

2011-04-27T23:27:00.001-05:00

Oh yes’m, hideous coffee, replete with antireanretireireire: you recognize this repetition.

Oh yes’m, hideous tea, replete with a wallow in water, an awaiting in water, a shallow swallow in wallowing water, replete with swallow, of shallow Shiloh of Shoah of forgotten Chaos of water.

Oh, yes’m, hidgeous prodigious brought to a boil, replete with wank with wallow with wanking wallow want no mallow nor marrow, tomorrow? Replete with tomahawk tomorrow sorrow swallow Chaos of water in smarm short of a Shiloh of tomorrow cut off from

Oh, yes’m, fishes do swim in shallow swallow of morrow on tomogram tomahawk squawk squint squaint quaint hideous coffee, hideous tea, replete with a wallow in water, in coffee, in scream, in tea, replete with swallow of Shiloh of Shoah of Chaos mistaken for forgotten, in water.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXXI

2011-04-27T20:35:00.003-05:00

Guest was holding some firewood. Itwethey hadn’t the slightest understanding of how this has transpired. There was almost always a need for firewood—Itwethey was the first to know this. During the winter time, it was Itwethey’s obsessive and yet casual concern (Itwethey, lazy, concerned with the abstract, little peepee most of the time wired to fantasy, not reality) that firewood be gathered and readily available if in case of frigidity moving in and causing suffering and paralysis.

Guest: let us attempt to describe her. Just as a general frame, think of both Lauren Bacall and Charlotte Rampling. Bacall or Rampling: Deleuze or Bogart. (Interesting, this stinking software corrects me on Deleuze, but recognizes Bogart. Itwethey concludes Bogart is much more establishment (bourgeois) than Deleuze, but why?) What kind of beauty is that? Itwethey assumes this is French avant-garde, in part because of its willingness to get naked and enjoy ( bathing. Bath, get yourself clean, means getting naked, even though and not in spite of, the fact that getting yourself clean is all about the sacred, whereas being naked is all about the “profane”. The propane, a gas, combustible, as we shall see Guest is combustible—and must be combusted—by Itwethey. Itwethey will put Guest in pipe and smoke, (NB: Itwethey meant to say “smoek” but again correcting software forced Itwethey to type the more conventional—the entirely conventional—smoke—(not that that is in any way unbeautiful or unbeautific)).

Of course Guest has perfect breasts. Hair is wonderful, as are eyes. There is something almond in the eyes. The shape? No, the content. The content of the eyes? Almondine? Or beige? Beige bath. Itwethey stands before bath and in the eyes of Guest all the reflected colors of Itwethey are there, all Itwethey wants to see—let there be no doubt. Itwethey wishes for the form of almondine.

Guest is too healthy to be beautiful. Little peepee is entirely unobservant (there is no obserject in these genitizing eyes). A round of fire, a sound of fife, a squire of the square, a pound of puppy pipe put in to “smoek” to realize to dwell upon to photograph, to ignite, to squarignite, to rarify, to volatilize, to spiritualize, as when the volatile molecules of smell go beyond the nose, and into any space: fifspirsqbeetnestin.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXX

2011-04-22T15:59:00.004-05:00

An end to “predator-prey” within “guest-host” means an elimination of nature (the natural, or savage, pre-historical, or pre-civilization), in the civilized….Easier said than done. (Predator-prey as at the heart of nature; guest-host at the heart of culture and we hope for the sake of civilization, at the heart of civilization), but still, “Easier said than done.” (Nevertheless a noble project for the Enlightenment wreckers, a crew with an assortment of mechanisms for dismantling the undainty (as their masters have told them it is) threatening plural joy nevertheless delicate…In LOVE.

What’s worse is that as said above, the saying isn’t that satisfactory because what Itwethey wants is a perfectly planned, or considerate treatment of Guest which “feels good” (not stiff or rigid—stiff and rigid never feels good, says those who are enlightened) (planned informality?), a “wild” Guest-host, which in a way it is said above equals nature-culture (w-G-h = (p-p)(g-h) = (N)(C), ). We love the beauteous things which are said with no intention of them ever being done. Yes, we do. We don’t equate them with being fully civilized or cultured, such as we conceive and will construct such ( still eschewing idealization).

If nature not be, not be reduced to, but merely including “predator-prey” (we would wish to see whatever considerations of nature are able to exclude “predator-prey” altogether, because we are quite sure we would then be looking at some conception of “culture”) (Itwethey doesn’t want to reduce nature to “predator-prey” but can’t avoid seeing “predator-prey” as essential to Itwethey’s view of what makes nature, nature. (It must also be Itwethey sees civilization as that state of affairs among humans where the “predator-prey” has be’en eliminated.)

Venus walks the path. Languid, for having wanted a path to lead her into wilderness…(must be wilderness isn’t incompatible with path because wild path was forged by wild subject) Itwethey’s Venus fly trap is poised…Remember this is all green. Itwethey’s very being is a fly trap, and yet, and yet, Itwethey has prior to every trapping consideration ( trapping-consideration: please note: it is hateful to everything Itwethey would want or wish, that consideration would be "trap": the copulative: consideration is trap.) Itwethey is already “trapped” by Venus. Trapped into trapping? (Even if this is true, it is irrelevant to Itwethey’s purposes. Itwethey insists her purposes be relevant; all of his irrelevant purposes Itwethey spanks those little dickens.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXIX

2011-04-20T16:19:00.005-05:00

Slowly, languidly, Venus Fur-trap-like, (wicked snapping of passive green, (traitor to the garden! Traitor to photosynthesis, (elegant compared to spittle-gobbed and fanged “in””beau”gestations or gestions, but not if leaves are going to contort themselves into some evil mouth-jaw shape, and use element of surprise to trap goobs of sun in the form of Yahweh-Prince of Flies, not to say what it is those hangiedown thingies are at the fringe of the leaf—a philosopher who is interested in the mislogic of analogy and also the peculiar way language shapes reality might do well to investigate this homology, this analogy), tensiled phloem, trusted flower, icy beginning, tempting nectar,) and yet very quickly too, vegetal images burnished by animal into slowness of seasonal growth, quickly converted to convention, to Itwethey’s inward eye, an eye preferred, etched, like a sheaf of sketches, mobile, forthcoming, Guest is happening along…Guest is happening: Itwethey, having mistaken the happening for the commodity, snaps down upon Guest, and with clever use of goo (gle) has got some gooey goed geochronal nutrient on which to dine.

When it gets right down to it, what Itwethey is hoping for is an alternative to the predator-prey situation which is the only one relationship on tap(or bottled) in America, even in the remote valley of BwOaska where Itwethey has staked his claims. It’s mistaken for civilization, though it is as far as possible from that. Flmabe art work, and art gallery, and genius level art work can lever or segue, on consignment or offer (or bid) . This is called “mutuality” sometimes, civilization at others, “pluralism” now and then, equality, if we are in a salon, or a coffee shop, where people congregate to celebrate the tame pleasure of caffeine, or purity. Multi-culturalism( a lot of us, maybe even a plurality of us would never have dreamed culturalism was anything but multi—excess—multi pressed onto multi—as a creamed delight presstitution—woohoo! what is tha’ but an affront to purity?(Purity deserves all the effrontery it gets! Until it is something new) Guest’s smile ground into a percolated mixture to be subjected to a boil, or a “biol” (believe it or not, it was difficult to type “biol” into this due to the self-correcting software which wanted “biol” to be “boil” correctly spelled. Dang—“biol” is the word intended, wanted, desired, regardless of “repressive” word-processing software we’ve been baited with.) Venus-warmth-flyeth doth indo splake—wha/ ? Boobs weren’t so much arranged as mouth (though they gaped) as buttock (though they extruded?) rompompumupghpumped-goldfinched! Away. (We get the viol of biol and the boil of violen or the biol boil o’ bi old violent violviolet mauve)

Dictionary is an odd way to establish dominance, doncha think?(Don Johnson and Natalie Hollaway were we oncedowned jubilstreamed! Shitenmearsed! (Just one Polaroid inserted here—as illustration—and by the conventions of path and stoop, maiden-ready, for the image is known and accepted—though Itwethey as scientist hasn’t yet come around to (Fox fur delta…Delta is that special place foxy fur meant and fixtured into dentate Delta is change and it certainly is, as oasis of fertile fructile crescent of moon and fooked) Lion, not lemming, fur. Itwethey mean, who cares about the definitive meaning? Who? Why build a monument to a meaning? To stabilize it? To identify it with a specific WHO who is who? (Fixt that who that monument be manumintal be manatee mermaidal blue and vinyl) Wadja language for cept to dominate? Is it for the lambs or the eagles? (Itwethey knows the warranted humility of such a stupid question. I mean, at the very least he could be celebrating the strange of Kings and proletariat), And yet brilliant for all of that, as is the encyclopedia which gives an authoritative and neutral read of all trappings and frappes of history...

Some minor pleasure. Trust me, more pleasure, even a major pleasure is possible. Somewhat cool, as evidenced by a poof of fogliggetine and forcwueks, like a mutiny, a crust.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXVIII

2011-04-20T14:29:00.006-05:00

The stoop is outside, where it is exposed to the winds that blow, the dust that covers, the leaves that decay, the rain that pools, and thus rots, the sun that nourishes strains of slime mold or algae not pleading the fifth amendment—("Yes, we are algae, and we grow in this restricted pool which has formed in this particular hapless depression (a defect of the two-by-twelve used to make the run of the third step) and we are not ashamed of what we are. We proclaim it and we don’t give a damn if anyone finds us guilty or not. We have staked out this domain (by the wash of our secondary metabolites, which we flush from our living tissues, much as you do your wastes from your anuses into your toilets, and out into the rest of the living world, to be dealt with by the rest of such world such as that living world is able (for the most part, us slime molds and algaes are best for accommodating you, and we feel this should entitle us to a little better treatment by you) to make our lives and to reproduce and be productive by cell division, here. This is what we will do. We rot your stoop and make it unsightly? 'Boo-hoo-hoo.' We could care less. You claim to want guests? We are your algal guests, what? You wouldn’t welcome Nelson Algren? Welcome to Nelson Algae!")

The stoop is relatively outside. (The stoop is partially covered from above by the jutting of the roof.) It offers entry—it offers entry to anyone who will walk up it. If the stoop was not there, a rude climbing, perhaps more difficult for anyone wearing a dress or other such covering, would be required. The stoop removes this discourtesy. The stoop, as it is customary on most dwellings in Itwethey’s locale, could be called, “standard issue courtesy.” Guest will not recognize the courtesy but would recognize the discourtesy if stoop has not been supplied. As a matter of fact, Itwethey has supplied the stoop as a courtesy for himself, primarily, as Itwethey has never yet, except once (this one event is the subject of this story,) had Guest come up the stoop and been thus absentmindedly greeted (in other words, unaware a courtesy, a token of mindfulness, was being extended, exhibited.) It is not objective because walking up it won’t be the same for everyone—Itwethey has hidden within it trap doors and subterfuges by which he will make walking up the stoop a very different experience for those she may not like. To the most naïve, the stoop will be taken as “objective”—it is just there.

Itwethey hadn’t really thought of the stoop as being a courtesy extended to Itwethey merely, when Itwethey had built the stoop. Itwethey now must admit Itwethey was guided by “convention.” That climb which would be rude and unmindful for Guest to make, especially Guest in skirt, the guest Itwethey most lusts after (openly and tolerantly invites, but with passion) wasn’t what Itwethey had planned for. Itwethey, thinking only of herself, would have liked to have forced herself to make that rude climb, each time entering cabin, in order to build gluteal strength, (and work off butt fat) and through the kind of swing of the hips that last tall step requires, increase flexibility. Yes, without the stoop, entry would require and develop strength and flexibility.)

Algal gobs now cover golden gobs, which not unlike spit do rain down onto sunken scene of murky depthal surface though surficial depth becomes our contemporary inquiry. From some indiscriminate sighting above, someone very talented has placed a spotlight—never in a hundred years had Sophocles or Euripides have gathered this placement would have this effect (is that why we only encounter Sophocles and Euripides in a history of literature? Why, in a history of literature, do we yet find in Sophocles and Euripides something new? Iffen they was so unsurfisticated in dramatic lighting? Maybe we can set up a cross-temporal dramatic exchange.) Light refracts (was this anticipated—AND—why is whether it is anticipated or not suddenly to become the “critical” question? Because consciousness is understood as one among many lighting effects?) Gobs sunlight splattering, Itwethey wakes from slumber and resolves to find a clearing within which to better enjoy gobs.

UmbrageProtectellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXVII

2011-04-19T14:55:00.002-05:00

You will put your wager up, Guest? There's more to you than your ample boobs, replete with tits, and attending hair? Anchorite there down below, in a furry repetition of no-place, as a bottom, as a above-bottom known as knew beginnin, or NEW beginnin, or e'en, as we look at KatzenjammerKids, wiedeeveneedrmeprantz, a glory!?*

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXVI

2011-04-18T13:24:00.001-05:00

Above, Itwethey displays her map of “openness”—the terrain Itwethey hopes to explore “in depth”. Though “openness” must be understood as a surface, with no vertical features, surfaces have topology (topography) and “openness” as surface has a particularly wonderful, intricate topology….The complexity of these folds are precisely the feature which has misled the acolytes and apostles of “openness” to believe they’ve discovered the unlimited. (“Openness” does wish to understand “openness” as the unlimited, and it has certainly set forth an “openness” offering a bounty of folds—Itwethey has been enumerating them, and though it would be premature—in fact would negate this inquiry—Itwethey bets these can be numerated. (Itwethey has placed a wager—that Itwethey will win, no one knows…Which, if you think about it is odd, because Itwethey is in the position to allow Itwethey to win, if Itwethey wants. Because Itwethey authors this?) The tripartite triumvirate IT-WE-THEY authors this, and the tripartite pronounial allows for honest wagers. (Even more so than “committees, legislatures, forums, salons, and yes, racetracks, and casinos.)) Here and there, an I-I-I has noticed these venues of probability “in the age of reason” have the appearance of being fixed.)))

We see that “openness” is not without its violent clashes…Itwethey calls “openness” a battlefield. (Itwethey has grinded his axe that this is a battlefield where sight, sound, smell, of conflict, is repressed—that this repression is what distinguishes this battlefield from other battlefields—Itwethey has ground that axe into the nubbins—prismatic fractalization of ocean spray, of cranappleCannesgoldorb, ground axe spraying submarine like unto ground rich with goldorb, ripe for the extraction and exploitation—But no doubt about it, the iron filings from this axe, scattered and haphazard, fall back into the “openness” battlefield…They are magnetic, as is the battlefield (the big-O-b) itself. They are magnetic, as is the battlefield itself. The battlefield, senseless to the conflict eventuating on its place—no less (no more?) deadly for this senselessness—is attractive.

If you look carefully at the map Itwethey has presented (above—must we always mention that? For sake of clarity or openness?) you’ll see Itwethey’s cabin in there. It’s somewhat below one of the nipples. There’s a solemn and this is to say gloomy valley down there, not exactly in one of the pores, or poorboy wrinkles, or places of neglect (unstitched, unswangled), or characterized such as it is represented in the map above, with a scattering of hairs (the forest, though harmed by warming trends and a long drought, is still “purty good” as faux wilderness, fer as modern, post-modern soldiers of nature be concerned (reasoned?) to judge), or patrolled over by the usual contingent of skin lice eating dead skin or whatever.)) There is no gold dripping from the nipples—not much is made of the sterility, milk-wise, of male nipples, nor their relative inferiority (in size, which is to say quantity, which, as we’ve been hammered to learn, is what males care about—why hasn’t there become a size competition between the sexes about breasts—oops, Itwethey has forgotten about man boobs.) )) As we are talking about nature (for no man did or would design a man’s nipple, or a woman’s boobs, and we only assume (though very, very commonly do) man invented the obsession with quantitation and then decided to make quantitating any damned thing would be the priority-purpose, though not the prior purpose, nor the prior of Christ Church, nor the porpoise diving through ocean spray to make rainbows! Children enjoy!)))

Itwethey will make a foray into the submarine world of the clashes of “openness”. Sectors of “openness.” (Sects are closed, as are cults, and part of the horror of “openness” has been the emergence of anachronistic cults. We all scratch our head at these anomalous and “irrational” results of our new and improved “open” ethics—we are better than this, are we not? No, the results are in: we are not.) Andy Warhol was open and was wounded (and crumpled up as open) by Valerie Solanis, who we regard as a recipient, every bit as much as the best, of “openness”. We assume Valerie had some wafer and/or wager of “openness” upon her—some from Warhol, some from far beyond Warhol. Why does “openness” clash thus? What restriction of space or time, what limitation whatsoever, cause these clashes? Is Itwethey wrong to require of “openness” some generosity and mercy to allow conflicting opennesses?

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXV

2011-04-17T18:09:00.006-05:00

As Itwethey unwinds into his tussle with the acolytes and apostles of “openness”, Guest is still with Itwethey at the threshold. Only Guest is not now sandwiched in with Itwethey on this threshold: Guest now oscillates out of the threshold, only touching Itwethey at the lowest moment of the amplitude of the oscillation. In other words, during this time of waiting ( which is created by Itwethey trying to figure something out, and which is inspired by a problem presented by some foreign and yet also internal notion of “openness” ) Guest bounces off and out from the threshold: Guest never enters, Guest never receives introduction or entry (intry) as Itwethey had intended (outietended, delicate tongue, frank handling of moments’ lust wild insincerity of promise most fleshy) (though Itwethey suspends everything in order to examine Itwethey’s ideas about “openness”; as a host, whether this is good or bad is risky. Itwethey is placing good and bad at risk.)

The scene is backlit. Molten gold coins, imprinted with the visage of Neptune, pour over the oscillations of Guest, which break the gold into rainbows. Dozens of porpoises leap into these rainbows, further fractionating it, and making the backlighting of Guest even more exquisite. It makes the scene all aquatic, perhaps as this delights Neptune, whose profile, though now obscured by dazzling prismatics here and there, appears to show a grin. Blue becomes darkness, reds and yellows take on the light. A gob of gold is not perceived as yellow or any shade thereof, but as something show stopping…In a good way.

It is not that Guest is deciding to accept invitation (Guest caught unawares, Guest “getting back to nature” stumbling upon Itwethey’s hospitality forcing Guest to come to grips with what Itwethey has succeeded, in this surprising and shocking display of humility and unaudacity (Marie Antoinette in a grass hut—audacious or not?)), to offer to Itwethey Guest’s startled, shocked, surprised inmost authentic response to “all of this”—better to describe this as Guest for the present unable to emerge successfully from Shock, Surprise, (Unaudacity—what is that: cowardice? This is the motto of the Enlightenment: Am I coward for knowing that I do not know, or a fool for pretending that’s no problem?!!!)

Itwethey is here (at this intellectual position—is an intellectual position EVER a “here”? Here we decide, as we decide openly the decision of closed openness): “openness” understood as “generosity” isn’t the slam dunk corrective or remedying addition to “openness” required to make “openness” accepting to other. Here are four considerations (is a consideration a reason?) 1. Other may not find the generous gift of Itwethey good enough in quality to be acceptable by Other (from now on in these four considerations, Other will be called Guest.) Guest doesn’t need to accept Itwethey’s trash simply because Itwethey offers it as a gift. Guest has many other Itwetheys offering many other gifts, and if ANY of these other gifts are better, Guest does no discourtesy (or more—or less?—strictly—any unethical-- act) refusing “gift” from Itwethey. 2. Guest doesn’t need the gift…It has nothing to do with Guest….Guest has no obligation vis a vis “gift” of Itwethey…Itwethey’s precious gift is Guest’s hindrance…Thrown up by Itwethey to ruin or delay or sidetrack or derail Guest’s essence (Itwethey absolves himself from what, from Itwethey’s point of view, is exaggeration, hyperbole, bearing of false witness times eleven!) 3. “Gift” is bad for Guest. Guest has a lot of independence; has through a lot of past generosity developed a great deal of capability, insight, audacity, and autonomy—Guest gets great (infinite? complete? total?)joy marching or promenading or wandering or exploring or investigating on the navigation of this wonderful GPS (God Promises Sweetness) of independence which will vouchsafe and warrant: NGN: (No Gift Necessary.) 4. “Gift” posits some psychological demands on Guest in that “Gift” demands some kind of response (negative, positive, gratitude, thankfulness, rejection—“gift” recipient must do something.) Itwethey knows what is wanted when “gift” is granted: LOVING response (cause and effect is thrown out the window here—“gift” doesn’t cause LOVE; if only it did! (No, Itwethey wouldn’t want the “gifts” he’s received to have caused LOVE or else he’d be married to ReReWooWooPartridgeSquirell, in that hovel, bonded forever.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXIV

2011-04-17T14:56:00.001-05:00

Itwethey sits staring out a window and up through a dense thicket, onto a bright blue sky, some cliffs, and above the ridge of the cliffs, sun bursting. It’s an intricate interlacing of light and dark, bright and gloom. The forest is downright gloomy, and it always is. It’s cool, and it always is (except when it is frigid.) It is within this ambiguous and delicately vague obscuring of lines between luminous and obscure, scientifically clarified and artistically chiaroscuro, Itwethey opens his “openness.”

Itwethey’s interpretation of “openness” is as a “bidding of welcome.” It is a generosity, a form of hospitality, and (this will require unpacking, “conversation.”) Some kind of warmth…Some kind of welcoming (rather than engulfing, dominating, or addicting) passion…

Itwethey’s “openness” is struggling to emerge against “openness” Itwethey finds to be without warmth; a solipsistic, and even narcissistic “openness”, somehow lacking sincerity—superficial.

Itwethey’s opening gambit is that these unappealing qualities of “openness” may be unlocked by looking at the way this “openness” will or will not embrace what its own metaphors of openness entail, infer, or imply. Sun bursting above ridge, dripping gold down a hillside, gold molten gobbing into living moist darkness, nourishing the darkness, never dispelling it.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXIII

2011-04-16T16:53:00.002-05:00

If “openness” is understood (the meaning of “openness” tacitly held by Itwethey and Itwethey assumes many others) within a network of metaphors of structure; and if structure is to be understood as time-invariant; but if the many other people (and Itwethey, too, until some point in time) think of “openness” as time-space-variable and varying (which is to say they don’t necessarily take their own metaphors very seriously, which might also be to say their approach to their own “openness” is open?) The inconsistency of their approach to their own metaphors is more than made up by their consistency in keeping “OPEN”, if open such it be.

Itwethey, however, faces a problem here. Remember, Itwethey wishes to explicate “openness” in a way which would continue, throughout the explication, to be acceptable and recognizable to the acolytes and apostles of “openness” (the many other people who share Itwethey’s vague understanding of “openness.”) Itwethey must choose to take the metaphors seriously, or the intentions of the metaphors seriously, or find a way to take both seriously at the same time (on the surface, the last seems impossible.)

For a long time, Itwethey had bluntly rejected “openness” and its apostles and acolytes precisely when they announced to Itwethey their willingness to not care about any concern outside of their intentions of “openness.” Itwethey saw “openness” as a kind of magic fudge factor allowing for and justifying all rule breaking or inconsistency (“flexibility” understood as ad hoc convenient justifications for not doing the right thing X, where X = anything on any level, but usually a mental act, for reasons to which Itwethey must return.)

Itwethey’s putative discovery of “openness” as time-invariant isn’t useful in explicating “openness” or finding an opening into the acolytes and apostles of “openness” if each time the consequence of “openness” as time-invariant is deemed inconvenient, annoying, or simply unopen (closed.) (This last is the most damning summary judgment of these acolytes and apostles.) There is no way Itwethey knows to show the acolytes and apostles that if the consequences are the true ones, the inconvenience perceived may be apparent merely. (However, that isn’t the real issue—convincing the acolytes and apostles. Itwethey has some real problem of Itwethey’s own in this vicinity, and it doesn’t have anything to do with convincing Itwetheyself, or being true to Itwetheyself.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXII

2011-04-15T21:21:00.004-05:00

Itwethey has proceeded this way:

A. Itwethey refers to something called “openness”, but doesn’t say what that is. This is because Itwethey doesn’t explicitly know what it is. That it is, is something Itwethey relies on others to already know or readily accept. Itwethey assumes “openness” whatever the heck it is, is culturally shared by a very large number of people, who, though their understanding of it may be as vague as Itwethey’s own, the vague understanding is the same vague understanding as Itwethey’s. Itwethey also assumes that as Itwethey clarifies the vague understanding of “openness”, its emerging clarified form will be recognizable by a large number of people as the “openness” that if they had clarified it, would clarify to this form.

B. Itwethey’s vague understanding of “openness” is metaphoric; the metaphors are taken from structural features. That this is so has, as far as Itwethey knows, nothing to do with Structuralism (or post-Structuralism), (or “structural engineering” or structure in any other scientific sense) and that’s all to the good. The metaphors refer to powerful, determining feelings. There is very little symbolism involved. The feelings probably do relate to such social, cultural, or economic phenomena as disciplining, and following routines, punching clocks, following orders, rules, laws, prohibitions, regimentation of all forms, and repressions (understood as the internalization of such disciplining). As both the desire to be able to follow the rules, punch the clock, etc, and the hatred of doing so.

C. Itwethey takes the metaphors seriously and wants to follow their logic: a logic of metaphors. The metaphorical meaning of “flexibility” is not arbitrary. Its association with the concept of structure is not arbitrary. The time-invariance of structure means that “openness” is felt as time-invariant, Itwethey thinks. If so, that might be an important discovery—Itwethey will by and by demonstrate this is so.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XXI

2011-04-15T16:09:00.008-05:00

Characterizing “openness” as hypocrisy, was, as an "opening" volley, mistaken. As an "opening" volley, “openness” is best expressed as akin to flexibility,changeability, and as opposed to rigidity, inflexibility, and the various synonyms thereof, of both.

"Rigidity", "flexibility",etc.,--these are metaphoric for types, or qualities, of structures. Itwethey understands structures as static,(static understood as inflexible in time). Excluding this initial disqualifying consideration of any concept of "openness" which allows without seeming to allow any inflexibility, Itwethey will regard flexible (though inflexible in time) structure as "open." (In other words, Itwethey will consider what openness Itwethey may yet obtain from an "openness" not considered open time-wise.)

Structure can be understood as "open", Itwethey thinks, in all ways, space-wise. (Itwethey has need to pause at how easy it is to say "ways" rather than "variable." Itwethey could say: structure is conceivably flexible for any spatial variable; or, structure can be understood as "open" in all variables, space-wise; or, spatial elements of structures may move. Here, Itwethey must add pause to pause, at the sheer banality of what seemed so exciting previously. Yet it must be clear how weird it is for us to think of structures moving in space while fixed or rigid or invariant in time--Itwethey ordinarily automatically dismisses concepts of space independent of time as obsolete.) Timelessly moving every which way--this is "opennness."

"Openness" is slippery, as slippery as e'er we could wish. It's going everywhere (but not all the time--time is excluded.) Is to structure as falling on our ass is to our dignity: something we’d avoid if we could, though such as our dignity is to our various objectives, because Itwethey stakes it out: if you wish you can consider closedness a variation of openness. Should you disagree, we would all know Structure must choose: "Hey structure, what are you? Open or closed? We will embrace and advite you advance you and subvite you or even, if you bid and we wish, 'outvite' you, whatever you vote, or tote, or toe whatever line, Structure is both OPEN and CLOSED: we therefore outrule and outrole and outvole and out—“out-out” you that we may 'in-in' you, which means, in this context, we don’t care if you choose one or the other." We literally do not care. (Itwethey is not afraid to assert the royal WE (Itwethey got the consent of "it" and "they" before doing so.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XX

2011-04-11T21:02:00.002-05:00

I’ve had you now rigged veda rivb fada!!!

We do wish for: desire. Itwould be better if we did wishdezree, Itwewouldbebetterzeestighthey itzeqeoo: but as it is, we sit, lay, or stand in amazement at some green round, purty and never petrified but we would know ham sandwich spindled in care and LOVE And we say “covet”—illegal desire. (Now what are the nasty desires behind that word? “Covet”—feel at the same time the legality and commingled perversion therein) we will be pushing upward and forward (two covetous directions, to be pursued, along with progressed: coveted upward coveted forward coveted proboscis coveted progressive—the word covet is perfect as far as describing the desires of progress…They each and every retain the contained G space

Desire-wish: I will attempt to describe Andy Warhol as he is in a Helmut Newton photograph. Is Andy someone we would call open or accommodating? We don’t know about that, but we would say Andy was welcoming, and that’s what we value more. He welcomed a lot of people. Okay, his ideas of difference were flawed. We don’t care.

Hairy bush. Alone, solitary. Breathe abbreviated. Abbreviated, for efficiency? Not likely. Abbreviated for the air blue resin plumbed like an electric santilary, of which yoe’ve ne me stram. Like a plume. Welcome in challenge. Welcome in something we must find out about. It was wild welcome. We went to the museum. We saw a lot of stuff, among which, fright wigs they said belonged to Andy Warhol. Woohoowoodeededdeddeswishewaywooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XIX

2011-04-11T19:59:00.004-05:00

Deedy, deedy,…dadeedy, dadeedy …Indeed there was a deed…Even out here in the forest Itwethey had staked out as improbably open..As beyond property. thera warz that little makeshift nomadic thingze of evil devil lived livelar vaxplore expladitious. Itwethey had stood there, on a ragged beach, loose skin adhering and also flecks of sand, magnanimous (and Itwethey is on the war path if, as seems to be the case, flecks such as this (with wind, with womb, with will, with winwomwillsheenxshine,) are to be denied: No! Itwethey will cast die down and all the wonder of silent, soft, deedy-da-do-daeio-emfromafreao-emfradtao will come to the rescue of Itwethey’s cast, of this Itwethey has house odds. (More than that. Here, house is church.)

It would all be better if when we hit upon one of the about 500 ways of harmonizing there truthfully and legitimately are to be hit upon, we had found a resting place. We don’t start from a resting place. We start squealing and screaming, naked. No kind of Guest, or, if Guest: greet us by wiping off womb-stench, womb-(slime: note, Itwethey does not reach for that word “slime” though that is the perfect word, in this instance, in this context, for this purpose, for this LOVE.)

Slime-love: "welcome." We certainly do. There’s probably not an ounce of aforethought or planning or estimation or evaluation in it. Get it out of your nose and mouth, that you may breathe. We wonder at your story. We want your survival more than your LOVE--we will sustain this want, be assured (and insured, if to be insured means we cooperate for your fragile survival.)

The equation here, which is one of the most powerful in the history of our kind, is: harmony=resting place. Resting place = “openness” (the acolytes and apostles do say), =”passivity” (that this last is so is more obvious, but let us be frank…To equate this obvious thing with what follows to a red-blooded American male—passivity = wuss; that’s not an obvious move, and probably most of the erstwhile afortainedmentioned would say so also, standing in line for a ham sandwich, which is smothered in cayenne and bobdylansmickers, ice cream sandwich to follow (as immaculate description)...

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XVIII

2011-04-11T14:13:00.001-05:00

To continue on with the examination of the differences between Itwethey’s position and that of the acolytes and apostles of “openness” we need some sense of the difference between the necessity of selection and the necessity to not select. “Openness” needs to be understood—as far as this critique of it by Itwethey, who is not intentionally setting up a straw man—as implying or entailing or “thinking it is a really good idea” to never select—to never say or think, “I want this and not that.”

Because, if we say or think, “We want this and not that” whatever the “that” was, we are not open to it. We are, just that far, not open. Obviously the acolytes and apostles of “openness” cannot in any way cop to some space of exclusion of openness, that wouldn’t be open. While at the same time being the cop of all hypocrisy—it is all noble ambition, and a tough ideal, and Itwethey is respectful. Itwethey will give the devil its due, or Itwethey die, or cast Itwethey’s die.

Itwethey, leaping ahead, sees a very interesting affinity now between the acolytes and apostles of “openness”, and the acolytes and apostles of “plasma-ism” as something Itwethey will wish to explore, as Itwethey is very near these camps, and, as inventor of the probiliscope, and the fervent planner and preparer of welcomes of Guests thought to be l’autre, Itwethey admires the admixtures of chaos and chance and energy (ah! Energy is motion and change and chance! Itwethey will explore these terrains of AND (which are specific and enumerated and local)) Itwethey hopes to leave aside the obvious inaccuracies of metaphor already suggesting themselves, as is so in hot water bath Itwethey has left in order to (can you believe it) smoke?

Any abode not hastily constructed can’t be satisfying to the comfort of bones or flab.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XVII

2011-04-10T18:25:00.002-05:00

Acolytes or apostles of “openness” have some common traits one or two of which Itwethey will now make explicit (for Itwethey does courtly curtly cunilinguilly-pickadially acknowledge an affinity to the “openness” crowd—though Itwethey wishes to distinguish from such crowd, equally also).

There’s a kind of hypersensitivity to hypocrisy, to the point where hypocrisy becomes the new universal and the necessary adjunct of every emotion(emotion now understood as “everything”): love-hypocrisy, door-hypocrisy, window-hypocrisy, regret-hypocrisy, (if it is odd to see “door” or “window” adjoined to hypocrisy, especially in a list of emotions: in “openness” everything becomes an emotion, and tinged with the guilt of hypocrisy: dirt-hypocrisy, earth-hypocrisy,universe-hypocrisy,cosmic-shiva-hypocrisy,jesus-hypocrisy, and so on.)

There’s a willingness to make everything into an emotion (and this is understood as a positive development.) Emotion is always open. (This is the fundamental premise. Please note that the openness crowd hates “foundations”—not on any epistemological basis, but as an affront to “openness”—and yes, Itwethey does understand if you wish to find “openness” in anything, the worst way would be to burrow up and into that thing’s foundation (Itwethey imagines the concrete basement floor of his boyhood home, and someone trying to come in, as Guest, through there—unpleasant, perverse entry that would be!)

“Openness” is understood as attitudinal and volitional: it is with some perfect frame of mind, obtained through “coolness of hip” (from the hip, though veering away from buttock and especially anus, though anus, if you think about it, is close “to the hip” and furthermore anus does open--) “openness” is thought to appertain, by the acolytes or apostles of “openness.” Itwethey will not accuse them of hypocrisy, no.(On the basis of hypocrisy? See how insidious and yet—Itwethey does not deny it—readymade delightful this bad infinite does present itself?) Itwethey wants to know only one thing: why is it Itwethey has never been “welcomed” by them?

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XVI

2011-04-09T21:27:00.002-05:00

The probiliscope was intruded into Itwethey's project of courtliness. Of Itwethey's courtship of known and unknown. Itwethey couldn't have commemorated this, sitting idly in his warm bath of (here, we have been tempted to be cute--we will, due to some unknown force, refrain), of--some kind feeling for all of you who Itwethey will never know.

Itwethey had taken a long shot--Guest would exist, but never ever or by the by or by occasional nod take into mentality have known, Itwethey required something of Guest. Guest only wanted to "get away."

Itwethey wanted to screw with this, and with everything Itwethey might think Guest would exhibit. Itwethey knew whatever Guest would come down path, up stairs (please correct into "stoop": Itwethey stoops and threshes holds to capture)Itwethey would court and of course, in planning for everything Itwethey had never thought of creating a courtyard. There's some matted down moss, and detritus, serving as courtship yard, but no more. Path is beautiful, but not in the way corruptyard is, or would be.

Unelectable, inelectable, raison d'etre, Itwethey holds many balances, like a deer. Like a woman subjected to X-ray vision, subjected to some frail pretense of "all is well." Itwethey sings so many ballads, all of them moving. To move had been decided prior to Itwethey's birth.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XV

2011-04-09T15:47:00.002-05:00

Why do multiples of five feel so rhythmically perfect? Itwethey wanted to call them “even” because they feel so orderly, so even-keeled, that no matter the roiling of the bottomless waters beneath the keel,(Itwethey knows numbers such as fifteen are not “even”) Itwethey may sip his tea (sip, not suck; tip not trowel; fold, not spindle or mutilate (such is nothing more than revelation of Itwethey’s age—as far as Itwethey can discern, or disconcerto mourn—always delightfully young, though stiff and unshiny) may be open to without being drowned in the leak which is Itwethey’s openness): alone. A cow was beautiful, however fed.

Guest stands, imploring. To all it looks as if Guest is naked, and even Guest’s eyes, to Guest’s credit, look naked. Itwethey requires of Guest that Guest allow Itwethey to make love, whether or not that’s a foregone conclusion (Itwethey is structured such that this is never assumed, taken as a solid premise, or concrete (why did concrete become so popular, and as it were akin to modernity and progress: because Marx wished to say something critical about the role of philosophy such as it had always been heretofore? Probably.)

This is number fifteen. Itwethey would curry your favor by making this a place filler. All of Itwethey’s various permutations (and how delectable to put “per” before mutation: Itwethey has a recommendation for Hollywoo'ed: movies about mutation have played out, but until “per” mutations have played out (which is never) you are okay. Therefore, shift to movies on permutation…This will be more hospitable, comfortable, and yes: suntanworthy.

Now we are on fifteen. We have been waiting to meet Guest, with hospitality, honor, nobility, grace, comfort, a glass of sweet wine, without whine, without garland, Judaic or otherwise, without whatever it was Barbara said about semiotics, without the rub, clandestine, of ladder against chin, against chafe, against chaff (it is our buggerboo), against a twining river, opaque, containing within its sylvan wrath, a wrap (chicken pecking in there, or only cilantro stiniking?) a ring, Neurewrapwrath, that in this dim round we might say: FIFTEEN!

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XIV

2011-04-09T13:16:00.003-05:00

Before we can continue, Itwethey finds it necessary to make a small clarification.

Itwethey has not persuaded Guest to become naked and fetch firewood. Itwethey has not even yet spoken to Guest. Itwethey is in no way intimate with Guest. Guest has, in actuality, not yet crossed Itwethey’s threshold. Itwethey is still, though Guest is at Itwethey’s threshold, preparing for Guest—Itwethey remains in the preparation stage of encounter. (If there is such a stage of encounter—this is part of what Itwethey burns to know.)

What we saw before, in the unlucky portion of this account of what may become an encounter, was a time effect of Itwethey’s probiliscope. (There was another such event earlier, a very close call where Itwethey, through overdose on the probiliscope, very nearly engulfed Guest, ruining everything.) From now on, Itwethey will find a convenient way to distinguish and communicate probiliscope effect from non-effect(normal or actual or reality or say what?)

The probiliscope is invented, but its range and power remains to the largest extent unexplored. Itwethey has enough on the plate already without monkeying with the probiliscope, but can’t help it—it’s too tempting, it is too exciting to play with. Besides, there seems to be some overlap between these three most important of Itwethey’s ventures: preparation for encounter with Guest; God as contained space; and finding out what the probiliscope can do. Yes, Itwethey plans to aim the probiliscope at God. Itwethey has every intention of succumbing to that temptation—as soon as Itwethey gets up the guts, that is. ( Seeing a preview of Guest naked, while wonderful, is now regretted by Itwethey—it is contrary, Itwethey thinks, to Itwethey’s intention.)

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Partly Unlucky

2011-04-08T20:37:00.006-05:00

Bark peeling off sawed logs, logs more pithy and punky than suspected when tree felled>>> Guest, naked, stands legs apart>>> in a wide stance: practical because Guest is holding logs; appealing because Guest is naked. Guest looks squarely at Itwethey: practical because Itwethey had asked Guest to get logs and Guest needs to get from Itwethey what next to do; appealing, because, once again: Guest is naked. How it is Itwethey has got Guest, for whom Itwethey had wishes to treat with utmost consideration from the moment of encounter, to both undress and fetch poorly stacked and therefore punky firewood,(both conditions calling into question both the functionality of the wood for burning, and the request to go get it for burning) must be one of our next necessary steps of inquiry into the relationship between certainty and uncertainty in their as yet undeterminedly necessary or unnecessarily additional capacity relating to: hospitality, compost, comfort, and ….a durned good time!

Whose captures Guest’s look (the one where Guest is standing naked, holding firewood, look chained, look linked, chained look, link chained, viable, violable-ent, somnoviolenviolavibratosunsetolent), inside Itwethey’s probabiliscope: it must be Itwethey, for as of yet only Itwethey knows of the invention of the probabiliscope, and its valuable uses. Few though they were, this was one of Guest’s best herring-glints to capture. As in the twentieth century so many arresting images had been captured through photography, Itwethey knew his probabiliscope would capture its chaff of harvests and in the shrine for that purpose Itwethey had commissioned in Le Havre, not a probability of haves and have not, but everyone celebrating the innocuous and undisguised and unmuddled celebration of whatever it is, is has.

Itwethey was as theywe doubt anyone finds hard to imagine, very impressed when Itwethey had invented the probabiliscope. His attention for quite awhile was diverted from preparation for Guest (though Itwethey awake or sleeping or in that indeterminate state of wake-sleep dream-reason work-aply application-plan-pan) for Itwethey preparation for Guest had involved the planning to throw the dice and to rescue from dice throw some divine care, or, as it were, necessity of chance, chance rigidified so that when Guest came, Guest might have some reason for having come. As understood by Guest. As appreciated by Guest. As having been validated and registered by Guest. (In other words, giving satisfaction to subject and object, subject-object, each and many and few.) Guest had to become for Itwethey the certainty and necessity of Itwethey’s risk of chance. It helped a lot when Guest was willing to become naked.

Itwethey says “welcome.” Guest, chained in the chain-link fence of modernity Mediterranean, ternity (Arctic Ternity) sllookks at Itwethey and says: “emoclew”. Itwethey, legs apart, determined never to be entered, wants his termity to be frozen as an Arctic, plugged. Is Guest going to insult Itwethey? Slowly, lugubriously, interminably, and yet—yes, yeasterday, as yesterday—Itwethey will plan to burn the barky-berkeley Aspen logs Guest now proffers.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XII

2011-04-07T14:22:00.003-05:00

Recount for us, if you will, Itwethey, the steps which take you to this place where God is intimate, and yet your fellow man is distant; where you prepare greeting with ineluctable and aleatory and yet studied and grave care (concern: in a mindforge this is said to be "condiscern", no matter what side effects, niggling horrors or slights your concerned and discerning cognated laborers want to put up later—Itwethey will enjoin); as if this is the absolute foreign with which you have nothing in common; as if God waiting is something qualitatively incommensurate-- you envisage Him as inmost within. God gives Himself; your fellows, with divine reserve, maybe not (through the randomness and discretion of their love, they are terrible.)

It is in a forest, dark, gloomy, decrepit, diseased, stifled, repressed; and yet you Itwethey, offer something you call flame-labor-suspense-dime-store—an appeal, humble by random, universal meaning connected to nothing; connection with something costing more than any of us commoners can afford, though many of us as of yet sexy, as of yet jungle or temperate forest enflamed! Temperature and time of temperate forest being elevated most exquisitely, as if temperate were the most exquisite time and temperature—yes, maybe so. Temper, temper—temper? Maybe so, if there is someone measuring temper(time) or temperature( heat).

Itwethey never in a billion years would have held heat in reserve. Nor time. Itwethey, truth be told did want it all now? (Why would desire be different?) What would a pause give to desire? What would a dimple give to relief? Over-excitation? That explains excitement, not relief. It describes pleasure, not peace.

Itwethey says, “welcome.” By it is meant: hindrance offered as gift to mind and body. Wrinkle: by which is meant acceptance of gift by mind and body. Grumble: by which is meant acceptance of hindrance and wrinkle (not resistance.) Get it over with if you will: Itwethey, speaking on behalf of all of us, loves the play and palaver of this prolongation of naughtiness—hindrance, goat, gatotat, falling flailing, fleshing, flthreshing, thresh: the "It" from the “we” from the “they”: then make "it?" the mission of (totalization?) to put it back together. What value proposes “itself (itwethey)” as higher?

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part XI

2011-04-07T13:06:00.003-05:00

Guest is, if Guest is and if Guest is as such, to Itwethey: l’autre (obviously?)

God is, if God is and if God is as such, Itwethey’s interior AND exterior. How and why God as interior AND exterior could be thought by Itwethey to be God as form, as contained space, as control, strikes Itwethey as crazy, implausible, and yet, Itwethey has both thought AND been this thought (Itwethey doesn’t want to deny the intimacy of this crazy thought, and what’s more, Itwethey knows Itwethey has thought and been this crazy and unexplored thought most thoroughly and intensely in moments Itwethey felt most sane, self-explicitly examined, and worthwhile.) Itwethey can think of himself as crazy, but as implausible? That's a limit to be tested.

God is, as interior AND exterior: both the first and last instance of cabin-interior with window-eyes and door-mouth in series with other cabin-interior with window-eyes and door-mouth peering, peering endlessly in two directions (unto either dead-end, where the series does end, as God.) Itwethey sees this as ugly and unsatisfactory, and cowardly, too. It is Itwethey’s reference point, in life, action, thought, in respite, in worship, even sleep. Itwethey might not be able to wake up without it. Itwethey does constantly worry: is this waking?

God is self-certain (cabin-interior is self-certain, as is cabin-exterior); and the gambit of Guest is to be invited, greeted, and hosted random. Itwethey, solitary, lingering, fingering, coiffed and chaffed and chafed, singled and singed and annealed, waiting passive alert, inane and inert, would treat God as Guest(not as interior or exterior, but as other): Itwethey has a number of questions, and beyond that, problems.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part X

2011-04-06T14:38:00.002-05:00

God as confined space is God as form. For the time being, we are not going to consider whether the form which is God is good form or bad. We are merely (we hope we may apply the adverb “merely” to our activities—we do indeed hope to be confined, refined, humbled, limited, controlled,) going to consider God as form. God as neutral (this only stands to reason: if form may be considered separately from good and bad, and if God is form, God may be considered as neutral…Notice the thousands of steps we’ve already taken… the leaps, the jumps, the pirouettes, our abandonment in ecstasy as we now consider God as neutral (with what little artifice—we believe it has been done with an economy of snippety-snip)(Itwethey demands to know why the neutral is not the stationary). Itwethey, who is one of us and we are one of Itwethey (“it” and “they” being the other parts) has asked us. (Not in so many words, but as the random, the unintentional, and a smorgasbord of other concepts and terms of the probable now determines our actions—um, you know what we are going to gong, mean) we are going to stand before God as form.

Itwethey had wanted us to investigate whether “God is form” is a monstrous or illegitimate copulation, or one designated by absolute authority (in other words, by God!) Did we have it from God that God was form? If we didn’t, what pain or pleasurable pain prompted us to posit Him so? We back-talked to It-they (the other segments of the “Itwethey” complex within which we snuggle and dialogue) about all the decisions and discriminations Itwethey was thus requiring of us, and were heartened to hear Itwethey laugh and snortle, as Itwethey had known, due to our internal linking in a snide solemn cabin interior living limned lined space we couldn’t dismiss as irrelevant, this wild and unruly and wholly improbable (what was the lineage or genealogy of God as form?)

What muck were the whole of us in to now be placed in this predicament? Itwethey wanted to ensure, best Itwethey could, God’s copulations be legitimate. If they had to be between Him and swans (the beautiful), that was okay, because somehow, that was legitimate in beauty (as long as a swan is understood as beautiful and a pecking chicken (poultry—not to be poled or pulled) is understood as something else entirely, or something else otherly.)

Itwethey had hoped to, had aspired to, seduction, but on a random basis. Thereby Love had to be unconfined. Itwethey was worried Love was formal; the worry had, at first, nothing to do with Itwethey’s God. Itwethey wanted Itwethey’s Love to be distinct from Itwethey’s God. That’d do honor to Itwethey’s God, Itwethey thought. Nevertheless, Itwethey requires us to stand before God as form. It is possible—it isn’t an unreasonable request. Pecking chickens aren’t formal. Itwethey knows God isn’t a chicken, but why is chicken-love unconfined? Informal? Itwethey sees it as hellish, but why? Because we can’t imagine any chicken-sensation as not chaff, we mean—-not chafing? But if you look closely at a swan, and imagine (as Itwethey has carefully and in detail (formal and informal detail) imagined: swan-love isn’t all that much less chafing.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part IX

2011-04-03T21:24:00.003-05:00

God is a confined space. God is a glowing eye the reach of which is confined.

The door of the cabin was a mouth; it didn’t gape, and as a good door, it allowed entrance and exit. Itwethey had entered and exited it many times, to the point it became the habitual act. It would be fair to say it was habitual to enter and to exit, but what happened was that it was habitual to enter, never to exit. Itwethey entered long ago and never went out. No matter where Itwethey went, Itwethey never left the cabin. Why the habitual would be unsymmetrical, Itwethey pondered. Itwethey left the cabin, went outside, walked down the path, laboriously surmounted windfall, went out onto the road, and from the road could have gone anywhere on earth—and Itwethey was aware of this potentas—this satisfactory openness (openness is power)--but nevertheless Itwethey never went out the mouth. Itwethey wanted to be the tongue sticking out of this mouth, or expectoration, or vomit—or a word howled--but it never happened. Itwethey was unexpectorant expectation, muffled, interminably. Itwethey was a guttural sound made at the back of the mouth (oral cavity as interior of cabin), echoing of the body, not rude, not significant, ultimately drowned by the teeth, the lips, and the front of the mouth (tartar.)

Itwethey doesn’t want to personify the stoop or the path. What does personification in an asubjectival world mean or do? Allow production?

It was a problem—Itwethey had been tortured to solve it generally or specifically, abstractly or concretely. Itwethey loved the idea of solving the problem randomly, because randomly meant, to Itwethey “no effort.” Unfortunately, all of the problems Itwethey solved randomly were solved unsatisfactorily. In all honesty, Itwethey often did achieve starting points to a solution via randomness—starting points, in other words first steps—to a hard won solution (hard won—in other words somehow “concerted” or whatever the antonym of random may be. Or whatever the antonym of “feel good” may be. Or whatever the antonym of “effortless” may be.) And also in all honesty, when Itwethey did so, he was forced to see how perverse the starting point had been (the random, effortless and happy “moment.”) Itwethey couldn’t “learn” from this, however, because Itwethey felt he knew he would never have had the courage or audacity to begin working to a solution at all, if he had not embraced some starting point, no matter how damned perverse it was…If the random made the “starting point” and made it palatable, and happy, and filled with joy, and in some weird violent and purple perplexed purplahexedenined pukla way something Itewethey could gather into, and coil up in, to strike “out” (out of the habitual which was in all ways always inward)…It was best.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part VIII

2011-04-02T15:04:00.002-05:00

Itwethey says bride bidden fresh through incorporeal bite be bedded embedded overbite just as fresh though Itwethey has asked guest (guest? Bride? Without inviting or indenting or intending it, Itwethey has invited, indented, and intended guest to merge with bride, guest-bride!)(wills Itwethey, itwehey! Guest-bride-X. “X” understood as varaiblesque, to be equated without variablesque unto arabest arabewque, Itwethey will be repelled if antiquated or adequated into grotesque, though Itwethey knows self as gargoyled framed in sky between earth and sky between sacral-illiac, mons-pubis and morte-public, or gulf-clean and gulf-BP,) Itwethey, standing inside, before threshold, lusts into guest-bride, precariously waiting (but we thought Itwethey only waits?) on stoop, stoop of herring and anchovy.

Dark bitter bite, bidden in beer violent and yet Itwethey says gentle, gentle as gentile genitalia, sensitive, given to over-excitation, relishing every taciturn turn of screw in screw, given and relishing makeshift lean-to in makeshift forest (forest as refuge from the makeshift, the mandigomanmade, from artifice, we must see, somewhere’s along this path, this way,) nutrition is state-feed. Diet is what bureaucrat puts into mouth (not of river, but of sewer, going in equals coming out, and nothing is coming and/or going.)

Bride on threshold says to fleeting past, rushing away, suddenly regretted, in roar of water (of time, for time’s rush is as magnificent) that sparkling time holds in its thresh this bride, this embrace, this native holder of reflection, though grey, though cold, though northern, though holding function, though of seed and of chaff it says to bride: your chaff I want to chafe me because that’s the sexy part, the part I love, and bride isn’t replete of your dynamo, though beloved, in so many media.

A little love bite. That’s the way guest walked onto path. A bite of a tasty worm. Path was like worm. Itwethey had felt so many shames, and yet tasty worm was not on Itwethey’s radar. It was, rather, what Itwethey included amongst Itwethey’s treasure chest of allures, a rare blessing, a night of jars held ajar that day again begin: guest, your neck, your you silent as a red-eye, est like lightning, is is lightning withheld from grammar, a little think in a night sky I saw your swan neck bite allure in fathomless confined green-blue I can’t reflect your color without my color night dream (threshold the cream) color.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part VII

2011-04-01T23:01:00.002-05:00

Guest like bride veiled speaking words well rehearsed guised to formality disguised night of seduction…All this mythical preparation for celebration of wildened sensual ill-considered sympathy of moment of innocounter. Aren’t you going to carry me over threshold? Best guess guest can do. Itwethey, suddenly seeing grumbles eyed and not-so-satisfying, sees anti-climax. Itwethey says, “welcome.” (Wel…come? Well, must ye come? Must I come? What have I done?)

Guest is aware of veil, of uncertainty, of blushing, of white goof, where did it come from? It was a day off, a moment of encounter of dark forest, a silent path suddenly and surprisingly inviting…To go in there, in spite of bug bites, mosquitoes, to get away, to forget about “finding anything” and to forget about fears of “losing everything” and to be enveloped by dark somnolent cloaking chaotic comfort…What is this embrace? (Confined space of sparkling grey water.)

Guest take guest a nature walk…Only requirement being no artifice. No labor of scratch, itch, or safeguard of scratch or itch…Just motion, through balm of darkness, balm of silence, balm of , um , “balsam poplar” (where else does all that balm come from? It doesn’t come from fluorescent lights or even church candles-watts, what? You quid my psalm? You wat my quaint light lit and extinguished for votive? I do. Bid bride bridge stoop sayeth bed ye adieu (on but oh butt et eats angeled cake like)

Threshed holed bride carried…Spoled spooled spiled delectable…Thrush thresh your guest over your threshold that you may hold your guest thrushed and cervical or circular or circulated or recirculated or over some maiden-like hill or vale knowing in a moment of sacral-cervical wonderment (nourished by attilla-climax) anatomy is destiny and destiny is guise, or disguise or guise-disguise. If he or she or it must we they must also they to the we to the it to the abode of disavowal of proponent pronounal metaphor so that the sheen of anchovy anchorite anchored to narrow fiord be veiled speaking words well rehearsed.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part VI

2011-03-31T22:17:00.003-05:00

Itwethey is waiting in a cabin in a forest. The forest is dark, and inside the cabin it is even darker, but light comes through two windows, facing south. The two windows seem like two eyes, and inside the cabin, it feels like the inside of a skull. Itwethey has the feeling of being inside another skull, peering out two eyes, into the inside of a skull which is the one room of the cabin, and out through the two window-eyes, out into the world, the visible.

Only Itwethey knows the cabin is there. (So far, Itwethey is the only person who has seen or been in the cabin.) It is hidden very carefully. To get to the cabin, there is only a narrow footpath through the woods; only Itwethey’s feet have been on this path, formed by Itwethey’s feet going back and forth. (There are a few windfalls here and there blocking the path.)

It is here and in this way Itwethey waits for guest, and thus guest can't know Itwethey waits for guest. Guest cannot know guest will be guest. Guest has no idea (Itwethey’s idea.) Guest must stumble into function and role of guest by stumbling upon Itwethey. Come unbidden. Come not knowing coming. Going not realizing going. Not knowing coming as guest. Not wanting, maybe, to be among people, to be greeted, to be welcomed, to be guest. In the woods, maybe and probably, to “get away,” to avoid or be reprieved of functions and roles, demands.

Itwethey, on the other hand, anticipates guest. Prepares for guest. Waits to be shattered by guest. Waits to shatter guest? Guest, no doubt, will be terrified. Itwethey’s unexpected hospitality may scare guest to death. However, it’s also quite possible guest will find Itwethey while lost, while somewhat desperate, or perhaps merely concerned and tired. Or, guest could be coming up path (though narrow and unmarked, the path isn’t disguised, camouflaged, or impossible to strike upon), curious and idle, wandering…The dark forest is beautiful and to a certain type or frame of mind, plenty inviting…Itwethey’s dark forest invitation is Itwethey’s perfectly-tailored invitational outvitalisteionale.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part V

2011-03-30T00:08:00.005-05:00

Fished up hope has come unbidden. Guest has come unbidden.

Fished up hope has been bid welcome, but not in the same way as guest.

Some kind of somber water: placid, too grey, too unsullied, too unmoving, too reflective, as unmoving grey water often is— (water can sparkle, moving or not, but too slowly the water moves means grey, more than not) -- Itwethey had in mind a beautiful greening greeting for a guest, not anything to do with a water quality report. Itwethey is not indifferent to water quality reports…. If water quality report would help Itwethey treat guest with utmost consideration from moment of encounter…Is such to be expected? Had Itwethey towed the narrow line where he would have encountered guest without understanding anything of guests’ waters? Such is the torture of Itwethey: that would from water come all but nothing of knowledge of water. From water quality report? It is all unbidden.

Itwethey feels panic from all this unbidden. The surface is a mirror and the depths are nothing beneath a perfectly silvered mirror. The mirror wasn’t all that threatening. True, mirror hadn’t been bidden, either. Unruffled water could have been happy in grey forever. Itwethey knows it would be interesting to know if the surface can be ruffled in such a way as to reveal everything of the depths. Itwethey never said anything about conceptualizing that as “encounter”. Ore or “concepts” coming into the situation, to be mined or minded. That’d be to be desired, because it would condense a lot of space into a little. But why would anyone want (desire) to condense a lot of space into a little? Itwethey knows he didn’t want such a thing when he was (little, slow, had learned nothing? ((NB: when we had learned nothing we learned everything, very fast.))

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part IV

2011-03-27T13:57:00.001-05:00

Itwethey’s reception of guest’s smile, which welcomes Itwethey’s welcome, fishes up Itwethey’s hope (silver as a herring) for successful welcome and understanding of guest, from the very moment of encounter, from out of Itwethey’s dark watery interior living room (like a pond, a lake, a sea, or an ocean) to glint against the threshold where Itwethey and guest now stand squeezed together. Though adding to the crowd there, Fished up hope relieves the squeeze in both Itwethey and guest, simultaneously.

Itwethey’s interior living space, watery but not fluid, (because it is frozen? Because it is compressed?) circulating and recirculating, (“recirculating” is a more perfect word because it illustrates what it also names) as if it could all be known, charted, explored, navigated, measured, taken into account, registered minutely through GPS and digital photograph from satellite, craves for these rare fish such as Fished up hope, to splash or better—pirouette—(pirouette is the movement of hope)—as something which can cut the law-engendered force of recirculation –just so. Oh! For the just so which is not law-engendered. To see it splash, silver, against the dark depths background of pond, lake, sea or ocean (contained water all. Fluid but not fluid of runneth over.)

Guest’s smile welcoming up hope silver as herring –Itwethey suddenly surprisingly suspects guest’s smile is Fished up hope. Smile is Fished up hope! (They’ve copulated!) Itwethey stammers hope as something from Itwethey’s living room interior, but if Fished up hope also comes from outside, “across the pond,” well, woo-hoo-woo-hoo! This is welcomed by Itwethey as revelation is welcomed, as revelation is welcomed by thin, crimped anchorite anchored twenty fathoms low, in dark ponded impounded lake lacking ocean water but not salt of the earth.

With that happy reassuring thought, Itwethey beckons guest off threshold and on down into dark watery depths of Itwethey. Guest smile no longer silver, as off threshold, guest reflects no sun. Smile gone, too. Day is done, gone the sun, gone the smile, gone the hope? Itwethey recovers from memories seared—guest is yet on the stoop, still a silhouette, still possessed of silvery welcoming smile. Still a silhouette possessed of silvery smile. That was a close one! Theory of welcome almost engulfed all practice of it, which could have extinguished all of it.

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part III

2011-03-26T17:12:00.002-05:00

Itwethey looks (quickly and yet slowly: a sudden glance but the registered brief image burns Itwethey’s memory to remain concentrated therein for 356.323X longer than the glance itself) upon guest, so humble, as guests often are, unsure of entry, though sure entry is desired. A pleasing smile, hoping to please, an entry entered into Itwethey’s memoric images, the sun burning brightly behind.

Itwethey returns guest’s smile. To guest’s smile, Itwethey’s smile says, “welcome.” The rest of the guest, against the burning backdrop of the sun, is silhouette: Itwethey cannot distinguish a single feature. The silhouette indicates neither great height or weight—but though dark and fuzzy (except for the bright, pleasing smile) and a colorful penumbra against that—and then the leaping sun all over everything else—Itwethey is assured any misplaced confidence in guest’s good intentions are to be poetic, or failing that, will provide a narrative to be used later…In a joke, perhaps.

Itwethey is aware the stoop is insecure—it may even be propped without being nailed, against the front of the house. Itwethey remembers something about being distracted many days in effort to determine a curvature of the rises that he may not have had time to fully think out how best to make home and stoop into a unity. The curvature was important; getting in and out of the house was the afterthought. Getting in and out of the house hadn't been a problem, either. That’d been at least two years ago that Itwethey had been coming in and out of home, going up and down stoop, without a crisis, no problem: guest wouldn’t be smiling brightly if crisis loomed,or stoop were teetering, either.

With that happy reassuring thought, Itwethey beckons guest off stoop onto threshold where Itwethey reaches out bare bear hug and hearty slaps for the back de la guest. Sheer animal barbarity sweating stinking force of Itwethey’s body, including breath coming from a lifetime of shit-eating is at this moment the one thing guest has to latch onto. Guest surges into Itwethey’s welcome, an ocean of sun, a sun ocean welcoming the welcome, letting loose tides, pirouettes, and forsaking all of that which hindered welcome just moments before ( guises? Disguises?).

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part II

2011-03-25T14:21:00.008-05:00

Itwethey says, “welcome.”

There is no understanding (fast or slow)—of Guest. For Itwethey, Guest is entirely unknown and unanticipated in any specificity or particularity. (“Guest” is a purely formal (or general?) designation. The specificity of Guest is that Guest is and must be (to be Guest) purely unknown and unanticipated…Known to be unknown and anticipated to be unanticipated (unanticipatable?) Itwethey means for Guest to be understood as different to anything Itwethey previously had known or experienced in any way. This does not however require Guest to be ENTIRELY different (Itwethey expects Guest to be a human similar to other humans, with similar needs, wants, desires, hopes) but in the specificity of some array of “minor” differences (little things which are entirely out of any of Itwethey’s prior frames of reference) EVERYTHING will be encountered DIFFERENTLY. Because Itwethey anticipates EVERYTHING will be different, Itwethey anticipates not being ABLE to understand Guest. Itwethey will not be able to understand Guest, and yet Itwethey, in order to host Guest, must establish understanding. To cope, Itwethey’s strategy will be to feign understanding. Itwethey is poised to act (act—as “to feign”, “to put on a disguise”)(is it not odd that the same infinitive “to act” means for us both what is most naked and unpremeditated AND what is most disguised and artificial) (quickly as possible) understanding, no matter how strangely, unusually, unexpectedly, Guest may, in specificity or particularity, behave. (Itwethey honestly believes Itwethey CAN convincingly and concordantly behave in such manner. Itwethey purposely excludes the circumstance of Itwethey being stumped as to what understanding would be in certain conditions of Guest behaving, e.g. Guest behaving belligerently, threateningly, more as intruder than Guest—in which case Itwethey’s pose of understanding would be shattered.) Thus, the part of the “welcome” Itwethey says which is composed of “understanding” Itwethey understands to be purely sympathetic. (Therefore, let it be noted Part II may modify Part I in that in Part I Itwethey used (or at least implied) “understanding”and “sympathy” as if they were synonymous. It matters to this inquiry and the success of Itwethey’s “welcome” which approach is better—Part I or Part II.) Itwethey will treat Guest with sympathetic consideration absent understanding of Guest (or of what makes Guest be Guest, this mysterious array of minor differences Itwethey anticipates in Guest.)

With this new understanding that the understanding Itwethey will offer as host to Guest is the “understanding” of sympathy, (or just plain sympathy) Itwethey will now help Guest, standing at the threshold, on the rickety stoop Itwethey had studiously and yet incompetently constructed, Guest looking bewildered and rather “thrown” (which fortunately doesn’t look much like belligerence, so perhaps the worst case scenario will be avoided!) as if some magnetic wind of continent shifting had bequeathed Guest to this not so much hallowed as hollowed spot, enter into the hospitality Itwethey has worked a lifetime to create (true—but it doesn’t lessen the fear a lifetime of effort may yield a resultant hospitality as shoddy and incompetent as the stoop upon which Guest happens up…) Nevertheless, and in spite of the discomfort of both squeezing onto the threshold above the last of the stoop’s steps, Guest appears delighted with Itwethey’s “welcome.” Itwethey and Guest make contact, and the contact is more satisfying than any Itwethey imagined during rehearsed “welcomes.”

The rehearsals had always been too formal—entirely formal, in fact. How could Itwethey have practice responses of sympathy to a Guest unknown, unanticipated—and not present? Sympathy has no formal qualities (hypothetically.) It is for “understanding” to be formal. Itwethey’s “formal” sympathy was thus simulated by Itwethey as a sheer animal barbarity sweating stinking force of body, meant to infuse the formal gestures of Itwethey’s practices of greeting with sympathy and thereby sympathetically synthesize what Itwethey wishes for, an adequate “welcoming” of Guest. As Itwethey had put it so often afterwards, (smoking and drinking) (which is part of this symbolism Itwethey uses to simulate sympathy when understanding is unavailable and the object of sympathy is also unavailable—though ne’er has Itwethey known any who found Itwethey endearing when smoking and drinking nor Itwethey staggering sweating stinking drunk (and this has got to factor in and matter)), “My shit-eating grin, my cologne, the bright colors of the interior of my living room (Itwethey here attempts to indicate, through contortions, winks, elbow waves, hands let loose at the wrist, pirouettes, and other guises (NB: guises, not disguises)) Itwethey’s “welcome” of not only this Guest but all guests, into Itwethey’s “interior” and Itwethey’s “living room” and Itwethey’s “interior living room.”

Umbrellas Unopent in Tempests, Part I

2011-03-04T15:27:00.003-05:00

Itwethey has learned(very slowly) there is no understanding or sympathy between host and guest unless Guest is treated with utmost consideration by the host from the very moment of encounter.

With this new understanding, Itwethey will now help Guest, standing at the threshold, on the rickety stoop Itwethey had studiously and yet incompetently constructed, Guest looking bewildered and rather “thrown”, as if some magnetic wind of continental shifting had bequeathed Guest to this not so much hallowed as hollowed spot, enter into the hospitality Itwethey has worked a lifetime to create.

Itwethey looks at the Guest, standing there on the threshold, bewildered, saddened, riddled by ambitions, delusions, false desires, misguided plans, thankful this Guest is on that sadly misshapen stoop, that stoop which is clownish, artful as the mistakes of a fool are artful, poetic, poetic as those first-scribed misprints of the sacred five-year old are what loving parent will revere and thank the Lord for.

Itwethey says, "welcome." By it is meant: precipitation will not hinder; intemperate temperatures will not wrinkle; bellies will not thunder; mind will not grumble; third eye blind will not mention all wasted by Itwethey’s hastily constructed and not-so-satisfying abode of comfort.

The Pent Umbrage of the Tempy, Part XXXVII

2011-02-25T15:11:00.003-05:00

You had this little treasure chest, filled with nuggets of absurdity.

Yes, these were your treasures.

In your leisure, you would take them out and look at them,

Turning them this way and that, that you would see them from every angle,

Every angel,

Every facet,

Every faucet,

Turning on the flow, or turning it off, as you pleased,

No facet be sterile or stable,

But every facet being fact, facile, fauction,

Absurd is odd, you know, in that absurd be not exacerbated.

Exacerbated absurd becomes ugly, stable, unangelic, unfacilitated.

The Pent Umbrage of the Tempy, Part XXXVI

2011-02-18T13:23:00.006-05:00

You had forsaken the mailroom. You had forsaken THE FIRM.

You had never expected a lot of money from the job. Your only ambition was to get by.

You had never expected a great deal of entertainment from the job. Your only ambition was to get by.

You had never expected a great deal of fulfillment from the job. Your only ambition was to get by.

The mailroom never had forsaken you. It had been steadfast by you. As far as you could tell (and you were diligent) the mailroom had never slept around.

You only wanted to get by. THE FIRM had let you get by. THE FIRM had encouraged you to get by.

You got by. Then you went away.

The Pent Umbrage of the Tempy, Part XXXV

2011-02-14T13:39:00.004-05:00

You were powwowing with some of your ex-employee’s co-workers down in the mailroom—these are employees of THE FIRM for which you also have supervisory responsibilities. Though you supervise them, you rarely talk to them, and you don’t even remember the last time you talked to them face to face.

You almost don’t remember the last time You were down in the mailroom. You don’t know why you don’t go down there more often. There’s something nice about it down there.

You had your meeting with the employees, and then you just started hanging around for awhile. Maybe two or three hours. It was nice. Everything was in order down there, but it is an informal order. THE FIRM has never invested in upgrades down there the way it has everywhere else. Maybe you're just experiencing the pleasure of a change of pace, but once again you are nagged by the thought things were so much better before, back then.

When you got back to your office, you wrote a nice report about your observations and discussions, and filed it away in folder 696969 in cabinet 131313. It was then you noticed something, or thought you noticed something. (You aren’t sure.) You were uncomfortable again. You notice the discomfort isn’t something entirely vague or abstract: it is associated with dryness of the skin around your nostrils and mouth. There’s that scratchiness again. It had gone away at some point while you were down in the mailroom.