roachboy

here's a quote from edmond jabès "the book of questions" that i have been thinking about alot lately. it isnt a new idea--neither in general nor to me--but i really like it:

all letters give form to absence
hence, god is the child of his name.

forms, levels, hierarchies of them: all are the products of a type of doing routed through the characteristics of words mapped onto what is said to lay beyond them. a very very basic confusion. same confusion that enables you to imagine yourself as a type of object (an "i")--same confusion that enables you to imagine that action is a discrete mode that this i-thing enters into--and the reverse (that absent this mode, the "i" is at rest, static, itself).
if you dont model the "i" as an object, then there's no need to posit an essence. if there's no need to posit an essence, there's no need to talk about a soul. the word soul refers to nothing. people are afraid of nothing, so they fill it in. there are obviously modes of being that are you cannot jam into categories. strictly speaking, then, all of these are nothing. but nothing is not homogenous. it simply denotes all types of activity that escape representation. most everything we are escapes representation.

but i am typing this, so there must be something.
yes.
no.
maybe.
sometimes.


what matters is that you find these ideas to be pretty.
because that is all that is at stake.

we are words <---this is the baseline.<---this is wrong. more exactly:
we are syntax. we are a mode of ordering phenomena based on modes of linguistic ordering.<---but linguistic ordering are not self-contained. what meaing is ascribed to verb tenses is not a function of verbs alone.

but just as the process of signification (the process of bringing phenomena into relation with each other) cannot be accounted for on the basis of the results of that process (signifier-->signified or more naively signifier--->referent) so the processes that we are cannot be accounted for in terms of the logic that we use to order the results of those processes.

so all the posts above are true.
none of the posts above are true.

what is consistent above is the conflation of conclusions motivated by aesthetic preferences with other types of claims.

none of this is about the nature of anything beyond what mode of conceptualizing the world yourself and the relations that can obtain between them is most pleasing to you aesthetically.
belief follows pleasure.
belief is the enactment--the spreading out in time, the repetition--of aesthetic dispositions.
without the pleasure, there'd be no repetition.
without repetition, there'd be no belief.

but to repeat something is not to say the same thing over and over: repetition is generative of phenomena that run way beyond what you're repeating.

we are processes: lots of them running on different scales simultaneously. any process is repetition.
any process goes beyond repetition.
repetition is a limiting idea.
repetition is a necessary idea.
limitation is necessary.
but which limitation?
which do you find pretty?
that is what you find necessary.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite