The New Empty of Graduate School

Here's a sample of some of the crazy shit I end up saying in class:

Just as the Skeptics refuse to rely on the senses, so too do the Buddhists. But in Buddhism, the mind (or mentality) is considered one of the six senses, so that every thought construction is as susceptible to error as every sense impression. In this way, prajñā too is empty (śūnyatā): it is not a knowing of a thing, or any thing; rather it is a way of knowing that all things are not things-in-themselves or things-as-such. Prajñā is a knowing that everything is beyond the conception of thingness; it is a knowledge void (śūnyatā) of content.

If it weren't for Andy's whispered admonitions and sometimes passed notes that read "Don't hate," I think my head would explode from frustration with my classmates, particularly the one who attempts to reduce (meant in the most derogatory manner possible) everything that is not Aristotelian metaphysics to Aristotelian metaphysics. For fuck sake: is that your frame of reference for everything? Including all those things that aren't really things at all?

Andy's right, of course. What's even more frustrating, however, is that I have no vested interest in Buddhism. No intention of being a Buddhist. No design to convert anyone. But if we're talking about Buddhism, should we not use terms and metaphors proper to it instead of imposing and superimposing our own sorry worldview, opposing a new thought or a new way of thinking, disposing of an opportunity for transformational thinking, hiding ourselves--what we conceive to be ourselves--from possible exposure to something wholly other? I suppose so. Otherwise, education becomes more of an unnecessary travesty and a waste of time.

Two days after my last class meeting, I still find myself seeking composure, a releasement toward letting-be. Away from any egoism or intentionality. À la Buddha himself. But there's still another class next week with the same sorry people. Thank G-d Andy will be there to remind me what I most need to learn.

the grandeurs of risk

I'm convinced that such a circle [that is, the unclosable circle of an encounter, which revolves around the undesirable] only exhausts the strength of those who don't enter into it with the grandeur of risk, the amorous and loving truth, slow devastation which breaks every tie with a life that is still immediate. To forget that is the obverse of disaster, because time's subtle desire upsets every foundation. A faithful weakening must meet the other and immemorially lose the other in the self.

--from Abdelkebir Khatibi's Love in Two Languages [Amour bilingue], translated by Richard Howard

This desire and promise let all my specters loose. A desire without a horizon, for that is its luck or its condition. And a promise that no longer expects what it waits for: there where, striving for what is given to come, I finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.

--from Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick Mensah

The principle that birth is presencing-of-total-working concerns neither the origin nor the end. Even though it is the great earth and empty space, it neither obstructs birth-qua-presencing-of-total-working nor death-qua-presencing-of-total-working. When death is presencing-of-total-working it becomes the great earth and empty space and it neither obstructs death-qua-presencing-of-total-working or birth-qua-presencing-of-total-working. The great earth and the empty space exist exhaustively in birth and death.

-- from Kigen Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, qtd. in Geron Kopf's Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self

Gay for Democracy

I wonder if I’ll ever post to this blog again. I wonder if my days will ever stop being so damned full of foolishness and nonsense and incessant busywork. I wonder if I’ll finally slip over the edge of sanity and land in a puddle of my own full-blown, hard-core, crazy-assed lunacy. I wonder if my neck will ever stop hurting.

These are all good things to wonder about as I get to luxuriate by not having to drive to campus this evening for the worst class in graduate school. Thank the heavens for crappy winter weather! Snow day in Texas in March—just two days before “spring” break? Why thank you very much.

Today I was thinking about tautologies and dogmatism … and how dogmatism is always a form of tautology: what could be more dogmatic and tautological than I AM THAT I AM? Even the skeptic critique of the dogmatists’ syllogism is based on the uselessness of tautology: premise A, that all human beings are mortal, is necessarily always (and in all ways) no less tautological than all black chess pieces are black. Dogmatism asserts its own meta-self-recursivity. And all must bow before it(self).

Truth however asserts in perfect Heraclitean fashion that I am that which I am not. Truth embraces its own opposite. In balance. And resonance: a non-Narcissistic echo that decenters and destabilizes its own frame of reference. The truth is big enough to embrace that which it is not. In my opinion, the apophatic god is the only one/not-one (not) worth worshiping!

And yes, I did vote in the Texas primary Tuesday. I even returned to the caucus afterwards to experience the glory of the chaos and insipidness of democracy. Sorry, Iraq. Sorry Afghanistan. Sorry Iran … eventually. Sorry for bringing all our overwrought freedom your way! And my small role in democracy is not over just yet: I’ve been elected a delegate to the district caucus. I’ll report back near the end of the month how absurd that procedure is.

A walk down memory alley

December 11, 1988, Sunday

Four days of
foreplay
and by the end of the week ...
Is no one real anymore? or anymore real?
I touch and tease and talk,
But I don't see him when he's not there.
And when he's here his face is not familiar.

Moving in dreams,
And yet I lack sleep.

December 13, 1988, Tuesday

I met a damsel in distress
Who fought dragons with broken wine glasses
She moved in shadows of candlelight
She showed me sights without a sound
And broke the silence with laughing gods
I'll build a tower for my lover
Keep her safe from herself

Instead of throwing myself under the academic bus this afternoon, I decided to drag out that old yellow spiral-bound notebook and see what kind of crazy shit I wrote almost twenty years ago. These were two particularly poetic passages that stood out from that cold December; the first entry was for Todd, the second for Melissa. Funny how I never wrote anything readable before then, and sad how even then what I wrote was pure shit.

The uselessness that was Todd (although I still sometimes mistype his name as Tod, German for death) dragged on till late the following summer. The bizarreness of Melissa petered out sometime in the spring.

After a few more pages--on the level of "I still smell you on my clothes"--we get to this:

December 14, 1988, Wednesday

The moon wasn't right tonight, but I was. And I remain hungry. If I get on your nerves, just brush me off. Both of you are pretty good at it already, and you're such great teachers. Perhaps I may one day brush you off like the dandruff you left on my sheets or like the mud caked on my muffler after we trampled it in your car. I may just fucking wash my hands altogether and be done with it.

And then there's some Russian phrases. We three were studying Russian together; in fact, Melissa and I met in Russian I my first semester at UTA. I was smitten. Todd was in a different section, but the subsequent spring semester we were enrolled in the same section of Russian II.

If I remember correctly ... and I do ... that double-whammy significantly contributed to my almost flunking out of college:

Fall 88 GPA: 4.000
Spring 89 GPA: 2.385

But how exactly did I manage to earn my one A that term in Russian II? The one class I only went to when I was drunk and depressed? (My one D was in PHIL 2311 Logic, as if my personal life needed that little reminder! Too bad there wasn't a PHIL 2312 Fucked-Up Crazy Shit that I could've drunkenly aced!)

Now I rarely write bad poetry (or poetry at all). Bad relationships no longer inspire me. And I don't compose verse as I'm getting laid. I only pray I have the good enough sense to burn all these notebooks (as well as push this big delete button) before I die.

A bad case of the hollows.

Yeah, this band is rad. I love new music that gets under my skin. Angry words about how fucked-up stuff is. Makes me wanna burn it all down. Singing at the top of my lungs … before I cough up a ball of phlegm the size of my head. Calls me back to Berlin, to that basketball court where it all began. At 11:11 (or was it 3:32?) last night I fell asleep only to wake up within 20 minutes. I read some Gadamer. Watched porn. Went back to bed more frozen than when I first laid down. Sometime around 2:00am I woke up to the sound of Spic-O-Rama, but without that adorable John Leguizamo. I dialed 9-1-1 on speed-dial to report the disturbance. Today’s shot. Tomorrow probably too. It’s now 4:00pm, and I’m only thinking about the things I should’ve already done by now instead of the things I have to do next. Can’t use the sink downstairs because of the leak. Don’t know when I’m going to get back to the gym that overcharges me on a monthly basis. Sick of the scams all utility companies pull with new service contracts. The bruises up and down my arms have finally faded from the boxes and boxes of books I moved. Ordered two new books from Amazon today. Eventually I’ll bruise myself by moving them as well. Benjamin’s greatest fear was losing his library. Before I slip away into nonbeing, I wanna pile everything I still possess into a gasoline-soaked mound and flick a match in its general direction. Just to see what would happen. Dreading Friday. Not because it’s my birthday but because it’s the anniversary of when the sky over Texas caught fire and rained down on our heads. Dead astronauts and all.

Listen when your hair gets pulled. Don’t get caught. It’s gonna be alright. As soon as the embers die.

As I lay me down to fall asleep
with my demons dying and my pilot light weak.
I curse the last six months I’ve been hiding behind a mustache.
To those last ten years I’ve been howling at a paper moon: Fuck you.

Nothing to say about love...

This interview suffers from the “Dance, Monkey, Dance!” Syndrome: flaccid American asks the world's greatest living philosopher (at the time) to perform for the camera on a topic he clearly isn’t interested in. But Derrida, in his generous generosity obliges, indulging the weak-minded question with a somewhat articulate—particularly for being impromptu—response about the difference/différance between/among the who(s) and the what(s) of love.



Do I love you for who you are? My friend? My lover? Or for what you are? Intelligent? Sexy? Do I love you because of what you do? Because you love me too? Do I love the absolute singularity of who you are? And when I stop loving you, will it be because of who you are [not] (no longer my lover), what you are [not] (no longer sexy), or for what you have [not] done (not loved me in return)?

Or can I love you purely because of your replaceability? For the fact that I can choose anyone else at any other time—knowing full well that the metaphysics of identity and time collapse just as fully and unequivocally as all [other] metaphysical systems in the end?

But can the modality of love bring us even closer together by helping to eradicate the notions of I and you (and us) altogether? That is, if—in the same way that each word engulfs an equally and conterminously unsayable silence—the I and the you embrace the not-I and the not-you (mere placeholders in an attempt to say something (which remains not-a-thing) real about the irreality of love in the first place)—we finally move beyond/through the metaphysics of identity which we sorely cling to in the West, especially as it perpetuates itself [gets perpetuated] through language, and approach a pure modality of love wherein no I and no you [and no us] exist, at which point existence itself—neither it nor self—ceases to ex/ist.

Or maybe we should just spend the rest of our lives searching for the “true love” Charlene sang about all those years ago:

15 Songs for a Solstice

...to help keep the cold in on the first day of winter. (As if most of us needed help with that.) Here's to a new season of personal (and universal) growth.

For those of you not on MySpace, I'm currently reading Edmond Jabès' The Book of Margins. After only the first 35 pages, I can definitively state that it will be one of my most favorite books I have/will ever read:

The word is distance within non-distance, that is, the width of a gap that every letter stresses while bridging it. What is said is always said in relation to what will never be expressed. At these extreme limits we recognize ourselves.

This winter will (always already and yet again) prove the truth of the infinite distance I must travel in order to recognize myself in the extremities of the here and now. And now to the soundtrack that will be playing on that trip:

• "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" by Leonard Cohen
• "Winter Kills" by Yaz
• "Drink Before the War" by Sinéad O'Connor
• "Dreamer" by Toni Childs
• "All the Candles In the World" by Jane Siberry
• "Bells Ring"by Mazzy Star
• "25th December"by Everything But The Girl
• "Trouble In Mind (The Return)"by Marianne Faithfull
• "Mad World"by Gary Jules
• "Untitled 3" by Sigur Rós
• "New Lost World" by Chris Whitley
• "Soon This Space Will Be Too Small" by Lhasa De Sela
• "Baby In Two" by Pernice Brothers
• "Wo willst du hin?" by Xavier Naidoo
• "Archangel" by Burial

Excerpts

Something I've been doing for the past several semesters is offering excerpts of my academic work here at the end of the semester. When I'm not writing here--which is happening more and more frequently--I'm most likely working on papers such as these. The work I did this term just about did me in altogether: I started working on the first paper in May, but I was able to write the second paper in just a few weeks. It seems I always shoot my load on one project (usually the one for my major professor and mentor) and then do a second quickie. (And yes, all academic metaphors must be sexual; otherwise, you're not doing it right.) By the way, my first essay earned me a "gifted," and the second one was termed "brilliant." (I'm not braggin'; I'm just saying....)

In die Fremde der Heimat:
Celan’s “Schibboleth” and the Ethics of Translation

Mem’ry, in addition to being short, is also (always already) a matter of convenience. A covenant both enjoins and excludes. Our inclusion in a community is a function of how we enact our communal memory—which flags we pledge allegiance to, which political slogans we cry out, which language community we find ourselves born into—in short, how we embody our covenant. Memory is the shibboleth we use to segregate: it either allows passage or cuts off the return passage home. This scar—this syllable pain, this wounded word, this death sentence—bears the memory of our covenant, a circle of forgetting, bereft of a center. Memory, therefore, is what must be transversed, transported, crossed over, and translated; it is the liminal border between the alien and the homeland, the superliminal space where the blood of the Passover sacrifice demarcates between the Chosen People and the(ir) other. Memory is the shibboleth—mispronounced, death-bringing, inarticulate; the unsayable that demands utterance, performance, invocation. The promise—the sign of the promise—the promised covenantal sign scars the human body. This scar—a genital, genitive scar—wounded by the past, is passed on to future generations, to those also born of the wound, born of disaster.

The half-mastness on both sides of mem’ry bisects “Schibboleth” with a reference to a political act: commemoration of the dead, of national heroes. Yet this flag at half-mast (from the fourth strophe) is not (necessarily) the same flag to which the poet has sworn no allegiance (from the second strophe). Instead of being unfurled in the market square, demanding allegiance, this flag at half-mast signifies the presence of death. Yet Celan’s dead remain doubly absent: not only are they no longer present (having been murdered and reduced to ash) but neither have they been properly buried and mourned for. No national flag had been set at half-mast to commemorate them. They are absented in both language as well as cultural memory, and it is an inherent characteristic of Celan’s poetological project to call those absent dead back into presence through language and to rescue them from forgetting/forgetfulness.

But just as Heidegger wants us to think being as some thing other than beings, so we too are called to think the other as some thing wholly other, as something more than the sum of all others—uncoordinatable and incalculable, unbounded and aporetic, unmappable and undateable. The wholly other exceeds all Cartesian coordinates as well as any Cartesian cogito: all that I can know of the other is that I do not know.

Initiation into Redon’s Initiation to Study

The fifth and final work in Redon’s two-woman sequence is his circa 1905 Initiation to Study. This oil painting is marked by a flattening of the pictorial space as well as by a sharp delineation of line of the two figures. The priestess is clothed entirely in blue; the novice wears white. Instead of holding a red branch as in the 1896 oil painting, the novice casually holds a scroll that has been partially unrolled. It seems that the natural element from the first painting has been replaced with a cultural artifact; the mysteries of nature have given way to the mysteries of a secret society whose knowledge is written down on the scroll. But no text is exposed; to the viewer, the scroll is empty and blank.

Though the novice’s eyes are still downcast, we get no sense of her emotional state from her otherwise expressionless face. The priestess, however, appears somewhat sterner than in previous depictions: she is clearly frowning, and the severe profile line only accentuates her one visible eye. Redon’s noirs were often populated by round, globe-like eyes, but in this series, the women’s eyes are almost always closed, further resisting the viewer’s gaze.

The women appear within a space defined by heavy brown lines to the pair’s left and right as well as beneath their feet. The light brown floor recedes a short distance before ending at what looks to be a white plaster or stucco wall behind the figures. The pictorial plane, nevertheless, is further flattened with blotches of paint that transgress across all three strong defining lines. No shadow or shading interrupts this compression to give the viewer any impression of dimensionalized space. Redon flattens the vertical as well by repeating the light brown of the floor in the upper right. Moreover, the illusory depth is shortened by the dark pink tones of the oil paint: Redon uses the same tone for his signature and the dominant background behind the priestess. In this way, the surface and the background are the same color, disrupting any sense of depth and preventing any penetration beyond the work’s surface.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Today is Labor Thanksgiving Day in Japan. After (only) two years in Japan I still have no idea what that means or what is celebrated. But I was always thankful to have the day off from teaching.
• When did the day after the US Thanksgiving start being referred to as “Black Friday”? It seems like I’ve heard that phrase before, but it’s only been over the past couple of years. What a horrible thing this over consumption is: people feeling as if they have to buy gifts for one another, a nation’s entire economy based solely on over consumption and reckless spending for a so-called Christian holiday, and then the utterly useless news reports about over consumption and greed and then the interviews with poor people who can’t afford to buy what they want for their children and then the interviews with self-proclaimed shop-oholics or compulsive buyers! It’s enough to make me run screaming, especially when the soundtrack to this shopping season—tinny carols about some Jewish baby born in modern-day Palestine—comes over the PA!
• In honor of the Japanese holiday, I declare myself thankful to be counted among those who labor to make this world a (little) better place.
• I always enjoy teaching Marx in my classes. When I taught government, I would spend about a week on political ideologies, slowly introducing socialism in small doses until the majority of my students would insist on knowing why we in the gloriously free United States didn’t fully embrace Marx’s philosophy. I had a similar experience teaching Marx in my philosophy course a couple of weeks ago. One student exclaimed, “I’m poor, and I don’t see anything wrong with what he’s saying!” Another student questioned, “Why were we taught that he was the enemy?” My answer: “Why don’t you write your president and ask him?” I’m all about pushing the limits.
• There is no free market economy. It’s a lie and a myth and a delusion all rolled into one. A free market economy in principle would not allow monopolies to exist, would not insure bank deposits, would not bail out corporate failures, etc. etc. The only good thing about the US economy is all of the Marxist-inspired policies we have implemented to protect consumers and workers and the public. And we have a long way still to go.
• "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
• My favorite new story this evening: the First Baptist Church of Dallas was robbed last night (on Thanksgiving Day). The thieves got away with eight plasma televisions plus a lot of other crap. I think God’s message this holiday: stop watching your fucking TVs when you’re supposed to be worshipping me! (I wonder if Homeland inSecurity will come knocking on my door if I declare that any church that has eight plasma televisions deserves to burn.)

Bullet-Point Friday

• Thumb drive? Check. I do, after all, need to record the grades of the precious students enrolled in the US history course I TA for.
• Stack of history quizzes? Check. I finished grading them over breakfast this morning, but I told my professor I wanted to re-evaluate a couple of them just to ensure I’m being fair (and consistent), so I’ll return them Monday. I’m still a bit perplexed by one student’s response: “Truthfully, I have no idea of what I should write because I haven’t read the book just yet. Fortunately [sic], there isn’t a way for me to pass this class having failed two of the last tests.” It continues for a couple of pages. I don’t like this conflicting sympathy-annoyance I suffer from: I really am too sensitive at times to be a professor, but I also work ridiculously hard for my courses, even the ones that only annoy me and waste my time. (After my last presentation, there was a hush before the professor exclaimed, “That was a damned good protocol!” I felt like crying, relieved after putting myself under that much pressure for a two-page paper.) But, of course, I’m not a freshman too lazy to read the assignment. (If I skip a required text, I have some deep-seated reason … usually. And I always make sure it’s one I won’t be tested over.)
• Sophie’s World? Check. I read it originally back in the fall of ’97 in Japan. When I moved into my apato, it was one of the few books left by a prior occupant. Because it was in English, I read it. I was annoyed because of its overly contrived narrative. I cringe when I feel like someone is trying to trick me into being educated. Now it’s a required text for my introduction to philosophy course I teach at the community college downtown. I had/have no say in the matter. But after drinks Tuesday evening with my brighter-than-average colleagues, I just may finally stop hating this book. Both of them swore that it was a more-than-suitable text for an introductory course. I’ll trust them (since they are so painfully freaking intelligent). Lesson learnt: stop fighting the flow and see what there is to learn instead of overly complicating things.
• Knitted skullcap? Check. In the mornings here, the temperature has been quite a bit more tolerable: in the mid-40s. It’s almost as if things are starting to cool down like they’re supposed to this time of year. In Poland I would’ve already had several days of snow by now.
• Crappy Apple laptop? Check. Thankfully it isn’t a problem connecting to the wireless here at this college campus (where I spend my “free days” writing, working, and doing research). I wonder how many other people here aren’t really supposed to be here? I spend more time at this school than I do at either the campus where I teach or the campus where I’m a student. But no one’s ever asked to see my identification or to justify my presence. At least I finally started bringing my own computer instead of using the one’s in the library.
• Internal (and upcoming) deadlines? Check. One paper due Wednesday. Another portfolio/project due on the 30th. And a final paper/presentation on December 3rd. Final exams in history to grade; five-page essays and final exams in philosophy to grade; eternal and continual paperwork to endure for classes taught as well as taken. Yes, I’m almost done with this term. But now I have to buckle down in order to check these things off. One by one.
  

Bullet-Point Friday

• It’s like, you know, flamenco piano: when you hear the first measures of just such a beast you recognize the form (flamenco) but don’t recognize the medium (piano) because your ears are not trained to interpret that form through that medium. After a few moments, a new synapse fires, and you are better prepared to hear flamenco piano again: a new possibility has been created in your world.
• It’s like, you know, when human beings rely too heavily on infrastructure designed to keep them safe (i.e., guardrails, stop signs, traffic lights) that they behave irresponsibly because someone else is policing their reckless behavior; they have a false sense of security because they’ve relinquished responsibility for their own actions. (It’s also like, you know, when parents expect legislation to supplement their demonstrably poor parenting skills: they want society to be policed instead of being responsible for the raising of their own children. I mean, think of the children!) Remove the guardrails and pedestrian accidents fall 60% because pedestrian and driver behave more responsibly when they must think for themselves. If I choose to jaywalk, then I’ll be sure to look both ways—twice, even—before jumping out in traffic.
• It’s like, you know, trying to get through a lecture on Berkeley’s immaterialist idealism when your students would much rather hypothesize about “crazy people” or “people on LSD” or “the blind”: if someone falls in the woods and no one is around to perceive it, did the person really exist in the first place? (Thankfully, for Berkeley, God is omniscient and omnipresent: He’s always watching/perceiving! And even if you don’t believe in God, He still believes in you.) I sometimes wish my students would stop invading my sensory world so their drug-induced craziness would simply stop existing, even if only for me.
• It’s like, you know, hotdog!
• It’s like, you know, accepting the alternate relationship with truth that wanders to supplement one’s acceptance of truth that remains coordinated on a grid. To start walking with the right foot (techne, the logos of techne, the word: “technology”) is quite alright as long as the next step is with the left foot (organic, systemic (uncoordinatable) episteme, the organicity of the epistemic); otherwise, you spin around in circles going nowhere. And no guardrail is going to protect you from doing that!
  
• It’s like, you know, attempting to speak language as such without using any of the words from the language of humankind. Or perhaps like, you know, speaking a word to(ward) an other all the while speaking a word as (an)other. This too shall not pass.
• It’s like, you know, Liberace’s famous question: “Would you rather have roses on your piano or tulips on your organ?” Vote now!

Bullet-Point Friday

• I had my first setback in about a month or so after beginning my new insomnia medications: I couldn't get to sleep Tuesday 'evening' until about 2:00 am (Wednesday morning). Now I'm still recovering from that episode. The only thing I can figure out that was in the least bit different was that I drank a Dr. Pepper at 3:30 that afternoon. It was the first soda I've had in two months, and the only reason I drank it was because I 'won' it by filling out a survey about alcohol use on campus. From now on, I will only drink water (and alcohol) on campus. Perhaps I need to 'update' my responses on the survey.
• I skipped working yesterday afternoon and instead spent about 90 minutes at the YMCA. I felt I needed a break from the multitude of assignments and projects after working almost nonstop Wednesday afternoon/evening until about 9:00 pm. Yea: endorphins are my friends! (Unlike Dr. Pepper.)
• I'm taking another 'break' this afternoon: we're going to the Texas State Fair. I know I'm going to spend all weekend working, so I might as well try to have a little bit of fun while I can. Besides, I spent my morning office hours grading exams.
• I'm excited about my books from Amazon being shipped: Gadamer, Jabes, and Plato. God, am I a dork or what? I used to be one of the cool kids (at least as an undergraduate), but now I'm quite the stuffy old graduate student surrounded by books ... and very few friends. (Even Dr. Pepper is not to be trusted.)
• Perhaps Tiny Tim (or is it Tiny Tina these days?) can bring a little joy back to my life.
  

Bullet-Point Friday

• Conversation over breakfast of Swiss oatmeal this morning included Alan Watts’ lecture over the coincidence of opposites, Huston Smith’s Zen training, and the metaphysics of becoming (as opposed to the Heideggerean notion of Gellasenheit, a letting be). All this before 7:30 a.m.
• There is no front without a back, no heads without tails, no sickness without health, no I without you.
• Now that it’s almost 9:00, I can also think about bringing in Parmenides’ attempt toward deduction: one can’t make negative existential statements, nor can one make positive existential statements (because by saying what something is, then one is implicitly saying what something is not—if this is a dog, then it is necessarily not a cat—which takes you back to the first premise).
• Therefore (in all of its metaphysical/rhetorical glory), all is one.
• There is no Buddhist monk without a dictator-general.
• And every poet has her other.
• But who is the poet’s other? The rhetorician? The philosopher? The linguist? The poem’s reader? The poem? The poet herself? All and (n)one::all is (n)one.
• It’s now 9:02, and I still have so much more work to do....

Scivias

I remain
Together:t(w)o-gathered
A union w/o unity
Identity w/ difference
Singable yet always (yet) unsung remainder
Twinned coils twining through
Here & (t)here & no(w)here:now/here
Wo ist der Mensch?
W(h)er(e) ist der Mensch?
Here- her- he- ach
And a thou-
Sand hands to hold at night
And an eye
T(w)o-ward
Hath an ear
Near- 'ear 'ea- æ
Farawaywayawaywayaway
Let be--this subjunctive that terrorizes time
I'm set ... for now
Know- now- no-

Il y a / n'est plus

A hundred years of his undying death articulating as if the singular unsaid, unsaying, unsayable, in its fully exteriorized impossibility against the homogenized totalization of a text, an other. He always already (yet) exceeds his own excessive supplementarity. I hereby sign and countersign your centenary as we both recede in our mutually singular oblivions.

Rugged Ascent

This afternoon I had my students do a close reading of Plato's Allegory of the Cave for the entire class period, and I have to say that they did an amazing job. I remember being wowed by Plato when I first read him as a college student, but several years later (and after one absolutely useless semester at the University of Dallas--the most narrow-minded, ideologically driven mockery of education) I just don't get that excited about Plato. Derrida? Yes. Blanchot? Heidegger? Yes, yes.

I wanted my students to get a feel of how a much more advanced philosophy course might be, doing a hermeneutical exercise for an extended period of time. Of course, we only covered two of the four-page excerpt, but I had students who I had assumed had already checked out of education altogether raise their hands and want to argue/discuss/interpret/analyze. One student in particular--one who has never spoken up in class before--started doing a Freudian analysis of Plato's allegory. Granted, he had never heard of Freud before, but his interpretation was dead-on. (I have colleagues at the university who would've been lost with what this college freshman was saying!) I joked with my students that they were doing advanced philosophy and that I wanted them to dumb it down a little.

In my own philosophy course this afternoon we read a short poem by Celan, taking three hours to barely cover the three stanzas. My head is still spinning. And of course I feel even more like I need to go back and reread all that Plato I haven't been excited about in twenty years. Being/Becoming a professor opens up all kinds of avenues of (feelings of) inadequacy.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Insomnia - Since returning from Germany two weeks ago I haven't been able to sleep past 4:30 AM. Most days I'm awake before then. (I'm usually in bed by 10:00 PM every night.) I'm just about at the breaking point physically as well as mentally, especially when I have as much work to get done during my typical day-to-day as I do. I fear my philosophy course--the one I'm teaching downtown--is suffering because by the time 11:00 rolls around I'm yawning and ready for a nap. I have an appointment with my neurologists (sleep doctors) Tuesday morning. Hopefully they'll put me on some better medication.
• Next Friday I fly to San Francisco to hang out for a couple of days with the ever-lovely Pani J. I'm looking forward to the escape from Dallas--yes, even though I've only been here for two weeks! Even more, though, I'm excited about spending time with one of my absolute most favorite people in the world. Jola and I were neighbors in Warsaw for almost a year, and I know I wouldn't have been able to last that long in such a miserable city without her continual friendship, insight, and hilarity. Can't wait for those long chats over good coffee while staring out over the Bay.
• Tomorrow I begin the German language course at the Goethe Center. Am I ready to focus yet again on that language in an attempt to develop some sort of fluency and literacy after such a crappy experience this summer? Stay tuned to find out.
• Exercise - Will I ever return to my pre-Europe schedule of hitting the gym 4-5 times a week? I'm afraid that all the weight I lost while in Germany was just muscle mass. I miss the sweat. I miss the endorphins. Ah, sweet endorphins! Perhaps before the German class tomorrow I can make it to the Y for a quick 30-minute workout.
  

Pieces of Me

If it’s not the hunger and lack of interest in any of the food I find on the streets here—I mean there’s only so many cheese pizzas, cheese sandwiches, tomato salads, falafel pitas, and gummy, cheesy pasta dishes with limp vegetables I can stomach—that will kill me, then it will be the utter inexplicability of my inability to sleep throughout the night. Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour (11:30), but I was wide awake (again) by 12:45, and I couldn’t get back to sleep until almost 3:00. In the meantime—and I mean this in its meanest and most unreasonable sense—I began reading another life-changing essay by Derrida about Gadamer and the poetics of Paul Celan. And then I took out my iPod and listened to some tracks from my Lazy Sunday Afternoon playlist, just allowing my mind to drift and reflect in a letting-be (perhaps—as if—a move toward Gelassenheit). Perhaps it will be the anticipation of the arriving/letting-go that will finally do me in.

“There are pieces of me you’ve never seen. Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen.” These lyrics by Tori Amos continually float through my head. Knowing that people—and ultimately all things, including the great to be (it)self—are ultimately unknowable, I know that I don’t even really know myself. So, how can anyone else know this me that I don’t even know, this no-ing, unknowable I that reverts to a me when faced with the face of the radically alter in its (own/un-owning/un-(kn)ownness) radical alterity? A good question to reflect upon and face at two-fucking-thirty AM. Kids: don’t try this at home without adult supervision. I am a trained professional, and it still hurts when I do it.

I like the subtle subversion of irreplaceability these lyrics hint at: as if to say, you don’t need to replace me with her because we are the same. Do you not see that which draws you to her is also present here in me? Do you not see that the continual/continuing race toward the (metaphysics of the) new is just as questionable as the issue of knowledge of self and other (it)self? We are ultimately reflections of one another, each other: “The killer in you is the killer in me.” (Lyrics by Smashing Pumpkins. Maybe I should just stop listening to music altogether.)

I like how da in German can mean both there as well as here. I like how nach can mean both to(ward) as well as after. This is a great language in which to lose oneself, especially when the first person-pronoun is never capitalized (except, of course, as the first word of a sentence) and the second-person polite Sie is always capital(ized). But true Gesprach takes place only between (ein(e)) ich und (ein(e)) du....

Speak my language.

Unfit for Life

Learning German is making me even more unfit as a human being. As if having studied Spanish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Ukrainian, and Latin have made me either marketable or more lovable! But German is becoming a special case: I’m not learning to communicate (i.e., how to buy falafel from the Turks) but rather to sit in a dark room alone with several dictionaries in order to decode, decipher, un-encrypt—to translate, carry over—semantic meaning from the Devil’s tongue to the language of angels. And I’m learning this “skill” from an angry Romanian woman whose smell I’ve grown accustomed to already.

So, I won’t be making friends in German. That’s involves a specialized vocabulary that my skill set can not at the present time manage. My morning language course, too, can attest to the fact that in German I will be (in the most absolute sense) all by myself: I’m not only alone in my endeavor to take the advanced reading/translation course alone but I’m also enduring, surviving the more remedial—actually the most remedial—course in the program. I’m surprised each morning when the short bus does not appear outside my dorm to carry me off to class with the (other) retards. (But at least I actually brung myself a real wordbook from Amerika to helps me with the studying.)

Yesterday afternoon I spent about four hours translating selections of Kandinsky’s aesthetic theory, and now I have a few pages of Walter Benjamin to tackle, conquer, capitulate to by my next class Monday. Benjamin and Celan are the main reasons I’m here in the first place learning the unlearnable with the unlearned, but I guess I’m not the first to blame my misery on G-d’s chosen.

Now I have five days all to myself. The others—those people—are heading off to the great Benelux conundrum, but I, because of UNRESOLVED ISSUES stemming from the GREAT UNPLEASANTNESS cannot fathom venturing near that part of the planet at this time. Instead, I’ll be visiting some of the cities nearby, exploring the offerings of Dokumenta in Kassel, the sculpture exhibit in Münster, and the great Civilized City of Köln. To further prove just how useless my German is, I will be tackling each new city purely in my native tongue. Halleluja! Hosanna hosanna! Pray that the train union strikes do not keep me in Marburg….

Podcast-aways

Here are my favorite podcast subscriptions. There's something for everyone. Well, maybe not you.

• Twelve Byzantine Rulers
  This history of the Byzantine Empire is a lecture series written and presented by Mr. Lars Brownworth who teaches history at The Stony Brook School in Long Island, New York. He has traveled extensively from the furthest reaches of the Byzantine Empire all the way to its heart at Constantinople. Join him for an engaging look at the history of the Byzantine Empire through the eyes of 12 of its greatest rulers.


• Alan Watts Podcast
  Alan Watts is one of the most widely read philosophers of the 20th century. In addition to his 28 books, Alan Watts delivered hundreds of public lectures and seminars the recordings of which have been preserved in the archives of the Electronic University, a non-profit organization dedicated to higher education.


• The Meditation Podcast
  A free monthly podcast of guided meditations with Jesse and Jeane Stern.


• PDX Ripped
  Pampelmoose.com's weekly podcast with Gang of Four's Dave Allen. Discover new music and catch interviews with up and coming new bands.


• Global Hit
  PRI's The World presents the Global Hit podcast, a daily spotlight on international musical artists or trends. Created by The World's Marco Werman, the Global Hit features interviews with musicians, critics and deejays around the globe.

Am I missing anything? I'm always open to suggestions on what to listen to.

"conversant on existentialism"

After hearing about yesterday's NPR article "For Shakira, an Emotional Homecoming Show," I imagined an encounter between Shakira, Beyonce, and French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Shakira: (Twisting Beyonce's hair into braids.) You know those lyrics from "Hips Don't Lie"? It goes, "Oh boy, I can see your body moving / Half animal, half man / I don't, don't really know what I'm doing / But you seem to have a plan / My will and self restraint / Have come to fail now, fail now / See, I am doing what I can, but I can't so you know / That's a bit too hard to explain."

Beyonce: (Giggling.) Yeah, I remember.

Shakira: I was really trying to articulate Sartrean nausea in the face of overwhelming freedom.

Beyonce: Yeah, I got that.

Shakira: God, Beyonce, you're so smart! Your friendship is like the unavowable gift Derrida writes about: it unhinges the narrative contingencies of pure spirit and opens the word into the openness of being.

Beyonce: (Twirling her own hair.) Uh-huh.

Shakira: It's like what you sing in "Irreplaceable." It reminds me so much of Rilke's first Duino Elegy. (Taking the text from the nightstand, she reads from the original German. Then she paraphrases into English.) "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror."

Beyonce: For sure!

Sartre recedes in disgust. Derrida turns in his grave. And Rilke wishes a rock would fall on Shakira's head. (Actually, we all wish a rock would fall on Shakira.... But really a rock should fall on Juan Forero, the idiot NPR reporter who wrote such drivel.)

Marked by the trace and the testament

Derrida's Learning to Live Finally--his last interview before dying in October 2004--is a brilliant testament to learning, living, and loving. This little book arrived today, and I eagerly read it in its entirety this afternoon. Here are a few of my favorite passages:

I don't want to renounce anything, indeed I cannot. Because you know, learning to live is always narcissistic ...: one wants to live as much as possible, to save oneself, to persevere, and to cultivate all these things which, though infinitely greater and more powerful than oneself, nonetheless form a part of this little 'me' that they exceed on all sides. To ask me to renounce what formed me, what I've loved so much, what has been my law, is to ask me to die. (29-30)

At the moment I leave 'my' book (to be published)--after all, no one forces me to do it--I become, appearing-disappearing, like that uneducable specter who will have never learned how to live. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it's something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, 'proceeds' from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing. It's the ultimate test: one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there even be any heirs? (32-3)

[S]urvival is an originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence.... We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of the testament.... [D]econstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life. ... This surviving is life beyond life, life more than life, and my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death, because survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible. (51-2)

To get a lucid and direct taste of this philosopher "whose entire work pays homage to the subversive intensity of existence," I recommend this little book, this blur, this tear--a mere paper left behind when a great thinker ceased to exist.

Uncovered (and recovering)

Last night at 10:00 I submitted my grades and officially ended the spring semester. Now (with head freshly shaved) it's time to rejoin the human race by returning to the gym, reading books and articles for fun, drinking and socializing--scandalizing--and fleshing out this virtual site.

Below are a couple of excerpts from my writing projects this term:

Irigarayan deinos and the Distance of Home

Our conception of nature—just like our grasp of masculine and feminine—is itself always already enculturated. That is, we cannot make sense of nature without resorting to culturally constructed tropes of intelligibility, without imposing human agency or scientism upon natural phenomena. Even when we attempt to make room for the inexplicability of nature (for example, relying on a “God works in mysterious ways” mindset), our conception of the mystery/mysterious is already encrusted by and ensconced within a cultural framework. We cannot conceive of nature that is not culturally formed/informed/deformed and is not a consequence of man’s greatest violence—the imposition of intelligibility. And yet “true” nature (physis) is first (at the beginning) and foremost absent of human beings. It just is—“measureless to man” and immeasurable. Only when man knowingly acknowledges that he neither has agency to grasp ungraspable being nor ability to run after receding being can he find his place, his home, as a resting place displaced—not at the center of being nor at its origin—but nearby, near-within, wherein man’s being calls forth being itself. At last being arrives but not according to man’s timetable, for it is only when man steps out from history, away from the act of historicizing, that he is able to attune himself to being’s already arriving. Only when man allows for a cultivation of the female/buddhic to be and accepts a position of repose, of rest and contemplation, does home—always already present even in its absence—draw close. When man’s fabricated home is no longer the site centered on the male to be, his true home opens up to the full belongingness of all beings.

Wounded Writing:
The Reticent Witness of Wisława Szymborska

From this lexical evidence, it seems that silence here has its own efficacy in opposition to names; silence, in effect, serves as a non-name that finds its own name in Szymborska’s poetry. Ultimately, there is no resolution to these antinomies; thesis and antithesis do not move gently toward synthesis in a semantically consistent form of Hegelianism. Instead, each image, each theme, each term flies free from any core meaning a reader might impose upon the text toward newly formed orbits of signification. This motion of silence and voice alternates back and forth like breath; every silence becomes a calling for(th), yet every shout is voiceless. This directed ambiguity resonates with the process of breathing: one cannot breathe by oneself; one cannot produce one’s own breathe. Similarly, the process of speaking and not speaking (that is, silence) alternates back and forth in Szymborska’s volume, always requiring the other and speaking through the other.