Monday, June 14, 2010

Dostoevsky

Life.

I was thinking about Dostoevsky's Notes from underground a few minutes ago. About the meanings of the words, yes, but also the flow of logic, the mad creativity of the logic, and then finally just the mind who could create such a thing. The thinking itself, the act of thinking as a man writing a manifesto toward postmodernist thought. The abstraction of abstraction.

It goes so far that I somehow felt it ended where eastern thought begins ... a synthesis of eastern and western thought: A logic of nonrepresentational thought through a nonrepresentation of logical thought.

To do that in one man's mind? Even if unintentional? Or without an awareness of that possibility? It's a stepping off point, a chance to choose again. Freedom. Liberty. Autonomy ... in Relation to All Else.

If Dostoevsky's mind began and ended within that single story I'd say, "Wow." But it's more remarkable still that this was the tiniest fraction of his thought. Just as this writing under-represents mine. Or anything any person writes under- and mis-represents all that person has thought, thinks, or will think.

I mean, come on, man, there's gotta be jazz. It can't just be, "Well, I decided that doing nothing but thinking is sublime in the most perverse possible way and, to embrace the perverse means becoming natural" ... or something like that. For awhile. Until it shifts into some other weird fucking thinking, some of it to my liking. Parts VI and VII blew a few new holes in my mind. It was like a structure came into being and my mind had to follow Dostoevsky's thought. He wrote a raging rant, but each sentence is essential.

Let me look at some key sentences, though, perhaps use them in my particular order to tell a different story using the same words. A more essential story. Without so much verbiage. But mostly in his words:

I could not even become an insect. I swear that to be too conscious is an illness. Every sort of consciousness is a disease. I feel every refinement of all that is "good and beautiful," but I do ugly things. Actions that all, perhaps, I committed while consciously aware that they ought not to be committed.


"Ought"? On what basis?

I committed a loathsome action again but this time the bitterness transformed into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness--into positive real enjoyment. Enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one's own degradation. Even if time allowed and faith created the capacity to change you would most likely not wish to change. Perhaps, in reality, there is nothing for you to change into.

The inertia developing from an over-acute conscious meant that one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. One is not to blame in being a scoundrel. When one is acutely aware of being a scoundrel, of the hopelessness of one's position, there is, of course, the enjoyment of despair. Even if I had had magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense of its uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to do anything from being magnanimous--neither to forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for even if it were owing to the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same.

A real normal man is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know?


For instance, I could say "Let's worship that guy ... he was the winning QB in the Super Bowl." And then pretend to be shocked when the guy who few fans at all know on anything approximating a personal level swallow the mythology of the man's character as created through very short sports-media choreographed interviews that highlight a smiling, aw-shucks face. All the sudden he's Opey with an uncanny knack for getting away from defensive lineman and finding open receivers improvising sandlot routes whenever he breaks from the pocket. Awesome physical display, indicative of great determination and concentration, but it says nothing of the man's ethics. So why do so many Americans believe these media-created superstars are superhuman? Or exceptional in any other way than through their few observable freakishly amazing skills?

I wonder.

Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it be the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it until their sides ache. Of course the only thing left for the mouse to do is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed, and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant, and, above all, everlasting spite. Teasing, tormenting itself. Ashamed of its imaginings, forgives nothing, revenges itself, recalls it on its deathbed all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years ...

In that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying itself alive for grief in the underworld ... The hopelessness of one's position ... unsatisfied desires ... oscillations, resolutions, ... repented enjoyment ...

Nature does not ask your permission. The deductions of natural science and mathematics? I dislike those laws, but they are stone walls and I haven't the strength. Absurdity of absurdities. All the impossibilities: the stone wall. Grinding teeth in silent impotence, sinking into luxurious inertia, brooding without an object for your spit, All around you is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a cardsharper's trick, it's all simply a mess, no knowing what and no understanding who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and fumblings there is still an ache in you, and the more you do not know and the longer you do not act, the worse the ache.

Oh, you will be finding enjoyment in a toothache next! Malignancy is the whole point! The enjoyment of the sufferer ... the pleasure in those moans. They express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not ...


Or does she? Does nature itself suffer from its own nature? If we suffer from our own nature, might not the universe be suffering as well? Suffering the pain of differentiation and unending change. Or so I imagine. At times. When I'm not imagining anything else other than that.

Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself? If only one could blame the laws of nature, for the laws of nature have throughout my life offended me more than anything.

I invented adventures--lies!--for myself and made up a life ... I had to live some way. A bit dull to sit forever with one's hands folded. I tried hard to be in love. I suffered, but I had no faith in my suffering. After a faint stir of self-mockery and an indulgence in self-jealousy resulted in ennui I allowed inertia to overcome me. You know, the fruit of consciousness is inertia.

The "direct" persons, the men of action, take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily that others do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To act, you must have your mind completely at ease without any trace of doubt in it. Where are the causes on which I am to build?


But why ask for causes? Why not ask for correlations? Aren't relationships all that there are? Does anything exist without being in a particular position in relation to all other objects (for lack of a better term at the moment) in other positions? Everything I sense or perceive is in relation to me. Or so i think. And if I'm wrong there isn't necessarily a consequence. But there could be. And we just don't know. The enjoyment of that is the perversion of humanity. But a perversion that could transform humanity into another species. Why not? What if? Could be. Maybe. Who knows?

Reflecting, every primary cause draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. Consciousness and Reflection. If a man revenges himself because he sees justice in it then that man has chosen as his primary cause justice. But where is there virtue in justice? It is nothing but spite, the abdication of consciousness to anger, the disintegration of self into object, a phantom playing the role of me, My feelings, hate or love, deceive me. Result: a soap-bubble and inertia. I neither begin nor finish anything.


But what of my goals? Have you seen my fish? What if the vocation of every intelligent man is babble, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve? Is a man shopping also a son, a friend, an accountant, a lover, a liar, a thief, a fat bastard, a fast runner, tall and slack-jawed, brave and buzz-sawed, crazy and blame thawed.

Wish, wish, wishing. What is advantage? Accuracy. Principles: laughter. Reckoning with certainty. Classification? Statistics and formulas. Prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace. Obscurantist reckoning. Strange advantage. Classification. Laws of reason and truth. Significance of virtue. Interests? Opposition to one's own advantage? An advantageous advantage?

Opposition to all laws. Opposition to reason, honor, peace, prosperity. Opposition to usefulness. An advantageous advantage. Normal interests: good and normal. Logical exercises. Systems and abstract deductions. Intentional truth distortion; sensory evidence used to justify logic.

"But look about you. Blood is being spilled in streams and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne ... The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely nothing more."

Now that's a statement. I bow in awe. But only experience the sensation.

"Civilization has made mankind more bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodhed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. [Humanity] is far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate."

Because of the lack of a philosophy? An ethics? A will? A capacity?

Man will cease from intentional error. Science teaches man that he never really had a will of his own. The laws of nature. Mathematically, like an index. Calculations and explanations. No more incidents, no more adventures. No more living. Economic relations, ready-made and worked-out. Nothing to see here. Nothing to play. Halcyon days of boredom and stupidity. Prosperity a propos of nothing. "I say hadn't we better kick over the hwole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil and to enable us once more to live at our own sweet foolish will!

All systems, theories. Classification. Advantageous advantage. Preferring to act through choice rather than reason or advantage dictate. Choice? Independent choice? Ha! There is no such thing as choice!


Surely you know this. A mathematical formula representing the false view of our advantage, that we have choice. Foolishness. If its not mathematics or logic, its needs and desires. What free will could there be? I can calculate and prove, but am I free to do so? Can I calculate in error of mathematics and find truth? Reason is an excellent thing; reason is nothing but reason. Will is nothing but will. What does reason know? It knows will and it knows it is controlled by will. It knows it fools itself into believing it is in charge, that reason and consciousness are one. But they are not. Consciousness can exist independent of reason. Reason cannot exist independent of consciousness.

But two times two makes four and my will cannot deny this except within my consciousness. But it's also true that my will cannot understand the truths of mathematics without my consciousness. Consciousness, then, must be superior to will. Right? How can i will without deciding to will? I can be without deciding to be, but I can't will without deciding to will. My consciousness is necessary for will, but not for being. I think. Right?

Dostoevsky says that a man dreads finding the mathematical certainty he seeks. To embrace uncertainty, then, seems like a logical thing to do. Well, uncertainty in relation to the past and the future. But a certainty in the now. Not one that is known, but one that is willed. Or at least allowed and observed.

Suffering or well-being, asks Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground. Caring for both, he opines, makes more sense than favoring one over the other. But perhaps even to care is ridiculous even though it seems to be necessary to escape inertia. D's narrator proclaims that it is better to do nothing.