Capital Z

Reading is doing. Action! David Copperfield, the commercial magician, was motivated to take his stage name after reading David Copperfield. He identified with the character because he, like Dickens, had worked in a factory as a child. Of course, that isn’t true at all. He just liked the sound of the name. David Copperfield, the commercial magician, is a philistine.

Bob, the weekend woodcutter, chisels scenes of the nativity. He anonymously delivers them to the yards of well-known atheists during Advent. Resemblance is a system of thought and played a constructive role in knowledge in sixteenth-century culture: guiding exegesis and interpretation of texts, organizing the play of symbols, providing knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlling representation. Infinite Jest, the postmodern novel by David Foster Wallace, is a work of word-stitching. The minute descriptive detail resembles the intricate stitching, millimeter by millimeter, of a life-sized embroidery of the exterior of an 1890s Victorian house; there are no rooms inside, nor are there any furnishings. It’s magnificent ornament disguising despair as vacuousness. Or, it’s purposeful meaninglessness disoriented by an aimless but desperate hunger for meaning.

Except, it isn’t those things. Creating a postmodern story is just a ruse to mask writing for the sake of writing just as a doily is a ruse for stitching for the sake of stitching. There were four articulations of resemblance: adjacency, emulation, analogy, and sympathy. No one knows why. I asked her and she said she knew. Who changes her name to “No one”? She did. The adjacency of places indicated that things touch and fringes intermingle.

Frogs have one goal in life: to become butterflies. They are a failed species. In terms of meeting goals, anyway. The problem originally occurred in the goal-setting phase of existence. The ongoing problem is adherence to the original goal. They are successful as a species in the sense that they continue to exist. That is decidedly unsatisfactory for frogs, though. They are unhappy with themselves as a species, but they continue trying. It could be said that they would cease to exist if they had an attainable goal. Movement, influences, passions, and properties were communicated. Thus, failure to achieve has been interpreted as the key to their survival.

Adjacency was also a sign of a relationship. Why wouldn’t it be? Fred thought he knew, but he was so distracted by the big things that he forgot to tie his shoes one morning then tripped and fell down the stairs. He has amnesia now and he’s happier than he’s ever been. Through adjacency, resemblance is connected with space in the form of a graduated scale of proximity. This gives rise to the proximal distal, though distal proximity is its mirror image. They’re the same, but the left is on the right and the right is on the left. Which means that they aren’t the same at all. Similitude. That’s a different concept, though. Getting the order of things correct has never been a specialty of mine. As a principle, I’m against order. Practically speaking, though, I use just enough order to make my eggs over easy. Hey, gotta eat, woman!

Were I to go to the moon I would no longer have a need for bleach. Adjacency also provided that the world is a universal convenience of things and linked the world together like a chain through relationships. Chain gangs were once convenient. I doubt being adjacent to a slave driver with a whip was fun, though. If I had been forced into labor like that I probably would have derided the concept and damned physics to hell. Silently, though. Mostly I’d be thinking I shouldn’t fall down or I’d get whipped horribly. Or maybe I’d try to figure out how to kill myself without being stopped before I could succeed. Is that the circle of life?

From circle to circle, resemblances were able to hold extremes apart while bringing them together in such a way that the will of God (the Almighty Unknown) could penetrate the unawakened corners of the world. It’s not easy to pass judgment on the unknown. Not with specificity, anyway. You could try, but I wouldn’t bother with you if you did. If you tried to tell me about it I would yawn before walking into traffic as fast as I could. 

Greta was a philanthropist. So she said. Evidence of her good deeds were scarce and those that were discovered proved false upon examination. She had no respect for science and even less for truth. That’s what we all said about her. She suggested we agree to disagree. Given that all of us were born in the United States after 1990, we were unable to agree that we were disagreeing. Emulation was a sort of adjacency that had been freed from the law of place and, without motion, was able to function from a distance. Before we were frozen by inertia, the iPhone was invented and we forgot that yesterday existed. 

I have undergone many surgeries. As such, it was a resemblance that needed no spatial contact. I see myself in you. Reflections and mirrors provided the means by which things scattered through the universe could answer one another. You accused me of harassment for staring too long and deeply at you, but I was really staring at myself … which I saw in you. Why are you blaming me from looking at myself … in you? It’s not my fault that you made yourself into an image of me. But you reply, “Oh, no! No, you made yourself into an image of me!”

Imitation throughout the universe, without connection and proximity made possible by duplication through mirrors, abolished distance proper to things and that allowed things to overcome the place allotted to them. I love words that begin with the letter “p.” “Pedantic” is a favorite of mine. I often consider myself a pedant, but only because the word begins with the letter “p.” I could write that the word begins with p, but I think writing “the word begins with the letter ‘p’” creates a more sufficient clarity. 

What is the meaning of all of this? Can such a question be answered? Am I the only person who could answer such a question? Or should I leave that to the practitioners of literary criticism? Why does one question lead to so many others? The problem of emulation was the inability to determine which was the original image: which image is reality and which is projection? Don’t get me wrong; I could answer these questions. But to do so would require a tremendous amount of time and concentration. In fact, I believe it would feel like time in a concentration camp. Not in the Nazi sense of the word, but a camp designed to facilitate concentration. The question was ultimately incoherent because emulation was deemed a twinship existing in things. The two reflected images are not necessarily equal; one may be dominant and the other weaker with the weaker image receptive to the stronger influence of the dominant. A university, okay! I’m saying universities are concentration camps.

Speaking of meaning, I recently read that men prefer acknowledgment for their intentions and purposes while women prefer acknowledgment of their feelings. This was a statement made by a couples therapist in the early 2010s. He had been working with couples since the 1970s and, after some time, he noticed a pattern in the complaints of couples. Granted, these were apparently heteronormative couples. Through emulation, like envelops like. Who knows what the patterns of failing LGBTQ couples are. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough once therapists specialize in seeing lesbian, gay, and transgender couples. The links do not form a chain but a series of concentric circles reflecting and rivaling one another. And then there’s mixed couples, a transgendered person married to a cisgender male who is attracted only to transgendered persons. 

Is there a name for that? A name for a cisgender man who is only attracted to transgendered persons? A lesbian is a woman attracted to women. Easy enough. A cisgender man attracted to transgendered persons, though? Is that a thing that happens? If it does then there must be a label for that category. There’s a label for everything now. Tied up in a little bow. Persons are like the firmament, but they are not bound to it. Their “inner sky” may remain autonomous and independent. Maybe not. Maybe the cisgender man attracted to transgendered persons will escape compartmentalization. On the other hand, that might not be so great for that guy. It’s got to be much harder to use computer dating services without having an acronym to let others know who he is and who he is wanting to date: “CGM/TP.” No one is going to know what the fuck that means unless they read what I’m writing. Even then, I’m not sure if anyone will know. I have no evidence of your reading comprehension skills, your tolerance for postmodern writing, or your ability to decipher absurdity and usefully apply it in your life.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Who knew doubts had benefits? Skeptics, for one. They live by doubt. Their entire metaphysical framework would collapse without doubt. Oddly enough, though, they may have the one conceptual framework that would make them happier if their worldview collapsed. After all, their lives would become filled with certainty! By means of knowledge and wisdom, persons come to resemble the order of the world by taking the world back within themselves and recreating their inner firmament in a manner that is similar to what is external.

There is more to say about that, but I want to return to the therapist’s notion that men crave acknowledgment for their intentions and purposes and women want acknowledgment of their feelings. As I said, this therapist was attempting to help heteronormative couples. So, okay, we’ll leave it at that and examine it as a fraction of humanity, a window into a specific Westernized socionormative dynamic within heterosexual couples and, I suppose, potential couples. If this occurs then the wisdom of the mirror will be reflected back to envelop the world, and persons will discover that they contain the stars within themselves, influencing what influences them. If that’s the case, it would be really simple to solve relationship difficulties. 

For example, a woman applies for a job, but is rejected. She is disappointed and sad. Her partner, a heterosexual man, should not focus on how hard she tried or insist that she’ll do better next time. No, he should, according to the therapist, express that he is aware of how hurt she is by not getting the job, by being rejected in her attempt to be employed. He should open himself up to empathize with her so they can share her sadness together. This, according to the therapist, not only soothes the feelings of hurt, rejection, and loss, but also brings the couple closer together in a time of need, thus strengthening trust between them and the development of a firm belief that they can overcome difficulties and crises together. 

On the other hand, a man applies for a job, but is rejected. This seems to be another twinship, but perhaps an infinite multitude of them. He is bitter, angry, and dejected. His partner, a heterosexual woman, should not focus on his feelings or talk about how disappointed he must feel. Within analogy, adjacency and emulation are superimposed. No, she should, according to the therapist, express that she is aware of how much work he put into trying to get the job, how impressive it is that he had the courage to make the attempt, and how proud she is of his dedication and determination. Analogy provides an endless number of relationships. This, according to the therapist, reinvigorates self-confidence, reaffirms a worldview that had been damaged, and helps the man feel that his partner believes in him, his values, his goals, and his purpose. Inversion is possible without rendering itself open to dispute. This leads to greater openness which brings the couple closer together, strengthening their bonds through trust, and creating a shared belief that they are there to support one another through difficulties and crises which, in turn, make the good times much more rewarding.

Earlier, I wrote about my love of words beginning with the letter “p.” Reversibility and polyvalency endow analogy with a universal field of application. There are so many incredible “p” words! How about “phrontist”? You can look up the definition using an online dictionary. There’s even another great “p” word used to describe the meaning of “phrontist.” All figures of the universe can be drawn together. 

Yet, I am quite sad that there are so few words that begin with the letter “z.” It’s unfair. No, it’s not. Who applies the concept of justice to words beginning with certain letters? Besides, I’m referring to the English alphabet which is derived from a Latin alphabet. I’m not even sure if Sanskrit has an equivalent for the letter “z.” If it does, maybe there are tons of words that begin with the Sanskrit version of “z.” I don’t know. There is one privileged point in the universe: humanity. In the scheme of things, I don’t really care. Not now, anyway. Maybe I’ll care in the future. I’m not going to rule it out. My interests have changed over the years. There’s some give and take there.

But right now I don’t care. What interests me at this moment is why there are so few words beginning with the letter “z.” I am enamored with the letter. I mean, it’s not the letter “p,” but it’s in the next tier of importance just below it. I never realized it, but I have a hierarchical structure for the value of letters used to begin words. Even to my addled brain, that is very odd. Humanity is a fulcrum of relations and proportions. Until now, I never knew this structure existed. I could sit where I am and go through the alphabet to find out exactly where each letter used as a beginning of a word fits into a tiered ranking system of values. Huh.

Humanity is always the possible half of a universal atlas. The ancient Greeks seemed to have a thing for the letter “z.” Naming the most powerful god “Zeus” is an intriguing statement about the power inherent in the sound of the letter “z.” Of course, I don’t know the Greek alphabet or if the Greek word for “Zeus” is pronounced the same as it is in English. The space occupied by analogy is a space of radiation. I’ll pretend it does. 

But there are far more “p” words and names in ancient Greek than “z” words. Pliny, Pythagoras, Pandora, Pegasus, Plato, and so on. Perhaps the Greeks recognized the power of the “z” sound and felt few words were worthy of beginning with that letter. Persons are surrounded by it on all sides, but, inversely, persons transmit these resemblances back into the world from whence persons receive them. I can respect that if it’s true. I doubt it’s true, but I am choosing to believe that it’s true so that my esteem for the ancient Greeks remains intact. 

I doubt the same is true of the English-speaking world. What I mean is that I doubt that there have been few “z” words created because of a reverence for the sound the letter represents or for the aesthetic attractiveness of the visual symbol of the letter. I think it’s more a matter of laziness, neglect, and a distaste for imagination and creativity. Let’s look at the history of the English, okay? Persons are the center upon which relations are concentrated and from whence they are reflected. The English and those in English-speaking countries have long lived behind closed doors. Being creative and spontaneous on the street? That’s for the common man, not a man of distinguished tastes! No, there shan’t be any “zooming” or “zinging” or “zapping” as long as we’re British, by God and Queen!

Or something like that. Sympathy provides no predetermined path, no prescribed links, and no measured distances. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. Though paraphrased, it’s a famous line from the movie Gone with the Wind. I’m not sure about the novel of the same name. I’ve never read it. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen the movie. Sympathy plays through the universe in a free state and traverses the vastest spaces of the universe in an instant. I’ve seen a few scenes here and there; the only scenes I can remember seeing were clips from Gone with the Wind included in other movies. Simple contact can bring sympathy into being. The other movies were pretty bad from what I can recall. That seems to be true of all movies that include scenes from well-respected and award-winning movies.

I’m not sure if that’s a diversion. I know the meaning of diversion; that’s not the issue. I’m trying to determine if the previous paragraph is a diversion, a detour, a continuation, or a piece of the puzzle. Maybe it’s something else. Sympathy can excite the things of the world into movement, and it can draw the most distant things together. The thing is, though, that the letter “z” has a power that is not recognized by the English-speaking world. What is considered by some scholars to be civilization’s first religion, Zoroastrianism, is yet another powerful “z” name. Of course, the name of the man, Zoroaster, is the English spelling. Zarathustra is the Avestan spelling. Sympathy exists also as a principle of mobility and a force of attraction. Well, actually there are some characters in Avestan that my keyboard simply can’t manufacture even through the different language options available. 

Anyway, Zarathustra was a dude who lived in Persia a long time ago. According to Wikipedia, the twentieth-century scholar Mary Boyce dated Zoroaster somewhere between 1700–1000 BCE. The instance of the Same is so strong within sympathy that it will not be merely one of the forms of likeness. I don’t know how she did it. She either lived at least 4000 years or she transported back in time. Unfortunately, she died in 2006 so I can’t write her an email to ask her how he was in bed. The power of assimilation through sympathy renders things identical while mingling them, causing individuality to disappear, and thus rendering them foreign to what they had been. Either that Wikipedia contributor was intentionally fucking with us through double entendre or was completely clueless about how that sentence read. Pretty funny either way.

This Zarathustra fellow is credited with teaching the concepts of heaven and hell, the resurrection of the body, the Last Judgment, and everlasting life, the foundations of all the Abrahamic religions. If sympathy’s power of transformation were not counterbalanced it would reduce the world to a singularity, a featureless form of the Same. Kind of makes the whole Israel vs. Palestine conflict over the “Holy Land” seem even more ridiculous than it already is. Antipathy is the counterbalance of sympathy, maintaining the isolation of things and preventing assimilation. I think if Judaism and Islam had some important people whose names started with the letter “z” (or at least a letter that represented the sound of the English letter “z”) then they’d probably be able to find a solution to their problems. Not really. I think collective amnesia is the only answer.

I don’t know, though. There is the figure Zechariah in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Maybe if they all focused on that dude they could figure out a way to get along. The problem is that they all have different stories about the guy—if it’s even the same man. In absolute form, antipathy creates infinite differentiation. If they can’t come up with a shared story then I don’t know how they can come up with a shared resolution. They’ve condemned themselves to division. In these ways, antipathy is a force of repulsion. 

It’s interesting, though, this push-pull dynamic of Zechariah being one man providing different meanings to different faiths. Through sympathy-antipathy counterbalancing, the identity of things is able to resemble others without losing individual singularity. Christianity actually incorporates this model through the Trinity: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one thing is three things simultaneously without losing its oneness. This counterbalancing explains how there can be space and time; adjacency, emulation, and analogy are resumed. To put it simply, Christianity has within it a singularity that is a trinity existing within the singularity of conflict about the meaning of Zecheriah between the trinity of religions traced back to the singularity of Abraham. The volume of the world is supported, maintained, and doubled by the counterbalancing simultaneously drawing things together and holding them apart. The world remains identical; the same remains the same, riveted onto itself.

The Problematization of Idleness

Juridical conception and practice of power occurs through policing which leads to confinement. The disciplinary power through confinement establishes control through punishment of behavior and socioeconomic status. Individuals are transformed into subjects by and subject to the government, notably in Europe during the pre-Enlightenment period. The confined are made subjects of the state through the practice of biopower. Individuals are confined or not based on how they are perceived to exist in relation to idleness versus productivity. 

In Paris, the Hopital General problematizes unemployment and begging and sets its task to defining idleness as the source of all disorders. One of the precursors to the problematization of idleness was the 1532 Parlement of Paris policy of arresting beggars and forcing them to work in sewers while chained to one another. Another precursor was the order given in 1534 to force the poor/idle from Paris and to forbid them from singing hymns on the streets. 

It was the wars of religion that grew the ranks of peasants from farmers, disbanded soldiers, unemployed workers, impoverished students, and the sick. At the time of Henry IV’s siege of Paris, 30,000 of the 100,000 inhabitants were beggars. 

There were other precursors to problematizing idleness as well and they spanned over one hundred years before the Hopital General was born as both a means of Parlement wresting power from the Church as well as providing a solution to the problems of unrest and unruliness created by what the state defined as idleness in its myriad forms.

There was an economic revival in the early 1600s which led to the 1606 decree ordering beggars to be whipped in the public square, branded, shorn, and driven from Paris; a 1607 ordinance provided for archers to prevent the exiled from reentering the city. It’s important to note that the state did not distinguish idleness from poverty.

The Thirty Years’ War provided yet another precursor to the state’s problematization of idleness. Mendicancy and tax increases inhibited “rustic” manufacturing which augmented the unemployment of the time. Guilds lost power as as new economic structures, enabled by technology, developed manufactories. The world of labor became disorganized by this revolutionary economic shift. A series of General Regulations prohibited worker assemblies, leagues, and associations. Rioting in Rouen led to Church intervention through the accusations that workers’ secret gatherings were practices of sorcery. In the latter case, the Church rose up to claim its political space within the state’s politics and economics by acting as a policing and propaganda force due to the failure of juridical power to regulate and disband such workers’ attempts to organize to create their own source of power within the state. The Sorbonne Decree of 1655 proclaimed that such worker associations were guilty of sacrilege and mortal sin.

…

Mom, please let me inside!

No. Not until you sign the contract. You provide nothing for your dad and I. You live in our house for free, you sleep in the bed we bought you, you eat the food we buy for you, we pay your health care costs, we buy your clothing, we give you toys. What are you doing for us? Nothing. You sign the contract and then I’ll let you inside and you can have all those things again, okay?

If I sign the contract I’ll owe you money for my entire adult life!

Yes, that’s the idea. 

But that is indentured servitude!

Yes. And?

That’s wrong!

According to whom? I have to pay the bank for the right to live in this house and to pay the bank I must work to gain income. I, too, am an indentured servant. Everyone in America is except those with enough money to not have to be indebted to others.

So you learned to do this to me by being taught by banks?

Yes.

But I have zero dollars.

Right now. Later, when you are legally old enough to work, you will begin paying us a monthly stipend for the loan we are granting you. 

I don’t want most of the stuff you provide for me. I asked for a train set for Christmas and you gave me a G.I. Joe. 

You never put that in writing.

But paying for gifts? Why do you call them gifts if I have to pay for them?

Good point. We’ll deduct the toys you received before your preschool years.

I also want Fruit Loops instead of vegetables.

I’m afraid that’s not negotiable. We need you to be healthy so you’ll live long enough to pay us back for our investment. 

Your investment?

Yes. We’ll be charging 10 percent annual interest to the principle you owe us.

When does this interest begin accumulating?

Oh, it’s been accumulating since I found out I was pregnant.

That’s not fair! I never chose to be conceived!

Those are nature’s rules. 

You could have practiced abstinence or used condoms!

True, but your father and I calculated our financial needs for the rest of our lives and determined that to be able to retire without living in poverty we would need a significant boost in income. That’s why we expect straight A’s from you. It’s also why we enter you into so many extracurricular activities. It will look good on your resume for college.

You bastards!

Now, now. No need for bad words.

Fuck you! My curse words come free. 

No, there is a linguistic and emotional harassment addendum in the contract so fines can be levied against you.

If that is so then nothing I have done or that you have provided previously should be in the contract.

Should? Ha! You have no bargaining power. It’s all in there.

I’ll go to social services. 

If you do you’ll wind up as an indentured servant to someone less welcoming than your father and I.

Maybe I’ll take my chances. 

In that case, I’m calling the police. You’re trespassing in our yard.

No! Okay, so in this contract, you’re charging me for everything you’ve purchased for me since birth and you will charge me for everything from now until I am eighteen. 

Until you move out of the house, but yes, that will probably be about when you are eighteen. When you go to college it will be best for you to get scholarships. We will pay for your education if need be, but I believe you can get better rates through student loans. 

So this you’ll be charging me a fixed rate at 10 percent?

Yes, honey. Only parents who don’t love their kids use APR. We love you very much.

Still, I will have to pay you much more than you will pay in providing for me.

Yes and no. Future interest is complicated. If you study economics you’ll find out.

It makes no sense. Right now I have zero dollars, but when I begin adulthood I will have negative dollars. 

Oh, honey, you have negative dollars now!

But I haven’t signed the contract yet!

I know that, but six years old is the age of consent. By law, you owe us for what we’ve paid thus far for your well-being. We’ve itemized everything.

How can I pay you now?

Pish posh. according to law, you’ll owe us monthly payments for the expenses of the first six years of your life once you enter adulthood. As I said previously, interest began accruing on expenses during pregnancy. You’ll owe not just us, but also whoever chooses to allow you to live with them. But they’ll only accept you if you sign a contract. 

I could live in the wilderness and survive there.

I’m afraid all land and water is owned by banks now, honey. You have to pay rent everywhere you may go. 

That’s crazy.

Some used to think so, too. They’ve been forcibly assimilated. 

That sounds terrifying!

Yes, it is, but it’s the only way.

So if I sign the contract, I’ll be agreeing to accumulating more negative dollars as long as I live with you?

That’s correct. 

How can there be negative dollars? 

Like I said, when you study economics you’ll understand.

Are there negative apples or negative trees or negative puppies?

In a sense, you could say that there are. It would depend upon the contract, though.

How could there be negative two apples in the house or negative four trees in the yard?

Well, if I made a contract with someone promising to bring two apples to the house and plant four trees in the yard, I would have negative two apples and negative four trees and until I brought two apples into the house and four trees in the yard.

Wait a minute. If we signed a contract for you to bring two apples to me in the house and to plant four trees in the yard and then you did those things … the two apples in the house would mean there were zero apples in the house and the four trees in the yard would be zero trees in the yard?

Contractually speaking, yes. 

That’s utterly insane!

Yes, dear, it is. Welcome to civilization! You’re a big boy now, the age of consent. Why don’t you come inside, sign the contract, and I’ll make you a salad. I got the ingredients from Whole Foods.

The fuck you did! You’re shopping at Aldi’s from now on. And you’re returning that damn Nintendo Switch you got me for my birthday, you bitch. 

Ah, ah, ah. Language. I’ll give you a pass on that this time since this is a difficult time for you. Believe me, it’ll all work out. Just think, one day you’ll be able to have kids of your own and you can start saving for your retirement. 

…

The advent of the Hopital General provided for the creation of truth. Truth, in this context, was the denial of worker gatherings as worker gatherings and identification of such gatherings as forms of idleness in their own right. Establishing this as truth within the state was a critical necessity in the triad of power with confinement now resting on the grounds of rationality and obligation. This was an essential process in the establishment of the problematization of idleness and the legitimacy of the state as the arbiter of truth. 

Idle persons were no longer exiled but controlled through the financial cost of the state and the loss of individual liberty. The right to food was was provided through the acquiescence to the physical and moral constraints of confinement (an acknowledgement by state subjects that the state and only the state had power over the body as well as defining acceptable behaviors of state subjects.

The Edict of 1657 formalized juridical power exercised by means of confinement. The granting of policing powers provided the militia with the legitimacy to hunt beggars and herd them into the buildings of the Hopital General. The population of the confined grew steadily in four years. Even married couples were arrested and confined.

Throughout Europe the triad of power—unity, necessity, and rationality (obligation)—carried the same meaning as it did in France. It either resulted from or was invented as a control mechanism because of the economic crisis affecting the entire Western world (Europe and its colonies) in the first half of the 17th century. 

The Truth of Idleness in its forms of poverty, unemployment, begging, and sickness was established through juridical power (decrees, edicts, and ordinances) for the purpose of controlling a substantial portion of the population that were feared as potential destabilizers of state sovereignty. The option of exile proved untenable as a solution because it created instability outside the cities and had the potential to provoke uprisings and the destabilization of state power to provide economic stability and growth. 

Though a portion of the population was not immediately needed for productivity, later possibilities for using the confined for necessary labor purposes that might arise justified (for the state) the physical, structural, administrative, and policing costs to the state. This new system of confinement provided a clever stabilizing system by bringing a formidable force of invested parties under the umbrella of state control which fortified state legitimacy and sovereignty.

Riddle Me This

Buber attempted to plot the “image of perfect space” as one composed of lines that allow no fixed definition. The zone between the individual and the collective is constantly recalibrated according to the free creativity of its members. “The relationship between centralism and decentralization is a problem which cannot be approached in principle, but only with great spiritual tact, with constant and tireless weighing and measuring of the right proportion between them.” This socially patterned utopia was based on a constant “drawing and redrawing the lines of demarcation.”

Is the drawing and redrawing of these spatial relations between individual and collective to be understood as variances in role playing? What is the difference between free creativity and creativity? Does this imply that creativity that is not free is bounded creativity? Given the finitude of the human experience of time and space, isn’t all creativity bounded in some sense? Is free creativity, as Buber defines it, really just politically-free, governmentally-free, and/or economically-free? These are questions to ask as one reads Buber.

Then again, you could just run in circles in your living room throwing your hands in the air whenever you scream out, “Chickaw, Chickaw!” That might work out just as well for you. I mean, does it really matter whether you figure out that Buber’s concept of revelation is remarkably similar to Heidegger’s concept of revealing? I won’t answer that question for you, but my intent in asking is not rhetorical. 

…

Bigfoot visits Dracula. Dionysus comes home from a three-week drunk. Wonder Woman and Athena kidnap a Jedi. Superman, not in costume, shoves a red hot curling iron up his ass at a circus sideshow and laughs at the audience. Three werewolves escape from a dog pound. There’s no happy ending here. 

…

I have recurring dreams. Several. Many. Innumerable. I forget that I have them. I forget that they are recurring while I’m having them unless, occasionally, I remember that I have recurring dreams while one is occurring. That rarely happens in the dreams, though. I remember after waking or at the moment the dream becomes waking life while I claw to the dream in futility.

I always wake whenever I realize I’m having a recurring dream. It’s possible, though, that I have realizations within the dream without remembering those realizations upon waking. the latter is inconsequential in relation to consciousness, though. 

I like all of my recurring dreams. None of them are unpleasant. They are curious, mysterious, and creative. Each follows a pattern too complex for me to map or define. However, they have parameters. 

That’s boring, though. It might not even be true within the dreams. I might just think that when I’m awake. But I’m never sure, in the dream, whether I’m thinking that or dreaming it or creating it as a reality. There might not be a difference between the three. Some call this psychosis.

The dreams certainly fit into descriptions that others label psychosis. But for me they are not psychosis because they do not fit the concept of a “loss of reality: which psychosis, by definition, requires. Plus, these conditions or processes occur in dreams rather than waking life. Well, not always, but mostly. Now. Hasn’t always been the case.

The dream I had last night—a dream that lingers after I wake which often makes me wonder if I’m ever awake or, conversely, if I’m ever dreaming—was what I long ago named “The Malleable Dream.” I could give you a description, but that would be exhausting for me as well as a distortion of the experience. Instead, I’ll provide you with a snippet of the dream as I now remember the experience of it.

The caveat is that it never feels like a dream in the way that other dreams feel like dreams. For me. I have no idea what dreams are like for you or whether we even mean the same thing when using the label “dreams.” I have my doubts. And, thus, some doubt my sanity.

Meanwhile, I doubt sanity means anything at all whereas most others seem to think it has a meaning of significance. But the descriptions, paltry as they are when conversing with anyone who uses terms such as sanity, insanity, psychosis, and the lot, are so flat and two dimensional if not ethereally simplistic and sophomoric that I’m certain that what is being described has nothing to do with what I experience, dreaming or not … or dreaming and not.

The dream I had tonight occurred between 10 PM and 11 PM on Friday night, January 5, 2016. Approximately. I was surprised by this when I awoke and stumbled further out of the dream, resuming the use of clocks, digital and analog, as time measures rather than the experience of being as passage. I was surprised only an hour had gone by. I was sure I had slept not only through the night and through the following day. The latter duration seemed more adequate given the fullness and diversity of experiences I’d had. The dream covered a large geographical area, including jump cuts to places not contiguously connected.

But what occurred through dream occurred in about an hour of waking time. It might just be that what is considered waking consciousness of time passing is distorted. It’s likely. As far as it seems to me.

Waking time is trapped by clocks or the arc of the sun across a sky, trapped by a dulled and limited awareness of the fullness of moments when maintaining a focus on so few sensations and thoughts, much too often in a linear, chronological sequence.

Time in dreams? I do not know how to measure it. I’m not sure it can be measured in anything approximating time as it is understood or experienced while awake. As far as most of my experiences of being awake inform me. Though not all of my waking experiences.

Some have occasionally objected to my occasional waking experiences of what I can’t really call time but they insist is time. I’m told that the experiences through waking time that, for me, more closely resemble time as I experience through dreams are experiences of “psychosis.” I’ve read the definitions and diagnoses of psychosis from many different psychiatric and psychological sources. At best, they seem to be lazy categorizations of experiences that cannot be classified, categorized, or compartmentalized linguistically.

The fluidity of such waking experiences begs for a more respectful, creative, engaged, complex, and intelligent explanation. The experiences as they are laugh at such descriptions and explanations. They understand them as a academic mathematician might understand first-grade arithmetic; they are but a tiny subset of the experience of time just as basic arithmetic is a fragment of mathematics. 

It’s not as if those waking experiences are even the mathematical equivalent of Euler’s Identity, in both it’s elegance and simplicity, which still serves as but one gateway into the unquantifiable—or at least ongoing—beauty and terror of being and experience that are not conducive to either addition or subtraction. 

One way to say this is that these words are different than they seem. To interpret through linearity or through the contiguity of sentences is to deny oneself a fuller experience, the beginnings of an experience that may result in a fruition of engorged and ripened understanding. What is meant within a sentence is not what is meant between sentences and certainly not between sentences separated by paragraphs—and there are meanings between sentences separated by paragraphs.

We could fault language, the English language, but that is only if I submit to its grammar and rules at all times. I shan’t. I won’t. I haven’t. The work I am doing is nothing compared to the work you need to do to fathom what I am writing. I cannot make it easier for you because there is nothing easy about understanding experiences I’ve had in dreams and waking life through words I’m using to create something that is more like a linguistic equation rather than a description, explanation, or story.

Imagine starting with E=mc2 and trying to translate that code into an experience of the physics it attempts to represent? Beginning with a conception and trying to decipher its potential realities through understanding the conception is … describe snow to someone who has never experienced it either personally through physical experience or through video evidence. Have fun.

You may be thinking as you are reading, “When will he get to the dream?” But this is the dream. Not the totality of it, but an integral truth within it if not a truth encapsulating it. This is a handful of pebbles dropped into a fish bowl buried in a beach of pebbles with no distinguishable markers of where it is located within the totality of the beach which may be of any size in any location on any planet at any moment. It’s not static or finite; it may be shifting through the tides or reshaped by winds and rain. It might not even be accessible through analogy which might make it all but inaccessible to narrative thought. Which means I’m misleading you rather than helping you understand.

You might then say “dada!” and I wouldn’t argue. This, though, is not yet dada. It is an antecedent to the necessary. Once it becomes unnecessary then dada may become, but only through its own necessary unnecessariness. But necessity itself might choose not to be involved. It’s likely.

Experiences such as these which have not yet been given word cannot reconcile with necessity or even with the negated concept of the unnecessary. But it is important that it is not the experiences that deny necessity rather than necessity which denies involvement.

This is important only for the experiences. Necessity finds this entirely unimportant. Which is its prerogative and, frankly, the experiences are grateful that they are unnecessary which ultimately frees them from responsibility as a means to become play; in essence, they are so unrelated to responsibility that even the term “amoral” would be absurd as a reference. 

Being unrelated to morality, the experiences are liberated in such a way that they become more than what morality and immorality and even amorality could allow. Morality, immorality, and amorality could be swallowed by the experiences, tasted, and spit out, but never could they be swallowed, ingested, and shat from the ass of experience. These experiences have no ass. In fact, they have no digestive tract. Consumption is a nothingness for these experiences, but not a conceptual nothingness. The experiences are; consumption is not. 

These experiences, dreaming and sometimes waking, cannot be defined by what they are not. They are secluded from nothing even as they embrace absurdity. After all, absurdity is and nothingness isn’t. We refer to irrationality because we mean something by it and if that something exists it necessarily has meaning merely by existing. We wouldn’t bother with it at all if it didn’t exist.

And yet, these dreams, whatever it is they are, are unnecessary even though they are. They contain meaning as well. But their purpose is not meaningfulness and their unnecessariness is moral rather than existent. But that’s only true because they have no purpose.

Again with the negations. They necessarily must exist because they exist. But that’s clumsy, too. They exist because they exist. But if I write only “They exist” you may accidentally wonder why and I can assure you there is no a priori reason for their existence which is why I state that “They exist because they exist.”

That satisfies your unspoken but ever-present need for causal explanation. You could exclaim, “Ah, they are! I need not causation! I am free of causation. Causation ceases! Causation never was!” And then, “Why am I referring to that which isn’t and thus creating it as something that is through the application of negation?”

I state only that it’s not your fault. Language has trapped us this way as negation only exists (perceptually) through language. It may exist independently of language, but in that case we couldn’t use the concepts of nothingness or negation to point at the existence of nonexistence. Hmmm. No, negation and nothingness are always conceptual. 

However, language and conception exist so it is fair to say that negation exists, necessity exists, causation exists, responsibility exists, and morality exists. I could say that those are unnatural or artificial existences, but that would only be true if language and conception were unnatural. They occur so they must be natural in some fashion, but maybe that is because I equate the concept of “existence” with the concept of “natural.” So, forget “natural.” Language and conception exist. 

These dreams, though, defy conventions of language and conception. That is not to say they do not incorporate them. They do. But they use language and conception in inexplicable ways which seems to defy the rules of language and conception. They somehow break those rules while still maintaining the rules as something akin to guidelines that may be heeded or may be ignored, rejected, shat upon, juggled, tossed on the ground, ground out like a cigarette, or any manner of other types of interaction.

The languages and conceptions of dreams are unbound. They are created in these dreams, waking or not. The dreams, the experiences I label dreams in this case, are the creators, the sources, and yet not linear or causal. Languages and conceptions are created into being or, perhaps, become being.

No, that’s not right. They occur. My application of words continuously undergo refinement as a means to clarify rather than muddle. If I bear responsibility for this expression of experiences that have no relation to responsibility, it is perhaps because language cannot escape responsibility even if the waking and sleeping dreams are occurrences of escape from responsibility.

In other words, to speak of what has no responsibility creates responsibility. To speak, to write, to express, those are acts shaped into responsibilities. The experiences which cannot come into existence through language are liberations. The languages and conceptions attempting (and failing) to recreate experiences are beholden to responsibility as sharing is an act of ethics.

I may proclaim language and conception to be other than ethical, but if I express that to you or anyone else then I no longer own the ideas conveyed. You have received them and you can say, “No!” or “How dare you?” or “#MeToo” and I’ll sigh and think, “Why the fuck did I open my fucking mouth?”

It is difficult to predicate without causation. I am trapping myself. I don’t believe the latter. And yet, I know it’s true because I have experienced the latter. And yet, I have also experienced other than the latter. So maybe the responsibility of expression is only a part-time job and never works nights or weekends.

Dada, the unnecessary necessity, I implore you! Thus, I abandon responsibility after having allowed it to creep through this writing. To witness the occurrence of dada where and when what-is occurs independent of what it is when it hasn’t deluded itself into believing it is being controlled by what it controls, responsibility is ridiculed as a practical joke soliciting laughter without charging a dime.

…

Kant’s categorical imperative obliges persons to consider persons as ends-in-themselves rather than means-to-an-end. His conception of ethics and aesthetics resonated with Buber’s notion that phenomena is always a gateway to things-in-themselves just as the noumenal can only be encountered in and by way of concrete phenomena. Buber managed to meld Kantian metaphysical and ethical conceptions into an immediate relation with things-as-they-appear (perception) and their representation that resonated with his discovery of Nietzsche’s conception of the immediacy of reality. How did a person with a name like Buber write anything other than fairy tales? The Dionysian primacy of life in its particularity, immediacy, and individuality and the Apollonian world of form, measure, and abstraction were conceived as interdependent by Buber. Both the Dionysian and the Apollonian are constitutive of human experience through the coloration of interactions with the Other in nature, with humans, and with the Divine Thou.

The notion that time and space are pure forms of perception underlies all of this thought. Thus, phenomena are things-as-they-appear. This makes persons, through perceptions, the center of the universe. Can theology replace stop signs? At best, I can say that “how humans perceive is human.” Besides, there are so many different conceptions and perceptions of time and space that standardized definitions, descriptions, and explanations create innumerable opportunities to misinterpret while believing we understand one another. Maybe good is a hairy foot. This leads to feelings of betrayal, distrust, confusion, anger, and hatred while also resulting in feelings of togetherness, trust, understanding, joy, and love. 

But they are feelings. Feelings are personal experiences rather than shared experiences. Your feeling of understanding and connection related to our interactions may occur while I feel misunderstood and alienated by the same interactions. “Butthole” is the greatest word in existence. I don’t know why you disagree with me about that.