It seems to me that all life is characterised by attempting to know, and accepting that you don’t know. If you think you know, then you’re in the first category, but also in denial. I think you’d have to be pretty cocky though to say you know, though.


For me too, it’s the scholars who attempt to know, the poets who accept that they don’t know. It should be said that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an optimist/pessimist dichotomy (though maybe it is sometimes?), and it should also be noted that it is perhaps the case that many scholars are in the ‘category 1 + deluded’ group. Thus they claim to know. When really they don’t. But even if they are in denial, and do not actually know what they claim to know, they still engage in the process of attempting to know, yeah? Thus the categories. Of course, poets ‘attempt to know’ things, too. But we’re talking about a very specific type of ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’. It’s not knowing things like ‘1+1=2’ and it’s not knowing things like ‘I am confused’ or things like this. We could go on categorising like philosophers, but I’m not a philosopher. Really it’s knowing the real things, what the world is and what God is. And maybe scholars don’t even claim to know these things. But in trying to order everything of the universe, there is still some attempt to reach an answer. A hope (which, we must note again, does not mean that poets are not possessive of hope) there is one answer, and one order. Poets much more often embrace a certain degree on confusion. One could argue they offer simply a different kind of order, but if we were to say this, we would still have to admit that it is a very different kind of order, with no or very few constants, an 'order' not built on any sort of.. slowly accumulated foundation of knowledge, but rather one entirely open to change, shifts, freedom - one that is different for everybody, one completely maleable.

A thesis offers a hypothesis, and a conclusion, and, as it goes, will lead to a Ph.D being awarded if it ends up being 'a significant original contribution to knowledge', or something like that. It seeks to add to the building blocks. without doubt, it can certainly challenge the established structure and basis of knowledge entirely, evne attempt to tear it all down, but still let it be said that this is done in order to build another structure, lay new foundations for a claimedly more accurate representation of the world, the nature of things.

poets are not generally concerned with building blocks, pure rigour and creating structures. I am not really sure what exactly they are concerned with, at the moment I want to say that a good poet is simply concerned with capturing experience and nothing more, I haven't thought it all through quite enough. For poets also seek truths, like we can say theses do. But different kinds.... I'm not sure. Poets can be empiphanic, to be strongly influenced by the wikipedia articles on Joyce and Proust. Proust can dedicate a good part of Volume I of In Search of Lost Time (a beautiful, beautiful book) to simply thinking about flowers and church steeples, and he does want to know something about them, and the world, by doing this. But, it's not the same kind of knowing. It's using them... to know the experience of the world, to know... God... (Proust being extremely patheistic, to qualify the term contextually), and it's different to using evidence and facts and things to claim to 'know' the nature of the world like one does in academia. We are entering Alvin Plantiga sensus divitus territory now, which is helpful, I guess, he talks about proving God's existance, and you see the night sky or a flower or something, and it is not evidence in an argument where the conclusion is 'God exists' (i.e. I see this flower, therefore God exists - he says this would be a terribly weak argument) but rather when you see the flower, you simply come to know that God exists. Replace the flower with anything, any experience. They don't even have to be like the flower at all, one of his other key examples is when you do something bad and you feel terrible - and this leads to belief in God. Again not an argument like 'P1 - I killed my brother, P2 - I feel bad, Therefore P3 God exists' no, but just through the experience, you can say you 'know' God exists. The idea is actually way more complex that that but, that's the core of it. The faculty through which you come to 'know' in this manner he calls the 'sensus divinitus' (sp.) ~ obv. translating to something like the 'sense of divinity' (Latin next semester, eh.).

These are just experiences. Poets are about experinces. Maybe both poets and scholars have conclusions. Maybe poets use experiences to reach them and scholars evidence. But that's a muddled idea. I don't know. I still just want to say that poets are just about capturing experience. you know, an academic can go, x, therefore y. And a poet can go, 'x'. (and, oh, that's intresting, x is intresting, let's have a think about it and a float around it and give it an all round good consideration and possibly think about trying to penetrate right to the heart of this x).

I have to note somewhere again of course, the rationality vs. irrationality thing. Academia is strictly rational. Maybe it's not fair to say that poets are irrational, perhaps only the most madly wild of them are, but still, they are not wholly rational. And is the universe wholly rational or not wholly rational? AH! There is a good question. Its answer of course proving who's getting at things in the right way (if not both/neither). Rationality again, to refer to now long forgotten posts, a strictly human thing, at least as far as any of us are able to prove. Steven Hawking talks of a great hope of us building a grand comprehensive model of the universe, and this finally built, will then put us in the position of 'knowing the mind of God' (or some wording extremely similar to this). This of course, this model, is meant to be created through yeah, this careful, slow accumulation of building blocks, ultimately intended to form this comprehensive model. Yet what if the mind of God can't be accessed through a stack of building blocks? What if God simply lives inside each and every one of those building blocks - each x, and we don't need to stack up all the xs in a massive pile to know Y - in fact, this method is not going to work at all?

But then perhaps it will, though? we don't know. everyone has faith in something, right. Hawking in his building blocks, Plantinga in his sensus divinitus. And a man in his wife, and a child in his parents, and everyone else in everything else. I'll feel like Ecclesiastes if I start giving those big long lists; 'a time to live, a time to die...'.

I want to end with a poem, but it will show a bias to the poet side, and there's already a stong enough one of them running through here. But let it be said, the scholar is an entirely reasonable position. I currently spend my days studying, and I may for may more yet. And we owe them plenty. We also owe poets plenty. yeahh i duno. this was quite short, but i gotta get some sleep.

Some thoughts stemming from Pascal's Wager.

rationality is a human faculty and has nothing to do with the universe. It is an evolutionary development that has been exceptionally useful to us in dealing with this world. However it has many great flaws, for example it cannot deal with concepts like infinity. It can only deal with the finite, which is understandable, as the world which shaped our genetic structure is finite in all the relevant aspects. How could science then, a practice based entirely on rational inquiry ever form a complete picture, obtain a total understanding of the universe when by its nature it is unable to contain or fully understand/conceive of/ comprehend concepts like infinity, and possibly others that I’m not aware of. We can form some idea of the infinite, we can claim to know it exists, we can incorporate it into some of our equations and theories. But we can’t truly be said to know it like we know the finite world. It requires a totally different way of knowing that, of course, we humans can’t conceive of, and so don’t know what this ‘way of knowing’ is. So I assert that yes, science will never obtain its complete picture, and rationality with it.




What then is the alternative? It is, (by default), irrationality. some form of it. If rational inquiry fails, irrational actions/belief/etc. something else/etc. potentially can succeed. However it really is unquantifiable and unchartable territory for humanity. Can we prove that irrationality can succeed in this way? No, we cannot, and in fact, to even attempt to prove this is paradoxical, as the concept of proving is inextricably linked to logic and rationality. Thus there is necessarily a leap of faith.



But there are problems.



a.) Which direction to leap in? A: I don’t know.

b.) I think this is a big one. The idea of actually desiring to know the universe, to understand it, to be embraced by it, to have a life of meaning, to find meaning, to pursue things in general, to desire, well, these things are unavoidably evolutionary. They are traits for survival. But if we are rejecting rationality then, this rationality that comes from evolution and the environment, should we not then reject these rational traits also? Why pursue? Why desire to know, to come closer to anything, let alone the infinite? Then we have, of course, why live? We need to justify a pursuit of the absolute and the infinite.
However again there are issues of cyclicality. Why are we attempting to justify? This is again a concept of logical and rationality, if one is rejecting rationality in making an irrational leap of faith, why should it need justification?

I guess this is again a paradox. It’s like the idea if the sceptics’ ladder, when sceptics try to justify their belief that we know nothing, except that we know nothing. Some sceptics have argued this is justifiable by way of the following method (I think it’s something like this, but I need to go re-read it), that they have followed a logical process, analogous to climbing a ladder they say, and at the top of this logical ladder, they have found the conclusion that humans can know nothing for certain. Once reaching the top of the ladder, they then kick their feet, disregard it and its logical process, and view the world from their higher position, with the retention of their one certainty. It’s a crazy position, but one must admit they can understand it/ see how it works (perhaps at least if you’ve read a bit more about it than outlined here). And maybe this is the same, or a similar analogy is useful. We have climbed a ladder of rationality, and at the top we have found that we should adopt a position on irrationality and blind faith, perhaps. So the rational action then is to kick away the ladder and embrace this. However, and this is where we differ from the sceptic analogy, we simultaneously realise in going to kick down the ladder that if we are going to embrace this model of irrationality, under irrationality, there is no justification (in a logical sense) for its embrace, for kicking down the ladder. There is only a justification under a rational model. But under the rational model, we have decided to reject rationality, which thus means we have no reason for kicking down the ladder. irrationality doesn't even understand the assent of the ladder in the first place. etc. etc. etc. round and round it goes. Therefore I find one to be stuck on top of a ladder, merely contemplating either a total nihilism, or a total embrace of the divine, the infinite and the absolute, and in this heady dichotomy of the mind you are without any ability to know why you're in it, or why you should or should not be. And of course, in this realm of confusion and total possibility, maybe it is even that embracing nihilsm and embracing of the divine universe and God, are the same "“I wish I was free/ Of that slaving meat wheel/ And safe in heaven dead”, Kerouac writes.

Do you know that feeling, your mind races and races in ecstasy, you are gathering more and more, understanding higher and higher, then suddenly bam, ouch, you can’t go any further in your thoughts and you feel like you’ve hit a great block and you and your mind collapse back down. This is the same thing.

This was going to be a word document where I did study, then it began to turn into a more general discussion of issues relating to Pascal’s Wager, then it has finally become a bare and meagre attempt to capture the chief philosophical problem that has occupied my mind this last year or two, and an attempt to better understand where my mind rests most generally. I have said to myself often these last few weeks ‘you’re stuck between nihilism and theism, nothing else’. This I guess has been an attempt to get at this a little more. It has not been a very good one, but I will admit it has been better than any I have accomplished so far in my life.

Two final comments to myself which are just complain-y:

-do other 18 year olds thing like this? Is it exceptional that your mind does this, or can do this, or strives to do this, this kind of thinking, as above?

-this is what sucks about studying philosophy where I am at in the study of philosophy. You... just talk about random dumb shit and engage in basic-as arguments where you simply take one simple position or the other, write 45 minute essays about something. I feel like all this stuff as above, I have to do myself, but you only have the spare-hours of your day to do it in, because you’re a student, and you’ve got to get grades and things, and your free-time is what’s left. Where you can read some real, full books, write some things. Ah I duno. I guess I am pleased that I’ve clarified my position more clearly to myself. I will continue reading, I know I’m just young and that there is so much more I need to consider here. Kierkegaard I feel will be a reasonable place to start, or as reasonable as any. So after exams, Kierkegaard it is. Then onwards from there.

And back to Moby Dick. Our mad and irrational Ahab after his whale... yet he still can’t get him... perhaps he was not mad enough...

I feel like everyone is blogging a large number of times tonight. Well, Sonya has blogged like three times today. and Wibur has blogged four. not that they know i know this and it might be strange indeed that i have made note of this. but it's not like i even use this as a proper blog. it's just like a big endless white scroll where I can dumb stuff, slash occasionally bring stuff out of. (like, out of the white. give the white form. but that's another story, another time, here's a note to myself to write it down, it involves white paper, wrenching, and the relative methods of Michaelangelo and Rothko for bringing form out of nothingness whiteness. which are both opposing (opposing in some senses, not all, of course) and which go around my head constantly. not constantly but often enough. i came up with the opposition last year. anyway.)

i feel kind of sleepy and underwhelmed at the world. i want to write about how strange and white the world is.

this blog post was just an attempt to keep up.

Le Petit Prince

I just pour my head out on here. It's such a mess but it feels good. Right now I should be thinking about my German oral assesment, but I was just thinking....

about interpretations. and understanding. and how for me in my own life, The little prince is a really intresting thing.

I think i first picked it up (I was given it as a present for my birthday (?) by the daughter of some french ambsadorial (sp.) official) when I was seven or eight. And I really enjoyed it. But just beacuse it was pleasant, and the little prince, he was a good guy, and becuase it was kind of magical and fantastical, and becuase of all this kind of thing.

Then I put it down for another I don't know, well, untill 5th form, when I was looking for an easy book to add into my reading log, becuase I was rowing first term, and had hardly any time, but we had a quota to fill. And I remember that time, I had decided it was all about the power and value of innocence and youth. We were reading a book about it at the time on class, and I guess that just shone though. The power of youth, even naivity (sp.), to see through the convoluted, even outright ridiculous adult world, to drive through to more absolute (absolute then I considered only in a positive sense) truths. and it was about what youth and innocence could show adults, even the stranded narrator, who himself declared his life to be not so much attached to any adult company as such.

Anyway I think I held onto that reading for a while following this, reading the book a number of other times over especially, I think, 6th form holidays.

Then I came back to it again thinking about schol. english. and by then I'd kind of grown quite a bit english-wise, and was able to concieve books in all manner of strange or novel or intresting ways. anyway I think it was because I'd done some psycho-analytical stuff for media, and if I didn't strictly attack Le Petit Prince in a Freudian sense, it was Freudian-esque. My reading there considered the whole thing in this way:

A man goes out into the desert. The desert is an isolated, silent place. It removes one from society, and gives one time to think. the stranded narrator has been stuck in this baren and silent desert for a number of days, and then the little prince comes along. Now I then saw the prince as the re-awakening, the re-arrival, of the narrator's subconsious, and of his childhood self (that self discussed in the first few chapters, the child who liked flowers, who could see boa constrictors in drawings of boa constrictors). The prince was a metaphor for this, and the journeying through the planets a re-visitation of experiences of the narrator's childhood. And he had come about because of the setting, the desert where the narrator was totally removed from society. And so, the dialouges between the two were really just an internal dialouge in the narrator's head. And I had so much more besides this, and to support it. For example at the end, or near the end, we have our illustration where the narrator tells us we may find the little prince too, this was the place where he found him. and the thing was, the image is totally non-descript, just two sand dunes and a star, from memory. which adds tothe thesis that anyone may come upon a little prince of thier own, if they head out into some isolated environment where they are removed from society. and it also is like, there is a definte truth, and there are true values in the world, if one just takes the time to sit, and look for them - they will become apparent.

anyway yeah. And now I feel when I think about it, it develops further still. For one I see for example the house in one of the early chapters with flowers and that, as an allusion to Proust (and ah, Proust, he is madly good, and I do want to return to reading him and his giant novel). And I also strart to convieve the prince/the entire story in much more religious/biblical terms. For I beleive it's true that in the bible, a lot of soul-searching was done in the desert, even by Jesus himself. And we have our snake, and we have the little prince, who, like Christ, is a monarch of a heavenly kingdom, is he not? At any rate, he is a prince/king, and he does come from another, higher world. And now I'm begining to concieve the prince as a sort of wandering, naive, passive (perhaps more passive than Jesus was) Christ like figure. In many obvious ways I guess, in his other-worldliness, in his affiliation with the desert, in his ideas about love, his ideas about the confusion/dissilussionment/lack of clarity etc. in society, with his planetary visits, etc., how he likes the old lamp-lighter more than any of the others. and i guess of course the biggest thing is at the end. the little prince dies, but he tells us he's not really going to die. (I'm doing this from memory but, it is something very much like this). He gives himself up to the snake, this metaphor in the bible of worldly evil, which I understand Jesus also gives himself up to (if this is not explicitly the intention, it is the case), but, as with Jesus, it's intentional in the sense that the little prince knows what he's doing, and also knows the ultimate outcome of the action, that he won't actually 'die'. And then there is the return hinted at, by the narrator himself, as discussed earlier. It's not to put forward the idea that The Little Prince is explictly even intended to be a Christ-like figure, but I think there are intresting parallels there, certianly at the very least right at the end, which is something i think i was very aware of actually from even my early readings. But like I said he's more meandering, and he's softer, and more naive.

who knows what I'll think next year. Thinking's always intresting. anyway, german oral assessment. this was a nice short and orderly post.

Hello, mind! I thought I'd come back to you this saterday night. I still can't fucking spell saterday. E or U? I try and remember but I can't ever sort it out, there are just some things you can never fix up in your head. Like I can never tell the difference between yellow and white. Or you know of course I can, but I can't ever say the right word for the right colour, no matter how hard I try.

Anyway. today is raining hard, and it has rained all week. it's been crazy, especially walking up and down to university, not being able to drive, not having any close by buses, and having only non-waterproof shoes. Rain is weird. Anyway, what Iwanted to do is sit down and finish off some off the stuff I've started on here recently and not finished. So now I'm going to spend like 2 hours or how ever long doing that. It's all muddled in my head now and I've got no idea where it will go and how it will come out.

(from thursday?):




and I think, we can't think everything at once, and everything is too much, and there is too much everything, and if we can't even properly understand people, how can we properly understand god. who is much bigger. But god understands everything. My diagram above is really courtesy of my history teacher last year, M. Savage. with some minor judgements, but essentially the same. We just had long off topic discussions in that class. so first understand X as god, Y and Z are humans. Savage's intrepreation/use of the diagram was about humans growing in understanding and acceptance, becoming more like God/Gods. so there, Z in an improvement on X. and it's like over time, as humans have grown in knowledge, become more all embracing, societies become more and more accepting, we've expanded out. I've tweaked mine though, for it necessarily works in the opposite way. For a start, with pessimism, my Y and Z are much shorter, you can see. Of course, God, X, is infinite in all these cpacities, so there is no diagram that can be truely drawn to scale, but the realative sizes/size of advance between Y and Z is intended to be symbolic. humans are so finite in their capacities.

The diagram, the x axis part of it, can be put in a number of ways. acceptance is one, as stated above. God accepts all things, people, etc. etc. but humans are not so good at this. they get angry. or want to challenge things. etc. etc. granted, some people are alot better at acceptance than others, but still understand, in relation to X, they are only Zs. This is my view, anyway. In a Christian sense, Love I think is a good one for the x axis. Jesus loved everyone, I understand. I mean I don't know anything about these things, and I know like in Michaelangelo's painting, in revelations, he was getting pretty angry, but I think I have the jist, you know. Anyway, unconditional love. Humans, though, find it so difficult to unconditionally love everyone else. to give unconditionally. to accept everyone in all thier different states. that's hard. but they should try. stretch thier arms out, as it were, and you see the diagram works that way too (if I had mad paint skills, I could have made the ends of each line hands, the lines themselves even arms, you know. it works like that. acceptance, love, understanding, knowing. we can only go so far. and it's not very far at all. and I think they're all intertwined as well. to understand everything is to love everything is to accept everything. to understand the beauty in every action! the ecstacy in every action! the beauty and god of all the world (and then side note, that starts going down a pantheistic track)! To have no hate, but to love even hate, or those who hate, or create hate in the world, unconditionally. Is Leonard Cohen's 1964(?) 'Flowers for Hitler' about that? Maybe, probably, the Jew writing a book for Hitler like that, hmm. I'll hunt it down one day, but I understand it's not easily avaliable. I really don't know where this is going. There are so many sides to everything. I come back to that basic line of Keats everyone knows, with the truth-beauty beauty-truth, and that like above, the stuff before intoducing Cohen. But at the same time this point of view is terribly nilhistic, in the sense that you go down that path, where if you love everything and everyone equally, you assign then an equal value to everything. That value could be an infinity, but it could just as easily be a zero. and then you are a nihlist. and the removal of varying values, oh, I am totally confused and totally confuse myself! And loving God? But do you need to love God more than say John down the street? Or is loving John down the street loving God? And can you love John if you don't really do anything nice for him really, just.. I don't even know? And even if he's mean, and kicks cats? It's crazy to accept him as you accept other people. But no it's wrong because, you should also say that if, if you unconditionally love him, properly, properly, he'll fall out of chaos in his head and stop kicking cats and see the light, as it were. becuas ehe doesn't really want to kick cats, he's just gone a bit crazy coz of something, and he's probably rather unset inside. anyway you don't love him for kicking cats, you just love him. and then he comes to love. but then the world is proposterous! humans can't love that much, they'd go mad! things become stagnant and pleasant and you want again, chaos, madness, change difference violence primal chaos. it's true. there are alot of questions about everything. I think loving unconditionally's an intresting topic. I remember savage telling us about trying to embrace the idea, going to parties, people telling him that they liked his jacket, and he just giving it to him. and then his like life spiraled down. maybe that's no proper loving unconditionally. but then what is? And how does equal assignment of values work? And surely loving people who kick cats the same as you love your best friend, or God, is crazy. it works somehow but. you know. and anyway this all proves the point that our line thing of understanding is so small. it's the whollleeee point.

So we come back of course, of course, to art, as a tool for stretching our arms wider. Being able to grab hold of more of the world, to embrace more of it, to take more of it in. as a tool for saying more than statements, more than just i duno. more than philosophical essays.

i want to cut back into what i was writing last whenever I was writing this, in links up, it links up, everything's the same, everything's the same:


Nausea. By Sarte. I haven't read it at all, but I want to, but I understand it's the same - there's a guy trying to write an autobiography right, some of the book is this anyway, and he can't he can't capture a person, in words. And it's a problem with language as much as anything, language's inability to encompass. it's neccessarily singular, specific, made for dealing with this world. I want to read Wittgenstein on language but, quite reasonably, I think, think I won't be able to understand it. so in place of language, what is there? Gestures? Eyes? paintings? Silence.

The only way we can think is with language. and language can not encompass everything, and it is impossible to fully get inside someone else's head with only language as a tool to get in, and it is impossible to get inside the world by thinking about it. and fuck, this is the sammmeee as bellow. and it's the same as a thousand people have thought before. and this is why people become monks and renounce language to come to know God, and understand and accept the world, and this is why (some) people take drugs, and drink, to stop thinking, and to just fall into swing with the 'drunk world' (see bellow), and this is where automatic writing/drawing comes from, not thinking, just creating, that sleeping subconious understanding seeping out into art, and this being considered more profound, and closer to X.

and I give up going down this path, and I cut back in here, and no worries with all the cutting and changing, becuase really, it's all the same threat of discussion:

there are pictures, but not as powerful as books for me, more engagement in books... but painting may work for painter, a process of intense and beautiful ecstatic creation of art and I think writing would work best for a reader, too. poetry as a great naked process of learning and understanding, but in a swirlier way (see bellow) that manages to get closer to a truth than a direct assult (philosophy) or silence (meditation). it's a human lunge in the dark at X. which is multiply interperetable and defineable, as below, that X. my head is stagnating. I need some new idea to think, new fictions to read. I will finish Dost. then on to something new. I think Bolano, I think and I want it to be so, but I'm not sure. but onwards. I should also be studying for university.

and chop and change:

I was thinking when I first discovered, first realised, the meaning of the term ecstacy. I don't know where it was, or how, probably maybe in the later stages of reading on the road, but my first memory related to it is in art history class, 7th form. the memory is neccessarily vauge, but it's just a feeling, a sense, with a dim image, and i just remember knowing what ecstacy meant. and another memory just similar of sitting in bed, and the dim image related to it is me looking up at my Smiths poster. madness.

I remember first reading Whitman's line (in some place or other):


"I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least"

and is it patheism or not, by the way, that quote? When I first saw it, I jumped, yes it was, but I don't know if Whitman would have thought similarily, and I think that in his mind was a rather christian sense of god, and can christianity recognise God in a pantheisic sense? In some respects yes, I think.

I remember when I was little, and hearing, coming to hear, that 'God was inside everyone' (something like this). And I always pictured a little minuture man (you know that classic media representation of God) inside your stomach, and the devil was there too I think, and they were just chilling, and I found it very weird. like if you had an x-ray and then you could see inside and there they would be.

and what is the holy spirit, and does it inhabit everything, and can it be understood in a patheistic sense?

I'm starting to grow attached to the characters in the brothers karamazov, or have, rather, to Aloysha, and Mitya. and have a bunch of affection for that Kratorskin (sp.) kid.

and there are no no new ideas in the world! where are the new ideas! i DON'T SEEM TO BE ABLE TO FIND ANY!! this is why i want to read the savage dectives next, perhaps it will have some new ideas for me. i also know there are some new ideas to be found in very complex philosophy, which is why I pursue it, shall continue to do so.

and books are swirly and they are great that they are swirly, to hold two contradictory opinions at once is to be god like, to hold an infinite number of contradictiory opinions at once is to be God, and for a human to hold wholly contradictiory opinions at once he is insane, and illogical, and this god, god is illogical, in that he is not logical, and logic is a human thing, a human thing, and do not criticize god becuase he does not add up in human terms, and this is why people get drunk, and they are illogical when they are drunk, and they are swirlier, and they are closer to God, and maybe it's all just a big mind-trick, and remember that, remember that. but the first part is true. to whole heartedly be a a national supporter and a labour supporter at the same time is to come to understand god, if you can come to understand this of course, but of course, of course, you cant do that! becuase humans are designed to be rational, and logical, to take one course of action, to make decisions, it's all about survial, survial, and yet yet! there's this other side of us! this strange other side, that other animals, that rocks & plants for sure, don't have, the illogical side, and as Dostoyevsky says, what principally distinguishes us from animals is our ability to curse, and so maybe God lies in curses!

and see how that doesn't make any sense! and see how that is and isn't the point! and see how we cant get enough things in our heads, becuase our heads aren't made for it! and see how essays are silly, and to hold an opinion on anything is silly, and that books and paintings are better because thier swirly systems can hold more, can reach further than us alone, can jam pack more into them that makes them fit to burst, and means you can't write a silly english essay about them at all, without totally and completely mis-representing them!

anger and hilarous laughing.

Whitman:

"And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."

"Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."

I think I love most of all those last two lines, especially "And I leave them where they are". beautiful.

and oh gosh, there are more things to write about. when I'm in a more logical frame of mind, I want to write about the problem of 'irrational' (again, the term is used to bring out the fact that must be accepted, that faith is not rational, in that it doesn't rely on emperical evidence, strong conclusive conclusions, etc.) faith.

Ah.

And I just think I should chuck in at the end, more stuff in my box of drafts, because I'm not going to come back to it, it's just me, tiredly writing a few weeks back about importiant dreams. Good bye and oh gosh, this was the worst blog post of the lot and it had the lest sense in it and it's a mess. it's clarity is completely gone, everything is murky and ridiculous. anyway here:

Ah, my head hurts from so many things. I don't know, no one else, no one else! Where are you all, where are these people!

I had a dream last night, I think it's going to be one I'll really remember. There are not many like that, but they're importiant, and I'll have to get them down on paper some time. And dreams are so hard to get on paper. you just have snatches in your mind, images, words, peoples eyes, colours...


I hate how I write.


I'm sitting in Critical Thinking class, up the back, and this girl comes up to me. She's young, with big eyes, and younger than you should be if you're at university, I later learn she's 15 (so she says). I'm sitting up there packing up my things, and she comes up to tell me, and she tells me that my reasoning abilty is 'seriously flawed'. That I can't construct logical positions. Now I think it's because she's so young, and at university, which I assume means she must be pretty bright, which leads me not to just ignore her but demand why, why, what she means. I'm genuinely worried, and there's something inside of me that suggests she might be right. But she doesn't say anything, just smiles and laughs, and runs down the steps of the lecture theatre and pushes open the door. Of course I'm following, and I catch her in the hall outside. But she won't tell me anything, just looks at me with big eyes, I ask how old she is, what she means, she just runs off.



We run, I'm increasingly frustrated that I can't get any answers, I'm growing tired, we wind through the corridors, end up, eventually, eventually, in a brick garden, by which I mean it's a garden with a grass lawn, but with brick steps and brick flower beds with tall flowers in them, and specifically there are delphiniums, and maybe bluebells. We are still in the university (the bricks I think give that away to me) but there might be faeries is that kind of garden. So I've caught her but all she talks is nonsense, out-of-breath nonsense when I ask her questions about why she thinks my arguements aren't logical, why she thinks that I can't posit reasonable theses. She doesn't have any answers, she just keeps giving me these silly suggestive smiles and is near-panting for having been out of breath. I finally gather she's 15 and some sort of brilliant genius girl. She says something about that what I write is just silly, it's made up, it's just me playing games, and that I should try writing something serious. Everything I write doesn't actually make sense if you look at it she tells me, and she can see that. This annoys me as she's hardly being serious herself, she's just paying games, but at the same time I know she is right about something there. And all the time the central images/colours are the bricks (slightly mossy), the delphiniums, her big wide suggestive laughing-eyes, and a certian roundness of her face. Oh, and her name's Olivia, for whatever reason. And all the time I'm so frustrated I can't get clear, sensible answers out of her, she can't logcially form an argument to tell me my argument-forming is inadequate. And all the time at the back of my head too there's my two essays I'd just about killed myself writing the last three days before that friday (which is of course why this dream was happening). And she's just laughing, and talking nonsense, but I know what she's saying is sort of true, and it must be, because she's a 15 year old genius girl. She might finally grab my hand at the end there, I'm not sure.


It's all also because I picked up Yates again, too. that's the faeries and the delphiniums part.

Sleep madness

High ho!
High ho!
Eating fire all Night?
there's no cure for that
silly girl –
eating fire's a profession,
see it through!

Don't mince meat your words,
put poetry in your soup
vocabulary in your handbag's
dangerous,
silly girl –
put down your Rimbaud,
your Shakespeare, too!

Don’t you want to straighten your
hair girl, to learn to mime,
stopping the chase and
slowing, slowing?
Silly girl –
and madness is fine,
this that, that this.

Sifting thoughts wildly
through your
no-sleep night sieve,
I see you’re still awake
silly girl –
why not bed,
why not peace!

High ho!
High ho!
Eat fire all Night
there's no cure for that
silly girl –
eating fire's a profession,
see it through! see it through!

_______________________________________________________
sleep and silliness. I'm sick of university, as usual. so I'm up at 2am watching documentaries on art that I illegally downloaded and writing some random shit (see above). I have like, ALOT, of blog posts that I have started and haven't finished. I've got a new intrest in van Gogh, who never really got through to me before, too much boldness, too brash, strokes too big and bold, I thought. but there are some things in there I have just been made to notice. i'm tired. i wish winter were warmer. i want to go back to europe.

Drinking

Abraham Cowley (1618-67)

The thirsty Earth soaks up the Rain,

And drinks, and gapes for drink again.

The Plants suck in the Earth, and are

With constant drinking fresh and fair.

The Sea itself, which one would think

Should have but little need of Drink

Drinks ten thousand Rivers up,
So fill'd that they or'eflow the Cup.

The busie Sun (and one would guess

By's drunken fiery face no less)

Drinks up the Sea, and when h'as done,

The Moon and Stars drink up the Sun.

They drink and dance by thier own light,

They drink and revel all the night.

Nothing in Nature's Sober found,

But an eternal Health goes around.

Fill up the Bowl then, fill it high,

Fill all the Glasses there, for why

Should every creature drink but I,

Why, Man of Mortals, tell me why?

[After the Greek of Anacreon]

Ah so. where am I. the idea of this is that I'm going to release my mind from thoughts it has, and then I'll be able to sleep. I liked this poem. I thought it was a good metaphor for some of the things I think about, one side of my thoughts. It's like... like before really, like down bellow (every thing's the same). Becuase humans have consiousness, and all that jazz, more than anything else in the world, they are detached from it. They think about it, consider it, map it, plan it, analayse etc. etc. etc. right. and but the world, the world doesn't do that. it just is. it just buzzes. it doesn't have life or death or any of those human definition things. it just is. you know that idea. anyway I think that's buddhist thinking. you know, and you let go of life and death, you pantheistically embrace the buzzing world, and try and sink into its drunkenness? This is also the philosophy (theology? haha) of quality druggies. Quality like, they've got a goal there like that, they're not just smoking etc. to ingnore thier problems and that. My god this is terrible. I just need to write untill I sleep. but you know. I want to quote at random and then go on:

From my english text book:

"the first [the truth of fiction is not neccessarily true] is actually a venerable insight. Aristolte's teacher, Plato, banned most fiction from his republic becuase, he claimed, it enevitably distorted the truth. Plato beleived that absolubte truth did exist, yet in another world from our own. the things of our world for plato were shadows of that other one, and, accordingly, the things of the worlds of representational fiction were shadows of shadows. In this view, anyone who says of a novel "How true!" is decieved. For some time now, and especially since Neitzche, much theorising about representation (though not all) has had to do without Plato's idea of Absolute Truth. In this view, the world we seek to get to with no hope of finally arriving, is, paradoxically, the actual world we inhabit and the life that goes on in it. to put this in narrative terms... if narative discourse always mediates story, both story and discourse in turn mediate how we view the world. Narrative, with all its powerful and distorting rehotric, comes between us and the world. -- H.Porter Abbott.

Replace 'narrative' with 'consiousness' or 'language' or 'thinking' (all are one in the same and interlinked, of course) when it makes sense to do so.

I wrote along side this: "the sober human's inability to get inside his drunk world. He thinks too much. Alchol, drugs are bad in a sense, they impair rationality. but X is irrational. Moby Dick is irrational."

that's what I do in english, which is why I do philosophy. anyway everyone knows these ideas a thousand times over, but I'm just setting them out for myself in my head, straight, and digging deeper into ME.

Anyway so yes. On National radio the other day there was a BBC documentary on silence. and they went to monastaries, christian and buddhist and other religions like them. and the idea of silence, and that silence is penetrating into the world/god (/ they are the same thing, depending on where you sit -- the christian god is in another world, a distinct and higher one, the buddhist one is as I understand just, you know, it's pantheistic) and removing language, and thought, and consiousness, and narrative (thank you text book on narrative) to crawl inside the drunk world and huddle up, and just hum.

It was intresting though, of course, becuase then they talked to people who were'nt monks, but still religious. And the buddhists, they were all for as much sitting around being silent as possible, but Christians, of course, well Jesus talked to people. The Word is also rather importiant to Chirstianity. you know, just a bit. And they were like, Jesus found silence importiant, he went off into the desert to say Hi to God etc. but he also went amoung people and had a few chats and told them a few tales and that. and there was good and God and beauty there too.

anyway fuck I'm totally out of it. i can't bring together ANY OF MY THOUGHTS. it hurts. I'm just tired. I'm not truely inspired. but I want to get everything out. out out out out.

to continue. Nietsche and art. Art is to neitsche the combination of that drunken dionysian oneness with the world(/God) and the appolonian. Which is the human consiousness. He talks about something like the 'dream' side, which is like, humanity's ability to envsion, to plan, to map out, to have a wider image of how one can bring disperate things together into one, which is art. to utilize the buzzing force of the world and unify it, or was it to be inspired by the dionysian drunken world, and unify our perceptions of it. it's something like that. Anyway you see fuck, this is why I need to finish his book on the matter, and read so many other books. Do you know how many books, how many ideas there are out there! I loved loved loved how Dostoyevsky explains that in the Russian Orthodox tradition, people aren't said to have 'died' they are said to have 'fallen asleep in God'. Isn't that beautiful! doesn't it just fit perfectly! I think it's great. these are the only ideas that exite me anymore. I was thinking that you know I mean, you read that stuff all the time "all you can do is live life to the full" or "take every opportunity you get, make the most of life", but that stuff has never ever worked for me. And I like like Dostoyevsky sort of says, it's all christianity for atheists. it's all a cult around man, not god. but it's whack i reckon.

anyway to continue neitsche, neitsche's claims about art are part of what make humans better than being plants of animals. becuase they, as Cowley's poem indicate, live within and totally emersed in the buzzing drunkenness. And we don't. we can know it, come to experience it temporarily, maybe for longer periods of time though drug use, or meditation, silence, etc. etc. but not fully be there, be can't just be it, just like I said, know it, which is a typically human thing, right, to know things. But on the otherside we have this other power, the ability to unify, to bring together, to, you know, to THINK. and I'm not sure what I think about thinking yet, but it seems to be quite intresting powerful etc. etc. gives us a bit of an advantage. it ddoes lead to ART for example, which is rather powerful/intresting thing. and I think it's what D., or at least his Elder Zosima, talk about when they recognise the specialness of humanity. the ability to think, the ability to think FREELY (to the extent that it is possible) may lead to great sin, and great evil even, but also to great good, and greater, greater something, than can be had without it. and thinking brings trouble, but it's a trade off. Did Jesus (in christian tradtion) give people free thought? Ivan argues he did, or at least that he rejected the idea of bringing them under some sort of control.

And humans have all sorts of things that other things don't. They go wandering for instance. what a beautiful idea. and oh fuck, we don't even have to start considering how this all links to KEROUAC, becuase of course it's ALL kerouac. crazy wandering buddhist/catholic art creating apoloinan/dionysian human. too influential in my life and thinking. at the same time mad though, far on the dionysian side. there's alot to say there. Neal, Neal, was too much of the dionyisian, too much in communion with the Gods, that he would never have enough of the appolonian to create truely great ART. to be truely human (for maybe to be the truest human is to create the truest art) but Kerouac, kerouac could always pull it back. right on the brink of the abysis of dionysis, and having Neal shout up things from its depths, he did a good job. And there are men far more on the applonian side too. and the greats, the greats, the true greats, maybe they're somewhere in the centre. Shakespeare, Goethe, Mozart.those guys. just, maginifficent. no words even, right? limitless powers, almost limitless powers. Dylan is highly dionysian, he moves over too, the first ablums, espc. that disgusting times they are a'changin', are v. appolonian. he swings alot. he's a mad man. he drove himself wayward too, drugs etc.

I want to end with R.A.K. Mason, who is finally someone from New Zealand who I do actually love. he's mainly a 1920s fellow. didn't write alot, wrote alot of crap, but what's good, i like. Here the metaphors/similies/illusions have changed... but the message sis similar. the earth for example here is not drunk and godly, but is the human realm. obviously this is becuase it's strongly located within the christian sense of the way the world is. but anyway:

Old Memories of Earth

I think I have no other home than this
I have forgotten much remember much
but I have never any memories such
as these make out they have of lands of bliss.

Perhaps they have done, will again do what
they say they have, drunk as gods on godly drink,
but I have not communed with gods I think
and even though I live past death shall not.

I am rather forever bondaged fast
to earth and have been: so much untaught I know.
slow like great ships often I have seen go
ten priests ten each time round a grave long past

And I recall I think I can recall
back even past the time I started school
or went a-crusoeing in the corner pool
that I was present at a city’s fall

And I am positive that yesterday,
walking past One Tree Hill and quite alone
to me there came a fellow I have known
in some old times, but when I cannot say:

Though we must have been great friends, I and he,
otherwise I should not remember him
for everything of the old life seems dim
as last year’s deeds recalled by friends to me.

Okay so, there's stuff there that doesn't even fit what's above. but alot of it does. but hey, the world is so complex and everythnig is so complex but everything is so simple but at the same time complex and so you know. I just like that poem.

I also have a note here that I want to write down:
-an interpretation of romeo and juliet related to the above -- R&J youthful buzzing dionysisian agents, as such, with the friar App.+Dion., with the perfect (near perfect) balance and as the central character and the one with the greatest understanding of the world as it is
-things about WB Yeats
-60s as a base culture as the Greco-Roman one was.
-ideas on creation
-etc. etc.

sleep.