logic of an agnostic pantheist

"This is what God said: 'I promise that never again will all people and animals be destroyed by a flood. I am putting my rainbow in the clouds. And when the rainbow appears, I will see it and remember this promise of mine.'"

for despite all claims to an omniscient God, God in fact has something of a bad, or at least imperfect, memory. it is a memory that needs reminders of promises, the promise alone unable to substantiate itself. God needs aids as we need them. this imperfect memory defeats, first of all, assumptions of omniscience, knowledge being only sustained memories, and complete knowledge entailing a working memory of anything and everything, alpha and omega, first and final cause. the act of forgetting -- Forgetting being actually inherent to everything -- could not be a possibility were it a true case of omniscience. so, God does not know all (and indeed CANNOT know all anyway, as a thorough study of prophecy would show).

secondly, God's imperfect memory begets an altogether different reading of the scriptures, if they are indeed supposed to be God's Word. the bible is no less a historical telling by way of selective memory than the histories of humankind produced by its own imperfect collective memories. were we even to propose that God would be at least less inclined to error in his telling than humans, it would no more depreciate the weight, the heavy burdenous weight, of the condition of a possibility (and therefore SOME probability) for error; nor can it stave off the more immense problem that with limited memory (of any sort!) there is inherently, indispensibly, a perspective, a point-of-view, and necessarily, simultaneously, a bias in what is Told. alternate histories must therefore have alternate Gods, differentiated and distributed by people (or, the more likely case, pre-differentiated and pre-distributed by something human but unconscious or subconscious), people who themselves have points of view and biases. God(s) must be pluralistic. monotheism in its strong form then can only exist emically, in those cases of violent (abridging, omitting) isolationism, in self-limiting; in its weak form, monotheism must equate itself with pluralism of a sort, a closet monolatrism, whereby, just like "Love", only the name and the act of signification itself of SOMETHING (always something different) can serve a base for union.

archiving a few notes from the past (couple of) year(s)

i've decided to copy some scribblings down here from a year or so of English bookreadings, podcast lectures, etc., as i sip through teeth a third cup of my own concoction of asparagus tea. these notes are not in full, not even a substantial fraction of the notes i've taken, and i know that i have many more in other journals; but the mad archiving machine has already awaken -- and some is better than none.


+ lectures on history by Rufus Fears:

--> "Signposts" of education in history:

"1 - Despite the importance of doing so, we do not learn from history.

2 - Science and technology cannot immunize us from history's lessons.

3 - Freedom, which Americans believe is longed for by people worldwide, is not a globally shared value. By contrast, desire for power, whether wielded as a despot, or as a benevolent empire or superpower, is a universal value.

4 - Known as the cradle of civilization, the Middle East has also been the graveyard of empires, no matter what their intention, as the Romans and so many others have learned.

5 - America will experience the same ultimate destiny as the memorable democracies, republics and superpowers of the past.

6 - Religion and spirituality -- and the lust for power -- are the most profound motivators in history.

7 - Nations and empires rise and fall not because of anonymous social and economic forces but because of decisions made by individuals.

8 - A true statesman possesses four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to build consensus to achieve that vision."


--> Three freedoms [paraphrased]:

national freedom -- independence from other nations
political freedom -- power of vote and rights as a citizen
individual freedom -- liberty to pursue happiness and live the way you wish (so long as it doesn't hurt others)

America's greatness stems from a balancing of these three freedoms.


[note: the mistake i belive Fears is making is in limiting his synopses of other countries to "not wanting freedom" -- that it "may" (as though he means to say 'will' and not the hypothetical 'would') be difficult to "transplant" our sense of freedom (that is, the balance of the so-called three freedoms) and way of living to other countries... as though he believes his own story of us as a "chosen people." he's also not being fair to the diversity of nuances to freedom, depending in part on culture. upon asking one of my japanese friends what kind of feeling she associates with the idea of freedom, she replied, "loneliness."]


--> 'Superpowers bring destruction upon themselves by getting too involved in others' business.' -- the lesson of hybris [hubris] (theological concept of "outrageous arrogance" -- later to mean "sin" in christianity -- at the base of which is free will.

[note: Fears believes we (Americans) are "the last great hope for mankind" -- based on the words of Abraham Lincoln. he also believes in an unchanging "human nature" -- and that this is what makes "the lessons of history eternally valid" (like laws of physics). "There's nothing wrong with wanting your country to be number one." i find this to be a very poor value in regard to international relations and international cooperative development. it's one thing to be loyal to one's country; it's another to proclaim oneself the best based on a limited perspective based on an even more limited set of values. Fears would obviously not like the notion of compassion much in this context.]



+ DECONSTRUCTION IN A NUTSHELL, by John D. Caputo:


"If a community is too welcoming, it loses its identity; if it keeps its identity, it becomes unwelcoming." (113)


"To give a gift requires that one then forget, and asks the other to forget, absolutely, that a gift has been given, so that the gift, if there is one, would vanish without a trace. If time is a calendar, a ring or annum, a circle or cycle, then the gift callus upon us to tear up the circle of time, to breach the circular movement of exchange and reciprocity, and in a 'moment' of madness, to do something for once without or beyond reason, in a time without time, to give without return.

"But that is impossible. To be sure. The gift is impossible; indeed, 'gift is another name for the impossible.' That is why we love it so much, like mad." (144)

[note: a thorough understanding of what Derrida means by "impossible" is important will shed light on the full message here. 'Im-/in-' having the same function here as 'important', 'impassioned' or as 'invenir' ('to come'), a 'coming into', thus a sort of 'into the possible' or 'making possible' (because, as a singularity, a singular event, each and every time, it isn't possible yet, is never entirely possible).]


"Learn BOTH to give AND to exchange; learn to see that each depends upon, invades, and interweaves with the other, and learn to keep watch, to see what is what, as far as that is possible. Know how impossible the gift is, how much it tears you out of yourself, and know how much you are intruding into your gift." (146)

--> "Commit yourself even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift...give economy its chance." -- Derrida


"The relation to the other -- even if it remains asymmetircal, open, without possible reappropriation -- must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic." -- Derrida


"Justice and the gift are impossible, THE impossible, which is my passion, that BY which I begin and am impassioned." (149)



+ THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA, by Umberto Eco

"To remember is to reconstruct." (25)

"Remembering is a labour, not a luxury." (?)

"To think that there are lunatics who drink to forget, or take drugs. Oh, if only I could forget it all, they say. I alone know the truth: Forgetting is dreadful." (?)


"To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it. I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy. Thus I decide that, if I am to escape temptation, I must avoid the suggestions of an 'education in purity': both are the devil's stratagems, and each sustains the other. This intuition, however heterodox, hits me like a whip." (396)



+ PATTERN RECOGNITION, William Gibson:

"There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comfortaing yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there." (304)


+ DUNE, Frank Herbert:

"There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace -- those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patters in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death." (380)


"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretension. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man." (126)

"Prophecy and prescience -- How can they be put to the test in the face of the unanswered questions? Consider: How much is actual prediction of the 'wave form' (as Muad'Dib referred to his vision-image) and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What of the harmonics inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?" (277)




this will be all for now. fingers are tired, tea is gone, and i have other things to handle. peace, and happy readings.

the GoodHost

to my dear friend Kayoko, whose birthday was yesterday...

A tart smell

of
age and
pretty dresses
as she walks
into the
room
abandoning
for only A Moment
those at home

they need her
After All, leaving

them to
fend
forthemselves for
a
couple of hours,

she comes for
tea
and Conversation,
"Have you heard?"
she doesn't see the flowers
stem ends

pierced
by plastic

and soaked
in dirty water --

when she does finally
she tones silently
How
Pretty! they are --

"Such a Shame,
that boy,
what
a
Bright Young Man
he was becoming,"
sipping her tea&Conversation
with the nod of
her host

a neighbor,
a neighbor-hood-equal,
smelling older, who
cannot Afford
to
leave
the house

"And
How Is
your
husband?"

a carnation
wilts slightly,
almost but not
quite imperceptibly,
nods with
the host,
nods
to sleep
to death

"Yes..."

a pair of
swallows
skirt by the window
and
land for a
moment's gaze inwards

the host, as she is
a GoodHost
draws the
curtain over
the
outside

"Well, it's
Time to return.
They need
me after all" --

she hardly
notices
the
dandelion
she steps on
on her
way out the
front gate.

Inside
the arrangement
bends forward, bows
down
betrays itself
and the GoodHost
with
dew tears,

a Couple of Hours

After All,

is an eternity

for flowers.

The surface of
the
inland sea
smooth
appearing off-white and like
the blue
pale
of
robins' eggs,
millions
fast ened
togeth
er
and
teeming
with gaps
and cracks,
mouths feeding
on
oxygen;
and
all to keep
a float a
wrinkled top hat
steam boat,
rims
curled
in
ward
to
satisfy weary seabirds.

I
crescent
the staring moon
by squinting,
and
hail
the
wav(e)
ing
hand
of an
ignorant friend
trespassing
the risen
crest
of the
edge
of
the
surf.

(w)holier-than-thou

holes in ourselves. holes in each other. love is not a state but a motion (an e-motion), an intensity, a warmth and a 'warm feeling inside'. society is riddled with holes, multiplicities of holes. holes make up societies. and no more (nothing less) is the love-act than a holefilling, a voidlessening, a penetrating and filling of empty wombs and empty stomachs. empty lives. and equally, there is a motion or attempt to negate or prevent the love-act: the making of holes to retract the making of love, tearing holes in each other to watch our wounds gape and gasp for the first of two impossibles -- the reversible, reversibility itself. yet love, the love-act, only exists by way of a positive impossibility, an impossible of space rather than time: self-completion, a gestalt of the One over the many, a wholeness and a holelessness.

aesthetic change

the first sign of a changing aesthetic is a wide-spread self-consciousness (a political identity) of societal norms and convention. the "beauty" of (the aesthetic of) 諦め in japan is threatened by the pragmatist values of economically dominating America, which devalues the sheer acceptance of a difficult or antagonistic situation as cowardice -- precisely because it can now be identified. take the unspoken (now too often spoken) understanding between members of a japanese baseball game, that in the case of a batter up and one man on first base that a person is expected to bunt (even position themselves up for the bunt); were this spectacle observed in the States, the beauty of self-sacrifice would not even be an occurring thought, but would be returned with pure (very well expressed) hostility against the player. hence why the notion is up for review in this country, to the point that it becomes an object of obsessive intercultural critique, or one to be justified by (or to itself justify) identity. ("because it's japanese" -- not to be confused with a statement like "because WE'RE japanese," which would limit the extent to which the identified aesthetic could be given distance to allow for change.)

universality invenir

it is by way of the singular that universals come about! it is the coming of what can never be predicted, the future (always as future) and its chaotic and arbitrary (but more importantly chaotic) materialization of the present and whatever we may be inclined to call the "future-present," the "possible."

approaching meta-physics

to avoid the essentialism of conventional universalist or relativist labels -- that is, the essentialist universality of both: universalists claiming that we're all essentially the same while relativists claim a different universal that we are all irredeemably different -- to avoid this, it seems best to me to approach meta-ethics in cultural theory through respective emical or etical analyses; respective of multiplicities of contexts (i.e., cultures and histories). in any case, it requires a vocabulary devoid of the essentialist underpinnings of the former two terms.

differánce and multiplicities

where does Derrida's differánce fit into the multiplicities of traces? well, that's it, isn't it? as the "open-ended and porous receptacle of the uncontainable...an un-principle," it doesn't stand to fit in anywhere. it is the "quasi-condition" of the place where multiplicities are forged and conceived, the BWO over which they glide and accumulate; conceived in bunches, in arbitrariness, born as multiplicities themselves but in absence of a single time or place of conception. differánce not as the "midwife" -- certainly not as the "mother" -- but as the incestuous "bastard" without a name or face.


how can multiplicities be handled as the "primary" basic units everyone's looking for (but via an ANTI-reductionism) -- such as is proposed by Zizek? is it a joke?

if multiplicites are to be infinitely, indefinitely, inscribed by différance, the problem is one of 'specific' multiplicites -- perhaps a sort of oxymoron -- which are immediately dissembled upon their address by attention and meaning, not unlike the killing of Schrödinger's cat. yet to speak of multiplicities in an empty fashion is also a waste of time, i would think, and probably also irresponsible. i'll need more theoretical context from Zizek.

a showdown with my simulacrum (OR becoming an other)

the way a blind eye turns in on itself and magnifies the immanent -- i turned to me to propose a revelating experiment; no mastermind in his dreams could muster what it takes to invent such a scheme. for you see, it surfaces on what's already apparent: the surface of the mirror, the glass in the photocopier, bordering my words and a bright light; the internal architecture prime for reproduction, like a mime, smooth and without obstruction. if the machine of life can do this, why can't i?

slowly i began to reminisce, thinking backward and forward -- the mirrors, the glassdoors, the sidewalk's skyscrapers, a highschool photo album, the family videos. there were little tyke birthday parties on VHS, RGB settings just a faint tint too red; there were ceremonies and field trips, balls -- portraits that sleep on the shelves after invading the walls; stories by friends, at least the ones i've heard, girls telling boys telling boys telling girls -- a history, the way all histories are made: suggested, imagined, mutated and framed. i made it, my image, a copy of me.

and i put it to work: sit in that chair, at the desk, near the stairs, say hello but don't say hello if it isn't clear, sing the songs, do the dance -- and done! i was free. not from the cage of walls and windows beyond which the piercing light of the sun illumines the greens and blues and gentle greys of a nostalgic world of origin -- no, not free from that, but from myself. from me! god help it was irrational but one-hundred-and-two percent logical, a provision of intense proportions, expressing the given truth that we mustn't say yet we need to know: a copy does what a copy should do, stand in for what you want it to.

so i plugged my ears and strained my eyes and let my copy tell its lies. it tugged at me -- it beckoned me to come closer, but i was bolder, and older; and i stood in the fourth wall of each scene and at times viewed it like the screen of the TV in the den, up too loud, full of bad reception and barely perceptible glitches. it struck me then: the bad reception was on the side of me, the me in the TV: no life, no breath, no warmth, no hope, nothing but an empty image, hollow of meaning, of chemistry -- a disemboweled and distorted semi-simulacrum encoached in malformed phenomenology. and strike two: this frankenstein's monster of one-sided memories had the lethal potential to disown me, the me of the periphery.

it was all over, unless i made one final move, one last synaptic convulsion, capable i knew of sending me, both of me, flying and dying into the ocean of molten thalamic fluids of the acutely neurotic; but the alternative was intersocial death -- so i played my hand. i threw myself back into the material world, into the mind's colloquial Cartesian theater, threw back the metaphorical curtains and bent all subjective space-time to my volition. all the shadowy reflections of my past were nearly gone -- fed to the cogs of my creation, teeth still nashing and grinding, silently resounding 'more! more!' oh, i'd give them more. return to the faces of family and friends, their souls, their tongues, their eyes. their eyes -- looking at me and searching me for signs, signs, signs of consent, all the things we needn't say but we must know: agreement, acceptance, convenience, displeasures and pain, brought to the forefront to pave the way for novelty, for change. i took it all in, in a breath, and filled the vacuous concavities of the copy with their jabber, their stares, the perceived expectations substituting at times their presence. natural channels of irrigation formed, veins and arteries, stretching between this and all other copies, traversing thresholds, restoring promises, reviving broken hearts, and procuring lovers. and when i'd finished my deed and looked into it eyes, it deeply bowed to me, and that's when i realized: if i could make one and God could make two, then with a bit more work i could complete me with you. so i did, and all was good.

now there's one small problem with this picture, something i've failed to elaborate -- too late to solve it, too little time to make a lecture, so i'll just say it once here and now. you see the problem with a copy is if you give it all that's you, then you'll discover unspoken truth number two: a copy is a copy until that copy becomes you. and as i winced at its glitch of a grin, a thought at long last came to me, that what it was thinking was beyond -- no, wait, more than me. MORE than me. and in the breadth of three words, all was said and done, glasses the world over shattered over a blink's millennium. and when my eyes opened again, there was only one -- one me, one 'real', no casualties, and the thing that had made me was gone, empty as it was of life, of breath, of hope. and as i write, i wonder if i'll ever see him again -- no, surely not. but the point of this message that i'm writing here to you is, when you say i've changed, lord, you haven't got a clue. i've just done what every living being someday has to do; and if there comes a day i ask what's gotten into you, then you can remind me of this story, of the natural progression of reality and the eternal assimilation of the simulating entity: the me, the you, the me.

history lesson

the history of our lives does not distantly resemble the history of the species. moments of dire importance are edited out of the narratives, at most times in an entirely habitual manner. the majority of us, for example, disregard our dreams, giving them merely the passing significance of their probably having occurred but leaving it be that we don't remember them; despite how extremely beneficial our lives could be if we each possessed the ability to analyze them, examine them for their symptoms of our innermost unconcious world. we ignore the fact that they even temper us for the following day, can hold us chained to subliminal influences throughout our waking moments.

the narratives of human history are so very similar -- so many dreams have been lost, unrealized, only acknowledged to having probably existed, as we 'progress' to future series of narratives.

love must be another one of those easily forgotten things where the approach matters at least just as much as the content.

taiko alley

the vibrancy,
vibrations,
tastes of clouds through
the street,
wadaiko
pulses
tremor of
the
heart
still caught in
my lungs

baachans
sigh-ride
under
looming
palmtree fronds
on the
side walk

our blinders are at
the very least
opaque
and
iPod soundbytes
can't
hold
water.

Impress-ions
made
stone-on-cold
-hard-stone
with the
mot-
to : Be
a lava-rock,
Fill
and flow like
water.
trans
forms
others
thru
time.
But
even the soft
-est mineral
fails to
break,
the rivers
bed
is
the
lot
of them.