The
Book of
Caesurae or
How to Philosophize with Scissors
Devin Halladay
To start, then—
because I have no other choice.
This humble book is a part of an extended, multidisciplinary meditation on perception. Through poetry, aphorism, and essay, I have been trying— laboring, really—to reach the edges of various concepts, discourses, objects, and experiences. To skirt around their boundaries, never entering, but never quite looking away. My goal is to interrogate the space where the edges between things tremble. To give a subtle rinse of my consciousness to everything I experience. In truth, I have no idea what the final state of this meditation is. But why must every process have a final state? If anything, my intent (and this is the soul's disposition, its motive in any act of creation) is to develop a sense of coherence in life. I want to understand how I am situated in the world: how I live in it, how it lives in me. As my mentor and professor Ben Luzzatto wrote in The Theory of Everything: Abridged, "I don't want to solve the mysteries of the universe; I want to know how I am a part of them." This project may never reach a finished state— understanding, after all, has no teleology. Nothing is ever fully understood, anyway; one does not have enough eyes to see a thing from enough angles. Still, I will trudge on. The uncertainty of this process will keep me warm. This is crucial: uncertainty is a friendly face. An old friend. The uncertain is already a part of you, it is already swimming in the ocean of your halves. And, you must understand, you are already a part of the uncertain—certainly! "It is what it was, which already included you, but then it is also something else, which you
know does not include you. You have remained together, but you have also become separate," meditates Ben in his typical prosaic fashion. This is why I give these little poems, essays, and aphorisms the humble name “caesurae.” A caesura is a moment of pause—a reprieve, a stillness, a meditation. It separates and distances, but also unifies and fuses. The caesura is life's structural subtext. Sometimes I think my whole life is one long breath. It is a process of meditation, of mediation. I let the unknown breathe, I give it its peace, I allow it a bit of light, a bit of air, a bit of soil. These practices are reciprocal. Each caesura—each image, each passage, each poem—is a sort of cutaway from reality, a cross-section, or a core sample. Through collage and disparate language treatments, I hope to catch enough cross sections of enough things that I begin to understand them. My hope is that, after some time, I'll have developed a new way of seeing: new eyes, for viewing new angles. This is all anyone can ask for. Just a little time, a little air, and a pair of scissors.
1. this is to assume that beginnings exist
incipit 1
an iota between inception
and action
I have sensed a certain
slippage
between impulse
and exertion.
This is a process of overturning but never of causation;
past and present coexist.
flickering into each other.
not quite a razor's edge, not quite chance, at least not on the way down.2 you fall on one side or the other—not sharp enough to cut, not dull enough to rest.
2. (gravity has no predilection)
Causality has been invented for comfort. What use is it to us today? In truth, causality is a disease of the central nervous system. A complete revulsion, a kind of cage. Causality is the kind of apparatus that sublimates into the background of the operational structures of society. It is a numbing agent, and a very good one at that. Events do occur in succession; but only in relation to oneself. The eye engages the causal instinct, filling the brain with false input. What has really occurred is not the event in itself, but an interaction of forces, a simultaneous duration. You have reflected yourself and projected the image of your experience into the world, like a wash of consciousness.
Time is a non-chronological manifold. It consists of a formal network of background processes, always protruding into and retreating from themselves, like techtonic plates. This gives time a topology, a unique geography. This topology is constituted, simply, by chaos. Like crumpling a sheet of paper, the space of time is n-dimensional, and the progression of time is nonlinear; built of smooth and striated durations, mirroring whole notes and caesurae. This chaos is characterized not by the absence of structures and determinations, but by the infinite and infinitessimal speeds at which determinations take form and vanish, like flickering lights. Each determination is time's disposition: whether it will lunge this way or that, forward or back. Whether it will fold in on itself or flatten.
:
:
Every interaction is a play of power, a struggle for control. A dance. Quite a beautiful dance. Every force has a disposition and an animating directionality, a determination. Disparate forces share common traits. A common ontology of shift.3 Every determinate thing, every moment, is a pure crystalline synthesis, constitutive of minds, subjects, and objects. Each one is a combination of singularities, forming a multiplicity that is changing in multiple ways.
quite a beautiful dance, always in motion 3. ΔS = âˆŤdS = q/T
Even timeless moments
are bound by certain limits
inscribed in their context.
Every moment is a tension
between past
and future,
and time is pluri-
-potential.
The moment is fugitive,
a collision
between past
and future.
a small pleasure taken
in gathering these moments
this will last a long time :
:
:
:
:
Perception is a wholeness :
The importance of understanding this point cannot be understated. All experience is an interpretation of quanta in constant motion, of flickering frames stitched together by the subjective eye. This interpretation is what is crucial. It allows us to explain, enhance and supplement, to connect and differ-
a sway
entiate, to exemplify and add voices, to see every moment with new eyes, to offer point and counterpoint, to establish figure and ground, to develop and to unfold, to analyze and reason, to criticize and, with luck, to comprehend and expand. Perception is a rift in the experience of subjectivity. In every perceptual synthesis, one has witnessed two types of activity. A subjectivity, emanating from the self, and a dilation, which comes to one from the world outside the self. It is when these two collide that we form a totality.
blurred into vision. :
Every image is constructed by a composition of microcosms. The present, the moment, is a kind of tension. A slippage between preceding and succeeding; an impetus and a protrusion. Translated through the eye, pieced together as if through mirrors. Every image is constructed by a composition of microcosms. Time shimmers, like a glint of silver at the moment of rupture. Every progression, every event, is a rupture—a protrusion into past and future. Both a breakage and a healing. Time is not cause or effect; nor is event. These are not binary, not truly linear; they push and pull all at once. A dance, quite a beautiful dance; time is a pluripotentiality. Each moment is a force, in play with other forces and moments, in perpetual motion. It is a movement in a field of perception, a glimmer in the field of quantum space.
Time is the purest and emptiest form.
Time trembles
with moments cut so small their edges roll together
the blink of an eye so quick that it dissolves itself
each frame so close to the others that they appear to merge repetition
repetition repetition repetition repetition
every moment is a replica
In another light, a moment is a sudden collapse of scale, a durational shift marked in time, a point plotted in space. disparate scales are always related; they share a similar composition, they breathe the same air.
And every grain of sand has been caught up in the movement of the eath. Each grain is its own limit, continuously reached and overcome,
in an infinite caesura, blinking in blinking out in rapid succession
Potentialities, riding on the back of zeno's arrow, snapping together like magnets.
The present is an impetus, always pregnant, filled with spirit by its forebear
eager to meet its future
The present is also a ghost, lingering and saturating experience with a rinse of spirit.
A mechanized prayer, bathed in our subjectivities, like snapping one's fingers in an echo chamber.
Resonaaaaating with spirit and breath, perfectly placid, yet full of motion.
At a certain frequency, all waves appear to stand still.
All experience is, after all, intersubjective. Each experience is a revery, constructed in reflection, like a million mirrors composed in intersection.
This construction will always reflect your spirit, and it will carry you forward.
4.
shrinking and expanding waves stretch i n t o r i p p l e s
limits defined only by perceived distance
which can be reached violently or with soft breath
the immediate and the durational contain each other4
An endess whirring,
the present speaks in tongues
caught up in its own dimension,
rippling through;
the present
is a reflection,
a refraction,
a rinse of consciousness