Le Grand Jeu (part 1) by Marianna and Daniel O'Reilly

DANIEL ANTHONY O’REILLY

LE GRAND JEU

COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED BOOK I

(THE FIRST NON-SEQUENTIAL BOOK OF ‘LE GRAND JEU’)

PUBLISHED BY DANIEL ANTHONY O’REILLY 2005 daniel_o_reilly@hotmail.com

THIS BOOK IS SUBJECT TO NONE OF THE LAWS OF OTHER BOOKS AND, SHOULD YOU MAKE IT SUBJECT TO THE LAWS OF OTHER BOOKS, IT IS YOUR OWN DECISION TO DO SO THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE EXISTENCE OF MARIANNA O’REILLY GORDON AND HELENA O’REILLY CHRISTOPHER O’REILLY CRAIG O’REILLY GALINA KIRK AND COUNTLESS OTHERS

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MARIANNA O’REILLY marianna_red@hotmail.com

9th April 2005

Letter to the Editor: Dear Sir or Madam,

This manuscript is the first and only draft of the work entitled ‘Le Grand Jeu’ which was written down by Mr. Daniel Anthony O’Reilly and he would be thankful to you if the thing contained therein between the substance of your mind and his mind is called ‘The Book’, and any discrepancies or issues that you may find with ‘The Book’ are purely intentional and for the purpose of reading alone and not for the intention of correction, refining, editing or any other form of maltreatment of the aforementioned artefact by any other interested or disinterested party other than that of ‘The Book’ itself. Mr. O’Reilly would also like to make it common that any matter contained within the aforementioned matter that could be described by the reader of such things as casual, repetitive, erroneous, disingenuous, misquoted, plagiarist, tedious, invalid, illegitimate, repetitive or illegal is purely intentional on the part of the text and blameworthy only at the point of the reader whose fault it was for having posited such qualities within the smooth, resolute and innocent space of ‘The Book’ whose only intention is to display no intention in the first instance, thinking in some peculiar way that what was written down may have pertained to actual cases or opinions or values or was even in the last instance what is commonly called ‘a book.’ DAO

I The Lungfish

Note: It is not good when a person realises that he has only his contradictions to look forward to in life. [Unless of course he is already enjoying them.]

A scholar, (and a most learned one at that,) was travelling one day along the road connecting his university town to a nearby village. It was a pleasant walk, and one that was borne out of a desire to go to the village and savour its quiet. Along the way, the scholar came across an orphaned boy who was playing with a bundle of sticks along the wayside. Not wishing to disturb the boy he continued along his merry way. As he passed by, the boy piped- up and said â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hey mister! Why did you ignore me just then?â&#x20AC;? In response the scholar, (who was quite startled,) said that he did not ignore him, rather he left him alone to his own devices and kept

himself to himself. Angrily, the boy said “Well, if we all did that, the world just wouldn’t get anywhere, would it?” The scholar replied “Why should it be any of your concern whether I choose to ignore you or not? That’s my business, surely?” The scholar felt somewhat defensive after the boy’s outburst, but he did not wish to start a fight with a nine-year old. “You don’t seem to be ignoring me very well now, do you?” said the boy. “In fact, you just told me that you were ignoring me, and now I think you are a liar for doing so, and that you do not hold very strong convictions about what you decide. Changeable like the wind, you are! And what do you mean “Its my business to ignore you”? Do you make a living from doing that or something?” A bit out of sorts, the scholar reiterated thus; “Well, you seemed ardent not to be ignored by me, and not wishing to disappoint you I stopped to talk to you. Does that upset you now?” “Damn right it upsets me” said the boy “I can’t trust you at all now because you don’t seem to know what you want at all and I wish that you would ignore me if that’s what you originally wanted to do to me.” Having learned his lesson, the scholar continued along his merry way and left, continuing his path toward the village. It had gotten quite dark in the meantime, and the scholar could not be sure if he hadn’t strayed from the path or not. In fact, he did not know where he was at all as the path he was following had vanished and had been replaced by a dense forest. The scholar endeavoured to find the path again and he was getting quite nervous – he had seen scenarios like this before in bad horror movies. (Perhaps that’s how bad horror movies get made?) After walking for a further hour and

still having no idea about where he was, the scholar tripped and fell over. He found that he had fallen [wait for it] over a bundle of sticks. Surely, he thought, the boy must be around here somewhere, he thought, surely. He called out “Help!” as it seemed the appropriate thing to do. A long while passed and nothing happened. Then the scholar noticed that the boy was sitting up a tree adjacent to him, smiling. The scholar, relieved, said; “Do you know the way back to town, kid?” To which the boy replied “This story could go anywhere now, couldn’t it?”

Returning to the university, the scholar returns to his labour, and we descend through the superficies of his grey tissue, enveloped as if from inside, by the unchaste material of his thoughts…

He thinks:

“Satan, in his broody lair, looks into my image as it appears in tapestries; the pattern declares all he is required to believe, colour and fabric testament to his belief. He puts pen to paper and inscribes his memoir into my knowledge. My knowledge, therefore, is a secret message; I am the disguise of his knowledge, the host for his belief, my knowledge host to his desire. Satan, rich in tapestry, the weft of the seducer, warp of the seduced; we harmonise in this criss-cross, no gaps appearing in-between, time cemented in the woven. His craftsmanship ensures my security, my belief complicit in his ability, my knowledge a fabric of predictability, my condition conditions his craft. His memoir is in my looking, his letter always received in the right place, his security seals the bond between my

belief and my knowledge, his belief and his knowledge guaranteed in each letter of the tapestry of my mind. The breeze begins to breath between the textured images; Satan is slowly brought to life, slowly released as we both unclasp our fists, dust loosened from its cotton grip, silks drawn back into their worm’s posterior. In the worm chemicals are undone, vegetation undigested, worms born in reverse, handicrafts are undone, chateaux lose their curtained adornment. Time moves backward through the worm, Satan comes closer to whence he came. My release is his reinstatement, I become undone and release us both; his letter comes closer to its addressee. The word spelled in the letter passes through the worm, Byzantine splendour degenerates into fewer manuscripts, monks becoming unlearned, heathens multiply, humans reverse their continual divide and become one, become one again, humans become fewer, the letter gets closer to the addressee. Satan harks for those dark days when he still flourished in the minds of all churchgoers, his currency quite great, his ability far reaching on the back of men’s minds. But he grows melancholy. When people who could write would write him down, he was born in letters, he exists in letters, he will die and be reborn in letters. Our mutual journey sees cities become towns, towns villages, villages hamlets, hamlets woodland clearings, woodland clearings wooded, woods growing young and sparse. Satan becomes lonely again, the word has un-spread; he detests both forward and backward – his immortality is to be undone in both. His victory though, testified in man’s forgetfulness. But then he mourns his Lord’s disappearance – Him that vanquished his armies is Himself disappearing in forward and back. Can they not help one another –

a great divide once again unified? Again the division is no more, the letter reaches He to which it is addressed. I walked in those youthful wooded glades, I took shelter beneath the older of those trees, listened to rumours whose wildfire were the only danger to the fledgling forest. Happiness there was forgetfulness, a swine’s bliss, down on my knees, squealing. I may act like swine but nature’s law dictates my inherent nobility, nobility inherent in law is a natural dictator. Neither would Satan seek as consort one who crawls on legs designed for uprightness. This pig is in the bottom-left of this great tapestry, and next to him offshore is a cathedral hewn from the arse-bone of Norway’s island-daemon Beelzebub. Hollowed from the tainted ivory are a trillion patterns, work so fine and cosmological one’s eyes cannot declare the details to one’s mind, one’s mind cannot declare its senses unto its reason. Circles merge within circles, geometry encircles the circles and spirals within an artful chaos, vanishing into microscopic heavenly proportions. The transept perfect in equality, the spire high without ungainliness, all of which complements the famous maelstrom beside it, posing no threat to my pig, but a danger to the intrepid sailor who wishes to join in that ever-decreasing circle. A pilgrimage of black-headed gulls line the upper part of the façade, shitting uncoordinatedly upon the divine figurines thereupon inlaid atop cruciform and dodecahedron. This adds growth upon growth atop the sculpted saints who work higher and higher up toward heaven, elevated by airborne detritus; were one to clean the shit off, the fragile and brittle substance, held together by impossible patterning of almost no matter at all, would disintegrate and shatter the entire hellish composition and make it human.

Beneath this foundation lies the leviathan himself, flesh pecked clean from his backside by the same gulls that shit it back out onto him, perched, as they are, from above. Beelzebub fails to notice; he scares the fishes what come too close to the liquid fire in his nostril-holes. It is beneath the water, like the mighty iceberg, that Satan’s brother conceals his ungainly proportions – were he to show it all but in one go, the deceit of the cathedral would lose its currency. Yet, like any ordinary devil, Beelzebub stays beneath water, for that way he never encounters the terror of his own reflection, and neither does man. It is a relation similar to that of orchid and bee, the Maelstrom testimony to his devilish farts. Deep below this orchid island, Beelzebub reaches into Hell’s innersanctum, his swollen, grimacing head the antechamber unto his belly fuelling the whirlpool above. Therein doth his sloth characterise the ambience of the underworld whilst brethren Satan, pro-active, divides his time between home and work like any other commuter. Intestinal be a Beelzebub’s bladder, retentive between tantalising the belly bread-winner. Waiting, the inner nothing deprived a great wood of brother organs, nourishment has safe inherent blissful Satan. The upper-part of the woven depiction takes the subliminal story aloft, to the insubstantial place from whence he came, to whence he shall timely return, if scientists are correct; if time runneth backward – who could argue with a scientist? The man of science finds too his place here, a little to the right beneath the un-whitened cap of Sinai, connected both above and below by a river of thoughts which go undisturbed and untainted by his liberal philosophy, converted into the coinage and currency of thought, a

golden passage between man and Him, a righteous passage forward. Forward; such an unilateral direction – it hath no place in a tapestry, and yet the scientists are there, all huddled together, for strength doth come from numbers as does complacency. The oldest of all the men of science, he of the longest and greyest of beard, stands with mouth open, about to speak. The others about him clasp their ears unto his utterance, one which cannot be made if his declaration is not put here in the cloth. In a textile, science hath no direction and no mouth. The one who concocted such imagery hath preconceived such contradiction as a joke – a joke must he hath had in his hard heart, as well as too many H’s. The particular thread that he chose to depict the torrent of thoughts which pass between thinker and thought-of is of a bright vermilion, which becomes indistinguishably and with great art intertwined with a cord of gold which weaveth its own path amidst the labyrinthine corridors of the weft. To be sure, even the scientist knows the truth that it is easier to be green than gold… He, on the other hand, on the right-hand of the tapestry, is trying to renew intellectual communion with God, for the reason that he cannot cope alone. His reason fails him, his mind full of mess with the distraction of distracting thoughts, his salvation an embarrassing confession that he cannot make. But this tapestry is static; its decisions were already made, its patterns locked in, colour chosen, subject crystalline. What might undo the finality of these choices? Somewhere in the Tuscan landscape lies the most direct route to him that made us. This causes no grief, for the depicted inhabitants merely share a world and do not constitute it; they are in the lungs of the lung-fish Beelzebub in the lake of

humanity; dry, cracked crazy-paved, beautiful only to those who look upon it, dead to those whom it once sustained. Once a year, normally at the start of spring, my brain performs a thought. This imp then activates many dormant sectors of the greyish pulp and causes an electrical disturbance. But these electrical worries soon drop off like brown leaves to be eaten by lice at the bottom of the autumnal lake, providing food for scavenging perch, melancholy only to those who look upon it. Summer never looks upon the lake for it is summer that causes memory, fondness, longing and hence, the instigator of melancholy. We are not optimists in the sun; we prefer a sun in our mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye when really the weather is grey interrupted by electrical disturbances followed by rain, clothes cling to undernourished bodies, hair damp and unkempt; we feed on the rotting leaves of our summers. This lake, which connects the lower-left to the lower-right, is dry on the left and abundant on the right, the transition between the two states is miraculously imperceptible, for a viewer it is half empty or half full. At the shores of the lake some are fishing, swimming, building houses. Inside a house there is an argument; a baby cries, there is a ripple on the lake, the feeding patterns of the fish change, a fisherman finds success, his family eat well, baby sleeps. The baby grows, becomes a fisherman, remains, as his father taught him, at the wet-end of the lake, his family multiplies. A hamlet grows up around the family, an economy starts, he is the master, the feeding patterns of the fish change, the master is impoverished, he becomes a peasant, he teaches his children accordingly.

The forest stage-left of the lake is dead-wood, holds no inkling of life, but remains petrified as if in the Gorgonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stare. Dead as it is, the former inhabitants are unaware and haunt the deer paths as if on their daily business. The Dead are but a memory unable to forget itself. As they terrify the living they become melancholy, all life driven away from them, the character of the underworld adorns them, and the whole thing is a DIY affair as we should all be aware. The lungfish awaits the rains. Ants are walking upon her face, but she cannot afford to sneeze; she must await the rains. The carcasses of other fish have been consumed by crows and other scavengers; no other fish survives but she. Why did they not swim to the other end of the lake where life is plentiful? But the Dead do not concern her. Storm-clouds are gathering, there is an electrical disturbance, the rains come. A single thought cascades about the tapestry, gripped as it is by the regularity of change. The living continue to be, the humans continue trying to be and that is the answer; it was a forced hand, thoughts are born thoughts die thoughts mean nothing the disease spreads the rains fall the dye runs the lake fills the ants drown and the lung-fish exhales.

II Schadenfroh (Thought-Barriers)

Thought: Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more, I feel this bar, this $, this empty gesture, when facing the task at hand. I sit down to write, but everything keeps me from that singular task, that singular thing that makes sense. I research all day long, and I take notes from the books I read. All of it goes towards useful background material. But of course the foreground, which is this text you are reading now, is the impossible space; the space where I must convey a voice, where I must begin to exist as the enunciator. How did this fragment of text that you are reading now, if it is so impossible, come to be written? I am reading, and the whole time that I am reading, there is an undercurrent of thoughts that are circling the idea of writing. Each new thought along this line

prevents me from writing, because of the satisfaction of giving these thoughts attention distracts me from giving them action. The undercurrent of thought gives rise to new currents of thought, all equally worthless, that circle the idea of the impossible but necessary act at stake, preventing the desire from attaining its satisfaction. For if the impulse is given voice, then the thoughts are taken out of circulation and find a form and the generative impulse that keeps them healthy also generates a resistance to making action. The final hopelessness of the situation, the pathetic avoidance of my subject, finally becomes realisable once it becomes hopeless. The thoughts have nothing to repress. They themselves become meaningless. Action is possible. It has been a thought of some currency for me now to consider the value of thought. The whole day long, whilst my mind spins its fantasmic web of thoughts ceaselessly, I stop and catch myself and think; “What is the value of this thought? Does it have substance? Does it have weight?” Given that so much of these thoughts are empty repetitions, empty gestures of thought that are machinic, it seems that they bear the hallmarks of symptomal thoughts as opposed to ‘thoughts as thoughts’. For example, to think about a fantasy that one has, to be lost inside that occupying daydream, is nearly always a repetition. And as one thinks about it, one is being oneself; it is a secret thought that is privy to no one, (except perhaps the big Other, but we are prepared to take the chance.) This fantasy, this hallmark of individuality, masks over a particular tear in the self, a chink in the armour. The self $ cries out for this suture, it wants to bind the gap where the logic of the signifier might break down, where the Real might poke through the

gap. Paradoxically, one feels more like oneself, more unique, more individual, when one is approaching that trauma, that piece of the Real. The Real never makes it; its dread proximity, (be it an hallucination or not,) inspires the self $ to repeat the empty gesture of fantasy to keep up the sham. For if the Real were to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;make itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, then the pure performative, the genuine act of the genuine self S, would abolish the self $. I have also thought, (and many of these thoughts are strategic in duplicity with their symptomal character,) that the thought-act that is to permit the act S, is the thought-act sans reason. Without a reason, an act does not enter into the machinic repetition of the self $, the gesture is no longer empty, but full of content by, paradoxically, becoming devoid of content. Strategic thoughts inhabit this strange space of being one thing and the other thing within the same shape, and this is the more beautiful character of having such duplicitous and deceptive thoughts. For to permit oneself this action, this action which would contradict the empty action, one performs the empty action contra empty action and produces the action.

Contraction: But why should one want to consciously deceive oneself? And how can one consciously deceive oneself?

Whilst I am writing this now, I am also hearing the fantasy voices of my fantasy critics, (a flattery to be sure! (The comment in brackets works backward as well as forwards)) that tell me of the vague nature of my argument that I do not comprehend the subject fully enough to have the right to comment upon it. For these critics

do not exist, but again are simply thoughts which are going to greater, more advanced lengths to keep me from my writing. I embarrass myself too easily and I am not strong enough to shrug off these critics which are myself, which are empty gestures. So to embarrass them, I make them the subject of this writing, I give them action, free them from the abstract, from the hollow domain. In attempting to make me quit writing, they have conversely produced material for me to write about. This method, which strategically produces valuable gestures from empty ones, is an example of self-deception, which deceives itself into becoming genuine. Thus does the very castrating nature of empty thoughts that repeat and prevent become converted into their valuable opposite; that of thoughts which are original and potential.

4 Fragments

1: Will I always be able to outsmart this feeling? Currently, patterns of behaviour yield their symptoms to me after a time. Is there a horizon beyond which I shall be unable to penetrate the style of my thinking? Or should this horizon be known as the Truth? If I were to label it the Truth, then that horizon and I would never meet and I cannot tell if that would be a good or bad thing; how can one know what the experience of de-quilting would be like? Naturally, I would not be so bold as to assume that there is a stratum of brain activity that could fatuously be labelled Truth - what an absurd idea!

2: If I must step outside of myself in order to reach objectivity, (to look in on myself from outside,) and thus gain perspective upon my thoughts, how many times is this process repeatable? How many layers constitute my thought that I can step into in order to look back upon the last? Would I come to a final layer that I could not get perspective upon? Or perhaps all of the layers preceding it would constitute the perspective I have over the final one? Or perhaps that final layer is the truth, or perhaps the final layer of infinite deception? If it could said to be the case that the truth is unreachable, that it is beyond the pale of human knowledge, then is that the truth about Truth? All of the desperate failed attempts that one makes to reach the truth actually constitute the truth about Truth or some such nonsense word play.

[I am burdened by the vast horizon of differences that seek to be fixed in the vectors of my actions. Experience teaches me that in each decision, another is lost. That in one actual world there is an infinite quantity of lost possible ones. Each affirmation thus constitutes multiple denials.]

3: Every success is a successful warding-off of failure.

4: The more I attempt to help other people, the more that I expose the sham of my vanity dressed up as goodwill. For my action and my

image are inextricably tied to one another, and my perception of myself through the eyes of the Other and my perception of the Other contrive to force my actions back on myself. This is the meaning of ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you”, the categorical imperative at work in every action, but through a mirror.

***

Again I sit down to write with very little substance in my thoughts with which to produce text. But this is a task that I have laid upon myself; no one has forced me into this choice. Or perhaps it is only a forced choice in that an exterior hand hasn’t forced me. The double agent of my desire is the only forced choice at work here and what I contradictorily construe as my personal freedom is in fact the precise opposite. But how may I come to know this if not that this knowledge is declarative? Which layers of procedural information am I unaware of that inform either forced or genuine choices? For Sartre, the freest of men is he who is in chains, for he is not deluded by the false freedom of the choice, the constricting burden of the decision. On the theoretical stratum this idea might carry some weight, but this man does not have the basic freedom to even keep himself alive. So might there not also be the greatest freedom in death? Sartre also said that the existential philosopher must be prepared to live by his philosophy; it is not merely the abstract entertainment of thoughts… …with each positive attitudinal statement of belief or conviction about human freedom, one seals up, one restricts the alternative, especially when the discourse is that of freedom.

Especially if that statement is borne of pathology, i.e. it is borne of unfreedom.

Why the inability to express things openly? Because the aspiration to the meconnaissance of my image creates a gap between desire and enunciation. This intense frustration that I feel as a writer comes from the inability to put together in my mind a clear statement of what I wish to say. But surely, this much is obvious? For if I knew what I wanted to say then I would have already said it, and if I knew what I wanted to say within myself that clearly, I would have no desire to say it. This desire is borne out of my inability to express, out of the haziness of my insight, out of the muddy waters of my thought. And would I have it otherwise? Why do I flick through these pages to look at the quantity of what I have written? Do I feel so weak that I need to see the amount to see its weight? Like a painter who stands back to see the achievements of the past hourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, I am not so engrossed with the task at hand. But then again, I feel that I am always typing for someone. Even if I feel that I am writing for myself, I am still doing it for somebody, [this is one of the techniques of thinking encouraged in our schools,] and if I am doing it for somebody, I am not simply doing it. I am barely doing it at all. It is another empty gesture, another herald of vacuity. Am I so geared towards making myself feel better? (And this phrase is well said; to make my self feel better.) Why this pseudo-naturalised belief that we feel worse or better about a thing of which we have little or no comprehension, such as the self? At school I was taught the techniques and the ability, but I was never told why. I am glad for that much.

I was just about to finish writing because I felt as though I had achieved a minimal amount to ward off the guilt of having not done sufficient work. No desire to continue, to penetrate more deeply, to challenge this barrier in my thought that prevents me from working. Rather, I can think tomorrow 'I did some work last night.' And so I saved my work and closed this program and almost immediately reopened the document. Why? Because it is precisely this attitude that the text is about. If I give in to the desire that to achieve the minimum is sufficient, that I shall not feel too guilty tomorrow, is to put an axe in my head. If this work is to be borne out of guilt, then it shall never be a piece of work, rather it will be a chore. If I keep merely warding off the guilt then I shall never start to make a piece of work that is valuable, rather it should be a piece of work that is an extremely short-term therapy for an intensely neurotic and pathetic creature. This piece of work should generate more questions, more hypotheses, more complexes, rather than perpetuate the pathetic vanity of a crap artist. I shall rather throw this caution aside and prefer to be either a genuinely crap artist, (for being something is more valuable than being like something,) or to be something else, something for which I am yet to find a nametag. And why should I immediately contradict myself in writing about not desiring to write any more? Because to enjoy the fruit of contradiction is to surprise oneself out of linear mediocrity, out of certainty, out of all things that answer the adage â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;know thyselfâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

[To append to my last entry, I feel joyous that I can turn my failings to my advantage, (if it can be said that this is what I am actually doing,) because I no longer wish to be content with the idea that there is an I, and that it is knowable. The only knowledge of this I

is through experiencing what it can do rather than already knowing what it can do as if it were written down in a law somewhere. And if you feel any contact with what I describe, if any of my fragmented ideas identify with any of your fragmented ideas, then perhaps these fragmented ideas belong to no one? Perhaps they signify that this self to whom we cling for dear life is too symptomatic to be unique, and at some point may somebody have the insight to shrug it off. Well, at least the idea is a nice one.]

Hypothesis: Posit infinite Value in the sphere of God, and human value in the sphere of the ‘I’. In order for God to be Godly, (as we learn from Kierkegaard,) He must demand in us a faith that contravenes His own holy law. In commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, He asks Abraham to break the law of God, yet this is the only way in which Abraham can access communion with belief; in breaking God’s law because He demands it. Thus does Abraham’s action move from the ethical to the religious, and thus does God become God and Abraham become faithful.

Could the same be true of us in our realm of human value? Must we transgress the ethical domain of the Self in order to be a Self? Must we break our own sacred [symbolic] law? Does this remainder constitute the Real? [Godliness in God and Humanity in Humans]

Let me write it again.

If we consider the holy Law of signification, (in that we find a Holy Family there; ‘Mother-Father-I’,) our belief in this law is through the same means; the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’. Thus, true orthodoxy to the symbolic law laid down by Freud would require the transgression of that law because it is what that law had demanded in us.

And again. If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, then as Zizek would have it, he is the ‘ultimate horizon of veracity’ on psychoanalysis. If a student sees error in Freud, means that the student has read Freud wrongly. Transference. This is applicable in the study of the sacred text also. This complication of ‘teacher-student’ relation must come to bear in the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, in that if God’s demands contradict His own law, then it means that we have misheard His law, and thus the same goes for Freud. Would we also say the same for the maxim of the symbolic law? If the symbolic law in us demands something contradictory to the way we usually understand this law, then only obedience to it will determine our belief in it. And thus ‘knowing ourselves’ requires the condition that sometimes we have misheard ourselves.

I am writing a book, writing a book

or,

I am writing a book about writing, writing a book about writing.

Shall we plot a course into nihil, into nothing? I doesn’t want to, but what does I know of it? I wants to hold it all together, keep the links of the knot tight, the sticks bound up. But if I comes to believe in the nothing, in nothing, then what choice does I have? And choice is the heart of this particular egg. I can see I plotting it’s machinations to keep strong; develop character, develop voice, develop security, develop certainty and the like. I can see I. To believe in the nothing, or not to believe; that is to exert power. Freedom comes in the ability not to believe. We becomes away from pathology, becomes through pathology, cannot deny. But truly I would become what I was always going to become if I believe, if I find my place in the symbolic network, if I fit into meconnaissance. I would be content. No more of this ‘peering-in’ from outside onto myself like James Stuart in ‘Rear Window’. And what I want is not really in question here.

***

Mythological interlude: Only King Arthur may draw the sword from the stone because he is the King.

To append, King Arthur is the King, therefore does not need to prove himself worthy, does not need to justify himself, does not need to reason; he is the King because he is the King. The sword is transcendental power and no mere man may wield it; the law of the sword is that only the King shall wield it. Therefore the Law is the King, the sword is the King, (“the King without a sword, the land without a King!”) descent into primeval chaos. King, Sword, Land, Law; Borromean Knot. Note: Wotan was not God; he was a god. He could not free Brunnhilde from his law.

2: Preservation of the Royal bloodline is like the preservation of the code of the Torah. If the Royal blood is intermixed with non-Royal blood, the code of Royalty, the tie with God is lost/polluted. [Thought: consider the throne of blood, Macbeth, in this light.] If the code of the Torah is changed, if it is not transcribed exactly, then the Word of God is lost, God is lost, it is not the Word of God, it is meaningless, it is subject to the pathology of man, the courier becomes the author.

3: Only Lancelot can defeat Lancelot in combat, because he cannot be defeated. Arthur defeats him by breaking his ethical law; “The sword was supposed to unite men, not serve the vanity of a single man” (teleological suspension of the ethical.) Lancelot, because he cannot be defeated by anybody else, is necessarily defeated by himself; he becomes an undefeated combatant only when he defeats himself in combat; that is how he becomes Lancelot, that is how he

becomes

undefeated.

(Perfect

combat;

see

Hofstadter;

Bach/Godel’s perfect record player. See Kierkegaard; Either/Or on Adonis the God of Love.)

4: The land was in fragments, but the true King unites it. ‘One land one King!’ When chaos ruled the land, before the land had a King, before it had a name, it was morcelated, it was in bits, pre-mirror stage. It finds its identity and its name once it becomes One, when it has a King, (a ruler,) when it has its signifier of Oneness. Of all the potential leaders that might rule the land, only one person has the ability to unite the land, and that is the rightful King. Note; when the body of Dionysis is torn apart, it miraculously becomes whole again. In fact, one could say that it becomes whole through the act of dismemberment/fragmentation.

5: In De Sade we are witness to the multiplication of pleasures, the fragmentation of the sexual act into a million pieces, a million new pleasures. In 120 Days of Sodom, the most basic perversions are intensified to their diabolical maximum; pleasure is intensified as is pain and ultimately, death. Death as the maximum pleasure. Are we still safeguarded by Kant’s categorical imperative? (Old news…) Note: What therefore can be said of the fragmented ethical text? Can ethics be intensified to their angelic or diabolical maximum, or simply multiplied into pathological pleasures? The land without a King…

***

Writing comes to me in short bursts and requires all of my attention; when I start, I need to overcome the greatest pressure imaginable, and that is the pressure not to work. Why this bizarre obstacle that keeps me from my object? Perhaps I don’t really want to write, or perhaps I have nothing to say? How strange that such a mute presence should be converted into substance; I am in[complete] contradiction! Perhaps it is the last and most uncanny voice to be heard; the voice with no voice, or the voice that prevents and obstructs the voice. My final utterance shall be that of a vocal silence because the way in which I make utterance is through its necessary impossibility. This dark matter of what cannot be said, or what is never heard comes to me not through inspiration or insight; I merely take dictation from my own inability, give credit to the forces at work behind the scenes before they are overcome and we hear the voice that comes on the scene. The more that I read through Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power’ notes, the more dogmatic he appears to be; it is almost as though each statement or phrase is intended to express its opposite, as though we are supposed to be lost inside the difficult areas that lie in wait between poles. Before long, I come not to believe in anything he says, I am forced to think! Tonight I do not have such difficulties in writing because I do not have too many thoughts. It is usual that I come to see thoughts as a barrier to production. This may be because of the transient nature, the shadow-like presence of thought, or it may be that thoughts are more conclusive than writing. I think that I can think my way around anything; I can think myself out of writing. How does this parallel between thinking and writing become

unbalanced? How this meta-thought; ‘…think that I can think…’? An endlessly neurotic loop, a circuit that does not go to power any diode, a repetition of the same because it is easier to think the same thing over and over again. It is easy for a man to believe that his wife cheats on him. It is difficult for the same man to believe that she does not. It is impossible for this man to experience his relationship. These thoughts prevent us from interaction with the world. Metaphor; these thoughts illustrate the impossibility of the sexual relationship. I think that thought can be overcome and become once again. If only we did not choose the complex over the simple… Every day I will encounter countless occasions where I will make a value judgement, and I will hardly notice that it has happened! What seems to be the problem is that I have a culturally predicated judgement system; if it weren’t for being so inept, so difficult to slot into the accepted way that things work, I would never have noticed this. If, (and this must be the case for so many people,) one finds oneself in a social position, in possession of an ability, or with the means to climb higher through the social network, then one should never know or have the reason to doubt the value of one’s values or why one displays the motivation to do so as if it were symptomatic. Therefore, to re-value comes from having been set back, having failed, or having been rejected at some point, and then having the mental ability to reassess the grounding for the social framework. Therefore an artfulness is required when it comes to catching sight of one’s machinations at work. Andy Warhol exclaimed that he should like to have become a machine. The reproductive reduction of the work of art

into a commodity has made his work priceless, (well, expensive!). The losers are those who followed suit and believed in his lie that originality had died. Once again, the game of the hypocrite becomes apparent, but always too late; the joke is always on us. The herd instinct, (as Nietzsche has told us many times,) is the instinct that will cause the ruination of society, the degradation of art, the final victory of passive nihilism. And if, as I have done, we therefore listen to Nietzsche and reject the herd instinct and follow himâ&#x20AC;Ś

â&#x20AC;Śyet again the hypocrite triumphs, yet the herd does not. For people must learn to hear the voice of their hypocrisy and hear the laugh of contradiction, for it is there that we shall see the truth; that value consistency is the most dangerous and naive lie.

Thought: His flock consisted of those who could not hear Him. In that His words were only intended for certain ears, not everyone shall hear Him. Therefore it is His flock that miss the message precisely because they hear the voice, the instruction, but the message is not intended for themâ&#x20AC;Ś

***

Problem: If I believe in contradiction, if I embrace it as my maxim, do I not then adhere to a consistency, an ethical stance? Solution:

Only the true contradictor, the one who reaches this final and most hysterical of conclusions is able to see the lack of conclusion. When the contradictor comes to this final contradiction, all there is left is to laugh at the sight of the ineffectiveness, the po-facedness of the ‘ethical people’. Those people who strive to hold their character together in consistency, the fascists, (not in the historical sense,) are the ones that break when faced with this idea as doth the tree in opposition to a reed. For that is the point where the ideology of the I breaks down into a façade-like sham. Some of us will rejoice this. But still we must not pretend that the I which provided our horizon has gone; we must look for it in its absence. When I speak to other people, their motives become transparent to me; in their eyes can they see mine? From the inside, my motives well up from such obscure strata, it takes a very cold eye to experience them for what they are, but perhaps they appear more transparent in my enunciation? When I say ‘cold eye’, I do not mean ‘objectivity’, for this is a motive dressed up as reason. What I mean is that there are no motiveless actions or perceptions, rather I look to see if these motives derive from a backward source, from $, the empty gesture. The more empty my gestures, the closer to nihilism, the closer I get to contradiction. This means I approach the heart of my experience as a human. I see it that as a human Being develops, as it progresses through time and change, its transient nature becomes more apparent. The more that the ego attempts to hold the self together through all of these changes, the more it attempts to enforce its voice over all other voices in the subconscious, the more it attempts to negate this fact. Rather, when a contradiction arises between the maxims that a person holds, between his values and his changing experiences, he should

scrutinise the situation and then it would become apparent that experience of the present is located within this rupture. When the image of existence as it is perceived conflicts with experience of the world and its changes, the dominance of the anthropocentric universe begins to crumble. No longer can perception, which locates the human in the centre of the universe, as the producer of reality, be reconciled with the contradictions arising in the present. As once did the human perceive that the earth was the centre of the universe, then he must turn that false notion upon himself and science will add no conviction to this, only an acute understandingas-becoming will assist this change. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean to suggest that the egocentric perception of the universe will dissipate, rather it will see a slippage that illustrates in a constructive fashion the difference between perception, representation, and the Real. That representation is a re-positing in the world the perception filtered through the ego, and that the Real is an adjacent, obtuse manifestation that is imperceptible to this mode of seeing is the realisation, the becoming, that is the object of this perspectival slippage. Thus the Real remains in its inaccessible domain, but we can feel the weight of its presence, we are aware of its absence. The wonders of the perspectival revolution of the Renaissance period will appear hopelessly naĂŻve in contrast to our new eyes, in our new looking as doubting, doubting as affirming, a constant redoubling of human perception onto itself, devoid of value, but value being re-inscribed through this very process.

Thought: Where will the value, the worth, come from in all of these writings, these fragments? They are sad scribblings that see little

development, little academic quality, inflated self-affirmation, presumption, bias, few references, little structure, poor grammar, little adherence to tradition or writing style, plagiarism, etc. These are the values, but listing them is not one of them. This observation has been worth nothing.

[Descartes: ‘I exist as a thing that thinks’, (and I don’t even do that very well…)]

When I awoke this Saturday morning in May, I recall the first images as sunlight, alarms ringing, taste in the throat. I remember a sharpness in my eyes; a crust developing overnight – an attempt to seal them shut. Each night a skein appears over the eye. It is brittle and rigid and must be washed away each morning.

Technique: When I slip into a fantasy, I apply parentheses at the beginning and end in order to delineate where the fantasy begins and ends. I then noticed that there were brackets within brackets, that the fantasy had stretched and I did not know how to apply the brackets any longer. I could no longer step backward to identify the fantasy.

***

When reading a statement written by another person, it is always best to assume that he is always lying.

When I am writing this, I am well aware that I am lying,

Yet I continue to write knowing full well that I am lying,

Thus I finish writing relying upon the assumption that I might not be lying.

***

Thought: What is a book that goes beyond all other books? Is it one that destroys the value of all books before it and thus only contains value in its being-written? [Manifestation of the present.]

The reason why I need to contrast these two ideas seems obvious; (without calculation, however; I acted in good faith, or almost.) For Lacan, we cannot have Being and thought in the same instant, (combined with my faculty for forgetting, it favoured my freedom.) If we are thinking then we are not Being, and if we are Being we cannot be thinking; but our hand is forced; we must think about the choiceâ&#x20AC;Ś

(All credit to Camus)

***

“A great philosopher demands unrelenting penetration into his texts.” Thus said Jaspers, unwillingly attracting my attention to his work, firstly through fierce opposition, and then later through Irony and reversal. I have learned then, that through initial identification to my feelings in Jaspers’ work, (which I would heretofore have perceived as a relationship to a text,) was in fact a narcissistic reflection of prejudice. (How else could my feelings become manifest in his work?) In understanding this, I became able to experience the voice of Jaspers as it does not relate to me, as a voice for itself, but one in which I may partake. In my feeling of displeasure at Jaspers’ forthright, single-minded and confident remark about what a philosopher demands, I felt both the need to react and oppose this stance for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I had dogmatic feelings towards those who could posit their opinions so strongly, (and I took Doubt as a sign of intelligence,) and Jaspers had got my back up in that this is an opinion of mine which contradicts itself, (in being an opinion strongly felt for one.) I had thus fallen foul of my own method in this first instance. I had felt that opinions were the sign of a closed mind that was unable to accept alternatives, unable to discover new areas and I felt that these signs were indicative of the Christian mindset that I had riled against so strongly in my youth. Thus, to spot this contradiction in my method was to untangle a particularly deep-rooted knot that spanned almost a decade in significance; to identify with these feelings falsely felt, (that were borne out of some other trauma; they were disingenuous, misleading,) was to suit a façade, I was in the blind-spot of self perception. The denial of my own opinions had served an interesting function; after the fact, I can see now that I have a large capacity

for doubt that has been stretched by years of having cast many important things into it. Now I believe that it is possible to put an opinion out that is believed in my conscience, that I simultaneously doubt and affirm in the act of speech and writing. I am now only concerned with richness, and not with correctness, error, dogmatism or clarity. I feel as though this stretching of my horizons of belief through relentless doubt and denial has inversely affirmed my willingness to know belief and certainty. This is one of the effects that Jaspers has had. Secondly, I had difficulty in coming to terms with the idea that one can penetrate a text whatsoever; allow me to clarify. As I have already mentioned, one cannot know what the extent of selfknowability is by definition. Reading a text is tantamount to reading yourself, and to know a text is to know what you think about it, or what it reveals to you in your forgetting of that which is yourself. (That which is in you more than yourself?) Invariably, when reading the text or reading yourself, you will run up against the horizon of insight, although naturally this horizon is invisible, intangible. It appears only through the totality of all the things contained within it, and thus does not appear as a horizon whatsoever. So to relentlessly penetrate a text is to run headlong into the horizon; that which may prove to be ultimately the truth or ultimate deception, although donning the appearance of neither. Were this horizon attainable, then so would be absolute truth or utter ignorance, to take the Kantian dialectic of the angelic or demonic. (And who could really determine which was which; is the Truth really such an Angelic pursuit, or indeed is the truth of deception a demonic angel?) The object that arose for me out of this enquiry was that each problem, each impasse produced a

broadening of the very horizon that it pursued. Again, in struggling against the enunciation of Jaspers I had in fact begun to delineate this boundary; it had become accessible to me by initially making it inaccessible to myself. The process of such doubting of Jaspers’ remark about ‘penetrating a text’ was in fact an attempt to penetrate the text disguised as doubt. The reversal in my method now becomes evident; that to answer the question I firstly negate the assumption, but in such a way that I conform to it; I am following and leading at the same time. Again, the problem of Nietzsche arises; do not follow the herd instinct, but pursue the superman, (which is my doctrine.) (n.b. Kant’s Joke*, from “The Gay Science”) Thus dogmatism finds a new form; that of a strange affirmation of the object against which it rebels, (and we might call to mind here the son who rejects his father’s decree so strongly as to continue to be defined by it in its very negation.)

* No. 193 Kant’s Joke. – Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right; that was the secret joke of his soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for the scholars and not for the people.

“We can thereby read their works as if all philosophers were contemporaries.” To quote Jaspers again, but this time we go a stage further, and into far more dogmatic territory. I see the first developed formulation of this statement in Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science”, in that Nietzsche tells us, (note – tells us,) that he does not add anything new to our knowledge, but rather he helps us to

know that which is already in our knowledge, as if we were unforgetting or re-remembering some essence that was lost, or rather, obfuscated. My first point then, is that we are directed toward some form of transcendental knowledge, and it is the function of the prophet to reveal this knowledge that is more in us than ourselves. The herd mentality that Nietzsche damns so often is the mindset that represses the knowledge that is common to all men. (or, as in the case of Christ, his herd follows him, yet his words are not for their ears.) To return to the first sentence of the previous paragraph, “, but this time we go a stage further, and into far more dogmatic territory.” (Also recall the previous section on Dogmatism.) Yes, we must indeed go a stage further; by that I mean an enriching and deepening in our understanding of the possibilities and conditions of transcendence that ceases to be entrenched in the naïveté of coarse religious teachings or even the more developed and subtle writings of the enlightenment that pertain to ‘scientific knowledge’ and ‘method’. In fact, the understanding that I have of transcendence goes in the opposite direction to that of ‘moving upward’, and is more like a ‘moving toward oneself’, moving back inside yourself as a common entity devoid of the illusion of characteristics. Let us first describe the qualities of transcendence that will prove useful in our understanding, in our going backward, (as in Zarathustra’s going under.) Transcendence incurs the quality of ‘goodness’ in that it is perceived as an enlightening of the human spirit, a raising – up. Heidegger uses the term ‘good’ in the sense that the Greeks used it; Agathon, which is akin to the sun, or to enlightening. It did not slide into a relationship with evil or bad, (but it did with the

idea of ‘darkness’.) I take transcendence to mean the ‘going inside of human of a human’, not so much a regression, but a doing backwards of that which instinct and conditioning demands. It rejects and yet affirms the second-handed-ness of other people’s knowledge, (that which is passed down to us,) it rejects the fancy that we stand on the shoulders of our forefathers. (If I were to claim to be developing the ideas of Nietzsche, then I should be doing his work a pointless injustice; the only justice that his work demands is to rubbish it, to destroy it.) To begin to understand the condition of the human is to unravel the fundamental temporal contradiction that exists between the infinity of the subjective horizon of existence, and the transience of the subject in the eternity of the exterior time frame of which he is a made a subject. Therefore, we see in Heidegger’s work on Nietzsche a production of a new type of value; one that cherishes the thoughts of someone and not his products. It must be almost too obvious to think that thinking the thoughts that led Nietzsche to his extraordinary books would be an incredibly valuable thing in itself. But, as is our belief, we read the book and see what we can learn from that as an object of the past, of the final culmination of thought and of value.

The thing which has been made and not the various things that go towards making it is what is valuable to us.

(This next section bangs-on about value and the human condition, which strays a little far from the point, but nevertheless demonstrates the importance of removing the predicates of transcendence in order to understand the idea.)

So if we were to root value in that which can be experienced for the first time as a human, (and I mean a deeply-held value which is hard fought-for, is deeply significant and human,) in contrast to a value that you have come to learn through the assumption of the human being as temporally smarter than the humans that have gone before him, (i.e. not needing to know what they knew,) then we find a common base from which each human can start. This type of value-acquisition is therefore directly linked to the condition of being human and not the misapprehension of the condition of being human. It discovers value afresh at each moment; new riches at all times, new shades of meaning. It does not lose all shades in favour of black and white, which is a product of the belief that we have advanced beyond all other humans because of culture and, ultimately, because of the forward-running of time. This belief also negates and demeans the very thought which thinks it, demeans the thinker, because it subjects the same thinker to the same rubbishing by all other thinkers that were born after he was simply through chronology. Thus our first task is to remove the ideas of development and sophistication from culture, history, and ultimately, time. This does not negate the fact that these phenomena exist for us, but it does contextualise our value-ordering and hierarchy of those phenomena. Our second task is to posit value-production in the hereand-now of experience. For this makes allowance for the inherent contradictions that lie in wait for the human during the passage of his valuing lifetime. Thus we move back inside of our temporal condition of existence and not into the abstract real of ideology

which would keep us from our experiences in favour of forethought of action. The human is allowed to exist and value because his values become his when he discovers them and not when they are passed down to him as givens. Thus, in order that we can read all other philosophers as contemporaries is a condition tied to a number of things; that The metaphysical question, (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Theâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; henceforth becomes capitalised,) is all metaphysical questions, (they are all tied together,) and that we must remove the prejudice that we stand in advance of all other philosophers because of the conditions of time. Time should not effect the metaphysical question.

That is what I take to mean as transcendence.

Problem: Is it at all possible that one can read the works of Nietzsche and not wish to overcome him, to not accept the horizon of contradiction in following him and being avant-garde? His name is quoted throughout so many textbooks on postmodernism, (and there are so many of these; nothing new, no inspiration, just illustration,) yet it appears that the author has not been shattered from inside by the shrill voice of change that is present therein. Is this why I find such good company in Heidegger, Deleuze and Lacan? I cannot say that I find the works of these writers agreeable, yet agreeing with them is beside the object of my relationship. I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t pretend that I do anything less when I read than to read myself as them, to breach the rather limited horizon of selfhood and discover that the stars are not painted upon a curtain hanging in the sky. If Nietzsche provides us

with a horizon forged from the burning–away of the previous horizon, then this is the same standard that we must aspire to in ourselves, especially if it means coming face to face with the contradiction inherent in following an example that demands the transcendence and realisation of that example.

Question: Why would I include meaningless drivel in my dissertation?

Have I found such a blind confidence that anything I write will be of value? Is it that I cannot think of anything to write?

I am attempting to work through various boundaries; that of personal vanity, (which would include the ‘good’ and edit-out the ‘bad’,) and then also through the distinction between good and bad itself, (which is pathological anyhow; what makes the word ‘good’ good?) I am also attempting to work through the constraints of writing as an academic style. Rather, I find myself writing when there is nothing to write about. The writing is not about nothing, but finds something when there ought to be nothing. Anyhow; why shouldn’t the reader read the drivel of a writer? Given that the mind drivels on and on and without valuable purpose for huge periods of time during the day, it appears selfevident that there should be at least something of value in amongst all of that automated process. You’ll find nothing of value here in my words. Nothing of value there, in your mind.

I do find things of interest in the works of others, but this is only because I have found them, (I finds them of interest,) they have meant something to me, (to I,) in that I have meant them. Just as things that mean nothing to me because I have not meant them. This is my horizon, my limitation of value, in that my reading of things reads myself as I become defined and I simultaneously define in the same limited way. (Problem of representation.) Things shall only become meaningful when I have ceased to define them as such, (in that my ceasing to define them shall have meaning, and they shall find their potential meaning once I have ceased to define them. I shall not be content to allow my self to define the world in its limited way in that all the things in it should then be defined in my limits and not in my possibles. How am I permitted to talk in this way by my self? Is there any perspective on the subject? Everything I have said to you on the subject has been a fatuous fabrication; this is still I talking! But it is precisely because I cannot comment on this subject, on the subject, because I do not have this right to my self, that I and Self are the same, that I must comment.

How do I get to my Being through writing, (if that really is my object?)

I am thinking about Jaspersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; important distinction between Philosophy and philosophizing. Why does the text of philosophy, especially metaphysics, need to be academic, when the subject of metaphysics, Being, predates the academy?

(When I use the term academic, I use this solely through my experience of writing in higher education; my tutors praised the structure, development, accuracy, etc., of my work, and deplored the grammatical inconsistencies, quantum leaps, unjustified opinions, etc. They did not like what they could not already know, that was not a quote. The academy enjoys a linear history, an easy index, an objective commentary. (As I enunciate on any subject, each utterance deploys some valuable signification, some symbolic nuance, hides as much as it reveals, creates a personalised game. The academy would not realise that in the academic style, these undesirables are still present. The fanciful myth of Objective knowledge still finds a home in the academy, where it still believes in the pseudo-scientific cult of the Theorist, the Historian, the Philosopher.)) The problem of doing things the right way is of great difficulty to me. It stems from having a definite ethics, one that does not require independent thought, (joke!) merely adherence. Therefore, the act of writing drivel under the pseudonym of metaphysics is a more crucial one that first it appears.

Question: What is the use of a hammer in vacuum?

It is not a question of testing a value as to whether it is solid or hollow, rather it is a question of testing your self in the same way, (and the testing of values is therefore metaphorical, or connected to Being.)

Is the philosopher hollow? (Use a hammer.)

To test value with a hammer is to test different elements that ground the self in stability, in Identity. Values do not exist as things-in-themselves if we have already killed God. (Did we even test Him with the right kind of hammer? Did we just forget about him?)

No hammer was yet designed, Mr. Nietzsche, to test God. Only God may provide that kind of equipment. Only God knows the truth about God, and has the facility to destroy Himself. (Only Sir Lancelot can kill Sir Lancelot.)

Only Narcissism can dispel Narcissism.

And thus, only human perception can reveal the truth, (or limitation,) of human perception, which provides a reason, a value, to a dissertation that trawls the murky waters of valueless drivel… …remove a sense of the Good and the illumination disappears. Someone needs to look across the desolate wastelands. It is there, at the edge [of within].

***

Eternal return is conceived ultimately in the Being of the Self by disposition; we know of the gestalt between the two, whereby the connection between Dread and Ecstasy is brought to eternal return by the mind of opposites. In Nietzsche’s last years the two have become intertwined, a double-image of the same. If we turn now to Hofstadter, (and we

cannot think of him simultaneously to Nietzsche,) we must think of his point that two things cannot be conceived of at the same time, e.g. black as white and vice versa. We either see black or white, (though grey does not count unless we could see black white and grey all at the same time.) Similarly, we can conceive of a triangle but not of a 1000-sided figure as an image in our mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye. Hofstadter demonstrates a few of the limitations to which the mind is subject. The same is true of concepts, wherein the subject can see only either of two opposites and not the whole, (love and hate being the two most common that spring to mind.) Yet this incapacity of the mind is not a physical constraint or boundary, rather it is a symptom of stunted growth wherein the mind has been trained to think in opposites and not in complexity. I mention the example of love and hate in that all of us must remember a time when we have hated the same person that we have loved, and then probably gone on to love them again. It is clearly not the case that we either love them or hate them, but we feel something strong for them that can be characterised as either love or hate at any given moment and given the correct circumstances. The adage that love and hate are two sides of the same coin indicates that it is the coin that is important, and yet it is the two sides of it that make the whole. It is often the case that we feel hate for a lover, and yet we do not feel love for a hater because we are optimists. And thus we are able to see the coin and not simply one of the sides; we can appreciate the gestalt if we put our minds to it. If we turn again to the case of Nietzsche, the emptiness and the superabundance, the Dread and the Ecstasy, then is it not possible to see the two terms that create the diametric opposition,

Dread and Ecstasy, as a whole, something different? Or are we bound endlessly to look at the one and not at the other? We know from Lacan that a positive necessarily incurs the absence of the other. When we speak of ecstasy, dread is never lurking very far around the corner, rather it is underneath the coin. Only the Moebius can adequately provide in space the envelope encased by its interior. So what term shall we use to describe the whole of the two things?

***

The slippery customer of writing in Being Or The primary failed attempt to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;describeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

[Why can a house be homely in one moment and then unheimlich in the next? It is clear that the house has not changed, and our Being has not changed, but the bridge between our Being and the house; the representation of it, (the Self,) has changed. Something between the two things-in-themselves has slipped, has the potential to effect both. Being is co-joined to becoming, (Self,) and becoming is representation. Being is not changed by becoming, but becoming,

its

connection

representation

and

self-

representation can be changed/altered. In its way, our position as things in becoming is naturally subject to flux for that is its mode; but that is part of our dilemma of Beings in Time, the one and the same, fixed yet slipping. But we must be aware of which part is slipping and which part is fixed and in what way they are co-joined.

In that there is a connection between Being and the self-asrepresenting, can there not also be a connection between the house and the self-as-representing? Is the self, the being as becoming, connected in a twofold relationship between Being (which gives it out to the world, which is its vital connection to existence,) and the world, (which gives it its representation, gives it its other vital connection to existence)? Does existence only come into Being when it is caught as becoming between two beings in themselves? Is that the character of existence; of the relationship between Being and Time, between Being and becoming, ecstasy and dread? Existence as a concept does not denote whether something is real or not, rather it describes the character of its existence; it describes the way in which something can be seen to exist. Existence is the connector between the infinite and the temporal, between the void and the full, the contradiction inherent at the base of the human problem. It provides the key to the gestalt that divides whole things in the mind into opposites.]

Kant works on the assumption that in the real world of ethics, of values, there is no diametrical opposition between the poles of diabolical evil and angelic good. There is only a temperate space in between where human beings can operate. In contention to this perception, I must argue that in order for a human being to exist, to Be, he must aim for those extreme opposites that lay at the far ends of our spectrum. For the idea that they are opposites, that they incur the metaphor of direction, is indeed fallacious, but this fallacy can only be discovered in the representation of the representing Being by striving, striving in the directions that we have been given, (that

of good and bad, etc.,) in order for us to witness for ourselves that there is no direction in void and likewise, no direction in the fullness of the universe. That we have this conception of opposition at all is due not to real perception of opposites, but through the ease of use of concepts. It is far easier for us to think always in opposites, to think of black and white, than discover the complexity that lies within each and every value distinction, for if we did, we would discover that there was no distinction to speak of. It is of far greater value for us to attempt to accept the dual image of meaning and meaninglessness as the same concept, and that any distinction between the two is due to our representation, and gives no consideration to the effect that it might have on Being. In order to come closer to Being, it is essential that we begin to complicate the function of representation, attempt to experience representation as just that; representation and not Being. It is too easy, being representation-orientated, to turn a blind eye to the state of things in themselves, to experience them as knowable, to come to understand and listen to the voice of the Understanding. Understanding has a similar form to existence; it is a slipping thing that slides between the fixity of concrete Beings outside of Time. The temporal essence of Beings lies in their connection to the World by existence, understanding, time, self, representation and perspective. These things that I have mentioned are things that locate the Being in the world, which give it its character, although they are not that Being. They function between Being and the World in order to locate it there, there in the world and in time. But these things, in that they operate in such a way, also have the facility to turn their function back on themselves, to bend backwards, to create a dual-directional flow of understanding, existence, etc., from the World back into

Being. This is what I take Nietzsche’s backwardness of concepts to mean, in that he stops the unilateral flow of representation from Being to Understanding to the World, and spins it on its head. This is why backwardness of perception has Value, in that it takes the value that we take for granted, and it gives it back to us, inverted, to give us the other side of the coin. The whole of the coin. In this way, and in this way alone, do we come to understand the Voice, the ready flow of voice that speaks between beings, but through the slipping thing in existence. For if we allow perception to look both ways, if we are looked upon by the world as we are looking at it, then the connection between Being and the World, Understanding, is opened up, it serves a binary function that enlarges and enriches Understanding. In this way, the egocentric universe, which is used to perceiving rather than being perceived, (and here I do not speak of paranoia; that is a ‘being looked upon’ by one’s own perception – a perversion of perception,) becomes rooted in the universe as it is, as a thing that slips between concrete things to which it is inextricably connected. To come again to the voice, but now with the added conception of transcendence, what I take to mean as transcendence is exactly this; that in opening up the understanding to a position whereby it exists between two concrete things, it exists, (and this is my correct term,) it transcends the boundary of the image screen, of the thing which is always looking, of the ‘thing that thinks’, but the thing which is being thought, it transcends the debilitating mode of perception which has only one direction in that it believes that there is a direction. To lose this sense of direction is to posit oneself, rather realise oneself in the void space between concrete Beings, and that is the transcendental Understanding.

***

Why do I find it so essential to write at present, although it appears as the most difficult of all things in the world available to me? I feel as though the voice to which I am able to listen I am also able to give voice to. (The form of metaphysical voicing.) What I speak of is the faculty of the Understanding; that division in the mind that interfaces most vividly and apparently with the here-and-now of the lived experience in the first-hand. I feel a compulsion in my attitude toward the subject, [take that however you wish!] in that I cannot perceive all about me persons that have made this simple discovery, (or should it be remembrance? Or recovery of Intuition?) The art that I see in life stems from the ability to understand the simple and for it to become enriched by the complex, and thereafter over and over again. It is too facile, too complicit with peoplesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; thoughts that we should rely upon the information given to us by others, by the voices out of history or the past, about valuation as it relates and infuses with lived experience. This complacency to the immediacy of the authentic lived experience demonstrates what? Is it that we are creatures both trapped and freed within time; we privilege the past as experience which we can vampirise, and denigrate the past because we are somehow in front of it; we are the avant-garde of the human race? These two impulses work against each other to de-resolute the experience of the present as a thing valuable in itself, it frees us to the past by chaining us to it. On top of this tendency, it is also apparent that the past experience,

(and the value that has come out of that experience that is the product of it,) is the cream of this particular cat. We take the value that the past has belaboured to give us and ignore the belabouring that created that value. This is how we devalue the values we hold; by taking them and not having them. I give thanks to Heidegger; he gives us a new value by excavating the valuable thoughts of Nietzsche as valuable in themselves and not simply the products of that thinking. We enrich our Understanding through this excavation; we see the background and the foreground as valuable when set off against each other. Our eyes are not simply undressing the product; our understanding is being ravished by a larger sphere.

[Note; our devalued life is a one where treading water is the best way to stay afloat. We will never attempt to reach Hero. And we will not drown.]

It is not a mere question of believing or not believing in the theories of past thinkers that have attempted to grip the infinitely greasy pig of value, it is instead a question of quality; each moment spent in the present is enriched by its authenticity, and is not a moment spent in regret, (the past,) or anticipation, (the future.) Our projected future is geared towards all things to come, the acquisition of things, of objects of desire, of vanity and other anxieties. Our memories of the past represent all things that are lost, lost to time. The past is full of phantom objects, the future filled with fantasy ones. Each inaccurate and vain.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Happeningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is only occurring right now. Right now.

The more that we are ‘right now’, the less we are ‘then’ or ‘will be’. The less we are these descriptives; hollow words that are our Being. And somewhere, we are lost in this tangle of threads connecting the future to the past by way of the present, chained by a forward and backward motion like the ‘push-me pull-you’.

Question: How does Value as currency travel through time, (connected as it is to the minds of men which give it presence,) if it can be said that we draw upon past values and projected future values?

Proposal by way of Nietzsche via Heidegger: The metaphysical question, as the prime mode of interface with value, (and therefore inextricably connected to Being,) inhabits a [space] [where] time plays no part, for, in Heidegger’s words, to ask a metaphysical question is to ask all metaphysical questions, (as if metaphysics inhabits a [space] with some kind of access to a place where there can be no place, space or time; Being.) Where there are no distinctions.

Objection: How can it be said that our thought, (the thing keeping us from Being,) can traipse the impossible space of no-space, no-thought, no-time, Mr. Heidegger?

This is an intersection where we are tempted by the Hegelian ‘pure spirit’ or Kantian ‘pure reason’. Why bother along this line when Kant already gives us the billy-goat example?

But, to ask the question, to create the aperture, is the interface in itself; the cavity of Being, its void, will speak no answer, rather we will open the chasm up with the question and the answer shall be the silence itself.

Question: How can two realities anathema to one another, Being and Thought, interact?

Proposal: This question is purely for the sake of language, of Thought. Being has no concern, (and this statement, ‘Being has no concern’, does not concern Being.) The silence of Being is delineated in the voice of thought, and this is where the interface between the two occurs.

I am laying in bed right now, and I am thinking about the task set before my Understanding in understanding how the faculty of thought, language, can approach Being. If all of my questions are words and have no effect upon or insight into Being, (in that Being is not language or thought,) then the effort is hopeless. If any conception of Being is ‘thought’, it is not Being. It is Being in thought and not Being in and of itself, and is hopeless. The thought of Being is the preventative of Being, and therefore is hopeless. I keep running up against a wall that is hopelessness don’t you see? This is the crucial point to be made here; attempts at getting to Being are resisted by the very mode of the attempt. Resistance is a characteristic of Being. That hopeless feeling that I describe is an affect that Being has upon my thought, and therefore an interface has occurred. We get to discover Being not through the

ingenuity and veracity of our reason, rather we watch for the effects that Being has upon our reason, we watch for the affect on our sensibility, (as in sensible objects; perceived through the senses as objects of our thought,) of a dark object, a negative entity which is not available to sensible perception, but whose effects are. In this way we can see that it is not us as reasonable, sensible beings that approach Being, but rather it is Being that approaches us in and through our inability to get to it. The same can be said of Truth; our attempts to get at the truth are flawed in our very attempt, but this flaw in our attempt constitutes the truth about Truth and our facility to get at it. If we think again about Kant describing one man asking the question â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;What is Truth?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; and another man giving an answer, we get the analogy of one man milking a billy-goat, and another man holding a sieve underneath. But is not this the truth about the subject? Is it not truth that has found us in our very attempt? Is it not true that we expect values, morals and ethics to come out of this timeless chasm of Being? We are looking for some kind of eternal truth that comes out of Being, (because as we know, we do not make headway in finding these things in the everchanging world,) but casting our voices into the eternal is like casting coins in a wishing-well. Being is the place where we must find it because our Being is our connection to timelessness. In the same way that I have described our perception of Truth and Being as things that affect us and that we cannot directly perceive as objects, then the same can be said of any attempt to find morals or ethics. If we are to have an encounter with these things that spring from the strange connection that is Existence which exists between our Selves as temporal beings-as-becoming and the eternal thing of Being, then it must come through this connection; it must come

directly from an encounter with existence. Each time we cast our voices into the void to interrogate Being we are set back either:

by silence, or

by echo.

If we hear the echo of our Selves, the repeated shadow of our voice, then this shadow gives us a feeling for the emptiness of Being, it shows its essential property in the existent form of an affect. Just because we do not get the answer that we wanted or expected does not mean that Being has not answered for we are idiots to expect an answer; it is our selves as vanity that demand answers, as if the Other will provide us with that final thing that we do not and cannot know. Being will remain mute and has no ears for our questions and no time for our selves.

The reflection of our voice by the boundaries of our selves which border Being give us the most uncanny answer; the answer of our own question redoubled, repeated, nothing new. This is the form of our selves that is heard, (empty repetition, vanity and disingenuousness,) and the one that we are least prepared or desirous to hear.

Question: How do I find my place in History?

[What can a question like this mean?]

‘How do I’ (how does this I, this Self that exists because it is ensnared in the movements of time, in a sense that is ‘doing’ something) ‘find’ (as if on a great search) a place (as if there were one waiting) in (within, fixed, stopped) History (where time and culture interact in men’s minds.) A question like this only has significance to the I that said it, it is not a concern of Being. Rather, this is a question wherein all persons that ask such a question are seeking to find the infinite in the edifice of culture, as if the false monument of history can preserve for all time the character of a self as if it were Being. To be preserved in History does not necessarily have any value, because Value comes out of Being, out of the void, and does not come when it is asked. Value attaches itself to things when there is no demand, when thought does not interfere with its workings. We cannot think Value into things, but Value can be present in thoughts. Cryptic passages such as this are frustratingly rhetorical and quasi-spiritual, aren’t they? Well, all I did was juggle some words around; they either mean something to you, or they mean something to you. They cannot mean nothing can they; you are trapped in their/your meaning. Value caught you out!

Let me propose a paradox that is essential to the shape of this book. This book is part of history; it is being written now, you are reading it in its future, your present, you will recall it in your past. I am writing it in my present, I shall be writing it in my future, I am drawing from my past in order to write it. It is located in a timeline by way of Nietzsche’s writing, and also that of Heidegger’s. At points I hope that the border between Nietzsche’s writing and my writing becomes indistinguishable. My questioning comes out of

my time, out of my being-here and having been there, having read Nietzsche, and, in turn, responding to him. But I am asking the question of metaphysics; in Heideggerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words, to ask one metaphysical question is to ask all metaphysical questions. How can this be? The metaphysical question, in its attempt to open a channel of understanding between the reality of our self to the eternal realm of nothing in Being, is the same question no matter which words are used in the formula. Once it opens this channel, all distinguishing features that it might have had for us are lost in the chasm of Being. Back to the original paradox; how can this book, as part of history, attempt to de-historicise itself? Because it asks the metaphysical question, it loses its shape, the distinctions it may have had in history are lost once this voice of mine becomes clouded by all of the other voices of history that have asked the same question. This is called plagiarism in culture. This value-judgement means nothing in Metaphysics, as the defining lines of selfhood that are solely the domain of self and self-reflection are nowhere to be found in Being. To ask the guiding question that is common, a voice for everyone in everything cannot be plagiarised; it is a defining property of Being and is not the property of self. It is a relinquishing of self in favour of understanding. self and understanding are at odds in this particular realm, and in order to understand can mean in metaphysics to lose oneself. This is a losing oneself in the moment, where the present overtakes thought and Being enters into the world for that moment. Where oneself becomes allself and noself. Dread and ecstasy become the same. All and Nothing.

Question: What can be said of the coming-to-be valuable of values that have their origin outside of our particular lived experience?

Firstly, we cannot instantly degrade the values presented before us, (that we have not come to know in and through ourselves,) as without value, yet neither can we accept them as valuable in themselves. A value that comes to us by way of an experience outside of us, (like for example, what your mother tells you is right,) is second-hand. On one hand, your mother may be attempting to convey to you a piece of knowledge that she has learned from life and believes that you might benefit from without learning it the ‘hard way’, (to experience it.) At the same time, to not experience the value of this value essentially degrades it; it can have no value if you do not value it in yourself; this much is obvious. So, what your mother conveys to you is for her a value, but for you, it is something else, it is part of knowledge and must be treated as such. Furthermore, we need to understand what this ‘know to be right’ sensation is, this conscience. If we know to be right an ethical disposition before it is encountered, then it is a principle, it is a defence against the ethical dilemma, the choice. (The choice is the point where everything in and around the human self dissolves and everything becomes dangerous; even that which appears to be a simple choice.) If this ‘know to be right’ is not a conscious principle, it may be a subconsciously motivated ‘feeling’ wherein one ‘knows to be right’ something that hinges upon the well-being of the self,

upon the fragile symbolic network that orbits the original trauma, (wherein the choice is a forced one; it is forced into protecting the self from another trauma.) Yet, to hold a conscious principle may be, (and probably is,) inspired by a subconscious â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;leaning towardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of an ethical disposition. But this inquiry is not discussing what causes an ethical disposition, rather it tries to understand where the value of that disposition lies. Therefore, it is quite easy to see that the motivation involved in an ethical decision can be duplicitous, hidden, deceptive. The value in an ethical stance does not lie in the motivation.

Example: I am going to the concert hall tonight. I have repeated this action many times but I have not heard this particular symphony. This symphony is very popular and has been performed and heard a great number of times. Due to the idiosyncrasies of live orchestral concerts it will, by definition, be original. The notes played tonight, although they have been played in the same order so many times before in adherence to the original score, cannot be heard again because it is being played live. (And what would happen if the same concert was played exactly the same more than once? What would happen if it was played exactly as Beethoven intended?) How can it be then that I can hear this symphony 100 times and each one of those times I hear the same symphony but have a different experience of that symphony 100 times? The symphony itself cannot be removed from the context of its being performed; it is bound to existence in such a way. (Or, its existence is bound in

such a way.) It is evident that the tie between the symphony as an abstract ‘thing’ existing as a concept, and our experience of the symphony as a cognitive thing we can perceive is what gives this symphony the resonance that we could describe as existence. (Here, the term ‘existence’ shall stand in the place of the gel that gives [existence] its character; trapped somewhere between the abstract and the concrete, its being borne out of its being bound to time and space. In the context of the above exposition of the character of existence, how could I then place the action of writing an original piece of philosophy dealing with the concept of existence when I am writing a philosophy of repetition, (repetition being part of the character of existence as outlined above,)? This is not a con: I do not purport to be writing something ‘original’ (in the idealistic sense of that term,) by explicating the repetition of originality. As I have outlined above, originality moves in patterns, is tied to repetition by an indelible bond which eradicated the idealistic understanding of both ‘originality’ and ‘repetition’. Neither is separate from the other. Rather, I am attempting to philosophise through a thing (this text) in all of its outstanding unoriginality and repetitiveness, about originality; this is another core paradox at the heart of the text which is designed to illuminate the character of art as it appears to us in existence. To illustrate the above tangle of words and ideas through the ever clear-headed Heidegger, we have the term ‘being-there’, which indicates to us that in ‘being-there’ we are existent in the originality of presentness, of closeness to the moment, as opposed to the repetitiveness of thought which always drives us away from the present. Dasein is diametrically and fundamentally opposed to

thought, and therefore the two are inextricably linked by and in their oppositeness.

“…existence” is a synonym of “being there.”

I have just finished work for the night and I have sat down to write because, (wait; if I have just finished work for the night then I cannot start work-this means I must not sit down,) I think that if I can make my day useful I will be well pleased. If I can feel as though I have accomplished something new amidst the intellectual sedative of my job I will feel that I employ my time wisely. But I sit here instead with my mind buzzing; there are various thoughts and ideas but I cannot remember what it is I am supposed to be writing about, there is a block in my mind preventing me from accessing what I want, (although I am able to remember that I want it,) and it has been papered-over with blankness. My method now is to try and write about this state; it has acquired meaning in that I am attempting to lend it my understanding.

Note: I am thinking that thinking can be overcome in its present state by thinking. My thinking is so ill-defined, (defined by ill qualities,) that it can easily be papered-over with blankness; this blankness as we shall discover is what we will later call the horizon – that which must be obliterated.

Does there come a time when all voices lose their character, their ‘individuality’, and become truly indivisible in that they all sound alike? This is what you might call a ‘universal’ voice, all voices,

the voice which transcends to a plateau of flatness beyond the defensive walls of the ego and the I as it is understood within my consciousness. We might draw a parallel here between our concept of the singular voice of all voices, and the ‘I am nothing/I am all the names of history’ that Deleuze and Guattari draw out of Beckett and Nietzsche. Might we choose to think about this voice as a manifestation of the schizophrenic, selfless, indistinguishable voice which pierces through all Being and all Time, which is anxiety to us in our current state of selfhood? It is quite evident that I have become engrossed by the idea of the transcendental voice of human Being. Why so? Primarily, this is because I have heard this voice an unquantifiable number of times and in so many different forms. I hear it in the concert halls where I work, I hear it in the night-clubs where I dance, I hear it in paintings, hear it in books, in short; everywhere. And the reason I choose to have for believing it to be universal is that it is not bound to any hierarchy in culture for it can find you anywhere. It finds a smooth place where both you as the [listener] become required to make the [music] exist. (I use here the example of music, for there is no music without a listener and no listener without the music; they are bound together in a pact with existence whereby they both reach a state where they are both ‘present’, both expose their Being without there being any thought.)

Again

Question: Why do I include absolute drivel in my serious dissertation on philosophizing?

Attempt at the answer: Have I found such a blind confidence in my thoughts and ideas that anything I write I will find valuable and worthy of inclusion? Is this the only way to get anything written? I think that I am attempting to work through several boundaries in this particular field: that of personal vanity, (that which would include the ‘good’ and edit-out the ‘bad’,) and also through the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, (which is a pathological bias anyway; what makes the word ‘good’ good, or denote the good? All credit to Nietzsche for that complication.) I will now abandon these two complications for the time being, as I would prefer to open my understanding up to another horizon. The boundary I wish to understand is a great one, and so far off that I get the vanishing point confused with myself. That boundary is writing itself, that of writing as something we know how to do, as an academic thing. (This last point would also have to include philosophy itself as an academic ‘thing’, and it is obvious that we are entering a vast territory with a large amount of baggage. Good. I would rather turn my heavy baggage to an advantage rather than cast it off, (which is what enlightenment usually purports to do rather deceptively.) If the baggage is there then why not use it?) Rather, I choose to write where there is nothing to write about. The writing is not about nothing, but finds ‘something’ where it appears that there is ‘nothing’. (The above remark only makes any sense at all if we understand the accepted notion that value and quality only enters into writing through the accepted channels for them to enter it. This is what I shall take to mean ‘academic’.)

Back then to add to the original question and ask ‘why shouldn’t the reader read the writing of a writer, even if considered by academic knowledge as drivel, for it is the writer’s writing nonetheless?’ Firstly, because the mind of any person drivels on and on for pretty much the whole of its functioning life, and yet nobody questions the value of its automated and banal functionality. [Why not weigh these thoughts?] Secondly, if it is only the accepted channels that give us our standards of good and bad in the realm of literature, then we should attempt to overcome this elitist and nonsensical attitude and attempt to discover for ourselves where quality resides without the need of an external guarantor. And if you find nothing of value in my words, that only means that your mind has found no value in it; the book has reflected the valuelessness of your own thoughts and we in turn both become meaningless. I must insist that I do find things of value in the works of others, but I must also add that this value only comes into being because I have found it there, I have produced the value in the work of another by allowing myself an interface with the work itself in the form of understanding. This is the moment where existence and value become synonymous; I must exist for this value to exist in me and I must allow this value to exist in me by opening my understanding to the existence of the work. These things have only meant something to me because I mean them, just as things that do not mean something to me do not mean anything because I have not meant them to. This here is my horizon, and this is the limitation of my valuing in that my reading of things reads me, I become defined and I define simultaneously in the same restricted way.

How can I possibly have the right to analyse in such a way my capacities as a self to value things when such an analysis requires distance from the prejudices of being a self? But, it is precisely because I cannot comment upon myself as the subject and at the same time the object that the possibility becomes feasible; possibility is unrestricted within a paradox in that there is no room for logic or reason, so the motivation to get out of the paradox must come from elsewhere. The next question that I must ask whilst I am on the subject is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;how do I get at my Being through writing?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; For, to be sure, the only possible object that I have made for myself is my self, and in this infinite regress of the self of the self of the self we are looking for the infinite, or the chasm of the chasm, and hence Being itself.

***

Nietzsche and I are walking along a beach. There is no one else on the beach, just the sound of the sea moving in and out, and the sound of the pebbles moving about as our shoes connect with the ground. Nietzsche says to me that he is alone, that he has no audience, that his work is just pure self-reflection unhindered by the outside world. He likes the air on this beach, and the day is warm and bright. I choose to swim in the sea for a while, and then to bask in the sunlight. Nietzsche sits on the beach waiting for me to come out, and I can see that there is something on his mind. I ask him if everything is OK, and he says to rephrase the question. Quite rightly I make the question more specific, for if not his answer might ramble anywhere and we will both be none the wiser. I ask

him what is on the front of his mind, his most insistent thought. He gives his answer, and I then decide to ask a more guiding question given that I have the opportunity. “After everything you have said in your writing Friederich, after all of the debates and attacks and insights, can you conclusively tell me what you have learned about the meaning of life?” He tells me to go back in the sea.

***

I woke up this morning and I had dreamed that I was selling paintings in an exhibition of mine at extortionate prices.

To use the simplest and crudest phraseology, ‘we are asking the wrong questions, we are looking in the wrong places.” In point of fact, ‘asking’, ‘questions’, ‘looking’ and ‘places’ all miss the ‘mark’, given that the concept we seek does not inhabit space or time, neither does it fit into our comfortable way of metaphorising things. It resists our understanding initially, and so it is foolish to continue in this particular vein. The method that we should in fact employ is one that operates on the same stratum as Being. If indeed Being produces effects in us by its presence or our awareness of its absence – our absence of knowing it [directly] is in fact an affect of Being on our understanding. Being causes an inability to understand Being, which is how we are to understand it. In language therefore, we seek to trace out the metaphoricity of Being, linguistic terms that do not aim at the un-present [absent] object, but aim at the unpresentness of it, the properties it affects the world with, its

remainder, in short – what we can know. Our language seeks to ‘estimate’ or approximate Being, locating it by finding where we are not, or finding where we cannot reach.

Hypothesis; If the philosophiser hunts for the clues, the symptoms of Being on the self, then he is becoming an analyst, for it is psychoanalysis that covets the symptom and the sign. But the philosophiser does not covet the symptom, for it is only an indicator of his true object and he treats it as such. Here there is reconciliation between philosophy and psychoanalysis; their borders are well maintained, their ambassadors carry news of co-operation. For example, the term ‘void’ is used to stand in for what Being is like, it is an estimation of Being’s correlative in our language. It describes something of which the word is not, (for ‘void’ is a word and not a real thing. What it denotes has no properties and no characteristics.) In my last point I used the phrase, ‘…what Being is like…’ Let me explain me explain first the need for inverted commas, and second the repetition, the need to repeat. I cannot use the phrase ‘Being is like’ in that ‘Being’ is not ‘like’ any thing. Being is. Being has no pseudonyms or correlatives in the world of things. Instead, I used inverted commas to show that the word ‘like’ is an approximation; I cannot use it genuinely or as though it were natural to this mode of writing. Secondly, the need to repeat the phrase ‘Being is like’ is to remove the phrase, isolate, reiterate and recapitulate that section. The repetition does not deplete the significance of the phrase, rather it removes it a stage each time it is removed to a place where it

becomes disingenuous, an object of scrutiny in itself, a point at which the language used is beginning to ‘think’ along the same lines as ‘Being’, in that it is an explanation, then an explanation of an explanation and so on. It never reaches a place where it is simply an explanation again, but recedes instead into infinite regress, it becomes void in a sense. This explanation you read now is a second-generation explanation abstracted from its original context, and is therefore a step up into understanding. But because Being knows no steps or distance, it is no further away than the original ‘Being is like’, (if you can remember back that far,) so the understanding of the affect of Being on language or analysis is enriched even though we come no closer to Being itself. The infinite regress is an affect Being has on our ability to understand Being. Infinite regress, (infinite repetition of the same,) and the concept of the singular, the indivisible, although opposite and anathema to one another, actually comprise a total understanding of the effect of Being on thought, neither of which can be attained within the realm of thought. We can know how, but we cannot Be, we cannot regress infinitely or be singular, for both concepts are horizon-less in their scope, and human thought is not. We are not Being, we are understanding; we know how. This is my mode of knowing, and none of this approaches Being.

[Note: A large section of writing, perhaps 4 paragraphs, has been removed from the beginning of this current section by the author.]

I feel that most of this writing is rambling; it has no real insight. But this understanding leads me to a real insight; after I have

rambled for so long I get tired of rambling and find the plateau where I am now. Why do I not cut out the bones and just leave the meat? That’s not how I like to do things. I am all for something new, I am not for doing things the way they have already been done. If I were to remove what I don’t want you to see, then what am I actually doing? By including all of the fragments I am de-fragmenting the entire text, but we are still a long measure off the full picture. [Read the subtext of my inclusion Mr. Derrida.]

Today I have done many things; I have been to the bank to organise my finances ahead of Christmas and ahead of my trip into Venice. I have slept well, but not for too long – I left the window open a fraction to replenish the air in the room, and also that I might hear the life outside of my overly warm bedroom. So why did I get no impulse to sit at my computer and produce any work? To be perfectly honest, I bumbled around the idea of doing so for practically the whole day, but each time I approached the actual ‘doing’ of that task I turned back, I desired to be distracted by something other and occupying. I talked excitedly on the telephone with my fiancée about the prospects of work on this fine and stimulating day. All of the conditions were right, yet something essential, the most essential thing was clearly lacking. At other times, I find that I have no subject to write, a lack of ideas, or some other hindrance, yet I am able to write. So why is that not the case in this instance? I resolved to leave the house once more, but this time without any clear purpose; I was simply ‘leaving the house’, (as I have found that it is most difficult to work in there,) and head towards my favourite café in Camberwell Green. This particular

café has a warm interior with a rich Turkish décor and is filled with billowing clouds of cigarette smoke. How it leaves me feeling Parisienne! (Clichés are often like dynamos; they get things started, they produce the ‘spark’.) I feel drained of emotion today given that I have just finished a five-day stretch at my employer’s business and now returning to my chosen task I begin falteringly. I am too flexible a fish to work each and every day in the same way, and so I would rather leave that task to those who were designed for it. My work has just begun now that I am writing this, and yet the goal or aim of the book is so hazy – I cannot in truth see a point to any of it! I am so melancholy; I could sit back in a trance for an hour rather than add one new idea to this essay, and so I explore this desire by objecting to it. As things become un-set, as the idea of a comfortable and mindless life leaves me, (and my employer and his stooges attempt to make me care for this mindless secondrate labour!) I begin to feel the excitement of being uncomfortable again. This is my boon; that I feel impulsively that there is a great task at hand, even though it is a silly idea, and yet this is the idea in front of your eyes now. I have no faith in this essay – it’s a book not a value – it is too much the narcissist of itself. I am writing it because it demands to be written; I am merely the author and slave to the words and ideas. This book was written because I didn’t want to be comfortable, or because I do not like the television – think about this when you cast your pebble! But in this strange feeling that I have just outlined, I am able to pull apart the tight weave of my characteristics. The strangeness is in fact a chink in my subjectness – pull hard enough and it will unravel and leave you cold! Use that thread to find your way back out again! This is what the action of this book does to me

– it is tearing me apart in so subtle a way that it can barely be noticed except in this register here, this book. And shall I suffer more and give you again the pleasure of witnessing as in a novel the self-destruction of an ordinary person, the kind you tip your hat to in the street or wink at? Yes, I shall go on, to satisfy whose desire? I am already the winner – by reading this book you still do not come closer, this book keeps you at a distance but frustrates you simply because I am doing it and you are reading it. How shall this be remedied in you? I will not say… And then, as if to intensify this anguished and bitter feeling, I do the silly thing of reading what I have written. I can’t! It is too embarrassing! I know full well that the only way of getting these notes into some order of coherence is to in fact read them, edit them, re-write them, refine them etc. But this nonsense is for academics and I can do the fuck what I wish, for I have never learned how to spell and neither do I know what a pronoun or a tense is. I have come to see it that what I have written is a trail, and I am following the thread back out of the labyrinth. Sometimes it feels like this thread has been set up wrongly by myself to fool me, or that I was born in the labyrinth and in fact the thread is meaningless as is my following it or my believing in it. But worst of all is the fear that the thread might in fact be one of the Minotaur’s pubic hairs. Now I am being coarse; did you not taste that flavour at the beginning of this fragment? No? Maybe I am in good humour, but write in the opposite fashion to fool both of us. It is no good following my meaningless thread when you have your own… I am sorry to disappoint, but in fact this entire previous section has been just a fancy, but I would like to remind the reader

that although the surface of my writing is deep, the writing of my depth is shallow. (For example, silly ‘Zen’ reversals such as this.) But what does this whole game really belie, and whom am I playing it with? I have no fame, I have no customers to serve, so it does not matter what is in the shop or what it looks like. I can decorate the shop howsoever I choose and I do not anticipate any increase in profit. So why, might one ask, (anyone blessed with the intuition of business sense that is,) do I continue to open the shop each day and prepare food in it? The invitation is indeed an open and permanent one, and the food that I serve is quite unusual and usual – some of it comes from ancient recipes, some of it is also reheated or hashed, some imported, some acquired in another shop, some stolen, some indigestible, and some having already been digested more than once. Some of it is even all of the above at the same time. But I have not advertised my particular menu, (but when I do it shall certainly lead you, you, to read this.) My shop resides down an unfriendly, inhospitable, debt-ridden ill-lit alleyway, (the kind that Freud gets lost in.) But, perhaps it is not inhospitable? Perhaps only it is unattractive and uninspiring? Is there anything unique about my restaurant – are there any specials? Is there anything here to attract customers or even flies? There are no quirks, there is no neon, and naturally, word of mouth does not carry from a mute or a recluse. There are no ears. So, I do not attract customers into my shop – if they are able to find it by accident or some mystery causes them to enter, then so be it! What will these fantasy customers order? I shall make my recommendations, but without conviction in my tone – I have no faith in the menu. All I can say is that other restaurants can provide the recommended nutrition. The nutrition to be had from

my delicacies are not manifest in the food, the company, the ambience, etc. (Although, to be sure I will concede that to attempt to digest these various dishes might cause some affect, some poisoning or malady.) Rather, this restaurant is self-catered and self-serviced, with no ingredients or facilities. It has nothing, which is why you are safe in here. If you decide to enter, then surely you will drive yourself mad about a restaurant that looks, sounds and smells like a restaurant, but is in fact not one – it is a cuckoo’s egg, or it is a flytrap, or it is a mirage, or perhaps even something less flattering. Because I have yet to find a place like this, (with the above qualities I mean,) so I built it myself but without the my and barely with the self. I do not know any of the things that I have just said because I am merely projecting and fantasising. Everything in the world serves a purpose, (so it seems, (to whom?)) That appears to me as a fundamental problem when faced with a search for meaning in life in that all you have to go on is hearsay and pointers; all the values, meanings and purposes in the world have already been worked out – best not to think about them really! What I propose in the form of this book is something without any of the above – this is a place where you can cook your own bloody food. I did not say this. I am not the proprietor or an employee here. I have no license. I sit back and decide to have a cigarette and suddenly I feel lonely; usually I wait in this place for somebody. There is a pair of persons also in the café; a young lady with an experienced face wearing sports clothes. Her partner is much older and roughlooking who speaks to her with his mouth full of food. How curious I must look as I peep out from my dark corner in the café! The

waitress comes across to me, (as I have yet to order anything although I have been in here for over an hour,) and says to me

“Are you alright?”

How does anybody reply to this question? That I am all-wrong? But instead I hold the impudence of my tongue and give the timehonoured response;

“I’m fine, thank you.”

(Incidentally,

probably

the

most

frequent

lie

that

slips

unconsciously like an eel from an Englishman’s lips.) I am a culprit of this lie; I display no desire to contact another human being. Well, so much for not being able to write today, for I am a failure.

***

When you are thinking, (as is your custom,) what does this book offer, think in a different manner to that which have grown accustomed, for my book does not offer but does instead only sacrifice its worth in the most reluctant fashion. Only a master thief or some other such cunning type, (a traitor or liar for instance,) has the correct artistry to extract from me that which is most safely guarded. It is the customary manner for a book to offer up knowledge for perusal, for that is the reason why it has been written down and sold for money. But to my mind the world is too full of consumption for that mode of acquisition to bear fruit, and I would rather hoard and be stolen from than give my secrets up freely in

exchange for sterling. Look down upon me from your lofty eyrie not as one looks down as is the custom of hierarchy, but as an fisheagle spots and ensnares his live nutriment. So think then upon what type of a writer or person is he who writes, (starved of any subject other than the subject of the subject, (which, incidentally is that type of nutrition that incest would provide if it were a foodstuff,)) who thus is unable to conclude; that most basic function of any type of essay. He holds and provides knowledge although I am unable to gain from it, for in any attempt to penetrate the surface, I find nothing but reflection underneath. Why am I reading this text? I hope for all sakes that you give up now, (if you havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t already,) and turn instead to some best-selling fiction written by clean writers who bow down to the guild of their trade, who turn art into profession. This is the reason to abandon this bastard text immediately, for like the bastard, it can only harm and cannot love, it has no hint of the qualities that it ought to have, (in fact, knows not of ought or should,) that would be beneficial were those two types of knowledge injected into the substance of this text. As opposed to the aforementioned ought, the text does instead have a hidden quality that must be invented with each glimpse of the eye, and requiring a swiftness of the mind that is able to look and look again into the text and the complex of its meanings, its neuroses.

Jean-Paul Sartre and I are sitting in a cafĂŠ together this afternoon. The ambience in the room is that of a Saturday afternoon; nobody rushes, a billow of cigarette smoke is exhaled from the local Turkish clientele, it is warm, but not outside. He makes many inventive and enlightening observations about the people around

us, (even the odd humorous comment about a fat lady at the table opposite,) things, objects, existence and the problems that are currently on his mind. [But this was my observation and what he did there has no relation to this.] But nonetheless we sit in this café in our strange way together, as if we were the oldest of buddies, exchanging the odd fragment of conversation. I eat the menu whilst he is writing it. I wish that other people such as journalists or photographers could see us here – I might feign off my particular madness in fantasy, (or at the very least I might gain some profile or credence.) But the cameras remain silent in our presence; there is just the clatter of coffee cups on their saucers to remind us of what we are. I am too busy smoking this cigarette, (it won’t kill me, but others like it will,) to pay any heed to what is going on in this present. Are you there with us now, I mean, in your mind’s eye, observing, fantasising? Have you formed a part of my insanity in that way? Each of us is mad, yet we call it our personality and pretend that our personality is a synonym for our sanity; what a mad thought! What stops Sartre and I from sitting in our café, I mean, how do you conceive that it is an impossibility? Time, place, the concreteness of the physical universe to which we are bound in our bodies. But the concreteness of reality is where our existence springs from, and is not the domain of Being, to which there is no proper place, in persons, time or space. You may find that I write with little concern for an audience, (which is a figment of my fantasy to be sure,) but I do write with great concern for my reader. As my image may or may not stand forward for public edification I am not concerned. But I care deeply for this channel that has been opened between you and I, between writer and reader, of a speaker

and a listener within existence. Do I write then for all possible readers, or an ideal one? I do not care, for all readers have the same value attached; they are readers; that is the value. As I am writing my writing into my consciousness in the fabrication of this text, you are similarly writing this text in your own voice onto your consciousness. I am reading from my consciousness to yours even though I do not know who you are. I am listening to my fantasy of your desire in order to write and to be satisfied. Who is the reader and who is the writer; you or I?

Imagine that life, or rather, existence, is like being tied to a piano in such a way that any movement of your body caused a key or a succession of keys to sound. If you tried to struggle free from your predicament, (as undoubtedly you would at first,) the piano would make noises that corresponded to your anxious thrashing about, becoming more and more terrible the harder you attempted to escape and the more furious you became. All there is to do is to accept the situation, (for it was not your choice to be tied to the piano in the first place,) and make movements according to your desires, or by at least accepting the noises caused by your each and every movement. In the same way, one does not choose this existence, for it is the product of the conjoinment of other people and their desires, (one’s parents.) Now consider that art does not cease when the artist leaves his studio or study or wherever the physical products of his work are fabricated. Each part of life or art is not a ‘part’ or ‘apart’ from any other – it is a whole organ, and it is we who try to part and divide it. Thus, art is carried throughout each and every interaction with the world; think back to the piano – you cannot choose to play

the piano or make sounds on it, for it will always make a noise no matter what you choose to do. And in this way existence is like being tied to a piano â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it reverberates through each and every interaction with it, one cannot shrug it off except in ceasing to exist, you and it are inextricably connected in such a way as to reverberate with each other through necessity. Again, choosing this existence, this condition, does not come into the equation, for you did not ask to be given life, but it is a necessary condition that is a property of all persons. We do not have the original choice. But given the unique nature of your husbandry to the piano, you cannot tell if you are playing it or if it is playing you; which object is the instrument? Is one an instrument of the thing called existence, or is existence an instrument upon which you play? Your bonds to the piano also elucidate upon your forced choice; your unfreedom consists in each sound which is created, no matter which sound you choose to create, and in that does the division between existence and the Self, between art and life, become indelibly blurred. The point to be made through this simile is that the concept of division is a concept that exists only for the subject, and must remain only a concept. Division exists in the realm of thought alone, despite what we might think of natural processes and the processes of division, for again this is an object of thought. The piano does make any distinction; it does not distinguish between you and it, that is for you to do, and that is what keeps you from accepting your condition, it keeps you from Being.

Criticism of my writing style recently:

It has not been my choice, but thus far my writing has strayed from the language that I became accustomed to when writing essays at school, has departed somewhat from the language that I have picked up from the texts that I have been reading recently, and has become somewhat ‘holistic’. [note: define ‘holistic’.] Why?

[It often feels whilst I am taking these notes in my book, wherever I may be at the time, or in whatever frame of mind, that I am simply taking dictation from the predominant voice in my thought. It does not feel as though I am writing philosophy in the sense of the philosophy that I am accustomed to reading that is set down by others. I feel as though my vocabulary is highly constricted, with the same phrases and words being repeated over and over, any technical use of terminology having been set aside in favour of ‘stream of consciousness’ writing.]

None of the above comments about the way in which I am writing has significance when it comes to the point of what is being said here: I am simply reflecting and responding, I am philosophising. A criticism of this philosophising would have to take into account the project that is laid down within these sentences, and would also require an interior view of the use of language, the concepts involved, in short; you would have to be me, or have access to my thoughts. This is one project; I am attempting to give access to my thoughts in whichever way they are becoming written. Each and every criticism that you make of this text whilst you are reading it is becoming part of the fabric of the text as it exists as an entity within your thoughts. The use of language in this text is of crucial significance; allow me to demonstrate. For a moment, conceive of

and contemplate my words here as your own, (for undoubtedly you have used most if not all of them yourself is some combination, perhaps not though in the combination in which I am using them.) The combination; is that where ‘art’ resides? There is to be no ownership of the concepts expressed here in that it is only the combination of words in creating sentences, paragraphs and books that keeps my book from being your book, my thoughts from being your thoughts. All of the above sounds hideously pretentious. Good. There is no value to my mind of using the usual arsenal of criticism against what I have written, because I do not pertain to enter the arena whereby criticism is criticism. Each and every thought made in relation to this work forms a part of it, every word that you read validates every word that I have written in a sense that it connects self to self across the boundaries of individuality, and therefore this book does not form a part of culture that can be accessed in the way that one accesses culture, (through money, taste.) I am philosophising when I move this pen, press the keys in this keyboard, when I breathe or when I satisfy an itch with my thumb – how? Because all of these things are reverberations of my existence and I revel in them. In the same way too shall I revel in each and every thought that you make in relation to this work of mine, regardless of your intention, because it is a connection between thoughts, and this thought of the connection between thoughts in different minds is a valuable one in my philosophising.

***

This is a story about a little girl called Snegurochka. Snegurochka lived in a village in Siberia with her papa and mama. She found her name when she was born during a great blizzard, and that was the only thing that her parents could think about to name her. One day, Snegurochka was out playing in the snow when she met a little girl who was also playing in the snow. (There was little else for little girls to do in that particular village.) Going over to the other girl, Snegurochka went and asked if she could play with her, and the girl agreed. “What’s your name?” asked Snegurochka, wishing to be polite. “My name is Snegurochka” replied the girl. “That’s not true, because my name is Snegurochka!” said Snegurochka. The little girl, who’s name was also Snegurochka, said that her papa and mama named her during a blizzard whilst she was being born. “That’s funny,” replied Snegurochka, “my papa and mama named me during a blizzard whilst I was being born, too!” Snegurochka was most surprised by this, and suggested that they should be sisters, given that they have the same interests, (playing in the snow,) they have the same name, and they live in the same village. Snegurochka wondered whether Snegurochka was thinking the same thoughts as she was. At the end of the day Snegurochka and Snegurochka parted company and went home to their papas and mamas and explained their story. Both papas went on to say that it was impossible that both girls were the same, because little girls are like snowflakes; no two are alike.

***

[The principle of chaos would state that no two snowflakes are alike, because there are an infinite number of variables, and

snowflakes represent each infinitely recurring variable. Also, because chaos is chaos, (i.e. it does not have laws,) it must be the case that chaos does not repeat itself, because that would not be chaotic. But, in order for chaos to be chaotic, it must certainly be true that one could come across two snowflakes that were alike, given that the possibility that two are alike is itself a variable. In fact, chaos could only be chaotic if it could replicate its own pattern, (which pertains not to be a pattern,) otherwise there would be a principle by which chaos abides; that of non-repetition.]

[Back again to the piano]

Principle: When we are listening to live music we are hearing something which is not repeatable.

Classical music in our tradition is repeated endlessly â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but does that mean that we hear the same thing twice? The answer is no, because the variables are necessarily different to each performance of the same piece of music, (time and space being the most obvious variables which cannot be simulated or repeated.) The piece of music is interpreted, performed and heard differently each time, but of course, we can still tie the differences together with the unity of the composer, the idea of the composer, the idea of his persona, etc. (All of which, to be sure, are our ideas of him, and not him himself.) The score is written down the same, (but we must remember that the music does not exist until it is performed; that is its condition for existence. It is silent whilst it is [only] written down.) The notes are all in the same order. We could pretend in an

naĂŻve way that mechanical reproduction, or digital reproduction could replicate it always in exactly the same way. But again we must remember the principal of individuality defined by the convergence of time and space; if the music were to be performed at exactly the same time by two different orchestras, it could not be performed in the same place, and if it was performed by two different orchestras in the same place, it could not be performed at the same time. Thus, in the realm of the physical, no two things can be exactly alike. Music, being dormant in its written state, is given new life, is given a voice in the present, as though it were breath, resuscitation.

Imagine: I know so well how to evade my reason â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we have become so alien to each other! I can see how disgusting I am, how lazy I am, how disgustingly lazy I am, which is especially nauseating when I know how much I have to do. The function of these words is as a warning to me in the future present, when I am writing this book, of how lazy I have been, and not to be lazy once again. I know too well, in my laziness, that it does not always have to be this way. Everything around me and in me seems so dirty, every action is coloured by my past, informing each and every decision in the current moment. In the present, this state takes on the outer appearance of anxiety, as though I live my life with a terrible anxiety about something. It feels as though I am pulled in a million directions by my desires, like a hydra without a guiding consciousness. This appears like a madness in every moment, and I am a guide, a fuhrer; it gives me the ability to be single-minded and not to be lost to the distraction of madness and desire.

Is that what this nausea amounts to – the disingenuous nature of the present? I felt that particular nausea when I could see each moment unfolding from my past. Often this nausea will gravitate around some important issue that centres itself and pulls desire toward it. The only relief is to bring the desire to the attention of the guiding consciousness so that it ceases to be nauseating and can at last be digested properly. Sanity, as I have seen it, is to be blinkered from the true nature of desire. Nietzsche speaks of heroic intestines in ‘Ecce Homo’, and goes on to describe the physiological effects on consciousness of variables, ‘small things’, (which have hitherto been overlooked by previous philosophers,) and their importance in relation to any philosophy; small things, prejudices, make philosophy possible at all. The intestines that Nietzsche speaks of are the metaphorical faculties of the philosopher and his ability to ‘digest’. We could understand the poison [of German culture] in precisely this way – the philosopher; is he to digest the poison with a heroic palate, or should he simply avoid or overlook such unpleasant, dangerous or nauseating dishes? Nietzsche seeks avoidance, (or in avoidance he seeks his own company.) Can we not also conceive of ‘tragic’ intestines – a digestive system which constantly worsens the body/mind? We could consider Nietzsche in this way – physiologically ill, and the effect of this digestive, physiological sickness on his philosophy. He speaks constantly of his heightened abilities as a philosopher due to his ill-health, his insight derived from his inability to digest – (he does not seek company in books.) He describes the scholar, who, for breakfast, eats a book… Neither will Nietzsche do that which is physiologically injurious to himself – he describes the [model] of the Russian

soldier or the fakir, who will hibernate rather than to push forward toward real defeat. He gives us a philosophy from the belly, and rubbishes the philosophy claimed to come out of ‘pure’ reason. This itself is a prejudice of a philosopher, the prejudice of philosophers, but brought to light, allowed to grow, to become the substance of philosophy itself; a conscious philosophy of consciousness. I have read and interpreted, perhaps even understood these words. Where does my philosophising enter into this? My project, (in part,) is to go beyond Nietzsche, to supersede him, whilst simultaneously to give new life into his words by breathing through them. In this way he can exist again in the present by giving life to his work, and he can exist as a living opponent for me to outwit. In the same set of instances, my physiology must affect this transcendence in order to effect my faculty for Understanding. Understanding as I have it is not a mere synthesis of knowledge as something which exists outside of the body. For instance, in order for me to understand Sartre’s ‘Nausea’, I myself had to live that nausea for myself in order to understand both Sartre himself and the properties of nausea on my body. (Remember the detective in Robert Harris’s ‘Red Dragon’, who could only catch the psychopath by becoming a psychopath himself – understand him from the inside.) This is understanding through a) synthesis, b) effect, and c) overcoming. I see the joke of Sartre only by donning the mask and misery of Roquentin. Without this method for heightened understanding, I would merely have read the book, but I did not – its effect on me was first nauseating, then profound and then comic. The book aided its own transcendence through the superficies of my consciousness first by mapping it onto the surface

of my brain, then by dismantling it from inside as though it were a first-hand experience. I laughed like a madman when I finally noticed the comedy of ‘Nausea’, and drew strange looks in the café. So what are we to do with Nietzsche? Must we map his understanding onto ours and descend with him into madness…? No – because to follow Nietzsche is to misunderstand him, to have heard him wrongly, to serve him wrongly. It would be an insult and a contradiction to his memory to serve him thus, (but perhaps that is a good thing?) The greatest challenge for our Understanding, (in developing it, expanding it,) is to both overcome and abide by Nietzsche, to live in the heart of his contradiction, to discover with golden thread the hidden path between following and deviating; and that is Understanding. This will be our ‘Schadenfroh’ both to laugh and to be laughed at in the same instance of consciousness, in discomfort and comfort, in dread and ecstasy.

Why is it that I should live my life with some profound anxiety invested in everything. (Now I am asking the same question again.) The anxiety is some kind of drive towards myself, away from comfort and distraction; it is a drive to Understand, and therefore it is a drive away from how I have previously understood. I am not content to be content. I feel a kind of pity for God in that we have forgotten about him, and yet I also despise him for causing me to feel sorry for him, to not even allow this decision for myself. He will not let me have myself at any time. Anxiety comes from this; I struggle against God in order to be myself, to be whole in myself, (and not part of Him and Him part of me,) and if I found this wholeness wherein my decisions would be free and my own, I would be tied to this and I would be unfree. This would amount to

the same freedom as if God controlled all of my decisions, and therefore he is present whether He exists or not.

Nietzsche makes himself more seductive and inspirational with every step, (although he was writing consciously to no one, or writing for me, the future,) and thus does the impulse toward a romantic idealisation of his philosophy become stronger. If this impulse begins to well up in us, then the greater should be the impulse to depart from his image or we are liable to fall into the most cunning trap of all the great artists; Schadenfroh. (Think of Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and Warhol.) I do not pertain to be a great artist; I have not the stomach. This is where digestion once again emerges – are we to consume the sweet nectar of Nietzsche’s fruits, (his knowledge,) and be seduced into this wordplay, or are we to balk and vomit at our attempt to vampirise and derive nourishment from a great, dead spirit? Nectar becomes blood, our fangs are all too apparent. One can consume but a pint of blood before vomiting ensues… So, our stomachs are not heroic enough for such a revolting, (and yes, like a Bolshevik our stomachs would turn and revolt against us,) meal. It cannot digest or be satisfied/nourished by everything that we put into it; we might induce nausea, vomiting or worse, diarrhoea… Why make something the object of contemplation simply for the object of synthesis, for this adds nothing to Understanding. I consider myself to be a great dietician and gastronome, and my diet is the richest that my pocket can afford. I both prepare my own food and allow others to prepare it for me. Are we to look at Nietzsche’s metaphor of digestion, diet, (in short, physiology,) as

we read Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’? Are we moving away from or even against scientific reason, and discovering philosophic reason? Seek out the melancholic foods, find that most visionary of nutritional lulls, the healthy cousin of laziness; melancholy. This is a region where double-meanings are most abundant; Durer’s ‘Melancholia I’ – is the angel unable to work, or has she transcended the idea of material labour? Is the doctor in a trance or in a sleep? Does the devil whisper an evil or a secret knowledge in his ear? The axis of melancholy/idleness holds the answers to these double meanings. Melancholy has been denied to us by our labour-hungry culture. The Devil makes work for idle hands. (Do any of us know what employment the Devil would find for us? Probably it would be a less demeaning experience than to go to the job centre.) Kierkegaard would rather be seen to be idle than to be seen working, a comic sham. I am by nature a melancholic, and I think that it is better to be idle than to work for the sake of it. Let me now impart to you an interesting story that I heard whilst I was on a time-management course at work, and then I shall describe the interesting relationship that I found I had with the course-trainer. In order to demonstrate to us how traditional methods of working can impinge upon any changes that might take place in the modern working environment, this trainer explained to me a story about some monkeys and a banana; In a cage there are 10 monkeys. Also inside the cage there is a ladder, and at the top of the ladder there is a banana. The first instinct of the monkeys is to go up the ladder to get the banana. When a monkey goes up the ladder to get the banana, a jet of water is sprayed at all of the monkeys. After a few attempts at getting the

banana and being sprayed with water, the monkeys attack any monkey that attempts to go up the ladder. After this has happened and the monkeys no longer attempt to get the banana, one of the original monkeys is replaced by a monkey that has not been in the cage before. Instinctively, the new monkey goes up the ladder, but is attacked by all of the other monkeys. One by one, all of the original monkeys are replaced by new monkeys, none of which will attempt to go up the ladder to get the banana, because they know that they will be attacked if they do so, even though none of them knows why in that they have not been sprayed with water at any time. Upon hearing this story, I was struck by an insight of the most profound kind; as artists, we no longer desire the banana! As humans we no longer desire the banana and we do not know why. Fair enough, if Adam and Eve got kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the fruit of knowledge, they had a direct, first-hand experience of God kicking them out. We no longer even desire the fruit, and for no good reason other than hearsay. In fact, we can no longer even see the fruit; we do not know of its existence because of years of [nihilism] engendered into our consciousness, causing us to deny ourselves the aspiration of greatness but without having even tried and failed as a reason not to do so. This must be the great task of the Understanding; to enlighten us as to our nature, and not to simply perceive the nature that is directly apparent before our eyes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; for we might not even perceive our most basic desire! It is clear that we do not know what we want, we are frightened and we do not know why, we exist with an anxiety for which there is no cause.

How do we begin to reinstall this object of our Understanding, how do we begin to retrain our eyes so that we can see this object? The mode of seeing must be that of Melancholy, the most divine vision into Understanding, one that we already have the faculty for, but are denied through guilt. If we can allow ourselves our melancholy, if we can understand it as the visionary twin of idleness, to make this initial distinction between the two, then we can begin the process of understanding our knowledge as an object in itself, as an object of its own contemplation. The object that we seek is ourselves, that we become our own object, and any psychoanalyst will tell you that we are unable to accept ourselves as we are, that guilt prevents us from doing so. The Self is too full of complexes, it keeps its self at a distance from contemplation, it is full of denial and regret. Denial and regret are the fetters that produce the feeling of nausea, that we are denied the pleasure of our selves and it sickens us; we must become drowned in the most beautiful melancholy in order to get the banana. I feel that I would like to take the opportunity to explain the fundamental problems that I perceive at the heart of our culture and the people of our culture, but this would be a contradiction to do so. It is not my place to know the thought worlds of others, (a principle that Descartes clearly did not understand,) rather it is my privilege to know that of my own, or at least to begin to know it like a long lost relative. This culture is not for me as I am not for it; I am a clown fish to its tendrils and a flea to its ass. When you have finished reading this book you may well understand it. You certainly will not understand me, (for that is not your object â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is mine.) But this book is for you, it enters into your life, on the scene of your life. It becomes a fragment of your

existence. But I have written it. Does not the concept of property evaporate in this particular relationship? At this stage I am still writing in the café. At some point I will type this sentence out onto my computer. Will it change? If you are reading this paragraph then I did not edit it out. Or did I add this paragraph to create the impression that I wrote it spontaneously for you? It doesn’t really matter. But you can see where the distinction between our thoughtworlds can be drawn, can’t you? (The fact is, they can’t.) When I come to type this out, will I correct it, edit it, append to it, improve it or spoil it? How will it change for having done so? In these notes there are all sorts of ‘small’ things at work; plagiarism, fragmentation, flashes of insight, but nothing consistent. Later I will chop parts of the text out that embarrass me for having written them. Is this a good enough reason to cut them out? Later tonight I shall say to my fiancée, (and in retrospect, I did, because I typed this and added to it after I originally wrote this paragraph,) “I got a lot of writing done today darling, but I don’t know if it was worth anything.” A question of value is involved in this – if I value everything that I have written I will not be able to edit any part of these notes. Also, a question of hierarchy and academic literary style is involved; will I shape these notes to fit […] We shall see -. I am an amateur writer in the sense of the hobbyist; on both of the occasions in which I wrote this same paragraph I was on a day off of work. I make no money from it, I am free of the burden of having to find readers, of having to profit in the baser sense from my art. If I make this text available, then perhaps my readers will criticise or complain that they had to buy this book.

I am writing this text largely in note form, here and there as it were, (for that is the occasion where my opportunity arises.) Then I think about applying a structure to it – how nauseating! To do so would be to devaluate the nature of what I have written in the first instance. So why do I get the occasional impulse to structure what I have written from time to time? Partially, the impulse comes from the fact that I already know what a book looks like, or rather, I know how a book should look or should read, (for I have read quite a number of them.) But the text that I am writing attempts to nurture an organic style in a twofold way. Firstly, it spreads out and creates its own course through some interior and hidden determinism rather than an external and evident constriction, and secondly, it grows up like grass through cracks in a pavement, in that I write it in between the cracks in my working life. The language that I have employed to describe this process has an element of the Gothic about it; there is a steady overcoming of human culture by the ceaseless and overwhelming processes of organic, sublime nature that follows its own course and overcomes any human fetters that are set against it. The impulse to convert these notes into an ‘essay’ is deeply rooted, and can be traced back to a larger, more fundamental determinism; to do things the ‘right’ way, (the way we know is right without having an understanding of why,) to submit to that sense of propriety that approaches us whenever we are on the verge of doing something for ourselves. Fortunately, I am able to convert this negative impulse into the substance of this book, into the subject of ridicule, and not merely into the subtext. Often, this is how new ideas are brought into light [Agathon], when something that has previously gone

unsaid finds its voice. That is how I can always convert what I have written into its own subject, where it forces itself to be necessary to defeat itself at every stage, which constitutes the final victory. Along the same lines, and to explain this microscopic relation of unfreedom somewhat more pertinently, is knowing that there is such a sense of propriety in existence between things, forming the crux of any intersubjective relationship. It is usually the case that a person is prepared to believe the big Other, (that nagging sense of propriety,) than to experience a thing alone. Understanding comes on the scene when this centre of gravity, this underlying current of bondage is brought into light [Agathon]. This â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;knowing how something is doneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is like two other symptoms of control that usually go unspoken but act as a gravity field set up around our desires:

1) Knowing what something is like, and

2) Knowing how something appears.

The mind is chained in every respect to that which it knows, (this much is certainly self-evident.) But to bring this fact into a conscious relation to our knowledge and our knowing is crucial to the faculty of Understanding. When one understands that knowing is subject to knowledge, that the function of knowing is to know, is to understand the parameters, the unfreedom that is afforded us by knowing and our knowledge. How, might one ask, does this affect the Understanding? True Mr. Heidegger, knowing what one knows does not add to knowledge, but it does expand the Understanding [Agathon} the capacity to bring things into light, into

consciousness. Understanding is that faculty who’s object is itself, a self-conscious relation to the nature of its existence. It is with the Understanding that one can form a relation to such obscure metaphysical paradoxes as ‘knowing what one knows’. This book will constantly attempt to know itself, as this book is attempting an Understanding, the first understanding. Self-referentialism is crucial to the Understanding; it is that which allows boundaries into its perception, allows self to come into relation to itself, its horizons. To allow the horizon to go unseen is to choose the veil of ignorance, to deny the Understanding its object. Choosing a sense of propriety about what one knows is to allow determinism into self-knowledge, (some might say an unavoidable inclusion,) and this necessarily incurs the erasure of self-referential knowledge. To write this book in the way that I know that books ought to be written is to feed incestuously from the dead body of the history of writing.

Jaspers’ foundation for knowing what one knows resides upon the necessary existence of God, which is contrary to Nietzsche’s fundamental position that there must be no God in order for men to be enlightened to what they know in and for themselves. These two positions are based upon a relationship to a God who is:

there, or

not there.

For Nietzsche, as is well known, it is essential that God did exist, as it is also crucial that we killed him. It would not be true to say that

Nietzsche believes that there never was a God, that he never believed in God, or that he would say as a scientist might say that God does not exist. It is crucial that God did exist, that we killed him, and that now He does not exist. Through this basic understanding of Nietzsche’s position, we can go on to understand that if there was a God, and now there is not, that there must be some empty, negative space in existence that used to house God. We can go on to think that this ‘negative’ space, this used to be, constitutes a tear in the fabric of existence, of a God that used to be everywhere, and now is not. Is this the way in which nihilism, (in Nietzsche’s understanding,) has infiltrated every part of human existence? Is this how the profound nihil, the nothing, in some way constitutes some part of everything? The question of whether God exists is here besides the point of my reasoning. What I want to know is whether the concept of God acts as a safeguard and guarantor for our knowing, or whether the concept of there being no God constitutes a guarantor for our knowing. (This is a reformulation of Jaspers’ and Nietzsche’s positions; knowledge and existence is secured by there being either God or no God.) Jaspers gives us the supreme authority for existence, that of a God that secures our knowledge in concrete, whilst Nietzsche says that only if there is no God can a man ever truly have knowledge. I shall now discontinue my use of the term God and use instead the term ‘big Other’ of psychoanalytic parlance. Essentially, our problem remains the same after this change; we still seek to know whether our knowledge is secured from within or without. Choosing whether we allow the big Other into our equation for guaranteeing knowledge is a strange thing indeed, for

if big Other existed then he would have provided his own answer to the problem, provided and safeguarded the question, provided the choice in the first instance, and finally provided whichever outcome we decide upon. (Even if we were to choose not to believe in Him.) Alternatively, if he does not exist, then our choice is a forced one in some other way; countless variables and determinisms that provide the correct answer in any situation; the voice of our knowledge reverberates and echoes against the walls of our brains. “I choose to be free, (but now I am tied to that choice and I cannot go back to being unfree; I am unfree to do so…) This area of discussion has a touch of the absurd about it; the question of freedom is again a case of Kant’s goat-sieve equation, and I would be a fool if I did not explain it in such a way so as to pictorialise it as such an absurdity. But, in contriving the problem in such a way provides a truth about freedom that we are able to know – that it has the character of absurdity and [endless] contradiction inherent in its form.

Note to the reader: This text will have undergone enormous change from the original text that was written in note form. (Note: Even this note has been a change (Note: Even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even

this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Note: even this note has been a change (Not

Note: The devil makes work for idle minds.

Writing behind the cover of a mask; both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche do it openly; why do it at all? To put pen to paper requires a voice to guide the hand, and that voice is rather a caricature dependent upon the disposition and nature of the writing. Or, one might find that the guiding impulse to write also demands a succinct voice – if one were to attempt to be ‘oneself’, or even ‘one self’, one might happen upon succinct-ness. If one did not don the mask of the succinct writer, would one then incur the wrath of the raging internal arguments which perpetually gnaw at the façade of unity and manifest themselves in the work, indistinguishable from the veneer of each smooth paragraph? If I am writing one of my voices at one time, I give voice to a facet of the inner anxiety, and only one voice – if another voice, a partner in argument, were to sneak in, then the writing would not happen at all!

Before weighing my naiveté prematurely, do read on.

To this idea I must in simultaneity commit another; everything that I can describe or commit can be ascribed to the property of the letter ‘I’; everything else beyond the pale of description in language cannot be ascribed to I, and we thank Wittgenstein for this. No

matter [what a strange phrase!] what I am writing at any given time, no matter which voice appears to be vocalised, occurs under the umbrella signifier of the ‘I’ of language. The notion that a mask is a mask at all is absurd, (and my apologies are given to theorists of gender for this remark,) for it is in itself another mask, a metamask, for, to be sure, I cannot wear a mask that already wears me, can I? (This may occur in a Moebius strip, an envelope enveloped by itself.) If ‘I’ cannot wear a mask, for it is a mask itself which masks itself, then there cannot, by paradox, be any masking as to the truth of the ‘I’. From now onward, I shall endeavour to make the ‘I’, (again the paradox reoccurs,) the subject of its own understanding, a doubling-back on itself as the subject of selfhood. This will be a philosophical enquiry in contrast to the Lacanian effort to the same subject, a ‘chicken and egg’ problem;

Which came first;

The ‘I’ or Philosophy,

ii)

The ‘I’ or Psychoanalysis,

iii)

Philosophy or Psychoanalysis.

At the end of this book I will resolve it’s own paradox and I shall thereafter answer the aforementioned problem. The advent of Psychoanalysis forces us to consider the role of the philosophical Cogito, and therefore to consider the role of Philosophy itself, (but this much is already well-known.) Has

anybody adequately positioned Philosophy yet, or is it to be forever usurped by young pretenders? When Philosophy takes on the guise, (yes, another mask!) of its son Science, does not the object of Philosophy become confused with the objects of Scientific method? Rigour, Veracity and Proof; are these the qualities of Philosophy? Science has detached itself from Philosophy like when a cell divides, and has taken with it qualities that would otherwise be damaging to Philosophy. Philosophy narrows itself to become broad. (Principle of Darwinian Philosophy.) The more that Philosophy is stripped of its nonessential parts, (that belong rightly to a subdivision,) its quest becomes less hindered and less deceived as to its object. The object gets broader as the subject gets narrower. (This is a parallel conception of the philosophical enquiry into the ‘I’.) These previous remarks rightfully deserve the scorn that rightfully belong to it. Those who wish to posit Scientific enquiry as the guiding and grounding method of human understanding, and those who choose to ‘unveil’ the meaning of human understanding under the quasi-scientific method of Psychoanalysis are subject both to a confusion as to what an object rightfully is; it is not an illusion created by the method itself. (But such an inherent contradiction can only work to the advantage of Philosophical method. (As can such a confession, without being a justification.))

Neither Science nor Psychoanalysis can answer their own questions.

I argue in an abstract fashion for one who argues and seeks to convince. Convince whom? Nobody has read this book yet.

Abstract argument is especially unusual for one who seeks to destroy everything solid and erect around him. My attack is pitiable, ineffectual and insubstantial – from the outside – but this is the understanding which is my comedy. I do not understand the value of things, the value of value, the value of myself; I’ll leave these and other small things to others. I hope that you, as somebody well versed in knowledge and argument, can criticise my work for me. You can fill in my gaps whilst you are at it. I am a great fantasist; I believe that I can convert, rather like an alchemist, each and every failing, weakness and inability into the rapture of philosophy. I believe that this book can write itself, is writing itself, (leaving me to do more appropriate things,) and hence become both subject and object at once, (that is to say, to become conscious of itself.) This book is not infallible, and that is not its object. It is it’s own object. You may criticise a person, but to what end? Treat this book the same; either be it’s friend, enemy, something. Ignore it if you like. It still exists either way.

Why is it that some voices choose, (or rather, find themselves,) to be talking out loud? I have the freedom, I have the critics and readers in myself inside of fantasy, so why should I wish that my voice could be heard amongst all of the other clatter of voices in the mad world? As I have come to see it, there is a rabble of voices, an endless chatter of voices, each of which says at the top of its voice “I am an artist”, but to my knowledge I have not encountered an artist in the bulk of them. All I can think is that they too are under the same delusion as I am – we think we are artists and shout it, but this shouting itself is not art, or we do not bother to be artful about it. There are so many voices vying for attention, proclaiming that

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they speak of art and yet, like me, actually produce nought. Could this be procrastination? (No; there is something more devastatingly empty to this endless ‘Me!’ dialogue.) I, like the other voices, are happy to squabble and to say that the other voices are not artists and I am the only real one. But I know this not to be true. Rather than attack the mediocrity of art currently in production, a social mirror, (again, a vanity,) a method of acquiring capital, of reaching fame, etc. (Which, incidentally, are all forms of currency.) My art that damns theirs damns itself.

Then what is art for? (This question presumes that art is a means.)

Not for artists, for they are the worst of them, they wear a mask out of mere ugliness, characterlessness, rather than as a ‘freedom of expression’. (Anyone that uses this expression was unfree to do so!) Why do artists feel confident to proclaim themselves as artists, and yet ashamed to call themselves great artists? No-one aspires to greatness anymore; it was a cultural myth, they say. In other words, mediocrity is a far more comfortable standard beyond which nobody need reach. The reason is that, despite our love of fame and celebrity, we are only really happy with getting by and barely being noticed. Or more accurately, we want all of our contemporaries to notice us, but we want history to forget. We prize that which is fleeting without even knowing what that entails. This is my criticism of my own understanding, always; I do not project onto other minds for that is what is left unsaid in my mind. I will come to the value in aspiring to greatness later on. I could not cherish something unless I had made it my own.

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Note: I speak because I knows the intimate secrets of your soul. They are my secrets too – we share them. They are the residue of language.

Test: Everything you know is true.

Everything you know is false.

One of the above statements is true and one of them is false. It is the primary task of the reader to answer this question to himself and to know why he has answered in that particular way. Then he must ask why his answer is false, and understand the truth in his observation.

Knowledge about knowledge; does it add to knowledge? Knowledge about knowledge is a type of meta-knowledge that enters a hitherto unseen spectrum regarding knowledge; a spectrum where questions about questions shift the emphasis from truth and falsehood into the domain of self-referentiality. To answer ‘true’ or ‘false’ on any level of the understanding of the question is to closeoff access to the other layers of understanding the question and create a mere polarisation, and eventually, an ‘opinion’. One merely answers true or false on every level of the question, hence there being no distinction between levels. Is that what we want? The domain of the ‘decision’ is paramount here.

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You can make an ant change its direction but you cannot change its mind.

I always repeat myself; it is because I do not always hear myself the first time, and I wish to inform you that I did not hear myself the first time, and to remind you that you may not have understood that I did not hear myself the first time. If your hearing is fine then you may skip this sentence/chapter/book, but my hearing requires tuning and this book is an attempt to hear each and every voice and to repeat it when regularly it would go unnoticed. This book is a recording surface [thanks Deleuze] and it may not be the case that this book will not hear everything/record everything correctly, (and that would be epistemology,) or even understand itself at any point. But people do not need to understand in order to keep on doing, do they? Therefore you must adjust your hearing in order to accommodate these possibilities and shortcomings. I have said what I have said because I have said it and not necessarily because I have meant it or understood it â&#x20AC;&#x201C; example: We often say to our lover things that we do not mean, although sometimes we do mean to say that we do not mean it even though we mean it. How fucked up is that? To know the interior of such a mind at work in outwitting itself must be quite a sight! I cannot even be sure as to who is purporting to write this text â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it seems as though the authors vying for attention at the front of my mind have somehow lost the characteristics that allowed me as Usufructor to comprehend which was which. Either that or the significance of authorship has rescinded in importance. No; for it cannot be that simple â&#x20AC;&#x201C; true, I catalogue the voices, (and yet their

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difference is questionable in a text,) but the one who catalogues the other voices pertains to be the author that sits aloft the others and has perspective, (I). If this is so, then surely that author must also become subject to similar scrutiny? As must the one who just composed the previous sentence, as well as this sentence. Will it come to pass that we shall actually reach the top point of the hierarchy here; the one voice that can have no perspective? This would constitute the very final layer of what could be called either Deception or Truth. The rather despicable notion â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Intellectual Propertyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; has no significance here. So long as something happens, some movement or stimulus is provided/created, so long as the mind does something to reach upwards, who cares whether its plagiarism or not? Movement away from what human beings are supposed to be, movement towards what a human could be, whether it be striving for Truth, (and I hear people laugh when I say this. It is not that an idiot strives after truth, it is an idiot that believes there is no truth, accepts this as the truth of the matter, and continues to wallow in the baseness of his thoughts,) or striving after deceit. This last alternative I will not explain. I merely desire to speak, but I is spoken through. I shall not lie to you reader; I am a ship without a rudder. Just as I began this sentence, (which was about to contain something, some substance,) I forgot what I was about to say. So naturally I began to write about forgetting what I was going to say, because it was the writing that was important, not the thing I was going to say. This is not a form of compensation for what I could not give you, rather I discovered the hidden substance in the act of forgetting, the reason for which remains unbeknownst to me. Why is it that I so quickly forget things? I am sorry to put you through

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my torment; a writer who forgets what he wants to write about and writes about that instead. I feel it is somehow right to confer this element of my fallibility onto you, for it is your right to know that allows me to allow you the right to know. Quite often I find that authors transfer some such psychological phenomena onto their readers, although I do not attempt to mask the fact, rather I revel in the prospect of providing this secret substance; it is the alchemist’s way. I do not know whether such an admission provides substance in itself; perhaps I am just forgetful? It feels as though I am traversing through an especially cunning labyrinth, although it is not especially cunning – it simply does not know its own plan, it did not intend to be a labyrinth, it built the maze up around itself with no such idea of an ‘exit’, and finally the maze came to replace the consciousness that created it. A maze cannot escape itself, for it is a maze. (A maze therefore does not need to ‘escape’.) This long route around has brought me back to my original idea; the one I forgot, remember? I was going to say that I was ambitious. I now see how my ambition has come to replace my vision – ambition with no object [ha!] Ambition was forgotten so easily in the maze. Please, untangle the substance in this paragraph, because I have become the paragraph I just continue to write, no audience is on the horizon, no money as a goal; I am trying to untangle a knot. What do I hope of this book? Will it cure me of the haunting paradox of consciousness? It will not, because I am neither a doctor or an

105

analyst, rather I make my joy in wading through the subject of subjects, touching lightly upon areas in which I am unskilled and untrained, writing this merely because I have chosen to. This book has only an ungainly introduction, with no body. It is dismembered – it is fiction, I introduce nothing, for that is all I can do. Something invisible, like God, can only ever be introduced, although we cannot shake His hand.

It is most crucial to keep one’s eye out for the effects of Being, (I do not say one’s Being, for it does not belong,) on one’s Self, for that is the only way that we can know of its presence within existence. As with the notion of God we can only go on blind faith because there is no way of arriving at a direct understanding of Him. He must be because he is absent and all we can know is what is present. If Being is a presence, then we are aware of it. If it were present, we could know of it. In the same way we can be aware of nothingness, (the concept of nothingness for one,) although we can have no direct knowledge of it. Therefore, we cannot know God, but we can be aware of Him. Faith is the only tool there can be for forging a link between what can be known and what cannot be known, and therefore we must care for our ability to have faith. Faith is a connection put across from the side of knowing to the side of unknowing which connects Self to Being. It is a question which values itself as a question without the necessity of an answer; in that respect it is a metaphysical questioning – it seeks to go beyond the realms of knowledge both in its question and in its acceptance of receiving no answer, (the question does not demand an answer.) It leaves us with the character of a question which does not serve the purpose of a question; questions are designed to

106

provoke answers – it forms a dialectic between consciousnesses. The metaphysical question has a different relation; it forms a question, but one which is sent into the void without hope of it returning in the form of a response or knowledge. But as I said previously, this casting of one’s voice into the void does in fact test the size of the vessel of Self, (it produces echoes – one’s voices provide answers,) and the bottomlessness of Being, (the true recipient/addressee of the question has no voice or knowledge to plumb.) In fact, writing this paragraph has been a testing of my own capacity to answer the question, but the lack of any conclusive answer demonstrates the emptiness of Being and its inability to respond, given that the question was directed toward Being. In this way does one fumble for a light switch that does not exist, or rather one has a match but nothing to strike it against. One grows accustomed to this predicament and continues as best he can in the dark. So here we are in the dark; some have navigated around better than others, others have feigned enlightenment, (an hallucination caused by sensory deprivation to be sure.) And to append, one cannot cast all of the apples out of the basket as Descartes fantasised, for the negative residual space, the absence of some thing which used to be there, finds an increase in power, its effects continue in a negative and invisible fashion. Therefore to doubt as a necessary method of enlightenment causes many problems. Doubt can be confused with denial. We shall not, however, cast doubt out of our basket, for we would fall foul of our own method. We must allow the function of doubting to enter into the faculty of our Understanding and then fathom what its purpose

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might be within ourselves, and find out how it complicates the knowledge of knowledge. I am passive-aggressive in my desiring; I shall often achieve what I want through failure or through my passive disposition. Rather than me getting what I want, what I want gets me; it comes to acquire me by desiring me, for it is evident that I do not openly desire it.

Knowledge – Interior or Exterior? Knowledge is, to be sure, an object of my thought in that my thoughts are comprised of knowledge. How can I know about this condition of my knowledge? The form of my knowledge must be knowable to my thoughts in order for me to know them, therefore the form of my thoughts [as knowledge] must be declarative, (i.e. it is knowable to and by itself.) We would then go on to make the assumption that ‘I am the user’ of this knowledge – I am peering in upon what I know.

Problem: Is there a hierarchy to knowledge whereby a ‘ghost in the machine’ portion of consciousness resides on the ‘top’ level and looks down, a kind of feudal system of knowledge where a sovereign ‘user’ has an outside perspective of all the layers underneath it? Or is it the case that if this knowledge declares itself to my reason, the ‘user’ is just part and parcel of the information being used – there is no exteririority, no perspective? If we choose the former, perspectival concept of a ‘user’, the inherent problem we encounter is that of the eternal regress of hierarchies of knowledge, and therefore an ultimate unknowability

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of self. If I, as the user of knowledge, can step outside of one circle of knowledge in order to be able to know it, how can this process continue? Can I continually know my knowledge until finally I cannot step back any further having reached my horizon for knowability? How does this relate to Kierkegaardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s observation that Adonis, the God of Love could not love himself?

To know the mind of the Other; that is what each of us desires most deeply.

My metabolism for converting time onto work-energy has slowed down of late. My employment consumes me, I feel as though a deep sleep has descended over my artistic ability. A book that has become its own object that has awoken unto itself, that has become self-conscious. The book must cure its own neuroses, must become its own cure, must be the cure for its self.

Guidance notes: [Start by writing longer paragraphs which gradually become shorter.]

Why? Does the writer make things concise because he is ashamed of his own babbling thoughts?

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Meta-truth (estimation) Only the truth about Truth can be known – Truth itself is insubstantial; our connection to it is to be measured as a distance – that is the connection. Our connection to the musician is the beautiful thing, in the same measure as Truth – our harmonisation with the thing is our love of the thing – it is the source of divine ecstasy. The writer [me] wishes that all of his thoughts and ideas could be converted into text – that would leave him; Free to write new things, freed from the nausea of self-perceived determinism. (see Nausea.) Released from the voice that babbles endlessly on the interior. We speak endlessly of values; our tongue is tainted with the cost of attitudes and the economy of desire. But how can things of human import, imputed to us before the currency of capital, have become reduced to economical laws? Surely this is the greatest devaluation of all values; a valuing which makes everything it touches valueless. Midas was the luckier one…

The value of Value: [Meta-value – measuring the value of value (in the same way that we are measuring the truth about Truth.)]

We live our lives as though we were alive, we become enlightened as though we had been enlightened. In this measure are we intermediaries in our own lives; nothing is ours, we have no property, no proper place, nothing is genuine and on the first level of nearness to the present. Therefore there is no ‘genuine’, only a series of unending ‘meta-X’. We are intermediaries in that we exist,

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and things which exist are in a state of becoming and never are things which are proper, things which are in and for themselves; Beings. The process of meta-enlightenment is like any other – a perpetual series of de-resolute transcriptions of previous documents of enlightenment. Being a person is an unfinished project, it does not result in Being. Enlightenment, which seeks to escalate up the superficies of meta-X and into the absolute suffers its own devaluation when it is not a thing in and for itself. It will never succeed as it always is the product of another enlightenment, a previous attempt, it is borne out of a desire, a formulation of the desire to kill oneself.

What is the purpose of knowledge? [Typical answer – It is for me to use.]

I am for the use of knowledge, for I am belonging to it. It is Being, I am not – it gives me character for I have none without it. It causes me to exist but not to Be. Knowledge is a labyrinthine and unending transcription of the absolute into divisible parts. I cannot put them back together in their original format. It is not my project to do so. When this book is through it will have written itself – it will have lost interest in me. I want to be free of this knowledge and thus to allow the knowledge to write itself as a book, to take my bad parts with it, to become an individual and save me the chore of doing it. I sit back whilst my machines do all of the work. Whichever direction they choose to channel their desires they may do so. Why should I be concerned with the outcome of this book? ‘Concern’ and ‘Outcome’ are out of place – I am free of them. Allow my concerns to be my concerns, ignore them, and then may I

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not be identical to them. I will gain precious perspective over this thing I once took to be my self. This book shall be my beast of burden – that will be its character – as I offer to it on a pyre all of the things I took to be mine, and fill its cadaver. Why carry the undead with us always? Even their ethereal presence is too much weight for my shoulders. And that is precisely what knowledge is – not living matter, but dead stuff. No matter what you have thought about this book, I have thought it first. I have predicted your thoughts, as we individuals are all alike in our unique way. Thoughts are ultimately predictable – they are seasonal – they no longer have the capacity to surprise me – they conceal nothing to me. This book is a lot of books – it contains parts of every book ever written and never written – how much knowledge has passed through this book?!? It is a great anus – the anus of God! This is my chance to laugh at everything that has gone toward comprising my knowledge. And that is not property as I would define… I am not in debt to any other authors. (Another financial word – is there no end to their reach?) I carry no debts to anyone, for there is no bailiff that could carry away the compensation. I cannot produce original thought; correction – a thought is original in time and space – nothing more. The content of that thought does not belong to originality – a foolish human invention for ascribing value to things. The stuff of thoughts – what is its value? What is its currency? Why am I using these words in particular? If you are to buy what I have written, if you trade in it, or if you have chosen to dislike or ignore it, you still form a part of its economical system. How sick! If you buy it, it will not be yours, for it wasn’t mine to begin with or even its own. And thus, if you do not own a

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thing, if it does not have its proper place in you, then you will never understand it. In this book you will acquire all of my ideas for the book, sometimes just ideas, and not as ideas that reached their potential. They have not become something else, just like this one. Why do I write? It is a penance for spending exile for so long as a reader. Why read yourself when you can write yourself? Why produce knowledge – surely there is enough of it about? Surely there is no need to think for yourself anymore? Why not become a living quotation; this would be easier, and it would do away with the false quality of ‘originality’. I do not have the ability to be ashamed of why or what I know, what I write – that is why [thankfully] I shall be unable to write a ‘good’ book whatever I think. I am entitled to this knowledge not because it is mine and I deserve it, but because I have taken it. The Golden Fleece was stolen. No intellectual hierarchy prevented that. I am entitled to my knowledge. My knowledge can only come under critical scrutiny if it enters into a hierarchy of the intellectualisation of knowledge. If I criticise my own work, I merely add to my knowledge. It is common for conscious minds to reflect on consciousness-it is self-consciousness. Here, we prize the thought that thinks itself, the thought of thoughts; it is our object of scrutiny, we descend into the superficies of consciousness. Our object of scrutiny, (an active thought which contemplates some part of its perception which is, in this case, another thought,) is trained on this thought – one thought perceiving another. The mind holds a thought as if it were an object before its reasonable faculties, and attempts to understand it. But how can a relation between thoughts within the realm of thoughts be of use; is it not merely the

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abstraction of abstractions? How do we know which thought is the object and which the subject/scrutiniser? Can the scrutinising subject, the thought which thinks, reason, distinguish itself as a thought against those thoughts it thinks about? [In fact, could we not conceive of both thoughts, the subject and object of thought, as mutual in this relation, without hierarchy, without the dream of reason?] Is it not feasible that those thoughts brought to mind as objects of our scrutiny in fact bring our scrutiny to mind as an object of that thought which is thought upon? [This last phrase sounds as if the intention here is to perplex and confuse, to sound enigmatic when there is no content, mere artfulness. But, in the dimension of our conscious mind and the faculty of it that we have hitherto called ‘perception’, it is feasible that perception itself has no grounding position from which it looks, and hence cannot discriminate the position it is looking from to the point where it looks to. Perhaps it is at both locations? Perhaps the idea of position is used for ease of discrimination – it is always us as a subject which gazes.] I had an argument with two friends recently. One had asked the other to explain the meaning of his artwork to him, because he could not understand it himself. The other then said that I would give the same account of his work on the basis that I am an artist too. But I said wasn’t it meaningless to ask after the meaning of something? If we can’t find a meaning ourselves, then adopting a meaning already in existence was to devalue the idea that something has meaning. One friend, (the artist), labelled me ‘evasive’. What I said was evasive was that neither of them had looked into this; they were talking about meaning without meaning. I said that the artist was justifying himself, and that a piece of

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visual art, say, a painting, ought to be looked at. That is where the meaning is produced. Any discussion around the object may have contained semantic meaning, or any other structural type of meaning, but that was not the meaning that I value. I was called evasive because I had asked a question of the question itself, descended straight into a meta-question, and refused to answer the top level of the question. But it seemed obvious to do so given that people have such an unspecific and ‘taken for granted’ use and understanding of ‘meaning’. At the art gallery the next day, I sat and watched how people understood visual culture. It was the ‘El Greco’ exhibition at the National Gallery again, which I had visited many times before, before it was taken away, that is. I went to look at what I have found to be a miraculous painting, the fourth rendering of ‘The Purification of the Temple’, painted after 1610. I shall discuss the painting later, and how I came to my beliefs about how art can have meaning. But this time, after looking at the painting for about half an hour, I sat adjacent to it and watched other people. I had never seen this painting acknowledged in the books I read about El Greco in the terms that I have come to see it. In fact, I could tell that it was not a great masterpiece to anyone, (curators included,) given that they were not selling a postcard of it at the shop at the exit of the exhibition. (This is always a good gauge of which paintings ‘we would like to take home with us.’) People already know which paintings they ‘ought’ to like anyway; it makes exhibitions so much easier if we have forewarning of a ‘masterpiece’. Anyway, I sat and watched. People would get to the painting, stop, look at the title on the wall, look at the previous three attempts at it, read the guide book, and then move on. I was astonished to see how few people actually looked at the painting for

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longer than twenty seconds. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect anyone to have so profound an experience as I had had, because people get in touch with anything they want, and I am not about to prescribe what that ought to be. So I looked at people in front of other [better-known] works. They were doing the same thing! Most were even using an audio guide as an accompaniment to the guidebook. Nobody in the gallery had seemed to notice that paintings can be seen with eyes, and that descriptions are something completely different. Having missed such an obvious characteristic of how to see paintings, I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect that these people had much chance outside of a gallery in developing the way that things are understood. No, for most it was a cultural experience, a semiotic experience, where absolutely every conceivable, describable, accountable thing that culture allows was available, with the exception of the most obvious component; Art. The culture industry is rotten through with this hollowness; anything which can be sold is sold, is bought up as it is in any consumer industry. But the one thing that cannot be bought, the thing that resists any attempt of purchase, which cannot fit into any such economy of values, is Art itself. I can sit here on my arse and describe this phenomenon as any sociologist would describe any other social phenomenon. But the secret of my heart declares something else, something which I cannot write here, for it was a secret shared by myself and the painting, and could only be shared by myself and the painting. It cannot be abstracted without becoming something else, without becoming a description, a product of the thing itself. If it could be packaged up in this way, as an abstraction of the thing, it would have been packaged and sold by now. If we could buy that which has real value, it would already be on sale. People would be happy. Life would always be

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rich with meaning. Buying a packet of polos would be a profound experience. If ‘true love’ could be bought it would have been on sale already. But to purchase something does not mean we acquire or know of its value. We know its exchange value, but not its meaning. A relation between two things is a lover’s discourse, its significance is the connection itself and not either of the objects involved, and one can cultivate this harmony between things, this ‘love’. This does not cause me to feel elevated above other people, it does not make me feel culturally superior to other people, because it is not a cultural phenomenon. You may sit on your arse and describe my description as a cultural phenomenon too, (and so you did,) but that will not or cannot account for what I have found to be unaccountable. So there is something that is excluded from economy, from capital! So how does this effect the way in which we understand the relation between mental objects, of the perceiver and the perceived, if we have found that to know something outside of the accountable is to value the connection between things? Firstly, we are assuming that there is a ‘something-ness’ about the human experience that we are unable to explain. I say that there must be this something-ness for an experience to be human. There are many humans that I know of who would seek, in their wholly accountable, accountant-like way, to eradicate anything of transsubstantial value. My valuing has a hard-core of unaccountability that would anger those who like to account for things. I do not think that the human experience will ever be satisfactorily accounted-for, but neither am I bothered if it is, for that is none of my business. And neither is it a pig-like blissful ignorance ‘of the facts’ that drives me toward this uninsightful conclusion, because I

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do not like to insult pigs. Such detective-work is substantial for those who like evidence, the empiricists of life. But what if all the evidence points toward some heinous crime? What if the crime were to be a detective and to miss all of the value that could not be accounted for in that way? This will not deter or concern the detective. “Just the facts, ma’am.” (You might ask, then, what are you doing with this book, if it is not a description? Can words be something other than that which describes? Has the nihilism of the structural finally become visible?)

[To consider the thought of Being; in order to measure this thought we must measure the effects of the object of Being over our selves. We cannot know Being, but we can know of it. If we shine a light onto it, it is not so we can see the object; it is so that we can measure how long the shadow is… I was always fascinated to know the size of a fish by the boil it produced on the surface of the water when it rolled. As a fisherman I always fantasised or was terrified by some leviathan.]

The Question of Being: What is Being and how can we know of its existence?

Stop.

The various incorrectnesses of the preceding question are a tacit proof of the inadequacy of language to ‘describe’ Being. Also, the flaws in attempting to describe Being are testament to the effect of Being over the one attempting to use language to describe it. As Being is antithetical to language and to knowledge, we must use

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that knowledge of it. Please use the previous analogy of the ‘shadow’ to conceive of this idea – it is not the object we wish to know, (because that would be foolish,) rather we wish to know of it, we wish to know how it characterises our existence whist Being remote from it, divorced. So Being is not description. (The truth and falsehood of Being is contained in this sentence.) We must cultivate our understanding of the truth of Truth in order to know of Being. Both understandings are at a remove, to be sure, but we can only know of the distance we have from them, for that is the knowledge to which we are entitled. Any description in language is not what it purports to be, for it is referential. ‘Apple’ is not an apple, is not an apple, is not an apple, etc, repetition ad absurdum. To know of this stricture of language is to our benefit, to be sure. Being is being, is Being. For Being to be it cannot be something, for then it would not be, it would be something.

Note: [ See how attempts to describe or to know Being result in complete absurdity. Note how language runs round and round, chases its own tail, emphasis lands on a new word each time causing a new formulation of each expression, different to the last but absolutely similar, in a game which persists until exhaustion; not of language, (for that keeps going,) but of the thinker!]

Being is contained in everything although our faculties for detecting its presence must be trained upon its effect on us. When Kant used his formulation of the two idiots milking the Billy-goat with a sieve, he did not account for himself, the onlooker, the one

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who relates this truth about truth and laughs. In fact, our faculties for looking at Being are looked at by Being. For to be a thing which looks must be, and therefore the character of looking is Being even though it does not look upon Being. Riddle me this, riddle me that, I am a twat. If we look for Being, it simultaneously looks back at us, for it is the opposite of us in all things, and that is the way in which it is manifest in us; in us but not in us, like us but unlike us – a peculiar relation indeed! Its absence in our mind is in fact its only presence. Each night I take a dose of what is good for me, (not a pill – rather something dosed in accordance to spirit not physiology.) I am dwindling – it is a fact, for if my life had not its most pleasant stimulant or sedative it would be hollow like a dark cave. Yet, she is no stimulant or sedative, neither am I for her, for she registers similar effects on me. What do we have between us? I am here and yet you cannot see me. I am speaking and yet you cannot hear me. What am I? Give yourself a proof of my existence and you would do me a favour!

The thought [as a thought] that some piece of knowledge, (the banana/the fruit of knowledge,) is beyond our reach, beyond human reach; is that thought itself the culprit? Is this how we fail? If I say that ‘We, (meaning people in general, (really meaning Me,)) have lost the impulse to reach after the fruit of knowledge,’ what do I in fact say? Nietzschean interpretation; do not climb the tree of the fruit of knowledge – that is foolish. Spend the summer relaxing in the garden and wait for the fruit to fall come the autumn. To express the desire is complex; the desire so expressed is a desire unto itself. To say such a thing turns that thing, (that we

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no longer know or can see what our goal is,) into a thing itself – there is no longer any interest in getting the fruit, only a baser and more earthy desire to philosophise about not getting the fruit. [Key human problem.] That is the essential problem – the philosophy of a higher knowledge loses a level of resolution as a thing to which human thought is identical and produces a meta-philosophy occupied by the inaccessibility of the top layer of knowledge. It can no longer identify itself as a top layer of knowledge, as a higher type of knowledge unto itself, but rather it scrabbles around in the dirt lamenting its faults, but in the most eloquent and beautiful of ways.

Question or Proposition [I know not which]: Can this meta-philosophising approach the higher ‘philosophy as identical to itself’ in some way? That question itself is a question from the lower level, asking a question of the higher level; what will the reply be? This question seeks to ascend into higher philosophy. First, I must argue for the notion that whatever fruit was in the tree originally is no longer desirable because;

In Biblical terms, our ancestor Adam was scorned by God for eating the forbidden fruit, for he got what he desired – he got knowledge because of a curiosity to know what was other than bliss and ignorance is bliss. God did not deal out his punishment; expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the result of the desire, for one cannot reside in bliss when one has knowledge. Thus are we still, as humans, contented with knowledge rather than divinity. We no longer desire a higher knowledge because our desires have been converted to work within a wholly earthy circle;

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it has been bred out of us by learning to be preoccupied with the meta-knowledge which is our pestilence and our cancer. Lower knowledge encircles and breeds itself, it is its own labyrinth. Do you not see the constant repetitions and failures evident in my thought? Secondly, I must also discuss how I, content with this meta-philosophy, the knowledge of philosophy, can ask the question ‘Is there a higher knowledge than this?’ Or is this question in and for the lower knowledge? (i.e. Is there a higher one, or am I just jerking off?) I shall also ask what this questioning means in itself, for this a crucial angle in gaining a knowledge of my knowledge of the knowledge of things. (How far can we de-resolute knowledge away from what is ‘pure’?)

Some people talk about the past as if we had a vantagepoint! Particularly philosophers of science, who follow the piece of string afforded them by the project of science itself. What does the ‘understanding through science’ have in common with the ‘understanding through philosophy’? It is selfevident that these two modulations of understanding are themselves antithetical. Philosophy in and for itself is plainly different from ‘philosophy of science’ which is philosophy in and for science. What is this work, strange as it is, that philosophises philosophy, denigrates science and its objects, rejects and affirms in a syncopated way? [Read this book, from now onwards, as though it were the first book that you read, as though you were able to know me through the work and not merely to reflect yourself in so doing. We

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must get to know one another, my friend. You will see that every ill-reasoned statement, every ill-argued point, every misinformed statement, will paradoxically reveal to yourself more about you and I than one had ever dreamed possible. Each thought produced in relation to this work binds us more closely, for they are thoughts that we both have, we are beginning to synchronise in an unusual way. Let us read on, past this brief divertimento.] Celebrate your criticism as a prized object of thought and yet do not become identical to it. One is not identical to one’s thoughts, least of all to one’s opinions. To begin with, how can one know the difference between an opinion and a truth if you are identical to that thought? Blindness ensues. How often do one’s opinions change and whereabouts is the objective validity, the qualifying quality of their source? One who gives show of opinion must always be self-ironic in so doing, for it is better to wear glasses when one is reading… To reach this new understanding, this new standard of identity, [something ‘genuine,’ perhaps?] one does not need to reject all that appears in fallacy; that was Descartes opening fault guilty of all the later small hiccups of his reason. We need not necessarily follow him. Disingenuous thoughts still exist, and they must be affirmed in preference to being denied, where they often become the secret and busy workers behind the scenes of the stage of life. We cannot simply shrug off that which is unsavoury to our reason and our understanding simply because it conflicts with a fragile, perverse and shambolic opinion that we may hold, for it is often the case that we miss the qualities that such thoughts possess. Such an attitude is a ‘bad reason’ to do things, it is ‘bad reasoning’, (which, by my own method is indeed in possession of certain

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qualities that indeed I am exploiting here,) but indeed, it is still an ability of reason. [Science would die if there were no humans to believe in it or who did believe in it. Such idols are always more dependent than those who depend on them. (Comedy of the feudal system.) No one is capable of exploiting humans other than themselves.] One may tell a lie, “murder some part of the world”, and yet it still exists as a thing in its own right, it has no less validity as an agent of our understanding than the Truth, other than the truth may be provable (?); but let me ask you, are we that Catholic in our method to require a proof of our understanding? A lie can be proven; in point of fact, a lie is required as guarantor of our truth.

I am never content with the way in which things are; this is my Greek hangover. In the same sense, you should not be content with the way in which I present things, for they, disclosed unto me in my particular reasoning, are still concealed to you. Perhaps I write only because I am not content with things; how would this colour the way that you read this text? Is this mere sophistry? You should not be content with what I say, (primarily because of the contradiction in my saying so,) because I never disclose my true meaning, (because this is a false notion,( as is this one, (etc.,))) Read and reread my words to discover new and old, the nauseating ‘meaning’ in them. Meaning is nauseating, because meaning is a second-hand good in terrible disrepair, it is my father’s sword – no renovation can make it what it once was, but it is precious because it has lasted this long. We renovate it just to rediscover our desire in it. Meaning should not be desired, for that is a vested interest and not a meaning.

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When I was a teenager I repeatedly had arguments with my father about whether Hitler had done anything wrong. He could not accept that I understood that Hitler had committed great wrong, but that all I had to go on was hearsay and I do not value knowledge from the second-hand. Why did Hitler commit great wrong; who is the judge, other than we who walk constantly with a great pair of biased scales in our right hand, and a fasces in the other. Tentative subjects such as these are controlled in our reason by our projection of public opinion – the internalised policeman that never wishes to offend always hinders our investigations. We cannot challenge our opinion of public opinion. We do not allow ourselves to know.

How often have I heard people say, “I hear that this is good”?

This disgusts me, the reasons are so apparent that to explore them here might cause me to vomit for they are so terribly obvious, even though we, I, still commit this atrocity on a daily basis. Chinese whispers are the current and prevailing mode of valuation, and to participate in this circuit-like game is to negate the very concept one purports to cherish; the Good – Value. Distance has grown up between us and Value in this way. Someone out there is producing these values at an accelerated and exhilarating rate; what makes them the authority to do so, and is it even a question of authority? Let us hide behind the mask of liberal opinion and say, “We all have the right to an opinion.”“ We all have a right to an opinion.” How can somebody, anybody, have a right to or be an authority on a thing that nobody knows and of which people only ‘hear about’? I do not trust my ears…

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I am glad to have located the source of my nausea; attempting to digest food that not only has been in existence for millennia, but has passed through the cultural gut over and over again, stripping it of whatever nourishment that may have therein been fixed. I view culture as a ruinous husk that died long ago from lack of nourishment, and yet its ghost continues its daily business ignorant of its own death. Each and every [value] phantom which haunts this ruined cathedral feeds from the living, perverted in the originally opposite relation, and phantoms absorb energy and show none of the generosity of the living. My generosity is a glacier that melts, feeds rivers, evaporated by the sun and is rained down and freezes again; constantly. I am a haunted man; long-lost tragedies envelop my person, but they are not mine â&#x20AC;&#x201C; they belong in the place of fantasy; a dangerous, shadow-like place. I too long for an Arcadian-like forgetfulness but, I too do not; this desire belongs to the same dangerous fantasy and one which may only be given expression in such a place. The children that I saw around me have grown up stunted inside a delusion; the fake smiles give way to fake anger, none of it has any rooting, it is easily subjected to change. I thought I had friends but I have none, nought. What a beautiful number! It is filled with my exhilaration.

Interval: I am haunted by phantoms!

But tomorrow there shall be a party â&#x20AC;&#x201C;

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My happiness is a false one – if I have money I am happy!

If I don’t I have anxiety! I truly am poor…

…I live on

for the next party – this is nonsense, truly!

***

All of the townsfolk had gathered to see the travelling monk that had arrived in the town that morning. Bringing food and water, the townsfolk tried to make the monk feel welcome as he had acquired some fame along his travels and they desired to know what wisdom he carried with him. The monk ate and drank heartily from their offerings, but not once did he impart a single solitary word, not even a thankyou. Believing the monk to be tired, the townsfolk gave the monk lodgings and let him rest. In the morning the people went back to the monk to see if he was in a better condition in which to speak from. Bringing a fantastic breakfast of watermelons, rice, bananas and fresh milk, the monk ate and drank an enormous amount, leaving none for the people who had brought it to him, despite the humble nature of the town’s means. Again, the monk said nothing. People sat about him for hours, waiting for some piece of wisdom to come from him. They gradually came to believe that his wisdom was so rich due to his diet that one utterance would bring them great joy, and he kept silent so as not to spoil his listeners, given that one so silent must be so profound upon speaking. The people continued to feed the monk, (with chickens at

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lunchtime and lamb at dinner,) and his appetite seemed as great and consuming as his silence. After four expectant but disappointing days, the eldest of the townspeople, the blacksmith’s father, said to the monk; “We have sat patiently about for you for four long days and you have said nothing. We have brought you the best food we have, whilst our people go hungry, and yet you say nothing. Please, will you not impart to us some beneficial and enriching piece of wisdom so that we might learn from your knowledge?” To which the monk, with a contemplative expression went to speak to the man, but fell silent. He visibly wrestled with an idea, something welling-up in his mind, for well over an hour, and the frustrated people wrestled with him in this idea. Suddenly, a look of enlightenment dawned upon the face of the monk, and again he went to speak. Turning not to the blacksmith’s father, but to the assembled crowd, he said: “”

***

I love this anxiety, for I am young, and it is the character of youth to worry. This is youth; immaterial worry, (anxiety,) supplemented by material pleasure.

The aforementioned text was stolen from me by melancholy. I had it stored in the safest of safes, in the distant far-left corner of my pituitary gland. It was scrubbed-bare by the sandpaper of distraction, (disguised as a massage of the ego,) no trace of it exists. I am in a mourning-period for God’s death; this is my melancholy.

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What happened after this mourning period for the lost lover of my brain was as unusual now as it was when it occurred; let me explain: I could not reach into the dry well of my brain â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the bucket was rotten and full of holes, the most common function of memory and reason diseased and stranded. During this period of thirst and deprivation, (for surely it is the case that abstinence produces many unusual effects,) I found that my appetite for water dried up like the wellspring itself; the two were conjoined in a supply-demand relationship. I was free to stray as far from the well as I liked without any need to return, without the centre of gravity. I was not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;freeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (for I do not know what this means,) I was simply not thirsty. Black bile ceased to be produced, and nothing dared to replace it. I was changing, and so were the needs and functions of my organs.

Conclusion: Anyone drawn by nostalgia into the quicksand of melancholy would do well to know of Faust, and do well to know that we may hanker for a past without appreciating its depth or its mundaneity.

Coda: A famous soothsayer was passing through a village on the road to Thebes, and stopping to slake his thirst at the well in the village square, was struck by a resonant vision. As the water passed his lips he fantasised a great tragedy that was to fall upon that same village. Drinking his fill, he went hastily to the village notary, and spoke to him presently. Having recognised the name of the soothsayer and in so doing ascertaining the credence of his ability,

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the notary asked what the vision had imparted to him. The soothsayer said; â&#x20AC;&#x153;This town shall suffer a great tragedy in the very near future, the nature of which I do not know. I saw this vision whilst drinking from the well in the village square.â&#x20AC;? The notary became transfixed with a terrific fear for this prediction and became incensed to know more of it. He commanded the soothsayer to go back to the well and to drink more, working on the assumption that the water had conveyed this knowledge unto him. Wishing to be of assistance in this grave mystery, the soothsayer did as he was requested to do, and went to the well and drank. Quite a crowd had gathered in the square as rumour of the soothsayer had spread about, and they came to witness his prophecy. At once, the soothsayer was struck by an identical vision to the first, and he conveyed as much to the notary who asked him to continue drinking until he knew more about the [his] future. The soothsayer drank until his belly and bladder ached, but no new information was revealed to him. Frustrated at this, the notary explained that the soothsayer must remain in the town and continue to drink until he knew the exact nature of the tragedy. Fearing for his life if he did not obey the soothsayer agreed, and slept on the matter that night. After a restless night of agonising and contemplating, the soothsayer had chanced upon an opportunity to resolve the situation, for he knew now that the notary had him captive there. Striding out to the well, the villagers peeped from behind their shutters, the morning heat already blasting the outside of their houses. The notary came striding out into the square, (who also had not slept, the idea that he was about to die had gripped him

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fervently,) and sat down on the edge of the well next to the soothsayer. The mystic began to drink, pausing only for the occasional burp, for ten days and ten nights, much to the astonishment of the notary and the villagers. On the eleventh day, the soothsayer got to his feet and said to the assembled crowd and in particular, to the notary;

“The Gods have made their decision!”

and promptly walked out of the village toward Thebes. It was only then that the notary became aware that there was no water left in the village.

***

A child points to a word on a blackboard and says to the teacher;

“What does that mean?”

Teacher has two options, (only one of which will actually occur,) give the answer that he knows because others told him so, follow the structure laid out to him, do his job. Or, He can ask himself in relation to his Being what this thing means, if indeed, anything means anything. He can tell the child, “You’re better off not knowing,” “Your guess is as good as mine,” answer the question as it is put to him as a Being, look for meaning.

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In the Bookstore: Not Roquentin’s library to be sure, no Self-Taught Men in here, (or are there?,) but here I am and fairly unenlightened, too. What do I buy? I tell you in vanity Rabelais, Petrarch, Pascal, Crowley. Reasons for doing so? [So I could tell you about it?] Same reason for buying clothes, really. Saying all this in sceptical colours, I did however feel the feistiness of omnipotence that a creative zest affords. Waking after a sleep, (how long I could not say, for I was asleep at the time,) I found myself in this bookstore on Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour, which seems to go on for the whole day, not just an hour.) The store stands proudly on its prestigious location, and I stand cowering in the grotesque and copious fiction department. Is any of it any good, I ask myself. If I had all of these volumes in my head, had all of this information to hand in my memory, would I be better off? Probably not, because books are to be bought to demonstrate the taste and intellect of the purchaser, as I have already demonstrated; to read it is to go beyond the economy of boos and of wisdom. I go to the ‘A’ section, begin to read, become identical to a character in a book in the ‘S’ section. How did that happen, I mean, something interesting in a bookstore? What is my prerogative now in the light of this event? I browse through the selection, the special offers, spend my money that, like an idiot, I give my time and my life over to, and walk away with some books. (Incidentally, it is 4 months later and still I have not read the Pascal.) I notice that they have over one hundred versions of the Bible in here. They are all priced differently.

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Do I wish to contribute to all of this, this production line? What if this book finds its way onto the ‘O’ shelf – what company would it keep? I know why notes should remain underground, even though I own a copy.

Do we prize the original copy of a book?

Pascal says that distraction is occupying, yet boredom drives a man toward the question of Being. I am in the bookstore, I am bored, I am looking for the question of Being, I buy these books. There needn’t be a question at all, (because careful cultivation of distraction can remove it for most people,) but alas, some of us aren’t built that way. Every action drives these poor souls toward it, toward destruction or absolution, all or nothing. We are haunted by relics and phantoms in the places where others do their shopping. Did you know that Social Studies are meaningless? [As I am re-writing this for the second time from notes, whilst continuing to write the notes in that other temporal dimension at the same time, I notice how certain attitudes are planted and begin to flourish.] Too many books in here that you would label studies in ‘consumerism’,

‘postmodernism’,

‘gender

studies’,

‘popular

psychology’, etc. Books as empty as the things that wrote them. Likewise, a science is a driving outwards of an ego, go outwards to avoid the nihil which is inwards. I do not reject these things per se, but I witness them as a mere symptom of emptiness, an attempt of Capital to wrap its tendrils around each and every thing to own it, exploit it for the sake of gain, an avoidance of the question. Note the lack of consistency in what I just said; I am consistently

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inconsistent. Humans drive forward, culture gets bigger, becomes an ungainly and fat beast eating everything in its path. I’m sure I saw a Manga comic on that theme. I move to a different section of the bookshop. The last section evidently caused confusion inside of me, and the quality of my writing suffered, (perhaps that is why books about cultural studies are bad?) I too easily take on the character of the books. I open the first page, my character is eroded and becomes porous, I read, but that is what my character consists in. Life is a distraction from the thought of Being. Consider this book that you have in your hand right now, inside a bookstore, containing a bookstore, and you as reader, becoming a bookstore. Each paragraph is a different department of the store, each word from each line from each paragraph taken from one of the books in that department. The macrocosm begins to swirl out of control. Do you feel your belly rolling in seasickness? Now tell me what is a book? Tell who you are right now, at this minute. Write your name here in the blank space, I, ……………………………………, know exactly who I am, I put my name in this text so that I speak through it and it speaks through me. Now we are co-owners. I know who I am. From this point I am the writer and you are the reader. We have switched, you and I. The rest of the text is of my composition, the previous text before I inscribed my name in is yours. Any questions or proofs of the validity of this writing may only be provided by you, the reader. That is not my concern; my concern is that I began reading this book and now I am writing it. I am the writer and you are the reader [I think]. If I were the reader, this sentence would not exist, correct? Too late; I will not change my mind now, (perhaps we already did when we switched back

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there,) I must go on, for I have not said enough/too much and have no time for moderation. Can I now think myself out of existence â&#x20AC;&#x201C; forget myself? Can I think myself into existence? The first thing that we must consider is that thinking is not proof of anything, for we cannot prove thought in anything because of the problem of automation. I cannot prove that Descartes doubted anymore than you cannot prove that I cannot prove that Descartes doubted. But perhaps, back in the last couple of paragraphs, when we switched identities, we caught a glimpse of each other thinking. We became alive to one another. What a nice thought it is! Where do we stand in our relationship? Do we even have one? Are we sentient minds communicating through language and thought, or automatons going through the aforementioned motions? All of the words that I have used have been used before. You even used them before I became the writer. Why should the simple combination of the words be a proof of originality? This is not the Torah! All things are second-hand in this way, and that is the extent of our charity and ability to recycle. If I am mad, then such a thought of being mad would be a proof of sanity or madness? Why bother to distinguish between the two; it is just another way of keeping each other at bay and never meeting. If we are truly sane we cannot know of the qualities of our opposite, (but I know otherwise.) Lucidity; what is this if not a clarity of insane thoughts? If a human is to be a human at all, does he need to know what he is, how he is, why he is? This is the character of his self-reflection. I only know what a human is by what other people have told me, for that comprises my knowing. Have you ever approached greatness or madness?

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This writing is mere distraction; I enjoy it, it helps me avoid the meaninglessness of life. I walk onto the street and am sick at what I see. This is because I am mad, not because the people I see are mad. Better to lock myself from them. If it weren’t for distraction’s polite melody, I would only ever see anxiety, decay, and rebirth. In short, the best things in life. The things that make a life a life. If I become more artful, perhaps I can avoid this anxiety better? Or I could buy a television. I want you to carry on reading; whenever I start getting predictable, or my work begins to descend into repetitive and useless crap, then you will be the one reading those qualities into it and will be compelled to read on, just in case you might be wrong, just in case we might encounter one another either through our projections of our selves, perchance something else. Will we ever know each other? I am deteriorating rapidly, (a phrase I picked up in a medical program,) my pen moves, but no thoughts sick to it. Four months later, my fingers will dance across a keyboard, and again there will be no thoughts; I will try to think about what thoughts I had when I wrote this originally, but I tell myself in my original piece of writing that I had no thoughts. Will I trust myself? Perhaps I didn’t exist back then? Where is the malicious demon? So much for proof of other minds – I need proof of my own! This is what my lucidity consists in; will I ever strike a chord? Yet, I do not flounder because I have found something amongst this whirl and rope of madness; I cannot be nothing, for that is a contradictory term. I am unable to put an end to the sentence “I cannot be…” Nothing cannot consist in something, be-ing cannot be any thing other than what it is. Therefore, this sentence must end somewhere. I must be

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content ______ to allow the world and all its things to swirl about me in its mad dance. I do not join the dance toward death, for I must be content. Content; that is what I have, what I must be to be, even if it leaves me discontent. I am not good at weaving clever sentences and ideas about. I am not good at nothing. I am. Nothing is not. I seek therefore I am something or want something.

Note: There is a break here in the text, and I like breaks. My mother always told me not to break things. I broke her heart. What I’m saying is that I started writing again after a night’s rest, and my train of thought was severed, is now different. But this cannot be, for thoughts never reach a full stop, do they? Can you tell me what it is like not to think whilst conscious? What’s different? For one, I have slept, slept like a fakir sleeps, where I am mute to the world. Today is dreary but I am not. A steaming cup of espresso sits before me. It is my favourite beverage, but do I require stimulation? I sit and look at it, and the waitress asks whether it is all right. I say it doesn’t matter if it’s all right or not; it’s an espresso. She laughs a bit. Anyway, I haven’t tried it yet. Sometimes I buy things and do not use them. Many times have I sat in a restaurant, bought something, and watched it get cold. Will I die if I do not eat? People have told me that it is the case. Scientists ought to live by their hypotheses like Sartre. Now do I see the interesting parts of my life; I took the day off work, (it was mine to begin with, I decided not to give it away so easily – extent of my charity.) I sit in the café and I decide to write this book. I had a terrible ethical dilemma this morning – can you believe it? I could not decide whether I should go back to

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work today. But my body knew its answer, and took me away from work. My mind can run rampant at such things, but my body always gives a concrete answer, (i.e. it always does something.) The mind is a magnet and worries stick to it. Life really is not a difficult thing because it goes on whether you believe it to be difficult or not. It happens on its own, spontaneously. The difficult parts come from what we put into it. In what way does belief function in the world? It doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, for it acts solely on the mechanism of thought. I have no desire to sit here and think as it effects no change. At least whilst my pen is moving some trace is left in the world of what just happened. Thus I connect my thoughts to my pen and allow you to put them into your scales.

This is a good point at which to discuss Value. If something has value, then some special thing is attached to it that we prize, that we gravitate around, to which we constantly return. We wonder whether we can afford it, whether we deserve it, whether it is dear, etc. Can I afford such thoughts? Is my pocket deep enough to purchase a thought so precious? It interests me; can Value exist without objects to attach it to? Can it be a pure and abstract thing that is potentially reified from the material world? It is quite apparent that as soon as you remove economic terminology from a thing it becomes near impossible to understand it. Value, Property, Cost, Exchange, Price, Economy, Purchase, Dear, Precious, etc. Question: Do we need Value? So long as people exchange, (which is indeed our primary interpersonal relationship,) we will require it. But what if something is given freely, received without debt, (of any kind,) freed from the capitalism of metaphysics? That is when

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we require new strands of terminology derived from some root other than Value. How is it that the concept of debt came to exert such tremendous leverage over the human psyche? Debt and guilt function in a pact against the better nature of the mind; debt is built into a value-system, guilt is the enforcer of this debt with his big stick. When you feel guilt beating you, maintain two virtues if you can. Be like a flagellated monk in one respect, and like a masochist in the other. And if then you feel like a pervert caught between these two paradoxical situations you may just come closer to Truth. Do not give in to pain, for life is a marathon. So to whom might you owe a debt? Your mother – she gave you life, (you never asked though,) but here you are; are you indebted to that loan shark or mort-gage lender? To society? Well, if you weren’t here, my friend, society would find another ant to replace you. No; humans don’t really owe any debts, but they invented this intoxicating delusion in order to create a natural hierarchy – nobody ever gets above himself, transcends, in this state. But that type of debt, the finance of ethics, is but an invention, a phantom before the fact, twisting your guts to cause the belief that it is real, you make it real through your belief, you bestow power onto it. Remember the ‘heroic intestines’! Economy, a gilt machine, a prize for those who cultivate and maintain it,, but not so rare and beautiful a thing that it should keep a hand in all of our judgements. We think, because we have heard of the ‘economy of signs’, of semiotics, that our words and language can be bought and sold, that so can our higher abilities. The word ‘value’ does not necessarily have Value; this is the shortsightedness of the semiotician. Remember that words mean as much and as little as their user.

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What do I mean? I would indeed be mean to suggest that my meaning had meaning. I thank my employers now for all of the sick days I took from them in order to get healthy, and I am planning another as I write this for the second time. So, if value, the word, does not necessarily contain or even convey the substance of the concept, then what does it have and mean? To be sure, one can use the word, without value as the case may be, and still one produces a linguistic relation to value in one’s discourse, people will understand what you mean by it, etc. But if it is just a word and not a ‘thing’, (an abstract concept, a subdivision of Truth, some agent or angel which operates in the human sphere but comes from the realm of Being,) then it is foreseeable that people have been bandying the term about without the comprehension of the term denoting anything other than discursive Value. Indeed, it may not denote anything transcendental, for this itself is a tenuous concept and fiercely denigrated by all nihilists. Value may indeed be only a thing produced in language, the vacuous voice of opinion which echoes only linguistic meaning as if in a cave, and moves nothing more than the ears. Why judge if to judge is itself only a word? We are talking phantoms; phantom words, (empty, dead to the world but alive unto itself,) mouthed by phantom persons. If there is an empty space left behind when a word is used, (i.e. if it does not have ‘meaning’; either concrete linguistic meaning, mystical metaphysical meaning, mystical linguistic meaning or concrete metaphysical meaning,) the is a debt carried over each time the word is spent? Debt is a hollow affair and the stuff truly that anxieties are made of; anxiety is an immaterial worry for those bound by material happiness. That is the function

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of debt; it is ‘something’ without the ‘thing’, it is an abstract worry about a concrete world, but our belief in the debt allows it to enter the concrete world as a perverse agent, it is much ado about nothing. Anxiety is a worry, a worry about Nothing. (If nothing is not capitalised, then you would not notice that I was denoting a thing, merely making an all-too common figure of speech.) Anxiety, unlike the flame that dies when the air is removed, does in fact breed in a vacuum rather well. This is precisely because it requires the vacuum, for it is born of nihil. Anxiety comes into the world by means of a reliance on material things that we try to endow with value, (I am a consumer of things; that is my economy, my part in the economy,) and with each thing that is acquired, a debt to anxiety is levied. Each new debt we incur, the wider the gap of nothing becomes, the greater the friction between our security and our anxiety. We only ever half exist, we are a perfect balance between something and nothing, between security in our selves, and anxieties scaling the ramparts.

***

A wise sage from the town of F______. was travelling along the road between two towns. The road was a straight one, and thus, through his knowledge of geometry, he knew it was the quickest route for him to take. Exactly half-way along the road, the sage came across a youth who was sitting on a small grassy mound next to a well-beaten dirt track. The youth was busying himself with drawing circle in the dirt and humming a tune to himself, albeit loudly enough for the sage to hear as he approached. Stopping a while for some water, (have you noticed a theme to these stories

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yet?) the sage kindly offered some to the youth. Refusing to drink, the youth continued about his business. As it was such a scorching summer day, the sage asked the youth;

“Why is it that you refuse water when it is offered to you on such a terribly hot day?”

The youth, irritated by the disruption for a second consecutive time, replied to the sage;

“Water is for old men. A youth as fit as I requires nothing and wants for nothing. Why is it that you are required to offer your water to me, and why do you insist on pestering me?”

Feeling out of sorts, the sage replied;

“I offer you water out of kindness, and I disagree with your point that young people do not require water; people of all ages require water, lest they die.”

“But you make it sound as though dying were an evil to be avoided; death is a natural sentence accorded to all people regardless of age, and water merely fends off the inevitable, it stops you from getting to God quicker. To say that water is needed by all people young and old ‘lest they die’ is ignorant of the fact that we all die.”

“You are correct in your observation that all things that live are required to die, but prolonging life is good because it allows one to explore life’s riches, its joys and the other things that a life entails.

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Death is nothing, and desiring it is contradictory both to desiring and to death, and to the life from whence the desire came.”

Angrily, the boy retorted;

“What did you drop that word ‘Good’ in there for? Your argument was doing quite well until you decided to beat me with the righteous stick of value. You are showing your age and your weakness. In answer to your point, to make a contradiction is to affirm life; to make a choice and reverse it, to desire death, (desire is a symptom of life,) is the supreme contradiction, the supreme affirmation of life.”

The sage pondered this remark. Such replies were artful to be sure, but in opposition to the divinity of reason rhetoric can only aggravate and not resolve. Considering his reply to the youth, the sage’s thought slipped over and knocked itself unconscious. After a period of nothingness, darkness, the sage’s thoughts came to. Finding his feet again, he noticed that both the boy and his flask of water had disappeared. Infuriated by the situation, the sage could not think of a half-way decent conclusion to this story.

***

Where does your edification figure in this text? Where can it possibly figure if this is the product of my consciousness? But, of course, you can answer that question for yourself, and don’t for a minute think that I am trying to put words into your mouth. But why not attempt to

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I got distracted Or Identical/Indentical I give enormous consideration to you, my reader, but do I? You do not yet exist, (and, to be sure, as a reader you have not yet come to exist, because I am still writing the text. Indeed, I am the reader and the writer.) But then again, I am not the writer, because this text is written through me by forces that act upon and guide my consciousness, be it semantic

and

linguistic

conventions

empirical

determinations of psychology. And thus, for the same reasons, I am not the reader because the texts are read through me by conventions and determinisms, i.e. structures. Or you, as my projected reader, are making demands upon my consciousness, thus you have become the writer and not the reader, even though it is that part of me which thinks it is you that has demanded it. Or, the writer can only come to exist if he has a reader, and thus I have not yet come into existence as that which I am unless you come to modulate your existence in order to complete mine, (existence formulated as a desire to exist.) So what is this I that is the vanishing point in this whole idiotic paragraph? I speak as though the I were a conduit through which different things pass, such as information or data, which is set into a structure in the conduit, so that anything going in or coming out becomes structured whilst in contact with the I. How can I know of this information?

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Precisely because I know of it; in other words, I have been influenced by information passing into the I, which goes to shape its character and its relation with the world. And some things, as if attracted to that I like iron filings to a magnet, stick on to it and comprise its character. Other things leave a residue but do not form substantial parts of the conscious entity. But that this information can be known to the thing to which it sticks, the thing which is it, is another matter. As this thing which contemplates its condition, I can attempt to be certain of things, which is a form of knowledge. Information, which in its raw stage is simply information, can become integrated into the thing which perceives, and forms part of its conscious character, forms a conscious part of its know-how when comporting itself to the world. It is a reflexive information which can be known to the I because it is part of the I; it comports the I towards the world in such a way that it considers the I as part of the world, and therefore the I can perceive itself, (due to this knowledge as a know-how.) It is the thing that sticks to the I, allows the I to see that part of what it is, and allows the I to perceive that part of the world. It is a constrained representation of the I; one may consider one’s ability to ‘know thyself’ with ontological blinkers. This is knowledge as Identity. To be Identical to knowledge. This is an ontological formulation; Being through the modulation =Identity/knowledge. I understand Being in this paragraph as something which is ‘to always be modulated’.

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But how, which part of our know-how, can uncover Being as something which is pure, and not comprised of or modulated by things in the world? How can the I be aware of the parts of the I that are not selfidentical and therefore not self-aware? This discourse drives towards the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’ at the level of Identity as knowledge. If Being is ‘to be present’, then one must be able to declare all parts of oneself to one’s representation of the world in order to ‘be present’, to be knowledgeable of self. If I try to penetrate the deeper subjects, I always become confused in this way: if I try to think about subjects so abstract as were discussed by Descartes or Heidegger, I can find no footing. But these two individuals had a scientific knowledge of their subject, a subject that in our understanding has no scientific interest or nature. There have been elements in this text that have described the inability of science to know Why, for it is busy with or is comported towards know-how. Perhaps Philosophy, as a lover’s discourse, the love of knowledge, which treats knowledge as a self-reflecting Being in itself, and not something which is at the disposal of another thing, (such as knowledge for Science,) can know the whys and wherefores of itself. But it is not in my philosophy to conceive of a scientific know-how in philosophy, although this would have been a common and self-evident portion of Aristotle’s process of disclosing Being. Even note how I use Heidegger’s style of language because I have no knowledge of my own with which to unveil this subject!

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Secondary Consideration Or Primary Awareness through Critique

[Note: Be aware that I am describing, through identifying with, an unnatural, (not seeking to disclose,) comportment of understanding to the world.]

Notice how I convinced you that I was aware of my faults in the previous paragraph, and therefore had some distance from my knowledge and was not self-Identical to it? So was this a rhetorical game of convictions and opinions, or did I gain a genuine self-disclosure through watching my intellectual machinery at work and then writing it down whilst I was doing so? Did I just glimpse a portion of thought which looks into self-Identical thought and makes it aware? I was attempting to suggest that my knowledge of the philosophical technique is radically different, distant, brute and common in contrast to that of Kant, Heidegger or Aristotle. Even my readings of Descartes were completely exploded today in Heidegger’s ‘The Task Of Destroying The History Of Ontology’. I then noticed that the subtitle to my book is ‘How to Destroy Yourself, Utterly’. I understood Descartes ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ with a mind adjusted to understanding the culture of today with the education of today. A

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postmodernist liberalist of today might say; “your opinion is as good as anyone else’s”. This opinion must destroy itself as it is self-aware as itself as an opinion. Also, it is evasive, because it does not seek to go further, it sleeps, it relaxes into complacency, because complacency is a form of bliss. This seeming ‘liberal’ attitude, which is a symptom of degeneration, which betrays the nihilism in contemporary mental life, must not be allowed, by its own token, to encroach upon the attitudes of the past. For to stand on top of, (as we do the past,) is not to stand aloof of. The young assume their ways are better than that of their elders, but in fact, it is we who are the elders of Aristotle, Heidegger. If the knowledge developed and disclosed in the past is our second-nature, (for I do not indeed need to ask why a cloud floats in the sky or why a brick sticks to the earth,) then indeed there are great many things in our consciousness that remain undisclosed because we feel no need to disclose them, or do not feel that they are concealed, (i.e. they appear self-evident.) I do not think it is necessary to disclose the theory of gravity to myself every time I drop something, but perhaps I do need to declare that this history of knowledge actually lives inside of my consciousness as living information. (Note: I shall, hereafter, describe this phenomenon as Spirit.) In this way do we seem like the top of a huge iceberg, and somehow must we requite, here in our knowledge, these things presently; Ourselves as Being in the present, (existing and becoming,) but having a huge, undiscovered and

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unconscious past, (our subsistence, or Spirit.) Our Being as presentness, (the present as undisclosed, as Being,) and knowledge as our identity, (the demarcation of our selves from other things in the world.) The way in which we can understand and which form part of the matrix I have outlined, are the different forms of knowledge comported toward the world as tools of disclosing Being.

I hope to destroy myself, to be sure, but am I like a Shiva, who burns away with one eye and recreates with the other? (Principal of Aborigine philosophy.) I think I am not. To be ‘like’ something is essentially being next to nothing. A close neighbour. And I am somewhat weaker given that I cannot destroy what I have become, because that is what I consist in. So the project of ‘destroying oneself’ would actually read better as ‘exposing’ or ‘disclosing’ or ‘uncovering’ oneself. This is detective work, but where is the crime? (Why do I keep repeating that phrase? Perhaps we shall see later.) If we work on the Aristotelian assumption that the world is essentially concealed, but we have the ability, the know-how, to disclose the world, the beings in the world, and thus, ‘be’, then we have a project. But this is Aristotle’s project, it is presented to me by the world, and is hence concealed. Thus, even this project, which could be seen as a ‘key’ rather than a truth, a belying which exposes itself as a truth in the nature of its belying, and work from there. I do not think that I can go down the path of saying that it is a truth, for I would then say that this piece of knowledge

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comports itself in the world to me in my existence as something undisclosed. Aristotle established that the world is concealed, and thus must his knowledge appear before us as something which comes from the world, (and this would work in the Cartesian argument for solipsism,) for there is no guarantor for this knowledge other than Being. We do not, however, need to paint our world as a malicious demon, for there is no demon at work here, other than ourselves. The world is only concealed in that we, as humans, have the ability to uncover it. And hence, the world is necessarily concealed because we bring that character to it by existing in relation to it as that which discloses. The world, however, does not change. It is not concealed in itself, for the world is neither concealed nor disclosed. As I repeat myself, it is we who bring that character and quality to the world. That is why we could not say that a glass of wine is concealed, merely that we conceal it in our nature as that which discloses. This example, with the glass of wine, was chosen specifically against my example of the law or gravity used earlier for a specific reason. With the law of gravity, there was a hidden, (hidden by its abstract presence in the world,) law that with scientific know-how could be made undisclosed, and this much comes to us from Aristotle, and to me from Heidegger. What is there to be disclosed about a glass of wine? There are ten million and one things, to my mind, but the one that sticks out the most as demanding attention is the cultural one. How do your powers of cultural association spring into action when I

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said glass of wine? I am talking specifically of meaning, because I think that this one thing demands attention at all times and actually discloses our nature as that which discloses. We know about what things are supposed to mean, because they are taught to us, we become familiar with them through use, through discussion, and it is knowledge of them which tells us their meaning. Roland Barthes could tell me what a glass of wine means either one way or another, and he could come to know of this by the way in which the structured glass of wine operates in a system of signs. So, all of the other connections in the system must also have their associations which connect together forming a matrix of signs. This much could be read in any old book of ‘Structuralism’ or ‘postStructuralism’. (I use this term because I studied in England. My use of Semiotic ‘meaning’ here is totally interchangeable with any other pre-existent system of thought, i.e. Psychoanalysis, Social Studies, Gender Studies and all other methods of analysing culture.) My problem with this type of ‘meaning’ is that, by necessity, it presents itself as something concealed in pre-established meaning. Meaning must and can only be produced in the moment of existing in relation to the world. Being present in the world is its meaning.

Principle: The ‘Understanding’ is that part of our nature, (which is to exist,) for which we disclose.

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Any system for understanding things in a particular way, be it Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, etc, may well be a comportment of Being towards the world in terms of technical know how, but because it is something we wear, because it is a tool, an extension of the understanding, it does not in itself have a relation to value in the sense that it perceives values in the world. An extension of the understanding is when we utilise some pre-established way of acquiring knowledge. But as a thing which discloses, we may indeed have it in our nature to disclose that which seems to disclose things for us, (i.e. extensions of the understanding.) It is the understanding which has a comportment to Value, for it alone can perceive value through the directness of its connection to existence; in short, it recognises it. Re-cognises it. The distance between an extension of the understanding, (preestablished know-how for acquiring knowledge,) and existence always produces a lack in the understanding, for it missed that part of understanding which unveiled the nature of the thing, and the nature of our Being. The penny did not drop, so to speak. Only Understanding has a comportment to Value. Value may indeed be produced at the comportment of Being to this technical know how, (if and only if it is treated as something which is in the world,) but the technical know how does not produce value in the world in itself. Value, the meaning of a thing in Being,) is produced as it is perceived, when Being comes into contact with the world in the present, when being ceases to

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be shrouded, (typically by the Idea of the self and all that it entails. These extensions of the understanding need to find their proper place within the place of the understanding if Being-present is an objective which is to be realised.

The world is concealed because: As things to which the world presents itself as concealed, as things which exist, it is our nature to disclose them. It is the nature of things in the world to be this way in relation to Being. My use of the term nature is acute and existential; it relates to my nature to exist. What follows from that; that this nature is to be understood because it is concealed is self-evident. My understanding of that problem was hence resolved.

Descartesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Being-certain is thus a posteriori to Being-present.

***

Nonsense: It is easier to discuss the Being of a myth than Being in itself. The

Being

myth

nonsense:

etiareisaotsdsucis.nhatneiBgnifitles If Shiva were to look in a mirror, would the mirror be desiccated or would she? It is the same problem as the Medusaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head; she was subject to her own nature, as must be Shiva. I saw a painting in the National Gallery recently that depicted Perseus with the Gorgonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head turning all in front of it to stone. All it would seem, except

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me. Am I immune to this effect as a viewer, or is this painting manifesting

poetic

contradiction?

The

comparison

Caravaggio’s Medusa’s head on a shield is that we freeze in front of it, (at least for a while.)

Idea: On the seventh day, God sat down and worried about what he had done. [In His own image.]

The Philosophy of the symptom. As previously discussed, there are many extensions to the Understanding that we might also call, through the nihilistic tendencies of their champions, symptomatic philosophies. In that these disciplines deal largely with the symptoms of culture, and teach us how we are to read culture in a particular way without the hard-core of Being at their centre, (i.e. with nothing at their centre; pure semiology,) how are we to progress toward an understanding of this extension? If there are symptoms, then indeed, must there not also be a disease?

So what happens when a symptom becomes a symptom?

Is it possible that in a meta-symptom, we might glimpse the inner workings of the sign of the symptom, a meaning that goes beyond that of the sign and what it points to? Could a psychoanalyst explain what the meaning of Psychoanalysis is without referring back to the symptom? “And so, what do your observations about the patient tell you about his condition? What do they tell you

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about your condition? Who is the analysand?” The human condition is the patient, and Psychoanalysis can attempt to explain the symbols and signs of the condition in relation to the psyche, but can it tell ought of what that condition is like? Psychoanalysis can have no meaning unless there is something pertaining to Value at its core. Perhaps I am straying into the territory of Qualia, ‘what it is like to be…’ in order to defend against the intrusion of analysis into what seems to be all parts of human experience. But I do not think that psychoanalysis can tell anything about what it is like to be. This is the result when an extension of the understanding becomes idolised as a thing unto itself. It can tell nothing of what existence is like, because it has maintained no link to the understanding of existence. And, as discussed earlier, because psychoanalysis abides by the conventions of a preordained system, it can tell nothing of Being. (But I am wrong, I tell myself later; in wrongness shall I discover certitude.)

Question: If an analyst had an encounter with God, what questions would he ask?

A poet had been advised to see a shrink. He had been suffering from sleep deprivation and amnesia. He laid on the couch, and the analyst began the session:

Analyst: “Now tell me, if you can, what you think might have caused these problems.”

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Poet: “Well, it all started when I was writing a poem. It was about God. I was trying to write a poem that encapsulated the Idea of God, which indeed is a big idea, in language.”

A: “And when you were thinking about this ‘Idea of God”

P: “I found that my thoughts began hearing themselves, like in a kind of synaesthesia of thoughts. I came to know that God was using me to produce words, and in so doing, He was describing Himself to me.”

A: “And He described Himself to you?”

P: “Well, at first He would not disclose Himself, and then later, when I persisted, He began to put words into my head that I was not quite familiar with.”

A: “What type of words did He put in you head?”

P: “Well, they were the same words that I had used before, godknows how many times, but they seemed different. I could feel the words loaded up with all of the meanings that I had ever used them to signify all at the same time, and all of these meanings came to mean one thing, and at the same time became fractured again. It was quite psychedelic.”

A: “How would you describe the sensation?”

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P: “I felt as though I could see all things at once; I could see myself reflected in every word that I used, past and present, and I realised that I did not exist; that my consciousness was fabricated, that it was an idea in the mind of God, and that I did not need it.”

A: [Holding his tongue] “And then”

P: “Well, then I began to write as I did before, but I could see a fractal myriad of meanings, like divine patterns on the page, all interlaced with one another in each new word I used. The poetry was everywhere, alive, a living knowledge. I could not escape my past, but it was freeing me into the present with each and every constraint.”

A: “And you saw this as God?”

P: “Well, God just described Himself to you, only you missed it.”

A: “You just described yourself to me.”

P: “No. God just described Himself to you. The birth of semiology was in the Quaballah.”

A: “And then you became sleepless?”

P: “There was so much of God to see that I did not want to miss any of Him.”

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A: “Ok, I think it would be a good idea if you could read your poem to me.”

P: “I already have.”

[Alternative endings: A: “Ok, I think it would be a good idea if you could read your poem to me.”

P: “No. It’s mine/It’s private/I found it!”]

***

Project for the day, 11/03/04: Do not say ‘Sorry’ to anyone, under any circumstances.

***

Lacan’s “Your Being or your thought!” problem. In this problem, Lacan tries to illustrate the loaded dice of thought over Being, to suggest that whilst one is thinking one cannot be, and if there is Being, there cannot be thought. The provocative choice-statement above only operates for thought, it only proves that thought cannot choose anything other than itself, and the choice, (which, dogmatically, always involves a thought,) could not effect Being. The thought itself illustrates that one does not need, or rather, cannot choose Being, because one already is, for it is ones nature to be. The thought itself cannot penetrate Being, and thus it

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is thought which comes off the worse in his formulation. But, not content with this brief analysis, we absolutely must go deeper into the relationship between thought and Being, the function of choices, (especially ones of this existential nature which, in fact, are not choices at all,) and why we must, eventually, re-present the original choice-statement again with an understanding of what is actually Being-said. As is commonly established we, as thinking things, have it in our nature to think. Because we are presented with an everchanging set of circumstances, (the world and ourselves through time, existence) our thought is modulated in a particular way towards this change, and that is to choose. We are able to envisage a number of possible worlds that we can inhabit, (the quantity of which is always restricted by our perspective,) and we make a choice to try to move ourselves along a specific course of action that will requite our desire to inhabit a particular possible world. The possible worlds that are presented in our thoughts by our fantasy of possible worlds is also an image formed in thought which has its only relation to reality in that we believe we are accustomed with reality well enough to predict how we and it will look, given certain circumstances. This is, (as no doubt every human has experienced,) a tenuous relation, as we cannot envisage, without prejudice or in fact, the variables which effect the actuation of possible worlds, which indeed highlights the tenuous relation of thought in human mental life towards reality, (our perception of the actual world.) It is also prudent to say that our psychological conditioning which colours our perspective has a hand in this process, for it is obvious that our decisions are made in accordance

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to various forces within ourselves that have different degrees of force. We use our thoughts in order to take specific variables from a situation, requite them with our understanding of what we desire, and then make actions, which we believe, will actuate the desired effect. (It is true that often, there will be X number of ulterior motives, repressed desires, other factors which effect the desired outcome, but the principle that we can actuate changes in the world still rings true.) This is a very potted history of cause and effect, to be sure, with a very crude psychology attached. Indeed, it is clear in the brief outline above that the entire process of choosing is a tale of forces acting upon a thing, and that thing attempting to exert forces upon other things. It is a play, a huge current of forces and flows, taking on, in metaphor, the character of time and its turmoil. Where, indeed, do we find a space, or in fact, a concrete relation for our idea of a sentient Being which is connected to this network of flows, and yet engages with none of them? This question is indeed existential in its nature, because it has to do with the position, within existence, of Being; a thing which, in itself, does not change, but the way in which it is manifest in all things existential, is constantly on the move. The transient qualities of existence are what we might understand as that which conceals the Being-there of things, the Beings-inthemselves. Permanence and consistency is not an easily perceptible quality in things which always change, but hence, that is the way in which these things are Being. So the place for Being in this turmoil of existence is the whole quality of existence itself as it is manifest here in the world, because that is its Being. Being appears imperceptible to us, because we are unable to grasp this

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naked truth without attempting to disclose the nature of things as they appear to us. This understanding can indeed be levelled at the human I, given that it can be levelled at all things in existence, because it forms the character and consistency of all levels. How do I, as a thing which always changes, (my cellular parts are constantly renewed, my character is always being developed, my opinions change, the life and reality in which I take part is always changing on the outside, too,) remain always the same? I always seem to perceive reality through my consciousness quite smoothly, for all the parts appear to connect. My opinions remain unchanged, because I have ethical maxims to which I always adhere, (even though these maxims came in to being,(in time,) and are subject to change although I cannot foresee it.) My psychology is set down in stone from my childhood years, in that part of my character which, like a coin, always carries a stamp which identifies it. Therefore, in myself, I can perceive consistencies and differences in great degrees, and this does indeed make being a person a contradictory experience. So, where does the agent of choice figure in this play of forces, between those parts that are fixed, and those parts in a constant flux? It is the imperceptibility of Being within existence that provides the forced choice of Lacan. Upon superficial inspection, the choice between thought and Being appears dogmatic, but that is because it is shrouded in the character of thoughts; of being concealed. As it is our nature to disclose for, in Being, we naturally conceal things, (as can clearly be seen above,) we must work on the basis that the basic character of this paradox is that it is concealed,

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and that we must disclose it. Because we know that this choice is a biased one we also know that there is indeed no choice at hand, and thus we make the choice, (because Being never allows us to choose and hence, when there is no choice, there is indeed an existential freedom.) Thus, to make the choice of thought is paradoxically to choose Being, because we choose to be that which we are, (in the first instance, as thinking Beings,) and also, because any choice betrays the character of our Being in the world. We cannot sacrifice our Being to our thought.

When I sit down to work, it is like approaching a bolted door that demands to be open. It is only self-consciousness and its need for self-preservation, (fear,) that prevents one from swinging it wide open. The self-consciousness produces a cunning barrage of thoughts designed to prevent the desire from opening it. Faith must be employed in order to open the door, against the harassing voices in the head. The door is what we might call a door into the place of Being, and to capitalise on Kafkaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagery, there are many similar doors beyond it. In my version, each new door is created at the point of opening the first. Self-consciousness cannot accept, desire, or believe in a place of pure consciousness, and thus it must produce a barrier whenever the opportunity arises. In point of Zen mischeviousness, the first door does not exist even in the first instance. One need simply believe the notion that a place of uninterrupted consciousness can be achieved; it is the encryption of reality that prevents belief from moulding reality to consciousness. So now I have sat down and I am working at last, the door will remain open until my self-consciousness approaches, and I will quit

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working. Once the door is fully open, and no barrier lies beyond it, then will I never cease to work.

Technique will assist genius.

I am now lying down, and indeed I am very close to my subconscious. I employ technique to achieve this end; I wish to get closer to the inner workings of my mind, the different layers that constitute the top layer of thought imagery. When I look at something I desire, I see cunning machinations at work; I no longer see that ‘I want something.’ When one becomes identical with the top layer of thoughts, one sees things in terms of the ‘I’, as if that is where the special and unique observer resides. ‘I want that’. It would be more interesting and consciousness expanding to say ‘I wants that’. This belies the knowledge that the I resides in one place, and perhaps there is another observer which does not feed off of desires; an ‘anti-I’. So my technique is to slow right down, induce a trance, and watch thoughts and language flicker upon the surface of the I. There can it be detected that desires, opinions and deceptions are at work, always at work. Allowed to flicker upon this screen, the perceptual ‘anti-I’ hovers between consciousness and sub-consciousness, able to be a part of both, on the fence, without being identical to either. Strange results abound. In opposition to the psychoanalytic myth of the inner-savage, the primal animal, it is more than evident that the mind has an inner philosopher at work that any person can reach. Consciousness is a new evolutionary tool, and it is not complicit with the animal desires that once formed part of the brain’s functions. This is the reason that humans develop neuroses over sexual relations; it is a

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paradox that cannot be accepted by either part of the mind; the savage, animal and material mind, and the ethereal, aesthetic pure consciousness. Neuroses develop from this point; sex is not only sex, for it is caught up in the development of human consciousness, in the mental evolution which is a departure from the animal heritage of the human. But this earlier stage in human evolution cannot be ignored, for it does indeed constitute the very ground upon which consciousness is founded, for it is this ground that will produce the character of consciousness. This relationship between material brain and immaterial consciousness as by-product, (albeit an all-engrossing by-product,) of material brain-functions causes an inevitable paradox, the symptoms of which register across the whole surface of the new consciousness. These ‘symptoms’, as they are widely labelled, come in the form of desires, pleasures, worries, madness and passions. The first, desires, is paradoxical because the desire for things that one wants has become confused with the things that one needs, and thus has desire become a thing trapped between the aesthetic realm and the material realm.

[Note how this writing does not pertain to the ‘actual case’, but merely constitutes the activity of my brain at this moment.]

Technique, a kind of mental ‘pranayama’, can be implemented to ease this friction caught between two equally valid worlds, a friction that both produces ‘existence’ as a thing to be experienced as both a sensual and aesthetic thing, a friction which invalidates Being in the process of producing existence as a thing. Being, just Being, is an invalid proposition if one is constantly becoming in the process. Only when a mutual harmony is reached through

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technique between these two antithetical but equally valid portions of human experience is Being attainable. I am writing very closely to my mind at this moment; through this ‘paranayama' of mental technique can one come closer and yet more distanced from opinions, insights, desires and ultimately, knowledge itself. This writing in itself is not an argument, it is in fact a record of the function of my mind in accordance with my knowledge and my desire, and that is how it must be read. I do not expect that you can be identical to my knowledge and my desire, but I do think that there is a place in consciousness where we can both be the same thing. Where we just know. At a concert a while ago, which was the Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin playing Beethoven’s 4th Piano concerto, I spent the entire time watching closely this great pianist’s face, until after a time it became identical with the music itself; the two had become mutually reliant upon each other for their existence, if you see what I mean. At this point, where distinguishable things are eroded by the presence of genius and beauty, I felt that there was a point where I needed to be in the same place with the pianist, in this sacred moment of Being, where I could be freed and united with the whole world, with Beethoven, with pure and uninterrupted consciousness. In order to have a higher, ethereal conception of the music and the experience of the moment, there needed to be a ‘transendens’ of all notions of self and identity. The expression of the pianist’s face, his closeness to Beethoven, his identical nature to the music at that moment, (it depends entirely upon him to exist, he depends entirely upon it to exist; they are identical things,) is where I want to be. This constitutes a higher ‘aesthetic’ desire which transcends beyond the desire from a self which has its own identity. This desire seeks to

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be without its own identity, but wishes to be absorbed by a higher identity, one without an ego, where there is true oneness. This thought, this desire is the size of God = for it is an absolute point where everything is nothing. I left the concert feeling very uncomfortable bodily bound. As soon as someone speaks about God, higher consciousness and things such as these, there are few readers who will not cringe in some sense. Why do we shrug away from ideas that have perplexed the human race for the longest time? Did they suddenly seem redundant after various cultures including ours attempted to cut the umbilical chord with the past as a quick route to the future? This does not constitute a transcendence; movement is not necessarily hindered by the past, and it was a Futurist naiveté like Marinetti’s that assumed that to reduce drag from an object would speed it up. In fact, to reduce the ‘drag’ of history means that the object moves but without knowing where or why; this is the nihilistic desire supreme. This is why it is so difficult or ridiculoussounding to try and understand concepts of God, good and evil, truth, spirit etc. All made taboo by nihilists who themselves could not nor dared not answer them. They have the cancer inherent in a thing that severs itself from the nourishment of truth and runs only upon momentum, (speed,) until it finally stops and it rots. I am recording the fluctuations, processes, symptoms and breakthroughs of consciousness upon the surface of this text. Each and every word opens up a path into the structures of your linguistic systems and consciousness, which provides the essential link between our universes. This phenomenon I value by recording it. This is the primary, essential value that is both inscribed in the work and scribes the work, and this is how the text becomes. My

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effort to make this writing a consciousness in and for itself is effectuated in this conjunction of things that produce its existence and are proof of existence. The motivations and values that I have produced in being a writer, (for that is my mode of being right now; I exist to write, and my writing exists due to me,) are the crux of the work itself. This is the condition of my existence right now, and your are made explicitly privy to it. That is how I privilege the reader. The validity of this writing is of a higher level, in that it has become valuable because of itself; it has become a selfconsciousness in and for itself. These previous sentences testify to that fact. It is therefore of primary importance to present these fragments as they are, for they are both a trace of my existence in the world, a valuable insight may be gained into my existence by preserving this footprint in the sand, and a documentation of mental activity occurring during those times; ideas that appear to me and my consideration of them. This writing is a life, or a fragment of life, (to paraphrase,) and thus it is of inherent importance. The thoughts that you produced to these last few sentences, all of them, such as your critique of my self-importance, are the reflective images of our interface. They have been produced in relation to this work. They have become of importance also in becoming part of this work as an existing self-consciousness, (so much so that you thoughts have been absorbed into the internal dialogue of this artificial intelligence.) What does the concept of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Death of the Authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; tell you about Barthesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; authorship? That is what I am pondering right now, and my writing has slowed because of it; I am looking at the sunshine that has broken through the rain on this chilly Saturday afternoon in July. Has this weather also become part of the character of the text? That last inclusion makes it so.

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The ego always loses (contrary to accepted opinion.) The ego is set up in my understanding as a ‘something’; that which is in diametrical opposition, that which must always have a hand in everything in order to exist, and that everything is Being. Being is nothing; ego is something, (thinks it is something, thinks itself into Being-something.) The ego always loses; each success achieved by the ego in the realm of existence, (each bolstering, each success toward making itself whole,) is a failure to forget nothingness. Each time ‘something happens’, nothing is present. The ego never overcomes nothing. “Nothing can be forgotten”, said the prophet to the fool. The fool replied; “Nothing cannot be forgotten”. Being, nothingness, cannot be forgotten, for it would have to be a ‘thing’ in the first place. It cannot be forgotten, for it was not a memory, it has no memory, no past, no present and no future. “Each success is a failure to forget nothing.”

The other way in which the ego loses: “The ego is always lost to nothing.”

The ego either loses or is lost. Ego-loss. The ego plays with loaded dice against its favour; “All or Nothing” exclaims the ego, and hence, Nothing. Only nothing is all. Being.

[Up until this point in the book it felt as though I were dealing with petty hindrances, ‘little things’. I was in a state of overcoming as one who was becoming. Now, existence has been tainted with the character of forms; the guiding question ever present in the mind of

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one who never sleeps as he has become awakened envelops me. I have shrugged off the small pieces of clinker that cling to my ego and now it is time to approach the infinite, the infinitely tight grip of the ego in keeping itself from Being. These larger fetters cannot be ‘shrugged off’ in the way described earlier. They simply represented a loosening of the ego from the mind, but did not separate the two, the symbiote from the entity. The one who does the ‘shrugging off’ must be ‘shrugged off’. Lift oneself by one’s own bootstraps, as they say. A meta-‘shrugger-offer’ must be employed, a move that opens the corridor into the infinity of Being, (meta-meta-meta-meta-meta ad infinitum,) as we spiral down the cascade of casings. It is this spiral which is in itself the character of Being, and our Being is to cascade along it as infinity manifest in itself. This again is technique. We are so accustomed to looking at the world on one level, whereas Being is on all levels into the infinitely small or the infinitely large; it is the motion of the cascade between them that constitutes our access to the infinite. This technique must be honed. When we tumble through nothingness, it is the tumbling we need to practise.]

Being, (to paraphrase the truly poetic moment of genius in Goethe’s Faust,) is a ‘thing’ so smooth that even the thought of it slides off’. That sliding action is crucial to the expansion of our consciousness into its next stage of evolution.

Contradiction: How can the ego have an infinitely tight grip over our Being, if Being is so smooth that even the thought of it slides off?

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Resolution: This is the ego’s last stand. At this point does the ego recognise itself as an illusion. It recognises reality as something other than itself. It knows it is not real. Its knowing ‘it knows its not real’ hurls its self-knowledge tumbling down the staircase of Being. It knows that it has dreamed itself up, that it does not exist and never had existed. It was a dream in the thought of Being. It is hence the most cunning deception of the ego; its own deception. It has come to think itself out of existence; it no longer exists, and the thought of it no longer existing absorbs it into the totality of Being; ego-loss constitutes the horizon of self-knowledge. The ego becomes indistinguishable, it has become part of a universal thought amongst the universe of thinkers; it has become its own impossibility;

“A thought the size of God.”

When one is aware of the choice, the journey becomes more complex. Only without thinking can one make the correct choice. But thinking is its own choice; the choice which always keeps the fork in the road in front of us, for there is no decision. This is the choice between Thought and Being.

That which does not kill me should try harder. [Machiavellian Nietzsche.]

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This book, as its title suggests, is an opportunity to destroy myself. The many ways in which this can be interpreted I have already attempted to provide in part. Let me now think about my former decadence; drinking myself silly each and every night, sexual liaisons with different girls every night, eating the worst food; forming a culture of self-destruction. Now, I do not see this behaviour as decadent whatsoever, for it is somewhat tame and ordinary in comparison to my present charge. All I did was to bolster my public profile, feel the conquest of women as a test of sexual potency, and generally to become an ordinary person with a psychology. Now I seek a far greater danger that genuinely puts the universe at stake, which is either drawing me into madness in the disguise of enlightenment, or draws me to enlightenment in the guise of madness. The mad ones know of the distinction; the enlightened ones do not care for it. It is not of their taste. The concept of self-destruction, (the ontological project,) is closely linked to the complementary concept of unveiling the world, (the phenomenological project,) and the concept of knowing the world, (the epistemological project.) This forms the matrix of philosophy; no one of these concepts makes any sense whatsoever unless it is characterised by a love of knowledge. Many dedicated exponents of the lower branches of knowledge, the scientists, the logicians, the rhetoricians, the psychoanalysts, the sociologists, et al, do not grasp this primary concept. The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;tree of knowledgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is by necessity hierarchical, although the tree is inverted, rather like a root-structure. And this hierarchical structure is an angelic hierarchy, of which truth is at the top; not directly knowable, but by sending knowledge up and down the hierarchy we come to know of its presence at the top.

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By inciting a mental course of self-destruction, I am actually looking for that single point upon which the whole illusion is built. This is destruction and creation, to be cleaned out with a bottlebrush fire; decadence is simply to look at destruction with one eye closed, (i.e. ignorance, wishlessness, idiocy.)

My aspiration for thought: To have a thought the size of God. This thought has not yet been approached in the way that I conceive the project; the thought itself must be perfectly requited with itself, a thought of all thoughts, an everything. This is a perfect philosophy; a knowledge that fully loves itself for itself. One must be careful in this project to spot when a thought becomes trapped in vanity.

I like to travel upon the London buses, for one can meditate upon a great number of things in a time where there is no choice about what to do, a void space between destinations. This is aided by the meaningless chatter of other peoples; I listen to them and hear only myself in reply. This is what they also do, but are unaware of the idea. Tonight I shall take the N47 into Trafalgar Square and see what happens in the interim. It is just about to turn midnight. The daytime, like a vacuous plateau, so I bathed off the night before spent sleeping on my brotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s couch with my fiancĂŠe and get prepared for the evening-time. The moment the sun goes down the dormant libido of my mind awakens and begins production. Is it this way with other people? How come people engage in anti-social behaviour with an almost psychotic zeal after dark? A night bus is a good place to observe it! I, as a human, am not a nocturnal creature,

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but what is this madness that grips almost everyone after dark? It is certainly not in my character to

[I forgot what to say]

A daytime dormant madness awakes; my lunatic. This is, (but neednâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be,) the most difficult part of my day, particularly after the zombifying daytime experience of my job. How to cope with mental time not spent working for something else; what to do with all that energy? I must be compensated by re-acquiring my daylight hours to write this book. Does all of this act as a confession, I wonder? I seek to explore life fully and openly no matter how controversial the findings be. Confessions open guilty secrets up, but I am not guilty for my life. We confess because we are engendered to believe unconsciously that we are sinners. I am too Greek for that! No, I do not consider this text to be a confession because I carry no guilt about the thoughts contained therein; can this be said of other people? I saw the work of Tracy Emin this week, and thought about its pseudo-confessional format. On the surface of things it appears to confess its dirty, sin-tainted nature, she looks like a guilty child. But underneath, because this gesture is an ironical one, because she exploits this fake guilt, she actually confesses a deeper crime. She is indeed guilty of murdering; she kills something because she wants nothing. This is not a confession; there is nothing to confess in this respect. It is the semblance of guilt. The real guilt is where

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she murdered value. There is no God in her to give the information up to. I do instead feel embarrassments in giving this information up to myself, but that is merely the operation of the ego; it is either a plum or a prune, and either way it will cause diarrhoea. It is also quite difficult to read what I write in this book, either because what I have put forward/foreword is mundane, obvious, secret, idiotic or passĂŠ. Or, because what is written, because of the aforementioned properties, is an assault upon the ego. This writing does not care for the same things that the ego cares for. This text has become an extension of my consciousness, a space where it can seep into, fill and cause the enlargement of the horizon. I am not coming closer to anything; the language will always prevent me from doing that. But perhaps if I jettison all of this information, these thoughts, into the space of the text, the annexe of my consciousness, I can create a space inside the ego sep[arated from its own machines. Language is a safety net protecting you from the ground. In that respect am I not too worried about finding anything in language that is too groundbreaking.

[deleted section]

Ok; it is time now to come clean; everything I have written is simplistic pretension. I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think about what to write because I am too wasted and it is Sunday. I even come to the cafĂŠ to aid my

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thought-process but it does not help because I am too wasted and it is Sunday. There is nothing more ordinary in the minds of men than the reassuring dread of returning to work on a Monday morning; this is the secret pleasure of a guilty heart. I am no different; regardless of desiring my own time on my own terms, my subservient psychology seeks distraction from anything more taxing, won’t allow me space to think of and do something. But to bring this simple piece if self-knowledge to the forefront of my brain is a small effort in overcoming my slave-mentality. Is it years of constant abuse from the banality-enslaved culture that causes this, or is it all of my own choice and doing?

In a small Himalayan town lived a blind beggar who “Daniel is thinking to himself right now; ‘What a waste of time!’ He is unable to do anything to free himself. The book heads toward nowhere – his life – what is that? Often, when the subject overawes him, he retreats into a private little cave where he consolidates his futility. Sometimes he feels the opposite – all of his writing is valuable on the premise that he wrote it, and therefore he continues to write. If he hunts around for something worthwhile to write about, he is a mute. He has chosen the subject of subjects. It only goes to show that if one writes for approval by one’s peers, one in fact has nothing to say for oneself. If one inherently values everything about oneself, then one can find a universe full of things that are of interest.” Today I am celebrating 6 months without a television. What an invention; create one’s own distraction and pay for it! That is the

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limit and constitution of people’s happiness – to be eternally distracted – to be distracted forms reality. Imagine being contented with one’s eyes being closed. Of course one is contented, but is there content in that? “Daniel is here being high and mighty. He perceives the television as being a source of his erstwhile stupidity. He perceives mass-culture as stupefying. If he had read Proust, perhaps he could have begun to explore the realm of fantasies in brief. Perhaps he would enrich time spent? Also he is still partially driven [by his tabloid sentimentality] by the illusion of high culture. He has not yet realised that there is no culture to speak of, only reality.” ““Pay no heed to the last justification made in speech-marks; it is Daniel’s ego trying guiltily to justify its own existence. It is apologising. Reality does not know of justice.”” If there were suddenly a world crisis, an impending Armageddon filled with the extermination of the human, the singular most terrifying, (and yet only consolidating,) thought would be to finally know how many people think exactly like you. Proof of other minds. Would you go to a church? Would you call your wife? Etc. The church would be too full of other like-minded people, so you would call your wife, but the phone lines are too jammed up with like-minded people. So you would fall to your knees in the street, but there is no room, because of all the other like-minded people. “Where would Daniel be now without his precious anxiety? It’s the driving-force behind his entire output, the justification for his life, so-to-speak. If there were no

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niggling thought that something was wrong with the world as it appears he would not consequently seek to dismantle everything he sees and put it back together in accordance with his own vision. Such feelings of omnipotence are a peculiar symptom of those who are paranoid. But remember that for the Greeks, Para-noia was the first escalation through a series of superficies of human enlightenment. Remember also that this was also the behaviour of various psychotics and fascists. Just be wary of anything the author is saying, as it could be misleading, a trick.â&#x20AC;? Am I an idealist? You may only answer this question if you:

i) are an Idealist or,

ii) you think in the same way as I do.

Actually, I think that we are both the same, you and I. A shocking thought, to be Identical. But right now you are thinking of me thinking of you thinking of me, ad infinitum. Hence we find our identity. I repeat this basic assertion so often because when it occurs to me, the thought is so large that I often stop to wonder about it, and I try to put it in words to capture that wonder. Read the symptom of my inclusivity to this text and stop to think why all of this is here, from the babbling of thoughts to the lucidity of ideas. I do not cut anything out of this text; perhaps I merely edit my thoughts. If this is the case, then what have I edited out of my own consciousness? There must be many secrets, to be sure. I am just as deceptive as you are, but if this is the case then

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what place or meaning can honesty ever achieve? One can only be honest to the extent that one makes explicit that which appears to the mind as an ‘honest thought’. The character of the thought is ‘honest’, but that is merely its form and not its content. So what then is the meaning of nonsense? Is anything excluded from sensibility? If something is nonsense can it possibly have meaning? Perhaps the only real value that this text exudes is valuing itself. If I value everything that I write out of the necessity that committing words to writing is to value them, then the text itself becomes a large and complex system of values. Whether the thoughts are as interesting or complex for you as those of other writers is your own business, but you cannot conceive of this text as anything other than ‘of Value’. That is its form; what about it’s content? Perhaps that is the single greatest achievement of this text; that it becomes what it purports to become; it is realised in form and content harmoniously. But it could be equally the case that this is only the product of an over-inflated ego. Either way, the distinction should not matter to you; these motives are for my experience alone; the text for the reader can have no motive, for it is just a text that records motives. It cannot become motive, (perhaps it may become a complex metaphor for motive,) it’s form is becoming and realising at once the shape of what has emerged. A day or two ago I caught myself smiling at someone who I find positively repulsive. I smiled at him because it is standard practise and stupid English politeness to smile at the people one works with, and then vent your disgust behind his back to people who do the same to you. So the smile, upon first appearance, is a lie; it is designed and implemented to mask my hatred of this person. [But it is still a smile.] I meditated on this matter further,

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and found that my smile was just an expression of my fear of other people. My relations with people always work on the assumption that they know something that I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. The fact is that this is necessarily the case, although one paradoxically considers oneself to be smarter. The paranoia in the case springs from the obvious conflict between the two dispositions. One cannot go on living ones life trapped in such mind-boggling idiocy. The two things should be left to exist separately, for this is not a question of choice; one cannot choose between the two, but if one tries then the conflict produces a most unpleasant effect.

[When I was in my first year of college I was very strongly opinionated, very aggressive and persuasive with my rhetorical arguments. I chose to express my intellectual might on all occasions. I reduced a girl to tears through a critique of her work that was so stinging I convinced her that her work was meaningless and should be destroyed. How meaningless was my action in this case, if indeed it was borne out of the concept of meaninglessness? How can one possibly advocate so strongly and with such zeal an opinion of nothing? Indeed I was trapped in the void with my ego to keep me company. I think about this occasion a lot, and with different sentiments. I wonder why I cannot present my case with such religious vigour, I wonder what caused me in the first case to present this argument, and in the second, what caused me to lose this vigour. I am providing here an insight into how I think about this smile, and how I think I have changed over the course of time. There are some points to which one always returns, and to which one shall always be indebted for ones character.]

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The reason why this smile nauseated me so much was that in it I confessed to myself what a coward and liar I have become. How deep in my knowledge does this deceit penetrate? But if I do not believe what I know, and neither do I believe in what they know, then what style of knowledge is this? Is this some kind of pessimism borne out of cowardice, or is it a trait of nihilism? This question may only be remedied in my mind and in yours through the simultaneous action of our reading and writing together as one. This text is testimony to my belief in other minds, and the value of my own thoughts. Therefore it should be possible to conceive of the previous case-study, and the context of this book within the same breath, or at least inside of the same thought. Rather than explain fully how things have changed for me after this pivotal smile, I shall instead just move along; this is the only for of justice I can accord to this epiphany. Later on, I shall indeed explain how anything can be implemented by the mind instantly and without deliberation. Immediacy and transparency are the question of the project here. Please tell me though if you think that my choice to move along is in fact a coward’s decision, an inability to approach a significant issue because one is a bit ‘touchy’ about it, because in ones mind there is a self-imposed barrier put in front of it. As one moves into the future and develops an account of one’s desires, ambitions, etc, so too do ones anxieties progress and develop in tandem to ones desires. The two opposites are coefficient, which is why one is not ‘done' with ones worries when they appear to have been flushed-out. A basic flaw in the way our consciousnesses have evolved is that one forgets. We do not see that our worries will not go away; we forget that they will always

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exist, and that no ambition or desire will take us any further away from our unpleasant character, but will instead develop it symmetrically. One must expect that the conquest of one symptom of neurosis that another will manifest itself. That symptom vanquished will again yield to another generation of symptoms. It is a familial relationship. One might, if one is lucky, actually flush out the root of this weed; that self is a diseased product of pure evolutionary consciousness; otherwise one will merely pull off the dead flowers season after season and leave the bulb in place. We must be careful here; to disrupt the neurotic weed at its root does not a free man make. What would happen without neurosis? Is our consciousness sufficiently developed that it can simply be, without all the layers of deceptive identities? Without neuroses,

would

one

then

become

identical

ones

blameworthiness? We would indeed become responsible for our actions in this case; no past identities to blame them on, (I was a different person back then, honest, etc.) On top of that, it is indeed the great scapegoat of the self to blame its neurosis, its automated machine of desire; this keeps us most safely guarded from truth. We always have someone to blame for our pathetic existence. But on the other hand, who would benefit if Hitchcock had been cured from his neurosis? Art hangs in a careful and delicate balance in this particular web of knots.

That which does not kill me should try harder, (or I shall keep on going.) [Eternal Return.]

I think that for a long time I lived as a decadent, toward a spiral existence downward, being sucked into oblivion; yet I say this in

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hindsight. Was it really oblivion into which I descended, or was it a mad journey to test the boundaries of self? Yet such minor worries to which we are peculiarly attached seem weighty when the mind focuses on them for such a time as for them to become abstract and ungainly. The water in the sea is not heavy when we swim in it, yet a gallon of water is heavy to carry. This strange time of mine was like a small-mindedness wherein my mind could only focus upon little things, and which gained weight because of this abstraction from context. This was no decadence at all; decadence is a Greek tragic term that no longer applies, for one must see the future in order to have a decadent manner. We are quite assured of our continued existence because we rarely meditate upon existence, thus we take it as granted [by whom?] that we shall be immortal, although we don’t know why. If we don’t consider God, or some Being higher than us to be our creator, then there is a kind of blindness put on us that excludes our thought from such matters. The historical reason in which Nietzsche says that we killed God refers to the evolution of the human wherein he chooses to perceive himself as his own creator, (which is an absurd concept.) The term ‘self-made man’ is symbolic of the nihilistic trend, as is our current obsession with exercise, work, shopping; all things that tell us that we make ourselves and that no-one else did. This strange veil of ignorance descended upon us a long time ago; the need for the human to acquire the God-like characteristics of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience abound in all modern people. We make ourselves. That is why we do not understand tragedy or decadence, as only the seer could hail in the decline of civilisation. The self-made man has ensured his continual existence by putting the concept of existence out of his mind and instilling the delusion

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of immortality, which is the form of the veil of ignorance. I myself have taken on the deceptive character of omnipresence in writing this book; for with it I wish to speak to the future, to always be present, to shape peoples and thoughts. This is a message in a bottle; the future will save me from my obscured past. This though is the point where the Godliness in man, if indeed He is our creator, emerges. Not the deception that a man can still talk after his breath has expired, but that he can see this in the future, and thus he can know of the tragic. He must know of the power of God in order to understand the tragic, and thus he must likewise know of the Godlike properties in us that are still there; God is not dead. God is a time bomb. How does one become a believer of Nihilism? I say believer because one practices, preaches and religiously executes its maxim at each and every step. Even though it pervades each and every action to the core, we have become unaware of it, which likewise means that we are unaware of every action and thought of ours because nihilism is a kind of forgetting, although in the realm of the spiritual. Nihilism comes about because we come to forget about God through the Zeit and its spirit, yet we still exercise rituals around an empty altar. Believing in nothing is still a belief, and yet this paradox evades the faithful nihilist. We are nihilists because we have evicted God and put ourselves in His place, worship our image of ourselves, and forget about the truly divine properties in ourselves. The quasi-divine properties that we come to exude instead are a deceptive reality comprised of a delusion of Godlike properties that mean nothing, are merely a forgetting in themselves. And yet we practice and preach this strange religious ceremony as if we were still faithful, religious people. What strange

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creatures we are, indeed! Worshipping ourselves is tantamount to worshipping nothing, for that is from whence we came and to which we are going, and the non-existence that awaits, (and this book is not for the non-existent because it is only related to existent minds like yours,) is the ultimate unknowing, the divine forgetfulness which is like waking up, that reality was the dream of existence. But it is only we melancholics, whose savoury dish is the vision of emptiness, can perceive the divinity that separates this life from its real past and its real future; nothingness, infinity. Existence is a spark of memory in the consciousness of spirit, but one in which our lifetime appears. How can we see the human evolving unless he can have a vision of the absolute, a thought the size of God? I see this book as an opportunity to destroy myself, to be annihilated, executed or sacrificed. In fact, that was the original working title. Can we now say that this is decadent? If my knowledge finds its locus around nothing, comes from nothing and goes to nothing, then surely it is nihilistic? But we have already discovered that decadence is not nihilistic, for only one who can contemplate God can also be decadent for he is preoccupied with the thought of nothing, of annihilation. Unlike the suicide, whose death is the product of neurotic fantasy and perverse feelings of immortality, (why the need for a suicide-note, if not that one wishes to exist forever?) this kind of annihilation is a remembering Being, for it remembers the infinite and God in the same moment and extinguishes any earthy feelings of self. Suicide is a product of self. Being is a property of God. In this way can we say that Nietzscheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s observation that nihilism was a required stage of human spiritual evolution is most precise. Perhaps the way in which he died was the

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conclusion of his movement out of Nihilism and to become instead a voice for the future; not a suicide, but a not-needing of the body and its earth. The human is not a machine, because the human is able to reconcile the ultimate paradox; that of himself. This is Schadenfroh – the conclusion of Nihilism; the ability to find joy in another’s discomfort, (which is that of the self troubled by a perpetual cycle of worry.) Existence causes a friction upon our consciousness which in turn causes us to worry about it always. Neurosis can be said to be the earthy and empty cycle of worry that distracts one from the object of Being, and neurosis is, in that way, the product of a choice, but a choice made on the scale of every element of our existence. As a person is able to choose to become his genuine and hereditary divine properties, he may also become the shadowy and content-less counterpart. But we must bear in mind that this stage is necessary in providing the clues to the paradox’s resolution.

Question; what would be the meaning of a special and private thought that you never divulged to anyone? Everyone around you is able to tell you endless things about endless things, and so they do. Nobody contains the message, the piece of knowledge that you really want to hear, either because nobody knows it or everybody kept it secret from everybody else. But in that this question resides within your body and burns you from the inside out, so too does the answer. People rarely ask questions that they do not expect to get an answer for. Either they are confident in their ability to find an answer, or their ability is dictated by their confidence; both are the same thing. How does one stretch the horizon of one’s vision? When we say nobody

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knows the answer to that question, it suggests that the answer is within the realms of knowledge but it hasn’t yet been happened upon. When someone says that ‘there is no answer to that question’, means that the question pertains either to nothing, or the nothing in us that provoked that response. Either way, nothing is in question, and nothing has no answer, for it is nothing. If I say’ Is there a God’, and you say ‘There’s no answer to that question’, means that we are actually approaching the subject; that God and nothing are equal concepts in weight; they are both unknowable, intangible in an abstract sense, but we can perceive pointers to that problem in that the question itself can be asked. This again highlights the dark sphere wherein the light of human knowing cannot approach, although the illumination of the form of the spherical impenetrable object provides the horizon, the ultimate knowledge that a human can attain, and eventually he comes to know what he is and He is not. He knows then that his unknowing is just as vital as his knowledge. That exclusion is part of something outside of his body, that indeed there is something out there, not just a hallucination. This is how we come to know of the without; by actually knowing what we can and do know, and that which we cannot. It delimits the human from the divine and allows him to achieve his own perfection. As previously mentioned, God acts within His own laws and this is where He derives His power. We too must perceive our boundaries in order to achieve ours. I like to travel upon the London buses for one can meditate upon a great number of things, aided by the empty conversations and behaviours of other people. I listen to them and hear only myself in reply. Is this the way it always must be? Tonight I shall take the N47 night bus to Trafalgar Square. It is just

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about to turn midnight. The daytime was a vacuous plateau, so I bathed-off the night before of its sleeping on my brother’s couch in my brother’s lounge with Marisha. Tonight is Saturday. The moment the sun goes down, the libido in my brain begins its accelerated production. Why is this? I am not a night-creature by nature, as my senses are not adapted in this way, and I certainly

[I forgot what I was saying.]

A daytime dormant madness awakes; my lunatic. [Why does so much of what we call ‘crime’ happen at night?] The more that I believe that there are other minds in the world the more concerned I become about life being meaningless. This is just a worry, a petty anxiety, nothing more. Then is all of this a confession? Do I perhaps know already the answer to cease this incessant questioning, and am I stringing you along so that I can laugh at you? The idiot laughs at another man. A wise man laughs with the man laughing at him. Laughing is a connection to divine joy in certain instances; Schadenfroh. I seek to explore myself openly, no matter how controversial to my ego the findings may be. Confession offers up guilty secrets onto the altar of truth so that we may be admonished of all guilt before God in order to perceive Him. We confess because it is a hereditary condition that we perceive ourselves as sinners. If we continue to do this perversely without the belief that God exists, then we become circus animals. This text is not a confession, because it conveys its own truth at each

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stage of development in its organic design. I do feel embarrassment, but this is a feeble attempt of my ego to get me to stop writing and give up; its either a plum or a prune, but it still has an indigestible stone at its core. It is quite difficult for me to write and read what I have put in these notes, partially due to the embarrassment it causes, (which is of course perverted vanity.) This could be because I enjoy perceiving my work as utter trash, I enjoy degrading myself, I loath the parts of my consciousness that make their way into this book. It is perfectly apparent that writers will often exclude those things from their work in order to mask the fact that they contain those things within themselves. This simple ‘dis-appearance’ of things is always a sham; they reappear in a disguised sense, a nihilistic sense where the object value of the thing in itself is degraded in favour of an excluded and blind core about which these things revolve. This is another manifestation of the death of God, of meaning. The object does not cease to exist, but does rather become phantom-like in its manifestation, and thus produces a ‘power from nowhere’, the cause of which we cannot [let ourselves] know. But now I must, by all my natural inclinations, revert to my common and still unknown object; what is this horizon? What does it consist in? What is its significance? Can it ever be touched upon? It is extremely clear that this horizon, as I have imagined it, changes everything. And I mean that in no ignorant sense. If the horizon constitutes the final layer of deceit, a final place where reason cannot ‘step-back’ to look upon ‘as an object’, beyond which nothing is provable or knowable, then indeed we have found a devilish mockery of ourselves in our constitution. If the final layer proves to be Truth, the object of Truth, the indeed we reach

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the most divine aspect of the human consciousness. Of course, we are in this way trapped, (or rather, comfortable,) between Heaven and Hell, on the physical plane upon which all things are manifest, Good, bad or mediocre. Does existence become more a metaphor when placed in this object-relation between idealistic states? Of course it does, because we ought to be aware that the horizon of human knowability constitutes the highest Truth, for that is the point at which the human becomes fully true to his nature, reaches a natural state of harmony. The oracle at Delphi spoke the same; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Know thyselfâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. This is indeed the highest truth; one then reaches a proper relation with all things in the world, for until one knows the boundaries of the self, one cannot know of other things. The human psyche is still wrapped in this problem, and has turned the problem into an object of human preoccupation. The problem of neurosis, the existential anxiety about what one is, is the problem of knowing thyself. We are all too convinced that we know ourselves, know our desires, know our truths. I do not see many persons about me that strive after the Absolute; we have become convinced by our gossiping forefathers that it has ceased to exist. Why should we listen to them when we have control over our own lives? We have been put in charge of Reality by being born, and we must strive to make it a fulfilling plane upon which to exist. Allowing the petty worries of the petty consciousnesses of petty people with their petty ideas, their petty abilities and the pettiness of their existential constitution to affect us is in itself as petty as this remark. It demonstrates a great lack of care over Reality, it shows no respect to that awe-inspiring phenomenon; it lies about being a human even though it is aware that it is one. I will here make a point about Nietzscheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s correctness and his falseness. When he speaks about

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the ‘herd instinct’ of the human; sticking together without individuality and identity, he speaks directly about the metaphorical ‘shepherd and herd’ of the Christian sensibility. He desires to be able to stand alone, to ‘become that which he is’, and to belong to existence truly. He sees people about him, as I do, without any care for the reality of meaning or the meaning of reality. This is why the Will features so heavily in his resolution to become in charge of reality. But Nietzsche does not properly grasp the Christian metaphor, despite his developed knowledge and critique of the subject.

[I cannot finish or answer this paragraph at this stage. Please continue.]

Reality is a person’s sole responsibility, for that is the most direct link between his consciousness and that which is Real. He has all of the power that he requires within this frame, and it is all available to him. Only when he becomes true to this natural aspect of himself can he muster this power. Otherwise these walls will confine him, he will become smaller until he becomes nothing. Know thyself. We must become awake to the constitution of all that we are in order to become that thing, as opposed to being anything. Human confusion is rooted in this maladjustment to the potential for reality, whether it be for too much, (ideal-ism,) or too little, (nihilism.) And the will, as I am just becoming aware of in the Nietzschean sense, features as an energy of change in the way in which one disposes oneself to reality. But again, the will must act in accordance to the Delphic principle, or it is subject to either Idealism or Nihilism. Propriety is paramount in this understanding,

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as it is in all things. Neurosis is symptomatic of not knowing one’s proper place, one’s sense of propriety, one’s appropriateness, one’s property.

[Incidentally, I have just bought a house, and these paragraphs a largely influenced by that factor; my consciousness is becoming enlarged by this shift in place.]

Again, the idea of the ultimate Truth or the ultimate Deceit, beyond which we cannot see, is important here. How can one act at all without this knowledge? But we do act at all times, for we have a role to fulfil. This is why, when we act in the space of Reality, we discover more and more about the way it works and about what we are. If I walk to the shop, the journey will tell me about my physical constitution in the world. If I listen to my thoughts, I can perceive glimpses of its constitution, too. All action contains such wisdom, but there is a question of becoming identical to the action, in which case we cannot look at it from outside, or being distanced from it, which causes a sense of removal from the world of actions. Doubt begin to seep in through the cracks, reality becomes murky. There is a careful reconciliation between the two, the harmony between which makes reality available to us as a place in which we can exert the power of our will. The desirable state is to be in a place wherein the world is immediate, momentary and transient, and consciousness is long, deep and permanent. This is a harmony between the deceit we perceive in the permanent world which we find to be transient, and in the transient states of mind which we find to be permanent. There is a grotesque discord inside of the mind that inverts these two portions of reality, which is invariably

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the root of human confusion. The state in which we find ourselves within reality and within existence is fundamentally confused, but it is also a condition of our nature that we can overcome fundamental problems, that we can discover truth down the blind alley of deceit. The truth is that it is a blind alley of deceit. That is the constitution of its truth. Truth from deceit. But let me talk now about the place beyond the horizon; I shall talk about my inferences; it is the only way in which this dimension can be known of. We cannot, by all rights, talk about ‘beyond’ the horizon. But we do because we are accustomed to knowing things in this way; it is the way in which the human mind has always brought obscure things into the light of its knowing. The problem arises out of the misapprehension of the absolute Being within the grasp of our knowledge. This misapprehension perverts all of our attempts to know it and naturally perverts a great deal of connected things, in short, reality. I propose the distinct shift into subtlety; knowing-of. This is the way to knowing human truth; knowing our truth. Human truth is defined and profoundly affected by Truth in the absolute sense, although human truth is a knowing-of Truth, a proper knowledge of human truth, distinct yet profoundly connected to the Absolute. This is how we are to reconcile our condition to our nature, and this is the way in which we may oblige the Delphic oracle’s suggestion. The Truth of human truth is that it cannot know the Truth. That is the profound conception of Truth that we can know of through its affects on reality. Something not of the dimension of reality cannot have a concrete and hence knowable form in it. Thus said, it can indeed have a profound and ethereal connection to it by its sense of present-ness. This is again connected to my conception of nihilism;

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that God, as that which is unknowable, is still connected to existence by his very absence. The fact that he is absent and unknowable makes his presence more strange and profound. This leads to our confusion when we think â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Does God exist?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; The question does not fit the subject; it is inappropriate. But the very fact that the question is inappropriate tells us something about God; we

become

knowledgeable

about

God

without

asking

unanswerable, inappropriate and ridiculous questions about something which does not answer, has no answer. Suddenly, we cease to flounder; there was no original question and therefore no problem or solution. We discover Truth by its very absence. God is present everywhere, yet our occlusion is absolute. We can never know this, though. But what we can know we must know when we know, and that is the divine aspect of the human consciousness.

Admission: I stopped writing from my collected notes a while ago and began improvising. It is now Monday evening and the sun is pouring in through the living room curtains. The text has recently become theological, something which I did not believe myself capable of. So you too are privy to my ponderous thoughts about God; a lot of things that people tend not to discuss either openly or inwardly through some strange kind of avoidance. I have just recently permitted myself to think about these abstract things without any embarrassment, and put them into the text because that was the intellectual direction into which I was heading. Again, this text becomes a kind of document-diary, which automatically changes the object-relation that my thoughts have to their subject. Well, they do to you, but to me they are identical to my life. You are

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requested to discover the relation of your value to this object in order to discover mine, and to remember to forget everything. Don’t forget to remember everything. I do not come closer to anything; the words always protect me from that. Therefore, do not expect to ever find anything groundbreaking in a book. The semiotician was never moved by a book, for it was just a collusion of signs without objects. It is no good lying; I cannot think of what to write right now because I am too wasted and it is Sunday. I even come to the café to aid my thinking, (it always did in the winter,) but it does not help because I am too wasted and it is a Sunday. There is nothing more ordinary in the minds of men than the dread of returning to work on a Monday, particularly when that feeling is perversely comforting because work will stave off the incessant boredom, the meaningless emptiness. I am no different, even though I say I am. Regardless of desiring my own time on my own terms, my subservient mind seeks distraction from anything more taxing; it ‘desires its own repression.’ But to bring this simple thing to the fore is a small effort in overcoming my slavish, herd mentality. How did this state come about?

[Daniel is thinking to himself right now; “What a waste of time!” He is unable to do anything, [the book is going nowhere] he thinks about his life, [what is that?] When he thinks about this subject, he feels the magnitude of it like a gallon of water is heavy, (yet, when he swims he does not feel the water’s weight,) and retreats in order to consolidate his futility. Sometimes, when he swims, he knows that all of his writing is valuable simply on the

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premise that he has written it, and ergo he writes in greater quantity. Yet this acceleration does not last long before the next turn approaches on the road and he must either slow down or go the wrong way. If he hunts around for something worthwhile to write about he goes mute. It only goes to show that if one writes for oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peers, one in fact has nothing to say for oneself. One in fact has nothing to say at all. If one inherently values everything about oneself, then one can find a great many things of which it is worthwhile to talk of.]

I got rid of my television last year.

[Daniel is now feeling high and mighty. He perceives the television as being a source of his erstwhile stupidity. He perceives mass-culture as stupefying. He is also diametrically driven on by the illusion of high-culture. He has not yet become aware that the two sides of the division do not exist and have no meaning. They only have meaning to those people content with the thoughts of others as those of their own. Feeling high and mighty; if one was true to oneself, is not that they way in which one would always feel? Sorry for the confused wording in the last sentence.]

[Pay no heed to the last justification in speechmarks, for it is the voice of Danielâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ego trying to apologise, trying to justify its existence.] [Etc.]

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[Etc.] [Etc.] [Etc.] [Etc.] [Etc.] [Etc.] [Etc.] [Etc.] [Etc.] Reality does not appreciate Justice:

[Etc.]

Upon which layer does the deception of the diseased mind occur? I could continue on this downward spiral infinitely; none of the layers in themselves would constitute the Truth, but the spiral, the infinity of the pattern, would indeed tell us about Truth.

[Proustian terror: If suddenly it transpired that Armageddon was truly approaching, (the kind that one finds in those films that Hollywood has been churning out ever since the terrorist attack on Manhattan,) say within 24 hours, the most horrifying thing would be to finally discover how many people think exactly like you. And this discovery would be too late.]

[Where would Daniel now be without his precious anxiety? It is the driving force of his entire output, whether philosophic or elsewise. If there were no niggling feeling that there was something wrong with the appearance of Reality, then he would not seek to disassemble its appearance and put it back together according to his own vision. He is indeed a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;fuhrerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;!]

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Am I an Idealist? You may only answer if:

You are an Idealist yourself, or

ii)

You think the same as I do.

There is a question of becoming identical; both you to me and me to you if we are to have any understanding of the abstract space which connects us. Without the admission that we are both the same, that we flounder or strive in the same place, then there can be no understanding, no critique, no knowledge. The distance between us is indeed the thing that connects us, even though we are bodies apart. And again this is only knowable through the Delphic principle. Read the symptom here of my inclusivity, my attempt not to occlude you or me from my knowledge; that is in opposition to the Godlike characteristic. I do not edit anything from what I have written, although I cannot know that which I have edited from the forefront of my consciousness. I am still deceptive. If this is the case, then to what end could one value honesty? Perhaps then the only value that this book does achieve is its inherent valuing-itself. If it values everything that it contains, and if I value everything that I put in it without editing, then I also value everything I think and do. The scope for building value into reality is increased exponentially through this practise. Perhaps this is my greatest achievement, or perhaps the product of my inflated ego. Either way, I am still valuing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; life has meaning. The nihilist would not perceive Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death as an opportunity to unlock the values inherent in the subjective experience. But then again, what do I know about the death of God other than what I have read in

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Nietzsche, whom I idolise and yet criticise? I am caught in my own trap; I borrowed a value and considered it my own! This thought is already four months old and I will move on.

Question for the current minute: What is the point of repetition?

Ponder.

***

The thought that thought is private is a common and shared misapprehension. In fact, because of this peculiarity, we become similar through our shared mirage of difference. Perhaps we should call this phenomenon â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;mass-consciousnessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;? What is this thought then if not private? Perhaps we should cease to think about consciousness and its aspects in relation to economics and property. Let us instead follow the converging lines in order to understand why it is that we make analogous to capital the value in being ourselves. The mountain is the biggest obstacle faced by all modern persons, and not because of its massive size. Humans have always climbed mountains simply because they were there; it was the physical realisation of ambition, and it was quite pure in that sense. We traverse up the mountains of our ambition to reach a peak, in full knowledge that a steep valley lies on all sides of the summit. And our euphoria is a decadent feeling - the ecstasy of highs and lows to which we have become accustomed and addicted to. This is where the limited scale of ambition without meaning can be measured, and by which we measure our metaphorical ability to

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become higher; we stand on the mountain, look out, see another worth climbing and move on. But the worth of the next mountain is soon diminished when we find another worth climbing. Ambition with no Value can have no worth at all. The post-Christian practise of agony and ecstasy can be understood as a seeking ecstasy only to find a guaranteed agony. We are still employed by this mindset. We are masochist sensation-hungry perverts. Transcendence is not ecstasy, pain, anxiety or euphoria. It goes neither up nor down but through. It can move one between states and yet it makes no journey; it is either instantaneous, transparent, or it never happens. And the decision is what fires it. The Mountain comes. The modern mind knows nothing of the concept of greatness or indeed it would aspire to such a thing. It thinks instead only of its limitations; not real limitations which are the boundary and knowledge of self, but of fictional and meaningless barriers that it has conjured up for its self. He can know only of accountable and equitable things, for he is money-minded. Greatness does not create the limitation, does not allot itself its place. Mozart always produced music from within musical laws, but that was the place where he could exert his power and greatness. He possessed knowledge of these things, but did not create barriers, although to create again that greatness one must interpret his work from within the boundaries of the piece of music. Beauty can only be created within laws, but the modern mind cannot appreciate this subtlety but is instead valuing its ability to break down barriers that it has itself construed as barriers. There is a subtle difference and a vast distance between the two understandings, and again it is related most strongly to the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Know thyselfâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Thus can the modern mind seek out only mediocrity, for it has and is continually removing the

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boundaries that were established for the production of beauty. The modern mind does not want Immortality; “Life was bad enough – let me rest!”, he does not want his spirit to continue to work after he has died because he has never valued the work he did during his lifetime.

[This is a blatant contradiction, but I am allowed it.]

This talk of mountains, perverts and greatness was actually heading in a direction and was there to make a point. But why should I feel the need to make a point? Perhaps in making the point, I can nail the exact nature of the problem, make it easy to remember and abide by, be succinct and lucid. And yet, if I make this point, will it not remove one’s focus of attention from all of the talk of mountains, perverts and greatness? I was actually coming to make a development on the Cartesian ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’, about private language and how the Cartesian method does, (although does not know it does,) provide a proof of other minds. The question I have now posed to myself is whether to include those findings here, but I am fickle and they will make their way into the text when I feel like it.

Thunder is rumbling around the sky this afternoon. Valuing is deeply connected to the practise of care, for to care for something in the world is to place value on its existence. Valuing shall be connected to the plane of existence in this way; we care for things that we find included within existence, and that branch of Value will be connected to our picture of reality hereafter. So, in order for us to exhibit our valuation of that which is included within

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existence, we exercise care over things. Similarly, the expression ‘I do not care’ should be used with every bit as much care as the expression ‘I care’, for we choose to care for things as we choose not to care for things. We place some quality of existence when we care for a thing; we are glad to exist because of our experience of that thing, and that thing is appropriately cared for by us through a significant relationship with it. The things we do not care for, we do not allow ourselves to care for, for if we were to exercise care for them, it would become damaging to our cared-for reality. So we take trouble to exclude these things from our picture of reality, although they have the uncanny ability to spring up within our world like weeds through a patio. This gives us the idea that perhaps the way that we care for things is unsophisticated, because few of us have developed the expansiveness of our conscious horizons far enough to gain a proper understanding of Value. If we truly cared for the things we care for, then the emergence of all those things which we purposefully do not include in our valued picture of reality would not effect the quality of the cared-for things. Real care is to care at all times for all things, not simply the ones that bolster our image of ourselves. This is why people always bleat the same ‘I couldn’t care less’, ‘I don’t care’, ‘Who cares?’ chant, over and over, like nihilistic Hare Krshnas’. People have never cared for anything, even the things they mimic their care for; loved ones, their homes, etc. Who could honestly say that there has been a genuine selflessness about them, a true ego-loss, when they cared for something so much that their existence became tied to it? Who does not think of their loved-ones with ulterior motives? Who isn’t primarily concerned over the appearance of their image in the world? I say mimic, for we are all trained to care for certain things,

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cherish certain things, and we begin to act around certain things like the dancing bear. That is Nietzsche’s herd-mentality in its crystalline form. Nietzsche wishes for us to discover humanity afresh, to experience the full vigour of life without using second-[at least]-generation values and meanings, without the need for heroic intestines. He values what is most sacred about a human in his work, the most sovereign aspects of the human spirit, and exposes the true nature of his life project. The genuine human can only be born within the existence of an existing life, as though a kind of rebirth were required. This is a shedding of the image of reality and the image of self, and becoming one with the phenomena of existence. Consciousness exists because of its existence; it is complicit with its nature – it exists because it exists. This knowledge finds itself outside of the pale of scientific knowledge, for if we were to locate the scientific reason for consciousness, it would not effect the phenomena that we are conscious. Consciousness existing is an a priori truth, for existence is conscious; only consciousness can exist. The character of existence is totally dependent upon consciousness. I am not refuting the independence of things in the world from human perception, (i.e. If a tree falls down in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a noise?) rather, that existence is a thing only for consciousness. This means that one must get one’s head around the idea that existence is something separate from things-inthemselves, (like Heidegger’s stone,) for conscious things have an existential quality which is their consciousness; the product of space and time on the human. A stone only has an existential mode of Being if it comes into a relationship with consciousness. It still Is even if it does not enter into a relationship with a conscious being.

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Our knowledge is intricately tied to this subject, for knowledge enters into our reality because it enters into our consciousness. Knowledge provides the character of our consciousness, and therefore affects reality. We must therefore discover how we know and why we know reality; we have the keys to unlock the secret of reality because it is characterised totally by our knowing it. Therefore Truth and deception reside in the space of knowing and have an outward effect of reality, and thus the search for Truth can only happen within the space of consciousness, and in this much was Descartes correct. The quality of any scientific discovery can only be measured within the space of consciousness, for it cannot be measured in itself. This is where the inherent selfishness of our valuing resides; because everything is done for the quality of the image of reality and not for reality itself, we do not care for that thing. If it looks Ok, we are satisfied and effect no change in it, and by restricting our view of the things we care for, we create this perception of an Ok reality. But should we be satisfied with this, or should we attempt to expand the entire field of Reality and consciousness by caring for all things that come on the scene?

Critique of the way in which care is denigrated in the world: I began thinking about this subject when passing across London Bridge one night, having seen a news article on an ‘Evening Standard’ placard. It said “[David] Beckham Faces New Scandal”. It was clear to me that Mr Beckham cares for this situation that he is in, (for it is in his reality,) for it affects his person and his image. I can imagine that this news is interesting to a great many people, (for every one of my work colleagues were talking about it the next day,) but this is interest without care; care without a nervous

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system. We take the information in, it mingles with our picture of reality in a loose and disinterested way, and floats out again, having left a slight impression upon our image of reality. The media relies totally upon interest, (it is like a bank in this way,) but it does not care; the most terrible world events are segued into the most wonderful news events without care or discrimination. It has no value system, it has no real principle of ethics, for it merely reports things to our consciousness that will generate interest; it capitalises upon Real events to produce unreal interest in it. The Real event, (if we could even call it that after such a transcription,) is like capital; it has substance in reality, it actually was something. Interest generated on it is a parasitic value that feeds off and generates from something which exists and is owned and cared-for by someone else. But why do we seem to exhibit care for these pieces of news that are meaningless, that cannot enter into a caring relationship with our reality? Surely such immature behaviour is at once nihilistic, (caring for something that we do not care for, that does not even exist,) and harmful to our reality? News stands to profit from everything because it has no ethical basis; it is a manifestation of pure capitalism encroaching upon the plane of human consciousness. We must exhibit a pseudo-care for these things because we are frightened to care for our existence, and we allow other entities become the custodians of it. But in so doing do we allow a great deal of harm come to our plane of consciousness; again, we have started to do something with no value; we are dancing with no music, (the mad dance of nihilism,) we worship with no God. A tabloid mind is indeed an enemy.

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I often think about whether other people are thinking the thought ‘I am unique’ at the same time as I am thinking it.

Synthesis of Lacanian analysis and Indian Buddhism: If neurosis gravitates around the first trauma, the Real, the hard kernel that may never be approached, and Buddhist teachings centre around the knowing that there is nothing at the centre of self, that the journey inwards is the journey towards nothing, then neurosis, indeed self-consciousness, (to include a wider proportion of my audience,) the Self, is a myth created by itself to imagine itself into reality. How can this be? How can the philosopher pull himself up by his bootstraps? Again we must contemplate Schadenfroh; this is the only way to create substance and meaning in the human condition. In this paradox can we glimpse the possibility that reality is the dream of Being.

***

Charlie the magic troll was unhappy with his daily life up in his tattered and old-fashioned pre-fab cave and thought about making a change. He thought about going down to the village and asking other people the questions that he was always asking himself. So he went off to town, wearing his bestest cloathes, and it wasn’t long before he had thought of his first question. He went to see mister Slag the butcher, who was hanging a freshly killed pig’s cadaver in his shop window, and he asked him:

“Do you think that you are the same as everyone else, or do you think that you are totally unique?”

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Mister Slag explained that he was the only mister Slag that he knew of that was a butcher, and that he was the only person that he knew to live in his house, and he guessed that he was unique in this way. But he also explained that he had two eyes like everyone else, he always ate lunch before dinner like everyone else, he always went to church on a Sunday like everyone else, and in that way did he think he was the same as everyone else. Charlie the magic troll was interested in these replies and wrote them down in this metaphorical diatribe. Charlie the magic troll then went to visit Mister and Missus The Terrible, who were sitting on a park bench making out. They related to Charlie the magic troll the next anecdote;

“It was a bright and sunny morning, and the hermit awoke to the sound of laughter. Having become alien to such a sound, he walked out of his cave to see a child playing a balancing game on a nearby log. The child looked at the hermit, laughed again, and continued to play. The hermit wondered where the child had come from, given that the nearest village to his knowledge was many hours walk away. He could not see anybody to accompany the child, so he decided to ask the child where he was from.

“Excuse me,” he said to the boy, “but where are your parents? How did you get here?”

The child laughed again, got off the log, and said to the hermit;

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“I don’t remember or know these things; I just woke up here.”

Perplexed by the mystery, the hermit resolved to care for the child whilst he ascertained where he had come from. Over the years that passed, the hermit had put much effort and devotion into the search for the boy’s parents. He had travelled to towns and villages, had met and spoken to a great many people, and through all of this had become acquainted once again with the strange world of society. He often thought that his solitude was justified, but he also had come to care for the boy, and that perhaps solitude was a terrible, empty thing. The boy had now grown up to be a strong, healthy and gifted young man who was dedicated to helping the hermit to grow vegetables. After the hermit’s many years of pondering his own situation, he felt that the boy’s happiness was of greater significance than his own, that he did not want to pass his hermetic emptiness to the boy, but should rather give him back to society. (But what if he never came from the society of people?) No; he was determined to allow the boy to make his own decision as to how to run his life, just as he had done when he made the decision to become a hermit. The hermit sat with the boy and explained to him thus;

“You have lived with me here for twelve harvests and I have grown to love you as my own son. But the time has come for you to go into the world and to become a man. Go and be your own person!”

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To which the boy replied;

“Don’t hit me with clichés like that!”

Charlie the magic troll was impressed by the overlapping metaphoricity of the The Terrible’s anecdote, and plagiarised it in his own memoirs. Having decided to become naked, Charlie the magic troll decided to go and drink coffee at the café, but they would not let him in there.

***

Thus far it has become apparent that the object of other minds is of paramount importance. For human life to have value involves the qualitative belief that other minds exist, for that is where we demonstrate care in the world, and it is that which connects our valuations to our beliefs. We register our belief in the world as a thing full of things when those things in our world make our lives worth living. This is an obvious cliché that I should like to reinstate as a phrase of great significance; ‘Life worth living’. A life is that which lives, an organic and natural ‘doing’ that we are lumbered or blessed with; it simply is the case, with or without our human valuing. On the other hand, once we introduce the term ‘worth’ into the expression, the content becomes exploded into a million pieces, rendering it near invisible to the naked eye as to what it could possibly mean. That is the point where we must make it mean something, for to inject meaning into a potentially unknowable thing means to take control of, to value, to rejoice in and to be

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human through that thing. In order to make it mean anything at all, something which is not a mere reflection of another thing, (a ghost or a mirage,) means that we must come to know ourselves as we appear and are manifest in our world. A two-way looking is involved, for we must look outward into the world from our position, a la classical perspective, but must also be the world which looks in upon us. This is where we â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;see what is on the end of our forkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, to paraphrase Ballard, where both we and the world become strange but related to one another inside of a shared reality. We must again, (and I cannot reinstate enough the importance of the concept,) come to know ourselves through this process, otherwise we are liable to fall into the age-old trap of human consciousness; narcissism. Our knowing ourselves must transcend the looking process of us looking outward and projecting onto the outwardly shattered mirror of our world. Our knowledge of what we are stems from the way in which we project onto the world. To bear this fundamental truth of our seeing in mind means to come to know ourselves, at once through seeing what we are, what we are not, and rendering visible our faux omnipotence in the world as its creator.

Revelation: Be what one is.

The greatest challenge facing any human is the recognition of his humanity. The delusory god-like characteristics that he conjures up for himself must be testament to his human limitations. A man must rise up to be a man, to be that which he is, and nothing more. His ambition must not outstretch the bounds of his human reality;

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genuine transcendence comes only from being that which one is; recognising oneself as oneself, and not mistaking oneself for God. This may sound absurd, but each and every human being considers him/herself to be God, for it is only natural complacency that causes this common and shared hallucination. Due to the natural existential condition of the person to consider his/her position as being that of the centre of the whole universe, from which reality is produced, from which everything stems, is something that we are all equally guilty of. The truest revelation for a person means coming to terms with that which he consists in, as recognising his condition as that which he is, and nothing more than that. The human condition means what one is, not something which prevents us from being human. Our Being-human consists in the condition of our Being-human. We all have an innate knowledge of what we are, because we are all part of the same condition, we are all in existence, we are all Being. But likewise are we all prone to the fallacy of forgetfulness, which is the prime part of the human condition which causes our profound and unfathomable human misery. It is the curse of men that they forget. Who amongst you has not had a profoundly joyful time, only to be replaced by the feeling of misery? Is it that we become miserable, (our natural state?) or that we have forgotten our joy? Joyfulness is the natural state for the human, because all of life, all of our existence, from the highest to the lowest, from the experiences of good and evil, is testament to the fact of existence. They all produce joy, for we resolve to be joyful in our brief yet infinite life lest we be miserable. Each and every time we feel the screws turning, the nails being hammered, the ever-lurking nausea, the tearful happiness or pain, the anger; they constitute the joyful fact of existence in itself.

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No other person or phenomena has the power to render the fact of existence meaningless or miserable; it is our unknowing choice that makes it so. Reality is our sole responsibility, no matter which circumstances we find ourselves to be in. We are placed without choice into existence as are all people; the concepts of good and evil appear small on the scale of our existence and the phenomena of time and space. But sadly, even though we are all the same, we choose to live the miserable life of individuality.

What kind of awakening can requite our Being with our Selves? How are we to remember not to forget, or forget not to remember, or remember to forget, or forget to remember? All these childish word-reversals point in the same direction, and only the most subtle will notice that they mean the same thing. We are to become everpresent to ourselves. Leave Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Omni-presence to God; it is not our mode of Being to be everywhere, know everything and be able to do everything. We are human, and a humanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mode of genuine Being is to be present to himself. That is all he can expect from himself, and yet it must be his greatest ambition; to be True. We must, through some technique or practise, become present and awake to our present-ness. We are not our future or our past, but indeed they do belong to us, but only in the form of fantasy or memory. What we have, our only Real property, is our present. You are present now. I am present now. This is what we are, this is our property, this is our belonging; we belong to the present and yet it belongs to us. It is a perfect thing. But the present is indeed like the single grain of sand that passes through an hour-glass; if we watch the one grain, it sinks into the muddiness of all other grains that have also passed through. If we look at the future grains, we

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miss the moments that are passing presently. The one present is the one which is not yet past and not quite future; it is perfectly positioned in-between, and that is existence. Each and every moment is to become utterly unique and valuable, (and in this way do they become the same, they form a plateau,) and thus does life become utterly valuable in each and every moment. If we save our value for moments we consider to be special or valuable, we devalue both those moments and all other moments around them; we end up valuing our fantasised value of moments not yet in existence, and hence we value a nothing, something we have already experienced in fantasy when it comes around to reality. There is no quality in a life that looks only upon its time passed and stored within memory, or only to the future, at moments that are mere shadows of our meagre pasts. The future is not for us, and never will be; our future never ever comes into Being, for it is always a future. Our past never ever comes into Being, for it has had its time of Being and now it is dead to the world and to existence. Vitality and life consist only in the present, and only in this valuation of the present can we respectfully and genuinely consider our past and future selves. Let me give you my deepest assurances that I am in existence whilst I am writing this; everything is immediate and fluid, I have not stopped to consider anything, I write with complete spontaneity. In this way do I capture each and every flickering of ideas on my brain and record their moments. I advise that you consider, whilst reading this book, that you are living in my moments whilst you read, and that the life of those moments become new and existent for you at the time you read them, such as now. The valuation comes from the whole experience, the quality comes from the intactness and preservation

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of moments, ideas, delusions, insights, repetitions and excitements, all of which map my existence on to yours. Take in the form of the work, understand the miniature and magnified worlds contained within each sentence, wherein imperfections and truths are preserved like insects in amber. In its own way, this concept mirrors that of Sartre’s ‘Nausea’, wherein he creates such a perfect blanket of existence that one cannot help but to become identical to the perspective of that of Roquentin. The nausea in this experience comes from being placed outside of ones own centre of perspective and duplicitously identifying with that of another Being. We then live and breath this nausea; it is the proximity of a feeling that one cannot shake off once the book has been put down. These deeper existential planes of feeling, like that of nausea, melancholy or joy, tend to lurk rather than appear. We only gauge a proximity to them as opposed to identify with them as we do our own emotions. With an existential ‘question’, we come to know that we can answer the question only when we come to know exactly what the question was that we asked about life in the first instance. This knowledge of the question provides its own truth to us, and hence we must understand it. A simple feeling, the tip of the human iceberg, does not involve a dilemma about existence, and yet, the deeper we go into the feeling, the more we come to understand that we are responsible for it; that we challenged the representation of life as it was, and we come to know that we are alone when trying to answer it. We become responsible for this deeply imbedded thing of the human condition, and come to learn that what we are is this condition itself, that we are a condition of life itself. We must care for this condition if nothing else, primarily because both we and the

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world are causally responsible for one another. We can choose to obliterate both by committing suicide, but this never works. The suicide’s primal narcissism is present even in the action of the selfkilling. The suicide already has constructed for himself a fantasy afterlife for himself when he fantasises about the world without him; as though he had become an ethereal being with no body but with a floating consciousness. It is a basic deception. All people, not only suicides do this. We have all fantasised about our own deaths, haven’t we? We all know what happens after we die, we have all created for ourselves a fantasmic afterlife. But we, in this way, somehow construe eternal life as requiring no enlightenment of ourselves, as though an afterlife will just ‘happen’ when we die, and just wasting or missing life when it is happening. How long did it take me to realise that life was happening already? I am stunned by my almost complete inability to recognise even the most fundamental facts of life. But indeed, until this realisation occurs, one continues to miss the fact that life is occurring and that it is yours. One cannot care until one makes this realisation; care happens when one believes in the world and believes that one is in it and believes that both things are mutually dependable upon each other. Life means both our life and the fact of life itself; it encapsulates rather than delineates. How will we live until we know what life is? That is the initiating question that opens up the plane of the existential question that unites all others, for this question questions existence, therefore displaying a higher desire to understand what one’s existence consists in. How could a Being that is the fact of existence come to question that very same self-evident fact? Indeed it is the destiny of a human to become enlightened. Heidegger

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explained that if one asks any existential question of himself, that indeed he would be asking all existential questions at the same time. Indeed, this is the guiding and grounding question of existence, and it is prudent to say that all humans have indeed asked those questions of themselves, and that it is product of consciousness. But in what way can the ethereal, invisible entity of consciousness interact with the world of things that it can extend itself more deeply into space? Does it indeed desire to shrug off the delineation of the self and become Being the same as all other things it perceives outside of itself?

[I am sitting down and thinking about writing. The resulting break of paragraph signifies my not working.]

I have to sit and listen very subtly to my mind’s voice or I am liable to forget what I was going to write. What I do write down is so faithful to this voice because I listen so closely. But whilst one is listening one must be aware of all the other noises within the mind’s eye. The multitude of voices constitute the whole edifice, and they are characteristic of the self-conscious entity that cannot come to terms with the appearance of consciousness. It is our permanent state of self-consciousness that causes anxiety and the reason for itself to call itself into the question. Consciousness is in a fallen state, it cannot be what it is, it cannot accept its resultant condition, and hence the anxiety that is produced becomes a causeway across which we can begin to understand existence. The metaphorical ‘fall of man’ can be understood in this way; that consciousness could not accept itself and therefore invented the ‘Why?’ The meaning of life is not an absurd question after all.

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A person’s fundamental nature is then to ask why, and this is related to Aristotle’s concealed universe; because the human asks ‘why’ is the reason ‘why’ the universe is concealed. His nature consists in this paradox; he is his own question; he is now a subject. He is subject to his own question, and is the subject of his own question. This means then that the existential question is the rug pulled from under one’s subjective feet; there is more than being merely a subject, for there is Being in itself. Being then is a realisation to be made during the phenomena of existence, for it is the higher desire of consciousness to become itself again after forgetting what it was whilst it was conscious of itself. It is essential that every person answers this question of theirs, otherwise they will never have been. The facticity of selfconsciousness is testimony to the Being of pure consciousness.

On the Meaning of nothingness: Thus far I have used the term Nothing without clarification as to what the word refers to or the context in which I have used it. To use a word that is common in the existentialist vocabulary could certainly mean that the word ‘refers-to’ another usage of the same term, and hence negating the context in which I have used it. But this would be shortsightedness on my part. If my usage of the term ‘Nothing’ is connected to all other usage of it across time, no matter how different, does indeed include rather than exclude my knowledge of all other types of knowledge. I could not choose, even if I wanted, to disconnect my use of the term ‘nothingness’ to Sartre’s famous usage. Therefore it must interface with and become complicit with Sartre’s usage. But in this instance am I relating to a thing in possession of existence? What does the term ‘nothingness’

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refer to, what qualities does it possess, what usage could it have, what meaning could it have, if it consists ‘in-Nothing’? I shall use the term henceforth to describe an inkling, a proximity to Nothing. I cannot use the term ‘Nothing’ legitimately, for it would have no meaning, (the reason I take it that Sartre uses ‘nothingness’ in place of Nothing. A word cannot stand in for Nothing, for it is a something.) The term nothingness is legitimate in that it can describe something which is almost nothing, it senses presence and absence simultaneously. It is the essence of nothing, but not nothing itself. It acknowledges its somethingness. Nothingness is therefore an existential feeling and could therefore be given as concrete expression, as opposed to Nothing’, which could only be expressed paradoxically and deceptively as its opposite. Nothingness is the final word, the last something, before we pass over in silence; it constitutes the boundaries of knowing and unknowing, Being and becoming, selflessness and self. We must not be tempted, however, to contrive Being as the opposition to nothingness, for both things are indeed things. In my formulation, Being is [the character] of nothingness. To be is nothing at all other than it is, Being simply is, and Nothing no thing at all. One must be aware that all terminology is subject to reappraisal when we consider the existential dialect. All words begin to melt, deeper significance can be extracted from this slippage. In certain respects, Being is nothing, nothing is Being. These formulations would have it that Being is not a thing and has no properties, and that no things possess the quality of Being, for Being is that which possesses. I must seek for myself an elucidation of Heidegger’s differing modes of Beings, or I cannot think of these abstract things. In my formulation, Being is no thing, i.e.,

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Being is. (Any attachment to the statement is truly false, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Being isâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is the last word.) Being is equal to nothing. Another statement which slips. Write down various combinations and then read them, adding different emphasis to different words each time, and you will see that some effect is acting upon the linguistic formulations of Being. It dawns upon you that Being and Nothing are merely words, and nothing more. The concepts that they pertain to cannot be reached or expressed in words, and therefore if we cast out any meaningless phrase into the chasm of Being, we get no kind of answer back; Being is bananas! Nothing is Christmas! Etc. These terms refer to themselves, they cannot be the appendix of another meaning, for they are absolute meaning, both the fullness of the absolute, (Being,) and the emptiness of the void, (Nothing.) The way in which our words and meanings slip about on that ice rink is a demonstration of our inability to grasp the absolute whilst our Being is subject to the spatio-temporal universe, or whilst our Being is subject to our Subject. Is this slippage the character of our relation to the absolute? Do we learn a truth about the absolute by not being able to know it? It is us who slip when trying to grasp these concepts. I have found, when reading and re-reading the work of Heidegger, that upon first glance, what appears lucid and concrete later becomes as insubstantial as air, a merely ephemeral counterfoil of meaning. But within this I learn. I realise through this dissolving that when I write, vast worlds of thought and meaning are crystallised and then shattered; be careful not to get a shard caught in your eye, or you will no longer see. My work must indeed be a stand-in for some larger concept or series of concepts, the discussions contained within mere allegory.

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If I go to make reference to a cup for example, then my use of the word ‘cup’ goes to denote a thing in the world. The word is a reference to a thing, and in the absence of the thing, in the absence of any cups, the word goes to ‘stand-in for’ or act as a pointer to the mental conception of cups, to our allegedly common ground of mental images and shared concepts. This could be called a general understanding for, to be sure, your mental image of a cup will differ in certain peculiar ways to my mental image of a cup, although the general idea of a cup-shaped vessel that holds fluids and can be drank from, (more than likely with a handle,) will be in your mind as it will mine. The functionality of the word is quite plain, but can be complicated if we start thinking about the associations that one has about cups and that has gone forward to provide you with your peculiar mental image; the concrete idea slips, although we are still left with a general understanding of cupness in our thoughts. We are thinking of the essence of what makes a cup a cup. How does this example conflict with the mental abstraction, (to take-from,) of the idea of nothing? Firstly, all of our ideas are bound in a particular way; none of us can conceive of Nothing, for it would be a pure absence of things, and humans cannot understand anything which is pure, let alone a pure absence of things. To think of Nothing is to think of a thing, (a word that goes to stand-in for a thing,) and if we take our cup example, we know that this cannot be the case for Nothing. There can be no ‘general understanding’, no peculiarities, no idiosyncrasies, no mental image or concept; we shall always fail to think of Nothing. The human mind likes things, and they cling to it like iron filings to a magnet. There can be no abstraction, no taking-from of Nothing,

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for this would be a contradictory term. Are we then all similar in our inexperience of nothing? It is safe to say that no mind has ever experienced nothing; with regard to other things like cups, semiology may have proven that different words can spark a trillion different associations in the minds of two different peoples, and that concrete meaning is a myth, but what is concrete is that no minds have known Nothing. This relationship has as much to do with language as it does anything else, and brings to mind Lacan’s formulation ‘thought structured like language’, (but which came first; the thought or the language?) so we therefore cannot think of something unthinkable. Let me now put aside the unthinkable, and look instead at the effect of the unthinkable on thought. De Sade provides an adequate expression of this in the ‘120 Days of Sodom’ when, in a bedroom with a young girl, we come close to the horror of the unthinkable. The man leads the girl from the bedroom, (the space of the intimate, our thoughts of sexual desire, the bounds of our knowledge,) into an annexe of the bedroom, and therein describes how the resulting perversion was too horrific for words. A simple gesture, to be lost for words, for a ‘thing’ to be indescribable, to slip on the icy ground of nothingness’ present absence, is about as far as we can go in this direction. But should such unknowing be horrific, as Death announces in Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’; is unknowing a secret, the secret domain of the Buddha, the pig-like bliss or the insurmountable horror and anxiety? Again, we tread the uneven ground of the existential question, the angst of unknowing, and yet faced with a decision in the face of unknowing, is a path that must be walked. But why should one embrace death in order to learn the secrets of

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unknowing? There can be no secrets. And yet death lurks over all of our shoulders, that veil of unknowing that shall embrace us all. This fact tells us that our knowing is of significance, that our mode of existence, that the fact and qualities of consciousness will be extinguished and should be marvelled and rejoiced whilst they still are. This I would understand as he Dionysian mad dance toward death, where each and every person celebrates the very fact of existence whilst it still is; this is ‘joyful knowledge’ or ‘gay science’. Joy is an existential plane of our knowing, for it is knowing that we know and rejoicing in it, rejoicing in knowing whilst it still exists. This is the next stage after our angst in the face of a mysterious existence and our question about the fact of existence. It is not an answer to this question, but it recognises the joy in being able to ask such a question, and affirms the fact of existence in so doing. Of course, in the example of de Sade, we know that he can include and exclude whatsoever he chooses, and his method of exclusion in the above example is a lure set up to entice us to fantasise with him upon the subject of absolute horror. In doing so, a peculiar thing happens; we are profoundly effected by the absolute silence of the word, this hole in the blanket of descriptions, this gap in the long list of sexual depravity. We are invited, as though a word were missing, to fill the gap, to cast our own voice into the chasm of unknowing, and yet the echo of our own solitude, the unheimlich repetition of our own voice in the place of absolute horror, our inability to fill the gap or to stand-in for the void of Being, leaves us impotent. The blank space wants a solid object to fill it, and yet there is none large enough or Real enough to do so. The void is absolute and cannot be filled. The deceptive mask of the self, that tried so effectively to protect

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oneself from the Real of the unknowable, is a failure. I must belabour this point, for it is central to my project; we must bring our understanding into line with the conditions of our existence, or our existence will be without understanding, and we will never have been. We must understand the conditions of existence in a relation to the absolute point of Being and Nothing. I shall now return to a point I have already discussed which is connected to this development of the understanding; that of the condition of Truth. We are our condition. It must necessarily be the case that Truth is in the sameness of Being and of Nothing, for we can know nothing of Truth itself, we can Instead know only of the affect Truth has on the material and divisible world. (And in this way must we consider truthfulness as a concept which is parallel to nothingness; the extent of our self-knowability.) To reiterate my earlier point, Truth cannot be known, (and it is not our place to know it, for it is not an it,) but this is the condition of our knowing of it. In other words, Truth speaks through our speaking of it. It is an independent voice encrypted in our own, and yet one that takes hold of us and not vice-versa. We cannot know it, but we can be known through it. Truth constitutes its own truth, and such absolute Truth is not for our knowing. Human truth, which is our only interface with what is of Truth, is a knowledge of the truth about what it is to be a human, and that is the most that can be demanded of a person; it is the maxim of the Delphic oracle. Any attempt to apply the indivisible Truth to the divisible world is a lost cause, and yet even in this failure is a human truth contrived; that absolute Truth is not for us. This is our human truth, learned from our human failure, our human condition, to know the absolute Truth. Truth speaks for

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itself, through us but not by us. Therefore, something which cannot be known, (but in which we are known through,) is an affect of the absolute over our becoming, (the state of our Self whilst in the divisible domain of existence.) This is likened to our attempts to know and grasp the concept of nothing, (which itself is an absolute concept and therefore not for our limited knowing,) for in Nothing there is nothing to grasp; it has no divisible parts upon which we can find our grip, and hence it is absolute.

Games: You know me as well as I know myself. It must be so, as I have said it. You are therefore entitled to use me as you so wish. You may say that I have said things that I have not said, because you know me as well as I know myself. You know right what I have said. Therefore I may say that you thought things even when you did not think them. This is now your paragraph. Your voice has been transposed.

It sounds as though I am trying to present my thoughts to my readers without exclusion. This is indeed a fabrication; did I really say that it was true? When you read that did you believe it like you believe your own voice? Anyway, who would really take pleasure in experiencing some other mind’s experience? This kind of virtual reality is wholly detestable and frightening. No; it is in fact predictable and it is already happening.

The singular most frightening yet desirable, almost necessary thing in life is to share a thought in someone else’s mind. This is Descartes’ unresolved desire, and it is the higher desire for all of

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us. If only we could prove that there was another mind out there thinking things; existence would have meaning, the loneliness would go away; there would be no question to ask of ourselves. This goes back in my mind to the Buddhist idea of regression into past lives; such regression poses the ultimate danger that we are blissfully unaware of, for if we were to know of a past life as if we were to know of other minds, we would be crushed and driven insane by the weight of another mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worries. It is a human truth that our occlusion from the knowledge of other minds is to protect ourselves from self-destruction. If you grasp even for a minute one of your own thoughts, say, when you are walking down the street, you will hear how completely insane it sounds. Pretend it is not your voice. It is crazified. When you worry about something, try not to think about it; No! The mind attracts worries like children to an ice-cream van. Now you will know why we do not know of anything outside of our own minds. The problem of other minds is the major consideration here. We need the proof, (like we were always asking for proof of God [Idiots!],) and yet we cannot possibly cope with or handle the knowledge. We are ill equipped for such an understanding; it is only through human truth that we can know what we can know of this matter. It is for this reason that Kierkegaard would insist that only Faith could operate in this instance; knowledge of God is not for us. In the same way, this text may give you an awareness that there is another consciousness out there, one that speaks to you only because it identifies with you and you sympathise with it, although any direct knowledge of it is not for you. And yet, you can only hear the voice contained within because that voices presents itself under the cloak of your own self. That is how you exclude the world from your world. That is a

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human truth of the matter. The substance in your mind is your business, and likewise is mine to me. This is a human truth that unites us together in our difference and alienation. And now, my next declaration is a little more dangerous, but my embarrassment is so diminished at the minute that I shall write it in blind faith and not show concern for the other minds that I cannot know.

Individuality is a form of insanity, tantamount to insanity.

Forever shall our minds remain distinct from each other, alien to each other, and mad because of this separation. We shall only ever have the impression, the glimpse or inkling that there was another mind present, and this thought shall fill us with sadness and a peculiar joyfulness. Why should we presume that the flimsy and dogmatic medium of language and discourse was some kind of guarantee of other consciousnesses? This is no kind of argument out of the problem of solipsism; this notion does not challenge the existence of other minds, for it is a question only for language and it’s edification. It does not help us. I return to my earlier question; “Who should like to visit the inside of somebody else’s mind?” If we did not share the common desire we would never exhibit the desire to communicate with one another, trusting and believing that they do indeed exist, that they are not fragments of our mind, but indeed that is what they are to us; they are fragments of our narcissistic self-reflection, and we devalue them in that kind of injustice; next time you are at a party, try listening to what you are saying to a person and what they are saying back; ask yourself ‘What is the meaning of what I have said’, and ask of yourself what you are hearing in reply; is there a possibility that there is some

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meaning in there, that there is a world with which we can interface, that there is a horizon beyond the limits to which we currently know of ourselves, in the third-person, so to speak, and yet there was never any resolution as to how we were supposed to exist and for whom. This causes human misery; that we are desperately looking and glimpsing, but the picture is never full; we never see anything beyond our short sight and limitations, and neither are we supposed to. Our enlightenment will come from the knowledge of what we consist in; when hopeless and dreadful projects and dreams of ours fall away, and we are left to rejoice in what are the boundaries and full knowledge of what we are. I have often sat and observed the behaviour of children when they are with their parents. They will desire something, their parent will refuse. Then they will enact some codified game that takes the form of moodiness and displeasure in an attempt to extract their desire from the parent. Often, the child will try to win over one of the parents; the soft touch. This ritualised behaviour we have all been party to, and therefore do we perform a repetitive game throughout our whole lives which connects our desiring to our emotions. Have we ever experienced a true emotion which is unblemished by meaningless repetition and play-acting? Are our emotions, the thing that each of us holds sacred to ourselves, at all genuine and worthy? The next time you find yourself getting moody with your lover over something, watch how the choice as to what to do drifts into your mind’s eye, and then watch how helpless you become when you begin to enact what you know as ‘What you always do in this situation’. It is connected to your desire in this way. You want something. You always do. You are utterly selfish. You have never loved your lover and never can. You are the most

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accomplished actor or actress that ever entered the stage of your life. You have never known another mind, you have never had real empathy that was not tarnished by your own desire or selfishness. You are disingenuous beyond measure. And neither does your desire choose to stretch beyond itself and become a higher desire; to be that which you are and not merely what you think you are. The self is truly an obstacle in this way, and one which may only be transcended once you have become true to what you are, when your knowledge and your existence become harmonious to one another. What do you think I am saying now? Oh. You cannot have heard me correctly if that is what you thought!

Now I get here and I cannot think of what I was going to write. I never have any problem with thinking about things; it always happens of its own accord. But thinking of things with substance to go into a book for other people to read; Ha! Caught in his own trap again. Whatever it was that I was going to write, it could not have been an important matter or an irritation, for those kinds of thoughts stick to the front of the mind whether we choose for them to do so or not. Try and shake a worry out of the mind and you will fail. But you will forget it. And that is a worry all in itself! On top of worrying, the other thing that humans do is forget. Perhaps this is why I so often forget about what to write when I sit down to write; this is some kind of thought-barrier that I never normally have. Either that, or what I was going to write was not a worry and therefore did not stick. Or it was a worry, and hence so immaterial the thought dissolved. This is good, for it shall not cause any bellyaches today; and what a wonderful day as well â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I can remember it so well! I sit in St. Jamesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Park, at the end nearest

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Buckingham Palace, quite close to a rough area of long grass, the sun is out – the first hot day of the year so far – and I have a raging cold. I also walked for two hours before I could find a shop where I could by a notepad. Now there is nothing in me that requires attention and requires writing down. But a rupture is caused at this last point; an intensity. Forgetfulness, the bedfellow of ignorance and pig-like bliss must always be regarded as a worry in itself, for what could be more common than the shattering of bliss by the intrusion of knowledge? The fall from the Garden of Eden can be described in this way, indeed, but this may also be found in the Buddhist understanding; we come to know things that prevent our blissful state. Should we strive to prevent the mind from excitement like the Buddhist does, and prevent the intrusion of thought upon our ignorant happiness? I shall say no, but that one-word answer cannot itself convey the reason for saying it. What could be of such profound meaning that could requite our perpetual becoming with our unceasing desire? What could we possibly ask ourselves that has yet to be asked of and by consciousness itself? If I choose to reject the Buddhist notion of enlightenment, (it was someone else’s enlightenment and not my own – I am still unenlightened,) but seek rather enlightenment through knowledge, then where does that position me? We side with the post-Christian over the Buddhist, (and there can be no post-Buddhist – the desire to overcome has gone – there is no desire,) and choose one cultural legacy over another. In short, we are to choose becoming over Being, for Being requires no choice at all. Being takes care of itself, for it is absolute and is, it is a predicate. Being will not however take care of us in our fallen state of becoming, never attaining Being. The absolute has only its

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natural connections to the transient world of existence, and not one which can be exploited by the existent, and that is the ignorance of the Buddha which allows passage to Nirwana. The chosen ignorance over knowledge, although that ignorance contains knowledge in and for itself. As a being which finds itself in a perpetual and infinite [fall] state of becoming, one knows oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s displacement only too well. And it is our business to know it. Knowledge is here crucial. I am not attempting to get closer to Being, for that would be a foolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s endeavour; I shall just be when my consciousness has passed over to nothing. I am attempting here to get closer to Value which is the sole guarantor of the quality of existence. That is my business here. Value is a thing of our invention, and yet it has many varied characteristics, (and so many so that it often seems as though it is beyond our reach.) We value according to other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s values, desires and expectations, we value according to our projection onto others of all the above factors also, we value according to cultural and societal norms, etc ad nauseam. Do we ever value what we value? If I were to choose to follow Buddha and his values, this initial devaluing of value, this disingenuous valuing of a dead value, would make for an empty value held in my heart. It would indeed, (as I have experienced,) lead to Nirwana, or a blissful state, but I have turned back from this. If I chose to be a Christian and followed the guidelines for being one, I would again find some kind of enlightenment, but it would not belong to me. Only property, or something properly positioned, can have Value. And therefore, something which is improper, or the property of another, something of usufructuary value, cannot be a value unto itself unless it is that of the usufructuary. The decision to do this is paramount, as decisions are

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things which cause a human to value and weigh things in the first place. There is a road that forks in two. We choose one road, but why? Can we ever know a value so appropriately positioned that it could be said to be genuine or belong to us? Is this a realisable ambition or a complete fantasy?

Attempt: When we are faced with a decision, it must be our decision, or it is not a decision at all. If we scrutinise the infinity of layers that comprise our decision, all the layers of determinism and causality, then we are faced with the utterly hopeless dream of the genuine. But, we must press on and make our decision now, even though it appears shambolic, but our making that decision and acting upon it in this space and time has been genuine; no other decision was made in this space and time and by no other persons; it belonged to us and us alone, despite its long-winded heritage. It has become part of the character of my existence, it becomes itself a part of memory, without desire for what is genuine or not. We face the ludicrous if we seek authenticity, and yet this is the form of our authentic stance. But this far we have spoken exclusively of authenticity and not expressly of Value. Does authenticity figure as something we value when we make a decision? It certainly is a predicate of ours to assume that a decision must be authentic, but this predicate devalues the very value it pertains to expound. If this value is gleaned from elsewhere, we know it but have no idea why, then we devalue it when we use it. We must know why authenticity is a value before we begin to employ it. If it is to work for us we must be sure of its credentials and references.

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But is this the case? Is there a single human being alive that could prove that it took advantage of all the forked roads in life by observing cause and effect? Is there a single human alive that could claim to have conquered meaninglessness? I shall abandon the tame philosophy of religion, psychology, culture, other people, and move on alone. I believe that what I am doing right now in writing this writing is to be moving toward understanding, for it is not our actions that forego significance in the face of the void, it is rather the understanding that apprehends it that must become more distinct and more subtle. This is the hinge upon which my article swings; I both require other minds in order to exist, and yet I must make decisions alone in order to exist. I always wanted to know exactly what it was that prevented me from taking my own life at an early age, and caused me instead to continue to live. We understand life, life gives us situations in which we choose to act, we value in order to make decisions, and the cycle continues. If I cannot pin down where meaning occurs in life, it does not mean that life is meaningless, it means rather that my understanding has not yet become subtle enough to detect the traces of meaning. Anyhow, so much of this and other existential debates hinge upon linguistic structures, wordplays and semantics that it is rather tempting to look for elusive meaning in that place. But it would indeed be a grave error and highly fanciful to do so; to put meaning solely in the realm of description undermines the world of real objects, undermines the meaning of meaning, undermines the meaning of relations. Indeed, words do contain, or rather, associate to meanings within a linguistic structure, but they are not the meaning of existence in themselves. They may be the structural components of consciousness, but one can exist without words.

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(But in what way I cannot know.) One must not go unaware of the significance of language in this matrix of concepts, (for that is how they are thought and expressed, and they must be respected and cared for in this,) but likewise we must not go unaware of the other components that comprise a consciousness. You are well aware of the thing which lurks in each and every moment, and you are human enough to come to terms with it. It is in each and every action and thought of yours; tied to a consequential past of which your existence is a consequence, and moving always toward a future you will never reach. One must allow the ties of this particular type of reality fall off; that of regret and its nausea, the inability to come to terms with one’s condition. Life’s peculiar anxiety and worry-filled coil stems from this root, and yet within it are the keys to all the successive lock-downs.

Philosophy, as we are all well-acquainted with by now, means ‘love of knowledge’ in the Greek expression. But do we know what this means? Which kind of expression of love is meant here and what kind of knowledge? What happens when both concepts become conjoined? Evidently they produce a precious alloy of a concept that is great in itself, (one that we would call Philosophy.) Love of knowledge transforms everything, and is not something that can be exercised at certain times with certain people in certain ways. But indeed we must come to understand it. What happens if one does not love knowledge? Does life become empty of philosophy: does the taint of meaning lose its lustre? Is it the kind of love which is driven by desire? Does a lust for knowledge, a basic hunger, constitute Philosophy? (If we were to call the existential question a hunger, then indeed it does.) A drive toward

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knowledge would certainly constitute Philosophy, for the desire is one of longing to know. But what of its object, the drive itself, the knowledge acquired or the marriage between the desire and the object, between you and it; does this relationship constitute Love? If love became the character of the inward drive to reach outward, and if it loved the object of its desire and held it in that love, then it would constitute a connection between consciousness and the world, and that would be Philosophy. Acquisition is only employed as a mode of providing this intangible connection between two worlds. How could this be so if we are as yet unfamiliar with this thing I call ‘I’? Perception is here paramount, for the object of Philosophy is Philosophy itself; it is the understanding of the connection, the connection between Love and knowledge which brings us into light. We must use our knowledge of the faculty of the understanding here as the perceiver of that which comes into light, that which illuminates objects in its perception. Philosophy is a self-valuing, a self which values as it values its self. This is also why I write.

30.4.2004 / Lunchtime. Why read a book when you can write one; “Everyone has at least one good book inside them”; is life such a story if not an immensely detailed, exciting and engaging one? Is writing a confession? Did Saint Augustine go some way toward acquiring entrance to heaven, or are there omissions or secrets of the soul that even he could not penetrate? Why did he write them when the supreme authority is God, who knows all men’s hearts? Did he write for other people [sinners]? If he did, he commits an injustice

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– his confession is not meant as a substitute for our confessions; his experience is nothing in our experience, other than the impression he leaves for us in writing. He tells us nothing that we won’t already experience. But does anyone have a ‘good’ book inside them; surely the Bible is the ‘Good Book’? What can a person write about if not the secret expression of the soul to others? Precisely because it is a secret confession to one’s self, always secret, never fully mending the sutured wound, secret from himself. It is not for the confession of my soul that I write, (for that would be perverse,) rather it is the confession of your soul that causes me to write, because we are the same thing, understand the same. Its only the flimsiness of our will that allows us to forget ourselves that we all become disjointed into individuals. One of us will not be an individual; will not become conscious – will be the opposite, will become un conscious, will be the prophetic genius with no individual soul – that was Jesus – he had no secrets of the heart that might have caused him to feel unique. If one is conjoined to the Holy Spirit and the Heavenly Father one cannot be a one – only part of a Trinity and part of everything. Jesus was not an individual. What stops one being a genius, a prophet, whatever? (Just Being?) It is consciousness; the conscious mind aware of itself as unique is UNIQUELY fucked up, mad, out of synchronisation with the universe. It is not a universe of ones, it is one universe. Therefore, in the cosmological scheme of things, individuals set them aside from harmony in the universe – think they can improve or control it. They are mad; Individuality is the character of madness. It makes me mad; I can only be when there is no internal

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dialogue preventing me from being. When there is a voice in the head; (everyone’s head, everyone is mad, Yes), one cannot Be, one is reflecting on Being –something. Being cannot be conjoined to things – it either is or is not. Being is not part of the world of individuals; they are all too busy being something – (Being disingenuous!) How does one become unconscious – how can be rid of the subtle & beautiful malady of Individuality; how can the mirror be repaired? When we look at other people we only see ourselves, we see our characteristics, all parts of our INSANE INDIVIDUALITY reflected back at us!! That is the second characteristic of INSANITY of INDIVIDUALITY. Looking is not seeing. Jesus said some will listen, some will hear. It’s the same thing – some see [themselves], some see.

03.05.2004 / Lunchtime. I shall start as I always start; at the beginning. But how can one do that – only God was there in the beginning. So I cannot start there. I guess I am starting a little further along the road; not so much of a head start for the tortoise, but having missed out the important part of the race. Is this kind of motion impossible? I am at the start, and yet I am not – is there a lie here somewhere or an irrevocable contradiction…? So, here we are; we made it past the start and into the second paragraph – contragratulations; motion is indeed possible! Only my work doesn’t go anywhere, but do not blame yourself for that! This paragraph follows the last one & precedes the next; how many more we do not yet know. But if I can write no more then we have finished and there was no middle.

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***

Why did St. Augustine write? What was in his confession that needed to be passed on to us? So then – why must I write? Why does anyone write? THIS IS THE BOOK OF WOE…worries are magnetic – the brain flows along unless it is worried, for then it cannot resist the attraction/distraction of worry. I was worried very much on Saturday and I attempted to stop worrying and I noticed my mind being drawn back to the worry without fail until that worry was forgotten. Contentment was not for us…it was for the Saints. If I were fed up with life, I would have finished it by now – but no; I will always make the effort to prove that everyone else is wrong about everything. Truth is not a thing for us – we are not ready. We have forgotten it and it will take a purity of will and conscience to bring us back to the beginning, like the virgin in the garden. For too long has the autocracy of the ego driven our hearts, minds, culture, spirituality, history and society. Now it looks like what it is; bullshit. Everything about culture is bullshit. Everything about other people is bullshit = and in this I mean the notion of ‘other’ people; there are no other people for the ego – there is only reflection. There are no other people without ego – for then we are not individual. Ergo; there are no other people. This is you writing this, but you forgot having done it because you were too busy trying to be yourself, too busy loitering at Delphi, without an idea that you were there. If you knew yourself, you would be able to get on with things, not so? You would be able to forget yourself by having already found it – there would no longer be any quest for identity, for that grail certainly is a myth.

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Why is it so important to delineate where ‘I’ begins and ends? Why the constant need to divide things always? Is it because humans have such a tiny and constrained horizon that they can only comprehend small pieces? No wonder that to date, no man or woman has had an idea that was the size of God. For, surely, to think about God, one must have thoughts that large? Who really could confess to that? You are probably more concerned with the weather or the television or the pub. Humans beings do not celebrate being human. It is a basic contradiction. They feel it is a curse that should be washed away. Why do people not walk down the high street with a smile on their face thinking that it is good to be in existence? Where did the joy go? It is just as simple as looking gloomy, but we know our preference, don’t we? Why don’t we do things that celebrate life – why do we just try to distract ourselves from the fact? Because we don’t know who we are and we do not intend to find out either. For if we knew who we were, nothing could distract us from that fact. Humans are desperately backward and sick animals in danger of making themselves extinct. If I could send a message into space to communicate with extraterrestrial life forms, I would send out a warning about us. And that warning itself would be a destructive act, because humans can only destroy, no matter how hard they try to do otherwise. The cure for this sickness, the holy cup of remembrance, is right there in front of us, but we have forgotten what it looks like and why should we choose to be cured anyway? The thing that people today are calling ‘ambition’ is a hollow sham for what people would once have called achievement. We are driven to succeed with no purpose, no reason, no meaning, because none of us know why we are to value such things. The understanding was driven out of us generations

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ago. It is an automatic process, yet we comply with a desire instilled in us by our sick cultures. This drives us to debase ourselves in such a way only because we built it to do so. We are all responsible for our condition, for it is the ‘human condition’ as it belongs to us all – and we should take care of the only genuine property that we have. But ‘care’ is a thing we do not understand. Why does care connect us to our damaged world? How often do we say; “I don’t care!” Is it a general statement – a symptomatic reflex statement rather than an answer to a question? An answer to all questions. One should say “I don’t care” with great care – because it does mean something. But we have come to use it in a way that suggests it has no kind of meaning. But it is better to not care for a thing that would otherwise be damaging to us if we were to care for it, than care for something that has no meaning. This cultivates nihilism. It is due to our complete amnesia that we have become so utterly crippled and apathetic. We would like history to forget us, to let us rest in peace, rather than seek out the absolute – to continue to be and to work throughout all of time. That is why we now record everything; because we needn’t discriminate as to what should be preserved for posterity and kept for all time as something beautiful; everything, from the mediocre to the great, becomes recorded on the same surface, every part of our pointless culture gains its place in history. We do not seek to turn a future history of our own making into a beautiful place, but perhaps we should. But we are too selfish to do this. Generosity is the shape of genius. You may record every pop song, every movie, every painting and every book in culture, but you cannot coerce everyone throughout history to privilege them forever…

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…Who amongst us never resents? Resentment is now a component of love; it is a symbol of our inability to be pure, to do something without duplicitously doing something else. Surely then, life itself has become an ulterior motive? Whatever it was that infected us, it got into almost everything and made it rotten. I am not damning of other people or culture or of myself. How can the damned be damning? I would not be doing this if I did not care, would I? Critique demonstrates love and care. To not criticise is to not bother at all, to not care. If that were the case, I would not write. By the same token, if you find yourself criticising this writing, then you must care about something – what might that be? Is there a part of life worth defending that perhaps I have offended? But to know why you value that thing is now your own job. I merely stood-in as stimulans to bring that to a head. If however, you simply put the book down and never pick it up again

The greatest degree of what we call self-interest lies in the thing called ‘charity’. Why is charity selfish? Because we do it for ourselves – we cannot see any other person than ourselves – we buckle to an inner drive that requires us to give something in return for relief, feelings of generosity, righteousness, or an easy ticket to God, (for those people stupid enough to call themselves Christians, yet are as nihilistic as anybody else.) Nobody as yet has rooted out the malady inherent in our ‘humanity’, and no amount of attaching oneself to something one presumes has meaning is going to help. Enlightenment does not come from doing this; it does not blossom from this kind of ‘charity’. No Christian is enlightened, for Being himself, he thought he was being somebody else, (i.e. was being a Christian.) This is disingenuous. Thus he never got anywhere. Only

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those who got to Delphi and understood the truth of what the oracle said could ever be enlightened. Only those who read the scripture and heard what was said and did not see merely what was written will ever know the awesome truth.

[Don’t even think for a moment that I would write down an answer here; it would be grotesquely misleading and you would not understand.]

‘Know Thyself’ was not so much advice as it was a phantom that haunts all our houses. It is a journey so difficult that it has never yet been trodden. This is good. There is no path. We must make one. Then we shall truly get to where we choose to be. If I were never to become self-conscious [too late!] whilst writing this, I would stop. Self-consciousness, (what some people take as meaning ‘conscious of self’, ‘knowing thyself’,) is in fact a hindrance to the object of consciousness, but at the same time a door that will lead us beyond it, the prime suspect of our malaise. It is my opinion that the genius is not for one moment self-conscious, for then he or she would not be able to perform the act of pure creation, the part which is not self-obsessed in a merely refractory way, a place where one reaches an agreement with the aspect of self-consciousness, a kind of truce. In fact, it is also my opinion that the genius has no individual consciousness at all, otherwise he or she would be unable to tap into the spirit that produces an art for all time and across many consciousnesses. If you are looking to suggest that genius has any parallel to the way in which our own minds function is to suggest either that:

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we are geniuses, or

ii)

they and we are not geniuses.

The point is, how can we, if we do not consider ourselves to be possessed by the genius of spirit, even consider the aspect of genius? The term itself is now highly unfashionable, although fashion cannot dictate what exists, either in possibility or in actuality. I do not feel hindrance in discussing a term that would make all manner of people cringe, for it is only a subject to me, but my argument naturally leads me to it on my investigation into the possibility of pure consciousness. We encounter a very obvious and dogmatic obstacle on any investigation of this type quite early on, and that is “How can we try to understand even the notion of genius, if we do not posses it or we are not possessed by it?” And indeed, we are entertaining a notion, aren’t we? We are asking a similar question as “How does one know if one is mad?” or “Is a mad person aware that he or she is mad?” We ask from some kind of exterior, alien viewpoint a question which is of deep interest to our selves, and this should be enough to make our introspection difficult in these matters. There is quite an obvious parallel here to the point made earlier about how one introspects and how one gains self-knowledge, (by stepping outside of ourselves,) and also to the idea tossed to the wind about Self as its own madness. It should not be our preoccupation to discover whether we are something else or not, whether we are to become our notion of ‘mad’ or ‘genius’, for it must indeed negate its own question. We are indeed we, but our preoccupation is to discover the way in which it exists and consists, and any question of this type should be levelled only on these two

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points or we should indeed be asking a worthless question here. I shall instead press on with my own kind of abstract theorisation about self-attainment. The genius remembers what he has to do with life. We have forgotten what to do with life, and we have forgotten how to live it because we are self-conscious; it is the disease of consciousness that causes our profound existential amnesia. So I sat here thinking about what I should write next on this point, for indeed, such a wild and careless remark should need some kind of elucidation, shouldn’t it? Mistake No. 1; I wasn’t writing what I was thinking, was I? So I wrote it down – it has value because now I am not thinking about it, idling – I have shifted gears and now I am working. This was my own sickness, manifest in a paragraph designed to expose that very same symptom. I pause for a cigarette; I open the window, lean out, and I smoke. Today I did not even get out of bed, get washed or dressed. This writing can be done anywhere. In the time frame in which I am re-typing these notes, I am sitting in a different house, I am not smoking, and I am half-dressed. Any other action on my behalf would be an interference to me, it would excite my mind to be distracted and I would no longer hear the voice with the same clarity. So now I write automatically. Everyone has so many things that they know they ought to do; we do one thing, and then another springs up to fill it’s place – but thinking about them does not get them done. It is an excuse not to do it. We constantly hinder our lives in this way; the human condition is one which has existentially hospitalised us. The curative is to be human and not merely deliberate on being human, (which is precisely what I am doing; let me do it so that you do not have to.) I will be back at

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work tomorrow, (and it causes me such sorrow!) but it is merely a way of making money. I must continue to write. [The me who is in the second time-frame re-typing these notes remembers so many thoughts, so many meanings that fit into this text; I am indeed existent in two different places now! Re-typing these notes is like a message in a bottle or a time-bomb for my future consciousness, who indeed is always a future consciousness, and indeed can discover and re-discover these same values ad infinitum.] Writing is my purpose; I have made it so. If I get into synchronisation with Zeit, [and indeed, looking back, it seems that I am talking to myself across time,] with the spirit of the time, then self-consciousness recedes and I can at last be that which I am. To cure oneself of the malady of consciousness is such a simple endeavour â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the only hindrance is having the will to exceed our desire, to challenge our desire for pettiness and inspire it to desire what we know rightly it should. It is easy knowledge to know that we always let ourselves down, it is easy to procrastinate like a devilish fart emitting from our mouths, to promise, to fail, to do something because we know it ought to be done and transpose it into a chore. But why would anything in our life be this way? Why would we allow it to be this way? It is indeed difficult knowledge to know why something should be done and desire it so. It is difficult, it requires the will to know and do something because of its worth and the joy we take in making it part of our Reality. The voices, from within and without, (and until we recognise that both voices are the same voice of our madness, there can be no without,) are merely chatter. They distract us from our knowledge, from hearing the subtle voice; we get lost in the shallow depths of confusion. Struggling to know who we are

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is part of who we are, and thus it contains part of its own answer. We don’t appear to be privy to this particular piece of information though, for if we were, we would not need to ask ourselves so often and in so many multifarious ways. If I get up and go and wash and ready myself for the day I will have lost – I will go and do something else. There are a great many people that are doing a job right now. Why? I do not mean “Why are they doing a job”, for those kind of reasons are apparent, tedious and uninteresting. I mean “Why?” This question is not so much a question, (although we seem always in readiness to reply, to defend, to justify,) but rather a phantom. The ghost of meaning, that little piece of knowledge in us which we keep in a closet hidden within existence. Why anything? But the “Why?” itself is again a symptom of the same sickness, and it always demonstrates our ill-equipped consciousness when we attempt to give piecemeal answers to an ongoing question. We avoid it by giving temporary and short-lived answers. The healthy person does not require this pedantic sigh of ‘Why?’ for the questions have ceased and he or she has begun to live in and through the answers, within the precious knowledge. This person has knowledge of self, the knowledge which knows itself and is alive, a knowledge straight from consciousness and not the reflected image of self-consciousness. It is now half-past two, [or quarter-past four.] The sun is warm, although it rained heavily earlier. I will remember this triumphant moment when I remembered, and I shall remember it again when it is written a second time, and it breathes again. When I forgot the things which made me forget. The clouds of amnesia have passed over my consciousness, the rain leaves the streets

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washed, the phantom has been exorcised, (but for how long?) Verbal diarrhoea is like anal diarrhoea; it stops when there is no more shit. The germ is expelled…

More talk about the horizon a few months down the road: When we say, as we do, that we step back from ourselves to gain perspective, and that eventually we reach an horizon beyond which nothing is knowable, (or should that be ‘nothing is unknowable’ or what?) do we say that we reach the final layer of deception or Truth? Any life which is willing to risk everything, (everything – it’s own existence,) is controversial to the point whereby it negates the desiring machine of the ego to desire more, it instead desires nothing. Remember here that the suicide is not a form of desiring nothing. This desires a false immortality borne from egoconsciousness, i.e. Vanity. The contradiction, the place where our existence becomes irreconcilable with itself, is the departure point toward the paradox of the Truth or of Deception. What lies beyond this horizon at the boundary of self is indeed Truth, for it has no self to pervert its purity, it holds no knowledge to be untrue, it is no thing, nothing, and is therefore Absolute and True. To say this about the horizon is, paradoxically, the final deceit of our sensibility. We can no longer step backward, we cannot discern Truth from lies at the point where there is no self to measure them against, and this fact constitutes the Truth about Deception, the Deceptive Truth. As I impressed upon you earlier, it is not our place to go beyond what makes us human, but indeed we must know how far our horizon stretches in order to ascertain the human truth and to become what we are. To get to this point, we use the

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existing structure of language and its descriptive powers in order to make these concepts knowable to us, but to get to the point whereby language is affected by the absolute is to know that the absolute is present to us. We then find that many acrostic or hidden meanings lie within all parts of language and knowledge, because we have understood our paradoxical subsistence. If we read existential writing, (like Sartre, Nietzsche or Heidegger to name a few locations where this phenomena occurs,) we find that we come across all manner of linguistic ambiguities and shape-shifting meanings that ordinarily we are utterly familiar with. Consider words such as ‘as’, ‘be’, ‘nothing’, ‘is’; these words find a new home within existentialism, they define how we exist and in what way, any ordinary meaning becoming ordinary in a thoroughly exciting way. Heidegger particularly drew out the strangeness of the word ‘is’, which of course is an existential attribute that is given to anything that exists. When he also outlines the different ways in which a thing could be said to exist, say between a stone and a person, the term ‘is’ would be different in each case. It follows, because we bring so many things into line with our existence by apprehending them, the term ‘is’ is indeed very popular. Indeed, this slippage of significance occurs when we consider things in their existential aspect which goes to affirm existence and its attributes even within simple descriptions. When we reach the place when we cannot know what we are through language, (because its signification is slipping beyond the grip of our apprehension,) we are faced with a choice. We find ourselves on a sliding scale between everything and nothing, (as in Deleuze via Nietzsche,) wherein meaning can either be everything or nothing. The signifier slips, possible signifying structures expand and stretch

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to the horizon of meaning, and in-between, we either mean all these things at once, or we mean nothing. But it is a choice. If language is indeed an abstract form of connecting different things within the mind to provide knowledge, this slippage causes us to either know everything or nothing, because we would either know the horizon of meaning, the position of the user within that structure and thus we would know the human truth of linguistic meaning through its nature, or we would know nothing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we would be lost inside of an infinitely expanding universe of signification where we could not locate ourselves or ever know what we mean. Both ends of this scale amount to the same thing, but as the consciousness within which all these things occur, (and that consciousness also occurs in all these things,) it is your responsibility to confer the stamp of existence and hence quality on all things within existence. In short, it is your choice to either be lost or found in this aspect, either half empty or half full. Or preferably, both things at once in order to be honest about the totality of the situation; do not deny anything if it exists. In this situation do we come to learn about our own particular drives and our higher desires.

English sense of humour. [Why, when British people get drunk, (and it is probably not an attitude uncommon outside of the UK,) do they use the terms annihilated, wasted, wankered, fucked-up, bollocksed, pissed, cunted, legless, etc ad nauseam? Partially because this is the part of culture that provides all enjoyment for people, (the working week gravitates around Friday night in this country,) and they celebrate by aiming at nothing, at being destroyed. They choose to test the human bounds of their bodies and brains by seeing how different to

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normal they can become, how idiotic, carefree and emotional it is within their capacity to get. [Note; I am not talking down upon, because I still have a similar drive, although I am working to overcome it.] The question I am coming to is this; does the Englishman have a notion of the Good Life against which he can measure all of his actions? The phrase occurs in many cultures in different ways, but seems absent in English apart from the name of a television programme. Indeed that programme was about abandoning the mindless distraction of working for a third-party subsistence, (capital,) in an effort to subsist in oneself. And it was also a comedy. The English are a great nation of workers, but with all of the capital generated, the GNP, do they have an understanding of what it is or what it does or how it functions? Without

this

knowledge

they

cannot

possibly

have

understanding of what it means, can they? Are we missing out on the good life here; can it only be observed from the third person on a television? Only in his country garden can an Englishman lead a good life. The English work like dogs, live like pigs, eat like maggots and drink like fishes. They use a television to provide a substitute reality for the one they cannot be bothered to cultivate for themselves. All the country gardens have vanished. An Englishman will fret and tear his hair out for his job, (it is now called stress,) even though what he is actually doing rarely has any connection to reality or meaning other than the third-party exchange of money. He then seeks to sedate himself from this terribly alienating lifestyle by â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;switching on to switch offâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, by using a television, or by drinking himself into the ground. The stimulans in his life is coffee, which paradoxically he uses to keep himself awake at work, to get him to work on time, to make him work better, (how many coffee

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shops are there in London?) He spends his money on this lifestyle, and thus does the cycle become vicious and awful. His reality consists in the cut-up flat montage of television land. Why are there so many gardening programmes on British television? Ah! It’s a sick joke, (the English sense of humour,) he does not garden any longer, there is no good life to lead; he lives the good life on his arse waiting to go to work!]

A Western man throws-over his Christian heritage and instead turns to Buddhism. He undertakes it’s Enlightenment, (and I mean ‘It’s Enlightenment, not his,) according to the manual, (like his predecessors with their Bibles,) and he is reborn. But this is a caesarean rebirth; he is reborn out of an unnatural and artificial vagina. Man’s Enlightenment begins with confronting his belief in Value in and for itself. He discovers or rediscovers Value for himself within his own existence which is now his property, becomes enlightened, but does not take a pre-existent path. He must forge it for himself because it is his path in life – his enlightenment must conform with his natural aspect within life. An ex-Christian achieving Nirwana is no different to an ex-Buddhist being Christened. The enlightenment may indeed happen, but the route, the substance, the journey was through somebody else, the genuine knowledge that originally lead to a true enlightenment was missed or conveniently overlooked. This is a ready-made, prefabricated, pret-a-porter enlightenment; pre-packaged, it is an object of desire, and only a capitalist materialist could possibly discover it.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;But surely there is no genuine path because there is nothing original. We always ride on the heels of others in the realm of thought?â&#x20AC;?

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