Howl

The boy who cried wolf
got eaten.
The boy who didn't cry wolf
also got eaten.

Someone Else's I

And now we only talk

Through other people’s poems

Whose I we deign to inhabit a minute

And doff

Like easily removable clothes.

Polish or Polish

Polish or

Polish 

Bass or

Bass

I can never tell

Exactly what I mean.

I know you can

Polish the

Bass

But can you also

Polish the

Bass?

Time is a field; it is not a line. We understood this before Proust, before we had the words to compel us to the deception of the short-lived linear metaphor, before Einstein’s mathematical confirmation. The present is a vast accumulation—of history and the future. If you want to raise your knowledge of time to words, if you want to be able to talk about the lived experience of the abstraction, talk about love, its waxing and waning, its accumulations, pulsations, and losses.

"Beyond God and Nietzsche" ch. 7

The signs in a language system refer only to other signs in it, but discourse “refers to a world that it claims to describe, to express, or to represent” (Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 145, as cited http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur). This would be the piece not, to my understanding found in Derrida or admitted by Derrida.

Now and then we have to return to politics, though we'd rather stay in the garden

It is as I predicted. Obama has offered the GOP their own proposals and they are lining up to reject them, not because they don’t like them, but because Obama offered them, and, as they have not been shy about stating, their main objective is to get him out of office. Anything that helps the country increases the difficulty of that objective, and so to help their cause, they cannot do what they are paid to do, which is serve the country.  That is the broad effect of the power politics in which party needs trump public needs. We can still hope there are enough sincere, honest, moral, patriotic republicans in congress who do not subscribe to the party-first philosophy so clearly manifest at this moment.

`               Perhaps the Democrats on the whole are no better. The party-first mentality seems endemic in Washington. But as for Obama himself, the critics cannot have it both ways. If he does not put party above the public need, if he assumes goodwill on the other side and seeks compromise, he is called naive. He is said to be “way over his head.” If he does not do these things, he is said to be catering to political interests—putting party above country. Damned either way when in fact he is either (as he is) a man willing to reach out to either party or annoy both parties in order to weave a mutually acceptable solution to intractable problems, or he is (as he is not) a typical politician.

It may be naïve to believe there is enough goodwill on the other side to get work done. But is there any other way to avoid the trap of party-first politics? I submit that there is not. It is cynical, illogical (and if you do it consciously and politically it is hypocritical) to criticize the president whether attempts compromise or whether he refuses to do so.

                In his attempt to compromise, he puts himself in a position in which, because the other side will not compromise, he is forced to cave in to their position or do nothing. Boehner boasts he received 98% of what he asked for in the debt-ceiling circus. If he can have such success with Obama, why would he not support him in 2012? Would he get as much from a Republican president?

                Obama needs to fight harder, to assume less goodwill on the part of the opposition, which has so blatantly asserted that it has no goodwill, no interest in goodwill, no interest in compromise, no interest in helping the country if that includes making the president look good to any voter. At the same time he cannot give up and retreat into party-first politics. That sort or cynicism would only further decay our already badly decayed political process. Every honest politician on either side has to assume goodwill on the other side even when it is naïve to do so, even when the other side has none to offer. Every true patriot has to back away from ideologically driven refusals to compromise. People who don’t believe in tax hikes must be willing to vote for them anyway. People who don’t wish to cut essential spending programs must be willing to cut them anyway.

The hurting family may have to choose between the air conditioner and the TV. 

The Garden Groweth

The Muse First Issue

You'll find two of my poems there. The title is a link.

The Garden House Inches Onward

On Language and Disciplines

All disciplines are false in that they cordon off and divide that which is unified, whole, and indivisible. But it is only by this cordoning off, this bringing to systems of language, that the reality can be known.

That statement is true insofar as language can state what is true, but also either redundant or nonsensical.

"Known" can only mean "put into a system of language." "Reality" here is not being "known" except insofar as it is expressed. If you measure a length of stem, you know the length of stem because you can express it in a number. You don't know the stem. If you say, "the stem of that plant is nine inches long" you come away knowing more about the length of nine inches than you know about the stem.

Disciplines are nonetheless necessary because measurements must be taken. This is among our most profound ways of knowing, despite its limitations. A bottle of soap is mostly water. But you need the water.

The main function of all disciplines, from math to music to poetry to philosophy, you might say, is to improve and refine language: to find a better way to speak the world. And though they hide in exact proportion to what they make known, they repeat (thus) the fundamental creative gesture, God's gesture, "let there be....and there was."

Ricoeur

“What fails is not thinking, in any acceptation of the term, but the impulse—or to put it a better way the hubris—that impels our thinking to posit itself as the master of meaning. Thinking encounters this failure not only on account of the enigma of evil but also when time, escaping our will to mastery, surges forth on the side of what, in one way or another, is the true master of meaning” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 261)

Time's Outside

Further Thoughts on Time


“the ultimate unrepresentability of time… makes even phenomenology continually turn to metaphors and to the language of myth in order to talk about the upsurge of the present or the flowing of the unitary flux of time” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, 243).

We exist in time. No one can disagree with that statement. It implies that there is an “outside” to time which it is possible to exist in—though not necessarily for us to exist it, occupy, see, or comprehend, but possible for us to imagine, in some way. Not what it is “like” particularly, because except for the possible and merely suggestive analogies or metaphors it isn’t “like” anything we know or experience. We exist in time. It may be that the “in time” part of the sentence is redundant, meaningless, dangerously misleading. It may be that time’s “outside” is a fiction made possible because our metaphor to our relationship to time is the metaphor of “in.” “Outside of time,” may be pure nonsense. If we die we may no longer be “in” time, but that does not mean we are “outside of time,” but rather that we don’t exist at all. An inside does not imply an outside when an inside is simply a metaphor for a relationship that has no nonmetaphoric way of being expressed.

On the other hand, we who live in time have no way of knowing that there is no such “place” as “outside” time. Do we have any evidence beyond analogy, metaphor and the tricks language plays on imagination to suggest there is such a “place”? I think we do. We do not have proof. And all our evidence can be talked about (I won’t quite say “explained”) by other references. But even Nietzsche, the great atheist, admitted that music suggested to him the unearthly and made emotional play son him that broached a sensation of the spiritual. Music did this to him even when the spiritual was no longer allowed in his positivistic frame of mind. We’ve all had the same experience with music, with art of all kind, with natural beauty—we say “breathtaking in a linguistic serendipity or causality that deepens the experience when we realize that breath is the ancient origin of soul. The longing we feel that nothing that is can satisfy, that does not have any obvious function in the world, that does not in any way contribute to our survival, that evolutionary pressures cannot adequately explain, this suggests that the world that we are in, the world of time, has an outside, a place for which our feelings are hints.

We have no logical need to tie the outside of time to the longing. They are two impossibilities that co-exist and are or are not in fact related. But if we do not want to accept the reality of the spiritual—which we are tempted to call the “other world” or “time’s outside,” then along with Nietzsche, we have to deny to this universal experience the urgency the experience calls for, and that action is as arbitrary as affirming it.