"The Fruitless Fidget of Composition"

Henry James uses this perfect phrase in the second paragraph of his preface to "Portrait of a Lady," one of the great masterpieces of the novel. Nothing makes a writer doubt his talent like that moment. But there is some consolation in realizing that all writers face it. The best may face it constantly.

Progress and Failure

We dream because our daytime perceptions fail to account for our daily experiences.

Knowledge does not adequately represent what it knows.

Knowledge does not know what it knows.

The greater the coherence of our knowledge, the more we have had to exclude.

We write poems because philosophy fails.

We do science because poetry fails.

We theologize because science fails.

We philosophize because theology fails.

We paint because words fail.

We act because representation fails.

All progress is founded on failure.

Thank God for failure. 

Eco, "Kant and the Platypus," preliminary thoughts

It seems to me that most of philosophy, even as practiced today, as far as I understand it (and that would be, admittedly, too little) looks through the wrong end of the telescope. It sees the world (the cosmos) as an order of things preexisting and independent of us which we must catalog, explain, relate to each other as they exist in themselves, as though the universe were a machine, made by an intelligence, which had parts that did work that we could reverse engineer.

                We have to start with the perceiver, in a kind of Cartesian move. Not “I think there I am,” but “I perceive, therefore I misunderstand.”

                Even accepting the Derridian claim that there is no perception, by which he means only that there is no “pure” perception without language, without interpretation, without a system of ways of understanding that predate and predicate the perceiver, in which the perceiver isn't always already caught up, by which he isn't always already determined in advance—even accepting all this, we have to say that knowledge starts with perception. Call it “perception” if you like to get all the caveats written onto it, then forget the quotation marks because 1) they would be tedious to type every time, and 2) once you start using them, you cannot justify ever not using them until all words have them in layers, like the Menelaiad but moreso.

                The animal that has no language sees and interprets—food, potential food, prey, potential prey, enemy, potential enemy, mate, potential mate, safety, potential safety, warmth, cold, light, dark and all that might apply to the senses and to comfort or discomfort. We can’t really call these perceptions conceptual, but these are what we would call the categories of what non-human animals might perceive, some more, some less of course in obvious gradations.  The difference between knowing something and "knowing" it, between recognizing and raising to the level of language--that's where language, explicitly, steps in.

                The point is that all that animals have by way of perceptual “concepts” (which are not, of course concepts at all, but recognitions triggered when some sameness has been re-encountered)  we have too, though ours be contaminated or focused (when it is) via language.  We can talk about our perceptions and talking about them changes them, though I would agree with Scholes that they also put pressure on language. Underneath or alongside of our language the things that we perceive exist, some and perhaps most of the time, particularly when those things are things, objects, and not things more nebulous such as emotions, though even then, though we get the emotion entirely wrong, more often than not there is still a “thing” that we are getting or attempting to get.

                Again, here is the point: what anything is it is to us, for us, insofar as we can perceive it. “Being” itself is a question because those who attempt to define it try to define it via a language that cannot encompass it and a perception that cannot perceive it. We can only infer it from signs—I will not say "its" signs. Signs belong to US; they do not belong to Being.  A sign is not something that exists. It is something that is read. Nor does it exist until it is read. Signs come into existence with the act of reading them. They are neither meaning nor potential meaning.  A sign is always an analogy or metaphor, a seeing as.

                If all humans die but their books survive and some alien race finds them, will they be able to decode them? Very likely yes. This is not because of a potential in the books to be read but a potential in the reader to read. To say the books have a potential to be read is like saying that the ball rolls downhill because balls always want to find the lowest point or because gravity wants to pull all objects toward a center. Gravity and balls are without desire. But we have no better concept than desire with which to describe such things.  

God Explains Himself to Man

I created Heaven because I was going crazy—
alone, outside of time—
and earth because angels are boring.
I left open doors for evil to enter
and made man for my companion—
who now can hardly see me.
 
I cannot say I did not wait too long to light that fuse
or too long once the clock exploded into being
to mold clay into my likeness.
I got distracted by the gasses
all the cool stuff they were doing—
coalescing and firing—
till things got hard.

Or was that you?

You who read this may be the man of clay for all I know, the only one I ever made

all the rest, all history, science, poetry, all you call the universe
or multiverse—the cosmos—all of it your own projection
to save yourself
from my insanity.

We should talk.

 

Sunset by the Abandoned Pool

Why say the sun ends at the horizon
of its surface? Though we give to the infinity of things an edge
to know them by, perhaps the edge of the sun is the reach of its heat
or its light, stretching to the ends of space, easing itself through time
backward and forward
as though in search of instruments sufficiently delicate to find it.
 

All knowing is death.

Again I see these things:

The ridge of your spine as you lean forward
to accept the glass of wine,
the surprise
that rises to your mouth at the sound of my steps
the rose-tinged light pouring in from the mountains
to outline your face
as you turn.

We do not end

at the horizon of our skin
or the heat of our skin
ripples in space time
the ever expanding horizon
of this moment
clouds the universe.

Where Did the Idea that Santa's Reindeer Fly Come From?

All over the internet you can find fanciful explanations of how Santa’s reindeer fly. But nowhere on or off the internet have I come across an historical explanation of how the fanciful notion came arose in history. Those who have glanced at the issue will tell you that the idea comes from the Moore/Livingstone poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (also known as “Twas the Night before Christmas”) and leave it at that. Once, briefly, the truth of the story was revealed on Wikipedia. But my explanation was very quickly taken down (sadly and uncharacteristically before I could make a copy). As I did not have the energy to re-explain, the truth has remained nowhere on earth ever since. But the burden of being the only one who knows has weighed heavily upon me lo these many years. So, I must, to divest myself of it, rebuild the house.

Not that it's really that hard to do. This mystery, like so many others, is open to anyone who cares to look for it.

Here is the reference to flight in the famous poem:

                               As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
                               When the meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
                               So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
                               With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too--

This seems clear enough. At first. But it clearly wasn’t clear to other compilers of the Santa Claus story. (I’d say “myth” but I won’t want to rove into actual controversy here.) The most prominent among these myth makers was perhaps L. Frank Baum, whose competing list of reindeer names did not take. The Moore/Livingstone poem was first published in 1823. But as late as 1902 in Baum’s “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus” the idea that Santa’s reindeer fly still had not taken off.
It may be that the Moore/Livingstone poem was still not iconic enough for the image to emerge automatically in the mind of the typical American child. And the fact that Baum could ignore the whole poem does suggest that though the poem was already popular, it was not yet quite the central reference point it has become.

But (I think) the most likely reason of all may be—that the poem had not yet been misunderstood. I have not been able to find who first misread this Christmas classic. I suspect it was an illustrator of the Coca-Cola/Thomas Nast variety. Someone made a pretty picture and from then on this crazy idea of reindeer flight was read back onto the poem and has been there ever since. This may have happened around 1902.  

But how can I call this a misreading when I’ve already quoted the clear evidence and labeled it as “clear.” Hmm. Well, first of all, I lied when I called the evidence clear.

Before looking at the lines quoted again, I’d like to recall the rest of the poem. For one, this is not the only reference to flight in the poem. Later in the poem we get  "And away they all flew like the down of a thistle." But we will perpend that reference for the moment while we note that still later in the poem, when popular imagination and occasional rewriting says, “I heard him explain as he flew out of sight,” what the poem actually says is “I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight.” I wish I could argue this next point from the quality of the poet’s verse, but there remains serious question as to the identity of the poet, and the one poet of the pair whose work we could use as a guide was not particularly good at his craft. Nonetheless, I will assert that poetics would argue that “flew” is the better choice if the poet envisions reindeer that fly.  The vowel of “flew” is light and swift and represents the motion of flying much better than the heavy “o” of “drove.” Say “flew” outloud, then say “drove.” Which one sounds more like flight? Any poet worth his salt would know this.

But Moore may not have been, as I say, worth his salt, and Livingstone gave us nothing but this poem to go by.

Now I’d like to look at one other piece of evidence from the poem itself. The narrator, suddenly awoken by clatter, tears himself to the window and reports what he sees in these words:

                   The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
                   Gave a luster of midday to objects below;
                   When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
                   But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer.

We might say that the reindeer are miniature because they are far way. But why are they “below.” Clearly this narrator is looking down, where ground-based reindeer would be traveling. Why else would he mention that the moon gave a luster of midday to objects below?

But that still leaves us with these troublesome lines:

             As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
             When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
             So up to the housetop, his coursers they flew
             With a sleigh full of toys and St. Nicholas too.

Surely the reindeer fly to the roof? How else would they get up there? But do they? The image  here is strained, hard to picture, but it seems we are to think of the reindeer as being blown to the roof like leaves are pushed against an obstacle in a hurricane. The only other instance of the verb “flew” in the poem, we should note, are in the line already noted about the thistle and in this line:  “Away to the window, I flew like a flash.” And the same, I contend, goes for the flight of thistledown. It is an image seen from above of the impression given by the sleigh against the snow. It is not meant or represent actual flight. The poet likes this word for “went fast.”

So what we find in the end is that while the idea that Santa’s reindeer fly probably did come from this poem, it came from a misreading of this poem and began probably a century or so after the first publication of this foundational vision of the story. But if it came from a misreading of the poem, it could not have happened by this alone. Some other later trigger—such as the illustrator I surmised above—must also have been involved.

By the way, what it says about our ability to read poetry today or our familiarity with animal-drawn sleighs I do not know. But it surely says something.

 

The meaning of a work

The impulse, so pronounced in undergraduates, and so obvious in untrained minds, the impulse that was fruitfully brought into question in various ways in the 20th century to appeal to history and biography in order to understand the text itself has a history. And it turns out to be another enlightenment/capitalist incursion. We ask not "what does it mean?" but "what did it mean?"Under the guise that we are understanding it, we encase the text in more texts in order to protect ourselves from it, when it is in fact the freedom from what no longer matters that allows the text to bloom.

Truth

Most people think there are only two options: truth is subjective or truth is objective. These are not the options. Truth is present. By the time you get to the end of the sentence, the moment has shifted.

Are the words eternally true? Perhaps. But the meaning changes while truth stands still. Now is static: it is always now--and yet dynamic; now is always moving, a bead along a string. 

Rage

Does anything in being correspond to our capacity for anger? We all know or have seen animals and children and people of all ages who fall into a rage over nothing, which is to say that the trigger of their rage is something other than the event that is its ostensible cause. The rage is inside—fear the true cause. Fear is unconditioned. We are programmed for self-protection and for this to manifest exaggerated fear. Overproportioned fear is safer. But fear relative (or less than so) to the danger is a necessary condition of knowledge. The extreme of fear is removal from the world. The basis of knowledge is engagement, overcoming fear. But I stray from the point. Pain and death are personal. They are the worst that can happen to us as individuals. But the fear of these is not the source of rage. Rage is characteristic of the fundamentalist of any sect or indeed the fundamentalist of any ism. The Tea Party rage, the Al-Qaida rage, the Klan rage. So much rage. This rage is functions to protect one’s “philosophy,” one’s “discourse” or “world view,” not one’s mere life. It protects one from thinking, re-evaluating—which is an exhausting process. (Nietzsche would relate it to power, but that is an oversimplification.) We have an exhausting catalog of methods for keeping the blinders attached.  What can we say? Rage erupts from weak causes. Rabies. Neither  the psychological cause and the environmental trigger nor the two together buy this effect. Meanwhile, greater causes, truer justifications for rage, rarely raise it: actual injustice, murder, rape, genocide, any sort of violence. Unless one is the victim, unless one’s self is at stake, one is more likely moved to sadness or complacency or cynicism. And if one is moved to rage in these circumstances, it is not because of the injustice, but because one’s self is at stake. One’s self. Not one’s life, not one’s body. Revenge often kills the revenger. Rage is always a danger to the enraged. There is much in being that corresponds to our capacity for anger. But it does not seem that our anger is ever directed toward it.

The Puzzle

It's a really clever puzzle. You can arrange the pieces in countless ways and none of them is right and all of them produce a picture (of some sort) and there's always a piece left over.

"A piece?"

Sometimes two.

Living Incoherently

Incoherence is the fundamental problem. It’s a life problem, but before that it is a language problem. And it’s irrevocable as far as language goes. Barthes suggests we eliminate the old bugbear, logical contradiction. It can take years to understand the necessity. Thinking narratively, we want to return to a time when contradiction caused little or no bother. We could find an arbitrary but expressive date for this, but then we’d be too much in the land of myth. Let’s say that the Cartesian pivot marks an adequate moment. It doesn’t happen at one time any more than Copernicus happens at one time. It hasn’t even happened yet in some places. But it began more or less at the time of Descartes—we could have chosen someone else for this—and has fallen through time like dominoes ever since, subduing the earth but never the whole earth. It’s the moment when the realm of knowledge became defined by the elimination of contradiction—and the discourse of science moved to the front as the model for discourses everywhere even ones unsuited to science, so that even Freud had to aspire to a scientific psychology.

                That as I say is thinking narratively. Then there is the fundamental dualism of language made famous by Derrida and others. This is older and more intractable than the Cartesian revolution. (I could have picked something else!) Love has to exclude Hate and God has to exclude Human.

                Reality is far too complex and interrelated and even interfused for these language systems (however necessary) to work. I heard this week of a brilliant man who died because he could not grant the concept “altruism” extension in reality. There are no purely unselfish acts. Christ’s death itself must have had something in it for God, or why would God do it?

                This is a problem of language. It’s not a problem of reality or God. We have words that don’t correspond to things, like having a word for a color that doesn’t exist. (I think all our color words are for colors that do not exist.) We have words for things that are not things, not only “unicorn” but also “permanent” and “love.” (People will argue “permanent,” but that’s the point, isn’t it?)

                Living in the world means being uncomfortable in language. Words never do their job. They can’t. The world is particular and language is general and even 2+2 only equals 4 within the contexts in which it does. Language is a rough guide at best. Necessary, wonderful, rough and frustrating.

                Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying coherence is impossible. That goes without saying. I’m saying that coherence is undesirable. The closer you get to coherence the closer you get to living within language alone and not what language sometimes wants to call “reality” (there is no reality without language of course. Reality itself is interfused with language) but which we want to apprehend as though it had no word because it exceeds all words. It’s where God is. (God had to become the word to talk to us and had to speak the word to made us but has to be beyond all words to be where and who and what is.)

                We make a fundamental error when we put on a language and step out with no other change of clothes believing this fashion we’re wearing is the only one there is, that it is adequate to the task, that it will last through the years. That it isn’t a fashion among others, that its time won’t go. Atheists proving there is no God via science. Science is a language that rightly excludes God as a premise.

                Logic is lovely, important, essential. Those who decide without it what is and then organize their language to create their conclusions have robbed logic of what power it has. They are the murderers of God. But those who rely on logic can only God where logic can take them, like the economist who write so cleverly on the economy of gift giving. In all his talk of value, he missed the whole idea of “gift.” Or Whitman’s Learned Astronomer.  When you thinking leads you to the conclusion that there is no God or that there plainly is, the problem is not in God but in your thinking. Shift the problem of evil.   

                Language can help us leave language behind—a little behind, attached to the ankle like a lifeline as we float from the ship. Cut the rope and we drown. Language can help us feel what it would be like to leave language behind, like a flight simulator. Language is always the glass that makes it possible to see what is outside as it puts a barrier between the eye and the skin and the world. (Even the eye and the skin are glass.) Break the glass and the world disappears. The words that can help most, I think, only two. The first is “is.” And the best is “love.”  

                A living incoherence is to be loved.

The Modern Muse

I become more and more convinced that the ancients were right. We don't create art, we don't write stories. We are the place where art and stories happen. "Author," and "artist" are myths of capitalism created to structure payment. Our job is to prepare ourselves to be the place for art and stories to happen. We entice the muses like bower birds looking for mates.

Freud and Dreams, a further thought

The more I read Freud, the more I am convinced that what he finds clever in the dreamworks and classifies under such headings is "condensation" and "displacement" is merely confusion. He's not trying to decode the secret message sent by the unconscious but just trying to untangle the mess made by the image-making, association-rich brain which in sleep has no aid from reason to help it out.

Preliminary Thoughts on Oedipus and Freud

Freud on the Oedipus Complex: People like to talk about this but don’t like to find out what Freud actually said. The initial description of what came to be called Oedipus Complex can be found on pages 294-297 of the old Avon edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (James Strachey translator, Chapter V, part D, “Typical Dreams”). It has often been noted that Oedipus did not suffer from an Oedipus Complex. Two things need to be said about that. 1) Freud never said that he did. 2) If Freud is right about the complex (about which everyone today seems to have reasonable doubts at the very least) then Oedipus, if he is an accurate representation of a human being, did suffer from an Oedipus Complex, though, of course, he didn’t know he did. Nor did his killing of his father or sleeping with his mother occur as the fulfillment of his desires to do so. But of course the Oedipus Complex in actual humans never leads to the killing of the father and sleeping with the mother. It leads to neuroses. Had Oedipus known Laius was his father and Jocasta his mother, he’d never had done what he did. The only reasonable claim is that the play is not about the Oedipus Complex. But again, Freud never said that it was.

                Let’s assume that Freud was right about the Oedipus Complex, just to see where that assumption will take us. If so, Sophocles would have suffered from it and so would the audience. A fictional character, not being a person, need not have so suffered. But a character who in fact kills his father and marries his mother is almost certainly going to manifest the author’s unconscious awareness of the psychological implications of it. Does Oedipus?

                Before answering that question, a brief look at the actual Freudian Oedipus. According to Freud, the thing that distinguishes Oedipus Tyrannous from  all other “tragedies of destiny” cannot be its treatment of fate, since that is what they all have in common. It must therefore be that alone among them this one appeals to us at an unconscious level. And the place where this does appeal to the audience unconsciously is in the dream-like reflection of the desire to kill the father and sleep with the mother. Since the audience also has this desire, they will feel the appropriate and deeply seated emotion that must accompany its representation. They won’t know why they are experiencing this emotion and will resist attributing it to its proper source. They will therefore find some other explanation for the play’s appeal—though that one being false, and unconsciously known to be so, will never satisfy.

                This analysis has already gone beyond what Freud actually says in the pages cited above. But it keeps, I believe, very safely within the understanding of Freud. Here I extrapolate further, but still remain, I believe, safely within Freudian thought.

Sophocles too will of course also have suffered from his own Oedipus Complex. And without intending to do so, would have represented this complex in some way, perhaps in various ways, in this drama. Where might this representation occur in the play? I believe in three places. The first is the least important. Believing the Oracle, he runs away from Corinth. The disgust he feels at the idea that he will fulfill the prophecy unnerves him.  Nor does it make much sense logically. If you really don’t want to kill your father or sleep with your mother, then it seems to me it would hard to bring yourself to do these things. Unless a frenzied mob were going to force you at knife point or threaten you with the murder of your own children if you did not, it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which one would even entertain the thought. And how likely is this sort of overwhelming compulsion? True, one could say, “but he understood that the gods were behind this prophecy and therefore however unlikely, surely the gods had to power to make this happen.” Perhaps so, though the mechanism still seems hard to imagine. But even if so, then acknowledging the power of the gods to bring about such an extraordinary event must compel the corollary acknowledgement that fleeing Corinth will not help. Gods that can make you kill your father and sleep with you mother won’t be stopped by anything you can do. This means that it makes more sense to see Oedipus’ fleeing of Corinth as an irrational manifestation of his desire to fulfill the prophecy accompanied by his disgust at his own desire than it does to see it as a rational decision based upon an overestimation of his own powers to thwart the gods. In fact it would not be out of the question to see his fleeing Corinth as a manifestation of his desire to fulfill the prophecy. After all, he has reason to believe that Merope and Polybus  are not his parents. And he fails to pursue the question to the end to find out if indeed they are. He leaves Delphi under the suspicion (or unconscious understanding) that his real parents are out there somewhere. And if he’s going to get to the business of killing and fucking, he’s going to have to let himself be led to where they are.

  Second, the expedient of the solving of the riddle of the sphinx. It’s an essential moment in the myth, not original to Sophocles as far as I know, but nonetheless bringing to the play the notion that the solving of a riddle is part of the reading of the play. Something has to be done to lead the people of Thebes to declare Oedipus King, and this event has the thematic advantage of doubling the central action of the play, which is the solving of the riddle of who killed the former king. At the same time the circle of the riddle expands to the play itself, an unconsciously plea or opportunity for the audience to comprehend the riddle of Oedipus—to make conscious the unconscious appeal.

More profoundly, though Oedipus did not knowingly kill dad or sleep with mom, if he does suffer unconsciously like the rest of humankind from an Oedipus complex, the realization that he has in fact done these things is going to determine his reaction to these acts. Here is where the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play finally becomes interesting. Oedipus feels disgust at his actions, plucks out his eyes and makes himself an exile. On the one hand this reaction is precisely what one would predict for all the reasons that easily come to mind about the breaking of the taboo. Oedipus’ reaction manifests his own internal accord with the socially defined disgust at what he’s done, which disgust if already a sign that everyone wants to do what he has done but is afraid of the reaction of others. Oedipus’ reaction is a perfectly represented representation of the personal desire against the social taboo. The society (not the gods) is such an overwhelming force that even the fulfillment of the deepest unconscious desire can only mirror the social consensus.

And yet, I find the lack of ambivalence troubling. I ask a couple questions: what if Oedipus had realized what he had done and yet been able to hide this knowledge from the public? We do get a sense of the possibility in the reaction of Jocasta to her own realization of what has happened, a realization that precedes her son’s. Her reaction suggests that she might have been able to live with the realization if the public did not also find out about it. But the public shame (it is a social taboo not a personal one) that drives her to suicide. Perhaps Oedipus too would have been less disgusted had he not been publically revealed. He might have exiled himself without also blinding himself and found some excuse other than guilt. He might also therefore have manifested some ambivalence toward his own acts.

Of course the problem with this whole analysis is that it seems to depend upon the acceptance of the terms of the Oedipus Complex? But does it really. I do not think so. Oedipus is a character who nearly got away with a crime. The Oedipus Complex is too narrowly defined to cover the appeal of this play. One does not need it, when the not even unconscious desire to get rid of everyone who annoys us and sleep with everyone who attracts us is already part of everyone’s experience. Choosing the father as the murder victim and the mother as the sexual object merely puts the desire into its most dramatic form. If you want to get rid of annoying people, how about killing your own father? If you want to sleep with every desirable women, how about your own mother? Any infantile impulses notwithstanding, the truth is normal people don’t want to kill fathers or sleep with their mothers. If those infantile impulses ever did exist, they do not determine the later psychological development of the individual. They do not become repressed. They are chuckled at, abandoned, likely forgotten—erased altogether, without legacy. The mystery is that though sexual desire is universal we are more likely to want to escape our families whom familiarity has made boring and whom a changing power dynamic from child to adult has made uncomfortable, caging. They may always be fun to visit. But they’re more fun to leave. We want to get back to our own lives, where we are king and queen.

So in the end, the appeal of Oedipus over all other tragedies of destiny does not lie in the Oedipus Complex but in the larger family dynamic and also in the larger human dynamic of sex, power, autonomy and freedom. The desire to get away with crimes accompanied by a realization of the need for the laws that define those crimes as crimes.  

The Still Ground

The problem of language is that it shifts while staying

perfectly still.

The problem of truth is that like a very clever fish
or freaking fly
it won't stay what it is
for language to catch it.

The overarching unanswerable question
for which you can hardly begin to find the words
for which metaphor is the metaphor
and poetry the vehicle
whose breakdown
provides only the dim comfort of assurance
and the sadness of knowing
it is there

maybe

urging you closer by this
 

whose words shift

at the fault—
carrying the net of your mind
like a dimsighted guide—
where metaphors
dissolve
and wordless being
emerges
 
where the still ground
shakes
and there’s nothing
you can do.

Freud quotation

There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel as it were, that is the point of contact with the unknown (Freud, Dreams 143fn).

The Oneness of All

Rise a little ways above the earth and see

the borders disappear. And then believe

that height is the true height. A little higher

and you’ll see the borders between words

erased as well, tree becomes one with apple,

apple with bird, bird with everything. My love

for you dissolves to nothingness and all

love cries for unity with it and snowball.

Tentative Thoughts after Reading Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor"

I’ve finished The Rule of Metaphor—a book whose conclusions regarding philosophy and metaphor are—one must use a metaphor—enlightening.

One can take from this work of philosophy an understanding of the necessary failure of philosophy which is an inevitable effect of the limits of language, the inability of language to articulate even once the thing the speculative philosopher desires/attempts to articulate. Metaphor is the conduit from the known to the unknown. Metaphor always erases what it writes as it writes, leaving only its trace. The end of philosophy leads to poetry—the next rung on language’s ladder. Poetry, the cauldron of metaphor, too must fail. The final step to being is silence. Knowing, inarticulate, smiling silence.

You Are a Balloon

You are a balloon.

Inside you is a capsule of compressed air.

On the capsule is a plunger, which, when pressed, releases compressed air.

A little spurt and you grow

a little bigger. But

osmosis lets a little air out through the skin.

Your biggest fear is you will aggravate the plunger and all that bottled air will scream to.

Now.

Boom.

Metaphors of Everyday Life

Ordinary language is the graveyard of dead metaphors. Ricoeur says as often as he says anything that metaphor is what you will not find in the dictionary. Thus he draws the line between metaphoric and literal expression, between those metaphors that have not (yet) ossified into a plain meanings and those that have. For his purpose this is perfectly legitimate. In a larger sense it creates a problem in that all the fundamental corpses of literal language can be (in theory) spontaneously reanimated. We never know if it’s truly dead or merely catatonic. Whether it is truly dead but can rise as a zombie. (This carving of a man out of wax seems sincere.) And there are a number of metaphors at the fuzzy border of the line of the dictionary, passing back and forth, not quite settling into death or sleep. And finally, for anyone deeply immersed in language and the history of language, the implicit metaphors are not dead at all. (I see dead—metaphors. Ghosts.) He laughs at the claim that the typhoon decimated the population.

It’s in part because language’s dead metaphors are never yet quite dead to all readers and yet dead beyond recall to others that sentences are so hard to nail down.

Moreover the study of metaphor yields, eventually, the realization that the ordinary language we use literally every day to make plain and unambiguous meanings is really just a collection of dead, half dead, playing dead and merely sleeping metaphors that create a bizarre monster of meanings in whose belly we live and which, but for myriad accidents of history, might have been entirely another monster.