What Is the Number?

There are many ways to kill yourself.
But if they didn’t have guns, many people who would wouldn’t.
They wouldn’t try or they wouldn’t succeed. They’d get help.
The moment of panic would pass.
Many would be alive today.

 Guns don’t kill people, people do. Yes.
But they do it so much more easily with guns.
So much more efficiently
So much more successfully.
Just aim at head or heart and pull.
It’s no wonder it’s the tool of choice.
 
You may think it protects you.
And maybe it does.
Maybe there will be a time when you personally for your own preservation will find yourself lucky
     you have a gun.
It’s not likely. Chances are better it will kill you
Or it will kill your spouse or one of your children
Or one of your neighbors or friends.
This is well attested, but no one can be sure.

Keep it, if you think it’s worth the risk.
Life is a gamble.
But please
To honor those who will die
Ask yourself this:
Where is your price point?
How many souls is your comfort worth?
On the off chance that sometime in the uncertain future you will be among the very few this thing
   has rescued, how many other lives equal yours?

 

Fixing the Door

For many months

if you did not open the screen door just right,

pulling up on the handle to keep the wheel that would no longer turn above the track and holding the tension

until it was all the way open or all the way closed,

the whole thing would crash on the deck.

Every fifth time, it crashed anyway.

You’d curse.

Everyone cursed that fucking door.

 

Today, you took the door deliberately off its track.

You opened the package with the two metal wheels (which you’d bought months ago),

and, drilling one hole and putting in one screw,

you fixed it.

 

It was as easy as you knew it would be,

which is why you took so long to do it. All day

the family has been going in and out of that door to sun,

to visit the garden,

to cool themselves in the pool.

The door works perfectly.

No one has noticed.

First Contact Speech

My friends—I call you friends, though I do not know you, though I understand that many of you wish bad things for me and my people, though if I knew each of you as a person, some I would laugh with and share a bowl and some I would greet through gritted teeth, I call you friends. –I call you friends as a sign of my good will, not because we are friends but because I hope your people and my people can live in peace. I call you friends to make us friends. If your tongue has a better word, I do not know it.

                My friends, you say you bring me God. God is already here. You know this already. You tell us God is everywhere. God is here. You say that this is true. You therefore bring us knowledge of God, God who is everywhere, God who has always been here. We thank you. We will hear your knowledge of God. And we will give you our knowledge of God. We will exchange our knowledge with your knowledge like fire of two colors, like a flame doubles when divided.

                My friends, you say your knowledge of God is true knowledge and our knowledge of God is not-true knowledge. You wish to take our knowledge which is coal away from us and give us yours which is gold. It may be our knowledge is coal and yours is gold. Gold is a useless ornament on a cold night. It is rare, hard to find, requires much labor to become a bauble that burns falsely in flashes. It gives light only when light is not needed, when the sun burns. Its light has no heat, and this is good, because when it burns no heat is needed. Coal is everywhere. It is easy to find. It gives heat to all, requiring no skill or wealth. I am glad our knowledge is coal. Perhaps you come from a place where there is no coal. I am glad your knowledge is gold. When we do not freeze, when we are well fed and watered and well pleased with our lives, we may admire this gold and ask of it what ornament it may add to our wisdom.

                We have received already one lump of gold. And it is this: you call God God. This is gold. We call God many names. This is coal. But God has no name. God is beyond naming. This is an ornament to our knowledge.

Before I will receive any more of your gold, please take from me an equal weight of coal in even exchange for this gold.

My friends, you call God "he" and "him." Your eyes see the world as "he" and "him" and "she" and "her." In all persons and all animals and all plants, you see the two of your tongue and so your tongue does not permit a one or a many that is a one or a many but for being a not-two. You must be patient. This is hard to say in the words of your tongue. You see the outside of things. And on this outside you see person as high and all other things as low. We do not see this. If person is the highest of all things, then you say God is a person, forgetting that this saying is a picture. When you see persons, you see man and not-man and you say that man is higher. We do not see this. You forget that this saying is a picture that says more of what you do not know than what you do know. So you say God is a man-person. You look around and you see the world in numbers. You say I am not my wife. You say I am not my children. I am not my people. I am not the earth, the stars, the sky. You say the rivers do not flow through me on their way to the sky. We do not see this. You say God is one. You say God is one-male-person. This is not gold. This is not coal. This is that which is not. This is a stone lifted to smash a bone then tossed aside forever. This is a stone when it is not a stone. What I give you is coal.

You must be patient, my friends. If your tongue has better words to say this, I do not know them. I do not believe it does. This is hard to say in your tongue.

               

Fencing as You Go

To some degree your words are defined by your use of them, defined, that is, as you use them. Your interlocutors have then to navigate what you say by reference to their knowledge of the language and their intuition of the present situation. (This is not fully recognized in any research I have read on the subject, but it seems to be implicit in the work of Austin.) Wittgenstein informs us that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Yes, but that means that the words' meanings are being made every time they are used. Add to this the imperfect presence of any speaker’s meaning to himself at the point of the utterance and you see the inherent and practical imprecision of every saying. And this is only the beginning of the complications, but it is as far as I will go at the moment. The deeper we investigate the complexities of the utterance, the worse it gets for what we like to call “communication.” Language affords all sorts of tricks that allow us to think we’re being rational when we are actually saying nothing at all—and to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness.

How to Read Anything (C.S. Lewis, Jillian Keenan and Company)

On the one hand you have comments such as this: “For there can be no serious doubt that Milton meant just what Addison said: neither more, nor less, nor other than that. If you can’t be interested in that, you can’t be interested in Paradise Lost” (C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 71).


On the other hand, you have comments like this: “We all have our own versions, and those interpretations are as valid as anyone’s…. Characters are like clouds: we all see different animals hidden in them” (Jillian Keenan, Sex with Shakespeare, 21).


Either there's only one correct way to read a text--or anything goes.


Lewis’ version of reading, which allows only two possibilities, the correct interpretation and error, is at odds with the history of interpretation and with language itself. All texts actually get multiple interpretations, remain sites of agony for various meanings among contentious factions and, far from settling into singleness from the concerted efforts of equally perspicacious, equally well educated readers, endlessly accrue and multiply meanings. And language itself, as shown by everyone from Saussure to Derrida, simply cannot ever be so absolutely nailed down.


But is Keenan’s view any better? Lewis would have called her informal reading method wishy washy (or something equally disparaging). It’s nonrigorous, nonserious. It puts the expert and the amateur on the same plain--a way of thinking that is currently having disastrous effects in the sciences where ignorant American politicians feel authorized to pronounce on matters they know less about than school children. It’s a complacent way of thinking, an unapologetic attempt to abuse (in Keenan's case) Shakespeare’s texts into mirrors for herself the working out of her private quirks or neuroses. It may be useful for her to do this and entertaining for us to watch her do this, in a kind of voyeuristic way, but in the end, if it tells us anything about Shakespeare it will be by chance.

Clearly, in my view, neither Lewis nor Keenan is right. He But the middle ground one might reach is hardly less problematic. Lewis is disingenuous or naïve when he claims that his singular view of the text covers all the intended (let alone the unintended) implications of Paradise Lost. He severely oversimplifies the text, cutting it off from innumerable rich and challenging readings that can and have proven productive—from Blake to Fish. The idea that the text to be seen properly has to be seen only via the ways that his own vision of Christianity matches (as he sees it) Milton’s own shows an unsupportable confidence in his own ability to align his 20^th century consciousness with that of 17^th century Milton, perhaps again a naivete, perhaps a Miltonic hubris—also ironic in an essay that centrally valorizes differences over samenesses and condemns the “enduring human heart,” as a valid critical focus. At the same time Keenan allows too little resistance in the text. True, she’s actually struggling with it. But she’s struggling against what the text seems to be in order to force it to reflect her own needs for the text. She's clever, and worth reading. And her book will teach you something about Shakespeare and about reading. But even her metaphor reveals the problem. While it may be true that not all people see the same shape in a cloud, it’s not true that we all see different shapes in them. When a cloud looks like a dog a lot of people are going to see the dog. And if you don’t see the dog, I can show it to you.

I don’t think either Lewis or Keenan is doing anything wrong. What’s wrong is proclaiming that what they are doing is true or right, that it conforms to the facts of a text. For Lewis, the only way to be interested in Milton’s poem is to be interested in the view of Christianity reflected in that poem—whether or not Lewis is correct in his characterization of what the Christianity is is beside the point. For Keenan, because we are all different all interpretations are equally valid. She’s as monolithic in her insistence on the irretrievable openness of the text as he is in insisting on its closedness.  What in fact is Keenan herself actually doing if not inviting us to see the shape of her cloud?

Here's a better way of thinking about texts.


As I tell my own students endlessly, if you want to read a text yourself and interpret it to yourself, you can do anything you want to it or with it. You can let it work our thoughts in any direction you want them to go. You can make it your mirror or your judge. (At least you can try; there's no assurance the text will cooperate.) You can skip words you don’t know or chapters you don’t like and lose yourself in our own head without permission from the text or the literature police because there are no literature police. If you want to think “The Road Not Taken” is telling you that you should strike out on your own and always travel the less worn path, you can make the poem give you that good advice—you can use the poem to tell you what you already wanted to know. It might work. It’s a kind of masturbatory thrill. But you can masturbate to whatever turns you on. However, if you want to read a text in a community—and literature has always assumed a community of readers—then you will have to negotiate the treacherous terrain of other souls or other subjectivities. You will also have to negotiate at some point with the text itself as though it were one of those subjectivities in your reading group. Once you’ve had your fill of masturbation, you will have to cooperate with the needs and desires of your lovers.

How do you do this? Since the text can only go so far in offering to you the means to decipher it, and although all texts at all times exert the threat of pressure against your reading, more and more texts more current than Milton or Shakespeare withdraw as much as possible from offering those means, you have to set up for (or with) your community what counts.


In other words, you make up the rules, and then you play the game.


What are we in particular after when we read this text now? The mind of Milton may not be attainable. But it can still be the guiding principle for the reading of a text. It can be what you want to achieve and you can tirelessly seek it via whatever means you imagine would be most likely to yield it. And you can justify the quest, if you choose or if you need to or if you are recruiting more archeologists to your dig. But not on the grounds that it is the only valid thing to do with a text. Or you can utterly give up on figuring out either what the author was trying to say or what the text actually says (which again, are only ever attainable up to a point—everything gets blurry again when you focus past the optimal). But you oughtn't make this choice either in monolithic despair over the possibility of the text’s meaningful resistance to your queries or in vague (and equally monolithic) assurance that your ignorance is good as any expert's expertise.


Equally monolithic. As I was writing the previous paragraphs, I was toying with the idea that if the theory advocated by Keenan (as opposed to her actual practice) is masturbation, then Lewis’ is a form of abuse. But in fact, since all metaphors break down when pressed too hard, both methods are equally abusive in so far as they say “no” to any practice outside their own.

Preview OzHouse at Amazon

OzHouse

The Skeleton of an Artist's Dog.

The more closely you look at grammar, the more precisely you attempt to formulate language regularities, the more your list of “exceptions” grows. You are forced to face the fact that no system of grammatical regularities covers the whole system. It cannot ultimately be reduced to laws. The grammar of the universe is written in math. And apparently the same thing applies here: the better your math, the more closely you observe, the farther away the total system gets. (Paradoxically the more you cover the less gets covered, or is it just that the further you spread you tarp, the larger the field is revealed to be?) It is the familiar problem of the particle and the wave or of general and special relativity. Reality, to follow and perhaps expand the metaphor of Schrodinger’s Cat, does seem to exist not only when but also only as you look at it. (It’s not just neither alive nor dead it’s not even a cat until you open the box.) A word gets its meaning from its use, from the context of other words, at the moment when meaning is inscribed or extracted. Between times there is no meaning. There aren’t even any words. Think of sticks, which are just sticks (sticks that are just sticks do not exist, but you can still think about them) until they are contextualized in some way, as indicators of arboreal infection or the skeleton of an artist’s dog.

Staring Down Reality

When you look too closely at anything, it disappears. This fundamental fact, this fact as fundamental as any fact can get, gets too little attention when we attempt to show or explain or represent. You can explain quite well to any third grader what a syllable is. You can get her to demonstrate that she has understood your explanation and to go off merrily clapping her hands whenever the occasion to count syllables arises and never to question her skill or the accuracy of her knowledge or the ontological status of the thing she knows for the rest of her life. Try however to explain to a professor linguistics what a syllable is and she will poke legitimate holes in every definition you try until finally you and she will be compelled to conclude either that there is no such thing as a syllable or that there well may well be such a thing as a syllable but what they are is beyond human comprehension.


If we have this problem with something a simple as a syllable, we will almost certainly have it with anything more complex. And everything is more complex.


Compare this


What is a syllable


to this


What even is a syllable

Complementarianism--on the work of Frank Wilczek

When Frank Wilczek (author of A Beautiful Question, Finding Nature's Deep Design) spoke to Krista Tippet he made the perfectly reasonable claim that beauty does not exist “out there,” that it is merely a human perception. He also said, half joking, that when asked his religion he replies, “I am a complementarian”—that he accepts the principle that complementary explanations of phenomena, of being, of the universe may be equally valid though they cannot be deployed simultaneously without mutual contraction, such as the observation that light is both a particle and a wave but must be considered either one or the other for a particular analysis, never both.

So although his claim that beauty is a human perception is perfectly reasonable, it fails to pass muster with his complementarian faith. Beauty may be a human perception and also be out there—in fact, in some sense has to be out there to be perceived. It has to exist neither in itself apart from perception nor wholly as a product of perception. The analogy would be color (so, in a sense, again, light—let there be light). If there were no eyes there would be no color. It would not be true to say color would exist but no one would see it; there would be no color. There would be energy (there would not be light as such). There would be particles and waves and those waves would have lengths even if they could not be measured. But there would be no light and ergo no color. Light becomes light only after it is defined by the eye.

Beauty too, though less clearly boundable than something whose properties include the measurable property of a wave, exists both because it is defined by human experience and also as something to be defined by it. The claims of Wilczek won’t make sense—the claim for instance that “I knew it [a mathematical equation] was true because it was beautiful”—unless the perception of beauty is an actual perception of something. That we feel it as beauty is beside the point just as the fact that we experience a light energy of a certain wavelength as red is beside the point. In its being it is not red. It is red only in the eye. And in its being it may not be beauty—cannot be beauty—but what we experience as beauty does exist, and it does exist as something other than ugliness or messiness.

But what does that fact open up? It certainly opens something.

The Ever-Changing Past

It is often said that you can’t change the past. But there’s no important sense in which that statement is true. It is much truer to say you can’t stop the past from changing, not for a moment. The past is in constant flux. It is only just barely less secure than the future.

                What is the past? From the point of view of the present, which is the only point of view we can know at all—and we know it very badly even as we experience it—it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist except as part of the present. In the present it exists as signs, as traces, as memories, all of which are at least as fallible as any first-hand witness. We don’t really know what’s happening to us as it’s happening. And don’t know what has happened better for having gotten some perspective on it. (In the history of literature both perspectives are privileged over and over, from Shakespeare’s “true avouch of my own eyes,” to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, "Every age,/ Through being beheld too close, is ill discerned/ By those who have not lived past it.") The traces may be visible like skid marks on the road, or they may be invisible like the untraceable pain you feel at the sight of a tearful child.

                The point is that even if we were there we’d have gotten it wrong, and pulling back and putting it into its broader context we still get it wrong. Because there is no right. Because neither history nor any “event” in history ever existed as such. History never existed as something that can be encompassed by language and represented in its fullness. It never had a fullness. It was never something you could know.

                And all the scared extremists cry, “so anything goes, huh? Your version of history is as good as mine, and there’s no one to mediate among them?”

                But that’s obviously not true either. Some versions of history, like some versions of scientifically verifiable facts, are better than others. Science is not the model for history; it’s no more than one part of the far more complex paradigm by which good history is constructed. As a heliocentric universe is better than a geocentric universe—though neither is right—so some versions of history are better than others. And competing versions may be equally good. The point remains that none are right, none could be made right even under ideal circumstances, even if everyone had recorded every motivation and we had all the documents, and even if we could rule out unconscious, instinctive, or otherwise unknowable causes for historical events. (The very concept “event” is already wide of the mark.)

                The past is open and constantly in flux. In response to this fact, we need to hold our understanding as lightly as we must hold our memories, no matter how clear they seem. We need to take seriously other people’s stories. It is in stories and only in stories that the present traces of history are arranged into the meaningful patterns we call knowing. Every story is made up. Made up stories (a redundancy therefore) are the material out of which the present is constructed and that construction is maintained.

Your Anger

It can never do you any good.
But you may be willing to accept its harm as long as it does greater harm to the one at whom it is directed, as you may be willing to accept the wounds of a sword provided that by your sword you kill you enemy.
But it is only anger. It's not a sword.
It does you no good and your enemy no harm--let it go.

The Grey Star

Poetics (in the works)

The Healtfhul Addictions of the Dying Body

I recall Garrison Keillor noting a study which informed us that coffee was an addiction and that coffee was good for us. This is a new concept he said, that there could be an addiction that is good for us. And the audience chuckled. The event of this humorous anecdote is worth exploring. We’ve so coated the concept “addiction” with the shell of “bad” that we fail to see how much of our behavior, good and bad, is already an addiction.

We don’t call it an addiction when the drug to which we are addicted—no, let’s get rid of “drug” which is coated in the same shell as “addiction”—when the chemical to which we are addicted is produced by the body. But all drugs work only because they body already has in place receptors for those drugs, and we only have to receptors because the body has a use for them—or for something so like them that these imitations can pick the locks of the native receptors. (Not all the chemicals the body produces are good for the body in all situations or in any amounts. But exploring this well-known fact will only lead us from the path. And we have such a weakness for striking off at every turn.)

We do we listen to music? Why do we crave sex and pizza? Why do we play or watch baseball? Or ride roller coasters? Why do we sleep? Climb mountains and stare at stars? (This is an endless list.) Why do we do anything we enjoy and then do it again and again and forever? One way to answer all these questions is simple: to feed our addictions. The music we enjoy releases dopamine. Probably everything we enjoy releases dopamine. I don’t know the physiology, the names of all natural chemicals, but it’s clear that we do these things to release these chemicals which we call “the experience of pleasure.”

Happiness is an addiction. Break the shell of the word. Addictions are not bad. They’re not good either. Neither good nor bad any more than a hammer is good or bad. Good for something. Good when useful. Just an object in itself, wood and steel. Most of our life is the balancing of addictions. Learning new things, experiencing new things—whether that is a new kind of music (because you will come to enjoy any kind of music if you let yourself) or a new food or an activity that was formerly anathema to you (math, poetry, sports)—is the creation of new addictions. Addictions tie us to earth, to our lives, to life. What is life but the managing of our addictions?

That would be a good round period on which to conclude this meditation. But I’d rather leave it with this:

It was widely thought at the start of what we like to call the Romantic era that our addictions were more than this—not that would have dreamed of using that language. Our feelings and emotions opened pathways into being it was thought. I’m not convinced we have to absolutely give up on that idea. Whatever the divine might be if it has any connection to the material, running through materiality like breeze or a melody or a hinted meaning, then it seems most likely that we would experience it in our pre-linguistic (or is it extra-linguistic?) being before we would in any other part of ourselves, before we would think it in language or conclude it in logic or find it in math. That doesn’t mean—contra Lucas—that we can “trust our feelings,” since feelings are as likely to lead us to heroin as Bach, but that we may nonetheless also, like Romantic poets (and other artists) take them seriously. Life may yet be more than the quest for the healthful addictions of the dying body.

Speculations on AI and the Turing Test

In brief, I take no stand on whether what we call AI is possible in fact—i.e. whether a machine could ever be created that would have consciousness. The belief that it can (rather than the more reasonable hypothesis that it can) is circular and religious, based on acceptance of the (currently) unprovable hypothesis that human consciousness is already a type of machine consciousness.

The Turing Test is inadequate to prove machine consciousness. Any test based upon the imitation of signs can fail. As the woman or man can make you believe she is in love with you just to get your money, so a computer “consciousness” may well be able to process the signs of human consciousness so well that no human can distinguish this performance from actual consciousness, and yet the computer may yet not be conscious.

The computer would know if it was conscious, since knowing one is conscious and being conscious are the same thing. But its assurance to us that it is conscious wouldn’t be the same as being conscious. (And in any case computer consciousness would probably be a new kind of consciousness, and as such would fall under the problem of definition rather than fact.)

So what? In practical terms, it doesn’t make any difference whether a computer is conscious or whether it only seems to us to be conscious. If it looks like consciousness and acts like consciousness there’s no more harm in pretending that it is conscious than there is in pretending that you cat loves you (incidentally, your cat doesn’t give a shit about you).

True, if we ever get there, there will be all sorts of moral questions that will have to be answered. And it will cause us to rethink what it means for us to be conscious in ways that we now are not constrained to think. But we are so far from there that I feel no interest in addressing these speculative questions as though they were practical. They will compel humans to adjust their own notion of morality. Making those adjustments now, however, would be foolish, since the thing that would inspire that readjustment is a mere hypothesis. It is right now the job of fiction to lay the groundwork, not science, not theology, not psychology.

The believers in the Turing Test are making a religious argument. This is their proof that God does not exist, that humans are not special, that life itself is not special, that the brain is an organic computer. (We’ve seen this before.) But since the Turing Test won’t prove consciousness, and the proof of consciousness is not a scientific proof, i.e. not a matter for science, conclusions based on the test won’t be trustworthy and won’t affect science. Conclusions based on a hypothetical passage of the test one day in the future are meaningless today. (That doesn’t mean speculation is meaningless or that this isn’t the time for that speculation, which it absolutely is—in fiction, in I, Robot, and She, and Galatia 2.2., just as 1820 was the right time to speculate about the role of electromagnetism in bringing inert tissue to life, which gave us Frankenstein. That was great as fiction; it did not end up working as science.)  

AI may be achievable, and may be achieved some day, perhaps even soon. But "I can't tell if it's a computer behind the curtain or a person" won't confirm that the day has arrived.

Is Two Plus Two Really Four?

We have each other’s blood on our hands.

And in our veins.

Husserl apparently marveled that “2+2=4” is true, everywhere and always, whether beings exist who are capable of comprehending it or not. It’s an ineluctably true statement.

If so, then “2+2=4 is true everywhere and always, whether beings exist who are capable of understanding it or not” is also an ineluctably true statement. And that one isn’t about math. This leads me to suspect a problem.

Has Husserl made a distinction between the statement as statement and the “fact” to which the statement is a pointer? I don’t know. The statement is not true in itself. The statement becomes true in reference to a system of language that defines the meaning of its terms. In mathematics, in the base ten system (and obviously others, but not all), the statement 2+2=4 is true—by definition. There is no requirement for the concepts marked by “2,” “4,” “+,” or “=” to have any extension in material reality. And in other contexts the statement may either be false or nonsense, even where those five concepts have meaning.

So what Husserl is (presumably) noticing is that the concepts in question are such at that other beings elsewhere in the universe would, in theory, with time identify them, would come up with a mathematics which recognized number precisely as we do and also combination and equality. And it is because of the nature or facts of the universe that this would (or always in theory could) happen. Our math has done such a good job helping us understand and control our world that it must correspond in an essential way to what the world is so that any intelligent beings given time would also discover the same math. (Or if not, and we found them, we could teach them our math and they would understand it and acknowledge its truth.)

Maybe.

But it seems to me the claim is highly homocentric. It implies that the rightness of our math exists independent of the perspective of the people who invented/discovered and deploy it on the world. Question: If you did not (and for some imaginable reason could not) see the world in terms of numbers, would our math from your perspective be true? Might you be able to describe and control the world using some system of knowledge that is not mathematical? We don’t know what that would be. It might be something like direct apprehension and what we would have to call intuition, as a bird creates a nest without math, but a bird that could explain what he’s doing.

There is reason to believe that the concept of number is not natural. Humans everywhere seem to develop some sort of number system for their own use, with obvious similarities (and real differences). But they are all humans. We humans tend to invent the borders between things and then to believe that those borders are real borders. We count the number of mushrooms in the circle without realizing that they are no more distinct mushrooms than the individual feet of a centipede are distinct creatures.

There are times when it is useful to count them and to limit them, but there is always something false in that act.

That statement “2+2=4” and the statement “2+2=4 is true everywhere and always, whether beings exist who are capable of understanding it or not” may be useful anywhere in the universe under certain conditions. But neither one is simply ineluctably true.

 

 

Bolt

The Ladder of Language:

A Thought on Objectivity in Husserl

Says Quentin Lauer, “Suppose… that the tree I see when I look out my window is a subjectively constituted tree. If I close my eyes several times and, each time I reopen them, see the same tree; if in addition I leave the house approach the tree and touch it, go around it and see it from every side; and if the result of all this is the identical unity of sense which I call this tree; then, says Husserl, not only has the tree been constituted in consciousness, but I am sure that it has been constituted a perceptive experience, and hence that the object is truly a tree—it cannot be anything else. Mutatis mutandis the same sort of subjective constancy in constitution will always be objectively valid: that is, will always have an object known to be true;  I can be sure that anyone who sees the object other than as I see it is in error” (Phenomenology: Its Genesis and Prospect 86-87).

To make this claim we have to ignore the possibility that what I am looking at is not a tree but a representation of a tree. The only other thing this tree could be is an imitation tree. True, it would have to be a good enough imitation to fool the viewer, but that is not outside the realm of possibility. Does this matter? Yes. The first thing it brings up is the question of whether or when an imitation of a tree is a tree. How do I imitate a tree so well that I can fool an observer? I might make it of wood. What if I make the bark out of paper—a kind of paper-mache sprayed or painted with something to improve its bark-like appearance. Or what if I glued actual tree bark to my wood core? I could have made the whole thing out of metal, but I chose to make it essentially out of trees. My tree is dead, but dead trees are still trees. Is my imitation tree an actual tree? Is it more actually a tree than my metal tree would have been? When is an imitation tree a tree and when is it just an imitation of a tree?

The question doesn’t have to set anyone’s head spinning. The answer is of course in my definition of tree. “Tree” doesn’t exist in being. It’s a concept; like all concepts it has to be defined, and is defined by its actual use, in moments of actual usage. What a tree is depends less on trees than on what I need a tree to be when I need it. It’s my definition of “tree” and my understanding of “is” that matter here.

But, of course, there “is” something out there that limits my notion of tree, which is to say my ability to define something as a tree. There is, to use one of Husserl’s favorite words, an essence of tree. A treeness that is not just a concept, subjectively or situationally constituted. Trees exist—undisputed trees that would be trees even if people and language did not exist. Noumenal trees. Noumenal trees phenomenologically known. I’d like to think so. My experience tells me that it is true. But there is no way to transition those trees into language or into consciousness as such. There is no way to purify the concept. The attempt to do so will always cut off part of its essence. The border becomes blurry as soon as you draw it, like a water-color line or a line infinitely magnified.

Knowledge then is finally silence. Philosophy uses language as a hand to squeeze being into form. Being always escapes. Language is the ladder that leads to silence.

TRAGEDY

"It should not have to have happened."

Doing everything right, failing anyway.

What the Nightingale Sings

The nightingale sings to us a beautiful song.

He does not know he does but he does. He does not
sing a beautiful song to other nightingales.
To them he sings desire
or threat. To the cat he sings
hunger. To the dog--I can't tell.
Maybe nothing at all. I know
he does not sing at all
to the snake. To himself the nightingale sings
pleasure or need.  Beauty sings
in the ear, tied to the brain
configured to hear it.

And not just beauty, all the rest,

sound itself. Air exists and throats can rattle
but the tree that falls in the forest makes no sound
without an ear. Colors don’t exist without the eye.
Taste was invented by the tongue. All senses
enword; bestowing the useful illusion of sense
to the sensible nonsense of being.

So much of everything exists
only in our heads even when masses of people agree
on a name. Perhaps we should marvel less
on the great strides we have made unmasking the universe

than we humble ourselves on how much there is

our tongues cannot taste
or say
or even sing.