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:: Do not add up
1.
If you didn't let the pages of a philosophy book add up into a
philosophy there would be no philosophic outcome, only a process,
only a person's own subtle process.
2.
It is a source of confusions that we do not know what to read:
(Do we read the trees? Do we read the leaves on those trees?
Do we go so far as to read the veins on those leaves?)
And then, how do we read them?
Do we read a novel as a novel
or as a library that the author has compiled for herself
or as a collection of great paragraphs
or of great sentences
or of great choices?
Or do we, and can we, read a novel as a sculpture made of paper,
or as a building block which is a piece of a larger sculpture?
3.
Understanding is an act of transforming that which is meant to be
understood into something else, into a new thing which has been
invented, at least in part, by the person who is understanding.
4.
The exact number of words to mean that this takes this exact number
of words to express this.
5.
Before we can approach the problem of how we bind reality into a
unified coherent whole we must address another amplifying question:
how do we bind our experiences, actions, perceptions, thought,
relations, etc., into a unified coherent sense of self. The binding
together of reality presupposes that we have bound ourselves together
into unified selves which can perceive, interpret, act, etc.
6.
Do not add these poor fragments up in order to make a whole. But,
of course, you could not help it, you could not help making a man
out of instances from his life.
7.
A new concept of addition:
Do not add up, add down.
Not subtraction, but condensation --
Crystallization of a hundred ideas
Into a residue of one dense, dry idea.
Take the smallest portion of one idea
And the smallest portion of another
And another and another
And add them down
So that the summation
Is smaller and denser
Than any of its parts.
Wetness is for fictions --
Whether the fiction of our lives, or of novels, or of paintings.
Dryness is for equations, for logic.
Somewhere in the anxious balancing act,
Between wetness and dryness,
Lies a true thought.
Francis
R a v e n :: writings
Ted
W a r n e l l :: codings
© 2000
Do not add up ::
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