* :: Do not add up
 
 
 
 
36.
 
Thomas Nagel asks the question, "What is it like to be a bat?" Or more generally, what is it like to map yourself onto some other entity with consciousness. What if I map myself onto a whale, dog, the President, my mom, a tiger, etc.? What creeps up for me is, what if I map myself onto "I"? What then?
 
 
37.
 
Have I changed my body to fit into these rooms or have I built these rooms in accordance with my body? Similarly, but strangely: Have I altered my actions and outlook to fit a political or philosophic climate? Or is it the other way around?
 
 
38.
 
Why do I write? One more reason for you: to compete with Rilke, Neruda, Eliot, Brautigan, Sexton -- mainly to know what is strong enough in them to compete with, mainly knowing what poetry is in all its forms and understanding it from the inside as if breath.
 
 
39.
 
Maybe this is our picture of words working together: Concept1Concept2
 
Obviously, we cannot use either entire concept, but only a portion of each extended. If the joint concept 'Concept1Concept2' is in a sentence then Concept1 must pick out aspects of Concept2 such that Concept2 will pick out aspects of Concept1 such that Concept1 will pick out aspects of Concept2.
 
 
40.
 
Y told you X, so is X your X? or is it still Y's X?
A question of intimacy.
If you are really intimate with a piece of knowledge and love that sort of knowledge then the definition that you were originally given fades away and the knowledge becomes yours. It begins to have your definition attached to it, but this definition is only seen by you. We must be careful not to think that everybody knows our loving definitions.
 
 
41.
 
There is this intrinsic subjective nature of experience, but there is always an object which experience goes with and that object is not subjective, it is full of physics and biology. But a phenomenological experience has only an interpretation of that object and must remain subjective.
 
 
42.
    Hey screen of life,
    hey thing I view --
    I must be an expert on
    the words you spin.
 
43.
    Idea:
     
    An art show of props from literature:
     
    1) The watch from The Sound and the Fury,
    2) The tarot card from The Wasteland,
    3) The tree in Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees,
    etc.
 
44.
    Essay:
     
    Gertrude Stein on deathbed:
    "What is the answer? (silence)
    Well then, what is the question?"
     
    +
    Joseph Beuys "Art is the riddle and man is the solution."
 
45.
 
Sure, let's get down to the simplest thing. But let's begin by stating how far down that simplest thing will be and what form it will take.
 
 
46.
    A leaf just said, "You know it's really
    funny, if you switch the letters of 'love' around
    you get 'vole'. So I have come to the conclusion
    that love is a vole and that it is evolving continually
    because of the mere fact that if you switch
    the letters of 'love' around in another way
    you get 'evol' sort of like evolving, ehh?"
     
    That's what studying linguistics does.
 
47.
 
I have swam upstream to my own beginnings -- now there is still more stream. I must have begun in the middle of a movie. I hope it was an uplifting movie, not too pretentious, but intellectual and funny.
 
 
48.
 
What words feel the best to say aloud?
This discovery would lead to some understanding of the physical side of spirituality. Possibly these words are religious words.
 
 
49.
    My new name -- Yossarian Estragon Severin
    The initials: Y.E.S
     
    **********************
     
    Jackson Domain.
    (Isn't that a great name?
    Sort of like the domain of Jackson.)
 
50.
 
"One can say that meaning drops out of language; because what a proposition means is told by yet another proposition." Wittgenstein, from Philisophical Grammar
    I built a house of words --
    not just words, but entire books.
    One wall was of Rilke,
    making me make a life
    worthy of praise.
    One wall was of Whitman,
    "Old Walter writing of his
    perfect dream of Walt."
    The other two walls
    seemed to guess
    at what they were made of.
    They guessed, yet they existed
    and I read them --
    and I read the whole house --
    It was not like anything,
    yet it existed
    and somewhere in my life
    there emerged a puddle of meaning
    which took exactly as many words
    to say it
    as my house was built with.
 
51.
 
Time is the selective accumulation of things.
Those things have become and the battle between those things (or dualities or obstacles or ideas) has been fought. And from this fight a decision has been made. These are actual battles between actual events, ideas, etc. Access to these battles and their outcome is gained through personal memory
or
impersonal history.
If we destroy the clock we destroy the actual battles and their outcomes, but we never destroy the potential battles which exist without time in everyone. Potential battles are always in a state of becoming, they are the framework (word, receptacle, etc.). We gain access to these battles through myth. No actual battle or potential battle is ever victorious because of the unique character of the potential battle. The potential battle is always in a state of becoming, it never/always is occurring. No victory is possible in the potential battle because an outcome is impossible without the progression of time. A victory signifies progression and a potential battle allows none. There is no victory in an actual battle because a victory within the actual battle does not destroy the impossibility of an outcome in the potential battle, and an actual battle "houses" both the actual battle and the potential battle. All myths exist at all times; the actual battle pulls them out for us to look at, but the outcome of that battle does not alter the impossibility of an outcome in the myth. This may be one of the reasons that myths are timeless and that their relevance does not decrease; they are absolutely unresolvable.
 
 
52.
 
A city is like a house on which you plan to build an addition. You buy a small house when you're young, poor, and have just gotten married. After a year or so you have a baby and decide that you need to add an extra room onto the house. Now, if you hadn't planned on building the extra room your house can begin to look fairly ridiculous and the unplanned addition can create unintended communication and travel patterns which will perhaps lead to divisions within the family and a change in the location of the main meeting-room of the house (example: you used to have breakfast in the kitchen every morning but now you eat breakfast in bed). These changes need not be seen as detrimental, but can be if they are not consciously decided upon and planned for. A city is like this, with every new suburb the flow of communication and the emphasis of the city changes. This need not be bad, but it will be if the consequences are not taken into account and planned for. A city must have a blueprint which does not cease after the city's completion. In essence, the plan for a city should be a set of directions which leads to another set of directions ad infinitum.
 
 
53.
 
A philosopher must be a writer, otherwise a student of theirs will have to invent their philosophy. We know Socrates primarily by reading Plato. We know only Plato's invention of Socrates. This process of invention is two-fold. First, Plato invented Socrates for himself and then he invented Socrates for a reader. We invent even those people who we talk to everyday -- we hear them say something and we place that thing within our invention of that person, and if that thing is enough to shock us we either throw away the thing that they said or else we reinvent our invention of that person. What I would like to say is that even when we write about ourselves, even when we think of ourselves, we are inventing our version of ourselves (much like when Jorge Luis Borges said that Walter Whitman invented Walt as Walter's perfect protagonist). And if I do something which is shocking to me I can either throw away that action or reinvent my invention of myself.
 
 
54.
 
Whatever is here, I am nowhere obligated to tell you all of it. I am only obligated to select --
(In the process of making his readymades, Duchamp made the selection of the object of art part of the creative act). Whatever is here, I am nowhere obliged to tell myself all of it. I am only obliged to select an instance of coherence for my senses.
 
 
55.
 
Whatever the scene might be in an ontologically objective sense I am only obliged to present to myself a subjective scene which is coherent enough such that I would feel (at least most of the time) that I was sensing an epistemologically objective scene.
 
 
56.
 
The world is all that is in my library; the world is all that is in my obsessive compulsive filing cabinet. Everything that does not fit into my library is not noticed and is therefore not part of my world. However, there are items (ideas, paintings, theories, people, etc.) which would fit into categories close to those categories which are in my library. Those items create new categories for themselves. These new items expand my library and as a by-product they expand what my definition of the world consists of; they expand what I am willing to see.
 
 
57.
 
If there are smaller things that a thing can be divided into I do not know of them or at least I must force myself to know them. I naturally see the cup as a cup and myself as an individual. I bind both the cup and myself into wholes in one single strength of an instant.
 
 
58.
 
If we have numerous selves do we have numerous soulmates? Well, what I am saying is that if we have a different self for each stage of our life then we hopefully meet someone who is our soulmate during each of those stages. When I was in ninth grade my honors geometry teacher, Mr. Gower, had days which he called "bag-days" for us to discuss issues that impended on our young lives. One such day we were discussing the topic of what the perfect lover would consist of and he said that for him any potential lover would have to have the ability to change.
 
 
59.
 
My girlfriend and I have recently been talking about the possibility of being with other people. I realized that what bothered me about being with other people was not the actual act of having sex with someone else -- what bothered me was that our language-body, (which we have created over years and which I think encompasses everything), would be severely limited. There would be certain things that we would no longer be able to talk about. What bothers me about her being with other people is that to do that she would have to create an entire language-body between her and her new lover which I would not be privy to and which she could not explain to me because she would be there in the thick of that language-body and I would not be.
 
 
60.
    I'm underlining words because I don't know where to go with sunrises, because I don't know where to go with sentences kept on the window-sill, waiting for a book.
 
61.
 
When we think about wanting to experience new things we often disregard our own experiences. We do not see them as experiences because we have already lived them or are living them now.
 
 
62.
 
Alyette said, "Something like a self, something like a grain of sand within an entire handful of sand."
 
 
 

Do not add up :: /