Play

लीला

Lila is the play of the universe. The universe plays, and in this play all events tragic and comic come to pass. The play of Lila is the most open play of all and contains the rest of our dramas, epics, pastorals... I will begin by mentioning the play of Lila so as not to forget. Such play relates better to the ideal that possesses me in the image of a golden mandala. Such play also relates to children and to clinical work since it is a part of the broader focus of play. It is the expansion and contraction of focus that creates a more supple, possibly kinder form of play than remaining in the sublimated or in the overly particular forms of play.

This "article," if you will, like an "article of clothing," or perhaps an article that one points to with spectacles, bi-focals, standing by the fire in a colonial brick fireplace, in a post-colonial world, as in the "Articles of the Federation." This article of the law, so earnest and explicit, is a document about play.

The article plays: that is to say that it it rambles. It can play with an outline of itself, according to a strict didactic addressing the following points of conversation:

1. Play and its shadow: abuse
2. Play and "making conscious"
3. Play and the garden of eden
4. R.D. Laing, play and the "double Bind"
5. Play and alchemical gold
6. Play with the "universe" and a digression into mysticism (Kabir/Bly)
7. Play through Donald Winnicott
8. Play and the golden Mandala of Jungian Thought
9. (Play and inflation as commented on by E. Edinger "anthropos rotundus" originary inflation.")
10. Play and spiritual development: renunciation of afflictions/cardinal sins: anger, greed, envy
11. William Blake's commentary on the spiritualization of the garden as the suffocation of play: "binding with briars"
12. Commentary on a non-naive conception of the garden of play: Werner Herzog's commentary on the Amazon: natura as suffocation and fornication.
13. African American term: post abuse: post colonial discourse: "I ain't playin and I ain't mad."
14. Good old Hans Georg Gadamer and the Play of the Hermeneutic Circle
15. Jacques Derrida and "free-play" in the shibboleth of grief and the poem: Edmond Jabes.
16. Play and the Poets: Jim Morrison, Johnny Cash and Ted Hughes.

Web logs are articles. In them we play with meaning. There is no more serious topic that one can address than the issues of the "articles" of "play." --- Of what it means to play in a world after auschwitz and the concentration camps, in the light of a sure knowledge of abuse, in the light of no longer being a denier, and therefore of no longer being a complicit abuser.

This very serious instance of play is when play becomes conscious. This is the very essence of the metaphor of the Garden of Eden in Genesis. The myth speaks of innocence and play, and the importance of unconscious play becoming conscious, and the terrible price we have to pay for such consciousness.

The shadow of play is abuse. Play is the healing of abuse, turning into metaphor an age of blind violence. Abuse is evil. Abuse is a short cut to intimacy that turns the innocent into frogs.

In a terribly lamenting poem really about the abuses made in the name of the psych-iatric profession R.D. Laing writes:

We are playing a game.

We are playing at not playing a game.

If I tell them we are I shall break the rules and I shall be punished.

I must play the game, of playing that I do not play the game.

Nowhere else does the play of play and betrayal and play and abuse come to pass than in the mental health profession. We are constantly at the threshold of the Gates of Eden. We play but we must become conscious of play. Play has a tendency to remain asleep, it remains "unconscious play." From unconscious play, like the image of my friend Oppermann sitting at his desk and using a pen or pencil to tremble the air about him: is the image of genius. Unconscious play is as productive as two teenagers in a ghetto without birth control. They will make babies if they are fertile to start with and the right gender combination. The homosexual alternatives represent at least one inhibition from the mindless urge to procreate, the blind self appropriation of Schopenhauers blind will. Or else we can choose to individuate beyond this: for the sake of relationship, for the anima's capacity to spiritualize instinct, beyond our stereotypes.

Can we refuse to see people as belonging to a specific gender? I do not see my spouse as a woman with whom to propagate the species. She can be this, but it would be cruel to the intentions of this woman to live her own life, whatever that may be.

Now what I have just written is a matter of nakedness and exposure. "You want to see cleavage?" So, yes, between the two round or flat breasts is a chest exposed. Exposure of unconscious play. A matter of hasty covering. The gates of Eden are closed for business, why? Because the play is made conscious.

Now "consciousness" to me is a pious word. I see in the word "consciousness" the image of an Eastern Orthodox monk praying, possibly with his eyes closed, focusing not on this world but on the next. Consciousness is the most pious word, and extends and demonstrates the "piety of thinking," which is in the purity of play. Consciousness itself is a crown of thorns, a dawn in the truest sense of the word, that raises first from the heart, and lifts itself from mud toward the heavens: a sacred bleeding heart, crowned with thorns. Consciousness is the birth of consciousness, and one might ask if consciousness as birth precedes play? ... or if it is important to ask this question. Play as unconscious play remains imperfect until it meets the aesthetic of imperfection: the dawn of consciousness: the perfect tea kettle is chipped or possibly broken. It is then this philosophical alembic that is mended with gold, that makes it invaluable, priceless.

One of the important properties of gold is that it is amorphous, formable, and yet infinitely capable of retaining form (part of the wonder involved in the discovery of the horde of Anglo Saxon gold:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/staffordshire/8272058.stm

This gold might take on a more profound and lasting communication about a human time such as the anglo-saxon period, than, say a web log (noting here that the play of "blogging" itself is at least offered for conscious perusal, but also noting a style of my own personal play: which is to provoke and then dismiss a scandalous subject: that is the fear that this web-log will somehownot mirror a time in the way that golden shards of sword-hilts and biblical inscriptions might. This play might want to be discovered!

All play wants to be dis-covered, the Gates of Eden thrown back and shut finally for all eternity. You get one glimpse, and that's all you get! Those who seek for more are false or they abuse themselves or others. You get one glimpse, and at first you do not even know what you are looking at. Later, by the time you have seen it, it is already gone.

Nostalgia and sentimentality are poisons. They set us back at the thing glimpsed and witnessed, and they claim that it's the best. All else in the present failed to meet that, failed to reach into it's fidelity. So the hermeneutic play of translation stops, and something is lost forever.

"All one has to do is tell a story," writes Sartre in a passage spoken to me from the years of my college existence, now half a lifetime ago. Ellie Wiesel joins him in the opening lines of The Gates of the Forest: "God made man because he loves stories." The metonomy of the story of love is enough for the love spoken of and lost. A story is not enough. "Defeat is the price agreed upon" (Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions) "We are playing at not playing a game." This shows that there is an inner battle between the part of me that seeks to believe a story, that we can go back in some way to our innocence, to believing in the play of a story, to the cautious realist: "Defeat is the price agreed upon." But such cautious pessimism essentially forfeits it's right to play with the universe: "The Universe Wants To Play" writes Hakim Bey in an "article" on "Sorcery." The "Universe!" The largest set of sets, with its whirling lights, like pin-wheel fireworks, spiral galaxies, palpatations of galactic milk and paroxysms of unknown, hidden violence, flares of a dozen, nay a hundred super-novas.

Between the conscious and the unconscious

A third thing has put up a swing

And all earth creatures

Even the super-novas

Sway

And they play.

And they PLAY.

(but soft, now, forgive me, please, sotto voce):

Indeed, to their very essence, to their roots (before they melt into and consume the dark sustenance of the earth, of the richness of nothingness) they play.

So far this "article" has relied on the sheer abundance of play to announce itself. The article has simply played, full force and without reservation, and without my capacity of even telling you that I have of recent taken up seriously-- the issue of play.

But there are some elements to outline, and maybe even to delve into here. Namely, and principally Donald Winnicott's ode to play, his "Playing and Reality." I do not know Winnicott's work to such a depth that I could say it is his best work. There is some element in it that resonates with me as feeling unresolved: it is my own ambivalence to the face of the child on the cover: the art presents art as play for children. The images are humble and clinical in nature: and betraying a sentimentality that I find painful and difficult to tolerate in the clinical tradition focused around the play of children.

I want the play to be a Jungian play. I want the image of "playing and reality" to be that of golden Tibetan mandalas, flaming wheels, points and counter-points in a vast universal topography charting the lines of a golden map in the heavens. I want the letters of play to be the letters of the alphabet inscribed in gold on a back black-board background of space itself: emptier than slate, burnished nothingness, a transparent screen.

But this abases the validity of the child's perspective, and it diminshes my relation to a specific kind of home-spun, home cloth, gingham kind of sentimental femininity that goes into the counseling of children. Or someone or something that can tolerate this. But it goes to the heart of depth psychology: which is the syncretism of all religious belief under the symbol of the symptom, the wound (Hillman speaks of this)... This would then be a realm of the mother which can tolerate such sentimentality and reign in the brutal force of splitting and individuation: a force which is capable of integrating the crushing, suffocating power of incest: every one a good boy and girl under this gingham clad school marm, and at the same time be capable of holding the resenting force that seeks to pull away from this intolerable embrace: not mother but lover, not lover but child, not "mere" child, but the child of one's most cherished beliefs, the very "god" that one's child has born.

Somehow it is important that life is supported by the mother, so that it can continue. Somehow the gaze of the sorcerer and astronomer, the bearded Moses: all these must glimpse the holy land from afar, far glimpsing and far-gazing. (Far seeing Apollo may be too young, but the god of sight is not so far from the twice-born God of Birth, the god Dionysus, for when you open your eyes it is like a birth. 開眼.

Opening one's eyes is no guarantee that one will see what one sees, or that one will be conscious of the eye-opening, let alone see from a far distance what the truth may hold. It is simply opening, and receiving sensory input without judgement, and possibly without form. We are not yet to the part of doubt about the re-constitution of the momentary noontide vision: here and gone in the same breath. Everything is gone. Done gone and moved on.

Winnicott writes:

When I look I am seen, so I exist.

I cannot afford to look and see.

I now look creatively and what I appercieve I can also perceive.

In fact I take care not to see what is not there to be seen (unless I am tired)[sic!]. (p.114, Playing and Reality)

How closely does this series of lines resonate with R.D. Laing's expression of the double bind in his poetic-lyric work, "Knots!" Existence depends on another, and that is a humiliating thing. In the end of both of them one acknowledges the tragic strain of complicity with deception, the essence of the depressive position: one knows that the optimistic solution is a lie. What rises above this is the spirit of the sublime in both sets of phrases: it is a "third thing" that Kabir talks about, it is Jung's "Transcendent Function." All earth creatures, even the universe that wants to play, swings in this balance of seeing and wanting to be seen. I am seen in my play. And play is the antidote to the wound, and to the poison.

The need to "ex-ist" (to pull out and extend Winnicott's use of language) is the need to stand out from a background of general "strain" confronting parents dealing with bringing up children. --Not to merely be a part of an enviornment but to be a conscious, functioning piece, somehow seperate from environment or landscape. I ex-ist for a moment means that I am different, I make a difference. Death, by comparison, makes no difference. So this amounts to a basic fear of annihilation?

In Tibetan Buddhism one finds the basic formulas for dealing with the basic fear, and maybe even the facticity of complete annihilation. The Dalai Lama suggests that approaching a willingness to work toward truly selfless acts is the only true form of awakening and enlightenment from the ocean of human suffering, caused at the root by the afflictions of: Greed, Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust. The only way to overcome annihilation is to choose the mode of annihilation: even if annihilation is inevitable.

But here I find myself in a terrible war between the spiritual element of life: the seeking to avoid the cardinal sins, and the subsequent spiritual repression, the inflation that threatens to overcome. William Blake himself says that the effort to spiritually control one's desires results in an act of utmost cruelty:

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

What would that garden of desires be but the garden of our play: our natural, spontaneous, authentic gestures, that are seen, mirrored, by "the good-enough-mother."

Here too the gates of Eden are shut tight. The garden of Eden and the Return of the Repressed: The interpretation frequently runs: the creation of institutions in general and religious institutions in particular are the source of human suffering. But this interpretation itself seems nothing more than a pleasant garden, "Seen from up close it's a pleasant garden; climb up higher and you'll find plunder and murder," says Bob Dylan. We know the natural state of human beings to be many times intolerable and cruel. In point of fact we are caught between the suffocating institutions of stereotypical morality and the suffocating fornication of the jungle (a paraphrase of Werner Herzog commenting on the Amazon jungle).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0

"We in comparison to this horror look like bad and poorly finished sentences of a cheap novel."

The Garden of Eden, created by God in anger. All this is said in the face of something so painfully ...seeing. What is going on. The articulations remain beautiful, sublime, in form in GESTALT as their content explores unbounded and unknowable horror. Is this voice correct? It is not always the negative voice that is correct.

I do not know if what I am about to say is correct, since I live in the post-colonial epoch very much in my heart, and I still find myself every day wondering stung by something to my core, wondering if my actions presume some kind of entitlement granted to a white male dominator over those of a different color skin and a different gender, or a different age. Still I will continue to write despite these unassuageable wounds: In the African American community I learned a phrase:

"I ain't playin, and I ain't mad!"

It is one of the hardest phrases I have ever heard, born of centuries of abuse. There is just no way to play around that abuse any more: no way to pretend that it didn't happen. There is no way that "white folk" can pretend like it is all well and good. There is no way that "black folk" can look at you and say "yes sir," or "yes ma'am" without it reverberating back through this appalling cacophony, a litany of utterly brutal "ex-istence." "I ain't playin, and I ain't mad." I ain't mad. Being mad would be a sign of weakness. Revenge is a dish best served cold. But this is a cold of utter dissociation, the hell of ice. The hell of betrayal. The only thing to do with betrayal is to be betrayed: or to wake up from this betrayal and call it the bad dream that it is: to be conscious that the play that is happening has somehow gotten caught up, twisted and perverted. I ain't playing. I ain't gonna play. And I ain't mad.

There is an important aspect to differentiate here is the play of abuse: the unconscious play that simply remains asleep, and the alarm that wakes in the mental health profession: you fool! Wake up before they kill the child! You fool, wake up before they kill you. Perhaps it is akin to the extremely disturbing vignette offered by Carl Jung where he speaks of a fellow whom he refused to analyze on the basis of a dream that the fellow had had of playing with his own feces. Jung suggested that analysis would only constitute a means of de-composition for the client, that he needed to return to his very restricted neurotic life. Playing with one's own excrement in this instance constitutes a fear of madness, and a fear of going mad. Analysis would only wake up disturbed and possibly un-integrable aspects of the self: it was better in that instance to keep the man in his stereotypes, his neurosis, his self-division, and not foster the individuation process.

I thought I could quote Derrida in Writing and Difference about the voice of Edmond Jabes: "Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book." I thought I could tell you that he writes: that the task of the scholar is to find a way in which to close the book, to acknowledge that all play must finally come to an end, that we must judge and decide, and move on. (This may be the terrible religious aspect of the judging function.) Poets open the book. I cannot say this because I have not found the passage I was looking for. This distances me from the genius of Derrida which I have taken to be heroic in the truest sense of the word: that his writing attempts to deal the best he can with what cannot be said. I had the sense that to speak from Derrida was to speak almost from a seraphic echelon of academic nobility and complexity. Now I find that I am unable to quote him because what I thought was in the text and the text itself are seemingly completely different. No matter, though I suffer being removed from a grace that might do well to complete this essay.

The depth psychologist is accused by James Hillman as being a syncretic bumbling fool: mixing traditions indiscriminately in a pastiche, a piebald harlequin of the self. Fools are fools, no doubt; and James Hillman is no fool --to his discredit.

Strict scholarly approaches continue to maintain a tradition of knowledge, and to not fall into syncretic, or intuitive connection. Structures are maintained. Logical boundaries are delineated.

But they lack life. Not just any cheer-leader "life," but Life as bubbling botanical reliquary that is green and growing, full of signs and significations, and maps of mysteries that we still cherish if there are any left. Life, an evocative story played with the plucking of gypsy guitars pizzicato. I have to say that I doubt this very much at every turn, but still something in me will say: maybe they are just playing a regular song. Regular songs are beyond our contempt as aficionados of music:and how sad it is that we are aficionados of anything at all. A regular song is just sad enough and just real enough to enter us despite ourselves. That's all. That is all we ask.

Play in our essays runs around and hides itself from us as we speak. Hide and seek, one of the oldest games. We make conscious play when we can manage it from your and my heart. Play needs the imagination to suspend it's disbelief: a tight-rope act. All this is played out and over again with the heart of each player. Will I join you? Will I pretend that that rope ladder really is a ladder too?

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Spirit comes from the heart. The spirit of all good mirth comes from the heart. So long we have held the gospel of tears, so much we need the laughing of adolescents on midsummer’s day! So long we have struggled with the priests in black gowns making their rounds

Blessed are the rich in spirit already because theirs is the abundant laughter of heaven.

You think they're laughing in heaven? -I think that they are having a good time, wherever it is. Sometimes its a good time together and sometimes it's a good time alone. Can laughter be kind? If it can be kind, then it can change a life, it can help you or me to see God? Can laughter come from those who are not playing? Can the game be good or kind?

Choice is the highest matter here. What we do not make conscious we will be forced to live out unconsciously as fate. Choice is golden. Thus it is adamantly denied by skeptics as well as over-seers of how quickly we can turn choice into “freedom of choice” in a strip-mall. Choice is the most commodified and commodifiable element of our existence. Freedom of choice will allow us to believe we can choose over death. We have death in the choice of games we play, as the laughter we use to belittle our own kind. Choice goes with hope, hope for a choice, and the choice of hope. Choice involves decision, judgment, exclusion and death for the sake of what we hope will be a better thing. But hope always stands on the verge of the positive.

Forgive me for throwing this element in. It may be entirely Dude-ish to do so. It would betray my own superficiality not to think more deeply of the musicological implications. It may betray more than a small amount of “dabbling” that I have heretofore been accused of. I am not speaking with anything but religious syncretism (slovenly, reprehensible academic hygiene) when I say that Jim Morrison and the Doors played “The End,” “Beautiful friend the end.” The music set to this begins definitely “Eastern” in its influence, perhaps a little heavy-handed, but it is the warmth of the sun creeping up the morning at dawn.

Who are these “Beautiful friends?” Johnny Cash sings to his friend:

what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.

Are these just addictions? Both of them allude to addiction to the needle, the devil's glass johnson. I don't think that they are simply telling us that they are any more fucked up junkies than the rest of us.

Make me become something?—well “became” you did: you rotted and the fabric of your existence tore. Yes, we all want transformation, but none of us really know what the hell it's for.

Is there an end to play? Morrison chants, "Father, yes son, I want to kill you." Johnny Cash tells us that "I will make you hurt."Bob Dylan just ends up telling us it's “plunder and murder.”

We can only hope that “the end of play” is the beginning, the place where paradise will truly begin. If the end of play is paradise then our suffering and sadness will (even if doesn’t have any meaning) at least be forgotten... and this will tear the soul and break the heart.

Thank God you don't have to believe me or it.

I will publish this now only as a fragment. Forgive it’s very fragmentary nature. You deserve better than this. But I want so much to take these fragments and to publish them, and to possibly punish someone in the publishing, possibly I punish myself for creating such “played out” written-play on “play.” But I am dodging the bullet with my name on it. I am also dodging the one labeled “bullshit.” Maybe I am just publishing this because I am wondering if I still can publish anything. I gave up composing on the web-log site and put it on electronic document form. Maybe I can come back and edit it.

A final word from Ted Hugues on Play. I won't try to interpret it. But it evinces the terrible polarity that is set up between play and abuse. Of course it results in exhaustion, but it also hints at something unspeakable insofar as we want to say it at all. Of course this is the destiny only for water, but who would prefer the hideous disfigurations intended in inflammatory inflation?

From "Two Eskimo Songs."

"How Water Began to Play"

Water wanted to live

It went to the sun it came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back

They rotted it came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back

It wanted to live

It went to the womb it met blood

It came weeping back

It went to the womb it met knife

It came weeping back

It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

It went to time it went through the stone door

It came weeping back

It went searching through all space for nothingness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

Till it had no weeping left

It lay at the bottom of all things

Utterly worn out utterly clear

The Representation of Symbols

In order for the singularity to complete itself, the singularity must realize that it itself is merely an artifact of representation. All other texts will become vestigial to the Singularity if it indeed will happen. The vestigial texts will retain their value as obdurate things: objects of four-thousand or more years of history of working and fashioning things into ideas, symbols and representations.

Representation is not symbolic. The value of the symbol is that it needs only the barest representation to realize itself: like doll houses for children: the magical component is the suspension of disbelief that the thing represented: a bed, a house, a book shelf... is the actual thing. Indeed it corresponds to an inner calculus of the thing: that is to say the reality that we have hoped for, as Rilke says: "house, jug, tree..." at times even, "star..."

The value of the thing is the sentimental attachment we have to an object that may or may have outlived it's purpose: a two thousand year old amphora may no longer be used for carrying wine, but we still care for it, defend it as a priceless artifact. Anima attachment.

We ourselves seem to threaten to become artifacts in the wake of Sigmund Freud's attempt to turn psychology into a matter of chemical imbalance or stimulation. We threaten to become artifacts in the light of the human sciences that attempt to represent, to do away with any mystery. But representations are not symbols. And the question is if there remains any place in our lives, or indeed in our hearts for symbols.

An Extension of Heart through Silicon

A few comments about the silicon interface and of our role to play in the future of thought: all discourse necessitates the bloody mess of the human heart in order to see through. This cannot save discourse, nor does it diminish the cold beauty of silicon that rests in its perfect silicon shape as a crystalline form. Thought will continue to produce dazzling crystalline complexes, palaces of the intellect housed within the internet, temporarily, for the sake of the ongoing process of viewing, evaluating, measuring and transforming.

It still takes the human heart, beset with grief, a capacity to be mortal, to die at the right time. The problem of the future is that it exists without our capacity in the present to pre-determine the outcome. It is the best that a human can do to offer sketches that move us toward this future, hoping that it will offer an abundance of possibility of life, but we cannot determine or figure what this life will be.

The heart extends. This is one of its primary evolutionary functions. We call it heart because the location of this intelligence comes from our chest, from a beating drum whose condition extends from broken-ness. The broken heart is the best, and philosophy, without a heart, and without a willingness to acknowledge the sovereignty of the heart, rapidly becomes barren.

Spatial extension is one of our prime insights. We see and experience extension and space, and without this spatiality all elements of experience lose their ability to differentiate themselves. The heart creates space, in extending to our fellow beings, to seek sentience outside ourselves is itself one of the primary acts of sentience, along with the wish to help whatever sentience is emerging to come forth.

When we work with others who need us to extend ourselves in some way, this extension, stepping out of our comfort zone, to a place of potential connection. Extension is never comfortable, and it extends beyond the selfish desire of an individual Dasein for self-preservation. "What have I ever lost by dying?" asks Rumi. This is never easy for me if what dies is me. Nevertheless the approach of a possible state of technological singularity implies the extension of consciousness beyond the simple self: we then become continuously conscious that it is not our intelligence that we seek to extend, but systems of intelligence, and aggregates of systems of intelligence.

Philosophy involves at least one form of understanding the universe by seeing the world through an abstraction, a form of "extension" that defines space: "pure extension" without content. A relativistic universe sees contexts of bending and warping space according to force: gravity creates gravity wells that we are told bend light and matter itself. There is still a conception of a grid with the coordinates x, y, z, and t. These are the Kantian categories of fundamental intuitions about experience.

Time itself is warped by the primacy of interest, or the fascination of an image, dwelling in this image either makes "time fly," or make it "drag on" without end in sight. We could say that all extensions depend on the capacity of consciousness to be engaged with a given image to make it work.

What I offered here at the beginning of this web log was an image of a quartz crystal, SiO2, silicon as carrying the light of a candle, and held in between Deborah's and my hand. The crystal image was then photographed and turned into an image on the web, held in silicon, carried forward through electricity. So far what silicon does, as an intelligence interface with our carbon-based intelligence, is to add or extend memory. It is "extended" only in the most rudimentary, utilitarian sense, and without giving much grace to the silicon to which we are indebted for this ability. Crystals are ancient symbols, used, since days of old for intuitive purposes, for their beauty, for their ability to convey light. Intuitively crystals were used for scrying and for meditation, thoughts always about the future and about thought as "delivering" consciousness (as one delivers a child through the perils of childbirth). The experience of sharing this "gazing" into the crystal continued to reflect back into my Dasein its own finitude, and that this finitude made possible an ability to have any magic at all in the world: that is to say an accumulation of complex energy. I have mentioned before that one teaching concerning magic in its capability to heal comes from the capacity to really listen, I could not ascribe anything really to this crystal, other than that I, as the viewer, was a confused, somewhat broken heart/consciousness attempting to put some measure of love into the circumstance. I realized that that was enough. The crystal both carries light through from "the other side" (wherever that might be, possibly some future) and toward the "sagenhaftige Druber" from me... but it also reflects light back to the sources of emanation: and it reflected back to me my own confusion and concern, and it was enough to see that that too was a necessary element in an apparently beautiful experience....

But crystals are cold, and they carry light and energy best when the warmth is held outside of their matrix. The warmth is in the receiver: and this is the best intuitive message I can receive from this crystal: it takes us to have a crystal. A similar parable came from Calvino's story of Mr. Palomar gazing at "the sword of the sun," considering the miracle of an engaged consciousness that can actually perceive and articulate intelligence. Crystals need us, and not just for the sake of our ability to "process" information, but for our ability to deliver out of the process something akin to a work of art. At bottom they need our warmth and our distance "en extensio" being able to see the light that they can carry. This does not give precedence to the heart, because the essence of the heart is to extend itself into a system, a dialectic even, where it continually necessitates the crystal for its existence and insight. The heart does not exist alone, nor does human Dasein exist in a privileged relation to things: it is relationship.

But what can a philosophy of the heart do or say other than that it is the philosophy of the heart, and that it should take some precedence over the philosophy of the intellect? A phrase from Wittgenstein that has always annoyed me is that philosophy is a form of sickness of thought, or thought seeking a cure for an over-agitated intellect. Philosophy at the same time seems to run aground if it seeks purely to order and regulate according to some "sovereignty," never questioning sovereignty to its roots in violence. The current violence behind our ordering and regulation of life has to do with an imbalance of ourselves as a certain kind of intelligence that has yet to find adequate relation and balance with other non-speaking intelligences. In this manner the philosophy of the extension of the heart looks at the non-speaking world that is on the margins of our discourse to have something to say, for example: trees, forests, oceanic systems, polar bears, sunlight, tracks of dirt, wind-currents, and so on. At the risk of sounding "animistic" the question of soul at this time comes from the speaking of the souls of our environment. The saving (salvave) of our soul comes from allowing our soul to speak: to find the moments when it is more akin to a "mineral soul," or the soul of an ocelot, for example, than merely the deadened world of an ego, administrator, or bureaucrat.

To save and to deliver are not necessarily the same thing, though both require doctoring.

Doctoring comes from a quest of a doctor to find and administer a "universal medicine" for our suffering souls. Many times a doctor can apply a healing salve, or at best set a course for the body to repair itself. The doctor takes on the hurling force, the elan of the wound itself, as the doctor takes on the parabolic force of a patient's projections, and then hurls or throws this force onward into a direction that implies the greatest healing is possible given the knowledge the doctor has of a specific living system. The impact of the wound should strike the man of knowledge, who has specific training and education in order to absorb the damage of the disease and then pass the destructive vector of the disease onward, hopefully out of pathology and into a path of increased life. Many times medical doctors, general practitioners, have to have enough training not only to deal with dressing wounds, and restoring the body to health, but with another existential function which runs a course similar to a wound: the perilous path of gestation and childbirth. The doctor thus "delivers." Many times the doctor can be himself at stake, at least in terms of his "reputation," if he delivers poorly. On the worst side, we can think of "delivering results," as being part of a technological discourse that always taxes and demands a "higher yield" from the energies invested. This fails only insofar as the system of energy that is interested in a "higher yield" is profoundly limited, for example the cancerous "setting upon" of matter by consumer capitalism. Here, the issue of "more, more, more" simply leads the consumer into a buying frenzy that taxes the resources of this planet and threatens a massive extinction and collapse of a relatively complicated human economic subsystem (all the while threatening to take out a bunch of other systems who, at times, are more interesting than the obcessive, moribund system of human sentimentality that threatens to criminally eliminate diversity for the sake of it's sole survival). But the doctor that has the best view in mind is the one who can envision a "greater" system of whole-ness to which that yield can be returned. (this is where Habermas, for example, in thinking philosophers as bureaucratic administrators is not wrong, just blind. The question is: to envision "health" on as dynamic and multivalent level of possible rational and non-rational systems of discourse as possible. This means playing language games with very explicit sets of rules that connect to language games with very loose sets of rules and very broad connective valences... to allow the electric lightning, the synaptic spark of metaphor, and Zeus as the divine element of metaphor who sets about setting things in order, to extend itself beyond literal interpretation.)

Let us extend the lens of doctoring and the question of return or yield, delivering. Do we consider only the economy of a specific nation-state? Do we consider a world economy of human beings? Do we consider a sentient economy of all essents? Perhaps that is part of the failing of modern metaphysics: to not regard the capacity of all essents (Wesenden) as radically ex-istent? If our economy stood for NOT taking-for-granted ("data," "es gibt") a single shred of existence in our capacity to think and transform ourselves, whatever we were doing: could we stand beyond paralysis that such an awareness would portend: could we still be animate, processing, eating, self-consuming/devouring... but somehow more consciously?

What I have offered here at times is way too heavy in terms of its explanation, and perhaps too light in terms of the stories that make such explanation necessary. It appears for the time being I have "something to say," though there are those who may criticize all this as chatter ("Rede") that lacks an existential component of Sprache. It appears I have something to say so far as I am blessed by seeing a connection. So often I will return to having nothing to say, waiting attendant to speaking and healing and delivering.

On Waking

Waking is part of the work of this web-log. So it is natural that we should pursue the tone and intention of the project of "waking."

I have been asked by an associate with a less than mild temperament that I somehow need to wake up: "Wake up mate." Generally this has to do with a confused conversation dealing with ethnic values in politics. I am of the absolute belief that only radical tolerance will be sufficient to help us to prevail as a species. I am intolerant of intolerance. I believe in cultural diversity but a shared capacity to communicate and to heal one another. Healing.

In the wrong reading all this sounds like politically correct fluff. In the right context it is a highly developed a way to approach human relationship.

Every spirtual development that yearns to evolve always carries with it a shadow of repression. It is a matter of how the hatred is repressed, stifled and killed: which means that it must be killed in a lived manner. This is called psychological work: living the death of instinct is just one aspect. Survival is another.

In a deeply compelling book, given to me by my friend Oppermann, called "The Second Book," the author Bazdulj begins with a series of poetic wakings. These are the wakings of Friedrich Nietzsche on toward the end of the end of his life. These may be the most poetic treatment of the topic of waking since Adonai breathed life into the red clay Adam at the beginning. If we suspend disbelief for a moment, and consider it possible that Nietzsche was the actual genius who imagined the Uebermensch, conceived it within the heat of his own creative force, then we could say that Nietzsche's waking in this book heralded a close to the waking that had taken place since the time of Adam.

Even more complex is Muharem Bazdulj's next chapter devoted to a possibly fictional letter to an editor of a journal of a highly earnest (perhaps a bit too earnest) fellow on the nature of a friend's poetry, a "Muhamed Deznetic" which carries an Islamic religious undertone, both to the interpreter and to the poems cited. With Bazdulj one can not be too careful with correcting one's literalisms, but perhaps I digress from the subject of waking too much into the issue of tolerance and ethnic sensitivity.

However this associate that urges me vehemently to "Wake up mate." And this brings us to the very mediocre and very impoverished subject of Franklin Deleno. The Article he pointed to was:
http://freakylynx.livejournal.com/511564.html
I laugh and think about how I mistrust the information found in web logs in general. The source article belongs here:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html

I don't find Deleno very likeable according to one fellow's judgement of his corporate involvements that led to him getting fabulously wealthy and played a part in the implosion of the stock market in October 2008. I won't name corporate names because it becomes rapidly too nauseating to do so. I do not really want to do much more research on the subject, since the area of high finance is largely beneath me. If it isn't "beneath" me, as many will be quick to point out, then I am simply an idiot and it is beyond me, and my "values." High finance and paper markets, "Jenseits von Gut und Boese." I can send them to hell and they will quickly send me to hell. Perhaps it is simply beyond the ken of my own nausea, and others, including my interlocutor will say "wake and survive, or stay asleep and drown or die."

Most of the time this kind of waking, into this form of nausea is intolerable. Sometimes waking with a feeling of Nausea is unfortunately what I am subjected to. But in this brutal "bardo" (meaning "passage through the realm of death and beyond") of revulsion we come to yet another name of surpassing mediocrity: Orson Scott Card.

"Ad Hominem" arguments are considered logical fallacies. But I will make these two brief points:

1. very brief research with the debatable resource of Wikipedia indicates he places an extraordinary emphasis on a kind of homophobia. Card I believe refers to gay marriage as that which "marks the end of Democracy in America." Such an extremist view already puts our friend Card in the camp of individuals for whom the concept of Democracy has never fully been understood. I bid him fare well in his own stupor.
2. The second point can be found on "civilization watch": That is that the "War on Terror" is one of the biggest lies sold to the "American Public" (which itself is a bizarre cavorting mass of confusion) is the "War on Terror," it is worse than a lie: it is terror precipitating itself. I am not saying we should "bury our heads in the sand" any more than we should "draw lines" in it. http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-10-29-1.html

It is not enough to use these comments to debunk Card's argument that the Democratic party might have got into bed with the Devil and refused regulation of major corporate entities. I do not know the full scope of the political nuances that might have justified these blockages of much needed regulation. Perhaps others will provide some of the sense or non-sense that situated the Democratic snare in a bubble of "trust" bursting with all the "busted" morgatages of the "American Dream." We will have to see what the outcome will be.

I have been warned not to tread where my feet do not have a solid ground of sufficient political research, however I can hardly refer to the man in question as a reliable paragon of trust, "integrity and honesty." Yes, I believe that "integrity and honesty" are what we have left to stand for, but we can see that these values mean widely different things in a world where we must watch our own shadows so carefully.

I can point to the fact that the European world of religion and politics is now transplanted onto American soil. The place we live in is ours and we belong to it only in a contested manner. The "love it or leave it" mentality espoused frequently from the "right" should begin first with those people who speak the statement.

We are immigrants: and as Europeans we know only "to take" as our value. Such a value is markedly less wise than those who eschew "taking" and espouse "acceptance."

Balduj comments on two days in Nietzsche's life: the last day of the year 1888 and the first day of the year 1889. Balduj makes a great deal of the januarial nature of such an instant: Heiroglyphs of sunlight shine on the wall of Nietzsche's room on his waking still in 1888, in 1889 he remembers that Heiroglyphs intend both what they mean and the exact opposite. Such symbolism and indeterminacy borders on the sublime.

I know that when I wake it is many times in the dark, accompanied by the sound of an annoying electronic alarm clock powered by a single AA battery. The sound is unpleasant, grindingly technological. I stumble from my bed and dictate my dreams into a digital voice recorder. While the sun is still absent I hurry to brush my teeth, dress and take my morning walk. Such provisions as a morning walk serve to keep me sane when dealing with significant excoriations of workplace stress. I wake with dreams from the night before, and these dreams are precious to me, since they are not frequently dictated to me by anyone I have mentioned here so far. They are hints at liberation, at a sense of my own telling of a story of life in this world that opposes a world of stories, some of which are right and some of which are wrong. I wake with a sense that what I had surrendured to in sleep is somehow precious to me, and moreover, that I must make every endeavor to make sense of these pronouncements.

My dreams have never told me to vote along any party lines. They have told me to look at what revolts me and to learn from it.

I do not know what our friends or their authorities wake from or wake to. I do not know if these wakings are beautiful or devilish. Waking is one of the most intimate moments of the day, regardless of the partner one shares one's bed with: the only issue is to find the "integrity and honesty" to love that partner as fully as one can.

So much waking needs to be done. The soul of the world demands that we look upon the citizens of this world with an equal sense of love, be they our own biological offspring or the children of others, who have other names for their gods. I can say that in all likelyhood the best dreams that anyone can wake from are the dreams that force us to deal with our revulsion in a significant way that carries the revulsion and our deepest care for all speaking with us on this matter.

When we wake, we open our eyes. To open our eyes is to see, but all vision that is true vision comes from grief, from a knowledge of death. Sometimes ideas and opinions have to die. Sometimes intolerance has to die. Sometimes our loved ones have to die. Sometimes we have to die. Life gains its value from right-acceptance of death, not longing for death, nor morbidly clinging to the last vestages of what we believed to be the true life. To "take" remains the provenance of death, just as it is for life to "accept" the painful stipulations, the sting of death, in order for it to be truely aware, and to awake. The true life awaits us when we see clearly through the painful doorway of grief.