Blockquote

Preemptive rejection’s so hot.

Rev that unsymbolic engine

until they eye my parking spot.

Preemptive rejection — so haute!

Detach me from her mighty coif.

[Commence epic invocation.]

Preemptive rejection’s so hawt:

Rev the unsymbolic engine!

(November, 2005)

In the third of Descartes’ six Meditations on First Philosophy either he has taken flight from reason or I have missed something. I suspect that if there’s a link, it’s on the page I rushed through before the singleminded masses would push me and all creation from the train when the doors opened to the platform. In the interest of preserving the embodied life I have enjoyed so many years, they left me no true option but to become one with them down the platform, up the escalators, and out to the street.

Somehow the book remains dangling from my hand when all of a sudden I find myself at the end of a line for tea, and when just as suddenly a line forms behind me.

The woman who will order after me wears a short blue summer dress. She is so tall that she is capable of reading over my shoulder the title of the book that I now rest on the counter, and she remarks, “Some light morning reading,” grinning. I reply with words that are not as extraordinary or apt as the words that come to mind in two minutes when I’m seated and watching her stride west on Randolph Street.

Once I sit, with my book and a cup of tea too hot to drink, my phone reports that I have enough time to divert myself with the commuters passing the enormous windows — but only that, not enough to hunt the text with due attention. I put the tea on a table and the book in my bag.

Descartes here meditates on the possibility, at this point in the text by no means certain, that things exist external to himself. “But what then am I? A thing that thinks.” He observes, he senses: still neither act suffices to convince him the world takes place outside his own mind. He reports feeling heat; I ease my hand from a steaming paper cup and turn my view away from the gleaming ivory white sky. The cup and the sun could be my own work — the book, the woman, and the crowds all my device, the creative product of my thinking self.

I remember an acquaintance once responded with a measured breath how frightening the thought of solipsism is. This, coming from someone who didn’t live by measure, whom I knew as a speeding train laying out its own tracks in time to ride them. It was my response to smile. I could and still can imagine more frightening things than a world wholly contained within myself.

A more frightening thing is how the idea of solipsism might motivate someone who is not myself to act within the world that I also inhabit, action of the kind Andre Breton called, “The purest surrealist act,” of “walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.” History advises me to add, DO NOT DO THIS. Certain ideas license antisocial behavior, many on the grounds that human society is basically false, and if false then actions are meaningless.

As one touched by trauma, I must say that actions are very meaningful. There is another mode of thinking that’s much more insidious and much less articulate than mere solipsism. I won’t name it; I don’t need to; it’s incredibly familiar.

I’m just thinking, as I sit watching well-dressed people pass by the hundred toward the towers that stretch higher toward the sun here, in Chicago, than anywhere for hundreds of miles. I’m thinking, as cars and busses pass, as the el screeches stopped. I’m wondering how many places we all come from this morning, how many places we’ll go back to at night.

What I’m thinking is how strange it is that we all come to this one place at right about the same time, do things in the towers at the same time, and leave for our own places at the same time. And I’m thinking about how singleminded we all become to ensure that these things happen at the right times, how everything else in the world impedes our daily progress towards these ends — and how counterproductive it is to view oneself as one more impediment among countless impediments.

Descartes, I think, sitting in that soft, cool chair before work on Friday — Descartes and his logic can wait for the weekend. It seems best to sit quiet, let my mind spin down to a reasonable cycle, watch the people on the sidewalk. A few spare minutes to collect myself and gather my thoughts, I reason, might be for the best.

Right as I opened a book at a coffee shop, a Stevie Wonder song happened, and it made me close the book. It was a book for school, for a final exam I’ve still got to complete. The song made me stop and groove. I was grooving along to Stevie Wonder in a coffee shop.

When I put down the thick book, I thought about the song. The first thing I thought was, what a powerful song to command my attention!

After that I thought about the future time when I wouldn’t have to read books I didn’t like simply to demonstrate my mastery of the writer’s vocabulary (books, like blogs, are language games) and my submission to the professor (classes are another kind of game). It occurred to me that in the future, the book I put down to listen to the song could have less power over my class identity, or professional designation, or consequently the value of my thoughts relative to the rank and order of society. The book could even be a work of fiction, like a novel or ancient history or systematic theology. Whatever it was, I could close it and put it down because the book would have no power over me. I could cede my attention to the song without the threat of penalty.

Then I began thinking about having the song, and ran through a mental catalog of venues that might have the song. These included a library, a record store, iTunes, friends. I soon assigned each venue a number of qualities according to a system that on immediate reflection appeared quite robust and silly, at which point I laughed and gave up the idea.

I didn’t need to have the song. The reason I didn’t need the song was that I already had it, right then as I was listening to it, in the coffee shop. All that thinking had forced me from the experience of enjoying it. The groove became thin because I wanted to possess it. And that is how I almost lost the song.

What I did then was to listen and let it do what it meant to do to me. The thing that it did was to make me dance this morning, two days later, in my kitchen where none of you can see me, as the chorus played back in my head. I could have it on my computer, and on the iPod that I really use for internet and games and not for music, but then it wouldn’t exactly be in my head, as a thing learned is in my head.

The Stevie Wonder song is just that: a thing learned. It plays back seemingly of its own accord. Sometime its melody will emit from my pursed lips as I walk down the street. People may hear that, and look, and wonder what’s on my mind, and hypothesize about what I’ve got churning up there, and what sort of person I am by implication. That’s something people do. It won’t stop the whistling, and it won’t stop the dancing. Whatever that says about me is fine.

Simone Weil wasn’t exactly wrong to want to regulate blog— heh, er … publishing.

A commenter in response to Stanley Fish on God Talk, Part 2.

I suppose one straw man’s as good as another.

Ain’t that the truth, Mr. Dawkins? Mr. Harris? Ain’t that the truth!

Writing for you always makes me tired. Making conversation with people also makes me tired. Language is so hard, and I don’t know how you all do it. Or why. Seriously, I don’t get what the fuss is about.

Over the last few months I’ve pushed a little too hard toward writing and talking, with the result that now my body’s telling me I need a long, long nap. When I wake up I’m going back to reading and listening for probably a long time.

Have fun, and please don’t be stupid.

Love,
Justin

Here is the gist of my concern, which I type from the safety of my bedroom, earlier than my eyes care to be open, because it’s bothering me:

We judge to be conclusive and definitive what are only possible interpretations; we act upon the conclusions we make; our actions set new standards for action; the standards are judged to be binding.

The first two parts are key. Nietzsche could say of himself, “I am dynamite,” because all it would take was one disaffected youth with a funny mustache and a taste for pyrotechnics to light the wick. Past a point it didn’t matter whether Hitler got Nietzsche wrong, so much as how he wielded him. Past a point it doesn’t matter whether I’ve got either right, so much as what I make of them. There’s a distance between what one means to say and what another takes that one to mean.

This distance can’t be traveled. You can’t know what I’m trying to tell you, you can only know what you hear me saying. What I’m asking you to hear is that there is a distance between my thoughts and your thoughts — a distance that no word and no action can remove.

My concern is that the distance never be forgotten. At either end are human beings, one writing, one reading. The words are an attempt to bridge the distance, but they are by nature imperfect: never the final words of my thoughts, my identity, my existence. I can only ask that they be received in a generous spirit, that their failings be forgiven.

The failings are mutual, mine and yours, intention and reception. I am not acquitted in how they inspire you to act; you are not acquitted by what I actually mean. Still somehow we have to live together — and I suspect that in a world that threatens to lay bare our shortcomings, being straightforward about those shortcomings is a viable means to that end.

Whether, and if so, how soon the preceding post comes back to me on campus will be a test of my thesis about a radical change in the ways we know and relate to one another. Further, the quality of its reception will test the hunch I have about prescriptive responses in light of that thesis.

An experiment of this kind was not my intent, but as I reflect on what I wrote earlier it seems I’ve started just such a test despite myself. The interplay of community and text is the substance of my interest. So I launch myself into the mix.

This post adds another, complicating variable to the test; admittedly, uncomfortably, and not without a layer of self-conscious irony. I have this habit of getting way ahead of myself and not explaining things clearly. It always gets me in trouble.

The hunch I allude to above is that the values of generosity and forgiveness will be critical to a society in which the faults and self-contradictions of its members constitute an increasing share of the public discourse. As diverse social media displace centralized media outlets, so do the power and the objects of investigation (by which I mean exposure) likewise diversify. We who clamor for transparency are going to get it, and we’re going to use it, and most alarmingly we’ll have the potential to destroy each other by it.

The first question then is whether we have to destroy each other. My 100% empirical answer is that we don’t. The second question is how we keep from it. At the moment, generosity and forgiveness are the best I can figure, and how we get there is what I’m working on.

Almost two weeks since Maureen Dowd wove a caricatured Twitter around the minds of an impressionable public, I gave in and read the piece — just did, now. In the space of a week (in the space of two days) two graduate-level faculty members of the institution that is the University of Chicago mentioned Twitter in the course of a seminar (one seminar per professor).

This is to note the arrival of Twitter in the classrooms of an established research institution, beyond fluorescent glow of comp-sci labs. This is to say Oprah was small change. Congrats, sirs.

So I smiled as I read the piece. In the piece everyone’s smiling, of course, because smiles are the suit-and-ties of diplomatic relations between hegemonies, those on the wane smiling smug at those waxing self-assured. The one sets the terms, the other breaks them, and being impotent to enforce them the former notes the breach. Value is at play, and, value being relative, the play is fierce, and the fierceness dresses as civility.

That’s one reason I smiled. It reflects on the part of the interview I excerpt above, about the accusation of “destroy[ing] mystery,” which as accusations go is pure rhetoric, which is to say pure suit-and-tie. On varying levels of consciousness we all get that so called New Media represent a paradigm shift by which the means of disclosure move from the board room to the bedroom, their newsprint to my blog.

Who exactly helps destroy mystery? They do; we do. Investigative journalists, op-ed columnists, web developers, end users, readers, critics, students, teachers, doctors, counselors, soldiers, commanders, and so on. It is, again, as always, at most, a shift, a change of hands from one power structure to another, the new hands eager and the old ones unyielding. At a certain distance the dress up’s almost cute, in an unfunny kind of way.

(And in case you were worried, the revolution is on its way. Barring the complete destruction of communication infrastructure, we will begin to know and relate to each other in new and profoundly unsettling ways. Patience, patience.)

The other reason I smiled was much simpler. My two professors, both of whom I’ve got nothing but respect for, against whose intellects I am a toddler mouthing phonemes, mentioned Twitter after Dowd’s piece hit the newsstand — that is, the web. The route from new technology runs to Main Street to established media to the academy. Where to from here? To publications to textbooks. Again, congrats, sirs. You are artists, you are culture.

Updated after this and this, which are meant to be read together.

Slept in. Read some junk on the interwebs. Signed for a package. Took a walk to the lake and looked at it for a long, long time. The Sox on WGN.

What I ate for lunch today was pb&j. about 6 hours ago from web