Simple

All the great issues of our time, distilled to a gnomic and rhetorical essence:

Should women be allowed to wear pants?

Here Come the Cavalry

Here's what I dreamed one night. I was in another city for some reason, in a hotel room, but the room was very small and crowded with books and bric-a-brac. Wellington was there too. Some time passed and it seemed I had fallen asleep, then woken up. But I hadn't really woken up; I was actually dead. I suspected I had died violently, perhaps stabbed by a robber. I looked in my wallet and saw wads of coloured paper there, but it wasn't real money. I had been robbed and the thief had replaced my good money with worthless junk. I thought that if I had been stabbed, there would be lots of blood everywhere, and I didn't want Wellington to get it on him. I looked down to see him stepping carefully around a small pool of watery liquid tinged a light pink. I looked in a mirror to find an open knife wound, perhaps two inches long but quite dry and clean, on the left side of my chest. It amused me that I should take all this so calmly. I was relieved that I didn't have to care.

We are strangers always, we insist on it, in a sort of twilight. And our strangeness is not supernatural. It is rooted in self-deceit. Its half-lit world is fear.

Fancy

If you were omnipotent, if you could do anything imaginable, what would you do? I would do absolutely nothing. To act in this circumstance would be to cheat. What's the point of that?

God cheats.

Soul Discretion

Actions might be soulless, music played with soul, earnest reflection soul-searching, the pith or model of something its very soul, a lover one’s soul mate. Upon my soul!, one wants to say, What a useful word! Notice, however, that when “soul” is applied in these ways, it can also be paraphrased sensibly. Actions are robotic, uninspired or insensitive, music rhythmically infectious and emotionally intense, reflection honest and thorough, the very soul of something a surpassingly fit example of it, a lover or mate extremely close and well matched. A pretty word, and a useful one, but hardly mysterious.

What are people saying when they talk about immaterial alter egos or souls? These souls don’t think or speak, cannot live or act at all except vicariously through their owners’ lives. For that reason they cannot be said to have the least effect on or in the world. A soul is created entire at the moment the person is, and disappears entirely at the person’s dissolution. It cannot be sensed, improved, expanded, damaged or manipulated. No ascription of responsibility can be made to souls. No communication can be transacted with them. Outside the religious fantasy, any application of the word “soul” and its varieties that we might make to people will not refer to souls, but to people, as do the instances cited above.

So why do people cling to their immaterial, metaphysical souls? Habit, dogma, pride? Perhaps as a direct and intimate link to an immaterial, metaphysical God? People believe in all sorts of funny things for all sorts of funny reasons, I suppose.

The Act of Being

Is it so strange to suggest that personality is shaped, meaningful selfhood undertaken, individuation achieved, through the manipulation of varied, complex and ramifying relations to a larger neighbourhood or family or world? Not just words, but people too, make sense only in a context or setting. And this setting does not have to be static. As much as any person, one's personal setting, place or function can and will be altered, refined, expanded, fitted, shaped, balanced, harmonized, electrified, and authenticated through action.

Actions are guided by values. Yet received, conventional, neighbourhood values are actively culled, sorted, weighted and shaped by individuals. This routine is circular, of course, but the circle is integral and alive: integral because it cannot be avoided, and alive because its content changes constantly.

I don't claim that this is how things should be; this is how they are.

In all this complicated process of acting, the play writes itself, constrained and undetermined.

Never say to someone, “Be what you are.” That isn't possible.

Honestly

People sometimes lie. Some lies are effective. The most effective lies are those that tell us what we want to hear. Our first defense against advertising, then, is self-knowledge.

This, That and the Other

Tanks are vessels, often large, usually intended to contain liquid or gas. A tank might also be the quantity of material thus contained. A tanker will transport it. Damp and secure, jail cells are called tanks. Things that fail are said to tank, perhaps after the septic container. To tank up is to fill with fuel or alcohol, by which latter means inebriates get tanked, sometimes while wearing tank tops. The word “tank” might have come to English from Latin via Portuguese, in which case it is related to “staunch”, itself implying both firmness and the stoppage of fluid. Large, strong athletes are often nicknamed Tank after the weapon of war.

While designing tanks for military purposes during The Great War, the British called them landships. To keep their development secret from the Germans, landships were publicly described as tanks for holding benzene or water (take your pick). Military jargon in English now dubs the tank an Armoured Fighting Vehicle, partly to ape the German Panzerkampfwagon, and partly to empty the vessel of its civilian and undisciplined content. Even soldiers, however, generally contract this to its acronym AFV, or retain that gem of common parlance, the vulgar “tank”.

Many a philosopher has dreamed the dream of a perfectly unequivocal language in which each utterance says one and only one thing. Innovation in such a language would be difficult. Not only would it require the invention from scratch of new words and whole idioms every time something new was to be said, but such neologisms would lack the buzzing fertility of pre-existing, equivocal, expressions: their history, their grammatical plasticity, their whole or leadingly partial synonymity, their connotative auras and figurations, their innate humour and suitability for play, their manifold and ramifying relations to a local neighbourhood or family of sense. Equivocation is as important to invention in words as indeterminacy is to growth in character.

Something New under the Sun

“Then a thane of Hrothgar who was skilled in word and song, who knew the lays of olden days, sang new words truly bound, began to sound in story all the glory-feat of Beowulf. He stirred his phrases wisely, mixing rhythm with the words, and told a wonder-tale...” Beowulf, 867b-874a.

Twin Peaks, or The Ghosts that Haunt Me

Given that our language is rule-governed and community based, its complex norms the stuff of learning to speak, how is it anyone ever says anything that is both meaningful and new? How do we say new things?

Given that the elements of every individual’s character are shared by large numbers of other individuals, that people are not in fact snowflakes, how is meaningful individuation possible? How do we be new things?

If meaning can be generated within a language, and personal identity can be generated in, through and by living a human life, might not these processes, or sets of processes, be related or similar? How so?

In the Balance

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. If you want to know what work is, try negotiating their implementation. Any creation introduced to custom’s house will require something similar, since to excite one expectation is always to disappoint others. And when the arrangement is quite new, when it confounds its idiom, the negotiation can be heartbreaking.

Of course, good ideas from Planet 9 are not so common. What generally makes innovation work is its fit into, onto or around some received pattern of values or rules or functions or expectations. The smooth and productive fitting together of new and old can be called a balance. Caught in the balance, however, there will still be casualties.

Platonic Shopping

“Hi. I’d like to buy a book.”
“Which one?”
“A good one.”
“Well,” amused, “there are lots of good books—”
“What are some of them?”
“War and Peace, The Sun Also Rises—”
“I’ll have one of those.”
“But,” confused, “don’t you care which one?”
“No, as long as it’s good.”

Mirror, Mirror

There is a widely reproduced image of a cygnet, head cocked, looking into a framed mirror. Gazing back, somewhat sternly, is a large adult swan. The picture’s aim, presumably, is to edify children. It promises the fulfillment, completion or perfection of what the child already is, if only incipiently or potentially. In time, all things being equal, and with perhaps some self-reflection, every cygnet becomes a swan. Read this way, the picture is fatal: one entity is presented in phases of development, its perfected form predetermined and inevitable. If only the swan were wearing a toque or fedora, its maturity could be regarded as a goal, and not a cemented nature. Would not this fulfill the picture’s aim?

The swan’s apparent disapproval might lead one to read it less as the end or completion of maturation than as conscience, directing, hampering, and feeding the cygnet’s growth. Even an imperious swan will benefit, however, from the artfully placed accident: when conscience, the voice or image of assured and mature wisdom, wears a fedora, everybody listens.

As You Like It

As one of the five senses, taste provides flavour.

As an attraction, bent or preference, a taste is often a badge, answering the call of the tribe. How else are tastes motivated? What sense did it make for our parents to say that we could or would or should enjoy this or like that? Tastes change; one can learn to like almost anything. Learning to like something might involve finding out just what it is, something of its history, what can be done with it, what other things typically come with it, how to get more of it, the differences between its varieties many or few, who else likes it and why. Altering, refining or expanding one’s tastes alters, refines, or expands one’s capacity to experience, compare, describe, enjoy, sympathize, and understand. Locking in tastes shuts out this altered, refined or expanded world.

There is a taste for the exotic, for science fiction, jazz, classical architecture, functional clothing, exquisite detail, solitude. Once the morsel is swallowed, all of these developed and learned tastes, aftertastes as it were, are metaphorical expressions of appreciation, requiring knowledge and skill. Good taste and poor taste are appreciations judged, or the capacity for so judging. This brings us back to badges.

If openness is among your aftertastes, if liberal or expansive is the sort of person you want to be, you will try many things, learning to like at least some of them, and judging the tastes you do not share very carefully indeed.

I Want! I Want!

Why should I shape myself into the form of a good man? Well, what’s wrong with wanting to be that way? On our being introduced, I reach out my hand to shake yours. Why should I? To be polite, as a sign of basic respect. Why grant respect? Because that’s the sort of man I want to be.

Can value be as flimsy as desire? What justifies mere wants? Where is morality’s grip on all of this? One longstanding answer is that God’s will justifies wants, grounds value. Whose God? and of what era? Why is His will self-justifying? God’s will is an excuse, a note from home.

Other answers will cite such large concerns as social utility and the physical survival of the race or of the biosphere. And these will serve as handy structures upon which to hang mediant actions, but only for people who have decided already that they care for the well-being of the whole, that they should respond to the needs of future generations or of other forms of life.

So anything goes? There is no wrong or right? Non sequitur. Consider that if value is ungrounded today, it must always have been ungrounded, yet we still ended up with the golden rule. Prisoners need chains; pilgrims don't.

Some people insist that there just are rights, there just is evil, and so on, regardless of the details. This is desperate, but its gesture finds an object: we are, every one of us, born into a world stuffed to excess with values. These values are, however, historically, culturally, sexually, and ideologically contingent, often competing and inconsistent. They cry out to be culled and sorted, woven by those who make the effort into harmonious and productive lives. The moral vacuum is a myth.

There is no easy way here – and that is important. Natures will be shaped, actions taken, values assigned, options rated, choices made. We should not expect these things to be easy.

Truth or Consequences

Why does truth matter? Isn’t it just an iteration? You tell me something and I cavil. You say, “It’s true, you can look it up.” Or I take your point immediately and answer, “True enough.” Truth matters to the extent that things matter.

People who tell the truth are honest or generous or dutiful or afraid, who seek the truth are inquisitive or driven or attracted by puzzles. Of course the truth of what you say matters to me, because lies matter to me, and commitment and friendship and crossing the street without being run over.

Telling me that you want to know the truth tells me absolutely nothing about what you want to know.

Truth is an afterthought.

Fair Warning

“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit...” Colossians 2:8

Monster Mash

In deep, dark places there are monsters. And while not all of them stand on two legs, it is hard to resist reading them as if they were misshapen people with exaggerated vices, angry, malicious and hungry. One might think of ghosts as monsters, starving for breath.

By humanizing the horribly alien we draw it nearer to us, making possible the dread comparison: what that does, people do too; what became of it might become of me.

What are we doing, though, when we call a person ‘monster’? when, instead of pulling it towards us, we push one of us into the position of being one of them? Is this a punishment? Withdrawing the recognition of humanity sounds like a punishment. Replacing it with a monstrosity that is interesting only insofar as it partakes of humanity is less punishing than than it is confused.

Turning people into monsters sounds more like denial: what that does, I could never do. This is not confused; it is dishonest.

Here’s an idea: let’s stop pretending there are deep, dark places inside of us, indeed that any part of a human’s being is permanently closed, unavailable to description and light. This will not redeem the faithless, nor rescue anyone from a criminal pit. It will rid us of monsters, though.

Songs without Words, or Linguistic Notes

Is music a language? a family of languages? It is regular, meaning rule-governed, without excluding inventions by all or any of its users. This reminds us of syntax. It is uttered in sound and written in signs. It also evokes and conveys feelings, moods, emotions; in fact it does this remarkably well. It is situated at a conflux of traditions, habits and cultural norms, just like the languages we speak. (One cannot sing in a vacuum.) But what human activity is not so situated? And what else does music do? Will humming a tune order my dinner? Will arpeggios get me to the church on time?

One can imagine a world just like ours, but wordless, where colour and duration of tone, serial or simultaneous vocalization, harmonization, attack, volume, thematic variation, sonata-form development, song structure, cadence and resolution, even degrees of formlessness or atonality, blasts, sighs and whispers, perform systematically the very functions English and Spanish do in our world. This puts the metaphor in perspective, though, doesn’t it? Mere words in such a world would be music to the ears. One wants to be careful with conceits.

To be sure, languages, natural ones anyway, have musical aspects. Consider Mandarin. Tone, volume and attack function in English too. Music and language overlap, then. That’s not saying much. Humming the chorus of ‘Hungry Heart’ to a waiter who knows Springsteen might indeed bring me a menu more quickly than not. This shows us something about language, not music: it is plastic and improvisatory. But so is music! So is everything, when related to human use. Blasts, sighs and whispers are meaningful. Any body part can be used to say something, any object, any sound.

Maybe what makes a language a language, or a piece of music a piece of music, is what we do with them. We do a number of things with music, but the range and complexity of what we do with language is staggering. Yes, Ludwig, this is rough ground!

Fascination

Cranach the Elder's portrait of Luther should be titled Suspicion. The man pictured takes nothing at face value, but demands that even the artist prove his worth. Such an attitude is jaundiced. You'd think this would alienate him from us, but it doesn't: it makes him more human.

Yours Truly

Describe yourself. What elements of your description don’t apply to anyone else? Relativized to particular times and places, you surely have attributes and relations no one else does. You’re a node, then, on a four-dimensional map? What have you done that no one else has ever done? These are not rhetorical questions. Now exclude from the list all those doings that aren’t worth hanging your identity on, and what is left?

Many are kind, many are pretty or plain, many have clean hands, quite a few are hungry, all are self-aware: these things do not distinguish you.

We are stuck with the traits, manners, desires and languages that we inherit and absorb as social human beings. Those are what we are. There are also weightings, arrangements, transformations, developments and articulations of these public natures that do indeed mark you as an individual, if you engage them in that spirit, as your project, your need, your fate, your commitment, your decision.

Any number of people can make the same decisions you do, but they cannot make your decisions if you insist on making them yourself. (And this is NOT a ‘grammatical remark’: it is a line in the sand. Who actually makes your decisions is a contingent matter.)

Meaningful selfhood is undertaken, not discovered. It is worked toward. It is aspired to, and feared. It changes. It is energetic and active. It is complex. It is dangerous. At its best, it takes my breath away. It is the shaping I call you.

The Shape of Things

The Old English word ‘scop’ (pronounced shoap) may be translated, by a fine application of the etymological fallacy, as ‘shaper’, ‘one who shapes’. The Anglo-Saxon poet, then, was a real wordsmith: he prepared and manipulated received cultural materials in accordance with the regulations of his craft until those materials had been altered into a substantially new and satisfying form. Beowulf is such a form, Cædmon’s Hymn is another.

The received materials included stories, characters, morals, wisdom, truth, common experience, and the entirety of the language spoken by the poet and his audience. The regulated craft, itself learned and therefore received, involved numerous techniques for expressing sense in a manner then recognized as typically, characteristically poetic: introduction and development, alliterative metre, accumulative variation, heightened or archaic vocabulary, punning, allusion and so on. Some swatches of material, a long story set in the past for instance, would demand of the shaper a somewhat different set of techniques than would another swatch, say a meditation on the plight of an exile. A large part of the scop’s job was to know when to apply what tool to whatever material he had chosen, or been instructed, to shape. The final form was spoken, chanted, sung – we don’t know which – by memory to a live audience in a smoky, beery hovel. Its twin aims were to entertain and to edify. Its satisfaction is as familiar to us now as it was to its patrons twelve hundred years ago: great show, fine performance, encore!

Today, we possess written versions of a handful of these works. Their audience is small, elite even, and sophisticated enough to enjoy the primitive as art.

In what sense are such productions primitive? Genetically, perhaps. They came first. Enormous changes followed, extinctions and migrations of word and body, a cultural evolution so extensive that its terms, were they to meet in person, would barely recognize each other as commonly civilized. Is a primitive shape in any sense unsophisticated? No work executed under such exacting compositional constraints as those that harnessed the scop should count as crude. In terms of theme, The Seafarer and The Wanderer explore alienation, literal and figurative. The Battle of Maldon turns a devastating historical event into humane drama. In Beowulf, the Christian poet contrasts the proud sadness, the hopeless heroism, of pagan lives that could only be redeemed through memorial, imperfectly and temporarily, to his audience’s implied potential for transcendent salvation. So nuanced a viewpoint would compliment any writer of any time.

One way in which wordsmithy has grown is in the number, variety and power of its manipulative techniques. Another is the immense volume of the cultural material it has to work with, most of it unknown to the scop. Most importantly, contemporary writers largely choose the terms of their engagement, its method, material, and purpose. The craft is self-imposed now, but its process much the same. This should not surprise us. Dark Age peasants were people too.

True to Form

Why do people say the things they do? They might say things in order to testify, mislead, fool, excite, amuse, entertain, imply, indicate, conclude, express, ingratiate, train, edify, teach, exalt, redeem, forgive, bless, annoint, direct, advise, aid, inform, reform, cede or grant a point, relinquish, introduce, agree, disparage, describe, insult, deny, decline, accept, narrate, qualify, demand, acknowledge, name, open, bequeath, greet, consecrate, compliment, denigrate, negotiate, explain, expunge, elucidate, humiliate, hurt, disadvantage, exploit, profit, record, encourage, satisfy, please, share, reject, insult, condemn or bid farewell. There might be times when people say things for no reason at all.

Truth is, though, no one ever says anything because it is true.

Shivaree!

"Another time, we went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree -- otherwise an opera --, the one called Lohengrin. The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed. There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the four hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of that long, dragging, relentless season of suffering is indestructible. To have to endure it in silence, and sitting still, made it all the harder. I was in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers, of the two sexes, and this compelled repression; yet at times the pain was so exquisite that I could hardly keep the tears back." Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, ch. 9.

Scribbles after Wittgenstein

We must guard against the temptation to use nature to explain anything personal. An itch occurs and, naturally, I scratch it. Do I use the same number of fingers you would? Scratch lightly or vigorously? Do I curse the itch or enjoy it? Do I curse it while secretly or guiltily enjoying it? Do I worry this itch might indicate disease, become infected? Stoics don’t scratch itches; they ignore them. Might not itches be taken as omens of future events? Happy or unhappy ones? Do I rub some icon afterwards, say for good luck? Or rub alcohol on it out of medicinal prudence? (Aren’t these sometimes the same thing?) Might not scratching my own or someone else’s itch be a sort of proposal, part of sexual play? A mingling of atoms sheds no light on any of this.

True, when we manage to trace out the causes of itches, tickles, pains, thoughts, inner voices, dreams, intentions, beliefs, aversions and whatnot, these bits of humanity are explained. And even if such explanations as we currently possess are incomplete, they are at least leading, and often productive (of effective medicines or public policies for example, or of sensible strategies for avoiding injury). But that some natural cause has some natural effect, while potentially useful, is not particularly interesting to me as a student of history, a music listener, a movie goer, a dreamer, a person. I want to know what roles a certain experience plays in people’s lives, to what degree they can alter these roles, and whether or not they should in fact alter them.

What clown studies Newton to improve his juggling technique?

The point is not to denigrate the science of bodies, but to recall that the subjects of such study do not blush with embarrassed pleasure, or wonder whether to turn on the light to see if they’ve been bitten by an insect. While I suppose you to be physically constituted, I nonetheless acknowledge and recognize your humanity. Does the fact that I do both of these things in English, indeed sometimes with the same words, indicate the substantial simplicity of my world, or the complex and flexible character of the language I speak?

It will happen that a doctor treating an illness also treats the patient with respect. How is this possible? It is possible if the same word does different things in different circumstances. But our words imply a world, don't they? How can one world have different natures? Say rather: there are worlds. But only if you have to.

Dream a Little Dream

She puts red paint on the backs of my hands, lumps of it. It starts to run and looks like blood. This makes you one of us.

Cabbages

Of Diocletian: "His answer to Maximian is deservedly celebrated. He was solicited by that restless old man to reassume the reigns of government and the Imperial purple. He rejected the temptation with a smile of pity, calmly observing that, if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power." Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 13.

Manual Dexterity

handpicked, handhold, handstand, handbag, handmaid, handgun, handicap, handle, handlebar, at hand, by hand, on hand, hand on, hands on, in hand, hand in, hand to hand, hand in hand, hand to mouth, my hands are full, my hands are clean, I wash my hands of it, on the other hand, hand off, offhand, take in hand, a laying on of hands, tip my hand, out of my hands, off my hands, hands off!, hands down, handmedown, at first hand, second hand, handicraft, a wave of the hand, the hand of friendship, hands of a surgeon, handshake, handyman, handsome, gladhand, open handed, backhand, hand back, hand over fist, hand in glove, left handed, right hand man, hands up!, handout, all hands, hand over, hand over hand, keep a hand in, handclap, gotta hand it to you, in the palm of my hand, one hand tied behind my back, head in hands, hold hands, join hands, handmade, heavyhanded, no hands!

'Stunt' by Claudia Dey

A graceful, lovely book, it reminds me of things –

whiskey and cigarettes, poker and an old man’s laughter
creosote and tottering on the rail
that sound the future made, the echo
the unread portent that was emptiness
the weight of living water just before the splash
the interpenetration of sound and time and taste and smell and mood
the unremembered
how as long as you don’t reach for it, it’s standing in your shoes
warm hands in a cold cold rain
not forgetting really, but the wisdom of not reaching back
the trick of pretending it’s easy

Variety the Spice of Life

Something is better than nothing, to be sure, and everything is generally out of reach. You don't have to be Everyman in order to be a someone, after all. Everyone is a special someone to somebody sometime, we optimistically think. Yet who could, or would, be everything to anyone? Even an exemplar is said to be something else; the alpha and omega of all (like) things it is not. That was some show, wasn't it?

A sum is, ironically, the totality of several somethings, themselves partial and exclusive. The Latin sum, 'I am', in Descartes' dictum, sums up the perfect partiality of his imagined, conscious something called the self. Let's edit Descartes thus, to admit of some constituent plurality: cogito ergo some. This grounds us; think of the proverbial salt. Life's better this way.

The subject of this sentence is

variation, a stuttering, a trial of errors, rudely spit exuberance, a feast, where qualified, of scattergun subordination ripe with change, a tense refusal to accept polite allusion, certain imprecision, disambiguation come unhinged and, homeless, spatterstrewn with a poet’s force at stubborn, dumb, recalcitrant realities, complexly inarticulate, a verbless gesture of unholy insignificance, performer’s art.

Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied

The baroque vocal music performance technique labelled "one-voice-per-part" is severally lauded and vilified as historical or not. Well recorded, it has the virtue of leaving its parts, its voices, unfermented and thereby individually discernable. The resulting sound has a sheer physical beauty that surely justifies its exercize. The parts are realized as both willful and tactfully conscious of one another, emerging from their grounding harmonic without merging into any single line. This crystalizes the organic character of all successful craft: the whole's constituent voices are both unique and subject to common structure.

Of course the structure is conventional; within it, the field of play available to a voice is limited. But then the interplay of several persons in league is also contingent, limited by interest, language, intransigent physicality. Pursued in good faith, however, sustained and alive with interawareness, social constructions large or small can be as beautiful as they are productive.

With regard to the historical question, well, authenticity is bunk.

Galleryspeak

A ball is tossed in the air, a ship by waves at sea. Ideas are tossed about in exchange or experiment. A letter is tossed off hurriedly, drink tossed back, a salad simply tossed. Frequently though, when we speak of what is tossed we speak of what is thrown away, discarded, by implication rejected as broken, without function or worth. Such a process is manifold: remote and familiar, mechanical and humane, public and private, symbolic and startlingly real. Its end is likewise uncertain. What is tossed might not disappear, but stain, haunt and reassert itself in any number of surprising and predictable ways. It might be witnessed, noted, described, alluded to, remembered, transcribed, relived either as a narrative whole or in self-reflecting shards of a broken mind's eye. It might be regenerated, remapped, reconnected, reused, reformed, resurrected either as an organic whole or in unnameable pieces drawn from the unspeakable body of the old. It might even cycle back towards those earlier, greener tosses, the careless cast or fling, the upward motion of admixture and, potentially, renewal. Who knows?

The Art of Being

I have told myself many times not to do this. At some time, perhaps soon, I will stop, having decided I was wrong to start. Writing is not natural. Speaking is not natural. These are nuanced forms of human interaction, and as such supremely artificial. I act in countless ways nonetheless for pleasure and profit, as we all do; why not then to express what and who I am?

For me to invent, declaim or even merely analyze publicly without a precise and certain context of expectations is to invite despair by demonstrating the craft and materials from which my very self has been created. If words are deeds, as Goethe wrote, and Wittgenstein, who will speak but actors in an endless play? Thus my trepidation.

I will try. Expectations can be built, after all, and even comfortably defined roles must be learned before anyone can take a bow for having played them well.

So much for introductions.