Oddly, it feels easier to post these notes on hybridity and something a Jamaican told me in a dream here, and then archive back to my disk. Or not so odd: Google is better than my computer's ability to search its own hard drive.
Aphorisms
March 13, 2010
September 21, 2009
September 08, 2009
Shared by An Experience of Friendship
Friendship is the con-division that precedes every division, since what has to be shared is the very fact of existence, life itself. And it is this sharing without an object, this original con-senting, that constitutes the political." (36)
Giorgio Agamben, "The Friend"
in What Is an Apparatus? Stanford UP: 2009.
in What Is an Apparatus? Stanford UP: 2009.
This quote is from a much larger discussion of Aristotle, but the first sentences in the quotation above clobbered and fascinated me. A connection or experience that precedes, and indeed envelopes, either friend. You might even say that the friends are effects of the prior connection. There's a lot more in the essay, but for me, there's a lot more to be unpacked, pondered, and tested in the notion that friends are shared by the experience of friendship. I'm going to be mulling this for a good long time.
[Image is of Barthes, with Foucault & Lacan behind him, greeting Deleuze in the underworld after death. From the utterly delightful comic, Salut, Deleuze! by Martin tom Dieck & Jens Balzer.]
August 14, 2009
September 24, 2008
July 06, 2008
Unremembered Aphorisms 1-5
Seem to have undergone a cognitive shift when I was about seventeen. Work prior to Inspiration Factory 5 just isn't there.
Inspiration Factory 5
Your enemies are the people you understand. Your friends are the people you know too well to understand.
Inspiration Factory 4
General rules are generally rare.
IF 2 & 3 are mostly short stories, while IF 1 is resolute juvenilia.
Unremembered Aphorisms 6
In the odd receding time frame of a blog entry, this post continues the previous blog about rediscovering my high school journals. I'm moving forward in space and backwards in time. Aside from a draft of a children’s story about a boy who
eats too many pancakes, Inspiration Factory 6 was mostly about adolescent pain. (One page simply says “help” in red ink). There were a couple of
sayings I still enjoy, though:
Believing is the first step to becoming.
Christ’s hands are warm because they are bleeding.
Unremembered Aphorisms 7
I was digging around for something else and came upon my journals from high school, each of which I referred to as an "Inspiration Factory." I just finished leafing through Inspiration Factory 7 and have concluded the following:
1> I was a depressed youngster. It would have been good to have been in therapy.
2> Then again, much of the maudlin and macabre moments in these journals (not to mention the towering self-importance) are not unusual for a high school teen.
3> I was religious, but more interested in theology than Jesus.
4> Occasionally I'd crack off something decent.
So I give you the five halfway respectable aphorisms of Inspiration Factory 7 in all their self-congratulatory splendor:
When one seeks inner beauty, they cannot assume all sought
inwards is beautiful.
What goes up must
come down. Except that which was up to begin with.
If you want to see a man with all the answers, try the
graveyard.
If it wasn’t fleeting, would it still be glory?
Show me a room with five men who believe themselves to be
wise, and I will show you a room where five men each believe that they are
seated with four fools.
Master Kong
"They must often change who would be constant in happiness or
wisdom."
What surprised me about this quote initially was that it came not from a Daoist text, but Confucius. English-speaking scholars of Daoism like to complain about how poorly it is understood and appreciated when compared to Buddhism. But both of them seem to flourish in the West when compared to Confucianism. Of China's three major (intermingled) religions, surely Confucianism is the least understood in the United States, and the least attractive to people outside of Chinese American communities.
Why is this? Surely we can't blame it solely on Charlie Chan stereotypes and fortune cookies. I suspect that if you scratch a little deeper, you'll find US culture's traditional hostility to Catholicism (as a religion of supposedly empty forms and superstitions, of rituals people supposedly follow without an inner core of conviction or belief in a set of propositions about faith).
On top of all this, you have the additional cultural hurdle that Confucianism was traditionally a religion of bureaucrats. It's hard to remember that once upon a time (the seventeenth and eighteenth century, to be exact), European intellectuals admired Chinese bureaucracy as a merit-based alternative to inherited feudal privileges. My, how times have changed. From the magnates of Silicon Valley to right wing nutters, bureaucracy is widely considered to be the enemy of all that is desirable, an unwieldy glove hampering the invisible hand of the marketplace.
And yet, can a billion people be so terribly wrong? If it's really as bad as all that, would anything function at all? So I'm trying to learn how to take a new look at Confucianism. But step one, at least for me, is identifying the factors and cultural legacies that make this hard to do.
July 05, 2008
Sages Are Like a Mirror
Sages are like a mirror--
They neither see things off
nor go out to meet them.
They respond to everything
without storing anything up.
They are thus never injured
through the myriad transformations they undergo.
--Huainazi, 6
cited in Ames & Hall's translation
of the Dao de Jing, 101
