A Weedy Florilegium

August 21, 2008

A submerged self-refutation

Tag(s): Theology – Posted @ 2:47 am Permalink

Why atheism today? — “The father” in God is thoroughly refuted; likewise “the judge”, “the rewarder”. Likewise his “free will”: he does not hear — and if he heard he would still not know how to help. The worst thing is: he seems incapable of making himself clearly understood: is he himself vague about what he means? — These are what, in the course of many conversations, asking and listening, I found to be the causes of the decline of European theism; it seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth — but that it rejects the theistic answer with profound mistrust.
Beyond Good and Evil; The Religious Nature; Nietzsche [my emphasis]

August 16, 2008

Politely Politely

Tag(s): Poetry – Posted @ 12:59 am Permalink

And how might I say “the beauty of ideas”
Relates to the idea of beauty,
If it in notion relates? If this notion relates,
It presupposes that it relates.
Which precedes, we ask?

Dwindling into itself does the question,
and I careen past it again and again.

In asking, I have taken what of it that is there,
There determining; and I have said what it has
Determined, though sanctioned by that it has
Determined. Standing static to the idea

Of beauty is, presumably, those ideas which
I find beautiful. Does the beauty of ideas
Give me the idea of beauty or is it my act
Of speaking through the beauty of ideas?

The act; the beauty; the idea; no idea acts,
But neither do we see “beauty” acting; or
Beauty acting; is “beauty” an act of itself?

Who finds therein the quote what is outside of it?
The subject entreats its own proclivity as subject;
Politely though seeming, but trampling in fact.

August 4, 2008

Elements

Tag(s): Photo – Posted @ 1:49 pm Permalink

Warlock

Wizard

Druid

Tim

Dirty Version of a Critique on Modo-onto-arguments

Tag(s): Poetry, Philosophy – Posted @ 1:32 pm Permalink

This will be a rant of the sort that seems trivial to most, in a way similar to the perception most have of philosophy. It’s the idle man’s game; as if the presupposition were discreet that any other discourse (most importantly theirs) actually does anything proper; that is, insofar as their “conscious axioms and premises” are concerned. And this will be their charge: you use jargon, whether conscious or not; speak my language! Let’s see you drown in your messy literature; I see you suffocating as if that were an art form (fumble the translation into a common tongue).

Despite those (supposedly) performative trips, the hidden premise is not so couched as one might think; through the fault lines of language, your discourse harbors calamitous wounds. My prayer each day is that proponents as such never see them; the feeling I bear is similar to the one the atheist carries in “defending” the theist’s psychological need. The lies reek of humanity, of humanism, as if the nature of man, supposing their is one, can defend legitimately the extensions of man’s trivial intellectual aesthetic crisis. But we call it now “rational”, now “emotional,” as if we’ve made any real move from our “collective source.”

We find ourselves in situations like the paragraph that precedes, ranting like mad fools through the day as if an engine of victorious wit. We rumble, roar, stomp and persuade from sources we think we thought we knew very well of and even the sentence has been given a “memory.” Language has no memory; what it involves is use. But I traverse the lines and I find no signs of my knowledge on my part or yours. Is language poetic? Is it philosophical?

One will say that it is a simple thing. The simplicity comes from the event of my saying it is so; where the contradiction presumably lies is therein what I say, rather than that I say it rather than that I not. So we stumble, so many think, and despite my shouts (to those naïve: as if I were shouting as a philosopher to philosophers, rather than as an indiscernible, an invalid, a part, like the rest), into what is called “necessity.” Abhorrent lines of philosophical and poetic filth follow like vomit from this concept, as if “necessity” were not only a more emphatic way of breathing, heaving, and shouting–”necessity! necessity!” No; instead, it tells you a story, so they say, of something grand but natural. In those eyes, a “way” is projected. It is a cacophonous event (because I have to repeat it aloud to ensure myself of what has transpired) to witness value prescribed and then transcendentally so; weeping is my reaction to the continual equivocating moans of agents. Yet I have to defend myself as if I had a position. Of course, I know this is where rants usually end up. Necessity is a motherfucker.

July 30, 2008

Use your inside roar

Tag(s): Poetry – Posted @ 12:59 am Permalink

My self-referential inside jokes will smother
your outside jokes in an evidently tragic-looking
event of ostentatious flagellation and suffocation,
bringing the embarrassing night to a disturbing
session of gimped witticisms and idle racial slurs.

July 17, 2008

Prayer in Philosophy

Tag(s): Philosophy – Posted @ 2:16 am Permalink

Outwardly what one sees is the closing of eyes and some tradition drenched gestures, but most disgustingly, in my view, it is the shutting of one’s eyes, the overt rejection of the experiential, that perturbs my own spirit. The pretense of it is that one is jousting some manifest materialism, even the stark dogmas of naturalism, as awkward as that sounds. As if an act of prayer itself were an argument with a logic or philosophical school. One may commend herself for condemning the experiential; but what is the comparison to philosophy that I seek?

In barring a faculty of the senses, a secret is introduced to one’s self. That secret is of the trajectories of experiences which one can only assume carry on outside of the self-induced event. The secret becomes what one keeps from herself. With eyes closed, the world becomes a secret of a serious whole. What is presumed is that virtue is contained in the activity of this secret one bears–therewith a burden is redeemed only if it is told, but a vice, as the pretense goes, necessarily corresponds.

But in condemning those objects, hidden away by subject-reclusivity, I see a likeness to that philosopher who, in most cases I say, travels on the road of concepts, devoid of attachment because of the principle of the endeavor. The venture of analysis seems to presume a correspondence with reality that brushes me as an article of faith one must take. The cognitions one perceives in taking those careful linguistic steps, in crafting cautiously, seems so remarkably like the shutting of one’s eyes.

The philosopher in the right mood walks so dangerously close to flavors of piety. Often does this comparison consummate my own dejection.

July 14, 2008

From Landlord to Lame

Tag(s): Poetry – Posted @ 11:12 pm Permalink

Bound to the rigid necessity of another’s web
Each of us will toggle, as if condemned to freedom,
A perspective, produced from the ebbing of naught,
Where troubled coffins loom without expiration

Exasperating will be the rigor of our chains, but
Compelling will be the harmony which they bear
Therein, as if from without, will our Landlord dream
Of the souls which selfishly confiscate emendation

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