Tuesday 25 November 2008

Language, Utilitarianism, Beckett, Borges

Excuse the sketchbook format of thought due to limits of interest in literary matter at hand.

Utilitarian language- where purpose is all-important. A path to freedom. However, the mind, or an aspect of the mind, in mistaking its produce for itself, through that very seeking fails to find itself. Being itself, why should it need to find itself in the first place? So the very seeking is self-defeating.
In time, within this self-perpetuating, self-defeating process, lost in language, with the inevitable non-appearance of the hazily imagined goal of reality and happiness, many come to be disillusioned and to doubt the very existence of the exalted goal, but hold fast to the process, but since there is no energy to fuel the process, it all grinds towards a self-consuming halt, with Samuel Beckett being the most obvious incarnation of such proceedings.
Borges as shown in the paradox pieces is an example of the gnostic position, where in the literary field, the mind is lost in the matter of words, but seeks a way out, and the schizophrenic escape route being the falsehood of language itself. Both positions arising from a self trapped within language and a false understanding of that language, and all this completely unnecessary- the mind having no reason to have to entrap itself within one of its emanations.

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