In Abstentia Out

white revolt

2012-01-16T19:24:00.002Z

burnt geometry

2012-01-16T19:20:00.001Z

dog, spirit, whatever

2012-01-16T19:12:00.003Z

splinterd

2012-01-15T17:35:00.003Z

ladders, snow

2012-01-15T17:21:00.002Z

face, windows, something

2012-01-15T17:11:00.000Z

Epilogue

2011-11-29T09:38:00.004Z

This isn't strictly speaking an epilogue as I haven't written anything that has gone before it, but if I had written something you can take it that this would have been the bit that came after.

Mostly Greys

2011-11-01T20:44:00.002Z

Charcoal Eile

2011-11-01T20:41:00.001Z

another charcoal

2011-08-31T09:11:00.003+01:00

Etipaf

2011-04-19T15:23:00.002+01:00

CrLong

2011-04-18T09:34:00.002+01:00

LanternChild

2011-04-18T09:27:00.001+01:00

The volumes are off but anyway:

Compassd

2011-04-13T13:51:00.005+01:00

CrDist

2011-04-13T13:49:00.001+01:00

ThrowawayToo

2011-04-13T13:41:00.001+01:00

Throwaway

2011-04-13T10:14:00.002+01:00

Crackli ng

2011-04-12T11:40:00.006+01:00

PuInfish

2011-04-12T11:40:00.005+01:00

CrPure

2011-04-09T11:14:00.003+01:00

Soviet

2011-04-09T11:09:00.002+01:00

CantRemember

2011-04-09T10:48:00.002+01:00

This had a title but I can't remember what, hence the title:

Short Piece

2011-04-08T08:43:00.002+01:00

Decanter

2011-04-08T08:34:00.002+01:00

Evisoi

2011-04-07T10:08:00.003+01:00

Infinit

2011-04-06T20:41:00.008+01:00

Schvelte Vos

2011-04-06T10:10:00.003+01:00

Another one of my musical things, Schvelte Vos. It really should be re-recorded, the bass for one more or less inaudible, but twill have to do for now:

Incisiv

2011-04-05T09:54:00.010+01:00

One of my own musical compositions, Incisiv - for the sake of the necessity of a title:

a few lines

2011-03-14T10:16:00.002Z

half-formed

2011-03-14T10:10:00.002Z

Ocean

2011-03-11T16:06:00.004Z

A man was sailing in calm waters in an expensive boat. Looking around him, he was very satisfied with himself and his boat and the waters beneath him, and he declared, "The ocean is not great. I, on the other hand . . . " - though this last bit, and what remained of it, was more felt than uttered, or if it was uttered it was done so very quietly.
Sadly though, things alter, and after a while the weather changed, the sea grew rough and rougher, the expensive boat was tossed about as a thing of nothing, was soon enough smashed on the rocks, and the little man was swallowed up by the waters and heard of no more.

something or other

2011-03-09T12:25:00.001Z

darkgrey

2011-03-05T14:05:00.002Z

prussian

2011-03-03T14:43:00.001Z

'American' Art

2011-03-03T09:25:00.001Z

I won't pretend to have any kind of extensive knowledge of art but one aversion or dislike I'll try to overcome the tediums fnd difficulties of expressing is for certain American artists, or aspects of their work, and this aspect is their monumentality of scale. What tipped the scales to trying to actually set to words this feeling is seeing a few minutes of a programme on the artist Julian Schnabel, featuring some exhibition of his works, the scale of which as in short enormous, requiring high wall space and certainly not for any ordinary home.

Firstly the po-faced attitude that determines the wish to work on this scale, and the crudeness of this thought: since to work on a huge scale is very awkward, then it cannot lie within a natural desire for artistic expression; the natural expression of art I would say is someone like a child faced with a fairly ordinary piece of paper, canvas or whatever and start drawing or painting. Working on the huge scale cannot be done in any such whimsical, of-the-moment fashion, and the thought behind it which I find so poor is that "I work on a monumental scale; therefore my work is of monumental import." That scale is equal to artistic import. I'll mention here my favourite artist of the 20th centry, Paul Klee, whose works tend to be typically of dimensions someting like 30cm by 40cm or some such, and just as likely to be smaller than that as bigger. Thereis an unbumptious intimacy of such in Klee's case highly concentrated works, and which if blown-up can easily survive such magnification, since these enclosed universes are sufficient to themselves. They are perfectly formed in themselves and retain their interest and integrity whatever the scale. Contrarily the American artists I am thinking of, the likes of Rothko, need to work on the huge scale so as to overpower 'sensually', perhaps comparable to the bombast of someone like Wagner; and in direct contrast to Klee, when such works are seen in miniature, in reproduction on the page, the effect is diminished to the point of non-existence; the paucity of any aspect of formal interest in the image renders the picture wholly uninteresting,and this is the difference between these modern Americans, as well of course as plenty others, working on this scale and old masters like Tintoretto or Caravaggio. Their best works are structurally fascinating and while, as above, losing quite a bit in terms of overpowering the senses , they easily survive the reduction in scale to the page, ad if Caravaggio's Martrdom of Saint Matthew were, instead of 323 cm × 343 cm, 32 by 34cm, it would still be a masterpiece.

Another aspect to my aversion to the inner motivation to work on this unwieldy, 'unnatural' monumental scale relates again to the intimacy I spoke of in relation to Klee; the works he produces are intimate processes in the act of production, and also intimate experiences in the act of viewing for the perceiver. Klee is not seeking to make to pun a public exhibit of himself and his work. Contrarily these American artists and their grandness of scale are very much within the American order of thing precisely in their desire to make of theselves and their works as public as possible - the greater the physical object the more 'public' it is - the more it partakes in the public, physical arena and is open to perception by the greatest number. It is the opposite of intimacy, and part of what one could call the current American mores where there is no intimate, private self; instead one participates wholly as part of the public whole; and in its apogee this manifesting itself where troubled selves tell of their most private problems on carnivorous talk-shows. There is I suppose nothing wrong with wishing to partake in the public thoroughfare, in the social, political life but these should very much be incidentals to the artist, and such a desire is in itself crude, apllicable to things like advertising slogans and if dominant contrary to the subtle integrity of self that produces real art, art which to be real art must be intimate. This desire to be 'public' should come into play after the creation of the work, not as prior motivation.
. . .

This has already taken up too much of my morning so rather re-read it, try and shape it into anything elegant, etc I'll stop there more or less mid-sentence.

Quick, Bit Unpleasant,Thought

2011-03-02T08:37:00.004Z

Such I suppose is vanity intermingled with a dash of stupidity, there are people who seem to imagine the mere act of reading we'll say more refined writers places themselves on an equal or perhaps even higher intellectual footing than those very writers; that this level of expression or thought is their own natural intellectual level which chance or perhaps just their earlier position in the temporal sequence had allowed those writers to express those thoughts before they themselves had a chance to do so. The same self-exaltation of course goes in the various artistic fields - the relevant artist looked down on from a position on high.

Some Kind of Blue 1 & 2

2011-02-26T20:15:00.000Z

itself

2011-02-25T11:35:00.002Z

in full

2011-02-23T20:32:00.002Z

dark green

2011-02-22T15:12:00.006Z

profile?

2011-02-22T10:19:00.002Z

Anotherone

2011-02-20T17:47:00.003Z

Animage

2011-02-19T13:53:00.001Z

Until

2011-02-18T09:11:00.002Z

They were passionate about truth, until . . .
- "Until?"
- They encountered it.

nearly there

2011-02-15T12:58:00.003Z

Death's Non-Existence

2011-02-12T12:58:00.001Z

I've repeated to and beyond the point of tedium how language properly used is meaningful, how this is unarguable as the very arguing itself proceeds from the acceptance of the meaningfulness of the language used in the arguing; I've shown quite a few cases of supposed paradoxes, alleging as consequence language being a flawed tool, being no such things, simply errors of language; and I've described how science itself is enveloped within the folds of this intrinsic meaningfulness of language. Also how language properly used in intellectual matters always corresponds to a what one might call living reality. Reality isn't being dictated to by language, say in the manner of a magic spell, but the reality and the language correspond, cannot contradict one another.
In relation to all this what I am going to look at here is the thought of death, which earlier thoughts are reproduced below:

Death is non-existence. Non-existence by its very non-nature does not exist. Therefore death does not exist.

This might seem a mere elegant play on words but not actually to be taken seriously. However language meaningfully used is meaningful and there is nothing false about the given logic. But to look at it slightly differently, but heading towards perhaps the same logical destination: putting into perspective, for example, a writer who is 'obsessed with death', or simply anyone's fear of death. This is all a process of thought, and what is the nature of the thought, 'death'?

The language term 'death' is an idea or principle of absolute negation and inertia. One cannot be in a state of inertia while engaged in an activity- tautologically. A concept is an activity of the mind. And so the very idea of death as absolute inertia contradicts its very nature as an idea, or activity in which the mind is engaged. An activity cannot produce inertia. 'Death' is an unintelligible concept; the idea that the mental substance of an idea can be devoid of substance.

Another tangent is to say that the products of the mind are emanations of life. Death is the one thing that does not exist in life, and so for this reason is a meaningless concept.

So stressing again that 'death' is a thought, and so what I have done is look closer at the nature of this thought and in the inevitable process upset a very crude but very well-accepted notion of the reality of death. And doubly stressing that while language is autonomous in the sense that correct language is self-sufficient in many matters of self-exploration, ike here, it is not a self-enclosed autonomousness, i.e. that it corresponds to life beyond its verbal confines. Madness by contrast is language where this correspondence to a very large degree has broken down. So I am not merely playing like a musician with language to produce some odd idea. A reality dwells in tandem with this declaration of death's non-existence and which can be experienced, admittedly in a very subtle way by the mind.

Another angle of perceptual attack on this issue is this, and also showing how the most apparently simple sentence can be a much more slippery, subtle beast than imagined:

John died yesterday.

So here is expression of the normal attitude with regard to death. "John died, he is dead." A word refers to something which is, and in this case "John." However to say that John died is to say that the word John corresponds to an external essence - and yesterday he died. John here is the noun and a noun is something to which one can point as a reality but here there is no such reality, and so it is nonsense to talk about anything happening to something which is not. And so it is an illegitimate intellectual construct to say that John died yesterday.

Similarly, another way this traditional view of death's reality would be expressed is to say that "John is dead." Again however there is no John who can be anything. To say that John is dead is to say that John is, he is in a state of existence, and that this state is non-existence. This is obviously full of self-contradictions, and so when one looks to the intellectual sense of the statement one that someone is dead or died, one sees quite simply that there is no sense. And to stress that the purported thought of someone dying cannot be expressed coherently in this pure intellectual sense.

So, repeating the earlier point, language is a truth tool of absolute intellectual precision if used correctly; it cannot be so if used loosely. I can easily imagine people thinking my statement of death's non-existence being simply a facile, 'smart' use of language and 'merely a matter of language' but this would be a misapprehension of the unarguable nature of language and its correspondence with 'living truth'. Even someone who wishes to believe in the religious idea of death's non-existence might well be dissatisfied with all the above as almost inhumanly dry. However language in this field of intellectual enquiry must be 'dry', precise; this is the means by which it yields the truths legitimately available to it; and also this language does not stand alone but that there is an inner truth to this language which can, however subtly elusive, be understood, or rather experienced, in a deeper sense.

Seraphim

2011-02-09T20:25:00.000Z

And there appeared before him three seraphim, terrible and beautiful to behold.
"We is the Beings of Light - "
"Are."
"What, mortal?!"
"We are the Beings of Light, not We is the Beings of Light." . . .

figures

2011-02-02T11:51:00.005Z

Once Again

2011-01-31T18:59:00.009Z

Read this once you'll never read it again. Why is that? Because it's hardly worth reading once never mind ever again.
But then again you mightn't enjoy being dictated to like this, or if not quite dictated to then taken for granted, and so instead of this never reading it again, accepting that is of course the reading of it the first time, you go ahead, in spite of its worthlessness, and read if it not just twice maybe even many more times again.

Another Man, Another Box, Schrodinger Again

2011-01-28T15:11:00.007Z

"We put this man into a box . . . "
"A man in a box, what are you on about?"
"Wait there now, give me a chance. We put this fella into a box but once he's in the box we can't see him, the box is closed, do you get me?"
"Did he do something wrong?"
"No, nothing."
"So why do we put him in the box?"
"Just hold on and you'll see. So he's in the box and we can't see him."
"How do we know he's still in there if we can't see him?"
"Because there's no way out."
"There might be a trapdoor under the box."
"There's no trapdoor."
"How do you know? It might be like them magician things, you think he's there and instead he's somewhere else."
"Look, just accept that he's in the box. We put him in there, and there he is."
"He's very docile is he?"
"Docile?"
"To just accept being put into the box; there's not many would accept that."
"All right so, he's docile. Are you happy now?"
"I'm perfectly content."
"Right so, there he is, the man, in the box, but what we also have in the box, the sealed box - "
"Sealed!? Why go to the trouble of having it sealed?"
"Just listen will you. So also in the box, along with the man, is a flask containing a poisonous gas and a radioactive source -"
"What the . . . ?! Have you gone mad? What ar you going doing to the man?"
"Would you hear me out for God sake! So we have the man and the flask now in the box, and there's this Geiger counter and when it detects the radiation the flask shatters and the poisonous gas escapes killing the man. . . . "
"God almighty!"
"Except . . . "
"Except what?"
"Here's the good bit. Is he really dead?"
"Oh you mean you just want to scare him with all this gas stuff. It's likesome kind of mock execution?"
""No, no, there's no scaring; he must be dead, mustn't he?"
"I don't know, sure we can't see what's going on in the bloody box. Maybe the poison wasn't enough to kill him."
"No, it's enough all right."
"How do you now?"
"Because it's deadly stuff."
"But how do you know it was even in the flask in the first place?"
"Of course we know, it's clearly labeled."
"Where would we be without labels. And what about that Geiger counter stuff, how do we know that stuff is working right? Where did you get it all from?"
"A man from a laboratory said it was all A1."
"And what did this man do again to deserve all this?"
"Look, as I said already he did nothing wrong. I've nothing against him personally. This is all just a kind of experiment."
"I'd hate to see what you do to someone who did do something wrong."
" But anyway as said the poison is in the flask, the flask breaks, out comes the poison and your man dies - that's what must happen you'd think, isn't it?"
"Well maybe the flask doesn't break. And anyway how do we know any of this convoluted stuff is happening inside this box we can't see inside. And even if he is dead whe we open the box, how do we know he didn't have a weak heart and being in the box with all this stuff was enough to do him in. . . ."
"We'd do an autopsy to establish cause of death."
"And what if he produces a gas-mask while in the box?" . . .

All this springing initially from a humorous spark but beyond the humour it relates directly and seriously to the earlier post on Schrodinger's Cat , within which I wrote that my coin in a drawer notion, relating to the same field of intellectual inquiry, was "a much better and simpler case than the needlessly complex cat notion". In the dialogue above, thogh with man substitutin cat, is shown how unsatisfactory Schrodinger's thought-piece actually is as a vehicle for intellectual knowledge. This also illustrates what I wrote of science and language here: "Science, in all its manifestations, is not an autonomous or 'pure' discipline, but is encompassed within, or a branch of, Language. What science , or true science, consists of is true language statements, and so the first principle of science is the innate and intrinsic meaningfulness of correct language, and science in all its applications also demonstrably shows the intrinsic truth and power of correct language, while also emphasising the absolute necessity of the language's correctness and precision." And so here, unlike his box, as an intellectual phenomenon Schrodinger's idea is a system far from sealed.

more later

2011-01-21T17:21:00.000Z

parts

2011-01-19T20:35:00.004Z

Specific

2011-01-17T20:44:00.003Z

"There was this person . . . "
- "Be more specific."
"There was this particular person . . . "
"Proceed."

chard

2011-01-12T17:28:00.005Z

details

2011-01-10T19:54:00.002Z

Ascending or Descending

2011-01-10T13:55:00.011Z

A ladder was descending from above . . . or it would probably be truer to say it was ascending from below . . . but anyway what difference does it make, ascending or descending, it's all the same. Or maybe there's a world of difference . . . but anyway, a ladder, you could go up it or you could go down it, you could even have one person going up it and at the same time someone else coming down it, the fellow below going up to the top of the ladder, the one above coming down to the bottom, or beyond rather the bottom, off somewhere else. But what would they do when they met each other? It would want to be a very wide ladder for them to pass each other, amicably one would hope, and everyone knows intimacy breeds amicability, and what could be more intimate than passing someone on a ladder.
"Intimacy breeds amicability" - I should try and remember that, it's the kind of thing that could get you noticed, you'd just have to choose the right moment . . .

But anyway the two people - men say, it would be more likely to be men - passing each other on the ladder . . . but in all probability, as I was saying, or beginning to say, they wouldn't be passing each other as how many ladders are wide enough to be condusive to passing? Instead you'd have an impasse, the two of them stuck, looking at each other, and after a while of this looking probably some kind of exchange:

"Could you get out of my way?"
"How can I?"
"You could move aside."
"You can see yourself I can't. There's no room."
"Hmm."

The man from above coming down could agree to start to retreat upwards but it wouldn't take long to see the problem there: the man below could still never get past, the man above always remaining above. So intead it's the lower man who'd have to retreat, retreat in an absolute sense, that is down to the ground and off to the side, out ofthe way, and then the other fellow could descend fully also, all the way down, and now with him gone if he still felt like ascending, the formerly lower man that is, could now unimpeded go up all the way to the top, at least unimpeded that is as long as there isn't someone else now also coming down, blocking his way, a someone who was all along behind, or rather above, or beyond the earler high up fellow who in the meantime came down. In which case of course the lower man going up would have to retreat again if he really wanted to persist in trying to get all the way up to the top.

It would be a bit much if after that came another unexpected descending man, but anyway, that's something about a ladder and maybe going up or down it and what might happen if there's a conflict of practical interests in the going up or the down.

wrenaysaunce

2011-01-03T17:57:00.002Z

It Was Raining

2010-12-28T14:25:00.004Z

It was raining, what more is there to say. . . . But maybe there's plenty more, and where would we be if our writers were content to just say it was raining, what more was there to say, and leave it at that?
"Corrugated molten tears were voicelessly descending with all the unceasing and pitiless rhythm of an African demagogue, bloated and gorged on the accumulated fats of his tarnished and burnished native lands."
That's the kind of thing you could say - and people would thank you for it. Why wouldn't they? To be honest though, I admit I'm a bit lost as to the sense of that revised or alternative sentence, but that's just me. And anyway where would our writers be without vagueness, that is I mean the most refined vagueness, and within those vaguenesses lying hidden, or half-hidden, or maybe fully hidden, the most precious metals, so to speak, whose invaluable essences are discovered by only the most civilized and penetrating of readers, who can then reward themselves, if they want, mentally, with the thought that their achievement in the discovering is as, or at least nearly as, great as the writer's who hid them there in the first place. And who's to argue with that.

Life and Meaning Again

2010-12-24T17:19:00.000Z

There's a couple of issues from Life and Meaning I should maybe look at. One is that this concentration and value judgement on life based on meaning, and that necessarily being the primacy of words over life, leads back to Plato and his strange idea of the world of ideal forms, and within that intellectual world the absolute primacy of the idea of the Void. To quote from that piece:

The Greek void is specifically a language form, an intellectual creation or form, and revels in the fact of its existence as such. Why are the likes of Plato drawn to this concept of the void as an absolute - the thought which sits atop all other thoughts, the ascendant within the mental hierarchy? It is because, as said, the world of the senses has been decided to be unreal, and so what is most real should partake least of all of the sensory world, and what partakes least of all being apparently an idea. Ideas are stated to be the purest of substances, and the most pure of these substances is an idea which is utterly self-referential and distinct from the debased world of external reality. And so the void: a pure self-contained idea without reference to the debased world of sense perception. Hence through the ages, and still, the exaltation of the imagined holy landscape of Pure Reason.

And so the stress on the meaning of life, and the judging of life on that basis. So this is the historical basis of this false judging of life on the basis of its meaning, that notion of life being debased and fallen, split somehow from the perfectly spiritual, and Reason offers an escape route, though this idea is much older again than Plato, but it is through his medium that the idea has been refracted on into the subsequent 'European' intellectual tradition, and into such modern inevitable rivulets as material atheism and life's declared meaninglessness.

The other thought to look at more deeply is that of accidental meaningfulness, which I mentioned in the Life and Meaning piece. Evolution is a scientific theory or fact that is falsely imagined to possess of some philosophical significance, that is that it negates the viability of an architect of life and renders valid the judgement of the human condition as being accidentally meaningful. As shown, the intrinsic intelligence of the human condition, as with any structure, cannot be denied, but even this is apparently not enough for it to be meaningful; instead it has to be connected directly to an external element to life, an architect or God - and so the depressing arguments about Intelligent Design. As described one cannot talk of anything as external to life or what is, and so this is invalid discourse to begin with. This is all an existential failure where life is not being accepted as is, intrinsically intelligent. With the evolution argument, and other 'scientific' stances is the attempt to posit the intrinsic intelligence of life as accidental, that things were senseless and unintelligent, and through chance and time eventually structures of accidental intelligence ensued, and so while offering the impression of being 'meaningful' these structures are only accidentally so.

But as written earlier: "Every structure that exists is intrinsically of an intelligent order; if it weren't internally intelligent it wouldn't cohere as a living/real structure. The fact of its existence, be it an atom, a stone, a bird, insect, human, etc. is absolutely dependent on its being intelligent and in itself meaningful."

There is no point within existence where this intrinsic intelligence of life's or reality's structures is flouted. The existence of every millisecond of being and the existence of everything that exists within every millisecond is inseparable and absolutely intwertwined with and dependent on this intrinsic intelligence. This intrinsic intelligence doesn't enter the equation of reality accidentally somewhere down the line of existence. Every atom, every gas, everything that can explode leading to further refinements of structure, an explosion itself, time and existence itself are and can only be because of their being of an intelligent order.

That this intrinsic intelligence is unarguable and present at every point is perhaps best illustrated when we consider what the ground of intellectual analysis or penetration of any 'structure' is based on. In this sense of intellectual penetration of structure I am inclusing phenomena from atomic particles to phenomena like gravity, light, sound, etc. And what this ground from which intellectual vision proceeds is that the structure observed and analysed is of an intelligent order. If it were not innately intelligent then the discoursing intellect could produce no results. And so again is shown the falseness of the notion of accidental meaningfulness; there is no point where an observing intellect can declare that this meaningfulness is accidentally introduced into the syustem of life as there is not and cannot be any point at which the meaningfulness can be said to be absent. The entire basis of the intellect being able to state anything about any system is that being of an intelligent order, this system can meaingfully yield meaningful statements. If a system were declared devoid of intelligence, well then it could not be a system in teh first place and so the statement self-contradictory.

Thus anyway, all in all, the obvious truth of WIlliam Blake's line: "Everything that lives is holy" - holy here in an intellectual sense being life's unarguable nature as being intrinsically significant at every point of itself.

[This is all a bit dashed off & lacking in elegance but twill have to do for now.]

Sign

2010-12-22T16:03:00.001Z

A travelling man came to a sign which said 'Beyond this point you may not go', and so what did he do but he didn't - go that is, beyond.
"'What was there to stop him going beyond?"
The sign.
"That's all, just the sign, nothing more?"
No, nothing else, just the sign.

Creature

2010-12-22T15:56:00.000Z

"There was a creature . . . "
"Night or day?"
"Hmm?"
"A creature of the night or of the day?"
"Both."
"God help him."

bluewhite

2010-12-21T23:00:00.000Z

Life and Meaning

2010-12-19T17:29:00.004Z

Every structure that exists is intrinsically of an intelligent order; if it weren't internally intelligent it wouldn't cohere as a living structure. The fact of its existence, be it an atom, a stone, a bird, insect, human, etc. is absolutely dependent on its being intelligent and in itself meaningful.

But what does 'meaningful' mean when talking of life and the living things which comprise or inhabit life? If 'meaningful' were to signify being possessed of intrinsic intelligence and so internally significant, then every structure, as said above, is in itself meaningful - the fact of its existence inseparable from its internal meaningfulness. Is it so instead the attempt to say there is a greater purpose beyond these things themselves?

The talk of life's meaninglessness seems based on the assumed absence of God, and in this absence life's living structures are then senselessly declared meaningless. Identically life's meaningfulness tends to be seen in terms of the presence of God, and the meaning of life's structures resides in their connection to this external element.
This is all the opposite of true existentialism; rather than being appreciated as internally meaningful structures, the meaningfulness of these living elements is perceived as external to themselves and instead dependent on their connection to an absolute, external to life - God.

When using language as an intellectual truth-tool, if that language is to produce the correct results, then it must be used properly, not in a self-contradictory manner. And so it makes no sense to introduce within intellectual discourse elements within life that are external to life. This can only falsify life. Life is what is, and if God is, then God is inseparable from life, or what is. To say that God is external to life and what is is to say that God, being not part of what is, is not, and so does not exist. If something isn't part of what is, then it is part of what isn't! which is to say there is no 'it' to speak of.

So to talk of God or anything as outside of life is senseless language, and so the notion of life's meaning as being dependent on its connection to something external to life is impossible to sustain. This is not all as relates to 'God' as a viable element of intellectual discourse. As I wrote here in God, Time, Idolatry, intellectual thoughts about God can only be emanations of the thinker of those thoughts, and so to make declarations about God is ultimately for the thinker to make himself in the form of his thoughts God. To treat God as an object of intellectual discourse is necessarily to falsify such an absolute. Firstly as shown above, God cannot be treated as external to what is, and secondly, God cannot be treated as an element within life; this is the attempt to turn an absolute into a relative, i.e. God has somehow become submerged within God's creation, and so is another object of creation and a lesser being than life.

So on an intellectual level is seen the logical coherence of all the genuine religious stressing that God is only to be met with in silence. Language necessarily cannot cross the divide to the absolute, and to think otherwise ends, either by falsifying the absolute, ending in a false, relative concept of God, or in the declaration of God's non-existence; or the two simultaneously, i.e. declaring the false concept to be the nature of God, and then going on to say that this falsified notion of the divine does not exist. It is again an instance of Wittgenstein's line, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent...."

Repeating myself: instead of this 'meaningfulness' external to a living structure, every living structure is a living structure because of its cohering as an intelligent structure, and one does not need to go beyond this existential state to adjudge its meaningfulness. It is in itself meaningful. Consider a crossword puzzle. There is no need when concerning oneself with solving a puzzle to trouble oneself with the historical matter of the author compiling the puzzle as if this were the essence of the matter; instead the puzzle is treated existentially, i.e. one takes as a given the 'intelligence' of the puzzle, considers the given clues and that is all.

We could imagine a sect of puzzle addicts who take to arguing that the puzzles are 'accidentally intelligent', that given the existence somehow or other of the letters, these letters through some mysterious (but senseless!) compulsion towards order arrange themselves in haphazard sequences, and so on till we end up with these puzzles before us. The puzzles are intelligent structures, it is, as it must be, admitted, but this intelligence is claimed to be 'accidental', and so the puzzles, while genuinely meaningful, are still ultimately meaningless.

This is all utter nonsense not primarily because of the ludicrous nature of the theory but in its failure to appreciate or understand reality in the flesh, that is, existentially. Accidental significance or meaningfulness is a false category; something either is or isn't of an intelligent order. That a puzzle works is dependent on the fact that it is intelligent and meaningful. If the clues and answers didn't match up then it would not be an intelligent structure, and so wouldn't in truth exist as a puzzle. For instance, a clue went: "Four-legged animal that barks/ Man's best friend' - but the desired answer was Cow, then this would be senseless. Contrarily any structure that truly is must be internally intelligent and meaningful - its meaning being itself. A human being is a living structure of more internal significance than an amoeba, and within the domain of humans, the consciousness of a Leonardo da Vinci, certainly within certain fields, is far more internally significant than that of an average person. Also a great work of art, say Hamlet, is a structure of immeasurably more internal significance than Police Academy 6.

But we should look closer at this word 'meaning' and its extensions of 'meaningfulness' and 'meaninglessness'. What is it to say something has meaning? It is to say it means something else. The meaning of someone's strange, tetchy behaviour may be that for whatever reasons he or she is enduring a period of extreme stress. To go back to the crossword puzzle: the clues have a meaning, the meaning being the correct answer. Essentially the clues are questions with single implied answers. So the clue's meaning is the same as itself but perhaps in more succinct form.

Meaning so is a matter of language; it is a linguistic equivalent to something else. Words mean something - they are purely intellectual entities with reference to a combination of objects of external perception and invisible inner realities. The word 'sun' without a sun to which it refers wouldn't exist in that sense, though it might exist as a word referring to something else. 'Happy' refers to an inner state, and so on. Language can become much more apparently subtle than when not concerned with matters of 'external reality', but the words still always can only maintain their nature as signifiers. Words mean things, they are not autonomous structures. One could say that a colour or sound is sufficient to itself, doesn't refer to something else, but not language. Take a word from a dead language, or words seen by a baby, the words do not exist in an intellectual sense. This again shows how language must by its very nature be insufficient to experience reality in an absolute, naked or ultimate sense; language by its nature must be at a remove from it. And so again one is led back to the importance of silence and intellectual humility. This is very different by the way from saying that language is a flawed tool. It is if used rightly infallible but even still it is what it is - a world of symbols.

And back again to the notion of supposed question of whether life is possessed of meaning or not. Stressing that what tends to happen here is to leap to the imagined answers to the question without properly considering what actually is the question. This 'meaning' is to try and say that the living structures of life do not really in themselves matter, but that life means something else, and this meaning is its essence. As described, this something else external to life is a senseless concept. Then we have the very bizarre thought that with the tautologically inevitable failure of this Something Else apart from life to appear within life, life is declared to be without meaning.
The very wording of the question attempts to deprive life of internal existential significance. Life's significance is instead in its meaning something else. To look onwards a little, a meaning is a matter of words, an idea. And to take from an artistic piece I wrote previously Rooftop:

So the essence of all matter it seems is words, ideas. In the beginning was the word. Matter was behaving in such and such a manner because it was conforming to an idea which was the truth of the matter. But what is an idea but words in someone’s head and words in someone’s head is a very recent phenomenon, so in whose head were these words to which matter was conforming before there were any words? A mystery.

So anyway, interest flagging, the notion again of life's meaning is to say that life's entities are not possessed of primary reality in themselves but that instead they have to be judged according to their meaning something else, some kind of ultimate language equivalent - this being the nature of a meaning, it is a matter of words. But as shown this is self-contradictory as the primary reality is necessarily at a remove from the symbol world of language. As for the idea that the meaning equivalent of life is that it is without meaning! this is simply comical. Well if this is its meaning - that it is meaningless - then naturally it is not deprived of but possessed of a meaning, and so its meaninglessness a self-contradictory notion.

Enough.

more snow

2010-12-17T13:31:00.001Z

this side up

2010-12-16T17:35:00.002Z

innoughsccent

2010-12-15T15:22:00.002Z

bottom left

2010-12-14T21:08:00.003Z

wrabit

2010-12-14T15:05:00.002Z

right angles

2010-12-13T12:19:00.003Z

clock face

2010-12-12T19:49:00.002Z

2010-12-08T20:43:00.002Z

Dimensions

2010-12-08T12:37:00.000Z

"Congratulations sir, you are the father of a beautiful healthy boy."
"What are the dimensions?"
"Sorry?"
"The dimensions! the dimensions! I must know the dimensions of the boy-child!"
"Oh sorry, you mean his weight?"
"And the length!"

fragment

2010-12-08T10:39:00.001Z

Encasement

2010-12-06T12:29:00.007Z

A universe, all of it, was encased in glass. However, those dwelling within a certain world within this universe did not know they were so encased for the glass was perfectly transparent and gave away at a distance nothing of itself. If they had been less unaware, who knows, they might have been blissfully so.

“In glass? Wonderful!”

But if over time, gathering dust and various wandering rubbish to itself, the glass becoming muddied and the universe within compelled to become dimmer, would the inhabitants begin to guess at all the glass? “The light is fading,” some wail. “We must be displeasing the gods!” Others: “We are polluting the atmosphere,” whilst others again, thoughtful, deduce the sun to be consuming itself, drawing low on its own reserves, and so this fading a precursor, in itself harmless, of the real disaster to come.

But it's much more likely I suppose that instead this dimming, if there was any dimming, would be both so slow and so faint as to go altogether unnoticed.

Something though that didn't go so unnoticed was the appearance of a crack in the glass. Why a crack? Because a stone had been thrown from somewhere effecting this crack. Thrown from inside or outside? Outside. The glass was of a scale that anything hitting it from the inside would have been far too weak to have caused a scratch, never mind a crack, and so it must be from the outside it came.

And so a stone was thrown, accidentally or malignantly, or maybe just unconsciously, that is inanimately, an unthinking movement of unthinking matter, and regardless, however, a great big crack appeared, clearly visible from all points within the glass, or at least visible whenever and wherever whoever was looking from was immersed in night and the crack above unobscured by clouds, and so, whatever the source, shafts of light could be seen striking the edges of the crack, creating an incredible, fearful, even mystical effect.

And with this immense, obscure appearance across the night sky, confusion, terror, people on their knees, floods of prayers sent into the void, and amongst whatever else, a great rush to interpret the appearance, but none in their interpreting proving inspired enough to surmise either glass or crack.

“My God! What is it?”
“Nothing to worry about. Something to do with the sky.”

One of the less impressive offerings. And so anyway, there it was, this wild, jagged line, unexplained across the heavens. “Heavens”, by the way, was enjoying a renaissance, and you could even, if you wished, make a case for now dividing people into two halves; one for those still using the prosaic “sky” when talking of such, and the other for those now saying “heavens” when talking of same - this use maybe natural or innocent at first, but pointedly soon enough after, autobiographical. There were also though a few of what you might call agnostics, who found themselves in the awkward position of not knowing what word to use, the use of either seeming to place you firmly within one of the two camps, and so they tried to intersperse both equally, but rather than being applauded for their delicacy, they ended up more or less just annoying everyone.

So the archaic style was back, portentous and poetical; in some hands serious, unforced; in others a fashion accessory; perhaps in others again sarcastic - even if this sarcasm might now seem a bit unsure of itself. Phrases like, “The starry vault has been sundered,” became almost a commonplace; things you might hear, never mind behind closed doors, out on the street in the middle of the day.

The likes of Nostradamus was poured over; lines produced, discussed, even thought about; perhaps the biggest fuss made over the following:

A jug spills, milk disappears.
A horseman descends, fearsome and hungry.

Whatever about the Frenchman's disappearing milk and descending horseman, that this was the kind of thing you could now mention in normal life without fear, or much of it, of being thought mad was, you could say, an emblem of the times, the times distilled.

And so now, on the cusp of these strange times, there they were, waiting.

But what happened in time with this waiting but more or less nothing - no Apocalypse, no dawning New Age, as said - nothing. And back out from the shadows began to emerge the sarcastic, slowly at first and looking about them, but then, growing more and more sure of themselves, in a surging rush. “Go on with your Apocalypse!” they jeered, and began, with an awful lot of noise, to enjoy themselves. Whether there was really any enjoyment at the other end of all the noise I can't really say, maybe just a lot of noise signifying enjoyment; but that's the theory anyway: In the absence of an apocalypse you enjoy yourself. There may have been some still waiting, but if they were, they were keeping their waiting to themselves.

So a return to something like normality; the crack becoming part of the furniture, no longer so novel, soon to be not novel at all; its prolonged existence proof of its banality. Relief, disappointment, a sense of futility and emptiness - all mingled. The coming time hadn't come, the great harbinger had foretold nothing, and the archaic style faded back away. You might still hear something like “The starry vault has been sundered,” but this time in a certain tone, followed by laughter.

Interpretations became more a matter of idle intellectual musing than apocalyptic sooth-saying; money still being poured into scientific alleyways, the crack had become, one was given to understand, the personal property of the learned, debated in smooth, antiseptic tones, and in a leisurely manner. It was, they might concede, yes, for now, genuinely quite interesting; a bit of an anomaly, but we had all the time in the world and there was nothing particularly at stake - or if you like there was something very particular at stake, the anomaly bit, but it would soon be an anomaly no more and no rush about it.

From those exalted and intellectual quarters, stern or amused looks arrowed themselves downwards now towards any remarks about the crack rising up from regions beneath. If someone from below had for instance insisted on the great thing across the sky's still being a deep mystery and was honoured enough to receive in response to these words other words coming back down rather than just a descending look, those words would probably go something like: “A mystery? Only because we don't yet know what it is.” If this someone beneath were stupid enough to persist with his mystery, not realising he'd been crushed, he would probably find himself enclosed in a silence hard to get out of.

And so, all in all, the crack in the distant glass still a riddle, but people a lot less concerned. Many disappointed, many not; tension eased but things a bit boring.

This relaxing of tension was dealt a very cruel blow though when another stone struck the outside of the glass, sending another, but this time far larger, crack scything across the surface. If in their observing our people had been anywhere near the glass, they would have experienced a sharp, very audible crack more or less simultaneous to the appearance of the visual one, but being so far away they didn't. Light informed them of the frightening event long before any revealing noise, but the noise didn't just lie down, and instead rumbled its immense way across space, gaining if anything it seemed rather than losing in mass, before finally rolling hugely over the humble world, flattening all other sound and terrifying everything upon it evolved enough to have got as far as experiences like terror. And, as if this weren't enough, as the huge roar slowly moved off on its way, fading at last to a low rumble, up struck across the continents a chorus of howling dogs, accompanied in places by howls more primal and awful again, human ones, pouring themselves out of abysses deeper than history - pardon the poetics.

When terror subsided enough to allow thought pour back in they tried to make sense of what had happened, to fit it into some conceivable map of existence; many even still in spite of all hoping this map could somehow be a reassuring one. Even the cynics though were shaken very deep.

“Now this is serious.”
“Yes, this time it really is serious.”
“I thought it was serious the first time.”
“But” — some other exchange — “you don't think it could have been some kind of thunder?”
“Thunder? That was no thunder.”

And so religion on the rise again, more floods of prayers, a sense of impending doom, some souls strangely exhilarated, more terrified, some few even trying to let on to be amused by it all - the cracks, the noise, the howls, the terror - but these efforts now all too obviously strained, and inclined more towards the hysterical in the mad sense than the humorous.

“Who knows what will happen next — the sun might explode.”
“Still, we might get a tan. Ha ha!”

And still they hadn't figured out they were encased in glass. But then another stone struck the outside of the glass, and this time the glass shattered outright; great shards descend upon the formerly enclosed spaces, sending everything - suns, moons, planets - that they smash into flying; and finally, the shards descending, the now horrifying, previously harmless truth of the universe's crystal encasement begins to dawn.

And . . . Apocalypse? But the strange truth is, no matter how doomed our planet appeared, however certain various collisions appeared, it defied perhaps all logic and escaped without a scratch. All shards and splinters passed it by.

And so, the danger passed, aware at last they had been encased in glass, they were encased no more.

charcoal

2010-12-01T17:21:00.001Z

Charcoal Unfinished

2010-12-01T15:54:00.001Z

The Twentieth Century

2010-12-01T11:13:00.002Z

"The twentieth century . . . "
"What about it?"
"I don't think much of it."
"But two world wars! . . . "
"I didn't think much of them."
"The Wall Street Crash?!"
"I didn't think much of that either."
"You're a hard man to please."

Schrodinger's Cat 'Paradox'

2010-11-29T13:57:00.013Z

For some reason the thought-piece known as Schrodinger's Cat came to mind last night, and and with just about enough interest to set to virtual ink the arising thoughts, here I go. I have no knowledge of the scientific background that brought the idea into existence in the first place, and if you want to familiarise yourself with it that's up to you, but for all that's really necessary here I've copied the following from elsewhere:

The Schrödingers cat consists of a cat in a box. The Schrödingers cat paradox is based around two events and a state.

The first event is a random event. This is the release of a poisonous gas by a radioactive particle, which will kill the cat.

The second event is an observer who will look inside the box.
The state considered is the state of the cat: live or dead. The paradox is: the cat is only in a particular state after "you" have opened the box and looked inside. Before that moment the cat is not in one or the other state.

So it seems to be saying that the act of human observation creates or is alleged to create the inner state of the observed creature, and prior to the act of human observation the cat is in a state of unreality or perhaps two mutually contradictory states simultaneously.

The essence of all the confusion here is all a matter of bad language, and comparable to an earlier post Russell, Berkeley, There is a House . There I looked at a thought, or attempted thought, of Bertrand Russell:

'"There is a house which noone perceives." Whether this proposition is true or false, I do not know; but I am sure that it cannot be shown to be self-contradictory.

So here it is stated as an objective fact that there is a house which exists but is unperceived. This, to emphasise, is stated as a fact, not as a possibility. And for it to be declared a fact it must be known to be so, and how is the existence of this house known to be a fact but only through observation. Without this observation or perception it cannot be a known fact. And so it makes no sense to say there is a house which is unperceived. To assert that the house is is to say it is a fact based on observation; so by stating that there is a house that is not perceived, one is stating as a fact that which one is simultaneously stating cannot be a known fact.'

So the essence of the above is that one cannot make statements of fact about unobserved phenomena. If I put a coin in a drawer of some piece of furniture, the Schrodinger's Cat variation is to say that the coin both is and isn't in a state of existence within the drawer until the drawer is again opened and there it is, or less likely, isn't. This though is parallel to the Russell piece above. There is a famous line by Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent...." and this is the problem here. One cannot legitimately talk of the unobserved phenomenon in terms of fact or precise argument. One has denied oneself the necessary act of observation but instead of shutting up about the unobserved, as one must do, one talks on about the coin being in some twilight zone of existence until the drawer is opened. I am not, in terms of absolute logic, at liberty to say anything about it and my theorising about the cat or coin is worthless.

With the coin in the drawer, which is perhaps a much better and simpler case than the needlessly complex cat notion, one might speak as following: I put it in the drawer, I do not take it out, I later open the drawer, there is the coin. So it might be claimed I knew all along it was in the drawer, and there was no increase in knowledge when the drawer was opened and there it was. I merely continue to know what I knew all along: ie that the coin was in the drawer.
However this is never a matter of knowledge. I may have left the room whereupon someone quickly steals in and takes the coin, and so when I open the drawer the coin is no more there. Then again that someone may five minutes after taking it have replaced it and so when I re-open the drawer and there it is, in truth it was not there all along despite my imagining.
If I do not leave the room perhaps it slips down some crack in the drawer and so despite my certainty it remains in the drawer it has departed. Wen I re-open the drawer when a coin is there where expected perhaps it is a different coin. Perhaps there is a secret panel enabling someone access to the drawer. . . . And so on. One can say whatever one likes about what is going on in the unobserved drawer, for example that the coin has been transformed into a goose and then just before the drawer is opened it transforms back: all such statements about the unobserved coin are equally valid in the sense of being equally worthless - stressing that this is language being used in a scientific or absolute intellectual sense rather than an everyday one.

So in essence, I am not in a position to say anything as a matter of truth about the unobserved phenomena, and this talking of the cat or coin as being in this or that state of existence is all a matter of illegitimate language; illegitimate because one cannot attempt to make statements of fact whilst simultaneously denying nseself the necessary foundation to make such statements. There is no paradox with Schrodinger's Cat. It is not a case of creating the state of existence of the observed phenomena; it is merely that with the renewing of observation upon looking into the box or opening of the drawer one is now in a position where definite statements are again permitted one. One is now again in a state of certainty regarding the observed phenomenon, and the 'paradox' amounts to having not accepted the fact of being in a state of uncertainty when this was the only legitimate intellectual position - instead waffling on about what may be going on in the unobserved box.

To add: in my 2 minute reseach into Schrodinger's Cat I saw that Schrodinger intended his piece as a Reductio ad absurdum; i.e. form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence. And so Schrodinger is alleged to be disproving whatever the relevant theory because of the absurd implications. This however seems to me utterly inadequate, and that the final arrival point of an argument leads to a destination one finds untenable is in itself no disproof. This is an example of the appalling vista argument - whether the phrase is simply my own or in use I'm not sure - but in short Schrodinger's thought piece, even if its logic made sense, which it doesn't, despite perhaps his imagining, disproves nothing. All he does is to take the presumed logic of some theory and shows it to have very odd implications.

A further look at Schrodinger's idea-piece here.

Science & Language

2010-11-29T01:21:00.004Z

Science, in all its manifestations, is not an autonomous or 'pure' discipline, but is encompassed within, or a branch of, Language. This can't be stressed enough and, prior to this, I'm not sure it's been stressed at all. What science , or true science, consists of is true language statement, and so the first principle of science is the innate and intrinsic meaningfulness of correct language; and science in all its applications also demonstrably shows the intrinsic truth and power of correct language, while also emphasising the absolute necessity of the language's correctness and precision.

'Meaning' never soars free from the language, contrary to what seems to be often imagined in the branch of language termed philosophy, as shown for example in this look at the notion of Eternal Recurrence. Again to stress, philosophy, like science, and as with all language disciplines - history, etc, is existentially a matter of language.

Darkening

2010-11-25T11:09:00.001Z

[This goes all a bit shapeless & the last section little more than just tacked on, but anyway. . . .]

The days were getting shorter and shorter; light being constricted, pulled towards extinction. Would this movement ever end? That is, would it end in a final end to the light, a ubiquity of darkness?

But history tells us - or rather memory, for what is history but memory, a kind of bureaucratizing of memory rather, a rendering it official; though perhaps at times, or even often, the substance of this history just fabricated or warped memory, some story convenient for the teller, his story; a nice, simple version of events whose bold, clear lines and elegant delineations others go on to inhabit in all innocence, convinced by these smooth contours and the desire to be just so convinced - for who doesn’t yearn for smooth, clear contours; and so, all in all, a geometry of certainty invoking, most convenient for the teller, actions, logical ones, seamless extensions of those bold historical lines, and onwards these lines push out into the naked spaces beyond; facts built on fictions, the conjuring of the future by fraudsters of the past.

But anyway, memory so rather than history tells us this encroaching darkness will not continue ever fatally onwards. Instead the advancement grinds to a halt, a pause, and then light begins to crawl forwards, eating ever more into the territories of night, marching on till… well, you know the rest, the pendulum one way then another, and so backwards and forwards it swings year after year, faultlessly.

So that’s the pattern. But patterns have been known to be broken, amidst the debris perhaps a new pattern emerging; so why not here with our coldly advancing darkness?

With this wintry dilation of light it could be that there is a thread and hanging from this thread a dark and heavy mass, and this dark mass is pulling downwards towards a greater darkness, a parent sea of it; the lesser darkness raised, so to speak, to infinity; and so every year the black mass is getting almost to within touching distance of the black sea beneath, but then, just before Christmas, the thread from which the weight hangs is extended and stretched to the full, reaches no further, and descent stops. Soon enough the dark mass is retreating, pulled away from the black sea by the drawn up thread.

But what if in time, after aeons and aeons of it, the thread, every year stretched to its limits, suffers wear and tear, becomes worn and frayed, and eventually, sometime near enough to now, the last of the fibres gives way, the thread snaps, and into the greater darkness plummets the lesser one, and so out goes the light. Absolute darkness follows.

Maybe you could try lowering into the darkness other threads with hooks attached to little knots at the end, and feeling around with these hooks, to pull the fallen weight from the black void, and, the snapped thread replaced, set the pendulum in motion once again; the odd interlude lingering a while unmourned as a memory, then as a fading myth. But instead, all that happens with you and your hooks is you pull from the sea treacly drops of night which slide down, off and away, even as they’re being raised up from below.

Hooks failing, into the darkness are lowered fishing-nets to trawl the depths. But however big the nets, what kind of depths are these, and whatever kind they are the nets yield nothing but a load of black drops falling mockingly away as the nets are pulled up. It might be that the mocking is only all in our own heads, but inside, outside or both, what difference does it make?

But ignoring the mocking, threads and hooks are lowered again, and hanging from the hooks are now more threads and at the end of these threads volunteers equipped with torches; and they are carefully lowered into the black depths, but their feeble artificial lights are swallowed up in the first few feet, illuminate nothing, and back up they return, gasping, with nothing. We should be glad at least of their returning.

*

But memory, you might retort, tells us that all this is nonsense; that the thread won’t snap...or forget about snapping, what bloody thread?! This is all just some stupid myth, and what’s worse a made up one - though of course they’re all made up, but this worse again because it’s made up on purpose, and by someone occupying the present! Those of us though who have kept pace with this present, rather than lagging behind, have moved far beyond myths, separating ourselves in the process, say, from those ancients who answered the fading light with stories of underworld dwelling dark gods who required placating by human sacrifices else the sun be consumed and life swallowed up whole by death, rather than just in these unhappy segments.

But, the people might have asked themselves - ignoring their authorities, the priests and storytellers of the dark gods – since these offerings of life must be the energy needed by such a malign being of death to keep itself alive, its necessary food, then why not deny it these offerings, forcing it instead to fulfil its own logic and become the death it’s supposed to be, to die, and so cease to exist. That must be the logic: death needs infusions of life to ward off itself, itself being non-existence. It’s only the slivers of life that keep it alive. So death is an illusion created by the energy imparted in its direction by the positive that is life - as could be said of any negative.

Unlike them though, those ancients, we’ve been around a while and memory tells us that the thread won’t snap - or rather memory tells us it hasn’t snapped, but within memory is something which tells us not just that it hasn’t but that it won’t, and that something is a formula, a legalistic code, governing the behaviour of all the forms, and that code of course is the Laws of Nature. We might have named them, these laws, but they’re not our laws but nature’s; but then again what are we but nature also, and so our labelling them nature again. So “Nature”, when you think of it, the word, is also nature.

With these laws was there someone then sat before a desk with pencils and paper, set-squares, compasses and all kinds of armoury, equations everywhere, formulating these laws, deciding how things shall proceed, before finally out reality was unfurled, obedient and mathematical? Who knows.

But might this ever obedient reality desire ever to be not so obedient? Maybe that’s where man comes in: Nature, fed up with having to be exactly as itself, ushered in man as a contradiction

Charcoal Negative

2010-11-21T13:21:00.003Z

Genius

2010-11-15T16:37:00.003Z

"There was this genius - "
"Oh great, I love geniuses."
"You're in luck so. So anyway, there was this genius and he - "
"Does he have to be a genius?"
"Sorry?"
"Why can't he just be an ordinary person?"
"I thought you loved geniuses."
"You can have enough of them."
"Well he was a genius because being one that's who he was."
"Right so, right so. Go on."
"There was this genius - "
"Just to say this is really good stuff."

'Abstract Art' Considered

2010-11-13T14:34:00.004Z

According to Wikipedia, "In 1913 the poet Guillaume Appollinaire named the work of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Orphism. He defined it as, the art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but had been created entirely by the artist...it is a pure art."

So the notion is of an art abstracted from the world of reality, and in the process becoming pure. To look at the logic of this: what are these art works composed of in the most existential form - ie what are the artistic materials themselves? On paper or canvas or wooden board, etc, which is to say elements of the world of reality, are pressed colours or charcoal or inks etc , again extracted from the world of external reality. So on this most existential and fundamental level 'abstract art' as a philosophical concept is nonsensical.
Beyond this, has the artist somehow conjured up of himself the world of colour? Obviously not.And how specifically are these the images of this 'abstract art' unrelated to sense perception? Does the artist enforce a kind of self-lobotomising where he forgets the existence of forms like circles in nature or all the rectangles and various lines and shapes he has witnessed in his life?

The use of the phrase "pure art" is interesting here, in that music is seen as this pure abstracted realm towards which the other arts enviously aspire. This all relates to this post where I write of Plato's basically gnostic attraction towards the notion of the void as reality in its purest form:

The Greek void by contrast (to the void of Eastern philosophy) is specifically a language form, an intellectual creation or form, and revels in the fact of its existence as such. Why are the likes of Plato drawn to this concept of the void as an absolute - the thought which sits atop all other thoughts, the ascendant within the mental hierarchy? It is because, as said, the world of the senses has been decided to be unreal - this in itself of course an idea - and so what is most real should partake least of all of the sensory world, and what partakes least of all being apparently an idea. Ideas are stated to be the purest of substances, and the most pure of these substances is an idea which is utterly self-referential and distinct from the debased world of external reality. And so the void: a pure self-contained idea without reference to the debased world of sense perception. Hence through the ages, and still, the exaltation of the imagined holy landscape of Pure Reason.

And so the exaltation and attraction of the senseless concept of Abstract Art as a pure art, having supposedly escaped the world of impure matter. This pessimistic gnosticism - in its damning sense of physical reality might be imagined, by those relative few who even know of it, as an ancient way of thinking, long irrelevant, an intellectual fossil, but it is the essence of modern material atheism, where reality is asserted to be meaningless, ie fallen, but now unlike the gnostics there is no escape route from its hostile clutches, though tellingly with the same emphasis on Reason as Plato in his 'intellectual' version of pessimistic gnosticism - not of course that emphasising reason is in any way a guarantee that one's own 'reasoning' is anything but facile.

Titled

2010-11-10T19:36:00.003Z

Titled

2010-11-09T14:00:00.002Z

Titled

2010-11-09T11:24:00.003Z

Titled

2010-11-08T13:14:00.005Z

Banal But Persistent

2010-11-06T10:12:00.001Z

Yes, they were banal, but in fairness to them they were persistent.
"But mightn't their persistence have been just another attribute of their banality?"
Yes maybe, but still, you have to be fair.

tytled

2010-11-02T09:04:00.004Z

b&w

2010-10-30T13:34:00.002+01:00

intersection

2010-10-28T14:16:00.003+01:00

Art Perception

2010-10-28T10:24:00.000+01:00

Static two-dimensional pictorial art - traditional drawing and painting - is the only art where the whole can be perceived in a single, simultaneous act of perception. With literature the mind scans along some point within the whole, as with music, film, theatre, ballet, etc. The act of perception with those forms is time-bound or related. They could be likened to streams progressing from A, the start, to B, the finish, and both the piece and one's mind are progressing together along the journey. Perhaps one can form some kind of inchoate sense of the total form after the event, a bird's eye view of the whole, but this is obviously not a direct act of perception. With these time forms all kinds of digressions are possible to the artist, harmful or not to the unity of the whole. but with the traditional pictorial forms, since the whole can be perceived simultaneously a greater rigidity is required, there is more absolute necessity for unity. Just to add that this simultaneity of perception of the whole is no longer there when the viewer focuses in on certain details and, because of the nature of perception, attention is now centred on aspects of the whole. In the creative process this focusing on details is where the artist may lose himself in 'digressions' - at the more obvious levels, say very intricately painting an eye but not standing back from his work to see that that eye is not positioned correctly.

That the static visual forms may be perceived directly as a whole is not meant as a value judgement - it is simply the way things are, though there is certainly an aesthetically satisfying aspect to this. Just to mention that the three-dimensional forms of sculpture do not quite exist in the same simultaneous way as objects of perception as naturally if one is looking at the front of a piece one cannot simultaneously be looking at the back of it.

intheshades

2010-10-26T12:35:00.006+01:00

Language and Life

2010-10-24T11:51:00.003+01:00

As written previously on the nature of language, the meaningfulness of this language if correctly used is inescapable, and to even attempt to question this involves the acceptance that the language used in the questioning is a meaningful act, and so to question language's meaningfulness is a self-contradictory, false and impossible act. This is in the same sense that to involve oneself in mathematics inescapably rests on the intrinsic truthfulness of the language of mathematics.

It would be wrong so imagine that this meaningfulness of language is at any point a subject of debate, a rational truth towards which one reasons, and once if successfully done, the point from which one can then meaningfully proceed with further reasoning. One doesn't need nor ever needed to prove mathematics to be true before engaging in it; instead its meaningfulness is an inescapable given, and it is the same with this language of words. The argument as to its meaningfulness has already proceeded as a matter of course from the imagined destination; that is, its meaningfulness!
It might be argued that language is true because it mirrors external life. To look at a case of a farmer with two fields in which are cows. In the first field are 35 cows, in the second 42. If all those from the second are brought into the first, one knows for certain, if no cows have been added to or departed from their fields, that there are now 77 cows in that field - as a matter of language, one comes to this conclusion, since 35 added to 42 comes to 77. To stress also that this truth is not a servile but an autonomous one, by which I mean it is not some historical matter of observed truth that 35 and 42 are 77, and we proceed into future time with this realised; instead it is purely a matter of language. Language needs no observation of external reality to make such deductions; instead such truths are embedded within language. People might balk at this as mystical, but that would be because they are at odds with the intrinsic meaningfulness of life, have painted themselves into some false corner.

So the internal laws of language reveal this unquestionable truth, and if subsquent to this mental arithmetic the slightly sceptical farmer, to be asbsolutely sure, then counts all the cattle, the pleasing truth that external observation and logical deduction will be seen to correspond perfectly. Language and 'external truth' correspond as a matter of course. In this above instance though things are perhaps a little subtler than superficially appears, as the 'observed truths' of there being 35 and 42 cows are themselves matters of language before any arithmetic occurs. Obviously perception is the first mover of this process but to count to 35 is itself a linguistic matter. Perception is not able to stand alone in the matter of any observed truths. Language is always involved in matters that end in linguistic statements!

As a general and absolute principle, the perfect correspondence or co-existence of properly functioning language and life is not an idea regarding which one has an opinion. It is not up for debate, the same as it is intellectually impermissible to question 2+2=4. Any engagement in language, such as the attempted cannot but accept itself as a meaningful act within life. As I wrote here "The position of Doubt is a nihilistic intellectual proposition in the true sense, within the framework of which one cannot grant oneself the liberty of believing language to be real and intrinsically meaningful. And so, within this framework of doubt the question of doubt cannot be asked, as to ask the question requires an acceptance of the very reality or meaningfulness of language which Doubt, if true to itself, must doubt. And so, since the question of doubt cannot be formed, then doubt cannot exist, as doubt requires a mind utilising language so as to doubt."
The mathematical scenario with the cows is a very simple and clear example of this correspondence of language and truth, but this correspondence extends without limits, though of course with absolute dependence on the correctness of the language. Again to illustrate using mathematics, this world of numbers 'invented' in and by our minds, at no matter how seemingly abstract and complex the levels, always corresponds to internal truths of the external world. And why? Because life is not self-contradictory but intelligent, and seamlessly so. And this is where the relationship of life and language begins to deepen. This language of words is far subtler than the mathematical one, but if correctly used it will inescapably correspond to some truth of life. Though on the one hand language can be autonomous, self-sufficient as a truth-tool, it does not exist autonomously; that is, language dwells in life and without life naturally there would be no language.

However, a rampant mistake is to talk of life, or reality, and language as distinct. Reality is all that exists within itself, and in fact there is no within itself - what is 'within reality' is reality. And so language as dwelling within reality is inescapably part of reality, and thus the perfect correspondence of the two, if correctly used - for language is apparently capable of error and so creating illusory 'realities', things that seem to be but are not, even if believed by any numbers of people. Also, pedantic as it might superficially seem, 'reality' or 'life' are themselves words, and one cannot talk of these as though they were not words, nor pretend that the total realities to which such all-inclusive words like 'life' referred even somehow excluded those words as comprising inseparable aspects of those realities. There is no life existing independently of language, the same as there is no life independent of anything that forms part of the whole that is life, including for example the glass near my hand, or my hand or you yourself. To talk of life as though it did exist separately of the words being used to talk of it is meaningless language, where the integral relationship of words and that to which they refer has broken down, and one is merely left with linguistic unreal illusion.

So language and life are not distinct from each other, in fact there is no 'and' about it. Instead language - mathematical and linguisic - are extensions and deepenings of that life, and thus the lack of inner contradiction between them. Language does not dwell in some compartment apart!

scattered

2010-10-22T12:06:00.003+01:00

Headache

2010-10-21T16:27:00.003+01:00

"To have a headache a man must have a head. Am I right?"
"Certainly."

Trapdoors

2010-10-18T16:11:00.000+01:00

Trapdoors, the place was full of trapdoors; and the funny thing was that even after placing oneself unfortunately right above one of these trapdoors and the trapdoor swinging open and down one going, one didn't even notice it had opened nor down which the going. And as for the odd and unpleasant place one had gone and ended up . . . one didn't seem to notice that either.

slowtocomeout

2010-10-16T11:32:00.004+01:00

Art

2010-10-15T10:57:00.002+01:00

"Tell us about your art."
"They're pictures that you look at."
"But what are they about?"
"Themselves."

grass

2010-10-13T20:35:00.005+01:00