“But now, I just want to get back to what I love,” I ended Thursday
(“ sunrise, sunset,...”).
He seems resolute.
I am. Yet, what I love is too much to distill into something both cogently fair to the love and brief (one would hope).
In particular, intending to write a good long posting today drew itself
into a skeletal mitosis by late afternoon that could be fleshed out as
at-least-nine essays.
That’s good—but not practical.
However, I could turn out a focused essay quickly, if I had an imposed
deadline.
But given free time, I thoroughly enjoy the mental heights. I do know to stop when there’s need—to transpose ongoing elation into a promise of future time I make room for, in terms of points in my garden (themes, notes, allusions, resources) that would be obscure to anyone else, but which work for me.
I love the cliché “art of living” because there’s so much potential for weaving normative (healthful) aspects of living well with senses of imaginability which are vital to envisioning a good life for oneself. Artistic living can be an idealization (so far beyond stereotypical and craft senses of “artistic” life) that may draw an envisioning life into its own potentials.
Can the health of communities be sufficiently grounded in realistic senses of humanistic belonging that imply practical sustainability of good lives everywhere?
Here is the news: The public intellectual struggles for time in the market of consumerist humanity.
Got time for the New York Times? I love what they’re trying to do to promote philosophy on the commons by giving academic philosophers regular chances to address topical issues (“The Stone” series).
So, is thinking of one’s “being” a luxury?
A presumptuous mind may unwittingly believe that its conception of what’s really acceptable for one’s body (as if embodiment isn’t constitutive of one’s mind) is for the mind to presume (apart from its embodiment), because the separate mind can vainly believe in its own conceptions, even controlling what’s good for the alienated body—until ill health later in life threatens to kill everything (including that deconstruction of presumptiveness called demenita), and the legacy of presumption cannot be simply undone.
Is the meaning of “the body” a legacy of regarding oneself as an other? (Certainly the economics of sexuality is about regarding oneself as another does, too often setting up oneself for chronic unhappiness.)
Self reflection readily grants the child within, but not easily the child that one remains (seeing oneSelf—all life historicality—in horizons). The genealogy of possible love emerges from the child—no: emerges from the evolution of childish imaginability, as culture itself evolved the conceivability of human flourishing through facilitating potentials of the child that would grow to facilitate potentials of the next generation.
Could it be that the ontology of our presence is embodied in the evolving ontogeny of our form of life?
Imagine venturing some comprehensive comprehension of ourselves as love of literary mindedness. Would it be ultimately idiosyncratic?
The tri-lingual literary essayist George Steiner recently published his Poetry of Thought, subtitled “from Hellanism to Celan.” But the publisher’s cover spreads the words of the subtitle through the words of the title and author, suggesting that the feasibility of narrative coherence is only possible by way of singular capability. Postmodernist cynicism about grand narratives is undermined by individual capabilities for cohering time through narrative.
The appeal of philosophy always was at least a hope for comprehension enough that we may optimistically live beyond the times that betray us with overtones of ultimate meaninglessness (which is pompous misconception of our intrinsic imaginability).
I’m enjoying life immensely. I have—may I say—the most luscious sense of human flourishing ever existing (at least because I have a garden of so many others’ excellent senses of flourishing, and an erotic desire to integrate them all into my narrative of desire).
Kathryne might have loved to berate me with her acerbity toward it all.
I’m terrified by how easily Kathryne might have found me, after I e-mailed her impishly that September. (Just Google ‘gary e davis berkeley’.) Not knowing I wanted her to want to respond, she saw stuff I write, and I had more effect on her than I could have imagined.
Awful vanity—only undone by refusing the possibility, as if otherwise my attitude causes suicides by unrequited loves (or makes someone turn lesbian when they can’t have me: Late 1974 [re: Thursday end of, ¶ 4], Linda set up house, after returning from L.A., with my best friend at the time, already lesbian, and they’re still together, 38 years later). Obscene vanity, deserving of whatever unhappiness I’ve given myself.
But there’s always Literature, isn’t there, K.?
When we were in our 20s, there was much literary-theoretical ferment relating to psychoanalysis and The Text. Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing” remains one of the greater philosophical essays of the late century. “Being” translates into a textual condition of self-comprehensibility. We wrote “God” into existence.
Recently, I wrote obliquely to Johanna: We are the species that makes stories—evidentiary and imaginary—history, literature, philosophical coherings, poetics of being in time. That is the kind of thing that draws together all of “Us”: a fascination, a love for being drawn into the gorgeous waters of time.
