(no subject)
Sep. 16th, 2014 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionAll those conversations that almost got there.
Those things that might have been meant stayed on despairing in the shadows of the room when the talkers had gone. Despairing and dissolving back inside their liquid prison.
You sometimes hear someone scream knowing's the problem. That knowing replaces truth while killing it, a net of razors that locks into place one inch beneath the skin.
You worry that the essential thing still seems sometimes to exist only in the unknowing. That superheroes, chef shows and rappers stir up more memories of the old art than art's annotators.
Worry other times that it's personality types. Each gets to speak once once the once better-seeming ones fail. Each starts strong but starts to hear itself. Its own failure is indistinguishable from hearing itself fail. Then silence from that quarter for millennia.
To take something in its best light is to also take yourself in yours: as the person able to summon that light, to adjust it, sometimes tint it. As the person whose life matters enough to be enlarged by what might seek to.
No idea floats free. The pull of its ground is more implacable, more thorough, more intense than Earth's on things. Whatever can't become part of you, a part that stays a part of you, is dashed. Its twin may come but unless you've changed it too will dash apart.
The only salvation for ideas is that they only start to fall when you notice them. The choice of what to catch seems unimportant, since they start as wisps and fall at once to nothing, and since they're all over - many more of them than there are atoms. But nothing could be more.
That catching too many ideas makes us too much like ideas ourselves is a nightmare thought surviving into daylight. It feels like we've found the right ones but too late. That outside their right sequence they're all wrong.
It's no historical accident that Empsons precede Blooms.
But there are days when manners are unimportant.
When even another's keys failing to fit your locks doesn't kill what you're holding.
Art makes life out of life and art, but it couldn't if life were not already art (and art life).
Whatever is lost by modeling the general in some small subset of its particulars you at least keep it feeling like something that has particulars, as the general, true general, always must. Where general models lose grain and die. Can become part of no one so die.
But no one can know enough particulars. Those trying who don't lose the general lose crucial particulars elsewhere. And all you really needed to know was how they fit the general.
Which they only will once from one single perspective anyway. It will look like you seek to make how you see things, and possibly you, live forever. But when you knew what you were doing you knew that was incidental: you want to bring back things to another you, but at best can only connect other yous to you, things to your perspective of things. Which are easy as breath next to squaring your self and perspective.
But all these statements glass away that that I might have meant. Sometimes you can feel it. As though the whole air were a sigh.
Those things that might have been meant stayed on despairing in the shadows of the room when the talkers had gone. Despairing and dissolving back inside their liquid prison.
You sometimes hear someone scream knowing's the problem. That knowing replaces truth while killing it, a net of razors that locks into place one inch beneath the skin.
You worry that the essential thing still seems sometimes to exist only in the unknowing. That superheroes, chef shows and rappers stir up more memories of the old art than art's annotators.
Worry other times that it's personality types. Each gets to speak once once the once better-seeming ones fail. Each starts strong but starts to hear itself. Its own failure is indistinguishable from hearing itself fail. Then silence from that quarter for millennia.
To take something in its best light is to also take yourself in yours: as the person able to summon that light, to adjust it, sometimes tint it. As the person whose life matters enough to be enlarged by what might seek to.
No idea floats free. The pull of its ground is more implacable, more thorough, more intense than Earth's on things. Whatever can't become part of you, a part that stays a part of you, is dashed. Its twin may come but unless you've changed it too will dash apart.
The only salvation for ideas is that they only start to fall when you notice them. The choice of what to catch seems unimportant, since they start as wisps and fall at once to nothing, and since they're all over - many more of them than there are atoms. But nothing could be more.
That catching too many ideas makes us too much like ideas ourselves is a nightmare thought surviving into daylight. It feels like we've found the right ones but too late. That outside their right sequence they're all wrong.
It's no historical accident that Empsons precede Blooms.
But there are days when manners are unimportant.
When even another's keys failing to fit your locks doesn't kill what you're holding.
Art makes life out of life and art, but it couldn't if life were not already art (and art life).
Whatever is lost by modeling the general in some small subset of its particulars you at least keep it feeling like something that has particulars, as the general, true general, always must. Where general models lose grain and die. Can become part of no one so die.
But no one can know enough particulars. Those trying who don't lose the general lose crucial particulars elsewhere. And all you really needed to know was how they fit the general.
Which they only will once from one single perspective anyway. It will look like you seek to make how you see things, and possibly you, live forever. But when you knew what you were doing you knew that was incidental: you want to bring back things to another you, but at best can only connect other yous to you, things to your perspective of things. Which are easy as breath next to squaring your self and perspective.
But all these statements glass away that that I might have meant. Sometimes you can feel it. As though the whole air were a sigh.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-16 05:19 am (UTC)Also, this: "I haven't written down a great deal about myself during these days, partly because of laziness (I now sleep so much and so soundly during the day, I have greater weight while I sleep), but also because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception to be established definitely in writing only when it can be done with the greatest completeness, with all the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness. For if this does not happen--and in any event I am not capable of it--then what is written down will, in accordance with its own purpose and with the superior power of the established, replace what has been felt only vaguely in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognized too late."
no subject
Date: 2014-09-16 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-16 11:54 am (UTC)(I would have disagreed with you! Alas, I never wrote it. Though bits are in my first book.)
no subject
Date: 2014-09-16 08:06 pm (UTC)What did I mean. All of the remote truth one can remember, vs. all that one doesn't need to strenuously remember to know. (And in each cases assumes an auditor will have roughly he same access to both sorts, when cued.)
But the compositional versions of each of these, where one single thinking moment doesn't need to contain the whole knowledge, or at any rate only can as supported by reminders on the page (or whatever neutral-ish medium).
no subject
Date: 2014-09-16 08:13 pm (UTC)I guess partly because that "established" is used in this unusual way where potential fallibility's implied, making it immediately extremely sinister. Wrongful establishment, or rather uncertainly wrongful establishment, was his one song to sing.