Introduction, I think we need to regress a bit, to move away from the philosophical, especially since the purpose of philosophy is not really acquisition or intervention but certainly a kind of speculating in the sense of looking over, it allows us to "bracket off" questions that we may not want to pursue. So I imagine this entry as a kind of stepping back from that spculation, a kind of "project", like a journeyman project.

So here, let's examine the question of "transparency", in particular, "insistent transparency" -- this seems not quite to be the issue in "An emperor's new cloths" ("insistent opacity"?) but it's close. The two may be much the same thing. For example, in thinking about "meaning", when one word or words means something, we are insisting either on the transparency of the word or on the opacity of ... that which lies behind or in front of it, however we want to visualize this.

Before we get much further we have to talk about the "clever outsider". They are the protagonists of many stories, they are "the cool ones". Isn't Don Quixote a "clever outsider" -- in the sense that he is certainly NOT a knight, but he tries to be one anyways -- and even succeeds? I think that's the lesson we learn, maybe, from the stage play at least, something about the heart being all that matters or something -- a familiar moral lesson. ... The examples from literature are probably too many too mention, it can probably be argued that all literature is about such a figure. It's certainly the case in "Emperor's New Clothes", the two tailors are clever outsiders, and their creativity hinges on an insistent transparency / opacity -- an insistent vision, in any case.

And finally, let's talk about "finitude". We've been talking for some time, I think, about the "auratic", which is our term for the aura of the present. It can perhaps be opposed to the "narrative". The narrative concerns the development of something, the aura concerns our general understanding, all at once. A narrative perhaps leads to an aura or suggests an aura. The aura is not strictly psychological, it is heavily mnemonic as well -- the nature of the aura is something that we here back away from, as declared in the introduction. We take it as a given, we wonder about the sorts of auras that are created.

... finitude is related to the aura, the aura is the way we see something, it is an apparance in the present. We cannot get beyond the aura. The notion of auratic finitude is really a response to the old question of "what knowledge is" -- we can know certain facts, for example such as the fact that the earth is round, yet that model of knowledge is of course inadequate. Nor are we content with equating knowledge with behavior, there are many problems with that. In fact, we have long known that there is something downright wrong with knowledge that seems to cut off any further progress -- but at the same time, we obviously don't want to give a too "inspirational" version of knowledge either. So here, we declare: the aura is the limit of knowledge, knowledge is the feeling of the aura. Insteresting knowledge is the feeling of an interesting aura. Literature does not seek to impose an aura -- it is not "inspirational" -- but rather it is *about* the aura. There seem to be problems with this formula -- are we here talking about paradoxical "knowledge of the aura"? But these can be sorted out: literature is an "insistent aura", it is an aura that we must see. An interesting example that highlights this would be Keats's "This Living Hand": the overall feeling of this short poem is -- do you see? (In fact, Conrad's very words regarding yet another auratic work, Heart of Darkness -- something along the lines of, "I want to make you see") "This Living Hand" -- this very short Keats poem goes, horribly misquoted -- "now capable of earnest grasping would, in the icy silence of the tomb, so chill thy bones and haunt thy living days that one would wish one's own veins dried of blood so that one would see red blood flow there again -- see, here it is, I hold it before you." Here, there is a sense of urgency to feel a guilt that we do not quite feel -- the key is to attempt to understand this guilt.

The central issue of The Emperor's New Clothes is certainly this auratic deception by the outsider. In fact, the works we are used to mentioning can probably be regarded as a kind of inverted, romanticized version of this old fable. The tailors weave what seem to be a magic cloth that no one can see... they do not have the authority of the king ... etc, etc..

The central problem being addressed by The Emperor's New Clothes -- this set of concepts, however, is that one needs to see. One can't merely know the darkness, one must see the darkness -- or one must feel the feeling of guilt, one must feel this impending guilt. (This guilt of (unfelt) guilt, however -- addressed not only in "This Living Hand" but also in Wordsworth's "Boy of Winander" -- is emphatically not simply the same as the first guilt!) But the task here is not simply to document the darkness, which would in fact be indistinguishable from documenting the human experiences of light. What then?

We must talk about the material here -- we are not really sure what this material is, to be honest -- is it the cloth? The cloth doesn't exist. There is an insistent transparency that transports us to another state of existence, which is characterized by the aura -- we are concerned, ultimately, with an auratic history. The aura is not essentially material, the aura simply is -- this is the question that we stated in the introduction that we wanted to look past, for now. The aura is real, however, I mean, it is a force in history, it is something that we -- well, others -- can investigate -- there is no "essence" to the aura, no overwhelming feeling of holism, since the whole is simply that which is not shattered.

The relationship of the clever outsider to the aura is one of oppurtunish, cleverness, and so forth. The clever outsider does not really understand the aura, probably, but he (or she) does not seek to duplicate it, but rather, attempts to generate an aura by any means possible. But this, it turns out, is not simply a "new aura", but rather -- well, it has a quite precise nature.

By the "insistent transparency" principle, the aura is based on -- or rather, depends on (ie, avoiding questions of essence) --  the insistent transparency of the signfier. The effort here is to go past and return, one can never know the signifier directly, but rather, only by understanding -- not the nature of -- but the possibilities of this insistent transparency (ie, in the sense of a branching out) -- well, not the sum of possibilities, but the possibility that is there preserved for us.

Now, the biggest error of the townspeople was believing Emily to be some kind of romantic or melancholic, or even foreigner: the error, we can call it, of mistaking psychosis for psychology. The psychotic is not insane, she is perfectly sane, she is rather 'ammoral' (in the 'beyond good and evil' sense), some insigt into life and it's constructedness has made her so.

Importantly, we are not talking about the foriegn, but rather of the event. The townspeople thought she was foreign, 'from another time', the ante-bellum South -- she is not, she is very much involved in their world. We can draw, of course, parallels with Hitchcock's Psycho, but also with La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which in many ways is about the very same thing -- an erroneous understanding of foreigness.

The dark seed, then... is the event, and not the foreign world. I should have just called it the dark heart (ie, the Heart of Darkness). The shift here is from foreigness to eventness. The foreigness is another world, the eventness is something that we can't quite understand that has happened in this one. The psychotic lives in another world but is not foreign.

Allow me to say a few words about the concept of the event. With both foreigness and eventness, we are thinking about the what I fancifully called the 'ideomaterialist' origins of history -- that is, at once idealist and material. There is no ground to history, anything can happen -- and this would seem to suggest the primality of the idea. But the idea is always related to nature, solitude, and work, the most basic form of behavior, the return to truth, and thus, the idea is related to the material.

But, as we said, with both foreigness and eventness we are thinking about the return to this ideomaterialism at the beating heart of the world. But with foreigness, we are still caught in the error of asking how ideomaterialism determines a new world STRUCTURALLY. Ie, the question is: how does the material, as seed, influence the final form of the new ('foreign') way of life?

But with eventness, we are talking about something within our world. The question is no longer structural. The figure of chess is interesting here. The peices of chess are mostly the same, but the way the game plays out is different. The psychotic brings forth an event as the dark seed of the world, and this event is not something that has a definite structural form.

But rather -- and what I speak of here is certainly an brand new 'hat' for the philosopher (scientist, moralist, artist, defender, celebrator, etc.?) -- if there is no structural form, well, then what are we to do at all? Out task can only be the attempt to stabilize the conceptual discovery or understanding of these moments. In other words, our task is to stabilize, in some way, how read, how we understand literature, how we understand history, via a set of concepts.


But let's turn away from this discussion of eventness, foreigness, and the driving forces of history, the theoretical groundwork, in order to talk what we set out to talk about: the dark seed of A Rose for Emily. The event involves the murder of Homer, yet we do not really know how it works as an event. Obviously Homer is not simply a person, he stands for what we hate about modern society. He is a man's man. I'm obviously not a man-hater or anything, but we must keep in mind how goddamn annoying these people can get. There are these people that always believe they are more 'random' or free than us or something, they think they are the shit, and I think that, yes, murder is something we can understand here.

As I said, we do not really know how this event happened. I mean, Emily poisons Homer, that much is true, but we don't know how she is able to 'bring down' the 'Homeric'. Well, we do -- that's the tricky part, we speak of that above -- but we know only in the sense of vague suggestions, concepts, etc. -- like the Intended said of Kurtz, 'I didn't really understand everything he did'. This is a consequence of the project we outlined above.

Tbc..........

I'm trying to get over my misogyny, my subtle or not so subtle misogyny. I've obviously never hated women as such, but I do tend to think about them, philosophically, in a 'traditional' role: 'mediator', I said, or something. There's nothing wrong with misogyny per se, of course -- but it's a good name for some unwitting stupidity we've been sheltering.

Well, let's develop this anecdotally, let me offer a new reading of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Basically, the attitude of the knight should be understood as, 'Kind of weird, but pretty'. I think this went through Rudolphe's head in Madame Bovary. This expression is intended to eliminate all notions of a 'mediator', the Belle Dame is not doing anything 'for us'. Her effect on us comes because she is pretty, but other than that, there's not much we understand. (Let's defer talking about the second part, the Ghosts of Kings, for now.)

Let's now speak about an interesting historical process: virtualization. I here want to consider a movement from an accepted land, to a false land, to a new land, a 'land in mid-air'. For LBD, the accepted land is, well, nature, love, community. It is the land that the knight assumes he shares with the Belle Dame. We need not say it's an actual land, it's rather a land that is common. The false land is our 'misogyny' (or the misogyny of the poem: 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci, has thee in thrall!') -- it's this notion that she is attempting to 'cheat' in some way, by any means necessary, 'self-alienation', constructing nature. Finally, the 'land in midair' is her 'coming into consciousness', if you will, it's the movement from power (and power is always unnatural, cheating, etc.) to self-understanding. Thus, the final reading of La Belle Dame will have to think about how she is referring to or thinking about power.

Let me give another anecdote involving computer programming. I've been doing some hobbyist coding project, and the latest insight I've come across is quite interesting. I've been trying to write some ... patches, you can call them, for vim, the text editor, and I was stuck on a long time on working out a fairly complicated bit of user interaction. I once had the vision of a generalized rule system that would simplify and automate the inputting of exceptional cases. The patch I was writing was getting increasingly complicated and I knew better than to push my way through it, when suddenly the obvious solution hit me: to simply go through everything case by case rather than rule by rule. To simply state what each case should be, and what one should do in each case.

In general, we go through a lot of insights that we believe to be progressive, but they are not. We live however we want to live, like wild animals, we occupy our niches. But we always yearn for an honest relationship with the land. Depending on what we are working on, we can come up with different insights and different progressions through these insights -- fine, all this we know. What I want to think about here is 'power', cheating, or a land without a land.

The idea occurs to me, but only vaguely: could there be some power common to all these lands, and could someone actually subsist on this land, come to their own on this land? The key here is reconceiving of power itself as land, as a land just coming into being. In other words, the key to overcoming misogyny is to understand how the mediator can be 'for herself'.

> vim: set nowrap ts=1 tw=66 fo=aw:

I made the argument some time ago that Christianity was the only form of messianicism: a standard philosophical trick maybe: 'if we were to ask what messianicism even is, then we can deduce from its very form, etc...' But whatever the details, this intuition is not incorrect: there is a underlying logic to Christianity that we have sudden insigts into, but this is, more generally, the only way to read anything.

There is a series of 'blessings' that catch my attention: I don't know the exact wording -- blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the meak, etc.. ('blessed are the cheesemakers...')

There is the notion that messiancism is, paradoxically enough, the bringer of a NEW COMMONALITY: is it simply a matter that we needed to be reminded that 'we are all humans, brothers, sisters'? But this would not be new, now would it ...

Forget the brotherhood of man, Christianity is clearly EXCLUSIVE in its blessings: it blesses some but not others. Plus, the brotherhood of man cannot possibly be 'new' by the very fact that it is obvious, easily accepted and soon forgotten. Some exclusivity is needed, but this is not a human exclusion, neither elitism nor the class struggle.

The question of christianity is, then, what exactly is being blessed here. A list is given, strongly suggesting some common theme, or ground, emphatically, however, not named. I raised the possibility long ago that christianity is not for christians, or at least, exclusively for christians. In other words one does not have to be a christian in order to be blessed: perhaps this is the meaning of the mostly unquestioned 'poor in spirit', 'blessed are the poor in spirit' -- I don't want much to pursue this: I mean, I know I'm right. Here we offer a further development, or proposal, for this question: the ground, or rather the land, those who share a common land, blessed are those who live on this land.

Our life is like a WHEEL: rotational into translational motion, movement about an axis, movement from one place to another. A further element to this metaphor: the ground on which the wheel travels, that which is touched by the wheel. We all touch upon this common ground. In other words, the common ground is our initial condition, or it is the possibility of messianic peace. [TBC]

We've been talking a lot about what we've been calling, 'nature': nature is basically is a state of 'vulnerability'. Of course, this means that nature, as a concept, is strategically developed, but this is true for all concepts, say, 'objectivity'. Nature describes the state where we are vulnerable to a certain sort of suggestion. It is a more sophisticated concept than 'truth', 'power', etc., as these concepts believe that that which is not universal is simply error. For power, power is not really the ability to change our condition, but rather, power is something that emerges at a moment ('strategically' is related to this) and seem to lead us elsewhere.

A mediator is still a very important concept here. The mediator mediated between nature and ourselves. For example, in Keats's La Belle Dame, the belle dame is the mediator. Note how she is 'high', in terms of something like social status. This also means that she speaks of things that I have been waiting for, rumored things. When I was younger, I would say many sentimental things, one of which was, that one of the strange effects of love is that one comes to understand love songs. This is the idea here of 'high', the 'transcendent', 'elevated', etc. Yet, at the same time, she 'arises from nature', her methods seem very lowly.

Now, these high things are there by a certain LOGIC. Well, my point here is that she has to WORK to evoke the high, she has to think things through logically: and thus, there is no 'natural' connection between the high and the low. Corollary: that which is high derives all its power from the low. This is a surprisingly simple and radical claim that would require defending. But, for example, we can already sense this in the Heart of Darkness, where the high is associated with 'death'. The high, by itself, is simply corruption, arbitrariness, inside jokes, etc..

... One wonders whether something like pro-wrestling falls under this condition, I mean, of being high and dry. When I finally understood pro-wrestling I was very disappointed. I didn't expect so much wholesomeness there. This was about the same time I lost interest in religion, I mean, modern religion. Neither of these two things involve what we here call 'nature'.


[ Well, we're basically talking about the existence of ghosts. We are talking about something 'anticipated', but this anticipation is absolutely the work of the human, or rather, the mediator, or perhaps even some conspiracy of mediators!

But our original point here really involved the 'big question' (which we now reconceptualize as the relation between the high and the low). The big question was the question of nature as vulnerability, and how exactly this high, this tasteless dry high, comes to be embodied. ]