Autumn Begins Unnoticed

Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,
and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder,

summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still.
At the bottom stair, in bunch-grass, lit dew shimmers.

[From Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, tr. David Hinton].

This Is Water

"...This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom of all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

[Slightly edited excerpt from a transcript of David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College; the full speech may be found here].

"Those who go down are always questioning."

Those who truly go down have no acquaintance with bleak "resignation" (which no longer wills, since it does not will anything future) and just as little with noisy "optimism" (which, despite all the self-assurance, still does not genuinely will, since it blocks itself against willing beyond itself and against attaining itself only in transformation).

Those who go down are always questioning. The un-rest of questioning is not empty uncertainty; instead, it is the opening-up and guarding of that rest which, as the gathering together into what is most question-worthy (the event), awaits the simple intimacy of the call and endures the extreme wrath of the abandonment by being...

Questioning of this sort is the restraint of seeking out where and in what way the truth of being might be grounded and sheltered.

--Martin Heidegger, Contributions, tr. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu, p. 315.

"Our own hour is the era of downgoing."

The down-going, in the essential sense, is the path to the reticent preparation for what is to come, i.e., for the moment in which and the site in which the advent and the remaining absent of the gods will be decided. This downgoing is the utterly first beginning. The distorted essence of downgoing, however, takes its own different course and is mere foundering, impasse, stoppage, under the guises of the gigantic, the massive, and the priority of arrangement over what is supposed to fulfill it.

The ones who go down in the essential sense are those who run beneath what is coming (the futural) and sacrifice themselves to it as its future invisible ground: the steadfast ones who perpetually expose themselves to questioning.

Only those who belong can know the era of down-going. All others must fear the down-going and thus deny and renounce it, for to them it is sheer weakness and mere ending.

--Martin Heidegger, Contributions, tr. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu, pp. 314-315.

Finnegan Begin Again!

The eternal now is always the mystic’s quest. Our predicament however, as Heidegger noted, is that we are too late for the gods and too early for being.

Being is not presence but an eventing steeped in the past and yet pregnant with the future.

All paths lead from the primordial (past) event but we mistake the path we happen to be on (an accident of history) for the only path through the forest.

Finnegan begin again! (This is "resistance to the thrust of beyng").

The Anti-Captain Ahab

The Leap Into Beyng

Those strangers alike in heart, equally decided for the bestowal and refusal that have been assigned to them. The ones who bear the staff of the truth of beyng, the truth in which beings are built up to the dominance of the simple essence of every single thing and breath. The stillest witnesses to the stillest stillness in which an imperceptible impetus turns truth out of the confusion of all calculatively correct findings and back into its essence, such that there is kept concealed what is most concealed, viz., the trembling of the passing by of the decision about the gods, the essential occurrence of beyng.

The future ones: the slow, far-hearing ones who ground this essence of truth. Those who offer resistance to the thrust of beyng.

The ones to come are those future ones who receive--insofar as they expect on the way back and in sacrificial restraint--the intimation and intrusion of the absconding and nearing of the last god.

The task is to prepare for these future ones. Such preparation is served by inceptual thinking as bearing the silence of the event. But thinking is only one way the few venture the leap into beyng.

--Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, tr. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu, p. 313.

"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?"

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a huzzar's surcoat.

"Hast seen the White Whale?"

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ch. 100.

The leap into beyng...

Dervish Fate

"He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon." --F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, aphorism 579.

For Those Counting The Years...

Romantic Politics

The Irish rebellion of 1798:

The Rising of the Moon.