So: I have more to say.

I’m reading this book called Baptizing Plato. It’s about neoplatonism and Christianity, riffing off the work of Spenser. I know pretty much nothing about Spenser. But the neoplatonic discussion is very rich, even if incredibly technical in nature. I picked up the old book with a blue tetrahedron on the cover at the Cal Poly philosophy department’s free book table. I’m pretty sure it was Todd Long’s. The book spends a lot of time juxtaposing metonymy and metaphor, as a catch-all of some kind for two prevailing attitudes toward representation and the world. Do we preserve a sense of conceptual distance so as to get a better ontology, or should we throw ourselves into the fictive realm of imagery so as to grasp meaning immediately? And to what extent does this dialectic even hold water?

Platonism has always been very significant for addressing quality of human life and the nature of the world. It gets a lot in a small amount of information. In the dialogue between the metonymic and metaphoric is something really powerful. Suppose you have a sequence of photography set to music, and the music is profoundly fitting for the music. And let’s say it’s a film, and the plot and the characters are also fitting with the music and imagery. And let’s also say the film-making process somehow conveys the same thing as the plot, the sounds, the sights. There is a trans-medial unity. What form does this unity have? Can we abstract beyond a conceptual relationship, dig deeper beneath the metaphoric forge? Is there something that simultaneously conciliates metonymy and metaphor, is both at once? Can we fulfill our deep aesthetic longings and drive for perfection in one act? Can the ultimate telos of each domain be the same?

I want to write a book about mesophysics and interrelativity, with an organization and efficiency that conveys something of its own content. That was the primary movement of A Vespers for Our World—namely, a structure that transmitted the same information as its content, and about how this tension is what’s at stake in human apocalypses. If we have a division in information types, not accessing their unity, we are cutting the world apart. The self and the other are at odds. I really stretched the relationship between formalism and spirit. There is tremendous energy in the poem, even if it seems rather clunky to read, once the fundamental insight is made, the thing glistens like a stone dragon.

I think that the trouble blocking the human spirit, from art to infrastructure, to energy, pollution, environmental degradation, rape, murder, arson—you name it—all comes down to a lack of accessing this unity. We are driven to do destructive things (and killing an animal for food or getting angry are not destructive of the systemic unity of life itself, and so they’re not ultimately destructive and shouldn’t be considered as destructive, only as conditionally deconstructive) because we feel odds between ideals and reality. Our ideas are immaculately close to our imagination, whereas outer reality has some distance from us. What is real, objective, true? Is it the physical things we can taste, touch, see, smell, hear, know by experience? Is it the principles, ideas, arrangements, processes by which we can identify and organize the ever-changing outside world? In the world of objects we seem to lack immediacy of awareness. In the world of thoughts we seem to lack independent existence to ground us. Plato and Aristotle, rationalism and empiricism, still argue in our hearts, our minds, our bodies, even if we’ve never turned a page of philosophy.

The question of this plagues and besets my research of the selfsame topic. By what structure should I approach the question of structure, if I am seeking a trans-medial package to convey information about trans-medial phenomena? I want to offer a polished work, with mathematical elegance to reflect, even equate the elegance of the mesophysical unity across media/fields. It is very jazzlike, simultaneously casual and extremely formal, equivalently casual and precise. There is a flowing stream of consciousness that can be tapped into. It’s not even consciousness merely. It’s a flowing thing, a system, a thing that can be mathematically characterized. The unity of a song and an experience can be representated as mathematically patterns. Dare I quote Tesla’s opinions on vibration and science of the non-physical? It’s a persian music thing, a Rumi thing, a turbulent gurgling river thing, a snow leopard tumbling thing, a dam-erosive thing, a thing that is poetry and philosophy, math and art.

I want so badly to write and to research, to be devoted to my work. But the oroborical nature of my work is hindrance to me. It’s also the reason. Social motivation could inspire me. But I want to write from pure spirit. FLAME. What is between matter and energy.

My blog here is incredibly dynamic and not polished. I have a good friend with a well-polished blog. I feel that isn’t what I want to do. I want to convey something that is really in the fray and furnace of my interior. For many it won’t be the most pleasant to read. It’s not exactly something I’m proud to share, even though I’m proud of its many steps and won’t change it for the world. You are witnessing rock-formation, not merely the final stones. So quit bitching and watch rock melt, cool, and fold. It’s not for you, anyway.


Gorda, California… in a light rain