Build up your pretentiousness, but smash your pretensions.

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But you’re just repeating the points made by X… – thinking my own life after my own manner. And this objection is only raised in my own head. There should be no need to attribute ideas that have use-value in my life, or at least, it shouldn’t be the primary thought. Maneuvering on the surface, rather than diving into the logic of concepts and the forging, shaping, reshaping and tempering of concepts.

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Obsession with form in poetry is exactly like obsession with the folds in origami.

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Time is the villain of the piece, and time is the protagonist.

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Consciousness is a relation between layers of flesh and organ in the brain-body system, or of different elements within it, the memory system-flesh, and the seeing system-flesh, and the structures that make up thoughts. This is forgotten when people begin to talk of panpsychism. If this is taken into account, panpsychism just becomes an affirmation that the universe contains the buzz that we’re made of. The world exists.

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If we say that something in history ended, it’s only an attempt to plaster over the remains – often living remains.

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Translating an old text is the best way to feel the language age in your mouth, as you try and pick words which themselves immediately appear to be so sunk in their context as to be unusable – words you know the new generations will never use. Language is a hecticity of generational dialects!

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Ulysses – The overpowering, overdetermined voice as it chatters gives a vision of people as essentially chatty, that is, concretely representational or at least obsessed with representations (yeah, okay, agreed.)  But in our wanderings we don’t often have this loudness, this voice in the head always going – at least some of us don’t – or don’t always. Regardless of the conceptual nature of perception. What is missing in Ulysses is silence – but then, it’s hard to speak silence, though some manage it. But this constant stream of word-images is what allows the the non-representational to be evoked in the book – the unspeaking though still basically linguistic intelligence that has no voice, or a silent voice. It kind of holds that to understand the private life of a person, they have to be examined from a third person perspective. But that third person could be oneself. In Ulysses this combines to give the impression that the world itself is a self, and is writing the text, and is alive in schizoid fragments.

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Watching a baby try to learn to drink water from a tumbler, I think – this kid has no idea what he’s doing or why, he just wants to do it! So much of our life in this world is exactly similar. The relative simplicity of things we just bash our heads against through ignorance never fails to amaze me (After saying this I, a grown man, take a sip from my tumbler and cough, choking.)

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Digital Books – I remember Hegel having this bit about how subjectivity expresses itself in the personal environment. And that’s the problem with e-readers, isn’t it, in the end? You don’t get to show your books to yourself, or to your friends, in the physical space which you have sculpted in tandem with your subjectivity. One might say, the subjectivity sculpting should be going on in the head instead. But we have memories that are designed around evocation and friends who we like to impress – that is, share things with. That can’t happen only in your head.

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One way of making poems comes from delicately filling the structure bit by bit until it touches the rim of the cup. That’s delicate. But a more extravagant way is to unload everything in a stream of rhythmic and metaphoric work, which overspills from line to line. Then to take that as the raw material, and hack it and cut it until unexpected meanings and a hardness appear, like a plant being fossilised. Nailing on and welding as needed. You end up with something that feels strange and bears the mark of its missing limbs but the only symptom of that is strangeness.

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There is an easily found film of Derrida talking about love, hesitantly or faux improvising to the camera, showing his narcissistic side, which is adorable. He talks about the difference between the who and the what, talking about the singularity of someone versus their qualities, which is interesting, as it seems to at first sight fall into the kind of Cartesian picture I thought he had tried to finesse out if existence. How easily mannerisms of the academy fall away in the real.

But we can do it for him – the being of this singularity is in fact a fidelity, a discursive act, a promise, a marriage between the mind and the other even in their flux. The what is the way we see them from day to day, that they annoy us and question us and undermine us, despite that fidelity, that love, that need to be loved. The problem of love comes down to the problem of being, he says. Between the who, and the what. The it, and the ‘that it is like this or that’. Our hope towards being is that it will love us, that it will hold us, forever. But in its paroxysms of contingency, it often hates us and spurns us, changing at will. There’s no solution to this problem, it’s just the problematic of life.

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Idealism – If there is no external world that’s only because we, too, are external.