1000 For a while in the dark night I travel with poetry. That is part of my shame and desolation. But at the end we part ways. I do not travel into the land of bleak death. The pale horse does not take me on its back sans merci. Rather I become bold. From somewhere the words come to me. Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth. I grab this god around his neck and his being pervades my soul. The rest is oblivion.
I deconstruct. I have been reading St. John of the Cross. I am imitation. I am fake. I am at Fontrevrault la plus troublante. I am the spinning door. I am the bad show. But I am not pale. I am.
I am writing this in Bangkok. I have been hurt by the emptiness of Buddhism, and I have secretly invited the blood-red kisses of Jesus to heal this wound. I have been cooled in the fiery jealousy of this god. I must say, of this God. I swear there is no other. I leave all these devas and idols. He is the only one. I don't want him, Him, to leave me. Love is a terrible bondage. I put the bands on willingly. His hands on my hands, we do it together. This word-scape is my escape.
It is of the essence of our religion that words are not nothing, but are of the Word, which for us is spilled out blood, drunk, enlightened. Beyond the weakness of the senses.
I have spent my life with logic and mathematics books. I intimately know the complexities, intricacies and delicacies of reason and reason's magic symbols. We are not far from alchemy, our science is now on the doorstep of fantasy. I can feel it. I let the feeling take me. And cut me. It is all unspeakably real. Red real. Read and reread until my eyes hurt and if they would only bleed I would feel better. This is all beyond the senses. The far a priori. In the dark night when I come undone. And the shirt falls to the floor.
The symbols of reason are all gestures lovers make for each other to show the delicacy of the pain they are in. This age of reason began in love's anguish. We have tried to escape it by going into the practical, but it hasn't worked. Love's worry has only increased.
1001 Poetry names the eternal things into our minds. It brings back to us what we have always known. It lets us see the one face we have been looking at forever. It takes us out of the entanglement we call life, and suddenly we are in a far place with the simple things themselves. The poet says the word war and if he says it correctly, that is to say, if that maddening thing the poets have named Poetry permits him to say it and is with him in his saying, then that great spirit appears before our minds, and we are silent. We have known this thing forever. We know its look and its smell, its feel and its taste. We know it in sensa that are themselves become pure and separate from mere life and its tepid sensings. The sound of the word War from the poet's breath dins forth in the great silence that is everything that war is.
Poetry names love beside the word war, and we know exactly what he means. He will not waste our time by saying look it is here or look it is there. He will just say the word, and we will already be stepping onto holy ground where it itself is, away from any earthly or heavenly battlefield, away from any particular friend with friend, that thing we have known for all eternity, and the blood from our heart rushes up into our throat. To then speak is to speak without speaking the very eternal speaking that seemed for a moment to be right there with this man who called himself a poet. Who named himself.
The Naming and the Speaking, the Word and its Going Out, the Real Things invading our shadow lives, the things that make us swoon and go blank and lie dead, the things that leave us with only the blazing light; these are the things that have left poetry and its poets so shunted and thrown down here where we are too busy for all this right now. Maybe later.
We have learned to turn our back to Poetry and Eternity. Of course we have. We had to found a way to stay alive and not be overcome. We no longer believe. We insist we no longer believe. We are the young boy who insists he is not in love. Who trembles when he is alone because he knows he is in love. So he seeks the incessant talk of friends. He becomes society's darling. Society's poet. The poet without Poetry. Himself an eternal thing we also know. This also is Poetry and true love. The hardest poetry to write. The hardest love to endure.
1002 Most of the time we live with shadows and wraiths and spooks and all those things that are there, but then again aren't really there. Ideas we understand, but not really. Maybe there really is no idea there. Lovers we love, but not really. Maybe there really is no such thing as love. Success we are about to attain, but what is that. Surely on the other side of attainment there will have been nothing there at all. And on and on. And so it goes. Ex nihilo nihil fit.
We have gotten used to it. It has become something comfortable. We knights of infinite resignation to the inevitable nothing have settled in.
Why is it like this? Well, there are reasons and then reasons for those reasons and reasons for those reasons farther beyond who knows or even cares. Scholars make money claiming they have found what might be a path through this wilderness. They write a book, have a party and get drunk. The next morning they will mumble something about having made a clearing where light can shine in on this benumbed world. I really don't think so.
I am a scholar. I will show you the path (mis)taken above. I moved from the word "maybe" to the word "surely". I moved from "it is, yet it isn't" to "it isn't". From the moderate, to a degree, I'm not sure, it could be, socially conventional middle to Nothing. I went from shadows to Pure Form. From words words words words words to Reality. I jumped and landed in Platonism. The great Nothing staring me right in the face. I love to jump like that. Away from the spooks. Sometimes I jump the other way though. To the Something full of existence. Always the extreme. Always intense. Always the grinning Cat among the sleepy pigeons.
As you can see I am not a good scholar. I jumped myself right into the middle of my analysis. Anyway, as Protagoras said, "These thoughts, Socrates, are OK for adolescents, but not for grown men. Grown men should be fighting wars, making money, being politicians, and raising a family."
I need to calm down and try to convince myself that the gods really have left or died or petered out. And yet when a pretty young thing looks into me with those piercing eyes, just like in old poetry, sighs, just like in old poetry, turns as though to say, don't you really want this fine little ass, just like in old poetry, and makes me beg, just as it has always been done from right out of the way things have always been and must be, no shadow of a doubt, this is real and has always been and must be, a god. Or nothing at all.
1003 Let me try once more to speak the difficult things of philosophy. Perhaps the unspeakable. Surely Difficulty and ontological Muteness are real. They are with me even now. Intimately. And I am close to my trying. Maybe it's my own, maybe it is given to me. And I feel I am close to speaking. Though I know that without his maddening presence I will never speak the Difficulty of the Difficult nor the Unspeaking. I lie in wait to watch myself being caught up. I will proceed by adopting the look of casual prose.
We know the fact that the sun shines hot. We know each word and its meaning and that one joins with another into a sentence. Words name things and sentences name facts. Facts have things as their constituents (I speak as philosophy books do, neither too precisely nor too loosely.) Facts though cannot be named, only things can. Things reveal, but don't speak how they fit into facts. I can speak a sentence, but I cannot speak the senticity of a sentence nor the thingness of a thing. Not the factness of a fact, not the rule of their ordering in a fact. Nonetheless I know all these things. I recognize them each time I see them, and I know that they are eternally self identical. I know Identity and Difference. And I can name them easily and you know them easily, but now with difficulty I look for words to say a something more. Everything I have spoken of has an inner being that I have not found or revealed or possessed. Each is a sun that shines hot. I stand before God. I burn. Cool love is for another time. He is trying me. I walk the city parks at night with Wittgenstein.
1004 Between the emptiness of Buddhist nihilism and the ruddy fullness of Platonic realism. Between the madness of Nietzsche and of Phaedrus itching for flight. Between no abstract thing and all conceivable and inconceivable abstractions. Between he is not here and he is here. Lies me. There is no between. It's all or nothing. I am that disjunctive thing. Lies, lies, lies. He is lying. To you, at you, on you, with you. For you. The empty words pile up.
My Lord is the Logos, therefore I am a writer. All things reduce to absurdity. I live with all these things and the reduction and the absurd. That I can say that is the proof of my sanity. I am simply speaking as a scholar trying the limits of thought and speech. Socrates was the most erotic thinker. Between the beautiful and the ugly.
1005 I'm a nice man. Ask anyone. But I'm trying to write true religion and true philosophy at the end of the twentieth century. It's been a wild century. A destructive century. How can I be merely nice through all that? I can't. But I am nonetheless a nice man. Ask anybody. I have wanted to write casually and clearly. Sometimes I can. Maybe I am now. But I wait for it to change. It always changes. And soon. It has to change. Here at the end of the wild destruction at the end of the twentieth century. Here in sex-clogged America. With unbelievably intricate computer logic that aids in its transmission. And AIDS. And politeness. And the police.
Religion is true, therefore there are gods and Him. Philosophy is true, therefore everything exists. Without the last little piece it all collapses. These are true because Here we are. The logic is inevitable. Here at the end of the twentieth century we have become precise. He is coming even now. The commotion is great. Flesh sticks out. The Soon is always too soon.
1006 No introduction to any philosophy is ever possible. As with the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, the beginning thinker is always at the culmination of what has been an infinite journey. The future, if there ever was one, is present. His words are no more than a speaking to that. He is with his infinite self. What he says makes no difference. It’s all to be said soon. The past is the future swallowing itself. The end is the middle is the beginning. The order to things is just not here. But the Order of order is all there ever was.
Order itself is not a thing in this world. Nor is The Beginning. Nor The End. And The Middle is not to be seen. Philosophy, the Transcendent, The Form of the World, the most clearly known, evident to all, a child playing, is not here. There is no introduction to it. There is no ladder by which we can climb up to it. There are no words that can catch it. Any speaking, any writing will do. The beginning philosopher begins again.
The Infinite has become easy for us now. The mind for us overmen knows how to catch up with itself. We are ourselves. The world in its strangeness is familiar to us. We wait for the latch on the door to move. He is close.
1007 Particulars and universals are timeless. They are nowhere. The Nowhere and Timelessness. Things hang like jewels, glittering in the nighttime of Being. The thought of Difference that analysis has revealed. Unthinkable. And the catastrophe of their smashing together in impossible unity. The One that cannot be. Gloomy super-existence.
The great structure of philosophical analysis, a juggernaut our lovely god rides within. Heart piercing love, the most universal, with all the shattered particulars.
The things of philosophy exist and are seen. We are passively in Being. Being for us is the great commotion of a paradise of beloveds. Being being the most beautiful of them all. Irresistible force upon the mind.
Ontology turns to religion.
1008 In our everyday thinking, our scientific thinking, our conventional thinking, our thinking is propositional. It is subject-predicate. It is sentential. The wind is blowing. The night is beautiful. The stars burn. Thinking gathers.
In our philosophies the sentences come apart. Each word names a distinct thing. Things that by themselves we know intimately, but which we cannot think or speak by themselves in their aloneness. If I say "blowing", I think of something blowing. And so it is for "burn" and "gather". My thinking and speaking looks for a subject. If I say "star" or 'wind" or "night" or "thinking" each becomes the predicate of an infinity of bare particulars. This star, that star, countless unseen myriads of stars. One predicate, many bare particulars. Each particular an x. Each x different, not in property, but only in its difference from all other x's. Philosophical unsentences. Unthought. Finally the "is" that unites each particular with a form. X is a star. This is a star. X is burning. The many predicates crowd in on one particular. Each star crowds into The stars. X's become a class. And philosophy in its cutting separates the class from its elements. The ___s becomes an existing pure logical form. The form of class. That particulars and class are united is then a deeper unspeakable, unthinkable thing that philosophy speaks and thinks right nicely. Perhaps in its eternal dream. A thing of the gods. Some false, some true, all existing.
1009 Philosophy asks questions about existence because the philosopher finds in such questions, in the Question itself, and in ancient Existence the only salve for the wound of love. He asks the question and the door opens. He lets the words form on his mouth. He himself will smear them all over himself. Of his own anointing he becomes the Answer.
The answer is long. It is hard. It is too much to speak. The eternal night has not been deep enough. I am the night. The drilling goes on. The few lights I have glare. Existence and the Question insist, and I still continue with my answer. The oil and the sheen and the machine of love. The two-in-one. There is no other answer. All the numbers are. Existence has gone deep.
The answers and the questions about the existence of numbers and relations, and universals, and individual things, about the Tie and the First and the Second and all the things that never were and You Never Were and Screaming and unheard crying sitting with that stuff all over your face and The door just closed! Which side are you, oh my God, on?
1010 This is all beyond the power of speech. This is all beyond the power of human intellect to think. So I write in dream metaphors. Blatant contradiction. Dissolving boundaries. Failed explanations. Childish analyses. Pure metaphysics. From logic to the Logos to the strips of flesh walking the streets. Irony and iron bars. Holy body eaten to holy bodies eating. To speech eating itself. "Beyond" is just a word. There's nothing beyond it. An empty frameword that captured the real thing. And your mind with it. There wasn't enough time nor space for a nexus, everything was shoved up close. The critical examiner never came. The everything spun and spun and spun.
The end of language and of the learning of language is pleasure. It should be pleasure. Or it is the death of language. With nothing spoken at all. Thus it must be about rhythm and its movement. About the surprising appearance of a well-formed body of words right in you and coming out of you and going back into your head saying only itself, you quietly overhearing yourself. You and your pleasure are one. The Word. You are suddenly what it has been forever. With it you never were not. And your head spins. It is Him. That Face.
I always end up speaking the philosophy of realism because a real thing has forced itself upon me. It would be pointless to try to speak nothingness with the mystics. Or to argue what should be with the legalists. Or to invent stories of the far away for romantics. He is too much even now here with me. I cannot deny the world because everything here speaks of him. Its hardness is his hardness. Its fleeting emptiness is me. Across the skin right above the nerves in his eye. I am in the electrical saltiness. I'm too tight. Just that, no more. Nothing. A hard presence.