with one exception

 When the former Boston

Red Sox pitcher threw batting practice

I smacked the ball silly

bad bounce

 I remember playing baseball

I had no arm, was slow on the bases

End of story

becoming all things

I know, it’s little bizarre. I do the dishes listening to Thomas of Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton. I’m trying to make up for not paying attention to the History of Philosophy courses I took undergraduate in the 1960s. He contrasts Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and Dominic de Guzmán (1170-1221). Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), it says in Wikipedia:

...was a proponent of natural theology and the father of a school of thought (encompassing both theology and philosophy) known as Thomism. He argued that God is the source of the light of natural reason and the light of faith.^[9] He embraced^[10]several ideas put forward by Aristotle and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity.^[11] He has been described as "the most influential thinker of the medieval period"^[12] and "the greatest of the medieval philosopher-theologians".^[13] Thomas Aquinas's philosophy influenced modern virtue ethics, aesthetics, and cognitive theory. He has been criticized, notably by Bertrand Russell, for seeking to justify conclusions already dictated by faith rather than follow reason independently.   

Finishing the dishes, brewing coffee, feeding the cats and preparing dog’s bowl. While still listening, sitting now, I read from article HEIDEGGER’S BEING AND TIME, Paraphrased and Annotated by Thomas Sheehan: 

INTRODUCTION

Heidegger’s point here is the basic one of the phenomenological correlation, namely that I ex-sist in an a priori reciprocal relation (cf. reci-proci-tas, “back-and-forth”) with whatever I encounter. As the young Heidegger put it, 

 

An object is an object only as an object of knowledge, and knowledge is knowledge only as knowledge of an object. No object without a subject, and no subject without an object. 

 

However, that relation is not one of an indifferent subject bumping up against a neutral object. It is one of reciprocity. Within the phenomenological correlation things can affect me—whether physically, affectively, or intellectually—only because as I am actively disposed to being affected by them. I a priori transcend any supposed self-enclosed interiority and lay myself open to people and things, allowing them to affect me. In other words, the phenomenological correlation is bound up with the mind as actively intentional, that is, with the fact that, in Aquinas’ phrase, the mind “is made to come together with all entities,” glossing Aristotle’s “the psychē is in some way all things.” 

 

For Heidegger there is no “inside” to ex-sistence-qua-mind. If anything, it is the reverse: my “inside” consists in being “outside” (Draußensein), exposed to and able to make sense of things other than myself. The mind is not a static substance but the constant activity of minding things. 

 

Nor is it a passive receptacle of data (even worse, a receptacle inside my head). That is the view Sartre parodied as “digestive epistemology,” the nutritional model of knowledge where “to know is to eat.” Hungry for nourishment, my mind allegedly sallies forth into the world to snatch prey (think of the chameleon’s projectile tongue darting out to snare a bug), which it then drags back into the stomach of consciousness to be steeped in gastric juices and peristaltically reduced to mental mulch that gets absorbed into the muscles and sinews of my mind. 

 

The human psychē is not a mental stomach; it is our power to contact what is other than ourselves and to be in touch with ourselves as related to whatever we contact. We do so not by magically transubstantiating “outside things” into “mental images” that get stored inside our minds. Nor (pace Aristotle’s ginesthai) do we physically become what we know. Instead, we assimilate ourselves to the intelligible content of the encountered other—for Aristotle the eidos, for Heidegger the Gehaltsinn—by conforming ourselves to the significance that we take the thing to have within a specific meaning-giving context. Aristotle’s “becoming all things” refers to participating cognitively in the meaningful presence of whatever we encounter.  (p.10)

That, and listening to Chris Hedges interview Whitney Webb,  The Rise of the Thielverse & the Surveillance State   (w/ Whitney Webb) | The Chris Hedges Report, while eating scrambled eggs with apple cider bread, rounds out Saturday morning in late October.

Thomas Aquinas, Martin Heidegger, and Chris Hedges are of a piece encouraging reflective thought and engaged curiosity about our existence, our world, and the rupturing fissures destabilizing our foundational reliance on ways of being commensurate with rational, intuitive, and morally considerate being-in-the-world.

Some have said that democracy was always creeping toward oligarchy and authoritarianism. 

Corporations are now persons, and, some say, the poor will be relegated to slave labor and prisons. The United States will belong, again, to white people of means. Black, Brown, and Red people will be detained, corralled, and deported. White Christian Nationalists have usurped Jesus and associated him with prosperity, wealth, and moral rectitude.

I study and read so as to maintain a remnant of sanity and thoughtfulness. I read and write poetry so as to explore and be explored by that which is beneath and within that which appears before us. I sit and watch in silence and quiet so as to allow the inner and the outer to rest in one another’s presence.

In short, I do not like what I see and hear taking place in America these days. (So what? you might say; suck it up and get on with it!)

You might be right. Displeasure or anger, fear or antagonism are luxury responses, which, in the face of authoritarianism and police threat, might prove inhospitable to remnant freedom and independence lingering.

So we attempt to comprehend "Aristotle’s words, to 'becoming all things' [which] refers to participating cognitively in the meaningful presence of whatever we encounter."

There is no one alive whom I am not.

What is it about me as Trump that is so unnerving?

What am I, really, trying to learn?

post-theology, post-history, post-toasties

 I don’t know how

This ends, but laughter

Might help

The unknowing

Just because

We are outraged

Doesn’t mean

Trump isn’t Christ

The adulation

The complete control

The unanswered question

“What is truth?”

Trump is Christ

An unredeemed Christ

Who never left hell

Who doesnt care

en regardant maintenant, bien sûr

 The last thing I saw

Before I died

Was what I am

Looking at now

oublier ce que tu fais

 Will you?

     Yes

Thank you!

     You’re welcome.

I won’t forget this.

     Yes you will.

That’s funny, who are you?

     I knew you’d forget.

I can’t remember my name.

     And my name?

I have no idea.

     Welcome to earth!

amicitiam

From Invocation, Ishavasya Upanishad:

तदेजति तन्नैजति तद्दूरे तद्वन्तिके ।
तदन्तरस्य सर्वस्य तदु सर्वस्यास्य बाह्यतः ॥ ५ ॥

tadejati tannaijati taddūre tadvantike |
tadantarasya sarvasya tadu sarvasyāsya bāhyataḥ || 5 ||

5. It moves, it is motionless. It is distant, it is near. It is within all, it is without all this.

---

यस्तु सर्वाणि भूतान्यात्मन्येवानुपश्यति ।
सर्वभूतेषु चात्मानं ततो न विजुगुप्सते ॥ ६ ॥

yastu sarvāṇi bhūtānyātmanyevānupaśyati |
sarvabhūteṣu cātmānaṃ tato na vijugupsate || 6 ||

6. Who sees everything in his Atman and his Atman in everything, by that he feels no revulsion.

The external world is not the cause or source of human misery.

It is the failure to understand, incorporate, and act holistically on the inseparate whole, undivided unity, and absolute intimacy of the spiritual/material world as if we were embodied λογοσ (logos: energy, mind, expression) of divine essence/existence in the space/time of NOW.

(The "no revulsion” part, I suspect, is the absence of opinion/judgment when encountering what is taking place in your surround.)

Does this have resonance with the notion that whatever happens is within the awareness and allowance of God? (Not that God wills evil be done; more like God understands that the option for evil is within human deliberation and choice.)

In prison today one of the men wrote this, a favorite quote, on the white board: 

nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur → No one is known except through friendship (Augustine, De Diversis Questionibus 83.71.5); or, no-one learns except by friendship; or, it is only by attraction that one is disposed to learn anything. 

cf. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/horizons/article/abs/fellowship-the-literary-lives-of-the-inklings-j-r-r-tolkien-c-s-lewis-owen-barfield-charles-williams-by-philip-zaleski-and-carol-zaleski-new-york-farrar-straus-and-giroux-2015-644-pages-3500/F5AB17F5541BD374AC329DDED3ABD095

He tutors math to fellow inmates. His dropping in to our room and the long conversation that ensued was, as with everything, an unexpected delight. The quote has been a longtime companion to him.

 We spoke of logotherapy, and Viktor Frankl, someone he admires:

Logotherapy is based on an existential analysis^[6] focusing on Kierkegaard's will to meaning as opposed to Adler's Nietzschean doctrine of will to power or Freud's will to pleasure. Rather than power or pleasure, logotherapy is founded upon the belief that striving to find meaning in life is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force in humans.^[2] A short introduction to this system is given in Frankl's most famous book, Man's Search for Meaning (1946), in which he outlines how his theories helped him to survive his Holocaust experience and how that experience further developed and reinforced his theories. (--wikipedia)

There is a punishment in prison that is experienced by many individuals there. It has to do with the longing for meaning (a deep version of amicitiam) that inhabits the psyche and core of each individual, but which is unattended to, no program touches it. It is the felt absence of meaningful meaning. It arrives with the first sip of coffee at 5:45am, another day in his life sentence, and asks “What now?”

Friendship need not be dualistic. It can be monistic. (That can read ‘monastic’ with little effort.)

If there is one meaningful reality available to whomever shares existence within that reality, it is the energy of λογοσ unceasingly creating, sustaining, transforming life-itself as it is being lived moment to moment.

We decided, without words, that we would look there.

cavafy’s voices

Doris sends Cavafy. We bring him to prison:

 Voices

Ideal and beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

And with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life —
like distant music that dies off in the night.

 

(Cavafy was born and died on April 29, 1863-1933)

[Greek original:]

Φωνές
Ιδανικές φωνές κι αγαπημένες
εκείνων που πέθαναν, ή εκείνων που είναι
για μας χαμένοι σαν τους πεθαμένους.

Κάποτε μες στα όνειρα μας ομιλούνε·
κάποτε μες στην σκέψι τες ακούει το μυαλό.

Και με τον ήχο των για μια στιγμή επιστρέφουν
ήχοι από την πρώτη ποίησι της ζωής μας --
σα μουσική, την νύχτα, μακρυνή, που σβύνει.

where to

 Reading Thomas’s Aquinas on causes.

“A rock falls down because its goal is the center of the earth.”

Never thought about it like that. 

essere-con oltre l'appartenenza, nessun trattino

 Monks and nuns call on

God in middle of night, chant

Into darkness, here

What are they doing 

We know that God is Beyond —

Their longing to Bewith

That’s it, isn’t it —

The longing to Bewith God

Beyond Belonging

nearing midnight

 I cannot think

Of anything

Not god

Not zen

Energy

Depletes

Surely the dead

Are dead and gone

No telling where

Until when

when it's your neck on the block, head in sand

Lalla Ded was a Kashmiri mystic who lived in the 14th century.

Poets, at times, have insight into what is taking place seven centuries later.

She wrote

   Now sir, make sure you've corralled your ass.

   Or he'll champ his way

   through your neighbors' saffron gardens.

   No one's going to stand proxy

   when it's your neck on the block. 

 

    (--Lalla Ded) 

We have an uncorralled ass champing his way through the peoples’ house and the peoples’ constitution while his minions unbutton their collars and ready their necks for (surely) a nearing falling blade.

I’m sure there will be an abundance of thoughts and prayers as their headless torsos find their way to unsurprising uncourageous ground. 

I would not have thought such reckless partisanship and mindless ambition would ever have exposed itself in such an interesting and enlightened time such as our current century.

There’s no explaining the combination of ruthless greed and uninsightful glee.

Of course, when you pride yourself on being ignorant and unawake, these’s not much wiggle room out of the quicksand of sucking breathless asphyxiation.

(o vromerós), phew, are you getting that whiff

 tear down the East Wing

of our White House, let it go

it is not needed --

we have our ο βρωμερός 

the one who makes red roses

smell like corruption

and a barrel and a heap

 Tell me

If

You love me

(“If” responds)

I love

You

A bushel and a peck

(There is

So much

To be grateful)

For

dominant minority, archeological mis-memory

At 4:20AM

Without knowing

It occurred to me

It was 4:20AM

And it was 

I awarded myself

A certificate of

Achievement

Thanked the  stars

And my family

Then proceeded

To tell you this

It is no longer

4:20AM, I have

Grown older with

This realization, and

The parchment already

Folds and crumples

With time not caring

My short window of

Astonishment cracks

Ancient papyrus, a

Forgotten civilization

Gone to slumber under

Wind-sculpted sands

Even Toynbee scholars

Are unable 

To chronicle 

In revised editions of

A Study of History

Forty-five hundred years

Into dusty dusky 

Speculation whether

We, yes we, ever existed

practice makes one’s way through

 Of course I practice

But memory is failing —

I must have practiced

Let me think of it

I walked, breathing, at snow bowl,

Read poetry, yes

I practiced, with Hirshfield, with

Lalla Ded, Robert Creeley

With meetingbrook friends

Between Buddhism

And Christianity is 

Mere conversation

no koan, no face, no recognition

 Show me your face…

     Stop it

Show me your original face…

     Stop it, stop it now

Before your parents were born…

     Just stop, right now

What’s wrong? I’m just asking…

     No you’re not, you’re antagonizing

. . .

I have no face

I am mere mask

What you see

You have put there

…

I’m sorry for asking

I won’t again

Zen is disappearing

Like your face, 

The one seen

Not recognized 

Seen,

Through and through

who woulda thunk; a real red, white, and blue

 some conclude the mess

this government is causing

can only end by

a military 

takeover, a faithful corps

true to  their sworn oath --

the constitution --

funny, isn't it, our best 

American hope

for democracy

resides in replacing chumps

with authentic grunts

...   ...   ...

cf. a look at where the power lies: and those with whom most truth dies 

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-power-map-of-the-trump-regime?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2xguy9&triedRedirect=true

note: neither Reich nor this poster advocate what these four haiku quatrains seem to mull.

Poetry is a useless meditation. There’s nothing verse than a poet before coffee. 

μνημοσύνη; ηλιθιότητα

 To find

God, get

Lost

Right here

There is

No future —

Residing

Within the

Unrecognisable 

μνημοσύνη; ηλιθιότητα

(Stupidity of

Memory)

...   ...   ...

(mnimosýni;  ilithiótita)

an antidote uneven

 I don’t know a saint

I suspect they are rare, an

Antidote, oddly

we whisper

Finish reading Bernardo Kastrup. 

• Kastrup, Bernardo (2019). The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. Winchester, UK: Iff Books. ISBN 9781785357398.[29]

At end he cites Wilbur poem:

 Epistemology  

by Richard Wilbur

 I.
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: 
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

II.
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, 'You are not true.’

The backstory:

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2024

'Cloudy, Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones'

The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of the Irish Anglican Bishop George Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism – he called it “immaterialism” -- is recounted by James Boswell on August 6, 1763: 

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’” 

 https://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2024/03/cloudy-cloudy-is-stuff-of-stones.html

 Idealism? Materialism?

Leave philosophy to poetry, and the fulsome void to conversation, as in prison this morning, editing “nel vuoto”.

seeing a world not outside mind

 Ah, rain, good, at last

Dry earth opens to water

This drop, this drop, this

nel vuoto

4. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.  (From the imaginism manifesto, possibly Ezra Pound)

1. 

In the void nothing

happens that you can explain —

Don’t try, stay alert

2.

Go about morning

As if each conversation

Began existence 

3.

You do not arrive

Until one unknown thought lights

Cosmic birth canal

lighting her way

 Twenty six years pass

Since sister’s death tonight, in

Cabin, guiding flame

free speech and the price of bullets

 we now put bullet-

proof protection between crowd

and speaker -- afraid

nimium, yes, 過度に (kado ni)

 There is too much to

Say — if you love me, too much

Is already said

paws sign language

 Cat walks on me

Knocks pens from table

Wants her breakfast

jesus drives by

Stillness of this room

Empty water bottles on

Desk, night table, floor —

My body becomes

Sluice between ground well and yard

Saving drought water —

Night animals hide

In stillness, overhead sky

Long, long, long distance —

We are unconscious

Our stupidity is red

No stop, crash and burn

Once, I’d say — Sunday 

Church — listen to preacher's words,

Now, silent, stay in room