The Godless Temple

There was once an hour that gathered its minutes like a wave- events burgeoning into a solitary point of focus, a crest erected atop its head so as to establish some momentary status, a glimpse or single tick of importance. Like all waves, however, a divergence is eventually reached which results in a separated rolling into an inevitable placidity. And it was in that marked point in time that man --for all of the glory of his species, the thought and histories that lifted him out of the mire-- fell off his pedestal and was sent careening back into the world of the beasts.

This moment, precious though it was, is a casualty of living memory. The cities and literature, however great, had been concealed by ages of neglect and growing illiteracy. What remained of man had been sent on a race to reclaim the glimpses of their glory, fighting among themselves to free mortared stone and shattered vase from the muck, that eternal downward descent into the terrestrial brain which would not speak its secrets.

Of the things found, none were as they should have been. At best, the existence of missing parts to a whole could be conjectured but never found. Ideas were tattered rags in a world where warmth was found in acquiring immediate sustenance while the intellectuals shivered and died in the shade of the mind. In a world where no practical use could be devised for the cataclysmic weapons that had a habit of surfacing from every which corner of the world, those who forgot morality first ruled over their neighbors.

Sending a Plate of Eggs to Hell, and Other Happenings

I hardly have time to write any more--both the time constraints from being in grad school, and the terminal quotidian boredom that that lifestyle brings make it nearly impossible to examine both what I am doing, and to put it to candidacy as something interesting enough for this blog.

I was randomly writing in the library after doing research for one of my final papers last month. I took a 15 minute break to rest my eyes, and dump the stillborn contents of my brain so as to prevent them from impeding any further thought. These very same contents came up in conversation the next day, and I was asked to type them out as they were--which I hope accounts for how incomprehensible they are at times. Anyway, I didn't have anything to do with them before now, so I figured that I'd just toss them on here so they didn't go the wastrel way of my other aborted efforts.


- On Excising Argument Structures From Simple and Complex Texts:

This is as much a criticism of essay writing and argumentative form as it is a meditation on how to distill the essence of argument from the academic fester of preponderance and the aegises of obscure terminology.

The introduction must clearly state the argument in terms that are not bound specifically in the discipline, even if the explanation relies on understanding sciences that purport to have logical weight upon the fulcrum underlying the issues in contention. Why "must?" -- In looking at what academia as wrought upon academics--where once there were disciplines that were definite and their objects many, now we bear witness to a clustering of offshoots and cross-pollination where the sciences have become specialized to differentiate or separate the modern phenomena from that which has come before it. In order to be plain about these terms--especially things like "structuralist," "constructionist," "normative," et al., where meaning and application change across disciplines-- they must be strictly defined. Even within one discipline there are are multifarious meanings based on differing contexts, and/or by a misconception held by the author. Even though philosophers like Wittgenstein lament the lack of added meaning through added words: each additional word breeding misconception, the problem of misconception tends to be endemic in the one word alone.
This seems to break with logic at first glance, but Wittgenstein's system is consistent: "what cannot be said clearly we must pass over in silence." If the word itself is wrong, ignore it. All too often, however, there is a pervasion of incorrect usage which in turn can be so damaging as to start a school of thought that represents an offshoot. we cannot "pass over [them] in silence" because the author has already erred and disseminated that malignant seed into the literary world. It is, however, inevitable, and this is why languages evolve as they do. As an ultimate consequence for any sort of standardized methodology being perpetrated by a technocracy, or an academic elite, we see the rise of academic and technocratic languages that come into forbearance out of juxtaposition with the ever-evolving languages around us. (lit. because there is a gap in intellectual language and standard language--to be extremely general-- we see a different stratification of class and a privatization of information by intelligentsia, who are a statal entity in the academic institution. The removal of specialized language is akin to the liberalization of the means of production, and, as in the typical socio-economic portrait of the worker alienated from labor, so too is this the democratic citizen alienated from knowledge). If we admit to this kind of entropy that is in the sway of corpuscularianistic elements of influence and uncertainty of change, how can we sustain any standardized academic language regardless? The answer to that lies in three things: a general de-academization, the knowledge that is the object of that process (and, moreover, what constitutes knowledge), and a temporalization/

conditionalization of the language for consumption.
This gives me three tasks to address, all detailed above. The initial item to address in this structure is that of epistemology. The nature of knowledge is the only thing that remains consistent across generations and cultures across measured time (this is different from experiential time, which has to do more with elements of a societal center that have a greater tenacity in the face of measured time. Example: 60 years have past since the 47 consitution was put into effect in Japan. The conditions of that document for the Japanese are still very real: to a certain extent the conditions of that document have not changed at all-- compare this with the 60 years that America has experienced. There is no comparable constant as X that can be set as relative to Y=time. We therefore have a larger sense of time sense on a massive localized scale). The idea that the Inca, Indus and Mycenaean civilizations all reached a golden age is indicative of an abundance of proper knowledge that was in-line with a zeitgeist that took the most of their ages(as in condition of lebenswelt), locations and great men. In comparing what each civilization thought to be "correct," however, there would be several lacunae in between certain things that, in abstraction, were shared, yet they were valued differently and held different roles in their societies. (It ends here, but what I was trying to get at in the end is that in the face of natural law, there are different qualifiers for what is true, what is right. Yet in putting those things into a teleological system with the goal of our baser needs-- food, shelter, society (law, god, science), what is perceived as "right" and "wrong" is never constant when put into particulars, only when put in a certain degree of abstraction. But unless we are in positions of abstraction, how often does knowledge occur in abstraction? We are students and therefore can say things like: "food and shelter are needed to form society." But I wonder if farmers in the Tigris-Euphrates thought the same things, or whether they thought in total specificity-- our task (what we are farming, how we are doing it day to day) is necessary for survival. (Food is a bad example because it's inconsistent with what I'm about to say next, but the general idea applies) How convenient is it that we can see through history--eternally (all time, all at once)-- and derive fact where fact may not apply. We're playing a colossal game of connect the dots, and repeated occurrences alone yield consent.

     Just to break the flow of what was started in the post below (although it is relatively in a parallel line of thought) I was inspired by the Paul Krugman op-ed piece on the NY Times website entitled "Failure to Rise," to post a piece from one of my famous poets.  Krugman, an economic pundit, should by all accounts stick to presenting the facts on the developments behind Geithner's bill--the topical bailout and how its travails less resemble tribulations of political processes than they do those of the literary hero cycle.  

So why then, in the last paragraph of the piece, when Krugman writes: 

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

...is it so startlingly effective?  For astute readers, the last two sentences will stick out like a pair of emotional thorns.  It is a quote from William Butler Yeats's "the Second Coming."  The prose is frighteningly conducive to the argument, even though it is outside of its formal construction.  

The poem that I chose is one by Dylan Thomas-my favorite poet.  Perhaps I should have taken more time in selecting one that is more conducive to another argument, but that will have to wait until another time.  Here is "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," as presented by poets.org: 

Do not go gentle into that good night, 

Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, 

Because their words had forked no lightning they 

Do not go gentle into that good night.  

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, 

Do not go gentle into that good night.  

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight 

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,  

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  

And you, my father, there on the sad height, 

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. 

Do not go gentle into that good night. 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The Moral Jigsaw in the Public Sphere

     I will preface this by apologizing for the rough causal logic and argumentative structure that will come into play here-- I am not at the point where I can distance myself experientially (and thus emotionally) from the events which inspired the subject matter at hand.  Perhaps this caveat should in turn serve as a lesson to the academic necrophagi: consider whence the break in emotion and interpretable stimuli (and subsequent stigmatizing of the former) began.  I would place it with the advent of the naming of the rational and empirical schools.  One can look at the old histories from Herodotus and still very much sense the "I" as a necessary element to what is historical narration.  It is with good reason.  If arguments concerning the standpoint of the narrator (both in spacetime and on a moral grid) are going to come into parley, the introduction of the self leaves little to doubt. 

     I make much mention of the double-standard between normative statements and aspirations to intellectual objectivity.  When writing on the nature of sciences, to paint a static picture of its elements so that its discursive parts do not swallow each other, the poetica of the narrative is sacrificed for the sake of the understanding of the reader.  This should preclude the necessity of prose entirely-- ideas can be communicated through annotated bullets then, with illustrations of the claims made in end notes in a flow chart.  

     To give you a heavy-handed view of the composition of the entire painting of the contradiction: the normative element of in the paradox dictates that the self should be absent, as should florid prose, illustrations of thought/introspection, etc.  This is defined as a "should" statement--things that are naturally happening are to be overcome, and the end-product is an piece that can be consumed by academics.  The actual element of the paradox is that the self necessarily exists within the process of thought and creation.  It is the crucible that smashes sensory data into neutrinos of abstract thought, and then synthesizes idea.  

     Excluding the self from the process at all is a lie; even alluding to it obscures the origins of the writing.  It is this attestment to objectivity that confuses the reader when it is present: Iris Chang's "the Rape of Nanjing" comes to mind, where the book reads like a historical fiction, but still relies on fuzzy math and fuzzy statistics, as well as makes use of very broad, racist statements.  

     The Pepys and Hachiya Diaries for the London Fire and the Hiroshima Bombing, respectively, serve as good examples for the self in the phenomenon.  The self is stated through both the diary format, the narrative structure, and the fact that the preface of both indicates that these are actual diaries, not just an adoption of the narrative to manipulate the reader's skepticism.  

Because I do not expect many readers--this blog being strictly to force myself to write-- I will return to this at another time.