today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.

gott gedanken denken iii

to know in one’s body (and is there other knowledge?) that there are great truths, as equally from those we love as those seemingly outside of love, that wholly negate us is to glimpse god and in glimpsing die.  that humans at various times say god cannot be glimpsed as it is outside existence or that we can glimpse god (even if this be but as god is us) and live only reveals that humans say much.

that god lives in the conforming sectors, those that accept the order of existence and mould their lives to this acceptance and call the moulding wisdom or pragmatism or both or other, that these sectors are the only places god can live (according to that order’s visions of life), hardly negates god’s living absence:  rather, all words (and if god is anything it is all words) have these qualities of multiple citizenship, disorientations, and god is a way of exploring these qualities.

god’s official and legal dwelling is in these sectors – what are called religion, temples, shrines, churches, sacraments, sacerdotal embodiments, established sacred texts, notions and acts of piety, vestments and altars, and by many other names – and, while maintaining certain ironies and necessities, these resident in an inexplicably turpitudinous absence of absence, explicitly and complicitly cooperates in the mouldings, a requisite sector, through ancient prescriptions that don the sartorially visible structures of the day.

while only no one can know where god dwells, god’s de facto dwelling is oracular – in pointings and silences and strange visitations, the plays and shadow flickerings of memory on time’s unattended and broken stage.

certain articulations in the folds of the manifestations of god have claimed to discern good and evil; others have seemingly simply asked how great the distance is between them.  in holding these and other measurements and prepositions inside of us – in our thoughts and actions – do we possibly give ourselves opportunities to glimpse god and die.

why die before death?  isn’t the death we name death a drop of rain among the countless drops, and each a death, so dying before death is a portal to a mode of seeing rain?  god is just a way of seeing rain.

that the human remains so committed to turning rain to stone and thinks that if it were to give this turning up it would die are not holdings without truth; but were it to test other turnings, would it not then turn to liquid ways among the elements of evolution?