The Second Law of Punctuation
Reading this morning, I found the following description of William Law’s punctuating. It put me in mind of Wittgenstein punctuating PI, even if Wittgenstein’s practice is much more considered and discriminating than Law’s.
…Law defies all reason and custom in his use of stops. He sprinkles them over his pages like a cook shaking out flour from a dredger and with far less discrimination.
Fearing Philosophy (Poem)
“Consider the world as it looks to the fear–it looks terrifying.”
You hear
such things
in philosophy
you know
& you have
to marvel,
to wonder
at a plight of mind that requires for its rectifying the calling upon such words,
at the being of a condition that involves such words in its being–
but now
I am
doing it
& I’ll stop
Immortal Openings, 4: Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael
I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.
Terms of Engagement–A Question
I am currently writing a new paper and have been developing in it a ‘variant’ of a point of Cavell’s–his point about the importance of identifying and thinking through a philosopher’s terms of criticism in reckoning the significance of the philosopher’s work. I want to say that there is a genus of which terms of criticism are a species, namely terms of engagement. These include the terms of address (of reader, of interlocutor) used by the philosopher, the expositives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and verdictives typically employed, etc. Assuming this makes sense, I am curious: what stands out to you about Wittgenstein’s terms of engagement in PI?
Musical Interlude
A new video by Benjamin Jameson Morey’s band. Give it a look; then, take a look at his other videos.
Here’s a little snippet I wrote about an earlier album:
I’ve been listening to Morey’s album, Songs in the Key of Being Scared to Death by the Idea of an Entire Life. It is remarkable. Morey writes lyrics out of a sensibility so tender and responsive that it seems debilitatingly fragile, but also so wry and ironic that it seems lordly, satirical. The lyrics hover between nearness and distance, between sensitive humility and gentle scorn. Morey’s voice is dual-tuned as well; it seems always ready to break–somehow and at the same time into tears and into laughter.
Morey manages the balancing act because his is an associated sensibility, an ability to feel reflectively, to think in the midst of feeling, without either diluting the feeling or scattering the thought. Instead, his lyrics ingather all that they touch, and he writes as if from a desire to reconnoiter his own experience, to make it all homely, to come to know his way about in it, in its highlands and lowlands.
He creates memorable, understated and meditative melodies. The songs will stick with you, not only as lyrics to be sung but as tunes to be hummed. Typically the lyrics and the melodies enjoy such mutuality that it is hard to imagine that either could have preceded the other.
A nice example of the strengths of the album is provided by its one cover, *This Little Light of Mine*. Morey complicates the tune, but still works recognizably within its structure. However, instead of sounding like a bit of Christian self-affirmation, a candle singing about its not being hidden beneath a bushel, it instead sounds like a candle singing against a strong damp breeze, hoping to hold out, if only for a while, if only it can provide someone some little light. The vocals are as weightless and fleeting as the light itself.
Go give Morey a listen.
On My Book
Here’s a kind comment on my book from Duncan Richter (Language Goes on Holiday). It is from a few months ago:
By the way, I was reminded of PI 531 by reading Kelly Dean Jolley’s The Concept ‘Horse’ Paradox and Wittgensteinian Conceptual Investigations. I would recommend this book except for the fear that someone might ask me a question about it that I couldn’t answer. It is short but dense, and reminds me of some tea that a friend of mine brought from China. The tea comes in a kind of cake or puck, from which I would carve a wedge or lump to put in the pot. After the tea is made the leaves in the pot expand and come almost to life incredibly, looking a bit like seaweed. My sense is that Jolley’s book is one with which it would be good to be infused.
Chicago!
Just back from the (this-time-not-so-) Windy City. I travelled up for the Central APA, along with some colleagues and about ten students. It was a good trip: I heard a terrific talk at UC by Matt Boyle (“Transparent Self-Knowledge”), got a chance to spend time with old friends (Jim Conant and Michael Kremer), to see former students now at UC (Ben Pierce and Stephen Shortt), and to meet charming new folks–including Rachel Cohen (thanks to her for a useful conversation on Montaigne), and a graduate student from Eugene, Oregon, with whom I had a brief but upbuilding conversation (but whose name, may she pardon me!, has slipped my mind). I also saw my teacher, Deborah Modrak, and got a chance to catch up with her.
And of course I spend time at Iwan Reis, the amazing pipe shop, at Powells Books, and the Seminary Co-op. But now it is time to get back to work.
Luke (Poem)
Luke
For Ward Sykes Allen
In a rocker
On the porch of the Overseer’s House
Behind Stony Lonesome antebellum mansion
He overlooks a new century morning
Beside him
On a table matching his rocker
An open copy of the Authorized Version
His mind submissive to it and to the dawn
He has no abiding city
Living as he does on the farm
His earthly country
A place of horses, whole horses,
Not half-horses, abstracted into horsepower
They will come no more
These old men with beautiful manners
They will come no more
(“He’d stand up even if a dog came in the room.”)
He sits
In peace, knowing how
to go out and come in
Even in this, this so busy a century
Mindful of images
Of the concrete series of his own history
And his people’s—he knows where he comes from
And belongs where he is
He knows the sunlight in the treetops is deceptive,
As all of nature can be
But he will not let creation groan without
Engaging it in a dialogue of comfort;
And he knows more than he says
In a rocker
On the edge of eternity
The sky open above him
Waiting
Borrowed From: Yelping with Cormack: Urban Outfitters
Union Square – San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Three stars.
And they come there in great numbers shuffling into that mausoleum that was built for them like some monument to the slow death of their world and among those tokens and talismans of that faded empire they forage like scavengers their faces frozen in a rictus of worldweary their clothes preworn in some tropical factory and they shop and they hunt with dullbrown eyes through that cavalcade of false trinkets and those shrinkwrapped mockeries laying there in silent indictment and they reach out to touch those trite things and their faces are slack but in their gullets a scream lies stillborn for they are the kings and the queens reigning over the death of their people and the world is not theirs and never was and the suffering and the horrors are not their doing but the work of their bankrupt forbears and before them stretches an abyss beyond man’s imagining and within their lifetime the promise of a coming reckoning measured in blood and in pestilence and they shuffle through that store near paralytic and finally they take a metal thing with a feather on it and they buy that thing.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 