0 :: Do not add up
 
 
 
 
144.
 
I have often heard "The eyes are the windows of the soul". This little expression hides one of the major philosophical issues. Namely, that you can either look out of a window or look at a window, but you can only look out of your eyes.
 
 
145.
    "What shall I do but sit in a room and tell my story?"
    "Well then, pick a subject."
    "How about a single day?" "
    "Yes, let's limit our subject matter to that of a single day."
    "Well, it would be fine to say that we were going to limit our subject matter to a single day if we excluded the thoughts of the people acting in that day."
    "Why?"
    "Well, once you get somebody thinking, some of their thoughts will have to do with the past and some will have to do with the future. So, in that case you haven't really limited your subject matter to a single day because the people's thoughts would expand that subject matter to include all sorts of other things."
 
146.
 
I want to write a book called "Imaginary Book". I guess naming something does not take away its essential properties.
 
 
147.
 
I was reading this book called Imaginary Book and in it there's this quote: "In Nietzsche's book The Gay Science there is this quote of Goethe's referring to Wagner's conception of the German landscape." That quote just struck me as so strange. It means that the author of Imaginary Book was inventing Nietzsche in such a way that he could be inventing Goethe in such a way that Goethe would be inventing Wagner in such a way that Wagner would be inventing the German landscape. What a long chain of invention.
 
 
148.
 
There is a strange hidden harmonious whole of an answer underneath all of this, but I can only get at small scraps of it by pulling at the roots of trees, which are, by the way, only minute imaginative explications of that implicate harmonious whole.
 
 
149.
 
My imagined purpose:
 
I am writing words that are meant to be parts of sentences and then parts of a book and then parts of a library and then parts of a house and then parts of a community and then parts of a city and then parts of a conversation and then parts of a state and then parts of a country and then parts of the world...
 
 
150.
 
I'd like to put the "imagined reader" into a book. That is one of the things that Calvino tries to do in If on a Winter's Night, a Traveler. But it's almost impossible to do because the imagined reader is, in a non-technical sense, in a superposition of states, he/she has any imaginable possible characteristics and background. The things that one could write in a book about an imagined reader would have to be, in some sense, a loose definition of an humanity which reads.
 
 
151.
    --Delinquent Dictionary--
    "define as I go, as the
    purpose changes, so does
    the elaboration of the definition."
 
152.
 
The object that drops out between us; first there was a thing between us and then somewhere along the line the thing got stolen by Big Brutus and in the very next frame there you and I are without the thing, but there we are in the wind, with this new object of the first thing -- that object is a word -- but that is not really the thing that used to be between us, though I choose to think of it that way. I think of a word as an object though a word is really a quality of a material -- a quality that you and I make to represent and negate that first thing. The new object is just a quality and is, as such, not a physical object but a mental one (rethink this, it's wrong). A word is more like money than it is like a dollar -- a word is a vow of trust. You and I vow to have the word mean the same thing, ohh I trust that you will. Now, our original thing is gone and we are left with a word -- ohh how I miss our original thing...
 
 
153.
    Twenty-six matchsticks in a box,
    neat and straight. I think of them as honest,
    I get bored with honesty
    And dump the matchsticks onto the floor.
     
    Ohh what new pearls I make
    With so few letters.
    In these sounds,
    In this mess of matchsticks,
    The cement floor
    Seems to quietly
    Transform itself
    Into the mirror of these sounds --
    Now the floor is less solid than before.
    It seems to be just more of the pile of pearls
    Just more of the sounds.
    Now there is no room in the house,
    Not even any house in the house
    Just this magnificent pile,
    Filling all wondrously --
    Filling even the spaces
    That I had once perceived to be
    Between the individual pearls.
 
154.
 
A day is an answer to a question. What question? "How will things turn out?" The day moves along and in its motion its form is unfolded. In that same motion the question of the next day is enfolded, like a napkin folded a couple a couple of thousand times around the small nugget of a scribbled poem -- the day's becoming.
 
 
155.
 
I'd like to get to a point in my life where everything I do will become part of my entire life's work: everything will be part poem, part love letter, part work, part discovery, part lesson, etc...
    (Side note:
    It seems that when you write "etc."
    Most of the time it can be replaced by "...")
 
156.
    "A marriage of bread and water"
    Not so strange a sentiment;
    "Companion" means "the one who you share your bread with"
    And the water, ohh the water, the flow of life between two.
 
157.
 
I move quick over surfaces -- taking merely atoms from each form and then proceeding to attempt a new form of thought alchemy.
 
 
158.
    A mixture of forms that attempts to get at the tortured quiet heart of an idea.
 
159.
 
Should I say that I am a poet-philosopher or a philosopher-poet? I suppose the poet part will always come first. And if I never write another poem this will remain true and I will never be able to tell you why.
 
 
160.
 
Emerge dear sentence from these small letters, I do encourage you. I do dare you to make meaning out of these named bricks.
 
 
161.
    I have battled in the strange waters of life to retain the murkiness of my name; let me signify many modes of transmission.
 
162.
 
Calm, though lifting; I need access to a difficult question. How about the question of a person? Very unresolvable; the same bones keep getting picked over; the same questions arise throughout life.
 
 
163.
    I admire the land; the petals of reality folded in upon themselves; implicated (an etymological return).
 
164.
 
The unbearable constant of my depth -- thus far and no further. Somehow it seems like the floor that I walk my life upon; so solid, so impenetrable. And yet, at times, I seep like viscous fluid beneath this depth and sit as a puddle sits at a new constant depth.
 
 
165.
 
I'm making pictures again, stumping myself on their connection to reality. But in the stumping, in that secret stumping place, I am doing the work of building; knocking off small chunks of cement one by one and then using them as stones in the construction of my new wall.
 
 
166.
 
I'm saying "The rose is red." Please take this to mean that the rose is identical with redness and not that redness is a quality of roses. Please do this. Please, for instance, obey me when I ask you to believe that there really is nothing else to a rose than its redness and likewise nothing else to the color red than roses. Please, if I mean anything to you, do this.
 
 
167.
 
There are some philosophers, artists and writers that make us feel that we too could be philosophers, artists, and writers. They open the possibility of doing things that way. I think it depends upon your personality who those philosophers, artists, and writers are. For me, Joseph Beuys makes me feel like I could be an artist, the later Wittgenstein makes me feel like I could be a philosopher and W.S Merwin makes me feel like I could be a poet. But there are other philosophers, artists and writers that seem to close the possibility of you becoming that thing. About these people's works, I often think, "How the hell did they do that?" Aristotle and Kant are the two philosophers that make me feel like I could never be a philosopher, Rilke and Eliot are the two poets, and Picasso is the artist who makes me feel like I could never be an artist.
 
 
168.
 
"the writer moves slowly through life, because each experience takes ten times as long to write out as it does to live."
 
"somehow quoting someone seems more authoritative and powerful than just writing something yourself."
 
 
169.
 
i'd like to start giving people my proses...i wish so much that you could have been the first to see it starting to become a whole... it's weird seeing it as a whole makes me sort of realize what it is better... i've come up with a new design for it... it's gonna be called "do not add up" and one of the ideas is that you can't really add up a writer artist from each page that he has written... you can't really add up a person from each of their actions... well sort of... but themes and problems begin to emerge... so, it's a question... but i've just started to cut some of the proses... i can't wait to give it to you at valentine's day... but i'm redesigning it so that there is one main section and a couple of appendixes, one for poems, one for stories and maybe one for art ideas... what do you think>? i'm trying to get a lot of different kinds of readers to read it, so that it will be really good... i think if i do it right it'll be the best thing i've ever written... 169 paragraphs so far... i think i'm going to try to get 250 this year all edited and arranged... but then i realized that i'm studying philosophy next quarter too so i thought i'd try to keep going at it and make it into a real book...
 
 
170.
 
This place in life rhymes with another, not quite deja vu but a similarity of form, and I have always said that the purpose of rhyme was an imitation of the way the gods breathe.
 
 
 

Do not add up :: 1