The Land After Time.

Metal and metempsychosis. Rich and I scrapped metal yesterday. We had long awaited this day. To gather up refrigerators, pipes, cabinets, nuts, bolts, random jagged metal laying around the Institute, and haul everything around the block to the massive, nearby metal yard. So, we did. We filled Rickie’s truck up and over and dragged a half-ton of metal over to Berks, and came back with how much cash? Two-hundred dollars? No. Three hundred dollars? No. Try, forty six dollars.

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Merciless

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The Blackened Sun. The Electric Blanket.

Rapacity was long the engine of history— at least as it’s canonically retold, the history of Kings and Conquests. Not rapacity for the sake of acquisition— for the accumulation of goods and resources, for zeal or even glory— but rapacity in and of itself. When I was younger, I always thought of human history as a work of ideals emerging out of the Darkness and now look at me: no longer able to believe that greed and cunning are even enough to explain the mess. The brutalities of history— the battle, plunder, burning, torture, decimation— once seemed like the unwanted effects of human struggles over land and resource… As if self-preservation was the highest end of the human tribes… As if power ever really cares about the ideal…

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The Birthday: one day closer to Eternal Darkness.

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Yes, a birthday. Me-day. The Solipsistic Holiday. Am achten Oktober. The gang spoiled me again. An early-nite excursion to an indoor waterpark, nearly empty save for us. Last year, it was a fun zone; a zone for fun rather than a park for water. What a substance, water— a fun substratum. What are the conditions for fun? What are its ambiguities, its failures? What is its relation to the broader Spieltrieb, or play-drive in the large, Schillerian sense?

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What is Cold? What is Color?

It’s said that we reveal the most in trifles. Tiny actions— simple glitches— will reveal the hidden whole. After another day of Study, I met Sienna outside her work and we climbed aboard the Frankford Blue Line heading home… Around ten o’clock, then…. Even before entering, we noticed something was spooking the passengers. Necks were craning to look into the next car. Sienna leans in to tell me “It’s someone with a mask.” I peer through to the next car over, to see some guy stiffly moving about in a white ghost mask, partially cloaked under his hoodie. A Ghoul on the train. Everybody was freaked, and for good reason— the guy was crazy enough to antagonize North Philadelphian tough guys all by himself… And all his signifiers were too crossed for easy interpretation. Inwardly I was thinking, “just keep your distance, Colombine.” But he didn’t. He moved from that car to ours, pausing in the passageway between, behind the glass, in a real piece of horror-film device. Lights from the tunnel lighting the mask in flashes.

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Spinnbarkeit.

Christ, I’ve never had allergies before, ever. And now, for the past two weeks, I wake up and walk through life as an open snot-faucet. Even worse is that, due to a lifetime of clear sinuses, I never learned to tend to them in a dignifed way. You see me clutching a wad of soggy tissue or launching snot-rockets onto the side of the road— either way, we both lose. But I have to admit, I half-like it. Allergies are like cigarettes. They give you something to do with excess nervous energy. A sneeze.  A wipe. A sniffle. Out of disbelief, I am collecting my snot in a plastic bottle. It is said that we produce a liter of the stuff a day. It runs out and down. Drips. I want to see it all in one place; its coloration and viscosity at a liter thick. That medical fascination for abjecta, I guess, which once had medieval doctors tasting bodily fluids out of glass bowls. What has caused me to catch this curse?

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The Minimum and the Maximum.

Yesterday, Dick Davis and I played a marvelous game. Spending 24-hours in Philadelphi, with no money, no tools, no materials, no help from well-wishers— only a few parameters— and then trying to capitalize something from nothing.  All food, shelter, and comforts had to be generated from the landscape. Pure invention and extraction. Deep instrumentalism. Garrett Edwards had proposed the game, but was unable to play this weekend, unfortunately.  However, I like the idea of different teams setting different parameters for different perfections. Of getting a spread for different situations. Our aim— this time— was not to suffer. To live well. To pass the evening comfortably, cleanly, and well-fed. Approximately from noon to noon. And live well we did. Exceedingly so. Less for the planning or invention than for the Luck. The Golden Luck. The Perplexing Luck.

A serrated shank, a jotbook, found funds, methods.

A serrated shank, a jotbook, found funds, methods.

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Kant and Upper Darby.

Noonish. On the Blue Line toward Upper Darby, with Jochi and Sienna. Viewing the city-endorsed Love Letter graffiti by Espo that adorns the buildings in relatively far-West Philly… Not bad: anything is better than the usual aesthetic of urban renewal— people-of-all-colors-holding-hands-together-in-a-garden. The Love Letters were something of an extension of that West Philadelphian aesthetic of dated signage— or at least, in keeping. A regionalism making enduring things of collapsing structures.

Nothing, however, in comparison to the abrupt aesthetic experiences awaiting us at the Terminus. 69th Street. The weird John H. McClatchy building serves as a gate to Upper Darby. It is Art Deco brought to near-Assyrian dimensions. The whole area was cobbled with tight aesthetic resonances. Thumbnails. Found views. Dust and rust taking over once-shiny decors. Lapséd de luxe. I love this kind of Beauty. I can frame out innumerable corners and sink into strong perception as I might before a Rothko or something.  What is happening in these moments? In these isolations of accidental Beauty.

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Dawn again, Atlantis again.

Yearning for Daylight again, I broke the habit and habitus of Total Night by leaving the house before dawn and walking toward Center City…  Always a time of looser thoughts. Once upon a time, in Chicago, while reeling from some effed-up sleep schedule, I awoke in my brother’s apartment well before twilight, and made my way downtown, to spend the entire morning floating in total rapture… Prompted mostly by the rapturous architecture of Chicago— Mies Van der Rohe, Marina Towers, Chicago Tribune. The city allows for much better vistas than New York City, which has more of a glass-and-concrete canyon aspect. I drifted along Michigan Avenue, in awe, and scribbled illegible notes on through the afternoon.

Likewise, on this day in Philadelphia, I soaked up Sun’s heat like a crocodile. Enjoyed the easy dawn— the purplish orange— and lounged around Rittenhouse, thinking. Rittenhouse is very soothing to the person committed to a day without sleep. Makes it easier. The fountains stand in for its rhythms. The stone cools the brain. Veering from any habit or habitus— or doing most anything of worth— always demands commitment, a word of great philosophical value. Its opposite would be akrasia, usually translated as a “weakness of will,” more or less. In any event, commitment and akrasia are pretty heavyweight terms in the first-personal struggles and strategies of the Agent; while remaining fairly meaningless to the Observer— to the sociologist, to the spectator, to the Descriptive Eye.

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Spine, Spleen, and Transcendental Narcissism.

Above is the Wii animation of faculty-member, Jon Karel. A wii game wherein you try to make wii macaroni and cheese— a game mostly of waiting and whiling. It was presented tonight, at the Institute, along with paintings on the same theme: virtual boredom. A rich theme when you think about it. Here we are, trying to design worlds, and thinking we can manage in a utopia with all ups and no downs. Constructed worlds will inevitably delimit the dynamics of Desire very precisely, almost quantitatively. We will try to design a world without frustrations and end in a world without desires, not counting on that old Empedoclean principle of mutually creating Love and Strife. The same thing plagues me in Philadelphia: I’m languishing in Paradise, in a way— that or a primate zoo. Which is why I have to leave.

Howard covered the floor of the Institute with garbage bags. People danced. Gorged on dubious treats. Geilo was played. Then we went down the street to a darkened Broadzilla bar to dance to a bit longer and protest the early close of summer and summernights. Summer was canceled this year, if you didn’t notice, just when it was starting to get good; so Sienna and I are going to chase it to the Equator. I dreamed of this as I walked alone to Center City in the drizzle. Mists clung to the streetlamps, giving them the look of sad, giant dandelions.

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Hypermnemata, reborn.

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Friends, I’ve finally reverted to the hypermnemata. The proto-essay. The dense daily notes scribbled to myself, beginning in the middle of things. Snippet-size to larger. Often indecipherable. On occasion, good. The reason being I need to hold my feet to the fire a bit more. Give you and myself that sense of the moment— the kairos— that sense of decisions and mistakes being made.

My career as a full-time Philadelphian is coming to a close. The Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study is about to “transcend into Pure Idea;” move into a new mobility. I need to follow suit. I have begun to drink coffee at seven in the morning, after having been up all night. The Pale Hour breaks and things are just getting started. Surplus thoughts can now find their way here, and leave me alone.

This is a weird hour for me. “Must the morning always return?,” asks Novalis. “To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.” I really luxuriate in that boundlessness; that room for Experiment.  With The Enthusiast, I want to offer a really solid phronesis, a playbook for agency, philosophically complete though forever unfinished. Fichte had this phrase that I love: infinite striving.  What else can you ask for?

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