THIS LAND was made for you and me.

This is philosophy

Greetings, tumblrverse! My oh my, it has been a while, has it not? Well, as of right now, I am declaring summer officially over, and my hiatus from writing is suspended until further notice. Thank god, my brain was beginning to melt into goo.

I’d be lying if I said I felt no twinge of sadness at the fact that I am not going to be in school this autumn. Okay, yes, I am a huge nerd, but fairly soon after I graduated from college, I realized something pretty important - there is a reason for academia and traditional academic structures. In an attempt to keep my critical thinking skills sharp and continue to expand my philosophical horizons, I have attempted to read three books this summer: Foucault’s The Order Of Things, Nietzsche’s The Birth Of Tragedy , and Felix and Guattarri’s Anti-Oedipus. Shamefully, I must admit that I didn’t finish any of them. But here’s the thing: it is much easier to stay engaged with that sort of work when you’re in an environment that supports it. It just felt wrong to delve into the finer points of Foucault’s archeology of human knowledge when my bike ride back from work in Philadelphia was more like a lesson in urban sociology. How can one really justify wanting to think and talk in theoretical abstractions when your neighbors are pretty clearly just struggling to put food on the table? While college students are generally broke, it is a totally different kind of broke. The truth is that the structure of the university makes it possible for people to engage in work that has no relevance whatsoever to the quotidian reality with which real grown-up people must grapple every day. Meal plans, weekly schedules, social events committees - all of these things take the pressure off the student to make life happen. That extra energy that doesn’t go into thinking about, say, cooking for a family, or finding cool things to do on the weekend, can be devoted to thinking about Foucault et al. Because that sort of work is hard, too - really.

I have had to think a lot lately about value. I find myself asking the same question over and over again: what is the point of studying literature, critical theory, and philosophy, ultimately - trying, even, to make a career out of it? It doesn’t immediately apply to the well-being and sustenance of humankind; it’s not going to save anybody’s life or clean up our environment; it probably won’t even make people very happy. Where is the value in what I am trying to do?

This question is part of the reason I am not going to graduate school right away. I need time - needed time - to examine what I find meaningful in life, and how best to use that information as I move forward. I think I have a workable answer, though, and now that I have it, I can start writing again.

The “good” in life cannot merely be reduced to what supports the basic functions of our existence. This position would assume that human beings are merely pleasure or diversion-seeking creatures who are busied with the exigencies of just keeping themselves and their fellow humans alive and healthy. Once that is done - the food harvested and cooked; the body tended to; the babies born; the dead buried - we just seek pleasure. Music, alcohol, sex, dancing…and that’s all there is to life. Work is the necessary exponent of being alive, and everything else comes after that.

I would challenge that. I think there is more to life than just keeping it going, although for most people that truth can never be fully realized. As a function of the daily grind, life seems to just be about working for the paycheck, making sure everything is tended to, and having that beer at the end of the day that makes you feel good about the whole business. But there is more to life than that - and certain modes of existence allow one to see that more clearly than others. The life of a genius professor, sequestered as she or he may be in her or his office, affords the ability to deal in the art of intellectual inspiration - to spend the day with ideas in one’s head about culture, art, philosophy, and so on. Which isn’t to say that they don’t have to think about the realities of putting food onto the table either, but that the two are necessarily related.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world without artists, thinkers, and philosophy professors. What saddens me is that our socioeconomic reality is such that this lifestyle is inaccessible to most people. But that doesn’t mean it’s an unworthy aim.

So, I am sad to not be going back to school this fall. I really am. At the same time, though, I have zero regrets; I am about to embark on an adventure of my own, one in which these questions about value, the good life, and what meaningful work actually means will surely confront me every day. I am going to be working on a farm - growing food - in Big Sur, California. Wwoofing! Now, if there is any action that correlates directly to utilitarian notions of the good, I would think that it is growing food. My motivations in doing this aren’t purely philosophical, obviously. I do want to gain some practical skills and live in another part of the country. I want to experience life outside of the Ivory Tower.

Summer is over, as far as I am concerned. This is my first autumn free of textbooks, syllabi, and dining hall meals. But it won’t be devoid of intellectual exploration or personal truth-seeking. I intend for this year to prepare me for a graduate course of study that examines the role played by the mind in modern reality. What space can we make for literature and the arts in 2012, with our country in economic shambles and the ever-impending doom of ecological devastation knocking gently at the doors of our collective psyche?

It would be so much easier just to watch TV and tune these things out. But I am tuning in. My situation with teh interwebz is going to be precarious at best in these upcoming months (true story: I am typing this from an iPad in a hostel in New Orleans, Louisiana; from here, it’s back to New York for a few days, then Scotland for a wedding, then California, then…who knows?), but I am going to try to write on these issues as often as I can. Next book - which I promise to finish! - will be Raoul Eshelman’s Performatism, or The End Of Postmodernism. The concept of performatism (which this silly device autocorrected to “Perot stick” and then “peddle arian”) has interested me greatly for a long time…but that is a post for another day.

Keep learning, reading, exploring, and don’t be afraid to take pride in what matters to you. And to my friends returning to classes pretty soon: study hard and have fun! I’m there in spirit.

- e

this is not philosophy

So instead of copying an excerpt from a philosophical treatise or bit of critical theory, or offering some sort of intellectual analysis of a strange grouping of ideas, I am going to make a list of things that make me happy. Because there is more to life than the deeply theoretical, and also because I am feeling a bit sad - and I have little tolerance for sad-feelings, so this is to cheer myself up.

Good things, in no particular order:

1) Tea. I love tea. I drank some black chai and instantly felt better. Any kind of tea is great, but yerba mate, green tea, mint tea, good chai blends, and English breakfast tea (I was raised on English breakfast tea) are my favs.

2) Sunrises. I wish I could convince myself to wake up early more often to watch the sunrise. My window faces west, so I’d have to walk outside to catch it…but I will, it’s worth it.

3) The way people smile when they’re truly happy and not just being polite. The way their noses crinkle.

4) Dogs and cats. Animals that evolved alongside humans to be their companions. Dogs and cats pick up on human emotions and are, I find, often more expressive and sympathetic than other people.

5) Good red wine; there is nothing more to be said on this.

6) Stargazing and identifying constellations. There is a whole universe out there!

7) Bonfires and campfires. I like fire a lot, in general.

8) ‘Cellos. Part of me is really happy that I don’t play the cello; I can enjoy the sounds of a cello more this way. Cello music is reverent and poignant. Nick Drake’s Cello Song should be required listening for all humans. And on that note…

9) Folk music. Sometimes I tell myself that I don’t like folk music; I’m not really sure why, because it’s a reliable source of comfort and a reminder of human grace.

10) Other people. In reality I can be a bit shy, but I love people, I like to hear laughter - as I am hearing outside my window now, familiar voices laughing and talking. I like living in a dorm for this reason; the din of others comforts and delights me, something that perhaps not everyone can relate to. Having found myself in a variety of different living situations in the last eighteen months, the value of being very close to other people really stands out. Humans are meant to be close together.

Well, there’s ten. I would also like to PUBLICLY make some resolutions: I aim to drink less coffee, be a bit more friendly, drive my car less often, and generally realize that life is pretty okay, there’s a world outside of the analytical, and cellos exist.

Spring is a time for joy and renewal. Generally my internet-offerings are a bit more strange or cynical than this, but at the end of the day, this is a lot closer to the person I am, really.

love,

e

The Conclusion of my Thesis!

While the genealogy here ends with Kathy Acker, it radiates into the future of literature in the form of other writers, writings, and theorists that adopted a stance on reading similar to the one espoused in the meta-narratives of each text considered in this paper. A profoundly important question underscores these works when considered in conjunction with one another: if the meaning of reading fiction is, in fact, based entirely on subjective impression, and if the derivation of truth and meaning in novels and short stories is only relevant on the level of the individual, how do writers contend with this in the present day, and how might they contend with it in the future? Arguably, the radical subjectivity that serves as the theoretical foundation for each of these works is part of a nihilistic project: insofar as each reader’s perspective is equally valid and serves to “create” the written work unto himself or herself, it would seem that a shared discourse or dialogue about literature would be functionally meaningless, and the meaning of each work simply “ends” with every individual reading of it.

By their very nature, the texts considered in this work resist being defined summarily as part of a larger category or genre of literature (except, perhaps, “literature that comments on literature”) or as including a set of shared features, beyond a desire to serve as both fiction and literary theory. Because each work stands alone, and because of what is implicit within the content of the work itself, it is left to the individual writer to interpret and build on the issues presented in Pale Fire, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, the short stories of Borges, and Don Quixote (Which Was A Dream). On one hand, the theoretical implications of these works might constitute an instant in which the writer, looking to Borges, Nabokov, Acker, and Calvino as a foundation for their own writing – as the latter three writers did with Borges – must be entirely self-reliant in their engagement with these works, unable to default to tradition or shared notions of the function and meaning of these texts. She or her would be writing in a vacuum of sorts, in which he or she is forced to invent their own literary values or do away with any notion of right or wrong reading or writing. On the other hand, this might allow for greater freedom of writing, interpreting, and theorizing. The express project of Borges, and the avant-garde literary circles with which he was associated, was to redefine and re-examine what language and literature could do. This sparked a tradition defined only by a categorical resistance to tradition, to being bound by concerns of evaluation based in literary theory that could easily become outmoded or stale. Works within this tradition resist this problem by asking timeless questions about the very essence of fiction reading in and of itself; that these questions are never easily answered reflects their position of fundamental subjectivity, allowing for a seemingly infinite amount of conclusions to be drawn from them, or, perhaps, no conclusion at all.

            This, I believe, constituted a significant shift in the history of literature: the innovations of certain seminal twentieth century writers created a situation in which each of their works constituted a sort of genre unto itself, due largely to the degree of self-reflexivity and self-awareness within each work. Of these writers, Jorge Luis Borges was certainly one of the most radically innovative and most significant, both in terms of his widespread recognition during his life and in the influence he held, and continues to hold, over other writers. A very small fraction have been acknowledged in this paper; any attempts at listing or discerning all of the writers who are indebted to his work would, undoubtedly, be incomplete. What is perpetually compelling about Borges, in light of this, is that he envisioned and espoused an image of himself not as a great writer, but as one ultimately defined by a love of reading: Borges was a reader before a writer. In this way, the very figure of Borges himself is an embodiment of “the death of the author” that haunts literary theory of the twentieth century. In his writings, Borges aligns himself with his readers: he, too, is one impelled to take journeys into unreal worlds and mental spaces made possible only by the written word. This is evident in his self-fictionalization and also in his non-fictional works, in which he writes passionately of himself as a reader. Borges made no claims as to what literature was or the correct way to read or approach a text; the overarching impression he gives is that of one as delightfully mystified by the entire institution of reading and writing itself as any of his readers. He espoused the virtues of reading for pleasure, and was not selective in what he read. He read for the sake of reading, and provided more questions than answers about the notion of reading in and of itself.

            Perhaps a definitive resistance to stable theories of literature, then, is not a nihilistic outcome of a distinctly twentieth century compulsion to ruthlessly innovate and create works which question their own meaning. It could be, instead, a mode of literary engagement that reveals a desire to take pleasure in the mysteries of the textual world – a space committed to honoring the fantastical, the unnecessary, the impossible, and the speculative within every reader. These works, I would argue, champion the reader as the true hero of every fictional work. The reader begins a quest every time she or he turns to the first page, subjecting themselves to the author’s experimentations. He or she might not be left on stable ground – for the texts considered in this paper, he or she will likely come away with more questions than answers, and might be at a loss to easily describe the work they just encountered. That, of course, is not a problem; these works defy understanding by their own design, and in doing so raise issues of what it means to “understand” any text.

There are no solid or stable answers to the issues raised in these works, but there are – ideally – instances in which the mind of a reader and the world of a text become one, moments which exist independently of the need to classify a text’s function or meaning. This is the instant in which the main character of In On A Winter’s Night A Traveler decides to marry Ludmilla; it is the fanaticism of Charles Kinbote, possessed as he is by John Shade; it is the moment in which the fictional Borges peers into the Aleph and when, in another tale, he begins to understand that the reality of Tlön is leaking into the reality of Earth. In these moments, each of these readers is overcome by a textual world to the extent that “understanding” the world becomes meaningless, and they have subjected themselves entirely to the written word as a space of positive mystification. The lack of answers or stability inherent to these works is, ultimately, a love note to that which defies rational understanding and to the ability of literature to defy any and all perceived limitations of what the written word can do. With each reading of a Borges story, a new Borges story is written; because of this, these works and all that claim them as influential will continue to enchant and mystify, and their meaning and truth, in their beautiful mutability, will continue to radiate outward.

…FUCK YEA