Suggestion #4

All my morality (and most other people's) is a patchwork of lies and inconsistencies, assumptions that are unproven or, at best, unprovable - and this is not enough.

written in the throes of despair at the death of a dear friend

Love is the Law (1): Poetry of Love

Here's something a foolish boy once wrote about Love:

Poetry comes from love, not from despair or darkness, this is only self-indulgence.
Love makes everyone a poet. Love of another person makes for a short lived career, unless one keeps their larder constantly stocked, as some poets do. This view is rather narrow. It is the love of the world that is the poet's life force, the mystical love that powers the greatest poets and their greatest works.
Despair looks at a point, eyes downcast, a view inward.
Love looks all around and into eternity.

Now, although we shouldn't be too critical of the young in case it puts them off from doing some serious thinking in the future, I would say this about the above aphorism... 

And before we get too critical it could be pointed out in their defence that this is about love as it relates to poetry and not people.

However...

Love of another person... is rather narrow.

The author of this aphorism seems to find (or, more likely, imagine) that loving other individuals is lesser to the love of the world, in a mystical sense. The idea might start, as follows, that one's love of an other is always derivative to the love of the wider world as we begin with our world-love and people come later. On the other hand, maybe they want to say that people are just 'smaller' than the world and so the love for other people must always be a fraction of the mystical love for the world (so, it doesn't matter that it has primacy in order of loves but that it is greater).

Two points.

1. Mystical? Why might this be the appropriate place for the poet? Surely a poet (a lover, a human being) should be based on the experience of the world and not a transcendental experience of entirety. Well, we might say that this is part of the experience of being human (the mystical) or at least a fuller experience, or weaker, a poetic experience. At any rate there seems no strong reason for the mystical world-love to be greater than the love one might have for another human. Indeed, more positively, we might say that the love for another being is so different from the mystical world-love that one need not destroy the other. They are so remote from each other.

2. People, lesser? The strongest argument for the mystical world-love seems to reside in its ontological primacy. That is, one must begin with this to experience the lesser love for human individuals. However, why would it be logically (or emotionally, or physically) appropriate to count world-love as the first and greatest love. We learn about the world from those we love and who love and care for us as we grow. That is, from our parents and from those adults that care for us as children. We simply begin with the love of others or special individuals and only then, from them, do we learn the possibility of world-love. The mystic's world-love is derivative from the love of a child for a parent, for a person or another person. That is, if we are saying that they are related.

At least, this is true of the religious mystic. As they start with this, seemingly, world denying world-love (a paradox that drives the spirit of religious mysticism). How might one be a mystic without be religious? More about this godless mysticism later, but this mysticism need not deny the importance of the love of individuals.

Suggestion #3

Faces in clouds, but not hands or other body parts or things, not always human faces, but faces are common enough all the same.

Do surgeons see spleens or plumbers pipe schematics?

I can set myself the task of seeing a body in a cotton wool blanket, as we fly above the clouds, but I cannot force it, I cannot invent it.

Even if there is something that I complete, I cannot create its first appearance.

Some Updates, or The Last Year (and a bit)

1. I've quit my PhD. Paying too much for too little. Going nowhere. No potentially positive outcome. Vanity project. Etc etc...

2. I've buried my dearest friend. He died too young. It's a mark of the loss that the only person I feel I could properly talk to about it, is him.

3. I've found God. He was behind the fridge the whole time. /sarcasm

4. I've fallen in love. This time with a person and not an idea.

5. I've started writing a novel, or rather, I've started writing my thesis as a novel. Sort of. Vanity project, take two.

6. I've decided to try and post more regularly on the blog. That is, at all. Give it a week.

7. I've got a job I don't hate, but that doesn't pay that well and doesn't give me enough hours to live on.

8. I've got lovely hair. I'm told.

9. I've turned 34. Not dead yet, but feeling that I'm old! Urgh.

10. I've lost a dog. He died, he didn't run away. He was a good dog. Damn shame.

11. I've stopped being a Pescetarian. Decided I didn't really care enough to continue with the whole personal martyrdom thing.

12. I've made a good few friends. No, better, a few good friends. Maybe. People come and go I suppose.

13. I've got back in touch with someone I thought had drifted away for good (see above). Actually, it was all because of my mum. Thanks mum.

14. I've gone through the most serious and sustained period of depression in my life, thus far. It came before falling in love and before the death of my friend (this is perhaps more surprising) about a year ago. In the end nothing really brought me out of it, no single event anyway, I just came out the other side.

15. I've changed my name again. I've added my friend's and my dad's first names to my name. I'll talk more about this later.

16. I've decided that I'm better suited as an artist than as a philosopher, that I need to work creatively and openly and not in the confines of academia. What will come of this? We'll see.

17. I've also decided to not be so precious about certain things, i.e. maintaining a personal distance on the blog (hence this list), being overly concerned about upsetting some people (hence the joke @ 3), generally acting in a manner that protects my fears and does not combat them. There's only so much time.

Quotes worth saving (11) Borderliners by Peter Høeg

Borderliners by Peter Høeg
Originally titled, De måske egnede
Translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland
Published in 1993, published in English by the Harvill Press in 1995

Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs in only one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, explicable or unapproachable. It is all of these things. (p.235)