Getting out of bed–again. What keeps us going, when everything seems so hopeless? We would like to say that it is the possibility that we will be remembered but it isn’t. In fact, nothing will be remembered, least of all our long, protracted solemnity in the face of life. Life will not remember such things, nor will any of the living. Life will spit out from the corner of its mouth any such nonsense, and make sure not to digest the slightest portion of you. So, it seems hopeless and it is, which means there is nothing that keeps us going–but nevertheless we still keep going, going until we run out of steam, going until the daytime becomes the dream and the dream our waking life. That’s how it is with life: nothing on top of nothing; the goal reaching itself, then turning back on itself, folding over itself as though it were the last thing standing, when it’s not. Everything is standing, so that it can fall. That is all.
To sell or to be sold. Every time I think of salesmen I think of them as desperate, sad, tragic. To put your life on the line that way–to sell your life that way! The thought that comes to me is not What an easy way out and to the top, just give it a little time and effort, but rather How I pray that I never have to become a salesmen–and sell myself! But the fact is I have and it is something about the age: sales and salesmen and saleswomen and saleshumans mark our time and still, even if sales as a profession has noticeably dwindled. In a world where everything is always already a commodity and can be, will be, already has been commodified, sales is THE modus of our being. It is inescapable, selling yourself, like a pandemic of prostitution; the oldest profession turns out to be the newest and commonest profession as well, even if more subtle and insidious. You are a salesman, a boss of mine once told me, one of our best, and I protested: I am not here to sell or to be sold. After years of contemplating his casual compliment of me I realize that he was right: all my life, since I was the smallest child, I have sold myself, sold others, and been sold and traded like something on the marketplace. My price might not be fixed and agreed upon by all parties involved, but it is still there and like my badge which proves I exist. The only way to escape this inescapable atmosphere of valuation and exchange, the only alternative we have to loving what we are, something with a dollar sign or some other sign of currency before our names, before our hopes, before our high-flying ideals, is to become priceless. But what is priceless anymore, and for how long? How long do we have until even the most unique and inestimable thing is made costly, even invaluable, cheapened and coarsened in this way? How long do we have until the bell rings again, the men and women on the floor begin their bartering and pleading for the proper price again, until the marketplace roars again, that omnipresent monster, with its jingles, its clicks of opening and closing cash-registers, and its no less frantic, even if smooth, slick and intangible, flows of digital data, until we are numbered, all of us, priced, no matter what we are, and placed back on the shelves?
When nobody else is around. That, I found, is when a person shows off his or her stuff: whether they are wasting their lives and the passions of their lives or whether, instead, they cannot live one moment without investing all they have of strength, determination, even blood and the other fluids of the body, into a work, their ownmost, proper, work.
But a bird reminded me one day as he squatted–it was as if he was chilly and needed to bunch up his feathers like a coat around his slender body–right on my windowsill as I was going about this or that–I hadn’t even noticed the little life observing me–he told me There is always somebody around. You are never alone, he tweeted, then he flew off, past the yard and into the ether, leaving me, to all accounts–alone. But perhaps the little bird was on to something: we are never truly alone. We just might indeed–indeed, for I have experienced it myself–carry around with us the shadows and shades of others as goads and whistling reminders, as nightmarish whispers and echos of songs we once heard, as playful dreams and as inner dramas, even the shadows and shades of the dead–it makes no difference. We carry them along with us not because we need them–as I said above, our powers just might be given their good chance to shine when we are all by our lonesome–but because they need us. They need us to show our worth, what we are made of, our stuff that is not merely some private stuff. So the next time you are at your affairs in the middle of the day or in the middle of the night, or at whatever time, remember that if you say you do this for no one but yourself you are fooling yourself–like a proud fool. You are showing off, in reality. And you might not like what it is you have to present to your shadowy audience–when you think of their black eyes staring at your creations they might become rather paltry and insignificant for such observers and judges. And they–they might not like it either!
But how do we know this? How could we ever know for sure? I gazed out the window, thinking of the bird awhile, of what he had said, then returned to my affairs in the cave of my room, my room made into a cave, with a fearless, ruthless–if stupid for all its fearlessness and ruthlessness–passion.
An irritable schooling. Annoyance, frustration, that nagging feeling…what are they? Mere spurts and shocks of energy coursing through us, like electricity or the blood through our veins? Some statement, as though in cipher, for where we stand regarding things, what our disposition is towards them, and what our current mood happens to be? A symbol, perhaps? A symbol of what–our enslavement to the world, a symbol of how well or how poorly we are getting along with our fellow musicians, and therefore a symbol of a symbol? Or not a symbol but a cymbal, the noise and racket of the world bleating into our ears and not giving us a moment’s rest? ..! How annoying, how frustrating, how riddlesomely nagging annoyance can be, especially for the philosopher–for her foremost! We come from a heritage of thousands of years, a good twenty-five hundred at least, as far as the West is concerned, of practicing, even attaining, a certain serenity, certain as the full-glowing discs of our eyes were aiming for it…. Spells of annoyance, frustrating moments, those nagging episodes, can really eat away at such a human. Let alone an entire Age of Annoyance…why, for her that would be an exile, a Siberia! The challenge it poses to her countenance, what it took millennia to achieve! Let alone its lack of straightforward conceptualization, its recalcitrance as far as getting hold of it or getting anywhere with it is concerned. Annoyance–this Age of Annoyance teaches us, us philosophers especially–how thoroughly annoying it can be. The best of us will stop swatting at flies sooner or later..! …We shall exit this nuisance age and win a newfound serenity, perhaps a stronger serenity, one more mature and composed with the composure gained after a long trial…. But when!
Even for the mundane. The most mundane of things can light up my gratitude, or send soaring my wonder. Not only speech–speech is a wonder itself, and it’s a wonder what we can say–but the most inane and casual or conventional conversations or phrases, about the weather or directions to somewhere, or some complaint or passing remark about something can send me into feeling Wow, to thinking Wow, to even saying Wow, that we are capable of such things! It’s a wonder, not only that we are alive–life itself is a wonder, and it’s a wonder how we can find ourselves living–but even dry spells of life are fountains for a disposition as, more than tolerant, as embracing and as affirmative as wonder, or the pleasure of gratitude. Next all someone has to do is wink at me, or wince or smile or laugh in the most unremarkable way and at something hardly funny, and I am sent to rapture in gratitude and wonder, I wonder how all of this can come together and just like so, even for the mundane; a proper starting-point for those who do not want to grow tired with life.
It’s not always meaninglessness. Sometimes it’s precisely because things are so filled with meaning, or because there are so many layers, so many dimensions, of meaning, that they overwhelm us–not only because the wind comes and blows all meaning away, but the wind that comes with leaves, clouds of leaves of meaning and flurries of snows of meaning, or downpours of meaning, is so incredibly multifaceted, so complex and challenging and contradictory, that it might as well be chaos, that it might as well be the height of meaninglessness, the storm coming in of meaninglessness in the form of overabundance–of meaning.
Towards a philosophy of empty-mindedness. A thought comes but it goes as quickly and as easily as it comes–with no thought of us, poor thinkers! And what are we supposed to do when our thoughts run away, no matter how noble they were when we saw them fully dressed and they shared our company: chase them squinting with arm outstretched, asking for their return? Is the philosopher supposed to be a desperate bird-catcher like this? Or is she, somehow, to tread another zone altogether, that zone between thoughts, whether we call it exhaustion or enlightenment or rest or empty-mindedness, somehow get into that zone, think with and in that zone, think, that is, between thoughts, whether they are the highest or the lowest? Philosophy of exhaustion! Philosophy of enlightenment! Philosophy of rest, of empty-mindedness! What a thought: an unthinking philosophy! The last thing such a philosophy would desire would be–to build a system! To think a thought to its end, when the thoughts are pressing in on us with their plurality and their respective demands, when there are so many of them, when there is that great space above them, below them–away from them! Oh, how even the most rigorous thought seems only to want, above all–to get away from itself! To taste for once that place of the unthought, and to reside there! Permanently to reside there! Oh, what liberation it would be, to give up–so courageously!–what seemed to be our last worthy vocation, to take a vacation from it for good! Or for ill! What a thought! Of all the thoughts thought has, this one, the thought of the in-between of thought, seems to be the most promising after a long career and even longer planetary sojourn, the most luxurious! But no sooner does the thought visit us, even this thoughtless thought of residing nowhere in particular, of looking out to the hubbub of the world without any designs of cogitation, than it–is gone! Than it leaves us, thinking again, with our incurable curiosity! Than we are back in business as–so-called–responsible thinkers, responsible philosophers committed to a responsible philosophy!
On the consequences of transplanting. Once you take the man out of the land, things inevitably change. It is the same with plants as it is with the human being, that preposterous plant, as obstinate with its roots as it is in keeping rootless. What changes? His breathing changes, first of all, for different climes are bound to have different qualities of air, breathable or unbreathable or whatever. In one place it may be hard and heavy to breathe, because the air is like a thick mucus and his lungs are not made of durable or heavyweight material, but would be better for that other place; that other place where the air is thinner than transparent fabric, someplace where life is loaded down neither with dripping weights from the sky nor the ponderous or opaque gravity of a milieu; or a place in between where the average lung could manage to inhale and exhale comfortably enough. His thought changes, secondly, and with no explanation: perhaps it was his altered breathing that had goaded him down some other denkweg; maybe it was something else, something we will come to discuss. But for now thinking: all at once and all of a sudden, even if he comes to notice it even gradually, the grooves down which thought had proceeded are transformed, so their pacing, and with their pacing their color, and with their color and pacing their manner altogether, and with their manner the content, again, all at once and in a blink. There is no prejudice the human has more than the prejudice that we cannot escape these grooves in our brains, that we are caught in their turns as mouse is caught in its trap-maze. Such a prejudice is probably to blame for our not changing, for the dull-witted eye, like those stories of metanoia we read of when we were a child, those stories that continue to captivate us for all their unlikelihood. But when our thinking so changes it is like the alteration of our breathing: usually imperceptible and to be quite honest negligible, until you attempt to do something you were used to in the past, or couldn’t perform in the past, say taking a long hike or working outdoors for many hours; no matter if some fool within us wants to continue his old manners of thinking, how he thought, for instance, in Chicago or in Los Angeles or in Miami, and trudge along in this way–no more than if he were to continue taking heavy breaths in the thin air, after moving from a place where it was dense and obstructing! His breathing and his thinking changes: these are obvious enough for those who have the eyes and ears for such things.
But what moreover changes is his power, or his effectiveness, how far he is able to wield the forces of himself, in what direction and with what consequences. A tropical vine would surely flourish and extend itself more in the tropics than on the trellis of a grandmother’s porch in the Midwest–some things are not meant to establish themselves anew in new places and among new surroundings. Likewise one’s intentions and the capability of these being accomplished, one’s desires and the capability of these being satisfied, one’s creative talents or inborn strengths and the capability of these being fulfilled, are all of them made more or made less depending on where a man finds himself, that in conjunction with where a man is most suited. It must be, then, that, with the mutation of one’s powers, there comes a mutation of who one is, at bottom or on top or wherever we happen to locate one’s identity. His breathing–and we missed his eating, and the way the man takes shelter in these different places where his arms are made to stretch, or to pull back sullenly–as well as his thinking and his effectiveness are changed by where the man happens to stand; it must be that the man himself changes–at least over the long term, in a type of Darwinism or evolutionary geography of the personality. How else could a man be whose very way of taking in air, not to speak of food and of taking himself to bed, whose very manner of approaching his thoughts, like a warrior or like a maiden or like a knight or like a mixture of all three or something else entirely, other than something which he was not, something besides what he was used to being, what he had grown used to being, with the air and water the way it was distributed, the avenues for his growth being allotted to him a certain way, the amount of space he was given to make the most of himself being granted like a destiny of hard and rocky or lush and fertile soil?
These four, then: his breathing, his thinking, his power, and with these three his identity; all of them are altered depending on where the man is planted. Not to say that so much else might not also be transformed in this manner. Also not to say that place is all that matters; it could be that there is something rather beautiful and worthy of admiration, if not outright noble, in committing oneself, as to flames, to a territory, to a sphere of influence, that will utterly destroy one, where one could not live even if he were the toughest, and perhaps the most flexible, specimen.
What type of protection does the writer expect his writings to receive who imagines all of them, or fragments of them, surviving–for to survive as a fragment is still to somehow survive, to not be obliterated– outlasting other writings or other structures or other lives, perhaps outlasting the lives of entire cultures and languages, ways of living for the human, escaping cataclysm, making it out intact of not only the destruction of a house or of a village or city or nation, but even the extinction of the species, or of the destruction of the planet itself–perhaps moreover the entire solar system and its sun, perhaps too the galaxy and its suns and planets and other bodies, blip that it is. Making it out not only of fire and flood, those emergencies the species has faced before and, with its imagination, projects to different times and different levels of severity, but out of annihilation itself? What unspeakable imagination, what unimaginable presumption could construct an entity, at bottom merely words and designs, that is capable of such everlastingness? If human beings end up colonizing other planets, or other galaxies altogether, just what would make these works worthy of insurance and selected for preservation–why would they, in relation to all other works, be brought on board whatever ships we use to travel the lifelong and generations-long journeys to other light sources or habitations? These records of our dreams and of our failures, or of the all-too-undeniable monotony of living with a brain such as we have, if they have shown us anything, have shown us the utmost fragility. With more minor upheavals in human and geologic history, most of those of our past have not been remembered or kept safe in any fashion, along with the authors of these tracts or poems, along with entire writing tribes and peoples. What difference does it make for those of us writing today, for anyone writing anytime? When there have never been writers in more abundance than there are now on this scribbled-over planet, and when we see things not looking too good for us, what gives us the assurance to proceed as we do in our craft, in our linguistic experimentation and disclosure? What gives us–the courage? the insanity?–to go on writing as we do? That is, if it is true that no writer avoids the desire to be read, if not by his contemporaries, but by someone out there, in the distance of time and in the unknown future, why now, when more than ever the fragility of such an enterprise seems explicit, complicated by layered certainties, so blunt, why now propose to oneself such a fruitless task? And to say what? Of course Kafka asked for his oeuvre to be committed to fire, and some other writers admittedly make much of getting down on paper or on the screen so many momentous times or grand thoughts, only to burn them, or delete them, themselves, without the help of an executive of estate after their deaths. But these writers into the flames or into irretrievability are only exceptions that prove the rule, a rule which we see is no less a conundrum, no less a phenomenon before which only awe or respect, or ghastly horror, is sufficient.
Writing in the digital seems to aid many would-be or actual writers in their fantasy, for the material here, more than what we were graced with in considering our words in the medium of radio technology, since the 1940s, traveling to unknown other ears and countless other places of other eras, has more tangibility, even if to many its tangibility is utterly inconceivable, utterly intangible. The computer chip comes to our assistance in our attempts to be remembered. Sure a computer chip could melt or be washed away like any other thing, but if it leaves the earthly terrain, if it is sent via satellite or some other space-worthy body into vast stretches of the universe, if it is somehow self-repairable and even self-protecting and -immolating against the ravages of time or internal deterioration, what then? Well, some nebula or black hole, some total transfiguration of a segment of the great chaos all around could make who-knows-what out of our little chips. Perhaps here is rooted the wish for the Cloud, some more disembodied digital reservoir: here we might wish to store our works and maybe, as time goes on and refinement in the technology progresses, our brains themselves, something of our identity, and thereby survive whatever is in store for more embodied things. Could the Cloud be hacked into or manipulated, could its contents be erased before anyone comes along who is capable of processing or translating what it contains into an intelligible idiom? Could the Cloud itself grow weary of holding in its wireless belly such inconsequential matters as the babbling and worries, or perhaps even the records of the joys, of long-ago extinct and writing beings, and itself make room for data much more comprehensive, if only much less human? These questions are not answered, and the writing class shirks it only to continue toiling in its endeavors with the same uncertainties as before. We are all of us, if we write and if we think along with our writing, writing as though the executive of our estate were ready, upon our deaths, to make nothing more than ash of our outbursts and ideas. The writer seems as courageous, as insane, as insanely courageous or courageously insane, as before, and perhaps more so, now, if he continues in his pursuit of being read. Inhumanly courageous, inhumanly insane, staking our claim of immortality on such inanities and such certain uncertainties! Not only writing about climate change but in the face of climate change itself, in the face of the possible uninhabitability of the planet at some–near, so near now–future time, not only about nuclear wasting and nuclear winter but in the face of these, when the human will have other worries besides gathering all the poems and tracts of its kind, not only about black holes and nebulae but in the face, the faceless face of these, how they might thwart our attempts to send records of ourselves out into space, how they may alter anything we say beyond recognition, not only about but in the face of–annihilation, no more, no more writers, no more readers, all gone: our writing, if it is to be honest, can only be done with shaking hands, can only call out to the world with its chemical and more than chemical emissions like an ant does, for its time on the earth, before it is stepped upon, before the entire colony is wiped out, before its genetic heritage is no more.
Love the Dust 