after bejar

by songs
slung down the notes of their own magnitude
moments may compare
these infinities in coupling pairs
unique
heartbeat jarring its electric
cardiogram line like guitars across a stage light
the mind in its analog time
trails paradox by scent alone
in a world where
truth flowers first for insect
lovers

so it sings
walk with small legs
keep immaculate your filament wings

later, on a May mornng

1
come May
it is still morning late

the trees have
by now
been shaken like private rainclouds on their tether trunks

birds as black as boughs
look through their flight-pecked feathers
cackle their calls

can such sharp, sharp eyes
know nothing of death
except the watchfulness of sky?

2
in the angle of late morning dandelion bloom
innocent as the wrong word

why does the soil so love them
what is their pact?

3
spent lilacs un-boughed have fallen
onto the deck's softened
grey surface
introjected by rains as a soul by themes, movements
of forgotten symphonies,
as a sepal sheath
unaware
of the billow of its own late fragrant flower
just now
strewn along the latest slap of blue.

it is may and it is morning

it is may
and it is morning

the night has been sighing
raindrops
and the shy earth is green as a new soldier
a first love, first draft
new teacher behind the desk of
her first class

nothing yet required.
nothing must be
changed.  the lilacs on
the table with lilies of the valley
a small wealth of fully wilted dandelions

need
no
arrangement to childishly
speak

a foggy breath drawn in through the open
window
from the patient, pausing earth
waits
for you to
exhale

because like each new thing drawn upwards
on its green string
your body
in the dawn air
involuntary
knows what
next follows last

Toward a model of the motion of the existential cycle (or something like that)

Well, let's take a different turn in our thinking. So much for Gettier problems and justified true belief--they belong to each other. Certainly but for justified true belief, a Gettier problem is hardly a problem.

I also noticed I over sold the idea of unities. I do think fundamentally there is a unity of truth and a unity of being. However, activity or will is probably less a unity and more a multiplicity. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is because humans have such a predilection for noticing activity that it is so difficult for us to see unity at all. Instead, we seem to be faced with a inchoate or at the least irregular terrain of truths and material reality.

At any rate, here are some rough diagrams of the overall model I am suggesting. First, we see several interstices within truth, activity, and being, which lie between dichotomies. There is a general flow of time from left to right, and a flow of phenomenology at the junctures, by which, I would vaguely posit, personal identity is maintained. At each end point is a spin toward some other state, marked with the letter T, A, or B for truth, action, being respectively. Continuing outward is a greater fabric of these lines which lie outside the perceptual borders which are (I am speculating) created by the phenomenological pull of the interstices (in a moment I'll show a second diagram talking more about this motion).

Click to enlarge

This is a very crude figure of the basic arrangement. The model itself creates many new problems which I won't try to tackle right now. However, it is important to understanding this conception to also understand that the real notion is not static, as this picture would present, nor full of "ends," which is precisely what I was complaining of in my earlier posts. Rather, since every end has a proclivity for some other state, it is a model of continual, cyclical motion. NB: I notice that I have some end-points proclivities mis-labeled in this drawing, but the second diagram should help to clear this up.

Below is a diagram of each state as a part of a cyclical movement. This makes more sense if I mention that the movements consist of pairs of lines--one from each implied vertical plane above. This is very rough, but I tentatively suggest that one plane is what we might call "subjective" while the other is what we might call "objective." For example, for being, creation and dissection are in the subjective plane, while void and ground state (these are all very rough terms) are in the objective plane. I don't know if this notion will hold though, because I haven't worked through that part yet. Points T, A, and B represent the interstices, or what I had whimsically described in my first diagram as the existential axes. In a later post I will try to say more about what I think these axes actually represent.

Click to enlarge

So, the rough representation of motion from above. I split it out because I couldn't draw it as one contiguous motion. In fact, the figure does not present a closed system at this point. In case this all seems rather interesting but useless, let me point out why this matters. If this is the nature of these elements, and if they are none of them properly understood as merely causes or ends, then it would follow that an explanation of any part of reality would be closer to correct if it demonstrated a following of these lines further than along any single paired duality taken from the first diagram.

In other words, you would do better to describe a unified truth which became diverse as it was made evident in being, which, through dissection created an emotion or felt reality which brought about some rationalized action which unified understanding but made it generally obscure, resulting in a state of chaos which resulted in an extreme rigidity of will...in a word, the further you follow the lines, the closer you mimic the existential cycle.

There is much more to be said about all of this (for example, these are not really "lines" exactly, and much more that is necessary). But, this is as far as I have gotten in my notebook.

A bunch of songs

Follow the red lights

Some older songs I found lying around:

Morning Glory

Civilization and its discontents

A myth to explain its longing

spring time

the streets are so perfectly dampened
as to seem alive as soil
alive as the image of black bough
hulloo-ed into your eye with large nows
waiting for the echo with cupped hand

alive is a series of steps
complex because it will twist
will cling like sap, like pitch
will rise from you don't know where
from your shoes on asphalt
from familiar morning words
and bedroom window seeping air
off moist rock walls of night, slow as roots
alive is in its spread from head to head
i love the day when you drift in it

spring is when things come back
walking beside you alive like another world would have been alive
full of only other people
and of you nothing but the trace
how hard to think of ashes strewn across this breeze
yesterdays pinched out
it must be something very large that chains together time
along unbroken dreams
halfways remembered
alive reminds
a same old song plucked from your fingers
like pitch a song
clung along lengths of wire

when you stretch your hand
can you feel how dead things pine
to be free of you?
they leave these nows
spread on softened
echo, touching down on here

Some initial thoughts on truth in being.

I left off by beginning to describe a system of reality construction, or an ecology of the real. Truth was a part, perhaps the most important part, of that construction, but was not considered as an end-point, or an end alone. In other words, truths, through their interplay with being and action, are part of what stands as a continual process or cycle. Certain parts of that cycle have what I was calling sympathy with each other.

I suggested this in the context of setting up a particular problem with truth as end: the justified true belief (this context is not, of course, my own idea, but has already been discussed at length by philosophers). The problem was, to summarize it in a way, that truths as end-points are sufficiently elusive that we cannot establish a sufficiently complete way to describe them. So, a Gettier problem shows us that what we thought was an end-point (a particular truth/knowledge) could not always serve as an end-point, because though the criteria of justified true belief were met, the concluding understanding was false in some important way.

To say that truth is not an end point might seem like a purely semantic way out of the problem. In other words, it changes the terms or the meaning of the terms, but offers no greater solution. After all, even if the nature of reality is exactly as I described, how does that really help us? We still will not know at any time what part of the cycle we are in.

What seems apparent to me, however, is that this becomes less of a problem if we continue to factor in all the cycles of reality--in other words, rather than looking for truths as ends, we look about us for the ecology of the real. This will involve a more holistic approach to knowing.

Critical to my view is that there is one truth, of which all truths are a part. There is one being, of which all being is a part, and there is one will or one activity, of which all activity or will is a part.

Furthermore, these unities are perceptible, I believe. To say they are perceptible is in fact highly unusual, however, and in fact is a large part of the problem that selves have within the overall ecology. Because perception necessitates some sort of separation from a unity. However, if the unities are in some sense complete in themselves, then the difficulty is diminished. Because action or will is not the same as truth, but is itself a unity, then by acting we can discover things about truths, and in turn discover things about truth as a unity. True enough, while we act we do not simultaneously perceive, but since acting has an effect on our being and the being of those outside ourselves, the temporary separation of these elements of the ecology allows for perception.

This is obvious from the very processes that we engage in scientifically to, as we think, arrive at truth end-points. By carrying out activities and noting their effect on being, we uncover truths which were previously only inherent in being. However, unless the action is perfectly understood, we cannot arrive at truth as an end. So, no experiment is designed to arrive at all truth. At the same time, and decent experiment is aware of at least some other truth which has been made apparent at a previous time. Well, made somewhat apparent. So, an individual experiment, great or small, begins with some understanding of the ecology of the real, and ends with, hopefully, some greater perception of all truth through the uncovering of some truth.

But this is not limited to scientific exploration. Indeed, virtue within a society has a similar dynamic, except that in this case different elements hold different positions. Truth in being is what is sought, while activity is like the prior experimental results (if this were described in an analogous way to a science). So we say, people have acted in certain ways, and we will use this as a model to explore truth in being. Thus, in a search for virtue, people will look to models of activity, and experiment on being through this process. The extreme, and therefore in this case useful, example of this would be mystics, ascetics, monks, holy people, and the like. By adopting certain activities as a given, they use being as an experimental element. Of course, the end point remains truth--being is experimented with according to models of will or action, and by attaining greater understanding of being, one may attain different understanding of truth--that is, one may experience truth that is borne in one's being.

To experience truth in being is not the same as to uncover truth in principle. At least, this is my thinking, if you like it. And if this is in fact the case, then we have a different case of truth than truth as end-point, which I will assert is a truth, as we might think, in principle. This different case of truth is not subject to the Gettier problem, though it may have other inherent problems of its own. Yet, if this truth in being is still a case of truth uncovered, then the difference is more than semantics.

One might say that this is a lesser case of truth understood, because it is subjective. It isn't yet possible for me to really deal with subjectivity, because I haven't fully explored where such a distinction comes from in the ecology of the real. At the same time, I would suggest that there are sufficiently rigorous ways of examining truth experienced in being that it should stand as a case of truth understood. The most obvious one is to turn again to activity. If truth is uncovered and perceptible in being, then it should furthermore affect will or action. The will or action, even of an individual, is not cut off from other beings in a subjective universe built on the fancy of the person who has experienced it. The effects of this experience are tangible in the outside world through activity. If they were not, they could not truly reside in being. I hate to be circular, but this is because being too is a unity, and by this nature, as the truth in it is uncovered, it cannot stand to cut off some part of itself. This is not the activity of truth within it, though this is a very common misconception (as we often characterize those who have special perception of truths to be on a new, separate path from the ordinary beings--and indeed they may think this is so as well).

So, will we arrive at truth in principle? Can we satisfy the desire for truth as an end, or do we simply need to point ourselves away from such a construction? I don't know, but I believe that we do not do ourselves a service in an attempt to arrive there by constructing ways to circumvent other ways of knowing--more likely that arriving at truths in principle is an activity which requires truth in being and truth in activity or will, and understanding what those cycles look like will be fruitful toward placing truth in principle within the ecology of the real.