9.09.06, Eve's Ramblings (disconnected thoughts)

[more rambling, b/f 10 pm]

Before I ramble too much more, a request. I know I have three sisters who read this blog, so is it possible to have one of you get these posts to mom? Or take turns? Would someone mind doing that for me? Nearly every time I talk to her she says she’s not heard of anything on the blog, no news, no details. Since I talk to her pretty much daily it’s not a huge issue, but I would imagine she’d like to see the blog.

All this searching about and studying about Being probably looks like it had some teleology in the light of the present “study” of it. While I grant that the two are related, even more closely than I would have thought before, the one is not just an extension of the other acclimated to death and short-term being. I’m surprised, however, by how all of the high philosophical attempts to work it out, though extremely wordy and too often burdened down with a scholarly tradition and apparatus, are at center the same as trying to get up every morning and face mortality. Knowing you’re facing death sooner than most people you know narrows those Big Question discussions down to a number of key everyday questions.

What is my desire? What is all the chaff in life? What can be eliminated without detriment? What do my actions mean, and, how screwed up are my priorities? On actions, what is left of them after I’m gone? What’s the value of social interaction? Ethical behavior? Etc. But now I feel like I’m I the laboratory and it’s possible to test theories daily. You can feel what some questions mean, whether some assertions hold water, whether some propositions are simply shit. I don’t if it’s coming out well, but I feel like Hegel’s concerns in his “Preface” are the same ones we deal with daily if we’re honest and thoughtful. Or it that feels pretentious, reverse the order, “Our simplest honest everyday concerns are actually . . .”

Death, or foreshortened life, forces all this. It's not so much about how long every morning till I think "cancer" so much as how long till I think "How much longer?" My head rattles with it all. And this is what happens mentally between bouts of various physical annoyances. It rambles, I can’t guarantee it’s entertaining, but it’s real.



[eve’s ramblings]

To blog out of nothing. Today. A 5 or a 6 for the numerically oriented. The Franky Scale (. . . where is St. Francis tonight, a cocktail in hand for me?). Feeling late. Always late, but this is all happening too early so what would I be late for? For what? Apparently last week I was late for a procedure that involved one version of “me,” but the version of me that maintains my body, governs or is governed by fatigue, experiences bouts of energy, never fully manic any-more though, this version of me was unaware of being late for anything. So the appointment made without me, the doctor scrubbed without me, the tan overconfident somewhat lacking in bedside mannerist there without me, while I was living my life and making sure I wasn’t late for anything. Till the administrator called and informed me there were two me’s, and one of them was scheduled, it’s just that the other didn’t know.

There is a parable in here somewhere? If it’s true that “because I could not wait for Death, . . .” then perhaps I’ll get lucky and be late again sometime in the near future. Death with wait in agitation, looking at his Swiss watch, wondering “What gall? What nerve?” while I’m off somewhere else writing him into a parable where he is the butt. I hope his administrator is the same as the one who called me to apologize and say I guess we assumed we had you on board for this. Nope. Not this me. Must be someone else. So Death will run around checking my usual haunts, to no avail. I’ll be sitting elsewhere with a good book, and no watch . . .

Growing inside me like knowledge. This is the thought that comes to me tonight. Wisdom — no, too high falutin. Some would have us think though that knowledge must inevitably lead somewhere, like wisdom. Hmph. Just knowing certain things and thinking them through these days. These Days, caps. What is it like . . . calls come, messages, over wireless, or through the net. But tonight too is solitary, more at this same day today. Sometimes often there is little to talk about. Times of patience, or simply, being. So much of Being accentuated these days, precisely because they stand out as being precisely “these days.” Keeps coming back, little returns of phrase. And, just being, for a little longer. No Blue Cliff Records, Dharma Bums, or else metropolitan or colonial fictions so much the less. Applicable. Not today thank you. The Stranger, Twenty Love Poems, Flower Garland Sutra / Hwaom, Satan Says, Three Poems, Tender Buttons. Philosophy and Truth and scads of other notebooks.

There — in growth, knowledge, tumors — is a strained simile. Still it serves. Sometimes even a cliché serves just right. It’s all tied through some backmountain trails and desert plateaus and long wash walks to the recent concerns I’ve had: no, let’s call it obsession. Being. The one uncanny fact is how I was obsessed before these days. For the past few years I’ve been studying through this maze on the side, the deepest philosophical problem, or question ala Camus, through Hegel and Marx, through Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, some other places. Put this on hold, there is a sound and sight afoot.

Interruptive image: A breeze flowing right through my kitchen window, with some force, and a tree sits just inside my eighth floor window, what kind, I don’t know, while I cook. When is the last time you could hear the sound of tree leaves rustling and breeze wind flowing while you stood in front of your stove. Next room the blinds sometimes reach just the right windspeed to imitate cicadas. Perfectly. Who did this? When was the last time? Now I sit to eat. There is one cup for tea, given to me by a poet named Hwang. Where is he eating tonight? There are two cups in the set. Or is he asleep in the midst of friends and hangers on, cigarette burning dangerously down to the drunk sleeping quick while one friend, who is a radical journalist and freerange intellectual, will catch it before the end. Then Hwang will wake up, laugh in small at a joke two minutes old, light another. So it goes. Eternal return. (Was it two years ago I was there grabbing the cigarette?)

More later…. That’s why it’s rambling…