From: Notes Toward a Poetics of the Numinous
¶ That the social order has been given primacy as the structuring force
of the individual has led to the deterioration of that social order far more
quickly than in the nineteen centuries before our last one. It is this kind
of (materialistic) thinking that is ironically elucidated in Wittgenstein's
Tractatus. However, his irony was missed by the positivist's who took up the
utilitarian aspects of such a philosophy alone.
¶ The seduction of history: the gradual accretion of associative residues
around our texts, until the heft of ideas was endowed with so much in the way
of historical accumulation that it's primary resonance began to be felt as a
thing and not a quality.
¶Aspects of the experience of the felt quality of materialism: density
/ finitude/ boundness/ constricted resonance/ the object as an a-historical
social artifact whose context is embedded in the social order alone and not
in the moral qualities of history or art or the "becoming" of the
individual. The result of this: concrete art/concrete poetry/ the
fragment /the lacunae that rises in the wake of the refusal of the life sense.
Only Goethe lived in saving contrast to all of these
.¶The development of measurement is a means to business, science and warfare. The activity of measurement is too often the primary comfort of those immersed in the materialistic ideal.
¶Materialism is a release from the fetters of a moral world, leaving the
available world as one of corporatism (Mussolini's phrase) and its advertising
, which is the manipulation of the five senses, the hypnosis of the masses to
watch the bright flashing light...
¶Materialist science has become an expression of gigantism -- the arrogance of control in the face of the numinous and the inevitability of existential crisis (and its accompanying fear)if one is not buried in materialistic concerns.
¶When the sufferings of conscience are muted by one’s constant comparison
to a codified ethics, it leads to the withering of the "I," the withering
of responsibility. Without the life-sense in the service of conscience and its
felt quality of belonging or living embeddedness, the moment in which the critical
decision waits to be made becomes only a sidebar, a means of satisfying an obligation.
In this way we have lost, as a culture, the capacity to tremble.
¶Semiotics is in the service of a hermeneutic of fear. The seizing up of
the creative encounter with phenomena is a direct result of the world's loss
of inherited cultural capital
as a living phenomena.
¶The belief that our beliefs structure the real: this is science cathecting
its own beliefs, & culture cathecting science. In other words, it is oedipal,
incestuous.
¶The belief in measure as a mirror of the real-- what characterizes this
belief structure when it is investigated phenomenologically?--
Answer: constriction. A lowering of temperature -- fluidity coalescing into
structures, structures lending themselves to empirical proofs, empirical proofs
themselves the love of measure for its structures.
And then, there is the necessity of the iconoclast, who, endowed with the same
beliefs as the creator of what he/she destroys, builds another mirror, slightly
to the left, (or more likely to the right) of the original....and what is endlessly
reflected inside it are successive approximations that end in a cosmic hardening.
. .
¶Perhaps the ultimate irony is in the necessity of materialism in spite
of all. That we must have a materialistic science at this time, since, without
it, the coming into consciousness of the individual would be impossible, as
we would have remained embedded in a world- awareness that is at this time retrograde
and against individuality. Though it is just this feeling of necessity that
is seized on by the proselytizers as a justification for the spread of materialist
thought.... It is in just this way that we are being manipulated
into missing the fact that the materialist moment is past.
¶That deconstruction gives us part truths is not enough-- it must yield
the real. Instead the best it can offer is fragments, and fragments that are
not to be trusted, because the human authority that it would take to put things
back together has been undermined by the deconstruction of the "I".
Nonetheless the I remains , as that which recognizes itself through the fragmentation
process, and as that which erases itself in the process of deconstruction, only
to emerge again to publish the book! The emotional life and memory life may
change, but there is always a numinous cognition which is able to recognize
itself as the same entity that woke up the day before..
.¶The critical time in history is now-- when we must begin to recognize that our philosophies can and already do support the numinous in spite of the gains of a skeptical science, in spite of the damage that is done when the scientific/materialist base apprehends language—
¶This is the simplistic logic that is the basis for the continued dominance
of science: that because science yields results it must be" right".
. . .But a look at the results that have been offered is frightening in the
extreme. Science, in a period of perhaps five hundred years, has become the
source of the world's potential for its own destruction. It is perhaps the ultimate
symptom of materialistic thought that we as a race, as human beings, do not
storm the capitols of the world demanding that such a machination of systemic
anti-humanism be dismantled and something humane put in its place.
¶The belief world has its boundaries , its trappedness, and its presentation of itself as the falsely numinous.
¶The struggle with the real as experience is apparent in the poem The First
hour of the Night, by Frank Bidart
¶ When original participation is undone-- it leaves the necessary gap in
the telos that we have attempted to fill in with postmodernism
¶ The discrimination against the "I" is a lacuna, or a lack in
the human sensing organism. . . in short it is of the character of an illness.
¶ Conciousness is the only means to the perception of the "I"
¶ The lost art of sensing: the internal experience of an external event
may be seen as a sensing motion as opposed to cognition in a cartesian sense
¶ The clear perception of what thought is is the the key to a uniform field theory of consciousness.
¶ Love is the given that constitutes the sensory field.
¶ The invisible lives in the idea at the same time it lives in the percept.
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