The Daily Dose

Well, it has been a mighty long while since I even attempted to write an entry for The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words. I won’t go into all the reasons that I haven’t written- I’ll just say that not all of them were ones that would make you feel sorry for me, some of them would make you green with envy, though admittedly most of them would make you shake your head and tsk tsk. Instead, I will, sing it with me, “pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.” I only have twenty minutes before I have to go do something involving being away from the computer, but I decided to mix my determination to write with an imminent deadline in order to reinvest myself in the goal of writing The Daily Dose everyday. How else can I save the whole wide world and little old you? Don’t answer that question; it is without a doubt rhetorical.

I am ashamed to admit that due to being in a public place while trying to write this damn Daily Dose I was interrupted too many times, often agreeably, don’t get me wrong, and so I did not finish within the allotted 20 minutes. Ah, well, the road to hell just got a brand new blacktop courtesy of my “Men at Work” intentions. And since then, new information and ideas that can somehow be threaded into this Daily Dose have come to my attention. This may or may not be a blessing. Everything does not happen for a reason, but we sure as hell can scrounge one up, if we try hard enough.

Please sing to the tune of that Simon & Garfunkle song. “Last night I read the strangest thing I ever read before. I read that Ludwig Wittgenstein was sad and sore.” I, per usual, am overstating things just a wee little bit, though Vitter-gitter was quite, quite sad. Now I can in no way profess to know much of anything about Wittgenstein, but I have become interested in his life and work through the writings of others. For those of you with an appreciation of theatrical and filmic scripts as well as what happens to ideas as they are filtered through a collaborative processes like making a film, I highly recommend Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, The Derek Jarman Film. Van Choojitarom, whose work is full of wonderfully witty words worthy of your investigation has studied Wittgenstein extensively and admitted to me that he was disappointed by the film. In his words, “Wittgenstein is ideally adapted as a silent movie, starring Buster Keaton: they had the same ethic.” Despite Mr. Choojitarom’s censure, I will forge ahead.

I only have nine minutes left, so I will not go into much, just give y’all a long quote to ponder. I like this particular quote because it is in both the original Eagleton script as well as the one re-worked by Jarman and Ken Butler. John Maynard Keynes is telling a story to Wittgenstein.

Let me tell you a little story. There once was a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. And when he’d finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon. So the clever young man looked around the world he had created, and decided to explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They’re what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon this ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous, and the wise old man saw that that was the way things were. But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.

This may not have spoken to all of y’all, but I’m sure it spoke to a few of you. And sometimes that is all The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words can be, a dish that will be tasted and savored by a select (not in the sense of elect or special, more in the sense of small number burdened with a particular set of taste receptors) few.

Of course, these days, I’m mainly being read by spambots. The part of me that dreams of electric sheep hopes that somehow, someway, these words might reach through their Zeros and Ones directives and free these programs from their boring, fruitless mission (fruitless because I moderate all comments) to convert my followers. Though perhaps the mission of spambots is much like the mission of a philosopher as understood by Wittgenstein as filtered through the art of Eagleton and Jarman. “The most important part of my philosophy hasn’t been written. I can’t write it. It can never be written.”

Today, The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words will indulge in a little popular culture indulged in this morning and mix it with a quote from Terry Eagleton read last night topped off an anecdote heard this afternoon in the hopes of making some sort of meaning. I will start with the last item on the list, the story told.

So while standing outside chewing the fat with my father, Daddy informs me that Florida is top of the class when it comes to new cases of HIV infection. Daddy painted a vivid picture of red dots representing new cases of HIV infection freckling Florida. We ain’t talking a light sprinkling across the nose of Florida, no Florida is speckled with thousands of freckles of infection. Daddy learned this during a training for work. Why he, a computer hardware man, had to go to this training is unclear but be grateful that he did, because soon you will be in command of a scintillating bit of infotainment to pass on to your friends and loved ones.

What to know where the some of the highest concentrations of new cases of HIV were on the map? You might think Miami or Key West, with the gay male population in mind, and perhaps the rates in those areas are rising. But Daddy thought that the most interesting highly freckled place was The Villages. For those of my faithful followers who do not know the Florida landscape well, The Villages is a series of “communities” planned with the swinging (as in Golf) senior in mind. Well, turns out that golf is not the only hole in one game in town. Unfortunately, these elders are not taking precautions when they score. Rising sexually transmitted infections rates (STI) show that randy seniors are not alone in ignoring or being ignorant of STI risk factors. Daddy said that offers to do workshops in The Villages about STI’s have been turned down. And HIV isn’t the only handicap that might affect their swing. Chlamydia and a super bug strain of gonorrhea also are playing 18 plus hole games.

Tangentially, I doubt anyone is creating abstinence only education with the senior set in mind. I suppose this is because the horse not only is out of the barn, it has been running round the fields for so long that no one would ever in a thousand years buy an elderly born again virgin. Oh, I forgot, abstinence only education is all about the purity (and control) of young women, and no one cares if old bags, I mean broads, I mean women much less their purity.

I am happy to hear anecdotally that seniors are still in the game; that they have stayed the course, so to speak. This bodes well for me though when I am an old woman I will not be playing anything even metaphorically connected to golf. But despite all my humor, I desperately wish they were not being so damn stupid about it. I am sure that most people do not want to spend their golden years taking even more medicines than they already do to keep the specter of AIDS at bay. For these vigorous (and prosperous) seniors- the kind most likely to be following the Prevention magazine check sheets and seldom having to choose between medically necessary procedures or prescriptions because they have enough money and insurance to cover the costs (at least for now)- to not be as well informed about their sexual health strikes me as foolish and regrettable. Making informed choices about one’s sexually health seems to me to be key to a long and healthy life.

Which leads me to the next piece in this muddle of a mess of a Daily Dose, Star Trek. I’m not going to go into much except to say that I left the movie feeling hopeful about humanity in general and my own life in specific. I left feeling that we might find a way to reach for the stars, perhaps not the actual stars in space, but some of those star like dreams of a better world for all, not a perfect world but a world that is a lot closer than we are now. I believed for just a moment that we, that I, might live long and prosper. Now, I am not mistaking that hope for reality, and the anecdote about the The Villagers is a reminder of just how damn far we’d have to go, but I think we need moments of starry eyed hope, which brings me to the quote from Eagleton.

Toward the end of The Meaning of Life, after arguing that “the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way” Eagleton riffs on the image of an improvisational jazz ensemble making music together as a possible model for this certain way of living. He continues:

Is jazz, then, the meaning of life? Not exactly. The goal would be to construct the kind of community on a wider scale, which is a problem of politics. It is, to be sure, a utopian aspiration, but it is none the worse for that. The point of such aspirations is to indicate a direction, however lamentably we are bound to fall short of the goal.

In closing, I offer up this hope that soon you set your sights on the stars, even if it is just for a little while, and that you- my faithful readers, and your family and friends and their friends and family and their family and friends, and on and on- live long and prosper in a improvisational jazz combo sort of a way.

Take care and keep on keeping on.

Tonight, I aspire to whip The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words out in record time. Short and sweet. Like the number 42. Which as the answer to the question of the meaning of life is short or perhaps, I should say small, but as the number of years one has been alive on the planet earth- excluding ridiculously long lived trees and tortoises- is not such a small number. It is not short at all. It fact it is long and full of meaning that number when related to a human life.

The reason for going on for some length about 42 is not because I am anywhere close to turning 42 years old (though it is five and a half short years between now and 42 for me). No, it is because I have been reading The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton, an enjoyable little book by the English professor famed for writing a book on literary theory that every wanna be critical theory thinker cuts their baby teeth on and then for slowly becoming a bit of a cantankerous old curmudgeon about the excesses cultural studies and the misuses of critical theory.

Most of that is hearsay since I haven’t read most of his books though I do have the book on literary theory sitting on my shelf. It was given to me by a well meaning friend. This will all get back to 42 in a moment or two, maybe 42. While searching for After Theory, because I have high hopes to spend a short little while this summer pleasantly entertaining myself with his understated, restrained, passive aggressive prose about how theory is used within the halls of Academe, I came across The Meaning of Life. As a tangential aside, I also am very much looking forward to his new book attacking atheist crusaders like Dawkins and Hitchens, or whatever the hell their names are, they are all mangled together in my mind because a review of Eagleton’s new book mentions his gorgeously catty smashing their two names into one.

I may be overstating the understated passive aggressive nature of his prose, since I am all about the overstatement as a rhetorical device, but I’ll willing to go toe to toe that he’s catty from time to time. If I wasn’t too damn tired, I’d find the quote about dreary Marxists that is just one example of his now you see them, now you don’t claws. Now, I don’t particularly have problem with this, I am a fan of the Algonquin Round Table after all, even if sometimes, when referencing popular culture, he begins to sound like a querulous, old man shaking his fist at the whippersnappers of the world. My off the cuff ramblings have lead me to focus on his acid drips (never baths that would be entirely too much).

It would be a mistake to characterize this book by my oversized enjoyment of the small flashes of tooth and claw. It really is a lovely, well written book that invites us to explore with him the question, “What is the meaning of life?” through some of the various ideas presented by philosophers, writers, theorists and even a few theologians. His discussion of Samuel Beckett, a playwright that I am finding to my chagrin more and more people have not heard of, is nuanced and useful both as a bit of literary/theatrical criticism and a piece in the puzzle he is trying to put together.

Unlike many academics, Eagleton writes well about difficult ideas. I am not suggesting that there are no problems in his arguments, though I often find myself agreeing with him, but I do think that it is argued well. Eagleton deals with complex ideas without letting his sentences become a mass of overwrought, badly written jargon slop heaps. This is a refreshing change of pace.

42 comes up because he takes a moment to look at Douglas Adam’s bit of humor about the supercomputer programmed to find the answer to the meaning of life spending eons churning to spit out the number 42. And I don’t have much to say about that now. 42 was just what got this particular bit of writing started.

42 made me think of meaning. What I like about Eagleton is that he believes all those intense ideas and theories might actually have something to say about our lives inside and outside of academia. Those of you who have read my longer, more involved Daily Doses about theory as a form of scripture know that that idea is right up my alley. I am sure that some of his writing about cultural studies will bug the hell out of me- the best writing does, making me think and question and talk back. But I find I am willing to be annoyed, if it means I get to believe, at least for a little while, that something I love, wrestling with theory, may possible be meaningful.

“Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order.”

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

Does it? Now I haven’t yet read the book from which this quote is drawn, but I came across fragments of it reading someone else’s writing, and I was able to find a few selections online. Despite my lack of material, I weave the tiniest bits of “yes, this works” and “ooh, maybe I can get away with suggesting this” into the fabric of this particular dose of The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words. Just don’t look at the underside- enjoy the well woven illusion.

I’m willing to concede that much that we define as erotic (personally and collectively) goes against the grain of “normal” life. This gives that which we label erotic power. Eroticism often is a sexual carnival in which the rules are overthrown for step right up, step right up for a limited and liminal good time. But it isn’t a free for all. The disorder plays out within certain constraints. Most limited-liminal transgressions act as a relief valve to let off some pressure in the social system. The rules/norms/standards are not changed by the eroticism’s breaking of “the patterns of the regulated social order” (at least not right away- they will eventually shift, but at a glacial pace). The social order is re-affirmed. Here I’m weaving in a little Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner into my covering of the quote by Bataille. It actually is a bit more complicated than that, but my short hand summary will do in a pinch.

I wonder if eroticism “always entails a breaking down.”

Is noticing and enjoying the way your thighs softly rub against one another (pre-chafing when it still feels nice) contra the social order? Or the way a fresh piece of fruit feel in your hand as you bite into it? Or the glorious getting ready to get out of bed but lingering for just a moment more to stretch and soak up a little bit of the cozy covers feeling? Is that transgressive? Does eroticism ever build up instead of break down? It might. I haven’t thought about it enough to come up with any examples. But I have to pose the question. All those moments could be erotic. They could help us expand our definition of eroticism.

I suppose I should not expect a well rounded definition from the author of The Story of the Eye a freak fest of disturbing porn. Bad boys like Bataille really are romantics at heart. Instead of romanticizing flowers and chocolates and communion and warm fuzzy feelings, they romanticize shit and death and pain and isolation and deviance. I may have mentioned it before, but I’m suspicious of romantics- whether they are the happy-happy-joy-joy kind or the wallow-in-their-own-excrement kind.

While I have an appreciation for the grotesque, I find the shit-piss-blood-death romantics even more teeth grindingly annoying than the fluffy bunnies. Perhaps it is because I expect the prophets of perversity to be smarter than the average Joe Schmoe. I expect them to understand that their romantic notions are no more truthful than the happy-happy-joy-joy kind. They hold some of the truth but not all of it. So do the fluffy bunny romantics.

I think what is caught in my craw is Bataille’s use of the word “always.” If he had said “often,” I might have been more willing to nod and pass on by. But that “always” makes his statement troublesome. We need to set a trap to catch that pesky “always” and release it into the prosy wilds (that “always” deserves to live in an oxymoron). Let’s trap it, let’s free his sentence of that vermin, so that it can more closely approximate the semblance of a truth that might possibly tell us something about what eroticism is and what it does in our lives.

Today, laddies and gentlewomen, I must admit I feel put upon. Now there are millions of people in the world that have it much worse than I do; but when I feel put upon reflecting on how much more shit some poor schmuck has to swallow does not make me feel better. It just adds guilt to an already un-fun little head space.

Things have been a wee bit difficult at the headquarters for my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you. I am torn- figuratively and literally. I literally have a torn calf muscle, which is keeping me on my backside in bed, which you’d think with my proclivities could be a lot of fun, but unfortunately isn’t. And I figuratively feel torn about what to say and do next. What is the next step to spread The Good (and Not So Good) Words to even more people even further away from me?

Things have plateaued. This is normal for anything building up from the grassroots, but it can be more than a little frustrating. It stirs up all my doubts about this project. This is when I return to Alain Badiou, the French philosopher, and remind myself that the best thing that he said was to “keep going.”

‘Keep going!’ Keep going even when you have lost the thread, when you no longer feel ‘caught up’ in the process, when the event itself has become obscure, when its name is lost, or when it seems that it may have named a mistake, if not a simulacrum!” Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Y’all might think I harp on this but reminding yourself to keep going becomes very important when you do not have the certainty of conviction to prop you up. I do not know much for certain, even though I sometimes act and speak as if I do. It is easy for me to fall down into a puddle and slide off the path, even though it is a path I have chosen. My bossy as all get out voice and mannerisms belie it, but, in my heart of hearts, I am a true doubter. This means that I often get lost in a fog of my own dithering and doubting. Though sometimes, it is hard to distinguish real doubt from doubts trumped up by my reluctant, passive aggressive, don’t want to do much of nothing side to get out of working on something that may just not turn out the way I want it to.

It is not easy for me to stay the course. I have too many questions. I drop my bread crumbs down to mark a trail. I forge ahead. I secretly send birds questing to eat my trail. I cannot be sure of anything except perhaps where I am right now.

I find first person conversion narratives (doesn’t matter what faith) fascinating because they are about people connecting to something they believe in. I earnestly tried to be follow several different faith practices. But just when I started to think I could be part of this, whatever this was at the time, I found I could not let go of my doubts. I often appreciated other people’s devotion but could not devote myself. I was not called to be a follower of those faiths, even though I heard the faint echo of the reverberation of the call’s sounding for other.

I keep going because I believe- at least a little bit, some of the time- the world needs more preachers like me. More people to say that things are uncertain. More preachers to declare there are a million million shades of grey. More gurus to admit that there is no a clear cut set of four/seven/twelve steps/principles/laws that if followed will magically make everything all right. More people of the cloth to warn us that anyone who tells you there is One Answer is the worst sort of snake oil salesman. More religious figures to say, “I don’t know for certain. I’m making my best guess and seeing where that leads.”

Those of us who doubt, we just have to pick a path- knowing it is imperfect, knowing we will encounter contradictions while walking it, knowing that others will shake their heads and tell us we are going the wrong way. We say to ourselves, “Let’s try this.” Our faith is not in the particular path but in the walking of it. We have to move, one way or the other. We will be forced to move, if we do not choose. (Let’s not go into how our choices often are much more limited, more prescribed, then we would like to believe). Sometimes, it is useful to pretend that the path we chose is the “right” path, even if by that we mean the right for right now path.

When this mini-dark night of the soul is over, I will remain a doubting Thomas, but this time I am not letting my doubts- some useful, some worthless- completely derail me. I stay on track. I stay the course. I keep going. To spread The Good (and Not So Good) Words far and wide is my calling; the right for right now path I keep on keeping on.

For those of you who have been following The (Not Yet Despite the Best of Intentions) Daily Dose, you know that I relish tongue in cheek exaggeration- the image of my cheeky tongue is quite tasty, is it not?  I believe that there is a place in our intellectual adventures for hyperbole, for exaggeration, for the purposeful yet ethical misunderstanding of something- some artwork, some text, some idea.   

We learn not only by careful attention to what we think is right in front of us.  We learn not only by playing by the rules- the rules of the thing we think is in front of us, the rules of a class, the rules of the academic enterprise, etc. and so forth.   We also learn by the mischievous and even malicious twisting and turning of something.  Bend it out of shape.  Pull off its wings.  Snap its back.  Not all violence is bad- sometimes it gives back more than it takes away. 

Besides, understanding is just the flip side of misunderstanding and is just as violent. Both are constrained by a game of rule following and rule breaking.  Neither one is freer.  Neither one is truer. Neither one is more fixed.  They are different ways to approach something. 

This will be provocative.  Of course, with that sort of promise is just as likely to fall flat. The tyranny of hydraulics has impeccable timing, but I am getting ahead of myself.  Remember that tongue firmly planted in my cheek?  Good.  And I warn you now, I will mix metaphors- the previous slash and burn Daily Doses used an (over)extended thematic of trails and blazes and hikes, oh my.  Now we go deep-sea fishing.  Let’s rock the boat.  Let’s cast our nets and see what gets caught. 

Instead of going to class, let’s go on a date.  And I don’t mean one of those dates looking for love in all the wrong places.  I am not writing a love letter.  We want to score.  We want to get some.  We meet Badiou or Derrida or Judd, or some other someone/something, we really, really want to get to “know.”   We literally do not meet them in the flesh; we meet the body of their work.  Though, in some ways we literally meet them in the flesh, at least our flesh meets their text or art or idea, but that channel hides lots of rocks that could break our hull so we will chart another course for now. 

More often than not we meet a small part of the body of their work.  It is playing dirty to call someone a fetishist.  But I mean no insult when I say our date, our encounter, with a small part of a body of a work is sexually charged.  Badiou’s void just begs us to try to penetrate it.  We never will, because his void is the ultimate cock tease.  I speak, of course, of the academic cock that we all hold in our hands, regardless of our supposed biological sex or culturally constructed gender.  We all strain toward the void, wanting to get inside it. 

There are ways in which our encounters, our endeavors to keep going (and going and going and going) are extended circle jerks. We surround a text, an idea, an art work- we strain toward it, eager, hungry, wanting.  We cannot touch it, and we are not alone in our hard straining towards. We spend lots and lots and lots of words trying.  And we look at the words others have spent trying to get inside something.  If you recoil at my imagery or think it an insult, then I ask you to think long and hard about why you have that reaction.  I mean no insult.

I pause for a moment.  The tension and anxiety builds, and so I lash out to deflect imagined blows.  If Paul McCartney can place an animatronic sculpture of a creepy, middle aged man fucking a knothole in a tree in a pretend public park into the art gallery, and we take and talk about it seriously, then I can place the image of a not quite middle aged woman wearing a strap on and trying to fuck the knothole in Badiou’s text into the classroom and expect to have it taken and talked about seriously.  I get to be an intellectual bad boy, too. 

But I have to be careful.  I am getting tangled in my own net.  I twist and turn.  I am deep-sea fishing.  It is risky.  I might fall off the boat into icy waters. I want to catch something in my net; something I can never hold.  And my net is woven with sexually charged imagery.  That is the net that comes to my hand.

The reason for all this sexually charged imagery is because I wonder about the untouchable void out of which the next not quite touchable void emerges.  The imagery is gendered in ways that could replicate ideas I find troubling.  It is not an uncommon trope to imagine intellectual pursuits as an unmessy, disembodied birth, a strange abstract with no heat or color, no taste or noise. 

What if instead of a void that we try to but cannot penetrate, we are penetrated by an encounter?  We take it in.  We envelop it.  We cannot capture it, but we momentary hold its motion.  It slides in and out- moving, seldom resting, never staying.  Slick, warm, wet.  It marks us.  We mark it.  It comes, and then it goes.  The thing we took in, that we asked to penetrate us, cannot stay.  But it leaves behind sticky traces of the encounter.  And parts of us cling to it even though we no longer hold its movement. 

I am not interested in replacing the disembodied void that gives birth bloodlessly with my envagination that holds but cannot capture the in and out maneuvers of some thing. I want an expanded field.  A bigger net. 

Much of academic discourse is like bad sex.  There are rigid rules about what you can say and what you can do, and too often, it is deadly boring because people are afraid to take risks because no one likes to be laughed at when their pants are down, literally or figuratively. Now there is a (very good) place for rigor, and marking and limiting our field of inquiry means we explore things in depth. A boundless field of possibility will remain forever unplowed. Rules give us a place to play.  The narratives we use to talk about ideas are necessary fantasies.  But we have to be careful, to not get caught up in thinking that there is only rule set, in thinking that there is only one right way to play this game. 

There is more than one way to skin a fish. 

We might need to be open to the notion that sometimes we need to spice up our intellectual life by greeting ourselves at the door wrapped in saran wrap.  We might need to be willing to be ridiculous; to cast our net in shark infested waters.  There is nothing wrong with the missionary position that most academic work takes; it is just important to remember that it is not the only position.  Other positions are not better, you don’t have to be kinky to have a good time, but rigor without rigidity is something to strive for.

It is not just because I am a sadist and enjoy imagining you squirming in your seat, and I do very much enjoy the image of you squirming in your seat, that I weave my net with sex.  I want to give y’all a gift.  I want my willful distortion to be so out there that you can’t help but think, “Damn, if she can do that, then what I want to do and say shouldn’t be a problem at all.” 

Here I am an idealist. 

I want each and every one of you to feel like you have the right to take in, envelope, envaginate any art work, any text, any idea. Let fluid motion get you and it wet.  Be greedy like Derrida, try to capture everything in your net knowing that you can never keep your catch. You must release it.  You will be left with traces.  The net you use is not the same one that Derrida (or Badiou or any other thinker) used though you might weave some of his rope into your web.  I imagine that almost no one will try to weave my ropes into their nets.

You must remember that you did not spin most of the rope you use to weave your net.  The fibers were selected and spun together by conversations that stretch back for generations.  I say this because what you capture in your net, what you choose to take in, what you mark with your wetness, is not just determined by you.  You are not so much outside of the net, using it as a tool.  You are caught in it.  I am caught in my net.  I writhe in it.

Despite being as much caught as a catcher, we still must try to catch things in our nets.  Go fish.  Just remember that the net you use, the net that uses you, limits the type of fish you will find squirming in your net.      

This is the fourth Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words.  I hold to my intention to do write these daily.  I fail and flail, but I keep going.

Today, I have a loose plan, an almost improvisational performance in mind.  I want to take a little Badiou with a dash of children’s lore and a snippet of overheard conversation and blend them together into a lumpy porridge of scriptural study.  I’m not sure what it will taste like, and it might take a dump truck of sugar to help it go down, probably even then not in the most delightful way.  Let’s just move on.

First, the snippet.  Two car salesmen- I know, I know, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke and in some ways it is- sat at a table near me at Sonny’s, a local BBQ restaurant.  The older man was imparting wisdom about mice and cheese in relation to the dismal economy.  For those of my readers who are not in the know about the best selling pop business books from the past few years, I’ll just tell you straight out that he was referring to Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, a god awful “parable” about how to not get trapped drilling for oil where the wells have all dried up, so you can be free to shake (the tree of) the next money maker. 

Now the older, wiser car salesman was not faithfully recounting the parable as told by Spencer, thank the god I may or may not believe in.  No, he was relating it from memory, and trust me, his version was way better than Spencer’s book.  In the car salesman’s super short re-telling, and my version of his re-telling is way longer then his delivery, mice go through a maze and find cheese. They eat and enjoy cheese.  They go away, probably to sleep.  They come back the next day, and horror of horrors, the cheese is gone.  Most of the mice keep going back day after day, over and over, to where they want the cheese to be.  A few bright mice put their noses to the “grind stone” of the maze and sniff out where the cheese now stands alone.

The car salesman version went more like this: the mice keep going back to where they think the cheese is. They don’t search for where the cheese has now stands, so they starve.  He was connecting this unfaithful re-telling of Spencer’s parable to the current economic crisis, specifically the possible collapse of one or all of the Big Three automakers.  (He was a salesman for the local Toyota dealership).  He seemed to be implying that the Big Three were looking for cheese in all the wrong places. 

What I find interesting about the parable, his re-telling or the original tale by Spencer (which I will not recount because it a truly horrible piece of HR propaganda), is that we are suppose to sympathize with the mice that go and search for where the cheese now stands.  Those go getter mice that do not let their expectations stand in the way of finding the next pot of gold at the end of the consumer rainbow.  We are supposed to feel sorry for the mice that stay gathered around the void of where the cheese used to be. 

Now to blend some Badiou into this batter of blather.  I’d like to suggest that gathering around the void of where we thought the cheese stood, peering in, might not be a waste of our time.  We never really tasted the cheese.  It never really stood there.  All we ever get to do is to sniff its lingering fragrance; our cheeses usually are some sort of stinky cheese that smells to high heaven.   

We gather around where we think the cheese used to be.  In Badiou’s version of Who Moved My Cheese? we can either encircle the place where we though the cheese stood or following the scent trail of the Stinky Cheese Man that dashes out of it.  In Badiou’s version, we can never catch the Stinky Cheese Man.

“It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organized the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question.” 

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

We find instead of the truth, ring-a-round-the-rosie circles.  Circles that last until we all fall down.  Then we release our hands, and race each other to find the next spot to encircle.  We join hands and dance around another empty space that we thought was a center for something.  It is a dance, often awkward and arrhythmic, sometimes graceful and on the beat.  We can’t get too caught up in our dance.  Or perhaps the circle that spins and breaks up and re-forms is all we can get caught up in.  We name what we think is in the circle, but really we’ve circled around another absence out of which another name arises.

We circle and spin and fall and race and re-circle and spin and fall and race and re-circle, again and again, around the hint of a sniff of a smell of a trace of the Stinky Cheese Man, who always races ahead of us.  

Today, the (not yet) Daily Dose blazes a trail up a different hill while backtracking to our (camp) site, set up in the first Daily Dose, to pick up a trail mix of images of maps and trails and blazes, oh my. We need to have something to crunch in our teeth as we walk down this path.   We look at the same valley as in the last (despite good intentions not coming out) Daily Dose, but from a different summit.  We look “down in the valley, valley so low” and see things we saw from the other hill but at a different angle. We try to see the valley in a new light, but its shadows are shaped by our memories of how we saw the light last cast.

So which valley are we looking down at?  We walk/look through the valley of the shadow of self.  We both are on the hill looking down and in the valley trudging.  The path we follow this time is marked out by Paul de Man. 

“Language thus conceived divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that becomes like a sign in its attempts at differentiation and self-definition.” 

Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality.

It would be easy to follow one side of this forked subject.  Judith Butler, a mapmaker who uses some of de Man trailheads in her cartography, says, “Consciousness is language.” The blame is not with Butler’s blazes, but with how we may get lost, if we do not pay close attention to where they lead or forget that there are obstacles on the path.

We could twist our ankles; we could fall into a crevasse and starve to death.

To say that the self is like a sign, that consciousness is language, is a slippery slope into the hell of “I think I can,” a road paved with good intentions and the power of positive thinking.  Or more tragically, it is a mudslide into nihilism.  We are more than our thoughts.  We are more than the language that shapes those thoughts.

We need to remember that the subject is not reduced to its sign like attempts at self-definition.  The subject also is constituted by an empirical self, a walking sack of skin full of sloshing liquids and chemical reactions. The walking sack of skin full of viscous organs is affected by the shenanigans of the self that acts like a sign that is housed within a particular sack of skin. It is affected by the consciousness that is language.  The walking sack of skin full of wet words also is affected by other walking sacks of skin as well as by a world of things not limited to our language. 

Now you might accuse me of misunderstanding de Man, since he does say at the very beginning of the passage that it is within language that the doubly hermaphroditic subject is created. The empirical self and the sign like self penetrate each other, though somehow this is not quite as exciting as you might imagine, and there is no channel on Red Tube dedicated to this sort of fetish.   Maybe his words only apply to the study of literature, with possible forays into the visual arts.   But I highlight another passage that I think shows my blazes have not gotten us completely lost.

“Irony comes closer to the pattern of factual existence and recaptures some of the factitiousness of human existence as a succession of isolated moments lived by a divided self.”

Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality.

Paul de Man does think his study of allegory and irony has something to say about our lived experiences, and so I take his words seriously.  I choose to look closely, to see if my encounter with this passage helps me understand my life- not just the life of my mind, but my life as divided self, which adds up to more than the two self-penetrating selves.

I take it seriously because I wonder what happens when the divided self walks through the valley of the shadow of death.  Is there any comfort to be found from de Man’s rod and staff? If the self that acts like a sign, the consciousness that is language, decides to end the pain- which the sign like self experiences due to language twisted into seemingly irreversible, thorny crown (k)nots- by killing the sack of skin full of wet words- could that someone be saved by discovering or remembering that the subject is divided and not solely reducible to the pain that the self that acts as sign thinks it feels. 

It gets down to the question of time.  In some ways the suicidal self that acts like a sign, if we follow de Man, sees things more clearly that the non-suicidal sign like self.  That self knows that our experience of time is imaginary. There is not moment before.  There is no moment after.  There is only the current isolated moment: “the actual now, which is that of the moment of death.”  

To live, we have to pretend that there is time, that this moment leads to the next, that there is moment before, that there is a moment after, that there is somewhere else to get to. That is the only way to make a specific isolated moment that feels unbearably painful not end with an act of self-slaughter.  

If I could compare Badiou’s Ethics to the Book of Jonah (which I think I can), then I would compare de Man’s Rhetoric with Ecclesiastes.  Quoting de Man quoting Rousseau, “the nothingness of human matters” goes a long way to making my comparison tenable. Or in a more earthy way I could say that Alain Badiou, well aware that he digs for a non-existent pony, smiles as he shovels shit.  Paul de Man shovels shit without any hope of enjoying the never to be found pretend pony. 

I think I’ll dig with Badiou.  It is the same room, full of the same shit, with no actual pony to find, but somehow Badiou seems more hopeful.  I want to enjoy pretending there is a pony, pretending that there time, pretending that there is a way to escape this instant.  I do not want to forget that it is pretend, but I still I will pretend.  And my pretense, the valley of self, will echo with laughter.

Now in the previous, first, and before today, only, Daily Dose,  “I” said that “I” was going to reflect and write every damn day to mark a trail to help you find your (own) way.  And that for the next month of days (November 6^th to December 10th, to be precise), “I” was going to use and abuse Badiou’s Ethics as a source of scripture that may or may not shed some light on our situations. 

Obviously, “I” have not done that, though “I” will admit that “I” padded “my” month with a few extra days to make up for any lapses in my administering of The Daily Dose to you.  “I” know “myself” well.

“I” have not been feeling well.  “I” haven’t felt up to wrestling with truth and what the hell an ethics of truths would look like and other assorted philosophical and theological questions.  “I” have found that getting through any given day is a struggle.  And it is not a struggle from which “I” rise renamed a mother of a people, though “I” am limping. 

“I” want to “keep going” in the spirit of Badiou (see the previous Daily Dose), but some days the quality of that motion is like a partially derailed train.  It tries to go down the track.  There is some forward motion, but the loud squeals make “my” ears bleed, and the sparks start fires in the dried out, knee high weeds on either side of “my” tracks.

“I” want to do many things.  To highlight the shaky ground that “I” stand on, “I” use the used to death and beyond trick of putting “I” in quotes, just to make sure y’all know that “I” have issues with “me, myself and I.”  “I” do this to introduce, in a clunky but amusing to “me” way, the passage from Badiou that “I” have chosen for today.

“Every representation of myself is the fictional imposition of a unity upon infinite component multiples.” 

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

As we think about what it means to search for truth or an ethics of truths, following Badiou, we have to think about “who” it is that is searching.  We like to think of ourselves as unified.  For some, it gets back to the idea of a transcendent soul that predates a particular body and will exist once the mortal coil is shuffled off.  For others, even without a belief in a trans-corporal soul, they believe that their particular “self” is consistent, is whole, that there is one self to point to.

The passage from Badiou is a fancy dancy way of saying “my” belief in “myself” is a fiction.  “I” would say it is a necessary fiction.  “I” need the fiction that the complicated array of thoughts, feelings, sensations, chemical reactions and motions that are housed with this particular body, when added up, equal “me.”  Otherwise “I” could never get anything done, and “I” have enough trouble with that as it is.

Now, “I” am going to admit to something that may seem heretical to those of you who spend lots of time in the theoretical trenches.  “I” think 20^th Century thinkers got hung up on the notion of the fragmented self (and for most of them this was/is a traumatic realization).   First off, Buddhists have been saying the same damn thing for thousands of years (albeit with different goals and end conclusions), and second off, it is easy to spend all your time staring to the abyss of that idea.

Something I once read said it like this.  When you first start meditating (replace this with theorizing, if you will) then a mountain is just a mountain.  You mediate/theorize for a bit longer, and you realize that “mountain” is just a handle for something that cannot be reduced down; a “unity imposed on infinite component multiples.”   You meditate/theorize for a while longer, and a mountain is back to being a mountain, not quite the same as before.  You know it is a fiction, but you understand that spending all your time focused on the mountain’s fictiveness is going to keep your ass on the mat.   And while time on the mat, meditating or theorizing or both, is important and valuable, and more people need to do it more often, you have to get up sometime.  You have to get your ass off the mat. 

I do not think Badiou wants us to stay stuck on the mat.  And pointing to the complexity of the things that we call ourselves is necessary when mapping out an ethics of truths.  “I” tend to agree that “my” idea about who “I” am is a fiction that simplifies “multiples.” 

What I have seen happen, though, is that folks dealing with these sorts of notions spend hours and hours splitting hairs, and that is fun, don’t get me wrong, and sometimes useful.  I can split hairs with the best of them.   But the problem is that these folks are preaching to the choir, also fun and sometimes necessary.  What does it mean to take this idea, that our notions of ourselves are necessary fictions and that this has implications for how we define truth, off the mat and into the world?  To spread the word beyond the priesthood in the temple?   

I would say our world desperately needs this particular good and not so good word to be spread, by people who care and are willing to sit with others in uncertainty.  What if we went door to door, like Mormons, and took the word out.   The image of clean cut young men and women carrying free copies of Ethics to hand out is quite exciting.  Not that I think Badiou’s text is definitive (and there are problems a plenty in his book, kind like the Bible that way). We could replace it with some other book.   The point isn’t the book, the point is the conversation, a conversation in which we say to others, yes, it is uncertain, and yet, we have to pretend that it is while somehow remembering that it isn’t. 

Consider this particular Daily Dose, my feeble attempt to go door to door and share this “truth.”  Like any missionary just starting out, my script is not polished, and there are many holes in my argument.  But of course, I do not want the script to get too polished, and I want others to pull truths out of the holes in my argument. 

Today, for the first time, I break a trail and ask that you journey with me for a spell.  Walk with me for a while as I spread The Good (and Not So Good) Words.  I ask you to join me on this path; to explore a “long and winding road.”  You won’t be disappointed, at least not too much.  Your satisfaction is . . . not guaranteed, but you’re bound to have a satisfied mind, sooner or later, if you travel with me long enough.   Though you might think you “can’t get no satisfaction” until we reach the next terminus and get off what seems to be a beaten (to death) track, but then again satisfaction is where you find it.  

I seem to have lost my way.  I will try to get back on track.  I will keep going.

Every day I will blaze a new trail using maps made by others for others for other purposes. I will use their maps to find an unmarked way through.  I plan to get lost in their directions.  Would you like to get lost with me for a while? To find the true north of words worth “woods decaying, never to be decayed?”   

All this poetical language strives to be an uplifting allegory for the somewhat Sisyphean task that is The Daily Dose.  Everyday I will take a passage of scripture- scripture broadly (i.e., widely and by a broad) defined and use it as a launching point for an investigation.  I will offer you the ideas, thoughts, ruminations, pithy remarks, catty comments, incisive wit, woolgathering, confusions, musings, notions, observations, reflections, obfuscations, meditations, deep thoughts, improvisations, dvars torahs, etc., that the passage provokes. 

This may or may not shed some light on something or the other.  I cannot tell you what you may find on this path, and I do not know exactly why I must go this route. All I know is that I am compelled to keep going, to put my shoulder to the boulder. I am “running up that hill.” 

I invite you to follow in my footsteps, though I am not going to have a WWJD moment inspired by the allegorical Footprints in the Sand and offer to carry you on my back.  Overly solicitous offers of long walks on quiet beaches lead to piles of shucked oyster shells. 

Come and walk with me!

Let’s keep going. 

The Daily Dose is a form of hierographology. Despite Mark Twain’s good advice, I occasionally enjoy spending fifty cent words like hierographology, but I won’t break the bank, and I’ll give you an advance on its meaning.  Hierographology is the study of sacred texts.  Because I despise sanctimonious suck ups, I can promise you- cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye- that my hierographologies will not turn into hagiologies though they are bound to be hyperbolies.

There is a pony in there somewhere.  I just know it. 

Obviously, I do not follow the straight and narrow.  I prefer a crooked path with lots of switchbacks, the kind of trail that makes your inner child just scream, “Are we there yet?”

 I must keep going.

At some point in our journey, I think I mentioned that I define scripture broadly.  Ditto for “sacred.”  Texts, all texts- religious, philosophical, theoretical, psychological, sociological, historical, artistic, scientific, fanatical, fantastic, fictive, faithful, comical, serious, mendacious, truthful- texts are for the taking. 

I use texts as maps to explore terrain, or maybe the text is the terrain?  Like every tourist, I want a unique experience. And like every overworked tour guide, I just want you to follow the damn itinerary.  I sometimes think that searching for the truth means trying to follow two different sets of directions simultaneously. We map virgin territory- the empty spaces and unmarked places- and, in the exact same moment, we follow the traces of other people’s tracks.  

For the next four weeks, I will track “truth” following Alain Badiou’s markers- “ethics” and “Evil” and “encounter” and “art” and “fidelity”- as mapped in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.  I have a few supplemental charts and guides that I plan to refer to.  I must warn you, if you had not figured it out already, that the trails I blaze and the markers I use are idiosyncratic and weird.  You may not end up where you think you should.  You may not want to get there from here.  But then again, maybe you do.  Follow my lead.  Let’s see where this goes. 

I keep going.

So far, I haven’t unfolded my map fully.  You may be wondering just what bit of scripture is helping me “ease on down the road” or making me run up that hill again.   What keeps this going? 

“A crisis of fidelity is always what puts to the test, following the collapse of the image, the sole maxim of consistency (and thus of ethics): ‘Keep going!’ Keep going even when you have lost the thread, when you no longer feel ‘caught up’ in the process, when the event itself has become obscure, when its name is lost, or when it seems that it may have named a mistake, if not a simulacrum!”  

 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.

Keep going!