Subject: About [to] (pre-)Face ... Inner Experience
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 08:22:55 PST


"For some minutes the old man seemed much too exhausted to speak" (Poe, 
_A Descent into the Maelstrom_).

"... with [true wisdom] we reach the highest level of knowledge, which 
has for its object the Entity for what it is, things for what they are, 
understood in their causes and principles.  ... And man reached this 
knowledge -- which is, in short, philosophy -- because of awe; awe is 
always -- today as in the beginning -- the root of philosophy" (Julian 
Marias, _A History of Philosophy_ 1967, p. 63).


AWE yes ... But what of _boredom_? 

The path of philosophy described by Marias can only lead to boredom, 
after all awe-inspiring events have been 'gotten to the bottom of'.

After boredom -- then what?  One must either create, or decay.

A primal boredom (as felt by God, perhaps) -- the result of being faced 
with an "unpeopled void of illimitable space" (Lovecraft, 'Ex 
Oblivione') -- DEMANDS creation ... of something.

The path of idleness and the path of being both lead to the same 
impasse: the limits of human knowledge.  All that is left to us then is 
a question: Now what?

Poisoned by the experience of the world of beings (lulled to sleep, that 
is, by the gentle hymns of a chaotic pearl [see also Carl Jacobi's tale, 
'Revelations in Black', which contains quite an intoxicating "Pearl"]), 
the being-in-the-world who reaches this impasse will attempt to create a 
world in the image of what s/he knows -- an ideal world based on what 
s/he has just passed through and exhausted.

The idler -- the eternal active emergent -- will have already 
constituted with his/her voice a world apart from other beings, a world 
uncontaminated by the compromises of adequation ... for him there is no 
awe in this world, for he controls it.  But should he reveal this 
private world to an other, the one to whom it is revealed will 
experience a new type of awe ...

A world not dependent upon a multitude of beings, but upon the whim of 
an autonomous Thinker -- in the only true sense.




Edward



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