From: "Blank" <gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: plans and ends
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 13:57:44 -0500



> >A projection upon a for-the-sake-of which amounts to an abyss works
> >just the same as Heidegger's being-towards-death but also Dasein going
> >towards it's ownmost can-be, potency of its origin. There, and you put
this
> >together with phenomenological seeing as the moment of vision of BT and
you
> >get H1 in a nutshell, a nut, yes I like this, a nut...
>
> According to Thousand-and-one nights, a great gift from our Arabic
friends,
> in a little piece of (hasjisj) - it is called 'benj' - the whole world can
> find place.
>

Are you saying that I'm drunk with Heidegger? I'm impressed, you are
bringing out some unthoughts thoughts. I'll have to read more slowy. Time is
motion. As movement but it moves in twisting, corkscrewing way like the
vines in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. There is a sense where intentionality
spins... and twists because it doesn't follow the most direct, straight
route to anything.

Leibniz is a route of access to philosophy or Heidegger because it
juxtaposes Dasein and the Monad but that as you can see has a long history
in a notion like the mundus concentratus and really a sort of phronesis or
prudence. The so-called 'access', door, that is, trial of passage; also
means that one concentrates on/in recollection-in-the-moment. Tanscendence
as the ectasis of temporality is not unlinked from the
philosophical-historical-object (i.e., a Monad). The problem, it seems, is
that the magic carpet is being pulled from under our feet and their seems to
be no grounds for proceeding forward, hence transcendence will become a leap
through the void. Certain stories, especially short ones, I think, can be an
illustration of philosophy when they help us see the illusory objects that
we tend to pursue in vain. You know Borges read The Thousand and One Nights
all his life.... I was just reading his Circular Ruins
http://www.online-library.org/fictions/ruins.html  It's short, read it
before you read on as I spoil it's moments and endings. It's been some years
since I  read it but it hooks me like always right from this first line:
"No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo
canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did
not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had
been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of
the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and
where leprosy is infrequent". The men from the South understand their
vocation to be a dream. They dream they are teachers of  the mysteries, of
magical correspondences. So the man form the South whose dreams were at
first scattered and chaotic become by and by,

"...dialectic in nature.  The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of
a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of
taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones
hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their
features were completely precise.  The man lectured his pupils on anatomy,
cosmography, and magic:  the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer
understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which
would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and
interpolate him into the real world.  Asleep or awake, the man thought over
the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by
imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence.  He
was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe."

Then an unthinkable catastrophe happens, he wakes up on an afternoon the he
mistakes for dawn and finds himself to be suffering with insomnia and begins
a "perpetual vigil" which I think is one the great comic moments in this
short, very brief story that almost is no story at all. After the proper
invocations, spilling of holy water and such, he falls into a lucid dream of
fourteen nights that turn into a thousand and one nights where he dreams
this:

"He dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and
of a garnet color within the penumbra of a
human body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen lucid nights he
dreampt of it with meticulous love.  Every night he perceived it more
clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to
observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance.  He perceived it
and lived it from all angles and distances.  On the fourteenth night he
lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the whole
heart, outside and inside.  He was satisfied with the examination.  He
deliberately did not dream for a night; he took up the heart again, invoked
the name of a planet, and undertook the vision of another of the principle
organs.  Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the yelids.  The
innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task.  He dreamed an entire
man--a young man, but who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his
eyes.  Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep".

Presumably this is the same young man that he saw in the ampitheater where
he lectured and which seemed most promising to him. From reading the story
we know that this 'young man'  has no real properties, no quality or
character but is a living statue without fixed possible actualization, or
apparition. It is a living stone that changes into many lifeforms. It could
be said with good reason on our side that this "Thing" is a Protean
principle as much as it could be the Red Adam of gnostic cosmogony, a
potency of originality. Our dreamer knows it to be a "multiple god":

"This multiple god revealed to him that his earthly name was Fire, and that
in this
circular temple (and in others like it) people had once made sacrifices
to him and worshiped him, and that he would magically animate the
dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself
and the dreamer, would believe to be a man of flesh and blood."

There is more... Any end to commentary is arbitrary, the story calls for an
infinite discussion perhaps; but the old man walks into the flames and in an
uncanny moment realizes he is the dream of another one, someone is dreaming
him, projecting him with a transcendental imagination giving flesh and blood
to a Monad in a somewhat fortified circular temple, substitute or prothesis,
symbolic effigy -- or maybe nothing is left of all this at the end of this
brief short story.

Muhahaha

Gulio







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