Home » ProtoWritings » A Divine Avenue
Category Archives: A Divine Avenue
THE TYRANNY OF HISTO-RHETORIC HYSTERIA: Ridiculously Restoring the Rhistoric
A short note. I’ve written this comment somewhat more consciously in line with my considerations and work of the period, 1989-1996. It’s not that those considerations and that work aren’t in the background of everything that I’ve written in the allegedly new century, since I began writing, again. But I haven’t always been as explicit as I would like; it seems, though, that those writings and ideas, like those of Sol Yurick’s, are proving to be a more effective instrument for dealing with past, present or contemporary, and future, problematics.
The prevailing forms of cultural understanding, including the reactions to them, are pretty much antiquated fragments of habitual, cultural obsession, that were obsolescent long before I was born. But it is this atavistic, cultural content, which is being incessantly reproduced, by a fundamentally uninventive and backward cultural motivation, inspired only by its characteristic insularity.
It’s an unhealthy, self-destructive context, that has received enough attention, to no avail. Accounting for its insatiable needs and broken understandings is not the most interesting activity, probably requiring some form of sociopsychological counselling.
This text is a response to a Facebook post concerning the quantitative decline of US students taking up history, with only a few, so-called ‘Ivy League’ colleges, experiencing greater demand for courses in history. The first paragraph is in reference to that topic. The rest of the text explores what might be called a theory of conditions of historical conceptions and discourse.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The same point, about disciplinary control by a well-advantaged, social group, was made in an academic paper over 25 years ago, on the art world. How high-level degrees in fine art were only available to those who could afford to spend over a decade accruing them; how they were extremely specific in terms of their possible career utility, that is to say, of not much general use in employment scenarios.
That this specificity, affordable only to the few and privileged, served to channel that group onto editorial boards of influential art publications; art museums and institutions; the art world, generally. This allowed a specific, socio-economic group, to control all discourses on art and to be the arbiters of cultural taste in art.
The western notion of history is finished, has finished, according to John Baudrillard.
That’s not because of student disinterest; it is due to deeper problems with the way that history is done, and how the past is configured and viewed. I’ve written recently, a comment about the ‘fascism of the present’. If fascist orders play with inclusions and exclusions, in terms of what they consider permissible to present, admissible to their version of ‘the present’; then, the mechanism of modernist rupture can be seen as the inaugurating ideology enabling not only neo-rationalist polity, but fascist rationalisations, too.
Even if neo-rationalist polity, or modernist society, portrays itself as all-inclusive and progressive; this necessarily implies an exclusion of regression. Like nations, the culture of the present is susceptible to producing self-celebratory propaganda, skewing, distorting, or otherwise misrepresenting, the past, always in its own favour. This is ideological chronology; it’s an epistemological mechanism by which various social phenomena, can be ordered or regimented.
Because of the genealogy of military hostility accompanying so much of historical discourse over the last 4000 years, all history, including modernist history, has become deeply problematic. Those problems aren’t going to go away merely through hasty retreats into imagined, factual realms, of alleged scientific objectivity. Because the nature of scientific objectivity is itself at stake as a historical or chronological production.
There is of course the global conflict of geo-historical interpretations; the various centrisms that have arisen, such as Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, et cetera. This is species-specific, internal to the public relations propaganda of internal orders of anthrosocial power, primarily emergent from the humanist ideology of anthropic supremacy, whose conceptual roots go all the way back to Aristotle and Protagoras.
Although this global conflict is a symptom of chronological disruption, it is not an explanation for it. History is a certain form of chronological culture; a certain experiential ordering and distribution. But the experiential root of that ordering and distribution is no longer quite so central, as it once was, or seemed to be. Common forms of anthropic experience have been brought to the limits of their traditional epistemological configurations. Those habitual configurations are no longer sufficient to account for newly emerging chronological conditions, conditions that were always there, but which could be safely ignored. Such ignorance is no longer possible. But the understanding which ought to be replacing that ignorance, doesn’t seem to be emerging, at least not in ‘human’ form. This indicates the nature of common, anthropic experience, as an effect. An effect of conditions of a chronology it is unable to understand.
TOWARDS NEW CONDITIONS?
I didn’t initially read your excellent eulological analysis of prayer, properly, but I’ve had some breakfast now, lol!
It looks like you’ve read the points I offered very carefully, answering each one, in full, more or less.
I’m not going to agree with you, in outright acknowledging the notion of “addressable reality” as a “failure”, even though it was your initial point or thesis.
~~~~~~~~
The notion of an “addressable reality”, was introduced by yourself; [TL] “from the Absolute qua addressable reality, which (from the vantage of the world and our being-in-the-world) is not necessary, nor even a necessary hypothesis, meaning it only ‘is’ qua our free turning to it (and thus can in no sense be ‘read off’).”, in contrast to Jabbar’s metaphor of the ‘elusive divinity pattern’, which are characterised as “the ‘immanent sacred'” “notion or model of ‘the divine’ (general, impersonal)”.
I referred to the conditional basis of this contrast in “STROLLING THROUGH THE DIVINE AVENUE”, saying these points:
1) “Your notion of the absolute as an “addressable reality” locates the divine in the realms of addressability and realisation.”
This means that your notion involves both the metaphysics of addressability, and the metaphysics of realisation, from which ‘realities’ are derived. I specifically introduced the notion of ‘realisation’ to indicate this condition of derivation. The ‘realms’ referred to, are the twin metaphysical scenarios of addressability and realisation, the logical possibilities of what Kant would call “transcendental conditions”, of those themes. So, it’s a kind of speculative analysis of their allegedly formal necessities.
2) At the outset, you absolutised the relation of “addressable reality”, which has the necessary consequence of producing personal access to the absolute, thus producing the scenario suggested by my statement, {AK (CJ)}: “If this ‘addressable absolute’ is contingent on voluntary relation, does this not imply the worldly feature of psychological attitude?”. This is a key statement, in a way, because it questions the contrast you introduced, between Jabbar’s metaphor of the ‘elusive divinity pattern’, and your notion of the “addressable absolute”, which is why I continued with, {AK (CJ)}: “Thus, assuming such an implication, this presentation of the divine rests on attitudinal gestures of psychic illumination, as so many flickering ‘souls’, divinely patterned flecks of existential light.”
If Jabbar’s metaphor of the ‘elusive divinity pattern’ originates at the borders of his speculative experience; he does say “survey my speculations”; then they are necessarily conditioned by his psychology, that psychological location being presumably the mode of access to the ‘elusive divinity pattern’. How then, can this not be ‘personal’, if the psychological has to do with the personal?
You suggested, however, that it was ‘impersonal’, presumably due to the elusiveness of the ‘divinity pattern’, such alleged elusiveness possibly suggesting the obscurity of fleet objectivity. Though your attribution of the impersonal must have been based on such intuitions of objective obscurity, you nevertheless do not hesitate to ascribe qualities such as ‘immanence’ and ‘destiny’ to that obscurity.
So in the case of Jabbar’s metaphor, if you predicate its impersonality on its objectivity, this neglects Jabbar’s speculative personality.
In the case of addressability, or structures of address, if you predicate personality on the addresser, this neglects the Absolute as addressee.
But, in any case, you do suggest an experiential status for Jabbar’s metaphor, which, of course, you reject due to the allegedly ‘worldly’ aspect of the experiential.
It seems to me that given the conventional nature of all the usual determinations issuing from the usual disciplinary and institutional sources, there really shouldn’t be too much of a problem in using those epistemic determinations, appropriately, at conventional levels.
We know that that is not what goes on, that there is a culture of entrenched whimsicality, in the pejorative sense. And that it is that culture, and its practices of conceptually discursive imposition, which impose various agendas of semantic mediocrity, as a kind of disingenuously ‘normative’ force.
The analysis of my previous comment was not questioning the practice of prayer, at all, or anything you wrote; but rather the shadow of that disingenuous normativity, of its fundamental uncharitability, and the tacit atmosphere of obligation that it interpolates, masking itself as ‘worldly’ convention.
In essence, if the conventional notions of ‘self’, ‘world’, ‘experience’, ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘perception’, etc., actually are contingent, then their referential attributions are likewise contingent, too. Thus, the entire ‘web of belief’ based on the referential attributions of those conventions, is likewise conventionalised. Thus, the ‘ground has been laid’, so to speak, for unlimited possibilities of radical rewriting of the referential, beyond the present conventional sediments of customary utilitarian assumption. This is where, what I have come to call, a ‘General Conceptual Holography’, can come into play.
In terms of contemporary, intellectual conventions of recent decades, though, I should add that equally rhetorics of ‘fragmentation’, ‘completion’, and whatever else, are also contingent, conclusive critical realisations regarding earlier practices of positivist convention and their assumptions, whose critical conclusivity is specific to the seemingly inappropriate inflations of those assumptions.
The Absolute, is meant to be unconditioned, but conditions are contingencies (for a ‘condition’ to be a condition, it has to be specifically distinguishable as such, such distinguishability necessarily locating it as contingency); thus if the unconditioned conception of the absolute is the negation of all conditions, one corollary would be the negation of all distinction. But distinction or difference specifically emerges through negation. Thus, negation ‘itself’ is a ‘condition’ of distinction. Thus, an unconditioned conception of the absolute negating all specific conditions, is simultaneously and perhaps thereby, the general condition of all those specific conditions.
What can be observed in these statements veering close to paradox, are some of the originary ‘conditional grounds’, so to speak, for ‘radical rewriting of the referential’.
Thus, it is easy to see that ‘failure’ or ‘success’, are merely inventions requiring appropriate citings of suitable conditions.
IDENTIFYING THE MECHANISM OF IDENTITY CONVERSION: THE CALCUL(‘US’) OF A CARTESIAN THEOLOGY?
If you’re going to file Jabbar’s speculations (“Sometimes when I survey my speculations”) under the category of the ‘worldly’, due to the ostensibly ‘worldly’ metaphor of a ‘moonlit surface of oceanic illumination’, used to describe them; then you would be consigning personal cognition to the category of ‘world’ (whatever that means), on the basis of the potential association of metaphorical reference.
As if all conventional, ‘worldly’ signifiers, instantly appropriate all that they might have contact with, however directly or indirectly, exclusively to their signified order. But this somewhat hasty movement of immediate, metaphysical allegiance, only serves to obscure the essential contingency of the very basis for such impulsive allegiance! This is merely a knee-jerk absolutism of the world-concept, forever substantialising that concept and its imagined hypostasis, with the tightly clinging energies of dogmatic assumption, as a kind of worldo-, or mundano-, -centrism .
If you’re going to follow that line of thought, in what way would the relation of ‘divine address’, insofar as it might involve personal cognition, not be susceptible to the same infection of ‘worldly’ assumption? Mutatis mutandis, the question of ‘instant’ susceptibility to world-categorical appropriation would beleaguer any other conventionally described attribute of the person, such as ‘feelings’, et cetera.
What then is left to constitute the ‘personal’ except, by your logic, a necessary ‘soul’ transcendence of the world, and perhaps or even necessarily, union with the divine; especially if there is nothing left to distinguish the personal from the divine, all such potential differences having been in advance consigned to the category of the ‘worldly’
So you get a necessary ‘hypostatic union’, I guess, in Christian theological discourse; after kenosis, which would be the Christian version of various Hindu and Buddhist transcendences of desire. The Tao or Dao, would operate similarly, perhaps with more of a ‘flow’, so to speak.
If the worldly is considered as the realm of contingencies, then how can contingency be counterposed in any way, to anything else? Contingency, necessarily implies that formal delimitation of the identities said to be contingent, has not occurred. Therefore, their actual nature is unknown and not susceptible to any final characterisation, vis-a-vis, whether they are ‘divine’ or not ‘divine’, et cetera.
If the quality of ‘contingency’ itself is offered as a binary polarity, in contradistinction to an attribution of ‘divine’ certainty, this has the unfortunate effect of reducing divinity to the distribution of mere polarised opposition (of mere binary understanding?), which is definitely not ‘transcendent’, in any way; not in ‘my book’, anyway. It’s possible to think up gods much, much, ‘better’, so to speak, than that. But, of course, it might be reasonable to expect any conception of the divine that’s ‘worth its salt’, to transcend the play of such evaluations, as well. Even when such hypothesised transcendence is couched in a statement of evaluative worth, lol.
So given that the logic of your assumptions ineluctably leads the essential basis of the ‘personal’ straight to divine union, from which it had never really strayed, anyway, would this not suggest that the relation of address might be redundant? That the structure of address might be merely worldly recapitulation? Because this is the necessary conclusion of entertaining binary metaphysical distributions of divinity and non-divinity, according to definitive fixations of the ‘contingent’, or the, at any rate, allegedly ‘contingent’.
I guess, there are different possibilities, different ways of looking at the divine. I take transcendence seriously, and don’t wish to fixate those possibilities, without good reason. From the perspective of transcendence, anything at all can be transcendent.
It seems to me that you want to preserve the ‘personal’, structure of addressability; away from any ‘impersonal’, structures or dialectics of the divine. Implicitly equating the personal moment with an explicitly absolute conception of the divine, through the relation of address.
By doing so, figures of consciousness and selfhood are emphasised.
One would have to exploit the concepts of ‘eternity’; ‘essence’; and ‘soul’; which are the usual mechanisms by which personal-divine addressability can be absolutised, guaranteed free of any other kinds of dialectical determination, in order to produce such an emphasis. On the face of it, it’s okay, though very Cartesian and Kantian; nothing necessarily wrong with that, though. Potential ‘wrongness’, would depend on subsequent developments.
Firstly, the conditions and rationale of such an emphasis require delineation. What produces the emphasis? Why did such an emphasis even arise? What are the factors, all of them, involved in such an emergence? And could it be, that the conventional conceptualities by which such emergence presents itself, merely recapitulate those factors according to a dialectic whose apprehension such convention proscribes in advance?
That this conceptual convention has suffered the fixation of subsequent development, to the extent of such hypostatic extremity, that not only is the relation ‘self’-‘world’-‘God’ (or ‘freedom’); the only sedimentary survivor; but a very particular, fixated distribution of it, as in a simplified, faceted structure, the metaphysics of frozen ice?
That fixated distribution is contingent, not on any purity of formal outlook or interpretation carried to its full extent, but rather on the preferred expediency of a set of perceptions granting channels of formal extension and materially substantive force, according to the construct(id) habitus of its own entrenched whimsicality.
This is the entrenchment, not of any one ‘idea’, ‘logical line’ or ‘thought’, carried through its extremities into the ‘beyond’ of any profound insight or understanding, but rather the incessant exploitation of prevailing social limitations, as precisely the conceptual convention spoken of, in order to substantialise the culture of entrenched whimsicality as a self-proposed, coercive metaphysical force.
This, essentially, is what is produced under the often derogatory sign of ‘ideology’. Back in the early 1990s, coming from other directions, my perception of this conventional conceptuality, was of an ‘l.c.d.’ (‘lowest common denominator’/liquid-crystal display) thought or force.
What could such ‘motivated cognition’ be, outside of the self-referring images of the economic procedures it calls its own? The not entirely incorrect cliche would be to suggest that answers to such a question necessarily reside beyond the ontological commitments and considerations of that ‘motivated cognition’ and its conventional procedures. But such a statement, in social practice, risks further reduction to precisely those procedures.
Or one could suggest the scenario of considerations reliant upon epistemological horizons of greater extent, from which the game of incessant reinscribings, in the light of a production line of nouveau-principles is enabled, in the service of some banal industry constructing Quinean ‘webs of belief’, the dismal commodities of which can be marketed according to the usual, sensationalist mechanisms of distribution.
So as can be seen, the issue is not so much, really or necessarily, one of ‘production’, any kind of production. In this, there is a possible correspondence to your perhaps underlying concern for the relation of divine address; a relation, moreover, which might seem to be, and always to have been, under threat by those forces of thoughtless production, so many of which positively and explicitly claim to ‘produce’ in the alleged name of that relation, or within some spectrum of ‘values’ allegedly associated with that relation.
Unless the ‘personal’ is expressed in solipsistic, pantheistic, or transcendent, form, the ‘impersonal’ is necessarily and simultaneously created. Conventional conceptuality begins to intercede, at the point when, and to the extent that, the ‘personal and impersonal’ become susceptible to relative distribution in some identifiably third scenario or medium. Once that third scenario or medium has been conceived, or otherwise constructed or requisitioned, the habitus and habitual gameplaying of conventional conceptuality can begin, functioning forevermore as a fixated screen of expressions for those unquestioned conventions and their production of entrenched whimsicality.
This mechanism purchases an alleged ‘freedom’ through innovations of conventional insularity it simultaneously both despises and celebrates, in different registers it likewise innovates, for precisely these apparently contradictory purposes. This is a very particular metaphysical story that continues to configure the mundane concept of ‘world’, the metaphysical ‘shell game’ of banal conceptual habits through which conventional conceptuality, and its ‘l.c.d.’ (‘lowest common denominator’/liquid-crystal display), sustains itself. It is the invention of a set of coercive determinations, calling itself ‘freedom’. But strangely, before the advent of that coercive setting, there was neither distribution of ‘world’, and its respective dialectics; nor the ‘necessity’ of their ‘compulsions’.
It might be as well to consider to what extent there has been a conversion into being an incessantly shuttling servomechanism of wish fulfilments, indistinguishable from the unquestioned mechanism of metaphysical fixations interpolating itself through osmotic inculcation?
Or is even the idea of such ‘conversion’ and ‘convertibility’, merely one more screened operation of that mechanism?
STROLLING THROUGH THE DIVINE AVENUE
There is a greater context to that excerpt, the passage cited, belongs to a character, Abu Jabbar, the Possibility Merchant.
I don’t recall thinking of the elusive divinity pattern as God toying with people as ‘playthings’; that wasn’t the relation, at all, that I had in mind. The divine would be beyond such figures of control.
Your notion of the absolute as an “addressable reality” locates the divine in the realms of addressability and realisation. Whether those realms are ‘formal’ or ‘material’, ‘transcendent’ or ‘immanent’, they would all take on those respective qualities with reference to each other, such referential distribution constituting and conditioning what can be called, ‘a world’. If this ‘addressable absolute’ is contingent on voluntary relation, does this not imply the worldly feature of psychological attitude?
Thus, assuming such an implication, this presentation of the divine rests on attitudinal gestures of psychic illumination, as so many flickering ‘souls’, divinely patterned flecks of existential light.
I wouldn’t want to limit the divine to a structure of addressability, alone, or even the moonlit surface of oceanic illumination used as metaphor, by Abu Jabbar, the Possibility Merchant. But these are all perspectives that say something, and I would not wish to discount any of them out of hand, or deny them their divine share.
The notion of addressability is interesting. Because, of course, the immediate suggestion would be communication mediums, such as language, whether in greater senses, as in the entire world as a language, or more specific codes of communion, such as the range of anthropic languages. Then, of course, there is the language of ‘feeling’, the codes of ‘affect’, in which the transactions of ‘soul’ are inscribed. All these different codes write each other, affect each other. The divine would be beyond, always beyond, such ‘languages’ and ‘codes’.
But is not ‘beyond’ a semantic code? But being such, need not at all invalidate its divine possibility.
"A Divine Avenue: A Mildly Metaphysical Fantasy": 1988: a short excerpt
“I know that God is around. Sometimes when I survey my speculations, I think I see occasional sparks of
divine interference, like points of light reflected by the sea on a moonlit night. These annoyingly ephemeral hints seem to form a ghostly pattern in my mind. Insubstantial, fluctuating between existence and non-existence, this pattern taunts me with it’s holiness· Wraith-like and tantalising, it flaunts it’s divinity, then disappears before it commits the error of divulging explicit evidence of a theistic presence.
Elusive God may be, but there is one conclusion I have been permitted to come to: God plays games and
has a sense of humour, sometimes.
NOSTALGIC TIME-SEQUENCES AND THE TEMPORAL TECHNICIAN
Reflections in time, back-and-forth they go, from one memory to another. This playing of mnemonic transactions, a ceaseless interchange of objectifying compulsions, all according to the metaphysics of that strange and unquestioned notion called ‘form’. It is under the spell of this notion, under its unquestioned assumption only, that one can talk about ‘repetition’. Without such an objectifying assumption, without these hypothetical ‘forms’ – at least one – there is nothing to ‘repeat’.
It’s not my intention here to outline the conditions of form or formal metaphysical assumption, but merely to suggest that beyond all the usual reflexive productions of insight attaching itself to this notion, mystery, or the mysterious, continues on its merry way, perhaps hinted at by this or that economy of ‘knowledge’ and its always not quite adequate ‘conclusions’, but never exhausted by these epistemological labours.
As is the case with economies of knowledge, so also with cultural economies of history and memory. It is quite possible for an entire culture to proceed in a particular ‘historical direction’, as it were, failing to adequately register the lessons of its development, and in such a way, that it proves impossible to simply follow along with such a culture, without provisioning radical explications apparently beyond that culture’s understanding. Not that there is necessarily any responsibility to do so, but refusing the task of giving explicatory contextualisations would be an unnecessary neglect.
If both Baudrillard and Fukuyama talked about the ‘end of history’, it is not so much that chronological developments have suddenly ceased to operate, but rather that the notion of ‘history’ in its conventional form; with its linear expectations and traditional narrative understandings; is no longer sufficient as an organisational mode. More is required. But the requirement of such an excess seems beyond the capacities of present cultural cognition. In the grip of this excess which it is no longer able to think, traditional cultural institutions continue on, incessantly repeating themselves and their procedures with ever-increasing uncertainty, as they slide into the unknown.
All that is left, for these alienated creatures, these ‘Occidental Androids’, who do not actually wish to think, is the contentment to merely and vicariously ‘operate’, sputtering positivist ‘memes’ to each other in vast, anxious, and swarming frenzies of ‘self’ and ‘world’ confirmation. As if repeating the exhausted terms of their Cartesian crisis with ever more fervent enthusiasm can somehow substitute for lack of greater understanding, in maintaining what seems to be mostly a dogmatic, miserable, and ignorant, charade. None of this is exactly new, but it is now globally instantaneous, and that is the key that has unlocked the first stages of a noospheric achievement, as it were, beyond conventional notions of both ‘knowledge’ and ‘history’. It is precisely those conventional notions which are in a crisis of inadequacy; their adherents, acolytes, and exploiters, in a crisis of promotion. What can be observed is merely the reflexive dissolution of those conventional dogmas, according to various arcs of nostalgic repetition.
I have, of course, referred to this before, at the outset of this blog: “Philosophy, in its institutional forms, has been busy archiving, classifying, and otherwise industrialising, the driven contemplations of various canonical traditions, as grist for the mill of future recombinant streams of commodified ‘wisdom’: a grist that will sustain the perennial tensions of these venerated traditions, with new brands of ‘logic’, intensified ‘epistemologies’, concentrated ‘ontologies’, nouveau-‘mysticisms’, etc.. All of this, circulating within the same circles of interpretation; playing the same topoi; in rhetorical oscillations, where the current jargons of reduction will scintillate with the shine of ‘progress’. A ‘progress’ in which the same, age-old platitudes can be uttered incessantly, as if they were unearthly revelations, never before thought or expressed.
All this, we have seen, and it has not proved sufficient.”
(“Possibilities of Thought”, Saturday, July 21, 2012: http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?page_id=7)
It has become necessary to return to my earlier period of writings, 1987-1997, for a more suitable and fertile context in which to address these issues. This, of course, is natural for me due to the element of personal continuity, but might prove somewhat strange to readers of this blog, as for the most part, the majority of my Internet writings have been strategically limited to theoretically contained, critical responses and observations , with only a sprinkling of writings from the earlier period. That was sufficient, in terms of addressing the philosophy blogging scene on the Internet, which I’ve done for six years now, but that scene is not sufficient. More is required. If Baudrillard and Fukuyama right, about the ‘end of history’, this recollection of an unexpressed, earlier period is possibly more than mere nostalgia.
A Divine Avenue (1988) – AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
A deliberately mannered introduction.
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
If some readers regard this bag of fictions to be nothing more than a sack of speeches blended with conceptual com, or a hold-all of harangues mixed with metaphysical trinkets, they would not be suffering from misconceptions, for this book is all of those things. But it is also a heap of hints, or, to extend the above metaphor, a carrier of allusions and implicatives; seen in this light, it should, I hope, provide more than a modicum of inspiration for the reader. If it manages to make such provision, I will consider it a success.
No doubt this book suffers from many defects, much as I would like to claim that it is flawless, such a claim would veer away from the realms of veracity. Nevertheless, I shall continue to hope that its readers derive something from it, I’m not sure what exactly, but something which enhances Life in an enchanting manner, and also attempts to bring Existence and Intelligence together.
However, that slippery character Life, whose allonym is Existence, remains highly refractory when any attempts are made to bring it into an ultimately intimate correspondence with human understanding. It is an elusive thing; evading epistemology with eel-like undulations.
Perhaps that is its nature. Perhaps Life is inherently problematic; an obscure phenomenon that teasiingly reveals to our thoughts only riddles, dilemmas, and paradoxes. Some say it is these very clashes of contradictories and the tensions between them, that constitute Existence. If such a notion is accepted, then paradox may be regarded as the fuel of Life. Be that as it may, for my own part, I suspect that Life will prove intransigent even when asked to conform to its own inconsistencies.
Whether or not paradox is the fuel of Life is contestable, but it is certain that paradox is the fuel of LIFE! “What is this LIFE ?” you ask. Because I’m kind, I’ll tell you. LIFE is acronymous for the Literature of Infinite Fictions Engine. Stokcd with paradox, this engine will transport you across the spaces of fiction. So reader, ride this engine, this mechanism of language, this train of’ letters and words, ride it to wherever uou want to go. LIFE, like Life, goes everywhere.
Gcd bless this contrivance cf communications and all its readers.
Off we go!
A Divine Avenue (1988) – AUTHOR’S COMMENTS
Actual quote, & fictive quotes.
AUTHOR’S COMMENTS
I’ll use this page as a device to insert some quotes. I have included the Sextus Empiricus quotation as it voices my own personal views on certain matters.
“I have a thousand tongues and a tongue, but only one mouth to put them in.”
Abu Jabbar
“I Know ‘Athene’s Avenue’ wouId’ve sounded better, but I decided to avoid the excruciatingly obvious.
Author of A ‘Divine Avenue’
“We do not positively affirm that the fact is as we state it, but simply record each fact like a chronicler. as it appears to us at the moment.”
Sextus Empiricus (I think)
“When we were doing the rounds with our “Snow White And The Seven Dwarves” show, we did a gig in the collective consciousness of the Milky Way galaxy, but we didn’t go down too well. Some dumpy planet near the rim – I think it was called Earth or Dirt or Dearth or something – anyway, this Dirty Earth planet was the only place that liked us. Especially the children, their minds were all over us.”
“So yeah, Life has its good points.”
Mizz Snow White
A Divine Avenue (1988) – CONTENTS
Architectonic – sections & chapters
Here are the sections & chapters of the novella.
CONTENTS
Title Page…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 0
Contents………………………………………………………………………………………………. 1
Author’s Comments…………………………………………………………………………..…. 2
Author’s Introduction………………………………………………………………………..…. 3
Prologue “The Abstraction”………………………………………………………………….. 4
1/ “4040 Saint Sophia Avenue”………………………………………………………….….. 6
2/ “The Universe At The Edge Of Creation”……………………………………………. 19
3/ “A Procession Of Processes”………………………………………………………….…. 27
4/ “Temporal Investiture”……………………………………………………………………. 33
5/ “Cranthimus Jaxley, Temporal Technician At Your Service”……………….. 42
6/ “Constructing Reality”………………………………………………………………….…. 48
7/ “Richard Merriman’s Elusive Merchant”…………………………………………… 51
8/ “The Pursuit Of Unhappiness”…………………………………………………………. 63
9/ “Logovia And Graphico”………………………………………………………………….. 65
10/ “At The Thought Port”…………………………………………………………………….. 71
11/ “Fountain Of Creation”………………………………………………………………….… 81
12/ “The Divine Cinema”…………………………………………………………………….… 83
Epilogue “The Various Voices Of Jabbar”……………………………………………. 84
Author’s Afterword………………………………………………………………………….… 88
A Divine Avenue (1988) – Title Page
I wrote a novella, “A Divine Avenue” (1988), more than 28 years ago.
It inaugurated a fictional consideration of ideas whose implicit modes & perspectives have yet to be explicitly & formally codified, if indeed such is even possible. Though I moved into other concerns, surveying various theoretical genres in Philosophy, ‘Literary Theory’, Anthropology; just about everything really, that was around; the sense of their contingent localisation, within a far greater space of possibilities, was never lost. Continuing explorations within this space, led to two more tentative ‘works’. All three works form a kind of synergy. “A Divine Avenue” is the first work in that tentative trilogy.
Title Page
This is the title page.
In showing “A Divine Avenue” on the internet, I’ve inserted “Artxell Knaphni” as the author. You can tell by its ‘lack of fade’, as it were, in the images below. As “Artxell Knaphni” is a character in the novella, the novella being the origin of my uses of the name; on my blog, “Visions of Temporal Accumulation”; on FaceBook & elsewhere; there is a kind of circle of nominality, scribed over the years.
A DIVINE AVENUE
A Mildly Metaphysical Phantasy
By Artxell Knaphni
Some Light-Hearted Lectures Of Liberation,
Possibly Leading To A Farrago Of Freedoms. Just Add
Butter, Eggs, And A Generous Pinch Of Salt.
AN ABRIDGED VERSION
OF AN UNWRITTEN
NOVEL
