INTRODUCTORY NOTES
“Time flies: from, Self, World, and Writing” was written some time between 1989-1992. As can be seen, my advanced hermeneutical technique of non-reading, though nascent, was obviously in its early development, here, lol. The references to “weak thought”, are not to be confused with Gianni Vattimo’s idea, though I was aware of his work, he’d been on television, with John Searle & David Farrell Krell.
This was based on an actual experience.
Time Flies: from, Self, World, and Writing
This writing is an anticipation of, but not an encounter with,Thomas Nagel’s text, “The View From Nowhere”, unless one counts anticipation as a form of encounter. This writing veers away from the text of TN.
I lack the force, the power, perhaps even the inclination, to knock my philosophcal head on walls made of Nagelian bricks. However, this is no celebration of weakness, of a “weak thought”. Nor is it the claim of some reflexive logic that weakness is actually a form of strength. It is, rather, a reminder that weakness as weakness is an indispensable perspective, that a cursory reading is perhaps philosophically valuable in itself, and that haste and superficiality in interpretation can be useful strategies in avoiding the hypnotic images of of metaphysics (“In skating over thin ice, our safety is our speed.” Emerson)
Consciousness as conceived is a simple and accountable fact, but the ultimate provenance of consciousness may well lie beyond all conception. The events of consciousness are significant vibrations, trembling meanings, and what occurs in the space of consciousness is a complex resonance of events, a resonance whose source transcends all realities within the hearing of consciousness, a source external to every phonic fact. A source of courage, perhaps, exterior to the phobic phonations that serve the closed economies of consciousness and knowledge?
A bench, trees, and birds suggest an avine metaphorics: the being and wing-buzz of these birds requires translation into conceptual spaces. An avine metaphysics? Why not? Why should “consciousness”, “intellect”, “reason” – the metaphors of “Man” – take precedence over the avine in populating conceptual space?
WANTED: an avine and arboreal logic require a consciousness, with incorporated perceptual faculties, to act as an interpreting nexus for the buzz of perceptual information (the “information atmosphere”) generated by our avine-arboreal cosmologic, so as to create an ecstatic ecology. An ecology that, through the agency of its interpreting consciousness, and powered by circadian and seasonal rhythms, projects flight into new spaces, and analogises birdsong beyond the audible.
…as the birds fly around him, forming a halo of sharp, tumbling melodies and pulsing winged rhythms mind, world, and self are lost: the emphases of epistemology fade and give way to an ecstatic ecology…
…we must fly away from the realm of epistêmê, and practise ornithomancy on each other…
Time has flown—
