Mayhewianism #5

"What's the point of being Z[ukofsky] if you are going to write like that?"

A Cleaner, Lighter Place

"You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music."

I read Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-lighted Place" for the first time after running into it in William Barrett's Irrational Man, where it is described as "a vision of Nothing that is perhaps as powerful as any in modern art". Here's a sample of Papa's vision:

What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it was all nada y pues nada y pues nada. Our nada who are in nada, nada be thy name... [etc.]

Barrett rightly says that this "encounter with Nothingness" defines modern art, and perhaps modern life. I, too, feel the pull of this urge towards something clean, something orderly. With nothing, Nothing, at the center.

It's interesting to note the similarity between this waiter who "lives in it", i.e., nothingness, with self-awareness, and the gurus of the East. Sectarian disputes to the side, it is in the discovery that there is finally nothing and that I am finally no one that moksha is achieved.

But I am committed to a different path, that of "immanence", in which the experience of nothingness, by way of which transcendence (it is said) can be achieved, is forever denied. (Perhaps I'm just not meditating hard enough, of course!) In my "metaphysics", there is no question of why there is something rather than nothing, only why not something else. In my "anthropology" there is no question of why I am someone rather than no one, only why not someone else.

That is, I am pulled towards the "nothing", but always find some-one there. I am pulled toward the "no one", and some thing blocks my way. I can escape existence but only by way of inspiration; I can cease to be only by becoming.

I don't believe it is nobler to suffer in the mind than to take up arms.

I think modern art forgot this. I think it assumed that there was nothing to do, only so much to see, and this seeing without doing (think of Hemingway's gang in Paris), ultimately produced that "vision of nothingness" that Barrett identified. Some of course accepted it, almost like sages, and found themselves a clean, well-lighted place, an orderly space around their emptiness. Others sought adventure (think now of Hemingway in Africa), nothing became anything, and they themselves became anyone.

We're still modern in that sense I suppose.

What is the pangrammatical supplement of cleanliness and light? Well, intensity is to poetry what clarity is to philosophy. Light is to the mind what tension is to the heart. [Note: shine and pulse, flicker and flutter, illumination and palpitation.]* Since time is to history what space is to the world, we need, not a place (in space), but a moment (in time), a now, not a here.

You want music now. Certainly you want music.

When you tighten the lyre's string, giving it tension, it becomes sharp. Sharpness is to poetry what cleanliness is to philosophy, let us say. A sharp, tense moment? How about this: a sharp, well-tempered instant? The duration of the "moment" is simply "tuned" into a "temper", leaving only its "edge", if you will.

It's the modernist fantasy of perceptions always enjoyed in good light in a clean space, and actions always cutting (cleanly, I suppose) with a sharp edge. It's all about precision. But it's all for naught, of course, for nothing and for no one.

The possibility I'm exploring, which is at once philosophical and poetic, is that the alternative to somethingness is not nothingness but always, for all practical purposes, someoneness. And vice versa. The mystic, the guru, achieves enlightenment by first seeking isolation, encountering nothing only when there's no one else around.
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*Update: I originally promised to write another post on Beckett's "mess", but never really got there. Also, I'm no longer sure about the light/tension analogy. Adding the other pairs, I'm thinking light/rhythm might be better. The would mean that light is to seeing as rhythm is to doing.

Fragments on Immanence

If the basic question of metaphysics is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" then the basic question of anthropology is "Why am I someone rather than no one?"

From the first question we can derive an ontological one: "What are all these things?" From the second we get an ethnographic one: "Who are all these people?"

In both cases, the answer to the first lies in the second. You are someone and not no one because of the culture of the people around you. There is something rather than nothing because of the nature of things.

There is the world of things and the history of peoples.

But the "nothing" and "no one" indicates a radical alternative to how things and people are, what and who they are: that they could be nothing and no one at all.

If the soul is "not" a thing, then it becomes something im-material. If animals are "not" people, they become anti-social.

There is no escape from the world of things except into the history of people. And vice versa. It is not possible that there could be nothing, nor no one.

There is no escape from existence except into inspiration. And vice versa.

We cannot transcend our existence. But we can be inspired.

This is immanence. Always partly learning what you are and who you should become.

Five Motives Revisited

"...the subtle link that joins the five senses to what is core to the living flesh, the living cloud, the living ocean of love liberated from time." (Lorca)

I just stumbled on Ramana Maharshi's method of "self-inquiry". Listening to Ram Dass's explanation of the method (which I found on You Tube), I was struck by what he calls "the five organs of motion". It reminded me of a question I asked (and tried to answer) last year. Are there five discrete motives just as there are five discrete senses?

Ramana appears* to have taught a method by which you gradually realize that you are not your body and not your mind either. You go through the "organs of perception" (the senses) and the organs of motion (what I call, perhaps a bit clumsily, "motives") one at a time. The senses are, of course, sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, and the relevant organs are, just as obviously, eyes, ears, tongue (sometimes this is "mouth"), nose, and skin.

Now, Ramana teaches that the organs of motion are the hands, feet, tongue (sometimes this is "throat"), sphincter and genitalia. My attempt to itemize the motives was speech, song, impulse (pushing/pulling), grasp (holding), and locomotion (moving around). I wasn't quite happy with it at the time (especially the idea of distinguishing song from speech at this level.) Ramana's organs give me another approach.

Feet: motion
Hands: grasp
(pushing can be understood as the combination of holding and moving)
Tongue: speech
Sphincter: waste
Genitals: sex

I like this way of analyzing the body. Remember that (in the Pangrammaticon) the senses are organized around the "mind", and the motives are organized around the "heart". Ramana's method moves on to the autonomic functions: "I am not the five internal organs: the organs of respiration, digestion, excretion, circulation, perspiration." It seems to me that before getting to the "thought" that must be denied at the end, one might say, "I am not this heart. I am not this mind." Or, perhaps that is precisely what I would deny.

I am not sure that I believe in the "I-I", the realization that I am nothing. I believe in a kind of samadhi that is perhaps worldless but nonetheless articulate. Parts joined together in a system.

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*Appearances can be deceiving. It seems Dass was merely propagating a standard misconception about Ramana's method. (This is what happens when you try to glean an understanding of spirituality from the internet!). Apparently (!) what I'm talking about here is the "neti neti" method of self-inquiry, which Ramana rejected.

[Update: but much of it can be found in his Who Am I?:

'Who am I?' The physical body, composed of the seven dhatus, is not 'I'. The five sense organs… and the five types of perception known through the senses… are not 'I'. The five parts of the body which act… and their functions… are not 'I'. The five vital airs such as prana, which perform the five vital functions such as respiration, are not 'I'. Even the mind that thinks is not 'I'. In the state of deep sleep vishaya vasanas remain. Devoid of sensory knowledge and activity, even this [state] is not 'I'. After negating all of the above as 'not I, not I', the knowledge that alone remains is itself 'I'. The nature of knowledge is sat-chit-ananda [being-consciousness-bliss].

[Note: "The five parts of the body that act are the mouth, the legs, the hands, the anus, and the genitals and their functions are speaking, walking, giving, excreting and enjoying."]]

Into the Mystic?

There's an age-old tension between mysticism and scholarship. The mystic believes that he can understand existence (and obey inspiration) by himself. That he does not need to learn anything about it by reading books. He simply needs to discover (and decide) what his body can (and may) do (and, dammit, see ... sometimes pangrammatical composure is a pedantic nuissance!).

The scholar would have you learn Sanskrit to study dharma, German to study Dasein, Spanish to study duende. The mystic would have you seek the answers within yourself. You would simply study your own existence.

There's something odd about presuming to actually face "the problem of existence" directly, in one's own case. I think the scholar assumes that the problem of existence has been solved in his own case, but that it is interesting to investigate in the case of others (Buddha, Heidegger, Lorca ... a strange list, I know). The mystic feels the need to face it himself.

The "guru" differs from "the professor" in that the guru's authority derives from a personal journey of enlightenment. The scholar does not pretend to "be enlightened", but is nonetheless able to transmit the insight contained in a particular tradition.

Lorca and Heidegger are hybrids. On the one hand, they practice arts (poetry, philosophy) that have an authoritative tradition, one that they have clearly mastered and respect. On the other, they seem (and are often read) as having some special access to the profound mystery at the bottom of everything.

We read them as though they lived their lives somehow closer to their being and becoming, their existence and their inspiration. Not just as men who read a lot of books.

Compare Williams and Wittgenstein, whose art of suffering lay in their eschewal of both mysticism and scholarship. Perhaps their mysticism was simply more thorough?

Spring and Whatever Fall Was

Here [defining "imagination"] Kant uses both large type and extra spacing for emphasis. (Footnote on p. 256 of Guyer and Wood's translation of the Critique of Pure Reason.)

[Demuth tell us] that design is function of the IMAGINATION, describing its movements, its colors (William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, p. 16).

Williams uses this device for emphasis in several places. What does he emphasize?

Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here. (16)

..in great works of the imagination A CREATIVE FORCE IS SHOWN AT WORK MAKING OBJECTS WHICH ALONE COMPLETE SCIENCE AND ALLOW INTELLIGENCE TO SURVIVE... (37)

It lives as pictures only can: by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION... (38)

[Shakespeare's] actual power was PURELY of the imagination. ... his buoyancy of imagination raised him NOT TO COPY [his fellows] ... (53)

The primitives are not back in some remote age — the are not BEHIND experience. (68)

That is: life is absolutely simple. In every civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always. There should never be permitted, confusion — (76)

There's more, but I'll leave it there.

Spring and Totality

"Imagination is the faculty for representing an object
even without its presence in intuition." (Kant)

Last year I was working on the "immanent doctrine of totality". It's an old project of mine. J.'s question about totalities has forced me back to it. That's a good thing, of course.

The basic idea is that Kant's philosophy needs to be balanced with an equal and opposite poetics. His "transcendental doctrine of elements" needs a "pangrammatical supplement", and that's just the immanent program of totality. (I like that analogy—a program is to power what a doctrine [Lehre] is to knowledge—which occurred to me when thinking about Williams and Wittgenstein earlier this month.)

Remember that imagination is pangrammatically analogous only to itself. It's "in the middle" between the "the media of immediacy", i.e., intuitions and institutions. The image belongs to neither philosophy nor poetry. This means that imagination is also the faculty for representing a subject even without its presence in institution. Let's try now to translate the following passage from Kant Critique of Pure Reason, specifically, a sentence from §24 of the "Transcendental Doctrine of Elemements", into the terms of the immanent program of totality. Here's Kant (in Guyer and Wood's translation), which follows immediately the definition of imagination I've quoted in the epigraph:

Now since all of our intuition is sensible, the imagination, on account of the subjective conditions under which alone it can give a corresponding intuition to the concepts of understanding, belongs to sensibility; but insofar as its synthesis is still an exercise of spontaneity, which is determining and not, like sense, merely determinable, and can thus determine the form of sense a priori in accordance with the unity of apperception, the imagination is to this extent a faculty for determining the sensibility a priori, and its synthesis of intuitions, in accordance with the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, which is an effect of the understanding on sensibility and its first application (and at the same time the ground of all others) to objects of the intuition that is possible for us. (KRV B151-2)

I won't here explain how it's done (I'm sure it's largely obvious), but here's a draft of the analogous passage in the Crisis of Raw Passion:

Now since all institutions motivate, the imagination, on account of the objective conditions under which alone it can take a corresponding institution for the emotions of obedience, belongs to motivation; but insofar as its analysis is still an exercise of discipline, which is determining and not, like motive, merely determinable, and can thus determine the content of motive a posteriori in accordance with the multiplicity of apperception, the imagination is to this extent a faculty for determining motivations a posteriori, and its analysis of institutions, in accordance with the dispositions, must be the immanent analysis of the imagination, which is a cause of obedience to motivation and its first application (and at the same time the ground of all others) to subjects of institution that is necessary for stuff.

I promise you there is method in that madness, albeit no doubt along with a few imprecisions and errors. I'll try to explain in another post.

Frühjahr und Alles was der Fall ist

We don't yet know what the body can do, Spinoza taught us. That's why we need ethics. Why do we need epistemology? Because we don't yet master what the body can see.

That's a rather neat pangrammatical analogy. (The body has no analogue or supplement. The body is the mind/heart, the eye/hand.)

We are dominated by totalities. To resist, Williams and Wittgenstein teach us to begin with our own experience, with what we find lying around in plain view. Pound said the poet must "build us his world". He said we should approach the world "in periplum".

Stil there is, clearly, an "everything" out there. There is an "everyone". But, as Pound said, the "total man" has found out for himself all he knows about metaphysics. That is, even our knowledge of totalities is situated in elemental experiences.

"In the composition, the artist does exactly what every eye must do with life, fix the particular with the universality of his own personality" (S&A, p. 27).

I would add "what every hand must see".

Yesterday a question came to me. Does composition teach composure? Does the artist who composes daily in writing find composure in life? The balance of historical and biographical evidence would not suggest so. But, then again, we don't know what life the artist would have led without art.

What is it that is to be composed? Always an arrangement of fact (a reality) coordinated with a subject (the body). Or an arrangement of acts (an ideality) coordinated with an object (the body).

What every hand sees in life as it fixes the universal with the particularity of its own thinghood.

There is a visual field, a field of perception, which is of interest to epistemologists. There is a manual field, a field of action. Here we need an ethics.

The inexorable subjectivity of practical life. And the objectivity of theory.

The poem notes down the emotions that inform the practice.

The totalities are represented (but how?). Poetry and philosophy begin with what is present. Out of this we can build our ethics and our epistemologies. (Pound: "the arts provide the data for ethics".)

The artist ... and both the philosopher and the poet is an artist ... notices facts and acts and brings them into an arrangement in his notes. This is all there is to composition.

Philosophy, Poetry and All

The poetical supplement of Wittgenstein's Tractatus would begin "History is everything that happens." (Sometimes I think it should begin with something funnier, like "History is everyone who's on my case." This has the virtue of correctly transposing "everything" into "everyone", i.e., things into persons.) Meanwhile, the "secret project" of Chapter 19 (pp. 4-6) in Spring in All, a "final and self inflicted holocaust" (remember this is published in 1923), "the annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth", marks the historical moment of Williams' poetical imagination. Now, compare:

Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown thither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations. A marvelous serenity broken only by bird and wild beast calls reigns over the entire sphere. Order and peace abound.

...There, soul of souls, watching its own horrid unity, it boils and digests itself within the tissues of the great Being of Eternity that we shall then have become. (S&A, p. 6)

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it. (T5.64)

Wittgenstein is not defending solipsism. In the Investigations he explicitly pushes back against the view presented here. And Williams is not, of course, proposing a glorious holocaust of humanity! He is rejecting History (with a capital H) as the situation of poetry and proposing imagination instead. When Wittgenstein later rejects his point of departure, "the world", in favor of a much more local situation ("this lamp", "this tree") he is learning Williams' lesson: "no ideas but in things". (Though as I've argued before this, too, can be made more pangrammatically precise.) We must begin with actual pictures of actual facts.

Philosophy must reject a radical solipsism in order to avoid its implication: an inhumanly "real" world comprising "everything that is the case". Poetry, meanwhile, must reject the idealism of each person's solidarity with all human beings. (History is everyone that's on my case, indeed!) Such idealism is at once revolutionary and suicidal. Williams' nightmare vision of a "final solution" is apt.

Tractatus Ver et Omnes

Williams published Spring and All in 1923, one year after what C.D. Wright, in her introduction to the 2011 New Directions re-issue, calls the "head blow" of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: "Now he knew what he was opposing" (p. viii). On her list of work that was published in 1922, one modernist classic is conspicuous by its absence: Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Having read and re-read that book for many years, when I finally got around to Spring and All, in the winter and spring of 2013, the latter seemed like a carefully constructed "other" of the former. Indeed, there is an almost perfect sense in which the two books are pangrammatical supplements.

We can begin with the surface features. Both are small books of under a hundred modest pages. And both books challenge the distinction between prose and, let us say, verse. I would argue they radically enforce the distinction between poetry and philosophy, however, even though they bring each right up to the other.

This only marks the difference more clearly. Where Wittgenstein says that the value of his book lies the fact that "thoughts are expressed in it", Williams could have established the value of his book in its expression of feelings. If we are in the presence of someone who has thought a great deal in the Tractatus, and very precisely, we are in the presence of someone who has "felt something through", if you will, in Spring and All.

Even the organization of the two books are poetico-philosophical mirror images of each other. Wittgenstein's book is ostensibly ordered in rigorously number of propositions that situate them into a clear hierarchy (1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, etc.) Williams, meanwhile, goes from an untitled preface to "Chapter 19", to "Chapter XIII" (which is printed upside down), then VI, then 2, then XIX, and then, on page 15, "Chapter I". It's almost as though Williams is commenting on the insistently clear logic of Wittgenstein's book with his own stubbornly intense pathos.

Finally, note the similar ways that Wittgenstein and Williams and address their reader:

Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts.—So it is not a textbook.—Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it. (T, preface)

To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination ... In the imagination we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. Whenever I say "I" I mean also "you". And so, together as one, we shall begin. (S&A, pp. 3-4)

Wittgenstein and Williams, it seems to me, arrive at the imagination by separate routes, one through thought and philosophy, the other through feeling and poetry. Once there, however, they discover the same thing, in the same sad condition.

"Philosophy is not a doctrine," said Wittgenstein, "but an activity." (T4.112) In Spring and All, I believe, we can discern Williams telling us that poetry is not a program but a facticity. More on that in my next post.

Spring and All (2)

The imagination can't save itself, I'm afraid.

Williams gives us the image of the Roman feast, where the guests eat until they can't eat any more, then throw up, and eat some more. Still, he says, "the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow" (28). A full stomach is necessary, in any case. "Having eaten, the man has released his mind" (29).

There has to be a "basis". We often don't notice how well these needs are covered, and therefore take the imagination for granted. The mind is released because the body is not anxious. (Pound talked of "freedom from worry", which any sane economy would provide to artists.)

But this also means that the imagination relies on everyday opportunities for work and play. It is an excess. Without a basis (a baseline of certainty and pleasure, let's say), there can be no imagination. There would be just the facts and our acts.

Maybe spring is precisely the promise of sufficiency in living. So the imagination stirs, ready to gorge itself on the excess.

Spring and All

Over the past few months, and with increasing intensity over the past few weeks, I've been feeling like something is ending, and something else is beginning. I've come very late, and very slowly, to an insight over the past ten, maybe fifteen, years. This blog has been a record of my process, as has my other blog, if from a completely different angle.

This month, both blogs will address the theme of Williams' Spring and All, which has helped me to realize what I've been doing all these years and why have not been doing a great many other things. Those other things would have been useful to me, both personally and professionally. But something else took priority. It was (and will no doubt remain) an obsession, but until recently I had not seen clearly enough what it was: the imagination.

I had long understood the importance of the image, however. I couldn't see the imagination for the images, we might say.

"I let the imagination have its own way," says Williams, "to see if it could save itself" (SA, p. 43). I've been rereading that passage again and again over the past few days. "I think often of my earlier work and what it has cost me not to have been clear" (p. 42). He talks of his "refusal" and "rejection" of "most things" (42) and of "trying to remain firm" (43). It's clear that he believes it was all necessary, all part of an unavoidable process. Nonetheless, also a kind of "hell".

And with the coming of spring...

Homeland Synecdoche

so though i dont believe more then half of what rand paul believes -hes right on war drones and civil liberties RT @bcls4: @jason_howerton

— John Cusack (@johncusack) March 24, 2013

My immediate reply to John Cusack was that if you grant a libertarian his point about civil liberties you grant almost everything. But it may be more precise to say that you grant exactly half of it, at least as goes Ron Paul libertarians. The other half is foreign policy, for which the Drone War of course stands synecdochally. Either way, I don't think Cusack really disagrees with Rand Paul about "half of what he believes". I think (like many of us) he's just having a hard time letting go of that last tenth worth of sentimental attachment to the welfare state.

The argument for the drones is that they are part of an elaborate, pro-active, and more or less permanent act of self-defense. But is it really true that ... if the Empire pulled back to its sovereign territory, i.e., those fifty "united states" in North America, and guaranteed to its population at home the liberties it claims to be spreading abroad ... is it really true that the result would not be vibrant, free, caring communities, but, rather, communities overrun by foreign hordes that "hate freedom"?

I don't think so. I think the homeland would do just fine if it allowed communities to organize their creative and productive energies themselves through free, local collaboration. Obama once rejected the false choice between freedom and security. I must admit I was charmed. But I now see what he meant. A libertarian would have been (they no doubt were) worried, and rightly so. Because it actually is a choice.

90% of the problem is liberty and security. End the Drug War at home and the Drone War abroad and you solve it almost entire—again, at least synecdochally. To continue to insist that libertarians are "half wrong" is just another example of business as usual for War, Inc. The anarchist left, that is, must recognize that "End the Drug War at home and the Drone War abroad" also addresses, synecdochally, 90% of their concerns, and stop distinguishing itself from the so-called "right". Let's get it together. Let's get it done.

Post Script
What I'm saying is that, on matters of homeland security and foreign adventure, the left and the right are almost entirely in agreement. I mean the actual left and right, i.e., those who do not hold to what Norman Mailer called the "the pusillanimous sludge of liberal and conservative bankruptcies", namely, the center. (See this post, from a time when I was nurturing the hope that Obama would facilitate Mailer's "hip" coalition of left and right.)

What I am saying is that, if they really thought about it, the grass roots of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street would see that they agree on 90% of the issues. If they could begin with those issues, they would move America, and therefore the world, toward an audaciously hopeful future. It would not be the utopia that either of them imagine of course, mainly because it would not express their sentimental attachments to race and class (a complicated set of a attachments I don't want anyone to try to understand too quickly.) But they would also realize how little this utopia actually matters to them once they get down down to the ordinary work of building their communities, i.e., rebuilding them after the ravages of the last seven decades of incorporated war.

Basics

Fresh air,
exercise,
meaningful work and
sensual play.

Once what Brecht called "the basic food position" has been sorted out, a decent society, it seems to me, would safeguard opportunities for these four elements.

As always, I suppose I'm being simple-minded and naive. But I'm trying to construct a scale of values. I think we're too eager to do big things in this world. I think we need to get back to basics.

A Poem

Dressed as a servant
she goes often to the sea.

As if to return the stones
the shore keeps stealing.

In the moonlight, she lets
the garment fall, and steps

into the soft, black waves,
her servitude complete.

(Note: This poem has been with me for years now. I don't know what it means, and I'm not even sure I like its imagery. But there it is. Sometimes one just has to accept the poems one is given by the muse.)

Imagination

"We make ourselves pictures of the facts," says Wittgenstein (T2.1). It struck me this morning, after my run in beautiful spring weather, where WCWilliams' Spring and All was on my mind (and on my lips, actually: I ran into my old boss), that this has been the theme of all my thinking for the past ten years at least. Sometime during my PhD studies I got stuck on a simple question:

"Yes, Ludwig, that may be, but HOW?"

I even played the ball over to Williams:

"If you can imagine the red wheel barrow, we'll grant you all the rest." (This is also a play on the opening sentence of Wittgenstein's On Certainty.)

Wittgenstein and Williams had, from opposite directions (philosophy and poetry) discovered, let's say, the "modern imagination". They both realized that it was in trouble.

Williams was very explicit about this in Spring and All. Like him, I believe there is a sense in which life is "hell" (S&A, p. 43) for those who, while trying to stay alive (and viable) in the modern world, insist on the primacy of imagination. We are under constant siege by entirely well-meaning people who simply don't know what they are working day and night to destroy.

Somebody's got to imagine the facts. Acts, too. Or we'll live in a world of mindless facticity, a history of heartless activity. We're getting there.

Proportion

I used to talk about pangrammatical "homologies", but I now think (and I think someone did point this out to me once a long time ago too) that they should be called "analogies", specifically "identities of relations". Here's one:

Understanding is to science
as
obedience is to politics.

Here's another:

Knowledge is to power
as
understanding is to obedience.

This way of thinking about abstract notions owes something to Pound's "ideogrammic method" and Wittgenstein's "method of perspicuous presentation", both of which approach the alleged "essences" of things in terms of the "family resemblances" that can be established between them.

The Greek analogia, Wikipedia tells me, was at one time translated into Latin as proportio. That sense is useful to me here. I believe in keeping things "in proportion". I believe that our culture has become unhinged because it has lost its sense of proportion about stuff like:

Nature : Culture :: World : History

World : History :: Science : Politics

Science : Politics :: Space : Time

And time is, accordingly, "out of joint".

Democracy in a Free Society

In my last post, I tried to describe the basic monetary and fiscal structure of a "free" a society. The title of this post is intended to be a bit disorienting: we have grown used to thinking of "democracy" as a kind of synonym for a "free society". But it seems to me that Western democracies today draw this assumption into question. We elect our leaders, but our state is highly controlling.

So I want to raise the question of whether democracy has a place in a state that (a) taxes only the productive capacity of its land (over which it is sovereign) and (b) pays a minimum living wage indexed to the price of basic food and shelter to all citizens.

First of all, the state will still have military and police forces. It will therefore have foreign and domestic policies that will be enforced. It will also run a range of services and utilities. In my view, in fact, it would be best for the state to provide free education at all levels (access to which would solely be based on merit, i.e., demonstrated ability at the previous level). I'm also in favor of state-supported research, and the integration of research and teaching at the university level. I tend to think that the state should build and fund hospitals (but I must admit that the health care debate in the U.S. has produced persuasive "libertarian" arguments against the "market distortions" that this implies).

I believe that the state should run all power, water, sewage, and waste utilities for the simple reason that major utilities are best run as monopolies and therefore will not benefit from exposure to market forces. Here the state's "industrial" aspect would become apparent. After all, it will be taxing the "productive capacity" of a particular plot of land. If that land has access to large amount of publicly supplied water and power, then surely it will have higher capacity for production. A suitable site for a factory, therefore, will pay much higher taxes than a comparably sized area in a desert.

Those are just my suggestions for how to use the sovereign power of the state to tax land owners and distribute purchasing power. Obviously, it would be possible to make all the relevant policies by a democratic process.

Here's how I think that could be organized. Every 1000 citizens living a particular area, elect one representative. "Cities" (boroughs) of 300,000 now have a representative body of 300, who select a council of 30. They select a representative to a state congress, which also selects a smaller group of councils. There would be no national elections for "national office". Officials at all levels would be selected from the population of representatives of 1000 citizens.

In my utopia, then, taxes are paid solely by those who own the land. And the laws are made solely by representatives elected by the people who live on the land, who then elect representatives at higher levels. Taxes would be paid proportional to wealth, not income, and laws would be made proportional to the will of the people, not money. The nation's leaders would constantly be talking to and negotiating with the "tax payers" (a limited and surveyable bunch of tycoons, one might imagine) on behalf of the citizens. And the nature of that conversation would be largely about the distribution of purchasing power in the society.

I understand the somewhat unhinged, utopian feel of this proposal. But it really is merely an ideal. I intend to approach reality with it "in mind" in the weeks to come.

A Simple Solution

I've given the subject of this post some more thought. And it has resulted in what I think is my basic political manifesto, at least in regard to fiscal and monetary policy, which is of course at the heart so much other policy.

I believe in doing away with all forms of taxation except for a tax on the productive value of land*. A government, after all, is territorial. My political philosophy, in any case, is to keep governments tied to their territories.

I also believe in doing away with all forms of social benefits except for the payment of a basic living wage to all citizens. The wage should be indexed to the cost of renting a reasonable home and buying a reasonable amount of staples. It should ensure survival without any draw on the citizen's time. It should also ensure the existence of a market for goods and services within the borders of the nation.

That is: the only money the state collects is a tax on land owners. And everyone gets a particular amount of money, printed and paid by the government, I guess every month would be the most suitable. ("Printed" would today probably mean simply direct deposit to whatever account a citizen specifies.)

Only people who want to own land will therefore have to deal with the revenue service. It would be part of the decision to get into that business. The cost of collecting and policing taxes would be unproblematic, and any evasion could be dealt with simply by appropriating and selling the land on which taxes are owed. (There would obviously be all the usual "due process" around this.) I think of the money collected by this means as money that would simply be collected and destroyed.

What is interesting here is that taxation would be the main instrument of monetary policy. It would keep inflation in check. Fiscal policy, the spending of the state would be fundamentally inflationary. The state would simply print whatever money it needed, fully cognizant that it would devalue the currency if it did not, over the long term, collect the money from the land owners.

This idea is age-old. I believe it is vaguely "Jeffersonian", and certainly something Ezra Pound would understand. It would seriously impede "progress" (understood as the process by which the rich become richer). It would not make the concentration of wealth impossible, but it would make those who are very wealthy, i.e., own a lot of land, much more responsibility.

It would also solve the unemployment problem (without, intriguingly, solving the employment problem.) Consider, people would want jobs (to earn more money than their living allowance) but they would not need them (because of the allowance) and they would have time to do whatever they wanted. So they could volunteer in whatever organization they hoped to work for. At some point a manager would notice that this is the kind of person we want to have around, and a contract would be negotiated. Simple.

I don't have any particular demands of the level of "democracy" that I hope to see, by the way. So long as everyone had money to buy food and basic necessities, and were otherwise not interfered with by the state, I think "freedom" would have arrived. Finally, let me say I would not be against implementing this kind of government globally.

Lots of things would change under this system. I'll write about that in the days to come. (What this has to do with language, philosophy and poetry, will soon become clear.)

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*Update. May 10, 2013: My heart is in the right place, but I think this focus on "land" is a retrograde agrarian fantasy. It seems like there's a pretty simple alternative, namely, a "wealth tax". Let all taxation be a tax on the wealth of the citizens, i.e., whatever the government needs to collect it just takes from the accumulated wealth of those who have it. If you own say, .0001% of the nation's wealth, you pay .0001% of the nation's bills. Simple. (Actually it's even simpler since the nation doesn't really have to collect money to "pay its bills". It just prints whatever money it needs. Since those who accumulate wealth, however, are really just using their activities to collect the money distributed by the national dividend, i.e., harness its purchasing power. It is entirely fair to have them hand over the money they've collected in proportion to their long-term success in collecting it.) As proponents of a wealth tax point out, you are simply paying your fair share for the basic government service of protecting your property rights. The mere act of destroying all the money collected in taxes is already protecting the value of your property against runaway inflation (since the government is already printing the money for the following year's national dividend.)

Dasein and Duende

Dasein is the not-quite-objective object of philosophical analysis. Duende is the not-quite-subjective subject of poetical synthesis.

Dasein exists, it is not merely extant. Duende inspires, it does not merely breathe.

The aim of philosophy is to understand Dasein. The aim of poetry is to obey the duende.