Being on a Holiday ( i n Burma)

sketchy Design for a footnote to the “Preface to a Cathedral treaty on Absence”

“On ne peut entreprendre de définir l’être sans tomber dans cette absurdité : car on ne peut définir un mot sans commencer par celui−ci, c’est , soit qu’on l’exprime ou qu’on le sous−entende. Donc pour définir l’être, il faudrait dire c’est , et ainsi employer le mot défini dans la définition.”

http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/newsendbook.php?id=510&format=pdf

Blaise Pascal in what Eco calls ‘a fragment from 1655′ (no further reference in my Dutch translation translating (from the English translation of the original Italian? we’d have to ask a Minne Gerben de Boer) that vagueness as Fragment 1655 so i got to the point of wondering whether my 2 volume edition of the Pensees was lacking fragments or even volumes, but no, it’s from the Préface sur le Traité du Vide written in 1655, a work that from that point onward was swallowed by its subject into the oblivion that is surrounding us these days, no more than usual, but still..

Now what’s the point of quoting all this mess ? well for me – a nutty poet by all means- it is quite clear that although the road taken by Pascal and all those in his wake is the most efficient and for most conceivable purposes undoubtedly simply the best, the statement quoted here is also very simply not true. Well it may be true qua truth value, but not by implication, and certainly not in the way it is mostly being implied.

You can indeed have a fairly reliable defining system without the use of the word to be, without making being into what it has become, a referencial still point of utter abstraction in the general process of defining things. So yes : it is conceivable that one could expand ‘The weak thinking – Il pensiero debole’ as Eco calls it, to its outer limit, a zone thus far only inhabitated by revered but also wildly abused suffering poetic heroes like Artaud, a zone where all abstracted Being is put on leave indefinetly, a whirling dance into pure becoming.

You ‘d need to snap out of it, albeit only momentarily to be able to communicate, because, as you could read down from here, in the end ‘Naming’ is all we have.

In this context ‘Naming’ is a process caught in the act and frozen into meaning, the deadening structure of the rigid Being a n utterly human way of doing things that is now being fully automated and driven even further into rigidity by what is very aptly called Semantic Ontology in Service-Oriented computing schemes.

As Deleuze often remarked, it boils down to entering the zone of pure becoming and re-entering, yoyo-ing as Pynchon would have it, perhaps.

Ok, but what has this got to do with Pascal’s statement, you haven’t said anything that would contradict it. Well it’s there allright but you need a helper-method to extract it. The helper method will lead us to Leibniz and a monadic, rather bleak concept of individual existence, but then only if you regard it as existence. Paradoxical it is, isn’t it ?

Now you need to be smarter than i am because i am simply to dumb to really digg any of it, i only know how to start it. Perhaps some of my friends ought to help me out here, but i’m too ashamed to even ask anyone. Anuway, here are the steps as far as and in the manner i can get through them.

1. Rephrase Pascal’s statement to the definition of a recursive definition.
2. Take the infinite process of recursion as a state, the state we are in.
3. Please refrain from calling this state being for a minute.
   If you call the state Being now, you are interfering with the very naming process you set out to fullfill. Why?
   

   Because you are instantiating something that is already coded by the remnants (garbage) of a previous run of the very thing you are instantiating. This is where the crux is: the instantiation needs to run, it takes time to happen, it isn’t around anywhere (yet, although everything is ready for it to happen) it is being made (into being sure haha) by happening.

4. Only human prehension requires it to ‘exist’ but there is no reality to this existence whatsoever. It isn’t even Virtual, because the Virtual, in Deleuze’s view at least, refers to a consistency of potentiality where nothing is Actual, a concept of part of the Real of which computer generated 3D environments are only simulations. Not cheap ones, by no means , but not in any way resembling the vastness of true Potentiality.

   You see the recursion is happening in a container already , a secluded fold within the foldings of the Real and the granulation that is perceived by the defining process as food for its defining run is the garbage of a previous run of a similar process. Defining granulates by cutting, imposing the order of being, isolating kernels within flows tot finite flows into themselves, trapping the energy in them to standstills, depletion, end, void.

   As it ends, it granulates. Granulation furthers definition. Definition defines.

5. It’s always the same conclusion, you don’t really need the fifth element: whatever we come up with, it always seems to lead to infinity, promise us a western coast to Elysium, but it can only do so at the expence of an excess of energy. Life defining through trapping life into death. This isn’t a definition of life Pascal is decribing, and i can certainly see all the required application of this particular form of annihilation, but in the process we need to make sure we do not mistake the defining process with what we are actually killing it with.

So please yes, do tell me where i’m making my no doubt stupid mistakes. in the meantime i have and will be working on turning this rather bleak picture of human perception into something a bit more user-friendly for the processes running us.
Because if you put the fiction of being as defined here on a bit of a holiday, i think we might actually start enjoying the working order of things some more, and/or get better at making it work.

O – the open mouth, a woman is seen diving into the water the water generates the woman diving amidst perceivable blocks, blockages of stasis

ex-stasis, exctacy: time itself, what flows beyond the remaining
( cfr Quignard – Sur le jadis p. 129)

will we make it? yes we will but
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