Gender: Male
Status: Married
Age: 40
Sign: Sagittarius
City: Grand Rapids
State: Michigan
Country: US
Signup Date: 5/3/2007
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Thursday, May 10, 2007
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 Dedicated to my favorite aphoristic authors: E. M. Cioran, Eric Hoffer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alain, and Marshall McLuhan. © Corey Anton 2009
Media
Irrelevant by Remote: To idly surf by remote control is to confess that we, as a culture, have no clue what we want to be when we grow up. It is the medium preferred not so much by the lazy as by the comfortably irrelevant. Would a stranger please tell me who I am?
Gravitational Perspectives: You cannot know lots of stuff about celebrities, have them know nothing about you, and still be relevant. If you are in any way relevant, you are a satellite in orbit, never a star.
Deluded Heroics: T.V. offers entrance to a world where we are the only people who are not actors and yet we cannot act. It is the only world where the beautiful eagerly pander to the impotent.
Sofa Indents: We leave no footprints in the T.V. world. We were never there.
The Golden Age: In the ancient world the Golden Age was behind people but retrievable. Moderns imagine the Golden Age as ahead of them, a future that will arrive one day. In the "post-modern" world, the Golden Age is always elsewhere, at a distance, some place other than this one.
How to Shoot Your Own Feet: The more information that people access that they either do not or cannot act upon, the more impotent they will be. Clearest case: college students who don't vote and yet who watch world news while they ought to be doing their homework.
Defining Pornography: Some pornographic magazines have pictures of faceless, near bodiless, sex organs. Such porn is not hard to define: Of the world's rich diversity, its complexity of relations, pornographic images are overly reductive; they are forced synecdoche.
One and Only One: Can any one photograph raise a highly specific and context-dependent question? If so, then I'd like to see a photograph that conveys that question.
The "I'm not Alone" Parade: Cell phones allow people to persuade others (and themselves) that they don't feel alone. Seen publicly on the phone, we dance the dance that says we are "with someone," (certainly someone important) though obviously we are alone.
Not You, Not Here: Cell phones are a ritual medium for the displaced happily-ever-after. There is, quite evidently, more reality out there than there is right here, with you.
Look Purposefully Ahead: Cell phones have replaced wrist watches as strategies for declining interpersonal encounters. Simply have your cell phone out and ready. Now start walking forward, pull it out and pretend to take a call, preferably the call you've been waiting for. Keep walking.
Relationships
Interpersonal Dialectics: If you cannot be a different person with different people, then all of those people will be the same person. To make someone in your life absolutely non-interchangeable, share some part of yourself with that person that you share with no other person. What makes people who they are is who you are when you're with them.
Being Larger than Yourself: No one says, "I don't like what you say, eat, wear, buy or own, don't like your family, friends, co-workers or neighbors, don't like your past, your beliefs, or even your aspirations, but I really like you!" Even children on the playground need to share in favorite colors and ice-cream flavors.
Memories of Umbilical Cords: Navel gazing is highly underestimated. We should celebrate meditations on the incontrovertible proof of our sociality. Look down, you bear the mark: you are caught in the web where beings emerge out from others of their kind.
The 12:00 Unmasking: Imagine the release of energy and social impact if people completely gave up all belief in the afterlife and simultaneously realized that, in all actuality, they are other people.
Dialogue: If the bulk of everyday conversation is disguised persuasion or simply self-confirmation, then genuine dialogue is when two people risk not knowing who they'll be at the end of their encounter.
Self-Relation
Gatherings: What must the nature of humanity be if, despite the fact that we had 'forgotten all about it,' we can unexpectedly feel remorse over something we did long ago?
The Taste of Soul Groves: Humans are the only kind of tree that can weep in the anguish of having failed to ripen its fruit. We are the only fruit that, ripe or not, must taste what it has become.
The Root of Plastic Surgery: In class Thayer once said that the mirror pulled God out of the center of the universe and put the human into it. Today, many people wake up and worship themselves at the morning alter.
How to Have No Friends: A friend is someone who likes you more than you like yourself. This means that some people have no friends not because nobody likes them but because they like themselves more than anyone else possibly could.
Having No Alibi: The most important words you need to hear, only you can say. Too many things are left unsaid by those who forget that they themselves need to say them.
The Hypocrisy of Hope: We commonly think of people as being either genuine or not. We thus forget the truth of moral history. We are the animal who is capable of being a hypocrite, meaning that animal who can aspire.
Time and Memory
Final Causes: As what we're moving toward, the past is actually ahead of us, meaning that what we call the future is just as much a species of the past. It is, as Martin Heidegger suggests, the certain but indeterminate past, the past that will-have-been.
Useless Recycling: Contemporary psychology has infected people with personal pasts in unprecedented ways. We learn from Nietzsche that most people today do not need any more self-understanding. They need to learn the arts of forgetting.
Time for Distinctions: Memory never feels much like thought until you can't remember something. But the thought that we can't remember we forgot is not even a thought temporarily forgotten. Who could say what it is?
Trust Your Becoming: The question is not can we relearn what we know we forgot but can we discover what we never knew we know?
The Pre-Reflective
Remembering Forgotten Preoccupations: How many gray moods dawn by suddenly being unable to remember some knot of concern that we know we left partly untied?
From the Other Shore: I wake up in the morning and start singing a song to myself, then I think, "I hate that song; why is it stuck in my head?" The next thought to follow: "Well, someone must like it."
A Call for Thought: Martin Heidegger has a book titled, What is Called Thinking? His title points not only to what we call "thinking," but also to what could be called "called thinking," that thinking which is done when what is to be thought about "calls" the thought.
Distractions and Impositions: Sitting down to write, I've now twice checked the clock. Anticipating the later arrival of some dinner guests, I try to hurry up, but it is here, precisely, that I should stop, for the guests rather than the substance of the writing are calling the thought.
Kinds of Vegetables: You start the car, put it in drive, and suddenly realize as if waking from a spell that you just arrived and parked the car. So preoccupied by some thought or concern, you now don't remember the driving. But how about this one: we are doing some handiwork, washing dishes or some other absorbing activity, when all the while talking to ourselves without ever realizing it.
What Breathes Who?: Right now take a moment and try to stop your inner flow of thinking. Isn't the first impulse is to hold your breath? Speech--especially that inner speech known as thought--is as semi-autonomous as breathing.
Culture As Auto-Pilot: Without direct effort or conscious guidance, self-talk moves by its momentum, eddies swirling wherever they may. A continuing current of culture and background, this is thought without conscious direction.
For the Beautiful, Talented, Brilliant or Well Dressed: The works of Erving Goffman advise against openly claiming for yourself attributes that others would willingly grant. You only need to say what can't be taken for granted.
Mind
Home of the Unthought Thought: Without questions you can't recall all that you know. For example, what color are the walls in your main bathroom? How, if not by words, would you have gained conscious access to that piece of knowledge? But you can believe you know something yet be unable to remember it when asked. So, how do you know what you know if you aren't always knowing it?
Who Knows?: Where is a thought before you think it? Which one?
Language as Order: Mental life is more than the occurrence of inner talk; there is cognition, computation, inner images, sensations, and feelings. Still, if not by words, how could we identify, catalog, and maintain the boundaries between and among these aspects of our mental life?
Thought's Registrar: If we admit the occurrence of some kinds of thought that are independent of language, we must quickly add that the thought that cannot be talked about is the thought that no one ever can remember.
Re-cognizing Non-sense: A mind is never solely one's own. If you can make sense of what no other person can understand, you'd better watch out: you probably have a broken one. For example, try to say something that is perfectly intelligible to you but utterly unintelligible to every other person. Fortunately, "Eggplant lenses shoe participle without," doesn't make sense to me either.
Missing the Obvious: Because native tongues are learned from others, we thoughtlessly can conclude that language is not natural. Truth is, we are naturally social.
Words Don't Die: The you who can be thought about when you think about you, Alan Watts tells us, is that you who need not fear death; it is the you who never was born.
Speech & Language
Nameability Rather Than Any Named: Language is thoroughly misunderstood when it is cast as discontinuous, as in: "I ran for a while, ate dinner and then I spoke with some friends, and finally, I went to bed." A horizon that is present all along, language is the continued condition of trying to tell what is going on.
Pity in Stupidity: When we learn a new word we often notice it as it is used around us. Because all unknown words can seem the same, we never hear all of the different words that we don't know. We can pretend they are but a few.
Ed Lorenz's "Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow": Leonard Bloomfield suggests that no two individuals have the exact same lexicon nor use language in precisely the same way. Each and every person speaks 'the language' uniquely.
Sustainability: The great advantages of everyday speech are its economy of production, ease of use, and zero cost for post-production clean-up. At low low expenditure of resources, speech can be produced and made relevant for an absolutely one-time occurrence.
Speaking of Possibilities: What could be more precarious than an animal that has learned to talk. Such strange and fanciful beings come mostly to concern themselves with what is not the case.
Ugly Clarity: We imagine that communication would be improved if we could more clearly and efficiently transmit ideas. We forget that we are living breathing organisms, creatures capable of aesthetic in-building through the slow and partly staggering grope toward meaning; conversational structure takes its aesthetic appeal not by any information transferred, but by the form of the on-going moments of disambiguation.
Where to Listen: Initially astonished at how difficult it is to shut off inner dialogue, I once concluded that it was impossible shut off self-talk. But I soon sobered up. The surest way to stop talking to oneself is to actually listen to other people.
Literacy
Reading Drifts: Several pages into an interesting book, we can suddenly realize that we have drifted off from the reading. Now, why do we always seem to catch ourselves only after slipping off the reading?
Ruminate: To read is to be unable to break down and absorb all we swallow. Later, talking with a friend or after an event, we cough up and give another go at what was previously indigestible.
Inspiration: Much writing writes itself yet provides itself with an alibi. It makes us the laborer, supervisor, and curious onlooker.
How an Author Becomes a Language: Authors sometimes coin new words or bring new meaning to old ones. Their writings eventually become a language that others can learn to speak. With time and practice, you too could speak Veblen, McLuhan, or perhaps Kenneth Burke.
The Difference Between Books and Doorstops: At first pass, a book can seem to be little more than a physical object present in a room. From that posture, it's easy to pretend that books and minds are easily separated. But, the "inside" of a book is more like the drunken stupor that can be found in a bottle of alcohol. As books make their way inside us, we fall under their influence.
Philosophy
Old Saws with New Teeth: If a tree falls in a forest but nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
--I don't know, did that one?
--The question isn't, "does it make a sound?," but rather, "what sound does it make?"
--If a rainbow is in the sky but nobody is there to see it, is there a rainbow in the sky?
--If tree falls in a forest but no one is there, was there both the forest "and" the tree?
--If a tree falls in a forest, but you don't believe in the natural occurrence of hypotheticals…?
Locating the Substance of Adjectives: Philosophers say that adjectives are used to predicate substances. This means that we can specify a quality of something by using an adjective. For example, "That was a hairy bear," or "the cup is heavy." How odd that the supposed quality, a predicate, is a comparison. To what does an adjective refer?
Religion
The Bane of Modernity: In the ancient world many people believed in the gods but not in a personal afterlife. Today the western world is populated with countless people who believe in some kind of personal experience post-mortem but do not believe in the divine.
The Twofold Attitude: The proper attitude toward our parents is the same as to the gods. We should thank them and forgive them in the same gesture.
Grow Up: The resentment toward life that many people feel comes from the fact that they never asked for all of the suffering and injustice in life and then they have to die in the end regardless. Still, what is more wretched than an animal unable to forgive life for not being perfect.
Christianity
Gratitude Requires Forgiveness: Imagine as fact no afterlife at all, just this world with all of its suffering and injustice. In light of this revelation how many people would be able to forgive the Divine?
You Must Be Kidding!: So much of Christianity today is pure individualism. It is hard to think of anything more presumptuous and self-aggrandizing than a cemetery plot.
On Becoming a Person: Jesus is the perfect symbol of transcending both body and culture. Erich Kahler tells us that the life journey of the historically existing individual was destined to take spiritual significance. "My god, My god, why have you forsaken me?"
Well Then There is No Hope: When asked if he was basically optimistic or pessimistic, devout Catholic Marshall McLuhan responded by saying, "I have never been an optimist or a pessimist. Apocalypse is our only hope."
Death and Dying
Look Them in the Eyes: When you are dead you will never see your friends and family again. Always remember this when you talk with them.
Knowing Someone Personally: We say that things can be understood only by assuming many different perspectives. Remember this when a loved-one dies; be sure to consider the reaction of all the people who never knew the deceased.
Wake Up: Death is not simply a future event that will one day come to pass, as if our only possible relation to it is anticipation. Death is right here right now, life's picture frame. Not knowing that you are going to die would be like being in a dream but remaining unable to realize that you're dreaming. If you couldn't see the borders around it, life wouldn't be nearly as real. All living things die, but awareness of death is the pre-condition for life's meaningfulness.
Kiarostami's Fruit: Three kinds of people refrain from suicide: those who are too cowardly, those who are too obedient, and those who find the little joys of life to be enough.
You're Not that Important: When people are utterly unable to forgive themselves, they become sadists who take heroic meaning through self-inflicted punishment. How many suicides are but sado-masochism perfected?
An Apology Would be Nice: God, as pure conscience, needs to absolve Himself of inflicting unrelenting terror upon creatures who never asked to be born. Perhaps there is an afterlife, one offered as a cosmic apology.
Where Would You Draw the Line?: Consider the rich miracle of all that is. Now, if you're going to go this big (electric eels, rainbows, dragonflies, wines, strawberries, orgasms, and music) then why not an afterlife too? We'll call it the perfect dessert for an awesome feast.
Ultrasounds: Perhaps God is a woman and she's pregnant: what we call birth was the beginning of Her pregnancy, and we, still in the womb, take Her placenta as the world. 'Life' is really the unfolding of what is unborn and what is popularly known as 'death' is actually the long awaited event.
The World
How is Distance Possible?: I am not the world, but I am not not it either. I am of it, indigenous to it and my body has always already made room for itself. Even with all of this, the world is at a distance.
The Whole of Reality: Want to talk about the real world? It can't just be nature untrammeled by humanity, for the real world already includes humans. If, as Alan Watts suggests, "Just as a tree flowers, so the earth peoples," then we must add: people world.
Truth by Perspective: Perspective is not the obstacle to truth; it constitutes truth as a possibility. Only where there is perspective can there be truth.
You Were There!: We think back over our lives and say, "When I chose to do X, I just as well could have done Y or Z." Could there be a clearer case of pretending that we weren't there? It is only your imagination that makes it possible for you to think you could have not been. Make no mistake, the only world that you could have not been in is the fictional one.
Problems
What a Waste of Understanding: It is best to avoid people who need to understand every one of their problems. As Thayer suggests, it's often easier to solve a problem than it is to figure out what it is.
Worry About it After You've Started: So many people want to fix their lives but don't know where to start, so they don't.
Ideas Don't Pick Potatoes: Intelligence is not how many things you can think about, nor how complex of things you can think about. It is a measure of how much good you can do for yourself and others without having to think about it. Some students will write that down so that they can later think about it while others, without a second thought, leave the room as vegetarians.
Therapeutic Incantations: Magic lore holds that one cannot dispel demons without knowing their proper names. As William Gass suggests, the struggle to articulate our thoughts is the only way of being truly possessed by them. But let us not forget Burke's insight that we can dispel most of our demons by comic misnomer.
Our Dreams and Longings: The problem is not that many people want something for nothing. It is that most people, thinking that nothing is something, don't know what is worth wanting.
The Two Kinds of Error: We can say that something is different than something else when in fact it is not. But we also can say that something is no different than something else when in fact it is. How many problems come from ambiguities between these two kinds of error? How many thoughts owe their existence to these two errors?
Being More Than You Achieve: The ancient Stoics openly scorned personal ambition. Today we see how social mobility--its ups and downs--is the greatest and most basic source of stress in most people's lives.
A Primer for Stoicism: Not everything that happens is good but it is always good to begin by accepting what already has happened.
Decisions
The Wherein of Decisions: Many decisions are made only in reference to our habits. Some people can decide to have a drink while others must decide to not have one.
Experiencing Our Interpretations: It may make some sense to say that we interpret our experiences, but we should never forget that what we experience in the first place is always already an interpretation. Similarly, because we can interpret messages, we easily forget that all messages already are interpretations.
Contemporary Dostoevsky Agonizer: Unable to talk their parents out of sending them off, some college students have their revenge by dragging their feet, doing just enough to barely graduate, and then, as they move back home, jobless, they can have the last laugh: "I told you 'it' wouldn't work."
9:54 PM
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