Waiting for the goat to gander

So...

Once I was very much in love. "Very much" is nonsensical though, since when you are in love, that's it. It is out of the quantifiable realm. And now, "once" and "was" also seem wrong to me, because there is no time there, in that dimension. Once you see that dimension, you cannot unsee it. It is part of your world, now and forever. It's an act, not related to a subject. It's awesome.

Anyway.

So, these were the last words he said to me: "Wait Aysegul. Wait for the goat to gander. Whatever gander means."

I laughed. It was a good joke. But today, out of nowhere, I started to really think on it, to think why I laughed so hard when the situation was so dreary. So here I go.

It was funny because... it skillfully pointed out something. Something very fundamental. The impossibility. The impossibility for the goat to gander because there is no such thing as gander. I know there is such a word. It probably means something. However, the "whatever gander means" that comes right after it negates the existence of "gander" itself since words don't really exist out in the nature. They are made up by us to point to things, feelings, situations, etc. When you don't know - or really don't care about - the meaning and when you use it in a context that requires you to know the meaning (I mean when you wait for something to happen, you have to recognize it when it happens to end the wait), what you are trying to point out is exactly "impossibility" itself.

I just realized this. A few moments ago. And I laughed even harder. Because what I realized was even funnier: I was actually waiting. Actually.

I was waiting... for an impossibility to occur. Yes. This is like waiting for a bus that would never come. No, no. It's more like waiting for a bus when there is no such thing as a bus. There aren't even vehicles. No such actuality. But you wait anyway. You can't even understand, let alone explain what you are doing because there is no such concept, even in your mind.

This strikes me as the most fundamental basis in life, of life. Like when we say "in life" it sounds like there is such a thing, place, whatever "out life." Isn't it funny? How can you even think "out life?" Yet, we talk like this.

Now, we have come to the most important point I want to make if I can manage.

According to scientific thinking, life emerged at some point in time. I mean organic life, of course, since universe has a life much larger than organic life. And even universe came to being at some point where there was no time. Before that, it didn't exist. It came out of nothing. Isn't this an impossibility itself?

The true nature of life is impossible. That is what I am trying to say without going into complicated philosophical concepts, and also I can't go into them even if I wanted to, since I forgot it all - after years of reading - to do me, to hand it to whatever I am... So, waiting for what you don't know, what you can't recognize even if you see it, which was my case in this scenario, is existence itself. I am not making this up. It is logically obvious.

Here, I found another support for my fight against the disease of nihilism. Nihilism consists of a very consistent and even more distorted way of being. I don't say "seeing the world" anymore because it sounds like a perspective, and perspective is understood as something harmless. No. It harms not only the diseased, but everybody coming into contact with him/her.

This guy embodied nihilism - for me. Maybe that's why I was so attracted to him. I wanted to understand my enemy at its source to be able to fight it better. He was walking-death, and I must say this as well: death has many faces as we all know, this one was cheerful, don't be fooled, don't confuse it with joy, it's not joy. What he said - what he thought he was saying - with the goat and gander was the manifesto of death. However it was a scam, just like death is. And I felt very proud when I exposed it for what it was: just another confirmation of life. That's how I managed, once more, in my own way, to weaponize death against itself (for more on this subject, see Deleuze&Guattari).

So, waiting for the goat to gander is the joyful truth of life. Although I don't like using the word "truth" at all, now is the time. It's joyful. I like it when the "truth" is joyful because it is true only when it's joyful.

I will always be waiting for the goat to gander. And I will do it joyfully - preferably with a whip, just in case... That's the beauty of impossibility that is life.

The horror and joy of a certain enlightenment

I've had my share of enlightenment in the last few years, and I suspect that I've stolen from the others' share if the quantity of enlightenment is somehow fixed. You know, if a quota exists.

These enlightening moments had a wide range too. In one, I found myself being in that place where the virtual becomes actual, the place where the world is constantly created, where life creates itself as a current coming from the virtual and transforming into actual, the ultimate now. In another, more mundane one, I suddenly understood something which before constantly escaped the eyes of my mind (which I don't remember now). Of course all of this had a transformative effect on me on some level, otherwise they wouldn't be called enlightenment. But I went through them intact, that is, I always felt an inherent trust in myself, therefore in life that it wouldn't break me. It would only make me more, I would know and feel more, I would become richer... Isn't this the meaning of life to some extent?

Then came the breaker and probably the most superior enlightenment of it all, at least among the others I experienced. I met this guy and had a lot of fun. I felt as if I found "my mirror twin, my next of kin" to quote Leonard Cohen. I don't remember exactly when or where I fell for him. But our encounter was such a forceful attraction that it was as if time itself disappeared and we were in a constant now. To speak more intellectually, it was Aion that I found myself in in contrast to Chronos. No wonder why Aion is identified with Eros... These weird things started to happen: I was dreaming his dreams, or maybe I was moving into his mind while I was sleeping. There I experienced the first tinges of horror. It's not pleasant to come into being in somebody else's mind, no matter how much you love them. It may even be the ultimate horror of life: realizing that you are a figment of somebody else's imagination. Being conscious and ultimately powerless. Having no power of action to change things around...

And his mind was not a pleasant environment either. It was contrary to everything I believe myself to be. So, I was put off a little and we eventually broke up with the addition of some other mundane reasons. But I couldn't really detach myself from this experience. One day, as I was in bed trying to sleep (you can imagine that sleeping has become very hard to accomplish for me after this), I saw myself standing at the edge of the world, where an abysmal wound was constantly opening in the flesh of the world. Yes. I'm sorry, I haven't yet found a more understandable expression to draw the image of that affect. It was the world becoming wounded at every instant and it was the abyss which seemed to me essential to the world's existence. The wound was always there and it was going to be there forever, without the possibility of healing since it was always becoming a wound...

Of course, being me, I approached the matter in a philosophical way, to discern the problem. I solved or am constantly trying to solve all my existential problems with philosophy, so why not this one? First I thought this was related to the material being of the world since the wound was crawling with things, things I couldn't define. It seemed to me, at first, that the world was suffering of the being of matter, in a Bergsonian sense that is matter is in a state of forgetting itself, continuously getting away from itself. World was rotting from within because matter was forgetting itself, becoming stranger every moment. World was not able to penetrate matter, relate to it even though it is made of it. So it was becoming stranger to itself. But the world had a flesh or is flesh, with that I mean matter with soul, something that relates everything with every other thing, invisible connections throughout. So, these connections were constantly breaking because f*cking matter couldn't remember that it was a part of all this. Sorry about that, I always get angry at this point. Can't help it.

OK, this explanation seemed quite right to me but I wasn't relieved of course. Now, my ground was shaken all the more because I believe in the world and matter, I believe that they reconcile somehow, that matter would come back to itself at some point. Maybe some connections are constantly being broken but others are constantly created. So this wound shouldn't be a fundamental wound but it terrifyingly seemed so...

Then, in the hope of finding my comfortable ground again, I started reading everything that made sense to me before. And there it was, in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition:

"Nietzsche seems to have been the first to see that the death of God becomes effective only with the dissolution of the Self. What is then revealed is being, which is said of differences which are neither in substance nor in a subject: so many subterranean affirmations. If eternal return is the highest, the most intense thought, this is because its own extreme coherence, at the highest point, excludes the coherence of a thinking subject, of a world which is thought of as a guarantor God. Rather than being concerned with what happens before and after Kant (which amounts to the same thing), we should be concerned with a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism - except, perhaps, by Hölderlin in the experience and the idea of a 'categorical abduction'. For when Kant puts rational theology into question, in the same stroke he introduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the ' I think' , an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle: the subject c an henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other, and in so doing invoke a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its own - namely, that of the world and God. A Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of 'I think' includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other. It matters little that synthetic identity - and, following that , the morality of practical reason - restore the integrity of the self, of the world and of God, thereby preparing the way for post-Kantian syntheses: for a brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterizes the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly on to difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept." [Italics are mine] 

There are other passages that are of importance here for me, in one he talks about thought, in the other about the nomadic distribution. Bear with me:

 "It is true that on the path which leads to that which is to be thought, all begins with sensibility. Between the intensive and thought, it is always by means of an intensity that thought comes to us. The privilege of sensibility as origin appears in the fact that, in an encounter, what forces sensation and that which can only be sensed are one and the same thing, whereas in other cases the two instances are distinct. In effect, the intensive or difference in intensity is at once both the object of encounter and the object to which the encounter raises sensibility. It is not the gods which we encounter: even hidden, the gods are only the forms of recognition. What we encounter are demons, the sign-bearers"

[...]

"Even when it concerns the serious business of life, it is more like a space of play, or a rule of play, by contrast with sedentary place and nomos. To fill a space, to be distributed within it, is very different from distributing the space. It is an errant and even 'delirious' distribution, in which things are deployed across the entire extensity of a univocal an undistributed Being. It is not a matter of being which is distributed according to the requirements of representation, but of all things being is divided up within being in the univocity of simple presence (the One - All). Such a distribution is demonic rather than divine, since it is a peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods' field of action, as it is to leap over the barriers or enclosures, thereby confounding the boundaries between properties. Oedipus' chorus cries: 'Which demon has leapt further than the longest leap?' The leap here bears witness to the unsettling difficulties that nomadic distributions introduce into sedentary structures of representation." [Italics are mine] 

Well, all this made even more sense to me. In a very real sense, his existence opened a crack in me, or my representation since I identified myself with him but he was an "other" nevertheless. I found this crack in the very core of my being, and a terrible alienation took place. It was the result of an encounter which forced me to think as it always is. Of course I had similar experiences before but it was always from a relatively safe place. I was always a good girl trying to make sense of the world. It seems that I had never put myself on the line and this time my very own being - or the structure which represents me - was in danger. What I encountered at the edge of the world's flesh, crawling were demons. The wound was actually the crack in "me," where I actually think. And this crack, this wound was as impersonal as it can be. It had nothing to do with my puny life. It was fundamental indeed, but in a good way, not towards death but creation.

You can imagine life is more endurable again. Because now I have something to work with to create. Now, I'm not drowning in the horror. I still see it, I still feel it but now I gained the necessary perspective to go on and transform the sad passions into joyful ones, to speak in Spinoza's terms. I can look in the eye of the horror of enlightenment and still survive to make something out of it. I was wounded deeply but I was healed in a different sense as well.

To return another deep love of mine, Philip K. Dick, I am now able to take smaller doses of schizophrenia. Dick talks about the unfolding in schizophrenia (in my context the crack in the 'I') as follows:

"This unfolding is not in any sense a causal progression; it is the vertical opening forth of synchronicity rather than the horizontal cause-and-effect sequence that we experience by clock time, and since it is timeless, it is unlimited in extent; it has no built-in end. So the universe of the schizophrenic is, again to understate it, somewhat large. Much too large. Ours, like the twice-daily measured squirt of toothpaste, is controlled and finite; we rub up against only as much reality as we can handle -- or think we can handle, to be more accurate." (Here is the link for the ones who would like to read this beautiful article) 

The space where thinking happens in the speed of light, the crack, the wound at the edge of the world's flesh is not a space you can endure to live. It is too much to allow any kind of activity. You are in the mercy of demons, always passive, being dragged from there to here. That was the source of my deep sorrow: ultimate passivity. All the thoughts that came to me was about that: the forgetful character of matter, the crawling eerie things, death, etc.

But there is no need to give in to death and get incurably depressed. You can and should make something out of everything in life since you are living! So, I thank life for giving me all these opportunities full of wonder to discover its horrifying and beautiful sides. I thank life for constantly destroying and reconstructing everything anew. And I thank life for introducing me such beautiful people like Dick, Deleuze, Cohen, and more who are constantly moving me, renewing the joy that is the essence of our soul, I believe.

"Got something in my eye, a light that doesn't need to live, and doesn't need to die..."

Politics of intense bodily metaphysical experiences

I want to say that the presence of loved one is what makes an intense bodily metaphysical experience possible so that normality (normal perceptions, habits, even normal sensations that are no longer perceived as what they are, but became a part of the feeling of self) dissappears, its thick surface shatters while allowing every kind of "beyond" to be free and in such a way that it is impossible to deny what's happening since it is felt in the body, through the body, as a body...

So this intense bodily metaphysical experience is fundamentally a political experience if political is understood to be an adjective for the things moving in an active way without a need but with the will to move. The will of things is political, whether they want to stay passive, to defend their static status, or to become active to put their mark on the world as their difference, they always create the sphere of, let's say, minor politics.

What is important is this: what kind of an intense bodily metaphysical experience does your loved one's presence create? In other words, what is the will of your love? Does it make you regress from everything and try to fit in the image that is being created by it? Does it make you afraid of loosing it and by doing so limit your relation with the world? Or does it make you want to traverse all images by fully subscribing to life itself with its every little thing? Does it create something more than your own identity using your own difference? Does it enforce your own difference in the face of the banality of life? Does it give you the power to change the world in your own way? Finally does it create feelings of guilt or joy?

These are the important questions to ask ourselves while loving somebody / something to understand what does that love wants. Does it want you to be limited and fixed so that it can feed on you? Or does it want you to be yourself, an ever changing, moving enpowered style through which it can proliferate itself?

Any evaluation about any kind of love should be constructed upon these questions, whether the object of love is a child, an opposite sex, a hobby, or a philosophical approach. Yes, philosophical approaches have presences too, and all the more intense.

Love perspectives or kaleidoscopes of sense - Part ...

How do you change your perspective? By moving to another place. Love is that movement to another place, to another point of view. But it has nothing to do with empathy. It is not pretending to be in the place of someone. Love is never "as if". It is there. It is real. It fills the atmosphere around so that you can dive into the "other". The impossible distance between becomes a sea to dive in. It necessarily connects you and it is just because of the fact that you are in the same waters. The invisible waters becomes palpable in love. You feel you are connected. You feel the existence in the most intense way possible.

When this atmosphere constitutes the relationship of a group of people, living becomes something kaleidoscopic. Constantly changing perspectives from one person to the other goes out into the open and becomes visible in the common place. The connection itself starts to shape people who are connected. In the palpability of love when everything touches everything in every way possible, identity understood as something inner to defend, dissolves. Identity becomes the movement style to the other, the very coreography of particular movements towards one another.

Love, therefore, changes, shapes, constitutes identity of those who are in love. Identity is not a given through which love is lived. On the contrary, identity is shaped through the invisible atmosphere of love which surrounds people. It affords certain kind of approaches and not others. You have to trust the other for example, not because you have to but because it is impossible to do otherwise if you are in love. To conceive this and act accordingly, you need to be able to recognize the "sense" which is always there, inside and outside at the same time, or better put always in the middle. Always generating itself with the movement of the relations and in multiple places simultaneously.

Love expresses sense as it is. That's why it is common but not always easy to call love an illusion when you fall out of it. When fallen out of love, you are fixated and imprisoned in just one perspective again: yours. That spontaneity, that undeniable presence of multiple could only be remembered in a dim light which makes it look blurry, vague and less detailed than it actually was. It is impossible to see the past experience as it is. The world around you changes because you lose the connection to the invisible, to the very relationality of the world. Then, treating the experience of love as an illusion is a sad preference. Nobody ever can talk of this subject without having the expression of melancholy in their face. There was something before that they don't have now. Calling love an illusion is a lie which people tell themselves without believing it. If they are to survive they have no other choice than to "hide behind the coward explanation of cause and effect" (L. Cohen). Retrospective corrections -such as finding reasons to justify the actions of love- are made to adjust after-love-life. It is never easy since one cannot easily deny her own experience. This is the reason of the obvious and mostly rigid changes in lifestyles or perspectives. You have to change yourself after losing that sensation of multiple in such a way that this new self would itself be a denial of the big truth, of the sense of universe which is always multiple. The logic is to justify the loss. Such a justification is very dangerous aside from being sad, because it creates resistance to the experience of multiple in the future too. Thus, weak souls once in love, become numb for now and forever.

But this is just a stupid option that most people choose without even knowing what it is. It is just like ignoring the reality because it looks ugly or it makes you feel bad. You can always be honest and say: "I have lost the big truth but I still have hope to gain it back anew". You can always choose to repeat your "mistakes" because it makes perfect sense. You can always try to be strong enough to be the living example of the absurdity of life like Kierkegaard says even if you cannot manage to do it like "knight of faith" does in such a natural way. (For more from Kierkegaard on this subject, check out Fear and Tremble.)

Love is a glimpse to the order of universe for human beings. To be able to love is an ontological decision without the deciding subject.

Finally, I want to say that love is THE will to grasp the world as it is.

Love is the real philosophy...