The old mind in the box stated as Keats billiard ball or Wittgenstein's beetle or the Man in the iron room, called also the lima beam where thinking and being, like one in a coma, cannot be expressed but does exist, where what is known there cannot be known here in the world we call the world, to pose also the question whether we are awake or sleep in either or both.
The Billiard Ball involves Elective affinities, Goethe, Benjamin- the mind thought and Klee angel on the wall.
Beetle in a Box §293 of Philosophical Investigations, meaning ‘that thing inside a person’s box’, a ‘private language’ untranslatable and obscure to everyone else, a thought language in which we express to ourselves over and over what we tell to [know] no one else, also conceived as the language of pain assured to exist in all, so that each has the language so in that sense all are language wired, capable, like all children, wired to learn to express but who learn to express only those things licensed by the politburo their authorities allow. All the rest they bury within. The private language outscripts the public.
The Iron House. Lu Xun. "Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?"
Parable of the Lima Bean. Recurs every time someone goes under or comes out of the ether. Take ether as either sleep or anesthetic. We have heard it in convalescent homes with women on stretcher beds around TVs calling out, help me, help me. By which they mean, kill me? I have seen into their cabals over wine when they talk about how to do just that, to die. Was it stop eating, drinking, taking meds? Dehydration being preferred. But the rest of the time the lima bean is silent.
Keats imagines what it would be like to feel himself a ball identity. The billiard ball does not direct its own ends; it is acted upon. Aggregate conjectures of disjointed parts come together beyond even Keats’ negative capability of holding in the mind, without judging, two contradictory truths. Nobody should think that such concepts are the result of hard work and investigation. Negative Capability is a throw-off by Keats in a letter that later became celebrated by many books of the critics seeking reputations. It’s like his billiard ball which didn’t quite make the cut. Critics don’t get the feelings of the billiard, but no matter. There are twos of many subjects, false and true, sacred and otherwise, two Jacobs, two Israels, dare we say, two Americas? But there is only one billiard ball, take it or leave it.
So to propose a ms. there that cannot be translated or identified here, but exists and is seen and studied nights in contemplation of it there, just on this side of that blink of an eye it cannot be stated or recalled. It won't come over. Red rover, red rover come over, come, come over the mind calls from, to, the lima bean in sleep so called. When in beta life, like Elizbeth Regina at the end she stood, sat motionless two weeks. We have others in the wards and homes and relate to them as if awake, even if they never do fulfill our desire to find them, free them, to bring them back which sometimes may occur. Where were you then?
To retrieve this mind therefore propose it washes your feet. Feel
the grit beneath, to borrow from Sjon Larsson, or any of those five in Neon Garden 7 as Rubino del Sur, Sjon Larsson, AE Reiff, Jon Rousseau, Augusto Todoele.
Sjón Larsson To Tell the Truth rev.
Over the city organic structures translate roots from invisible plants above.
Whoever stands on a flat roof surveying the broken skin of bare scuppers, where water pools and cracks and the drips know a kind of beach, with a flat roof there is nowhere to fall. Wash the roof, patch, coat again elastomeric paint, start to finish up, down the ladder without knee operations, workouts or stretches, why don’t they build a better pitch?
I slipped on the silt from runoff some days after this and took a fall in the driving rain, fell on the right hip. I don’t feel the fall itself. I felt the landing. The heel slipped and I ended up in the water wet. Another time I fell against a rock with a chain saw idling in my hand, so know there is a disconnect in the fall from the moment it starts from the moment it comes awake at the end. The fall is a fulcrum where the body is spun, lifted to another direction so that where the head was first pointing is reversed and to the side. This completes a neat 180 degree turn in the air and lands with what it was on top. All this of course is a metaphor for our lives and acts. I have done this consummately so one can say that if a city were to be imagined to be conscious as it lays there like me in a heap of itself, it has fallen so, but first feels embarrassed. I hope nobody saw that, the city, history say, looking around for spectators. When the shock wears off it dusts itself off and proceeds on its way, not knowing how bad it's hurt. This adrenalin in the body politic of a city or state of shock and awe, ready or not they said, has a gender too. We can call it a privilege to be in one of these. Please add your own experience here.
In these rises and falls the present is shadowed, is ghostly and airy with sightings of the future which arrives dressed with what we think we know, since it is costumed in the old. In this way the future that walks through the past leaves a trail. We know and feel the present but it is gone fast. We forget our memory of the present and by then it is the past. If you catch the future walking on a roof, on a slab, in the grain of tree cuts, these seem concrete events, decisions and timings, predated and postdated to the next keeping.
In the next view of past and future I stand in a dream river meandering pleasantly along, then above it on a walk when it begins to increase and course large swales of current around the bend immediately above. Great muscular torrents, clean and deep seem to endanger my position so I move up the swale and cross to a stair where I live and go up. This river map of sounds and sights disappears when I open my eyes. I see the images shake and disappear, not seeing the world. Connected thought just below this surface is heard but not heard, especially when I slip up. It is therefore lost, unremembered, unless I hear and document. This requires me to be honest, but to be honest I am not.
I sit reading aloud to myself. The first page has twenty drafts that hide the spirit of the original first-person right voice. Once I hear, I go on from one language to another, thought to language, but the text only exists after it is made. It could have another form with a different prompt, but this version that exists cannot be that other, even if denied.
Whatever thought is any thing touchy, let it go. Forget about perception, forget about other worlds. We want other worlds to save. Throw a bone. Get the Tractatus Preface out again, but we are now well north of Wittgenstein’s cabin in Skjolden.
The very thing we have been advised not to say, that all the facts are not known, and the case is obscure, which we puzzle and conject, where any one can either be the case or not the case, and everything else remains the same, this which we should not say, we say, but in terms that do not show what we mean. What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. In order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit [but don’t talk about it] (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
II. It’s not good enough anymore to allow the unsayable to go unsaid. So we have to catch it unawares and bring it back to ourselves. Wittgenstein free of infirmity would say so, although his infirmities were the source of his insight.
What lies on the other side of language is thought that cannot be put into words, per se. To catch the invisible in a net we bait it with sound, and that may be nonsense. We have another way of knowing too, where the present is connected t things that happen at the same time as it. They mutually interpret aspects of each other, in actions not words. This leaves causation to be inferred, from the moment of greatest awareness. In these events the paradox of our life begins. Hence the saying goes we have a thing but not know it, and try to tease it out like a rhyme itself formless. Formless Shapes like this can take a form of tree whose cracked skin, stout limb speaks of growth. A sapling becomes that. The circulation of these events drives me to do what I don't know, while I think I am doing something else, and for different reasons too.
In cave psychologies that gophers apply the entrance is covered with a thin layer of hard earth on top but loose soil further down. Further down in the awareness means as if stone letters were written in shale below creeks, and under factories, but our identity is held on only by wax, and the letters come off. So we have seen many things, but paid no attention. Our ears have been open, but hear nothing, even hear something else. But at the same time reversals of these dimensions can go from sound to letter, as if in the timpani of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony I pick up a phrase, invert it, splice it, reverse it at will, so that the words at the beginning follow a drum which sounds out, WHO MADE THE DECISION, BOOMAY DECISION, ON, ON which becomes a word with a BOOM echoing ON, ON.
I started out on this planet myself you might say sarcastically, had no more idea of what it was than a state of forgetfulness. By means of a finger to illustrate, is that a finger or not a finger? Much of such narrative suggest foibles on the edge of the prophetic. So if I manage these multiple paradoxes and construe them, I am like an amphibian constantly dealing with both land and sea. This stretch of broken boundaries fails to recognize what we can not see the way ocean shapes all utterance. The opposites of fire and water in air, male / female undivided, lips light and dark have no middle state. These opposites inhabit a cubicle of door where nothing is heard except we find ourselves in the other.
Of course the amphibian can swim so a colonist to this state at home on land is less so at sea. A clam, admirable for its failure to open, nourishes opposites it frets between. Colonists see only what they ask for. What they don’t ask is the reason for sea legs and hard coats with soft viscera beneath. More opposites. These beings are not diamond spirit, no. As if to hide the hidden too big to see up close, escaped shadows of light, Colonists ride the back of these torrents in the singing rhythm and image of the word, that tells them, or not, who they are.
When the terrain that lives in sea and air and land and then itself penetrates to the core, these high figures are like fires off the Roman Camp at Ynys Môn, where snowy owls hang like low mist of mountain above flint middens, and all soldiers fall beneath the bracken who have to live among the furrows where they translate to bird song when the man dissolves. Elk and deer speech voices may be called mental speech through the mouthpiece of this dictation. Mind you there is no memory extant, no record transfiguring the originary unspeakable, failed to become language. The voice of all that forged the anvil with bear, bird, and cat philosophers write themselves.
Hence we must say we don't conceive it, but translate it and write down to capture the image of the vision. Like a piano of space and time in a playful-weary and almost-spoken tone, whatever that might be, inferred in words, the difference makes us able to survive.
Don’t take the literal people symbolically who dress up as colonists the way adjectives pile up, or nouns on the table in the foyer, or smart talk on the rug. That is, ambiance, not symbol, the cabinets of liqueur that keep the surface.
To recognize the ineffable turned to some form or other in the flap of a tongue moving back and forth, not just in birth and death, but in the accident of contradiction after the lightning phrase that begot the fire tries to be caught, all that matters is that after alternatives that would have been, the shape of a head, a cross, a tree, stems of flowers of internal shapes, there is language to describe the aspirant flight of a world to live in pure praise.
The writing over writing where parchment in such short supply, bleached or not, is a palimpsest, overwritten in a different ink. This "new writing," maybe lists prosaic things over top of ancient texts and obscures old precepts, resonant with the past. If you scrape off the lists and see what's beneath it will retell the centuries over. This is the way a man speaks to himself so that we at all points can consider him an archaeological strata underlying and surrounding all that is said. Everything built on top of everything else, the word coats worn give away what transfers by your will to extend. You're going to say you've been praying all these years to extend.
I am a resident of Norway North above the 65th parallel, called the Davvi-Norga, where plumb the arctic birch for Chaga tradition among the Sami. I publish this statement in case it is my last before cut off by the powers of quarantine spreading north, rumored in the air conditioning ducts, but in my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life. This is written in my own hand which I Sjón Larsson bequeath.
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