[ a philosophical act in three gestures ]

- Day One -

Storms become quiet. The many-faceted intersecting tensions of one moment, then another, slacken. Night opens onto an atemporal expanse without repetitions, clean of suppositions.

Today, we spoke of mortality and human defiance. We spoke of denial’s strong and necessary foundation of knowledge. It was asked whether a human ‘purpose’ could be located or unveiled that would not be an attempt to compensate for the suppositions which make up our mortal knowledge, ‘essentially’ our knowledge of mortality, as such.

Words fail in such a task. The question, I think, perhaps in the healthiest way (moment) possible, got away from us. But its many generosities remained.

Now, I am faced with a question of priorities, a basic, originary procedural question: how readily should ongoing priorities become disrupted by conditions of the moment? It’s a long drive tomorrow; I’m close to knowing I will not make the drive.

Pennsylvania would become an extension of my neglected unconscious (could it be that the unconscious is simply a ‘matter’ of neglect?). I would be alone, on a desolate road, driving ever deeper toward the center of myself. One questions what such a movement (effort) would bring (produce). Satisfaction? Continuity? Which of the lurking myths? It has been a long wait. There will be grandiose concentrations of personality there. I could get involved in insurrections against answering, achieve brave satori, enact breakthrough perceptions.

An entire life should be altered by such events (movements, efforts). But I might do better to honestly explore my own inner reaches, instead of the pale metaphor of a journey to the center of old Penn’s Woods.

I do not have the option to travel with a companion, because for many reasons (due to many conjunctions of moments, momentary lapses) I have elected an intensely solitary ‘structure’ in which to dwell.

‘Solitary’, I say, because in it there is implicit the ongoing desire to be centered, aware, in myself. But I am not entirely alone, just averse to my old habits of rampant connectivity, and even the solitude can be seen through.

Even the solitude is a veil. The honesty inherent in any incidence of seeing is something other than solitude itself. It is not fully ‘will’; nor is it fully ‘summons’; nevertheless, in perceiving coherently, honestly, one is never alone, but with...

Within...

- Day Two -

Today marks half a century plus half a decade since the day the woman who bore me was born. It is a day for gratitudes, plural, and for the self-examination of the depth and root-structure of gratitudes.

If I were to set off in search of the word, or of a new taint in which to dress the word, it could very well stem from a desire to avoid the awesome task of ‘saying’ the word, thereby recognizing its origins, and relativities which might behave toward me like debts.

Of course, these considerations still skirt any attempt at saying the ‘truth’ about priorities, about loyalties. These ink-patterns fan out to in-form an elaborate screen through which to observe my favorite things... instances... selfhoods.

And no matter. No matter the massively perjuring tendency of reason. Each action will resist its own disappearance by pushing-out its surroundings. These will be called ‘effects’, and the notion of ‘ends’ and ‘beginnings’ will be re-asserted.

A re-assertion of barriers in the ‘aporia’, the stopping-point that is the very demonstration of their absence, via compulsive interaction. Talkative vacuous barriers. Impossibility. Here-ness.

I seek to illustrate a particular here-ness, a locality-plus-essence, because it seems to me it would prove me, by seeming... and yet conversely, this locality-plus-essence calls me to the image-ing because I would prove it, by seeming.

Every ‘action’, every evidencing of ‘agency’, every occurrence uttering itself into the fabric of our hopeful ‘is’ (is [is]), poses (structures) an infinity of diverging questions, and in the space of these interrogations of what ‘is’, what was not, becomes.

The ‘ultimate goal’ can only be an ‘absolute’. This almost seems to indicate an empassioned attempt at achieving the much-sought menacingly-slippery repetition, by cloak and dagger.

The ultimate proof by the ultimate perjuring. A deliberate redundancy. A boot-print on the Moon. A successful forgery, sequestered now against the contaminating influence of the senses. Moonrise. Everything begins with a stillness.

- Day Three -

I would like to begin by ‘giving’ you my name. Which is to say, by ‘saying’ it. But, I cannot in good conscience participate in such a beginning (or re-commencement), because it would merely bestow on you the endless task which all of philosophy and literature cannot manage, and that would be to ask and to answer the question of whether my name was my own, whether it issued from elsewhere, or whether it is an outright lie.

So I ask myself... I offer the weighty gift of the name, to myself, within myself, and I ask of myself the endless task... and within the task, there comes upon me the query, but aren’t you begging this quest(ion) [of the following and unearthing of the name] simply by standing there, your face imposingly making a study of my own?

Does not your very natural scrutiny of what seems ‘other’ immediately confer upon me the swelling of an urge to offer my name, regardless of the eternity you might subsequently incur?

This could be. This could be the constant summons... that sensation that I am compelled by an everywhere-written/ everywhere-unwritten request to behold, to be still, to begin... which is arguably all the sublime and tawdry extent of Being itself (but Being, that’s yet another name, another crystalline forgery awaiting trial), existing by waiting.

This could be fantasia. A pattern of pretty logics playing on one another like melodious spurs of mercury, free-floating. In night air. I confess: I have not traveled; I chose the journey inward, the removal of spatial concerns. Immersion. In ‘open’ (sun-drenched, hydrogen-colored consciousness of) air. In the nothings underscoring air, priveleging it among the browbeaters. Those that want answers, regardless of fact, regardless of evidentiary protocol.

And I await a shimmer on my brow, a justification both comprehensible and nourishing. In wanting to atone for past incomprehension, in the midst of this struggle, one comes to vision, and one must recognize where one has trespassed into half-constructed banquet-halls, and how one used those unfinished experiences to found a dis-order of remembering.

All of this raises the question of success. We have a perjuring at center, a forgery for a cloak, a fantasia for a dagger.

What do all forgeries force us to consider? The extent of our knowledge, how much trust we should invest in our senses. What do we really know? Is there aretê, a virtuous excellence?

If all forgeries aspire to verisimilitude, if the perfect forgery is perfectly truthful, then where is the truth itself? The common truth? Facticity? This face that I witness approaching? The way she loved, with healthy, happy eyes? The sadness on which we two were chronically adrift?

If the perfect forgery is as distant as the ‘whole truth’, then are we anything but an accretion of (possibly polite, or precise, or generous) forgeries?

And yet, I cannot say this without negating it... the assertion of forgery (admission of guilt? opportune confession?) is also an act of perjuring (perjuring my existence against itself, against its own ethereal harkening)... the forgery is itself true.

And so, there is no excuse! I had no reason for denying myself the drive, to that cathedral woodland fold, where truth was meant to run like water through an interrogative oracle... no reason, except to deny the drive itself my participation. I acted freely, wanting to be larger than that which I had been awaiting. It is here, at this meditative impasse that one must learn to stop waiting for that which one has freely chosen not to witness.

This, it would appear, we are always struggling to learn, in order to wash our inner life of so many incomplete engagements.

We are trapped, awaiting news. (Existing by the slimly breached, slightly unavoidable window offered by the impossible: to be false and be true at once...)

So I sign my name, according to tradition, at the end of an exertion, as a confession that, against and from and by way of the impossible, I tried...

To unravel the wait, to some better end, to move toward the moment of fullness as emptiness, giving as knowledge beyond ‘knowing’...

Yours,
Pseudo-Manuel

 

 

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

SUSTENANCE BY PERJURING
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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