Buber attempted to plot the “image of perfect space” as one composed of lines that allow no fixed definition. The zone between the individual and the collective is constantly recalibrated according to the free creativity of its members. “The relationship between centralism and decentralization is a problem which cannot be approached in principle, but only with great spiritual tact, with constant and tireless weighing and measuring of the right proportion between them.” This socially patterned utopia was based on a constant “drawing and redrawing the lines of demarcation.”
Is the drawing and redrawing of these spatial relations between individual and collective to be understood as variances in role playing? What is the difference between free creativity and creativity? Does this imply that creativity that is not free is bounded creativity? Given the finitude of the human experience of time and space, isn’t all creativity bounded in some sense? Is free creativity, as Buber defines it, really just politically-free, governmentally-free, and/or economically-free? These are questions to ask as one reads Buber.
Then again, you could just run in circles in your living room throwing your hands in the air whenever you scream out, “Chickaw, Chickaw!” That might work out just as well for you. I mean, does it really matter whether you figure out that Buber’s concept of revelation is remarkably similar to Heidegger’s concept of revealing? I won’t answer that question for you, but my intent in asking is not rhetorical.
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Bigfoot visits Dracula. Dionysus comes home from a three-week drunk. Wonder Woman and Athena kidnap a Jedi. Superman, not in costume, shoves a red hot curling iron up his ass at a circus sideshow and laughs at the audience. Three werewolves escape from a dog pound. There’s no happy ending here.
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I have recurring dreams. Several. Many. Innumerable. I forget that I have them. I forget that they are recurring while I’m having them unless, occasionally, I remember that I have recurring dreams while one is occurring. That rarely happens in the dreams, though. I remember after waking or at the moment the dream becomes waking life while I claw to the dream in futility.
I always wake whenever I realize I’m having a recurring dream. It’s possible, though, that I have realizations within the dream without remembering those realizations upon waking. the latter is inconsequential in relation to consciousness, though.
I like all of my recurring dreams. None of them are unpleasant. They are curious, mysterious, and creative. Each follows a pattern too complex for me to map or define. However, they have parameters.
That’s boring, though. It might not even be true within the dreams. I might just think that when I’m awake. But I’m never sure, in the dream, whether I’m thinking that or dreaming it or creating it as a reality. There might not be a difference between the three. Some call this psychosis.
The dreams certainly fit into descriptions that others label psychosis. But for me they are not psychosis because they do not fit the concept of a “loss of reality: which psychosis, by definition, requires. Plus, these conditions or processes occur in dreams rather than waking life. Well, not always, but mostly. Now. Hasn’t always been the case.
The dream I had last night—a dream that lingers after I wake which often makes me wonder if I’m ever awake or, conversely, if I’m ever dreaming—was what I long ago named “The Malleable Dream.” I could give you a description, but that would be exhausting for me as well as a distortion of the experience. Instead, I’ll provide you with a snippet of the dream as I now remember the experience of it.
The caveat is that it never feels like a dream in the way that other dreams feel like dreams. For me. I have no idea what dreams are like for you or whether we even mean the same thing when using the label “dreams.” I have my doubts. And, thus, some doubt my sanity.
Meanwhile, I doubt sanity means anything at all whereas most others seem to think it has a meaning of significance. But the descriptions, paltry as they are when conversing with anyone who uses terms such as sanity, insanity, psychosis, and the lot, are so flat and two dimensional if not ethereally simplistic and sophomoric that I’m certain that what is being described has nothing to do with what I experience, dreaming or not … or dreaming and not.
The dream I had tonight occurred between 10 PM and 11 PM on Friday night, January 5, 2016. Approximately. I was surprised by this when I awoke and stumbled further out of the dream, resuming the use of clocks, digital and analog, as time measures rather than the experience of being as passage. I was surprised only an hour had gone by. I was sure I had slept not only through the night and through the following day. The latter duration seemed more adequate given the fullness and diversity of experiences I’d had. The dream covered a large geographical area, including jump cuts to places not contiguously connected.
But what occurred through dream occurred in about an hour of waking time. It might just be that what is considered waking consciousness of time passing is distorted. It’s likely. As far as it seems to me.
Waking time is trapped by clocks or the arc of the sun across a sky, trapped by a dulled and limited awareness of the fullness of moments when maintaining a focus on so few sensations and thoughts, much too often in a linear, chronological sequence.
Time in dreams? I do not know how to measure it. I’m not sure it can be measured in anything approximating time as it is understood or experienced while awake. As far as most of my experiences of being awake inform me. Though not all of my waking experiences.
Some have occasionally objected to my occasional waking experiences of what I can’t really call time but they insist is time. I’m told that the experiences through waking time that, for me, more closely resemble time as I experience through dreams are experiences of “psychosis.” I’ve read the definitions and diagnoses of psychosis from many different psychiatric and psychological sources. At best, they seem to be lazy categorizations of experiences that cannot be classified, categorized, or compartmentalized linguistically.
The fluidity of such waking experiences begs for a more respectful, creative, engaged, complex, and intelligent explanation. The experiences as they are laugh at such descriptions and explanations. They understand them as a academic mathematician might understand first-grade arithmetic; they are but a tiny subset of the experience of time just as basic arithmetic is a fragment of mathematics.
It’s not as if those waking experiences are even the mathematical equivalent of Euler’s Identity, in both it’s elegance and simplicity, which still serves as but one gateway into the unquantifiable—or at least ongoing—beauty and terror of being and experience that are not conducive to either addition or subtraction.
One way to say this is that these words are different than they seem. To interpret through linearity or through the contiguity of sentences is to deny oneself a fuller experience, the beginnings of an experience that may result in a fruition of engorged and ripened understanding. What is meant within a sentence is not what is meant between sentences and certainly not between sentences separated by paragraphs—and there are meanings between sentences separated by paragraphs.
We could fault language, the English language, but that is only if I submit to its grammar and rules at all times. I shan’t. I won’t. I haven’t. The work I am doing is nothing compared to the work you need to do to fathom what I am writing. I cannot make it easier for you because there is nothing easy about understanding experiences I’ve had in dreams and waking life through words I’m using to create something that is more like a linguistic equation rather than a description, explanation, or story.
Imagine starting with E=mc2 and trying to translate that code into an experience of the physics it attempts to represent? Beginning with a conception and trying to decipher its potential realities through understanding the conception is … describe snow to someone who has never experienced it either personally through physical experience or through video evidence. Have fun.
You may be thinking as you are reading, “When will he get to the dream?” But this is the dream. Not the totality of it, but an integral truth within it if not a truth encapsulating it. This is a handful of pebbles dropped into a fish bowl buried in a beach of pebbles with no distinguishable markers of where it is located within the totality of the beach which may be of any size in any location on any planet at any moment. It’s not static or finite; it may be shifting through the tides or reshaped by winds and rain. It might not even be accessible through analogy which might make it all but inaccessible to narrative thought. Which means I’m misleading you rather than helping you understand.
You might then say “dada!” and I wouldn’t argue. This, though, is not yet dada. It is an antecedent to the necessary. Once it becomes unnecessary then dada may become, but only through its own necessary unnecessariness. But necessity itself might choose not to be involved. It’s likely.
Experiences such as these which have not yet been given word cannot reconcile with necessity or even with the negated concept of the unnecessary. But it is important that it is not the experiences that deny necessity rather than necessity which denies involvement.
This is important only for the experiences. Necessity finds this entirely unimportant. Which is its prerogative and, frankly, the experiences are grateful that they are unnecessary which ultimately frees them from responsibility as a means to become play; in essence, they are so unrelated to responsibility that even the term “amoral” would be absurd as a reference.
Being unrelated to morality, the experiences are liberated in such a way that they become more than what morality and immorality and even amorality could allow. Morality, immorality, and amorality could be swallowed by the experiences, tasted, and spit out, but never could they be swallowed, ingested, and shat from the ass of experience. These experiences have no ass. In fact, they have no digestive tract. Consumption is a nothingness for these experiences, but not a conceptual nothingness. The experiences are; consumption is not.
These experiences, dreaming and sometimes waking, cannot be defined by what they are not. They are secluded from nothing even as they embrace absurdity. After all, absurdity is and nothingness isn’t. We refer to irrationality because we mean something by it and if that something exists it necessarily has meaning merely by existing. We wouldn’t bother with it at all if it didn’t exist.
And yet, these dreams, whatever it is they are, are unnecessary even though they are. They contain meaning as well. But their purpose is not meaningfulness and their unnecessariness is moral rather than existent. But that’s only true because they have no purpose.
Again with the negations. They necessarily must exist because they exist. But that’s clumsy, too. They exist because they exist. But if I write only “They exist” you may accidentally wonder why and I can assure you there is no a priori reason for their existence which is why I state that “They exist because they exist.”
That satisfies your unspoken but ever-present need for causal explanation. You could exclaim, “Ah, they are! I need not causation! I am free of causation. Causation ceases! Causation never was!” And then, “Why am I referring to that which isn’t and thus creating it as something that is through the application of negation?”
I state only that it’s not your fault. Language has trapped us this way as negation only exists (perceptually) through language. It may exist independently of language, but in that case we couldn’t use the concepts of nothingness or negation to point at the existence of nonexistence. Hmmm. No, negation and nothingness are always conceptual.
However, language and conception exist so it is fair to say that negation exists, necessity exists, causation exists, responsibility exists, and morality exists. I could say that those are unnatural or artificial existences, but that would only be true if language and conception were unnatural. They occur so they must be natural in some fashion, but maybe that is because I equate the concept of “existence” with the concept of “natural.” So, forget “natural.” Language and conception exist.
These dreams, though, defy conventions of language and conception. That is not to say they do not incorporate them. They do. But they use language and conception in inexplicable ways which seems to defy the rules of language and conception. They somehow break those rules while still maintaining the rules as something akin to guidelines that may be heeded or may be ignored, rejected, shat upon, juggled, tossed on the ground, ground out like a cigarette, or any manner of other types of interaction.
The languages and conceptions of dreams are unbound. They are created in these dreams, waking or not. The dreams, the experiences I label dreams in this case, are the creators, the sources, and yet not linear or causal. Languages and conceptions are created into being or, perhaps, become being.
No, that’s not right. They occur. My application of words continuously undergo refinement as a means to clarify rather than muddle. If I bear responsibility for this expression of experiences that have no relation to responsibility, it is perhaps because language cannot escape responsibility even if the waking and sleeping dreams are occurrences of escape from responsibility.
In other words, to speak of what has no responsibility creates responsibility. To speak, to write, to express, those are acts shaped into responsibilities. The experiences which cannot come into existence through language are liberations. The languages and conceptions attempting (and failing) to recreate experiences are beholden to responsibility as sharing is an act of ethics.
I may proclaim language and conception to be other than ethical, but if I express that to you or anyone else then I no longer own the ideas conveyed. You have received them and you can say, “No!” or “How dare you?” or “#MeToo” and I’ll sigh and think, “Why the fuck did I open my fucking mouth?”
It is difficult to predicate without causation. I am trapping myself. I don’t believe the latter. And yet, I know it’s true because I have experienced the latter. And yet, I have also experienced other than the latter. So maybe the responsibility of expression is only a part-time job and never works nights or weekends.
Dada, the unnecessary necessity, I implore you! Thus, I abandon responsibility after having allowed it to creep through this writing. To witness the occurrence of dada where and when what-is occurs independent of what it is when it hasn’t deluded itself into believing it is being controlled by what it controls, responsibility is ridiculed as a practical joke soliciting laughter without charging a dime.
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Kant’s categorical imperative obliges persons to consider persons as ends-in-themselves rather than means-to-an-end. His conception of ethics and aesthetics resonated with Buber’s notion that phenomena is always a gateway to things-in-themselves just as the noumenal can only be encountered in and by way of concrete phenomena. Buber managed to meld Kantian metaphysical and ethical conceptions into an immediate relation with things-as-they-appear (perception) and their representation that resonated with his discovery of Nietzsche’s conception of the immediacy of reality. How did a person with a name like Buber write anything other than fairy tales? The Dionysian primacy of life in its particularity, immediacy, and individuality and the Apollonian world of form, measure, and abstraction were conceived as interdependent by Buber. Both the Dionysian and the Apollonian are constitutive of human experience through the coloration of interactions with the Other in nature, with humans, and with the Divine Thou.
The notion that time and space are pure forms of perception underlies all of this thought. Thus, phenomena are things-as-they-appear. This makes persons, through perceptions, the center of the universe. Can theology replace stop signs? At best, I can say that “how humans perceive is human.” Besides, there are so many different conceptions and perceptions of time and space that standardized definitions, descriptions, and explanations create innumerable opportunities to misinterpret while believing we understand one another. Maybe good is a hairy foot. This leads to feelings of betrayal, distrust, confusion, anger, and hatred while also resulting in feelings of togetherness, trust, understanding, joy, and love.
But they are feelings. Feelings are personal experiences rather than shared experiences. Your feeling of understanding and connection related to our interactions may occur while I feel misunderstood and alienated by the same interactions. “Butthole” is the greatest word in existence. I don’t know why you disagree with me about that.
