Jared Schickling to me
12/6/09
Hey Chuck,
Sorry I've been so out of it lately. It's that time of year and since i've been writing my brains out, learning a little what beckett means the siege in the room, all the expected things piling up, some more facts to take care of, so that when i'm not writing my work i've been switching to autopilot and thus unfit for cluttering your inbox. plus XXXXXX coming wednesday for the first time is the expected things to complete two weeks in advance. one unfortunate, i'm completely divorced from XXXXX and XXX -- not technically, but literally, and i'm happy that everyone's seemingly happy with the arrangement. if i could stay on as sporadic partaker, that'd work. the other night i gave a reading, our tri-annual reading. crowd of about 200. without blowing my own horn -- i've seen a recording, i don't know what they're talking about -- it seems to have been a success. so i'm calm today. our third snow.
but i wanted to send you this keats i'm reading. seems a little closer to home, sort of end-stage romanticism proper, keats an expressed atheist, as i read it, which seems only in the way blake was an atheist, not atheism, verb not noun (but a modifier)
To G. and G. Keats, 1819
"I have been reading lately two very different books Robertson's America and Voltaire's Siecle De Louis xiv It is like walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the great-little Monarch. In How lamentable a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where Man might seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontamination of civilisation; and especially from their being as it were estranged from the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries--and thereby more immediately under the Protection of Providence--even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad; or even worse than Bailiffs, Debts and Poverties of civilised Life--The whole appears to resolve into this--that Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts--at each stage, at each accent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its Stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy--I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme--but what must it end in?--Death--and who could in such a case bear with death--the whole troubles of life which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise--But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility--the nature of the world will not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself--Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes--Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness--The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature and no further--"
Jared Schickling to me
12/7/09
MIT Uses Social Networking to Win [DARPA-sponsored] High-Tech Scavenger Hunt
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/8/09
It's always stunning to me how blatantly stupid smart people can be, especially if they're getting paid. Not one of these MIT scientists or associates even considered where the money was coming from and how the research would be used by the entity funding it. The level of stupidity is nauseating. And these are "smart" people. Yesterday I read the literacy rate in Afghanistan is under 10 percent. If that's true, what's really possible there? It's all a fucking sham and the "educated" function as Kool-Aid engineers, nothing else. The comments at the end are really disturbing, at least the two that were there when I read this.
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/8/09
Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” seems the very essence of nihilism, or the belief in no-thing-ness, only the mental essence of something referred to as “existence.” The void, however, is not meaningless, the black hole of death does not usurp the spirit, it does not snuff out awareness…though it indeed does try to do these things, it actually creates our shared “event horizon.” The void is Wile E. Coyote, the sometimes comical sword of Damocles subverting our very situation at every moment…until “we” as someone inevitably get up and walk away, full from our meal…We’re not dead yet…Shit doesn’t always happen, but it will. The limit my imagination may arrive at seems recursive to the imagined limits of the things it imagines, and can go no further…Perfection is irrelevant as a conscious aim because it’s beyond imagination, nothing anyone can imagine is perfect, which is to say universal and standard and unending…Who the fuck wants that anyway?...The words of any language will correspond with the words of that language only…and if everyone’s language is like a fingerprint—experienced as touch, formed from the inside-out—no word I use will correspond with any word you use absolutely…it’s a leap of faith on our part that we both see the same black letters on white background…and we must at least agree there’s a consistency of pattern allowing for the agreement of terms…but what if....every time we enter into the illusion we share something in common we become neo-Adams and new-Eve’s re-entering the imaginary Eden of our faith-based mutual understanding, the closest thing we can agree on in terms of “happiness?” Until death do us part heightens the illusion and heightens the happiness…for “us”…and so fucking what, actually? But, then again, why the fuck not? Is one alternative better than another? Says who? Says what? Isn’t there more than one alternative, one alternative or other person actually speaking themselves? For starters, I don’t think it necessarily takes a Socrates to have the kind of conversation that can create a thrilling enough illusion of shared meaning to call it happiness. Anyone with a gift of gab, sex appeal, money, good food, weed, anything you want…can be a Socrates. Socrates is Santa Claus, knowing who’s naughty and nice [and you are always nice], etc., and at some point we gotta kill him because he’s corrupting our chirren, and killing him like killing the Buddha is a gateway to enlightenment and presumably greater happiness, or higher dimension thereof…
The inner chaos of anyone worthy of happiness gives birth to dancing stars…Who will find the limits of their imagination? Those who are grief-stricken and truly happy for it? Who’s worthy of happiness? Consider this from William Blake’s notes written on the pages of the Four Zoas:
Christ’s Crucifix shall be made an excuse for Executing Criminals.
Till thou dost injure the distrest
Thou shalt never have peace within thy breast.
The Christian Religion teaches that No Man is Indifferent to you, but that every one is Either your friend or your enemy; he must necessarily be the one or the other, And that he will be equally profitable both ways if you treat him as he deserves.
Unorganiz’d Innocence: An Impossibility.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with [uncultivated, Chuck presumes] Ignorance.
I would suggest that, echoing Blake, those who innocently cultivate the proper Ignorance, treating themselves and others as they actually deserve, heaping further injury upon the sources of pain, the undeserving speakers of happy talk who strive after happiness, who will always have a use for the term “happy” in their lexicon, are truly happy because they need not insist on their being happy anymore than they would insist on being unhappy. Truly happy people need not speak of happiness, much less bother pursuing it. A country that idealizes the “pursuit of happiness” is informed by ideologies of profound sadness, where a “negro”* can be counted 3/5 human…Those who pursue happiness are pathetic; therefore, the American is a pathetic ideal.
Bottom line: If you’re happy you deserve it clap your hands…
*“Negro” has an evolving etymology…in the sixties feminist said woman was the new nigger… “negro” today might mean all poor people, everyone middle class and under, all organic as opposed to corporate “human beings.” The ideal human is inhuman, or incorporate…a “good corporate citizen.”
Jared Schickling to me
12/8/09
I think you misread Keats's use of "happy" -- and that, replace Socrates with Beckett -- but that's ok. And I think too what you say about death must only apply to the living. "Whereof...thereof one must be silent." Everything said about or to death has lived on this side of it. If it's a void, it is so as its (our) concept, but seems in point of fact more an all-extensive barrier as any life would be. One can't adequately mean death while living.
I've been thinking through the movement through romanticism through modernism through postmodernism. And I don't see much difference at heart -- the difference is in the treatment of terms -- which accounts then for the differing poem. Romantic imagination = perception squaring off with cognition, the use of one's medium and the perceived world to speak/understand a self within that world. Its limit to know one's limit. The modern and postmodern imagination inhabits the same thing, asks the same question -- perception squaring off with cognition -- but here the cognitive side of the argument turns more purely constructed, social, *cultural,* economic, political etc. Increasingly in time, the cognitive takes center-stage, and correspondingly, the "without" replaces the "within," as the question is necessarily historicized/feminized/economized etc. "this" becoming "that" -- very different from "that" becoming "this." The purely former seems to me as error-prone as the purely latter romantic, ideal, individual transcendental (note the irony -- "that" becoming "this"). I mean, I'm a colony? As a desirable aesthetic, or rather, life, philosophy? Whom would that serve? Recognitions never precluded resistances. Emily Dickinson, when asked for a photo from a friend, explained she never had one. The romantic attention, mostly lacking in mirrors, in its best forms was deeply other-oriented, a less bubbly, more severe conception of the I, because it was at liberty to speak of growth and life, not compelled to shrinkage and death. Happiness, here, is as inevitable as you say it is.
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/9/09
Holy shit. You're going to have a lot to say in about 3 to 6 months. That e-mail sounded like one of those blizzard balls, you pickem up and shake them and the snow flies all over inside until it settles. You're really riled up and that's sweet. I didn't misread Keats' use of happy, either. And I didn't replace Socrates with Beckett. Let the snow settle. You're grading too many undergrad moron papers with fun distracting ideas swirling in your head. I'm presuming much, perhaps...but any more than you?
Jared Schickling to me
12/10/09
I'd like to say I've found a lot to say the past few weeks!!!! If not, fuckin A, I'll just burn the manuscript. If nothing else I simply can't help defending this stuff I'm reading and taking to. I think I might live in the 19th century for a while. Mind you, various ideas are of course by now problematic, seen for what they turn out to be, fruit from the tree -- but reading it clues me in to what that means, how also the common reading may or may not be wrong or ignoring certain things, and besides, shit, this stuff is rich, more clearly rich and of depths lacking in most contemporary writing. Adds folds in yr brain. I enjoy the way the ideas happen in the work. Anyway. It'd be like if I started poking and prodding your Beckett -- the other Chuck stands up.
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/10/09
you always have interesting things to say. and lately i sense big things are going on in your mind...the grappling with it is only just beginning. And I agree with you one-hundred percent about the 19th century. When I think what the "average" human mind in America would have contained back then and imagine what it contains now, I see anything but progress [just compare the literacy and penmanship of soldiers' letters home]. Technology has had an inversive effect to its intents. We have less time, less freedom, less well-being. It's not saving but destroying the world. And since you are where you are, I'm hopeful at some point, when you're finally ready to go fucking nuts and get all John Brown and shit, you'll pick up Thoreau. And read all of it. Then start the journals. One of these days I'm going to Walden where they have the mss of his journals in a library and i'm going to study them. The experts I respect most claim this is the true treasure trove of Thoreau's genius. No one I've read truly stands up to the totality of his achievement. Einstein comes to mind, but he became really popular really fast. Thoreau's beyond that because he bears witness to the esoteric in material terms like no one else I've come across. Beckett, Melville, Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, Hawthorne, Kafka, Nabakov, Hesse, Marquez, Borges, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Huxley...the list goes on of people who bear witness to the esoteric in material terms very well. But Thoreau gets the most across, in my opinion. All these folks are better writers than Thoreau, but none have a more transcendent original language that seems other than or beyond human in its function. In other words, one doesn't read Thoreau to find out how a human being should behave so much as how humans actually behave within their cosmic situation. Thoreau isn't self-help or a guide book of any sort. It's an odyssey through life into the recognition that you and I are not fundamentally human, or even fundamentally earthlings, as the stuff we are made of is stardust...The truth is not meant to make human beings feel good. In fact, truth has no intention at all...it insists on nothing, including non-insistence. Of course, Thoreau didn't know that stuff about stardust as a scientific fact, but intuited it as an essential and necessary human reality in light of the big picture as he witnessed it, according to the language he let pass through him...
I'm rambling, but I'm psyched that you're going where you're going.
What do you mean by "It'd be like if I started poking and prodding your Beckett -- the other Chuck stands up."? Sometimes you really stump me.
12/6/09
Hey Chuck,
Sorry I've been so out of it lately. It's that time of year and since i've been writing my brains out, learning a little what beckett means the siege in the room, all the expected things piling up, some more facts to take care of, so that when i'm not writing my work i've been switching to autopilot and thus unfit for cluttering your inbox. plus XXXXXX coming wednesday for the first time is the expected things to complete two weeks in advance. one unfortunate, i'm completely divorced from XXXXX and XXX -- not technically, but literally, and i'm happy that everyone's seemingly happy with the arrangement. if i could stay on as sporadic partaker, that'd work. the other night i gave a reading, our tri-annual reading. crowd of about 200. without blowing my own horn -- i've seen a recording, i don't know what they're talking about -- it seems to have been a success. so i'm calm today. our third snow.
but i wanted to send you this keats i'm reading. seems a little closer to home, sort of end-stage romanticism proper, keats an expressed atheist, as i read it, which seems only in the way blake was an atheist, not atheism, verb not noun (but a modifier)
To G. and G. Keats, 1819
"I have been reading lately two very different books Robertson's America and Voltaire's Siecle De Louis xiv It is like walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the great-little Monarch. In How lamentable a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where Man might seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontamination of civilisation; and especially from their being as it were estranged from the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries--and thereby more immediately under the Protection of Providence--even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad; or even worse than Bailiffs, Debts and Poverties of civilised Life--The whole appears to resolve into this--that Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts--at each stage, at each accent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its Stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy--I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme--but what must it end in?--Death--and who could in such a case bear with death--the whole troubles of life which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise--But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility--the nature of the world will not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself--Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes--Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness--The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature and no further--"
Jared Schickling to me
12/7/09
MIT Uses Social Networking to Win [DARPA-sponsored] High-Tech Scavenger Hunt
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/8/09
It's always stunning to me how blatantly stupid smart people can be, especially if they're getting paid. Not one of these MIT scientists or associates even considered where the money was coming from and how the research would be used by the entity funding it. The level of stupidity is nauseating. And these are "smart" people. Yesterday I read the literacy rate in Afghanistan is under 10 percent. If that's true, what's really possible there? It's all a fucking sham and the "educated" function as Kool-Aid engineers, nothing else. The comments at the end are really disturbing, at least the two that were there when I read this.
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/8/09
Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” seems the very essence of nihilism, or the belief in no-thing-ness, only the mental essence of something referred to as “existence.” The void, however, is not meaningless, the black hole of death does not usurp the spirit, it does not snuff out awareness…though it indeed does try to do these things, it actually creates our shared “event horizon.” The void is Wile E. Coyote, the sometimes comical sword of Damocles subverting our very situation at every moment…until “we” as someone inevitably get up and walk away, full from our meal…We’re not dead yet…Shit doesn’t always happen, but it will. The limit my imagination may arrive at seems recursive to the imagined limits of the things it imagines, and can go no further…Perfection is irrelevant as a conscious aim because it’s beyond imagination, nothing anyone can imagine is perfect, which is to say universal and standard and unending…Who the fuck wants that anyway?...The words of any language will correspond with the words of that language only…and if everyone’s language is like a fingerprint—experienced as touch, formed from the inside-out—no word I use will correspond with any word you use absolutely…it’s a leap of faith on our part that we both see the same black letters on white background…and we must at least agree there’s a consistency of pattern allowing for the agreement of terms…but what if....every time we enter into the illusion we share something in common we become neo-Adams and new-Eve’s re-entering the imaginary Eden of our faith-based mutual understanding, the closest thing we can agree on in terms of “happiness?” Until death do us part heightens the illusion and heightens the happiness…for “us”…and so fucking what, actually? But, then again, why the fuck not? Is one alternative better than another? Says who? Says what? Isn’t there more than one alternative, one alternative or other person actually speaking themselves? For starters, I don’t think it necessarily takes a Socrates to have the kind of conversation that can create a thrilling enough illusion of shared meaning to call it happiness. Anyone with a gift of gab, sex appeal, money, good food, weed, anything you want…can be a Socrates. Socrates is Santa Claus, knowing who’s naughty and nice [and you are always nice], etc., and at some point we gotta kill him because he’s corrupting our chirren, and killing him like killing the Buddha is a gateway to enlightenment and presumably greater happiness, or higher dimension thereof…
The inner chaos of anyone worthy of happiness gives birth to dancing stars…Who will find the limits of their imagination? Those who are grief-stricken and truly happy for it? Who’s worthy of happiness? Consider this from William Blake’s notes written on the pages of the Four Zoas:
Christ’s Crucifix shall be made an excuse for Executing Criminals.
Till thou dost injure the distrest
Thou shalt never have peace within thy breast.
The Christian Religion teaches that No Man is Indifferent to you, but that every one is Either your friend or your enemy; he must necessarily be the one or the other, And that he will be equally profitable both ways if you treat him as he deserves.
Unorganiz’d Innocence: An Impossibility.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with [uncultivated, Chuck presumes] Ignorance.
I would suggest that, echoing Blake, those who innocently cultivate the proper Ignorance, treating themselves and others as they actually deserve, heaping further injury upon the sources of pain, the undeserving speakers of happy talk who strive after happiness, who will always have a use for the term “happy” in their lexicon, are truly happy because they need not insist on their being happy anymore than they would insist on being unhappy. Truly happy people need not speak of happiness, much less bother pursuing it. A country that idealizes the “pursuit of happiness” is informed by ideologies of profound sadness, where a “negro”* can be counted 3/5 human…Those who pursue happiness are pathetic; therefore, the American is a pathetic ideal.
Bottom line: If you’re happy you deserve it clap your hands…
*“Negro” has an evolving etymology…in the sixties feminist said woman was the new nigger… “negro” today might mean all poor people, everyone middle class and under, all organic as opposed to corporate “human beings.” The ideal human is inhuman, or incorporate…a “good corporate citizen.”
Jared Schickling to me
12/8/09
I think you misread Keats's use of "happy" -- and that, replace Socrates with Beckett -- but that's ok. And I think too what you say about death must only apply to the living. "Whereof...thereof one must be silent." Everything said about or to death has lived on this side of it. If it's a void, it is so as its (our) concept, but seems in point of fact more an all-extensive barrier as any life would be. One can't adequately mean death while living.
I've been thinking through the movement through romanticism through modernism through postmodernism. And I don't see much difference at heart -- the difference is in the treatment of terms -- which accounts then for the differing poem. Romantic imagination = perception squaring off with cognition, the use of one's medium and the perceived world to speak/understand a self within that world. Its limit to know one's limit. The modern and postmodern imagination inhabits the same thing, asks the same question -- perception squaring off with cognition -- but here the cognitive side of the argument turns more purely constructed, social, *cultural,* economic, political etc. Increasingly in time, the cognitive takes center-stage, and correspondingly, the "without" replaces the "within," as the question is necessarily historicized/feminized/economized etc. "this" becoming "that" -- very different from "that" becoming "this." The purely former seems to me as error-prone as the purely latter romantic, ideal, individual transcendental (note the irony -- "that" becoming "this"). I mean, I'm a colony? As a desirable aesthetic, or rather, life, philosophy? Whom would that serve? Recognitions never precluded resistances. Emily Dickinson, when asked for a photo from a friend, explained she never had one. The romantic attention, mostly lacking in mirrors, in its best forms was deeply other-oriented, a less bubbly, more severe conception of the I, because it was at liberty to speak of growth and life, not compelled to shrinkage and death. Happiness, here, is as inevitable as you say it is.
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/9/09
Holy shit. You're going to have a lot to say in about 3 to 6 months. That e-mail sounded like one of those blizzard balls, you pickem up and shake them and the snow flies all over inside until it settles. You're really riled up and that's sweet. I didn't misread Keats' use of happy, either. And I didn't replace Socrates with Beckett. Let the snow settle. You're grading too many undergrad moron papers with fun distracting ideas swirling in your head. I'm presuming much, perhaps...but any more than you?
Jared Schickling to me
12/10/09
I'd like to say I've found a lot to say the past few weeks!!!! If not, fuckin A, I'll just burn the manuscript. If nothing else I simply can't help defending this stuff I'm reading and taking to. I think I might live in the 19th century for a while. Mind you, various ideas are of course by now problematic, seen for what they turn out to be, fruit from the tree -- but reading it clues me in to what that means, how also the common reading may or may not be wrong or ignoring certain things, and besides, shit, this stuff is rich, more clearly rich and of depths lacking in most contemporary writing. Adds folds in yr brain. I enjoy the way the ideas happen in the work. Anyway. It'd be like if I started poking and prodding your Beckett -- the other Chuck stands up.
Chuck Richardson to Jared
12/10/09
you always have interesting things to say. and lately i sense big things are going on in your mind...the grappling with it is only just beginning. And I agree with you one-hundred percent about the 19th century. When I think what the "average" human mind in America would have contained back then and imagine what it contains now, I see anything but progress [just compare the literacy and penmanship of soldiers' letters home]. Technology has had an inversive effect to its intents. We have less time, less freedom, less well-being. It's not saving but destroying the world. And since you are where you are, I'm hopeful at some point, when you're finally ready to go fucking nuts and get all John Brown and shit, you'll pick up Thoreau. And read all of it. Then start the journals. One of these days I'm going to Walden where they have the mss of his journals in a library and i'm going to study them. The experts I respect most claim this is the true treasure trove of Thoreau's genius. No one I've read truly stands up to the totality of his achievement. Einstein comes to mind, but he became really popular really fast. Thoreau's beyond that because he bears witness to the esoteric in material terms like no one else I've come across. Beckett, Melville, Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, Hawthorne, Kafka, Nabakov, Hesse, Marquez, Borges, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Huxley...the list goes on of people who bear witness to the esoteric in material terms very well. But Thoreau gets the most across, in my opinion. All these folks are better writers than Thoreau, but none have a more transcendent original language that seems other than or beyond human in its function. In other words, one doesn't read Thoreau to find out how a human being should behave so much as how humans actually behave within their cosmic situation. Thoreau isn't self-help or a guide book of any sort. It's an odyssey through life into the recognition that you and I are not fundamentally human, or even fundamentally earthlings, as the stuff we are made of is stardust...The truth is not meant to make human beings feel good. In fact, truth has no intention at all...it insists on nothing, including non-insistence. Of course, Thoreau didn't know that stuff about stardust as a scientific fact, but intuited it as an essential and necessary human reality in light of the big picture as he witnessed it, according to the language he let pass through him...
I'm rambling, but I'm psyched that you're going where you're going.
What do you mean by "It'd be like if I started poking and prodding your Beckett -- the other Chuck stands up."? Sometimes you really stump me.
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