Philosophy Begins in Terror: Reflections on Loving and Living

Fragments & Notes 

(26, September 2011 - 14, March 2012)

1.  Countless times I've heard it said: love yourself if you wish to be loved by another. Now, as the essence and apotheosis of love is the ecstatic loss of self – in which the two are no longer one, without thereby creating any unity but co-mmunity – countless times I denounced this dictum as a diversion, or as naught but an incitement to narcissism.

As the fault of Narcissus lay not in self-adoration but in the neglectful self-abnegation arising of attachment to misrecognition, so I failed to detect that destructive, self-negating nature that lay  concealed – and was revealed – in my denunciation.

Self-loss without self-love is only death. Self-love is laughter of complicity with oneself.

Only this complicity can prepare you to let your heart be consumed in love.

2.    A Microcosm: one day I awoke in a world forever and radically altered.

Koalas are a terrifying distraction

3.    Philosophy begins in terror: wonder is a distraction; skepticism is a diversion.

4.   The beyond? Neither something but equally not Nothing.
 

5.    Fear? But of what?

– Neither disappearance, dissolution, or the sufferings of love spurned, rejected, rather of the possibility of assuming the position of passive bystander – invisible, inaudible – to life, my life.

6.   The non-identical cannot be reduced to dialectical leftovers (whether re-heated or served cold).

7.   Time is the necessary non-identity of (self) consciousness.

8.  There can be no kairos, no time, for the conflagration of love, if the human tragicomedy is without end.

9.   The essence of psychological well-being: to live in such a way as to prove – ex post facto, of course – the truth of one's deepest-held (messianic) delusions of grandeur.

10.   It must be of necessity that consciousness first came into being and to have continued to exist. The alternative: the advent of consciousness as a terrible accident, grave error, as a monstrous mistake (the question follows: to whom to attribute error?)

11.   What we call Law is Universal Error – what cannot not be the case.

12.   Love is life, the crest of waves, rippled surface, fluid formation upon the glittering seas of becoming. Love is life ascendant, the approach of its dizzying aphelion, its defiance in the face of the abyssal depths of death and dissolution – perihelion. Love is the commingling in one moment of our essential outpouring, becoming wave-forms merging – never sub-merging – and breaking beside ourselves upon these strangely radiant, transfigured shores, sea-cliff-heights arisen from our mutual depths.

13.

Today I am returning home to a place where I have never been,

but for times torn out from time,

intimacy in the blink of an eye.

You'll find me there,
once again like never before,
and I will meet you there,
on that night after the morning before.

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