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Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2022


SEGMENT #4 JULY of “IT”
Prophecy And Tracing Dreams into The Days
That Follow. Reverberation

by: James Edward Carlos





Dreams augur choices. Choices, more or less conscious, are to be made, and these choices will momentarily act with sufficiency until the next night and/or the next sleep. Or later. What we interpret, regardless of the conscious level of our insight amended within the avenues of our interpretation, sums up our past in terms of dream images each proving to be metaphoric and experiential. These metaphors being image-based constitute patterns and although seemingly as disconnected issues, one is capable of finding a coherency between them because the images and the discoveries are as abstract as anything else in our lives; in keeping with our first human inclinations in making art and marking letters (words)--speaking and inventing, imagining and drawing, we affirm the abstract nature of our youthful efforts to understand and depict. A narrative is not always discernible because of the sequential variances in dream “sections,” but despite any difficulty interpreting the form or pattern of sequence, and about discerning any “coherent” narration, one exists, a pattern is present, clearly or obscurely.

Patterning is a subconscious efficacy of dreams upon which we move from awakening and prophecy (our secret verification of our personal life and relationships with all that is) into motivation, determination, and maintenance of our teleological thrusts.

Returning to the Foucault quote within which he explores dreaming as contending with sexuality via Artemidrous whose interpretation suggests that dreams can be ... ... traced between the action of the sexual act and the dreamer of the dream, going in this way from subject to subject, and starting from the sexual act and the role of the subject as he presents himself in the dream, (then) the work of interpretation will have as its object to decipher what is going to happen to the dreamer once he has returned to waking life.” (Ibid. Foucault).



James Miller states that in a 1977 interview Foucault ...

...was committed to importing ‘fiction,’ as he called the element of transcendence in language, ‘that the possibility exists for fiction to work within truth, for a fictive discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders, or ‘fabricates’ something that does not yet exist, that is, ‘fictions’ it.’ Thus Discipline and Punishment, as he once put it, ‘makes use of ‘true’ documents, but in such a way that through them it is possible to affect not only a certification of the truth, but also an experience that authorizes an alteration, a transformation in the relationship that we have with ourselves and with our cultural universe: in a word, with our ‘knowledge.’”

(p. 211. “An Art of Unbearable Sensations,” The Passion of Michael Foucault. James Miller).

While similar implications figure in my writing disposition about Foucault I purposefully attempt creating imagery as to his thoughts that present questions arising as stimulus, finding choice of words to be fundamentally meaning-oriented in contrast to my reading of Foucault’s finding image and meaning oppositional as quietly stated above. Miller, contrastingly, descriptively quotes Foucault further in keeping with Miller’s form of scholarly exploration and analysis, although references such as “light” in the following quote are indeed imagistic and content laden. Miller quotes Foucault further suggesting that language by the very distance of its existence seemingly reorients what is an otherwise inaccessible and always potential truth. Verse rises to a position of revelation, akin to mist in the horizon in the far vista. In that space between earth and sky is where being and being interact, caught in the gaze of each other, and where subject and object become one instance. ...‘Fiction does not exist because language is at a distance from things,’ he explained in another essay published in 1963, carefully defining the scope of ‘fiction;’ ‘Language is the distance.’ It is as if words produced a kind of diffuse and artificially generated ‘light,’ revealing that things exist while simultaneously reminding us of the ‘inaccessibility’ of these things apart from language, “the simulacra that gives them their sole purpose; and all language that instead of forgetting this distance is maintained in it, and maintains it in itself, all language that speaks of this distance by moving into it is a language of fiction. ... Foucault took seriously a convergence of fiction and ‘reflection.’

(p. 130. “In the Labyrinth”, Ibid. Miller.)

The complexity, however, seems to be that of whether relationship is part of the exchange, or whether the potential of relationship adheres to a more direct coming and going, and the object of desire remains objectified and thereby eventually is to be displaced. If exchanges do not legitimize relationship, not as development into relationships, objectivity is desired, sought, found, pleasured, and removed. If this latter propensity comes forth, the resulting manifest implies that the subject of the object is reduced to the object, to affirmation for the object. Sans subject being legitimate in the endeavor, the object indicates no concern for what is missing. Through sexual plaintive momentary examination, the act for the sake of the act is being manifested. Such then is sufficient to the inclination of being a “pure act” through the very anonymity and furtive rendering, a primal physical act of sexuality for its own sake; akin to art for art’s sake, sex is then for sex, as an immediate sensation of pure pleasure.

The abstraction of artistic indifference of which Kant spoke becomes a function merely of decorative design and resolution. The activity alone is deemed to be sufficient unto itself. Transubstantiation And Mythic Reversal.

The Other As Fiction.

One is reminded here of sovereignty attempting, God-like, to induce an articulating that is a form of explicit divinity according to the personal, sexual, whims of one’s own fascination; by contrast a sense of the divine within each perceiving other as in a mutual gazing, if extended the spiritual and symbolic in each other person is encountered. In the case of Roman Emperor Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus: born 76 A.D. and emperor 117-138 A.D.) (p.7. “Preface,” Hadrian, A Novel. Joel Schmidt) the inversion, this reversing of the process of transubstantiation, is particularized to and objectified in his young lover--the beautiful Antinuous. Centering himself, seemingly, on an awareness of the centralizing quality of beauty, Hadrian attempts to fictionalize the transubstantiation process of God-into-human as a convenient (perhaps) consubstantial insistency of creating Human-into-God, having recognized the god lurking always within the instance of an enigmatic beauty, of fascination and sexual seduction.

Hadrian, otherwise, if disembodied of his belief, lies to his constituency and attempts to make fact, fiction, and the reverse, i.e., Hadrian speaking through his authority as sovereign. The historical instance of Antinuous’ mysterious and mythical (sacrificial) disappearance and dematerialization offers reversion to the tradition of possible assumption and thus offers a non-existent substance to Hadrian’s dream. Note: In Greek mythology the raising of

humans, like Herakles, to divine or semi-divine status as ‘heroes’ had not been uncommon, and in actual history a favorite like Hephaestion could be made a hero by Alexander and even a wife like Arsinoe could be made a deity by Ptolemy II Philadelphos. Other popular figures, like the thaumaturge Apollonius of Tyana, attained a standing akin to modern canonization. Nevertheless it has been doubted if the total number of such consecrations in antiquity in any way outnumbered the plethora of sainthoods subsequently bestowed in the Christian epoch.” (p. 146. From “Life Eternal,” Beloved and God. – The Story of Hadrian and Antinous. Royston Lambert). “

After death, Antinous was identified as a god most often with Osiris, Dionysos and Hermes. These three gods had in common powers over the world of the dead. … {and, (this essayist’s insertion) regarding sacrifice and assimilation to ”chthonic deification”}: … It is notable in this respect that Christ, the supreme exemplar of vicarious sacrifice, was himself frequently depicted in his earliest image also as Osiris, Dionysus and Hermes.”

(p. 139. “Death in the Nile,” Ibid.).

Gods of transgression if diverted as indicated above may lead to transcendence of the highest reach for humans in the attempt to become one with the sacred. A consideration! Ultimately such reach in human terms administers a configuration, an image-based avenue to transformation and transfiguration as passion in desire. Therein a name capitalized configures a mark of personification and implies perfection – to be named a god; thus, identification is formed with what is desired to be (as with my own capitalization of Consciousness, or in various philosophers creating a similar conjecture with Being). It may go no further.

The void, expressed in such an intercession suggests that the bridge between the supernal and the lower world is an anonymous act of being, a secret of the night province of dreams where one seeks the uncanny in all of sorts of embraces, and in the initiation into the secret world is promise. With human promiscuity, adjunctively, this leap is an elision to power in whatever form is taken, a movement of becoming when coming into the orgasmic power of the cosmos, a definite affinity via mystical encounters and the consciousness appearing thus in order to elevate awareness. Elision, Eleison:

To continue with the potentiality of distortion and confabulation in the midst of speaking, and the means into what is beyond the transgression of the negate, speaking then becomes as if an act of affirmation while being an affect relative to the void; hence Miller tells us that for Foucault ... ‘Transgression…affirms the limited being’ - namely, the human being, and it affirms this ‘limitlessness into which it leaps,’ opening a space of possible transfiguration and offering us moderns our ‘sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated content.’ ... ‘consecration undone: a transubstanti-ation ritualized in reverse–an unholy communion with uncanny daimonic forces,’ where real presence becomes again a recumbent body.’

(p. 88, “The Heart Laid Bare,” Ibid. Miller) …

Regarding the void from which language speaks, in reference to the subtext of sexuality, the body sensation, in talking of a visit to San Francisco, Foucault adds the visit is ...... promising a welcome ‘limbo of nonidentity,’ the city’s countless bathhouses enabled Foucault as never before to grapple with his lifelong fascination with ‘the overwhelming, the unspeakable, the creepy, the stupefying, the ecstatic,’ embracing ‘a pure violence, a wordless gesture.’ (pp. 26-27. “The Death of the Author,” Ibid. Miller).

The almost surreal frequency in Foucault’s use of it is akin to the continuous references in footnoting Shekinah in the first volume of The Zohar (that speaks to the exclusion of the Toseftas and the Matnitins, since midway in the second volume. Some Tofestas are presented in the final twelfth volume.

(Note: The twelfth volume is translated by Nathan Wolski who also translated volume ten with Joel Hecker who translated the eleventh volume. The Stanford University Press description includes “Matnitin and Tosefta are dense, compact passages in which heavenly heralds chide humanity for its spiritual slumber, rousing people to learn the mysteries of holiness. Packed with neologisms and hortatory in tone, these passages are spurs to pietistic devotion and mystical insight). (Noting the changes of translators in the final volumes, I acknowledge that those especially mystical passages, for me, provoked part of my study, but will be explored elsewhere).

Word after word, phrase after phrase, the voices imply that the representative gestures lead to a centralizing connotation - Shekinah, and likely, thereof, akin to Foucault‘s pervasive it) and are the repetitive symbolic references (as to the pervasive gender defining in other languages) that an inordinate number of textual implications point to again and again. In The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, according to footnoting throughout the translated volumes, the text is vastly symbolic, referring to Shekinah and her attachments to the male personifications in the Sefirotic grid that symbolizes Divine Consciousness. Such continuity challenges. Even in this mystical Sefer ha-Zohar –The Book of Radiance (i.e., The Zohar: Pritzker Edition. Translator Daniel Matt) many such words and phrasing defer to the symbolic, thus, provocatively, significantly, dividing subject from object when subject/object is a unified province as the metaphor for consciousness. Momentously, I believe, repetition invites stereotyping and, thus, defies or denies mystical consciousness ultimately. Yet the body of the work is mystical in reference after reference until the symbolic (the symbol as manifested) hears its own story and the mystical becomes contextually hidden via syllabically measured consonants and vowels at one level. Foucault reminds us that a question lies in truth spoken in that the subject is the subject of the speaking. Also, Foucault reminds us with it that the fictional is repetitious within the context of the commixture of words, that even if the use of such symbolic symbols suggest lying. (The implication, too, of a “neutral” pronoun such as “it,” assumes a masculine demeanor in French hence binary language pronouns assume that root, to be ignored or not). The prophets in turn speak through the ultimate pronoun, Itself, that nomenclatures dominate and that any clarification slides into patterns (a case in point: the apex in the Old Testament’s Dream of Jacob). I add that to Keter the apex is nonetheless fed by Ein Sof “God prior to any manifestation”(Wikepedia), i.e., the ITSELF of ITSELF, a delineation of successive abstractions). Otherwise, the implication is that concepts do not build or expand into insight but remain at the level of redundancy without spiritual development. An implication in Foucault’s title, “I Lie, I Speak,” is the wonder about where does language start, and wondering what is descriptive about a name, a word. Fiction, condemned as lying by Foucault, denies that metaphor is an experience of a deeper nature, a higher truth perhaps, but yet metaphor forcibly questions whether consciousness is experience in the visionary sense or is a form of adaptive consequence per natural biological inclination.

We are reminded of the mystical sense in the phrase that lying is about lying, and truth is the thrust of what is heralded beneath the in-and-out of discourse, and perhaps of physical, sensual, sexual forms of erotic behavior, a verity remains. Fiction condemned as lying inverts the supposition and reverses the depiction. Yet the question of authenticity haunts Foucault as does “identification,” self or otherwise.

(See David Macey with his introductory chapter “I, Foucault” in Lives of Michel Foucault regarding how Foucault deviates his strategy as to any descriptive identification).

Nonetheless, we learn ...

...that he (Epimenides) may indeed be lying about lying - all this is less an insurmountable logical obstacle than the result of a plain and simple fact: the speaking subject is also the subject about which it speaks. … I am protected by the impenetrable fortress of the assertion’s self-assertion, by the way it coincides exactly with itself, leaving no jagged edges, averting all danger of error by saying no more than that I am speaking. Neither in the words in question nor in the subject that pronounces them is there an obstacle or insinuation to come between the object-proposition and the proposition that states it. (p. 10. “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside,” Foucault/Blanchot. Michel Foucault):

The Expansive Membrane of Thought.

Multiple levels exist in the naming of almost anything; the various antonyms and synonyms as extended implications for meaning attesting to these various levels. Despite the singularity ascertained, in the reservoir of language depth, naming is a composite of the subject and the object, but of more—naming stems from an apprehension of a presence, an aura and atmosphere, that instigates the proposition, theory, and resolution on the form and formula, hence, of the seeding of thought, and, of the sacred – our secret (and secretive) consummating means to relationship. The fabric of language induces one to reach beyond tendencies for repetitive compulsion and stereotyping, beyond the instigation of the impulse. We are induced to expand, linguistically and spiritually. A process is involved. Thought is the reflection of perception, the reflection centering in conception once established and initiated as an expressing. Thought, as body essence and inclination, as human source of potentiality, evokes conception by reducing the proposition to the proposition. Thought further affirms, when shared, the inclination to a primal truth expressed in an inspired and instigating utterance, the cry of acknowledgement and a sound of discovery. Deep in the utterance is silence, a silence of apprehension, and a sensing of the void-or-non being that is an acknowledgement that initiates all that is is being in mystical persuasion. Being conveys presence that further instigates apprehension in terms of feeling awe. Intuition is the inkling of this presence, an appropriation recognizing that being is a measuring by consciousness.

With reference to the gods of the past, and of the present, persistence occurs in the multiple naming of the deifications, a litany of attributes personified and made sacred by usage and a skillful shifting from metaphor to metaphor. A litany, for example, is an abstract listing to avoid reducing the sacred emanation to a stereotypical formula after what seems to be a deep concern about voiding the subtle momentous expansion. Another example is ritual where somehow a narrative performs a memoriam often to what is considered a sacred event. From the environmental mapping of qualities associated with distinct gods and goddesses to the various hierarchies established in reconciling what is perceived in flesh to have reconciliations in the heavens, whether in discerning anthropomorphic images in the constellations or seeing a parallel world existing in another dimension; that which is above echoes what is below, and vice versa.

The fabric of language, however, especially in mystical comprehension, induces one to reach beyond tendencies for repetitive compulsion and stereotyping, beyond the instigation of such an impulse. This primal urge for singularity and monotheism despite the pluralities of past deifications and the present plethora of many religious sects et al stems from the deeper matter of language as history’s stages seem to demonstrate. Many strange variables are presented when sovereignty is claimed, especially when magnifying the status of certain human individuals (as deifications, for example), and sometimes including other species, animal species as with some ancient manifesting. What have we humans lost, or gained perchance, by indentifying other species as mythological inventions, as configurations such as in fables and fairytales?

At this point...

*****

IT:

PART THREE:

Subject As The Form Within The Form.

When any tree has been cut down we see the rings of that tree’s lived years; we are seeing not just the remnant of a life shorn but a place that is alive still, a crying out, for investigating the consciousness of a tree. The rings depict the various stages of development. A narration exists in this unique set of rings, awaiting us to visibly encounter and view the tree as subject and wonder about those levels of growth. The tree is nature, not only a vital part of nature but conveys meaning about life on this earth. A record is waiting to be heard if we knew how to listen, or to read the secrets within each ring of growth.

What is the subjective aspect of the subject, and what conditions the objective nature of a name, of a given event? In Foucault/Blanchot, Michel Foucault’s perpetual and poetical usage of the shifting, hermaphroditic, heterogeneously ambiguous, generalizing pronoun it is seemingly a language-unconscious assertion of object-physical being, possibly a male object assertion of phallic irresolution. The endeavor indicates vitality and energy, a promotion for nomenclature’s advantage for spreading forth. Does physicality, one’s body as a corporeal substance, refer to divine consciousness or does it not? Is the raiment attributed to Eve and Adam when leaving Eden, body and flesh? Is this change a guise, perhaps, to hide the original light of being? What is the botanical and biological-mammalian (and other species’) connection to the sacred? Consider the vast biological affirmations of being, for example, the multiplicity inherent in being, and grasp the ecological relationship between all living matter to a living world and universe. In a broader, historical, and religious sense beyond any such usage or inadvertent implication by Foucault, it and “itself” (and versions thereof) augur a pretension toward the divine (both male divinity and female divinity and inclusively as such as pronounced as in The Zohar (as noted in the quote used in the introduction of the second sectioning of this manuscript “Itself”) when the body inclination proffers validity as an object while seeking spiritual resolution and consolation.

Sacredness Hiding In The Void.

God’s Genotype, Gender, And The Birth Of Language.

Deep in utterance, however, is silence, the very silence of the sacred; the void/non-being that initiates all that is is, i.e., is being in mystical persuasion. The void is the source of consciousness, at least in terms of human awareness. If the source of consciousness finds ramifications in object-ness, that of being as given form, the source coheres in the physical realm of being awash in a gulf of silence. This silence finds itself as meditation in the reflective level when awareness penetrates the psyche. In the Hebraic symbolic sefirotic scheme, Da’at--that non-step in the ladder (as if a designation for unconsciousness) distinguishes non-awareness from awareness, and death or non-being from life, i.e., apprehending the entire living process. Da’at (death, in some interpretations) (knowledge unavailable to human awareness in others) distinguishes momentarily the triadic or Trinitarian upper three levels in the grid for God’s Consciousness inspired by Jacob’s dream in the Kaballah early history of mystic theologies, such as in the Judaic religion. The Merkavah tradition that I see as related involves Ezekiel’s experiencing the chariot of fire and the living beings (Hayyot) -- (the aspect of mysticism which this author finds personally compelling) is the movement surrounding Sefer Yetsirah and related texts, halakhah (Talmudic teaching concerning tractates of Rabbi Moses Nahmanides), the narrative tradition aggadah (or inquiry, homiletics), and liturgical practice, and poetry corpus (piyyut). * * (“Introduction II” by Arthur Green, The Zohar-Pritzker Edition, Volume One.

Daniel C. Matt, Translator).

All levels of the ladder are apropos to content as a mystical endeavor that is intermeshing of level upon level in the Seferot grid for God’s Consciousness. The complexity of the grid-system for God’s Consciousness allows for reflective speculating on possible interpretations of biblical statements therein regarding The Hebrew Bible, an Old Testament exegesis. The three upper supernal levels of consciousness include Keter (crown of light; pinnacle-Itself), Hokmah (wisdom; male-himself) and Binah (understanding; female-herself). I.e., the pronouns himself, herself, and itself take on the richness of the noun Himself, Herself, and Itself. By Da’at this trinity is separated (or, interpretively, bridged by) in the wider literature (than the Pritzker Edition perhaps) from the lower seven levels--archangelic (Geburah, Hesed, Tifereth, Netzah, and Hod), angelic (Yesod), and physical corporal being (Malkuth; also referred to as Shekinah). That the angelic appears for some mystics as a male (human implied) personification may be contextually symbolized in the implications regarding Yesod (Phallus). Binah is the initializing Shekinah “who” interacts with each level of the male column (the female consciousness acting as the multiplicitous spouse) and symbolized in all levels in the ladder of three columns—s/he is both Binah-and-Hokhmah, and Shekinah-and-Tifereth, as divine couples who comprise enacting the animating cohesion throughout. Da’at separates the supernal three levels from the lower seven levels of the sefirot and acts, perhaps, as a bridge experientially and spiritually. Stipulating these excrescences of body-object as nomenclatures, we return to Michel Foucault’s references on speaking and lying. Note:

The formal position of ‘I speak’… {and his use of it} … as meaning opens a potentially unlimited realm of questions, in spite of its apparent clarity. ‘I speak’ refers to a supporting discourse that provides it with an object. That discourse, however, is missing: the sovereignty of ‘I speak’ can only reside in the absence of any other language: the discourse about which I speak does not pre-exist the nakedness articulated the moment I say, “I speak”; it disappears the instant I fall silent. (pp. 10-11. Foucault/Blanchot. Zone Books, NY. 1987).

Inference: meaning opens a potentially unlimited realm. Consider that memory is a referring confabulation--word or image, an impulse of the return of one’s reflection, that which may be discovered in altered states of consciousness, including mystical consciousness wherein reincarnation is deeply inferred. We must enter the depths of Da’at naked and listen to the whirlpools and eddies that surround us, the waves summoning articulation with their movement, and edge toward the water-soaked sand, and then listen again. We might cross over or through the River Styx. Language is a way to describe the process of being in such depths; imagery, however, involves the initiate within the process as a participant, and imagery suggests layers of language, including ritual. Within language are other residues of what provokes language regardless of the venue. Language is multifaceted; words are only part of this impulse for meaning and urge for expression toward many guises: “The nakedness articulated” is not engaged with a pre-existent, as Foucault states, yet such in this particular phrasing suggests the primal moment of perception. This moment is akin to that undifferentiated carnal wildness of flesh born of the shape of water, coherent as to the shape of the vessel that prompts the notion of subject in a phenomenological theory regarding perception (via Maurice Merleau-Ponty as one conditioner); others, too, suggest that flesh is the it in the instance of being, being in the instant; i.e., with content a coherency exists in the state of being--speaking, proposing, propositioning or not.

It is as if the visibility that animates the sensible world were to emigrate, not outside of every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and thereby would be emancipated but not freed from every condition. (p. 153. The Visible and the Invisible. Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

Suggested is a visibility to matter, to the subject as object, that the inclusive but not always binding flesh is the it in the instance of being. Consider, too, the assertion of flesh being presciently female, despite gender modification in the fetal time, and attempts to define being according to gender, as at birth. Or, citing recent thoughts on gender in physics, the personification of sexuality intensifies with the vast (mystifying) attenuating range of sexual expression within the human species (at least) and with human connections to the Hayyot (living beings, implying angels). The following is from Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos. I find the issuance herein of such importance and significance to our subject and thus include the quote below):

Typically, the overlap between the behavior of males and females is enormous, there is far more variation within sexes than between sexes, and a statistically significant number of females will fall well into the range of distinctly male behavior, and vice versa. … What this situation seems to require is a logic where sameness is the predicate for difference, and where profound differences between the brains and behavior of all men and women are narrowly defined in terms of a general lack of sameness. The logical framework that makes this possible is complementarity. … What is expressly forbidden by this logic is the assumption that all characteristics of the same-specific female brain apply to all females or that all characteristics of the sex-specific male brain apply to all males. Since complementarity requires us to describe any individual human brain in terms of the total reality of the human brain, the enormous overlap between male and female brains is implicit in each description. The only profound gender-specific differences that are relevant to this description are those that utterly displace one another on the full continuum of tendencies and associated behavior. (The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind, (pp. 121-123), “The Logic of Nature: Complementarity and the New Biology.” The section on Male-Female Complementarity).

This study affects what has been inadvertently considered to be the norm of gender differentiation, norms that have mistakenly quantified and codified stereotypes concerning gender identification and sexual expression. By contrast, perhaps, in remote times the religious mythos of the first man, Adam, with his androgyny, and the first woman, Eve, drawn from within his nature, comes into play here - a genotype for being with the range of variations. Again, as the sacred is multidimensional, variable, expansive, similarly creation infers the range of expansion and the vastness in the personal vision about the meaning of one’s life and individual living process. The many historical and cultural associations regarding stereotyping objects includes the human variations on race, culture, religions, and body, all relevant to mythologizing our differences and similarities into narrow concepts (consider those religious connotations that address a monotheistic God-The Father); thus profound implications arise, as noted above in considering the complications of gender in fact and fiction.

The perpetual reminder of object-being is an assertive objectivity in the nature of physicality—a sovereignty even in mute awareness. Physicality, the doctrine of perception contained, is the intent (i.e., an extent, too) of human consciousness. The image perceived and reflectively conceived is drawn forth into a manifestation. Receptive itself is the erectile assertion; the presence of one’s self erects into being an object (it) in the body - a genital reminder fathering the potentiality of solid evidence; but consider for the moment, God-The Mother, mothering the potential. Despite the reference through the literature involved with this study of Foucault’s and other (mostly male) philosophers’ persistent use of the pronoun it, another such significant assertion, another genital reminder, is the female clitoris which enlarges as an erectile functioning. This body fact broadens the discussion. The sexual articulation of erecting simultaneously, female and male – with each half of the impulse, the occasion or persuasion, the magnetic compulsion finds viable references throughout the wide range of sexual fields for exploration. Included in this range is transgender processing, bi-sexuality, homosexuality, the androgynous interfacings, and onanism as self-discovery and self-affirmation of one’s sexual possibilities, et al.

The body as presence is at the heart of the irresolution of abstraction. The physical body as primal object is a prelude spiritual by inclination and offers an emergent is-ness. Thus psychologically, the emerging spirituality is seen as a presence, a realization of the personal reality. The object by demarcation is a presence among other presences, an object manifested among other objects. Dependent upon what is is, a subject is to be subjected at birth to the whim of objectivity, to the pre-conditioning of the body as object in the first naming: “It’s a boy!” “It’s a girl!” Listen to the cries at birth and feel the crisis of objectivity and how it as objective nature is asserted and confirmed by way of enunciating gender. Language is the assertion of the physical, i.e., of consciousness evolving into being. We are always of that state. In the cry is an acknowledgement, a verbal, oral, verification of the godhead Itself.

Any possibility of language dries up in the transitivity of its execution. The desert surrounds it. In what extreme delicacy, at what slight and singular point, could all language come together in an attempt to recapture itself in the stripped-down form, ‘I speak’?” (p. 11. Foucault/Blanchot. Foucault).

To speak is metaphoric and experiential; to tell is to speak in parable and in verse, not as a compromise of a truth at least in intention. As determined thereby the inversion, as such, may be a paradoxical intention of discovery; speaking is a resounding that is a poetic intuition about depths within the objectiveness of being, although the compromise and impropriety of being-object reconciles the notion that this plane of being is continually, momentarily, unresolved. Truth is the precarious primal instance of that continuous interweaving of experience but can we recognize truth; can we remember? When all language comes together asserting the sound of its itness as asserted by Foucault, an objectivity he (and so many others) long for, this coherence of all that is is in the image behind and within the speaking, the impact of doing. Note the image power of the dry desert, and then meditate on the paradoxical nature and delicacy of language as an oasis. The language (metaphoric and imaginal) of being is that insistence in mystical consciousness that is pure conscious leveling throughout its range (the range symbolized in the image of Jacob’s Ladder that is fervently dramatic metaphorically; from that perception comes inspiration-an inherent act of creation. Insistent! Hence come the rites of initiation, a formalizing of conjunctions and symbolic entanglements that precede injunction and an effort to reprocess the major essence of supernal meaning.

Emerging, then is the expression--a manifestation, and the necessity of being continuously solved, thus re-solved through the manner of being unresolved. As if recurring resolution is confirmation of who and what we are but not quite; ritual manifestations act as such embodiment and interlaces the dynamic with others. The coherent image-form (thus formed) is equivalent to consciousness that supports and creates us prior to our evolving into being.

Unless, of course, the void in which the contentless slimness of ‘I speak’ is manifested were an absolute opening through which language endlessly spread forth, while the subject—the ‘I’ who speaks—fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space. (p. 11. Foucault/Blanchot. Foucault).

Perhaps the philosopher stumbles (brilliantly) into a wider truth, a greater freedom and expansion beyond objective grammatical form.

Finis


Friday, March 29, 2024