pencil on paper
autumn 2009
A sewer rat with greasy teats
sat pumping lumps into her brain.
A viscous sour fat that cools
her fears and soothes her pain.
Doris is trying not to notice the fourteen ticks on her head. they are numbing her higher faculties. stimulating her defence mechanisms.
With oily tongue of hook and bind
they mount the head of Doris,
caress her blind with sighs like knives
and feed upon her blockage.
notebook – mixed media
summer 2009
Through reflection, instead of grasping simply the matter straight out – the values, goals, and instrumentalities – we grasp the corresponding subjective experiences in which we become “conscious” of them, in which (in the broadest sense) they “appear”… In unreflective holding of some object or other in consciousness, we are turned or directed towards it: our “intentio” goes out towards it. The phenomenological reversal of our gaze shows that this “being directed” is really and immanent essential feature of the respective experiences involved; they are “intentional” experiences.
…
Observing the flux of modes of appearing and the manner of their “synthesis”, one finds that every phase and portion [of the flux] is already in itself “consciousness-of” – but in such a manner that there is formed within the constant emerging of new phases the synthetically unified awareness that this is one and the same object… If this same thing is intuited in other modes – for example, in the modes of recollection, fantasy or pictorial representation – to some extent the whole intentional content of the perception comes back, but all aspects peculiarly transformed to correspond to that mode.
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A consistent epoche of the phenomenologist is required, if he wishes to break through to his own consciousness as pure phenomenon or as the totality of his purely mental processes. That is to say, in the accomplishment of phenomenological reflection he must inhibit every co-accomplishment of objective positing produced in unreflective consciousness, and therewith every judgemental drawing-in of the world as it “exists” for him straightforwardly.
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The method of phenomenological reduction (to the pure “phenomenon”, the purely psychical) accordingly consists (1) in the methodical and rigorously consistent epoche of every objective positing in the psychic sphere, both of the individual phenomenon and of the whole psychic field in general; and (2) in the methodically practiced seizing and describing of the multiple “appearances” as appearances of their objective units and these units as units of component meanings accruing to them each time in their appearances. With this is shown a twofold direction – the noetic and noematic of phenomenological description… In its own nature lies manifest the possibility of being carried out continuously in infinitum with methodical preservation of purity.
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The reductive method is transferred from self-experience to the experience of others insofar as their can be applied to the envisaged mental life of the Other the corresponding bracketing and description according to the subjective “How” of its appearance and what is appearing… [T]he community that is experienced in community experience is reduced not only to the mentally particularized intentional fields but also to the unity of the community life that connects them all together, the community metal life in its phenomenological purity (inter-subjective reduction). Thus results the perfect expansion of the genuine psychological concept of “inner experience”.
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To every mind there belongs not only the unity of its multiple intentional life-process with all its inseparable unities of sense directed towards the “object”. There is also, inseparable from this life-process, the experiencing I-subject as the identical I-pole giving a centre for all specific intentionalities, and as the carrier of all habitualities growing out of this life-process. Likewise, then, the reduced intersubjectivity, in pure form and concretely grasped, is a community of pure “persons” acting in the intersubjective realm of the pure life of consciousness.
Phenomenology – Edmund Husserl
Glendale bush
ballpoint on paper
summer 2009
One should not make the mistake of concretizing “cause” and “effect” as do the natural scientists.. in conformity with the prevalent mechanistic foolishness that pushes and tugs at the cause until it “has an effect”; “cause” and “effect” should be used only as pure concepts, as conventional fictions for the purpose of description or communication, and not for explanation..
[I]f we project, if we mix this world of signs into things as if it were an “in itself”, we act once more as we have always done, that is mythologically. The “unfree will” is mythology: in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.
Whenever a thinker sniffs out coercion, necessity, obligation, pressure, constraint in any “causal connection” or “psychological necessity”, it is almost always a symptom of where [her/]his own inadequacy lies: to feel this particular way is revealing – the person is revealing [her/]himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.
Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth. I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes. Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Also Sprach Zarathustra
