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please read slowly, aware of the medium of language, just let it slowly flow, and wait to judge the dangerous monstrous sea creatures (metaphors) by their place in the whole. I feed them well, so even the sharks won't attack if you just keep your distance and watch. If you don't understand, maybe read the sentence a few times, and if you still don't understand, or you begin to object, just read on. The organ is only known by the whole it serves. Essentially productive philosophy is different from the essentially analytic type. It's only trying to be perfect enough to work and play. Play is its work. There's no right answer to a dance. It can only be judged by how well it's doing what it's trying to do, not whether it should do it. It's risking everything and nothing. On the other hand, please try to stick with it.
Or if I didn't need to say that, because you really would like to get to the bottom of it, in short, make wasteful haste right now to baste, taste and clean the plate, as you chew, swallow, digest, and absorb the nutrients of the full meal of the ancient adage that haste makes waste, this "trite" adage almost universally today ignored (unless one is under the sway of a mesmerizing "mentor," but however mesmerizing I (ha ha) or any might be, I personally wish to wean the reader from dependence on the writer; that's why I play a guy with a patch in her eye, passing on a torn, faded map to Treasure Island), explaining how and why waste is winning. So don't worry about getting anywhere or finishing it today or this week or ever.
I mention this even to thoughtful philosophers or mathematicians, who know how to go slow when you can't go at all any other way. In this case, by contrast, the unbearably lightweight form of the text belies its unbearable heaviness. Meanwhile, just to confuse things more, the unbearably light form bleeds in and out of the unbearably heavy content -- skiing up and down and all around the visual model of the one-sided, yet two-sided, yet one-sided -- which is it? -- Mobius strip, a band with twist creating an endless loop (shown below). As a whole, you can cover the whole strip in tracing one continuous side as it returns to its origin; it has no inside or outside, there's only one side, but at any point you can still read it conventionally as just a two-sided piece of, say, paper. Still, the whole, simply by its arrangement, belies this reading.
One can say, oh it's just a weird, clever arrangement that signifies nothing. But maybe the world without it is just a weird clever arrangement that signifies nothing, and it signifies everything. Reflection on, and empirical testing of, that hypothesis begins to weigh in its direction. Maybe the two weird clever arrangements will achieve a rapprochement in the future. Still, power corrupts, and by mutual agreement among the good willed, it is illegal to refuse equal service to a separate, but equal, or possibly better construct in any form of scientific, artistic, or philosophical endeavor. No affirmative action is required when it out-performs competitors in the entry exams.
Please make one yourself -- cut out a band of paper, twist it once, and join end to end -- and write a tautology upon it, such as -- ...I want to go there, but when I go there, there is here, and so... -- that just goes round and round forever. Sitting still, and running it over your hands, while muttering aloud the endless mantra you inscribe on it for fifteen minutes a day might open so many chakras you'll shock your guru into going into hiding. (I think I read somewhere that Buddha prohibits the selling of the teachings, so resenting the fact that no-one will hire me to do this would be foolish in the event that I really want to do the world some good.)
The relation of the two "sides" describes the relation between signs and what they signify in productive, visually informed philosophy as it aligns with the actual physical world. Without this visible "word", the Mobius Strip, language is relatively inarticulate, and language applying to being itself effectively quite inaccurate, as it strives in vain to fill in the holes in itself with more of what the hole-riddenness is made of, visual illiteracy.
As the annotated illustration shows, the visual figure demonstrates how the inverted retinal image of what's "out there" becomes the upright thing itself that we are part of; there is an "out there" and there is an "in here", and yet there isn't any such thing. How can this be? Simple, just make a Mobius Strip, and this visual construct explains it. And make a second one just for fun and slice it with the scissors right down the middle. The strip quite magically becomes two, irrevocably intertwined, but now autonomous entities, like a "married" couple become flesh of one flesh returned what they were before they got "married", but were merely "engaged".
After all that, you can just say no thanks and go your own way and read in any other way than the Bespoke tailored way just bespoke, but that's already to dismiss what the text says and does, so if you plan to read any other way, please don't bother and just go your own away in your own space, not mine. It won't do any good to stay, as wedding guests appearing improperly attired will not be admitted to the feast.
Probably the best thing just to go your own way in your own space, and let me keep going my own way like I've been doing for decades before it caught on; and now that everybody's doing it, I want to go my own way and not do it, as I corral everybody to go MY way in MY space. Don't fall into the trap! Go back to your own, and go your own way in your own space. It's the latest, most natural thing -- they say the universe is expanding even faster than they thought -- men, women, brown people, black people, white people, culture, nature, philosophers, artists, planets, their inhabitants, atoms, particles all, just going their own way in their own spaces with more and more space between them.
But around here Sisyphus is us. However futile, we resist. We are professionals like the New York Knicks who fight with all our might in the last two minutes when the score is something like 165 to 34, and as this is rather typical, there aren't too many fans left. It's not just that we're professionals, that wouldn't be enough to keep us going. Somewhere deep inside we believe in miracles, one of us has a elaborate logical proof of their ultimate inevitability, and a few of us have experienced them. One day the Knicks will rise again!
In truth, I'm not sissy enough to want to be anybody but Sisyphus. I am happy to allow the universe and everything in it to go its own way quite naturally, and leave only whoever wishes to resist that to join me in doing so, because if everything naturally went one way, and that was my way, I would just be a black hole.
One more point: for the visually literate the subjective and objective, always on opposite sides of the Mobius Strip, merge or come apart depending on your focus. There's no rigid, false division protecting one from the other, the protection and discernment lies within the reader. With a bit of good faith, the reader can see that the writer here has discerned and is purveying something objective, but "about that which nothing can be said, one should remain silent". The objective is like the God whose name should never be uttered. To be nothing about me, the mongrel discourse must be all about me, and if I succeed, that's not narcissistic. It's narcissistic when it's almost all about the artist, but something of the artist is withheld, so nothing objective emerges. For the visually literate, words are not things, but displaced from them, you have to glimpse the things sidelong in the corner of your eye.
(probably enough for today, there's more to digest here than meets the long visually illiterate mind, or rather the part of the mind (even of artists) brainwashed into believing in its visual illiteracy. If you don't sit with and think on any novel words or word arrangements, by tomorrow you'll have forgotten them. But if you don't keep at it, that won't work either. Hope to see you tomorrow! Thanks! this reminds me to do my twenty minutes of Italian a day. Otherwise the whole project is futile.)
