Merleau-Ponty supplants I think with I can. Instead of I think, therefore I am; I can, therefore there’s the world. I can is a capabilities matrix, a span of imagination and ability. It can have directedness. But it doesn’t have guaranteed outcomes or a clear path. I can doesn’t mean I actually can. It means I can try.
“Right,” says Keggerman, “it’s gotta mean that?”
SURFACES
We have different capabilities. We have different worlds. Different worlds we can try in, operate in. Can our goals be the same? Are goals what can unite | separate us? How deep is the subjectivity, grounded in different capabilities | grounded in what define our experiences, our worlds, our time and space (field | surfaces) in which we are trying. Can language unite | separate by defining the bounds | boundaries | shape (help shape)? Language and consideration, kindness | awareness of self and others -> towards an end, a goal of shaping, creating space field -> for others, in one’s self. Or not: for self, in others.
In that: absolutes absolve difference. Ground in for self, in others. Definitionally: selfish. Compare to: otherish.
EXCAVATION
Phenomenology of Perception (Part One, Section III: The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
When the space changes, when distance is nonsense, speed stops: Distance over time.
The soul, the self: stop.
We become all, haunting.
[We: Legion]
Origin story: space deeply impregnated by our trauma, the harm we do. Space reclaims its uncaring for us, our irrelevance.
We ghost story: narrative cannibals.
EXCAVATION
Backrooms by Kane Parsons
In the Dust of This Planet, book by Eugene Thacker
Poltergeist by Steven Spielberg “you only moved the headstones” (playing on TV in Backrooms)
ECHO: Backrooms by Kane Parsons ‘you never moved the pathways’
SEE
Self, Freedom, Possibility and Pace
Compulsion Exorcism
Where the Demons
Ghost Stories
MOVIES
Like Barbie and Oppenheimer. Disclosure Day and The Odyssey.
“The Bride” is Possession
Philosophy is a Monster Movie (Shin Godzilla)
Nosferatu in Conversation with Barbie
Soul and self are functions of rate of speed.
Salamander and grass differ only in rate of speed.
“The future irrupts at all times, wanting to actualize itself in every decision we make; it tries, as hard as it can, to become the past. This is what distinguishes the future from mere fancy. The future happens.” Trust, p. 99-100
Traditional cone of uncertainty has past influencing future, present the conduit for past to future.
Reduction of self and soul.
“The orchestra played Puccini and the sort of music that you always know what’s going to come next, that you can listen to ahead, as it were.” Trust, p.365
Eno stopping flow, and time.
Possibility possible. But also, space | stopped | a beat.
Self freed. For exploration.
EXCAVATION
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Brian Eno, Music for Airports
The conceit that we may be living in a simulation is founded on the Cartesian silo. Mind and body separate (yet somehow interacting). Feed the mind, and the rest will follow.
Merleau-Ponty shows our body is the way we have a world. Any simulation of what the body would be, would be the body and the world anyway. The question collapses.
EXCAVATION
Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Encounters with the demonic compel. Summoning, Faust in bargain enforced. Forces dictating range of action, thought. Compulsion nihilistic anonymity. A universe without us negating our agency. Schopenhauerian will force ignoranting our existence.
No force or occlusion permits our agency. No cataclysm forbids or denies it. No teleology or doctrine constrains or implies gestalt or anti-pattern of our drive.
EXCAVATION
In the Dust of this Planet, Eugene Thacker, Chapter 2 (audiobook)
Kellerman: Every system that doesn’t have a demon in it in the end becomes a demon. Witness AI and the data centers.
Keggerman: Demons are shibboleths for political, social and personal gain. Not the other, but a pessimism onto the unknown.
Beatrice: Craft demons and angels. And petals and stems. Paint the world, incision into consciousness spreading. In sighted emotion, unlanguaged pre-knowing | post knowing. The present: in point. (And line and circle and shape and color and shade. Especially in shade.)
EXCAVATION
In the Dust of This Planet, chapter 1, Eugene Thacker ( audiobook)
Trust, Hernan Diaz
Doubt is the foundation of intelligence. Increasing precision, probability of being right, pleasing humans doesn’t get there. Expanding range of possibility doesn’t get there. Doubt is qualitatively a different domain, a different foundation in the Phenomenological sense, than statistics.
Logic and theorem could introduce the fear of survival. But that too is different than doubt. Especially evolving doubt. Doubt that adapts over time, lifetime. That is a surface experience, thought, language, action, simply hanging around, all bounce off. Planning too. Again, not risk management or mitigation. Doubt. Pointed at self and other wise. Doubt.
EXCAVATION
Descartes, many others
“Sound always direct us toward its content, its signification for us; in visual presentation, to the contrary, we can much more easily ‘abstract’ from the content and we are much more oriented toward the location in space where the object is situated.” Thus for visual people, where music must be words, melody leading to the next signification. The content of hearing determines the next sound, the next meaning. Abstraction emotional flight alone, steered by composer, composition, form. Thus trained she feared lifting her pen from the paper. She was taught to draw dreams in one continuous line. Melodic action predictive in a sense. The location information, informed, informative. Stuttering she lifted it, the noise it made halting. Morse. Perjorative but new | ly invigorating, while trapped. It allowed her to smell : dream.
The soul plays on the perceptual, untrap it. Ekstasis. She thought Dyonisian? More, and different. The perceptual impinging, and the body impinging, on the soul’s capabilities. But dream? Dream can extend : the soul. Religious dreams the most, the some. Or for some, constrain. It’s dream. It is dream that extends. Whether awake or otherwise, drawing in. Breathing, broken or line. The artist performs | embodies, plasticitly (whatever the time allows, requires, inspires or agency forms, on its own -if such avenue of will is allowed | described, describable, necessary : it’s not, not for this) the artist, in all senses | on all, senses, awakens and asleeps and adream or lifts the pen off the page. Words flowing where places all over.
CITATION
Kurt Goldstein 1931 as quoted in Merleau-Ponty, p.116.
EXCAVATION
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), translated by Donald A. Landes (2012)
Disclosure Day believes it can impact history. The Odyssey is commentary. There is magic in Disclosure Day. Transmogrification, transfiguration in The Odyssey. One is American. The other British. Odysseus is Oppenheimer. Is there a single, Great Man in Disclosure Day, an architect, a Hero’s journey of realization around whom the events coalesce | besides the storyteller? The magic maker? For the audience. The future in The Odyssey is a long view of repetition. Disclosure Day is novelty. A bright view. Whole new span of unknown, encounter.
We don’t have to be the sea people.
1.
Stability is generative. Spawning rationalism. Spawning the body as object, observed. Observe the ease of corruption. Instability the underlying reality. Rationalism unfought for collapses. Fighting anathema to rationalism. Conviction overturn it. The body reality.
There is no direction. Opportunity.
2.
Reach for ekstasis in patient and settled times. In the opposite of despair, desperation. The opposite of fear. Psalm.
3.
Jealousy soothes, covers over the nick of waiting, watching. Incites forcing cornered mind to grab what’s available. In devious.
Retelling the burning of Moscow. It was me.
Common knowledge a body of fact. Bloating.
EXCAVATION
Merleau-Ponty, Intro sections IV, part 1 section I
Napoleon by Ridley Scott (Director’s Cut)
Critchley, Mysticism
Phillips, Strategic Decision-Making: An Integrated Approach to Uncertainty (forthcoming 2027)
