“Darwinian Arguments for the Quick Grab" #poem

On the Shelving Cart

“Pictorial Archive of Female Touch”

“Freud’s How-To: Volume IX 

            of the Academy of Futile Investigations”

“Library of Geological Curiosity:  Female Orgasm 

            Challenges to the Richter Scale”

“Proceedings of the Society for Sensual Revelation”

“Darwinian Arguments for the Quick Grab”

“Theoretical Orgasm: A Position Paper”

“Real Deal Orgasm: Authentications”

“Paradigms of Necessary Ecstasy”

“Tendencies to Colonize the Cunt”

“No Longer that Rare Rapture: 

            An Expository Essay”

“Inner Thigh Love in the Early Middle Ages”

“Your Porous Skin So Hungry”

“Mechanical Schemata for Quickies”

“Rounded Hip on Rounded Hip: 

            A Cartographer’s Dream” 

“Universal Primer on Teaching Touch”

 “Finger-probing Vaginal Regions and 

            Other Investigatory Bliss”

 “Stately Pleasure Domes”

“Love’s Globalization: Sacred Texts on 

            Orgasm as Universal Verity”

“Venture Capitalism: Artifact of 

            Nothing in Contrast to Women Sighing”

“American Medical Association’s

            Acknowledgement of the Embodied 

            Ache for Pleasure”

“The Atlas of Female and Non-binary 

            Explorations in a New World”

“American Medical Association

            Addendum:  Immeasurable 

            Possibilities of Gratification”

“I Married a Vagina: An Inside Story” 

“Big: America Awakens”

“Expansionists Praise Ample Regions of Flesh”

“Vag on Vag: We Happy”

 ___

Sarah Sarai. Sinister Wisdom: The Lesbian Body Issue, Fall 2017

Life is Without Meaning and so Is Advertising

This posting may be of limited interest. A friend who is in advertising strongly suggested I read "Absolute Advertising: Ground-Zero Advertising," a chapter from Simulacra and Simulation, a small and intense collection (1981) of essays by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. As is demanded of the French, Baudrillard is cynical. I'm not sure there is are counter arguments to his contention that the meaning we may find in life is scorned and ignored by advertising, although he did, as they say, paint with a broad brush, offering few specifics. Except for the majesty of Las Vegas, rising from the desert every day, sinking into its darkness at night. I offer the image, not his, dare I write, nostalgia.

I tend to argue with my reading, explain lapses in perspective to writers. And then, as I did reading this chapter, I argue with myself to not argue, just read. The essay is eight pages. Elegantly dismissive. And not about to give ground. For my own benefit, I copied a few quotes. Consider this posting a Notes to Self or a reminder to fight for meaning. The culture is dissolving its own importance.

from the essay:

Advertising, therefore, like information: destroyer of intensities, accelerator of inertia.

It is not that people no longer believe in it [advertising] or that they have accepted it as routine. It is that if its fascination once lay in its power to simplify all languages, today the power is stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and thus more functional: the language of computer science.

...it has both "entered into our customs" and at the same time escaped the social and moral dramaturgy that it still represented twenty years ago.

It is confused with itself (and the eroticism with which it ridiculously cloaks itself is nothing but the autoerotic index of a system that does nothing but designate itself--whence the absurdity of seeing in it an "alienation" of the female body.

There is no longer a staging of the commodity: there is only its obscene and empty form.

image is a detail from Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ

88 constellations - a Wondrous Way of Learning About Wittgenstein

Here's a particularly brilliant and imaginative, what, insight into? riff on? amplification of? next generationing of? the great, off-putting, daring, brave, lovable, not lovable, sad, distant Wittgenstein. Soldier, brother, bad teacher, philosopher, maybe lover but probably not, and European - brushing suede elbows with other post WW I Europeans of note. 88 Constellations. Created by David Clark.

It doesn't take long to learn to navigate the site. Even if you have never heard of Wittgenstein, the site itself is a plaything and learning tool. And since I was staring at the skies and fat-happy golden moon last night, more sky staring is in order.

Solids, Liquids, Spherical Shapes, and I Lost My Train of Thought

*

Apparently Titian didn't paint mockingbirds. It would seem Mary Cassatt couldn't be bothered. Titian's first name was Jordan. Mary Cassatt's first name was Camryn. I googled "mockingbird art" and discovered mockingbirds aren't artists. Why the mockingbird? I don't imagine that you, reader, inquires. I imagine I ask because it's what I expect: a question. The Question In Pre-Modernity. Solids, Liquids, Spherical Shapes, and I Lost My Train of Thought. Camryn Mary Cassatt: couldn't be bothered or wouldn't be bothered? The heart has wings so why the fuck not the suckling child? Tell you the truth, I dread work today. But I love getting paid now and then, the now and then I get paid. Even $25 for reviewing a book is a thrill but Christ it's a lot of work. The end.

[Sarah Sarai, June 10, 2013] [written because blame habit] [written because I watched a show] [written]

[That's a royalty-free stock photo of a northern mockingbird. In 3-D.]

Spinoza to Simon De Vries: No Experience Necessary



from Spinoza in Cartoons*

Respected Friend,—You ask me if we have need of experience, in order to know whether the definition of a given attribute is true. To this I answer, that we never need experience, except in cases when the existence of the thing cannot be inferred from its definition, as, for instance, the existence of modes (which cannot be inferred from their definition); experience is not needed, when the existence of the things in question is not distinguished from their essence, and is therefore inferred from their definition. This can never be taught us by any experience, for experience does not teach us any essences of things; the utmost it can do is to set our mind thinking about definite essences only. Wherefore, when the existence of attributes does not differ from their essence, no experience is capable of attaining it for us. ...[Italics mine, more info below]**
Letter XXVIII, courtesy of Online Library of Liberty.

To which I, Sarah Sarai, say, what?  Experience doesn't teach us a thing's essence? Okay, then. I vote for intuition and a holy flash of understanding. Experience can be a first step, but if something is what it is, well, then, that's that, and it can stay on the top shelf in a Chinese pagoda while I know it, just know it, from afar. My oldest sister experienced Europe. She came back and said, "It's just old." Living in New York City after having lived in Seattle for ten years and Los Angeles for over twenty-five years, I got it, believed her, understand the essence of her critique. It's old here in Manhattan, too. The infrastructure is weak and every tall building is on a sinkhole of mildew resulting from poor caulking. Trust me. Without experiencing the absolute collapse of European culture I nonetheless tell you it's inevitable. Move west. West.

[Sarah Sarai, June 9, 2013] [written because I was blown away] [written because Spinoza's torments were worse than mine and he got a grip] [written because I ain't kidding anyone anyway] [written because yowza writing's fun ((not sure if all these are prose poems but they are definitely probably paragraphs))]

*** Spinoza, pg. 316-317 of Benedict de Spinoza's On the Improvement of Understanding/The Ethics/Correspondence tr. by R.H.M. Elwes, Dover Books. BUY IT! [Italics, mine] [He continues a few more lines to talk of eternal truths.]

Spinoza in cartoons. I'd like to see him in Khartoum.

Poem: Experiential Philosophy

One of my earliest romantic loves was Baruch Spinoza, the 17th Century Dutch-Portuguese-Jewish philosopher. My emotions were Wagnerian operas roared. I had no control; gentle Spinoza understood. That man knew me. Blew my mind though I was unable to work his logic on my passions or "consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies."

I read both Spinoza and Descartes while cozied in a chair I inherited from an upperclassman (who was in truth a woman but upperclasswoman feels like gentry rather than year in college). That chair so padded and accommodating was the chair of chairs, the eidos (Platonic form) of reading zones. I am unable even now to distinguish the philosophy I read from my experience of reading the philosophers.

Experiential Philosophy

Descartes was not a philosopher,
but a chair with one arm
around me and another
under my legs,
carrying the puny selfhood
I crawled from at 18
on knees and elbows.
You can live in the ring of mist
around the leaning Chinese peak
if a hung-up life’s enough.
Ah, the consolation of
philosophy.

Spinoza was the man
I’d have married
if I’d moved to Salinas,
worked in a Woolworth’s,
lived over a bar, not “matriculated,”
written. Smiled at the gentle.
To know who you are
is to be complete. “Your mother
tried to protect you.”

Rationality is fearless,
mysticism a corolla of the sun,
a parley with the soul,
hot gold and warm honey
in the melancholy beehive.

Each substance has attributes,
i.e., the cat’s meow: is

proof enough of my existence;
existence proof that paralysis
is a few pages of the history,
that history is just a word and
“now,” this one, I said, here,
is a liberation, if observed new.

Published in Fogged Clarity and collected in The Future Is Happy.
Note: The whimsical and imaginative illustration is from a blog which I'm unable to read (Italian): http://mariodomina.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/lezione-spinozista-8-sub-specie-aeternitatis/ [Blog di riflessione, critica e discussione filosofica a cura di Mario Domina]

Chronic need for sleep thwarts blogger's blogging

Owing as last night this blogger ("yours truly") slept not enough and furthermore owing as this very night is the occasion for said yours truly to catch up (as if) (see: Xeno's Paradox) because tomorrow is another day (talk about chronic, jeeze, if it isn't Monday, it's Tuesday, if it isn't Thursday (which it is but whatever) it's Friday (which it will be, like that impresses anyone).

Or, it is what it is. That's my philosophy and I'd put it in a nutshell if I were a carpenter.

So I am not blogging more as of this moment herein right now though not to be believed in perpetuity merely in the moment. But let it be known throughout the land by all of my many fan, that I herein live up to my promise that I (yours truly) am blogging every day in June (thank God for 30 days). (Next time I so declare it'll be February.) (Did I mention the chicken in every pot?)

Night'all. Night'll. Knightel. Sarah "yours truly" Sarah