jbml thln3 Why Should The Choices Be Limited To

WRITING
MORE OR FEWER
WORDS ALL BY MYSELF?

I KNEW ALMOST INSTANTLY THAT I HAD ANOTHER OPTION!
For ML & I had recently had a satisfying, if not actually happy, experience writing together on a rather bleak subject ~ the second election of George W. Bush and the serious contemplation of human extinction portended by that event. Friend had asked whether we might collaborate again, and both of us knew we wanted to; but what do you say after you've said that the world is ending, and that repentance is just another avoidance mechanism? The answer (one answer) is: you seize the miracle of being able to talk, now, still, even if all you're talking about is a plausible fear of the ultimate silence. You talk about the astonishment of communication, of dialogue. You talk about how much we still have to lose.

I didn't, back on July 20, and now September 7, once again in Kansas) know how to articulate the WHOLE THING any better than that. So I began, immediately, to break the topic into some possible component parts, some themes this correspondence about talking now might take up, and I set them down as a series of possible starters.

FIRST, it was already clear that both tense and person would need careful attention in this exchange, which is fundamentally about tense and person. I thought I remembered a point made by the linguist Emile Benveniste: that the notion of any present, and the linguistic second person (the possibility of my addressing you) are mutually dependent concepts. That is not, it seems, quote the point Benveniste had made.

Rather he wrote (in the passage in his essay on "Subjectivity in Language" that seems closest to whatever it was I remembered, or trans-formed in memory):
CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF IS ONLY POSSIBLE IF IT IS EXPERIENCED BY CONTRAST. I USE I ONLY WHEN I AM SPEAKING TO SOMEONE WHO WILL BE A you IN MY ADDRESS. IT IS THIS CONDITION OF DIALOGUE THAT IS CONSTITUTIVE OF PERSON, FOR IT IMPLIES THAT RECIPROCALLY I BECOMES you IN THE ADDRESS OF THE ONE WHO IN TURN DESIGNATED HIMSELF AS I ... IF WE SEEK A PARALLEL TO THIS WE WILL NOT FIND IT. THE CONDITION OF MAN IN LANGUAGE IS UNIQUE.

AND SO THE OLD ANTINOMIES OF "I" AND "the other," OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY, FAIL.

And again:
[W]hat does I REFER to? To something very peculiar which is exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. It is a term that cannot be identified except in what we have called elsewhere an instance of discourse and that has only a momentary reference. The reality to which it refers is the reality of the dis-course.

BENVENISTE IS TELLING US THAT SOLIPSISM IS NOT MERELY A MORAL FAILING, BUT A LOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITY. WITHOUT YOU, THERE IS NO I (not, as Benveniste also makes clear, the same as "WITHOUT ME, THERE IS NO YOU." And, now I look further, I see that he did indeed make clear, stunningly and yet quickly, as if in passing, the relation of temporality to subjectivity as well: the "'present' ... has only a linguistic fact as temporal reference: the coincidence of the event described with the instance of discourse that describes it."

For Mor,
which I am (and am not),
all other persons are equally real & fantastic:
I am thus (also) my father & mother, brother & sister, child & lover?
All people I've met (& met not or didn't meet yet) are equally present in this eternal now
that reflects as well 'past', 'present'
and the 'future'!

All forms of 'life', mineral, vegetal, animal, human & 'godly'
are thus present whenever we want them to be
...
WE ARE THE SPIRIT OF
"g d"
HOVERING OVER THE ETERNAL WATERS OF SPACE & TIME!
It is
'US'
saying/seeing
THE
'light',
and see, there was:
the separation between sun, moon, stars, planets, comets, earth, space, time, past, present, future
...

We are our body, spirit, mind, creation & creator, brother & sister, even if we have to do without?

All of us have become
AS ONE
in this myDi while still being 'ourselves' whenever we want to be 'either'
~~~

It's all 'in the mind' ~
which is as real as we
can 'be' (were) & 'are becoming':
the miracle of this life is eternal existence
'as we want it to be' - 'we
may be', thus
'we are'
...

for
The
Moment
!