[NetBehaviour] Short prolegomenon to philosophy iii

[Alan Sondheim]

Short prolegomenon to philosophy iii


In the Zen koan there is a severing and no return; in the Oxherding images
there is a representation of this. The emerging geodesic is an opening
elsewhere and elsewhen under erasure and the twist is that evidence
which continues the duration of the novice until it is recognized that
what appears to be a setup is no such thing. The analysis is a perception
of the failure of analysis. In Tantra there is a similar occurrence with
generation and completion, a severance which is not a severance. Nagar-
juna's contradictions emphasize this on the plane of a logic which
nonetheless remains bound to its analysis. Without such, there is Tao one
does not contend with; Tao follows a geodesic. What is missing in all this
is the twist per se; the twist carries information, that of the semiotic
foam, information inherently tangled, but information that is not annihil-
ated. The physical gravity of space-time is presence as well; it is within
the fine-tuning of analysis that withdrawal and severance appear obdurate.
Neither withdrawal nor severance is complete; the twist, diacritical
curlicue presences itself in analysis or not in analysis. In relativity,
the twist is measurable, a measure of local curvature; in philosophical
analysis, it is the objet petit a, the horizon and so forth, which resists
annihilation, continues the project of being-human. What about the curva-
ture of space in the Flower Ornament Sutra? There must be some such thing
for perception to occur; even so the Sutra's insistent and continuous
exfoliation fills every void, as if one could talk of an energy-momentum
tensor at work. The geodesic clots, is slowed; perhaps this is the case as
well in any severance or jump; the ground, what one falls into or through,
is never as clear as it seems to be. Shades of Hegel's porosity come to
mind. And what comes to mind and disappears is mind, but always with a
twist.

One should be careful about rolling everything up into zero or one; the
fit is not a fit, harmony not a harmony. In a stringed instrument, tension
constantly varies, and decisions are reached, when something is in or out
of tune. The beat frequencies slow, but never reach the zero point; there
is always a literal twist left over, and on a quantum level the string
frequency must vary to some noticeable degree. What degree is character-
ized by both human perception and tuning, and by fundamental constants of
the universe. One always plays against noise, tuning (a) is never the same
as tuning (b), but neither is it zero nor one.