Sylvan PassagesBy Dan Wood
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§1
Old friends. Upon receiving word from their old friend Truth, Aphorism allows some missives to be transcribed and translated by Humor (whose pen often smudges and smears through the exertion of too much force), whereas it seems that, although having grown up together, the occasionally dismissive Proposition has only been able to keep up a somewhat meagre, on-and-off correspondence.
§2
Unlearning. Those who worship and consume the slaughtered offerings at Trivia’s altar never consider sacrificing themselves.
§3
Gossip. Gossip circulates because it is counterfeit. The majority have no means or reason to question its authenticity, and the few who know or suspect its speciousness must get others to buy into it the more swiftly to pass it along.
§4
Bandwagons. An argument that catches is not always an argument that holds.
§5
Religion. Religion is decidedly not the opiate of the masses. It is an entire apothecary of uppers, downers, nostrums, expectorants, and—most importantly—placebos.
§6
Portmanteaux. Whether in high French theory or at an airport, where there are portmanteaux, there are cheap things for sale.
§7
Esteem seekers. That humans seek to be esteemed by the living is not half as oneiric as their unquenchable desire to be praised by the dead and the not-yet-living.
§8
Purity. ‘Purity’ is an absolutely repulsive term in all cases save those concerning beer laws.
§9
Philosophical digestion. That one cannot digest some work of philosophy does not mean that it is indigestible. But, that no good work of philosophy is easily digestible does not imply that a philosophical work which triggers indigestion is thereby good.
§10
Discourse on method. A method is a pulley. It mediates theory and praxis as a simple machine that is intended to abridge the attainment of some goal. The frequency of resorting to such a mechanism should increase or decrease proportionally to the increase or decrease in its mechanical advantage in relation to the mass of some particular problem.
§11
Art and soul. No artist has a soul, but all good artists have soul.
§12
Reading. By not reading enough, one risks reinventing the wheel. By reading too much, one does not leave enough time to invent the new wheel.
§13
Stille Macht. Solemnity is the electromagnetic force of Heideggerianism: it both attracts and repels.
§14
A new gambler fallacy. Einstein was correct in his assertion that God does not roll dice, but only in the way that negative predications of empty sets are always trivially true.
§15
The Communist International. Would that the Cominternians were less commentarian!
§16
De Revolutionibus. The theories of Nicolaus and Vladimir both made use of new epicycles to explain and predict the related movements of the god of war and the god of merchants and shopkeepers. A telling resemblance between the Copernican and Bolshevik Revolutions.
§17
Goddess of wisdom. Minerva was born of Jupiter’s divine head, and she suffers and obliges this relation to rule—always somewhat embarrassingly though sometimes a bit affectionately—according to her life’s freedom and fortune. Unlike the shrieking Gorgons, her sight does not turn things or people to stone, and she is much slower to rage. Yet Medusa’s head does adorn Minerva’s shield, a sign of being in controlled possession of—and yet at the same time beyond, on the other side of—the powers of petrification. The creation of her aegis required vigorous pounding and striking upon the serpentine stare of reification itself, until this molten matter became transformed into shimmering bronze. All of her assailants try to seize and immobilize and pin down this goddess, always blocked, blow for blow, by a Tartarian mirror whose hideousness provokes anger while guarding an unspeakable loveliness. But wherever she goes and whomever she visits, Minerva never escapes the originary nebulous head behind her and the abysmal one ahead.
§18
Pseudo-science. The only justifiable jurisdiction for pseudo-science is the bathtub.
§19
A brief history of the deep South. Louisiana inherited Napoleon’s code, and Texas his complex.
§20
Vis-à-vis. Every countenance has its natural history. All of the relations between faces make up so many invisible fault lines, concealing antediluvian chains of active and dormant pressures. Every visage’s formations seem natural, eternal. Some are noble, gorgeous, and demanding. Others are open and inviting. Still others slope diffidently, with fragile arches and impending avalanches. The rains of spring and summer slowly give way to the furrows of winter. Yet all of these seeming permanencies are the result of prodigious and glacial transformations, collisions, ascents, corrosions. No canyon forms and erodes over time without at least two faces.
§21
Logic. Logic is the martial art whereby one learns to restrain oneself from attacking straw men through equally flammable, and no less mindless means.
§22
The mailroom. Lenin could only have been so excited about and impressed by the US Post Office because he had never spent any time there.
§23
Billboards. Valiantly shielding the golden rays of the setting sun, the billboard raises up like a modern Oriflamme looming on the horizon, a metal banner signaling the inevitability of surrendering and submitting to the desires and demands of unknown others.
§24
Travel advisory. Johannes de Silentio should never have left the land of his toponymic surname.
§25
Operation(s). One cannot make an unpresumptuous choice between inclusive and/or exclusive disjunctions.
§26
Surveys. Surveys always begin by begging at least twice the number of questions that they will then proceed to ask.
§27
High-strung. Night after night, moving from hall to hall, venue to venue, tuning ourselves and letting ourselves be tuned ever more finely, obsessively, excessively, we become so high-strung that we forget how to play.
§28
Arguing with the departed. A mediocre thinker always wins arguments against dead thinkers, whereas a great thinker often loses them.
§29
Polyphemus. Common morality sets about its work like Odysseus and his crewmen who, finding a monster that has but one eye to begin with, trick and mislead this Cyclops only to gouge out even this meagre source of limited vision. As long as some mutual slaughter gives rise to moral heroes with whom one can associate, such gore each time becomes more necessary, eventually most hallowed.
§30
We. Royal We’s rein in and reign in disloyal Me’s.
§31
Chewing the cud. One would do a great injustice to those critics of Nietzsche’s appraisal of morality by charging them with not really having tried to take up the art of reading, patiently chewing cuds of ideas, ruminating as slowly as cows.[1] With as much clarity as generosity, not a few have taken their time with his arguments, thoughtfully swallowing and digesting every wad. Some have even cautiously sauntered away in order to graze apart from the herd for awhile. And lo and behold, all these reluctant and perhaps unique bovine movements only prepare the way for so much bullshit.
§32
Bookstores. One can intuit much about a place solely from its bookstores, and even more from their absence.
§33
Universality. Universality: or, being-for-and-against-the-one.
§34
For K. Bureaucracy is a thermostat which always appears to be set to a comfortable temperature, yet which has been programmed by no one in particular to keep a room far too warm or too cold. The best possible interaction with this mechanism leaves one with a brief, satisfied feeling of passing from warmer to cooler or vice versa, and so no thought of the apparatus as the cause of eventual displeasure emerges. In this way, the imperceptibility of its constitutive disequilibrium—where “‘hotter’ never stops where it is but is always going a point further, and the same applies to ‘colder’”[2]—produces further unnecessary dependencies. Practiced synchrony with various environmental in-puts guarantees this simple machine’s continued perseverance and future indispensability.
§35
The witch’s number theory.
‘Number’ is the great uncountable noun,
Each countable one being a number.
For each such noun, there remains another,
Taken together, still uncountable.
“How, then,” you ask, “can number be marked down?”
Listen, and you I will disencumber:
Words of spelling unbound are the answer,
But for all these I’m unaccountable!
§36
The state. The state is not a cold monster, but a warm zombie. It is indeed God’s march in the world, even and especially after the death of God.
§37
Vanity. One’s vanity is measurable by the content, duration, and intensity of one’s imagined eulogy.
§38
Metaphysics of evil. The Christian metaphysics of privation, guilty by association with theodicy, does not explain evil but only exonerates it—an erasure which is itself positively evil.
§39
Erasing. A good day of writing is sometimes no more than long day of erasing.
§40
Oenotrian oration. The vain orator fancies his words to be the speech act that formally inaugurates and condones the celebrations, whereas we know that the privilege really belongs to the outgoing thoomp of the auspicious, older, and much more succinct wine cork.
[1] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, §8.
[2] Plato, Philebus, 24d.
Old friends. Upon receiving word from their old friend Truth, Aphorism allows some missives to be transcribed and translated by Humor (whose pen often smudges and smears through the exertion of too much force), whereas it seems that, although having grown up together, the occasionally dismissive Proposition has only been able to keep up a somewhat meagre, on-and-off correspondence.
§2
Unlearning. Those who worship and consume the slaughtered offerings at Trivia’s altar never consider sacrificing themselves.
§3
Gossip. Gossip circulates because it is counterfeit. The majority have no means or reason to question its authenticity, and the few who know or suspect its speciousness must get others to buy into it the more swiftly to pass it along.
§4
Bandwagons. An argument that catches is not always an argument that holds.
§5
Religion. Religion is decidedly not the opiate of the masses. It is an entire apothecary of uppers, downers, nostrums, expectorants, and—most importantly—placebos.
§6
Portmanteaux. Whether in high French theory or at an airport, where there are portmanteaux, there are cheap things for sale.
§7
Esteem seekers. That humans seek to be esteemed by the living is not half as oneiric as their unquenchable desire to be praised by the dead and the not-yet-living.
§8
Purity. ‘Purity’ is an absolutely repulsive term in all cases save those concerning beer laws.
§9
Philosophical digestion. That one cannot digest some work of philosophy does not mean that it is indigestible. But, that no good work of philosophy is easily digestible does not imply that a philosophical work which triggers indigestion is thereby good.
§10
Discourse on method. A method is a pulley. It mediates theory and praxis as a simple machine that is intended to abridge the attainment of some goal. The frequency of resorting to such a mechanism should increase or decrease proportionally to the increase or decrease in its mechanical advantage in relation to the mass of some particular problem.
§11
Art and soul. No artist has a soul, but all good artists have soul.
§12
Reading. By not reading enough, one risks reinventing the wheel. By reading too much, one does not leave enough time to invent the new wheel.
§13
Stille Macht. Solemnity is the electromagnetic force of Heideggerianism: it both attracts and repels.
§14
A new gambler fallacy. Einstein was correct in his assertion that God does not roll dice, but only in the way that negative predications of empty sets are always trivially true.
§15
The Communist International. Would that the Cominternians were less commentarian!
§16
De Revolutionibus. The theories of Nicolaus and Vladimir both made use of new epicycles to explain and predict the related movements of the god of war and the god of merchants and shopkeepers. A telling resemblance between the Copernican and Bolshevik Revolutions.
§17
Goddess of wisdom. Minerva was born of Jupiter’s divine head, and she suffers and obliges this relation to rule—always somewhat embarrassingly though sometimes a bit affectionately—according to her life’s freedom and fortune. Unlike the shrieking Gorgons, her sight does not turn things or people to stone, and she is much slower to rage. Yet Medusa’s head does adorn Minerva’s shield, a sign of being in controlled possession of—and yet at the same time beyond, on the other side of—the powers of petrification. The creation of her aegis required vigorous pounding and striking upon the serpentine stare of reification itself, until this molten matter became transformed into shimmering bronze. All of her assailants try to seize and immobilize and pin down this goddess, always blocked, blow for blow, by a Tartarian mirror whose hideousness provokes anger while guarding an unspeakable loveliness. But wherever she goes and whomever she visits, Minerva never escapes the originary nebulous head behind her and the abysmal one ahead.
§18
Pseudo-science. The only justifiable jurisdiction for pseudo-science is the bathtub.
§19
A brief history of the deep South. Louisiana inherited Napoleon’s code, and Texas his complex.
§20
Vis-à-vis. Every countenance has its natural history. All of the relations between faces make up so many invisible fault lines, concealing antediluvian chains of active and dormant pressures. Every visage’s formations seem natural, eternal. Some are noble, gorgeous, and demanding. Others are open and inviting. Still others slope diffidently, with fragile arches and impending avalanches. The rains of spring and summer slowly give way to the furrows of winter. Yet all of these seeming permanencies are the result of prodigious and glacial transformations, collisions, ascents, corrosions. No canyon forms and erodes over time without at least two faces.
§21
Logic. Logic is the martial art whereby one learns to restrain oneself from attacking straw men through equally flammable, and no less mindless means.
§22
The mailroom. Lenin could only have been so excited about and impressed by the US Post Office because he had never spent any time there.
§23
Billboards. Valiantly shielding the golden rays of the setting sun, the billboard raises up like a modern Oriflamme looming on the horizon, a metal banner signaling the inevitability of surrendering and submitting to the desires and demands of unknown others.
§24
Travel advisory. Johannes de Silentio should never have left the land of his toponymic surname.
§25
Operation(s). One cannot make an unpresumptuous choice between inclusive and/or exclusive disjunctions.
§26
Surveys. Surveys always begin by begging at least twice the number of questions that they will then proceed to ask.
§27
High-strung. Night after night, moving from hall to hall, venue to venue, tuning ourselves and letting ourselves be tuned ever more finely, obsessively, excessively, we become so high-strung that we forget how to play.
§28
Arguing with the departed. A mediocre thinker always wins arguments against dead thinkers, whereas a great thinker often loses them.
§29
Polyphemus. Common morality sets about its work like Odysseus and his crewmen who, finding a monster that has but one eye to begin with, trick and mislead this Cyclops only to gouge out even this meagre source of limited vision. As long as some mutual slaughter gives rise to moral heroes with whom one can associate, such gore each time becomes more necessary, eventually most hallowed.
§30
We. Royal We’s rein in and reign in disloyal Me’s.
§31
Chewing the cud. One would do a great injustice to those critics of Nietzsche’s appraisal of morality by charging them with not really having tried to take up the art of reading, patiently chewing cuds of ideas, ruminating as slowly as cows.[1] With as much clarity as generosity, not a few have taken their time with his arguments, thoughtfully swallowing and digesting every wad. Some have even cautiously sauntered away in order to graze apart from the herd for awhile. And lo and behold, all these reluctant and perhaps unique bovine movements only prepare the way for so much bullshit.
§32
Bookstores. One can intuit much about a place solely from its bookstores, and even more from their absence.
§33
Universality. Universality: or, being-for-and-against-the-one.
§34
For K. Bureaucracy is a thermostat which always appears to be set to a comfortable temperature, yet which has been programmed by no one in particular to keep a room far too warm or too cold. The best possible interaction with this mechanism leaves one with a brief, satisfied feeling of passing from warmer to cooler or vice versa, and so no thought of the apparatus as the cause of eventual displeasure emerges. In this way, the imperceptibility of its constitutive disequilibrium—where “‘hotter’ never stops where it is but is always going a point further, and the same applies to ‘colder’”[2]—produces further unnecessary dependencies. Practiced synchrony with various environmental in-puts guarantees this simple machine’s continued perseverance and future indispensability.
§35
The witch’s number theory.
‘Number’ is the great uncountable noun,
Each countable one being a number.
For each such noun, there remains another,
Taken together, still uncountable.
“How, then,” you ask, “can number be marked down?”
Listen, and you I will disencumber:
Words of spelling unbound are the answer,
But for all these I’m unaccountable!
§36
The state. The state is not a cold monster, but a warm zombie. It is indeed God’s march in the world, even and especially after the death of God.
§37
Vanity. One’s vanity is measurable by the content, duration, and intensity of one’s imagined eulogy.
§38
Metaphysics of evil. The Christian metaphysics of privation, guilty by association with theodicy, does not explain evil but only exonerates it—an erasure which is itself positively evil.
§39
Erasing. A good day of writing is sometimes no more than long day of erasing.
§40
Oenotrian oration. The vain orator fancies his words to be the speech act that formally inaugurates and condones the celebrations, whereas we know that the privilege really belongs to the outgoing thoomp of the auspicious, older, and much more succinct wine cork.
[1] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, §8.
[2] Plato, Philebus, 24d.
Dan Wood teaches philosophy at Villanova University and is the translator of Amílcar Cabral's Resistance and Decolonization. While not researching and writing on anticolonial politics, he enjoys cooking, hiking, and experimenting with alternative genres of philosophical expression.