AT THE STOA

If you can answer how a thing is a verb, then you have a language spanning philosophy and psychology; a language relating how a thing becomes a process. Let me put it in more mundane terms. A person is diagnosed with a disorder. They go to a doctor, who prescribes them medicine to chemically normalize symptomology of the disorder. Why? Because the reasoning to prescription proceeds from all manner of assumptions - involving an ontological magisteria (the neurobiochemical) as well as a causal magisteria (behaviors). The reasoning thus involves both thing and process: the thing is the composition; the process is what the thing does or undergoes. That, however, is too limiting a metaphysics, for it also harbors another assumption: a thing is not in itself process; there is an exclusive disjunction between the two. Traditional philosophy would, according to Derrida and Levinas at least, be violent in this regard, for it programmatically makes things about being. Things, processes, al...

I was making tea when I noticed I had fried chicken breading crumbs on my floor. The tea was for the hangover I was nursing all day like a mother raises an itinerant child, and after spending the entire day in bed, decided to make tea because goodness knows how I will chase sleep when I've been in bed with her all day. Last night, like all drinking nights, were filled with happiness stolen from tomorrow, and a hangover is nature's way of cashing the check with 200% interest. Tea is a way to make the interest hurt less (or maybe more alcohol). Anyway. The bread crumbs. Sometimes, when he feels like it and after he'd gotten together with Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter smashes a tea cup and waits to see if entropy reverses and makes the tea cup whole. If it does, then surely he could see Mischa, his sister, alive again. Hannibal has spent his considerable intellect trying to mathematically prove it could be so, and Thomas Harris describes it as an elegant mathematica...

In an article espousing ἔρως (eros) as the other of λόγος (logos), Garrison uses Levinas and Derrida to problematize the entirety of Western philosophy - or what comes down to it, to the entirety of thought itself (an arrogant statement, that). He starts with a fundamental implication of both their positions: culturally, infants are our others, and through enculturation they are rendered unto the same, that is, the sameness in hermeneutic humanity. If that is correct, infants are our cultural, existential, and phenomenological others, because properly speaking, no one experiences being an infant. This is not to say that they are tabula rasa  when they are born, neither is it to say that they are not born. What it says is more fundamental: that there is no rubric, language, frame, or anything that, phenomenologically speaking, an infant has to make rational sense of anything at all. The closest we get to experiencing infants is through other infants, and inferring what...

They were on opposite ends of the globe - 13,000 kilometers give or take a few hundred to be exact. Sometimes their days coincide in their activities, if only for a while, and then the inevitable necessity for sleep, or for work, would take over, always that of one inverse to the that of the other. Today they spent the day together virtually, locked in the silence of each one's duties, self-imposed, seemingly endless. Comes a small break in her work, and she, being more used to staying up longer, was with him when he started working in his corner of the world, when he was sleepy, and when he slept. She might just also still be up for his waking. He slept long hours. He says he dreamt weird dreams in his sleep. This strange spending of their days while geographically apart could continue, theoretically, for days at a stretch, but it does not. It's unsustainable. Today's long hours consisted of her working, listening to music, linking three music videos to his social ...

I am quitting  again , or, in more accurate words, I am again saying farewell. Fare thee well. Fare well. Farewell. Goodbye. Colloquially, it is said by or to someone who departs, and it is a wishing well of someone in their travels, implicitly in a direction different from one you are taking or from where you are staying. It is said by and/or to one who will go away in a different land (whether metaphorically or topographically), or by and/or on whom you do not wish ill when you part ways. There is movement in that word, a movement to and from, which are in, by the demands of the word itself, different if not opposite directions. There is something strange about farewells. It is a cutting off: goodbye, we might not see each other again, we will end here. It is, however, also a well-wishing: fare well, we might not see each other again, but in your future endeavors, I wish you good happenings. It is a schizophrenic word and concept, for in its very utterance there is a di...

I suppose I could start in plainer English discussing who I am as a layman not trained in psychoanalytic language, and if so will revert to the language that I do use when discussing anything worth discussing: half academic and half wit (indistinguishable at times from being a halfwit). As a layman I chose to major in philosophy, for better or worse, which is a fast track to being witty, or being a halfwit, and other things besides. Or I could start with a bombardment of links mostly pertaining to The Diagnostic Statistical Manual   IV and V  and increasingly technical accounts of co-morbidity and dual diagnoses involving bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder until we both drown in jargon I will not be able to understand, much less simplify. For DSM-IV diagnostic criteria regarding bipolar disorders types I and II, look at  this  if you want a full jargon drowning, or  this instead  if only for its simplicity and overall pleasant color sche...

You are softer at night, more honest, as though your walls were made of daylight. More needy, and vulnerable, more uncaring of things you let slip. Maybe that is how you can dream. And come morning, with your shield of sunshine you look to the mirror and find your feet or your battle. I love you more at night. That is how I dream.

I was amused by the idea that it was  purportedly Kant  who first used the phrase "always already," though it is more amusing that, at least according to  this  blogger, Gayatri Spivak in his introduction to Of Grammatology  currently holds the record for the most number of instantiations of said phrase. I would have wanted to verify that for myself were I younger, but presently that would require me to read pages ix to lxxxvii of the book's John Hopkin's paperback edition (1976), and ain't nobody got time for that. (Suffice it to say, though, that the semantic evolution of the phrase itself speaks very strongly based on  who  uses it most famously: first Kant, then Marx, then Heidegger, then Derrida). I would also, apart from being a lazy pedant, be careless and say that it needs one more "al-" in it: almost. The beauty of that word, apart from lending a necessary uncertainty to the monolithic formulation of "always already," is that it ca...

Tell you what. If you happen to spend New Year's, or any celebration worthy of company, alone, try to do these. 1. Put a kettle on, and make some tea. Or make a cold mocha drink, so you'd have the comfort of chocolate and the kick of coffee and the who-knows-what of milk. (Cowness?) You'll have very confused physiological reactions not to mention wakefulness, but number 4 below will take care of that. 2. Put on a sweater, if you haven't already. Even if you live in Manila, it's somewhat cool enough this time of year to wear one. Preferably one with holes in it, just so that you know you're at home and nobody really would care. There is a small comfort in that. 3. Work, if you work at home. Don't overdo it (although if you work at home "overdoing it" might take on a different meaning, but whatever. You're at home. Nobody really would notice.) 4. Inevitably, go down rabbit holes.  Into the acoustics of St. Pancras O...