from beneath a cloak of invisibility
Here is the third and final installment from the letter I’ve been transcriping from Bob to Lydia, Kathleen’s mother, from that period in the 1970s when Bob was a shut-in.
I could be more plain. But I observe the alchemist’s cautious motto: obscurum per obscurius. Well, not really, I don’t mean to swathe my head in a turban and give mirror-practiced knowing looks into my transparent bowling ball, with which I knock over pinheads. I don’t mean to encoil myself in Sybilline obscurities, or out-enigmatise old Heraclitus. No, I think of it as a kind of antic caper, such as is suggested by the wonderful title of that old Irish folksong, “Float Aimless in Motley.” A tune as near to the true Irish heart as “Run Silent O Moyle.”
Like most people nowadays, I have difficulty taking myself seriously when I’m not being scientific. It is an indoctrination of the currently entrenched priesthood of science. We think there can be no serious domain of thought outside those which exhibit the rigors, but not necessarily those rigors. There are certain assumptions – for example, the priority of the object — that prevent Science from achieving a full account of Reality, or from examining its relations to our concern, or to the concern of Being itself in strepping into the lighted clearing of itself which is man’s consciousness. We are to believe that this lighting of itself in mind is so much epiphenomenal swampgas or Northern Lights emitted b y the lifeless matter, which Science stresses as rthe most important measure of Reality. Science certainly can not demonstrate the validity of such a point of view, and yet it feels authorized by its wisdom to strangle the uncanny spiritual mystery, which is the emergence of nature in the fisheye lens of consciousness. To my way of thinking, “time” makes sense only in the context of that emergence – as a night of dreamless unconsciousness will tell you, there is no meaning to the idea of an extended time without extension of consciousness: it becomes but an analytical graphing of sequences, of purely abstract ‘befores’ and ‘afters.’
(Don’t think I’m unaware, by the way, of how highly eccentric it is of me to make of a private correspondence the occasion for such relentless performances. Let me take the occasion of this parenthesis to assure you that I am slightly more civilized than to be so naive.) )See how that parenthesis peeped in, butler-like, from what seemed a wholly different time strand? Let us proceed to the end of this parenthesis and see if the original topic is resumed.) ‘Befores’ and ‘afters’ can, you see, be scrambled by a shuffling of perspectives.
Phenomenology can be charged all too readily, I know, with evasiveness. Would anyone believe that I was struggling to make myself clear?
A touch of the wand and our balloon has settled again upon terra firma. Episotolary extravagances of this kind do not make, I realize, a very good case for my sanity. But think of them as exercises in blarny-artistry that possess occassional, unexpected islands of lucidity [I think of Joyce].
This is perhaps an all too indolent employment of the mind, but I invite you to think that I just wish to share my thoughts with you as I sit here, knitting them.
This strange buzzing speechbox coding its contented hum and sending the runes to you.
I’m approaching what the philosophers call the phenomenological object, and expressing it in the form of sentecnes which, like this one, comment on themselves. Having attainted it but fitfully, still halting and lurching amid abstractions, in the attempt to make an object of my state in words, I simply made an object of my words and let them pulse onto the page even if in the context of an empty sentence like this one. Thus it becomes almost like seeing a video image of the old blatherskate in living color; though he has nothing in particular to talk about; just a sort of muttering amid the crackles of a fire.
I hope you are managing to keep a tolerance for this breeseweavery. I was just trying what you m ight call an experiment. I wanted to see if I could, as it were, make a kind of astral body out of sentences that served not so much to conveny meaning as to be a cloak for me. I fear it has gturned out to be a cloak of invisibility, of obfuscity. Forgive me.
Be well.
Love,
Bob