BERNEVAL

Murmur is a novel by Will Eaves that is patterned on the life of Alan Turing. It’s a plunge into the mindset of a character receiving treatments for chemical castration and in passing is a meditation on how one makes meaning and the reach of intelligent machines. This struck me:

It isn’t knowing what another person thinks or feels that makes us who we are. It’s the respect for not knowing.

This hard won realization is prefaced by the speaker in distress: “He breathes into a point of infinite and traceless pain. He stares hard at a carpet tile that’s come unstuck and wanted to say: It isn’t knowing […]”.

The respect of not knowing opens a sort of plenitude:

We are consoled by someone’s efforts to conceive us, and that effort’s keen shortfall. We are unreachable. A shared mind has no self-knowledge. A field awareness cannot be unique or self-conceal: it has no privacy of mind.

A nice slide from efforts to the shortfall of one. Something is happening in this passage from plurality to unicity. Something unknowable, unreachable, private.

The notion of respect is complicated.

And so for day 2190
11.12.2012

Annie Lowrey Smart money: Why the world should embrace universal basic income in the Globe and Mail

So easy to miss the negation

These studies – as well as many others – counter many of the most common objections to a UBI. Such policies do not turn the safety net into a hammock, for one. People still work, particularly if the payments are not too big. Indeed, one benefit is that such payments do not penalize people for working and earning more, as many other welfare programs do. [our emphasis]

Would love to conceive of a world where relaxed swinging would be a valuable day dream option for all — just a wee bit of time to listen to a berceuse.

And so for day 2187
08.12.2012

By happenstance of typesetting, it stands alone on the page at the top of a vast white space that figures the future.

Finally, the flow of my life changed after meeting Rich Murray. The passing of time feels different now, and I’m deeply grateful to dwell with him in the movement of that tide.

The words are Mark Rifkin’s in the acknowledgements to his Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination.

Note how the temporal sharing buoys the figure of the lover-partners. It is a formulation that neatly captures individuality-in-connection without subsuming it in relationship.

And so for day 2185
06.12.2012

Family resemblance.

Call for clarity. Clear call.

Philosophy as envisaged by the Tractatus is therefore a futile attempt to say what cannot be meaningfully said but which can only show itself. So, philosophy, insofar as it is possible at all, cannot be a body of doctrines. It must be an activity. It must aim not, like science, at truth and knowledge, but only at clarity and, with the achievement of that clarity, peace.

One difference from the earlier work is that the Philosophical Investigations gives us not a single ladder to climb. Instead it shows us the paths up a series of hills and promontories, from which we may gain different overviews of the landscape and, with luck, see the light gradually dawn.

From Ian Ground, The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein

And so for day 2183
04.12.2012