Roots In A Curlicue

In what sense are the contradictory desires that seize me also mine? It’s weird, you know, when those feelings happen. Feelings that don’t feel like they belong to you. But in what sense did any feeling belong to me? Isn’t it just energy passing through me? The same energy that travels through you. And you. And you. And you. The intellect is what is most universal in us, it is this part of the divine which is identical in everyone. Reflecting on the soul basically amounts to reflecting on what I am by doing without the notion of subject, without something that brings me back to an introspective subjectivity whose canonical formulation we find in Descartes, over there, sitting on a barstool, listening to Patsy Cline. What interested the ancient Greeks regarding the matter of personal identity had much more to do with oversoul than the identity of any one person. Here’s what Plato has to say about this in Timaeus:

And as regards the most lordly kind of our soul, we must conceive of it in this wise: we declare that God has given to each of us, as his daemon [an attendant power or spirit] that kind of soul which is housed in the top of our body and which raises us—seeing that we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant up from earth towards our kindred in the heaven. And herein we speak most truly; for it is by suspending our head and root from that region whence the substance of our soul first came that the Divine Power keeps upright our whole body.

So: we’re plants, and we’re upside down, our roots pointing toward the sky, for divine nourishment. It could be a painting by Magritte.

Why do we write? This is the question that occupies the end of the Phaedrus. One reason is to amuse ourselves, to divert, to rejoice, to console. But what Socrates is getting at in this dialogue is that writing represents dead knowledge. Writing encapsulates a body of knowledge that isn’t inhabited or internalized, it’s frozen, nailed down, stationary. But there’s a way around this: if the writing reproduces the movement of thought, as it might occur in conversation between two people who aren’t in agreement but searching, feeling their way through the incertitude that surrounds us, then the writing is ad-lib, impromptu, without restraint, noises and conversation at a truck stop, abrupt deviations, U turns, nirvana, midnight revels, glass breaking in a street, murmuration of starlings in undulations over a field of alfalfa, pyrotechnic blooms of fireworks in a summer sky. It’s why Kerouac’s writing & Cassady’s Joan Anderson letter make such compelling reading. I like the slop & solecisms of their mercurial dromomania. Bombardments & spouts of nutball jibber jabber fueled by the insanity the absurdity the crazy persistence of life.