Hacker agonistes

from Jan. '23 

Short footnote to what I wrote about writing fiction and it's-really-about-the-writer: Recently I felt I should correspond with someone I have known for twenty plus years but have had little time to enjoy her company for almost that whole period. I didn't want to compose the email message. I resisted for some reason. I wanted just to say that I had gotten and felt much older and had retreated into myself and had regrets for times lost to us, to me. Would I get another chance in this life or the next?

So I had the idea of forwarding a link to a story I wrote last year. I felt that it reflected all the above and that I had taken refuge in writing and living in imaginary/better worlds. Upon careful reading, she could see who I am today and know basically what had become of me.

I made the case in another short piece I wrote some years ago that if you read a work, any work, and gave it deep and thorough reflection, you would find all the wisdom of the ages contained therein. I don't suppose anyone else feels or thinks that way about writing and worlds within worlds that are revealed, but no matter. Except to say that this idea or hypothesis was behind what I was thinking of doing, just sending a link to something I had written which I liked a lot and thought it told my story as I would like to be known and remembered.

On a very obvious level, everything written reveals what the writer is concerned with, had wondered about, etc. This is not the deep stuff but what everyone can see by reading and reflecting on who must have written that. Oh, he thinks there is an unseen world of ideal forms, or gosh, it's like that living in a racist community, etc.

The written is part of the newsy autobiography of the writer, and the reader can begin to construct the biography through careful and thoughtful reading. As to whether that matters or that we would have an insight into other, deeper stuff, well, that is for the critics and would-be bright ones, who really, most of the time, don't know what they are talking about. Or more accurately, one moves from what we know the writer knows and cares about to conjectures which go beyond the evidence of the text and known biographical details of the writer.

So in the end, the text shows itself and something of the writer, but we'd best leave it at that and avoid the error of conjectures, i.e., gossip, and stick with what we can be pretty sure about.

I don't know today, June '25, who the person was that I thought about contacting, and I am lost as to what I wrote that brought these (above) strings of words on. But the thesis and hypotheses continue to occupy my thoughts from time to time. 

As do some personal conclusions that I also deem universal.

Example: Take a quote from Rushdie's Satanic Verses, or any other book you find, and see if it doesn't lead you endlessly toward insights and revelations you thought were more properly a part of some sacred text you are more acquainted with. I think of the dictionary that way, one thing always leads to another.

While I wax thus, truths here discovered while you were unaware of me and all these endless words trying to sort out life and living:

1. All speech is political, even this that you are reading, as well as whatever you have not seen or heard, present, past or future.

2. If you get the girl by befriending her friend, the friend you will cast aside once you have attained your desire.

3. You can share your deepest and most intimate thoughts with an animal, dog in my case, and it will feel like you have earned forgiveness and reached understanding. People can't give you that.

4.

5. 

(Aside with sorrow as I ponder for more) I should have been a hack literary theorist at least and not this pussy faux-philo fragmatist.

Pea-sized brains

I retrieved this from my catch-all folder of draft writings.

It would be . . . accurate to say that the individual-phenomenological and the physical-biological give rise to a suspicion that there are origins for being and being aware of how things are separately and connectedly. And that the cultural and systemic inform and energize such inklings. And it would be more honest to say that each of these perspectives can be misguided and are often wrong. We know little to nothing. Pea-sized brains, or capacities? I vote that is our condition and motivation to make up stories. For it is all about stories, isn't it? A story about what I experienced. A story about what is what and whether an effect has a cause. A story we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from. A story about wholes and parts and how they relate, and what motives there may be behind the things that we think we see and understand. All stories.

Really not knowing the author, I asked a chatbot (AKA AI), was the quote from some published work?

The passage you shared does not appear to be a direct quote from a widely known source (such as a published book, article, or famous figure), based on current databases and literary corpora. It reads more like original philosophical or reflective writing, possibly from an individual thinker, essayist, or someone engaged in existential or epistemological reflection.

Its style is informal but intellectually rich, combining phenomenological, epistemological, and narrative themes—the kind of content you might find in personal essays, blog posts, or spoken monologues rather than academic or canonical works.

If you found it somewhere specific (like a blog, journal, or lecture), it's possible it's authored by a lesser-known thinker or someone self-publishing ideas. If you wrote it yourself or are considering using it in writing, it's quite thought-provoking and stylistically distinctive—definitely in the realm of original writing unless you have strong reason to believe it's been quoted from someone else.

Ha, hiding in a computer file. Genius sometimes doesn't recognize itself.

However, appearing along with the above re-discovered fragment was this from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. 

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

I am afraid these days about what the staunch and mechanical followers with pea-sized brains are up to. I believe culture and the best which has been thought and said will not turn the tide. Nor will instinct help anyone gain greater awareness enough to make saner choices and change false and malicious stories relied upon as actionable. 

I doubt I'll see the day the clock is re-set to tell of better times.

I don't know

After my first heart attack and second wife's departure, and after having had extra-ordinary experiences, caused I suppose by trauma and spiritual practice and instruction, I visited my sister, and in the course of keeping her company as she went about her workday, we met someone she knew. I wasn't introduced but had a kind of clarity of seeing as I took in the image of this person, as if my perception enveloped her. Facing me, her body head to foot became one for me including the line of her profile plus a few inches, not an aura-light or that kind of thing. She was this cutout object, as it were, and it stood out such that all the rest of the place disappeared and I saw only this, and my feeling was that I was seeing this as-suchness and through this suchness, around her to the limits of her physical self plus profile from behind. I asked my sister who this person was. She told me someone I didn't want to know, she had unspecified problems. I said without thinking that I had seen through her to the limits of her presence, as if I was seeing something like some mystical person might. At the time and upon reflection I don't know what I experienced and what or why I even said this. It must have sounded strange or some kind of fabrication or prelude to being captivated by this person, getting to know who she was. She had an effect on me, unmistakable. But to this day I have never again had such a kind of seeing through comprehensively like this, a physical not metaphysical thing. I suspect it was not her but me doing something. Perhaps it was an awkward expression in a moment as a result of months of silence and suffering and trying to connect again with the world. I don't know.

---

It is impossible to know another person, that is to know him or her fully inside and out. Of course, we say we do, after some time and experience of and with that person; but that isn't even the half of it. Others can tell us about our person of interest. But these are isolated stories, snippets from a life lived and perceived in parts by others. And what do they really know? 

How can we access more of what we would like to know? And what would the person you are interested in like you to know about him or her?

I suspect some of that more that we would know could come from media--print and other media, perhaps like film or recordings. And what would these capture? In my case: Words. Perhaps lots and lots of what the subject-person said or fixed in media that we can visit and re-visit to try to say, in the end, hey, I really knew them, perhaps more than anyone else would care to know.

Finding out who I am, or was, is through words. I have left them here and there. A place to start is here.

Standing at the corner

I wonder, looking at me:

Do they expect I shall be

their image fixed of this street?

Such to minds privy discreet?

It can be other surmise. 

Thus alone, I'm no way wise,

able to guess or to know

the looks that goad us to glow.

I wait, wandering in lies:

What's in the light or their eyes,

that wordless passing must sate?

Stay here and wait for my mate.

Yet of s/he or me inside 

would out but never betide?