Dating Advice from Trakl

a taste of my own medicine

     “I drank the silence of God
     Out of the stream in the trees.”

      –Bly & Wright’s Trakl

I would be remiss if i were to urge that philosophy give up systems-building, endless explication, & tinkering at old broken mathoms, in favor of an unfolding phenomenology which might oneday, with a little luck, yield some useful insights; without myself adding to that attenuated lineage, which belongs rather to writers such as Proust, Woolf, Powys, & Rilke (& perhaps half or more of the haiku poets), than the epigones of Cassirer.

I began inventing my own language out of realization that the majority of my experiences did not have a name. Perhaps a few hundred definitions later, this coinage mostly lapsed, for i found it difficult to remember the words. (Also, they weren’t all written down in one place. My bad.) I have often used the example of riding a bicycle, as a case of nonverbal meanings which are perfectly subject to analysis but not yet verbalized. Another i discovered when i took a class in Scuba Diving.

There is an operation which involves learning to switch from nose-breathing to mouth-breathing. Nobody can tell you what to do, but most people pick it up in a few tries. It is both a matter of shifting attention & forming a new habit, upon which other new habits will be built. Even in the sport i believe it has no special name; it’s just one of the gates beginners pass through, if they want to continue at all.

And speaking of breathing, there are various regimes (let us call them “hatha yoga” even though they may not even stem from that tradition) which urge you to switch your habitual breathing from head-breathing to diaphragm-breathing. (It’s not the same as the scuba breath.) I found it challenging to do this. As long as i wasn’t thinking about anything else, i could maintain it, but as soon as i got distracted or purposeful, i reverted to what i was accustomed to (& had been doing, unselfconsciously, every moment for 20 years).

I started sitting, at first for minutes, later for up to an hour. And finding my natural at-rest posture, i figured out that the pelvis had to be tilted just-so (& i began to curse virtually every chair made by WestCiv in this century)... When i’d found a reasonable position, my breath changed of its own accord, & i am not boastful to add that i’ve pretty much breathed that way ever since--including times of discomfort or distress.

Peintre de la Vie Moderne

spider in the sky
at dusk
outside my window
harvesting what night fliers
seek this light
by an evolutionary accident
of their guidance system
like casual thoughts
on the way
to becoming something else
i trap in my delicate patience
and wrap with such care,
O dust-lost spinner,
you wouldn’t think
they are my subsistence too

(poem from the early 80s)

So, practical phenomenology might consist of observing & collecting: things you notice (particular shades & textures; movements; sensations of every kind--everything, in fact, that is not just registering a known quantity), things you suddenly figure out (insights); maybe even larger realizations ( “i’m in love”; “you must change your life”). This latter direction might not even end with things that exceed one’s individual awareness, for intuition can grasp a whole of infinite span, if it has a shape. (E.g. gravity.)

This isn’t the only job of a poet, & for a lot of poets it’s barely a consideration. Poetry, after all, is the art of words. Poets name moods, if they name anything. Not in a single word, but in a whole poem; if they’re fortunate, other people will find their own mood named in that poem as well.

Would philosophers desist from opining, & even moreso, from referencing opinions? Should they? Let us call this a certain traditional game, a game like ping pong, or Go, or 3-D chess. In one circle they play by this set of rules, in another by other rules. (And the differences matter.) You can even be nourished, somewhat, by following the game. What of those who thirst for insight? Will they find it in the records of the game? Barely. They sure won’t get it from dogmatic systematizers, for whom insight can only be ancient revelation.

Others, let’s call them Taoists, would say: you don’t have to hoard your insights; & if you share one like a kid would share a neat rock, it may or may not be appreciated. You can put it in a poem, you can mutter it to yourself.

Or you can let it go. It came from somewhere else.