critical massage 3: student studies

AT LAST at fucking last and only after much hesitation/procrastination, and with easy justification for same deriving from the radical change(s) in my immediate environment during the last year; hold page 13, i have started to read the tri-axium writings. this is really the first time i've tried in depth to follow a really detailed system of philosophy since i read ouspensky in my late twenties... and even that was essentially quite different, since much of the core text is not written by him as such but transcribed from q&a sessions (ideal stress- and ego-free way of doing it, in principle). braxton's writing takes me right back to my last year of uni, heidegger's being and time as my english edition is called; in order to crack that (very difficult) linguistic code i had to get all the forensic tools out and really dismantle the stuff sentence by dragging sentence, constantly annotating with abbreviations to ensure that every fragment was grasped before inching onto the next... four or five hours of this, during which time i covered a surprisingly large chunk of the first half of the book, all that i really needed to know once the massive implications had had time to settle, following the series of earth-splitting reverberations detonated inside my head, on the occasion of that one late-night total immersion...

... this time is somewhat similar in that the beginning is very, very dense and requires painstaking and meticulous reading, the writer going to great lengths to present the eye (and impatient questing mind) with structures both seen and unseen, entirely personal and therefore new and fresh models for arranging communicative or discourse-related information for purposes of dissemination. or something like that (ahem). actually, once the main body text is underway, the ideas and words flow very smoothly and efficiently with no wastage, only such repetition as is necessary (and already stated at the outset as a core principle) in order to keep presenting and re-presenting the new ideas and models from as many different angles as practicable within a written text. (heidegger never reached that stage for me; maybe one individual sentence might be brief and/or simple, but never an entire block of text actually "readable"...)

already, after just a few pages there are so many details i could go into that i have to rein myself in almost completely, not allow any digression into details of the text (yet) but simply point out the most poignant aspect of the work at this time, when so few of the writer's hopeful hopes have been realised on any significant scale; yet; but a new phase is, indeed underway - and although there are never any guarantees (except the obvious one or two) and it's best not to get too carried away with ones hopes for the human race, there is still time for major and radical change to occur, with the sort of shake-up which could (indeed) destroy empires, but would by no means extinguish human life in so doing, merely perhaps draw the line under an obsessive, unhealthy and ultimately futile and self-defeating (ask alexander the great) target-driven approach to life. that is what it might take, at this point... the potential to end up as another failed experiment (this particular life form called the human race at this time) is still not only there and considerable but in terms of betting, it's where the money was... till very recently, since of course now "they" aren't sure whether any of them are gonna be left with any money once the buildings have stopped shaking...

i never did read radano last year beyond the first couple of pages, can't remember why really, never even read more than a chapter or two of george e. lewis (yet - neither of these books is going anywhere) - and had enough reasons for that anyway, as i did for leaving the braxton books in their box for a while, daunted by vast mountain-ranges of detail - at a time when i couldn't even keep the braxtothon going, and pre-parenthood time was ticking away week by week - but now that i have made the effort to engage with this major work of profound social value (as it seems to me - feeling always confident that i know the ring of truth when i hear it being spoken or channelled) i shall keep up with it, for sure, as time and circ's permit. as the warmer weather approaches, light advances / dark recedes, new undertakings are timely and apposite... as usual, watch this space... long, slow, deep breaths ;-)

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ask me some other time to tell you about the music i've been listening to during the last 72 fairly hectic hours... and maybe just maybe i'll have time to tell you about it :)

cent x