afternoon tea, ontology, politics… (for violet the cat RIP)
A smooth wooden table, marked with decades of use, on its aprons there are drawings, writing and marks from when the children and their friends had been small, mostly crayon but some felt tip as well. One of the legs has a blue duck with black eyes drawn on the side. The story of our lives drawn/marked/written on the table. We are sitting on either side of the table drinking Orange Pekoe tea and slowly eating slices of honey and walnut cake, his with brandy butter whilst mine is unadulterated. We are discussing the ontology of things, reading the set of concepts through some papers he is supposedly marking, he’s pointing at the obvious plagiarisms, the creative ones opening a possible toolset, and the regressive ones closing it down. An empire of things that they are not yet aware they live in, consumption shapes their identities, the empire of things marking their places in the social order, and yet their casually or carefully constructed papers not demonstrating this. [The blue glass light shade has a halogen light bulb, the light on the table white and glacial. She wanders into the room smiles warmly cuts a piece of cake, takes a cup of tea and goes off to wait for her next patient. The buzzer goes and doors can be heard to open.] Over the decades we had shared tens of thousands of drinks, we are getting used to our growing old together, over glasses and cups…. [Which are things that move along the incline, the round and the curved. Not here in this text descended from Euclid, but from language in general, from the universal and not the particular. In this then we see three lines, the straight that goes straight, that which tilts and inclines and the round which turns in a circle. The straight and flat plane: the angle and its inclination in divergence from equilibrium, with its multiplicity of angles according to the divergence: and finally the circle.] (All aboard the A-train, you’ll find its the quickest way to Harlem… she sings.) On the (straight) line we naturally talked about death and endings, talked about about BL’s recent suicide, about how the man had killed himself because of his depression. Was he depressed? Not like that, but because his wife, my sister died a few years ago from a stoke. Not like Al, who on the incline had recently killed himself at the bottom of one of his depressive cycles. Not at all — though both had had had enough of living. […we made some more tea, laughing about how useful a samovar would be. His analyst in B, had one in his waiting room along with a selection of teas…] We driftworked from the ontology of things into talking about the way the remains of the early residual monotheism are still affecting his life, the trajectory being from a Catholic theistic childhood, through agnosticism into the final state of many decades of atheism. The names of gods may be invoked everywhere but not in his heart — no theistic emblazoned shields assaulting him claiming dominion, a domination hiding behind religious pretexts. […..] For its now clear that security and dignity has no need of the religion. I suppose he said, that we can no longer know how to analyze monotheism today [or any of the other theisms we suggested], or what it mobilizes. It’s not supposed to be the religious ideologies used by princes to justify mastery and servitude. [Did they know?] Instead the princes have been deserted just as the gods have been, left behind as political economy ate the cities, states and empires. Where monotheism is the religion par-excellence, even though its absent, slowly destroying itself..[absent ?… it’s not so absent i said, gesturing at some of the papers he’d brought with him] Is it different for you ? he asked pausing. [we poured some more tea. turning a book face down on the table.]… Yes… when you speak of monotheisms, polytheisms or paganism it has little or no meaning for me. My childhood was a-theistic, essentially non or not at all theistic, speaking of when I was 12 or so seeing children leave the morning assembly because they were Jewish, Muslim or had some relations with another religious ideology, and not understanding why they treated the fairy story as real. It’s always been like that, as meaningless as magic, miasma or alchemy. It’s not simply that the deities are not real and have never been real, but that the ideologies and institutions dependent on the various theisms aren’t either. [paused] Actually it was later, decades later whilst speaking to various religious ideologues who thought their belief made them superior… [the barometer’s numbers were still falling 1001.05 hpa…] One of those things that are insufficiently reduced […..] We meander back into the foothills of the ontology of things, touching for a second on the thought that philosophy is engineering, then move into the rarefied atmosphere of the mountains of realist ontology [… Realism, simply put, is the notion that something is real… ontological realists constructing a diverse array of positions: ranging from relativism to determinism, and involving commitment to the existence of things from everything through to nothing at all… ] This is always several orders of magnitude more difficult to contemplate than the possibility that philosophy might be mistaken for religion or perhaps a little less so by science, flowing through the ideological elements of the communities and commons that we know to well. An ontological flow away from realism towards its antithesis. More liquid pours into the cups as we follow this speech about the difficulty of revolution in the present down into that place where there are so many projects (are) destined to run for centuries or longer. A becoming revolutionary that involves attacking nuclear power plants is so horrifying that its as appalling as the idea of not capturing carbon and methane from the atmosphere. He wonders if he spoke of it not as plagiarism but as unacknowledged cultural appropriation whether it would capture there attention given their love of purity…. Machines always lack, they are always in need of something else, not so much a machinic force as the flow of liquid through the spout with a curve and then the Lucretian fall into the china cup. The machine as a source of threat, not merely a poring mechanism supporting the private character of the action, but like mechanization itself converting into machinery, like the dominant reactionary rejection of political economy. [The cat walks across the table, her right back leg is wrapped in a blue bandage today]
