Unfolding the Accordian, then Squeezing It Back Up Again.

Idea and Ontology

I spent somewhere around four hours in the past two days trying to track down a song that I heard on This American Life. Thinking about any number of micro-dilemmas brought to course in the passing of a day, I set bow to break and dug in a virtual landscape of placelessness for an ontological cue. This post is about idea and ontology. Chords are ideas. They are measurable, discernable, recognizable and identifiable; they are finite and tangible. They are not invisible. Circumstantially, our sensate capacities come to measure, discern, recognize and identify such cues like music, and waves of fluctuating air become ideas. A single piece of music, as a deliberately considered construction, denoted on paper and executed with a different rule of measure, communicates intention. This too is discernable; intention begets consequence, begets consequence, begets consequence, and on and on until we ( I ) ruffle my whiskers and call it causality. Last night I had a conversation about altruism and justice, and it was in the end a silly conversation because the other person involved and I weren't acknowledging the words that we were dodgings by proclaiming them. Besides, it was late and I was exhausted and I wanted to sit under the flourescent lights in the studio and stare forward, sipping on the lukewarm beer that stood at hand. Justice is black and white, she said, referring to Scripture. I said yes, it is. But we know it only in greytones. I don't believe in altruism, I said. I don't believe such a complete conviction is possible--sip--we declare it isn't. We're talking around the center now. At the end of the day I don't know what God's justice is. There's no way for me to a priori determine whether God's standing on a divide hoarding the murdered into hell. I cannot do this because I only see greys, but never black and never white. Of course, she said. But you have faith that God is correct. Right, that's the temptation as well as the pain of it. Yet how can we then turn around, admitting that faith in correctness is the best we can do, and send our own into a hell of our own making? What is this nihilism? How can you stand by the exactly ambiguous with an ambiguous exactness? Is it so easy to swing back and forth between poles, and miss the dialectics of moving in between? Sip. I wanted to say that I believe in one justice because the very concept doesn't allow for duplicity, and that we don't have relative palettes of choice. Sip. But that's the paradox of Christian ontology; that we depend on the relative to know the universal. This is a melancholy of all things in parallel--greater knowing yields only the possibility for greater unknowing. A god of justice is a god of torment then, if justice is univeral and singular, but we cannot know it in such terms. The extent to which we know justice is described most essentially by the extent to which we don't know, and the extent to which we don't know is the extent to which we are exacted the torment of not knowing, of building up in an origin-less world according to what can be seen and heard and tasted and felt around us; the melancholy of all things in parallel. In such a world, we will spend skewed time digging for the ontological cue. It is a grounding, as sign measures intention, measures consequence, and consequence, and consequence, and consequence...Sip. The whole time with two hands in two poles, two ends of the arc of a swing, eyes cast down along the trajectory of in between, constantly dropping swings from the right hand to pick it up with the left, and back again. Sip.

Chanson: A Perfect Circle, Judith.