Dailies II
101. Again, in sum: Time signifies eternity.
102. The thought is freedom disengaged from every shackling fear. 103. An essay on euthanasia confirms: The thought now has its apostle. 104. An ancient issue: Can insight bend the human heart? And to what end? 105. The world divides conveniently in two: The saintly, and the rest. 106. The thought solves the problem of life in all its forms and extremities. 107. The thought is the solution. There is no other. 108. No 'if's, 'and's, 'but's, or alternatives: The problem of life has been solved. 109. Stigmata redefined: The prehensile thumb that bleeds and closes. 110. Not church--intelligence, triumphant. As Siddhartha over pain. 111. The stigmata attest: As God or devil, they have ceased to matter. 112. Malraux: 'How long has it been since a great religion shook the world?' In generality, no longer. 113. So as to say: Even miracles no longer matter. 114. The thought obviates relationships to man or God, all legacies of fear. 115. The art is the visual correlative of the thought, by which it is emboldened. 116. The thought is arrayed in signs and portents, for efficacy and range. 117. If there is a God, the thought is his definitive word. 118. Stigmata, coincidence, sign, and symbol: The powers that be make it easy. 119. How many summers are left in this battle of 10 thousand years? 120. Joan of Arc was fire, in her element at the stake, and inextinguishable. 121. November 25: The author was born on the feast day of Catherine, the voice of Joan's authority, and patron saint of philosophy. And so, to God's amusement, the thought is sanctioned. 122. Not faith, personhood, or objecthood, relic or incantation, but the logic and implication of time. 123. Those who have been called, and have delayed, or have not answered, must face a public whose pain has been needlessly prolonged. 124. A condition of Eden: Let others condemn. The thought redeems. 125. That 'a married philosopher is a figure of comedy': Superceding God, everything becomes supernumerary, in need and in fear. 126. The thought, in generality of power: No one deserves it more, or needs it less, than another. 127. Christianity is limited by a cult of personality. 128. Again: Obviating personality, the thought is the form the second coming assumes. 129. Service cannot be, as it often is, a mask of self-indulgence. 130. For once a servant comes armed to the teeth. 131. What is the claim? That the thought succeeds against all possible contingencies. 132. What matters is the perpendicular, personality to beauty, asethetics to logic, pain to Eden. 133. November 25, feast day of Catherine of Alexandria, in the year of the dragon. 134. What can we say of birthdays? They are hearsay, and must go the way of all other suppositions. 135. As to stigmata: The thought has been sanctified in blood, to stain the opposition. 136. The banner is partly of style, by which it can be known. 137. As a person might imagine, each thought means many things. 138. Not even objects are absolutely labeled, to prevail against all future time. 139. What do we know of privilege? That everyone else may see blue more intensely? 140. That 'God is a raft . . . and sex a salve' in an acid sea: The thought burns with sufficient intensity to evaporate it dry. 141. As elsewhere: The subtext of want is need, its presumption. 142. Competition reconsidered: To direct our energies, not against each other, but the common contagion. 143. What is it to become someone else? To die upon a wish. 144. Senses of inadequacy, fear, and pain sustain claims of privilege. 145. Even this were necessary: That, in the end, only presumption can decide between misery and redemption. 146. Than progeny, the thought is a firmer comfort, even as we age. 147. Evil, signifying desperation and despair, manifests itself in minutia, as in walking a dog on a restricted beach. 148. Joan's mistake was faith in visions, voices, and signs, despite their force of conviction. 149. 'Things can only get better': As if we knew the direction of amelioration. 150. Any reversal means through generality. 151. As Siva, sex is a desperate dance. 152. From what need we be diverted? 153. We dance as we sing: To forget. 154. The Buddha, as the Aristotelian god, does not move. 155. The second coming is non-relational, epistemological, bears no human form. 156. Mailer, Paglia, and victimization: We are prey to our weapons, as women sexuality. 157. Our weapons validate, to our peril. 158. What do we want in Eden? Not mythology, but happiness, and an end to pain. The thought provides the latter; the former follows. 159. How strong is vanity? Enough to support all measure of pain. 160. It is easy to want. Less easy to discern its presumption. 161. The creative well is pain. 162. Not knowing that life is greater than death, what exactly are we discussing? 163. Simply: We haven't a clue what's going on, but think we do, and suffer. 164. And: The future can erase, redeem, transfigure, and fulfill the past. Every millimeter, every inch of it. 165. From beginning to end we write to console. Were there no consolation, there would be no thought worth conceiving. 166. The theology of hope: Presume against time; you will despair. 167. Our pain is as deep as our sense of God. 168. The thought fulfills, or obviates, fate. 169. When 'the voices have burnt out' and 'the world is a silent darkness': You have not yet heard, or felt, a siren's song. 170. Time rings in our ears. 171. 'What do I know?' governs 'What should I fear?' 172. Again: Morality is of fear, superfluous in Eden. 173. We rage at what we fear, our faith in symmetry. 174. A rule of reversal, a heuristic: What inspires no interest demands attention. 175. The point of multiplicity? Generality, the meaning of things. 176. Generality explicates multiplicity. It is the existential logic of meaning. 177. We can only guess at what a baby points. 178 . Among incompatible views: The tragic sense of life. 179. As the categories, the tragic sense of life is obsolete. 180. We smile at possibility. 181. The thought makes emotion voluntary, a new kind of freedom. 182. The tragic sense: The art transfigures what the philosophy ends. 183. A test: Expectations vary inversely as 'faith.' 184. At the end of abstraction, everything congeals, as space in Van Gogh. 185. Against pain: The philosophic understanding of time is stronger than the religious conception of divinity. 186. Contingency Theory: How future possibilities decide past realities. 187. Is life unfair? Not so far as we can say. 188. The concept of fairness is atemporal. 189. An atemporal claim is indeterminate, decidable by chance. 190. Salvation: At best we cannot say we are lucky. 191. The thought is sanctioned by Catherine, and stronger than the second coming. 192. Human dignity is ontological, not categorical. 193. The haze that obscures our sight is conceptual, and tractable. 194. Freewill, in Eden: There is no ill-advised choice. 195. In Eden, as here, deciding is arbitrary, flipable, dice. 196. God plays dice in a perfect world, where every possibility is good. 197. A credo: There is something called the meaning of the world, that has power to end human pain. To understand it, the generality of it, one must be able to flip a coin over life and death--one's own. 198. The implication of time, sub specie aeternitatis: In this world, so far as one can say, every possibility is good. 199. Eternity mirrors temporal possibility. 200. In Eden, life is a random walk.