Thought.is

It conjures truly exquisite images.

The world comes at all of us, all the time. There is no down time, only slower and faster, more or less intense. To be alive is to perceive, to have the world literally bear down upon you, inundating you with stuff — air, sights, sounds, feelings, affects, moods, ideas, people. It is relentless.

To me, thinking is a practice in and of itself and hence is inherently practical. Thinking is a kind of doing such as, say, running. It’s an activity. Unless we say that running is physical masturbation as it’s not practical. After all, you’re not running to get anywhere such as the book store.

Often, we imagine the world is this static platform on which there’s stuff. And then there’s us who spend our time maneuvering around this stuff. But between the stuff and between us is, well, some stuff but also a whole lot of nothing.

I get a call from a friend asking me to go out and I think, “Well, I kinda wanna. But I’m tired. And driving’s a drag. And while I might want to go out, I’m not sure I want to go out with that friend — not tonight. But maybe it’ll be fun. And I should get out more often. And I haven’t seen him in ages.”

What I taught — at least, what I tried to teach — is how to see the lay of the land, how a discourse constructs itself, what its terms are, what the assumptions are, what the pivotal terms are.

No more saying, “Why do these things keep happening to me?” They keep happening to you because of how you go. Maybe you can discipline yourself to go differently; maybe you can’t. But it’s not you doing it to you (as there is no inner agent acting on you); nor is it the world doing it to you

Writing like this is what we call an essay — a try, an attempt. This is, of course, the etymology of the word — from the French, essayer, to try. This is not about creating a highly polished, clean, clear monolith. It’s about seeing how thoughts meet language and what kind of order might emerge.