The fourth dimension of the proposition is sense. “The Stoics discovered it along with the event: sense, the expressed of the proposition, in an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition.” The Stoics were masters of paradox, especially Zeno. They even had their own esoteric vocabulary. Sextus Empiricus tells us that the Stoic had a word completely stripped of meaning, “Blituri,” which was employed with its correlate “Skindapsos.” Strictly speaking, skindapsos was the word for a four-stringed lyre. While, blituri is an oenomanopea for the strumming of the strings. But, in the Stoic use, it is applied as a blanket term for any combination of series (or strings) and the corresponding event produced by this combination. “The blank word is designated by esoteric words in general. The function of the blank word, or of the esoteric words of the first order, is to correlate the two heterogeneous series( Deleuze 67).

Zen also has a blank word, Mu (Wu in Chinese). Roughly translated it can mean “no”, “none”, or “without”. It can be used as a response when the question itself is wrong and thus cannot have a definitive answer. The Rinzai school of Zen uses the following koan as their initiation. A monk asked Joshu: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu answered “Mu”. Early Buddhist thinkers conjectured extensively on whether animals had Buddha-nature, so if Joshu answered “no”, then he would be denying their wisdom, while if he answered “yes” he would seem to obey their dogma. Joshu’s answer signifies that the question, which demands that one take a position on a rather arbitrary matter, is itself a delusion (Mamon). More recently, Discordians, a quasi-parodic modern religious movement, sometimes labeled “Zen for roundeyes”, used Mu as the appropriate response for the loaded question “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

These blank words also extend into portmanteau combinations. Take for example the notion of We-wei, typically translated as “action without action”. This is not to say wu-wei is idleness. Instead, it’s a sort of preconceptualized, primordial action that comes directly from the will, without being turned around in the intellect. There is also the notion of Mu-shin, or No-mind. Again, this is not a purely negative indication a somnambulant, crazy or zombie-like awareness. Instead, it is a free and fluid mind, that it not preoccupied by thought and emotion. It is not relaxed or sleepy, but working very fast, as it has less mental preoccupations. It is the mental state hightly trained martial artists are said to enter right before battle. “Esoteric words, in turn, may also be designated by portmanteau words, of the second order, whose function is to ramify the series (Deleuze 67). The contradictions often stem from the misunderstanding of the negation of negation to mean the same as the original affirmative statement. But this is of the same class of mistake as taking an undead zombie to be a regular living human being.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
John McRae, The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chense Ch’an Budhism
Mumon, The Gateless Gate

Paradoxical statements in esoteric words and sayings stem from the attempt to use common language to describe uncommon experience. They are not irrational. If we agree that mystical experience is an experience, then it should be possible to talk about it. Take this hypothetical example. There is an island where the inhabitants can only see in black and white, the traditional binary opposition. So, in their language ‘black’ and ‘non-white’ mean the same thing. With this, the language’s capacity for colors can be described as ‘something is either white or non-white’. Now, we have someone on the island that had a mystical experience and saw the color red. He tries to communicate this by saying he saw a thing that was neither white nor non-white. But to the typical inhabitant, this comes off as utter nonsense (BP). “This affirmative synthetic disjunction… consists of the erection of a paradoxical instance, an aleatory point with two uneven faces, which traverses the divergent series as divergent and causes them to resonate through their distance and in their distance. Thus the ideational center of convergence is by nature perpetually decentered, It serves only to affirm divergence, That is why it seemed that an esoteric ex-centric path was opened to us, a path altogether different from the ordinary one.” (Deleuze 175)

Some would object that there is no logical ground for mystical experience. However, technically speaking the statements of a mystic are founded in empirical observation of a trained consciousness. The fact that these experiences may be internal, does not make them inauthentic. It is rather a symptom of an ironic reversal which has taken place over the last century, as pointed out by Adorno in Minima Moralia. It used to be that objective knowledge, meant that which you saw and experienced directly first-hand. Now, objective is that which you believe because others have experienced and studied it for you, while subjective is the realm of faulty imperfect knowledge, somehow disconnected from the world.

“Esoteric language, which in each case represents the subversion, from the ground up, of the ideal language and the dissolution of the one who holds the real language” (Deleuze 140). It is the nature of esoteric words to disrupt the existing order, because that order is inherently man-made, imperfect and impermanent. The Zen master uses language to show and break its limits.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
Henk Barendregt, Buddhist Phenomenology

N.J. Senate approves bill allowing the use of medical merijuana, NJ.com
NJ god says he’d sign medical marijuana law, Newsday.com
Coalition for Medical Marijuana - New Jersey (CMMNJ.org)

Study Suggests Collective Religious Rituals, Not Religious Devotion, Spur Support for Suicide Attacks, PsychologicalScience.org

Institution, Work and the Masculine Self.

On Thursday, 19 February 2009, 5-7 pm, in the Great Room, 1st Floor, 19 University Place, New York City

Free and open to the public

What role do work and institution play in the gendered construction of masculine self-consciousness and what are the effects of hegemonic masculinities as constructed through work? How have the changing concepts of “man’s work” or the “all-male sphere”, over the last century or so, operated upon male self awareness, representation and action, and what relationships may be perceived between the construction of masculinity through institution and work, and military interventionism? Centered around a discussion of these and related topics our panel features:

‘The Literary Study of Victorian Masculinities’ – Benedick Turner, PhD, Department of English, NYU

‘Keeping Workers Out of the Spineless Class: Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor, and Masculinity in the Making of Labor’s Foreign Policy, 1895-1918’ – Justin Jackson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Columbia University

Film screening: ‘Debating Masculinity’: A short film of interviews with five leading voices in masculinity studies – Introduced by Josep M. Armengol, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor, Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, SUNY at Stony Brook

Moderator: Josep M. Armengol

Man Enough Blog

The first stanza of Jabberwocky first appeared in Misch-Masch (a series of private periodicals for his siblings, which Carroll wrote and illustrated) in 1855, when Carroll was 23, under the heading “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.”

 After interpreting the different words, he wrote:

 Hence the literal English of the passage is: ‘It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out.’

There were probably sundials on the top of the hill, and the ‘borogoves’ were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of ‘raths’, which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the ‘toves’ scratching outside. This is an obscure, but yet deeply-affecting, relic of ancient Poetry.

A Possible Interpretation

Stanza 1: Around 4pm, the toves spin and screw near a sundial, while the depressed birds turn up their noses and the foolish kneeling land-turtles whistle and sneeze.

Stanza 2: Words of caution in the Name of the Father, who warns to beware the Jabberwock, the thing that speaks incoherently, thereby destroying sense. Also, the Son should avoid the bird in passion that has no release as it lives in isolation, for this perhaps makes its thoughts muddled, as well as the raging Bandersnatch, which Carroll does not define possibly on account of its lewd origin

Stanza 3: So, wielding a vorpal sword, the Word as Gospel, he goes off seeking his foe. On the way, he stops by the monotonously rustling tree and contemplates awhile.

Stanza 4: But, unlike Buddha’s serene meditation under the Bodhi tree, the Son’s mind is turbulent, and suddenly the Jabberwock appears. It’s whiffling and burbling could be huffing and puffing (like the Wolf in Three Little Pigs), but could also mean that it’s whistling lightly, mumbling to itself, or just talking to itself in a silly way.

Stanza 5: One, two! One, two! The Son, through binary oppositional logic, slays the nonsensical metaphoric beast, his sword laughing as it feeds. Upon cutting off the Jabberwock’s head, the Son galumphs home, though this can mean either that he is galloping triumphantly as a hero, or that he moves clumsily and slow, in which case maybe the Jabberwock was no real threat and killing it was unnecessary.

Stanza 6: The Father welcomes the Son back, rejoicing with open arms. Yet the restraint of his laughter hints at insincerity, and his caveats on the Jabberwock’s danger may have been false.

Stanza 7/1: The story comes full circle and starts anew, perhaps this time with the hero in the role of the Father talking to his Son.

Limerick for Miss Vera Beringer (1869)
There was a young lady of station
“I love man” was her sole exclamation
But when men cried, “You flatter”
She replied, “Oh! no matter
Isle of Man is the true explanation.”

There are a couple of Gaelic words in the poem, particularly ‘rath’ and ‘manxome’. Carroll clarified that ‘rath’ rhymes with ‘bath’, hence it is a homonym with ‘wrath’. The limerick above makes a plausible case that ‘manxome’ is related to Manx (the Ancient Gaelic spoken on the Isle of Man, as well as a type of cat native to the island), and so could mean ‘of man’. In combination as ‘wrath of man’, this possibly hidden connection may refer to the violence done to meaning through binary opposition logic and blind obedience to the Name of the Father.

This is a "death van" used in China as an alternative to the traditional method of execution by firing squad. Manufactured by Jinguan Auto, a maker of ambulances, the van has a sliding stretcher that comes out the back, so as to avoid the brutal scene of dragging the condemned prisoner onboard for their lethal cocktail. It also comes equiped with a live video feed to broadcast the executions. Certain critics argue that the vehicle makes it easier for authorities to engage in illegal organ harvesting of the prisoners, difficult to verify, since no one is allowed to view the corpses of the executed prior to cremation. Amnesty International reports that the profits from organ sales may be part of the reason China refuses to abandon the death penalty. According to Kang Zhongwen, designer of the vehicle, the shift from shooting people in the back of the head to poisoning them in the back of a bus reflects how China "promotes human rights now." It’s also a horror movie begging to be made.

China Makes Ultimate Punishment Mobile, USAToday.com

Many players underestimate the time they spend playing the game
The amount of players who admit to being depressed is disproportionately high
Women don’t like to play with other women
The average player is not a teenager, the mean age being 25-26
Most people play with others from the same general geographic area

Virtual Games Players Stick Close To Home, ScienceDaily.com

Intellectual Love, by me

Buying experiences, not possessions, leads to greater happiness, EurekAlert.org