The artificer therefore unites the two by blending the natural and the self-conscious shape, and this ambiguous being which is a riddle to itself, the conscious wrestling with the non-conscious, the simple inner with the multiform outer, the darkness of thought mating with the clarity of utterance, these break out into the language of a profound, but darkly intelligible wisdom.
- Phenomenology of Spirit, Paragraph 697
What a month. I don't think my social life has ever been more active, and that's been on top of the demands of a full time job. Around the end of last month I had my first session of Dungeons and Dragons with the chess club, earlier for the Fourth of July I had them all over and we shot Roman candles at each other. That first session we had I underestimated the power of the wax-infused joint and foolishly braved another bong hit, only to end up near incapacitated, petting one of their cats for 15 minutes straight. The next week I managed to collect myself enough to run a game that went quite well, although I don't know if I'll be able to manage doing it every week with everything else that I'm having to juggle at once. As far as the new job, it's decent enough work although I very clearly miss the night shift. I started reparing iPhones and then I moved onto Samsungs and Google Pixels, a couple times I even got to try my hand at repairing Nintendo Switches. My only real gripe is that we tend to get caught up with insurance repairs for phones and accidentally neglect multi-day repairs of laptops and game consoles.
After our first failed session, I took some time to myself and I started watching Prof. Greg Sadler's lectures on the Religion chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Now, I haven't watched all of his lectures on the Reason and Spirit chapters, skipping ahead due to my recent readings of Feuerbach, but I intend to backtrack after I finish up this section. Thankfully, work is sometimes slow enough to allow me the time to watch his lectures between repairs and other duties. Deleuze critiques others for what he calls aboristic
(treelike) thinking, but my engagement with Hegel has been incredibly rhizomatic lately, like a garden of speculative potatoes. I've been skipping around a bit with Sadler's lectures, I watched all of his videos on the Pleasure and Necessity section in the Reason chapter, I've been bouncing all over the Religion chapter, and I even watched a couple on the Absolute Knowing chapter. I'd feel bad about it but Hegel wrote the Preface after the section on Absolute Knowing but those were the first lectures I watched and I made it through those just fine. I'm slightly frustrated with my slow progress on my Cruelty Squad writing, but unfortunately my shitbox Thinkpad is incapable of running any games in three dimensions and my social life has been so busy that I hardly have the time to sit down and play video games anymore. But, I finally got a copy of Visions of Excess in the mail and I'm hoping to read a bit of Bataille before I really get working on it.
Last month, I met up with another philosophy professor who works at the local university that I live by now, we met up at one of the more popular restaurants in the area and I drank 4 or 5 beers while we discussed all of our philosophical interests and commitments, my only regret is drunken oversharing. I mentioned my recent interest in Bataille and Deleuze and he advised that I should avoid anything that Deleuze wrote with Guattari and that if I'm going to be reading an unhinged French philosopher, the most worthwhile is Althusser. So, having a copy of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, I opened it up and started exploring his writing, it didn't take me very long to become a fan. I'm excited to read For Marx and On the Reproduction of Capitalism but as of now I have no idea when I'll get around to it, but Althusser is now on the list. The professor also advised that since I finished up the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts that I immediately begin a study of The German Ideology, but I'd prefer to start that after I've worked through The Unique and Its Property from Stirner. I hope to see him again soon but I am an incredibly busy man. He also invited me to join the local university's philosophy club that meets on campus but I don't think I'll get to meet any of them until the semester starts later this month. I'm praying that I meet someone else with an absolutely restless obsession with Hegel, but we'll see.
Recently I finished my third journal, putting it up on the shelf with the others. It was a pleasant Kokuyo journal that lasted from early January to the end of last month. The very first journal I finished was a little pocket sized black journal that I got when I worked the night shift, it was small enough to fit in my pocket so I didn't have too much trouble writing in it every day until the habit was ingrained. This most recent journal that I'm somewhat excited for is a medium sized Midori journal with blank pages that I hope will help me work through insecurities around drawing. Every now and again I check the subreddit for journaling to see how other people approach it and what other journals look like, and while some have a tendency to use the same kind of journal for every one they write, I have a habit of using a different kind of journal every time I start a new one. This will be my second journal that I intend to draw in, the first was a hardcover sketchbook that I received as part of our supplies in art class when I was in high school. That one I only used studiously for only 20 pages, this time I hope to finish it.
A long time ago when I was in high school a friend of mine had a little journal of his own that looked like the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies, it had a plastic case around it that looked gnarled and mysterious with a face staring out at you. I remembered the brand years later and bought one exactly the same off of eBay and I hope to start it after I finish this one, that should give me plenty of drawing practice first. I remember he, myself, and another friend practiced a sort of homebrew Neo-Pagan religion and he kept all of the lore
and notes about it in that journal. I've been reflecting a little on those experiences while I read through Hegel's writings on religion. Once we performed a little ritual honoring some kind of holiday that he came up with and we spent all day exploring the woods around us, looking for berries and leaves that we later used to make a ritual tea, which tasted so vile that we ended up mixing it with Dr. Pepper. While we explored the woods we found a running creek and I distinctly remember cupping some of the water in my hands and taking a nice, cold drink. I don't remember houses that I used to live in as I grew up particularly fondly, but I do have a certain reverence for the old houses of friends. That house, my friend's dad owned it, had a particularly spacious game room that sat comfortably on top of a 2 car garage, a room that became the space for candlelit ceremonies and the recording of shitty black metal demos. They don't live there anymore, and I'll always miss it.
Speaking of esoteric knowledge, there's a rabbit hole that I want to go down, which is also a rabbit hole I don't want to go down. As above, so below. I was rummaging around my bookshelves yesterday and I found my copy of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, which I've read once as a PDF and enjoyed enough to hunt down a physical copy. Yesterday I had to stop myself from drunk purchasing a 4 dollar collection of translations of the Emerald Tablet, and right now I'm eyeballing a scholarly edition of the Corpus Hermeticum from Cambridge. When I was younger I had an interest in occultism and ceremonial magic and I've labored hard to get away from that, and here this book is pulling me into the realm of the speculative mysteries once again. That's part of the reason I'm quite curious to work through the Revealed Religion section of this chapter in the Phenomenology, as well as the section on Absolute Knowing. The author essentially argues that Hegel's Phenomenology serves as an initation rite into the speculative mysteries to prepare the initiate for the reception of wisdom in the form of the Science of Logic, but as someone who's labored a great deal on the Phenomenology I can kinda see what they mean intuitively and at the same time reject its importance. Their book is worth a re-read but I'm cautious of where it'll take me. I might end up writing a review of it, but I hope not. I'll come to know god through the wisdom of German mysticism, or Soviet fisticism.
I've spent the last few days in another narcoleptic haze, it comes and goes. I miss having time to myself, but I cherish the time with the people I love. It's unforunate I wasted so much time when I was unemployed, I can't help but feel guilt, guilt of an uncomfortable realization that I am not what I could have been.