Once more I sense uncertain shapes appearing,
dimly perceived in days of youth long past.
As of now, I've lived for a little over a month in my new place of residence and I've had time to rest and recalibrate. Much to my family's displeasure, instead of doing anything productive with my time I've spent the better part of a month cooped up within my new bedroom reading with a frenetic pace that seemed to belong to someone else. I've managed to finish five different books in one month, which I'm rather proud of since I used to work the night shift where I had ample time to read on a daily basis and I could barely manage two or three.
I began this month by picking up a book I had been meaning to get to for quite some time, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, which was later adapted into a film which I had seen years prior but scarcely remembered. The story follows a Bob Arctor who's an undercover narcotics agent haunting his way through the underworld of Substance D dealing-addiction, I clasp those words together to better capture its reality. As I read the book it became quite a personal endeavor due to my own personal experiences with not necessarily addiction, but drug habits that some could consider unhealthy or immoderate. Dick likens those with drug habits as children—not in a particularly patronizing way—playing in the street and taking a risk every time. At the very final pages of the book there's a list of friends he had either lost or who found themselves irreparably damaged by their play, who he thinks were punished too much for wanting too little. Another aspect of the book I ended up latching onto was a character by the name of Donna Hathoway, who Bob Arctor finds himself in love with. Eventually, through a seemingly innocuous interaction about Donna's plans to move up north with Mr. Right, Bob decides to ask if he could ever come along with her whenever she decided to leave. She smiled and said no, and Bob understood very well what she meant. It was precisely that moment where I sublate my own experiences with my previous romantic failure and realized that I, like Bob, had to accept what she conveyed but didn't utter.
After I wrapped that up, I decided on another book that had been festering in my mind for a minute. I picked up Hard to Be a God by the Strugatsky Bros. which follows a man by the name of Anton from our Earth, who on an alien planet goes by the name Don Rumata and claims to be the issue of a local noble. The planet is never specified in name but finds itself trapped in our equivalent of the Middle Ages, rife with feudal kingdoms and imposing castles. Anton travels the planet alongside other scientists from Earth who presumably come from a planet that has fully realized communism across every continent and ocean and has since become a spacefaring civilization unfettered by orbital provincialism. Other scientists had attempted to change the course of history through their own endeavors—none were successful. One of the more colorful examples was an Earth historian who happened to be an expert on English and French peasant revolts who attempted to lead one of his own but found his skull pierced through with an arrow after attempting to stop the peasants he was leading from looting a village. There was one particular interaction in the book that I've found it impossible to forget. Near the very end, Anton has a conversation with a local from the planet known as Doctor Budach, a person he had been attempting to rescue from prison for most of the book. Anton and Budach have a long discussion amongst each other about theology, about the nature of God and debate various points of theological intrigue concerning God's presence in human affairs, Anton responding to his questions as if speaking with the voice of God. Eventually, Anton asks Budach, But should I deprive mankind of its history? Should I exchange one mankind for another? Would it not be the same as wiping mankind off the face of the planet and creating a new mankind in its place?
Budach takes a moment to think, perplexed by God's lack of willing intervention to improve the lot of his offspring and merely states, then, Lord, wipe us off the face of the planet and create us anew in a more perfect form. Or, even better, leave us be and let us go our own way.
This stuck out to me in particular because I read it in a rather imperfect Hegelian light, and it was then that I concluded that for all of our planet's accomplishments, glories, and horrors, they'd be nothing without its development in the slaughterbench in history and that this is what imbues our historical struggles with their potency and meaning, at the most encompassing level and at the localized level of our own personal horrors and shortcomings. God would have no right to deprive us that history.
Next, I read the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, a collection of short stories by an Argentine. Unfortunately, his stories are ultimately something I think I'd have more to talk about after a second or third re-reading, they're incredibly cavernous and would likely require notes for a complete explication. But, I thoroughly enjoyed his writing and hope to read more of his short fiction. I think what I most appreciate about his writing is that for all of his highbrow allusions and philosophical locutions, he seems to never forget the experience of the reader and crafts stories with a blend of confidence, humility, and encyclopedic breadth that keeps them entertaining and engaging. I finished the collection alone in my bedroom but it was the first book I took with me to the first local bar I went to here in this new town. I sat at the very end of the bar sipping Bud Light and read through his stories of The Library of Babel along with Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and people would sometimes come up to me and I'd have to try my best to attempt to synopsize The Library to the best of my ability because I thought it was the more entertaining of the stories I had read that evening. It was a good night, I never regret bringing a book to the bar, especially because the library refuses to serve beer for unelaborated reasons.
Wanting to take a detour from fiction and get back to my roots, I read a biography of Robespierre that I'd like to read again after spending more time with other books about the French Revolution. Ultimately I found the figure of Robespierre admirable. I both fear and hope that I'm to share a similar fate. Although, I'd also like to read a book about the French revolutionary François-Noël Babeuf to compare and contrast their development and political careers. Another detour that I think would be worthwhile is reading a collection of Robespierre's speeches that I have laying around compiled by Slavoj Žižek. I think I've grown past my interest in Žižek so I don't know if I'll find his introduction particularly compelling but the speeches themselves would be a blast to read through.
Lastly, just last night I finally finished reading through Dr. Josephson Storm's Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and it touched upon a few issues that I had been rather interested in. When I was first getting into philosophy I did so through the videos of Cuck Philosophy (who now publishes his videos under a different name) and he helped form my initial interest in various thinkers from the continental tradition, particularly thinkers that get umbrellaed under the categories of post-structuralist or postmodernist. So, I had a somewhat passing familiarity with these thinkers and later along the way I became quite interested in pointed issues that philosophers within the Marxist tradition had with these various thinkers. As Hegel reminds me, it's quite easy to see philosophy in terms of either blanket acceptance or blanket rejection, but much harder to see the various moments of philosophy as moments of an organic unity, so it's always been lurking in the back of my head that at some point I myself need to read some of these alleged postmodernists and come to my own conclusions through my own labors. Dr. Storm's Metamodernism performs a rather interesting mediation between my distinctly modernist interest in the works of 18th century theorists like Hegel and Marx as well as my nascent interest in postmodern theorists like Deleuze, Blanchot, and Bataille, as well as a bit of Wittgenstein, Rorty, and others. Since I've only read his book once I'll refrain from going into the weeds about it since I don't think I'm quite ready for anything like that, anything I'd say couldn't help but be misleading, but it's a book that I think warrants my further attention. Eventually I'll come to write about it somewhere else on this website with a bit more lucidity and perhaps a bit more critically.
This month I'm going to take some time to read about Pre-Columbian philosophy with a couple different books, the first I'll most likely get through is called Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time. After that I'll finally get around to reading Aztec Philosophy by James Maffie which has been something I've really been wanting to dig into for longer than I'd like to admit. Then if I have the time to I'll finally get around to reading Terry Pinkard's translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which looks like it might end up becoming my favorite of the bunch. Then, it'll be back to reading about Marx, historical materialism, and everything I've been putting off for some purposefully personal digressions. It's a rather strange explanation but through Hegel I've developed an enduring love of heroic gestures and part of my reason for wanting to read into Mesoamerican philosophy is the hope that at least some of my ancestors are looking down at the long, protracted history of those valiant souls willing to fight and die for communism and honoring them as warriors in the event of their ascent to the immortal realm of Elysium, where heroes do perpetually in memory what they only did once in life. It's certainly been nice to write again, and I thank you for reading!