Hotazel: Queer Memoirs of a Lipstick Lesbian

By Vincent Gray

The sources that have inspired ‘Hotazel’ are many and multi-fold. As a work of art ‘Hotazel’ is a literary work in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. ‘Hotazel’ falls into that celebrated genre of literary creations that arises by way of not only breaking out of, but also transcending, those four walls of confinement which imprison, detain, cut-off, isolate and remove the inmate or detainee from society and the life-sustaining social intercourse which one enjoys with family and friends.
‘Hotazel’ shares the sense of bodily confinement with other works such as Descartes’ ‘Meditations’, Xavier De Maistre’s ‘A Journey around my Room’, Beckett’s Molloy and Malone, Bunyan’s ‘ Pilgrim’s Progress’, and Proust’s ‘Narrator’. Forced to endure the mind numbing paucity of events which usually interrupt and fill the normality of our daily lives, Hannah clings onto her sanity by exploring her memories, by story-telling, by day dreaming, by lecturing to an imaginary audience , by preaching to an imaginary congregation, and by philosophizing in an imaginary seminar. And sometimes the dreaming, story-telling, recollections and the interludes of didactic-pedagogic-lecturing-to-an-invisible-audience on various themes, all merge into one another. In the prison cell the boundaries between storying-telling, dreaming and imaginary pedagogic-interludes, breakdown, and become hazy and indistinct.
Hannah in ‘Hotazel’, like Descartes who while completely room-bound, trapped within the walls of his wintry lodgings spent his sojourn pondering on the Cogito, now Hannah Zeeman also in a state of ‘enforced leisure’, likewise embarks on her own journey of the mind, in a fashion similar to De Maistre’s Journey, Bunyan’s Pilgrimage, and of course the meanderings of Beckett’s room and bed-bound characters.
Out of the microcosm of her seclusion, first in her prison cell and then later in the isolation of the bedroom of her childhood following her release, she becomes an intrepid explorer of the boundaryless macrocosm with represents not only her physical-material confinement but also her ‘metaphysical’ confinement.
Like all the characters who are engaging in breaking down the walls of their confinement Hannah even in her immobilized state emerges as an unstoppably loquacious protagonist who somehow manages to have the final word on all matters of ultimate concern. Hopefully it will be this attribute which will endear her with her readers and make ’Hotazel’ a book worthwhile reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Gray
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310590719

Vincent Gray

As a son of a miner, I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. I grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg. I matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, I was conscripted into the South African Defence Force for compulsory national military service when I was 17 years old. After my military service, I went to the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree I worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. As an obligatory member of the South African Citizen Miltary Force, I was called up to do 3-month camps on the 'Border' which was the theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War'. In between postgraduate university studies I also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales rep. In my career as an academic, I was a molecular biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I lectured courses in microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and evolutionary biology. On the research side, I was involved in genomics, and plant and microbial biotechnology. I also conducted research into the genomics of strange and weird animals known as entomopathogenic nematodes. I retired in 2019, however, I am currently an honorary professor at the University of the Witwaterand and I also work as a research writing consultant for the University of Johannesburg.

Book preview

Hotazel

Queer Memoirs of a Lipstick Lesbian

By

Vincent Gray

Copyright © 2016 Vincent Gray

First Edition

Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction. All the characters developed in this novel are fictional creations of the writer’s imagination and are not modelled on any real persons. Any resemblances to persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.

Author Biography

As a son of a miner, the author was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg during the 1960s and matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force (SADF) for compulsory national military service at the age of seventeen. On completion of his military service, he studied courses in Zoology, Botany, and Microbiology at the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree he worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. Following the initial conscription into military service in the SADF, like all other white South African males of his generation, he was then drafted into one of the many South African Citizen Military Regiments. During the 1970s he was called up as a citizen-soldier to do three-month military camps on the 'Border' which was the operational theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War' during the apartheid years. Before and in between university studies he also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales representative. The author is now a retired professor whose career as an academic in the Biological Sciences has spanned a period of thirty-three years mainly at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Before retirement, he lectured and carried out research in the field of molecular biology with a special interest in the molecular basis of evolution. He continues to pursue his interest in evolutionary biology. Other interests which the author pursues include radical theology, philosophy and literature.

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The Tale of the Sakabula Bird

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Segomotso and the Dressmaker

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Hotazel: Journal Writing of a Lipstick Lesbian

Farewell to Innocence: The full uncensored saga of Hannah Zeeman

Send Him My Love (Short Story)

Three Days in Phoenix (Short Story)

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Raghavee: The Immoral House Keeper (Short Story)

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Dedicated to my wife Melodie and my daughter Ruth

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Memoirs

Foreword

The electronic copy and the hard copy of ‘Hotazel: Queer Memoirs of a Lipstick Lesbian’ came into my hands shortly after the author Hannah Zeeman following her retirement took her own life on the 8th of March 2016, after struggling with terminal cancer for some years. As a Professor of English, I knew her for many years as a colleague at the University of the Witwatersrand where she had been a popular lecturer in the Department of Zoology. She was an internationally recognized researcher in animal behaviour, evolutionary biology, who had published over a hundred scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, and she had been a member of senate for more than 25 years. With the winding up of her estate, her lawyer Mr Paul Goldrich handed over to me the electronic and hard copies of an unpublished manuscript that she had written about 27 years ago after she had been released from a lengthy prison detention in solitary confinement after being charged with promoting communism. She was held in solitary confinement for a period of two years extending from 1988 to 1990 before being released. Mr Goldrich had glossed through the manuscript and thought that it may have some literary value as an unconventional work of fictional writing. I read through the manuscript and believed that it did indeed have some literary merit. Mr Goldrich disclosed that in Professor Zeeman’s will, she had instructed that a trust fund be setup with the funds derived from the liquidation of her estate. Apart from supporting the cause of anarcho-communism, the trust would also fund the legal expenses for the defence of political detainees who had been arrested for furthering the cause of anarcho-communism. Mr Goldrich as executor of the Professor Zeeman’s estate felt strongly that some of the funds of the estate should be used for the publication of her manuscript and the proceeds of the sale of her book be used for the defence of political detainees. At her funeral, she was buried as an Anglican. As a single lesbian white woman, she chose to stay in her flat in Bellevue even though the suburb underwent almost a complete change in its demographic composition. She embedded herself in her community treating everyone as her equal in a spirit of true egalitarianism and solidarity, always practicing at every opportunity what she preached. During the last years of her life, she became a parishioner of St Mary’s Anglican Church, which is the landmark cathedral next to Park Station, where she seemed to have found some solace for her troubled soul, following the disappointing turn of political events in South Africa, and the indefinite postponement of the socialist revolution that she had worked sacrificially towards.

Given the successful publication of the first edition of ‘Hotazel: Queer Memoirs of a Lipstick Lesbian’ Mr Goldrich contacted me and asked if I would like to work on a revised and expanded edition that would include additional material which had been discovered in her rough drafts. The revised edition includes additional material on the themes which had preoccupied her during her lengthy detention and also some of her post-detention journal notes. Her reflections on the meaning and significance of Mythos, Logos and Telos in relation to her idea of the City have been reinforced with additional commentary and arguments.

Preface

All that needs to be said is that the final word on the meaning and significance of speech and writing has yet to be said, and there is no point in remaining silent about what cannot be said. All narration involves saying something about something to someone. The actual saying of something about something to someone occurs by means of a physical enactment in the form of a performed event. The performance of saying something about something to someone takes place or occurs as a performed event through the medium of speech or writing within a world of imposed meanings and significance. But who or what is it that actually imposes the meaning and significance of the world or Universe or reality? Ultimately, it is not us. It is impossible for us as humans or animals to impose any kind of ultimate meaning or significance or purpose on the World or Nature or the Universe, by virtue of our subjective constructions or discoveries. Ultimately, the significance and meaning of reality cannot be constructed or imposed by finite minds. It lies outside our capability or power. We cannot order, govern, or control the Universe. It is the Universe that orders and governs and controls us. This is the same as saying that we do not ultimately govern or order or control reality. Rather it is what lies within the essential nature of reality, which orders and governs or controls us. Does this make us unfree? Does this make the Universe completely deterministic? The answer is paradoxically NO! The conditions governing the possibility for the realization of our free and unrestrained agency or for the existence of our free or nondeterministic agency, and even for empowering our capacity or disposition to act as free agents, are ultimately founded paradoxically in the ‘necessitation of necessities’. The significance and meaning of reality has its foundation or basis or ground or founding or establishment or condition of possibility or even its creation if you so wish, in what can be called ‘the necessitation of necessities’, where necessities became evident to the conscious mind in the world about us, or in the Universe in the form of what we refer to as the law-like ‘uniformities’ and ‘regularities’ of Nature. The concept of ‘necessitation’ speaks to the ‘reasons’ for the existence of these law-like uniformities and regularities of Nature.

Reality is always one thing, while thought or speech concerning the actual nature of reality, or even our consciousness of reality, is another thing. However, the conditions of possibility for thinking or writing or speaking or even for our conscious awareness of the reality in which we are embedded or enclosed or encapsulated, ultimately belong to or are attributable to the nature or dispositions of reality. Again, the essential nature of reality is one thing, and the perception, and the consciousness, and the thinking, and the comprehending, and the understanding of the essential nature of reality, is another thing. Can what actually constitutes the essential nature of reality on the one hand, and the thinking about the essence of the nature of reality ever coincide or converge or become a mirror reflection? Can the essential nature of reality and our thoughts regarding the essential nature of reality become perfectly symmetrical, or in other words, a perfect match? Can reality and thoughts about reality ever coincide or converge? If you think about it, conscious or thinking or speaking or writing, are in fact integral parts of reality. It is by virtue of the dispositions, properties, powers, and relations, which make up the essential nature of reality that in turn facilitates the eventual or inevitable emergence of a materially embodied self-conscious awareness capable of comprehending the essential nature of reality. The ‘in its self’ of reality becomes the ‘for its self’ in the form of a materially embodied conscious awareness. The dispositions, powers, properties and relationships which have been built into the very material and physical fabric of the ‘in its self’ of reality, by virtue of the necessitation of necessities, make it possible for the inevitable emergence of the material embodied existent which we refer as the ‘for its self’. The alienation or dualism or diremption or dichotomy or duplicity between subject and object is dissolved or overcome or sublated when thought or thinking and reality converge or merge or become reconciled.

This means that ultimately the diremption or dichotomy or dualism or ‘duplicity’ between reality and the thinking about reality can be overcome or dissolved or sublated. We owe our understanding of the ‘logic’, which underlies the process of sublation or the overcoming of diremption between reality and thinking about reality to Hegel. Sublation is the motor of Hegel’s dialectic as described in his Logic.

In a certain sense, consciousness cannot exist without being conscious of reality. Consciousness is always consciousness of something and that something always has some kind of connection with reality. Can thought or consciousness of reality and reality as it is in itself become the same thing? This question is what constitutes the most fundamental ontological problem. To ask this question or even to think about this question is to become engaged in metaphysics. It has been popular to talk about the end or overcoming of metaphysics. However, in all truth and honesty the end of metaphysics has never arrived, nor has the above metaphysical problem been overcome. Even in the face of the undoubtable progress and advance of science the deep metaphysical questions regarding the essential nature of reality and its relationship to consciousness or thought remain unanswered. How should reality be defined? Reality includes or embraces or encloses everything, including the things of the material or physical Universe and the non-material things of the abstract Universe. To recap once more, the essential nature of the physical or material dimension of reality includes things like necessities in the form of dispositions, powers, potentialities, capacities, properties, and relationships which are embodied or are immanent in the material or physical constitution or dimensions of reality. Reality also includes the things which belong to the abstract Universe of logic and mathematics. Reality is what encloses everything, both the physical and the abstract. Nothing physical can exist outside of or independent of this reality. Reality is infinite. The owl of Minerva will never get a chance to spreads its wings because the coming dusk will never arrive. This means that the possibilities embodied in the essential nature of reality are infinite. And because of this, there will be not an END. The things that reality encloses or engulf include every thought which has ever been thought, and every word which has ever been spoken or written or heard or read. This book is part of that reality.

And so it goes (thanks for that Kurt Vonnegut). There are different views on the nature of the relationship between reality as one thing and the thinking about reality as another thing. We have the different conclusions reached by Plato, Descartes, Locke, Berkley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Husserl. But Hegel points the way! The ultimate conditions for any kind of communication which makes possible the realization or achievement of meaning and significance through the medium of speech and writing, or language, in other words, is imposed on the ‘world’ by a pre-existing order or by a physical/material state of affairs which governs the occurrence or the eventuality of all possibilities in the Universe, including the writing of this memoir. Aware of all the deficiencies of thinking, listening, reading, speaking, and writing I have often wondered whether these deficiencies could be remedied by a new kind of thinking, listening, reading, speaking, and writing. In all thinking, there remains the unthought and also the unsaid, and within all speaking and writing there too remains the absences in the form and content of the unsaid. There are also always the silences. Whatever is absent becomes a mark of the silences. The unsaid, the unspeakable, the unsayable, the unwritable, and the unheard silences can indeed be thought. This is what Heidegger concluded. Here in the pages of these memoirs, I have tried to write about my thoughts? This is the deficiency that seeks its own self-remedy. Can the unthinkable be thought? What about the unthought? Is this also a deficiency of thinking? The deficiencies of thinking, speaking, listening, reading, and writing represent an epistemological problem because the deficiency of all thinking, speaking, writing, and also reading becomes manifest in its incapacity to truly represent or grasp the essential nature of reality. So we are left with no other option than to dwell on the poverty of thinking, speaking, writing, and reading while engaged in the enterprise of thinking, speaking, writing, and reading about our experiences and how our understanding of these experiences bear on the essential nature of reality. The reality of what? Well, the reality of everything, which means making transparent the underlying intelligibility of everything that is. And this exercise is not without political significance regarding the nature of the City. And it is my critical and subversive engagement with the City that has brought me to this sorry state where I have been left with nothing else to do but write about everything which is somehow linked to furthering the destruction of the City. And any meaningful headway in the critical resolution of the problem of the City cannot be made without solving the problem of the first principles in philosophy, a solution that depends on proving the self-sufficiency of reason. Back to Hegel!

When thinking about the essential nature of the world as we experience it in all of its dimensional multiplicity, and our reflective thinking, when we decide not to take appearances at face value, provokes us to entertain the idea that the world seems to be both ‘what it is’ and ‘what is it not’. The ‘what is’ of appearances is opposed to the ‘what it is not’. Usually, the ‘what it is not’ is taken to be the invisible underlying reality by means of which appearances can exist as sensible experiences. So all experiences of the world involve interactions between the visible and the invisible. This means that we need to query our consciousness perceptions of what we take to be reality. In reflecting on what has been made visible or sensible we now query whether this ‘visibility’ or ‘sensibility’ is based on a coincidence or merging or a monism of the ‘what is’ with the ‘what it is not’, rather than an illusion based on dualism or duplicity or diremption. If we accept the illusionary nature of what we take to be the ‘visible’ or ‘sensible’ then the world presents itself to our consciousness as an unfathomable reality. On reflection, the world of experience seems to become an unfathomable reality when we first entertain the idea or the hypothesis that there exists an irreconcilable ‘duplicity’ or dichotomy or dualism or even a diremption, underlying all our perceptions, thinking, and understanding of the nature of reality. I have used the word ‘duplicity’ intentionally with regard to our perceptual engagement with reality. The word implies double-sidedness, deception, deceit, and deviousness. Duplicity haunts our not only are perceptions, but also our experiences, and also our thinking, speaking, reading and writing.

The other word used as an alternative to ‘duplicity’ regarding the relationship between our sense experiences and the nature of an ‘external’ reality was ‘diremption’. Diremption means separation, disjunction, or dividing one or something into two, for exampling dividing the world into the visible and invisible or the sensible and insensible or the Kantian phenomena and noumena or the thing in itself. The Hegelian meaning of diremption also encapsulates the splitting of thought from the world. The problem which Hegel attempted to solve in his Phenomenology and Logic included the overcoming of this diremption between thought and world or in other words, reality in itself and the consciousness of reality. Recognition of the problem of diremption inaugurated the beginning of philosophy. In this sense, the original goal of philosophy was to overcome ‘duplicity’.

The problem of reconciling reality with the thought or consciousness of reality is as old as philosophy itself, and possibly as old as thought itself, going back to the very first signs of the emergence of conscious awareness in the evolution of the hominins. Reality in itself and the consciousness of that reality or the perception of that reality is the most fundamental dualism or dichotomy confronting thought and thinking. We have to deal with the fact that we cannot know anything about the nature of reality independently of consciousness. Nor can we experience or know anything about consciousness independently of reality. It is impossible to have access to the one without the other. It is impossible to meet or engage or comprehend the one without the other. Reality and thought about reality or reality and consciousness of reality are inseparable. For Hegel the separation is overcome dialectically. When we are conscious we are always conscious of something, which means that we meet reality only as the reality which we happen to be conscious of. The overcoming of the problem of the separation or dualism of reality and thought, with reality being on the one side and thought of reality or consciousness of reality being on the other, constitute the dialectical programme of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic.

Everything which we take in from our experience of the world to be normal and real now seems to be riven with two opposing fundamental dualities, that of Being and Becoming. It is this kind of thinking which we characterise as being Hellenic in nature, and which has its roots in Parmenides and Heraclitus and which Plato has explored in many of his Socratic dialogues. It is this kind of thinking and reasoning which we call Logos, and Logos emerges as the seamless fabric woven on the great loom of logic and discursive reason. Going back to the idea of the existence of two worlds or two Universes, one visible to the senses and the other being invisible to the senses, the one empirically accessible and the other not being empirically accessible. The dualism of the visible versus the invisible while being seemingly opposed may indeed be related to each other. The visible being the realm of the Many and the invisible being the realm of the One, constitutes the problem of the relationship between the One and the Many which Plato reflected upon under the influence of Parmenides and Heraclitus, and also dealt with in terms of the relation to Being (the One) and Becoming (the Many) presented in the allegory of the Line and The Cave, where the resolution of the nature of relationship bears on the idea of the Unity of the Soul and knowledge of the Good, where the Good embodies Truth, Beauty, and Justice.

In contrast to the Hellenic, we are compelled to ask what it is that constitutes the essential nature of the Hebraic? We begin to understand the essential nature of the Hebraic not in terms of Logos or thinking or discursive reason, but in terms of the rhetorics of Mythos and Ethos and Pathos and Telos, which being produced by the ‘work of memory’ arises from the ‘listening’, ‘hearing’ and ‘obeying’ of the ‘revealed’ or divinely communicated commandments. As opposed to the Hellenic Logos, the Hebraic Mythos emerges as the seamless fabric woven on the great loom of the ‘memory’, ‘hearing’ and ‘obeying’ of commandments. If we explore the Hebraic heritage which emerges from a reflective reading of the Old Testament we find the following defining elements: The Genesis creation account is not a Hellenic speculative cosmogony but a confession of faith in which Mythos enjoined to Telos embodies the claim that Israel is God’s chosen nation with a divinely appointed destiny. The Mythos embodies all the ahistorical founding myths which have become woven into the fabric of the Pentateuch or Torah and Talmud, and which have shaped the social, cultural, and political consciousness of the nation of Israel. And it was out of this consciousness that the religion of Judaism emerged during and after the Babylonian exile.

In contrast to the Hellenic, the fabric of Hebraic monotheism did not originate in theoretical reflection or in other words from the loom of logic and discursive reasoning. Yahweh the God of Israel was born as a tribal god with a tribal kingdom and when Israel first became established as a nation state then Yahweh became the God of the nation of Israel. In place of a Hellenic cosmogony the Hebraic God speaks the word and it is done. By speaking the word, God by mere fiat calls into existence that which was previously non-existent. Hebraic mythology does not share any features with the Hellenic notion of arche or first principles. The word spoken by the Hebraic God is not the word of first principles in the Hellenic sense. This word of first principles was first used by Anaximander and in its Hellenic development, it embodied the ideas of beginnings, origin, creative action, and agency, based on discursive reasoning concerning the nature of the first principles underlying the coming into existence and the continued existence of all things. The Greek problem of form and matter does not interest the Hebraic mind. In the Hebraic mind, there does not exist any equivalent to the Hellenic conception of cosmos or universal laws of nature. The natural world is never objectified as an object of rational or discursive investigation. The natural world is never viewed as a natural order governed by eternal laws, which are empirically accessible to intellectual apprehension. In the writings of the Hebraic mind, there is no physics or natural science. In sharp contrast to the Hebraic mind, the Hellenic mind perceived the existence of divine power in the laws of nature and the ordering of the cosmos all of which could be apprehended by way of logic and discursive reasoning. And therefore, by extension of this apprehension of the divine in the ordering of nature, God in the Hellenic mind, as opposed to the Hebraic mind, could be apprehended or at least thought about and theorized about in terms of reason. To the Greek mind, the name of God was not a mystery nor was God inscrutable. The idea of creatio ex nihilo was not something, which readily took root in the Greek mind. It was an idea that developed logically out of Biblical thought (Jubil. 12,4; 2 Macc. 7.28). In the Hebraic mind, the wonder of the Universe was beyond rational comprehension. The Hebraic mind does not reflect or inquire into the rational intelligibility of the Universe, nor does the Hebraic consciousness see God’s revelation in the uniformities, regularities, or the natural laws governing the dynamics, structure, and functioning of the natural order, and so there is no natural history in Hebraic thought. The Hebraic mind never concerned itself with the problem of theodicy. The existence of evil was not something, which needed a justifying explanation in order to protect the sovereignty of God as an omnipotent and omniscience being. Evil could exist on its own accord despite Yahweh’s lordship. In Hebraic thought, because the world of nature did not seem to be susceptible and accessible to rational understanding, the world of nature was consequently treated as a mystery, as a source of awe and wonder, but also a threat, as something, which embodies great danger, but never something which could be understood in its own terms.

The Hellenic understanding of history differs from the Hebraic. The Hebraic sense of history differs in that it is not based on ‘laws of motion’ or any kind of underlying historical law-like process. In contrast to the Greeks, in the Hebrew mind history is never treated as an object of critical or scientific study. Instead, history is seen in terms of an End, or a Telos in terms of which God’s purpose for the nation of Israel will ultimately be realized. And the preconditions for the realization are elaborated in Israel’s Mythos, which is rooted in Israel’s founding myths and underlying mythology, a mythology that spells out its status, nature, and destiny as a religious community, a peculiar nation, chosen by God. For the Hebraic mind, history is conceived in terms of Mythos. Israel as God’s chosen people ends up existing ahistorically outside the great drama of the world and universal history. Hence there are no true literary based historiographies in the post-exile Hebrew writings or in the post-temple writings which reflect a rational endeavour of historical self-conceptualization, especially when compared with the historical writings of the Greeks and Romans. Post-exile and post-temple the Hebraic mind lives in a state of exile outside of universal history, and in its dispersion and wonderings following the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Hebraic mind lives in ghettoized isolation outside of world history. Hebraic history conceptualized in terms of Mythos is never concerned with an objective science of history, no matter how nascent that idea of a science of history may be, but only with Telos, which embodies God’s destiny for Israel, with the realization of God’s destiny for Israel being wholly dependent on God’s moral demand on the people he has chosen as his own. The song ‘Tradition’, sung by the main character Tevye in the Broadway musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ actually exemplifies stasis, stagnation, ahistoricity, resignation, and the repetition of the same against the backdrop of the real march of history. Judaism is a religion and lifestyle based on a never-changing ritualization of doing and repetition. The devouring gates of Auschwitz standing wide open becomes the realized Telos of the Mythos buried in Tevye’s celebratory hymn. In Tevye’s hymn, there is no element of historical agency, there is no summons regarding the demands of reason. Tradition has no ultimate significance or meaning because it is ultimately based on an illusion encapsulated in mythology.

In terms of the Hellenic and the Hebraic, God cannot be seen. God is invisible. However, in contrast to the Hebraic mind, the Hellenic mind believed that God could be known. In other words, God can be apprehended by reason alone. For the Hebraic mind, God could only be apprehended through hearing or listening. God speaks his Word, which is then heard. This hearing of the Word is not something physical involving sound waves or acoustics, but the speaking, listening, and hearing of the Word is allegorical or metaphoric. The mediating agencies of God’s Words are the priests and prophets. The knowledge about God, which the Hebraic priests and prophets have communicated does not concern God’s metaphysical nature, the knowledge communicated only concerned God’s will so that the people can know his will and act accordingly. God reveals his will to the prophets.

Truth in the Old Testament does not embody any propositional content, which can be certified as creditable in terms of evidence or logic. The truthfulness of something is accepted solely on trust. Truth as conceptualized in the Old Testament as wisdom involves knowing the Law, and knowing the Law involves the correct practice of a system of moral codes or precepts or commandments.

In these journal writings, I have been engaged with the meaning and significance of Mythos, Logos, and Telos. And this engagement has been informed by a radical Lesbian perspective on the nature of Eros and also by a critical analysis of the nature of the City in the form of the Oligarchy. I have purposefully woven the Hebraic and the Hellenic into the fabric of the text, so that the weave made up of an intertwining, an interchanging, a knotting, and juxta-positioning, will result in the creation of a tapestry, which will become the curtain, which unveils what should be of greatest human concern. In my mind, the confrontation and resolution between the realm of the Hebraic and the realm of the Hellenic revolves around the idea of the Unity of the Soul and the knowledge of the Good. It also revolves around the One and the Many or the idea of Universals.

The Greeks words, parabolic, parable, and parabola, have been derived from the same root word, a word which was meant to capture the sense of something being cast or thrown alongside something else. A parabola is a curved line that bends around a fixed point without ever touching the point directly. And we can extend this sense of the parabola into an imaginative visualization of a relation between the geometric idea of the parabolic and the idea of a parable as an allegorical representation. The parabola, embodying the ideas of the parabolic and the parable, can be imagined, as a confrontation and a resolution centred on a fix point. A parabola is a curved line that bends around a fixed point without ever touching the point directly. A parable is a story which by means of symbols, signs, myths, imagery, and metaphor allows something like the Hebraic (the Law) to be cast alongside something else like the Hellenic (the idea of the Good), with its resolution being embodied in the fixed point.

Memoirs

1.

I know that ultimately in the broad sweep of history my own life is insignificant. I know that the life I have lived will be of little interest or value or consequence to the overwhelming majority who have opened this journal by accident. Now if you have bothered to read this far, you belong to that small minority who are generally driven by an inborn curiosity to know and to find out. My advice to you is to stop reading this journal right now at this point and ask yourself whether you really want to continue reading.

You will probably agree that the first few opening lines have in all likelihood failed to stir any further interest in the contents of this journal, which I have written during my prison detention while waiting for the trial date to be set. It turned out to be almost an interminable waiting. However, the fact that you are reading the journal means that it has been published. Concerning the actual publication of this journal, I would have ignored the advice of the editors, publishers, and other literary pundits regarding its style, its contents, and the way it was presented, or structured, or organized, or put together as a work of literature with artistic pretensions.

2.

While writing the journal notes in prison it was always in the back of my mind to write something of substance, which would be both original, pioneering and experimental, and which would follow the literary format of a journal or a diary or even of a rough notebook. I liked the idea of a rough notebook or even the reworking of a rough notebook. As I have discovered that journal writing is a form of ‘free writing’ or even a form of ‘pre-writing’, which is what write before you think of what you want to write. I liked the idea of a literary creation that had all the features or imprints of a work in progress, a work based on a continuous improvisation and syncopation, somewhat like jazz, rather being something, which bears all the attributes of something that has been premeditatedly contrived for the sake of producing a smooth-polished and elegantly crafted literary artefact. What I have in mind with respect to using these prison notes as a literary resource was to create something, which would be both novelistic and journalistic. That means it had to have the literary form of a novel and a journal at the same time, but it had to be also autobiographical as well. It had to be a book that could be read as a memoir, but it had to be an atypical memoir, breaking all the literary conventions of autobiographical or memoir writing. It had to also be journalistic, with the kind of notes that one would expect to find in a genuine philosophical or scientific journal. This is what I meant by journalistic writing, that is, it is the kind of writing one would expect to find in an academic peer-reviewed journal. Yet it had to also have all the creative, poetic, artistry and aesthetic forms we associate with literary fiction. What is it precisely that we expect from works of literary fiction? Do we expect literary fiction to conform to some ideal or code or guidelines or structure or pattern or form? Of course, it is expected that the author or the writer has certain goals, objectives, aims, reasons, purposes, and intentions in mind when writing fiction. To see if I have succeeded in satisfying any of the expectations, which a reader may entertain when reading a work of fiction, I invite you to read further.

3.

I don’t believe that my life thus far has been particularly extraordinary. But as the Baron said to the Doctor in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood: ‘One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it’. The life I have invented for myself has not been lived as a public spectacle, it has been lived very privately, which is the kind of life that would be overflowing with an abundance of secrets that will go to the grave with me. So happily, I am not any kind of celebrity. And lastly, I am not even sure why I have embarked on this writing project. I am not even sure what my literary goals are, nor am I sure about what I may hope to achieve in this literary project. I am uncertain about my own motives, and I am unsure about my intentions. Moreover, I am not sure of the plot of the story that I am writing even though it is supposed to be an autobiography with a journalistic slant. Anyway, what kind of plot if any would an autobiography with a novelistic and journalistic flavour embody? Do we live our lives according to a plot or do we retrospectively invent the plot that makes the most sense of the life that we have lived? If you continue with the task of reading my journal, you may stumble on the existence of an underlying plot that miraculously gives shape, meaning, and order to what seems to be a fragmentary disconnected collection of epigrammatic sketches on a diversity of topics, which have been somehow cobbled together into a rambling directionless narrative, which does not seem to be going anywhere.

Anyway, what would constitute the real story of anyone’s life? What would be the actual story in-its-self, without any ‘spin’, the true story in other words? And who would be able to tell the true story? And how could we possibly know that it is the one and only true story? These questions imply that there could be more than one story, which could be told about any person’s life. A life, which likes all lives, could only have been lived in reality, as a continuous series of events in space and time, an ordered sequence of events, which would be necessarily linked by a chain of cause and effect, beginning with the birth and ending with the death of that person. This would represent the true story. It would be a story told in the form of a descriptive account of all the events that made up a person’s life from beginning to end in their proper sequential order. But it be would a story vested without any meaning even though the plot of the story could be discerned in the chain of causation that shaped the particular individual’s life from its beginning to its end. Only a particular kind of narrative, which represents an intentional or purposeful or teleological reconstructed, retelling of the story, could invest the story with ‘meaning’, where meaning revolves around a reconstructed or projected representation, which in fact, is nothing but a representation of a representation, with the latter representation being the ‘true story’, told without any ‘meaning’, an ‘objective’ account emptied of all meaning, consisting only of an enumeration of brute facts, or states-of-affairs. A narrative, as opposed to the above supposedly simple telling of the true story, would involve a re-telling of a story, which would become a representation of a life in terms of its projected or constructed or imposed telos or anti-telos, a story dressed up with all kinds of creative, metaphorical, rhetorical and paradoxical embellishments. Each narrative tells its own story by reshaping the plot, by investing it with a telos or an end towards which the story progresses, and in doing this the narrative engages not only in the creation of a fiction but also in the creation of a myth. Mythos and Telos belong together. A narrative often acquires its meaning by reference to a larger more ‘meaningful’ narrative, a narrative, which represents the order or disorder or chaos or purpose or purposelessness or rationality or absurdity or irrationality of the Cosmos. Meaningfulness here means saying something about something by someone to someone else. This telling of something about something may be utopian, dystopian or nostalgic in its plot thrust, concerning its Telos or Mythos, which have become thematised, in the fictionalized account, or in the novelistic work of fiction. Fictionalization always involves a representation of a representation, which involves the verbal process of speech or writing in a retelling and it is the retelling, which constitutes the narrative. A representation of representation, involves a re-telling, re-interpretation, re-counting, re-imposition, and a creative projection or construction of purpose and meaning. In this exercise, we see the relationship between representation, retelling, story, myth, telos, narrative, parody and plot. It is these relationships, which reflect, or embody or constitute the economy of all storytelling. The theme may be utopian, dystopian or nostalgic. The economy which a story or narrative embodies also necessarily imposes an economic circularity on the plot, giving it an ‘Odyssean’ parabolic structure, which when nostalgic, involves forms of homesickness. The arc of Ulysses involves the circularity of returning home.

Whatever the nature of its arc or parabola, the story's theme is always plotted out in terms of or within a framework of a Mythos and a Telos. Not every recounting, or retelling, or representation of a representation, whatever it happens to be about, can avoid the inevitability of fictionalization, in the actual performance of telling or writing. Yes, I have used the word ‘recounting’. To recount is precisely a recounting, and a recounting involves a performance, which is a constructive retelling, a narrating, a reporting, a describing, or even an explaining and also an adding up or a summing up. Yes, every recounting of something, involves an adding up. To add up what? What does it mean to add up? To add up in the recounting always ends up in engaging in an inevitable and inescapable fictionalization, which occurs inevitably in the retelling of a tale or a story, in other words, saying something about something to someone, is to add up, to recount, and to retell a story. In these cases, to add up is to add something, to add something else. To retell is to add something in the act of telling or retelling, and every telling is always a re-telling. To add something is to create a representation of a representation. To add up is to embellish. Every retelling adds an embellishment. A representation of a representation represents an embellishment.

To retell a story about something also involves communicating a message of truth or a lie, maybe even a Noble Lie about something. Leaving aside the idea of the Noble Lie, for the time being, this claim seems to suggest the possibility of the omnipresence of truth or the constant intrusion of truth into every recounting or retelling, even if the recounting involves the inevitable fictionalization of what is being recounted. This claim that the shadow or light of truth falls upon every utterance or every act of writing, that is, on every single word that is ever spoken or heard or written or read, may strike you as a gross over-exaggeration of the powers of language. How can truth be a constant ghostly presence even in the retelling of something? How is it possible that the presence of truth haunts every performance of verbal expression? To recount is to add up and to add up captures the idea of the dialectic, and by dialectic, we mean the work of dialectical reasoning. It is in the adding up that the message of truth emerges. It is in the adding up or in the recounting or in the dialectical analysis that the truth about reality emerges even from the tales, stories, allegories, fictions and myths, which Socrates called the Noble Lies in Plato’s Republic. Everyone experiences those occasions where the need is felt to tell or retell the story about his or her lives. It is an inbuilt or natural impulse, which we all share, to a greater or lesser extent.

4.

This patchwork tapestry, which has been woven together into a complex narrative, has all the confounding features of a selectively composed autobiography, containing a jumbled catalogue of unconnected memoirs, memoirs that have been interpolated with frequent diversions into philosophical or scientific commentary of a journalistic nature. The composite narrative seems to be overwhelmingly greater than the sum of its parts. This gives the reader the deceptive impression that the journal has been inadvertently and haphazardly stitched together. The narrative is filled with frequent and random interruptions, often in the form of interludes, insertions or detours or digressions. These interludes, insertion, and detours involve the introduction of off-the-topic digressions or ‘add-ins’. Different kinds of digressions have been inserted to fill in gaps or omissions. Inserting different kinds of writings or topics or digressions on apparently unrelated subject material became a bad habit, which I could not cure. Some of these insertions are distinctively didactic in tone and intent. Quite often, they don’t seem to have any bearing or relevance in the form of a connecting thread, which, only by a stretch of the imagination could be seen to play a role in holding together the vaguest outline of a plot waiting to be born. These digressions intruded into the flow of the writing quite inadvertently, which I blame on my constantly drifting trains of thought from one topic to another. Allowing these intrusions to work themselves into the flow of writing would represent what I mean by a novel or innovative or even an experimental approach to writing that is neither modernist nor postmodernist, and also neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a completely improvised exercise in writing, following the writing wherever it takes one. If I may say so, this journal or memoir or autobiography or novel, embodies all the pretensions to be something else, something quite different, or even extraordinary, which means not ordinary in the sense of sticking to accepted writing conventions. It is different because of what I have stated in my preface. Moreover, my ‘preface’ actually gives away the formulaic agenda guiding my intended literary project. So there we go, off to the Wild West show, in a manner of speaking. I have given away the plot even before I have begun to expound on the narrative. The plot has imposed itself on the writings. There was nothing I could do to circumvent this. It would have been an exercise in futility. To circumvent, to undermine, to repudiate, to deconstruct, to defer, to ignore, and to disavow the plot would have been to engage in an exercise of self-denial, to labour under an illusion, to become blinded by the kind of short-sightedness that is unable or incapable of recognizing the abyss of the infinite regress, the infernal vicious circle, and the self-reference paradox. So the plot revolves around avoiding the inevitable falling into all the logical and metaphysical traps of one’s own making when trying to comprehend the meaning or non-meaning of the life that one has managed to live in the thicket of conflicting choices and forking roads. And as Sartre has said, we are our choices. Nothing could be truer, in fact, it is inescapably true. It is true that I am the choices that I have made. I take full responsibility for my life and the way that it has turned out. In this sense, I have been an existentialist, even though I have never overtly self-identified as an existentialist or identified with the writings of Sartre.

5.

I am not sure under what genre my writing would fall or could be categorized. Maybe my writing does not conform to any specific genre nor does it fall readily into any kind of literary classification. What I can say is that I write like a scientist, and also possibly as a philosopher. I will leave it to you the reader to decide on the nature of my literary work. If I had to give away the plot of my narrative right at the very beginning of the story which I hereby wish to write it would be best to state it in the form of an enigma, an enigma that will haunt every word that I have set out to write. I would like to believe that in one way or another all speech and all writing, which endeavours to say something about something cannot escape the desire to make totalizing claims about ultimacy. Totalizing claims about ultimacy are the kinds of claims we make when we try to express the ultimate purpose or significance of our existence. And if I am going to betray the plot at such an early stage, then this would count as the hidden plot buried deep within the narrative which I have woven together from the material of my prison notebooks.

Making totalizing claims about ultimacy involves venturing beyond borders, beyond the thresholds of discipline boundaries, in this sense, totalizing claims involve transgressions, and therefore intrusions, detours, digressions, and insertions, and interludes, and meanderings, and being offbeat, unconventional, and daring. Making totalizing claims involves the transgression of the boundaries that divide literature, theology, politics, ethics, economics, behaviour, evolution, philosophy, science, morals, genetics, sociology, metaphysics, logic, ecology, mathematics, anthropology, and biology, into separate disciplines and intellectual enterprises, each with its own theoretical and critical agenda. Transgression of thresholds and boundaries in thinking is ultimately about the relationship between the one and the many. In this sense, a genuine Summa Theologiae, is essentially and necessarily transgressional in the scope of its address when engaged in the business of making totalizing claims about ultimacy. Even the Socratic Noble Lie as a totalizing claim to ultimacy concerning the nature and sanctioning of the City, which carries within itself the seeds of its own self-transgression. It is through the cracks in the edifice created by transgressions that the light of truth penetrates and shines into the darkness. Transgression is always against the edifice, the citadel, the Oligarchy, which is paradigmatically exemplified in what we call the City, the City, which is founded on the Noble Lie and the City which can only exist by virtue of the Noble Lie. No Oligarchy and no City that embodies the Oligarchy can exist without the cementing glue or the cohesive hegemonic power made possible by a fundamental untruth, a falsehood hidden within the bowels of the Noble Lie. The transgression ushers in the day of reckoning, and the day of reckoning also represents a summing up, a settling of accounts, a balancing of assets against liabilities and also an adding up. The reckoning, the summing up, the balance sheet, the settling of accounts, the recounting and also the adding up, metaphorically represent what dialectical reasoning is all about. However, there is more. I don’t know where to start or where to end. Talking about where to start and where to end is a good place to say something more about dialectical reasoning. Dialectical reasoning involves seeing the connection between the parts and the whole. It is through dialectical reasoning that the truth is recovered, or redeemed, in the unveiling of falsehoods. Falsehoods that lie hidden within the body of the Noble Lie, and which constitute both a poison and a remedy. The fundamental untruth on which the City and the Oligarchy have been founded also represents in Plato’s Republic the poison, and also a remedy, which has been referred to as Plato’s Pharmakon. I am attacking the institution that we recognized as the state in all of its various historical manifestations since the commencement of the Holocene.

6.

The erotic quest for ultimacy.

In keeping a journal during the time of my detention, I have also succumbed to my desire to narrate an account of a life, and also a desire to expand on the kinds of concerns that could have given meaning to that life. This desire, which always bordered on the erotic, was a desire to garnish and dress up my narrative with the kind of interpolations or interruptions or insertions that have the form and content of totalizing claims about ultimacy. And I have mingled various formulations of claims to ultimacy, all of which are concerned ultimately with the erotic quest for the beautiful, and also the good. The logic of desire or the Logos of desire inspire the erotic quest. Claims regarding the significance of human existence cannot be divorced from the desire for the possession of the beautiful, which cannot be separated or divorced, from the desire for the good, and the desire for the good represents the logic of desire. Hence, the passionate or impassioned, quest for ultimacy, which is aroused by the desire to possess the beautiful, is the kind of intimacy that the erotic seeks. What is the object of the erotic impulse in all its sublimity? It is to know the truth. To know the truth is like experiencing the intimacy of the erotic. To know the truth is to experience the fulfilment of the erotic desire to possess the beautiful. To know the truth is to experience the kind of erotic intimacy that we experience in nocturnal adventures involving encounters that are secretive, secretive like our unspeakable dreams, and many of these secrets, which I have already alluded to will of course go to the grave with me. Therefore, my ulterior motive and hidden agenda behind the writings of my notebooks has been to speak the truth to matters of ultimate concern, matters which have borne down on my life, and from which I could not escape by ignoring. And these matters of ultimate concern have involved passions, desires, ideals, hopes, and dreams, all of which concern truth, and meaning and significance, in one form or another. And of course, the thing which we call the ‘good’. The truth, the good, and the beautiful are indeed one.

Like the desire to possess the beautiful, the desire to know the truth is erotic in the sense that knowing has an unavoidable sensual dimension. Knowing is being sensuous, knowing the truth is mediated through sensuality and sensuality involves the physical and physicality, and the physical involves matter, it involves the flesh. The erotic is always embodied. The erotic is always incarnate. The sensual and erotic desire for the knowledge of the truth and certitude cannot be divorced from the physical. And consequently, the desire for true knowledge is necessarily anti-Manichean and anti-Gnostic, and therefore, anti any form of the dualism of Good and Evil or dualism of Mind and Matter or dualism of Spirit and Body or the diremption of thought and reality or ‘duplicity’. The erotic desire for truth concerns that which is ultimately knowable. And that which is knowable possesses the property or the attribute of knowability, the attribute of being knowable as something. Being knowable can be treated as an attribute, or condition, or state of things, which make them cognizable. Cognizable means capable of being perceived or known. Being cognizable also means being susceptible to the jurisdiction of the court. Jurisdiction implies or means to have power, authority, control or rule over something. Jurisdiction in the context of something being knowable or cognizable also means being susceptible to Reason or the rule or authority or power of Reason. Knowability or being knowable, in a cognizable sense, is central to the essence of a particular thing. Being cognizable or knowable is to be susceptible to the judgment of Reason. This line of argument can be developed and expanded further: Being knowable is something that is integral or intrinsic to the essential nature of things.

Knowability is ultimately founded on the necessitation of necessity. This is an ‘ontotheological’ judgment. While ‘ontotheology’ has been viewed as something to be disparaged, this does not mean or logically imply that the ‘ontotheological’ is something that can be avoided or ignored or wished away or argued away. The very fact, that something is cognizable or knowable, ultimately means that there can be no escaping from the ontotheological implications of this fact, or the ontotheological questions, which this fact brings to bear on the mind or consciousness.

If we concede that there cannot be any true knowledge or certitude, that is foundationless, then we concede by default to some kind of ontotheology. Criticism of ontotheology is a form of denialism. The passing pageant of the God is dead theological fashion, and the end of metaphysics fashion, the disparagement of ontotheological fashion, are all rooted in the same kind of denialism, a naked emperor kind of denialism.

Every act of cognition in which something becomes knowable always becomes knowable under the jurisdiction of Reason, and is thus, confronted with the ontotheological. The necessitation of necessity is also the Archimedean point, it is the ground, the foundation of knowability and the reason for the enigmatic knowability of the Universe, and it is the reason for the otherwise unfathomable intelligibility of reality. It is the ‘counter-weight’ that cancels ‘duplicity’ and brings an end to the Kantian thing-in-its-self.

The truth or the certitude of all claims to knowledge, including claims regarding ultimacy, can only become possible or realizable or even concretized if we agree that there are some critical claims that we can state as being true no matter what. Being true no matter what is a radical postulate, it means that there are claims which we have no alternative but to accept as being true, that is true, even though it would impossible to fully account for the truth of these claims on the basis of empirical evidence or logical inference.

For example, we readily accept the claim that the Universe is intelligible. We can claim that the truth of this claim explains the historical success of the scientific enterprise. And we can also make the claim with supporting reasons that this intelligibility of the Universe is not in itself, self-explanatory, in a self-referencing fashion, because the reasons for its intelligibility lie outside of itself and not within itself. Any attempt to demonstrate the intelligibility of the Universe as a self-explanatory fact will end in failure. Accepting the fact that the Universe is intelligible without being able to give any empirically based account of what makes this fact true in a logically rigorous self-explanatory fashion is a problem, which resists solution. This problem has logical consequences. It means that ultimately there are no self-explanatory empirical facts. There are only facts. Brute facts if you like. It boils down to that we can explain the existence of necessities in the form of the regularities and uniformities of Nature. We cannot give an account for the necessitation of all the existing necessities we discover in Nature and which we endow with the epistemic and ontological status of law-like generalization that supports counterfactual generalizations. All such law-like generalizations are in principle vulnerable to logic and rational attack. On empirical grounds, they have been given a law-like status, because no refuting instances have materialized. However, their truth as laws of nature cannot be established inductively given the logical problems, which plague inductive reasoning. Logically speaking, there is no ultimate confirmation for any law-like generalization regarding the regularities and uniformities of nature discoverable or observable within the empirical realm. This is the metaphysical threshold, beyond which science cannot progress. Beyond this threshold, science as an empirically based enterprise is, rationally and logically forced into silence. In terms of science, as an empirically grounded enterprise, whatever lies beyond the empirical threshold is unsayable or unspeakable. Therefore, it is a simple empirical and logical fact that science cannot answer questions regarding the ultimate nature of reality, because to answer this kind of question, science has to explain the necessitation of necessity. This ‘fact’, cannot be explained within the framework of the empirical realm. Where science ends, philosophy, metaphysics, and theology find their mandate to break the silence and speak the unsayable.

If we try to rationally demonstrate that the fact of the Universe being intelligible is self-explanatory, our reasoning which also happens to be logically and empirically well-grounded will lead us into an infinite regression or circular arguments or logical contradictions. It is because of these kinds of problems that we are forced to accept some claims no matter what, and all ‘first philosophies’ seek a way out of this conundrum of having to accept certain claims no matter what.

The Universe or the Natural World of things and beings, as we experience them in science and in our ordinary day-to-day living, presents itself to our perceptions as something that has the properties or predispositions or the essential nature of being knowable. The essential nature of the Universe also includes, from an epistemic and ontological perspective, its intrinsic knowability. Its knowability is one of its essential properties, an attribute, which is built into its constitution or