Essays on Time and Space

By Loren Berengere

Fundamental ontology is not possible because of the nonuniformity of time. Physicists privately acknowledge that their time cannot be time itself, what time itself is cannot be known. Fortunately, beyond all putatively definitive ontologies and pharisaical physical scenarios, we catch an astonishing glimpse of time’s dialectic, the secret of historical time, cheek by jowl a sweeping reappraisal of the temporal condition of creators who must climb into deviant spatiotemporal identities. Surging with startling pirouettes, in style, genre, and philosophy, Berengere blasts every tradition and trend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796024395

Loren Berengere

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Copyright © 2019 by Loren Berengere.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019903668

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-7960-2441-8

   Softcover   978-1-7960-2440-1

   eBook   978-1-7960-2439-5

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Rev. date: 05/29/2019

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CONTENTS

Prologue: Tilt-A-Whirl Tableaus of Praxical Time for the Aspiring Priests and Priestesses of the Power of the Air

Part One: Acts of Creation and the De-finitized Spectral Temporalizations Thereof

Part Two: Spatial Temporalizations of the Sublime and the Sublunary

Part Three: Oscillating Toward Heterocosms: or Life-Exits for the Irreal

Part Four: Temple Sermons of a Solitary Exister Concerning the Irreal Temporality of Religious Faith with Constant Reference to the Kierkegaardian Abraham

Epilogue: The Task of Philosophy as the Comprehension of Great Time

Tonight I’ve watched

The moon and then

the Pleiades

go down

The night is now

half-gone; youth

goes; I am

in bed alone.

Sappho

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea, —

Past the houses, past the headlands,

Into deep eternity!

Bred as we are, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand

The divine intoxication

Of the first league out from land?

Emily Dickinson

Boldly I dip it in the well,

My writing flows, and all

I try succeeds. Of course, the spatter

Of this tormented night

Is quite illegible. No matter:

Who reads the stuff I write?

Nietzsche

For they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time.

Anaximander, the

earliest surviving words of

Western philosophy

PROLOGUE

Tilt-A-Whirl Tableaus of Praxical Time for the Aspiring Priests and Priestesses of the Power of the Air

There are three rules for the practice of philosophy, unfortunately nobody knows what they are. Meanwhile, have you nothing better to do than scour my haystack for a needle? For the needle? No one will ever find this needle, no one will ever comprehend what time is, if I know what time does I do not know what time is, if I know what you do does that mean I know you? I enlarge the kingdom of time as a means to you enlarging your own kingdom, your picture of yourself, if you happen to step out of one time it’s only so you can step into another, as you will see, so although no one will ever know what time is for the same reason that no one will ever know what being is and is not, we can still discover whole continents, maybe even a sunken one, now that would really be something! So, before you go scouring for Atlantean needles know that I expect you to read the prologue to get a laugh, the rest to get a frown, if philosophy done correctly won’t put a frown on you nothing will. Montaigne first attracted you to philosophy when you heard he spent most of the day in a tower thrashing out locutions and rubbernecking dead men, the king heard and requested a visit, nothing spectacular, as you, already in your tower, already climbing on rutilant rainbows, look down on everything, kings most definitely included, this is so and can be so because you’re a Dog-philosopher, a sleek canine of the Cynic breed, bless your shapely footsies, la loca, and you sir, Berengere salutes you! Before you do anything rash like nipping at my heels you need to pull your besieged soul out of the swaggering silico-looneycosm, the pre-fab digitalisized spatiality you’re commanded to inhabit, now’s the space for BAD AIR, so throw some window open, disengage, and, for once, calm down, but who can do that? This is the perfect storm and shipwreck for philosophy, frost in the schools, deadening routine, hostility to anything that loosens philosophy up, and on the outside, vapor, chaff, degression, disrepute, spiral down, but there’s a reason for the season, as I will reveal in due time. Meanwhile, before you make a start to follow me farther out, detach yourself from today, and the rotten tomorrow sure to follow, as best you can and by any means necessary—now go eat your birthday cake, just look at those candles, peerless coffee steaming, it’s early morning, mockingbird singing, crows cawing, sun slanting in, I see you holding and fondling my pieces of eight, you lucky Dog.

Look who’s new in town, look who came up to hoodoo town (New York City) to seek and find what’s theirs—prideful voguish poets are come up for recognition. Tell me, poets, poets, what are you fancy dan poets supposed to do for me? I said do, what does poetry do, better yet, what can poetry do today? Electric ice cream’s ruined you, I don’t hear Virgil or Stefan George, your ears are shot, what kind of looney does it take to go off on a search for large ideas and wind up cultivating infatuation with poesy, I thought you knew large ideas don’t deign in little malaproptic baskets. S.K. forgot to count the prolix wordjangle as part of the aesthetic, Rilke’s words are stargazing whiskeysips spewed up, the poet comforts himself with notions, his notions aren’t his, what a mountain of debt beseeches all poets, all around large hearsaid ideas employed to comfort a soul, it’s always a soul, it can never be a demon. . .

Trade’s rough, Mary’s down Market, screamers acting up, I’m on the Geary bus riding a buckboard, bowing, bending like a surfer off Land’s End—because I shan’t hold the bar the delusory Delilahs do—Foucault’s in Hemlock Alley close to Polk Gulch, Foucault’s frouncing in Frisco, frottages frou-frou on Folsom Street, that’s right, I was in town then. I love the ups and downs of the hills, it’s all about hills in San Francisco, big hills, smaller hills, steep hills, high drama on high hills, lower Frisco folk hunkering down low, I lived up low, a might down from Sutter on Jones, the middle north of Nob, the teeming Tenderloin below sprawled beside honkytonk halls, I spy a hatchet-faced Dorian girl dart out of nowhere, was that a girl? Yeah, that was a girl, I think it is, she gets in my car. You’re a guy in the Tenderloin driving around at night in a car girls are liable to crawl in, she bleats, she’s real cold cause Frisco’s cold, she says, It’s warm in here, she says she wants to make time, I tell her I’m sorry I can’t do that, Stop the car, let me out, time is money.

— Time is money —

And what is money? Money is the almighty, holy, eternal, covenant-keeping God of America, I see a bulge at the crotch, she’s no Dorian girl, did I see a bulge?

Lots of flies in the desert, did you know that, I didn’t. I found no besetting insects in southern Nevada, but that’s high desert, not as high as the desert between Goldfield and Reno, yet it’s fortyish, on the road going the forty way west, next up from ten west, trucker what’s your twenty? So, you’re divvying pure thought, swatting flies, outside, sitting by a wall, looking at Mexico. You work till the sun go down, the sun do move, you swat flies from time to time, a mechanical snake slithers east by the river, just above it, empyrean, range four, three, two, one, echo-eyed Yaqui girls worship yonder once, you work with constant disturbance, you’re flying momentcraft, now ingress, now egress, back and forth, up and down, if you let them crawl on you you seem to maintain the distance, the tension of opposites. Don’t look at me funny, what’s there is there, philosophy of life, which one are you working on? Aha, think you that there are no more warring pairs to discover, read your Venus-eyed Ionians again, pandejo. The tension is in the holding apart. I do not know how pure thought can not be universal, can not be. Pure thought, its host, is not concerned with life concerns, Plato knew this but couldn’t turn to examine this, Plato certainly knew about Thales taking a tumble into a deep well while he was philosophizing, if we want only two worlds we get them, yet if we catch two we throw the others out on their helixical encasements, is that how worlds should be treated? Motionless, Socratic feet on ice, go ahead, let them crawl on you, then you commit no praxis acts, which, I said, pure thought always eschews; the tabooed acts evict you from your upper rooms, surrounded by yourselves in round towers looking down, out, in, up, over there, cumulus fiefs all the way down to the horizon to your left, to your right, upside down ideas nudge nubile blue. Follow this scent. The game you wolves, foxes, and dingo dogs catch is the sirenic side of time.

The basic and original idea in philosophy is that everybody who does not philosophize is and must be a slave, this, beneath our dolorcast days, our electrical sins against the original nature, is a most brutal fact, facts being facts because of their brutality, today, but if by original nature I mean the patriarchal dispensation I am wrong today, tomorrow, and forever … Go ahead, tell me why, sure, I said that, nurturing values, the values of the spirit of the Earth, came first, then, nobody knows exactly when, patriarchal chieftains arose for the specific purpose of throwing down the holy stelae; the patriarchal ideal achieves power quickly, its symbol is lightning, but the matriarchal values, needing water in a desert, creep forward by degrees, and we call this progress. We don’t know why what’s real is real, what’s not yet is not yet, today’s conflicts, just to keep to now, come out from—somewhere or nowhere, what do you say? The meaning of nowhere is no meaning, nothing, we have nothing to go on, so these conflicts are just conflicts between willi-nillies and their values, no, sir, all values are emissaries sent to us for the building of a new order, the older order being the one that superseded the one that came before, which is the matriarchal, a plant, not an animal; the patriarchal is the animalian in process of being tamed, and we call this progress.

The animalian, the animal nature, is being tamed by the values of a foreign order, as both ideals are foreign to the last atom, opposites. De-androcization of all values by the opposite values, oestrogenic values—the o is there for a reason. The philosophy led me to the writing, before I disdained shifty scribblers, yet if philosophy leads someone somewhere, the philosopher, who is not a slave, remember? feels the quaint need to feel persecuted by everyone who does not go through life disturbed by ideas, does the parvenu ex-slave look up to his former estate? In other words, and to be rudely blunt, the need to practice and create is the need for philosophy gone wild, it’s just as you can imagine, even the cool ones, out on a thin limb, not choosing philosophy but its shadow, whose stages and scenic actors seek to dramatize ideas rather than live them, even they will admit how easy a go of it they enjoy, whereas the philosopher class hunts ideas down, the better to understand than if you never meet up with them face to face—but that’s no face, ideas are contra life, even, as in the case of Nietzsche, when they preach life, that life is the supreme value, call it caprice, freewheeling, funtowning, going just to be going—somewhere? Does anybody care anymore about somewhere? Up, down, where is that and with reference to what? Where’s your what? I don’t see any what. When will the time come when our epicritical demiurgers know what from which, who? Am I miffed, what is created is not conscious, the creator is not conscious? Yes, and not even the philosopher is conscious anymore of not being a slave. The Greek thinkers meant the state of not being a