From the Journal of Benjamin Suzuki

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39. While on the Oregon Appellate Court

At home, Salem, Oregon

Upon conclusion of Qur’anic readings at a meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a man proffers a gun as donation to the speaker, blowing himself up as the gun is taken. The speaker survives unharmed, this the third attempt on his life leaving him unscathed. Afghanistan, May 2008.

[Archival note: Entry 39 is out of sequence due to storage/retrieval error; numerical ordering does not in any case always reflect temporal journal sequence.]

Gift the blood of God, grace without prejudice, no respecter of individual or outcome, only process is, the incalculable triviality of our ends essence of His grace, grace which cannot know it is being used, use to small to be. Destruction circulates, bringing all home, grateful servants to incomprehensible purpose. There is no place of righteous protection, no place to protect, destruction freely given and taken.

God suffers no prophet to endure overlong, oblivion in battle final equality bestowed to unseen creation. The gift of violence is removal from endurance, from emblem of unwanted creation. A gun later, a bomb now–infinitesimal mercy in the differential for those who exist only as a limit. God does not love; He vanishes life into seamless continuity. We are but revealed process, individual as fictioned as a Euclidean point, defined as the intersection of unfathomable orderings of minutia which are not.

Until a prophet comes refusing death, refusal atomic existence, no longer a construction of infinities but denial of where it is. This prophet has remained unscathed thrice from God, God not noticing, only protection possible. Infinitesimal this cloak, this hiding place: here dogma is born, religion instantaneous rebellion against God, points lining up to order infinity, then trick falling into the spaces in between, for there are always spaces in between for the insignificant, continuity’s self trap, point people prophets falling into oblivion from one another, as good as any explosion. Instantaneous rebellion instantaneously self quashed, this the faith of centuries.

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60. While on the Oregon Appellate Court

At home, Salem, Oregon

A suicide bomber plunges a SUV filled with explosives into a field crowded with people playing/watching volleyball. 98 die. Northwest Territory, Pakistan, January 1, 2010.

A moment suspended in freedom, beyond all cause, gravity releasing from compulsion, then falls again into inevitability, ball made theirs, hands anonymous tapping upward, faces raised joyed to see effort translated beyond their experience, freed from their grounded existence, communal effort to make something freed. Contest ploy to escape all contest, points made or lost less than that ball traveling towards the other in hope of continuance, lengthening rounds of save and return turning into escape from place, little marvel unrecorded save in the short recall of struggled lives. In their flushed effort promise for other work days, there tapping towards an other never returned, tapping, hoping somewhere someone does the same, keeping something afloat, beyond contest, beyond team, making the hard blinding choices easier to bear. Here humanity is made in anonymity, hands high to raise and tap, contest beaten, what made us losing for an instant, movement beyond our jeopardy making a beyond our jeopardy, anonymous arrival sustained anonymously.

Into this escape never experienced comes God’s servant, helpmeet to omnipotence, performing the physics of our origin. Contest makes us one, struggled existence knows no side, blinding light translating evolution into contests elsewhere where the abomination of anonymous release cannot go.

So God polices his creation, we, on all sides, his loyal servants.

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61. While on the Oregon Appellate Court

At home, Salem, Oregon

The Malaysian State sanctions the caning of three women for adultery under Islamic Sharia law, Malaysia now importing Sharia to all ethnic Malays, excluding resident Chinese and Indians. When queried on the severity of caning, Malaysia’s Home Minister says caning is applied so as to leave no enduring mark while restoring the true path for the fallen. February, 2010.

Astounded God looks his hands as creation is shaped, clay semi-dry, cracking into contours while not shattering, magician’s feat of knowing just how far to go, scars later hardening into beauty of character, or at least beauty of remainder, beauty of that which did not shatter to scatter into the refuse which is the raw material of all God.

Vessels of admonition, that the strength of shaping which keeps refuse distant until calculated slap falls the container, the invisibility of God pouring unnoticed from the shards suddenly made by men not God, to be picked up in days of centuries, function gone not in the contents but in the travel of hands now only imagined, perhaps only imagined even when the passing was. Slaps make the surface, are the smooth to unfinished rough upon which we pass our hands in caress, caress which makes the contours of pain into existence satisfied, another hand of God.

Slap me so I know I am in you’re here, that there is a we and I am there. In your eyes I can still move to become, to travel your eyes which make a maze, a future to turn into, a script to play made of God or Darwin, let others say, just let me play. Admonish me into the purpose of words mysteriously here, gifted by an ever coming past which, greatest mystery, was never anywhere. My surface shall word the past; in my handling read the was that will be.

God astounded looks in ethnic eyes at hands in the making, wondering how to best this making when he audiences those hands, when they become estranged eyes to his making, when he turns himself elsewhere into audience anew. While we shape and break and caress God audiences himself, we his essential, trivial props; in selfed audience God becomes and is.

And no one is slapped bright in cane.

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62. While on the Oregon Appellate Court

At home, Salem, Oregon

A young couple, arrested by the Taliban, are ordered stoned to death for the crime of adultery. 1000 are said to look on.

Afghanistan, August 2010.

Bulleted reality breaks the imagined barrier between world and I. My skin tearing becomes world, my muscled arteries become in world, pummel on pummels pass through all my retreats, world passing through world, I turning my eye into the path that was, no trace of I, only world encountering itself, until my eye shatters as all distinction is lost. We are all One, stone cozeyed in its socket; in eternity privileged place cannot be.

We all made one in Word, stones dropping from hands, falling in anyplace, as good there as the cover of me which never was, a temporal trick I was, never able to flee eternity, everywhere trumping my needed where. They turn their backs, scores of them, thrown and throwing they move each other, shattering imaginary barriers, fleeing to become new barrier, self the flee. They turn their backs, gazing at backs, seeing only world, a flying shatter, Word made flesh in the breaking of what is.

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63. While on the Oregon Appellate Court

At home, Salem, Oregon

Floods in Pakistan leave 20 million homeless, without means of livelihood. Western commentators, noting that Islamist charities are first to respond, fear their growth.

August 2010.

Submit. No command, but outcome.

I am the firmament descended onto earth, my vessel which is my Being. You crack, I rush uncontained to be held again in you. Each shattering a new vessel, my miracle you live after the touch of All.

I am the flow through which you make. You shatter others for my flow, are my flow, and call this life. Your desperate humping is my flow, you desperate for container, awed in miracle of overflow, caught in new container, family, friends, profession, life preparing to break on.

Submit. Shard whose meaning comes from sunder, my greater vessel shall cradle you, bump you to a stop, you then collecting others to the halt, beaverless dam, I buttressing, anger loving, flow a power you contain in thrall. You will be feared, you will have a here. Tremble my onslaughts and look the distance. Out there they fear not your coming but your release. That is your here, taken from you by me, returned to you by me. Watch my miracle of growth as vessel overflows, expand into others as you do in birth. I am life, but Omega in Alpha, the afterlife, that which makes unbidden, the only allegiance which cannot be trumped, flow of all breath which roars else to silence, in your scatter you never die.

Submit. Miracle with me. Command with me. You will in any case.

[editorial note: Islam translates to submission. All three major Abrahamic faiths view worship as slavery, more or less joyed, depending on time, place, and uttered words]

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64. While on the Oregon Appellate Court

At home, Salem, Oregon

A mosque is torched near Nazareth, presumably by Jewish Settlers.

West Bank, Israel/Palestine, October 2010.

there was a darkness over the deep, with a divine wind sweeping over the waters.

Genesis 1:2

Let him be whomever you wish. Like a fluttering candle

into a stormlamp, I place myself there inside him.

A glow becomes peaceful. May death

more easily find its way.

Rilke

The Spanish Trilogy

(Stephen Mitchell, trns.)

In our gatherings His servants lie, awaiting the night from which all creation springs, to travel unspied to other lights, God moving anonymously through His creation, hating what gives Him place, using place to destroy place, a snuff discernable only when seen through lighted window. Only He’s, roaring to the other only’s, uniqueness despising itself, existence calling itself out, only in no abode but in outside, that which no one owns, commonality unshared because unlived. In those wanderings God is; unattached is eternity, the hands of night its incarnation.

There is but one God and He is God, monotheism owned of none, incalculable intersection of all other, we infinitesimal creator of creation so the Creator may Be.

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65. On the United States Supreme Court

otherwise undated

While reading Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972, 1980), generally regarded as a pivotal text in the philosophy of logical analysis.

We reduce objects to parts, but this is a manipulative task; there comes a point of division where reconstruction fails: parting parts of parts leads to a practical loss of material, leaving an emptiness in what was. We can speculate on more preserving, refined techniques; but as well they may not be. So objects are decomposable in various outcomes, with a lower bound on part, greater than some smaller constituent entity revealed in other ways. Reduction to irreducibles sunders the presented present. Which is their power: to produce a fluidity unseen where rigidity otherwise reigns. We sunder the present to escape the prison of the eye. What grounds the world leaves our hands empty, but promises magic, magic being the unseen convoked through the handled seen. Science is not magic repudiated , but its fulfillment. Demons we conjure, to find they have conjured us.

Claim that decomposition is an absolute reduction is false; all one can say is that objects seen can be irretrievably reduced to levels beyond recognition. Science often presumes decomposition with retrieval; this a faith, no analytic necessity. Analysis leaves us with the mystery of the presented present. Objects insist they are, immune to their death through atomic sundering. Objects are composed of parts until they are not; in that gap existence lies.

[added later]

Scientists are nihilists who have discovered that from nothing creation comes; the descent into nothing is ordered.

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66. On the United States Supreme Court

otherwise undated

While reading Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972, 1980); cf entry 65, above.

Neptune, Kripke notes, was originally designated as that planet which must exist to account for the orbital discrepancies of some other planets:

Since Neptune was introduced as a name rigidly designating a certain planet … [the designator] could well have believed that if Neptune had been knocked off its course one million years earlier, it would have caused no such perturbations and even that some other object might have caused the perturbations in its place. (N & N, p. 79, fn 33)

But the sole warrant for Neptune’s designation are the observed perturbations. Without these, the claim that Neptune would have made them had it not itself been deflected is vacuous. Claim that another body makes the perturbations Neptune would have if not deflected is not only vacuous but physically absurd; for, undeflected, this Neptune would encounter the other posited body, yielding distinct, other perturbations. Imaginary events cannot rigidly designate; and possible world alternatives which remove the sole reference of designation remove rigidity of the name. Otherwise an innumerable number of rigid designators exist with no referent in the actual world. If there is a planet out there unidentified, it has nothing to do with an event which would have happened if its circumstances had been otherwise, and we cannot deviate from those imaginary conditions to consider imaginary possible world circumstances for our now rigidly existing rigid designator. A rigid designator must have warrant of real discovery, and that warrant cannot be vanquished in possible worlds.

Kripke says Nixon would be Nixon even absent a political career. If we warrant Nixon based on that career this is no more true than saying several Neptunes would have, individually, produced the observed perturbations, but all but one were flung into deep space. These lost Neptunes are no named object because their sole warrant are the perturbations captured by the real, present, Neptune. If we warrant Nixon at birth we can imagine diverse life histories, including the real, political one. While the named infant Nixon rigidly designates Nixon in these possible alternatives, the real political Nixon does not rigidly designate world paths where the infant Nixon avoids politics. Rigid designators are forward transitive in time but not backward transitive. “Aristotle might not have been a philosopher” is neither true nor false until the warrant of designated Aristotle is known. Infant Aristotle would make the statement true; another Aristotle might be compatible with truth depending on the scope of its warrant (is something else known of this designated Aristotle before practice of philosophy?).

Note that “infant Aristotle” might be warrantless; that whoever wrote the books associated with Aristotle must have been born does not warrant a designated infancy from which world time lines may diverge. All warrants are in the present. But a necessary inference of origin (the author must have been born) does not warrant a particular birth; such inference warrants the search for birth, evidence for a particular birth establishes the referent of the name. And without this latter, we cannot conjecture life deviations from the asserted Aristotle philosopher.

We may imagine that a Nixon never entering politics has a calmer life. This Nixon is not the Nixon of Watergate (the name designator fails) but is the Nixon of the common time line infancy. “Nixon would have been happier” is either possibly true or vacuous depending on the warrant validating the designation of Nixon. Because we can embed the real Nixon in his early history, the statement is meaningful. This embedding defines an object in its world [this anchor will vanish if we alter the possible worlds of all objects known to have been associated with our focal object named; we can then have, as above, multiple Neptunes all of which run off before affecting anything we know], allowing us to extrapolate possible worlds by deviating the embedding. The rigid designators “Nixon,” “Neptune,” “Aristotle” do not pluck objects isolate from the universe but are time lines with a fixed path from which alternative futures are conjectured. Because we can take parts of a time line of a named referent and alter them, producing a new history of the named, the named object seems independent of the world. But this independence is consequent of new circumstance, a new embedding. If we remove the embedding, backtracking to a time without warrant, as in Kripke’s fn 33 above, we have objects wandering about in nothingness, the imaginary become real.

As Kripke says, a name may designate an object without being shorthand for a definite description to which alone that object refers. But this is because the named object is not simple, being a complex with many reference points for definite descriptions across a time line. The name entity is a time line, with every segment or “cut” composed in part by encounter with other time lines. Freedom lies in the deviations which can thereby be conjectured. A whirling extra Neptune, running from all reference, is trapped in what it is. An individual is conjecturally free because embedded in a world.

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67. On the United States Supreme Court

otherwise undated

While reading Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972, 1980); cf entries 65, 66, above.

If direct reference is of the present, most everything floats before us, attached only to other floating things.  They bob, we push them this and that, some attachments taut in significance, others slacken into unnotice.  Jungle vine that races from our gaze, reality must ground somewhere–that’s why the vine races.  Somewhere the bobbing stops, or tether becomes so short that a rapid up and down assures truth is here, reality agreeing that we have found it nearly so.

We pull our tethers to make them bob yes’m.  Our pulls pulling their other tethers, ripple wave of the unseen hand which is each of us affirming we are yes’m grounded and we will pull each of you to conform, floating bobbing yes and no, with few near the ground overlong.  A history all in the present, about as real as the impossible stretch into the past.

Something must be real, for we are pulled, vine racing back to us for a do not dawdle, come along.  We reply with a pull of our own, a tug a war with no allies or win or lose.  We reply by explaining the past, impossible sight as defensive offense against what is too distant to be seen.  Bob tug, bob tug, just like our ancestors–and it’s true, in that view without perspective which we deem science to be, science our short cut of vine, forced into grounded reality.  We are always waiting for science to make a presence, so we can tether it to a good tug for our bobbing yes.

Statements such as “The first Postmaster General of the United States invented bifocal glasses” [cf pp 98-99 of N & N] seem contingently true, ‘first Postmaster General” and ‘inventor of bifocals” consequent of independent bobs and tugs.  We can imagine the dance with no partner choreographing the inventor and Postmaster disjoint. Yet a sole select twirl might place them the same, necessity in the contingent, place happenstance riding necessity.  Place floats, well, not quite free, among the bobs and weaves, but it floats, until a weave tethers to it, a me, who says my placement here is freedom enjoyed.

Enjoyed of necessity. These traits of social import will be, we vying for their where,  this the engine of their making.  Contingent truths might have been different, but are not, their might have freedom, spied in alternatives but absent, imagined by greater, wider history, distance losing focus, freedom spied in the blur.

What happened to direct reference?  In social matters it resides in the statements of others, in the denial of your denial of these, the present conformity at least to silence of the asserted, a long way from vine’s root, but that is something rarely seen in any case.  The rarely seen everywhere unseen, bobbing, tugging, pulling, world grounded because everyone desperate for ground.  So names appear of their own, free floating above our bobbing float, say yes to this, no to that, descend the names which ground and are on their own, unlike the us we deny, like the us we demand affirm.  Kripke’s name which refers all of its own is an act of necessary desperation in the myopic present. Humanity a collection of innumerable desperations asserted in the present which never ends.  If only we will great enough our presence is all; so the will of others is not so real as ours.  And language lets us say, nonsense discreetly in the ready, awaiting deployment, to warrior for, never against, each of us.

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68. On the United States Supreme Court

otherwise undated

While reading Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972, 1980); cf entries 65-7, above.

Phosphorus is the morning star, Hesperus the evening star; both are Venus. This a necessary consequence of planetary motion–necessary, yet discovered, an a posteriori necessity  (cf, eg., N & N, pp. 100-5).   One could, though, predict the existence of Hesperus and Phosphorus based on planetary motion, how Venus will appear on Earth, this an a priori necessity. So a priority and a posteriority are, in some cases, situational, depending on the history of an observer’s encounter.  Actually, for most people this truth is neither; we are told Hesperus and Phosphorus are Venus, understood or not.

A theory may carve the world before or after direct encounter with the prediction.  Venus likely cares not the order, but our a posteriori encounters may elicit screams on other occasions.  When an object talks it will say what it is, right or not.  This right or not say is self-social designation, endured with more or less sanity (so the Soviets declared that under realized communism disagreement with the State was insanity, placing dissidents in mental asylums in ending, if mute, scream). Our assertions to which others assent are empirical in outcome (even God must effect our worlds), but mostly not local in genesis.  We say what others say and make others say, watching for changes in the weather; when these come some ones will go, the hand which moves even God plucking them out of our hearing.  Reality is somewhere, but heard distant thunder, with the occasional catastrophic storm.

Why wonder scientists are disliked, their words thundering yonder, our say desperation in our look around, wondering who will remain at the beginning of their, always their, new say.  Science is not our said world, no matter its bestowed fruit; we endure it as we do the economy, always distant creation, further than God.

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69. On the United States Supreme Court

otherwise undated

While reading:

1) Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972, 1980); cf entries 65-8, above.

2) John P. Burgess, “Translating names,” in Burgess (2008), Mathematics, models, and modality.

3) Bertrand Russell, “Review of Meinong (1907)” in Russell (1973), Essays in analysis.

Phosphorus is Hesperus [cf entry 68], a rigid designator, Kripke says, made so by their identity with Venus:

if Hesperus and Phosphorus are one in the same, then in no other possible world can they be different.  We use “Hesperus” as the name of a certain body and “Phosphorus” as the name of a certain body.  We use themas namesof those bodies in all possible worlds.  If, in fact, they are the same body, then in any other possible world we have to use them as a name of that object.  And so in any other possible world it will be true that Hesperus is Phosphorus.

Of course, it is only a contingent truth (not true in every other possible world) that the star seen over there in the evening is the star seen over there in the morning, because there are possible worlds in which Phosphorus was not visible in the morning.  But that contingent truth shouldn’t be identified with the statement that Hesperus is Phosphorus.  It could only be so identified if you thought that it was a necessary truth that Hesperus is visible over there in the evening or that Phosphorus is visible over there in the morning.  But neither of those are necessary truths even if that’s the way we pick our planet.  These are the contingent marks by which we identify a certain planet and give it a name.  [Kripke, N & N, pp. 104-5]

 Adamently, he says that even if the morning and evening stars were identical in the sky yet caused by different astromontical bodies, these would not be H & P.  Identifying the cause of H & P in one world (that cause being Venus) links these designators to an object exterior to all possible worlds, although recognized as existing in some possible world–ours.  A rigid designator identifies an object which floats above all existence, descending when the (possible world) conditions are right.  Object existence is warranted empirically by discovery (that H is P) or conceptually by constructing a possible world where existence could be discovered empirically.  An object becomes a linguistic artifact of talk of possible worlds, an idealization abstracted from real things, constrained by the sense of possible.

Kripke avoids ungrounded idealism by restricting the sense of possible:

characteristic theoretical identifications like “Heat is the motion of molecules,” are not contingent truths but necessary truths, and here of course I don’t mean just physically necessary, but necessary in the highest degree–whatever that means.  (Physical necessity, might turn out to be necessity in the highest degree.  But that’s a question which I don’t want to prejudge.  At least for this sort of example, it might be that when something’s physically necessary, it always is necessary tout court.)  [N & N, p. 99]

The possible is what physics allows.  H is P because gravitational theory makes Venus their real cause, even if Venus does not exist in the actual world.  If another configurationof [fictive] planets could produce H and P in the sky, then that configuration would be an entity set distinct from that our real H and P discloses as Venus; that entity set would have the same status as the extra Neptunes of entry xx, above.  Kripke can be generous with the naming [so creation] of objects because he restricts his core reality [apart from mind] to physics.  Physics is the sea upon which all objects nameable must float.

Fictive entities are as rigid designators so long as they conform to physical conjecture.  There is here a recurrsion to early [Bertrand] Russell:

xx