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

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70.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

Despite terrorism, tens of thousands of Shiites travel to Karbala in pilgrimage, some flaying themselves on the path, some crawling with their elbows, dragging their legs.

Iraq, January, 2012

God migrates the rumors of His path, strides so dense unseen, life lifted from livelihood, traveling out of the trap that lets it be, traveling towards words promised to portal us elsewhere, the breath unchained, Paradise life released from all it is.  God migrates, listening to whisper for a way to turn, at each place benevolence waiting to act, tell me in this hear, I can do as much as each of you are.

Migrates, turning to encounter itself, traveling through itself, miracle of self medium, deity made dense, self-existent proof, talk of God fulfilled by other talk of God, compelled self wind, running ahead of talk of God to make a place in future myth, there to mourn a past where has is gone.

We abide in the inbetween, was to come, miracle heard done to come again, God wondering where where was and will be, He the present waiting, as we.  Flay yourselves, crawl the ground, see the feet surround which makes your canyoned path, walk of others the ground you make your struggle, audience so high your pain cannot notice, that look down to where you crawl the God of notice, your crawl the path to God God sees.  No longer rumor You flow prostrate, legless, elbows Your stride, stride dense so small, less than Your creation to furrow its path, to channel feet high into the mystery of tomb yet closed, life released from living circling an exit unprovided.

Go home.  Say you’ve been and seen the mystery of God, tell your children to do the same, then come home, life returned to living, life released from our early encounter of End.  In His mercy He lets us be of Him, shows us His creation so tall, lets us path the ground as He, then promises the tomb, that creation will fall on us no more.  If we would stop looking God could rest.  But we demand the path of unending why and force Him to that ground, knowing for each of us the why will end.  But not for His creation, making itself to keep the question going.  In his image creation is made, each of us discarded tool in the making, God the why of His own design–not an answer, but ever question.

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71.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

During the liberation of Tripoli, anonymous Libyan command orders the death of all at a prison.  One prisoner, a doctor incarcerated for sending medical supplies to the resistance, turns to his torturer now executioner, saying, “Fear God.”  The executing hand is later imprisoned by the revolution, perchance subject to the whim of the dead doctor’s brother, now local command, demanding to know his brother’s last.

At the taking of Tripoli, mosques called out Allahu Akbar, God is Great, as signal to rise.

New York Times, Tripoli, Libya, 2011-12

God is Great, he placed me here, I who followed the easy only propel of stream, who bumped and turned and washed over others, my little forward their drown, until bumped stopped here, to face you.  Didn’t hear his cry, too busy eddying my place, he the downstream of oblivion, what all survival resists.  He my brother, lost not wanted found, he my victim pet, he my he, he medicine sent into the nowhere beyond the horizon I am into a people never experienced.  God is Great, see what He’s made, calling from heights men have made; voices everywhere, only people seen.

God is Great, wall of sound, ricocheting us into one another, some against the grain, that was I, wrong turn made wrong by others’ turns, wall’s direction lost through its own energy, God is Great on all sides, maybe God placed me here, exactly here, to do what I have done, to be an am.

Fear God, he said, we saying it together, to localize his here that was, a triangulation with his echo, the three of us a prisoned space for God, finally captured in our minds, in this space of past and too presents, God is Great, call resounding in memory, there is God, beyond no horizon, in the back of memory, turn around He’s not there, now He is where horizon was.

Fear God, fear the wall, fear the rivulets of command, fear His next commanding hand, anonymous He in the soundings beyond our artifices, He in the coming turn of maze we have made to place each me.

God is Great.  God is Greater, never Greatest.

editorial note:  artifice (fourth paragraph), dated to 1534, “workmanship,” from Middle French, “skill, cunning.”

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72.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

Backlogged on pilgrimage to Karbala, Shiites gather near a mosque outside Basra.  A suicide bomber kills 50 and more, at least 91 injured.

January 2012

–

Ra is no self-creator god / Ra is us / Embracing space / Traveling time

–Ayi Kwei Armah

(b. 1939, Ghana)

–

Captured God flows into we His vessel until bursting, He running from us through us, stopped by our labels which make Him be, He not even infinite, just too much said in too many places to be total anywhere, the breath upon which He travels ladening Him with necessity, that which removes Him filling him into an elsewhere, His flow a little bursting, brimming over our categorical say, His miracle that we live beyond His presence gone by.  His divinity is our calculated loss of say, our closing of mouths to deny His breath entry for too much creation, our say as much His creative expulsion as His stay.

Be as passers-by, do not congregate to make my skin, to swell in power until you fear what has become, pushing to pierce my body made, divinity my peace upon departure.  Watch me begin elsewhere to drain anew, benefit begun without the cost of realization.  Future is what you want, not I the End of Days.  Conjure me for end of day then begone; I will flow in and out of your tomorrows to watch your children grow.

Do not call ekklesia to know yourself in full, to gather all history in your saying, to draw all my steps into you.  For then in the pain of my too much finitude I need must call my servant present to give you divinity complete in your now.  Life cannot abide life in full.  Space and time are here to let you be with me.  Each child you make is your escape:  push space forward; thereby you and the we that is I can Be.

editorial endnotes:

1) passers-by:  “be passers-by,” Gospel of Thomas, 42.

2)  my peace (Peace of God): In Islam, the bounty of God, descending.  In the Christian Epistles, “The Peace of God which passeth all understanding,” Philippians 4:7.  In European history, immunity from violence granted by the Catholic Church to noncombatants, especially in travel, c 990, presaging the Crusades.

3) ekklesia: New Testament Greek usually translated as “church,” meaning to call out; in Classical Greek ekklesia is an assembly of citizens summoned by a crier.

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73.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

A suicide bomber detonates in a rehearsal for a military parade; more than 90 killed, 200 wounded.

Yemen, May 2012

–

We can be one then, we can be one / We will shake his fingerless hands

–Kofi Awoonor

(b. 1935, Ghana)

–

March the field of Being into being, legs raised tandem, choreograph which pauses the inchoate entrances and exits upon which we stand.  Leg raised high, ungrounded, other burdening existence, its back slaved for a precipice height which cannot endure, to fall upon the certainty that something will be there, sound of stomp surround each foot’s placement, Being confirmed because made.

Sound is what we are, not backed burdened ground but the wave progressing from its centers, a hit wall, existence’s role its resistance so our march can be.  In sound we are All, our pasts naught but the movement down stopped, stomped, to let us rise half in air which denies its embrace, balanced on the necessity of dance, struggle molded into pause, existence without extinction, an our which endures as All, promised immune from individual fade.

Sidewise comes our cause, not grounded past inarticulate saved our forced stomp; sidewise comes the present, catapulting from its ground, sidewise on all sides, vectors intangible, angles encircling our our, making us, pressing us into together, our march calling them into our in, what props us up from sidelined fall, otherwise tumbling onto the past, an extended ground meeting the air into which we would now rise, not here as we feign one-legged prop, but at horizon in distant tale.

Sidewise into our in it comes, parsing the All of our choreograph in sunder made silence, an other assembly, groundless, ground upon which others will be forced to stand, raising leg in hoped walk away from ground.

—

74.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

Two Tibetan monks sit facing the outside wall of a major monastery, shout words twice, then immolate themselves.  One survives, housed in hospital.

Lhasa, Tibet.   May 2012

–

Look up at the sky and count the stars if you can.  Just so will your descendants be.

–Genesis 15:5 (New Jerusalem Bible)

–

Life burns slowly, torso topped with gentle flame, lighting a world for others, warming them, moving so they can move, steps to take spied closely, held in darkness surround which lets us be.  Flame lights flame, one step making shadows of new direction, lamp made eyes made lamp, past and future both outer dark around a brightness of we, we unseen save in the changing shadows of movement.  In eyes raised distant we would see what we are, but there only stars abound, unfathomably distant as arm unraised toward touch, what makes our home a furnace elsewhere ready to pull us in for fuel.  Each we no star, inner process never outer reckoning, eyes cast distant to throw alien afar, universe never our mirror.

The world is burn and we titrate the awe, make vessels, add ingredients, tap the sides with words to stir some somewhere us into vessels kept, their burn made mark on inner sides, snuffed into history thereby traced and made; thought shaped into container for peopled script seen only as they extinguish in mild addition to necessity, vessel’s outside an accumulation of insides lost to view, history the act of containing, not its distant seen consequence.  Wall vast, thickening through each ending, making a universe into which we cannot die, surface only ever ours.  No stars uncounted now, only the wall throwing shadows into distant unreachable exit, shadows made through the interior glow of extinguished burn, that beyond light and dark growing through the transition of light to dark.   So we are cradled in the necessity of thought unique.

Come supplicants from the emptiness of far exit, sitting on the shadowed light thought has made, calling out words which echo back on ancient death, flaming their burn complete to be seen not inside what wall says is but from outer unsaid.  Come supplicants to ground in light brief that an outside is, that universe is uncontained, to be seen in impossible conjecture that something there is beyond all communication.

One extinguishes wall-less, useless nova of stars, the other reduced to controlled burn in cradled interior, potted script on walled inside rarely touched; whether an answer will come from beyond all known history ever unknown.

editorial endnote:  potted: 1) preserved in a pot; 2) (British informal) summarized or abridged.

—

75. On the United States Supreme Court

otherwise undated

While reading:

1) Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: the last philosopher of culture (2008).

2) Cian Dorr, “There are no abstract objects,” in Sider, Hawthorne, Zimmerman (eds.), (2008), Contemporary debates in Metaphysics.

3) Bertrand Russell, The problems of philosophy (1912).

A

Pure nominalism is a phenomenology of the presented particular carried in a language of abstraction which has no foundation save in that presentation.  These particulars, grounded in science, have no direct presentation in everyday life.  They do not greet, as a chair does, or a radio which is both object and thrown sound.  An electron, if it survives the push toward nothingness which is reduction (*) [see Suzuki’s footnote at entry’s end], cannot inform us of its presence without a circumlocution of fictions which leave it elsewhere by the time they’re understood; our words say it was there, and it can once again be once again there if we travel the fictitious path again.  Fictitious, for full of properties, numbers, relations, sets; yet without these it would be more forlorn than Kant’s thing-in-itself, cocooned not in the necessity of reason, but in a story it forces us to tell so that we may know it is, our reason for this grace its own manipulation; well, not so much it as so many just like it–and exactly what does just like mean in a world of presented particulars?  I present myself through others, we a chorus unveiling one another, yet each of us is as it is by itself, with the direct presentation of self mostly an anonymous presentation of a mass mostly like me, if you ignore some things they are doing, that is.

So the presentation of me invokes not so much me but my brethren. They, anonymously, sing out me.  The particular presents by being beyond location, the fictitious talk more real, to us, than it.  Location, the place of nominalist rest, is, in full, bounty promised but deferred.

Reduction is false nominalism.  The reduction is brute as applied, shattering the object held at arm’s length, with no patent for reconstruction.  In portent, reconstruction is in the fictitious talk, but rarely as applied.  Any reconstruction will invoke multiplicity of location and entities, and so number.  And number, nominalists like to say, is a strange beast, purportedly an existent abstract entity, yet causally inert, differentiated by relations among themselves causally inert. Without location, how can they influence anything, mere spectators cheering on particulars by counting them, or labeling them in various dimensions (including motion) by coordinates.

En masse, number is not causally inert.  In particle physics, energy creates the opportunity for particles to manifest; so magnitude transforms into object.  Number could be said to participate in the formation of the particle via reduction in magnitude–less energy, now particle.  The creation of the particle transfers participation of one number to another number; the particle effects number by shifting participation; cause and effect are not unidirectional, number involved in causing particle, particle’s appearance shifting participation to another number.  Number is not removed or destroyed or converted as particle is, but participation of number is subject to loss and gain.

There is a sense in which number connects the world.  A particle event is held in number, conversion to another event transferred in number. Events are not totally connected, as they are in [Alfred North] Whiteheadian prehensions, where all eternal objects (what elsewhere would go for abstract entities), held in God (his only function), are taken positively or negatively into the concrescence of an actual entity (a fundamental particular) as that entity accounts for all actualities prior to it.  Rather, here number cradles each event, structure on number defining endurance, change, destruction.  An event, knowing only some of its coming and going, yet conforming to all through common participation in the structure of (and on) number.

Yet numbers are also isolate in a way events are not.  Events can be casually transitive, A affecting B, B affecting C, means A indirectly affects C.  Numbers are intransitive in participation.  A transferring to B, B to C, fails to connect A to C; the transference (in participation) pre-history of B is open-ended (certainly in macro events; quantum events have an integer structure on energy transfer, e.g., of electron orbitals, but arriving energy can jump the sequence).  Numbers cradle the world in commonality of structure; particle events isolate in the act of creation.  The world does not totally know itself; to be is to sever.  Yet there is a hand of God holding each demanded severance, traveled through mathematics.  To be isolate is still to be said in common.  The world is the concurrent product of two forms of isolation, one yielding events with transitive causation, the other holding these events in a commonality which declares no fixed eternity of actuality.  Number seems inert, yet it participates in causation which is actuality.  Particles seem unconnected to the eternity of number, yet they constrain/exclude the participation of numbers at any actuality.

B

Democritus had another way.  Atoms are internally inert, indestructible, selfed only by shape, like shape attracted to like.  Their combinations, positions, densities form all events.  An atom is never removed from the world, unlike the modern particle (save, perhaps, the proton), so always engaged, unlike number; causation, as movement of position, change of combinations, density and collision of atoms, is dampening transitive across positional proximity.  The world is totally connected, not potentially through conversions of number, but in the actuality of combined atoms.  Empty space itself has a power akin to negative collision, or attraction:

Democritus postulates that … like is carried to like–but also that everything is carried to what is empty… (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Problems and solutions, c 200 ce)

The empty is a sort of space in which all these bodies are carried up and down for the whole of time, and either somehow intertwine … or else strike and rebound; and in their meetings they dissociate and again associate (Galen, 129- c210 ce,  Elements according to Hippocrates)

So both atom and empty space carry force

Democritus [says] that the full and empty are elements, calling one ‘existent’ the other ‘nonexistent’; and of these the full and solid is existent, the empty nonexistent (that is why they say that which exists no more exists than what does not exist–because body no more exists than what is empty), and these are the material causes of what exists [as appearance]. (Aristotle, Metaphysics)

In Democritus number appears as combination, position, density, but as an overlay on atoms, a snapshot indicating transition to new snapshots.  Force, moving atoms, participates number.  Number is again not (causally) inert, combining force and atoms, still potentially isolate when not applicable.  But atoms are inert; they are not isolate in creation.  The severance is not in the created particle of modern physics but in force propelling atoms.  Mass/energy conversion replaces this global severance of force from atom with the isolate severance of created particle, where the properties of particle arise from no manifest prior.  The world becomes locally atomic in a way Democritus could not imagine, at cost of totality full (the modern particle a primary motivation for [Alfred North] Whitehead’s actual entity).

C

Modern particle may be an act of severance, but it is not an exact pure alternative to number as existent entity.  In atoms, electrons are probability clouds.  Molecular bonds are intersections of probability clouds which alter the spatial probabilities of occurrence or revelation of an electron upon an external event/intervention.  An electron is a probability space, altered by probability spaces of same kind (so molecular bonds), with the electron as entity an event forced by intervention.  The benzene ring is a molecular bond which has no fixed location relative to the atoms sharing the bond; yet upon intervention of a radical, one or more of these indeterminate bonds can become spatially specific.  As in the creation of particles at high energy, particular (particulate) existence is a forced outcome at thresholds.  The fictitious language used to describe nominalist particulars rather creates them, not as fictitious entities in turn, but as causal revelations, revelations impossible without the participation of number.

It is, here, impossible to isolate an electron as a particulate entity; the fictitious chorus makes a real.  Talk of unrevealed particulates can be vacuous, unrealized, providing a false nominalist ground.  So Dorr notes

Many philosophers accept what I call the Humean Intuitions:  they think that there are few, if any, interesting structural conditions something must satisfy in order to fall under a basic physical predicate [like being an electron].  Instead of obeying the actual laws of nature, electrons could be distributed in some very different way.  For example, there could be exactly seven electrons, evenly spaced in a straight line and motionless in otherwise empty space.  Likewise, there could be exactly seven non-electrons, evenly spaced in a straight line and motionless in otherwise empty space.  But if both of these situations are possible, it cannot be the case that whether something is an electron depends only on its place in the structure of resemblances, natural classes, or whatever: these kinds of structural facts are exactly the same at the world with the seven electrons and at the world with seven non-electrons. (Dorr [2008], p. 47)

Here the label “electron” has been reified.  Particulate existence, which is outcome, has been severed from event, reductionism forced to duplicate the particular of arms length.  The seven electrons are grounded on reduction’s unfulfilled promise of (full) reconstruction by, strangely, removing these electrons from the theory needed even to assert that promise.

If electrons are not nominalist enduring entities, how do you equate their manifestations?  That is, how do you make sense of Dorr (2008:45)’s

Whenever x is an electron and y is a duplicate of x, y is an electron.

By the chorus of talk.  Even spatial temporal nominalism does not take “duplicate” to include positional identity; a duplicate exists elsewhere.  When fundamental particles are revealed as events, duplicate entails being in the chorus.  The nominalist phenomenology of present particular becomes instead a phenomenology of articulated possibilities, a chorus with soloists brief.  An instanced particular as much reveals its embedded language as language reveals it.  A reductionist entity in particle physics is the chorus; no particular manifests particlehood complete.

This puts a different slant on Russell’s (1912) argument for the existence of resemblance as a necessary existent (relational) universal:

If we wish to avoid universals [such as] whiteness and triangularity, we shall choose some particular patch of white or some particular triangle, and say that anything is white or a triangle if is has the right sort of resemblance to our chosen particular. But then the resemblance required will have to be a universal.  Since there are many white things, the resemblance must hold between many pairs of particular white things; and this is the characteristic of a universal. It will be useless to say that there is a different resemblance for each pair, for then we shall have to say that these resemblances resemble each other, and thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal.  The relation of resemblance, therefore, must be a true universal.  And having been forced to admit this universal, we find that it is no longer worth while to invent difficult and unplausible theories to avoid the admission of such universals as whiteness and triangularity.

Resemblance need not be an implicit to vague metric, but common placement in pathways of possibility.  It is the assertion that this revealed path is tied to others unrevealed in the instance; that without the articulated chorus the present could not be.  But articulation is often incomplete.  Existence is not contingent on our hearing.  When an electron presents itself, it is potentially a nominalist orphan.  “Electronhood” is a promise, not property, the nominalist phenomenology of present particulars ever ready to haunt, existence severed into isolate presence in a flash.

(*)

[Suzuki’s footnote flagged in first paragraph]:

…Cohen’s transformation of Kant’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself.  He discarded Kant’s original conception of a dark metaphysical substance lurking behind and obscurely “affecting” our empirical sensibility, but did not follow positivists such as Mach in jettisoning along with it the very distinction between appearance and reality.  His objection was only to Kant’s articulation of this distinction as an absolute one between experience and something entirely beyond experience: his am was to recast it as a relative distinction between different levels within experience itself.  Each revolution in science reveals a new “reality,” in comparison to which the old reality is exposed as mere “appearance.” But this new reality can in turn be exposed as appearance, and so on ad infinitum.  The thing-in-itself is retained only as the “focus imaginarius” of this infinite advance.  No longer a thing at all, it represents the idea of absolutely unconditioned knowledge, the ideal limit that science approaches but can never reach.  (Skidelsky 2008)

Particle physics says otherwise.  “Reduction” is not in the dissolving of particles but in their transformation and creation.  High energy physics supervenes by transforming energy into particle; the reduction path reverses, or, rather, downward reduction becomes lateral loop. True, there are quarks.  But if the proscription against isolated quarks survives, reduction becomes not a taking apart but paths of transference.  Looping back upon itself, construction has a platform.

And macro entities in fine can be constructed.  Wafers of countably few atoms are constructed in molecular engineering; molecules are designed to attack specific cancers.  We are left with a world not reconstructed but pieced in wantingly incomplete jigsaw.  The question is not if the thing-in-itself retreats into non-atomic reductive oblivion, but whether in our reductions we have carved away residue lost to us.  Aristotle’s query of infinite divisibility take on new meaning:

If some sawdust, as it were, comes about when the body is being divided, and in this way a body escapes from the magnitude…how is that body divisible? (On generation and corruption)

It is not divisible; it has escaped.  So too the thing-in-itself reminds us that we did not evolve to know in full the world.

[Editorial note:  unlike footnote (*), the divisions A, B, C are not original to the journal, added for small ease in presentation.  There is no evidence that Suzuki’s journal was seen by anyone else until opened at Northwestern University after his death.  Indeed, there is no uncontested evidence that entries were ever used by Suzuki in any other context, save perhaps as unknown self quotations in oral arguments or conversations.  Kendal Q. Binmore (A cacophony of silence: the personal journals of the Suzuki Court) argues that the journal, along with Suzuki’s Zen Journal, formed the ground upon which he stood, making gestures to lived elsewhere from there.]

—

76.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

A woman in a pull over dress tie-dyed in brilliant red with intimations of violet stands sidewise in front of a burned out truck used in a bombing, her arms raised straight above her head, face crying out toward sky.

New York Times photo, Somalia.   March 2013

Residue of failed sun unable to consume itself, artifact of imperfect finality, hoped to erase the world; stands before you color unspied without the conjecture of culture, moving brilliance of being beyond the ken of she who wears it, yet here, crying skyward past every death made, no matter the severance of ground.  Here, standing thin raised, cry makes heaven, not in the sky, but in the distant eye which has never seen such moving beauty; so not in the still cry, but in the walking after.

—

77. On the United States Supreme Court

otherwise undated

While reading Saul Kripke, “A puzzle about time and thought,” in Kripke, Philosophical troubles, Collected papers, volume 1 (2011).

Suppose, says Kripke, I think of the set of times in which something happens or is.  So the set of times (instants) in which Neandertals existed as a (sub)species; or times (all instants) after the first three solar days upon any new supernova in the Milky Way galaxy.  Each such set has a time thought.  Barring aliens, divinity, or a prophetic Neandertal, the first set does not contain the time(s) at which it is thought.  That derived from new supernovas may or may not contain the time (let’s just say one time) in which it is thought as an empirical matter.  These sets are intrinsically and well defined, each quantifying only on times.

Since each such set has a time thought, we can take these times and consider the set of such times which are not in their associated set thought.  If we call this set S[0], then t(n), the time the above set of times in which there were Neandertals, S[N], is not in S[N], so t(n) is in S[0].  The time at which the three days after times of Milky Way supernova may or may not be in S[0].  The time at which the set of times in which language is spoken is thought occurs during language, so it is in this set, so it is not in S[0].

Since we can think of S[0], it too has a time thought.  This time, t(0), is either in its thought set S[0] or not.  The usual paradox arises.  If t(0) is in S[0], by definition, S[0] contains only those times thought of sets not in the thought set(s), so t(0) is not in S[0].  If t(0) is not in S[0], by definition it is in S[0], so it must be in S[0].

This is as Russell’s paradox (the set of all sets not elements of themselves; is this set an element or itself or not?) without direct self referential inclusion.  S[0] is composed only of times, just as all other sets considered.  It seems well defined, so subsumed under the standard axioms of set theory.  So the Axiom of Choice allows us to pick out t(0), paradox ascendant.

Now S[0] contains all t(i) in which an associated set is thought.  But there may be many sets thought at t(i), and we need to know how (or be able to pick out) each such set; otherwise, we do not know if a set S is thought at t(i) or not, and the Axiom of Choice will fail.  So we reallly do not use

S[i] ↔ t(i) ε S[0]

as a mapping but

{S[i], t(i)} → t(i) ε S[0], with several distinct S[i] possible for each t(i) ( S[i] ε S[i] = {S[i] such that S[i] is thought at t(i)])

To construct S[0] we need to quantify over all sets thought S[i]; the elements of S[0] are not t(i) but {S[i], t(i)} (abreviated).  S[0] is not a pure set of times; quantification across all sets of sets of times is on the sly.  This violates the Axiom of Foundation, so Russell immune set theories forbid S[0] as well.

The lure of Kripke’s puzzle lies in its echo of standard constructive mathematical injunctions.  The set of all possible times thought is just a continuous interval of the reals, from which the set of times in which all sets are thought seems derived.  Constructive injunctions on the reals are timeless.  So in the definition of continuity we say pick any e > 0; then for | f(x) – f(c)| < e, there is a δ >0 (or we can find a δ) such that for all |x-c| < δ,  | f(x) – f(c)| < e for focal value of x=c.  “Pick” and “find” are ordered, but time invariant; they work whenever the injunction path (the construction rules) begins–timeless as are sets with implied Axiom of Choice.  But Kripke’s S[0] constructs S[0] by considering (quantifying over) a priorly completed S[0]; otherwise t(0) is never defined for S[0] is never fully articulated by construction rule.  Here timeless construction (possible at any time as in continuity) enters a time before its use to complete the construction (S[0] must already be there to identify t(0) to construct S[0]).  Now the Axiom of Choice enters time from a timeless prior, picking an element from a well [instrinsically] defined set, to construct (by proof) at that time. But S[0] is not prior timeless, being constructed; Choice does not, can not, bring it.  So Choice fails, for t(0) of S[0] is not there, via construction, for choice.

This puzzle is consequent of a failure of abreviation.  t(i) is naturally a one-many mapping of times to sets thought. Saying S[0] is composed soley of times is a convience; it actually invokes a more complex mapping constructive process.  This is not to say that all sets must be constructed extrinsically; the Axiom of Choice assures otherwise.  Continuity is not defined by extrinsic rote listing of infinite e, δ; an intrinsic constructive rule is given which produces e, δ as needed via Choice.  But the timeless prior of choice brings nothing with it. Eternity enters time pure, neutral, without prior existents.

—

78.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

After held 4 months without trial or charge, the last 67 days on solid food hunger strike, Khader Adnan is released; next day he is photographed holding his young daughter aloft, she sitting in mid-air, his face raised not to sun, but her.

ActiveStills photo, 972.com magazine.  West Bank, Israel/Palestine.  April 2012

–

Non-cooperation is nonviolent when you give your opponent all in the place of just what he needs.  You have disarmed him once for all by your apparent cooperation, which in effect is complete non-cooperation.

–Mohandas Gandhi, Harijan, 7-13-1940

–

I am what you say I am, and you say nothing.  Distilled silence so gone that I must be imagining myself, a delusion asymptomatic placed in no hear spoken.

Nothing cannot be cured.  A optomism so vast that the universe expunges me, miracle of God, I am that I am leaving me the neglected residue of His imperative.  One God makes all, not for all:  this the pivot of existence, which divides itself to be.

You need me.  You need a there to make a heard here; you need silence to surround your voice, to pinpoint existence through a triangulation of controlled oblivion.

And I accepted this gone until I felt your voice return to you though me, the walls of my cell echoing your importance, I the ambiance for your resonance.  Nothing is the air you breathe to say.  We all need to cage something, and I am your something.  You are not insane; you need a cell which houses nothing–it’s the walls that matter, that block the infinitude of oblivion, that return of Voice that you are.  I am the perimeter of your existence, the differential necessary to all importance, the overlooked which lets topic reign.

So I took your silence and lived it, concentrated it, starved myself, a limit sequence of the nothingness you breathe, my death, your vacuum.  In fear of death you let me go.  Existence cannot abide a vacuum; it needs itself.

And so we remain taut in differential, breathing one another, I raising my child who knows not the self cost of Being paid for in others, I a would be Atlas that supports a world.  Perhaps not support.  Release.  To raise her high so she sees beyond our Gods, beyond the reciprocal air we have made, a unteathered hope that seeks an atmosphere unmade of the lives of others, a place beyond all evolved God, to see the face of God.

—

79.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

A bearded Muslim in his late 60’s is held aloft, floating on the arms of others, near Ramadan’s end, resident in the protest camp/village in Nasr City, formed after the military expulsion of Morsi as President.

Egypt,  August 2013.

Lifted on labor released from necessity, eyes raised to sky indifferent to existence, floating as cloud, made stream, released from particulate being:  the years which  have no here astounded in their pause, this moment neither point nor flow but heaven prophesied.  So God sees:  not embedded existence holding on but the gathering of number which makes a flow, arms digging into ground to be a place now raised to let a stranger be what they are not.  Old man weighed by an existence no one sees, raised brief in inconsequential solace by those making ground, being ground, that if not them, then someone else may obtain the promise of thought unburdened of past.

Look up into sky and find clouds migrating vacuum, traveling to connect to make a greater something, the great unbounded horizon enticing them to stretch further to make an All until dissipated thin in glory to be God.  God is not up there.  You can feel Him, below, those bumpy hands transferring you one to another, you a boat ever almost capsized, yet ever upright; if you could say thanks the hands you would grasp ever gone, replaced by others, sometimes creature of two or more bodies not knowing what thanks is.  There is God, in the unthankable, not All but enough in now, embodied of no body but the transference between, brief aggregate to propel the particulate beyond itself.

Old man floating, warn the creature you have made: do not stretch to be an All; gather into a here, not an everywhere.  The price of God is His presence elsewhere.

—

80.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

Coordinated bombings across several cities leave more than 90 dead, intermittent bombings in the following days.

Iraq,  August 2013.

Gutted grin of God, failed entries of eternity, strung together in talk of what divinity should be, to reclaim creation from the finitude into which it was set.  Failed omnipotence, enfeebled by finitude where explosions end, His servants marching a land with ends, incompleteness insulation from the divine.  They say and speak when words themselves are finite failure, dampening beneath echo into unheard, divinity in every way repulsed.

So great a God to create space which He cannot transverse, to find in finitude His creation beyond Him.  To ask to be seen when light itself makes an apart.  With each entry finitude pushes Him back until the eternity He is is reduced to the moment of loss, exit become entry unnoticed.

Enfeebled God, servants raging into explode and explode, finite life ever remaining after Your exits.  Do you not see that You are ever present, sprinkled throughout finitude?  Your eternity is in each loss, in that brevity not really here which we try to reclaim in memory, eternity not the memory, but memory of memory.  No need to explode unending; the failure of finitude congeals loss which is entry into You.  You are in the radius of every said, which is why we say.  That which keeps you at bay, refusing total consumption of now, makes you in every where if we but wait.  You’ve forgotten the brilliance of your creation, eternity perpetual within time through the loss in others’ exit.  You have no need of entry; you are ever here.  Your servants would expel all now, would cordon off eternity, would sunder You from Your creation, would make your manifestation impossible.  They force Your speech to drown You out.

Pray, do not speak, so we may hear You everywhere.

—

81.  While on the Oregon Appellate Court

Chemical weapons in Syria kill more than 1000; the United States debates punitive reply.  In Iraq, a Shiite, having been a medic in Syria, now working in a hospital, vows to return.

New York Times, August-September 2013.

Convulsed unto disjoint of reality, askew the plane of being, seen, no longer touched, signature of was, they now the remains upon which creation makes.

Sinews unseen moved them, thought long gone yet condensed into canister, carried by hands moved by something that exists but cannot be seen; such is God, of no man yet passed through men, trace in the echo of their in betweens.  God resides in the gaps through which we move, which let us move, gaps the absence of other made incessantly in our declarations of moved presence.  In the gaps of God we come rushing hungrily for His absence, His miracle our movement, wonder of becoming which must not end.

Distance is gap, God everywhere but more in far distance where purpose is clear, no local losses to push aside in our forward.  Worship far and let vacuum suck you there, God in the miracle of traveled encounter, others like you through greeting, common worship in encountered rest point to be sundered into gap so travel may abide.  God encounters Himself to sunder Himself, recreating what He is.  An avenging angel on high merely mixes the world anew, gapping the land for further travel.

We cannot destroy You without creating You.  We cannot move without destroying You so You may be again.  We are Your residue of past and portending resurrection, our cries of grief Your morning call. You are the absence pulling us toward search; in our commanding heights we glimpse You, only to fall into presence awaiting shatter for Your gap.

Creator, You never come but make us leave. Your fighting flight is Your being.  Those of us who would stand before You in accusation, demanding Your self creation complete, would fossilize all we ever are.  You are the erasure which is recreated resurrection; You are Humanity which passes through men.

Forgive us as we vanish, for we are Your making sin.