Trying On: The American Education

Ethically, variously, and well–

How I once described how I would like to be reading. Living, really. Living, because: not separate from seeing. All a matter of attention. Not all, reductive. But all–whatever’s not an ear is just pretending. 

But what of the problem of methodological supersaturation? Political theory: I can deal in this; philosophy–I am driven to it from the outside. Words, music, the unlike parts of stone, the path beneath me, the flowers that I ignore, the dust I kick beneath me. Critical animal studies: Lord, child, now you have to pay attention to them too. 

And I’ll be the one standing outside with my bird notebook at 6am tomorrow, rain and barely sunrise, attempting to see a problem, to define a situation. And how is it I could see what I don’t see yet? How is that I use the birds to wrangle (back?) my fore-sight? 

There are ways of “experiencing,” it would seem, that are not really experiencing. Things in themselves? Idealities? Have I just brought those back? Let’s live in it for a moment: how do I really see that waterfall, which one has fallen farthest from the garden path–theoria, perception? And that’s assuming some pure sight! Derrida on perception: “there never was any such thing.”

I can’t look at a waterfall not because I don’t know what to do with it, because I don’t know what to do with my not knowing what to do with it. And because I don’t want to do with it. So: I want the thing? Myth of unity, waterfall in every drop and roar at every source (multiple)? No, I think. I want some ways of seeing that see against that claim. Like, you put your back against mine, and three steps, draw. 

Or, the most mature thing to do is to accept that strange contigency. To acknowledge it–to sing to it, almost. Singing is thus not a fiction–not a believing (I say: “I see that waterfall”; I see it all) but a note upon the gate: Hey I saw some parts of you, I don’t even know which or how I measured, thank you for your grace, such a short season–

JLRH