Message to N

Hahaha!! What a lovely message! I love how passionate you are in it! But I love even more how we've managed to stay friends and are now helping each other this way. I think I'll have another listen actually before I carry on with this message...

Haha!! When I heard you say "If I'm totally honest with you..", I truly felt that you were about to be, and started rubbing my palms together with glee. That's what I love the most. "Get ready for some good shit!", I said to myself. Do tell me if you have any additional criticisms to add that may have come to you since.

Erm....well, I don't really have much else to say really in reply because I don't disagree with what you point out. From my perspective I just wrote what I needed to write and it took that form. A form I knew would immediately be anathema to many of my facebook friends, but didn't want to change despite knowing this.

Ok, let me listen again and address your points as you make them...

"What it lacks for me, is feeling" - I agree. If taken as a whole anyway. The piece lacks the cohesion necessary to carry the emotions on a constant journey, and there was no attempt by me to address this at the time. Maybe in revisiting the piece today, as I usually abstain from from posting big pieces the day it's been written - perhaps the desire or need to fashion it into something more unified in its purpose will come to me. But I'm not going to force anything if it doesn't. Trying to make things happen always ends up with tears for me!

"It seems like you're talking about yourself in the past, and not in the present" - Yup. Agree with that too! I'm barely present in the entirety of the text, and make only a brief appearance towards the end. The text almost reads like a cold philosophical manifesto. Like it's aim is to propound something profound. And because of this appearance of supposed profundity, along with the text's didactic tone, it causes many people to want to stop reading immediately as it feels like it's contrived, on its it's way to pretension. Again, I was aware of this, and if the impulse to modify the text in order to ameliorate the sense of lofty pretence arrives, then I'll be all over it.

I think the voice IS from the past, as you say. It's not me in the now. It's like a voice from the past being recalled to the present, by Scouse Ben from the Wirral. "Who does he think he is plastering his tomes on Facebook like they're undiscovered ancient manuscripts? I think he may have gone a bit too far with this one". Hahaha!!

"You cannot talk about love with indifference" - Why not? You don't qualify that statement. What happens? What inviolable law is broached in doing so?  

But let's say it's true. Why does the crime of talking about love with indifference mean that it also cannot be spoken of with a voice of purest reverie or abject despair? How are the two linked exactly? Is not aiming between emotional extremes a fine example of striving for mediocrity? "...where what you're invoking is a feeling you can't interpret as either joy or pain".

Jouissance is a feeling of ecstacy, and jubilation is not far behind. Am I misinterpreting you here?

By the way, I used the word 'crime' up above because it fit better, so don't feel like I'm accusing you or anything!

I feel like the cohabitation of statements about knowledge acquisition alongside those of love spoken with a dispassionate voice offends your sensibilities of what is proper. I think you find it grating!

"Knowledge...what knowledge is and how it's experienced, is technical" - I'm not sure what you mean by experiencing knowledge technically. I think I'm more interested in what constitutes the act and process of knowing rather than knowledge itself to be honest. The dynamics of knowing.

There wasn't any intention for the themes of love and knowledge to ever engage, interact, or dance in harmony together; so any contact made was purely coincidental. I just wrote out my thoughts in a serial fashion and refused to do any arranging!  

"Is this really profound? Do you really believe it so? And if you are, then you need to go deeper into the feelings of that to express it in a new way, in a new form of love, of knowledge" - I wholeheartedly agree with you. But I don't think that new form should consist of ordered words. It should remain silent and operate within the realm of the ineffable. 

"...in expression where knowledge becomes another person in the other" - Yes! I'm all for people being transformed for the better through expression which brings them a sense of knowing, which leads to a new becoming.

"And when we talk about otherness, it is something we can never have, we can never possess. It is always absent. It's an absent presence" - Are you sure otherness is something we can never possess? How do you know? More importantly, and leaving aside the proving/disproving aspect - what benefit or advantage does it bring you in believing resolutely that this is the case?