a love letter
How to make accidents and contingency part of knowledge production: A) throw away all course descriptions. How to make accidents and contingency part of knowing a thing or being: A) cook a stir fry over the burning course descriptions. Give it to someone. Eat together.
Sensus means to understand. To hear, taste, smell, see, and feel. Sense the world and you become the world. The world becomes you. Build a new definition of tragedy and form where Aristotelian progression collapses in on itself: mimesis, anagnorisis, and katharsis become in the same instant. Things are falling all the time and things are rising simultaneously. Falling and rising things pass each other on their opposite ways, occasionally bumping into the other and flying off in third directions. Death is only finite to the Kantian soul – it is not finite to the beetle and worm that consume the energy stored in flesh.
Body skin is not impermeable; it is not an emblem or seal. It may proclaim "Bob" to some adjacent receptive body; to other receptors it is "purchase" or "food" or "portal." To another receptor it is "Bob" and "purchase." Purchase/portal. Bob/food. Through the skin and eyes, into the blood and out again into the earth, the material world circulates. Humans are not creatures as much as vessels that are filled and leak with matter and combustion, once held in other containers. In a constant state of simultaneous decay and rebirth. From conception, we are always emerging and dying. Feel the precariousness of fluid movement by being in it.
As if ash did not dust the wings of the flight of the Phoenix. Or the Anka -- whose life/wing span is unimaginably long:
"They say that the Anka lives to the age of one thousand five hundred years; and when it has come to the age of five hundred years it begins to sing; and when the time for the female to lay its egg is come, the male Anka comes with his beak full of sea-water, and sprinkles her till the egg is laid; and when it is laid, he sits upon it, while the female goes out for food. In one hundred and twenty-five years the young bird is hatched; and when it is grown up, if it be a female, the female Anka gathers much wood, and the male and female rub their bills together, from which comes a great fire and falls among the wood; into this the female goes and is burnt, and the young one becomes the mate of the male bird. And if the young is a male, the male Anka goes into the fire, and the young one becomes the mate of the female. Many other things are related of the Anka, but as they rest on no good authority, I have not thought it well to insert them here." - al-Ghazālī
And in that very long, nearly unimaginable time, chronology no longer matters. There is no more waiting.
