The Formal Cause of Metaphysics

In a mind without words but shaped by the memory of words, time's passing is experienced elsehow. I felt it like emotions. In an environment without stimulus but shaped by the form of where stimulus might be, emotions are experienced without obscurity. I saw them like clouds. In an emotion without subject but remembered like any emotion with subject would be, time passes long-long. The proof is in the putting.

In talking of this now, having to pull my memories from back then and put words to the wordless, I fall back on the mannerisms of smart people whose works I have read far more recently. All this time, I've been speaking in the style of Samuel Beckett, and in the last paragraph I recalled some Michael Stevens. There simply are no words to adequately convey this, only references and signs, and signs signifying signs. What was that one. Umberto Eco. Of course.

There was a time, at the very dawn of protohistory (i.e. long before this blog or even the whole series of blogs, long before I even had the "protohistory" reference I just made), when I spoke like this too, pulling from contemporary sources, signs signifying nothing but their own technicalities, and fired away my sentences like and as the teenager I was, tasked with describing a past far bigger than any of the words I heard. And the word of the day then was "abuse," unsatisfactory but at least a container of those fires that escaped my brain (far better described through signs like "the eldritch" and "cosmic horror," signifiers of the impossible). The word of the day now is not quite as simple as that, though it's one I recognized even then:

"Isolation."

It's the theme, you see, of all this. Here I sing, you see, the refrain. It's isolation. All the books I've read talk about it, and none of them capture it. How, then, can I capture the unspeakable? How do I speak of where I've been, for eight long adult years, without merely repeating the readily-dismissable forms of the past? It's the refrain, I sing. How do I write about years spent unwriting my own brain?

Well, as you can see, I elected to begin with a conceit: a conversation with a personal god that frames a longer expansion. That expansion treats the allegory, an invention, that is the eternal mansion. Within this expansion, there is a maze, barely mentioned. This composition is set within a maze, in contrast to other works of mine that have been mazes. There's still more to be said, and my pace in setting it all down has been slow, so I can't tell you how long it will be before I'm done. But that's alright. I want this composition to have a slow tempo anyway. Every word must be taken into the mind, considered as an effort. What you're reading, my EAT, my sweet, my last mirror, my lost reader, is the product of the resolution of its own conflict. I am writing now because I am no longer in those mansions. The writing treats a foregone conclusion because it's not really about those mansions. It is about finishing a long thought far bigger, too bigger, than the shadow of a name.

Now I have to kill the You again and try, but only try, to speak of I again. End the refrain, but we will return.

The secret is in the emotions. Isn't it always? The emotions felt in those mansions, devoid of any stimulus that those emotions would otherwise treat as subject and color, in the absence of any natural form, gradually and with conscious practice over the course of courses of times and time, must take on-- must reveal-- the form of emotions themselves. Cut out all distractions, and the form even of the formless may be discerned.

I saw them like clouds, and necessarily like rain and the rivers too. Therefore, I saw emotions, in their purest form, as water. "They come and go like weather..." said one memory of a creation of my head. "Picture yourself by the rushing river of human history as the flotsam of memories drift by..." said another memory of a creation of someone else's. "The Cloud of Look-Like," said one more memory of a creation of my head, "does not exist, yet those who behave as if it does manage to get something right. Therefore, existence is not the only form that our reality accepts..."

Emotions, being of a similar chemistry as that of memories (in fact, what are emotions if not memories stripped, with time, of their content, left only with their form?), move. They enter our focus, color whatever thoughts and sensations are in front of us, then carry on, leaving us to reckon with the consequences of our actions taken under colored impressions. "We are left holding the bag..." says a nameless memory, but I must disagree with that premise, as it supposes that emotions do this on purpose, out of some design of our greater suffering. We are the ones with the designs, we are the ones who create those designs over the course of years, and we leave emotions to hold the bag. Emotions do not have intent. Emotions are like clouds. They come, they paint a sky that we then interpret forms out of which we call "weather," they go none the wiser, neither the more foolish, only the dumber. (remembering what "dumb" actually means)

It is not inherently pleasant to stand within a rainstorm. It is neither inherently depressing to stand under an overcast sky. A sky devoid of clouds, beautiful to look at, leaves my body exposed to the ultraviolent rays of the Light of Knowledge, the Sun we must in our time put down. The rubrics of nature were set before us and did not presume our needs; to change them for one is to change them for all. We must be certain that we know what we are doing. We must understand, and to stand under that Ideal Sun is to exert more effort than life had before prepared me for.

To stay in the eternal mansions, without words, meant watching the slow flow of emotions go, never to know, only to low, never to yes, only to no. Observation yes, composition no. Forget all I know in hopes of one day remembering when I have a better emotional foundation. And that.. may never happen. It may never happen even with the fount of all human knowledge to drink from, it may never happen even with the solidarity of friend and foe engaging me on the daily, it cannot happen when devoid of all drive and alone in rooms I will not describe. I figured that much not long into my stay. And yet, without drive, there is no movement. This situation would resolve itself only painfully slowly, all the while watching my emotions... watching them go.

It was scary in the way that horror stories never know.