Alphabet Soup
alt title: A Nietzsche Gone Mad
I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
David Foster Wallace, This is Water
We understand the alphabet once we’ve been able to reference it without question, with certainty, with dogma, under its spell. From the alphabet soup of existence, we arrive. We go full circle when we learn by faith that our enunciation of “Ahh” corresponds to the first letter of our alphabet. The faith is mended by correlative responses but it’s never truly healed. For example, someone screams and it sounds like the first letter of the alphabet but instinctively we know that it means something else. The scream belongs to a different language.
Faith requires us to act without expectation. The dogma of the alphabet is that we should be offended or perplexed when we hear the alphabet in its natural habitat but in a way that cannot be made sense of. The alphabet is a tool to make sense of the alphabet and words fail if they don’t allow us to experience sense. All these words being picked up from the soup, we know how to tie them together. Because from the language we spoke, from the language that bewildered us, we made a math of it. We made an alphabet that mimics the universal alphabet soup. We can make the sound “Ahh” and each language is going to interpret that sound differently, the sound is going to be used differently. What we ourselves do with “Ahh” is turn it into an atom by using it in a system that gives the “Ahh” inherent meaning. The meaning being inherited partly by us in our interpretation when we are able to interpret it in an inherited (mathematical) way. Attached to the math is something underneath that allows for irony.
Language and communication came before the alphabet. The alphabet was perhaps the second mental atomization that allowed us to interact with the world in a mentally unique way (first being the “word”). Rather than just play music by ear and maintain a rhythm, we could write symphonies that re-captured the experience in a new, malleable shape. With letters we stopped just keeping up with what we expected was coming and started inundating what was with what we saw. What we saw could only be shapened or formed by what we inherited. Thus a loop. The alphabet we created spoke to the universal, metaphysical alphabet soup. It spoke to it because in our assumption and creation of words, more complex words came into existence. We can bring words from before and make them better.
We can extrapolate this and also say that chemical atoms didn’t really exist until we wrote them into existence the same way we wrote letters into existence. Democritus didn’t just speculate about atoms, he showed how to think about atoms. In your own mind, you have to re-create events first and then see them as based on various dimensions and planes of existence.
From here we can understand each other. Understand orchestration. Read music, listen to the rhythm, experience the faith-lived movement with heavy, dogmatic letters that structure the rest of reality. Moreover, we can distinguish the potential. We can tell who’s playing and who’s not. We can join the movement or read it from afar. We can contribute to the music, change it. We can become the movement in an effort to not just keep the movement going but to go towards something.
Deontology — duty based action is not determined by what we see. Although we’ve talked about the role sight plays in our want to act, our responsibility is to allow everyone else in the community to act, to allow everyone else to see, to be part of the orchestra, to participate in the want of what comes next and to be a willing contributor; to create the vision of societal contribution, we have to act as to make room for that other. This aspect is troubling. Because our sight tells us something and that something plays a role in how the structure of reality will unfold. This structure is the underlying substance that we all get nutrients from. When we keep nutrients away from others because we’re afraid of what they’ll see, or we don’t want them to see certain things, our sight doesn’t keep the other down. Our actions do, our action restructure reality to keep the other from our sight. But most importantly, it keeps the other from being able to act as an accompany to our sight. The trouble being that as soon as we keep the secret from the other, the other has a right to see to our destruction.
Know Thyself — Can dogma expose us to ourselves or hide us? Yes. Power within dogma defines the self. People are idiots but even idiots know what makes sense. Even if it’s from their own unique creation. When vast numbers of people get together, they have to operate via a creation they understand and make sense of to the point that there’s harmony. Or at least harmony where it matters.
Moments — Even a moment is not an atom. How long does a moment last? is a circular question. A moment is whole. It’s only incomplete in relative terms. The moment ceases being whole once its existence is seen as relative or dependent on something else. The ultimate example of a moment is our life. The moment of our life is still happening if we’re aware of our relationship with these words. This relationship we’re referencing is happening right now and is whole. Right? Everything you’re aware of is holistically connected to even the furthest dust particle at the edge of our galaxy. If we tie together the furthest dust particle with our own physical cognition, which is summarized together with our historical experiences, we have a moment. Our moment is not incomplete but it doesn’t end. It just keeps going. Each moment the moment grows.
If we say something like, “two moments ago led up to this moment,” we’re saying that there were two holistic moments in particular that led up to a unique moment of the two moments coming together. But this is just a way of speaking and the analysis itself is probably subjective and subject to interpretation. What without a doubt happens is that we experience a further moment from the previous moments. What makes this moment distinct from previous ones is trivial, nihilistic. But we make the moment non-trivial. We experience the moment in relation. And this experience makes a moment atomic, made up of “smaller” moments.
I’m not convinced the person you think I am exists. Maybe because I don’t know who you are. Maybe because I don’t know who I am. More than an atom corresponding to an orderly world. Who are you?
