Where I Sit

I used to have this old, tattered armchair that I bought from the Salvation Army for twenty five dollars. I placed the chair in the corner of the designated work room of my two-bedroom apartment. My initial thinking was that an upright chair would be conducive to reading and thinking in a position that challenged my generally reclined position...on the couch...behind the television set. After realizing that I simply found it harder to recline in the armchair, my legs falling asleep over the arms of ripped and stained fabric, I decided to throw it away when I moved. One of the legs wobbled anyways, and a chair with a weak leg is worthless anyways.

When I think of my philosophical wanderings, they still seem rarely to travel far beyond that unstable and thoroughly used armchair that held my restful legs while I dozed with a book in my lap. My armchair philosophy is less a position of comfort or stability from which I can hurl my claims and assessments of the world, and more of a comfortably unsteady support where I can sleep uneasily on the marks and stains of those who sat before me.

I imagine that my armchair was constructed by miniature puppet masters, destroyed by poetic interpretations of Satan and Love, reconstructed by Reason, and essentially deconstructed by children who have always already been masturbating in front of a mirror. I love reading about the Kabbalah, but I have little interest in reading its sacred texts because I know for a fact that I couldn't interpret it's meaning. The prophets spoke most in the words that they never allowed themselves to speak. Socrates was a horny son-of-a-bitch with the will, but never the way. Christ was a horny bastard without the will or the way, until until he was finally and enthusiastically adopted by germans, where he learned quickly that Father knows best, even if it means sitting cross legged in the school cafeteria. He knows that harboring enmity for one's neighbor's is the sure fire way to building empires in the names of temples destroyed by those same neighbors.

Plato knew how to capture an audience. Aristotle reminds me of a compliment I once received while I was reading about him in a laundry room. The guy said to me,

-Reading Aristotle, huh?...pretty smart.

I shrugged it off with a satisfied acknowledgement.

-I mean Aristotle, he was pretty smart.

I quickly agreed and shook my head with evident regret.

Reading Plato never once made me prideful or regretful. I mean, what is pride anyways? I know it comes before a fall. But, could that fall have been prevented if it was being carried by a charioteer with two flying horses? One of the horses is sick, and the other ideal, these horses buck and sway through history, never resting and always tied to a struggle shared between them?

Betting kicked in the face by a horse is way more fun than speculating upon how many falls man's had, believing all along that Eve is really to blame.

Though, the horse kicked Nietzsche, first in the balls and then in the head; but Nietzsche didn't give a flying fuck.

So fuck flying horses.

Heidegger seemed to agree, and he thought more of the relatively different clouds

through which the charioteer's horses might fly while laughing at man's fallen-ness. They laugh without apology or playfulness so we must laugh-with-playfulness if we are to avoid apologizing all of the time. But when I laugh, I'm signing an event marked in history with a verbal proclamation of its existence. Once that laugh is recorded, according to the linguistic contexts of that area, it becomes governed by a laugh incapable of being heard because it is never silent.

So it seems to me that people can either try to fuck flying horses, laugh at flying horses, or forget about everything besides the low and breaking hum of god's first flying horse.

Looking back, I should have kept that philosopher's chair. So, despite tears and stains, this philosophy in my mind is a workin' progress of recovery. I will undoubtedly make sweeping generalizations of things I know not of. However, one must sweep to clear the clutter, and I get generally excited quite easily. Nonetheless, this blog is my new thinking chair.

Hopefully, future posts will be more coherent.