Geometry of the soul: Force and Limit in Aesop's fables

15 Aug, 2022

Wolf and lamb
The relationship between the wolf and his food is pinned down, fixed, by the diet of the wolf and the material characteristics of the scene: The wolf crouches in the field, hungry, where stands only a single lamb. Any lightheartedness in the fable emerges from its dialogue’s manifestly useless character, that it would be just as silly for two right triangles, adjacent on one leg, to justify to each other and agree that they combined to form an isosceles. The lamb is not denying his place and possibility as wolf’s food, but rather, his plea is the precise form for the words of food. If the slain and then eaten—foods—were to speak again (in a metaphysically naive sense, without first having been ‘revived’) they would only express the immanence of their scenario as eaten. It is not to escape being eaten that the lamb speaks here, but insofar as the lamb speaks, as food, he states the facts. Whereas the wolf has tricks and guile, the lamb simply answers: Only the wolf is deceived. To “justify [the] right[s] to eat him” in clear view and hold of hunger, the wolf denies himself, crushingly—by a method which dominates entirely his spirit and obligations as a spirit at all—contact with the scenario, the limits involved.

The kingdom of lion
Here, the first moment and setting tip us off to the hare’s feeling at the last: The king lion is as just and gentle as a king could be. There are two possible analyses here, both of which should have us running for our lives. First, that a lion is not gentle and so we should worry. Second, that a king cannot be gentle: Read: ‘gentle as a king could be.’ We should now be twice as wary; the vicious and proud lion has taken the role of king which in no ways can accommodate even the slightest demonstration of change in him, like a beggar or glutton taking up work as an assistant chef, eating raw ingredients as they pass from one stage of cooking to the next. Not one characteristic extenuating or tempting another, but rather, their perfect inescapable alignment, such that the lion has no recourse for reflection. That is, if the lion became a nurse, he could, as he felt a pang of fury and hunger, discover an immanent incompatibility between this hunger and the proscribed orientation towards his patients, as a nurse. As a king, the lion has no such odd angle, strange mirror, or skewed boundary against which to measure himself. His only two measuring-sticks are laid one on top of another, face to face, degenerately and perfectly. The hare doesn’t run for his life out of a sense that the lion is concocting a trick, that his document is false or ineffectual, but rather out of precisely the fear that this document will be effected, that the lion will enact what he believes is “perfect peace and amity” which he can only but believe it is, the lion with no point of reference other than the focal point, the lion whose two lines of sight have converged, leaving no possibility for drafting a plane. How can he draft an entire treatise?

Dog and shadow
It is no coincidence that here the dog sees his double, and the double’s catch, in a swiftly moving river. This river which casts the stable, material dog in one of light has as its substance only rushing water, forward-vanishment. That is, we see our own image in the rushing-away characteristic of images. (Or, the rushing-forward of the substance and body of the image, whatever it may be that the image is projected on, while the projection itself hangs in front of our eyes; in fact this is the only way in which we see ourselves, and when we attack ourselves it is this image we attempt to attack through its receding substance.) It is also no coincidence that the shadow dog’s catch appears “double [the dog’s] own in size:” He sees in his image both the image’s catch which is a mimic of his own and also his own catch—in our image we see not only the reflection of our desires, which is once over painful, but again we see in our image our desires, which double the pain. A double: what mimics the original as well as has contained within it a copy of it. A double in a moving river: The desires of the original are free of those solid geometric limits: Only in our vanishing portraits are read the capabilities of flight, escape, vanishing. For us, the originals, these are impossible capabilities. Trivially impossible. The substance of our scenario, the scenario which also includes the river—the possibility of this reflection at all—contains and restricts this freedom. That is, the double truly does hold our desire so near, as well as simply mimicking and keeping it from us. We all have what we want: the image of what we want. Our lives already contain those evanescent regions which betray our whole lives. When we “leap to grab” beyond (or what we believe to be beyond) our circumstance, both our piece of flesh and the piece of flesh sustained in shimmering, always-dying at a distance, are violently swept away.

Mole and mother
We find in the expression of the mole the most perfect representation of our scenario. We are not only ignorant of the limits of our circumstance, but, upon being presented with those bodies or movements or “grains of frankincense” from beyond it, mistake even their quantity and kind. That is, as we approach one interior edge of our life, we see it stretch infinitely before us—it having expanded in length as we approached—ignorant of one, its finitude, and two, the other edges: how this one depends on others—what angles the various limits of our life make. Then, when we truly come to an insurmountable wall, we “are not only blind,” but in abandoning an intuition for causality and the interconnectedness of our labyrinth, we “have lost [our] sense of smell.”

Fawn and mother
The fawn’s mother’s reply to his curiosity will be met with the same general confusion as the remark of anyone who recognizes their circumstance, that is, their obstinance will be taken as cowardice, or depending on its nature, insecurity, recklessness, a death wish. The mother here recognizes the simple danger the dog represents for her, the clear and well-defined limit of her speed and defenses which no amount of bracing will topple (meaning either the fawn’s original assertions were wrong, or, if they were right materially, failed to encapsulate the metaphysical barrier presented by “the hounds.” Most likely the fawn is only in such a position to posit his mother’s superiority—it is he himself who, in this privileged vantage point, represents the liability and limit for his mother with respect to the dogs). If one recognizes the geometric necessity of a certain fate, like a love, their determination towards this end, or rather, their following its least-resistant path, in its unworldly clarity, will be perceived from without as perfectly nonsensical. Some know with exactitude, like the mother, not only the circumscribed limits to their endeavors but also the most open and fruitful areas to which their efforts can be being directed. It is those efforts, aligned with circumstance, which can be applied perfectly, almost with superhuman character: It is for this reason that at “the bark of a single dog” the mother can be at once “ready to faint, and fly away as fast as [she] can.”

Oxen and axle-trees
The oxen and the axle-trees are both under the same burden since they are rigidly joined by the wagon and yet the oxen do not cry out: It is the bearers of burden at the edge of this burden who recognize their scenario. The oxen lead the wagon, they stare directly out beyond it, and have no mechanism of this burden before them to blind them; the axle-trees, on the other hand, are afflicted deep within the mechanisms of the wagon, coupled to the wheels, the carriage, the steering column: In this way, the axle-trees are captured and enamored by these devices which they experience as subjecting them to force, when in reality, it is the chains of mechanical coupling and determinism which transmit the load from the distant edge of their burden—the absolute ends of the wagon, our lives—to them though these things. This is why they cry out, because to them the mechanisms of force are comparable, in size, in character, and in mode of being, to themselves, and therefore seem surmountable or extinguishable or otherwise avoidable; it would be as if the believed by a simple tweak to the chassis of the wagon that the entire weight of the wagon would be lessened. In reality, they are affected by the unavoidable weight that the entire entourage is tasked with shipping from one place to another. The oxen, however, are under no such obfuscating bodies. If we could simply understand what it is that is so viciously burdensome, out at the edges of this world, that communicates its weight towards us through all the variegated structures and internal contradictions of our lives, if we could perceive this for a split moment we would be as silent as the oxen, and just as noble.

Miser
We replace our heart with the first object of our desire, and then, as is the nature of material things, this object swiftly replaces itself with a terribly imperfect image, albeit one of the original’s same texture, smell, and weight. We, however, go on as if nothing has occurred, proceeding as if we don’t notice, or perhaps we don’t—this object is so central, the place we’ve chosen for it so focal, that neither the switch nor the replica’s imperfection can exert a noticeable torque on the rest of our souls. It is the same principle as a wrecking ball balanced on the fulcrum of a seesaw: By virtue of its location in the center, the wrecking ball just sits there invisibly.

Laborer and snake
We have to ask ourselves continually “who are we opposed to, face to face, that we could have such a dialogue as the laborer and the snake?” “Whenever I see you I shall remember the loss of my tail, and whenever you see me you will be thinking of the death of your son.” It is a remark fitting between ourselves and the object of our love: Each party is in constant remembrance of whatever part of the body it has given up, which naive self or interval of time—in the purest most fated love (that which resembles our love of the divine) we have given up everything, ourself, our sense of full determination, and love swallows these up through the mechanism of fate. But indeed the world has given up its equal: It can no longer function without our love. These are both grave injuries, and it is true that we can seldom stand or accept them—our love is like the peace offering of bread and salt from the cottager which our memory forces us to reject. Our great sorrow is that this rejection comes from such a tempered vice as memory: If we could see the process of sacrifice from above, the trajectory of our walk into love’s deep dark forest, atemporally, that is, notice fully its sacrificial character, then truly we would be able to accept such a peace offering and also the character that joins the offering to the totality of its preparation.

Wolf in sheep’s clothing
Integral to the punishment of the wolf is that he was killed instantly—without time to remove his cloak, without time even to die as a wolf. Integral to the punishment of the wolf is that his death was brought, through the material-temporal chain of the sheep’s clothing, into a continuous movement connecting back to the instant the wolf fashioned the clothing. Originally he donned, soaked in the blood of the recently skinned prey, not just death, but it was his own death. Integral to the punishment of the wolf is that he, who is not innocent, died the death of an innocent sheep; his death takes on the mere appearance of innocence, because it was a wolf and not a sheep who was slain. Moreover, if the wolf had been able to die uncostumed he would also have died an innocent death, since the wolf has no choice other than to accept his nature as a predator and eat. We cannot fault him for eating. However, because he died in such an unbalanced, awkward half-pose, able to rightly take neither the innocence of sheep nor wolf, he died instantly because he must. He died instantly because he stole a twofold innocence and the innocent die outright (or else cease to be called by this name: They die first an inner death in which the cleaver is replaced with a dagger and the butchering block is replaced with an altar table).

Frogs asking for a king
Our central fable regarding force and limit. What has already been made clear about these frogs is that they, like us, desire force to guide them and rule them. Nothing is more comforting than a sense of determinism activated and mediated by forces. The frogs want not simply a single forceful entity—a focal point of force, a king—but rather to have their lake stirred by a continually active principle, a ‘personal determinism.’ Something to cause, by some sort of external injection of energy at some finite set of discrete points, the mixing of the entire lake. As for us, our desire and conceptualization of a ‘personal’ determinism relies on: one, the character of causation coming from ‘elsewhere,’ whatever region we decide beforehand to isolate and analyze apart from us (meaning apart from some finite set of material and its coordinating circumstances). We want to be able to trace any causal chain—coordinated by the question “what material factors brought this about?”—far enough so as to bully the question outside the realm of this analysis, that is, outside this set. Then we can happily claim that our analysis is totally absent of possibilities for “why,” which we usually consider to be holes. Two, the finite character or countability of these ‘causes.’ We want to be able to enumerate the sources of energy, the batteries which set our convenient conceptual calculator in action—even if the number of batteries is only one—in order to trace the infinite variety of causal ‘links’ in such a system, through a backwards propagation of “why,” to a smaller, finite set of such links which lie just outside the realm of our interest. In terms of modern scientific positivism, this one point is the initial conditions of the world (at the moment of the big bang, if necessary and willing) or the material system in question. Of course, this kind of determinism is not what the frogs receive when they ask for it. They are confronted with a splash and… a log: the principle of non-causality, even stasis. The frogs receive this log without understanding the fulfillment, in this very log, of a wish far surpassing in bearing and capability their own. The log indeed rules with perfect necessity, insofar as the flowing of the water is immediately contingent on the shape, radius, and buoyancy of the floating log. By virtue of being placed in the lake, King Log is an entry in the deterministic matrix of all things inside the lake, and thereby his scepter and ring do indeed determine and guide the frogs, but in an intrinsic way. Not out of an external injection but from an internal set of limits it imposes on the surface of the water. Not out of a finite set of activity-wellsprings, but out of (if need be to conceptualize it as such, albeit with a lack of the generality involved) an infinite set of possible relationships, tangencies, parallelisms and boundary conditions, coincidences and non-contradictions. Specifically, the water must flow parallel to the side of the log near the log, water cannot flow normal to the region occupied by the log, water must not occupy the same space as the log, and so on. These principles just as well govern the flow around each frog, and so by granting them such a king their god desired to show them the possibility of an internal, non-escaping kind of determinism—history. The frogs, like we do, misunderstand completely, and assume their god has made a mockery of their wishes. Then, in rejecting King Log and desiring again a clear and active hand in their destinies, the frogs are sent King Heron who swiftly eats them. King Heron is the logical conclusion of a guiding hand, that is, the hand guiding you towards its mouth. In our case, the method of materialistic analysis sketched above swallows everything we have, leaving us with not even itself in that its conclusions and fruits it ejects from our system of concern, our sphere of science—any science we do, science in its weakest and most encompassing sense. It can also be the case that the heron is not simply a conceptualization of force in the abstract, but—and in the ordinary sense of this fable, the political sense, this is the case—a particular, actual, force that is granted us, and, like all who come into contact with force do, we perish.

Boys and frogs
We who are so blind regarding the limits we exert and inscribe on others are very much like these boys. Yet, today, as long as our clothes are sewn by child-workers and slave laborers (conceding that their entire circumstances are not contingent on our wearing said clothes, but rather on all of us wearing said clothes, or, equivalently, the entire global beast of interlocked economic limits) and as long as we are at least on the ‘objective’ level aware of this fact, we are more like some simultaneous combination of the boys and the frogs. We cry out among ourselves and pelt ourselves with rocks. We make our own death into sport, by method of separating this death out and away to the far side of our subjectivity, (and, in ‘fully-modern’ countries, to the far side of the planet,) and inviting its unbearable tension to radiate towards us in what becomes dynamic (or economic) activity to seize upon, sexual intrigue, ideological play, etc. It is that which removes our own death, the death of our neighbors and fellows, that this playing feasts on. (cf. The king Yajnavalkya’s attitude towards meat-eating in the Satapatha-brahmana: “Hence, were one to eat [the flesh] of an ox or a cow, there would be, as it were, an eating of everything, or, as it were, a going on to the end [or, to destruction.] […] Nevertheless Yajnavalkya said, ‘I, for one, eat it, provided that it is tender.’” This final statement does not have to be read disjunctively in any way: It is in the fullest sense compatible with how we live today. Even with a modern ‘global’ or ‘political’ consideration of suffering, we still cannot help but eat the tender meat. If anything, it makes the meat more appetizing. What we are lacking is the understanding of the shared surface on which live both the destruction of everything and our palate…)

Shepherd’s boy and wolf
Two contrapunctal sequences: the boy’s cries and the wolf’s appearances in the flock. The boy’s call is repeated because it is not met; it is left unaccompanied and so echoes. When the melody of the wolf’s appearance enters, it at once takes an interlocking role (via the normal differentiating mechanisms of counterpoint, that is, the wolf lies absent when the boy called the first four times, then present, and so stages a unique structure with respect to the boy’s calling) and also a limiting role. That is, the wolf’s appearance is singular and the boy’s calling approaches this limiting point. Indeed, each time he calls out, the wolf is closer to making his appearance in the flock—whether or not the boy knows this. There is a sequence here, however, which prevents his approach from being uniform or purely monotonic: the appearances of the neighbors; because they come at first (as they should for a boy who calls out a grave danger), and slowly, iteration by iteration, grow tired, disbelieving, and cease, their absence as the wolf’s presence waxes leads the entire scenario away from its harmonic prototype: all three notes played simultaneously—boy calling, wolf eating, neighbors rushing. So is revealed the source of the punishment. As songbirds sing with a continual and crescendoing wish to sing as one with the chorus, both the boy and the wolf harbor and grow their song in intensity, in earnestness and vigor. The neighbors, however, are the note which grows more and more distant, despondent, and imperfect. It is therefore they who have blood on their hands, as much blood as we can punish the boy for lying—it is the responsibility of all people to come fully to the others, in full intensity and presence, ready to assure and to bear. It is a grave mistake to assume that the neighbors are justified in ignoring the boy’s call after the earlier failed iterations. What are they defending in this rejection if not simply their own pride? Their own sense of intelligence: “Ah, I will not be fooled again….” In reality, it is their great duty to be fooled, to be fooled until they do save the boy from the wolf, and only by continual and repetitious answering, from himself and his foolishness. Who do we save with our self-serving temporality of memory? Memory which recalls “I was embarrassed before my peers,” then, “the stupid boy,” then, only, almost as an afterthought, “I had once heard that boy calling…” Even if the wolf should never come, the neighbors should come to this boy each time he calls, forever, if need be. Not simply because memory distorts towards the sole view of the self, but because a malformed combination of circumspection and introspection cuts the actual, breathing, limits of circumstance from their contract with ‘the past,’ if only by conceptualizing the effects of events as distinct from these limits. Insofar as each call of the boy is assimilated as his most recent, they serve to show that—like how omens and foreshadowing impress upon the mind the gravity and reality and truth of something when it comes—“this most recent call, is too, a call;” the neighbors are responsible to come to his aid. Not that the boy deserves their coming at all, but that at each injunction, the neighbors face the deadly toxin and temptation of silence. For the neighbors to be at the fool’s end of an empty call is no great loss to reality—they have simply come to a certain scenario and experience it as the fool. However, as soon as they refuse the call they sever themselves from understanding, from contact with the presence of the boy and the possibility of a wolf in the flock. Their refusal constitutes a coalescence and conference of forces, an active decision to transform the given questions and propositions of their scenario by sheer psychic fact: “Ah, there is actually no wolf. The boy must simply be lying as he was before…” Whether or not the boy has indeed lied, a writing-off of circumstance, or what is, can only mean its replacement with images of liars, social standings, and even moralities—“this boy should be punished for his lies…” As the neighbors’ voices recede further into the safety of the village, vanishing off into the most afflicted and virtuosic of solos, these neighbors believe that they are walking up the bleachers up into the chorus.

Father and two daughters
It may be that we can only ever express our sense of a contradiction with respect to one of its contradicting principles and never both. Further, it is always the second principle—because we are spatiotemporal, shaped, extended—which we observe as the ‘rest of’ the contradiction which completes a whole. Only when the father comes to his second daughter and she gives him a wish opposite to the first daughters’ does he lament, and then, crucially, lament to her. As ‘mystical’ as we may attempt to think, we cannot hold both propositions of a contradiction in our attention as true, as immanently true. We instead take one first and, noticing that the second is incompatible with the first’s consequences, declare that a consideration of both simultaneously is contradictory: just as the father poses his lamentation symmetrically (“which of the two am I to join…”) while in fact addressing the second daughter. If we are able to suppose both, even just for a moment, then, by definition there already is no contradiction to be resolved—at least in the sphere of reason. Of course, this impossibility is then dissipated into the sphere of extension, where it imposes on us directly and just as brutally, regardless of how we consider it. But we are incapable of it and so for us, reason will live alongside and subservient to extension.

Crab and mother
The most naive representation of this fable is that we are in the place of the baby crab and out heart is the crab’s mother—the heart being the source of all moral reproof. We are like the baby crab and say each time our heart enjoins us to the straight path: “Quite true, dear Mother, and if you will show me the straight way, I will promise to walk in it.” Our heart, however, is always unable to demonstrate to us how to walk it. Critically, the heart does indeed know the straight path, and does indeed draw us (or seek to draw us) towards it. It is no banality or simple cutesy that the definitions of this path are taken in the fable to be the one-sided walk of the crab and its opposite—for what else defines the crookedness of how we go about our everydayness than the exact same one-sidedness of the crab? Our hesitant and temporal walk which in attempting to satisfy all—possibly contradicting—principles with our legs set towards one (the principle which for whatever reason we have taken up first), fails at carrying out the balanced and rightful consequences and motions of even that one principle. In this way our heart knows that truly we are best served by walking the path (of ‘consequence’ or ‘causality,’ as we often like) with a fuller, more intentional orientation towards these particular rules of change we have before us to follow. In this way it is our heart, which is also the source of our unwillingness to bring to full bearing its own method, which denies us an example of such a full orientation; because it was the heart which sought to teach itself since the very beginning, it is the heart which is in perpetual struggle to reorient itself. It is like as if there were only one crab in the fable, and he knew full well to right himself, but as it were he has been upturned and his path is the one sinking down to the seafloor, through only water and directed only by gravity. Without fins, until this crab hits the seafloor, he is unable to right or even turn himself. We who are very much like this sinking crab, can, however, take solace at least in knowing that we are in a sense heeding our heart’s plan: We are traveling straight down, no matter how askew we may be facing. Despite our inattention, our imperfect knowledge, and our reaching for the tip of each principle which satisfies or promises to satisfy us, we are indeed following through to its very core, constantly, the principle of gravity and gravity’s trajectory laid out for us, since the beginning.

Heifer and ox
Unfortunately for us, the image of work is sacrifice, and the image of sacrifice is work: This is why the heifer and the ox find in each other such perfect foils and abominations; this is why we cherish the fruits of our work as if they were those of offering, and the fruits of our petitions—gifts from friends and the divine—as if they were the most natural consequences of our work. It is a terrible sorrow by which we exchange the two. Only in the still, silent mechanism of asking, asking by the innermost supplication of the heart, can what is good be approached—any other method is in the kingdom of force, or, more precisely, this kingdom is a no-man’s land in which those who enter are blind to the limits of things and each other. It is a pit one descends to as soon as what is good and taking what is good are conflated. The active principle of work can only be understood as having access to what is real insofar as this reality is limited by what restricts this work. Therefore it cannot near the perfect stillness of the sacrificial altar, upon which only and decisively one’s own heart is to be offered. Just as sorrowful as this confusion by which we mistake the gifts of prayer for the fruit of our work, which always reifies the concept of force (and the word ‘reify’ being the source of this error at all in the sphere of language), is the confusion by which we mistake the fruits of our work and call them the answers to prayer: In this latter case we substitute the introspection and self-awareness necessary to ask, to truly ask, (not only in prayer, but to formulate a question at all, a true question, meaningful and authentic to life, a great understanding of one’s actual decisions—all such questions pierce directly through our so-called ‘consciousness’ and ‘unconsciousness’—as well as the circumstances our scenario both is contingent on and predicates) for the blind searching of pure activity, which grapples and tumbles but cannot ever take.

Fir-tree and bramble
Our riches are the reason and source of our destruction. More generally, this supposition holds without pride and in fact without riches: Our circumstances are our futures as well, or, circumstances evolve in time simply according to the principle of non-contradiction. Like the fir-tree, our work is empty of all fruit save destruction—destruction of the heart and of the hearts of others, self-destruction, which, without expecting of it, is good. However, conceptualized as a wellspring, its water is the most bitter. It is not because the fir-tree boasts that he will be destroyed, but rather he will be destroyed and his work ‘leads him there’ or appears to do so. In fact, the fir-tree would be right to boast, for he is indeed useful for building “roofs and houses” and these uses are good. But that his work is realized as the unique means to these ends is also that the ends must be realized in light of work’s absolute end and limit-point. (cf. Verse 2:47 of the Gita: “Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work.” This maxim is infinite and its wisdom can never be exhausted. The relationship between work and its fruit is like that between limit and force—both force and fruit are the illusory outgrowths of actual motion and yet claim exclusive rights to the goods derived thereof.) It is not good that the fir-tree is used for roofs and houses—it is good when the fir-tree is used for roofs and houses. And we are destroyed, “hewn [us] down,” either way.

Mouse, frog, and hawk
Simple destruction of a line by bringing the two points of its construction from some finite difference together to nothing. Same principle governing the destruction of friendships, or all modes of joining-together besides mystical communion. Note that, in the fable, the asymmetry of this ‘deconstruction’ is such that the frog brings the mouse into his domain, which instantly kills him, and then a third point is able to do the same with the frog. That is, this total deconstruction follows the supposition of one point (the mouse) as derivable from, or dependent on, the other, when in fact it takes two co-independent points to construct a true line. Note also that the destruction is not complete simply through the assimilation of one domain by another—a line through a point can still exist, although in an under-defined way—it isn’t until the hawk comes, and is able to approach this ill-defined line and extract the sole remaining point from its last domain, is the destruction of the original axis complete. What remains of this axis until the hawk arrives is only memory, dead and still strapped to the frog’s back, the instability of a one-principle. Only in a complete totality is a one-principle stable. Otherwise, always follows the zero. Self-reliance of two. Two minus one is zero.

Stag in the ox-stall
The stag in the fable is subjected to a perfect, unerring judgment, an exact inspection with “as it were, a hundred eyes,” the same economic operation—the weighing of good and bad in us—which we are each passed through, not because we hide from it, but because we are hidden. Likewise, the stag is not subjected to the inspection in such an integral way—literally his “life is still in peril” before it—because he has hidden from the master, in fact, he is hidden from the master and the master does search his hiding spot, but the fact is that the stag has hidden from the hounds; the master seeks not the stag but rather simply “examined everything in turn.” It is pure circumstance which brings the two operations into coordination. That is, that the stag is in the ox-stall. Similarly, no one ‘hides’ from the moral principles they take as universal metrics, rather, they run from doing good because almost always it is painful to do good. Or, more typically, we run from pain and so end up running as well from doing good. Moreover, our metrics of doing good and doing bad do not seek us out where we hide, nor do they ‘find’ us at the end of a long interval of being unchecked. In this sense the idea of any sort of ‘judgment day,’ either in time or after time, is flawed existentially, because with such a definition there would be introduced a lag between our actions and their moral results—let alone their punishments and rewards—and left in between nothing but empty, meaningless, time. Rather, the two need be co-determined, intrinsic to one another’s being. Like how a circle’s circumference or area is not superimposed or derived ‘after’ one draws this circle, but rather one draws a circle with some circumference or area. So are our actions and their irrevocable judgments under the divine. It is by the stag’s location among the oxen that he is subjected to the watchful eye of their master, and this master seeks originally no harm for the stag—he seeks no stag. It is like we are hiding among others, and whoever watches over them and cares for them comes up against us in turn, each of us as the odd man out and also the sole recipient of differentiation along whose axes our doing good is contrasted. The stag among oxen is not. We among others do good or do bad by them. These are purely spatial and homogeneous criteria in which live the loving differentiation of the divine, and by whose differentiation is “spied the tips of [our] antlers […] peeping out of the straw,” and by whose differentiation we “should be seized and killed.”

Wild ass and lion
The replacement of all ‘entities,’ once cordoned off as such, with forces—one major operation of Newtonian physics—converts a geometrical plane to a vector field. The vector field, however, suffers a crucial deficit as a representation of our world, since all vectors are very naturally defined by a single point: their endpoint (since the tail or starting-point can always be, or assumed to be, translated to the origin of the field’s coordinates). The vector field is the hidden structure which the conceptualization of subjective force gives rise to. More simply, modern scientific positivism and its corresponding ontologies like to conceive of our world as a flowing force-field, everywhere de-centered, everywhere contingent, but in fact each of these force vectors in such a flow can take on, and do take on, the character of emerging from the origin, or a subject, and in doing so, each vector translated to the origin takes up a representability by a single point. That is, such an everywhere contingent, nowhere linear or genealogical structure, the idea of which is to eliminate the subject and its relationships to force, is perfectly mapped to, and more elegantly expressed as, a space in which all flow can be tracked relative to an ideal subject. Indeed, all it takes is for one to drop a mustard seed or a pollen grain into such a flowing field to see how the entire field is definable now with respect to the moving seed—in fact, if such an invisible flow is for example, the flow of water, we would actually require such a test-grain to construct the water’s representation as a vector field in the first place. Hence the affirmations and rationalizations of the fable’s lion, who tries, once suitably centered at the sunburst of outwards rays, to affirm the righteousness of such a position. The first affirmation regards the centering of his subjectivity, the claim that it was all good and well to observe, track, and relativize the entire field (here, the forest,) with respect to a point. “I will take the first share because I am king.” Meaning, he has taken a subjective role regarding or with respect to the forest. The second is the appeal to the illusorily two-dimensional character of the force-vector, the affirmation of a necessary specification of both its head and its tail. Or, that the lion’s use of force is still conditioned and negatively defined by the two partners of the chase, lion and wild ass. In fact, the lion has obviously already taken a privileged orientation by which his force only requires one coordinate: its target, the wild ass. Still the illusion is sturdy enough for the lion almost to fool himself; that the sole targeting motion can still be leveled, the “you” with a paw on the ass’s neck can still be spoken in the sentence “as a partner with you in the chase.” (This affirmation is critically not “because I am king and you are my subject,” because it is solely concerned with the taking up of a purported objectivity and not its relationality. This relationship, in being projected onto the origin, loses its significating power completely: Although the lion is king, when he references the wild ass it is as a “partner in the chase” and not as a “loyal subject,” almost as if the ass could be anything at all, another king if he’d like; truly, for the lion, the ass might as well be a second king, since the terms of their relationship bear no weight at all: They are purely concerned with establishing that the ass is there, as if the lion simply needed reassurance of this fact alone that there is both a source and destruction of the force in question and that they are both necessary constituents in its definition.) The third appeal of the lion is both the plainest and most insidious. It is the simple appeal to the vigor of force, the fact that something appears to be moving, active, flowing. Indeed something is, but this appeal implicitly seeks to connect this movement to the ontological principle of the forest. It is insidious because it is the closest to the truth, that it makes use of such a slight re-emphasis, and that it on first pass it seems completely commensurate with a pleasing kind of universalistic egalitarianism. And yet, just as the prioritization of force over the circumstances which allow and limit it make insurmountable the conceptual ghost of a brute directionality, a flow without referent, the axiomatization of such a flow tucks away in a sleight of hand not only its coordinating principles—where, to what, from whence, around which—but also and more underhandedly, the need for a test-point to ‘feel’ the flow at a given location: an object. Without which one does not have a force at all but rather only an empty breath, what, originally masquerading as materialism, might as well be pure spirit. It is the necessity of a test-point, a bit of resistance to make real the force, that dissolves this whole conceptualization and drains it out through the empty point of subjectivity. It is therefore fitting that the last appeal of the lion, the appeal of the vicious “great evil” which should “set off [the wild ass] as fast as [he] can,” is the appeal which, if withstanded, would essentially reveal a gaping hole in this schema decided on by the lion. Limit too has a fundamental reliance on the point; the point is the building block of geometry and thereby of necessary relations. However, limit makes no claim as to the uniqueness of one point or another like the vector field does. Rather, it joins points together by the infinity, the line, in such a way that they are irreducible to the one subject or point again, e.g., the infinite line’s ignorance of any observation point, once two points are given and established such that the translation of either would mean a different line, a completely unrelated limit. Or, more precisely, a new limit which is related to the first by exactly that translation—but in no way unchanged.

Eagle and arrow
In the simple sense, the eagle must be stationary, “waiting for the movements of a hare,” in order that he be shot through so cleanly, hit with such an “accurate aim.” There is a second sense of stillness, however, that our eagle takes on—a stillness in such a space that he is able to be pierced by an arrow fashioned from his “own wings,” a stillness which clearly transcends the first in purity. Once over, stillness in space and time; twice over, stillness of the heart. Stillness such that our own feathers “enter [our] heart,” and even in a single “one look of the arrow” we can see that it is we who have “wounded [ourselves] mortally.”

One-eyed doe
We are very much like the doe who, having only one eye, shores himself up against the cliff’s edge. We are like the doe who believes that the sea is inert, that no eye is needed to watch over it because it does not need to be watched over. This kind of sea does not change, and in its stillness, cannot affect her. Our damaged eye, in this sense, is turned exactly and always towards the divine; it is also the defunct eye of the heart. Our one good eye we have always turned towards what we vigilantly call the ‘material world,’ or ‘Nature.’ Material determinism has robbed all of us, including the most devout religionists, of Belief’s access to truth: All of our beliefs are oriented towards their ‘verifiability,’ and cast into the furnaces of deductive reasoning without regard to whether or not the extreme heats have any capability to refine the particular ore. See the vast array of comically dubious literature attempting to reconcile scriptural claims with (some image of) the results of scientific history—the myriad of variations on the theme “Genesis and the Big Bang”—always the most horrific chimeras of incomplete archaeological and cosmological half-truths, the most castrating materialistic abstraction of what were penetrating religious insights. Our damaged eye that we’ve turned towards the divine is moreover shut, because out of the barren ocean of spiritual stasis we expect absolutely nothing: either a non-interacting, purely psychological or panpsychic principle, a comforting appendage to pure material reductionism, or even worse, a hobbled deity who, with his creaking cane, steps only where his ‘natural laws’ allow him to step (which, on second glance, is precisely nowhere). Then, when to our great surprise and sorrow we are pierced with a mortal blow of spiritual kind, when we are shot through with the arrow of existential longing, we are left lamenting the “seashore, to which [we] had come for safety.” The sea, even deeper and more dark than the most unresolvable paradox we are capable of imagining, we have set up and leaned our heart against as if it were the most stable of crutches; when it erupts out from behind us, under us, and through us, why do we turn around in mystified awe of the waves of the deep? In fact it is no coincidence that we have our back up against out hearts whenever scientific positivism claims we can take such a universal and subjective stance with respect to the material—in trying to secure the highest and furthest vantage point over all the land, is it any surprise we have ended up, through the method of steepest ascent, at the precipice of a cliff?

Wolf and housedog
Unprincipled reason is the master who keeps us both well-fed and chained, “compelled [to] drag that heavy log about wherever [we] went.” That we have so ‘domesticated’ ourselves through the fetishization of reason is the single principle which commands these two effects. As soon as we make near contact with anything strange or otherwise unfamiliar, our collar of reason extends out already before us, before we have any time to really eat, and there lies the entire mechanism of reason’s weight and the entire weight of reason’s mechanisms. Reason immediately sets to work placing this contact, this somehow-new reality, amid an immense network of already assimilated realities—it integrates it so well that the mouthful we once had before us no longer fits in our mouth, and we are unable to swallow it let alone digest it. Often this assimilation by reason doesn’t even reach completion before we lose our appetite; reason merely has to roll out its tapestry of torture and extraction instruments, it merely needs to extend before us like a sunbathing snake, let us see what with perfect exactitude and precision it plans to do. This is enough for us to push away the plate. (This is also the case with writing, which loses its joyous reality when the entire chain of reasoning seems clear before pen touches paper—who would subject themselves to a torture in which they only need transcribe or take dictation from what thought has already prescribed for them? It is better to make sure reason remains folded in itself until the perfect moment, like how a snapping turtle hunts—blindingly quick but tethered in at the end of a short, extensible, neck.) Our compulsion to keep chained to our person the total apparatus of reason at all times is the banalizing appendage of liberalism (in the weak sense of the word), it is the promise in which each idea can find its proper and useful place, however trivial, however reclusive. It is the wooden collar which can’t help but induce a kind of desperation in its wearer: Like how “the weight of this chain is enough to spoil the appetite,” the weight of an already-manifest world, a world in which each question has already found its answer, is enough, too, to spoil our appetite. Reason is already self-complete and self-consistent and so its weight is in perfect proportion to its perfection: Not only does it have a perfect place for each new thing, it always already has this place in waiting. Nothing expands it—as much as science may claim this about itself—and nothing can be understood as sating reason’s appetite. Reason only desires to desire to eat. The place of a thing in reason already exists in the measureability of this thing, its virtue of already being understandable, perceptible, thinkable. This is both its sustenance but also its immutability, its sturdiness but also its indomitable inertia; because it is an unprincipled reason which has no satiation at all, it is us who it keeps perfectly well-fed.

Old hound
A form of existentialism which in its simplest version replaces ‘the thought that counts’ with the more apt but still deficient ‘the attempt that counts.’ Ideally we would like to escape from the disjointedness of both of these, as well as the old hound’s equivalently temporal (and thereby unsatisfactory) “I rather deserve to be praised for what I have been, than to be blamed for what I am.” Further, it is not simply a matter of a naive compactification of time whereby we say “ah, but part of the old hound now is what he had been, it is inside of him and part of him…” and it is also not the praising of the attempt (to catch the boar in chase) in its failure, (with, even, an indifference to future successes or failures,) but an authentic reckoning of the “decay of our teeth.” Or, our most authentic inner circumstance: incompatibility of time and time-in-ourselves, of change as such and our change, how we chase the boar and how the boar is chased—the fundamental link between these two is the pair of dissolving jaws, rotted not because they had once been hard, but rotted out of the mouth. Rotted from having continually been in—permanently and so necessarily making its escape by dissolution—the mouth. Rotting is the change of self necessary to turn perfectly inwards, it is the breaking of bonds between the chase and the boar, the bite and the ear, the loosening of the capture. It is the focus on the change of being by being. Renouncing what we have been by changing it, renouncing the reward of youth and youth’s firm grasp on being is the only way such a renunciation is possible, and only possible by immense sacrifice…

Milk-woman and pail
The young have the twin weapons of Reason and Anticipation stretched out before them; the two combine when both plunge into the wound of Hope. In fact, they are both needed to open up and hold open this wound. (Reason is Hope’s sense of space, its method of calibration; Anticipation is its sense of time.) Unfortunately, both Reason and Anticipation anticipate Hope, that is, they overrun it in some sense, they fill themselves, deny Hope its proper lack. Reason in the sense which we’ve already described, the sense in which each logical step of the milk-woman is already reasonable (that is, follows from the last). Anticipation in the sense that these events and things—the “money for which this milk will be sold, […] the eggs [and] chickens, […] the new gown…”—already occupy the future, that they take up a real weight even if it is the weight of a hole: Anticipation’s hole has a positive temporal presence. It is saturated with respect to our circumstances as their insurer and guarantor. It is also circumstance’s counterbalance over the pulley of youth. Youth: promise of alleviation, constant continual escape from itself, effervescent change, the kind of thermal jiggling to all situations which promises to at any point (and certainly eventually) explode and carry us with it. In fact it is this very thermal energy that, congealed and precipitated, constitutes the mass of our youthfulness: In some sense it is its thermal mass—both its capacity to be heated and its heat. This is why it is the duty of the young to pull their two weapons out of the wound, to empty Hope of its perspicuity and return it to the form of a question from its already-clear statementness, its reasonability in time and space which already, in promising an answer, provides one. This is why our duty in youth has within it the refusal to double check the milk-pail, to reassure ourselves—a refusal which bears a striking resemblance to faith—so that when “down [falls] the milk pail to the ground,” nothing spills; we were already sure it was empty.

Lion in a farmyard
Our lion is the principle of other-than-here which we attempt over and over to capture somehow in intuition, to distill into a combination of here and extension. Because we are, and at least conceptualize ourselves as, extended beings, and because the mind imagines itself as the transcendent arena of extension (an arena in which extension occurs but one which itself has transcended it) we often imagine that we can assimilate the ray from us to another place into a simpler position, that is, a single focal point or subjective, but in fact, we “shake in [our] shoes if [we] only hear his roar at a distance,” the roar of, at a distance, the non-identity itself which is the wellspring of all extension. It is this soul of geometry, this non-identity that variously finds its expression as ‘place,’ ‘other,’ ‘far,’ or ‘near,’ which we use to built up a geometry of the soul, a working sense of our own extensions’ otherwise unassailable disquiet. What other principle could wreak so much terror in us, what else “[flies] upon,” in order of docility, “the sheep,” “the oxen,” then our very lives? What else if not the most radical way out from extension would take this most urgent “opening the gate” to retain our own safety? It’s true that while we have the lion caged we remain terrified, but for that short while, those unsettling moments which beg of us everything, is it possible to have one eye in our heart which is able to trace as a whole the arcs of our life which begin and end there, the arcs which we are only ever aware of having either begun or ended there? These few moments might sketch a picture of an awareness of youth, an awareness of the other-than-here and also the along-the-changing-here that as soon as we actually recognize, that is, once the lion has had its fill on the sheep and oxen and we become concerned then for ourselves, disappears. At this point this awareness becomes replaced instead with a vague and punctured, fractured but very functional, view, almost shattered and only just recognizable, of our distance from home. Our other-than-infancy but dizzyingly massive other-than-wisdom. It is at this point when youth’s gravity is manifest and we can realize the impossibility of wasting it, of, and may the expression die here, ‘wasting time.’ “How could [we] for a moment think of shutting up a lion,” of containing in ourselves the full experience of the passage of time, which we regardless think of as the only natural state, the state in which we are able to ‘waste it’ or worse yet ‘kill it.’ That non-identity is in danger of us: the wantonness which it may well be our responsibility to suffer. It may be in this exact sufferance where becomes efficacious to contemplate the nature of singular, motionless and point-like things, to imitate these in perfect wonder of their obedience and inertness, of their irrevocable sacrifice of dimension to stasis, of economics to gift-giving, speech to silent poetry.

Peasant and eagle
Under various names: karmic principle, the eternal return, synchronicity… different facets of the fact that not only does the world respond to us, but in fact it delivers us unto ourselves. Once having cordoned off a world ‘outside of’ ourselves, having supposed a shared experience of matter and ‘objectivity’ then denoted as ‘world,’ it becomes clear that this so-called ‘world’ must deliver us into pure repetition, and we have no choice but to respond equivalently by receiving this repetition with an incredulity which sustains its novelty. In fact this repetition-response can only be received as such. It is our responsibility to receive each return of ourselves, to receive and approach ourselves again and again, in perfect unawareness, that is, in the fullness of a total mirror. It is our actions that echo and petition the world, or, our complete being. Truly it is our goodness and wickedness which is returned to us in full, silently, circuitously so that we don’t realize which action has been returned to us in what form, and which we must come to bear in its own weight and the weight of its aftershocks—aftershocks which are of the exact same magnitude as the original. The diagram is this one: our ‘action’ (in the weakest sense of the word which can still be understood, the quietest sense) is that we “set free” the eagle “captured in a trap.” Meaning, we extricate some part of the world as we do in a question directed towards someone we love, by unlocking some central part of their heart and freeing it. The world, not “ungrateful to his deliverer” returns to us this freedom by some route which we unfailingly do not recognize, which we unfailingly understand as good if we have done wrong, as bad if we have done good. Not only this, but pursuing our eagle unfailingly drives us away from that unsafe wall we have been sitting under, a reward which we do not and never deserve: If we do good the world’s response and our chase lead us away from a punishment we know not, and if we have done bad the world draws us from the purity of having done good. In fact, the wall we have been driven from as well as the method of this eagle are so obfuscated as for us to be ignorant of the entire operation, unaware of any correspondences in their motions, until the very moment we are driven back to the collapsed wall. At which point—and this is where Aesop is mistaken—we do not “marvel at the service rendered [us] by the eagle” but only sit pondering the similarity and change in the wall, that we have returned by unknown route to the exact same location or principle or thought where we had once been, and that it has since collapsed. We are then set perfectly in place to repeat ourselves because we are left with precisely the same tools as we were before, only tarnished, rusted ones, only slightly less familiar. The world has only delivered us, saved and loved (or, punished by virtue of exile and return) us, no more or less; we cannot know what else it has done for us, how our question was answered, so to speak, how we have remained ourselves, what this self entails to have over and over. It is the divine and ourselves who have conspired together to bring about an identical change in our circumstances, it is the love we have for each other which is so deep that it has passed unnoticed, is passing, changing absolutely everything. It is this love which we accept by perfecting an unawareness and full, opaque, gratitude, both for the spiritual riches which have slipped through our toes as well as the most unfathomable horrors which have just barely skipped over our heads. In totality, then, it is our duty to recognize the profound nothing which has befallen us as a response to the effectual nothing of our intentions. The deepest petition inside of our every action is the one for absolute nothingness, for perfect acceptance of both each action’s inescapable banality as well as its tendency towards itself again: further banalities. It is also a great acceptance of ourselves that we are willing to return to it in love, and furthermore return to an ‘ourselves’ that has been returned unchanged by our most profound wishes, meaning that those wishes exist but must be the wish for nothing to occur, or equivalently, the wish to be loved more fully by the divine.

Image of Mercury and carpenter
For everything in our entreaties which we desire in urgency and love we must receive the opposite, because that desire needs first to be reflected through the axis of the desire for no desire at all which runs through the core of our urgency—which is the source of urgency at all, the feeling that it is crucial to reject this central desire, the vague premonition that if we could, we would have a desire that at its core was full and then that its fulfillment would have to remain unreflected, correctly oriented, as it were. Correspondingly, if we do get what we want, it is only insofar as we have gotten something at all instead of nothing—the ‘fulfilled’ desire is simply a reflection of that central axis through itself, it is the reflected fulfillment of the fulfillment of nothing. In this sense we have still received the opposite; this is why the purest-hearted desires always go perfectly unanswered, it is because they were the closest to being exactly unanswerable. It is a great sorrow that when we do want for naught, we literally receive everything. In the sense that the desire for nothing is perfectly answerable, it goes terribly unanswered, always denied. The desire for nothing, then, is the furthest possible desire away from the desire for no desire at all, because it is the desiring of something immanently fulfilled, the closest to a perfect, direct, exactly knowable and un-short-circuitable desire. When you want for nothing, you want precisely for a desire which cannot be misdirected, that cannot be subverted or failed: which is why it must, as reflected as the purest desire through the non-desiring axis, fail spectacularly. We should therefore seek to orient this desire for no desire towards the divine, to seek non-desiring not out of its fulfillability or our own contentment but in the stripping down of love to a line of perfect zero width, like the unwinding of a thick cord down to its central thread, so that what it reflects through itself is no longer some finite distance to another, but, transposing itself against infinity, reflects and returns unto infinity this very infinitude. The only fitting response to a love so perfect, the only fitting response to the gift of infinity—to return it unopened. To receive the question by pretending to not even hear it. And actually not hear it.

Monkeys and their mother
It is perfectly natural to observe with great sadness, then, in light of the previous sketch, that our work directly corresponds through its circumstances to its fruit—unfailingly, inescapably, we reap what we sow although we sow precisely what we do not want to reap. In this way the mother in the fable receives exactly what she has brought about: one child “smothered by the too great affection” and the other “despised” but in fact “nurtured and reared in spite of this neglect.” Here Aesop stretches the neglect of the mother beyond its capabilities and its plain sense, insofar as a child cannot be nurtured in spite of not being nurtured, that is, in actuality he was nurtured in spite. Therefore the mother has reaped the perfect fruit of her actions, but of course the precise opposite of her desires: which then drives us into the location of this ‘reflection’ sketched above, the location in the entire motion of carrying-out-desire, of making-desire-real, where everything goes wrong. Meaning, it is at the moment of translating our desires into action where we trip and fall. It is when we conceive of the action that will bring the desire into context with its object that we invariably conceive of the opposite. It cannot be that we simply fail to carry out the action we’ve conceived, since that would imply a plain incapability or disconnect between heart and hands which is not the case. Our heart and hands are perfectly parallel: It is the right ventricle of the heart which is disjoint from the left one. It is that desire is incapable of bringing itself into the world in light and intimidation of its central axis, the desire-for-no-desire. Failure to notice this is a critical mistake. It is because desire and its methods, preconditions, and consequences indeed come about simultaneously, without ontological priority in one or the other, that we have no recourse for inserting a sliver in between them, of going in and, with a wrench, orienting desire with the axis along which it touches reality: Desire is speared through heading the wrong way along such an axis, speared through already as a retreating answer to the question “can we want for nothing?” whose independent life constitutes this axis and sustains it, connects the two ventricles of the heart into a perfectly well-defined line; this line outwards extends into our life, and outwards farther towards nothingness, and farther still becomes tangent to the divine.

Hare and hound
Every chase can be judged on its own terms, as in, by its own formal structure, e.g. a chess game by its victor, or the goat-herd’s remark that “the little one is the best runner of the two,” but also by its exact circumstance, the structures which extend outwards from the edge of the chase into life, and which are tangent within the chase to its formal structures, e.g. the chess player’s artistry regardless of his victory, or the hound’s remark. It is a great spiritual miracle that these two align, that life makes its way so profoundly and meaningfully into abstraction, e.g. the beauty which is absolutely central to mathematics but of course nowhere formalized. It is an even greater miracle when nonrepresentational structures, e.g. most music, are able with piercing brilliancy to command the perfect power of representation (e.g. meaning’s structures entering into music as signs, and then, deeper, as plain abstraction, counterpoint) although there is no reason for this to be the case. It is not the coincidence of reading, that somehow we read onto one structure the other, but rather the co-incidence of ‘spirit’ and ‘matter,’ that the two have struck a deep and certain friendship. Here, friendship is no analogy but the sense of compatibility, harmonic rationality which admits no interlocutor but common sense having transcended reason; only intuition, and intuition by means of a uniquely human mystery…

Shepherd and dog
As much as we hope to read this fable in the positive sense, we could just as well be agnostic to whether or not the shepherd realized at first that there was a wolf among his flock—although it is his job to realize just this—then, whether or not he recognized the danger such a wolf presented to his flock—although it is his job to recognize just this—then, whether or not he considered that shutting such a danger in with his flock would allow the wolf to prey on his sheep all night long and in perfect ease—although it is his job to recognize precisely this, and all common sense demand he consider this. With regards to almost everything in our lives we are just like this shepherd; no one knows precisely where, or how, we are about to make our crucial mistake. No one knows the inner mistake on which every true mistake feeds.

The lamp
Pride is such that we “are soaked with too much oil,” maybe not always “flaring brightly” but always soaked, sole bearers of the knowledge of our own capabilities—it is true that we each know under exactly which circumstances we would give “more light than the sun,” exactly which conditions and combinations of actions would ‘actualize our potential’ (supposing as this phrase does some latent, inner, self) and allow our plans to go smoothly, recognize outwardly our self-image—or at least this illusion always dogs us. It is the case by definition that our actions are either oriented along this illusion, in which case they are the first flowering of our ‘great change,’ the first sparks of our immanent upheaval, or they are misaligned with this ‘knowledge;’ this latter case is usually so with failure, with backfired plans and missed opportunities. However, it still precisely like this: Our failure is simply the instrumentalization of, or a deficient mode of, the more brilliant light which yet hides dormant but threatens to burst forth at any moment. If we are “suddenly extinguished” we are “lit again” to “give [our] light in silence.” That is, our extinguishing or defect was a perfect response to the light, an answer which quieted simply the connection between oil and air, which simply dampened the character of our self-knowledge’s hold on its own brilliancy, and then we are content to give our light in silence, that is, not in humility but just reticent pride: Every flash we give off is dampened by a silence since every flash is accompanied by the evaporation and combustion—actualization—of our oil. Our ostensibly tacit humility is actually silent noncommittance towards this combustion, because how can we refuse to conceive of ourselves with respect to our potentiality? (How even a humble action is joined by a perturbing awareness of what humility is like.) We should seek to be ‘content’ in both the fire and the oil. We should accept our own light in silence knowing that the stars themselves are unaware: They burn not oil but are sustained by fusion. Our only humble acts come in those moments where we act unknowingly. Otherwise, we can only parody ourselves by a kind of feigned innocence. It is one of those rare struggles in which an imitation of victory, a pronouncement and repetition of it in speech, like a self-reassuring mantra, is the closest we can approach to a victory which in actuality is impossible. Take for a toy example the most lifeless, impersonal of all routines, one with no possible source of outer recognition or fruit: moving a pile of clay from one end of a room to another and then back again, over and over. Many modern jobs are like this, and many of the rituals we perform daily have this character as well. Is there not still a secret awareness of the job’s futility, a secret contract by which we recognize its destruction of our time, energy, or character, as well as our own capabilities which must rise far above all this clay-moving? Don’t we recognize in a hidden inner agreement this maneuver’s hideous unsuitability for ourselves? It is so. But the sorrow is that it is also so to varying degrees with everything that we do, even for the most exalted of clay-piles. It must be that our only hope besides closing completely our mind’s eye and feeling about blindly is to respond to these awarenesses by ignoring them, like how we might respond to misbehaving children—we have misbehaved just as egregiously. This prescription is not founded on the axiom that all self-awareness is degradation, but rather on the observation that although we are continually extinguished “the stars need [not] to be relit” as well as the ancient understanding, however dim, that it is a kind of great good for humans to orient ourselves towards the relationships we find in outer space—silences and patiences beyond even the most passive-seeming of all life forms but still somehow perfectly organic.

The lion, fox, and ass
Possible misreading: the subordination of what-is to brute force; in fact, subordination of what-should (e.g. equality of thirds, the principle of what-has-been-promised, of words and expectations, futures and pasts, fulfillment of memories and dreams, the accumulation and release of tension in the weakest sense) to what-is at any point (e.g. the stray, the chance, unexpected, coincidence or unavoidable contradiction—an ‘unavoidable’ which has not been expected in order to be avoided—the gone-wrong and the twisted arm, failure of plans—the illusion of force in its spontaneous form lives here, fury and deception live here; cf. Wild ass and lion in which three shares are yet, in effect one, and a useless one). Note that the ‘is’ of ‘what-is’ here represents nothing contingent on the constancy of being, the continuity of being in time or subjective time, e.g. expectation or planning, to say reason differently. Here, ‘is’ simply represents the ‘coming-into-being’ which makes no reference to time, which is non-contingent and cannot be surmounted: Constancy is defeated handily by change. Truly, change is what subverts the reasonable, that which was and was expected to continue by virtue of inertia. It is also thereby that ‘force’ gains its illusory mass, its repeatability: It is force which seems to alter inertial things, matter, or ideas, it is force which seems to change their course, once idealized as a subject-object pair. It is surprise, on the other hand, which cannot be trapped by such a scheme as force’s, because its mode of being is such that it doesn’t carry itself in time but merely reflects a certain state of circumstances as they are, when they are. It is a simple image which cannot be altered or diverted. It is not that the three shares of the lion, fox, and ass have been altered as they stand, but rather the circumstances changes to reflect a new conceptual grounding of the shares: At first they are equal and three, and then, just as suddenly as there were shares at all, there are two shares, “one large heap” and one “smallest possible morsel.” The joke of the lion has its secret core in the fact that the fox could not have divided the spoils otherwise: Only this new state of affairs, the “witnessing [of the ass’s fate],” is, and it is not otherwise. It is by being quick-thinking, crafty, and responsive, all of which are in the nature of the fox, that he is able to wield the new geometry he is operating under, the surprise-distortions which now, as the case, are axiomatic, precluding even the possibility of calculation by other methods because these other methods have been excluded definitionally, and within which the fox—in order to live—is “perfect to a fraction.”

The trees and the axe
The question is: What about this scenario would be different if the trees had given up one of their older members, an aging oak or cedar? What about sacrificing the ash-tree and its youth—if not the simple ‘loss of innocence’—causes the destruction of the others? There are properly two questions here: One, why value youth as much as we do, that is, what is the good which we have decided belongs solely to the quality of having-had-less-time? Two, taking youth valued as it is, why does its sacrifice or undue destruction cause in return such seemingly disproportionate catastrophe? Firstly we have to address the simple answer which clings to the first question naturally and the second question partially, at least on first pass: The good commonly accorded to less-time is the plain fact that the young typically have more time stretched out before them before death, and it is the weight and potentiality of this expected time which we value, seeing in it our own time, and then it is our own time which we mourn grievously when it is lost: the feeling that so much is lost to the world under the death of a youth—it is the anticipated actions and thoughts of a youth until a more ‘timely’ death and the reflections of our own actions and thoughts in them, which make this time real. And yet, these potentialities on second glance are just as vague as the future-time they promise to fill. If time can be filed up with actions, can it variously be filled more or less densely? Could it ‘have been’ filled instead by the actions of another? Could it be filled equally by two youths who both die half as early as the first? Can our time filled by another’s actions? What have we lost in a youth’s death, then, their actions or their container? Beyond the ordinary pitfalls of this kind of utilitarian-like maximization, these questions take on an unanswerable moral character. “Ah, it must rather be that time is constituted of actions, and as such we mourn simultaneously the loss of so much time as well as the deeds which have made it up.” You may suppose. The simple reply remains unresolved that, if future-time has no such emptiness or capacity to be filled, then we have lost nothing in the way of projected actions. It is the common understanding that in death we ‘shouldn’t mourn what was lost as much as celebrate what once was.’ Does this leave us as well the option to mourn what was? Assuming as we have been that the object of mourning should not be empty, we should seek positive qualities in youth to realize and affirm loss; we shouldn’t let ourselves be swept up with the ideas of what essentially become what we could’ve lost: the person who could’ve been, who if they had abruptly died, would be cause to mourn accordingly. The positive qualities we seek should lead us to, and emerge from, the goodness we seek in (and not outside of, or after) youth. What we call ‘the quality of innocence’ is no proper solution either, because its entire apparatus is conceptualized with respect to what hasn’t happened yet, what hasn’t been experienced, and only then reified into a positive quality; only after a subtle metaphysical leap can innocence ‘be lost.’ The next most obvious candidate is the ‘vitality’ of youth, youth’s tendency towards vibrancy and bodily energy: This is certainly a positive quality, as in, it makes no explicit or necessary reference to aging, but on yet another second glance we find that we value youth’s vitality with respect to the fact that it diminishes with age, or at least under this assumption we bring it from the sphere of intrinsic qualities into the sphere of external reference: that we have situated youth within an already-formed and prioritized conception of aging, the life-cycle, and life’s totality. Further still, this vitality has only an expected, reasonable, already mapped-out character, as in, it takes part in life’s self-narration, the mode of a book: Vitality is ‘supposed to’ fade. Not simply then out of recognition of its exceptions—the vital old man, or the vibrant and mature old forest—the exceptions that immediately themselves become assimilated into the chapters of this book, into expectations of exceptions—“such a vital old man, how strange it is…”—do we neglect this vitality as a central quality for youth’s good. We reject it out of a suspicion that these exceptions lead us to the conclusion that this vital principle of youth is not at all essential to youth’s definition, in fact, it is tangential to it at best and essentially unrelated at worst. So we still seek a positive property of youth—What is youth? It is something which we, all who consider it, are on some stage of ‘passing through.’ This is unlike age, which is something all the aged have passed through, and not quite like aging, which is not a state but a process. Rather, youth is something absolutely common to us all. Our prototypes of youth are infancy and adolescence, biological categories under which our body and mind are so radically developed, and, considering as we do that those who have passed through these stages properly are ‘fully developed,’ or whole, these stages of growth are something which all thereby defined whole lives have shared. Constituting a proper positive quality of youth, as well as a proper goodness of it: commonality, shared experience, that is, our only possible working definition of objectivity. It follows then that the disappearance of youth has to do with the simple condition that less and less of us share larger and larger amounts of life experience, that it is lonelier to be older. It is not simply expected to be so, in fact this commonality principle, as well as the loneliness of the elderly, goes commonly unnoticed. It is rather that this commonality decreases according to the circumstances of life, that we all are born and ‘time pushes us forward’ such that we have to leave at varying stages but unidirectionally. Life extends outwards along our time. Life’s objectivity, the shared understanding of what it is like to grow, constitutes its most clear and unmistakable good. What is to mourn under its loss is the severing of this growth, that we have lost something so familiar and unstated that we could have easily mistaken it for our own hand, something which entered equally into our universal experience of what it is to be made of matter. It is so straightforward that we are at a loss of words for it; it is so universal so as to seem, as it were, universally invisible. Which is why we lament its negative, its complement which is time unshared, the apparent background against which this perfect identity appears to us. Not only can we understand this loss of commonality as governing and effecting the depth of the tragedy of youth’s destruction, but we can also understand it as an answer to the second of our original questions: A sacrifice of youth or youthfulness, by virtue of what youth is, not what it represents but what constitutes it, is a sacrifice of the shared root of the forest, the forest’s objectivity and notion of what it means to say within it “here I am, a tree, among others,” and therefore, a sacrifice of the rights accorded thereby. So too it is with us, who measure for measure as youthfulness is given up give up our sensibility of what it means to be human, that is, to have become whole. A destruction of shared experience is a destruction of all of us and our ‘common sense.’ Its dissolution would mean a total annihilation, and then an inversion, of our capability to comprehend right and wrong.