Haze, by Mark Wallace

We live now in an empire which, in the name of reasons, has stolen our lives away from us, but which will then sell them back to us at the cost of all that we have ... ("Reasons To Write")

These lines from the brief opening essay in Mark Wallace's Haze made me think of some of my most-quoted lines from Greg Brown's song "Where Is Maria":

There'll be one corporation selling one little box.
It'll do what you want and tell you what you want
and cost whatever you've got.

As an iPhone owner, I quote these lines all the time! :-)

Another passage from Wallace's book made me think of another of my favorite musicians, this time Ornette Coleman, who once said something to the effect that he knew that the music he was playing had a system when he realized that he could play wrong notes:

Discourses create a network of statements it seems relevant to think and say. One of the main ways to recognize that one is in a discourse is through the feeling that one recognizes when other people make statements irrelevant to the discourse. ("The Haze")

And later in that essay, Wallace reminds me of Mark Rowlands's claim in The Philosopher and the Wolf that it is in our moments of defiance that we are most ourselves:

Haze shows that the potential of the human can be found just as much in what resists organized Discourse as in what organizes Discourse.

This could probably all be worked up into a nice little essay but I'll just leave it at that.

Idleness, defiance

Somewhere (where? I don't remember, and my internet searches have not been successful; perhaps in his diaries?), Franz Kafka wrote that it is only our moments of idleness that count.

That crossed my mind when I started re-reading Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf and noticed the clear statement of the book's thesis that appears at the end of the acknowledgments: "... it is only our defiance that redeems us."

When I first read the book, I even read the acknowledgments, but the thesis did not jump out at me—perhaps because it is only the whole book that makes it seem like a general statement, and not Rowlands's own peculiar take on things.

But which is it that redeems us: idleness or defiance?

The Philosopher and the Wolf

I'm reading The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. A truly exhilarating book, sort of a cross between J. M. Coetzee on animals and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I'll probably say something more explicit about it later, but right now I am reading it with the Cartesian approach: read it first like a novel, then read it again and start really thinking about it. (For the full description of his reading method, see the end of my post from February about Descartes.)