Destroyer Tender

Destroyer Tender - I clicked 'random article (on Wikipedia, you understand...) and got - Destroyer Tender. That wasn't quite what I had in mind - I was hoping for something more along the lines of Existentialism or The Black Death or Violins. However - I will do my best. Incidentally, what I plan to do, dear reader, is to, each day/week/month/whenever-I-can-be-bothered-to-blog, "choose" some random subject from some website such a Wikipedia and WRITE about it. The very practice of writing is, in my view, quite enough to keep me from falling into the abyss of unbeing of the wilderness years separating BAs from MAs. Without writing there is - drifting. I am all too inclined to drift, flotsamly and jetsamly, in a Heideggerian-falling sort of a way - and that, for anyone who has read their Being and Time (which I, partially, have...) is not (while it may be inevitable...) a very good idea... You will perhaps have noticed the preponderance of dot dot dots. This is intentional. Dot dot dotses symbolise, for me, the interconnectedness of ideas central to the idea of the stream-of-consciousness. I suppose the idea underlying it, the bedrock of the stream-of-consciousness, to be almost pathologically literalistic, is continuity. For someone with a memory as fluctuating as mine existence can seem (rather delightfully, sometimes) like wandering through a reasonably dark but occasionally gold-dappled woodland. This may be what Proust was getting at (fauxly informally-rhetorical)... The intention then is to join up the impressionistic dashes of gold so that the whole thing looks like a Klimt painting...

DESTROYER TENDER

It sounds like the title of a strangely mawkish S&M Mills&Boon ... however it is not: it is a kind of ship.It is a ship providing "maintenance and support" to other, smaller ships. I know nothing about ships. The Destroyer Tender, 'no longer as necessary as [it] once [was] ... [due] to the increased size and automation of modern [ships]' stuck me as a metaphor for the (supposed) movement of the individual away from church-and/or-state-control of thought/ideology and towards autonomous thought/ideology. It is quite possible, of course, that the thoughts/ideology of the individual have never been quite so constrained by the wishes of the church-and/or-state as is generally stated (you want references? Just state the possibility I have just stated above a whisper in a university corridor and wait for the startled cries of 'Anachronism!'): it is possible that, as now, anyone thinking anything quite beyond the pale would generally not give voice to those thoughts (or that only those people who were generally considered beyond the sane gave voice to thoughts beyond the pale and that, thus, those thoughts went unrecorded). The general trend, however, does seem to have been away from faith (of various sorts - faith in god, faith in the clergy, faith on the monarchy,  faith in the state, faith in the hierarchy, faith in the family...) and towards reason (of various sorts - questioning god, questioning the clergy, questioning the monarchy, questioning the state, questioning the hierarchy, questioning the family...). The conventions may (in evolved/altered forms) remain - but the one is less likely to be prosecuted/executed should one dare (and it still requires some measure of courage) to question them. The point I wanted to make, when I started writing this, was that, without meaningful (whatever that means) Destroyer Tenders of thought (so to type) people are rootless, drifting, impoverished, terribly susceptible to whatever nonsense happens to appeal to them.  I find myself objecting vastly, though, to the very idea that one may not think what one likes. The problem is, we are neither franchised not disenfranchised - in any very extensive manner - not most of us. Dragonflies, ink-blue, in spiderwebs, half-caught, half-free, half-dead, half-alive, it would be much better for us to be one or the other. The insistence on references is a form of curb on free-speech - because, it might be argued, speech is only ('truly'?) free is it stands any chance of being taken seriously, and, at the moment in academic circles at least, only referenced writings stand that chance, which seems odd, given the importance ascribed to primary texts, many of which evince a valiant and exuberant disregard for referencing... Think Being and Time - did you notice any referencing in that? I may be wrong ... but I don't think you did. Think The Bible ... apart from the odd mention of letters to be answered, not a thing. Originality is crushed beneath the (sometimes quite unnecessary) armor of references. References can be marvelous things, played with correctly, inserted into the text as part of some paperchase, or like a reference, in conversation, to the relevant input of some absent mutual friend - used defensibly, they can become a moat-morass through which the reader, who really wasn't about to argue with the writer anyway, has to wade, perhaps drowning before they ever work out quite what (if anything) it was of originality the writer wanted to add to the evidently abundant pre-existing material... Referencing for referencing sake is simply namedropping. The point is, though - when it is considered unusual to know about really quite important thinkers (unless one has studied them - or unless one belongs to that hyper-knowledgeable social group everyone who's anyone seems to pretend to belong to, polyglots with Oxbridge Degrees whose children get extra tuition...- I wonder if anyone does...?) then it is considered unusual to have received (from these people who have preceded us - who have done the groundwork) the most minimal and (potentially) inexpensive of intellectual ... um ... guidance/help. Most people are intellectual orphans - this is all rather tragic. The point is (I know I keep typing that -  am trying to be incisive), when entertainment becomes a substitute for anything of real worth/use in the creation of the self (the ephemeral somehow gets in the way of the non-ephemeral), one is in danger of becoming entertaining and ephemeral and hollow. This is all very well for courtesans - the world needs people who are merely pretty - but to be merely pretty is a martyrdom, a dreadful one, a dehumanising one,  and should be considered with much awe, a semi-religious awe (because of course what is beautiful is what is true and what is true is what is sacred - for all the hollowness - where else could God be contained ... end of semi/faux/not-entirely serious theological sidetrack). We are, like Nietzsche's new philosophers (see Beyond Good and Evil) and like Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (see Peer Gynt) 'afloat on a raging sea in a little row boat just trying  not be  swept overboard' (see Charmed Life by The Divine Comedy). To give up, to give oneself over to the Zeitgeist for consumption as though the Zeitgeist were some terrible water-dragon or The Thin One (see Peer Gynt) exulting in the consumption of the drowned is - suicide, intellectual/ideological suicide. Better to go down holding the wheel of the ship and screaming into the storm, covered over by the mass of the water of the opinions of other people, than to jump off the boat like a rat - because to do so really is to give up one's humanity. It is a great deal easier for the vast majority of people to accept the entertainment and journalism that is prepared for the masses. POPULAR literature. POPULAR television. POPULAR music. These are the most readily available things. They appeal to the intellectually apathetic. The intellectually apathetic are intellectually apathetic because they are tired, because they have been utilised, because they have been stretched out of shape by their families their friends, their schools, their jobs: they just want to curl up on the sofa and watch some trash - and who can blame them. Once people have the energy to play with ideas (and this energy is generally knocked out of people by the time they leave school - which insidiously lets people "have fun" for a couple of years, then, when it has gotten their attention, inflicts its will in excessive ways over appearance, handwriting, eating, communication, styles of art even ... to an extent which would in any other context be deemed appallingly dictatorial and imprisoning and brutal). Yes -people are brutalised. They forget their impulses and they work so that other people within the capitalist system will like them (not everyone, of course - some lucky people work because they want to, and some lucky people do not work because they want to, and some unlucky people do not work because the whole damn system has pushed them beyond the prescribed level of apathy) and they dress in such a way that they will not get lynched (metaphorically or literally) and they talk in such a way that people nod and smile rather than shaking their heads and frowning (as though these expressions of opinion were more than counter-symbols for other things - as though a shake of a head or a frown were dangerous in itself - how terribly atavistic ... and I have been guilty of this, loving language, and manipulating language simply to produce effects on the faces of other people, which in a way is a disregard for a language and a step towards being a director of a - somewhat meaningless /meaningfaux - little play rather than a participant in a conversation). These people - the masses (am I underestimating them? I think not. If anything I may be exaggerating....) have had the blood (in the metaphorical sense) sucked out of thier veins. They are the pit-horses of the state. They are sent into the lightless, pre-Genesis world of DOING and PRODUCING and BEHAVING (which they are allowed not to do at the weekends, until the police, the state-cavalry, picks them up - at which point they are punished and realigned to their outside-imposed work-rather-than-telos). Who can blame them if most of them then really don't have the energy to expend on anything that demands a response (as most things worth reading/watching/doing do). These are not aesthetes. These are practical people. who need all the energy they can get for self-preservation, mental/spiritual/physical and so on. They see advertisements for fast foot that invite them to refuel. This is because the life has been sucked from them by the (somewhat shortsighted) vampire of the state. This depletion becomes habitual. They become used to it. Exulted states of mind seem absurd to them. The long and impassioned speeches of people in, say, The Idiot by Dostoevsky, even if they are uttered by people similarly disenfranchised (in different ways, perhaps, or technically more so - to avoid vast anachronism), seem absurd to them, nothing to do with them... What they are forgetting, of course, is that people are people are people... Theoretically, what one person can think and feel and say and do (gender and intactness and age aside), another person can think and feel and say and do. It is in the interests of the state for only those people who are playing the game (rather than playing up) to remember this. Everyone else must be led to believe that they are (at least potentially) a loser. Also of course, they can be a winner - if they follow the rules just enough. The tabloids are the twenty-first-century's version of heads stuck on poles. The blood is generally invisible emotional metaphorical blood - but it is a very public purging of vitality nonetheless. I suggest a sudden break from this exhaustion. More time. Less coercion in terms of what books and television programmes and music people are - subjected - to. More ACTUAL choice.