Don't Stop

Don’t Stop

Certain phrases are especially packed with polysemy, no?

I mean, a phrase that is greeted with wild adulation in one context

Will arrive to jeering, hissing, even furious screaming in another

But does it follow that meaning is wholly dependent upon context?

No, meaning is the bastard of form and content, text and context, how and what and where and when and why

Don’t Stop

Suppose the question was, “Should I stop x,” wherein x is an empty variable aching for content

Suppose x stands in for a whole globular cluster of gerunds: writing; hoping; trying; editing; rubbing; going; coming; procrastinating…

Wouldn’t each gerund have a distinctive form, distinctive content, and the capacity radically to alter meaning, when situated in a given context?

Not all unions are meaningful

But all unions have their meaning

Don’t Stop

Why is “like, that’s subjective” considered by so many to be the guillotine of arguments?

If it is subjective, it emerges from the union (collision; awkward exchange of small talk; discussion of the will) of the subject (a mind for whom there is something it is like to be itself) and the object (reality at large; a plate of food prepared with obvious resentment; Shelley’s Frankenstein) and the subject responds qua subject

If it depends upon the person, it depends upon you; it always has

You are a person

Act like it

Don’t Stop

Make firm decisions. Know things. Believe things. Have opinions, if you must, but they are mere opinions

If a lip or a hip or a book or a brook is beautiful to you, you ought to be able to persuade others that it is beautiful. Appeal to reason or ethics or emotion. Cite things great and small. Get emotional. Make what is private public, the better to make what is public private, and pleasantly so. Persons wish to keep things for various reasons and in various ways. But strive to make what is worth keeping. To yourself or by other persons. Be mindful of the strange and fortunate fact that you are a well-groomed primate who can ever say to himself or herself or themselves, or any other self

Don’t Stop

Because once you’ve said that, as, or for that matter, to a particular subject confronting a particular object, well--

You’ll be mindful, when you do, of the fact that this applies the other way around

That is, contrary to some, it’s not really between you and the person you’re doing it to; it’s always with

That other person? That object, insofar as the other person is a corporeal entity, an embodied being, extended in space (more extensive in some cases, less so in others; various colors, shapes, sizes--it doesn’t matter) and enduring through time, right in front of everyone, is also a subject, see? Maximally obvious things are practically invisible. Everything that is true of your experience of being a person, is true of that other person’s experience of that mode of existence. A variegated panoply of differences characterizes the contexts in which you have appeared, and what you have made of them, and what they have made of you

But we’ve all been there

Don’t Stop

So “like, that’s subjective” ought to be the beginning of the best conversation we will ever have

We are doing this together

Why?

To what end? For what purpose? To get the degree or the certificate or the diploma or the "appropriate kind of experience," and then the job and then the money and then the shiny things and then—stop? Or get others involved, before we have any idea what we are doing, or why?

How did that work out for you? For it seems that is how most of us got involved in the first place

Don’t Stop

When you change the object in such a way that the subject cannot help him or her or themselves, and says, or whispers, or shouts

Don’t Stop

You’ve got it right. Whatever it is. At last, or completely by accident, or in a way that you would never want to see rated online—but you did. You made another person will this to go on, just like this--yes!

You have made that person with whom you are doing it feel as if this is the way it must be done, in this location, at this time, with both of us in it and with it--this polka, this party. this parliament, this prison

Extrapolate , please. When you write a sentence, or prepare a meal, or make an observation, or sign a document, or vote, or buy a painting, or--so precious—paint a painting

Create an object that moves you as a subject to say, as it is being honed and perfected and refined and completed

Don’t Stop

As you are striving with every molecule you can muster to make it the paragon of its kind

That act, that decision, that alteration of what is not you by you with them in mind

It’s bound to look clumsy, or ridiculous, or incomprehensible, or alarmingly ugly to them on occasion

At least at first

But as you strive with everything you can summon to say to yourself, with real conviction and ecstatic joy

Don’t Stop

That singular phrase that means: at last, you are doing the right thing in the right context with the right person(s)—that usage is quite deliberate, for viewed from without, we wear a mask; we see the world from within, behind that mask--it is in that sense that we are objects for other persons and subjects for and to ourselves. We ought to be trying to understand and improve what’s objective so that every subject, including each and every one of us, ourselves, will moan, or shout, or whisper—or write (just remember that everything is subject to the alchemy of a single, tiny comma)

Don’t Stop