So I write about worlds, worlding, worldmaking, worldbuilding, the world, a world. How do other people use the word?
So I write about worlds, worlding, worldmaking, worldbuilding, the world, a world. How do other people use the word?
Ulay versus the bones of Descartes
Ulay is a hard put upon performance artist with a career, or should I say now, platform, based in shadowing a successful New York eurotrash dominatrix from the Balkans.
Ulay said,
"The process is alchemical. I've learned to avoid saying 'the world' as we can only know a world."1
Now I cannot stand performance art. It multiplies all my audience awkwardness. So normally I would move on past it, but moments ago on a social media platform, a meme floated by attributed to René Descartes the following:
“We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we describe.”
I tried tracking this one down. Doing my own research, it suggests more ancient origins in the form:
“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
which is via Anaïs Nin, quoting perhaps Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani, in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (55b.)².
“We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
The Rabbi was talking about dreams. So, it’s like no one said it.
Even if Freud would agree, I guess, it’s like no one said it but it floats by me, and that’s cute I think. Maybe it was some AI production number?
Dreams, we see, worlds we see, know. If we mix the meme and the Ulay quote we can get Ulay to say he only knows himself. That’s is if we substitute terms.
the/a world = what we describe = ourselves = a world
A performance artist who only know or sees themselves in the audience. “It’s alchemical.”
I don’t enjoy that sort of alchemy, but then I have other pots to stir.
Anyway, a lot of political argument substitutes terms, in classical studies this is called rhetoric. Nowadays its just the mixed metaphors of politics and we do not criticise it we just run away, like we have been told to do by psychologists when we encounter narcisists. I wonder why so many narcissists are in positions of power that they design to suit themselves?? Suit you sir.
A lot of philosophy is suspect to many because it plays with word usage deliberately, consciously.
Carefully.
A lot of philosophy tries its hardest to get better than just wordplay and its deconstructions. Wordplay with suspect histories that we can deconstruct via etymologies of usage even when we do not seek to re-frame some poor guy Ulay with a misappropriated meme from Descartes.
But poetry does that stuff too, and if it does it well, and if it can withstand the scrutiny of the stage then we can say, holding Ulay’s bones, or the skull of Descartes.
I knew him well, Horatio.³
And the worlds I world with others, a one or two, among many more, even as I may but know them as a few, and if only but one, then I would not be sad.
Philosophy should do more poetry, at least, we should do more poetry. For, if we have moral philosophy, we should have ethical poetry which does as much making as some philosophies deconstruct in good faith. An ethical poetry should meta-ethics into shape (or world) how an audience asks why we should of the stage.
All the world’s a stage. ³
1 Ulay Interviewed by Dominic Johnson’ Art monthly No. 423, February 2019
2 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/09/as-we-are/
3 So popular one does not even need to name Shakespeare.