the particular is the universal
I am a fan of inhuman hours. Drawing humans together in such muted totality as drawing moths to a flame. It doesn't matter if you like it or not: the inhuman hour, the wicked city, and the crawling hush of time told from the sky above will get into the marrow of your bones.
The inhuman hour is the universe's flame. Example: nobody is the same at four in the morning. This is one hour past the devil's time, which is a crock of bullshit if you've ever woken past noon. It doesn't matter where you are. It doesn't matter where you're supposed to be. You walk outside your house at four in the morning and you hear the sharp shadows of birds in the trees trying to talk to each other.
You should stop and listen to them, you know. They're saying something. Listen to the way that the throat flutters and forms around senseless vowels. Contract, tighten; let air escape only when appropriate for speaking this dinosaur language. During the day time, they never seem to shut up. It's only at four in the morning, hugging your arms in the cold and wondering what the hell you're doing standing outside, that you realise they might be saying something, right?
I mean, that's just the temporal condition, though. Time-space-mind fuckery we invent to make ourselves feel better about slaving to the hands of a clock. All that jazz and nonsense. You can't say it isn't pretentious to act like pointing out that time is a construct makes you freaking Einstein. Your humanity, too, is a construct. The importance you place on dissecting constructs is a construct. We construct and we deconstruct, with equal abandon: this is the abhorrent labour of humanity. This is the labour that rules the need to forge the universal into our own 'particular'.
Kwame Anthony Appiah says this of cosmopolitanism: "we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practises and beliefs that lend them significance." I think that significance can shift and change with context, just like the colour of the sky dictates the way our minds spout poetry. I think that we can be selfish and possessive about this significance. We want to feel special, like these thoughts are our own. Like we own the hour of four in the morning and the birds are talking to us. Like we know which hearts are beating miles away from our own and that they're the supporting characters in our own narratives. Isn't there something a little freeing about shrinking yourself down to size? What is the shared morality that makes up the fissures of cosmopolitanism, if not simply in the breath and bones? Where could it possibly come from, with all of our endless differences, if not from the dinosaur languages and the human need to construct and deconstruct?
If you're looking for the particular human life, if you're interested in finding it universally, of neatly condensing it to the 5cm by 3cm space of a dictionary definition entry, shed your moth's skin and just say "fuck it" to the flame. Go for a walk at four in the morning. There is witchcraft in the skies. You never felt less human. You never felt more universal.
The inhuman hour is the universe's flame. Example: nobody is the same at four in the morning. This is one hour past the devil's time, which is a crock of bullshit if you've ever woken past noon. It doesn't matter where you are. It doesn't matter where you're supposed to be. You walk outside your house at four in the morning and you hear the sharp shadows of birds in the trees trying to talk to each other.
You should stop and listen to them, you know. They're saying something. Listen to the way that the throat flutters and forms around senseless vowels. Contract, tighten; let air escape only when appropriate for speaking this dinosaur language. During the day time, they never seem to shut up. It's only at four in the morning, hugging your arms in the cold and wondering what the hell you're doing standing outside, that you realise they might be saying something, right?
I mean, that's just the temporal condition, though. Time-space-mind fuckery we invent to make ourselves feel better about slaving to the hands of a clock. All that jazz and nonsense. You can't say it isn't pretentious to act like pointing out that time is a construct makes you freaking Einstein. Your humanity, too, is a construct. The importance you place on dissecting constructs is a construct. We construct and we deconstruct, with equal abandon: this is the abhorrent labour of humanity. This is the labour that rules the need to forge the universal into our own 'particular'.
Kwame Anthony Appiah says this of cosmopolitanism: "we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practises and beliefs that lend them significance." I think that significance can shift and change with context, just like the colour of the sky dictates the way our minds spout poetry. I think that we can be selfish and possessive about this significance. We want to feel special, like these thoughts are our own. Like we own the hour of four in the morning and the birds are talking to us. Like we know which hearts are beating miles away from our own and that they're the supporting characters in our own narratives. Isn't there something a little freeing about shrinking yourself down to size? What is the shared morality that makes up the fissures of cosmopolitanism, if not simply in the breath and bones? Where could it possibly come from, with all of our endless differences, if not from the dinosaur languages and the human need to construct and deconstruct?
If you're looking for the particular human life, if you're interested in finding it universally, of neatly condensing it to the 5cm by 3cm space of a dictionary definition entry, shed your moth's skin and just say "fuck it" to the flame. Go for a walk at four in the morning. There is witchcraft in the skies. You never felt less human. You never felt more universal.
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