January 19, 2009: Writing a book can be hazardous to one’s health. Bertrand Russell said he spends three years reading about a topic before starting to write on it. Then, if he is lucky, the material somehow pulls itself into a unified whole and he simply describes what he sees. I was pleased to notice that my approach is similar. The three years of reading is the dangerous part. Cramming too many facts into one’s head can suffocate the reader. He needs to take time out to breathe. But one cannot just blab about warped space or explicit performatives to friends. They look confused or horrified, and quickly find reason to leave. Other philosophers might be interested but are not easy to locate. They are like ships at night in the harbor, but without lights. I could perhaps signal the whole harbor. Doing so, however, would be aiming at nothing.
Enter Immanuel Kant. He felt that external reality is not entirely external. Kant viewed reality as a combination of perception and conception—we presuppose a component of reality, which of course then comes from within us. He postulated four constructs that contribute to our experience of the world: space, time, cause, and substance. I am adding a fifth—communication (this is just a blog). And there might be a sixth, God, since we instinctively think in terms of purpose rather than cause. We do not see these suppositions; we see with them. Without them, color, sound, texture, form, etc, are merely sensory input. With them, sensory input becomes information.That is close enough. Someday I might describe it more accurately, but it illustrates the point—that dialogue might be essential to conceptualization. In other words, we perhaps grasp things more clearly by observing physical actions rather than mental images. The mental may require physical pollination in order to bloom. This means Requiem might not just rise out of the pages by itself. So with this introduction the blog begins.
Another problem for a blog is that it presumes usefulness. But not much about my life warrants attention. Solipsism and abstraction sounds like a formula for indifference. No trees will be lost, but what value can be created? Perhaps I would do better simply by tending to my blueberries.
Still, I will not know unless I try. And Requiem is not for my benefit as much as it is for the people and things I care about. I have a limited number of years left and want to give something while I still can to those who matter. Requiem is my life task, a final synthesis of personal experience, hopefully leading to a plan for moving into the future. It is also a goodbye.
The blog then is my effort to continue to relate to the world while on sabbatical from the world. I direct it to no one in particular, but neither is it for everyone in general. In writing Second Choice my birthmother was always in my mind. No such “listener” exists today. Today’s audience is probably an abstraction of all the people in my life who cared. It is also an exclusion of those who should have cared, but did not.
