Monads

This is how I use (waste) my time on the bus when I am not sleeping: I was reading the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the German philosopher Leibniz, a book called The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque. It is a difficult book, and my mind wandered to what I remembered of Leibniz' Monadology, where, famously, "monads have no windows--" a cryptic remark about the absolute isolation of each thing from every other thing. So, thinking about these things, I composed in my head a short, rather Celanesque poem:

Monad
what is
sole?

windowless
mirrored only
reflected folds
of velvet curtains
silken cushions

your hut 
on endless plains

windblown

light snow
whitening
the south sides
of furrows
& ruts

oblivious
to the cold

you

When I arrived at the bus stop at Westlake, I rushed into Pacific Place, which I knew was open even if the shops weren't, sat at a table, and wrote it down so that it wouldn't disappear like a dream as I became involved in the business of the day. This reminded me of Derrida talking about Socrates' distrust of writing because it weakened the mind by removing the necessity of remembering . . .

Alethe

Philosophical speculations from reading Heidegger's 1934 lectures on logic:
A tree--
why is it always a tree? Are trees hard wired into us as symbols of nature? Would that be true of people who live in a mostly treeless region? And what tree? I usually imagine a maple with broad limbs and green fluttering leaves, but sometimes I imagine a pine with blue clusters of needles. Would someone in the tropics imagine a palm tree or a mahogany? --

All part of the point, really. A tree, any tree, does not exist for our purposes. It is not there to provide us shade (though it may do so on an August day). It is not there to scrub carbon dioxide from the air, though we may be grateful that it does. It is not there to provide us lumber for our patios, though, sadly, only then do we value it by assigning it a price.

Its only purpose is to be itself, a tree, separate from any of our purposes. That is the root--pun intended-- of what Heidegger means by Alethe, the Greek word for truth which means "unhidden" or "not forgotten." Truth is the unconcealed. When we allow the tree, the broad flat leaves of the maple filtering sunlight, to present itself as itself, to stand, as it were, in the clearing, only then do we see the truth of it, the mystery. Only then do we encounter it in its "uncanny" otherness. Only then do we experience the sacred.