Lost in the relativist jungle

 " We sit here stranded, but we all do our best do deny it" (Bob Dylan)

1.
 
    Dear friend,     


   You and I tend to disagree all the time and we are constantly arguing it seems. In this scenario, it becomes relevant to talk about truth -  here we might have something to agree on, some kind of universality, yes? Because if we do not have a common understanding and base for what is truth, then how should we be able to understand and reasonably respond to the other's claims and arguments? And in today's rushing information society, with cascades of information from myriads of sources and streams, where everyone is expected to discern and sieve true from false, and meaningful from meaningless, it becomes even more important with some kind of foundation - a constitution perhaps?. But where to find such a structure in this fragmented jumble, and within the time frame allowed us. 

   Pondering and thinking. I dive into texts and videos. What is Truth? There are different theories for starters and one speaks also of different domains of truth: objective, social and personal and human.  

    The correspondence theory seems, at first glance, most sensible: a statement(or assertion) is true if it corresponds to something real in the world. So the statement 'The car is red' is true if it corresponds to a red car in reality. A perfect match between statement and fact apparently. It gets tricky though when concepts like perception and reality enters the discussion here: I experience this red car from my perspective (or from within it) and what can I know about the red car as it is, really, in reality outside myself? After all, I can't get out of my head (although it would have been preferable from time to time) to really see the car as it is. And then we have the correspondence itself, what does this flow consist of? And what is lost and distorted along the way? 
   And what about language then, this envoy of meaning and supposed truth, is it too poor to fully reproduce the experience? does it lack adequate bandwidth and luminosity? Tomas Tranströmer wrote: 

   "The language marches in step with the executioners
     Therefore we must get a new language" 

    In conjunction with Tranströmer's Nobel Prize, the Nobel Committee wrote that Tranströmer's poems gives us "fresh access to reality". A bold statement to say the least but I can still agree on its accuracy.

Allen Ginsberg said of poetry that it is words that are so subjective that they are believed to represent an objective reality. The poets actually work for the dictionary one could say, few know about it, and they can take a "bewildered look at the familiar". But that raises the question what kind of truth do you encounter in a work of art? Can you palpate it beyond the language? Rather, what invites us into a work of art is its ability to open up a new horizon, it can for example illuminate a new perspective on ethics and so on. But does that make it true? Impossible for me to answer. But what if one can discern, through the artwork, traces of an independent truth outside of consciousness. The artist is, so to speak, via back roads almost, hot on the heels of an objective truth, and they have reached there via intuition and accidents.

Back to the language. According to Joseph Brodsky, language can be said to be a diluted aspect of matter. Or like this; language is the non-living's first line of information about itself secreted to the living.

And for Brodsky, the poet is someone who "negotiates" himself into real matter or real time (pure matter ... pure time). This seems a little bit too esoteric for me. I have to return the "car is red" statement and the correspondence theory.

     As an analogy to the correspondence theory's correspondence between reality and assertion, one can see a translator's job of translating a poem from one language to another: again it is down to the question of what is being lost on the way? And what will be added and/or distorted? If we translate the following fragments from W.H Auden to Swedish, what will we get?: 
 

   Time that is intolerant
   Of the brave and the innocent,
   And indifferent in a week
   To a beautiful physique,

   Worships language and forgives
   Everyone by whom it lives;

 

Every time I try I fall flat. I do not get to the same epic verve in Swedish as in the original language. Of course it can have to do with my lack of talent as a translator in combination with inherent prosodic and melodic differences between english and swedish. In any case, one could still argue that some crucial experential data goes missing in the translation, in the correspondence. 

   
 ......
 

2.

 

   Nothing is as I imagined. Theories that are more perspective-based are, for example, the coherence theory and pragmatism. In the coherence theory one assertion is true if it is coherent and consistent with a system of sentences that are mutually coherent, like in a puzzle almost. It is akin to idealism and was like an old-fashioned response to correspondence theory. The idealists seems to tell me that  "there is no real world just our inner system of representations", yes, but what is true then ?? Idealism here contrasts with realism. From my horizon, the coherence theory seems a bit inward and relativistic, but then again I am just a layman scrolling through wikipedia. Who are the authorities of truth? The dogmatists think they are the ones. But are the coherence theorists way off? The questions pile up like the boats outside the resort in the summer. The coherence theorists mean, as mentioned, that we can only base one notion of belief with another; as an example, my belief that Olof Palme was murdered on February 28, 1986 must be based also on the belief that Wikipedia reproduces information correctly and do not present falsehoods.

Donald Davidson takes the word: "If coherence is a test of truth, then it is a direct link to epistemology, because we have reason to believe that many of our beliefs are coherent with others, and in that case we also have reason to assume that many of our beliefs are true ”(Davidson, 2000). A far-fetched analogy to Davidson's paragraph would be that one of those boats outside the resort town probably has truth on board.
   Perhaps one should look through epistemology, the study of knowledge. I see epistemology and knowledge illustrated in a picture: two circles next to each other that partially overlap, truth is one circle and beliefs are the other and in the overlap area between the two there gleams "knowledge" in yellow. Idealistic almost. Beliefs are things that people have and they do not exist outside of consciousness, probably. Some philosophers believe that beliefs are like an outline, a psychological framework. That means that a person is inclined to behave in a way as if what they believe is true. A belief is a statement that a person accepts as a representation of what the world is like. Beliefs can be about false statements and thus be highly inaccurate since the person accepts them as being true. Critical distinction then; a statement can be true or false while beliefs can be about true and false statements even if the person always accepts them as true. Believe it or not but at random I look up a page in Comte-Sponville's "A small treatise on the Great Virtues" and read the underlining there; "knowledge, which applies to being, does not say anything about how one should be; knowledge does not judge, knowledge does not govern. The truth forces itself on everybody, of course, but it imposes nothing." (Translated from the Swedish version, so again some crucial nuance might be missing). Now I am a little confused and the only thing I come to think of is another Tranströmer quote: "There is rain above my ceilings and I'm a rain gutter for impressions." I wander backwards in Comte-Sponville's text and read the following on the same page (page 200); "For those who recognize that value and truth are two different orders (one related to knowledge, the other with desire), there is in this separation on the contrary an extra reason to be tolerant: even if we would have access to the absolute truth this would not actually force all people to respect the same values, and consequently it would not force them to live the same way ”.

   Typical, too. I who thought I was on to something absolute. If anything could be easy. Again a Tranströmer quote is flickering past like a butterfly: "And the creature with glued eyes who wants to walk in the middle of the stream downstream throws himself straight ahead without trembling in a raging hunger for simplicity". This is starting to look like a collage of miscellaneous quotes. And poor Tranströmer, he is quoted ad nauseam by now. I have internalized his words and they often pop up for me on outings like these. Okay, here comes a promise: no more Tranströmer quotes in this wall of text.

   Have we come closer to a shared common ground or have we distanced ourselves from each other even more? Unknowingly, I think of the motto or saying the more you learn the more you know that you don't know. Here we philosophize, which is to think without proof (otherwise it could not have been called philosophizing), and see where we end up. So far, I could conclude that, after these investigations, I am a sensory agent who is trapped within my consciousness, and one who cannot step outside of that consciousness and experience the world as it really is. But then again I have not yet examined empiricism or rationalism or a plethora of other theories. This jungle seems immense and it keeps expanding.

 

 .....

3.
 
   Weary and giddy, I stop on the road with the Hedgehog and the Fox: Isaiah Berlin's famous essay ("The hedgehog and the Fox"). The point of departure in that text is a cryptic statement from the ancient greek poet Archilochos in which he states that "the hedgehog knows one big thing but the fox knows many small things". According to Berlin, the fox is one who is fascinated by the infinite variety of phenomena and things, the teeming individuality of objects, subjects and events... while those who relate everything to a central, all-encompassing system and boiling things down to a unifying whole are called hedgehogs. Rather schematic at first glance one could say. A coherent worldview is perhaps impossible for a fox: their experience is too kaleidoscopic and maybe even contradictory. They must align themselves with the boundaries. Isaiah Berlin tells us: “We are part of a larger whole than we can understand; we ourselves live in this whole and from it, and we are only wise to the extent that we make peace with it ”. 

However, in this aspect, Berlin's hedgehog is more unforgiving and strives incessantly to give reality a unifying form, a universal explanatory principle. I come to think of Freud and Marx and Kant and their grand systems of thought. There's the one lense, very roughly speaking, to filter everything through,"one ring to rule them all". I also ponder the fact that the world has been rather monoteistic and hence quite "hedgehoggy" for almost two-thousand years, most of the big religions have only one God (Christianity, Judaism, Islam etc) and is contrasting to the polytheistic worldview of Antiquity.    
   In his essay, Berlin mentions a lot of artists and philosophers who, in his estimation, are either foxes or hedgehogs, but he immerses himself in Leo Tolstoy because Berlin there finds a figure who initially evades categorization. Tolstoy was a deep sceptic of any theories that would try to explain the course and events of history and the social phenonema contained within it: he would ruthlessly debunk any synthesizing theory and explode doctrines contemptously and without difficulty. His "genius is devastatingly destructive". But at the same time he longed for that universal explanatory principle, "always hoping that the desperately-sought-for 'real' unity would presently emerge". So Berlin finds that Tolstoy was a fox who really wanted to be a hedgehog. Berlin argues that Tolstoy had "a bitter inner conflict....between the immediate data, which he was too honest and too intelligent to ignore, and the need for an interpretation of them which did not lead to the childish absurdities of all previous views". Tolstoy meant that history can't be explained through such entities as heroes, historic forces, moral forces, nationalism, reason.. and so on. There is something else at the core according to Tolstoy, some inexorable character - the march of events - and humans are basically to deeply ingrained in life to grasp it, the flow of life is too vast and cannot be sorted out because the proportion of "submerged" and uninspectable data is too high. Berlin points out that "a notion of inexorable laws which work themselves out whatever men may think of it is itself an oppressive myth". One could argue that Tolstoy, while debunking so many other theories and doctrines, himself, with his "inexorable laws" and so on, falls prey to irrationalism and obscurantism. He thinks of what occurs as a "thick, opaque, inextricably complex web of events, objects, characteristics, connected and divided by literally innumerable unidentifiable links- and gaps and sudden discontinuities too". I imagine Tolstoy getting up in the morning and looking out the window and thinking "wow, the world is simply mindboggling"  and to him the social-, political, moral and spiritual worlds, in which we function, seemed permanently out of reach of acute scientific inquiry. 
 
......
 
   I leave the Hedgehog and the Fox and walk on. It feels like a side track, but it was enjoyable.

The questions seem to have multiplied since the beginning of this writing. The constant questioning can be associated with what is called skepticism, it comes from the Greek word skeptikos and means seeker or questioner. It's like a rather annoying dinner guest who doesn't settle for simple answers or catch-phrase dogmatics. "Walk like a snifferdog where the truth trampled" (I broke my promise and quoted Tranströmer again).

 
 .....
     
4.
 

    They are two well-traveled roads by now, empiricism and rationalism. And how much of these ways of thinking has over the years been incorporated into, or excluded from, what people call "common sense"? 

   In empiricism, sensory experience is considered to be the most reliable source of knowledge. The thinker use induction which is to derive conclusions from the experience that then leads to knowledge of the world. Rationalism instead says that reason is the most dependable source of knowledge; this includes ideas, deductive truths and mathematical truths, all of which are reached through the use of reason itself. Simply put, one can say that the thinker concludes from the inside and out as opposed to empiricism which then, so to speak, goes from the outside and in. The dividing line in the dispute between empiricism and rationalism is thus about how dependent we are on the sensory experience when we gain knowledge. Hard materialism and the dream of the watertight bulkhead. How much and how often are these roads intermingled ? Looking further back we can find a similar divide in the contrast between Plato and Aristotle where Plato was convinced that truth lay in the immaterial world of ideas while Aristotle could be considered more down to earth and "here and now"; Aristotle believed that all knowledge came from studies of the physical world, could he have been the first empiricist? Be that as it may and regardless if you are inclined towards Aristotle's way or Plato's inner world of ideas, the problems of perception still remain.

    What does empiricist John Locke say about all this? He talks about primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities belong to the objects themselves and these are for example density, mass, weight, depth, figure, mobility and secondary qualities are color, taste, texture, sound, smell and political affiliation and so on. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities explains the disagreements we have regarding our perceptions of the outside world. Primary qualities are easy to agree on, but the squabble usually start with the secondary qualities. Or to quote René Girard: taste is distaste for other people's taste.

    But if we disagree on primary qualities then one of us must be wrong, because they are dealing with the object itself, it is not about you or me. Locke thinks that secondary qualities are not objectively real, they can only be experienced subjectively - here we open a box on the quiz walk that seem to pop up repeatedly and inside there is a note that says "the problem of perception". Bishop George Berkeley objects that you cannot exclude one or the other, you can not only experience secondary qualities without primary included, and vice versa, so then Berkeley concludes that primary qualities are not real either, they are just what consciousness perceives. Berkeley even goes so far as to say that there is no matter, there are only perceptions. There are no objects just perceivers of objects. Oops. In Berkeley's world we seem to float around inside a huge tank of thoughts. Berkeley also believed in God, that is, he incorporated mysticism into his system of thought. I don't know what you say about that, but I'm guessing you would say, "that raises a lot of questions, mate".  

5. 

  After many months of nothingness and not thinking about this subject I happen to bump into Hannah Arendt - the great distinction maker -  and she differentiated between basically four kinds of truths: mathematical, scientific, philosophical and factual truths. A key claim is that truth is more or less durable depending on what kind of truth we are talking about: mathematical truth is, for example, being very durable (!), and factual truths are more vulnerable (in fact, Arendt claims that "Facts are fragile").  Arendt specifically made me pay attention to factual truths, truths that are concerned with human events, things that happen in the world, occurances. (Historical) "facts once lost or destroyed cannot be recovered" whereas mathematical truths are more or less always there, just waiting, so to speak, to be discovered. 

   She stops and points to the castles and the government buildings in the distance, where the kings and queens and the prime ministers are residing. "Remember, facts can be inconvenient to those in political power, and those in power often have a desire to conceal or destroy certain facts". This is dangerous terrain, many truth-seekers have had to pay dearly, sometimes with their lives. Hannah Arendt goes on to tell me that the real danger to facts aren't beliefs but rather organized lying, a coordinated and concerted effort to undermine the factual character of human events. Facts are like a check on the operations of power - steel bathing, invigorating and sometimes embarrassing and at times even destructive - but certain kinds of political power wants to push factuality out of existence.  
    Constant lying undermines the factual character of reality (and then we get 'Fake news'!). The goal of organized lying is to make the facts sound like opinions, and vice versa. It opens up a space for a slippery slope of relativism and then there is no factual account of reality, "nah, that is not a fact that's just like your opinion, man.". Reality becomes highly malleable and that plays into the hands of those politicians with a fascistic or otherwise despotic tendency: they want to shape the world, and the news, into whatever they want it to be. This is scary stuff because those kinds of governments treat facts as enemies and they can rewrite history and they become free to categorize specific groups of people - often minorities - as threats, and they do so without any shred of evidence.

   Hannah Arendt lights another cigarette and concludes "And therefore, we have to speak up for the facts!".   

 

 

6.

   

    When I am about to pay for my beer at the "Narrow mind" roadhouse I discover that my wallet is missing and on top of that I also get into an argument with the bartender. He accuse me of being a relativist. I answer him that I think I am a fallibilist but that assumption is of course open to challenge, revision and even dismissal.

    -I have a belief about my belief that it might be wrong  

  - that sounds like epistemological skepticism and them nutjobs claiming that we can’t access any ‘genuine’ knowledge

A stately guy at the bar who is sifting through his purse for some lost item begins to speak to us. Sermon-like. Eyeballs focused as if piercing through the purse.  
    - .. I say there is a difference between knowing things as they are, on the one hand, and claiming absolute certainty of knowing in any special case, on the other. We as a community of inquirers, at this fine establishment, can function more effectively if we regard inquiry as a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy... though(t) not all at once. That way we may encounter the real… you know that which sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me…. even though the notion of reality involves the notion of a community… 
   The barman looks annoyed and a bit flabbergasted
   - what do you mean, self-correcting?
   - To say that inquiry is self-correcting is to say that a critical community of inquirers has the intellectual resources for self-correction…
Mister Purse finally picks up a worn-out coin from his purse. Holds it up for scrutiny. Dusting it off with a puff, and continues
  - Maybe that wanderer isn’t a relativist after all, maybe he’s just a pragmatist… simply critical of the traditional quest for absolute certainty and of what Dewey called “the spectator theory of knowledge”… and more aiming for what is useful and practical in the community in which we are enmeshed... aiming for know-how and knowing-that s
   -  actually sir… I was just trying to pay for my beer
   I say, interruptingly. 
Mr Purse puts the coin on the bar counter and says
   -  Well, here you are then. It's on me
The barman examines the coin and then proclaims:  
   - your currency is of no use here !    

    

                                                                          * 

7. 

   

     I had no map, it disappeared with my wallet. I agreed on a future payment plan for the beer I bought at the Narrow Mind roadhouse and then I kept on walking. Like I always do. A comment from mr Purse kept echoing in my mind: "To make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious". I didn't know what to make of it. 
      The landscape looked barren and desolate. Eventually, after long time units of walking, I came to the edge of a forest. There was a man sitting at a table. He wiggled and twisted a bottle in all sorts of ways. 

I asked him what he was doing and he replied flatly that he was trying to help the fly out of the bottle.

I said okay. I asked the man with the bottle if he knew anything about the dark forest in front of us. 
"it's the forest of pluralistic empiricism", said the man whose name was James Something. He continued:
- it is a turbid, muddled, gothic, sort of affair, without a sweeping outline, and with little pictorial nobility...  
     James Something became more enthusiastic and told me that he actually had been involved in the planting of the forest back in the day, many years ago, before it took on "a life of its own". James claimed that the forest was his response to dogmatic monism. I was puzzled. He talked with more fervor now:
- philosophers often have a deep impulse, a desire that wants something more orderly, more clean-cut and more systematic... but I thought, what the heck, I might try to cure philosophers of the craving for definitive order...and this forest is what grew out of it 
- ...and did you succeed ? 
He smiled, almost mysteriously. 
-  well, hard to tell, I might have succeeded in making some people angry but that's not the point... my view is that there is an irreducible plurality of visions out there... and we finite incomplete human beings can never reach a "God's eye" point of view...and besides that there's no room in monism for genuine freedom, chance, love and poetry..bu   
     Then my field of vision turned pitch black and I passed out and I was unconscious for God knows how long. 

                                                                           *

8.

     It turned out that I had been knocked unconscious by the objectivists' security service- OBS. The objectivists must have annexed the land where James Something and I were walking and talking. After waking up I was taken to a claustrophobic courtroom and the judge pointed out in his closing statement that "either there is a fixed point, a foundation for our knowledge, either there is or there isn't and if there isn't, then we cannot avoid the madness of relativism and the intellectual and moral chaos that follows. And you, as a proponent of this unscientific mess, has to be kept restrained and hidden from the public". In accordance with the laws of the objectivists, I was convicted of "illegal relativism" and my punishment was to stay one year at Hostel Nowhere. 
     To pass the time at Hostel Nowhere I watched endless reruns of the TV-show "The X-files". Richard Rorty was often there on the couch in the poorly lit TV-room. He would comment on things happening on the screen but sometimes the commentary was tangential or about the charge of relativism: 
   - the charge of relativism is insignificant... relativism is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. So why are we here ? 
"The truth is out there" I said jokingly, nodding to the TV-screen.  

   - truth cannot be out there - cannot exist independently of the human mind - because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot... 
There was a bit of awkward silence and then an unnamed third person responded dryly and parrot-like
   -  Ricky don't loose that number....  
      I had to step outside. Breathe some air on the prison yard. Blow off some steam. The prison guards had warned me about Rorty and said that he was the worst relativist of them all, and with "an engine of a brain".                         
     During the break in the prison yard an angel of unidentifiable sex approached me and told me :" there is a way out....mr Purse's third way out". I was stunned and injected with hope. I didn't want to see any more x-files episodes, ever. 
   - there's a secret tunnel that avoids the extremes of intuitionism (the myth of the Given) and that of idealism (coherentism) ...it's a passage beyond the dichotomy of objectivism and relativism. 
   - I don't believe you, it seems too good to be true 
    The angel with the unidentifiable sex picked up a note from a pocket, unfolded the piece of paper and handed it to me. "Look". I immediately recognized mr Purse's handwriting. The note read: 
"Experience is that determination of belief and cognition generally which the course of life has forced upon man. One may lie about it, but one cannot escape the fact that some things are forced upon his cognition. There's an element of brute force existing whether you opine it exists or not". 
    - yes, I recognize the brute force alright, the objectivists brought me here using brute force... 
"I think" said the angel of unidentifiable sex, pausing to organize the thoughts: 
   - that what mr Purse is driving at is that the world does constrain our knowledge but this constraint is mediated through our perception and experiential judgments... we may be constrained to believe something but its epistemic authority may be challenged by further and prolonged inquiry
    - That's a lot to take in, all at once. I said.
The face of the angel looked mild and professionally concerned. I wondered to myself if the angel was sent here by some opulent administrative deity. 
   - Yes, I know, but using these coordinates that are implicit and inherent in this document you should be able to find a way out of here... but ....there is a catch 
   - a catch ? 
   - yes, you have to take Richard Rorty with you through the tunnel. That's the deal. 
     One cold morning, after months of substantial preparation, Richard Rorty and I tried to sneak out of Hostel Nowhere using Mr Purse's secret tunnel. It was hard work waking Rorty up. He was sleeping in the bunk across the room and he was talking in his sleep: 
 -  frameworks....zzz....vocabularies...paradigms....zzzz...contingency... irony..zzz....and solidarity

                                                                  

                                                                          * 
                                                                               
9.  

   

     Tense and nervous, we passed through Mr Purse's tunnel. As we approached its end, the tunnel began to slope steeply downwards and we lost our footing and slid down into a river where we floated downstream clinging to a tree trunk. Unexpectedly, Rorty found a piece of rope floating in the water and we later managed to tie several tree trunks together and assembled the beginnings of a raft. Rorty kept shouting "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use!". We picked up floating spruce twigs, various sticks, cloth rags and shabby plastic paraphernalia and using these objects we were able to construct a rudimentary shelter on the raft. 
     We came to a delta where we frantically tried to paddle towards the beach that seemed inhabited but the current was too strong and we were slowly transported out to sea.  
    There were a few days of fog, gliding with the whims of the winds and the currents, eating seaweed and catching fish with hooks carved out of bright yellow plastic boxes and then the weather cleared only to transform into a storm. Our vessel was a plaything of destiny as the waves got bigger and bigger and the wind grew strong and we clung convulsively to the raft just hoping we would survive. When the wind calmed down, after a time period that felt like an eternity, and it became a new warm day with high blue skies, we lay knocked out on deck among the rags from the torn windbreak. Rorty was sweating profusely and talking in his sleep with some inner ghost: "nominalism ...and reductionism ... forms of a single error... the error goes back you see .... to the protean metaphysical urge... to transcend language".  

    I fell asleep and woke up much later when the raft rubbed against something. It was the beach of a tropical island. Rorty looked up from the raft and eyed the island towering in front of us. He mumbled something from the side of his mouth " the general form of a philosophical question is: I am lost, I can't find the way". 

     The island seemed lush and covered with tropical forest and a couple of foggy mountains but we could not get an overview of the whole enclave. We pulled up the raft on the beach and sat for a while looking out over the vast sea. The loud birdsong from the forest behind us was cheering us on. Wow, what a trip,  but I thought also that we should not stop at wonder, we should seek a way out and it was likely that this wasn't our way out, maybe we were only in a transitional phase from one labyrinth to another. Had we, like the fly in the fly-bottle, managed to get out of one bottle only to then get stuck in a new one? I wondered what kind of island we were on.
    Up at the edge of the forest there was a tree where someone had etched "to Live in one category and to Think in another". With flashing clarity it occurred to med that this was the rebellious mark of Fondane!... and the critique hurled at speculative philosophy from the standpoint of authentic existential thought. A dizzying feeling of deja vu came and went and thoughts from different angles puzzled me: was all this pre-programmed and determined beforehand by an omniscient blogger? had Rorty lured me here for some opaque reason? but then again he could not be accused of being an existentialist. I didn't know what to make of it.  
   I hesitantly showed the existentialist etching to Rorty and he replied, after thinking for a while, that this is probably, or has been, the island of idealism and Benjamin Fondane, the metaphysical anarchist, is, or has been, engaged in guerrilla warfare in the forest, often directing sharp attacks at Hegel, the question is whether if he's still around and whether this conflict is ongoing at the moment, we might be at the end of History. 
    After more searching and rummaging at the edge of the forest we found a wooden box and inside it there were some notes and an old boat ticket to Argentina. On one of the notes it said "for Kierkegaard, the absurd is not beneath but is rather beyond Reason". I don't know if this is so useful for us right now, said Rorty, I think we first must find some food. 

                                                                           * 

10.      

   

     A bumpy path meandered here and there under the green leaves of the jungle. So many trees, shrubs, and flowers that grew next to, or on top of, each other or that had been twisted around and mixed together in strange braids or that had nestled in some obscure nook. It looked ingeniously beautiful but at the same time I knew that the competition here was murderous. 
   I found more Fondane inscriptions carved into the trees. I didn't bother to tell Rorty about my findings because I didn't know if he was secretly a Hegelian or not, but I doubted, on the other hand, that Rorty was being that serious. On one tree I read:" Hegel neglects the rights of the existent: the finite, the dismembered, the wounded exists, no doubt, but they have no say in the matter". What matter? 
   The organic hodgepodge of the jungle made me think for a while of History as jungle-composed of misunderstandings, coverings-over, palimpsests: ideas, living words, reveal their viability by the unforeseeable deviations they give rise to. 
    Rorty was walking ahead of me, I saw him trudging forward on the partially overgrown path and I remembered something James Something had said that "philosophers are after all like poets, they are pathfinders who blaze new trails in the forest. They suggest a few formulas, a few technical conceptions, a few verbal pointers - which at least define the initial directions of the trail". But this trail that we walked on was not new and one could assume that at least some Hegelians, and also Fondane and his crew, had walked here before us.
    We crossed small streams where the sunlight sparkled in the water and we trekked past minimal clearings and small rock formations and at one place we saw a flickering blue hologram. It depicted Birger Sjöberg trapped in a wistful loop : 


  "Sjunga. Kvittrar du för positioner
    i en ärans svett 
    det blir dött rop i dina toner
    och intet mer har skett" 

 

   

For the same (unknown) reason that the Swedish word 'Lagom' does not have a satisfactory equivalent in the English dictionary, I judged it pointless to try to translate the paragraph into english. 
- what's he saying? said Rorty, chewing a banana. 
- it's of no use for us at this moment. But it is from his later and more difficult work I think. His earlier stuff was more accessible, when he still had high hopes of getting the girl.  
    Accompanied by chattering birdsong, we struggled through the damp and dense vegetation and finally we came to a more open place where a couple of straw huts were placed along a watercourse. No smoke came from the fireplace and there were no human beings in sight. The site looked abandoned.

          
   
                                                                            *
    

    
11.

       Although it was risky, even though we risked being caught by hostile creatures returning to the village after sunset, we decided to spend the night there in one of the huts. Intuition and inference, no matter how altered, had led us to conclude that this was a safe bet. 

     I slept a restless sleep and dreamed I was having a nightly conversation with James in his log cabin high up in a fir tree somewhere in the northern forest of pluralistic empiricism. Fifty meters away or so, in a spruce below a large yellow moon, there sat an ominous and spying owl that made me unable to relax and that fueled my paranoia. The owl's pair of eyes and the moon formed a dimly lit triad in the deep blue of the night. James seemed unconcerned and jovial, talking about Hegel: "he was a naively observant man who plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression of what happens.... the only thing that is certain though is that whatever you may say of Hegel's procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it..". He paused and I could not stop thinking about the owl. Its glowing eyes burned in me somehow. Suddenly it set out on a sweeping flight in the direction towards us and I felt the fear grip my heart and throat, I was sure I was about to die, that I would be swallowed whole by the category of negation. But I woke up. And I had someone else's words on my lips: 

          "In thinking I am free 
         because I am in no other 
       the conceptual is unbounded

        there is nothing outside it"  

    Had Hegel infiltrated me through the dream? Was such an impact in fact inevitable here on "his" island? Could Fondane come to the rescue? Or was he out of the picture long ago? 
    I imagined Hegel thinking that the "conceptual realm is unbounded and (that) does not cut us off from reality, on the contrary, it is precisely because of this unboundedness that we can achieve knowledge and access to a reality that is independent of us".  
    I felt uneasy and I had to get up and go outside and trudge about in the village for a while. Borrowing Rorty's handy little flashlight I stepped out into the darkness where the crickets chirped and trilled a monotonous timeless rhyme, a soundtrack to a joke I will never understand. 
    Behind one of the huts stood some kind of storage shed and behind this, in the bushes, half sunk in the ground, I saw a couple of Kantian gas tanks where "rationality operates freely in its own sphere". One might wonder if this was waste material from previous settlements, when Kant ruled, some time before the Hegelians took over the island - if they had done so at all, this was not crystal clear. Whether the Hegelians had any use of the gas tanks was also beyond my comprehension, but it was reasonable to assume that the Hegelians probably thought that Kant had left them in a shitty seat when he introduced a categorical dichotomy between the realm of nature and the realm of freedom.
   In the storage shed were some shovels, buckles and skewers as well as a brown briefcase that seemed to want to remain closed. I suspected that Hegel advocated a kind of organic relationship between the subject and the object, intelligence and the world and that he was critical of dualisms and the seesaw of fixed dichotomies: mind versus body, nature versus experience and so on (A voracious raccoon I had seen on TV squeezed into my mind and said: "to be a subject is to be an object that is inaccessible to itself"). 
   So, was Hegel's island really the final and intended destination for Mr Purse's tunnel? At the same time, however, it seemed to me as if randomness itself had brought us here.
   Mr Purse was similar to Hegel in that he seemed to think that we are not cut off from the reality we seek to know, we can achieve knowledge of reality, but we cannot reach absolute certainty either. I remembered a phone call I made from Hostel Nowhere to Cheryl Misak, Mr Purse's confidant, where we talked about truth and about the coordinates that would show us the way to the tunnel, and Misak had reformulated something and said that " a true belief is one that would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could on the matter...". 
   I felt trapped and entangled in too many threads. There were so many thinkers' versions of the concept of truth and I had so little time. Maybe I should abandon the "truth" and instead try to investigate "reality". 
  Without noticing it, I had reached the edge of the village where the very dark jungle took over. The crickets grinded on and some cackling bird inside the foliage insisted on some specific and unknown message. Rorty's flashlight was offering a brittle cone of light in the darkness. 
   I went back to the hut. Rorty was awake and a little bothered because I took his flashlight without asking, "we should develop a social practice and some rules over the use of the flashlight," he said. I agreed with him. 

  

 
                                                                           *

12. 


    The next day, which was foggy and raw, we continued to explore the village and in one of the huts we found some necessities and useful things: a sack of grain, a bag of rice, matches, kitchen utensils, cloth bags with nuts and spices and a pair of night vision goggles and also some kind of electronic device, we guessed that it was an old Hegel detector: the text under the lights and buttons were in german; "aufhebung" , "Geist" and so on and so on. 
   As we walked around between the huts and the nooks and crannies, I felt incredulity towards Rorty's narrative, and why did this strike me only now: where had Rorty gotten hold of the flashlight and how could it have survived the tumultuous journey across the sea? and why was it not used on the raft, why had it only begun to be used now, here on Hegel's island? No, Rorty withheld something, there were strange gaps in the story. 
    We had lunch - rice and mashed avocados - took a siesta and then we met up again at the fireplace that served as the village square and meeting place and from there we continued our search. 
    One centrally located hut had two dingy doors, on one door it said "W1" and on the other "W2". Inside the W1 door was a room full of slides symmetrically hung with clothespins on sewing threads. The place testified to an obsession with precision. I was thinking of my friend with asperger's. The pictures themselves were quite mundane and straightforward: plants, fruits, tools, animals and people who made different grimaces. Altogether, the lines with slides formed a word: "image". The W2 room was furnished as the wheelhouse of a locomotive full of handles that at first glance looked more or less the same but one handle was a crank that could be moved continuously, another was the handle of a switch with two positions, a third, which was impact sensitive, went to a brake and a fourth went to a pump and so on. I went out on the lawn and told Rorty about my findings. He was peeling an orange-like fruit. The sun broke through the clouds and shone on Rorty's face, it was difficult to determine if he was smiling or squinting.

 - What you can not talk about, you must refrain from talking about, said Rorty and took a slice of orange-like fruit. 
   A kind of sabotaging boredom and desolation came over me. It was as if I felt the presence of a spirit being, immensely intelligent but non-empathetic and also the worst nitpicking fusspot imaginable.
   The village seemed to me poor and barren, the lack of electricity and books certainly contributed to my judgement. I had a bout of homesickness and a feeling that my whole life was the fruit of a big slip and that "matter itself was the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness". 
   I longed for a purpose, an aim and a meaning, but I knew that those yearnings were also dangerous, because now in my fragile state I could easily fall into some ideological trap. In that way, it was good that Rorty was with me, he was at least democrat and humanist and even though he was according to some the worst relativist he would at least be open to dialogue, conversation, conference and discussion. He agreed with Dewey that "the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute". I hoped that our life in the village, no matter how weird, would be democratic. 
    

  

                                                                              * 
    

13. 

    The jungle path was now sloping downward and was crossed by moss-covered bearded vines and lianas, and further ahead large parasol-like leaves arched over the trail and spear-shaped rays of sunlight shone down through the gaps in the foliage high above us, but the general theme of green murkiness seemed to persist. A grumpy and scientifically minded donkey, Alper Kropp, who we found tied to a pole inside the village, carried our baggage and our necessities on his back. Alper was reticent, but from time to time he could angrily exclaim "pseudo-scientific!".    
    -  I thought you noticed it but I could not say anything, said Rorty and spooned out the inside of a kiwi fruit. He continued: 
   -  I found surveillance cameras and hidden microphones everywhere in the village, that was why I wanted us to get away from the village and that was the reason I communicated so enigmatically at lunch. Another thing I did not tell you was that the village was most likely a former dispatch center for linguistic philosophers. I saw traces of Carnap, Sellars, Davidson, Austin, Bergmann and Quine and Wittgenstein...
    -  where did they go? have they been chased away by Hegelians or even become converts? 
   - They most likely split up due to internal disagreements, their philosophy worked on philosophical problems by trying to reform the language or by understanding more about the language we use. In Bergmann's way, you can describe it as if linguistic philosophers talk about the world by means of talking about a suitable language, and then they disagree on what constitutes 'a language' and on what makes it suitable.  
    -  every blockhead, from Bacon to Fritz M, has criticized language!... and being interested in language is like polishing glasses, snorted Alper

    Bewildered, distracted, I tapped on the Hegel-detector. It didn't seem to respond. I recalled a picture from the W1-room which depicted a little boy and an elderly man who both sat down on a prayer rug and who seemed to be involved in a praying activity. For the boy, the prayer was probably only the pronouncing of words, mechanical almost, but for the older man, the prayer had been loaded with a lifetime of conditions, experiences, hopes and crises. Or so I thought.  
   All around me it was crowded with species, flora and fauna, exhibiting myriads of movements, topologies and sounds and smells, the jungle was a full-scribbled green flipchart of soil, metamorphosis and chlorophyll in a blissful mixture. Nevertheless, for the time being I had the same feeling as when I surfed through the thousands of job advertisements on the employment service's website: there is nothing for me here, I am alone in the world.
   I heard Alper somewhere higher up on the trail, he was ranting that "a theory must be able to be falsified ... nothing can be fully proven....however something can be fully disproved .... and we must become better at distinguishing science from non-science". Rorty sounded sleepy and somewhat indifferent when he replied: 
   - I think it is more important to distinguish between hidden and open meaninglessness ...

   After a while of walking, the trail flattened out a bit and the vegetation changed and became more digital and text-based at the same time as the correspondence between the active entities increased, and so did its speed. It all looked like a big and intricate pinball game where transmitters wrote short text messages to which other users responded by sending red little hearts and "refeets" and by writing new text messages and this activity in some way strengthened the transmitters, especially when users also started to 'follow' them. Everyone can be a transmitter and everyone can follow suit. It was communication that became a public performance and some text messages became "viral" - got a lot of red little hearts and "refeets" - and every moral and emotional word used in a transmission increased its virality by twenty percent (Alper could quickly figure that out). The users used moral talk to increase their prestige and often when a user reacted maliciously to a text message, nuance and truth were the first casualties, so it seemed to me. It rapidly developed into a competition where users wanted to gain the audience's approval and where the context collapsed and the transmitter's original intention was ignored. We hurried through the undergrowth so as not to get involved in any cultural war or nasty smear campaigns, but it was relatively easy to avoid because we did not seem to have any followers. 
   The lizards scampered off, in quick succession, as we struggled up a bushy slope. Rorty and I pushed Alper up the path, as kindly as we could, and soon we arrived at a small plateau where we stood for a while and looked out over the lush landscape. 

        

                                                                           *


14. 


   "A journey is a suite of helpless disappearances," said the poet, but sometimes things are discovered and we had made a macabre find on our side: laying in front of us in the tall grass, below a huge oak, just before the hill began to slope down again towards the jungle, there was a skeleton, dressed in an army jacket and baggy jeans. Next to the skeleton was a leathery shoulder bag. After an initial shock, I searched the bag and found cigarettes, a compass, antique protein supplements, a pen and a minimal moss-green notepad. In the inside pocket of the jacket we found an Identification Card: "Clarice Vingbygge". It was hard to imagine the woman in the photo ending up as a skeleton. I skimmed through the notepad and found lots of Fondane quotes and other related bits:  "Hegels idea was that History is not made for man, but just the opposite: man was made for History" , " the search for the possible beyond all logical possibility". 
   - Could she have been the one walking around writing all those Fondane snippets on the trees? I wondered. 
   - the traces seem appalling, muttered Alper. 
On the huge oak tree I found another Fondane quote, a longer passage that seemed to me more fateful and final than the previous fragments:

                "Side with Reason OR Existence.....

     The whole human being cries out for wild freedom 

       freedom from the constraint of rational necessity 
                        the laws of reason" 
   
    Even though we were amazed and a little paralyzed by the situation, we still decided to give Clarice some kind of funeral. We dug a pit, lowered the body and the belongings, covered it with soil, and then laid a flower sheaf on top. No one seemed to want to say anything but in the end Rorty said something about chatter that falls silent before the seriousness of history.
   When we got down into the crooked and winding jungle and my mood felt lighter, we began to speculate about the fate of Clarice. Had she been a fiction writer who became too didactic and preachy while  zealously trying to incorporate a comprehensive picture of Hegel's philosophy into her work, and had she then lost her mind in the process? Or had she been a regular Hegelian who was converted by Fondane and later joined his guerrilla troops or had Clarice been bitten by a poisonous snake while she was on a butterfly safari along these flowery slopes. Was she, in any case, consumed by Hegel's absolute idea, the idea that thinks (for) itself? 
   Only the whole is true, everything partial can only be partially true according to Hegel: no fragment of the whole has any viable reality or meaning in itself. And I could not see the whole, just shattered shards here and there, at the same time I had a vague suspicion that Hegel's Absolute controlled us from the depths, pulled the strings behind the scenes, it was either Hegel or the omniscient blogger or some unknown third alternative. 

    -  You shouldn't worry too much about Hegel, after all he thought that history had reached its final stage with the Prussian state in the 19th century ... he was a bit off on that one ... said Rorty and slowly swept away one large palm leaf. 
   Alper trotted slow yet resolutely on the path. The hanging kitchen utensils clicked and clanked against each other and on his durable donkey body, creating a crestfallen unsynchronized percussion symphony. He muttered sourly, almost to himself: 
    - such pride and arrogance .... to believe one being able to establish laws for historical development ... to believe one being able to create a fully-fledged system ... utopian principles that must not be criticized .... ridiculous pseudoscience!... 
   Whatever Clarice intended to accomplish with her life and work, we could not know what it was about and we had buried the notebook and the other clues with her body a few feets into the ground, we thought it was a good gesture. If she was Hegelian or Fondanian ultimately did not matter, she deserved a dignified treatment in any case.
   We could not reach the truth about Clarice, and me, Rorty and Alper all had different temperaments, intuitions and inclinations, and these would lie beneath and influence and motivate many of our disputes about truth, justification, realism, and objectivity. The jungle was also a temperament one could say, and what was allowed to grow here and what remained suppressed?

                                                                           *

15.


     Small streams had formed over the path due to the heavy rainfall and we tried to zigzag and jump over runnels and puddles. On Alper's body we had set up an umbrella device made of sticks and stiff palm leaves. He was unenthusiastic and complained about the poor working conditions. This was 'wetexperience'.
   Out there in the jungle, there was a potential myriad of different nervous systems existing and consequently, in and out of these entities, a plethora of varied and exotic experiences would blossom and I was wondering as we walked through the mud, what kind of beings are watching us right now?. Speaking of experience, I knew from previous conversation that Rorty dismissed the very word 'experience', "we're better off dropping any reference to that middleman" he commented and he thought it was too vague and confusing and that it had a whole jungle of different definitions and meanings to different people, yes it was to Rorty as vague as 'truth' and 'language'. In any case, there was in my perception of 'experience' a central element of surprise that was its crucial point: the shock of surprise - which was related to Mr Purse's 'bruteness' -  produced a new cognitive scheme but it was also the case that 'experience' was an experience of negation: something was no longer as we assumed it would be. But my theory had some kind of fly in the ointment I couldn't pinpoint and I knew it would be difficult to convince the objectivists of this theory, I could not hammer it home with hard facts, the construction was a kind of speculative balloon - and I suspected also that at bottom of 'experience', there twinkled Hegel's idea of contradiction as the moving principle of the world.
    There is always an otherness, both in myself and vis-à-vis the world, and the shock of experience breaks through, is exposing 'the new', through different senses and mediated by conceptual clashes, the shock is where the 'transaction' takes place: it is also the 'transaction ', this is the one that makes us enter into a relationship with the world and the otherness within ourselves. I vented this to Rorty and we got into another discussion where he claimed that this talk about 'transactions' sounded like the metaphysical side of Dewey:

 - He wanted phrases like "transaction with the environment" and "adaptions to conditions" to be simultaneously naturalistic and transcendental... So he blew up "transaction" and "situation" until they sounded as mysterious as "prime matter" or "thing-in-itself". 
   Splashing through the jungle's gurgling sink, we later stopped by a large cobweb. Water droplets lingered on the threads and the occasional animal and whatnot had become irreversibly entangled in the network: a bee resembling a red harring, miniature scapegoats, ants, leaves, incommensurable vocabularies and the shredded remains of an iridescent beetle. 
    'Language' was absent in my theory of experience and I had also neglected the experience of being a body. There was Alper Kropp for example, only he, and other similar donkeys, could describe this particular "donkeyness" from the inside and with the unique sensations and signifiers it entailed (if they as such existed), but then again it seemed to me as if Alper didn't want to be a donkey at all, he didn't want to be "donkeyfied" and alienated. In fact I think that Alper only wanted to be an autonomous being and not associated with any particular kind of animal, but on the other hand it was really hard, at least for me, to ignore his bitter-pilled mule-like presence. I guess Alper, if he had the resources, would engage himself in some kind of corrective surgery, so that he could mold himself into something that was corresponding with his inner being or with an image thereof. 
   I got a sting of bad conscience, we had not been nice to Alper, we took advantage of his labor and gave him only edible plants and our companionship in return. I thought then and there that the only reasonable thing to do was to set him free. 
   It was difficult to see where the cobweb began and where it ended and the spider, the manager of the building, was absent, but you could feel that it was lurking somewhere nearby and that it was watching us from the shadows, right at that moment. Eerily, something sprung to my mind like a whisper through smoke: " there are more things in experience, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"...    

 
     
                                                                           *  

    

16. 


   At night I woke up under the windshield, a distant rumbling sound rolled across the starry sky. I looked up between the treetops and saw an airplane that seemed to be traveling downwards towards the island in an easterly direction. An airstrip on the island would indicate that there was still some form of human activity here, or even civilization. I felt hopeful and permeated by a restless longing for food, bathrooms, showers, decent lighting and to be allowed to sit in a cafe with an espresso while scrolling through the social media feed on my cellphone.
   I was too excited, I could not fall asleep again and my brain was like a jukebox that played pictures; chords and melodies of scenarios; lining up little tunes of details, sequences, fragments, impressions...
; the quail that flew into an overly polished window in the office building; broken discarded umbrellas thrown next to the bus stop; a cross spider that gently sinks into our nocturnal camp on the vehicle of a smooth thread; the quiet dusty life of a video game controller between game sessions; a secret masturbation moment in a secluded toilet somewhere in the company's huge building; crispy dog candy in the dog yard; a turquoise scent of detergent in the old stairwell; foster parent maturely looks through letters from the tax office and scratches his bald scalp; the mercury-like in her laughter that escaped linguistic precision. And so on. Scatterbrain. I didn't know what to make of it. 
   Some people have an enormous sense of detail, at the expense of the whole and the synthesis. For Hegel, it seemed almost like the opposite, it was as if Hegel claimed that a piece of a puzzle had no meaning or significance until the whole puzzle had been put together. The empiricist, on the other hand, acknowledges that each piece has its own significance, which otherwise might have led to one never wanting to start solving the puzzle at all. It was probably as pipe-smoking Sir Bertrand Russell had said: that rationalism relates to empiricism as a puzzle of inseparable pieces does to (with?) an isolated piece. But the analogy seemed to me somewhat slender and two-dimensional: because to this I wanted to add a  third dimension: what is the factual usefulness and social practice we can extract from this puzzle?
   My friend had a sharp logical intellect but still could not see the "ripples in the water" socially: he was oblivious to the effect his blunt and often times rude comments had on people he communicated with, it seemed as if he could not create mental representations and ideas of the other's state of mind in his brain. His mom used to take out paper and pencil and draw and explain the process in a few picture frames, as factually as she could: "When you say or do X to me, I feel Y, I would like you to say Z instead ...". He had to be supported in putting the relational and social puzzles together, so to speak, but at the same time he was brilliant at solving physical wooden puzzles and complex mathematical problems. 
  There was something dubious here in these mindsets, and I thought of unscrupulous people in society who somehow saw people as means in their scheming puzzles, in their nets for personal gain. They saw people as means, not as ends in themselves. I thought again of what Fondane had wrote: "Hegel's idea was that History is not made for man; but just the opposite; man is made for History". Hegel's idea of History is like the unscrupulous, it sees man as a mean and not as end in himself.  
   The plane had passed by, the rumbling roar died out. The glistening night sky was a mute witness. I heard the chirping scissor music of the crickets, each member of the ensemble produced his or her sound by rubbing two textured wings together. In my mind I heard Fondane's voice again: the howl of existentialism, a voice crying in the wilderness, a protest against the "system" and his question remained unanswered like a nocturnal phone call that faded out into the darkness: 
   "should we ask what knowledge thinks about the existent or what the existent thinks about knowledge?"

   I glanced at the other two persons in the caravan, they seemed to be sleeping heavily. Rorty talked in his sleep: " the arts and the sciences....unforced flowers of life... the charges of relativism and irrationalism against Dewey ..... mindless defensive reflexes from the tradition he critized..". I borrowed Rorty's flashlight and got up, eager to search further, because something was out of focus. It seemed to me that Fondane, his spirit, had led us to a philosophical crossroads, on one street came the philosophy of knowledge and on the crossing street there came the philosophy of existence, and it seemed to me that they had long ago lost touch with each other, like two old friends who both had become too greedy in their respective directions, "a huge gulf separates the two". 
   That dead end feeling came over me. The burst of inspiration had died as quickly as it started. Had Hegel set up all these lines of thought in advance and led us here to a blind alley, without us being able to reach the synthesis? I suddenly remembered the voracious Raccoon I saw on TV who had said that Hegel never even used the word synthesis, it was a retrospective construction by his followers and interpreters, it was as if Jesus never came up with the words "church", "catholic" or "protestant".
   A spider ran jerkily over the sticks. The wind rocked the tall treetops, ever so gently. Rorty continued to mumble in his sleep: "this essay is one more attempt at reformulating my views in a form that may be a bit less vulnerable to Bernstein's objections..."

   It seemed to me as if Hegel was not interested in reestablishing symmetry, balance or harmony or anything like that, no, the goal was rather to recognize in one pole (knowledge) the symtom of the failure of the other (existence): something neglected in our selves, in our tradition, reappear, embodied, as an antagonistic force. And the first step forward is to make a wrong choice, and then the wrong choice opens up a space for the good choice. I saw his paradox moving: an act of error is an act that leads us right. 

                                                                           

         

                                                                           *


17.


   The trail meandered through a mosaic field of vines and epiphytes and beautiful orchids that flaunted along softly moss-covered tree trunks. In curlicue-shaped bushes and trees sat green, red, yellow and blue ancient birds, cackling briskly while feasting on nuts and all kinds of seeds and leaves. A red ragged parrot that seemed to have a particularly long working memory repeatedly proclaimed: "my wandering uterus is constantly giving birth to inappropriate metaphors". 
   In the end, our little party traveled through an arch lined with climbing shrubs and foliage and we arrived at a seaside house complex with a terrace. Beyond the house a small sandy bay unfolded. The house seemed deserted. The truck that stood a bit up on the dirt road had punctures and dented doors. In the grass lay the remains of the analytical-synthetic dichotomy, probably mortally wounded by arrows shot by Quine in 1951 but its relative, the fact-value dichotomy, was still very much alive, no one had yet been able to close that gap but Hilary Putnam had made a serious attempt on one of his expeditions: he would scandalously assert that "value and normativity permeate all of experience.."

    Along the shed were packing boxes and oak barrels and along the wall on shelves behind locked glass doors were a number of rum bottles: pineapple rum, amber-colored vanilla rum, honey yellow rum and transparent white cane rum. After more snooping, we concluded that we were dealing with an abandoned rum distillery that also had made fruit juice. The name of the place seemed to be "Trioca rum haven". Maybe this was the synthesis. 

    Rorty and I slipped in through an unlocked window in the back and ended up in what looked like a lab. There were stainless steel tanks, copper-colored pipes; plastic buckets; hydrometers and thermometers; burners and scales and pipettes and various kitchen-like utensils. A pair of white lab coats and goggles hung on hooks by the door. It looked neat and tidy. From that room we entered a small office with a mahogany-colored desk and with a panoramic window that overlooked the desolate bay where seagulls floated lazily in the air.
   On the desk among binders and paper was a photo depicting a smiling curly woman who was more pale than she was blonde. Beyond the smile I saw a fragility, a way of distancing and withdrawing from the world when the pressure was too much or too intimate. She had to have everbody and everything at a correct distance and it was laborious work as the margins of error seemed tight. I suspected also recurrent mood swings or a seasonal grief without objects, I read a lot in her face. 
    The electricity was off but we found a kind of diesel generator and a barrel of fuel in the garage. One floor down, in a storage room that was also a laundry room, we found to our delight rice, canned food, soap, candles and matches and a box of "Trioca rum haven" slippers. In the distillery's small shop there were lots of towels, t-shirts and shorts designed with the logo against a background of sea and palm trees. 

     In the evening we turned on the electricity and a string of multi-colored light bulbs was lit around the terrace and a cassette player started to jingle itself into action in the kitchen: 
   

      "Galveston, oh Galveston
    I still hear your sea waves crashing
  While I watch the cannons flashing
           I clean my gun
        And dream of Galveston"

  
    The phone line from the office was dead and the old computer on the desk did start up but it got stuck in a reboot mode over and over again. 
    We sat on sun loungers on the terrace and looked out over the sea. Alper lay on a palm logo towel. The cassette player sounded through the kitchen window and intermingled with the sleepy roar of the surf. Rorty drank vanilla rum and I sat with a mug of pineapple rum. We were wordless travelers, and now also burglars. The conversation unfurled under the tapestry of the night. 
-    disturbed, troubled, confused, ambiguous ... full of conflicting tendencies...Dewey meant that it is the situation that has these traits, we are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful. Said Rorty.
Yes, this rum distillery vacation seemed too good to be true, the situation itself seemed too smooth and arranged in advance, like a trap set up by cunning Hegelians, but then again I was prone to bouts of paranoia, my judgment had been distorted before.

    Somewhat semi-drunk, and slippery on the pronounciations, we slided into the subject of democracy and Rorty said that "democracy is conflict and an ability to lose" and I wondered to myself if I had lost that ability, somewhere along the way. I poured a small tub of water for Alper and spiked it as he wished with white cane rum juice. The stars shone between dark fluffy clouds, it got colder and we wrapped ourselves in palm-tattooed towels and drank Trioca rum. It was true, without creative conflict there would be stagnation and complacency. It seemed like anti-synthesis. But what kind of institution could help us foster the spirit of creative conflict and safeguard the ability to lose? 
    I lost concentration and swam away in my mind. I thought of the pale curly woman in the office photo. I imagined her life in the metropolis, hardworking and so busy and distracted that she would never need ,or be able, to think any deeper or outside the habitual pattern. There was work at the women's center plus volunteer work at the Lookout Society Shelter and then training, painting courses and cleaning and renovation at home. But every now and then came the "weakness", as she thought of it, the depression, but then she put in another gear, worked even harder. She thought that - or if it was an unreflected though active Hegelian principle - "if I am more useful and helpful to others then maybe I will eventually feel better myself". She saw an episode of "weakness" as a program one just had to go through, an inhospitable passage to endure while biting the bullet, and she followed, on a friend's advice, the change of mood and its progression by drawing a graph in the calendar every day, even though she thought it was a bit ridiculous. But she was too proud to take psychotropic drugs or to begin talk therapy, pride was perhaps the wrong word: she thought she was unresponsive to such interventions, what was required, she assessed, was to fight and strive further. I wondered if she had the ability to lose. 
     Rorty had gone to bed on a mattress in the office. I sat on the terrace for a while. Alper had fallen asleep on the wooden deck, his big belly pumping slowly up and down, like a soft rhythm that accompanied his tenacious dream of freedom. 
 

                                                                          *

  

18.


     The following night I dreamed that Rorty, Hilary Putnam, me and a fourth unseen person were visiting a restaurant. The dark interior consisted of shrubs, palm leaves and gloomy burgundy curtains and draperies and pink lampshades. The serving staff looked like white-faced clowns wrapped in patterned sarongs and one of them stood by the entrance and insisted that you take off your shoes on the rag rug outside before entering the restaurant. I don't remember much of the conversation, only that Putnam had made me uncomfortable when he said that "there's no neutral conception of rationality to which one can appeal ... when the nature of rationality is itself what is at issue ..". I was afraid that OBS, the objectivists' security police, were wiretapping us and that they would come and arrest us at any moment. But Putnam himself seemed unmoved by such scenarios, he took a sip of Prosecco and said emphatically "we can not make sense of science and rationality without appeal to normative considerations".
Rorty, idiosyncratically aloof, swallowed some green olives and said:
- yepp... we're in the logical space of reasons alright....of giving arguments, of justifying ...of trying to justify what one says. 
    I could not determine if he was ironic or not or if Rorty and Putnam were speaking in code language above my head, if they were engaging in scheming between the lines and making a diabolical plan in which I was unknowingly involved. The unseen fourth person was still blurred and somehow outside the field of attention as well as, at the same time, being crucial to it. I was going to ask Putnam straight out if he knew how Rorty's flashlight had ended up on the island, but I did not dare. The question seemed charged and outrageous. 
   When we later stood at the checkout to pay for the food, Ulrika, an old acquaintance, was next to me in the queue. Awkwardly, we tried to find our way back to the loud joviality that characterized our time at the student dormitory a long time ago. I took out a black wallet and was in the process of paying with the credit card and it struck me just then that I had found the wallet earlier in the evening and I knew, crystal clear, that the wallet in fact belonged to Ulrika. A surprised recognizing expression travelled across her face and she proclaimed: 
- that's mine!
- yes ..ehm..ehm. I found it ....
But some kind of omission in my being contributed to me still completing the transaction and paying for my restaurant visit with Ulrika's credit card. She was standing there flabbergasted next to me and her once happy face now had evident features of disgust. I gave her the wallet and said, somewhat embarrassed, that I intended to pay back what I owed as soon as possible. But it was too late for reconciliation, or too early. Ulrika put her wallet in her purse and turned around and quickly went out to the rag rug and put on her shoes. 
   Then I woke up on the terrace, under layers of towels. The stars were mostly covered by dark clouds. I thought about what kind of punishment that awaited us, now that we had commited burglary and settled here at the distillery and supplied ourselves so generously with the rum products and everything. Would the Hegelians punish us by negating the negation of the right that had been created by us, the criminals? Or did Hegel want to show us, make us realize - through bizarre detours and games - that real morality arises only when the judge and the criminal are one and the same ?

   

 

        
                                                                           *

 

        

19. 


     A few bland days passed. Indolence. Decadence. Drinking Trioca rum. Resting in sun loungers on the terrace. I saw another small single-engine propeller plane pass across the sky in an easterly direction towards what I perceived as the "middle" of the island, the plane flew over the coconut plantations and some groves with pineapple trees towards the misty mountain in the distance.

      I spent some time walking along the beaches, "searching" with the Hegel detector. I thought maybe the detector would only work in an unforeseen context and also that it could work on a subliminal level for those who used it: the idea being that under certain circumstances the Hegel detector would transform the user without him or her barely noticing it. 
     Around the bend, the beach topography continued obliquely to the northeast and a few hundred meters in front of me, right at the water's edge, a flock of squawking seagulls circled around a large lump in the water. When I got closer I saw that it was a massive fish cadaver, judging by the stripes and the dorsal fin one could argue that it probably was a tiger shark. The animal was cut open and intestines and various liquids and half-decomposed stomach contents had fallen out and hordes of scavengers had congregated to dine. The stench and the sight made me nauseous. Crabs crawled freely on the rotting piece of meat and provided for themselves meritoriously, the flies flickered about in a fear of missing out and the gulls cheered and ate, both carcass and inattentive crabs, while also engaging themselves in the bullying of smaller shorebirds. 
    I backed away a bit towards the palm grove. It all seemed strange, the shark must have been murdered and torn apart by human tools and then left here at the beach. What other animal than man could have cut up its stomach in that way? What necessity had it served? Or contingency? 
     In a nauseating realization I remembered again the origin of my journey, it had been to look for the "truth" but here I was standing on an island in the middle of nowhere watching scavengers partying on a carcass. I was on the wrong track. 
     The stench was oppressive so I went and sat down under the auspice of the coconut palms further away from the water. There were still no signs of life from the Hegel detector. I thought of my logical friend and when I followed him to the train station and how we passed the time by walking around and looking at the old maps that were painted on the walls. Classical traditional train lines. And at one point he had erupted: 
   -  maps they are good, because they are objective 
   -  really? 
His obsession with objectivity, like my fixation on truth, was perhaps a kind of idolatry and a philosophical substitute for a religious belief in a transcendental God. "The last word" so the speak. Rorty, on the other hand, had suggested during conversation the other night that philosophers should stop worrying about objectivity and knowledge and truth and instead make solidarity their major concern. Rorty's remark had made Alper angry and he then claimed that such priorities could come and bite Rorty in the ass someday.
     The Hegel detector suddenly signaled something. A large red light flashed on the panel and below the light was a printed strip of text: "Aufhebung". Out at the water's edge, the febrile activity continued unabated. Reality is process, and right there and then, in dazzling sunlight: the unfolding of a negated tiger shark. 
     I had to calm down and bring myself to some kind of limit so as not to condemn, ridicule and mock the logical comrade and his rigid certitudes. Or was I the one who did not understand, who was being too rigidly categorical? (After all, I insisted on calling him "logical" all the time). Did I need to both change and preserve the concept of my friend in order to save our friendship? It was as if we were symbols of some kind of deep division that was constantly grinding and rubbing, unresolved...as two quite different ways of thinking about human existence, a split, similar to the one Fondane talked about, that had deepened ever since Hegel challenged Kant's version of a kind of platonic idea that philosophy could be like mathematics, that it could offer conclusive demonstrations of truths about structural features of human life. I hoped that the conversation between the two would continue, that we would find new words and formulations and that perhaps these could help us out of various dead ends and achieve synthesis. But no matter what you did, it seemed to me that there was always an incomplete reference to something else: mote in the cup, unforced flowers, spontaneity, whatever. 

 

 

 

                                                                          *                                                                    

 

20.


     I returned to the distillery later that afternoon. Alper was dozing in a shadowy part of the terrace.  Through the open kitchen window one could hear the sun-soaked jingles flowing from the cassette player. 

            "you stopped making sense
           you forgot about your friends
                I wanna come closer 

                I wanna come closer..." 

A straw hat-clad Richard Rorty entered through the kitchen door while munching on a mango-like fruit.   

     After Alper had woken up somewhat I told the pair about the tiger shark carcass I spotted on the beach and that the Hegel detector had flashed red at the "Aufhebung" mark. Rorty wondered absentmindedly what it all could mean and if there was any internal connection. He mumbled in a spell of introversion: 
    -  the concepts are to Hegel 'germinative'... and pass beyond themselves and into each other... it's the immanent dialectic..
Alper rolled his baggy eyes and said
     -  here we go again..
     -  I don't get it. I replied, while pouring up some pineapple rum. 
    - I'm trying to imitate Hegel's way of thinking, said Rorty... in order to see if these events have any particular significance to us... Hegel's erfahrung.. rhythms of experience, its internal tensions and conflicts ...give rise to a dynamic movement toward integration... which is "aufhebung"...
  Rorty tipped his hat slightly to the back of his head and looked out over the blue horizon beyond the palm leaves. 
     -  This suggests that the Hegel detector picked up signals from a dynamic integration or reconciliation occuring in the area... 
Alper could not hide his irritation :
      -   fuzzy airy-fairy pseudo-scientific speculation !...he burst
Triggered Alper tried to regain a more controlled composure.
     -   have you thought about that maybe it's a tracking device for something else, "aufhebung" might only be a cover name or indicate something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with Hegel, the thing might even register the opposite of what you are suggesting, which is DIS-integration!... we may never know..
      - are you dis-sing my idea?  said Rorty with mild irony. Unperturbed as ever.
    -  Or... the Hegel detector could be bugged by the OBS. I said nervously, offering the more paranoid side of things. 
    After fruit time and rum drinking in the fading daylight the conversation continued. We tried to reach out to the points of contact where we could critically engage with one another but I felt increasingly uneasy and unfocused and I was thinking that our dear distillery was an easy target for Hegelians, Fondanians or the OBS and in my rum-induced mind I figured that maybe we were going to be safer if we kept on travelling through the jungle. For now, we had agreed that our long-term goal was to try and reach the supposed airfield way out east - at some point in the future - and from there fly back to civilization, legally or illegally. 

    During the extensive night conversation it became clear though that Alper were by no means interested in returning to a role as a drudge again and argued that we could wait for a while before leaving the distillery. I sensed that this "wait" of his really meant "postpone indefinitely". 
   We had made awkward attempts to repair the truck up on the dirt road but we had now given up on it and we were thus forced to travel by foot. If we were to go, Alper argued, the burden of carrying would have to be distributed equally, taking into account everyone's ability, but then the question arose as to where would we could find an objective, unbiased and neutral assessor of our abilities. 
  Alper argued that we should stay at the distillery for a couple of weeks to gather strength, but for safety's sake we should start patrolling the area around the house and some parts of the beach. We would basically become guards who worked in shifts, and our "escape suitcases" would be constantly ready for departure. I felt as if we owed it to Alper to join his line after all he had endured in terms of humiliation, exploitation and non-payment of wages, but at the same time I was of the opinion that the "stay scenario" was really a bad alternative. Rorty did not think the dangers were so imminent and said that we might as well stay at the distillery for a little while and "there's no rush" and from here we could, from time to time, set out and scout the surroundings with the Hegel Detector. At first, Rorty smilingly dismissed idea of guarding and patrolling the premises, but eventually he agreed to do it, possibly to appease Alper. 
    I was tired and lethargic after our long discussions and solid alcohol intake but still I lie sleepless at night. The trees outside rocked and creaked meekly in gusts of wind, like wooden doctoral students in equanimity. I thought of the woman in the office photo, I often did, something seemed to force her into my thoughts. What would she think of me? Sometimes when she appeared in my mind, like a question mark from nowhere, it brought tears to my eyes and I could not explain why.

                                     
                                                                          * 

 

 

21.


      During the next few days, we began to act as patrolling guards around the premises , but soon it so happened that Rorty and I began to build a simple lookout tower on the flat section of the distillery's roof. It all started as a gag. We nailed and fastened and tied locker room cabinets, ladders, planks, forks, leftover chipboards and discarded oak barrels and soon a crooked collection of things towered on the top of the building: it was a hybrid between a hut, rubbish heap and lookout tower that was braced and attached to the surrounding trees, fences and downpipes. 
    We were proud of our creation but unfortunately it was impossible for the four-legged Alper to climb up in the tower and he muttered that it was another injustice to note in the logbooks because this would mean that he had to patrol the area on his shift while we, during our shifts, could sit on our asses in the watchtower and drink vanilla rum. 

    One night as I sat peeking out from the lookout tower, I saw through the night vision goggles some movement in the foliage next to the dirt road. Soon I discovered a cluster of figures, dressed in monk robes, sneaking along the ditch. The gang carried bludgeons, cameras and binoculars and they snuck in and lurked in the bushes some distance away from the defective truck and then they seemed to be scouting the distillery. I crouched down inside the tower and hid as best I could and prayed that Rorty wasn't sleeptalking too loud and that Alper lay quietly and slept inside the house and did not attract any attention. Through a crack in the chipboard, I zoomed in on the group with my night vision goggles and I seemed to distinguish some familiar faces: Wuhan Hund and Anders Boj Tropen. They were known mercenaries working for the APA - the anti-postmodern agency - and who most likely were out reconnoitering and looking for new postmodern prey, prey that APA considered to be the root of all evil. I was in any case surprised to see APA operating in these remote regions. For APA, postmodernism was the reason why children in universities were messy and uneducated, and postmodernism taught children that everything was in a monotonous way connected to power struggles and structures, and even truth and knowledge were alienated and attacked by postmodernism, or so APA declared. 

     I became frightened because I knew that I would have a hard time avoiding their predatory claws since I had been convicted of illegal relativism which according to the APA was a salient feature of postmodernism as well and on top of that I was also on the run from the objectivists' prison which was another compromising aspect of my resume. Rorty, who was considered a proper pragmatist, for his part, would probably be even more doomed if they would find him given all the overlapping tendencies and common denominators that existed between pragmatism and postmodernism, both of which attacked foundationalism, grand narratives, systems and the metaphysics of presence. It was also reasonable to assume that Rorty had placed himself high up on their death list after he had written that we should get rid of the words "truth" and "fact", and after such heretical claims as: "there were no truths before human beings began using languages".  
    I tried to sit as still as possible and time passed slowly. The APA team took some pictures with a camera and then snuck away, the same way they had come. I lingered for a long time in a quiet position. The morning light broke out from the east in liquid yellow tones and from the jungle the rising bird-chirping-dialogue song gained momentum. Finally, I went down from the tower and called the newly awakened to a breakfast meeting. 
   -  He is lying ! shouted Alper after I had told them my story. He went on,
   -  Of course, it is so fitting that evil agents appear in the bushes on your shift... just in time ...when you needed to find a compelling incentive to abandon the distillery
   -  but please, I'm not lying, the APA has been here and who knows if they will return more heavily armed and with reinforced troops. Besides, I think they're allied with OBS these days, and if that's the case, Rorty and I are in serious trouble since we are runaways from their prison. I said, pleading to a voice of reason. 
     Alper stood up with his neck straightened. Eyes gleamed accusingly and a quick salvo of words left his mouth :

   -  such paranoid nonsense from this cackling hen! Alper said och then he sort of turned to Rorty, as pleadingly as pride would allow. 
     Rorty sat at the table on the terrace, morning tired, bearded and his hair tousled from sleep. He slowly dissected a papaya-like fruit with a knife. 
    -  Well, I guess we'll have to go up to the bush and the dirt road after breakfast and see if we can find any footprints from the intruders .. Rorty said. 
     Alper Kropp's hypothesis about my organized lying could be somewhat falsified later that morning when we found several traces of hiking boots and Dr Martin shoes in the mud. At the same time, Alper insisted that it "was not entirely unlikely" that these traces could have been "printed" by birdwatchers, Goth rockers or lost linguist-philosophers who had wanted to revisit the analytic-synthetic dichotomy.
     At the avocado lunch that day, after more argumentation and reasoning, Rorty addressed the group but mostly Alper.
    -  I think it's justified to believe the accounts of what happened last night, now that we have footprints and everything, ... and by the way, I see no reason why he should lie to us ... and I think his sense of solidarity in this case is stronger than his self-interest ...
    -   Okay! snorted Alper in a clownish borderland between incredulity and disappointment, 
    -   but from now on I think you should consider that this little paranoid benefactor has a tendency to see what he wants to see and to hear what he wants to hear ... he himself has admitted that before ... his perception is wobbly... 
    I had a lump in my throat and I could not speak and it was obvious that from now on I would be a bit on my guard against the scientific donkey. 


                                                    

                                                                          *

22.


         Access to vocabulary is sometimes slow, delayed or completely shut down, it is reminiscent of the symptoms in a patient with brain fatigue or aphasia. You then seem to swim through a viscous medium of verbal jelly. It was like that in the dream, I had no clues or reference points to begin with, I was about to be born into something new, and everything seemed strange or out of focus. But then I suddenly found myself walking through fog on a path that led up to a shady rectory. I went inside the house. The spacious foyer was lit by a faint yellow glow. The blinds were pulled down. Me and the other guests gathered in a U-shaped formation, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the host couple. There was something ominous and threatening in the air. We seemed to be waiting for further instructions or the presentation of the rules for a particularly cruel game. My former brother-in-law was there. Pale plump kind face, more boyish than before, he had a bowl haircut and was wearing a crisp black windbreaker. He had deceived my sister, but I still felt a certain gratitude and warmth towards him because he had arranged an internship for me at the local locksmith. Suddenly the stage was disturbed by extraneous sounds, scratching sensations and then a kind of hissing pitchshifting music was heard and then I was pulled out of my sleep by Rorty and I was there in the kitchen at the distillery in the middle of the night. Rorty seemed unusually stressed:
-  Wake up! we have to get out of here .. I saw a convoy of military vehicles in the distance and they seem to be on their way here on the dirt road. And I can't find Alper anywhere ... speed up! 
We hurried to pick up the escape suitcases and half panic-stricken I made a quick search of the office and snatched cigarettes, batteries, a green notebook and the photograph of the curly woman and then we ran to the north along the shore. The moon shone like a sharp shard in blue darkness. Just as we got to the bend where the beach strip trailed off to the northeast, I turned around for a moment and looked at the distillery and saw it lit by wandering lights and headlights from trucks. Inconceivable shouts were heard in the seaweed-scented air. We continued to half-run along the beach in our Trioca Room clothes and towels. I don't know for how long. Hours. The atmosphere turned gray and hazy. The beach became more rocky and cliffs towered up with leaps, patches and runs of jungle that grew exuberantly and hung over the passages. When the light of dawn sifted out, through twig nets and over rock formations, in peach-colored and yellow streaks, we found a cave and we sat down and rested outside the entrance. 
-  at least we got a complete change of clothes, said Rorty. I didn't respond, I was too exhausted. The sound of the waves softly caressed the vision of a hazy blue sea. My hands shook while I peeled a banana. Shorebirds strolled across the beach farther away. Content. And less stranded. 
    The cave seemed to have been some kind of hiding place or a research station for linguistic philosophers and we found again, as in the linguistic village, traces of Quine, Sellars, Carnap, Bergmann and others. These must have worked in the cave in an attempt to find "language minerals" and nuclei - universal common denominators - but had propably abandoned the project when they touched on metaphysics and dialectical dead ends. Chalk lines on the blackboards and graphs on the cave walls testified that the philosophers had not been able to achieve a presuppositionless method or agreed-upon criteria for what counts as success in dissolving philosophical problems (James Something had said to me that "there are no presuppositionsless choices, to begin with", but I didn't know at the time what he was talking about). Rorty argued that linguistic analysis is vulnerable to the pitfalls of realism and reductionism, and "something tells me that many of these linguistic philosophers have come out on the other side of this cave system as ordinary Aristotelians... and that's nothing to be ashamed of". He smiled evenly and let his gaze slowly wander over the pattern on the walls.

-   each system can, and does, create its own private metaphilosophical criteria, designed to authenticate itself and disallow its competitors.  
      It was mindboggling stuff. I thought of toddlers who seem to have the whole range of speech sounds available from scratch and who then, as language acquisition and speech production gradually commenced, came to lose the speech sounds that are not included in the language, or languages, that they are being subjected to early on, they "lose" the sounds that are not included in their native language... If there was a lost starting point for speech sound production and prosody, could there be one for philosophy? I would have to be more specific if I was to investigate further.
     I examined the area inside the entrance with Rorty's flashlight. There was a shrunken backpack, military green, and there was a vase with withered flowers and on the ground lay a pair of cracked binoculars. A horseshoe was placed in a bulge above the exit. 
     These were new circumstances for us. This changed the "rules of the game" but that was also the point in some weird way, it seemed to me that we were actually playing, and were trapped inside, "the game of changing the rules". It was either that or we were a Hegelian concept emerging in the brain of the omniscient blogger:  actualizing universals, on the path to the Absolute. 
     We decided to lie low for a few hours and camouflaged the entrance with palm leaves and uprooted undergrowth. The hours passed in the cave's dusky light. I was thinking of Alper. Had he betrayed us? Had he finally gained his freedom and autonomy? But it seemed strange to think that he would leave because he had been so provincially obsessed with the distillery and had argued strongly that we all should remain there. The questions and the uncertainty piled up, so did the questions about the questions. Outside in the bright daylight, the steel blue breathing sea seemed more secretive than ever. I sat and listened to the soft noise of the waves until I fell asleep on my Trioca rum towel. 

  

    

                                                                          *

23.

   

 
       The steep slopes above the cave were brushy and overgrown with trees, shrubbery and half-rotten plant formations but I found a bare piece on a ledge and further in there was a niche in the rock wall, resembling a bench to sit on. During sleepless nights, I sat there looking out on the starry sky and the sea. A hooting and cooing sound often rose from somewhere above where the jungle greenery hung out over the mountain walls like sprayed sprawling fringes. I simply called the place "the park bench". 
     I came to think of the cave where we had settled as both an orifice and an asshole, an indecent vision to say the least, and it became clear quite early on that we shared the settlement with a bunch of bats. How many we did not know but every now and then during the night they could noisily flutter past our sleeping heads on their way in or out. They seemed rather indifferent towards us but we were on the other hand, more often than not, rudely awakened by these nocturnal bloodsuckers. The bats cut my sleeping habits into pieces which resulted in me never feeling really rested and during the days I was mostly tired, sluggish and moody. I discussed the bat problem with Rorty one evening and he, who was less affected and not as easily aroused, had only mumbled about unconscious adoption of assumptions built into the vocabulary itself and that the word "bat" came with its connotations and symbolic meanings which in turn changed somewhat depending on the language and the culture. A whole new concept for our new roommates would clear out "old soot" and free us from certain prejudices: some words had simply become too charged and that made "fruitful conversations more difficult". I nodded without being convinced. This was reminiscent of philosophical problems: they appeared, disappeared, or changed form due to, and as a result of, new vocabulary. What would happen if we could find our way back to these "assumptions" built into the vocabulary and show that they were optional?  Was this the beginning of a derridean labyrinth?
     The wind changed direction. Mild breeze. The hooting bird sound continued somwhere above the park bench. In the starry sky, I saw a constellation I called "the streets of the rejected", dedicated to those who for various reasons could not stay in the conversation, those who were not allowed to participate. It was difficult to keep up with Rorty's thoughts sometimes, especially when we were drinking rum, this time around he was postulating that "we should assent to the premises which generate their problems and from there we can see some point in playing their game". I tried to stay in the dialogue.   
     After we both drank a ceremonial mug from the last bottle of vanilla rum, Rorty went down to the cave to sleep. I sat for a while. For me there was almost no point in going to bed at all. Fucking bats. 
   A mint-like scent emanated from wispy shrubbery along the rock wall and was cross-fertilized with the sight of moonlit shimmering waters far out at sea. I was enveloped in loneliness and the perception of enormous distances made me dizzy. I took a cigarette from the package I had stolen from the distillery's office and lit up. It was the most wonderful as well as the worst cigarette of my life. It was neurochemical epiphany, the jubilant juices of the synapses firing their fireworks, initializing whimsical songs of praise, introducing freewheeling snippets of joy that brought tears to my eyes, producing forms without substances thanks to a substance, just for the hell of it. I was inside a spinning wheel of wonder and I saw a kind of flicker of a figure rushing past, divided into a grid of lights in petrol green, yellow and pale pink, it was examining and moving about, an ancient Greek concerned with things? or a rationalist interested in ideas and judgments or was it a logical empiricist obsessed with words? or was it all three of them intermingled in a rarefied mix? There was something extraordinarily reverent in the vision of this passing figure whose meaning eluded me. The scintillating smoke sensation soon faded to some extent and now I felt that my consciousness was threatened by chaos, incoherence and insane whims and I turned on the flashlight and started to read in the green notebook I found in the office, I tried to lock myself to the written word and its fixed metronome, its rules and pulses - logos, form, scheme, syntax - I thought that if I hung on to the pattern of the letters, like a castaway clinging to a life raft, I might be able to cope, and not lose my mind. A sense of impending doom intensified. I don't know for how long I read without reading, or how long I was thinking without thinking. I was afraid that I had fallen over an irrevocable limit, where I was forever lost to madness. I tried to fix my gaze on the pages of the book without being able to decipher the signs and I suspected that outside the frame there were absolute horrors which would be either deadly or deeply traumatic. It was as if the vegetation around me had turned into carnivorous plants and was ready to attack me as soon as I let go of the text and gave them my gaze. 
     When my visions of horror had subsided somewhat and I began to regain my visual acuity and I could read the characters, I could tell that the notebook was full of lists: inventories and evaluations of distillation equipment; thoughts on logistics; ideas for the distillation process and suggestions for new rum blends: punch vanilla rum, punch ginger rum and coconut special spiced rum and so on. There was also a curious note in the middle:

    "On the boat. The barometer's staring black eyes. And then the father, I can see him standing with a pair of oarlocks in one hand, a boat hook under one arm and in the hand of the same muscular arm a basket, from which a pair of rum bottles protruded their sober faces. As far as I can understand, my father was a despot, who loved the outdoors and rum distillation. And then consequently, so did we. We were dumb companions on the boat trips, even when the boat - the cursed boat - ran aground and our father had to undress naked and jump into the water and with herculean forces and moans pushed the boat off the reef. The cursed boat that always ran aground around the time wholesaler Edvin Medvind's yacht whizzed past in the green water. The yacht was full of beautiful girls in white hats and their soprano laughter echoed right into the heart of our Lord. Usually our beloved father had time to undress first, before the yacht drove by, and he could show the abundantly growing hairs on his powerful chest.
    As a mantra, I have told myself that I would not sit in the same boat again, or follow in his footsteps, but still I sit here in his gallant office and work in his distillery. I have not been able to break free. But this is at least a better thing than being a shop assistant at Newstreams's Paint and Wallpaper store."

    Towards the end of the book, I discovered rhyming poetry fragments and verses penned with a more sensual handwriting. Was it another author or the same person as before? It dawned to me that the notebook writer could actually be a poet who reluctantly worked at his father's distillery, or even that he had taken over the whole caboodle after the father had passed away. 

    
      She looked straight ahead - a sweet profile 
      walking silently, as the night got spent 
      how many glances I sent, how many loving miles
      who knows, if she knew what it meant 
 
     I was filled with a certain antipathy and spite towards the poet and the writer of the notebook,: what a pampered, spoiled and ungrateful little bastard! I also felt a strange rivalry or jealousy start bubbling inside because I assumed the curly-haired woman in the office photo was, or had been, his wife or girlfriend, but at the same time it seemed unreasonable to assume that the curly woman was more deeply involved in another human being because her face radiated from the kind of melancholy that requires a debauch of space and seclusion, but perhaps their relationship was a periodic on-and-off thing. 
    I put down the notebook and poured some vanilla rum into the mug. Suddenly I felt less guilty about plundering the distillery, maybe I was fueled by a tinge of resentment towards the poet. In any case, I could not shake off the sound of his embarrassing and cheesy stilted verses, they sat like glue:

 
     I sell tapestry during the day 
     at night I'm spinning rhyme

   'bout the knight who got betrayed
     giving sword blows all the time 

 

 

 

                                                                           * 


24. 


     Little by little, bit by bit, I was being influenced by the bats, at least so when it came to activity patterns: I slept, or was lethargic or drowsy, during the day while I was more active at night and wandered around along jungle-clad mountain passes, signaling with the Hegel detector. In the middle of a moonlit night I could be found scrutinizing the beaches for useful things or I would be sitting on the park bench with a mug of rum and probing the surroundings with the night vision goggles. A little further away in the jumble of the jungle mountain, I found a rippling stream where we fetched water in empty rum bottles. I became less afraid of the dark but I did not become more intimate or friendly with the bats, they remained almost nobly indifferent to our existence. 
   It was a great feeling of freedom to roam the jungle at night. High above treetops and veiled vines, stars twinkled in the black sky and who knew if OBS satellites and drones were watching us during all this time and in effect were making us less free, but I could come to terms with that circumstance somehow: as long as they kept this distance I could live and thrive in my illusion of freedom. It was like critique, it had to attain the correct distance in order to be effective. Speaking of correctness or rather its opposite: I raided the pineapple plantation away at the distillery and filled a sack with fruit, but I did not dare to go too close to the house complex even though all the lights were out and the place looked abandoned. I figured that OBS and the APA probably had set up surveillance cameras and transmitters. 
    One night as I was climbing along the cliffs at the edge of plantation, I saw a campfire burning on the beach near the place where I had previously found the tiger shark carcass. Four figures sat around the fire and poked with sticks and when I got closer, and zoomed in with the night vision goggles, I saw that they ate from cans and from something edible sitting on the edge of sharp sticks. Every now and then a burst of laughter or an exclamation rose from their side and faded away in the wind and drowned in the sound of the waves. I cursed my frivolity for forgetting the Hegel detector. Who were they? a perfect circle of friends, having a laugh, eating and smoking and coining phrases in the sensuous murk of the night? I was eager to find out more about them and their practices, if only I could approach them with an unclouded mental eye, a perspicuous language and with all the friendliness available to me in the human reservoir. But I judged that such an approach on my part could be dangerous and uncertain, the gang of four could easily be APA- or OBS agents on leave. I sat still for a while and watched with the night binoculars, tense and quiet and rigorously methodical in order to not compromise my position. Occasionally I was reached by scents of canned beef, heinz white beans in tomato sauce and whiffs of marijuana smoke which made me even more tempted to abandon my hiding place and approach them. I could not make out the conversation, or the lack of conversation, that took place between them, but from time to time their faces lit up in the yellow glow of the flames and I seemed to perceive a lazy hilarity among them. They were "kicking back". 
    After an hour or so, one of the four began to wander around the fireplace. The person seemed to limp as if from a sprained foot. And he looked up at the sky, suddenly pointing and gesturing towards it. Inferencing from the sense data that was available to me he appeared to be shouting "goaded ids, goaded ids!". The others in the group looked uninterested and it dawned on me that the limping person was rather different from the others, he was much thinner and had a ravaged bearded face and from my horizon of interpretation he was perceived to be of a more nervous, even neurotical, disposition. 
   I looked up at the sky and saw a small point of light moving eastwardly and assumed that we had seen the same phenomenon. No rule can determine its own interpretation, but an interpretation can lay the foundation for rule-making. I say this because I had the sensation that this person was a typical class A hyperborean rule-breaker, a plangent iconoclast so deeply and severely ingrained in subjectivity that he would have been the one and the same no matter what epoch, time period or culture he would have lived in. Of course, I was being very speculative, I didn't know what principles, values, rules and norms that really guided the limping man's behaviour or what interpretations and inclinations that were sparked by his temperament. In any case, he limped towards the edge of the forest where I noticed, through the leafage, that he began to untie a horse or a donkey that had been tied to a palm tree. Was it Alper who stood there? A ghostly shiver ran through my body. Son of a bitch! Still, it was impossible to distinguish the animal's identity because the field of view was obstructed by foliage and twigs but I saw, a little while later, after a moment of zooming in with the night goggles, through the aquarium green murky lens, that the limping man was sobbing intensely and had his arms hugging the animal. His lips formated some kind of linguistic utterance, over and over again, I unriddled the message to be: "mother, I am stupid" or "mother, I am sorry". I had a sense similar to that of a diver who has been under water too long which in turn often resulted in the diver not really believing in what he is seeing.  
   I turned and began to sneak back, towards the cave, treading lightly through the undergrowth and the tangle of trees and branches along the cliffs. Taken aback. Uncertain. Rattled. In a dither. Not sure where I was heading metaphysically or emotionally, I just kept on walking and focused on that formation of steep cliffs with the sprawling fringes of trees in the distance, at least I had a geographical guiding principle. 
    For the Hegelians, reality was presented with an imperfect conceptualization as if one was looking through a cracked lens without really knowing that the lens was cracked - yet it determined and influenced one's perception - but through further conceptualization and reasoning - reason working itself out through History - one slowly realizes that the lens is cracked, but then it is too late, reality has moved on. I had a related sensation of being a walking kaleidoscope equipped with a somewhat wavering conscience. I told myself that even though the Hegelians were obsessed with the "whole" and the "system" and everything, we nevertheless shared a theme of brokenness.   

   A neat hazy morning cherished the area around the cave when I finally returned. The sky was mottled as in a watercolor drawing in vague purple, blue and yellow strokes. But I noticed that something had changed when I got to the cave entrance. Small twirls of dust and smoke came from the cave mouth. A pile of stones lay like a tongue out on the ground. Rorty sat out there on a stump, looking steadily out over the sea. Some of our things were in a chunk behind him: the escape suitcases, the Hegel detector, some rum bottles filled with water, the psycho-cigarettes, a sack of fruit and so on. 
-  There was a landslide this morning, or something like that, parts of the cave collapsed. But it mostly affected the inner parts, and I was awake when it started so I managed to rescue most of our things,  Rorty said calmly. Later he told me that the bats had left the cave some time before the collapse in an operation that seemed to him suspiciously coordinated and choreographed. 


                                                                            *



25. 


     After a quiet banana and apricot breakfast where only birdsong and the rustle of the waves could be heard, we went into the cave again to probe if there was anything more to save, we went in even though there was an imminent risk that the cave would collapse further. To the left, some distance into the cave, a kind of cairn had been formed by boulders and rubble, like an ancient burial ground, it almost looked like a monument dedicated to the linguist philosophers. Above the cairn, there was a crack in the cave roof where faint rays of daylight broke through and where specks of dust and flies swirled around. Rorty said something about "that fabled place beyond hypothesis". To my right, to my surprise, a kind of corridor had been formed whose sloping tunnel ended at a cloddy little wall where I could discern a strange pattern. Obscure. Full of intimations. Symbols and signs in a language unknown to me, not even well-read Rorty could decipher the message. Anyway, we took one of the shovels that the linguist philosophers had left behind and started chopping holes in the clay wall and the structure gave way quite easily and collapsed and I peeked in through the hole with the flashlight and saw another tunnel that seemed to end in a larger room further away. We played rock-paper-scissors about who would go first and the lot fell on me, so I crawled in even though the activity went against all security thinking and the idea of clarity and logic. I thougth of a Fondane inscription, "there is something to learn from extreme states of mind ", and this was one of those. For the Hegelians, it was all about the "idea" but this was more of a whim, a flash of foolhardy inspiration. After I had crawled in the dark for about ten meters, I came out into a room where railway tracks ended at a stop block. It looked like an end station in a timbered mine shaft. I signaled to Rorty to come after and that we would haul our things into the room with ropes. 
     Where would the railway tracks in the mine shaft lead us? To an age oversaturated with irony in regard to itself? To the temple of self-gratification? Or to the Hegelians, once and for all. Oddly enough, next to the stop block there was a Kantian gas tank, with the familiar slogan printed in capital letters on the side: "Where rationality operates freely, in its own sphere". I wondered what rationality would be without imagination and what the bats would be without the loyalty to other bats but I couldn't make sense of it. 
    I hauled in our things that Rorty attached to the rope and then he came crawling himself, mumbling "this is a criterionless muddling through". He brushed off soil and mud from his pants and put on his straw hat and looked around. 
   Slowly and with nerves on edge, we followed the track down and into a tunnel. Just after the "exit"  there was a framed glazed fossil sitting in a niche. Rorty went closer to examine and almost pressed his nose against the glass. "Seeing how things, in the larger sense of the term, hang together, in the larger sense of the term", he mused. The fossil resembled a mixture between a parrot and a snake, halfway between. The bone fragments were not bones but, as it turned out, toilet paper dipped in some kind of white-colored clay material or excrements.
   - How postmodern. Rorty said evenly, as if the results of his investigation were expected. 
   - by the way, I think it's strange that the word "postmodernist" is somehow attached to me ", I think I only used that word in one article ever, and then it was meant as a joke, but still, it's an epithet I can't get rid of. 

    - Perhaps they did a "strong misreading". I said, vacuous and without conviction. My guitar-strung nerves being directed elsewhere. Rorty became more thoughtful:

    - Speaking of parrots ... did you know that Konrad of Wurzberg meant that the parrot's feathers did not get wet from rain and that the parrot would therefore be a symbol of the Virgin Mary, who was unsullied by original sin. 
     - No, that was news to me... but this fossil seems to be more of a parrot-snake hybrid. I said, referring to the strange anatomical structure.  
    We continued down the track and deeper into the dark timbered mine shaft. I was thinking it would have been nice to have a parrot as a travelling companion, a lovely chattering bird who would break the silence of the mine with sweet nonsense. 
     At a flat piece of the tracks stood a small freight wagon and a hand-lever draisine and next to these lay some iron skewers, picks and a bunch of helmets. We put our things, helmets and a couple of iron skewers on board the draisine and continued the journey on this antique vehicle. We tied the flashlight to the bow and then we synchronously pumped the craft forward on the rails. A stuffy oppressive atmosphere pervailed making it hard to breathe and I was permeated by a nervous state of mind: the cockiness of the bat-days was blown away like a house of cards in the wind and my temperament really gave me a stronger bias than any of my more strictly objective premises. I was trying to keep myself grounded and tried to phrase our predicament to myself as in a terse telegram: "Draisine traveling. Unknown mine shaft. Don't panic". It seemed to me that the temperament charged the evidence in some way, in one way or another, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, or in this case, the view of a mine shaft. 

    The track meandered slightly uphill and into the dark unknown, showing no signs of any mineral mining. Bland hours of nothingness passed inside the tunnels. Doggedly pumping the draisine. But just before a steep climb, we discovered a disconnected, atomized refrigerator next to the tracks. It was as if someone had tried to dump precarious evidence here, in an attempt to escape the webs of historical context or something. Next to the refrigerator was a black urn which, on closer inspection, turned out to be filled with ash. I opened the fridge and found disintegrating paper notes, an emerald green pearl and an expired jar of strawberry jam. I took out the shabby notes and read aloud from its only readable fragment: it read "seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned". I was certain I had dived into a world of nonsense and that it was really difficult to get out of it.  
     We had a break and ate some clementines and I watched the steep climb of the tracks. It was doubtful if we would be able to pump the draisine all the way up there. Rorty gave me some clementine pieces and tipped the straw hat slightly back on his head. The Hegel detector had started to flash red but I did not pay much attention to it. I was tired, tired of everything, I just wanted to get away from it all. 
     I tried to gather strength, courage and inspiration. I stretched my arms above my head and pressed against the side of the refrigerator, like an athlete stretching his arms, shoulders and back muscles before the big "push" but this sequence of movements caused the refrigerator to tip over and it hit the ground with a thump and struck up a cloud of dust and particles. Astonishingly, there was a door, in a recess, just behind the place where the refrigerator had stood. The Hegel detector still flashed. 
     We opened the squeaky door and went into a narrow corridor, equipped only with the Hegel detector, a flashlight and a couple of clementines. On the ceiling hung a rope with light bulbs that led us further in, but we could not find its associated switch. About twenty meters in, inside a door, there was a toilet, nothing extraordinary, just a healthy stack of toilet paper and a few thumbed comic books, "Purveyors of the south", "Agni revelation Zero" and "the Alien organizer veto". Dust, the flesh of time, covered the surfaces.
    A bit later we went through a door and stepped out into a large octagonal room where the ceiling height increased markedly. I flipped a couple of switches at the door and flickering fluorescent lights lit up the place and a few fans were set in motion. The room, which was unfurnished in the middle, seemed to be a mix between a high-tech laboratory and a dusty library office. Each corner had its work surface and orientation, like separate stations. A slight scent of red cedar roamed the air. The three lights of the Hegel detector flashed, which had not happened to us before. On a drawing table in one of the corners lay compasses, scissors, pencils, rulers and on a dark blue moth-eaten curtain sat pinned pictures of animals that had subtitles underneath: beer hall auk, asian hum dog, chessboard cow and an unnamed parrot-like creature similar to the one that we had seen earlier in the mine shaft. Another station was more like a chemistry lab. Various colored solutions in glass bottles were lined up behind a transparent plastic screen. A bottle attracted me with its constantly spurring and changing color scheme - ambivalent purple, deep sea blue and emerald green - and as I got closer, images seemed to flash by inside the liquid and after a while it visually mimicked my desires, thoughts and feelings, like it was answering and transmitting to a deeper need from a wound in the soul or something. Rorty quickly handed me a pair of protection goggles and said:

    - careful... that potion is probably an ahistorical transcultural matrix for one's thinking... into which everything fits...independent of one's time and place.... you can get really hooked on that stuff I think. 
    I reluctantly backed away, even though I felt as if the keys to my being lay in that liquid, it could be the cure to my homesickness. I was going against myself. 
    In a workspace that also resembled a chemistry lab or a biology classroom, dark green aquariums stood along the walls, some covered with moth-eaten drapes. There were blackboards, crayons, lab equipment, a sink, solutions and tools. In armored and reinforced aquariums crawled crab-like animals that also had emulating abilities - like the color-changing liquid - but these were monstrous, infinitely plastic and seemed to be able to metabolize and absorb most things that got in its way, except the aquarium itself, fortunately. These were more eerie than the transcultural fluid, these crabs "lived" in a different way, they wanted to multiply and rule and take over. When I got closer, one of them quickly turned into  seagrass and then it presented my own reflection. The aquariums were curiously connected, via hoses and cords, to some frazzled Kantian gas tanks. I took a few steps away and out into the octagon. I had the feeling that if these crabs were released into the world, it would result in chaos and in terrible exploitation. 
      Rorty, pensive for a moment, nibbled a slice of clementine. I could hear the fans whirring somewhere above our heads.

       - we are probably dealing with a metaphysical laboratory of some kind. Rorty said.
      - should we neutralize it? we could set fire to the place and after a while the Kantian gas tanks would explode and finish the job for us. 
       - well .. if this is just a private lab then there is no danger, and not our concern .... if the fanatic is just a fanatic at home, so to speak, then it's okay .... tough question though ... but it's clear that we do not know what the channel between the public and the private looks like in this case ... but on the other hand ... if there is a spread on a massive scale and where one wants to influence public life and its institutions .. then it's another matter. 
        For a moment we just stood there in the middle of the octagon, amazed, processing the ins and outs and chewing rum-nuts from the distillery while the fans worked languidly.
        - We could use the place for our own purposes. Rorty said suddenly, and I wondered to myself if his cognition and judgment had changed due to some leaking gas somewhere in the octagon. He carried on: 
       - Just as Marx used, and misunderstood, Hegel to serve his own purposes and his own system, we can, in a similar way, use some of the equipment here in the metaphysical lab to create new metaphors and novel vocabularies... and then one can expand the logical space... 
         -  Why would you want to expand the logical space ? I said.
        Rorty munched on some rum-nuts. 
        -   when in a narrow space... a voice saying something never heard before may be heard, but it will lack resonances because it falls outside established meanings... this is the limitation of this lab so far I think, it reminds me of universalist philosophers who assume, with Kant, that all the logical space necessary for moral deliberation is now available - that all important truths about right and wrong can not only be stated but made plausible, in language already at hand.  
        Once again, I felt a certain skepticism and was worried about his mental state. I let the conversation ebb away, like one long fading piano note. I turned around and moved slowly into a corner behind dark draperies where there were TV screens showing grainy movie sequences. A squeamish presenter talked about "the medium of perhaps". I sat down on a chair and watched and ate the last clementine wedges. After a while, the presenter in the TV program was changed and the new one resembled the bearded crying man on the beach, he who had hugged the horse-animal. This might have been recorded a long time ago. He started to speak about "philosophers who in the future would dissolve the hierarchical logic of mutually exclusive opposites that had hitherto dominated Western metaphysics, but who would instead negotiate with the inseparability of oppositional values in a way that would unseat the hierarchy and unsettle its certitudes, and this could now also be provided through the medium of perhaps, for a small monthly fee". I dozed off in the chair and woke up from time to time to strains and excerpts from the word salad TV show:
      "questioning is the piety of thought but all questioning must be preceded by an appeal..a gage, a wager ... to which the question responds". Flicker. Suspended lingusitic apparatus. Color mixtures. Sensations. And new fragments bursting through:
     "affirm the possibility of the future ... by opening yourself to a certain indeterminability .. join us in the medium of perhaps, for a small fee." Travelling through threads of the suffix. Threshold worlds, a borderland between wakefulness and dream.  

     "The medium of perhaps marks the difference between the ability to think and the ability to know which in turn entails the difference between 'there is' and 'it is or exists'.... spatial temporal singularity versus space-time transcending generality".... "join us in the medium of perhaps, it is an experience that can never be accessible to theoretical knowledge or to a determining judgment... yet it is not simply the negation of such knowledge or judgment". 
     I fell deeper into a soft world of endless contourless symbols. Sleep. Dream. Seamless. I don't know for how long. After traveling through pillow worlds, I finally entered a scene with a linguering amber light. I'm sitting on a chair in a dusty locker room. A woman slaps my in the face verbally.
    - Wake up Eddie Manslow! ... what the hell are you doing?...you promised me to speak up for the facts! ... what happened to your judgment? ... and why are you traveling around with that puffy relativist? .....this is an important match ... and you have to be able to judge from the stands as well as amidst the action ..". I'm some kind of boxer and the slapping woman is probably my coach. She is smoking incessantly and knocks off the ashes into a glass on the bench. 
   -  You will be led to the very center of their work...to the fundamental and flagrant contradictions...and there are the most important clues to a true understanding of their problems and new insights. 
      I'm getting ready for the match. Drink. Strike the gloves together. Some deep breaths. The coach takes some puffs on the cigarette and looks at me with a weather-beaten patience, like an old sail on a boat that has traversed the oceans many times. 
     -  remember, the power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others....

     Standing at the door, hesitating. It's time. Hear the murmur from the other side of the door. The boxing gloves just grow and grow on the hands, becoming awkward. I walk out through a corridor and into the sports field that looks like a basketball court but where people sit in front of computer screens at a cluster of tables and chairs. It seems to be some kind of computer game championship. The small audience in the stands are in an after-party acedia. I go to the secretariat and ask a bespectacled gentleman for my place:
"Manslow, Eddie", I say and feel out of place with my huge boxing gloves. The man writes something into the computer and then he looks at me:
"forgive me sir but there is no one registered under that name".
"well, that's just swell".
     Maybe I'm here as a mascot. The man is nice though and insists that while I'm here, I might as well enjoy the championship. He hands me a cup of blackberry tea which I decline because of the bulky boxing gloves and then he goes on to tell me about the game of Tarcraft and its imaginary world where players are exploiting finite oil resources on an overpopulated planet and to achieve their goals the players have an arsenal of ugly tricks at their disposal: one can, for example, sabotage for competitors by setting fire to their facilities, hire pirates to hijack their oil tankers, bribe governments to start embargoes or in order to obtain lucrative development contracts for yourself. A third participant in the game is somewhat more ambigous and works to make the game unpredictable and is being controlled by computer bots, these are, among other things, engaged in companies developing renewable energy sources that in turn become competitors to the oil developers, to counterattack and respond to these actors the players can in turn employ fierce oil-lobbyists who will try to influence legislators and policymakers. 

    The misplaced boxer sank into thoughts while the Tarcraft championship continued feverishly on the tables around him. The coach was probably not happy with how he handled the job at this moment, he was fundamentally off track. In front of the boxer sat a sedentary player who had presumably been knocked out of the championship, clearly bankrupt and his reputation ruined, on his screen flashed the text "There are no free lunches in the energy world" which must have been code for Game Over.  
    Bored and somnolent the boxer fell asleep on his chair and dreamed that he waded through the water at the beach in his hometown, Dodger Mana, that coastal town they forgot to close down, and the bladderwrack, the seagrass and the teeming simmering life of small fish, shrimp, jellyfish and eels and crabs had all disappeared and in the clear green-blue water he saw how the sea floor spread out in all directions as a monotonous and sterile desert landscape. My whole body must have been screaming no to this vision because I somehow pulled myself out of the dream and out of the chair and threw myself on the floor. Now I was awakening in the working space of computer game developers. The area was crammed with computer screens, cables and wires, groovy neon-lit gaming-chairs, joysticks and pointing devices, keyboards, headsets, message boards, pepsi cola bottles, Grov snus, half-finished packages of chewing gum and candy and whatnot.
   The screens were still on and the programmers were obviously making rules of code, models of behavior in imaginary worlds where players could participate, more than merely experience, through the interaction and manipulation of said behavior but still within the unseen limits set by the game developers. The computer software emulated entire worlds - ancient, medieval, 18th century, present-day with a twist or space time-travel futuristic noir, you name it whatever - so did literature but the computer game had that "advantage", or head start, that the participant/the player could be more active than a reader in the making of the script because one had to operate the game and maneuver about whereas readers where merely interpreting. Literature was what it was, the text was fixed save for revisions, only the interpretations (and the translations) of the text changed and differed from one reading to another. 
     I was thinking that computer games, the code of it, was like philosophy: it was systems of thought that described systems of being. The laws and rules, set up by cunning game developers not unlike Hegelians, introduced and conveyed a certain ideology within, and through, the game. The game developer set up one argument as in a syllogism (which consists of two arguments) and then the player is invited to fill in the missing argument, the player is filling the missing portion of the game-syllogism by interacting and playing the game with actions that are constrained by unshakeable laws and rules, these are unshakeable unless one knows how to cheat or how to crack the game and alter the code. 
       Still, a reader of literature had the expedient asset of being able to reply to the text or the code at hand by simply writing a proper response, a response that can fall outside any boundaries set by the author or the game developer, only language and imagination and the degree of openness in the community are then dictating the limits. The reader/writer is in a free society allowed to recontextualize, rehash, reweave and redescribe etcetera, the computer game is in that sense, for the player, more closed, dogmatic and totalitarian, you can't, in most cases anyway, change the code or alter the rules but you can fill in the missing argument.       

      

 

    

                                                                        *

 

              

26. 


    The sixth corner, or enclosure rather, was little more than a laundry room with a couple of droning washing machines at work. A colourful smell of detergent held the space hostage and on flaky vanilla wallpaper hung a bulletin board, a comment field cluttered with notes, some of them more peculiar than others:

    "Beloved user scheduled for tuesday use, I do not know you in person but God knows you. God showed me a revelation when I was on your profile to see things around you, I saw blessings but spiritual attacks holding on to them, I saw a woman in the realm of the spirit monitoring and plotting delay in your life, with an evil mirror, and a motive to destroy....". 

    I was interrupted in my reading by Rorty who came in through the draperies, whistling out of tune, and  sat down on a chair next to me and said that it was our Trioca Rum towels and bathrobes that tumbled around in one of the machines. He had started a wash program while I was asleep (in the medium of perhaps). In any case, there did not seem to be much more to be seen in the octagon by now, the only remaining space of the octagon was blank and sparsely decorated with a sign that said "wonder construction" and after that one completed the loop and returned to the door we had entered through when we first arrived. We sat down on the chairs and the story could have ended there, in a laundry room deep down in the bedrock, but as the lazy conversation progressed and detoured and wandered around and tardy time unfurled inexorably, one frantically spinning washing machine turbine began to dig a hole in the medium itself, there was a stormy transformation occuring in front of us where a smoky cloudy cavity was being formed and widened as in a vortex and something, some kind of imperative voice, forced us to enter the cavity and to walk down its hazy round evolving hallway. Soon a bald man appeared from the mists, he had an antenna-like device attached to his ear and spoke to us in a friendly russian accent:
    - Greetings fellow apes, don't be afraid ... you are under hypnosis and I have summoned you here in order to warn you. The bald hypnosis doctor pointed with a slow gesture at the Hegel detector and said:
   - I have for some time picked up signals from your transmitter, and I have due to certain affinities taken a liking to you and become anxious to help you ...but unfortunately ... it so happens that your transmitter also sends signals to the OBS headquarters and the APA, albeit with a slightly weaker signal strength ... however, they have now definitely found out about your position due to the intense signal flow in the octagonal recently and they are on their way here as of this moment. You must leave...
    Apparently, it was the case that a baneful design twist on our so-called Hegel detector made it work in way that it, just like Dewey, tried to serve both Hegelians and Lockeans at the same time and seeked to find continuities between nervous systems and people and between experience and nature, it did so instead of keeping these lines and systems separate. This meant that the Locke-oriented OBS also received transmissions even if the device was dealing with Hegelian findings such as dialectical tensions, historicisms or cultural contexts. This probably also applied to the reverse: Hegelians, in some high kingdom, picked up signals when Lockeans, in a humid empirical alley, thought that they once and for all stood outside the problems of the day and finally achieved a "plain, historical method". 
        The hypnosis doctor broke an apple in two halves and gave us each a piece and then said prophetically : 
       -  You will be led through the TV tunnel and at the end of it you will find a computerized room where the toad Nick Tip reigns over the sluice and the pond drainage. He will unfortunately not let you pass without some form of sacrificial gift from your side, but if you manage to get past him, you will be able to travel up into the jungle again via the sluice system.... I think mr Tip would be really interested in your transmitter gadget,  said the hypnosis doctor and glanced at the hegel detector. 
          If the hypnosis doctor was right, that the toad should accept the Hegel detector as a sacrificial gift, it meant that we had to reveal our position to the OBS throughout our journey down to the toad. It seemed rather imprudent. 
       -  you have to excuse me now, I have to go back to my workplace but I wish you the best of luck....just follow the road ahead... intuition and inference will guide you comrades, said the hypnosis doctor and then he disappeared in a cloud of smoke. 

    The road we came from seemed to clog up for each step forward we took so now it was just a matter of continuing, persisting, and walking onwards without the things we had left in the draisine. For a fleeting doubting Thomas moment I thought of the curly woman in the office photo and imagined a togetherness plagued by communication difficulties, long silences and a small apartment filled with anxious question marks. I also thought of her supposed fiancé, the distillery poet ... and again I felt that sting of animosity. I recognized in him a spoiled mama's boy and a reinforcer of the status quo. 
    The fog and smoke dissipated slightly and we stepped into a desolate church. An enormous boredom sank into me, permeated me like some kind of mindblowing ancient radiation. It was the kind of boredom that unleashes an intense craving for stimulants: drugs, debauchery, thievery, violence and cruelty, anything that purportedly could transport you out of it. This was where "reason pours you the poison of the enemy" but after an unbearable snippet of time the aggressiveness of it faded and I had the feeling that boredom opened a window to time itself: one could palpate it... pure and undiluted time in all its "repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor". One felt, with devastating force, the infinity of time and thereby one's own immense insignificance in it. It was here that one changed roles with a speck of dust swirling in the room, it was here that one understood that boredom speaks the language of time, and time came near and said, in a voice of boredom, "you are finite", "and whatever you do from my point of view is futile ". And this grain of dust whispered, "remember me". 
    Empty wooden benches. Emblems. Commanding crucifixes. Ornaments. Decorations. And in the back, in the western part of the room, stood the church organ. The row of pipes looked like an eerie city silhouette and on the player's side several terraces of keyboards exposed their rows of teeth and around them were accomplices of levers, controls and pedals and I got the strange feeling, all of a sudden, that I had in fact inherited this very organ after grandmother. There was no tangible way to transport the thing with us and out of this medium, this was a once in a lifetime patch, and if I were to play something on it it was only now that I had the chance. "Now is the only thing that's real". I clinked reverently on the keys. There was no sound, but I tried to imagine a vessel of sound flowing out of the gloomy pipes, a transcendental synthesis of  some kind. Rorty, who had been distracted, with a door ajar to indifference, pressed a few keys and said: 
    - what if jarring dialectical discords could be resolved in previously unheard harmonies? 

   We walked slowly forward past the chancel and an old piano and into the sacristy, the dressing room, where a tiny square window framed a faintly moonlit city landscape. Long-sleeved white shirts, tunics, chausubles, veils and dalmatics hung on wheeled coat hangers. There was an ancient wardrobe in dark wood and a special wash basin and in the middle of the room stood a solid bench with a blue-green work surface. It was here that they prepared for the service, the priests and deacons, who, like Hegel, wanted a synthesis, a synthesis that demanded the postulation of a cosmic spirit, one who lives as a spirit only through individuals who express this spirit in their thoughts and deeds.
    - Once novelists and poets displaced not only philosophers but also preachers at the moral center of the culture. Rorty said, speaking of nothing. 
  - and now these in turn have faced competition from youtube influencers, gaming culture, twitterers and podcast personalities ....I said, in an attempt to be pungent. 
    - What's that? said Rorty, vaguely interested and searching the bag for some fruit. 
    - sorry... those probably had their breakthrough on the internet some time after your death in 2007 ... One could think that western culture has become more orally oriented since then ... more people listen to audio books and watch movie clips and I guess there are fewer than before who actually read novels ... for better or worse. 
     Rorty raised a leisurely eyebrow.
   - well that's a pity, I think the novel is the democratic toolbox or genre par excellence, it is the genre most closely related to the struggle for freedom and equality  ... and the conglomerate of narrative, detail, diversity and accident in the novel is also a way to subvert the essentialism grounded in traditional philosophy. 
    - what do you mean? I said, loosing track and also thinking that Rorty was unaware of the complex web of narrative, diversity and accidents that could, for example, also be offered in today's variegated computer games, but it was no wonder that he could not see this, he grew up in a different time, without the all-encompassing presence of video games and computers and the internet.   

    - well... traditional philosophy is privileging theory, simplicity, structure, abstraction and essence.. and on a similar note I think a society which took its moral vocabulary from novels rather than from, say,  ontotheological or ontico-moral treatises would not ask itself questions about human nature, the point of human existence, or the meaning of life.. Rather it would ask itself what we can do so as to get along with each other, how we can arrange things so as to be comfortable with one another... how institutions can be changed so that everyone's right to be understood has a better chance of being gratified... 
     I thought it sounded too essentialistic, but I let it pass uncommented. We looked around and took a few solemn steps on stony floor towards the back door. Eyes were spotting sober decor arranged by a conscientious deacon. Ardent job person. I didn't want to disturb the order. Rorty pushed down the handle and opened the door. Cold air flowed in. A spooky city in pixelated video game graphics lay in front of us. The whistling of the wind accompanied his speech:
   -  to take us out of our old selves...by the power of strangeness...  

    

 

                                                                         *

         

27. 


     The video game was rigged in such a manner that you had to jump - like Super Mario - between rocks, ledges and precipices and over passing geese, hedgehogs, turtles, carnivorous plants and more and you were at the same time solidly busy ducking for fireballs, flying thistles and stone chips. But it was suspected that these obstacles in turn represented - at a deeper level - all the cheap joints and fallacies, illogical transitions and trivial conclusions and platitudes present in the narrative of the omniscient blogger. One had to jump between all his unplausible segways and gaps.
    There were ravines; secret passages; steps and ladders materializing in empty air and there was an immense postmodern self-awareness exposing itself as one traveled through the pixelated video game world. At times one plunged into underwater worlds in order to return stolen quotes and passages to their rightful owners while simultanoeusly being chased by scary, albeit slow, copyright sharks.

Overall, it seemed to me the common thread was one of avoiding logic and reason.  
    It struck me as I swung over a precipice that the difference between postmodernism and pragmatism was moral, pragmatism appealed to a community of inquirers, to cooperation and dialogue: what is useful to us here and now, and how can we understand the past with what we have now and vice versa. And this game was the opposite, it was trapped inside the fragmented postmodern omniscient blogger and there was no community that the player responded to - maybe there was someone one wanted to impress but that was a different story - there was no major community that one worked for and perhaps it was the loneliness embedded in that realization, combined with the glaring Nintendo graphics, that gave me a melancholy that was both oceanic and claustrophobic. It was one huge space of "I", alienated from all "we". 

     I had a vision of a grey apartment building where everyone sat alone in their room, playing the same game, but still we were separated from each other, we told ourselves that there were no deeper connection, "you're on your own now Tommy", we were the atomized generation.
   But still, the game was about creating some kind of coherence: by avoiding, skipping, jumping, overleaping, ducking and escaping... it was like one long epic game of changing the subject. I tried to get through the program. It was a single player game so Rorty had to settle for being - like Luigi - player two and thus had to wait somewhere behind the scenes. When I finally beat the game, thanks to an abundant supply of extra lives, I was catapulted out into the streets of a ghost town and I walked around while waiting for Rorty to complete, and survive, his game round.

    If the previous game was about dodging, ducking and jumping between the omniscient blogger's (Obie) mistakes and logical oddities, you were now stuck inside Obie's writer's block or melancholy, or both. It was certainly frustrating for Obie not being able to transcend Rorty and not being capable of building a hopeful bridge into the future and instead now only offering readers ruins and desolate urban environments where his lone protagonist limped around discouraged. Here hopelessness prevailed, this was to populate the epistemology of the depressed, one where it was almost impossible to imagine an alternative to the depression and see beyond its gloomy horizons and the hopelessness of it was so strong, so penetratingly rock solid, that it was taken to be an objective representation of reality. 
   The city was like a rupture in a sail and stuffed with old cracked brick buildings and deserted streets lined with abandoned buggered cars and all sorts of scraps, rubbish and debris. Graphically speaking, everything was back to normal, the world was at least three-dimensional again. If the Mario Bros-like game conveyed a sense of something pre-programmed and linear, Obie certainly wanted, through this new environment, to try to convey something else that was a bit more organic and imbued with chance and dialectical changing concepts. Or something like that.
   Further on I discovered more of roadblocks, barbed wire, DIY barricades, gas masks and broken glass and stones and the messy street environment testified that some form of strife or battle had taken place here and it made me think of the story of the "lambs". All brew melinite. The lambs had not been able to organize in a united front but had mostly torn each other apart during internal battles of pure doctrine and pointless orthodoxy and the enemy had of course benefited from this. In fact, the enemy had also themselves contributed to the lambs' internal discord by planting sabotaging secret agents inside the lambs' enclosures. The police, for their part, had over time become more and more corrupt and allied with the wolves.

   I walk past a half-collapsed gas station where a solitary fluorescent lamp flickers deep inside the store, as in a visual equivalent to the hiccup. And wasn't that the case, I recalled, that one of the lambs' cars, with the party's name painted on the side in half-meter-high letters, once stopped at a gas station. A man gets out of the car and then robs the station for a hefty sum of cash. The car was later stopped by the police and it turned out that the perpetrator was a convicted criminal on parole. It would have been wildly stupid and self-destructive if the lambs' party leadership had planned the act, but a less paranoid person than myself could also have assumed that the criminal was in collusion with the police, he was yet another infiltrating police provocateur among the lambs.  
    The city itself seemed to be an entity, a living mass, one that slandered me and held me responsible for everything that had gone wrong. And that was a lot. I walked on between piles of paving stones, scattered furniture and craters and, here and there, relatively undamaged houses. I saw, in addition to an upside-down monument depicting Descartes, monuments and statues of my old friends, solidified in malicious and accusing facial expressions. Besmirched. Bedamned. I be damned. I was reminded - again biting of inner wit - that I had failed to stay in the dialogue, I had closed too many doors, burned too many bridges and all that and what I longed for now was a mutuality, genuine two-way communication, a collaboration with something outside of myself, I wanted to travel from an "I" to "you" and back again, from an "I" to a "we" and so on... and I wanted to find an ability to abandon the slanderous voice behind the scenes. But here comes the gravitational field of the narrative and one sinks into a languid mud of melancholy - "that dream state of egoism" - where one is unable to mourn and consequently incapable of moving on and instead lingering self-gratifyingly at the paradoxical mother teat of pain. This had clear points of contact with the postmodern writer who in a similar way lost himself in a kind of inward-looking hyper-self-consciousness, as if having locked oneself inside an eerie palace full of mirrors. Instead of action, forward movement, dissolution and catharsis, his book became a deep dive into that anthill of identity. Navel-gazing instead of world building, the postmodern writer, like the melancholic, had stopped believing in the future because it had, according to him or her, cancelled itself out. It was impossible to imagine anything that could transcend the current order. Such disruptive behavior was of course something that the APA wanted to eradicate. Personally, I believed that the postmodernist writer had taken an overdose of that drug called skepticism when instead he could have just settled for a good enough dose of it. 
      Stuck on one persistent note. The barking of a bulldog harried me out of muddled and daydreamy speculation. Rung bad el John. Shook me to my foundations. Luckily, the angry dog was tied to a lamp-post and because of its manners I made no attempt to untie it, even though I badly needed some company. I continued onward through hazy hugger-mugger. The barking petered out in the increasingly dense fog and by now it seemed rather tricky to find your way back to the unloading site. I was walking and evaluating the small brick houses that emerged from the fog and hoping for a suitable refuge for the night. An old bent hag crossed the road carrying a bundle of keys jingling silvery and "laden with hints". Suddenly she was up close and squinted at me and said: 
      - well well well, here comes the great blasphemer ...
She took another rocking step. Chuckling scornfully.
      - you're a bit of a cunt Paddy....You can't have your cake and eat it too...

Surprised, unresponsive, skeptical, I was searching the anthill of the mind for proper comebacks. She continued.
      - I don't think the coach is happy with you Paddy ... you've missed too many important checkpoints. She said and started walking with a swaying gait down the road.
Most likely a heavy smoker, she spoke with a nasty gravelly, low-pitched voice typical of patients with Reinke's edema. She had taken a few steps away and then she stopped and turned to me again. Spiteful.
      - you know Paddy, sometimes you can be a bit of a twat ...you won't overcome the dualisms of modern philosophy... sooner or later you'll end up accepting a set of even more rigid dualisms, like that between the theoretical and the practical for instance, or between man as moral agent and man as natural being. You're heading for a blind alley.
The hag spoke as if she was gargling Lucifer's black porridge or something and it felt like she had uttered a spell that I did not fully understand. Spiteful and satisfied with the state of affairs she swayed on and slowly disappeared into the fog.
     I was not overly upset, after all, the hag was, despite her vividness, just a pre-programmed supporting character in Obie's shady narrative, designed to appear at this very moment to deliver just these sets of gestures, words and whatnot. Or, I wondered, was the hag a repressed but still autonomous, free-spirited aspect of Obie's psyche? that made the whole thing a little weirder, what if she was a neglected part that Obie did not control - a kind of subconscious organic outpouring - constantly evading his control?. It somehow reminded me of Fondane, with his moss green beret, who broke free from Hegel's system building to form a guerrilla unit on Hegel's island. Fondane would ask: "Was Man made for the Law or was the Law made for Man?... and he revolted when Hegel had stated that "the idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being". 
   I waited for a while and then continued in another direction. At a crossroads I stopped. Due to the deep boredom, I thought about smoking one of the psychosis cigarettes but I let it go when I more clearly remembered the horrendous flipside of its bliss. I let a whim of fate determine the way forward, I threw a cigarette up in the air and deciding I would go in the direction the filter pointed. Boulevard Trev una. The sign was misleading, it was more of an ordinary street than a boulevard, still lined with these small two-story brick houses. And down this tapering street I dragged my feet. Knackered. Soon I could make out a dimly lit neon sign there. "Hotel Flora". Looked cheap. I went in. Depopulated. Brown dusty interior with arabesques on the tapestry. Ferns and areca palms resided in large pots on the floor and by the windows. It took some time before someone showed up at the front desk. The bell had a long lingering tone. A sleepy busty woman in a dark suit asked "Can I take your name please?"
- Manslow, Eddie...
Later, in the room, lying on the bed, the world spinning around, or was it me, I felt the confusion of my life, all the questions that seemed to blow my mind. "Hit him like a freight train moving ...". Phantom flee prettily. 

 


                                                                      * 

28.


      Fast asleep in that fluffy bed, I dreamed I was a cleaner with responsibility for a couple of small apartment buildings out in the suburbs. The work consisted mainly of mopping stairwells, attic corridors and basements. I appreciated the secluded physical work and I enjoyed the smell of detergent and ended up building a whole vocabulary around it. On this very occasion, I was elated after having been in contact with philosophy professor Brien Gubs the previous evening. I finally summoned enough courage and called him up. After the conversation, which I vaguely recalled as being about making arguments clear and the like, Gubs had played the song "the Great beyond" on the livestream of his youtube channel and I again could not determine if it was some kind of coded message impregnated with scorn. I suspected that he was making fun of me because he knew something I did not and that there was something obvious and really easy to understand that still eluded me. In any case, that very day in the dream, I also saw the woman in the office photo as I was walking between the houses I was cleaning. A light blue dreamy sky performed above us. I was on my way to pick up a forgotten bucket in a "finished house". Oddly enough, I would also mop outdoors. She shuffled past me and I had my chance but I did not have the stomach to introduce myself, moreover the woman was also involved in a rather loud and upset conversation on her cellphone and I didn't want to interrupt. I hypothesized that she was talking to her mother, with whom she was too entangled. "I will move far from here," she said in a voice that carried a shade of menace and blame and also something of the ill-conceived ultimatum. A little while after she had passed me, I was caught thinking maybe it was for the better that no contact had taken place, she might not have appreciated that I was just a grubby cleaner and she was, clearly, in a different class.
    When I woke up, it bothered me that I could not figure out Brien Gubs' role in the dream, and if his participation and actions had any connection to the woman in the office photo, or if they were separate stories entirely, stories that could not, or had not had time to, develop into a synthesis or anything that resembled shared resonances. A Freudian could probably see the connection or create one on the fly, but an OBS agent on the other hand might dismiss it all as nonsense: it was random neurological imagery, one might as well play the roulette or work the slot machine.
    All around the hotel room stood flamboyant flowers, they were on the bedside table, in front of the TV-set and on the window sill, obscuring the view. At a small table lay a chessboard with the pieces properly placed on the squares. Correspondence chess? Someone had abandoned their rooks, these were lying on the side of the board, and the queen looked vulnerable in the middle of the playing field. Beginners tended to overuse the queen at an early stage of the game, leaving her open to ambush and surprises. I washed my face in the bathroom and then went downstairs.  
   In the dining room, which was bounded by an obscure glass door, I later sat down to breakfast and looked out through a plant-adorned bay window. I had tea and eggs, scones and strawberry jam. The room was deserted save for a neat man in a blue blazer and tie. His black hair was glossy and combed back. He thoroughly examined a newspaper with outstretched arms and his head slightly tilted back. The screaming headline on the front page read "Ric Dosh has given up on America!".
   I had a long day ahead of me, I had to find the TV tunnel but first I would return to the unloading site to see if I could find Rorty, or at least some traces of him. I tried not to think about the fact that I was deep inside an improbable tangle of loose ends. The waiter came by and I ordered a fruitcake. Sipped tea. Considered pointilism paintings on the walls: a man in clichéd profile; a party on a picnic; something resembling a turtle, and everything was created with small distinct dots in patterns, dots of color to a surface so that from a distance they blended together, and from further away forming images. Suddenly I felt a slight panic and dizziness because I realized I had no money to pay for breakfast. I was a fraudster with inadequate experience of dining and dashing. The waiter had just arrived with my fruitcake and I must have looked at it with a brooding face.
      -    Is there something wrong with your cake sir? Is something troubling you sir? 
I didn't know what to say. Hesitantly, I squeezed a listless "no it's alright" out of my mouth and then after an awkward pause I said "I've been having second thoughts about cake recently". Then we heard a familiar voice from behind us. 
      -    Sounding like Kant is a fate that will overtake any systematic account of human knowledge which purports to supplant both physiological Lockean accounts and sociological Hegelian accounts by something still more generic.....
     It was Rorty who was entering the dining room. He obviously misheard and misinterpreted the gist of the exchange that unfolded between me and the waiter, but it was nevertheless, and despite all annoying tendencies, good to see him again. He looked relatively fresh and had somehow managed to bring about a complete change of clothes: pastel green blazer, gray polo and khaki trousers. In his hand he held a rolled-up newspaper which he flicked lightly in the air when he spoke. He laid it on the table and I rolled it out partially. Irish Times. The even-faced waiter asked Rorty if he wanted to order something and Rorty replied "If you can find some glassy essence, I'll take that". The waiter took the bait and whizzed on over fuzzy carpets and out through the glass door. 
    -   how did it go in the game, I asked.
    -   yeah ... I tried to go by St Thomas' advice. Rorty said and hung the blazer on the back of the chair and sat down.
     -   when you meet a contradiction ... make a distinction ..
     -   alright
He went on.
     -   as far as I could see the game tactic was largely a matter of proliferating as many distinctions as were needed to wiggle out of a dialectical corner. 
    It was unclear if we had even played the same game as I but I was nonetheless impressed that he had managed to survive unscathed. He could not have had much previous experience of video games and computer games, after all he was practically already an old man when video games were popularized in the 1980s.
     -  I have learned, he said, that when trapped in such a corner, it is a matter of redescribing the nearby intellectual terrain in such a way that the terms used by one's opponent would seem irrelevant, or question-begging, jejune. 

     As the conversation forged ahead, it seemed more and more as if Rorty had been playing a different game altogether. Nevermind. It sounded as if Rorty had gone a match against analytic philosophy itself, which in a way had once been like a mother to him. 
     -     ....they were committed to the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for inquiry, and then of all culture ....they were trying to eternalize certain contemporary language games... and seeing language as a mirror rather than a tool.
      He leaned slightly across the table towards me, lowered his voice and said with a tinge of irony,
-    I tell you these traditional philosophers are trying to escape from history ... is that a responsible thing to do?
    Rorty seemed to me, there and then, as a kind of woodpecker of philosophy and other people could settle in the holes that he had drilled, and he was mostly only pecking on dead wood anyway and thus making his approach therapeutic rather than constructive, or that was his intention at least, the crux was that he occasionally drilled holes in something that was a living entity, like a community or a tradition, it was similar to when real woodpeckers were pecking holes in the walls of houses where people actually lived. To use his pragmatic vocabulary: it was not always useful social practice, but it could introduce a new perspective and expand the scope of the conversation.    
    The receptionist from the previous evening also did the work of the waiters. The hotel seemed to be the kind of small business where everyone does a little of everything and where noone is particularly specialized, except possibly the manager. I wondered if all employees received a decent salary. The receptionist came close and picked up our plates, cups, glasses and jugs and whatnot and placed them on a silverish tray. I read the nameplate on her jacket, "Florentina". I thought about the payment again and bluntly asked Rorty if he had any money on him and he replied "of course". It turned out he had received a substantial financial reward after finishing the game, "didn't you get anything?". Typical. It almost proved we had played different games but it nevertheless meant that Rorty could pay for breakfast. 
    Rorty went scouting for orchids in the flowery garden and I sat for a while in the dining room. Eyed over the front page of the newspaper. Irish Times. I had a woozy flashback from some dream where we, in a similar setting, toasted "for Ireland!". And that was all. We held up our glasses. Davidson was there too. Upbeat but still serious, as if the occasion was symbolically charged. There was some kind of pride or hope perhaps, a warm feeling at least, among toasting friends. The ice cubes clinked peacefully in the drinking glasses. What caused the toasting, and what followed it was lost in memory, inaccessible as the queen of Sheba.
      Later in the morning, when we were getting mentally ready to go out into the city and look for the TV tunnel, or some kind of portal, I wandered around the hotel. It was fuzzy, stuffed with books, flowers, plants, bibelots and cabinetry, if the place had been a gastrointestinal tract, it would have been critically close to a constipation. A fragile phrase from Proust sprung to mind, "he suffered from constipation, the affliction of the prophets". In the lounge room there were glass doors that faced the densely grown garden where orchids, hollyhooks, London pride, roses, pansies, Canterbury bells, larkspurs and so on flaunted in a motley mess. The room itself was covered with flowers and bookshelves, some sofas, a TV and large butterfly palms in pots on the floor. A quartet of white-haired elderly people sat and chatted away at a table. I botanized among the books. Many books seemed partially erased, as if the text had faded or withered away. I flipped through a dream encyclopedia and while doing so I could easily imagine Alper contemptuously condemning its contents, "charlatanry! quackery! nonsense! put that away!". I searched for Ireland and found information that stated that Ireland, in a dream, represented a way of thinking "relaxed and calm" and symbolized "to pass life well". Moreover, encountering Ireland in a dream might reflect feelings about being immersed in a situation that insures that you're enjoying yourself. However, dreaming of Ireland could, on the negative side, also reflect emotions about situations where nobody is helping you or symbolize the feeling that you are surrounded by bastards who like themselves too much and that these bastards does not want to return a favor because it costs them too much happiness. I was not convinced and no direct and useful connection to my current situation presented itself. For lack of anything better to do I also read the next entry in the book, Iroquoian dream cult. These north American Indians had no deity or divine being they turned to for guidance or worship. What they had instead was the dream and dreaming itself. They had described the conscious and the unconscious as early as the 17th century, a couple of centuries before mister Freud had done so, and they believed that hidden or unconscious parts of the psyche were played out in dreams and made its desires visible. The Iroquois chaps  developed a system of allowing the dreamer to act out their dreams socially. Although a moral and disciplined group, during such acting-out the dreamer was allowed to go beyond current social boundaries. This included receiving valuable objects or making love to another persons spouse. This was to allow unconscious desires to be expressed, thus avoiding sickness of body or mind. Such hidden desires were seen as the basis of social as well as individual problems. 

   Florentina walked slowly through the lounge room. Arranged flowers. Placed some books on the bookshelf. Removed a small crumby plate from the table. Nodded dutifully and smiled kindly and professionally at the guests. Then buggered off. Positively stunning. The quartet of pensioners must have seen that I cast lustful glances at Florentina because they soon began to comment on her in a backhanded way, tossing a few considerations into the air.
-    they say that she lives alone..and maybe she wants to keep it that way....creaked person number one.
-   nah ... for all that she wants is another baby, yeah... said person number two with a soft hoarse voice and a distant something in her eyes. Person number three put his chin against the cane and said, summarily,
-   she's taken her time, I convince you she's fine ... but why does she hide emotions, why won't she say she needs you? I know she's not as strong as she seems.. .. 
    It was followed by a certain relative silence. Sighing. Noise from the pipes. The elders continued to drink tea and nibble on biscuits and soon they conversed again, in a manner reminiscent of cooing pigeons. I leafed further into the dream lexicon. "Cleaning: Dreams about cleaning usually mean that there are a lot of negative emotions in your life, so it may be necessary to get rid of them. You must change your own attitude and start a new chapter in your life. Sometimes it can reflect the moral cleansing necessary if a dreamer has a bad conscience. If you dream that you were cleaning a building it is a sign that very soon you will have an unexpected visit from someone".  

   

     
                                                                           *

 

29.   

      Days of fruitless search for the TV tunnel followed, and I soon found myself, for the umpteenth time, in a mental limbo: exhausted and listless like some constantly rejected novelist drained of his spirits. The thought had occurred to me, during the days of rummaging through the ghost town, that the hypnosis doctor had tricked us, but to what end had he done so?

     On the table by the chessboard lay the Hegel detector, supposedly sending data regarding our position to the OBS headquarters, but for the moment I was rather indifferent towards such a circumstance, and in a languid state of mind such as my own one would meet the prospect of OBS-detainment with equanimity.
     Another night of lying awake and staring at the ceiling... hearing the wall clock ticking and listening to the murmur of voices from the other side of the wall: their rising and falling bass tones, shifting pitches of mumbling nothingness, strangers taking turns delivering short bursts of sounds, the common vessel of the human comedy. I thought of all the friends I had lost and fantasized about going down to the flowery foyer and snatch a stack of postcards in order to send "I'm sorry"-notes to everyone I had ever known. Unfortunately though, I didn't know their adresses in this particular medium. 
   Someone was talking on a cell phone or something in the dark hallway. I got up from the bed and opened the door to the slightest degree, just enough so I could hear the strange English emanating from that nocturnal conversationalist. It sounded like urgent reporting with the sounds of mumbo-jumbo and in the intervals one perceived the faintly buzzing remarks from his conversation partner in the phone, like tirades and interjections from a persistent bee. I fumbled for pen and paper and then tried to transcribe the conversation.

   "  - Bester John, to the game Elena's freaked. Out shot the thing, the fire were fooling, toaster logs had it. 
       -  bzzz...bbbmzzz..bbbzzz

      -  It was on the veterinary undiluted, deeper for battle. Dana Ausmus looked destroyed, it was hard wearing toe biomes. 

       - bzzz..bz ....bzbzzzzb...bzzzzzzzz.bzzzzz

      -   Tender? yeah, a 10 Lincoln he briefed. We're half by Ain and out in the vascular...Big Willie Bell da eina Lotus evil...wears evil mask but carries his own hat and talks build account. 

       -   bzzz!! 

     -   Murata Cough, the Zeta's app is Minnie Mouse by Bobby Merriman, in only answered the hint, funnel, for how far as my book of a hit up mess. Down is very laborious, as in a film for the noodles market, which aired for a lever from the builder from the Aina play "Bacon meat".

       - bz...bzz...bzzzz.bzzzzzzzz.bbbzz.bz 

       -   Ah! perfecterica... who say "they", can you search them ? 

       -   bzzz

     -    A rabbit. Knocked at it.... It marked my shades or my A-Melindas-freestyle-baddies ! Ruffle a Lamanna Constant, for the entire making of a young....and on the Aina black dye for landfill and DA Mahal. But the talk at work... 

        -    bzz.bz.bz...bzzzzzzzz

       -    Dumare, aim of storm lake? You've asked, you invite over the autumn block north Allahabad, probably cleared on factionist or now the immunity: that laser metabolic from what McFadden of a Hotel-mile-attic need for a drone.

        -    bzzz..bzzzzzz.bz

       -      Big loss! domain of Cydia anuses 

       -     bbzbbzzbzzbzz!

       -      Gather from the fool...allowed....and outlook of Ashland, else could say "fire Zener".

Dr Hogbarth is that for him, and lazing.  HAHAHAHAHAHA

        -    bieeb bieebi bieeb 

       -   After laughs you are safe.... School night... Dost.... Coma.... Desmond set from ten thousand kilometers. Fair, on the whole of a dictum. 

         -   bzzz! ...bzz...bzzz.bzzz.bzzzzzzzzz.bz 

        -   Elder have office. All night? 

          - bzz ! 

         -    but for menses and on and toast ? 

         -   bzzzz! 

         -    by Percival! .....that ad for toast in it ? 

         -    bzzz! 

         -   Enols, ample me, retract-and-toast area in DC. 

           -  bzz.bz..bzzz.bbzzz.bbzzbbz..bbbzzb.zzzb

           -   But Altos, think dutiful. Boo H's console our CEO Phyllis.....and My visa from Dr. Hogbarth,

do not toast in the philosophy. 

            -  bzzbbzz

             -   who connect the days ago to gala Grove ? ......in Holdistan. Over
 
              -   in Holdistan..."


      With slow trailing steps, the interlocutor walked down the corridor and I found it harder to hear the talking. The transcribed word diarrhea seemed almost devoid of meaning but there was something to the tones and the rhythms and the emphasis of the delivery that made one conscious of a meaningful exchange taking place, something beyond the transcribed data suggested that a shared communicative transaction had occured here, possibly between two secret agents. Clearly, it wasn't dementia talk, but still there was a sense of "wavering semantics", as if one traveled in and out of meaningfulness itself,  like in one of those dizzy spells of consciousness. In any case, a completely new way of talking english had been reeled off before my ears and my curiosity was awakened like some twitchy ghost with a hangover, and for a brief moment I entertained myself with the idea of spying on the spy, primarily to uncover the mystery of his language.
     One recurrent theme in the spy's output was the word "toast", and a phrase that especially glimmered  was the line: "do not toast in the philosophy". What was signified here? I recalled having dreamed, the other night, of "toasting" for Ireland which symbolized, among other things, to pass life well, but what about the activity of toasting? do not toast in the philosophy he said, and with a marked warranted conviction like it meant "keep that illegal stuff out of philosophy". I envisioned a fervent analytic philosopher who wanted to keep everything clear-cut and plain and who wanted to eviscerate any traces of continental "mumbo-jumbo" philosophy, and this analytic philosopher was one who had a particular disdain for Rorty's program ever since Rorty had abandoned the analytic ship and instead wanted philosophy to grow closer to poetry. According to Rorty, the mutineer, philosophy was simply just another literary genre. 
    Coded spy language or not, it all made me ponder the theme of words and their relation to reality, to put it crudely, I returned to the question if words (and also thoughts) are - metaphorically speaking - mirrors of reality or merely tools for coping with said reality. I paid a short revisit to the schism between representationalism and anti-representationalism that was so confusing. But, I was aware that analogously to this, one could in a broader sense meditate about the characters in the narrative web of Obie, the omniscient blogger, and mull over how these characters corresponded to anything or anyone in the real world, or were they merely "tools" for coping in the now depressed mind of Obie? 
    At this late hour, I found no way out of Obie's subjective labyrinth but I was nevertheless fascinated with the language riddle he had flung in my direction. In the future, I had to interpret my way out of this, and it was like that voluptuous raccoon on TV had said, " No dream comes with a guide that says 

'this is how I should be interpreted'. There is no right interpretation, but that is not to say that every interpretation is as good as every other. And when it comes to the literary domain you will have to face this: ...canonized works tend to give rise to multiple interpretations...often separating themselves into different and competing schools of thought even..." 

       

 

                                                                           * 

    

30.

        Initially, we searched through the ghost town with relatively high spirits but after repeatedly returning to the hotel empty-handed and with no clues regarding the TV-tunnel's whereabouts, the doubts concerning our search-quest commitments began to intensify. And, on top of that, there were clear signs that Obie's depression was getting worse. When I woke up on the sixth day I saw that the ghost town had somewhat transformed and was covered with snow and ice and people with shovels were working full time along the streets. But more pressingly, in addition to these phenomena it seemed to me that the "wolf" regime was spreading and taking over and bringing society in a more totalitarian direction. I observed, from the angle of my frosty hotel window, how people were stopped and searched in the street and sometimes brusquely thrown into police cars and vans. Something was up. 
       The 'Lambs' seemed to have gone underground or were being imprisoned. The revolution had promised a life of free inquiry but the post-revolution resulted, on the contrary, in an excessively structured existence of intolerance and unfreedom. The wolves had, I assumed, succeeded in seizing power and quelling competition by being superiorly more organized, more tech savvy and more thoroughly entrenched at the grassroots level. One could imagine also that it all was a massive projection of Obie's depression that deepened by the hour, probably as an effect of the infamous "guilt-shame-lock", the one that can trigger addiction relapse.
       One morning I was sitting in an armchair in the flowery hotel lobby flipping through an old daily issue of Irish Times. The staff had informed me that the newspaper could no longer be obtained. The hotel still seemed like a protected zone, but for how long? Violence appeared to be escalating on the streets and I had seen through the windows the most horrible scenes. And here we sat, wallowing in armchairs, eating peanuts and browsing through old issues of Irish times. One's sense of proportion was easily disturbed, in the worst case scenario it was lost forever. 
      But then suddenly a gentleman clad in a black hat and overcoat breezed through the revolving doors and into the foyer. It was the Hypnosis doctor. His antenna was tilted forward like some kind of miniscule microphone. He approached us cautiously after reconnoitering the lobby.  
    - ah, here you are .... excuse my delay comrades ... it's rush hour .... and also note that in this medium I'm just a simple spy trying to make a living .... no quick tricks of disappearance are available to me in this sphere and there have also been some concerns with the subcontractor, but .... anyways ... I'll be brief.

     He handed me a small envelope that seemed to contain a couple of buttons or tablets.
      -  what's inside the envelope ? said Rorty, freshly hauled out of his reverie. The hypnosis doctor gave us each a glance, an owl-like consideration. 
    -  this hotel will be stormed by the "wolves" within ten minutes but you can escape it all if you strictly follow my instructions ... 1) take this bag and fill it with your belongings and put it in the foyer, my envoy will leave it later at our meeting place 2) Go to the balcony on the third floor, where you each swallow one tablet from this envelope 3) Within a minute you will turn into Bohemian waxwings 4) Fly in a northwesterly direction, away over the manor houses and over the arable land where you soon will see a roadwork site. That's the meeting place. There you will receive further instructions. 
     The hypnosis doctor paused and peered around the foyer. The reception desk was unmanned. A faint murmur and clinking sound mass rose from the dining room on the other side of the obscure glass door. The areca palms in the pots were still, its leaves only parading a slight meditative quiver. Everything seemed calm.
   - ...and when you see two palmchat birds flying towards you, you should continue straight ahead, this is very important, it marks the starting point of a highly prestigious version of chicken race, and if you in some way cowardly chicken out of it you will get a whole community of angry bohemian waxwings after you, you will be "cancelled"... said the hypnosis doctor and glanced at this watch.
       -  well that's all for now, Good luck comrades !... All brew melinite.

    Our mysterious friend with the russian accent nodded goodbye and hurried out through the revolving doors and disappeared into a glittering winter landscape. It was rush hour. 
     We hastily went upstairs and ransacked our two hotel rooms and filled the bag we had received with Hegel detector, psychosis cigarettes, clothes, towels and some fruit and then we, accordingly, left the jampacked bag in the foyer. Some moments later we stood on the snowy balcony on the third floor and opened the envelope containing the tablets. A high blue winter sky radiated its blueness above our heads. 

    In good faith I swallowed a tablet and then even-tempered Rorty took his pill and in the next instant came a physical sensation which I would describe as a potpourri of migraine attacks, dazed alterations of conciousness, involuntary twitches and muscle cramps but after a while the painful transformation was completed, we had become two full-feathered Bohemian waxwings. Rorty, who was not easily flummoxed, looked with limited curiosity at the pattern on his right wing. 
    - I hope someone, somewhere, some time can reverse engineer this ...he said. By some providence in the narrative of Obie our human speaking ability and cognition had remained mostly intact.
     The two newly conceived birds then set out in a feather light experience: swirling, sailing and hovering through the blue airspace like in some kind of intoxicating aerodynamic benediction. This was to "connect with other states of being where curiosity, tenderness, kindness and ecstacy is the norm". But after the greatest spikes of euphoria had subsided somewhat and my machine-gun-fast-beating excited ping-pong heart slowed down, I was reminded of the stark contrast between the enchantingly beautiful snowy landscape and the cruelty and suffering that humans, in all probability, endured in this very landscape. It seemed like two irreconcilable spheres, but perhaps someone somewhere had caught a glimpse of a synthesis, an unlikely fusion...  was it something akin to what Plato had wanted to achieve when he tried to hold justice and reality in one and the same vision?
    I thought of Obie the omniscient blogger again, what was he on about? what kind of Hegelian synthesis was he after and what kind of wound inside him generated the need to spin it in this peculiar fashion? Obie had moved, in terms of narrative and storytelling, from the ordinary letter-essay form to the Unlikely and then, irrevocably, on to the surreal magical narrative. I say magical because here we were, me and Rorty, transformed into two flapping waxwings pacing through the blue skies and we had entered into this world through a dissolving washing machine turbine. It all obviously denigrated the laws of physics in an almost grotesque way. Why did he do it? Did Obie have to resort to fantasy-magical improbability in order to tie everything together into one unit? Or did he avoid something psycho-sexual? Or did he somehow want to show - like Plato, Kant and the positivists - that man has an essence, namely that of discovering essences? But that would mean he really had his work cut out for him since both of his two protagonists seemed rather anti-essentialist for starters. Moreover, Obie's web of text was, in a way, from a certain angle, reminiscent of absurd futile attempts to revolt against time, space and the cognitive categories, and these elements were in turn, according to Kant, crucial in helping us to create what we call experience. To all these tendencies and tangents, a philosopher of Rorty's kind could only mildly suggest that Obie should stop trying to find that "full presence beyond the reach of play": that luminous, self-sufficient, self-justifying synoptic vision that explains it all.  

    Soon we flew over long poplar-lined avenues, lavish residential buildings, manor houses and mansions. Most likely home to the wealthy and the party elite. After these structures the settlements thinned out and we were more or less out on the countryside when we, a little while later, landed on a snowy field. Rorty insisted that we eat the snow and claimed that Bohemian waxwings have stomachs for the task, they even like it. White snow covered everything. An embodiment of Obie's depression. Snow had restrained him from falling and enabled him to escape from the colorful commotion called life.

     After the short snow snack, the flight continued. Some distance away from the field was a roadhouse that seemed familiar to me. The place looked like the Narrow mind roadhouse or some carbon-copy of it. That was where I first had met Mr Purse - or Peirce as I later gathered his name to be -, and wouldn't you know, peering in through the icy window you could see him, there he was, sitting on a chair by the bar and looking for something in his purse and a little further away, there perched an earlier version of myself and behind the bar counter stood the bartender, the curmudgeon, wiping a glass with a towel. It was after this encounter that the narrative, this very essay, had started to go bonkers and Obie had given himself up to fantasizing and the dubious practice of reification, i.e, turning ideas and concepts into things. 
    Sitting by that cold window, I became aware of my debt - and my lifelong installment plan -  for the unpaid beers. I was obviously behind with the payments. I also recalled that the bartender had accused me of being a relativist and here I returned, funnily enough, with the person who some considered to be the greatest relativist, namely Richard Rorty. Luckily we had a brilliant disguise in our waxwing costumes, we could easily fly under the radar.    

    - Peirce ... the most Kantian of thinkers ... an intellectual counterpuncher who never managed to assemble a coherent and consistent view of anything ... said Rorty with a not so vague tone of disapproval.  
     -  but... wasn't he like the first pragmatist or something ? and in a way the one who started it all ? I objected  
      - yes, that's probably right... he set the snowball rolling you could say ..he gave pragmatism its name and he was the one who stimulated James...but I think we can leave it at that... he's not particularly interesting.  

      It sounded like Rorty had attained a state of belief (about Peirce) that was unassailable by doubt. I, for my part, was contemplating that if it had not been for Peirce, I would never have met Rorty and we would never have managed to escape from the prison of the objectivists and consequently, we would never have ended up on this strange journey in the first place. There was a Peircean sense of fate at work here... "that which is sure to come true, and can nohow be avoided".

    We hurried on across the fields but had to hide in some bushes to escape the surveillance of a high-gliding hawk - "the hawk knows no churches". When the bird of prey was well out of sight, we flew on via some forest groves and there we crashed into a nest and its jumble of branches and leaves which, upon closer inspection, turned out to contain an unprotected stock of rowanberries and we swiftly provided ourselves with the goodies. 

     The flying, as a means of moving from point A to B, in this part of the story, had correlations with James' concept of "true ideas". The bearded fellow once proclaimed: "Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak, any idea that will carry us prosperously from any part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor: is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally. This is the instrumental view of truth.". 
     If the objectivists would ever track down and capture James they would probably put him on trial for deliberately obscuring, or overlooking, the distinction between 1) giving an account of true ideas on the one hand, and 2) giving an account of the concept of truth, on the other. According to hardliner objectivists, James illegally blurred the lines. I remember being high up in a tree in the forest of pluralistic empiricism, and James had asked, "what does it mean for an idea to correspond or 'agree' with reality?" In hindsight, one could ponder if it even was an agreeable question. For some pragmatists though, this 'agreement' consists in being led "towards that reality and no other, in a way that yields satisfaction as a result". James' assailants would have it that he seems to both criticize and co-opt the correspondence theory of truth: he wants to have his cake and eat it too.
     In any case. The flight took us further out on the countryside where the landscape consisted mostly of snow-covered fields and more or less thin scattered forest groves with the occasional hut or deserted-looking cottage strewn here and there. Suddenly we saw two birds flying at high speed in our direction. Was it the palmchats? Was this an invite to the prestigious Chicken race event ? I quickly made up my mind.  
    - this is the challenge, I shouted, fly straight ahead now! as fast as you can, do not turn away! ..this is the chicken race!
    A few adrenaline-fueled seconds later we crashed clinkingly through the glass material on what must have been a giant mirror and then we tumbled down the sloping mud among wheelbarrows, cement mixers, excavators and shovels and planks: the hallmarks of a construction site. The violent crash through the mirror had broken the spell, we had lost our waxwing costumes, we were once again humans in human bodies, lying bruised and battered among the mishmash of mud and things. 
    I saw through my cloud of pain that further down the hole, laying in a dirty wheelbarrow, there was the Hegel detector and our other belongings, and that could only mean one thing: this had to be the meeting place the hypnosis doctor had mentioned. 
  

 

                                                                                
     

                                                                         *

31. 


         Crashing through huge mirrors is a painful affair and if you also at the same time, or shortly thereafter, go through the metamorphosis of changing from waxwing to man, well then you are shaken in an extraordinarily unpleasant cocktail of the senses. Soon after the breakthrough, I fainted from the pain, but later as consciousness was transiently patched together again, I sensed through flickering sequences that someone was carrying me to some place indoors. I was put on a soft surface and then I felt a sting in the thigh as from a syringe and the pain faded out in a gracious greyness and I was chemically lulled into sleep. The film was pitch black for quite some time. 
       Slowly, like the wedding speech of a sloth, a scene appeared in a damp gray misty forest. Jagged conifers encircled the camp site where we were sitting in a small formation around a campfire. Head cases congregating. Warming cold hands. It was me, my sister and a person with alternating identity and finally a fourth unseen entity whose presence in the absence was suspected to be imperative. I was listening to the gentle sound of rain tapping against the tarp. The fire had died out, a thin column of smoke dwindled upwards into the sky. Suddenly I spoke, seemingly out of the blue, 'subjectivity permeates society's conversations'. I was only trying to make small talk but it was as if I had punctured a vital foundation that held me and my sister together. Her frowning face froze. I tried to save the situation by saying that there are of course different kinds of subjectivity and that it is neither necessary nor desirable to synthesize or integrate a private ethic of self-creation and a public ethic of mutual accountability. Apparently though, I was only pouring fuel on the fire, I had been swearing inside the church. The openness of the conversation broke down and it suddenly struck me that we were all on the run from something. Displaced and Dispossessed.  
       In the next upsurging dream sequence, I was sitting at a table inside a shabby caravan. Yellow-smoked interior, cigarette-scented 1970s claustrophobia. James came in through the door. He sat down by the table and gave me a long probing glance from a bearded face. 
      - I'm a little confused ... is it you or your sister, or the two of you, who do not understand that the trail of the human serpent is over everything?

     The stuffy atmosphere made it impossible for me to come up with any response. James carried on. 
      - however, that insight doesn't mean you can just go on and make up anything you like... 
     Pause. Nobody said anything. James twiddled with a small bag of marbles or something. Suddenly he poured the contents of the bag out on the table.    
      -  the world per se may be likened to these cast of beans on the table... by themselves they spell nothing... An onlooker may group them as he likes. He may simply count them all and map them. He may select groups and name these capriciously, or name them to suit certain extrinsic purposes of his... whatever he does, so long as he takes account of them, his account is neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true ?...it fits the beans-minus-him, and expresses the total fact, of beans-plus-him. Truth is in this total sense partially ambiguous, then ... if he simply counts or maps, he obeys a subjective interest as much as if he traces figures... All I contend for is that there is no truth without some interest....and yet here we are accused by the OBS of denying the beans, or denying being constrained by them! it's too silly!   
     Swish! Zoom! Pang! Thump! 
    A new evolution in the dream. Morphology. I'm witnessing the peeling of an egg against the white spotless background of a commercial. The lucrative scam. And we see the discovery of something blue veiny and sick inside the egg, something ominous.
    In the ensuing dream-frame: Sky-green leopards. Silvery branches. Sally Orchid saying Jesus was a Californian. On board the vessel of some acidic erosional spliff I descended down on a hospital bed. Dull-green room. Craters of hatch-codes in my mind. 

   The next thing I know in this weird collage of scenarios is that shadow-like figures appear next to me, like healthcare professionals around the bed of a delusional patient. A familiar droning voice is speaking: 
     - He has remained sufficiently Hegelian not to think of the natural sciences as having an inside track on the essences of things... 

    Another healthcare shadow is coming closer in the undefined grid. I hear a light melodic syrupy voice,

     -  His anti-essentialist view permits him to see descriptions of ourselves we find in the natural sciences as on par with alternative descriptions offered by poets, novelists, sculptors and even mystics.  
    Traffic noise from an open window, probably. Someone turns onto Equine Road. I feel a whimsical sensation of the pale woman in the office photo whispering in my ear ... "perception is also action". Then the clacking sound and the humming traffic music is muffled. 
    -   According to recent testing the patient assumes his intuitions are never anything more than a familiarity with a language-game, and to be discovering the source of these intuitions is simply to relive the history of the language-game we find ourselves playing. 

      The other shadow speaks yet again. 
     -   What the patient needs is not a list of his mistakes and confusions but rather an understanding of how he came to make these mistakes and became involved in these confusions 
     The shadows are most likely examining medical records and test results.
    - one could say that the patient has three basic issues ... problems of consciousness, Reason and Personhood.....and he, or she, has been appealing to indubitability... he, or she, has been exhausted from trying to reach the origin of the obsession with incorrigibility and privileged access.
     From the sound registered I inferred that a shadow doctor crumpled a piece of paper and throwed it in a trash can. A window might be opening. Sensing increasing volume of traffic noise .  
     -  As he or she described while being awake earlier...  quote:  "I've been to hell and back, what good did it do ?" unquote....he or she also described "a maddening maelstrom, a warped-up version of the dynamic to-and-fro transactional character of situations.." 
      - that sounds a bit like ... life  
      - yes...life    




                                                                            *

32.

     For a moment I only heard the tapping sound, as of rain asynchronously beating against a window pane or a thin makeshift roof, but then I could gradually open my eyes and the picture appeared slowly:
I was in a ramshackle of a caravan, similar to the one in the dream where I had met bearded James. The exaggerations of the dreams had subsided. I was back on square one, and marinated in a smell of cigarette ash and lying bandaged and plastered on a creaking bed. From behind a door, which in all probability led out to the front of the caravan, I could make out Rorty's trailing sleep-speaking voice:
"... no words .... no reasoning ..... no imagination, no new words .... no such words ... no? ... scattershots"

     The plants by the window panes had withered, their few remaining leaves were bronze-gray and crispy like potato chips. "Dead-sea rolls". The refrigerator door was fully opened, exposing a dirty empty interior. At the entrance stood a blue bucket receiving drops from a leak in the ceiling. 

     Without warning, the Hypnosis Doctor entered through the front door, he was followed by a black dog, assumably a flatcoated retriever. They both looked wet and ravaged. The hypnosis doctor was like a concept that was the same as before but one that still had radically changed, he was like Hegel's 'aufhebung'. The doctor was standing there dripping, clad in grimy chef's clothes and with a sloppy toque perched on his head, his shoulders sloped down as from the weight of pure discouragement, he seemed crooked and exhausted and dark gloomy circles surrounded his eyes which in turn had lost their former esprit and spark and now instead signaled an endless sorrow or perhaps something even worse. 

       -  There are no more 'Lambs'... He said, woefully.  
     I sat up in bed, as fast as the ailments allowed. The Hypnosis doctor took off his toque and laid it slowly on the table, much like a general handing over a signed letter of capitulation. 
      -    there is no more lambian community.... a future historian will describe in precise detail how they died... and you will read this account and you will experience madness and horror...
    He picked up a relatively clean handkerchief and blew his nose. Tjoflöjt! The dog curled up into a sleeping ball outside Rorty's door. 

       -   I have been secretly forging signatures from the wolf commissar of enlightenment, trying to extend special protective measures' for mr and mrs so and so ... but now the All-wolfian-extraordinary-commission-for-combating-counterrevolution and sabotage - the Weccas - is definitely on my tail... I can not play in this masquerade for much longer....you know I was almost exposed today when I was with the former general. The Weccas barged in downstairs and I ran out into the kitchen and threw on this chef's uniform and then I sneaked out through the staff entrance. There were some half-drunk Weccas or revolutionaries out on the street but they did not suspect me or anything, they even gave me a whole pack of cigarettes, they said they had just looted the cigarette magnate. While this was going on I could hear turmoil and screams from the house. 
     The hypnosis doctor lit a refreshing cigarette, the wolfian brand, swosh, and offered me one but I declined.
     - you know, the wolves are increasing the terror now ... their goal is to unleash a campaign of warfare against counterrevolutionaries ... the wolf commissar of enlightenment told me in person that 'to overcome our enemies we must have our own militarism' ... .
He peeked out through a gap in the blinds. The Hegel detector flashed for some unknown reason.
    - We have seen this before ... as the old enemies are defeated, new ones will have to be found in order to justify the continuing struggle for the bright future of the wolfian tomorrow. 
   The hypnosis doctor sighed deeply. He sat down at the table right where James had been sitting. He had his perspective, his particular outlook on things, no question about it. He spoke with a rueful timbre: 
     - I should have listened to my grandmother.... she foresaw all this.....she knew my father jeopardized his wealth by becoming a middler and helped bring about a revolution that, in the end, would leave him a pauper...  he tried to be a voice of mediating moderation... but that died out in the strenuous noise from different extremes

      The doctor blew his nose again. I stretched out Joe Roganish. The peculiar doctor continued his story:
      -  They shot Grand dude Butterfly... they shot him last week.... you know I paid a visit to him just a few days before... at first he had openly endorsed the revolution but the electoral commission denied him to run for office and in the end even the right to vote, and by the time the hardliners took over he was deemed a second-class citizen... of course his optimism had long since evaporated by then... he asked me 'when we meet again, where will we be ?.... shall we meet again?'  He knew he was marked down for the gallows. 
       The doctor stubbed out the cigarette on a small plate and spun the lighter a lap on the table. There were no traces of James' beans but I kept hearing a phrase from James in my mind .. "all I contend for is that there are no truth without some interest". 
     -  One cannot help but to see what's happening now as a retribution for the evil done to the people... for centuries of repression and serfdom.... it was written in the cards so to speak... we are paying for the sins of our forefathers.... I just hope that one day these ruthless wolfians will understand the crime in which they are now taking part.. 
        By this point in time, Rorty had stopped talking in his sleep and only regular snoring and hissing sounds could be heard from that part of the caravan. The doctor eked out his narrative.
      -  Of course, It helps the objective of the hardliner wolves that their leader is a strategic genius, he has understood how to use the forces of anarchy and discontent as an engine to sweep away the remaining institutions of the old order... his idea is that "revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and exploited and we have to use this festive energy of the masses and their revolutionary ardor to wage a ruthless self-sacrificing struggle"....
       He got up and went and looked out between the blinds. I had striped impressions: Out there in the greyness resided a parked yellow dumpster truck. 
        - Still,I don't know what's worse, what's wilder, what's more wicked... the unruliness of the insolent barbarian crowd or the petty tyranny of the aristocrats and the Grand dudes who consider themselves 'the salt of the earth'...  said the doctor. 

        The dog suddenly raised a worried head and sharpened its gaze towards the entrance. The nose sniffed the air. Probing the surroundings. Possibly sensing a copycat in the vicinity or a weasel beating around the bush. The doctor barely noticed it and soon the dog relaxed again. 
         -  and both movements are founded on fraudulent theories...... 
         -  or perhaps they didn't get the application right.....I said, getting tired of the doctor's wickerwork monologue. But it seemed as if he paid only minimal attention to my interjection. 
          - They won't back the tape and start all over now... this is the application they have chosen.... and from now on, noone in this sphere can freely speak their mind and engage in free inquiry, from now on we shall lead a double life... one outwardly wolf-compliant and one inwardly secret life of the free roaming mind. 
         The hypnosis doctor had tears in his eyes and went to the toilet and locked the door. A few seconds later one could hear him start sobbing. The door to the front of caravan opened and in came Rorty with a mushy morning face. We ate breakfast in silence. Canned tuna and pineapple. The hypnosis doctor continued to cry. Later, after breakfast, we stood on the outside among rubble, building materials, boards and stones and cement mixers. Looking at the horizon. All around us were shards from the shattered mirror. The flatcoated retriever came out to us, pawing gently between the shards. Sniffing the air. It was thawed weather and the snow was slushy and watery and the landscape was gray and I wondered if it all was a sign that Obie's depression had begun to melt away and now instead opened up to a clear flowing grief? Or did the depression just change character?

         A red-eyed hypnosis doctor came out to us on the construction site and spoke in a gentle manner:
        - You may be wondering why I tricked you into all this?
        - well, the question has crossed my mind, once or twice. I said.
        The hypnotherapist lit a cigarette with a slight tremor in his hands. 
       - it had to be someone from the outside .... it's the alien organizer veto .... only someone outside our sphere could do the job of destroying the mirror.
       - were we really the only ones who could smash that mirror? ... it hurt like hell.
        The hypnosis doctor tried to steer the conversation in a different direction and I deduced that we now had undermined Obie's self-aggrandizing and narcissistic scheme ... maybe forever ... and by breaking the mirror he can never place himself outside the human - time and chance - and believe himself to be playing on the strings of the prophet ... and everything is thanks to the Agni revelation zero ... he is one of us now. But the problems with the wolves unfortunately remain .... we can only hope that the wolves and the lambs reach a reconciliation somewhere in the near future.

 

                                                                     *                                                                

33.     

    

       On board a bland yellow dumpster truck we steered through rough rainy weather and over sloppy mud of puddles and ditches and we whizzed past depressingly leafless birch groves. At one point we nearly ran over a deer. We hit full stop in front of the animal while it looked at us with eyes like dark wishing wells. It seemed to say: "Be careful with what you wish for...". The hypnosis doctor was driving the vehicle and had regained some of his lost esprit but I had a feeling that this expedition of his was like putting all the eggs in one basket. The plan was to sneak back to the hypnotherapist's childhood home - a stately mansion now confiscated by hardliner wolves - and once there we would steal and reappropriate the "family" jewels. The maid had previously been instructed that as soon as the wolves and the weccas appeared on the property she would run and hide the family treasures in a special water tank located down in the basement. Our main idea, our plot, was to slip in incognito dressed as kitchen staffers and to simply grab the jewels while doing 'inventory'. Well equipped with the jewels again, the hypnosis doctor would consequently have a starting capital to recruit staff for his future guerrilla ventures that would, paradoxically, work for peace and reconciliation between 'wolves' and 'lambs'. As a service returned, the hypnosis doctor said he intended to escort me and Rorty to Nip Tick and from there we could get back to the jungle again. 

       I felt like lost ballast in that shaking truck. I was anxious to get home but that seemed like light years away and we were still deep inside the spells of the sixth enclosure of the octagonal, where absurdity reigned supreme. 
      It was almost dark when we stopped. Long brooding shadows and light cones characterized the silent birchwood. Further down the road was a gate with white walls on both sides.
       - this is it comrades, said the doctor grimly.
      The rain tapped lightly against the truck roof. We stepped outside and the Hypnosis doctor ordered Elsa - the flatcoated retriever -  to go and find the secret passage and she ran off with great speed and we had a hard time keeping up. The path was muddy, leafy and cold and enveloped in that sort of atmosphere that generates "indoorsy" individuals. In a particularly dense grove we later found the retriever excitedly waving its tail and with the gaze pointing at a cluster of brushwood and twigs.
    - Good work Elsa !.....Now Comrades, let us remove branches, twigs and stones and find the door! commanded the doctor and we started working and after a short while we had dug our way to an old heavy door that was immersed in the hillside. 
       -  this tunnel will lead us to a basement under the main building.

        I had an ominous deja vu, we had been here before but I tried to let it go, I told myself that it was just one of those daily OCD whims of the brain not worthy of attention. In the next moment we opened the heavy door through the use of a switch hidden in a bush and then the hypnotherapist, seemingly keen to get going, gave me a flashlight and made an urging gesture to me and Rorty who thereupon started walking down some cloddy steps. Then after a few steps down a bang was heard, I turned around and saw that the door had slammed shut behind us. The armoured door was unshakable. We shouted at the hypnosis doctor but to no avail and everything amounted to that lonesome realization: we were once again positioned in a dark tunnel. 
       - at least the man gave us a flashlight, said Rorty even-flowing, with thoughts arriving like butterflies.  
       I tried to repress a rush of panic. 

           -  will we ever get out of this labyrinth? I said.
           -  Time will tell, epistemology won't.... 

            

       

                                                                           *

34.

       We should have had some premonitions. This was not the first time the hypnosis doctor had tricked us, nor was it the only time he had lured us into a tunnel only to then exclude himself from the course of events. It all resembled the scenario with the washing machine tunnel in the sixth corner of the octagon. What also seemed like a cheap replay from morning TV was that we found on the wall - among roots, gravel and sediment - a fossil of that parrot-snake animal we had seen in the dark mine shaft. Rorty was inspired and saw it as a symbol of a kind of mix between systematic and edifying philosophers: one was preoccupied with getting the facts right while the other was interested in finding new and more fruitful ways of talking and thus of coping with the world. I listened with half an ear. 
       For a short while we had tried to pry open the reinforced door but we gave up the project. Instead, we continued deeper into the tunnel and soon, behind another heavy door, shady blue flickering TV screens materialized on both sides of the aisle. There was some kind of interrogation going on and when I looked closer I recognized the two interrogators: it was Wuhan Hund and Anders Boj Tropen, the mercenaries who work for APA, the anti-postmodern agency. It was unclear if the event we witnessed was pre-recorded, God knows when, or if it progressed in real time but I nevertheless had a feeling I had seen the spectacle before. The person interrogated was bald and had a somewhat similar set of facial features as our beloved hypnosis doctor. Wuhan Hund shook a piece of paper and leaned over the table towards the suspect who was sitting on a chair at the other end.
        - you have violated the contract with the reader! said Wuhan aggressively.
        - how ? replied the bald man.
        - you have contravened the expectations of the reader in a typical postmodern way
        -  do you think can you be a little more specific ? asked the suspect.
Anders Boj Tropen did not say much and occupied himself with a red yo-yo at the same time as he occasionally cast incredulous glances at the suspect. 
        Wuhan seemed to get more annoyed and read aloud from a piece of paper.
       - you have been using metafictional techniques! .... fragmentation! .... ontological concerns! ... and temporal distortions! .... and all these cheating methods have led you on the path to an anticlimactic narrative! ... we can not have that behavior in this establishment! 
        - I don't think that's what I've been doing. Said the suspect. Almost calm, cool and collected. Wuhan Hund glared angrily with his mouth somewhat open, seemingly running out of verbal ammunition. Anders Boj Tropen briefly stopped his yo-yo activity and assisted the suspect in lighting a cigarette. Swosh. The suspect inhaled the cigarette and continued. 
         - I was only trying to negotiate myself into pure time...... and pure matter.... you must mistake me for someone else ... 
         -  bah! exclaimed Wuhan and began to walk to-and-fro in the bunker-esque room. Soon he resumed hurling accusations. 
         - you have self-conciously and systematically been drawing attention to the task of fictional writing itself and also its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality....that's not the way to tell a story!..... and on top of that you have also been stealing material across the board !!!
           The suspect calmly sucked his cigarette and exhaled some smoke before he spoke. 
          - so ? 
         It was, on the whole, a rather absurd conversation to overhear and soon we tried to skip this particular program and the TV screens where it was aired. The case seemed to be that Wuhan Hund and Anders Boj Tropen represented the position of modernist literature, one that dealt with the "problems of knowing" while the interrogated suspect was engaged in "problems of modes of being" and where the former ask "how can I interpret this world of which I am a part?" the latter instead asks questions such as: "Which world is this? and what is to be done in it? and which of my selves is to do it?". Curiously though, sometimes the suspect - and writer's of that ilk -  seemed to 'forget', if that's the right word, that all their written arrangements were their own creations. I was struck by the idea that the interrogation, on a deeper level, was a representation of Obie's pinballing self-critique and also his ambivalence. In any case, I was at least more or less convinced that this had to be the so-called TV tunnel. 

        If you grew up during the time before cable TV and internet TV streaming, you did not have many channels to choose from and it could be a frustratingly meager range of programs, but then the pendulum swung in the other direction and all of a sudden you had an abundance of channels and programs to choose from, and that could also be frustrating. We passed through halls with TV screens showing all sorts of programs: sports, history, sitcoms, TV shop, debates, news, movies, the "Mountain men" and whatnot ... it was like wading through a river of live images. We looked at a medium that was about the same age as the toaster and the electric household oven and one which had been considered dangerous for children in excessive doses, it was a medium that had been condemned several times by ophthalmologists and psychiatrists and that generally had been addressed in a stepmotherly and condescending tone, especially if the cousins "Cinema" and "Theater" were present. But around the time when the internet started to become a mainstream phenomenon, people also started to wonder if television was really so despicable after all? It seems to happen again and again: we recognize and discover the value of an art form almost always only at the moment when that art form is being surpassed by another art form, when it has become an anthropological artifact (and here I sensed something vaguely Hegelian at work). I guess it happened when the theater came to life, it befell upon the book, the cinema, the radio and it happened to television, and it will surely happen the internet, even if it is more sprawling and, in a way, encloses all the other earlier forms in its network. A new medium comes in (internet) and creates an environment in which certain things that you've taken for granted about ancestor systems (e.g Television) are now being brought to the surface again, are made visible, so that you become aware of them. But this new medium will initially incite a discourse of fear and disgust, something similar to what happened television in the beginning: "Television turns children into paranoid stay-at-homes"..."it's hypnosis, a narcotic poison!". 

       In one room, I recognized on the screens what in the early 2000s was called reality TV: no actors but ordinary people, with more or less ordinary jobs, challenged each other in a kind of social king of the hill type of game. The events usually unfolded on a tropical island. The element of cooperation was highly selfish and it was important to be tactical and vote smart and form pacts and so on but if one's conniving efforts were in vain, or if they were somehow exposed in a compromising light, one ran a higher risk of being voted off the island during the next Meeting. Why did they call it "reality TV"? was it because the program imitated a kind of cynical idolatry of the individual and the competitive element that was prevalent at this time in history? Or did it have more to do with the idea that ordinary people do not act, the viewers will get the real deal so to speak, the actions and reactions will be considered  "authentic", "real" and unhinged. Rorty had other thoughts, not entirely on topic.

          -  we should drop the notion of reality ... instead of saying that our ancestors were less in contact with reality we could say that they have a more limited imagination than us.... 

           -  I hear you ... I said, scratching my head.

          -  Philosophers have become obsessed by the need to achieve direct access to reality... unmediated by language..
       We stood on the threshold to a room where TV screens showed a nature program: some persistent beavers were building a beaver dam, that kind of thing. Rorty was in the zone.
        - I know that in certain circles they agree that the ultimate nature of reality is simply atoms and void ... but I think what we call increased knowledge, in these matters, should not be thought of as increased access to the Real but as increased ability to do things that can make human life richer and fuller

        -  ...it sounds as if you want to make philosophy more unreal. I said in a poor attempt at witticism.  

      -   Frege and Russell hoped to make things clearer... Hegel and Heidegger wanted to make things different. I think we, on the other hand, should stop thinking of philosophy as the search for objective truth or the Real and begin to think of philosophy as a creative enterprise of dreaming up new and more humane ways to live   

       -     Fair enough.... but that doesn't sound like philosophy at all. 
     A zealous beaver on the TV screen struggled with a dam construction. Rorty lost himself in the program. He was open to a sense of wonder, a wonder which poets can sometimes cause.

     If the metamessage of David Bowie was, as Dick Hebdige argued, that of escape - from class, sex, personality, from obvious commitments - into a fantasy past or a science-fiction future then the metamessage of Richard Rorty could be framed as 'making conversation possible'. As a piquant juxtaposition then, one could argue that Obie's metamessage, at this juncture in the story, was something like "endure, and I will see you tomorrow". 

  

                                                                             *

35. 

          Inside a billiard room - somehow ulterior to the TV-tunnel -  with dark wood paneling and deer trophies on the walls, we found some couches where we finally lie down to sleep. And In my subsequent dream, Benjamin Fondane appeared. Smoke swirled around him and his green eyes gleamed. He spoke: 
         - in vain you squeezed the orange, the universe... sleep was there, sat with open eyes, space could not be eaten, the blood bit the void and felt hollow ... a big fish touched the world with its tail ... its cry was drawn-out and dirty... 
            I was puzzled but I noticed in a jiffy that we were traveling, or descending rather, in some kind of  balloon. We landed next to warehouses and harbor sheds by the water and we got out of the balloon vessel and started trudging along the quay. Fondane spoke again:

         - just like you, I have sought in vain on a woman's belly the impossible peace that we lost long ago  in a large garden where the tree of life blossomed....... like you, I have read newspapers and books and I did not understand anything of the world, I did not understand anything of man, even though I often claimed the opposite. And when death came, I may have claimed that I knew who it was, but now I can tell you with full certainty: it came straight into my bewildered gaze, I was surprised to understand so little. Have you understood more than I do?

           No plausible linguistic response presented itself and my lips remained sealed. We kept on walking by the docks and came by a large passenger ship. People with suitcases and small children boarded on a gangway and a plume of smoke rose from the chimney. 

         - what is man really looking for on this trembling earth? why do you make her descend into sewers, into mines with her face covered in urine and mud, why do you take advantage of her, beat her? why do you spit in her face and take the Song away from her?

          I felt as if the slightest idiocy on my part would cause the dream to dissolve or to change shape. We stood and watched for a while as a cow was lifted by crane and transported over to the ship. 
          -   are you leaving on this boat ? I said.

          -   no... I can't leave my sister behind....neither should you...
         Dreams are often the domain of weird segways and sheer strangeness, and that was also the case this time around because the next thing I know is that we - Rorty and myself - are being miniature divers  diving in a huge water tank and we're intent on finding the lost family jewels of the hypnosis doctor. Some kind of mandala is glowing mysteriously on the bottom, vaguely resembling the Tarcraft logo or the club badge of the Hockey team Edmonton Oilers. In a hidden corner we really find the jewels, but the instant we touch them a large toad appears and devours the two of us in a single bite. Groping about for a while in the dark toad-interior, we live and breathe inside the toad's stomach and we hear the heart-like sounds and the qwark-qwark-qwark while thousand-mile questions rub the temples. For some reason though, the toad then decides to vomit us out and we are demonstrably catapulted out, evicted with brute force as it were, and land next to a pond inside the forest. We were okay, in spite of everything, just a bit slimy and gloppy I guess. Rorty brushed of some sand from his pants and muttered something about contradiction being the essential moment of the notion. 
         There was a deflated hot air balloon laying on the embankment. We had traveled a long way and this was what we had found. It was like a resignated symbol for this absurd essay on the truth (and it also, in a way, served as an image of Obie, the depressed blogger running out of steam). 

        One could assume that we at this point had arrived at deflationism: "For the deflationist, truth has no nature beyond what is captured in ordinary claims such as that ‘snow is white’ is true just in case snow is white. Philosophers looking for the nature of truth are bound to be frustrated, the deflationist says, because they are looking for something that isn't there." The deflationists argue that truth is only present as a device for pointing in the general direction in which the real explanation is going to be found. It is like hearing someone refer to something, although you do not know what it is. Truth is viewed as a device for generalization, a device for indirect reference. I must admit, it was a bit discouraging. 
         In addition to these circumstances, we had finally come out of the tunnel system and consequently found our way out of the Octagon, but we were still inside some kind of dream and nothing in the immediate surroundings hinted at the possibility of ever waking up from it. That was how it seemed. But how was it all connected? Was it a typical trait of depressed writers to become more and more inconsistent, incoherent, non-linear and even desperate in their extravagances? As if only something really weird can keep them going. Recent events seemed to point in that direction. Perhaps it was not reasonable to generalize like that, those characteristics mentioned might only apply to this special case. 
         Moreover, I pondered the prophecy of the hypnosis doctor, the one where he stated that we would be led through a TV-tunnel and at the end of it, in a computerized room, we would meet a toad named Nip Tick. That was almost what had happened, but not quite, he was almosting it. 
      Discouraged, I was caught thinking that this whole journey had been in vain. All this effort for a deflated balloon? 
    - what is truth !? I said. 
Rorty, who had begun to pick berries in the bushes, emerged from the leafage.
     - you tell me ... he said calmly
     - where on this moonlit and dream-soaked Island is truth and it's authority to be found !?
It crackled and cracked from the bushes. Rorty was in the thick of it again. There was a pause and then I heard his mumbling voice.
     - truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying...

                                                                           *

36.

 

       The forest around the pond appeared gray, monotonous, withered and even half-dead in some places, but still we managed to find some edible berries and roots and whatnot. A consequence I deduced from these scanty surroundings was that Obie, the depressed blogger behind this text, was suffering from some kind of midlife-crisis. He must have fallen into a predicament, an existential dead end, where his previous experiences and learned reactions were no longer sufficient for him to understand and mentally master the current situation and we, his literary inventions, were the ones who suffered for it because he now offered very little excitement, a very scarce food supply and the nerve of the story had ebbed away and life was as quiet and dull as the pond in front of us.   

     The midlife-crisis was a rummy thing in that it manifested itself differently among different individuals. It was a shapeshifter of sorts. Generally speaking, it seemed to be a catchphrase for turning 40 or 50 years old and feeling rather upset about it. I fancy that in some cases the midlife-crisis was like finding out that the map you have been using to get up to this point was a bit fraudulent and that it won't get you any further. Touché, as the fencer said after receiving a hit. For some, the midlife-crisis presented itself as a dismay at having squandered the potential of one´s youth, for others it was the aging itself and the decay of the body that was the most disappointing thing about the whole affair. And of course, people acted differently on such emotional data, some wealthy cronies started buying sports cars left and right and tried to look more dashing and youthful, still others got divorced and started with yoga or something else that had been completely unthinkable in an earlier stage of their life. In any case, I didn't know how all this would pan out for a blogger of Obie's kind but I was rather worried that he might consider to expose us to something really nasty just in order to break the stupor. 

      We built a hut by the pond. We fished and picked berries and drank rainwater. Time passed slowly. There was no reason to go anywhere it seemed. Imagination itself had left an out-of-office reply and Ambition was dozing in a hammock.  

      One day a woman in rags came walking along the beach. As she got closer, I recognized the baggy eyes and the radiant wisenheimer spirit. It was Alper Kropp! Sensationally mind-boggling you could say. It turned out that Alper had undergone gender reassignment surgery, hormone treatments and, on top of that, a revolutionary donkey-to-human transformation to round it all off. Our initial contact was very tentative, certainly influenced by the sheer shock of the encounter, but after a while we became more chummy and comfortable with each other. Alper told us, not without a hint of remorse, that she had in fact revealed our position to the APA - the anti-postmodern agency - that night at the distillery a long time ago. Alper had thought she would lead a better life with the APA, but after the gender correction and the donkey-to-human transformation many in the APA camp had continued to refer to her as a donkey and that circumstance had led Alper to leave the community. After that quandary she had just kept on walking. 
       And here she was now, Alper Kropp, the same but still radically different, it was Hegel's aufhebung all over again. Even though it wasn't any of my business I still couldn't wrestle myself away from the impression that there was some kind of remaining donkey-vibe about her, not that it mattered or that it  made any difference as far as my angle of interaction was concerned - at least I hope not. It was more of a vague exotic perplexing sensation that lingered in a corner of my mind and it was one that I didn't know how to act upon. You could also say that some part of me was at sixes and sevens about the whole shebang.             
      The general feeling of resignation, which seemed to emanate from the very ground, made it pointless to harbor resentment towards Alper for what had happened in the distillery. It was no longer relevant. We welcomed her to our little camp without further ado. 
     In the evening we parked around the crackling popping campfire. The sky was pitch black and did not seem to house any stars. The forest appeared ghostly quiet and had the air of something that had been hastily abandoned. A certain seriousness weighed on me, but it was better than the death anxiety that had crossed me, like electric shocks, earlier in the day when I had become aware, with crushing clarity, that we were forever trapped inside Obie's web of a narrative. We lived only as constructions in his body of text in an obscure corner of the internet, and the cold realization told me that we could never get out of this medium, we were going to die in here, and we also lived only to the extent that a reader noticed us and the probability was high that Obie, due to his inaccessible incoherent text, had scared away the last reader a long time ago, and that effectively made us - after the flow of Obie's typing had stopped - like flies caught in amber. It was, by the way, a common fate for many fictional characters, but that realization in no way dampened my anxiety. 

     The finitude of life became clear and I also sensed a diminished vitality in the body of the text itself. And I was ambivalent about the end of the essay, because its end would imply my own death but at the same time I did not want the essay to last too long either, it would not be fair to an eventual reader, you don't want to bore them stiff. 
       Being like a host to the reader, the author or the blogger is like someone who begins by presenting the surroundings, who lays out a few starting pointers, and perhaps offers drinks and snacks and possibly even cigarettes. Obie seemed in that metaphorical sense to be a more confused host and the rooms he introduced were disjointed and had strange thresholds and Obie himself had a penchant for saying ambiguous things during the tour and he also had not cleaned the toilets properly. It was clear that the guests did not stay long under such conditions, especially not in the era of IIG - instant-internet-gratification - where precious patience ran out quickly like some rare potion. No one had the time nor energy to handle his obstacles. 
     The fire crackled and snapped in front of us. Alper dismissed my theory that Obie was suffering from a midlife-crisis, she was in fact highly skeptical of the very idea that there even existed an "Obie".  There was no reasonable way, she said, to test the theory that proclaimed the existence of such a being. She continued,
   -  Whatever you see and hear and feel, you seem to be able to interpret that as a verification of your theory ... you have to think: under what conditions would I admit that my theory is untenable? What possible facts would I accept as refutations or falsifications of my theory? ... you sound a bit like a marxist or a psychoanalyst who is able to interpret every event as a verification of their theory ... there must be a testability.  

      -  ... but exactly those remarks can be used when dealing with a midlife-crisis .... you have had a theory and a strategy about how to live life but new relationships and new facts now forces one to refute and falsify the previous theory, with grief and desperation as a result initially. One needs a new theory to get going so to speak. I said, dodging the check.  
      Alper was no doubt friendlier as a human and a woman than as a male donkey, it was as if she had found home. Gone was the short-tempered grumpiness and sourness. One could imagine that she had finally been able to match the outward appearance with some inner sense of identity and it was no suprise that it, presumably, had worked wonders for her mental health and confidence. 
     Rorty looked up from his beached-whale position. It was unclear how much he had listened to our exchanges. He munched on some fermented berries and mumbled, sounding somewhat drunk while rehashing familiar tropes,
     - I don't think we can discover the nature of things or reach the core of this .. we just have to find what is useful to us in this particular situation and muddle through, criterionless.

     Alper's eyes revealed a steely glint. She took a deep breath and proceeded. 
     - Interesting thoughts here ..... to quote Einstein, no physical theory can find a better destiny than to point forward to a more complete theory, in which the previous one lives on as a borderline case ....  something similar can perhaps be said about our loosely defined mid-life crisis here .... you are on your way somewhere, you are in a transitional phase, the old must die for the new to take place, the current theory of life is a step towards a more general theory .
     I heard the wind rustle through the trees. There were ripples out on the pond, minimal waves. I took a cruise up to the hut in a fit of awkward restlessness. Checked the construction, counted the water bottles Alper had brought and I wrestled with the emptiness. Bungled John Ra. I returned to the beach where Alper was still in the flux of conveying her theories and methods, the processes intended to put doubt to rest and whatnot.  
    - ....human knowledge is composed of our theories, hypotheses and guesswork ... it's a system of statements ... that is the current position of science .... and we need a critical and open dialogue and we have to test, examine and evaluate our theories .... excuse me, I have to go and pee ... this transition has given me some urological inconveniences

      When Alper was out of sight, Rorty, semi-drunk from fermented berries, leaned in my direction and whispered:
   - She's insisting on a reality independent of our representations of it. She might preach open dialogue but I tell you the metaphysical realism of hers is in itself dogmatic. It's an unshakable form for her.
     -  I shall take those remarks into consideration. I said, trying to be diplomatic.
      Rorty looked out over the pond and mumbled, mostly to himself.  
    - she sounds like a glorified stock-room clerk inventorying the universe in accord with a predetermined scheme ...
      I thought his assessment was somewhat off the mark but I could not exactly put my complaint into words, something made me lag behind.  
     Alper came back to the campfire and sat down. Rorty seized the moment and delivered a reply.     

    - I don't want to adopt an antagonistic position [burp] to natural science but I am sort of against the idea that human thought should culminate in the application of a scientific method... 

     -  What do you suggest instead ? said Alper, not without a certain bite. 

     -  Well, we have our socratic dialogue, which is an end in itself...[burp]  we are engaging ourselves in the conversation  ... we're asking questions, debating, giving and assessing reasons, that kind of thing........[burp]... but mind you... [burp]... reason works only within the limits imagination has set [burp].. and every once in a while comes a creative genius who asks a new set of questions in a new way, and thus expands the range of acceptable moves of social practices within the sphere we call rationality....[burp]
    Alper displayed a faint grimace of incredulity and poked the fire with a stick. Rorty and Alper were both, in my estimation, commited to the creation of an open dialogical problem-solving society, and neither of them seemed interested in the purely inward technical pursuit of many philosophy departments, but while Alper's intellectual heroes were undoubtedly natural scientists Rorty was more inclined to praise literary culture as the ethical and epistemic guide towards a more humane society. As the night progressed and the stars popped out twinkling, it became more and more like being seated between two siblings caught in a game where they disagreed upon the basic rules of the game: it was natural science versus literature, or the distinction between finding out whether a proposition is true and finding out whether a vocabulary is good. 
      Rorty seemed to treat Alper as naive in thinking that the scientist is doing something more than putting together ideas and constructing new texts. Alper, on the other hand, was contemptuous of historicism and to some extent also of art. She was downright scornful of poetry, and although she could see that some found poetry and the like meaningful she made it abundantly clear that it had nothing to do with the truth. She snorted with condescension when Rorty presented the idea that art can put us in touch with a free, spiritual and numinous part of ourselves that science cannot see. I mean to say, she could probably see the usefulness of art - in recreation and catharsis - but it was obvious that she kept science on a much higher pedestal. After all, I did not totally disagree with her, and it was possible to embrace both activities, you did not have to exclude one or the other, but for Rorty though it was probably at any rate important to point out that the natural sciences did not have any moral superiority in itself and that it also depended on a contingent vocabulary just like the humanities did.
     The former donkey kept her good spirits despite some sharp differences of opinion. She anyhow continued to preach about science and theories. Rorty had at this point entered a more languid mode of being where he sometimes seemed too lax to even respond. Alper was sticking to her guns, 
     - We try to solve a problem with a theory that we try to error-eliminate, troubleshoot .. and that process may in turn result in a new problem ... and so it continues ... the purpose of science is to find theories that are better approximations of the truth and who can pass through criticism and testing better than their competitors. This of course means a growth of the content of our theories...
      Then Alper abruptly turned to me and said:
      - think about it Eddie, falsification can entail a direct collision with reality.

      I didn't know what to say, and perhaps I was also getting intoxicated from fermented berries but I heard in Alper's words an echo of Peirce and Misak, "if we were to reach a stage where we could no longer improve upon a belief, there is no point in withholding the title 'true' from it". This fallibilism of Alper was perhaps a useful technique for a paranoid person such as myself: to constantly test and challenge the thoughts and theories about the world, and about oneself, maybe I would be better off using that very tactic. But that being said I still could not refute my ideas about an omniscient blogger, or Hegelian, who pulled the strings behind the scenes, the sum of all information seemed to indicate that this was the case and there was also some kind of language in the absence itself that gave fuel for such a belief. And ultimately, I simply couldn't let go of it. 
       Alper now spoke in a surprisingly humble and tender fashion,
     - I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort we may get closer to the truth.
It was an unexpected comment, it was a vocal delivery that would have been unimaginable in her previous hardheaded donkey existence but this was the new Alper that continued to surprise. Even Rorty raised an eyebrow and the remark somehow concluded the whole evening.
      Some time units of silence prevailed over the camp, only the muffled crackle of the fire could be heard. The stars were out and the moonlight was forceful and epigrammatic. I looked at the ripples out on the pond, its wrinkled forehead. There was a creaking sound from the forest, like a slow arthritic move in an ancient game of jackstraws. Rorty got up and stretched his limbs, he was ready for sleep.   
     - take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself. He said yawning, and then he tottered up to the hut. I guess this was his way of saying goodnight.
     The moonlit setting and the late hour struck a pensive chord in me. There were so many roads, so much at stake and here we were at the edge of a small lake. Thoughts of the midlife-crisis, death and gender reassignment swam around in my mind like incompatible brightly colored fish. I wanted to reach clarity and understanding and I wanted to live some kind of dignified existence, fair and decent without too much of a fuss.  
     Obie's midlife crisis, if that was what he was subjected to, had not yet resulted in any major difficulties for us. The only thing that had happened so far, and which assuredly had caused great astonishment, was that Alper had entered the stage again and in a completely new form. Alper had reemerged in the story with the reinvigorating aura of someone who has been liberated from a terrible trap. I saw an analogy with the midlife-crisis here, if you worked in the sensible way it could also be a liberation from a kind of trap even though you could only categorize it as such in retrospect, when the crisis was over and the storm had been weathered. But what Alper's gender change - and animal change - had to do with Obie's midlife-crisis, at a deeper level, I could only speculate, they may in the end have had little correlation and interdependence with one another.
     The seal of silence was broken by Alper who cleared her throat and told me about her theory of the  "Three worlds". I was tired and possibly soused and could not assimilate all the elaborate information, and I can therefore not reproduce her theory in full detail here. Her basic idea was that the first world was about material things; the second was man's thought processes and intuitions and the like; the third world was the statements-in-themselves. As I said, I lost track of the details and of how these worlds interacted, but it was clear to me that we were in the third world, that of statements-in-themselves.  

    Thoughts of death stung me once again. I could cognitively grasp, I think, the very idea of being dead, of not existing anymore, but it was when this notion trickled down to my heart, so to speak, that I panicked and I heard my inner logic-defying protester screaming "it can't be true! this can't happening!". Was there a way, I pondered when I had calmed down a bit, was there a way for us "statements-in-themselves", we poor text constructions inside Obie's rickety blog, to attain eternal life? Or was the best we could hope for to have a dedicated wikipedia page? Or, to shift focus a bit, was there a way for us to transfer to another medium? to become flesh and blood? or at least get converted into audio and video?

     A vision came into view in my brooding mind. It was the supposed airfield to the east, our previous destination, our hope ... I didn't know what was waiting over there (or if the place existed) or if we were still on the same island as before, we might even be residing in a different dream altogether by now, but I nevertheless felt refreshed by the conviction that this was where we were going. The airfield wayout east was what we were striving for, and from there we could take an airplane off the island and something transformative and new would be awaiting us at the other end of that journey, it just had to be so. I ventilated the idea to Alper, it couldn't be that alien to her, after all, it was what we had previously planned and aimed towards before breaking up at the distillery a long time ago. 
    - I have taken it for granted... that's where we are going, sooner or later. Is there any other way? said Alper. 

  

                                                                           *

          

37.

         
         As deflationist Simon of Blackburn wrote in a letter to his aunt, "if you don't have sufficient reasons to believe p, then you shouldn't behave as if p". I thought of this when I opened my eyes in the morning, the phrase was glued to my mind like a catchphrase or a pop song slogan but it was decoupled from any specific matter, it was, so to speak, still waiting for its proper context. 

       I was in the hut loafing about. Sunlight filtered in through gaps, cracks and cavities while Alper, who  suffered from some kind of voice failure , inventoried the gadgets in her backpack:

    - five water bottles

    - two pieces of rope

    - box of matches
    - box of crayons
    - two towels
    - Flashlight [similar to the one Rorty had before]
    - Diving mask and snorkel

                

     And so on and so on. I heard some crunching steps from the outside and then the jerry-built door was removed and there was Rorty, lingering at the entrance. Light flowed around his pragmatic silhouette. He had wrapped himself in towels and had the appearance of a monk or a shaman. A small basket made of twigs and blades of grass rested in his right hand.

      -  I have to make a concession to my realist friends. He said, beaming kindly at us. Alper, who didn't like to be interrupted, started to glow of skeptical impatience.

        - what do you mean? I said.
      - I had the strangest dream you see... I was rammed by some bear, in a mountainous landscape, it must have been in Norway... and this event made me realize, in effect, that it was a mistake on my part to go from criticism of attempts to define truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality to a denial that true statements get things right... what I should have done, the bear made me realize, is to grant Davidson's point that most of our beliefs about anything...snow, molecules, moral law... must be true of that thing... must get that thing right. 
       Floundering among the apparent question marks at hand, I was about to take the plunge to say something but Rorty kept talking, as if surfing on a benevolent streak of inspiration. 
       - I am going to have to stop saying, in imitation of Sellars, that 'true' and 'refers' do not name word-world relations....nor shall I any longer be able to say that all our relations to the world are causal relations. 
       I will admit that I didn't get the gist of it, the particular go of it. Rorty took a few fermented berries from the basket and chewed away and in between the bites he produced some new strings of words: 
        - I shall instead have to say that there are certain word-world relations which are neither causal nor representational -   for instance, the relation "true of" which holds  between "snow is white" and snow, and the relation "refers to" which holds between "snow" and snow..... these relations, however, do not hold between that sentence and what philosophers like to call "reality as it is in itself" but only between those expressions and snow...No snow, no truth about snow, because nothing to get right.... what is true in pragmatism is that what you talk about depends not on what is real but on what it pays you to talk about. 
       (Here, when the word "pays" popped up, I was briefly reminded of my debt to that old roadhouse.)
       - ...and what is true in realism is that most of what you talk about you get right. Said Rorty,  digesting berries. 
     Alper, mysteriously aphonic, rolled her fed up eyes and seemed to signal that she already knew all this or perhaps even that Rorty had gotten it all wrong. She continued with her inventory. I found myself rather speechless. It sounded as if Rorty suggested that we cannot get reality right but we can get particulars more or less right on "the test of relative efficiency at accomplishing various purposes". And this was said by a man who earlier had urged me to drop the notion of reality entirely. It was a bit confusing to say the least. Rorty had probably reached a state where he assumed some kind of duality or twofoldedness when it came to the matter of reality: 1) it was the cause of sense and the world of causal relations and all that but then there was 2) the goal of the intellect, the normative side of it, what we ought to do and so on - how we should live - and was it here, on this second side, that we should drop the notion of "reality"? I felt like a butter-fingered stock-room clerk who had a hard time on the first day on the job. 
       Rorty dwelled at the entrance, radiating an awkward brand of kindness. None of his mates came up with any replies so he slowly turned on his heel and walked out into the sunshine. Later I would ponder, what practical consequences could these concessions have? Would they hold up in an OBS courtroom? I couldn't tell. But I did assess, however, that Rorty was a pragmatist through and through and as such adhering to the view that we only answer to each other and not to something non-human or to the intrinsic nature of Reality or to the way the world is in itself. 

     Instead of pondering further, I borrowed Alper's mask and snorkel and went for a therapeutic swim in the pond. I set out on a slow ambulation in watery ambience. Spears of light shoot through shimmering water. Dusty spells of grains in corridors of light. Clumsy humanoid floating in swimmer's medium. Dilly-dallying about. A clueless tourist afloat in the here and the now. After a while I see some kind of greenish structure far below. I hold my breath and dive down. Once further submerged I see a huge green muscular body with red lashes. When I get close enough, I see to my horror that it is a sleeping dragon. Terrified, I swim up to the surface and then into the beach. I go about it as neat and sneaky as I can. Treading lightly. And then I am whispering, telling the tinkering crew about my find. 

     Something told me that the dragon was the result of Winnicott's false self acting inside Obie and that we would be best served if we could avoid waking up the sleeping beast. My message, delivered on shaky legs, engendered a lukewarm response. The response then degenerated into slight antipathy and ridicule when I mentioned that the dragon was a fruit of Winnicott's false self operating inside Obie and that this phenomenon - the false self - prevented Obie from acting according to his spontaneity and creative impulses and was ultimately causing him to feel unoriginal and empty and this, in turn, could have a profound effect on our quality of life. I had by this point, obviously, abandoned the Obie-has-a-midlife-crisis hypothesis.  
     Voiceless Alper emitted a collage of dismissive gestures, faces and sounds and then grabbed a crayon and wrote a long message to me on the bare cliff,
     -  you are the most ridiculous person ever !!!

    Amused realist Rorty brought himself to a shred of politeness and said that he might accept the dragon-part of my account because we were, after all, trapped in a surreal and strange story where anything goes but he added that he wasn't so sure about that Obie-psychoanalytic stuff.  
    I tried to overlook their scorn.
    - go and see for yourself! I said and threw the diving mask and the snorkel to Alper. She stood and shook her head before getting the equipment in place and then she went out in the water and swam away in a slow determined forward crawl. Sunlight glistened on the surface of the pond where insects clinged lazily. After some considerable amount of time, Alper came out of the water again. Dripping and shaking with fear. She grabbed a crayon and wrote on the rock,
   - dragon!!
     We wrapped her in towels and she calmed down an ounce. Rorty had suddenly become more serious and mumbled something,
    - this might be all the justification we need ... the cautionary use of the word true is a flagging of a special sort of danger ....

     After a short deliberation we decided to leave the campsite as soon as possible, staying about was regarded an unsafe alternative and besides, we were scheduled to leave within the near future anyway. Rorty largely agreed with the decision, although he had been looking forward to a few more days of berry-picking. 

      We tried to be completely silent and bring only the bare essentials, but because of these considerations Rorty and Alper ended up in a philosophical dispute and got entangled in something about Tarski's meta-language. Alper wrote her lines with chalk on the rock. The scene reminded me of a story my grandmother told. She was on her island and she was arguing with her brother. They shared a teaching position on the mainland so they rarely saw each other and the argument took place in writing on a chalkboard inside the house on the island, one argument at a time. It became a heated debate. In the end, the brother wrote a quote from Kant that my grandmother could not counter, and as a final reply she drew the ugliest animal she could think of. But, as it happens, it turned out that that ugly animal eventually spawned a new career for my grandmother, it evolved into a popular cartoon cherished by many.

       Finally, we left the settlement and the sleeping dragon, and none of us had yet made any ugly drawings. We walked through the dry woods. Rorty was grinding on about truth and justification, he was now, as one might have expected, aiming for justification rather than truth, 
       -  one difference between truth and justification is that between the unrecognizable and the recognizable. We shall never know for sure whether a given belief is true, but we can be sure that nobody is able to summon up any residual objections to it and that everybody agrees that it ought to be held....
           -  what are you suggesting ? I said, keeping the conversation going.
           -  that you should forget about truth and stick to justification.....
           -  "hmmpf". Said voiceless Alper and made circular signs indicating Rorty had some kind of mild cognitive impairment.  
        The forest was beige and very dry and one could guesstimate that should the dragon spray its flames on us, the forest would catch fire in no time. I tried to calm my anxiety with the thought that some creature was playing soothing sleepy harp tones for the dragon, reinforcing the drowsiness, and thus keeping the beast anesthetized. 
     We wandered through the monotonous vegetation and I soon got lost in speculation. I was thinking of Obie again. Had he been living too much hampered by the need for compliance with his parents' wishes and expectations, and the result was this dragon ready to explode? Other people's expectations had become of overriding importance, contradicting Obie's sense of self. Had Obie been bereft of that queer thing called "good enough parents", you know those who are attuned to and gratify the infant's need for help and assurance and who, at this business, are successful "most of the time". GEP - "Good enough parents" - they can handle whatever they stumble upon, most of the time, and they help us know that we are relatable and that our feelings are manageable. But by being deprived of this Obie had in turn been building a false set of relationships in order to protect his inner more vulnerable self, but those actions had only, in the end, brought about this dragon assumably bent on murder and chaos. Or was the explanation for the dragon somewhere else, was it simply a representation of something extremely difficult to confront, a force majeure such as death or perhaps a grand self-deception?  

     The trio walked on, well into the night. Alper was leading the way with her flashlight. I heard Simon of Blackburn mumbling in my mind, "if you do not have sufficient reasons to believe p, then you should not behave as if p". 

 
     

    

                                                                        *

 

38.

     During our walk through the forest we saw a bright twinkling star in the night sky and we travelled in its direction. After a couple of hours of hiking, the landscape opened up to a certain extent, it became a bushy steppe and then later a kind of prairie where lone cacti displayed their crooked "w"-like figures. Far in the distance we saw the contours of a mountain range under the light of the moon. A few hours later, we arrived at a three-story house where a gravel road wound up. There was a light bulb shining in one of the windows. We knocked on the main door. After a long while, a woman came and opened. She carried a baby in her arms. We explained that we were refugees who just wanted room and rest for the night and the woman said, to my surprise, that "well, this was actually a motel once upon a time, so why not .... come on in". There was a strange shimmer emanating from the woman and the child and I felt an impulse to donate a gift or something but I had nothing to offer. The Hegel detector, which would have been a fantastic gift for a toddler, had presumably been lost in the stomach of the toad. 

     The woman, named Kara, was open-minded and generous enough to haphazardly receive three strangers in the middle of the night. Given the conditions, some might attribute to her the epithet "foolhardy" but I would rather argue that she had "the distinct and praiseworthy human capacity that is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people", an ability which I myself, as a paranoiac, of course had such a hard time conducting. In any case, I was eternally grateful to her.
        We eventually bunked in a room on the third floor where some mattresses were scattered about. The others fell asleep pretty quickly but I was lying awake looking at that big star in the sky. My mind spun feverishly and maybe I was hallucinating. I could not help thinking that that star ushered in a new era whose implications and consequences we could not foresee. This new era would bring forth a new way of living and feeling and thinking and relating to other people. And it was a little scary. Would many followers of the old way of life get to bite the dust because of this alteration? I felt like a witness to the birth of a new concept, a concept no one had named or analyzed yet, one just knew that it was coming. A flock of migratory birds passed by in the moonlight and I thought about what Rorty had said about Kant helping us hang onto the idea that there was a great big difference between us and the other animals but then Darwin came and made it harder to be a Kantian and they, the Kantians, then found it harder to think of themselves as having a noumenal or transcendental side. But I was at any rate feeling positively transcendental, I just couldn't express it properly, because it required a new vocabulary not yet available. I distinctly perceived this presence of something new being born, a brand new world in the works. However, it was clear that I myself would never be part of that world, I was just a passerby and besides, I had my own schemes to fret about, like how to get out of from Obie's shady tale, and how to travel from language into fact and out of appearance and into reality and, perhaps more importantly, I had to travel from this remoteness into something more immediate and intense.
     The wind howled around the house and a gate creaked in the yard. I recalled something about Dewey, he had apparently said that there was no decisive moment at which language stopped being a series of reactions to the behavior of other humans and started to represent reality. If that was true, I was in a fairly locked position, then there was no escape route out of this text and into the "real", if that was the case the only thing I could do was simply to ride along as a puppet in Obie's saga and see how it goes. I guess one merely had to adopt a stoic attitude towards it, but that was easier said than done. 
    I had touched on that point earlier and here it reappeared: it seemed to me that we were evolving concepts in the consciousness of Obie or in some dubious Hegelian and one felt compelled to ask, was he or she losing their concepts? or phrased more bluntly: were they losing their shit? 

    Speaking of concepts, Rorty had told me during the exodus from the pond area that "where you went wrong Eddie was when you started believing there is such a thing as a correct analysis of a concept ... and that notion of correct analysis is one of the successors of Socrates' unhappy notion of 'correct definition'". At first I thought he was only being rude. It was anyway in all likelihood Wittgenstein that had made Rorty aware that there are as many definitions of a concept as there are uses to which the corresponding word can be put. They were pan-relationalists who were thinking about things as being what they are by virtue of their relations to other things. According to the pan-relationalists, the things were caught in a flux of continually changing relations. I could in this instance see the merit of this view and we, as concepts floating in the mind of Obie, had no doubt evolved during the course of our journey and we had probably been doing so as an effect of our fluctuating distance and approximity to other things and concepts that were put in play by the conscious or unconscious side of Obie. But that kind of goes without saying I suppose.  
     When I could not fall asleep, I made the cardinal error of sleep management and got out of bed and went down the stairs and stepped out into the yard. There was a starry sky, desolate expanses and the rustle of the wind and some forgotten garment fluttering on a clothesline. After a while of hanging around, I saw an old Volvo driving slowly along the gravel road in our direction. The car stopped some distance away and a person wearing a hat and trench coat stepped out. He - I assumed it was a he - lit a cigarette and stood there observing for a while, leaning against the coachwork, and then after some time he got into the car again and drove away. The whispering wind had filled in the blanks of our non-existent dialogue. I sauntered back upstairs and slid into bed. Puzzled. Who was that man in the trench coat?  Alper, Rorty and I were, according to my estimates, wanted and pursued by, essentially, three different gangs: objectivists, the anti-postmodern agency and also by angry theologians. But this gentleman seemed mundane and relaxed in his endeavour, he stood fully visible and smoked and did not seem to exhibit the slightest qualms over the risk of being detected. It was plausible that he did not belong to any of the aforementioned groups, he may even have been reasonably friendly-minded. Who was he? A guardian angel of some kind? the mysterious father to Kara's child or a tracker from the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians? 

       Eventually, after a lot of twists and turns on the mattress, I fell asleep. Everything seemed like a snarled fishing net and made little sense. 

     For breakfast, Kara invited us hikers to omelets and dates. She told us that the child's name was Logos and that he would grow up to be king one day. Alper mumbled between the bites and said "lets hope he doesn't become a tyrant". I conceived of this as Alper lacking in tact but Kara smiled indulgently and replied something in the general trend of "no, he will be an advocate for peace and brotherly love". Alper countered that such ideals could easily backfire, it has be known to happen throughout history. One wondered how Kara could know all this in advance, but I did not want to disturb the peace of the house with nosy questions. "Let's hope so," said Rorty, picking up the thread from Kara, "and let's hope the king becomes anti-authoritarian in both ethics and epistemology."    
     After lunch we said goodbye to Kara and we thanked her so much for the hospitality and generosity. She gave us a bag of dates and a couple of cans of mushroom stew and then we walked away. We waved to her as she stood on the steps with the baby bundle in her arms, looking like something out of a 1950s TV-show. During the exit march we passed by Kara's plantations and a small dog yard where two Alsatians lay dozing under the shade of a tree. Alper's water bottles were refilled and we headed in good spirits through the rocky and bushy terrain. Huge distances gaped in all directions. 

      

            

                                                                       *
 

 

39.       

 

          If one can imagine a person who has been struggling with the midlife crisis and who, simultaneously, has been combating Winnicott's false-self dragon then one might be inclined to think, by extension, that that person, at the end of his rope, is likely experiencing some major fatigue and jadedness. Be that as it may, but the desolate prairie around us was a tenable manifestation of such hollowed-out states of mind. Very little was allowed to live and grow in this harsh environment and its inhabitants of snakes, rodents, armadillos and scorpions probably eked out a somewhat meager existence. And upon surveying the terrain, a huge expanse of sand, rocks, dust and short shrubs and the occasional cacti was what met the eye. This was Obie's internal shift, this was the initial desolation one acquired after giving up one's previous hobbyhorses and behavior patterns, it was the freedom obtained after blowing up your former prison and in the bargain losing a sense of security. As a wisecracker once said, "all of life is a wager". 
     Rorty was being thoughtful in the sunshine and talked about Kara's child, Logos, and the kid's future job assignment:
       - Let's really hope the king adopts an ideal of fraternity instead of paternal authority. It chimes with horisontal rather than with vertical metaphors.... Did you know by the way that pragmatism imported the theme of fraternity from christianity? but the influence pretty much stops there ....
     I brushed Rorty's potential sunstroke aside but I couldn't dissolve the image in my mind of Kara and the child. Remembering the sight of them, their warm shimmer, made me think that love rather than knowledge was the distinct human trait. And from this barren vantage point it seemed to me clear that without love you are just an empty poor shell but that being said, it also looked obvious that it isn't a lack of love that makes unhappy marriages, it is a lack of friendship. I shivered in the dusty wind and I felt poor as we moved across the plains, I was far from the curly woman in the office photo and I had also become alienated from my friends, but I had on the other hand in recent times become acquainted with Rorty and Alper, I guess I was lucky in that regard. 
      -  I am not so keen on kings and queens, said Alper grimly.

       In the distance we saw the contour of snow-capped mountains, as if quivering blueish on the horizon. I looked at my worn walking stick and I eyed my hiking boots, the pair I once stole from the objectivists' prison. Unbelievably, I could now, at this stage, miss the security and predictability and the perks within the prison walls: three meals a day served at fixed times; generous laundry service; ample supply of board games and a spacious TV room with access to all the old X-files episodes.  
      When the evening arrived, and the sky was painted in darkening and floaty red-yellow-purple, and the coyotes were howling, we decided to camp along the wall of a huge boulder. We collected whatever combustible material we could find and made a fire, and we ate the dates and heated some cans of mushroom stew.
      Wrapped in towels and whatnot, I later experienced a cold anxious night session with many awakenings and a slew of shifting dreams. In one of the dreams I was dwelling in a house with innumerable chambers and I passed through the walls like a ghost. In one room was a man writing an atheistic pamphlet, in the next room was someone on her knees praying for faith, in a third space was a chemist investigating the properties of a body. And in the stairwell I met Russell, he said he'd lost a key. It was a place of teeming activity but what really stuck out, what seemed to me most significant, was the corridor in itself ... all occupants shared the corridor and they all had to pass through it. I woke up to the sensation of having been given important information in code but having no address to send it on to. In the sky, I saw a shooting star, like a bright slash in a really dark dotted notebook. Soon I fell asleep again. Suddenly I was in a gloomy pub with Putnam. We threw darts and drank pints. The arrows disintegrated when they hit the target. One corner of the floor was crowded with ants. They formed the pattern of a face, it looked like Churchill. And that was it. The third time I dozed off I dreamed I was being late to my appointment with the psychotherapist, I called her from the grocery store and she said she would charge me for a full hour regardless of my time of arrival, the "late-coming" was apparently important therapeutic material in itself. When I came out of the grocery store I noticed I had parked the car in someone's garden and when I drove away from there, I unintentionally produced ugly tire tracks in the lawn. 

        

      

       

                                                                         *

         

40.

 

      A cloud of sand and dust followed the vehicle in its tracks. Bob Random put the pedal to the metal and his red and white ornate ice cream van made an accelerating jerk forward towards the last car of the train that curled through the praire landscape in an eastern direction. My intention was to board the train on the move and the prelude, the source, to this risky venture lay in the contingency that I had previously been contacted by the angel of unidentifiable sex again. The angel had in an imperative voice exhorted me to enter the train and somehow I had managed to persuade Bob Random about the fundamental necessity of the enterprise. And here we were now, he drove up next to the last carriage and I was getting ready for that crucial leap. Bob was making it explicit, "Jump!", he hollered.

       Well, I'm jumping the gun here, we're getting ahead of ourselves, I shall have to start from the beginning. First things first. It all began with a customary night walk induced by the all too familiar predicament called insomnia. I was strolling along the wall of the boulder, Alper's flashlight in hand, and contemplating how deep I had gone into this bizarre rabbit hole. Something that rubbed my mind discordantly was the thought of that sofa we had fallen asleep on in the billiard room, it had been like an extra portal, and that might have meant that we were not actually evacuated out of the octagon as of yet, we were more likely travelling inside its seventh room, the one with a sign that read "wonder construction" if you do recall. On top of that I also had a growing suspicion that Obie had lost the crucial helicopter perspective a long time ago. It's a vital perspective for any sensemaking blogger if he or she wants to offer readers anything that resembled a coherent plausible narrative. However, not everything was doom and gloom, the night itself was inspiringly clear and crisp and adorned, as it were, with a magnificent painting of sparkling stars. You know it was one of those nights when you can be stirred into thinking that life itself has huddled up a step closer and that you can feel the pounding heart of creation and palpate the universe's continuous experiment and peek into its workshop where it still is fashioning new eyes with which to see itself. Obie-constructed or not, it was a fine night nevertheless. 

      I don't know how I came to think of it - was it mischievous braingels, anything - but my mood sunk somewhat as I remembered, all of a sudden, how some poor blighter had been derided and sneered at in the objectivists' prison yard, by both inmates and prison guards. And it was all because the blighter in question had maintained that we have a greater responsibility towards our fellow human beings than towards the Truth or Reality. My disagreement with the objectivists, however, was that I was a little dubious of the notion of "Objectivity" overall, and this was from their point of view, in turn, of course, related to the fact that I had been convicted of "illegal relativism".
       While I was out there walking by the side of the boulder I tried to make my case clear and I postulated that if we, for charity's sake, first focused on the things that we agreed upon we could see that there were many things that simply "worked", like maps; timetables; electric lights; the internet; cars and aeroplanes and so on and one could thence in a spirit of James suggest "it's true if it works" (although that statement came with a few problematic pitfalls of its own....lies can "work" too)... but to say, as the objectivists would, that an assertion about a thing, or a state of affairs, in our universe is "objectively true" assumes that we somehow can snuggle over to the universe's side of the transaction and there attain a grant that confirms that we have represented the universe in her preferred and privileged vocabulary. I doubted we could do that. Maybe fundamental physics was such a vocabulary, I didn't know, but how will you know that you have hit the mark? 
        For a brief moment I had to pause. It became glaringly evident what I was doing: I was, like James, both critizing and co-opting the correspondence theory of truth, I wanted to have the cake and eat it too. 

I couldn't make up my mind. The objectivists' case would be easier to hammer home if we only talked about a single item and its corresponding word, it became harder though if we talked about entire vocabularies. 
     The boulder curved and seemed to thin out and I soon came to what I perceived to be its southern end. There stood, to my great surprise, an old orange telephone booth pressed against the rock wall. Just like that. Now, many would probably argue that Obie had become desperate to deposit this thing out in the middle of nowhere like this and I would agree with that assessment. It felt like cheap narrative technique but I anyhow opened the door and started to examine the shabby interior. "Low cards are what I've got, but I'll play this hand whether I like it or not". Of course there were a lot of graffiti and scribble. Someone had written above the sticky keypad that "all our beliefs are up for grabs, though not all at once". There wasn't much to go on. I picked up the receiver casually and then, can you believe it, a hatch opened up into the mountain with a deep murmuring sound. Hesitantly, I entered the mountain even though I was severely fed up with tunnels at this point. I crawled a stretch and when I got further in I came to a room where a costumed person with a rhinoceros face was sitting at a desk and behind this person were two doors and a filing cabinet. A domed green lamp on the side of the desk spread a faint glow in the room. I approached the rhino face and conversation commenced.
    - excellent .... you arrive just in time to pick up the last ticket. It said and looked at me through tortoise shell spectacles.
       - eh ...  ticket? I said with as much confidence as was available in front of a bureaucratic rhino.
       - yes ... the ticket for a round trip with BATS... of course
       - BATS?
The rhino glared in an austere civil service manner. It may not have liked to explain things that were obvious.
      - The brand new atheists underground train service ....naturally

       - Ah, I see.... I responded while thinking that they hadn't assembled the abbreviation properly.         
The office-like rhino pushed a piece of paper forward on the desk and pointed.
       - all you have to do is sign .... here and here
I was confused. 
      - But what am I signing ?
The figure began to transmit a certain impatience in his tight suit.
     - You sign that you renounce and repudiate all metaphysical comfort, all belief in supernatural entities ... Gods, spirits, angels, fairies, elves, trolls and esoteric historical forces. Should you fail in your commitments or violate the contract during the round trip with BATS, you will be escorted off the train at the nearest station. From the contract there is no turning back. 

There was something stuffy about the whole enterprise. I took the plunge.
     - I don't know if I can do that .... and how do you know that you have cut the mustard, so to speak? .... and by the way, isn't atheism also a form of metaphysics?  ... a kind of statement about the beyond and the things that aren't there....
The rhino gave me a cold stare.
       - Atheism is not metaphysics! It said with emphasis and continued.
    - I'm disposed to imagine that the gentleman is not willing to make the sacrifices required to be granted to travel with BATS. 
Tensely, I tried to establish an illustration of my views,
   - Forgive me sir, but it seems to me that the human consciousness is sprinkled with blind spots ... and unconscious intentions and metaphysical traps ...eh..and what I'm saying really is that we therefore can not overlook our underlying intentionality ... I said, losing my train of thoughts and being nervously unable to connect the dots. The hard condemnation of my intellectual failure, and loss of coherence, might have softened somewhat if one took into account that it was difficult overall to be a bright reasoner in front of a stern censorious-looking rhino. 

   - I don't know if I can follow the gentleman's reasoning ... but are you, sir, insinuating that we possess an implicit or unconscious metaphysics or belief in God?

    - perhaps .... 

   - But if your metaphysics is unconscious, how are you going to find out about how it works?  ....or do you have a method for capturing these unconscious metaphysical fish? The rhinoceros, who now had the appearance of someone talking to an unwise child, withdrew the paper form. I thought of saying something about reasoning just being one project among many but I had no power in my soul to do so, and the scheme also seemed rather fruitless from where I was standing.  

   - From what I've gathered so far I would be in unison with a description labelling you a radical agnostic and I would consequently suggest that you apply to another club. In plain language, there is no point in you becoming a member of BATS, we do not want overly skeptical passengers on our train. 

     Although I was almost certain I did not want to become a member of their dorky club I nevertheless experienced the sting of rejection with unmistakeable force. 

    -  Okay ...  thanks anyway. 

   - Goodbye. Said the rhino and bundled up some papers and turned around and put them in the filing cabinet. I wriggled out the same way I had entered.

   Once out of the telephone booth, and again under the majestic supervision of the stars, a stream of thoughts was actualized. The rhino had seemed to me totalitarian, prohibitive. Or would he accept a world where everyone can believe what they want to as long as it does not harm the public space of institutions, laws and norms? Science could help us to predict, measure and control the environment, but religion could offer hope and thus something to live for. Fellow traveler Rorty believed that religion and science should do everything to not get in each other's way. Science and religion were, in this view, like two cousins who at family reunions would sit at different tables and who were dissuaded from approaching the buffet at the same time. They were two non-competing sets of desires, two different ways of producing happiness. James on the other hand, bless his soul, he could even go so far as to say "religion is fine, as long as it has the same cash value in directing action". 

      Uneasiness pervailed as I started walking back to the camp site. The question kept grinding: what happens after the end of metaphysics? Rorty had hinted that for Dewey it would mean that we would have the space to dedicate ourselves to the concrete problems of our time. For Heidegger though, the end of metaphysics would allow us to pose a brand new question about being with a capital B. Other geezers promoted the view that "metaphysics is platonism and platonism is metaphysics". It seemed nonetheless that one problem of metaphysics was that it presupposed that we could reach a conclusive answer in the same manner an empirical toolkit could for empirical questions. I was overheated with metaphysics and also pregnant with the suspicion that I had misunderstood the whole enchilada.  

   I paved my way over rocks, gravel and dusty little cactus plants and after a while I could make out mumbling voices. Alper and Rorty could not sleep either, it seemed, and beyond the stones I could perceive an equally fatigued campfire distributing its dusky lighting. I hid behind a rock to eavesdrop on them, I wanted to find out if they were slandering and traducing me while I was away but I discovered upon inquiry that they seemed to be hashing it out about truth, once again but in a rather slow sleep-deprived manner.     

    - I'm pitching the old story about how truth took the place of God in a secular society and how we should get rid of this God-surrogate in order to become more self-reliant..... said Rorty.
Alper, with the sound of a modified larynx, ventured into the speakers' space.

     - I disagree .... of course .... I don't think we should get rid of truth ..... science is dependent and thrives on our quest to reach the truth .... it is something to be aimed at ... it's a regulatory idea ... but we can not reach certainty or absolute truth ... and the revisable theories we evolve to reach this goal might still bring forward something interesting... 

         It appeared to me that they were talking about two slightly different things. Rorty, humming and reclining, responded in that tone of his that could be simultaneously lenient and condescending. 

      - hmmm .... I think that what should be aimed at is justificatory ability... and the reason I make a distinction between truth and justification is that there maybe objections new audiences would make that the old audiences would fail to make.. 

       -  what kind of objections ? said Alper. 

       -  there may be newly discovered data, fresh hypotheses or a change in the vocabulary, for example 

There was a pause and then Alper proceeded thoughtfully. 

       -  These justificatory abilities you mention makes me think of something like manipulative skills... that could be really problematic in the wrong hands.... it could cut both ways I suppose....

        -   Look.... we can never be more arbitrary than the world lets us be. So even if there is no way the world is, even if there is no such thing as the intrinsic nature of reality there are still causal pressures... and these pressures will be described differently at different times and for different purposes... but they are pressures none the less. Said Rorty. 

      In the ensuing silence I thoroughly apprehended my ridiculousness for pursuing the suspicious eavesdropping business.   

        -  I would state that what you call justificatory ability is a rather coherentist position but though you acknowledge that there are causal pressures I wouldn't regard you as being too distant from the ideal of aiming at truth...Still it appears to me that you with that sort of view end up in a position were you don't really answer to anything more than your peers ..... imagine if the only peers you had were thuggish authoritarians ?  said Alper with a brooding facet to her voice.                                       

         - yes that would be unfortunate... but no matter what theory of truth the thuggish authoritarians adhered to they would probably disregard or suspend it when they wanted to... I think it's important to distinguish between truth and truthfulness here... truthfulness is saying publicly what you believe, even when it is disadvantageous to do so. This is a moral virtue that is punished in totalitarian societies. That is why I claim that if we take care of freedom truth will take care of it self... because it implies that if people can say what they believe without fear, then, just as Conant says, the task of justifying themselves to others and the task of getting things right will coincide...

        - Ha! how neatly put. Exclaimed Alper, seemingly not convinced. 

Rorty wanted to score the point. Seal the deal.

        - My argument is that since we can test whether we have performed the first task - of justifying to others - and have no further test to apply to determine whether we have performed the second task .... truth-as-end-in-itself drops out ....

         It was at this point that I deemed it appropriate to jump out of my hiding place and the spur of the moment made me do so through the performance of a clownish spectacle. I climbed the boulder I had hidden behind and erected myself on the top with outstretched arms and then I boomingly addressed my companions.  
        - Good morning comrades! 
Alper winced violently. Rorty turned a surprised head. I continued the delivery of the sermon.
       - I hereby announce the universal necessity of Fika! ... if we can sit down and have coffee or tea and talk things through, we can reach diplomatic compromises and solutions. Fika will guide us forward!

Alper was not satisfied with the entertainment and approached me, it was perhaps too early in the morning for burlesque.
         -  I suggest that you from now on always wear a t-shirt with the word "moron" written on it.... and also, let me remind you ... it's not okay to pinch my flashlight!! .... I had to go and pee in pure darkness because of you!  

       I climbed down from the rock to meet my audience and I was just about to start the business of telling them about my strange discoveries of telephone booths, tunnels and rhinos with tickets to underground train systems but I stopped myself from doing so when the thought struck me that if Alper received this information she might be tempted to grab the last ticket and thus betray, and leave, us for a second time. Moved into a somewhat mistrustful attitude, I wangled myself out of storytelling mode.
       Later that morning, after a few skimpy hours of sleep, we were taken aback by a sandstorm. The visibility suddenly became almost zero while huge amounts of sand and gravel flew over and into our  bodies. I was already wrapped in towels and I pulled another one over my face and it must have given me the appearance of a mummy. I sat in a protective fetal position for some time, but after a while I began to crawl blindly along the wall. I crawled and crawled, a blind mummy, and the storm swirled and howled around me and all the time I had the wall as a tactile reference point. In the end, I came across something hard and metallic in the chaotic sandy maelstrom. It was the phone booth, still upright despite everything. Don't ask me how but from a blind lying position I then somehow managed to pry open the door and shoved myself inside through the resulting gap. With my last expiring forces, I closed the door to the storm. Exhausted, and half-sitting in the sand that came in with me, I subsequently dozed off.  
         Some amount of time later, at lunchtime perhaps, when the storm had died out and the blue aspect of the sky was becoming more and more prominent, I stepped out of the telephone booth again and began to trek back to the campground to look for my friends. I found some dates in my pocket that served as eatables for the journey. Upon my arrival though I was baffled by the perceptual and conceptual accounts that were informing me that the campsite was empty. Neither Alper nor Rorty or their belongings could be found and their footprints were either erased or diffused by the storm rendering it impossible for a detective to suss out their direction and habit of action. What had happened to them? Had they gone to look for me or had they even been kidnapped? Or, horrible thought, had they deliberately abandoned me? 

     Flustered. Puzzled. I went back to the telephone booth, where one at least could enjoy protection from the scorching sun. Upon returning there I was once again rattled by astonishment because there abided the solid frame of Bob Random, the man I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. He wore a straw hat, shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and he was standing in front of a red and white ornate ice cream van.

 

 

 

                                                                            *

41.

       - My dear fellow! Exclaimed the man in the blue suit. He was sitting at the train compartment table, which was cluttered with newspapers, letters, pens, a jug with red liquid and a couple of goblets. The man wore horn-rimmed spectacles and had bushy eyebrows and his worry lines were angled in such a way that they bestowed him with a strict teacher-like expression but these rather scowling features were somehow mitigated by the playful liveliness that I thought animated his lips and cheeks.  
       - Welcome to the afterword! In fact, it is absolutely fantastic that you have managed to get all the way here .... we should toast to that! Said the teacher and poured what appeared to be port wine into two goblets. I took a glass and we raised them up in the air while the prairie flickered past outside the window. 

     -  To Ireland ...and to the Queen of Sheba! Said the teacher ceremonially and I was uncertain whether he was joking or not but I anyhow gushed some port down my throat and sensed its warming effect in the chest region. I sat down on the chair opposite the teacher and he looked at me with keen, searching eyes. 

     -  I've been waiting for your arrival ... This is where we follow the breadcrumbs, this is where we bring it all together and connect the dots  .... for starters, did you know that you are both key and lock in this story?
        Some kind of vertigo came over me and it was inflamed by the old realization that I was just a guinea pig in Obie's shady essay where he conducted his mad search for truth. We were templates in a deterministic universe and I had to, unwillingly, play the leading role. And it was safe to say that I had a troublesome relation with the director. 

       -  I miss my friends.... . I said, sipping port and evading the subject.  

       -  I know you do... so do I! ...but look at it this way ... if this blog is a disguised bildungsroman then it is only part of the story's theme that you should free yourself from father figures, mother figures and mentors and all that ....
        - but I saw them as friends .... and now they are gone ... I declared.     
      - my dear fellow, do not despair ...  sorrow has lost joy as a target .... it's part of life's great ensemble, and If you have not experienced grief then you have not lived ....
          I thought the teacher sounded too clichéd and sprinkled platitudes but I saw where he was coming from, he tried to comfort me.  
        - Where could they have gone? I said.
       The teacher looked out the train window and eyed the passing landscape. He turned to me again, grabbed the glass and drank a moderate sip of that red stuff. 
      - Obie's narratives are often very strange .... I have been an Obie researcher all my adult life and I still have a hard time understanding some of his moves but that's also the part of the charm: it is obscure and incomprehensible, "full of intimations", and you are therefore invited to solve the mystery ... by the way, did you know that the man has had his manuscripts rejected by publishers about nine hundred times? that's why he only writes blogs ....and did you know that he has been admitted to a psychiatric clinic a dozen times? ....  and did you know that when he tried to write a philanthropic pamphlet, his friends, and the publsher's that rejected the manuscript, interpreted it as if he had become a fascist .... and did you know that in periods of strong self-confidence he thinks of himself as the greatest genius since Goethe? In melancholy moments on the other hand, when the pendulum swings in the other direction, he hates himself more than anything else. Then he is just an ordinary housecleaner and an ardent student of analytic philosopher Brien Gubs. 

       I was not very interested in this nerdy marshalling of biographical facts, but I still tried to be polite and nice and I kept the conversational ball rolling as best as I could, 
      - Maybe Obie would benefit, like Rorty, from exchanging vertical optical metaphors for more horizontal ones, and shifting focus from being to doing ...Overall I think exchanging shame for guilt is the best we can do ...

     The teacher lit up and seemed happy that I wanted to get involved in this topic.     

    - Precisely ! Capital ! ...but still consider that we are who we are, and we are situated at this place, at this point in time, precisely because Obie is who he is, or rather because he can not accept who he is ... some goad in the flesh is egging him on ....and we live because of and by dint of this rupture. Imagine the possibility that Obie, like Gunnar Ekelöf, only writes in order to stop writing ... in order to reach some kind of peace or contentment, a point where he finally can put down the pen and close shop eternally, ... and at that exact moment is when we cease to exist.
     The teacher had apparently missed the salient point that readers can make a text come alive again, or he may have assumed that noone, ever, would read Obie's blogs, and in that case we were dead as soon as Obie stopped writing. 

     -  I don't care what Obie is like and what he is doing ... all I'm interested in now is completing my mission and concluding this essay on the truth ... I affirmed and took a mouthful of port for good riddance. 

      - My dear fellow! ....that's why we're here ....you have probably already discovered that the truth can be difficult to reach and that we might never get to that point called perfect knowledge...we may be to feeble-witted, or too weak or corrupt or sinful, to achieve this. The obstacles, both intellectual and those of external nature, may be too many. Moreover, opinions, as I say, has widely differed about the right path to pursue - some found it in Churches, some in laboratories; some believed in intuitions, others in experiment, or in mystical visions, or in mathematical calculations. And there are questions circling around the matter of timeless truths... not everybody is on-board there... Hegel and Marx, for example, think more of historical development, continuous change and evolving human horizons altered with each new step in the evolutionary playbook... 

        There was, so to speak, a lot of meat to digest in the teacher´s output. I touched a somewhat lamenting note, 
      - I have tried to find a way but instead found several different paths and rabbit holes ... I have sought synthesis and reconciliation and instead found fragments, rubble and eerie contradictions ... I searched for love but only found a photograph which later was lost  ... and I have found that method and rationality are merely names for a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one's fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation .....
     Speaking of sensation. I now wholly experienced the warming relaxing effect of the port wine, it was oiling the old machine in the right places.
        - That is, if one ignores the sad story about the girl, still great news old chap... you have reached valuable insights! ...  philosophy's goal is to assist humans to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.... you see now that you are a fox, knowing no vixen, you are a fox in the Berlinian sense, a fox who really want to be a hedgehog....and that's not the end of the world! As a contrast one could conceive of your friend Rorty as a hedgehog who, despite showering his reader with allusions and dropping a lot of names, has really one idea:... the need to move beyond representationalism, and thus into an intellectual world in which human beings are responsible only to each other.
        - That may be the case but what happens next ? I said impatiently, and still not fully grasping the idea of representationalism. The teacher refilled our goblets.  

       -  Anything short of a thorough notes-and-reference section would be a moral abomination        
       -  but why ?  
       -  I would estimate that about sixty percent of the content in this blog has been stolen, it is only the arrangement, the collage, of the stolen material that is somewhat original .... anyhow, the morally righteous act would be to at least report and account for these thefts. 

      A pregnant pause in the conversation occurred. The desolate scenery outside the window whizzed past, I heard the peaceful sound of train wheels thumping against the rails and one saw the slight tremor of port in the glasses. The teacher took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and rubbed his eyes. Thoughts of the possibility of somehow returning, or being transported, to "reality" fermented in my mind. I did not dare to be too hopeful about that project but I saw that it was somehow linked to the conclusion of the essay. 
       -  What about reality then? ... is there a way for me to reach it? I said frankly while trying to hide my expectations.

     The teacher, who had calmed down a bit, put on his spectacles and imbibed some port.

      -   you have certainly, as sure as eggs is eggs, displayed that you are eager to explore and turn stones in order to reach reality, and perhaps one could postulate that you have embodied what your Raccoon-friend once wrote on the matter: "beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction". Your companion Rorty, on the other hand, wanted to abandon the concept of reality altogether. Brandom described Rorty as claiming that "God and Reality alike fail the test of critical reason, they are not participants in giving, asking for and assessing reasons, in justifying and demanding justifications.... we are beholden to no authority outside our practices. What is authoritative are the reasons we give each other, the justifications we can offer and assess." Personally, I would not go that far and the question of answerability to something non-human is not something to be scoffed at. We are entangled in reality's web whether we like it or not  and I would say that there are more ways than one to defy it. It is unscientific to 'defy' for no good logical or empirical reason established hypotheses and laws. But it is unhistorical, on the other hand, to ignore or twist one's view of particular events, persons, predicaments in the name of laws, theories, principles derived from other fields, logical, ethical, metaphysical, scientific, which the nature of the medium renders inapplicable ....but that being said I would still maintain that there is a very slim chance of you being transferred from here and into the real world, and furthermore, I have no technical insight into how to bring about such a transference...that's a case for the astrophysic-psychoanalysts to indulge in....the only way for us to connect with the real world is, as far as I'm concerned, to engage with readers from the real world but mind you, the influx of readers is not something we can control ...  care for some more port?
     -  eh.. yes please. I said. Wishing to consume more port was, for the moment, the one thing I was certain of. The red liquid went into the goblet with a lapping sound.  
     - What about love ? I inquired and gently poured some fluid down the hatch. The teacher exhibited a contemplative deportment and gazed out the window. It was as if the mere mention of the word "love" slipped some wistfulness into his system, making his eyes dreamy and distant for a moment.  
     - who can define love and get away with it ?... and without being a tad ridiculous in the process? He mused and paused for effect and then continued, 
     -  I think that love is beyond the scope of this investigation, at least in the general sense... and Obie has really left us scrambling for clues in that regard ... ideally though I think love should be the only law but human beings are presently not up for it, they need something more steadfast like written constitutions and legislations and things...something to stave off the worst cases of greed and hatred.
       It struck me that the teacher had a dual identity, he was one person in this story and he was another, albeit probably extremely similar, out there in the real world. Had I, too, a doppelganger moving about in the "real" world? Be that as it may, but the teacher and I nevertheless seemed stuck in here, like two flies trapped in the fly bottle. I pictured James sitting by that table outside the forest and twisting and turning the bottle in all sorts of ways in order to release the fly. The mind tried to turn the tide and somersault itself into clarity of vision but it was all a blur, all of the time and "I'm never sure why I need you".
     We passed rock formations and odd-looking cacti, angled John Rub, and the questions were lining up in my mildly inebriated head. What did the teacher know about what was going on in Obie's other blogs? Did he withhold important information? Was there a similar blog like this that investigated the properties and tribulations of love? Did it matter now when there, supposedly, was no way to get there or to extract information from that location? I scanned the teacher's demeanor while he helped me to some more beverage. Outwardly, the man in the blue suit appeared quite content and satisfied with sitting in this train compartment and conversing and drinking. And perhaps so was I. After all, I would agree with Bob Random's assessment that "conversation is the highest good for discursive creatures". But it was a bit strange that the teacher had said that this was where we put the whole thing together because I had the distinct experience that we still swam among the contradictions, just as before. Nothing had changed it seemed. It was in a way analogous with what Ulrika used to say about fucking, "fucking leaves everything as it is". For a minute there the prospect of a proper escape from this blog had seemed plausible, for a minute there I lost myself. It became clear to me though that the teacher occupied one of those semi-almighty supporting roles - like the hag - that Obie threw into the mix whenever he could not move the story forward in the commonsensical way. They were the implausible ice-breakers of the narrative. I suggest that the teacher was semi-almighty because how else was it possible that he could know so much about my activity here on the island? Or was he put here and endowed with a hefty amount of background information concerning yours truly and the moment he was propelled into action inside the blog he then somehow gained a life of his own with full-fledged autonomy and agency of spirit? Obie the depressed blogger was like a parent, and his characters were his children and some of them were keen on leaving the nest.      

               

                                                                          *

           

42. 
     

        

   Dear friend,

     I have vague memories of sending you lots of letters but these were written in a psychotic fog I'm afraid, so I ask you to take what I wrote with a pinch of salt. I remember the incentive was our differences of opinion and it was as if truth itself was on trial. But somewhere along the way, I must have gone crazy and started imagining intensely. Again, I beg you to be forgiving with my imagination.
     In here it's alright. One dorm with seven beds. We have draperies for privacy. Soft lounge music is coming out of tiny loudspeakers. Some aloof patient is entwined with her visiting lover while others play a game of chess. The queen looks vulnerable. A tall man in a robe is clicking with his flashlight, he swears he's not to blame. I often step up to the mirror, for some kind of reality check I suppose, I'm still there despite everything. It's concise and clear, I've been put through the wringer mentally but I try not to take myself too seriously. Still it's a stern task for anyone who has really made a fool of himself. What I can conclude now, in my dazed position, is that I'm a metaphilosophical relativist in the limited sense that I grasp that there are no neutral, practice-independent standpoints from which to adjudicate competing philosophies. Discourse and truth are made possible by community life. "There's nothing to rely on but ourselves and our fellow human beings".  
       I have to start living for real, in the community. Hope I get discharged soon. I'm like a frozen stuffed animal in a museum, or just lazy and over-medicated. Someone seems to whisper, "this is far from salvation". This is mind-numbing and I have to get out. I want to feel life bubble and simmer again. I can sense that Joy - this jewel among the emotions - is out there. Some kind of imperative calls on me to become active with something again, I want to get away from these abstractions. But this distance to joy is so stinging, I feel the salt of time running out in the bloodstream ... there is no time!

     The nurses do a good job of pretending to care, but still there's something comforting about our joint spectacle, our daily transactions. It makes me miss Ulrika, you know. "What if truth was a woman?".