Stuck,

Over and over and over again- not like the tides. Over again.

1

It is like celebrating Bastille Day or the Fourth of July, it is true but with variations. Henri Bergson, through Gilles Deleuze, the philosopher of repetition as much as Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. It was through memory he became the King of Repetition! Les Hugh Capet de Repetition!

Could you find that in his works? Articulated in the same way as Deleuze? No, it is in there, Deleuze -the new Crown Prince of Philosophy- is a really amazing reader. People can criticize a lot about him, but to criticize his erudition is just wrong. Erudition is the perfect word for his generation of French thinkers. Those people were amazingly well read. Foucault liked finding books that nobody has even heard of for hundreds of years.

So, no, Bergson was not writing about repetition like Deleuze wrote about his philosophy. It is weird that a generation of French Academics hated his works, and yet they were so influenced by his works. He was stuck even in death. A kind of proper fit for his philosophy. Memory and duration after all, the Élan vital-

2

A digression- it feels great to go off path. Nobody wants to talk with me on the weird flights that I go on. I hardly blame them. I would have the same speech over and over again.

My mind just has an odd focus, but it is odd- erratic but obsessive- and that keeps me occupied for the better part of the day.

-it is a shame that the worries are there all with the weird thoughts-

I know I am hardly special. People have odd thoughts all the time. People do, but there is a certain type of individual that can shut off their thinking. I wonder how relieving that is. I wonder if it breaks that stickiness that most people feel.

I think aloud and quietly, I think in the shower- actually I write TV shows in my head making a show. If it is a good show, then I am late for work.

3

Regrets and ruminations last longer then they should. Memory is horrible. I think Nietzsche was right in the second book of The Genealogy of Morals, forgetfulness is an active process.

Guilt is a heavy burden. It ways you down. It is clingy. Regret is similar, but one can reflect on regret. Guilt is always bad, even if you are guilty. Guilt and pity are both awful. Nietzsche is always right about things like that. Pity is not on equal status. Pity has no respect or honor to the person being pitied. Guilt and pity are passive. Regret is active.

4

La mer.

The foam and salt roll about, they roll about tumble fumble and rumble.

In Charles Dicken’s Moby Dick, Ishmael is constantly going out to sea. Ishmael assumes everyone is drawn to the water. Most people do not become sailors but humanity is drawn to the sea. In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, he describe that ocean feeling that religion gives people.

In the Second World War my grandfather, Robert Rowe, served in the Navy. He was on an escort destroyer, the USS Samuel S. Miles. One of his shipmates was afraid of the ocean and always wore his life vest. When the war ended he threw the life vest into the bay. The vest sunk like a rock. Apparently, the Pacific ocean could be endless flat, with very little disturbance, like a deep blue desert.

All the deserts, oceans and the vastness of space are our limitations. It is formless and incomprehensible. It is both the opposite of being because of its vastness and overwhelming being, but it feels like nothing. Nothing is impossible, but when we think of nothing it tends to be that ocean feeling.

It is funny how God and nothing fit together. I am not saying anything anti-religious, it is odd the religion, nihilism, and everything all sort together. Spinoza say that God or nature is infinite. I think of space or the ocean.

5

Alas, the end. Everything end; that is everything that begins, ends. Everything is betwixt with a beginning and an ending, there is hardly a need for deep reading of that, but this will end. Not withstand a need to keep along this path I will stop. However, what is that you need or want? I am not sure!

Farewell today!