Coda to the Index

We are a culture
obsessed with
selling beauty
when it's free
all around us.

Deconstructing the Index

The only way to make it
is to trick yourself into view.
They won't notice or care
and you won't make a mark
unless you misdirect attention
your way. Doesn't matter
what you've got, you're worthless.
Until you create the accident.

I used to act,
now I perform a show
whenever I feel like it
at work,
no director, no script,
and a stage wherever I want.

Johnny Depp
was a cinematic Paris Hilton
before he slipped into his Sparrow.

I went to the same high school,
same college, had the same teacher
who criticized him (but she, uh,
liked me), but I never got into
Stephen King until a couple of movies
put him in my must-read stack.

He may have had ways to
engender himself to the crowd,
but Ric Flair learned
to be The Man he had to become The Man
by becoming the most dedicated
star in the business.

It's a bitch of a way to go.

Building the Index

The thing about philosophy
is that it's spent most
of its time concerned only
with matters that seemed
pressing at the time, or
just trying to figure out
what goes on inside our heads.

The Metaphysics of Value
are concerned at least as
much with the concept
of context as anything else.
You could it's one of
Value's primary objectives,
because of its unexamined
importance.

Context is what philosophy
should always be about,
not just in the study
of what people were up
when they were thinking,
but in the way they
were thinking, what they
were thinking of. I hate
to say it, but the history
of thought has been sort of
shallow to this point.
It's not hubris speaking,
that's just the way it is.

Context is about what lies
at the heart of things,
because at the heart of things
is what's around that heart.
If you'll indulge the metaphor,
to speak of the heart of things
is to acknowledge a body around
it, which we've all done a great
job theorizing, but what matters
is taking into account what
is actually there, why something
is, because we know, we have
developed psychology pretty well
at this point, even though any
class you take will teach you
anything but psychology,
just what a bunch of wankers
tested with it. That's because
most people really don't know.
They can think in terms
of context, but they have no idea
what it really is.

That's why it's a matter for
the Metaphysics of Value,
why I must pretend it cannot be
understand, because it really can't.
Context is another distinction
for the guiding principles
of civilization, the belief in
the past, present, and the future.
We've done a great job with the first
two, but notably, even Christianity,
which has footholds in them and
has always talked about the last one,
has never been able to figure out
what to do about the only unknown
we pretend to know.

We pretend, and that's where
the vacuum appears around context.
If you cann't understand where
you're going, then it stands
that you're really just lost.

[The extended poem The Index will be inserted into the collected version of WE'LL SEE at a later date]