Purple Passion Flower Vine
If the back row can take this seriously and stop rolling their eyes I'll remind you that Borges took much of his metaphysics from Schopenhauer. A précis of Schopenhauer's work suggests: "The material world is an invention of creative imagination." Beware of what Schopenhauer understood by Will and by Creative Imagination, if you don't know, don't pretend you do. Borges's own thoughts on the subject included the idea that "Fiction is Metaphysics." Then, yesterday, we briefly played, ironically, with this understanding of metaphysics using the Modernist James Joyce's Ulysses, until overwhelmed by our own genius, Baxter and I sunk into a deep ennui with ill-temper that required lunch and a lie-down, which, according to Schopenhauer, genius is inevitably prone to. Our question this morning goes this way: "Does whatever comes after Postmodernism in the West, treat Plato and Immanuel Kant with respect, will these two giants of metaphysics become an example of really boring, soon forgotten and passionless or will they keep their place as tedious collectibles in one or other of the many Ivory Boarding Houses that does the laundry, serves breakfast, interesting lunches and dinner so no one has to think for themselves?" OK, as fans of Post Irony, what Baxter and I really need is for Kant to offer us an endless Critique of Postmodernism, then we might get a better understanding of this awful accusation that Postmodernism resulted in an all pervading cynicism where a buffoonish, snow-flaky understanding of authenticity defined as "genuine feelings and human connections" are impossible. Oh diddums, that's inches away from saying what we need is a good war. Ask Baxter, try being on the receiving end of a radical Spleen's theosophical invective. Here we go, my good friend's still waiting for the Spleen's Jesus or maybe his Buddha to send him a manual. So let's just hold fast to the Chariot Theory of God and Men and assume an Almighty is an inevitable gathering place for Ideal Forms. Anyway, David Foster Wallace, was born in 1962, he was a depressed person, he threw coffee tables at his girlfriend, that sort of thing, he hanged himself in 2008 when he was 46. His critique of Postmodernism goes something like this: he reckoned the Postmodernism of the 1950's and 1960's used irony as a tool of rebellion. Good Lord! Beatniks, hippies, sex, drugs, rock and roll, pluralism, social safety nets, national health, unemployment benefits, mixed marriages, irony from the children of Franklin Roosevelt and Ernest Bevin. But on it went, in 1970's postmodernism, according to David Foster Wallace, who would have been a teenager at the time, became a fashionable cave, it was hip, it was super cool, people learned to love it, which resulted in a pervasive cynicism. David wanted a return to his ill-considered understanding of authenticity, he was a teacher looking for enthusiasm perhaps, maybe the back row really pissed him off and his solution to the cynicism he saw being promulgated by the cave of postmodernist irony was this new human condition referred to as Post Irony. The simpler answer might be to remain an existentialist by not parking the boat in a harbor of convictions that demands an enemy for an anchor. But there again we have the very ancient Chariot Theory of God and Men, a demand that experience precedes essence as well as an understanding of authenticity that suggests that like cats we people make our own meaning, so get over it. David Foster, who might not have grasped the fundamental argument of the postmodernists, which is that we're all better off without the wriggling around and lies meta-narratives require to maintain them, was born in Ithaca New York not Ithaca Ulysses' home Island or Dublin the birthplace of James Joyce's own metaphysics. Tomorrow an unironic introduction to hypocrisy.
