history & moment

                                    mingle here,

                                    where the seen side

                                    of awareness

                                    awakens

            Among the Confucian principles, perhaps the preeminent for those in our peculiar situation posits language as the only valid ethnos, that, in fact, language precedes the culture in terms of developing philosophy. The philosophy appears when the language is ready. And, by corollary, linguistic changes predicate cultural changes; language itself is oracular.

            Language, then, is the basis of culture. But culture itself thus becomes essentially teleological.

            The listening enterprise, then, is inherently prophetic.

            Our time is anomalous.

            The mirror has been freed.

            This is the cultural change the words now lead us to.

            The independent mirror allows us to mirror from ethos to ethos, from ethnos to ethnos – to witness our own self world as a separable world, and hence to envision a paradise world, a world of the self figure, shared at its nature, but endlessly proliferating uniqueness.

            But, simultaneously, the mirror has become a leveling sword, swallowing all values in its bloodless severing edge.

            This barren landscape is where we now live, unless we can find the fulfilling paradise of the self.

Jeremy T. Monro

The blog began in November 2006.

This revised presentation

begins in August 2010.