Canto I
“The Nice Man with his Wife’s Last Name’s Form of Annihilation”
1859:2546
.730
(3rd edition: block-as-line macrotonal)
Cloud was sitting at Seventh Heaven drinking a Fernet on the rocks engaging in light conversation with a cocksucker he’d never even met about a Queen’s Blood play-in game that he’d - this particular cocksucker - requested to be put on the TV at the bar. Well, actually Cloud corrected, for the record, that he’d actually been reading a few pages of Timaeus prior to all this, making a few disparate notes, finding himself puzzled at the sensory information that continued to be relayed into his brain. Cloud basically alleged he was flummoxed about the sensory information that became, in some way, relayed to what he guessed was his brain? - how any of that was corroborated, but more so Cloud contemplated the static nature of said images - that’s what he was specifically contemplating when a guy with a round-ass face leaned onto the bar, seeking to close his tab, obviously excited to tell the bartender that he may need to show her his ID, just because he took his wife’s last name and hadn’t had a chance to change his license yet? The patron with the round-ass face noted how nice the bartender was (Tifa!), but what was her name again? He could definitely display his ID if she really needed, just because, again, his last name was different now - taking his wife’s name and all! Of course, Cloud noted, that it was clear that no one gave a fuck about the printed name on a credit card in that bar, and Tifa, for her part, didn’t exactly seem like she was ramping up to suck this dude off just because he was a radical feminist. For Cloud’s part he was still, you know, attempting to get behind the blunt sensations being smuggled relentlessly into his so-called conscious existence. Everything was an image to some extent, right Aerith? Touch itself was a fucking sensory image. It was a quaint Spring evening where Cloud felt more or less destined to philosophize, having started drinking wine in preparation for a Friday night dinner, only to have Tifa bail last minute, because she needed to pick up a bar shift - leaving him completely free to continue this wine drinking in a ritualistic way that would be conducive to philosophical ideas. Yes, Cloud continued to Aerith, it was basically only via drinking alone, but in a ritualistic fashion, that he’d achieved any sort of philosophical inquiry. You couldn’t just sit at a desk and become philosophical, at least not for Cloud! Maybe some people could! But, no, not Cloud. He’d imagine that there were probably a litany of possible ways of becoming philosophical - like, for instance, for the round-faced albino chap, perhaps telling Tifa that he’d taken his wife’s last name, maybe that could be seen as possibly ritualistic in a way, a gateway to some sort of becoming philosophical. This was actually science, Cloud told her he thought at the bar, successfully avoiding making any eye contact with the round-faced man. Was it necessarily strange at all that once the Greeks went extinct philosophy went more or less completely and utterly downhill and never looked back in the least, that the last group to really reach much of any philosophical success made a sincere effort to conjoin getting fucked up with contemplating intelligible phenomena? - that these Greeks attempted to marry inebriation and rigorous dialectic? That all thought since - to paraphrase Northhead - had been a minor footnote to Plato or whatever? The thing was, according to Cloud, you just couldn’t willy nilly delve into metaphysics completely sober! But that wasn’t to say a person should necessarily become some degenerate alcoholic either, because a degenerate drunk would in no way make a great meta-physicist either - that was basically impossible, because, like Cloud said, the solo mode of inebriation should be done ritualistically, in spurts, at certain times. You couldn’t just be like hitting the bottle as soon as you woke from a slumber! - after said inebriation sessions you’d require sobriety to parse through whatever it was that came to you via said contemplation, no? In fact, the actual science was nothing beyond this parsing through of inebriation sessions of rigorous contemplation! That was it - what laid behind logic and metaphysics, in Cloud’s mind at least! But inebriation could be anything really - Cloud could enter a state of inebriation in a car alone on a Tuesday AM, without consuming a damn thing. Aerith more or less agreed, adding that on the one hand a philosophical mind should be able to analyze, interpret, extrapolate, all of that scientific stuff - but, on the other, if you fail to place yourself in a position to receive anything to analyze, interpret, or extrapolate then you were basically screwed! Cloud more or less agreed but added that - sans this type of “inspiration,” so to speak - they’d be stuck sitting at a table just noodling around nonsensically, vacillating back and forth between two types of nothingness, and then just probably knocking off someone else’s work by accident. But none of this was new! It wasn’t like Cloud was breaking news in any way. At this point Aerith asked - you know, was this albino douche bag, he was an element of this analysis? No, not really - according to Cloud - maybe the guy was trying a tad too hard? - to present himself as a specific archetype to the general public, as a guy who decided to spit in the face of his own chromosome count, which was something Cloud personally endorsed! Granted Cloud probably wouldn’t do it by taking his wife’s last name, because Cloud personally was obviously more prone to a type of isolated and overly dramatic self-annihilation than a subservient and disingenuously muted feminist annihilation, but he wasn’t ipso facto opposed to either! Aerith agreed one hundred percent! But Cloud still would go a little further, noting that in the intelligible sphere, as someone like, say, Proclus would note, that so-called forms were somehow able to participate in one another without mixing, whereas within the sensible realm they participated in things and subsequently got dirty. But Cloud thought that it was worth going one step further - since they were discussing annihilation and stuff anyway, that the perceived mixing between forms that took place in the sensible arena was itself just a projection of mixture but not actual mixture. The intelligible sphere, being purely emanated, participated within itself without mixing itself, while in the sensible sphere it didn’t seem like that was possible, that by participating within sensible things they became essentially mixed with them, assuming they were categorically sensible. Essentially nature was tainted, which of course Cloud and Aerith knew all too well! Way too well! Hence their shared acquiescence toward occasional annihilation! But even this sensible filth, so to speak, Cloud thought, this perceived mixing up in the participation of sensible things, wasn’t it also a projection? - an emanation, just as the participation of the intelligible sphere was also an emanation of the primary unity of all things? Which, yeah, brought Cloud back to that albino round-faced fuck at the bar, taking his wife’s last name - because ultimately the albino’s vantage point wasn’t remarkably divergent from Cloud’s or Aerith’s, Cloud thought. This albino was promoting a certain type of annihilation of their cultural-sensible realm, thinking that the patriarchal lineage of their society was basically something objectionable, something essentially tainted, that should be annihilated in the service of something more pure. Okay, well, Cloud thought that made a modicum of sense! Maybe taking his wife’s last name was in a sense a greater form of purity than locking a woman in a kitchen and expecting a blowjob every other evening, Cloud thought. Just as Proclus and Socrates sensed that the intelligible sphere participated with itself yet not in a way where it mixed with itself, that this was distinct from our further descended, sensible sphere where things participated with one another but got mixed up in the process - well, maybe this albino man was noting that the patriarchy was a participatory mixing that left unseemly cum stains - for lack of a better phrase! - on human experience. Patriarchy, in the albino man’s mind, should be annihilated because of this sensible mixing up, this putrid tainting of what would be better off pure. And taking your nice wife’s name was a proper mode of annihilation in response. Aerith remarked that she knew Cloud would inevitably bring the discourse back to this poor chap closing his tab, but, just to be clear, what Cloud was saying was that this mixing that occurred in the sensible realm was itself just a separate projection - just a lesser mode of projecting! So while the material world may have disgusted them, perhaps moving the two toward some sort of all-encompassing conceptual annihilation, and as much as the patriarchy might have seemed putrid to the albino husband at the bar who looked to annihilate himself by taking his nice wife’s last name, it could be wise to consider that these disgusting aggregates were themselves simply derivative projections, that they weren’t actual mixtures, that they were just derivative emanations as opposed to tattoos of what they thought they despised. Aerith was aware. She wasn’t distressed about it, but she knew this poor albino guy would in time take the brunt of it from Cloud. Cloud questioned whether he didn’t deserve it? Plus like they’d already implied - they must to proceed from the immanent to the transcendent, no?