David Baird db@theunspokenyes.com theunspokenyes.com

Lori Robertson, managing editor American Journalism Review www.ajr.org

Dear Lori,

Greetings, and – hello. I am writing to possibly interest you in commissioning a piece from me

• a piece of new writing, which I am beginning now. There is a type of new thinking afoot, which I would like to cover for you. While some say “new thinking” is not new, I do believe we make different progresses as “the Ages” unfold, (or sur-logically develop), and, in any case, “[k]new” has different senses... In literature, the cultural happenings in the last half-century are as new as it gets, without actually going into the future, which we know is less possible than anything else currently happening...

  While in “virtually media culture,” forty-year-old information, no matter how _artistic or _beautiful, might not be taken as quite as timely by the “cultured set,” (those who make decisions occupationally – leaders – and those who make occupationally their decisions – thinkers)... So apropos the “cutting edge,” we then remember – journeys from “highest pinnacles of philosophical reach” all the way to “constructed, and no doubt constricted, mass-popular consciousness,” can be quite a long, troubled, and even dangerous one; indeed – if most of history is to be exemplary, the journey may for some ideas, some newnesses, never yet complete...

  We would help our contemporaries, (the denizens of contemporaneity’s “net” and knowers of its “code”), complete, or at least get complimentarity with, part of modern human thinking’s journey.

  As normal journalism is thinking about world(s), I say we publish eccentric “journal-ism” that gets into “the worlds’ thinking” – that, in other words, helps catch us up to where we already potentially are, as a species and a network – opens our eyes to the unique and wonderful picture projects that have been developing most explicitly since the 1960's – illuminates the new style of conceptual human illumination that has arisen most notably in the thinkers of “the French philosophical singularity,” as Jean-Luc Nancy, one of its highest powers, calls it – though the pattern is in many places to see, and monopoly

  on, or centricity of, truth is impossible, and I’m American and trying writing this.

  I almost certainly don’t claim to reproduce the quality of Nancy, Derrida or Deleuze... But I claim to have, in my own way, tuned in to their spirits or materiality’s – and to now have been sent, by their writing or philosophy (same difference), on a seemingly world-important head-long trajectory of necessarily human desire, a textual and imaginative trajectory through the “ratiocinating” dream space of earthly life its self... (Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find _any writer capable of reproducing the fractally crazily involuted and spectrum-full sublimely beauteous color-quality of the _apparently

  _relatively few thinkers who happen to be highly, highly trained and cultured philosophers in the most expansive extension and magnificence of their powers or forces, (to play on science’s distinction between _work-done and _work-doable)... (Some theories would even hold us moderns to may be the greatest thinkers ever-, because of the omni- and sur- and total- reality of intellectual growth and progress...)

  Even if you see the need for attempted public enlightenment, do you think, “Why not get a philosophy Ph.D. to write this – why use this guy who has only one B.A. after ten years of university?” Educationality is a strange thing. I would put reasons like the thing of “(intensive) quantity vs. (extensive) quality”... Or how all the “teachings” of the world mightn’t teach us, if we could not already learn, how to play with “the big kids”... How the youthful mind may have insight the aged mind might have somehow moved beyond... (At thirty-one, I am an embryo, a child, in the eyes of philosophy...) How, sometimes, a thinker comes into fullness of his compassionate passionate power without costly, costly “critical-clinical attentions” of a graduate “program.” Some do not have time to get doctorates.

  I think I would be good to write this, though I am employed (deployed) by no learned profiting institution, and have never published, except for my own website, (thisfeel.com), philosophy – or anything, really, besides poetry. I think I would be good because I have _studied the matter with mine and many other minds. A glance through thisfeel would make apparent some of the things I have been led to try and tried. Both in university and on my own, I have been constantly reading into with wonder, and even writing into with discernment, the issues.

  I attended university for a variety of things, but eventually hungrily attempted to learn the philosophical tradition at the University of Pittsburgh. I got a B.A., anyway... That was a year ago. I think I really believe in some philosophy for a general-interest audience... I am a writer who has much

  respect for journalism, though I admit I would have a difficult time writing it myself, (though my political philosophy papers come close...) Anyway, my foundation in reality can be in large part attributed to those people investigating reality in all sorts of dangerous or difficult ways, who have then chosen to share with us. My conception of the world would be far less fantastic and surreal and real without reportage of the highest quality...

  As such, I was wondering about your take on my approach. I’ve written a strange and intense piece, “Today is Only Day... Synthetic Variance of David Baird,” and put it on my website, giving away its ten pages’ length to the wanderers in the net, because I believe in this type of writing’s key nature, and have a strong commitment to “open-info,” or educational, ways of dealing with the other reading and writing humans. Also, I do not see totally convincing reasons why someone would refuse to print this piece, even though it is already online. The print and online are two worlds – and each can view the truth in its own way...

  It would be great if you’d publish that one, but I was mainly wondering whether you’d want me to do a new thing launching off from it. As I will try to show in my proposed article, the importance of Today is Only Day, or any similar piece of writing, seems to reach far beyond technical philosophical disputes, our own random personal experiences, experimental “fiction” of whatever quality, or anything else that might be suggested by the formal appearance of the text. Something different is at stake – inner life. It is language that does not know itself. It is a thinking that truly wonders what it is really thinking. It is a statement of, not single-minded purpose of thought, but apurposivity, (dreaming) – nonteleologicality – a kind of “omnidirectional desire” – a desire that knows there are wanted things in

  _all_ directions... (Not that all things are wanted.)

  Even though I am not the only one doing this sort of thing, I think and hope (and dream, in a way), that this document will become thought a departure for thought – a reference point in the research of reference – a node in the network of nodes in the human world/info structure; that is, the history of literature, the literature of history. Such as “Derrida” is this kind of node... A point where opposing and compossible textual fluxions, say of the poetic and dramatic, (from different “worlds” of intellectuality, and, I would suppose, lifestylicity), merge and interpenetrate and open up new modes of communication, new processes of thought/action, vision/passion... Your publication could be the first big-time nexus of this reality of mine.

  I have two poems published by The Front, a Pittsburgh weekly literature alternative magazine. I thought they were quite good for what they were, but I wanted more... And I knew somehow that I could do it... (That I could write something interesting enough for philosophers to study.) Finally, in my Synthetic Variance, I take my writing to the level of full intricacy and symbolic resonance – the text became an amalgam of tuned-up perspectives on a visible and knowable constellation of problems, a written, linguistic synthesis of the most convincing analyses – both abstract and concrete – of “our hour.” I think I created a kind of “totalistic exception” (new system) – or even “singular generalization” (systematic newness) – a “thought” which can serve as a hinge of time, a device where our time-senses can, like crystallizing ideas, fold in on themselves. My “goal” was nothing less than true educationality, true perspective-opening – the transformation of reader minds into more involuted and hyper-aware versions – the transformation of writer minds into more convoluted and ultra-“there” versions...

  I’m sure these claims will be disputed by some experts – though you’d find others who would agree with me. (And do you wonder, who the “experts in thinking” really are?) It is fairly difficult to make one’s way through the philosophical body of work, and come to a realization about what readers would find most important in it. I believe I have done sort of this – a kind of complex realization – one whose honesty and ethicality are evident, though whose riskiness and devotion to the “gamble” are also not hard to miss. And in a way this realization is a mirror – a surface of reactivity and omnireferentiality

• a mirror that can show any English-speaker a new perspective on her mind, no matter “where” she is currently at intellectually. I have some strange ideas about language, and what uses it can be put to. Lines become their own explanations – tools which in-themselves are exactly what they say they are, but which harken back to the type of magical power that witches’ spells must have had, for the wrath of the community to fall so hotly upon them...

With text, you can get more out of it than went in – that is, you can write something which can open even your own eyes – you can build a structure/appearance whose passages and transitions can change your self – you can actually profit from all that you have learned, and craft an almost living gift- that-ever-gives... This is why I would like to choose my own work as the main departure for discussion, though if necessary would write this as a research piece about others. Shouldn’t we attempt to understand ourselves? Would you rather me tell you what Derrida has learned – or what I have? I do not think this is arrogance or self-absorption. I just have always found it more enjoyable to read

people write what they want, rather than to read them write about what other people wanted to write...

I’m not arguing Today is Only Day is obscure and in need of a brilliant book report to make sense of its symbolism, or something. Rather, as a piece of thought thinking about its self and, indeed, thinking’s self, this text is a _beginning_ – it not only can be pushed further, made clearer – it feels as if it _needs_ to be... However, if you feel that I should discuss recognized authorities, I would be more than willing to bring the Europeans into play... Not that I wouldn’t anyway – but I could make it very explicit that I am simply speaking English in a way approximating how people have been speaking French for the last forty years...

“Compossibility,” I write, in the line of the text with the biggest words, “of image and sense, their ineluctable nexus, is rationality.” What is human inner life? (Outer life is “plain enough” to see clearly, if journalism does its job...) Our experience is most intimately image and sense. (Or, if you prefer, world-model and self/consciousness.) The French philosophers, most especially, have reminded us of their originary roles in our being. Neither image nor sense can be imagined without the other... A pair whose connection is so strong arises out of nothing, or almost-nothing, in the primordial or embryonic mind – a pair arises to as far as we know never break apart – and to even stay around through all observable variances and modalities of the subject. To “think about it” or engage in representation, (intensionality), to “think it” or be literary/creative, (to write), or to “think/it” and be spiritual, or one with the fluxion, (to become what you are). All options are open. (You can get out of them). Rationality would seem to be concerned about its own sources, and its own fairness. I would encourage you with all respect and friendliness to try out my brand of rationality, and share it with the world and histories...

thanks, yours,

David Baird