There is this thing called the 'I', as in an I for an I, for long thought to be one and in unity with itself. But then came Nietzsche and said that this I is not a simple, but a multiplicity of things. Anway, what do those untimely meditations of yours have to say? — Pussycat

I appreciate the wordplay - Hammurabai - Nietzsche - meditation -a Nietzsche work whose title includes that word.

Yeah, I think the I covers a multiplicity. If you're used to identifying with a unitary I, that's weird and a big shift. If you're not, and have already accepted a fragmentary self, you're just at the beginning? It seems that way to me. Now you have a whole menagerie of voices and tones and personalities to attend to.

I agree. I do agree, with almost all of that. Through and through. But, jesus, there's something to this sort of thing that reminds me of a subselection of biblilical prophets. Yes, it's bad, really bad! But who is this complaint being lodged to??? It seems like a moral complaint, which it is, and which is legiimate - but what court is hearing it? There's no god, as with the prophets, so ---- who is this addressed to?

I'm not content to smolder in the face of capitalism. how do we use this fuck you energy in a way that isnt a forum fuck you? I mean this. People are really coming together now. How to use it?

Yeah, not discussing. I do think it can be partially shared, but not in that way.

I've been meditating more and more regularly the past few months. I've noticed my chatter is very argumentative. It argues both sides of whatever topic it settles on (there are a lot of different voices and tones that crop up). Sometimes in a sustained back and forth. Sometimes its like catching fragments of a courtroom argument from a few blocks over, so you don't really see the whole thing. In any case, there's a lot of that. I don't know if that's a cause of me liking philosophy or an effect - it's been too long, so I can't remember what my chatter used to be like. Whatever the case, it's frustrating. It's really frustrating sometimes. I want it to stop, but I'm not in control of it. That might just be part of getting into meditating though? like you have to actually look at how out of control your inner conversation is before you can calm a bit.

I agree with you about german idealism. It's something you contract, it clogs up your head. I was pretty ensorcelled by it for a long time and still recovering. What I mean though is they had this idea of 'intellectual intuition' which seemed like a reminder this was all missing the mark, only they made it a concept, sort of, instead of exiting.

I hear you man. Mental illness sucks. I hope you're riding this whole thing out ok. Message me anytime if you want. I've struggled with a lot of mental stuff - I can't promise I can give you good advice, but I can relate at least. In the meantime, stay safe.

I haven't spoken to so many strangers as I have in recent days, spontaneously, while going about things. Although that will probably change as we've just gone into partial lockdown here. But yes, there's a definite sense of concern for one another that's kind of hard to fathom as being in place at any other time. My dream is that this sense of mutual care gets translated into our ways of social organization, and prompts us to rethink what and how we value things as a society. There is, among all this horribleness, an opportunity to use that 'shimmer' as a window into that better world, I wish we knew how to take it. — StreetlightX

Yeah, but also here's a chance to figure out how to take it, right? If I was speaking with my phil-hat, I'd say something like, idk, we're offloading our responsibility on the subject-who-knows-how-to-take-it, assuming they'll fail. But that's us! We are actually that - we're actually the people this is affecting! This is a window, of sorts, how do we use it? The whole thing of : 'this would be great, if only' supposes someone other than us, equipped in the right way, would make use of it. Well - who is that supposed to be?

We don't have to wish we knew how to take it - we can try to figure it out.

Ah. The question of neuralink and mental health is a complicated one. I suffer from mental health issues so I understand the pressing need for relief. I don't have anything intelligent to say. I guess my sense is that any relief afforded would be offset by the actual thing it is (which plays way too handily into the thought-ruts of psychosis & delusion)

Neuralink is an unequivocally awful idea. That it's considered seriously by anyone is alarming. Any new introduction of tech tows with it, almost without exception, a slew of unforseen problems. This always happens. If you needlessly create a situation where the problems are happening in such a way that it directly affects the brains of people involved, that's....it would be an ethical breach of an order you don't usually see outside of thought experiments and sci-fi. It blows my mind that some people ( a lot of smart people, in fact) support this.

Also re-reading Heraclitus' Fragments. Always good to revisit these mysterious aphorisms. — Alvin Capello

Still some of the best stuff out there.

I am pretty pessimistic about it all. The worst possible thing will probably happen: things will go back to being just as they were before, after some time. — StreetlightX

If you could bracket all the deaths and suffering- and you can't, but if you could - in my experience, this whole thing has had a net positive effect on social relations. When I go to the grocery store, or smoke shop, or anywhere, people are talking more, more open. And they're actually interested in what everyone has to say. There's something shared. I finally did my big stock-up today at the supermarket and went to the self-checkout station. The employees overseeing that station have always, as a rule, seemed checked-out and indifferent (which makes sense given that job, I'd be too) but the attendant today was joking and we talked like real people to whom something shared was happening, making conversation. I'd put a scented candle in my cart (for some reason scented candles are one of the few things that actually help calm my nerves, as GOOP-y as that sounds) but when I saw what all my groceries were adding up to, I asked to return it. She casually was just like 'ya I can do that, or if you want, I can just knock ten bucks off the price.' and then did that, laughing.

On a more serious note, I have many friends in the restaurant industry (servers and bartenders) who are indefinitely out of work, and everyone in our friend group is pooling resources together for food and utilities and whatever else for those most affected.We've been having game nights and 'cocktail parties' over video chat. In a lot of ways, these are more socially satisfying than the occasionally desultory nights out we'd had in the past. We're trading information and checking in on one another's situations and meaning it. You can feel the mutual care.

If none of the actual suffering was happening, this would be an almost miraculous improvement in everything social and communal. It's like a surreal, and encouraging, shimmer of how things could be.

It's sad to think it could go back to how it was. I think you're probably right, but I'm going to hold on the foolish hope it won't, even afterward.

It is a thoroughly contingent practice, because it only developed a few times worldwide. Nothing demands that it happen.

And sure, it's a hybrid, and has elements of mystery cults, ancient cosmological speculation, hucksterism, and primitive mathematics thrown in (these are all around today in some form under the umbrella of 'philosophy'). But there is a central thread, so I claim, which is what really drives it and causes it to survive. That thread runs through the rise of litigation, to the development of rhetoric, to sophistry, to the Socratic method (where it roughly stops developing). — Snakes Alive

stray thoughts, slow sunday:

-It is very strange to try to capture the structure of the world in a game of claims and defenses. I think, by nature, this can't satisfy the thing it's trying to satisfy. But I do think@Pfhorrestis on to something with Athenian democracy. I don't think philosophy is necessary, necessarily, but it does seem like something the potential for which necessarily exists in certain social organizations. This is why, perhaps, you see those spontaneous rediscoveries of philosophical moves you described.

-I think 'intellectual intuition' in German Idealism is a placeholder for the kind of practices that actually provide the emotional satisfaction and spiritual understanding people often mistakenly look for in philosophy. 'intellecutal intuition' got a lot of scorn heaped on it, but I think, if anything, it's a useful talisman or touchstone reminding that this stuff only goes so far. Maybe they needed that placeholder more because of how systematic things were getting.

-You can imagine similarly structured societies spontaneously developing legal ideas, or just laws, that are similar - but they certainly won't necessarily develop the same bloated reef of stopgaps and implications and workarounds that constitute our particular legal system. Maybe it's the same for academic philosophy.

-Where would you place, say, Thales, in the litigation>rhetoric>sophistry>socrates development?Unrelated question, do you think the dialogue between Job and his interlocutors has any similarities to ethical philosophy?

Oh, sure, so if you ask people whether they have free will, or whatever, then they're often interested. Sometimes in their fumbling attempts to discuss it, they even accidentally reinvent certain proto-philosophical discourse moves. But not very many people know or care about what happens in the discipline.

I guess you redefine philosophy as anything you like it's more true, but that's just a verbal thing. — Snakes Alive

Yeah, I think it's fair to make a distinction between professional philosophy & spontaneous questioning. I also agree that most people don't know or care what happens in the discipline (except, again, in that 'wisdom of the ancients' when regarding ancient, canonical philosophers - this may have been what you meant when you said 'People outside of it either suspect it is what it says it is...")

Stil, it's not insignificant that people accidentally reinvent certain proto-philosophical discourse moves. Maybe the litigious genealogy of a lot of greek philosophy is one strand that got woven in with others, and assumed a perhaps bizarrely central role. I think you could also add in the 'wrestling' aspect of the gymnasium, an aestheticized grappling with one another. You mentioned, above, Socrates' fondness for aporia being disingenuous. I half agree there. I think, by the later dialogues, he's clearly carving room for his own positive philosophy. But, while he's for sure disingenuous throughout (Thrasyamachus lays how this works in The Republic perfectly, before nevertherless succumbing to it), I think there is a genuine magnetic draw to the aporia. You see this in the Parmenides dialogue, which never resolves, but grows more and more lost in the whirlwind.

If philosophy is a thoroughly contingent practice, it feels like it makes sense it would be this hybrid monster of things, that lurches its way forward. Just like Midrash or the short story or haikus or professional wrestling or painting or any other tradition.

I have a lot. Before I write them out, I want to make sure: are you asking about individual stories of people outside academia who care about philosophical questions and like to talk about them when you raise them? I can see how it might seem like they don't when you don't relate to people on that level. Why would they raise them in those circumstances?

don't ignore philosophy entirely. Most people do worry and care about it even though they don't have to.

Most people don't though. I mean that literally. They just don't scratch much, because of what else is on their mind. They have responsibilities (or desires.) There are few truly mindless people, if that's what you're getting at.

Right, but think of what we're talking about. The guy on the street doesn't know philosophy. The guy who does - Azner Baez - is sketching how to go beyond it. Which person is more in the tradition? Now, maybe being in the tradition is necessary to go beyond it, I'm not saying it's not, but I can't shake the feeling that you're trying to do two things at once. It's just a folk tradition, but you have to master it and exit in the right way. I don't know how to understand your posts otherwise.

Right, that's what I'm saying! It feels a little like we're taking a long walk from philosophy as a folk tradition to philosophy as something only understood adequately by experts, who reflect in the right way on it. Which makes the whole detour needless.

Yep. The lack of self-reflection comes in part from the fact that only natives study the tradition. People outside of it either suspect it is what it says it is (because they are part of the same civilization), or simply hold inarticulate contempt for it. It would be nice if that could change. I like the idea of the culture that used to house philosophy becoming post-philosophical. — Snakes Alive

I disagree. Empirically, anecdotally... i just mean reflecting on people I talk to day to day. A lot of people are interested in philosophy - that's why the guardian, the atlantic, the times etc puts out these pop-philosophy things. Guy on the street took DMT and is reading Plato now - it's not that unusual. Plato et al aren't usually seen with contempt - they're treated like the way people treat the Founding Fathers. Wisdom of the Ancients etc. Likely misguided, sure, but if you're actually trying to gauge how people outside the inner ring think of this stuff, that's closer to how it is.

Contempt is more commonly directed at present institutions. No one really hates plato on the 'outside.' They hate harvard, or something.

@Snakes Alive
I do think that philosophy is closer to Kabbalah (something evolving, ramifying and so on) than a fixed tradition whose core we can isolate. I agree that Philosophy's self-characterization seems flimsier the more you read, that it's a mistake to read Big Names in isolation and so forth. I can't weigh the extent of my germane reading against yours - I don't know how they compare - but I have read enough to have a broad sense of the lay of the land.

I agree with what you've said about snapping out of philosophy as something less like a philosophical epiphany than an extra-philosophical spiritual realization of having been confused in a certain way. Ideally, what that would lead to is finding what you were mistakenly using philosophy for outside of philosophy. Then, if you want, you can participate in philosophy as a detached hobbyist, or someone who enjoys it as a pastime.

There's something that you see in people like UG Krishnamurti where they sometimes play the game by its rules, but if challenged, switch to saying the game is bs. Back and forth, as they see fit, so long as they are seen as being the most authoritative source in the room. This is kind of like 'leaving a relationship' as a move in a relationship. We know that 'overcoming philosophy' is a big part of the folk tradition of philosophy. I looked up Avner Baz - he appears to be a professor of philosophy.

don't think so. Anyone familiar with the tradition isn't going to see anything new in Kant. Remember, the 'Copernican Revolution' line is his own propaganda. We tend to see differences because we're ignorant, and read 'great figures' in isolation. Reading more always dispels the illusion. — Snakes Alive

Oof.

That was the bleak moment. All in All, there's actually a giddy feeling of camaradarie I've noticed. I almost prefer it, tbh.

I'm working at home now. I finished my day and went out to smoke a cigarette on my porch. A very drunk man walked by, looked up, made eye contact, and moved toward me. There was snot running down his nose. He asked for a cigarette after a while. I gave him one, outstretched hand. Then he asked for a lighter. I lit his cigarette instead.He said 'god bless' He left, fell down, cigarette went out, and walked back. I lit it again. He said 'god bless' He left and fell down again. I didn't move to help him up. He said 'Man this sucks"

In the Socratic / Western tradition, the basic practice of philosophy is to do something like say 'Imagine scenario X. Is X a case of Y?' That's what most philosophy boils down to. — Snakes Alive

I don't think it's impossible, necessarily, but it does seem like you'd have to do some work to show that much later philosophy is essentially doing that. So, for instance, in Kant, there's a central thing of subsumption of particulars under a universal, but that's just one piece of the system - a major part, for sure, but a self-consciously deilmited part. I'm not defending Kant along any line, or anything here. But if you have to show that things that seem not to be 'is scenario x a case of y?' are actually that, then hasn't the tradition essentially changed because of that fact? (the fact that practioners can't see what they're doing as that, and need someone to cut through the fat? The other question lurking here is what it means to see something as a 'folk tradition'- it seems like folding that in on the tradition that underlies the idea of 'seeing something as a folk tradition' is just another way to keep it going, but with a ironic twist. Is philosophy (x) an case of y (folk tradition)? )

Isn't it more like, say, Kabbalah ?- there's a throughline, some continuity, but there are some genuine ruptures and changes that alter the core practice (like with all folk traditions?)

Everything you've said makes sense to me. I also think you can't connect with others if you can't be by yourself (in reasonable doses.) If you scour out all the phil-talk what you're left with is just yourself and a part of yourself that doesn't like yourself, and what that all is. I don't think there's a way of thinking around it (the temptation to adequately state a problem in a sanctified register, rather than undergo something). You have to plunge in. And figure out what you need in your life to allow that kind of plunging to happen safely.

I would like a real history of philosophy to be written. Not a summary of what philosophers have thought, but an actual historical account of what the heck it is and how it came to be in Greece. I'm particularly fascinated by the relation between philosophy, sophistry (something that I think may not really be distinct from philosophy, and was only thought to be so as part of a propaganda campaign that was pretty uncritically swallowed), rhetoric, and the Greek legal tradition. Looking back on it from 'outside the fly bottle,' what Socrates does is so weird, and it's an interesting historical question how such a practice comes about.

I'm particularly interested in how philosophy relates to the sophist's claim to be able to 'speak about anything,' an ability made possible by the emptiness and verbal nature of the sophist's claims and practices. Philosophers don't seem to understand that they make the same claim – to be able to 'speak about anything.' But isn't this a stupid claim! — Snakes Alive

Yes. I'd like that too. The real history, I mean. So, the conversation on the thread has since outstripped me, but I did want to respond to this.

I suppose it'd be hard to do because plato is the primary source for everything. On the other hand, I suppose that's true of the bible as well and people have done great work there.

One thought: Socrates is weird and that probably has something to do with his appeal. In Plato's account, he seems to be well-versed in the thought of the sophists (he seems well-versed in everything at the time, really) His driving force looks like a fondness for aporia. The sophists can talk about everything; Socrates can hiccup any talk about anything. You get the sense (or I get the sense) that the Platonic Canon erects itself (in later dialogues) in a space cleared by Socrates, while still using Socrates as a mouthpiece (and of course. The guy's a hit, early dialogues are at 95% on rotten tomatoes, why not keep using him?)

Socrates' daemon seemed mostly to tell him when something was bullshit. It didn't seem to do much besides that, from what I can recall of the dialogues. Of course, this is also a canny rhetorical move, but is it just that? I don't know.

If Socrates is the wound, maybe Plato is the pus and scab and scar?

Next stanza tomorrow. The 'Grand Galop' stanzas are monsters, and I'm back from bar trivia (first!) with fumbling fingers.

I have!

I think we just posted the same idea, essentially, at the same time.

The big question for me is : Laruelle sure reads a lot like a parisian Intellectual, so is this just a magisterial one-up in a known tradition of one-upping? I'm not sure - it seems likes something's there, I really think that. I just wish he didn't come out of Paris. But it's also something to while the time.

Yeah, I agree with that. & I don't want to jump too in the middle of your conversation with fdrake, but I think (I think...Laruelle sprang to mind when I first posted in this thread, but I didn't know him well enough to confidently bring him up-) that you guys are actually largely in agreement. A lot of what you're saying sounds very close to what (I understand) Laruelle to be saying. When you say philosophy only superficially reflects on itself, applying the same techniques to itself while missing actual reflection, that's exactly the tack he takes. I understand fdrake (when referencing Laruelle) to be making that same distinction, between what philosophy claims to be doing and what it's actually doing

(formats a little off on mobile, hopefully it looks right on a normal browser)
Edit: it's not. But it's pretty close. Nothing majorly off. the lines 'imponderables' and 'fleeting second' should be indented.

The dog barks, the caravan passes on.
The words had a sort of bloom on them
But were weightless, carrying past what was being said.
"A nice time," you think, "to go out:
The early night is cool, but not
Too anything. People parading with their pets
Past lawns and vacant lots, as though these too were somehow
imponderables
Before going home to the decency of one's private life
Shut up behind doors, which is nobody's business.
It does matter a little to the others
But only because it makes them realize how far their respect
Has brought them. No one would dare to intrude.
It is a night like many another
With the sky now a bit impatient for today to be over
Like a bored salesgirl shifting from foot to stockinged foot."
These khaki undershorts hung out on lines,
The wind billowing among them, are we never to make a statement?
And certain buildings we always pass which are never mentioned -
It's getting out of hand.
As long as one has some sense that each thing knows it place
All is well, but with the arrival and departure
Of each new one overlappping so intensely in the semi-darkness
It's a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a
fleeting second
Must be replaced by imperfect knowledge of the featureless whole,
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail unrelated
To any attempt at definition. And the minor eras
Take on an importance out of all proportion to the story
For it can no longer unwind, but must be kept on hand
Indefinitely, like a first-aid kit no one ever uses
Or a word in the dictionary that no one will ever look up.
The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.

In general, only an outside view sees something as a 'folk tradition.' For the people in the tradition, it's just 'what's done,' or 'the tradition.' So if you ask a performer of the tradition, they'll say 'it's the most general form of inquiry' or 'it's the study of how things hang together in the broadest sense' or 'it's an inquiry into the deepest questions,' but these things aren't true. So what is it really...? Well that question hasn't been properly asked yet, because al the histories are written by natives, who give you the party line.

Philosophy is 'self-reflexive,' OK, but so is Islamic hadith, and so on. Westerners have a blind spot for philosophy because it's their folk tradition, but an outsider is able to see that it isn't what it claims to be from the inside. — Snakes Alive

Agreed mostly all around. Still Hadith (or midrash, say) are the go-to analogies rather than, say, Sufi Dance or Quilting etc. Though those can just be as imperial as philosophy, too. If the philosopher tries a a Sufi Dance and can't sync up, the community of Sufi Dancers may (justifaibly) see philosophy as correlated with a particular impediment to dancing. Or a novelist may place the philosopher in a certain role etc. Maybe the philosopher can't pray because thought modeled on litigation doesn't allow the right kind of silence to emerge. The concerns of the philosopher are recontextualized; their significance changes.

Still, probably the people doing hadith would find more commonality, qua hadithers, with philosophers than they would with dancers.

Team flux here. Constancy is just ordered flux, the invariant in variation. I'll only add: both are perfectly real, only that the one furnishes the sufficient reason for the other. — StreetlightX

Same here, but mostly the second half of what you've said. Emphasis on flux is good as a counterbalance to an overemphasis on permanancy, but neither are comprehensible without the other. Which, I guess is boring, but seems all you can really say at this level of generality.

@Pneumenon
As a general, like, methodological thing - I always feel like once the term 'illusion' crops up, that signals there's a fork in the road, where there are two paths opened up:

One way is to 'delete' the illusionary thing, to make room for the 'real' thing. But that leaves you with a situation where you have to account for the reality of the illusion, as illusion. And that gets almost impossibly sticky, if you deny reality to the illusion.

The other is to see what's being called 'illusion' as a symptom of a widening of scope. What's called an 'illusion' is still real, as the thing it is, it just can also be understood in a different way by shifting context.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. I was going to say that the tradition itself, in philosophy, tends to become a tradition of self-reflection on the tradition. Then, I realized that's not quite true, except in pockets. Well, you can separate the unreflective practicing of the tradition, from reflexive consideration. Maybe the latter thing is something different than philosophy.

I suppose the effect of characterizing philosophy as a folk-tradition only works if philosophy thinks of itself as something different, so characterizing it that way says something new, reframes things. If it is the same as any other folk tradition, that characterization should have the same effect for any folk tradition (one says 'this is a folk tradition' and sees what the effect is) That may be the case.

That's a good way to look at it. Still it's a particularly decadent and weirdly self-reflective folk tradition. The participants seem particularly concerned about what they're doing and why.

8. 'knowing' philosophically seems, inherently, to have something of the umbilical cord tied to something fixed. At the limit, you can do a thing of having an umbilical cord to the impossibility of the umbilical cord, but it effectively does the same thing, if you return again and again in thought to it.

Some scattered thoughts on this:

1. All three of Holmes' categories get scrambled when you add more detail. A few quick scramblings: Plato did have essences, but a lot of relational aspects too (participation, emanation for the neos). Something somewhere else relates to something here, and the essence is transmitted.Leibniz and Spinoza were extraordinarly relational, while being of the 'mechanical' age. Kant in many ways is platonism turned inside out where, instead of a higher place beaming down the forms, we beam them out from ourselves. And so, like Plato, both essence-focused and relational. & sort of mechanical as well.


2. But you can also see the dialectic crystal of Holmes' break-down, regardless of how well it maps the terrain. There's the thing as it is (essence). Then there's the thing as a momentary 'snapshot' that expresses not itself, but what a linear process of matter-undergoing-laws-of-transformation looks like at time x. (mechanical). Finally, there's the addition of a 'ground' (transcendental apperception and spacetime, I guess, here) which provides a depth and connectedness for phenomena which Holmes' 'mechanical' would be lacking.

So (1) the thing as it is, which is the thing it is (2) it's fragmentation into blind matter and (3) its reintegration into a whole.

This sounds like the hero's quest. Many metaphilosophical accounts seem to tend that way


3. But there's definitely some discernible progression. Is it that there's an innate tendency, in any time, to take the dialectic crystal Holme's has used, and cast it over any sort of material. So that two things are competing - an innate tendency to 'work out' that kind of framing with whatever material is handy (philosophical or not) + an attempt to adequately sketch what's happened in philosophy?

4.

I've speculated along these lines in an old post, though emphasizing (epochal?) experiences - shocks - which I think have made philosophizing possible, so to speak, instead of "conceptual equipment ... frameworks" throughout history: — 180 Proof

If the Holmes thing is an instance of universal cognitive tool for re-arranging things according to a certain triadic structure of integration-disintegration-reintegration (a structure which works through the thinker, to realize itself) then an adequate 'meta-philosophical- perspective wouldn't seek to impose that structure over the whole history of philosophy (which seems like a response to the thinker's own personal shocks) but see the particular ways in which each epoch worked through that structure with regard to their specific shock, and the particular materials they had to make sense of it. @180 ProofI guess this would be what you called 'nonphilosophical critique.'


5. It's hard, when breaking down things into epochs, not to see them as suggesting a new source, a center of stability, that organizes everything else. Plato has a fixed elsewhere. Newton's laws involve a fixed progression of matter through fixed transformations. So on, and so on. There's always something you can return to, in thought, which will always be there, and explain the rest. Not explain, necessarily, but organize. This still goes for Deleuze and whoever else. It's a kind of hearth.

6. Maybe the question to ask of metaphilosophy, to figure out what it is, is what it is it looking for and why?

7. At a certain point, I get a feeling like this all Dumbo letting go of his feather, slowly, through a series of of progressively more abstract transitional objects? I guess ala Wittgenstein's 'fly in the bottle' but with a little more empathy. Instead of a meaningless creature, meaninglessly stuck in a small bottle, you have a confused and earnest person slowly trying on new ways of organizing things once and for all, until letting go and cultivating their own ability to organize with others, in their particular situation. (but then this too seems to be an overhasty wrap-up of it all?)

Water
Drops from an air conditioner
On those who pass underneath. It's one of the sights of our town.
Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More Vomit. One who comes
Walking dog on leash is distant to say how all this
Changes the minute to an hour, the hour
To the times of day, days to months, those easy-to-grasp entities,
And the months to seasons, which are far other, foreign
To our concept of time. Better the months -
They are almost persons - than these abstractions
That sift like marble dust across the unfinished works of the studio
Aging everything into a characterization of itself.
Better the cleanup committee concern itself with
Some item that is now little more than a feature
of some obsolete style - cornice or spandrel
Out of the dimly remembered whole
Which probably lacks true distinction. But if one may pick it up,
Carry it over there, set it down,
Then the work is redeemed at the end
Under the smiling expanse of the sky
That plays no favorites but in the same way
Is honor only to those who have sought it.

It's the downturn, sometimes called "correction". Blame the triggering on whatever you want, it's inevitable because it's how people claim their winnings from the losers. — Metaphysician Undercover

Cynicism about finance echoed and accepted, but, I mean, it seems clearcut the 'triggering' is corona ( or the perception of corona, if you want to push it one frame back.)