More Meta Journal: 3 April 2000

I can't help but feel that if i stop and do not keep up with the "latest" technology that i am going to fall forever behind. I don't like this feeling. I really do enjoy working with techno-logy, but i do not like it when it enstills this horror in me that Michael Heim talks about. But is it really a feeling or is it more something that i make up in my own head. This is obviously me talking about myself, but every so often i find myself caught in this self-referential loop, where the only thing that matter is getting out some sort of hedonistic pleasure. I guess it borders on the boudary of solipsism--you know, when you were a baby and you peed your pants, the entire world was wet, not just your diaper and your ass. Sometimes i feel that way. Very bad, Onur. Very Bad.

 heidegger

Calling is something else than merely making a sound. Something else, again essentially different from mere sound and noise, is the cry. The cry need not be a call, but may be: the cry of distress. In reality, the calling stems from the palce to which the call goes out. The calling is informed by an original outreach towards....this alone is why the call can make a demand. The mere cry dies away and collapses. It can offer no lasting abode to either pain or joy. The call, by contrast, is a reaching, even if it is neither heard nor answered. Calling offers an abode. Sound and cry and call must be clearly distinguished.

The call is directive which, in calling to and calling upon, in reaching out and inviting, directs us towards an action or non-action, or towards something even more essential. In every calling, a call has already gathered. THe calling is not a call that has gone by, but one that has gone out and as such is still calling and inviting; it calls even if it make no sound.

As soon as we understand the word "to call" in its original root significance, we hear the question, "What is called thinking?" [was heisst denken?]. We then hear the question: "What is That which calls on us to think, in the sense that it originally directs us to thinking and thereby entrusts to us or own essential nature as such--which is insofar as it thinks?"

What is it that call on us to think? As we develop the question, it asks: where does the calling come from that call on us to think? In what does this calling consist? How can it make its claim on us? How does the calling reach us? How does it reach down into our very nature, in order to demand from us that our nature be a thinking nature? What is our nature? Can we know it at all? in the sense that we can know that the computer i am typing on is made of plastic, and transistors, and chips, and wires, and electric current runs through it giving it its nature in what it does? If there can be no knowledge here, then in what way is our nature revealed to us, as being the one who also ask the questions we want answered?

"What is it that call on us to think?" We find that we ourselves are put in question, this question, as soon as we truly ask it, and not just rattle it off.

But from what other source could the calling into thought come than from something that in itself needs thought, because the source of the calling wants to be thought about by its very nature, and not just now and then? That which calls on us to think and appeals to us to think, claims thought for itself and as its own, because in and by itself it gives food for thought--not just occasionally but now and always.

That so gives food for thought is what we call most thought-provoking. Nor does it give only what always remains to be thought about; it gives food for thought in the much wider-reaching and decisive sense that first entrusts thought and thinking to us as what determines our nature.

As for the matter at hand, i seem to recall that this weekend was a weekend whereby i was unable to recall what was done, said, utterred in all of its truth--it happened and there is no way i can go back and fix damage that has come to me and the one whom was influenced by my deed. But the deed was of happiness for an-other, though the other does not see it this way at all--the other sees it as a means to an end, be it pleasure in the deep Dionysic fashion of orgiastic hedonism, or in the pleasure of penetration by the member that is not of the original act. the member remains a member considering all of its attributes.

But i still cannot recall. I was helpless pacing back and forth wondering what actions were taking place within the abode of thought of the other...was the other even thinking other than the member entering the abode at that moment--faceless members are always subject to this type of scrutiny by the other member of the abode who has fashioned himself a niche within the thought-provoking matter of the other.

It hurt painfully in the abode of thought, and in the stomach of reason. The act was unreasonable, it was as Kant would call it, "putting aside reason to make room for faith." I was putting aside the reason in hope of some faith, but the faith received was false, it was fleeting, it was tangential and it remains a deep dagger wound directly above the heart--searching for a way to get into the abode of thought.