The Stygian Wholesto

Winnie the Pooh continues to teach us all. Recently, I watched an old Pooh episode with my niece which proved to be a closer, and more precise exercise in the dialectic than we have chewed in pompous circles at the universities, chock-full of senseless bravado. In the penultimate spot of the 1977 cartoon, Pooh finds Piglet struggling in the blustery winds of the Hundred Acre Woods; the dialog is as follows:

Pooh: “Where are you going, Piglet?”

Piglet: “That’s what I keep asking myself, where?”

Pooh: “What do you think you will answer yourself?”

Piglet: “Oh, oh, oh, I’m unraveling."

Pooh could not ask a better question. He is beyond an existential role. He asserts upon Piglet with our central question which many stray from—not what you will do, but how you will answer. Pooh should be part of the Stygian. Existentialism has grossly become a cliché in our time, often supplanted by angst filled pseudo-intellects or half-ass TV screen writers as a buzzword for boredom and suburbia idleness. Pooh reinstates dominant traditions in philosophy which foreground the influence of our greatest minds of two hundred years. Pooh, in his simpleton approach, understand human subjectivity, denies determinations, clusters empirical and idealistic emotional projections upon his careful aimed criticism of phenomenological perspectives. Heidegger and Sartre both moved away from an emphasis on knowledge; Pooh affirmed the fostered personal inflection into not answering, but thinking of the question. The question is more than the answer, the question is intersubjective—it’s inebriated, it resists logical discourse and should draw a detailed portrait of consciousness without a clear method. For Pooh, imagination is something intrinsic and is always opposed to utter alienation. The existential is not alienated, but orientated. It is careful in the episode that right after Pooh lets Piglet spiral to the skies on his unraveling sweater that silence follows—our most profound aesthetic. Piglet’s proclamation is an anti-manifesto in itself—“we shall not discuss.” The Stygian sees this, of course, as similar to “‘What is the wind doing?’ Nothing again Nothing”—if we can get away with another Eliot line. Against philosophical judgment, we can funnily find ourselves (albeit satirically) at a sort of realism which defies ratioclination, or even better, attendant reflections towards our historical milieu. Pooh stands the test of time. Pooh’s spatializing and recentralizing of fundamental insecurities, juxtaposed with his temporal and ceaseless experience of ontological necessity is something we can all benefit from touching again. The hope lies within is that kids still love watching Pooh.

The Stygian Wholesto apologizes for such a long, unexpected hiatus. Griffin, Stallius, and yours truly have been working feverishly on intellectual projects—as well as Appareo Nihil—the Wholesto’s upcoming manifesto. The ambitious project bogged in its fifth unit regarding the topic of pre-messiahian speculation. Stallius believes without a clear hominid teleological undergirding, we are unable to divorce from our anthrocentric comic view to fully articulate its discourse. Who is the new #2, anyways? But that topic is for another day, and I’m sure Stallius will be hitting this blog soon with all his “unacceptable and dangerous” pleas. For tonight, we discuss the growing concerns about the myths of war, the sensorial reality our panoptic schemas shield us from, and why neither is a worthwhile starting point for a grounded discourse in evaluating conflicts in the middle-east. Chris Hedges, a combat salty New York Times reporter, (a title we are reminded of every other paragraph), said that we basically hyperconform to the myths of war—the empty and hollow heroic mother country, apple pie, remember the Alamo ideals totally severed from any true reality….which he calls the sensorial reality. And Hedges has great validity in all his claims. See Pat Tillman. See the most recent American embarrassment. But the Stygian Wholesto always defers from the political hot bed, and instead, we will discuss the bubbles of myth we live with every day. The modern abstract man, (and I’m using modern as current), seeks communal harmony through unspecified inquiries into his despotic past. This is the whole reason we cannot fully understand mimesis in the first place. Man seeks latent patterns and seeks them when they don’t exist. See our constellations. A knee jerk reaction is that we should stop this madness and hold an ontological priority towards a decoding of feelings and associations. But when faced with war, there is a tendency to form paradoxical logic and implicitly look for interpretive inferences where there are not any. Hedges tells us that though. However, Hedges forgot that the blood and gore is ultimately at odds with structuralistic and hermeneutical empathies. From this, one may say that the sensory could perhaps be the mythic bubble. If the sensory punctured the bubble of myth, there would have not been an American war post Saving Private Ryan. But Hedges would assert there that this proves the addiction. But we can never arrive at our own history. We, sadly, only live in seamless discontinuities, always fabricated. If we say that a dismembered soldier and his close comrades bear witness to the “true” reality, and good reportage of that episode is our only tool to pop the bubble then we are naïve to our operations of rhetoricity. Transmitting the “truth” only becomes the replicator of another myth—the myth of propaganda. As we have gestured at in another blog post: the making of myth only brought into play the notion of myth and lie—and once lie was introduced—all truth was lost. That may lean on postmodernism, but sometimes those freaks have a point. Man is more mythed about reportage and media. So when a myth is punctured; the event moves on through the night. We are entangled in myth. Untying that knot around what we want to call truth requires more than reportage, genocide, and disillusionment. Disillusionment is/was simultaneous to civilization, and looking for a binary approach to problems in the middle east with sensory/mythic falls short…like most modes of privileged rhetoric.