Saturday, December 23, 2006

IT's pig metaphysics

LI’s readers are, presumably, the same people who read Infinite thought. For those who haven’t read IT’s prolegomena to all future pig metaphysics, go here.

“What we have to understand, as a matter of some urgency, is that the transcendental pig is our friend, just as the empirical pig is our lunch.”

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have not understood the Pig Fixation. Another Englishwoman informed me that I thought of her as a pig, but it still took me awhile to comprehend that she had made a correct assessment that would save me time in a way she had never done before. IT calls herself a pig. Is she?

However, I never think about pigs, and refuse to be involved in Pig Metaphysics. I realize this sounds somewhat rude, but there it is. I probably think it is a way of being pushy while appearing to be cheerful and just-folks about it.

it said...

I am a pig, yes.

No one need be involved in pig metaphysics if he or she feels it is not appropriate. The transcendental pig is indifferent to all human concerns.

Merry xmas Patrick and Roger!

Roger Gathmann said...

Merry xmas, IT!
As for the pig - I maintain that one must grant the artist her materials. Black to Malevich, the minor or major key to the composer, and the pig to IT. As King Lear said to one of his bothersome daughters, reason not the need. There is a formal moment at the beginning of every piece of art - or math. David Hilbert famously said that math could easily substitute bear mugs and chairs for points and lines - the initial elements are arbitrary. Necessity arises always and only out of the game.

Anonymous said...

IT--Thank you admitting you are a pig, which means you probably are not even if you need the character. I thought I ought to warn you of the perils of too-strong an identification with The Pig. You may well decide it is NOT worth the price after awhile, and I believe I remember photos of you several years ago which prove pig-identification not to be accurate--therefore not necessary if you ever decide you've exhausted the field. That was a bit rough of me last night when I put that there, but I was genuinely curious as to why The Pig had become such a constant in your blogging.

By the way, I flipped over to your blog after you'd asked people if you 'should be nicer' and said you 'didn't like niceness' and saw you'd closed comments. Someone wrote something offensive, but I never saw it. Then you wrote 'I'm Dr. Pig to you, punk!' I don't know if it was our friendly, if occasionally seemingly inebriated personage who appears less and less and never addresses me (I don't care either way, although I used to like him well enough.)

I have no idea how David Hilbert got famous for such a ridiculous formulation. You might as well say God could be substituted for Storied Atheism, so well discovered by all 20th century intellectuals as necessary for what they were now necessarily calling 'truth.'

Now, my Cambridge lady who informed me that 'you think I am a pig, Patrick' well before I had managed to think so, was being uncharacteristically generous: She had gone to some ruralistic fair and a skillful wire sculptor was making beautiful horses. She asked him if he would make a pig instead, and there it was in her Pittsburgh kitchen where she refused to have even a single drink with me of the Framboise I'd bought her as a house gift, saying (totally insincerely) that she 'didn't want to become an alcoholic.' What she meant was 'I've been serving you cheap wine since you've been here, did no publicity for your concert I asked you to do so that only 8 people even knew to come; and even after that, took you to an inferior restaurant to celebrate, saying that the expensive ones 'weren't very good', told you my father had been knighted, told you I sold plastic bags back to the supermarket for 2 cents apiece, that my husband had divorced me due to my 'old Scottish habits', told you I had over a million dollars in the bank and was still sore about how I was banished to Pittsburgh because I was so honest at Columbia they refused to give me tenure--and you STILL don't know I'm a PIG!!???''

I gentlemanlily said 'well, no, I didn't actually, but Diane did tell me you're father had been knighted 20 years ago.'

She still didn't think I'd absorbed the porcine facts due to what she considered my stupidity despite 'ways with Chopin.' Therefore, when I called her from NY later in the week, she acted all English schoolgirl and breathlessly said 'Oh, you had a wonderful time...and you want to come back...'

But you see I had. I said: 'Well, yes, but in the meantime, would you look in the closet, I think I left a pair of my best suit pants there, and could you send them back.'

Over the years, she sent me those horrid form letters, and they were all about how she and her son were always alone with the Thanksgiving and Xmas turkeys. I never answered her, having delved deeply into porcine ways.

This 'A Christmas Story' is meant to suggest that you give at least some thought to the fact that pigs may do better in Supporting Roles than as Stars on Two Legs Who Forget Who They Once Were Before They Got Clean Sheets...

One other movie I must recommend that I hadn't seen when you were asking us that you must see is 'Les Temps Qui Changent', Techine's film with Deneuve and Depardieu. Deneuve goes well beyond her years of vanity and is even a bit zaftig here. Depardieu is good too, but it's really her film. On DVD now, and easily the best film I saw in 2006.

Okay, babes, have Happy Holidays and onward and upward! You may find it more expedient to identify other people as Pigs, such as Dick Cheney, than to identify yourself as one. Otherwise, wicked sharpies like me are always lurking--especially since we've been freed up from having to mug warszawa to the point that cohorts are calling me a 'paid government shill.' (And I think they really believe it, poor things.)

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