Immediacy & Interpretation (Part 1)

1. The Majesty of Immediacy

2. The Poetry of Interpretation

3. Becoming of Immediacy & Interpretation

The Majesty of Immediacy

We are fiends for the immediate experience; the immanent joy. This is the beginning which is difficult to not be simply the end. Stirner describes men as becoming bodily as they age, which is to say becoming more & more caught up in the assuredness of immediacy. To make a step beyond immediacy we are first tempted to go into the realm of rationality. To make rational our desires & our impulses, this is the Platonic tripartide & the history of religion which takes us away from bodily immediacy into rational inquiry & religiosity. It is by the right of these two next steps of immediacy & the power they have in the world that should tell us something about their fuel, sublimated impulses of humanity.

The God of our immediate ideas & desires becomes a King in various determinations. In Buddhism, the description of now-ness & the possibility of suffering calls towards a transcendence of now-ness. In Stirner’s egoism it becomes an elimination of all ideas into their quality of immediacy. For the teacher it becomes “sit down & shut up,” an enemy towards all the knowledge of what it takes to become human; this is to say, the immediacy of the pupil talking in class, interupting. If you want to see who rules you, just look immediately at immediacy. The power-of-now is not simply friend or foe, but fuel & God.

The Aton people worshipped the Sun God, & when it comes to immediacy, it makes sense to turn towards the thing for which without life would not longer be. In the same way I would like to introduce you to this other Sun King, Immediacy. It is what gives us the feeling when we see a landscape that stretches out before us, giving us the feeling that we could traverse or maybe it is too vast for us to traverse, but none the less we get the voyeur’s experience of looking out over it, which is a traversing in consciousness.

The Poetry of Interpretation

Once we take in the landscape via consciousness, we confront the limits of our language. Unlike Wittgenstein, we won’t ascribe the limits of our language as a Being, since when we know that we are translating immediacy into another sort of immediacy which is in fact a secondary reflection, our limits are so dynamic that they can hardly be called a boundary at all. Rather, they are better understood as having stake in our psychology & skills at reflecting.

You can’t write this paragraph I am writing now, not because you aren’t a good writer or thinker, but because the current words are staked in the ground of my psyche, being directed not just by intelligence, but by desire & immediate impulse. Having been fed back into itself, I am interpreting. But how good of a poet am I? I am a psychotherapist, but what I have going for me is that I think many people, like myself, are not necessarily looking for poetry. Why do you have stake in reading this rather than searching for the endless poets online?

The poetry of interpretation is not necessarily poetry, but the immediate impact of analysis. Is the immediate impact of analysis able to go beyond itself? In a way, yes, it can pause, take in something which is outside of it, but because to be at-stake, which is to say at the stake-in-the-ground which is poetry, it is the stake-in-the-heart of being someone else besides myself, since it is always the interpretation of the someone-else rather than an actual escape of interpretation. We desire to be more, & we desire to be ourselves, & we desire desire itself.

Becoming of Immediacy & Interpretation

You lie on the Analyst couch. You look at the paintings on his wall, you check to the left of you & see the entire works of Sigmund Freud. You see a book in French, you realize the analyst has this skill you don’t have. You begin to open up about yourself, about your impulses, your desire for escape, your desire which points to something that you don’t quite know yet. You describe something more mundane. You start to wonder if you are mundane. You wonder if you are not excited about yourself & your topics, but if this doesn’t have a sort of emptiness insofar as afterwards, you are left with an empty feeling.

You are younger than you are on the analyst’s couch. You are at the Dionysian experience in youth, when you are first escaping your parent’s superego & discovering the world’s potential for immediate excess.

You are older than you are as you read this, you still feel emotions, you still feel that you want to discover things, you still figure out things that you have to do. You still have tasks that need taking care of. You still feel stress when a problem arises. You still feel relief when you have some spare time to do the things you want. You still get into patterns from your youth. You still try new things & feel insecure if you should be trying it or not.

Whether you are a poet, an analyst, an academic, a line-worker, a caretaker, a nurse, a historian, or a lawyer, you are within the becoming of immediacy & interpretation. Experience & analysis work in tandem. The excesses of analysis call you, & promise to bring along with it the immediacy which it seems to lack. The excesses of immediacy forget analysis altogether, until they burn-out.

The life we create encouters with immediacy, interpretations from the past. Thus our interpretations become the ground for immediacy. This makes immediacy, & the majesty of immediate, not so immediate afterall. Immediacy has a past & interpretation has a future. They both become immediate, they both become majestic, & they both pull back into poetry about itself. Rome becomes the story of Rome, emperors follow Julius’ lead. Even one pope.

Alexander the Great, after being tutored by Aristotle on Homer, had a “literally me” moment & conquered the world, actualizing the myth. What will you actualize?