Fluo, Ergo Sum
Week 22: Experimenting with Absurdism
Flow1 is the stuff of humans and rivers.
TLDR: When you’re unsure what to do, just flow. Let what moves you do its job, and you do yours: be moved.
The briefest reminder: If you’re new here, we’re learning to thrive in the absurd in 4 siMpLe StEPs.
Accept the Absurd.
Embrace your freedom. (We’re here)
Live with Passion.
Keep fucking going.
We’ve already accepted that the world is absurd. If you’re into the idea of figuring out how the hell to embrace your alleged freedom, read on.
***if you're on the website you'll know I flowed a little to quickly to sending the email, leaving behind some notes here. But it's all good. 😆
Embracing your freedom is an issue, as we’ve discussed previously, because it means you have to figure out what you ought to do, and according to Camus, all you ought do is live. We could even argue against that (maybe later), but ultimately, even if there is some thing we ought to do, there’s no real way to know what it is. So, when in doubt I do like the universe, and Toni Braxton, and Sade, and Mihaly Cszienmihaly, and Heraclitus, and just flow. Every argument Imake comes around to “Do what you want, and try not to hurt anyone”. So, I won’t argue what we ought to do anymore. I’ll just flow.
The law of …constancy does not imply that we ought not…decline and secure ourselves from the mischiefs and inconveniences that threaten us; nor, consequently, that we shall not fear lest they should surprise us: on the contrary, all decent and honest ways and means of securing ourselves from harms, are not only permitted, but, moreover, commendable, and the business of constancy chiefly is, bravely to stand to, and stoutly to suffer those inconveniences which are not possibly to be avoided. So that there is no supple motion of body, nor any movement in the handling of arms, how irregular or ungraceful soever, that we need condemn, if they serve to protect us from the blow that is made against us.
-Montaigne, On Constancy
In other words: do what you gotta fuckin’ do to keep on keepin’ on.
Montaigne isn’t shy about telling you what he does, or what other people did, in lieu of what you ought to do, and neither am I. In On Pedantry, he calls out the so-called lofty-minded Men of Letters (academics of his time), for their insistence upon being ‘learned’ without the acquisition or concern for anything resembling wisdom. Not that I’m wise, (nor claims Montaigne, we both admit our pedantry) but I try not to advise much. I just do what I do. Learn from it or don’t.
I flow, therefore I am.
We flow, but what exactly is it to do so? It’s tempting to viewing “flowing” as a passive process, but we’re always actively managing at least two currents: the one that flows in the direction we’re currently headed, and the countercurrent. We could break these down into varying degrees of microcurrents, but let’s don’t - just know we’re always in swirling waters, treading to a certain extent allowing the soft animal of our bodies to float downstream, kick upstream or serve as a rock in a stream, forcing the water to partaround us, but eroding all the while.
In my Golden Mean of Flowing up or down stream, I err towards the active side of the active/passive spectrum. I love a float, but only when seasoned heavily with sweat and motion. Only when exhausted or coaxed to lie back. I love a fight, but am not so enamoured that I can’t sit back and enjoy being rolled by a wave. The Golden Mean isn’t a mean, after all. It’s skewed and dynamic. Aristotle says courage is half-way between cowardice and hubris, but most of his virtues as skewed towards what’s harder. Here I thought I did this because I was a masochist, but after reading Nichomachean Ethics, looks like I’ve just been an Aristotelian thot daughter since birth. I think as you become a more skilled swimmer, more things feel like flow, when they used to feel like hard work. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as somewhat of a mean,
but If I were do draw it, I’d skew it a bit:
It should get easier to flow, or to accept more things as flow, the more challenges you encounter and capabilities you acquire.
Whether you flow or struggle starts to become a matter of perception. It always was, but now you see it as the mirage it is. The currents swirl and your view of the river changes.
Of course, what is active, can be passive, and vice versa; what may look like two opposing currents may join and change the overall flow. There’s are our perception of what “flow” actually is.
I love rivers. Dirty, placid, flowing, sparkling.They’re semi-living conduit. I aim to be like a river: in it and of it. I’d be remiss not to speak of the great river Heraclitus2, the authority on the subject - even though he stirs up about as much clarity as the Chicago River on St. Patty’s Day.
The funny thing about Heraclitus is that the fate of his actual words couldn’t be more emblematic of his point. His meaning, muddied by the tides of time, if he ever had any in the first place, is made more clear by each interpretation. Clear as mud, as it was meant to be. Many, many thinkers (like - every single one) have had their opinions about Heraclitus and what fragments of his work remain:
12. potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.
On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. (Cleanthes from Arius Didymus from Eusebius)
49a. potamois tois autois …
Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. (Heraclitus Homericus)
91[a]. potamôi … tôi autôi …
It is not possible to step twice into the same river (Plutarch)3
Most attributed to Heraclitus is 91[a], but who the fuck knows what he actually said/meant. Diels’ first fragment (12) is supposedly most likely to be something he said. It speaks to flux and permanence. Changing and persisting. This is what I refer to in the title Fluo, ergo sum. There is persistence in change. I don’t care if Heraclitus would agree with my sentiments, or if Nietzsche or Heidegger’s version of him, but fuck it, let’s go into it:
In his Pre-Platonic lectures, Nietzsche, agrees with me that the flow is constant:
“He rejects Being. He knows only Becoming, the flowing. He considers belief in something persistent as error and foolishness…the one overall Becoming is itself law; that it becomes and how it becomes is its work.”
Flow is a necessity, yes, but is flow present even when we stand still? Even when we swim up stream? Even when we are stuck in a stagnant pool? Even when we can’t feel the flow?
Nietzsche’s interpretation is yes.
We’re always flowing, bitch. Even when flow feels like stagnation. And he uses scale, and science to prove his point:
“I am reminded how the natural sciences approach this problem: Nowhere does an absolute persistence exist…whenever a human being believes he recognizes any sort of persistence in living nature, it is due to our small standards.”
(Pre-Platonic lectures, Heraclitus)
He goes on to say that basically, the farther you zoom out, the more moving things look still.
“Reduce, for example, pulse rate and sensation threshhold by one one-thousandth, and then our life would last, “at the upper end,” eighty thousand years: then we would experience as much in one year as we do now in eight to nine hours; then every four hours we would watch winter melt away, the earth thaw out, grass and flowers spring up, trees come into full bloom and bear fruit, and then all vegetation wilt once more.”
He says we’re just too puny and short-sighted to perceive that everything is in constant motion.
“Every shape appearing to us as persistent would vanish in the superhaste of events and would be devoured by the wild storm of Becoming. Whatever remains, the unmoving proves to be a complete illusion, the result of our human intellect”
So even when we feel stagnant, forces are acting upon us. Well, shit, I mean then maybe our struggles are just about ascribing too much to our own ability. Here’s where I feel Spinoza beckoning:
“To act absolutely in conformity with virtue is in us the same thing as to act in conformity with the laws of our own nature. For our nature is part of universal nature, and its laws must therefore necessarily coincide with the universal laws of nature.”
(Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Chapter 4)
Basically, do you, booboo. Act in your own nature. Let it flow. And then, all that’s left is to ensure that you don’t sweep anyone away (anyone unwilling that is):
“Piety, then, in the highest sense, consists in obedience to God, which is a kind of justice, consisting only in charity toward one’s neighbor.”
(Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Chapter 13)
if God wants us to do anything, it’s just to live and be cool with others Just to be is to be pious. We can’t act apart from our nature. Sure, Spinoza talks a lot about “reason”, but as we now now, reason is broader than just rationality.
Yeah, this sounds like therapy speak (i.e., the worst person you know is being told to be themselves), but the whole be cool with your neighbor thing is the point of emphasis. And how does one be cool with the neighbors? Get to know them.
Now, what if my neighbors have beef with my flow? My ugly garden, untended might be an eyesore this season (i’m kinda going through it - i’ll chop it down when i can move my arms again). If they have issue, we will deal with it, we’ll talk it through. COuld it be a real beef? Sure, but then we have to think about how to deal with rocks that interrupt flow.
In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger respects Heraclitus’ notion of struggle saying “it allows those that struggle to originate in the first place…”:
“Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as the free” - Heraclitus
Or
“War is the father of all and the king of all, and it has shown some as gods and others as human beings, made some slaves and others free."
It seems more apt to refer to the first interpretation, for our purposes. So, let’s say my neighbor is really contemptuous about my overgrown garden. We’ll allow a confrontation if not to resolve the issue, then to let what emerge, emerge. Whether it means I need to move, or I just need to get my ass down there and work on it, we’ll see, but we just have to be willing to struggle, and to deal with our neighbors.
You can’t deal with all of them at once of course, but we do what we can. We flow where the waters go. And right now, these waters are about to board a plane.
Thanks for hanging out. I’ll try to write again soon.
So far we’ve discussed how weird you have to be to accept the absurd, how you kinda have no choice but to live, whether to calculate shit or just fucking do it, how to exist within your means, how freedom can feel like estrangement, how to thrive in chaos, dealing with fear of loss, why you should not be self-effacing, and how to integrate all these sensations, thots, and feelings we have.
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What a weird fucking video.
To be fair, Heraclitus’ indecipherability may, in part, have been a consequence of the great data crash of 47 BC, have been written in sidewalk chalk, or deleted tweets and IG stories, maybe even ramblings in text messages or what have you.
About as real of a citation as you’re gonna get here
Fuck I'm too tired to cite the rest.