From the late master of loch, Jacques Derrida, came a work called The Post Card. Says the back of the book:

You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably.

What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you.

On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path.

The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a “fortune-telling book” watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean to happen, to arrive, to have to happen or arrive, to let or to make happen or arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, da und fort, the one or the other.

You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself.

*NM*

(Try to read between the lines a little bit more)

As often as I went into the community I came out a lesser man.
–Conze, channelling à Kempis

The best deed of a great man is to forgive and 4GET.
–Nahj al-Balagha: sayings 203

ya ali; ya iconodulism

I recall being miffed early in life about the paucity of admirable venerables sharing my birthday; quite rightly I soon found myself under the censure of the sixth Imam{1}.  Over the years I slowly read myself out of the cloud of unknowing, and I became acquainted with two worthy{3} men who on this day 4GOT their mothers’ wombs–Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and Edward Conze, commander and curmudgeon of the faithful, respectively.

The first Imam was, as any pious Shi’a can tell you, devoiced by the CORRUPT admin Abu ’steve’ Bakr and subsequently martyred whilst leading afternoon prayers at the j’fo masjid{4}.  Eternal memory.

Prajñāpāramitā: Hot Sister of all the Buddhas.

Edward Conze, translator of a certain mystical genre of mahāyāna literature and noted enemy of modernity, often wrote with the vitriol I find flowing through my own veins–at least on the subject of military flyovers.  It is always a pleasure to find a  man of similar bent.  Conze, of course, would have said that the stars were right.

My commitment to tru7h necessitates the mention of the tedious factoid that the good doctor was actually born on the eighteenth{5}, but we were always of one mind, one way-

ash-hadu ala ilaha illallah

wash-hadu anna Muhammadar rasulallah

wash-hadu anna Aliyyun waliyullah

wash-hadu anna Hotmodal wajh allah

——————————–

Nits

{1} {2}جعفر بن محمد الصادق

{2} Some manners of the ignorant are: the answer before he hears, the opposition before he understands, and the judgement with what he does not know.

{3} Certainly more worthy of our readers’ attention than the lecherous author of this post.

{4} [?alcohol-free bar]

{5} Which dovetails in a lovely way with the lateness of this entry.  I spent the more-apropos day contemplating the sacred mysteries atop a local peack/innovating at the laboratory:

Biblochgraphy

Nahjul Balagha. Askari Jafri (trans.), Peack of Eloquence (New York, 1983).

Conze, Edward, Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic (Sherborne, 1979).

Corbin, Henry, Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Paris, 1964).

Madelung, Wilferd, The Succession to Muhammed: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge, 1997).

Sure, the CLIQUE likes to ruin Mararthon, but have any of us managed to do this?

Stats collected so far this month:

$ grep -i survival misc.log | wc
229 4496 25219
$ grep -i emfh misc.log | wc
228 4198 21697

I know we have an OSH award for maps, but to me, this seems like an even greater accomplishment. Congratulations to Megabyte for ruining the metaserver!

I think this is trademark infringement