Kingdom of Ends

February; the calendar’s cold sore, an unsightly stretch of time we all agree to abbreviate. From what I understand it’s shorter because of a still uncorrected Roman superstition, but I like to imagine the earth spinning faster to get it over with. A string of unmemorable days, muddy sidewalk wet slapping sound, cream of mushroom soup shaken out and still retaining the shape of the can plopping and splattering effect, greased rubber spatula spanking a loose buttock in a tiled high ceiling hall, slipping on carpets of black banana peels, it’s treacherous out there says everyone with corny pretension. Those sheeny oil slicks, invisible ice laminating all footpaths, dead frozen squirrel on the sidewalk, no sign of decomposition but inexplicably the smell of burning wood around my apartment. A week of grey skies, down the drain afternoons, soundless rains, walking through television static and then blinded by the cold white radiance of a sudden snow dump. A vicious unrelenting wind, my globophone tells me it feels like 10 degrees here in Indiana for all hoosiers with standard issue skin, organic under armor but it’s actually 30 degrees, and I know this, ie I assign a quantitative value to what I recognize as my lived experience of temperature, my embodied reactions (mostly consisting of shaking and sweating and making comically obvious statements to anyone who happens to look at me) to the speed and density of tiny particles crashing into each other, mad unchoreographed dancing balls; elements are defined as other elements, not other elements or as themselves, tautologically posited as that which can’t undergo further subdivision (fundamental identity is what can’t be broken up, but where’s the positive definition? I know who or what I am because after stripping all positive charges something is still here glowing and grumbling in the dark and I can’t get rid of it. Ion know why so many people have such a problem with the ionic, you’d think they’d be all for stronger bonding given how they talk).

My negative feedback flesh in a collide-a-scope; I pour this information on me, take a shot of satellite sauce thanks to African minor miners and a team of American and Japanese electrical engineers, throw some Russians in there too. The textbook postmodern; the global, no the unearthly unrepresentable totality of determinative causes, the impossibly vast yet essentially incomplete context of the allegedly concrete immediacy of a solitary person pursuing his own idiotic enjoyment; and not just the fact of it, but the background intimation of it, the sometimes vaporous and sometimes viscous sense of it, the dialing in and out, the basement room paranoid tattered mapping evidence board crazy wall glimpse of it. If I’m a feeling being and it feels like 10 degrees then what is the additional information for? Why do I need to know the quantitative dimension of my feeling, why do I need to press my shivering into a scale? Well I’m also a thinking and calculating being, I am an I am, and I’m real sick of everyone thinking they’re so clever for responding to Descartes with oh yeah? You think, therefore you are what exactly?

All the man did was think his way to an undoubtable proposition as a foundation for inquiry, spearheading the scientific revolution and also creating a coordinate space combining algebra and geometry and popularizing x and y for unknown variables and it’s still not good enough. Everyone living in a Cartesian world but no one’s a Cartesian girl. Everyone has their correction, their deft spin on the old move; I feel therefore I am; I am, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am a transcendental apperception which is only to say, very modestly with sober critical reserve, and only for the sake of delimiting the proper application of tables and categories and circumscribing a space for belief and moral behavior, that I think is only at most a formal presupposition of all synthetic cognition, a principle of unity without which sensuous manifolds couldn’t possibly yield objects of experience, so in reality I am nothing that can be known in the sense of becoming my own object of experience, but I must, I am compelled all the same to believe I am an indivisible soul with a binding duty to uphold the moral law and establish the kingdom of ends, which is to say, I should treat other people as ends, as sovereign self-legislating beings just like me. The trouble with ends in themselves is that it’s hard to do anything with them. And people like being treated as instruments, but usually in a way that still respects their autonomy, without at the same time burdening them with excessive responsibility; it all gets to be complicated.