CITY OF DALLES

 

After considering that the Self (Moi) was a synthetic and transcendent production of consciousness (in L.U. – Logical Investigations) Husserl returns, in Ideen, to the classical thesis of a transcendental Self that would be as if behind each consciousness, that would be a necessary structure of such consciousnesses, whose radiations (Ichstrahl) would fall upon each phenomenon that presented itself to the field of attention. “It will help your understanding” (I told her) to also see Epictetus and Syrus – the excessive electric lighting now in focus on the interlude entitled “truck journey” (thinking of Hood River and how melancholy it would have been to stop and sleep there). As I write this, my thoughts play with the noises at the edges of the tents. K-lakk… making rain with the thought. “I was raised in Kansas City, Jackson County (she said) and my place of origin is Texas” – or Bakersfield (I thought) or Modesto, or Delano – the city had been remade four times in my mind as I wrote this, four kisses she had given me in total. Indeed, consciousness is defined by intentionality, and I spent another night alone on the road. Consciousness unifies itself (I thought) concretely, through a play of transversal intentionalities that are concrete and real retentions of past consciousnesses. Phenomenology of the gathering of perceptual traces in consciousness, phenomenology and reincarnation. Thus, consciousness is perpetually sent back to itself; to say "a consciousness" is to say the entire consciousness, the entire psychic fabric of the superconscious entity. Lattice. Vedic soma. Original sap of the intellect; consciousnesses as travelers on the dark sea of consciousness—the second—the third attention—the seventh attention totally without Self—and this singular property of psychic purification belonged to consciousness itself (I thought) "whatever (even) its relations with the Self..." "I'm going to The Dalles," said the girl. "A small town of farmers and lumberjacks." But when we reached the foot of the hill, her brother and I got out of the wagon to smoke. "The horses here walk with difficulty." he said, stepping on and rolling the pebbles on the ground. “They must have fed them sawdust (I thought)—thin and sweating profusely on their necks, while she looked at me for the thousandth time, pulling on the reins and squeezing tightly. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” she said. “Go ahead!” she ordered. Now in the indestructible heart of the road (four gates, four towers, four cigarettes, and four fertilizations). Clear dawn over the latrine the next day. Ahead in the great Columbia Valley! – Look (I said at coffee break) DO YOU SEE?? – but perhaps she needed to squint a little harder. – Every thought grasped in intuition has an I (I said) and besides, the essence of the gearshift will never be the disappearance of the I... nor the exhaustive classification of “totally Iless” states of consciousness of the most pedantic esotericism. Believe me unconditionally (I said). The essential principle of phenomenology is “ALL CONSCIOUSNESS IS CONSCIOUSNESS ‘OF SOMETHING’.” Safeguard and Cogito at Tonompah Falls. “This cake will still be good when I get to that mouth-shaped hole where the water falls hundreds of feet above the rocky cliffs, worn down in layers by the patient and terrifying Columbia River, above the frozen shallows, evaporating into a celestial mist as it falls.” I didn’t have any broken bones, and this (I thought) was just a bunch of bumps in the natural world. “My horse and I had gone away (…) one night at dinnertime,” I recited from memory, whistling the old melody of my childhood—through whose torrent I seem to have remembered it too (my frozen forehead, a nightmarish night screaming, “My mother is a fish, My mother is a fish. My mother is not in that coffin! My mother doesn’t stink like that. My mother is a fish!”). Now it seemed we were at the bottom of the valley, looking up at the ancient rocky banks. I couldn’t see what lay in the darkness above. “The earth belongs to the living,” (I thought), “profit on everything it creates from nothing.” METATHEMENON (we haven’t gotten past the last chapter yet!); Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel (...) I slept soundly as the bus passed through Hood River, the Dalles. But this time I dreamed of Voltaire wanting to finish his Louis Quatorze quickly... I woke up where the Columbia was heading to meet the Snake, on the brown plains of Pasco and, in Yakima, a little later. On the horizon, the misty mountains called Horse Heaven—and to the south (Oh, Oregon!)—Whitman National Park.