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There can be no bookish introduction to philosophy. It is possible to state a few of the main ideas used in a work or even in the whole of philosophy, but from that the reader must still do the long work of gathering toward an understanding. It will be a quiet dark work. The lights will be few. The path will be slippery, steep and forked. The idea may lead nowhere. In fact, all philosophical paths lead nowhere, but no matter, visions happen along the way and that is philosophy. The relationship established excludes the writer. It is rather between the reader and Philosophy. In a sense, the reader must be intimate with that before he begins. He slowly moves his hand and caresses him in the glorious night until that inevitable ecstasy. What greater delight could there be?

There exists no entryway into philosophy. Each philosophical writing is an attempt to look for it. Just as there is no entryway into love, and each act of love becomes a temptation to give up the search. So I begin anywhere at all, knowing full well that my reader knows perfectly well what I have to say, but will probably see no way from what I do say to that that he knows, and I wonder why I write. Yet, if he is a lover of philosophy, a lover of this love, then any writing that speaks of his love will be inviting and he will want to find his beloved once again in there. He is on the look out. I am in a dangerous place.

This is Platonism. Or so I suppose. It seems that Plato himself may not have been a Platonist. Platonism may be an antedated invention of the Victorian Age. It seems that everyone in the schools is against it and thus I am alone in being for it, especially in that I also tag along the boy Jesus with me. We together are invited to none of the wholesome gatherings. Is this decadence? The fall has been far, but necessary. The dawn is even now appearing on this boy's downy cheeks. I advance and I recede at his bidding. I have no defense. My paragraphs soon reach their end.

Platonism is usually thought of as a contemplation of the eternal heavenly forms that are mirrored in this visible world. That's not too far from how I see it. To do ontological analysis, one has to break up the ordinary object into pieces that are nowhere in this world. These ontological things are somehow related to that ordinary object. Plato said they were mirrored in, reflected in, the object. He said the object participates in these ontological things. Today's realists want to say that they are constituents of ordinary objects, but they draw back from having such a nexus. They leave off without having any connection between what they see in their contemplation and the world. The idealists say that the things of this world "fall under" the mind's concepts. They don't really mean it. We are left with only Plato's names for this most baffling togetherness. I fall into the gap. The vortex I find myself in is my agitation in these writings.

The thought that I here attempt to write a Platonism of Separate Forms will instantly leave many of my readers exasperated. The others it will leave in confusion. Plato is majestic, all agree, but his ideas are gone the way of religion - the Majesty is dead - it was just a silliness to begin with - surely it is so, the exasperated will think. But nothing has changed; the exasperation was always present. The giants of the earth have always found the gods ridiculous. The Separate Forms have always been a lovely mystical erotic confusion. And the exasperation was always just another form of the erotic.

Philosophers cut the things of the world into their abstract pieces. Then they worry that this distraction has left them outside the warmth of home in the cold intellectual night and they disown their own. These retractions have no traction on the road back home and all are left to languish, shut away by the state in schools. Their job is only to keep the kids out of trouble for a while, contracted into tight erotic constrictions. The Separate Forms are the things of cut off places compressed before the Glorious release into the blanking out night fight right there.

If the Platonic Separate Forms didn't exist then we couldn't think the cut up things of ontology. We think universal and nexus and bare particular and entity and existence and on and on and on right nicely and there you are. Philosophers and the things of their lovely thoughts exist. And they are surely a separate lot, ask anyone. Those who eat the forbidden fruit can never return. That's us!

The distinguishing mark of Platonism is its belief that universals exist separate from the world. A precise expression stating that idea is impossible. Perhaps there is no such thing as Platonism. But if you know the literature you somewhat understand. I am such a Platonist. Thus I am a questionable thing. And you somewhat understand me. Let me only say that I think you will agree that the thoughts of philosophers, the things they expound into students' heads, the strange questions insisted upon, are far from the ordinary man's world. It is philosophy and the philosopher that are separate from the world. Philosophical things are separate somehow from ordinary things. Therefore most who call themselves philosophers, the professional philosophers, wanting the safety of the ordinary, defer in the end to the world and acquiesce in making themselves and their studies comic. They are each a Socrates who willingly gets into the basket of Aristophanes.

Platonism is a circus full of freaks, its boys are imps and urchins and fags, its old lovers are just old. Its reaching for the divine was hubris and the fall was precipitous. Its separation from the orderly cosmos widens.

The object before your mind's eye and the object that is your act of knowing that object and which is now also before your mind's eye, both divide into being a particular that is just that particular and a form that is a thing that has been exemplified by endless particulars for us lost in the vastness of spaces and times. The ontological things that account for there being particulars in our world and for the forms that all those particulars are united to, those ontological things are the topic of this writing. Particulars stripped bare of all form and the Forms with the particulars themselves stripped away. Philosophical things not of this everyday world. Things only a Platonist, only an erotically desperate man, could hold to be really there. The cut is deep in Being. The Eternal Platonic Forms that startle and dismay the young student. But perhaps he falls in love with them. Only perhaps.

I talk incessantly in my philosophy of the nexus. It's not a common word but it stands for an exceedingly common thing, but a perplexing thing if gazed upon. Let us say that it is the meaning of the word "is" in the sentence "This is very sweet music." Here it is the connector between the particular and the universal. It is there sometimes called, and I often called it, the nexus of exemplification. There are, however, other connectings profound enough to be called ontological and they too need a nexus to ground them. Between word and meaning, set and element, idea and its object. Perhaps they are there, perhaps not; it is the task of philosophy to argue the case.

The idea of the nexus is difficult for everyone. That of the universal for the dull and materialistically minded. For the lover, the idea of the universal is easy, because he sees that one thing, that one elusive form of the beloved everywhere, that one fragrance and touch, that face, that glance, that spirited thing. It is the only real thing he sees. And the idea of the nexus looms large when he tries to grab hold of himself in order to calm his perplexity, when he wonders about that one thing being in every where. The nexus is the togetherness of the one thing, the beloved one thing, with this and that and that and that and on and on into the whirlwind that is the world. The one is with the many and the many without its being together with the one thing is nothing at all. The idea that they are together stares at the togetherness, at the nexus. That complexity, the nexus, the idea that, the very world forgetful of all that, are one and not one. There is no nexus between wonder and the not wondering. The lover and the philosophizing lover trying to control this serpent of love are left out. In the great isolation. Even I cannot think them together with the ordinary. And should the ordinary read these words they will be transformed into what they aren't. Thus the idea of the nexus will remain difficult and an aberration from out of the mania so blithely called love. There is much cause for anger here.

It may seem strange that philosophy and its philosophers would come up with such a thing, but to ground the phenomena presented is what ontology, first philosophy, is all about. Should we say that grounding is the nexus between what we see and what there is that accounts for it? Perhaps. Or if the complexities we see are constituted by simple things is there the nexus of constituting? The confusing game of the One and the many has been played it seems forever, which brings to mind another possible nexus. Are the temporal phases of the existence of a substance tied by nexus to the substance? Are they maybe "in" the substance? Are they "created" by it? Is each now in the Now? And is each place of the playing in the one placeless Place? So many things to consider and the object is so fine and refined.

If these matters, these very immaterial matters, seem unnecessary or tiresome to you then philosophy is not for you. If they hint at a paradise of thought then attack and command the beings there to fulfill their promise. Sweet water will pour forth and in the end it is you who will be called and then gently seduced. The nexus between you and that grows in uncommon importance.

 There could, I suppose, be an ontology of the nexusness of the nexus. Why not? And of the particular in each instance of it (is it an it?) in a fact and of the number of them. But why? Infinite regress sits close, not to mention utter confusion. So let's just say that Nexus itself is its own ontological essence out there in transcendent ontological space, there being no nexus anywhere in any world I have ever seen. Or is that too much for you? There is, I admit, something wrong with that thinking. The fact remains that we can think this maker of facts and we can think it quite nicely if uncomfortably. And it is everywhere in its being nowhere at all. That we can think these matters and speak of them, pace Wittgenstein, is amazing and, yes, with Wittgenstein, deadly . No doubt a Minotaur lies at the end of the thinking. Or worse, the need of an ordinary boy to have you explain it. He knows all about it already, being one himself.

I see you're lost. So am I. So are we all. Still, all in all, the considerations, the starry thoughts, are lovely. So why not? No one has ever made much progress in understanding the Nexus, but there is the great demand that we do, or at least pretend that we do. I shall elevate thought of it to prayer and on to theology. Do you object? We are not dealing here with knots and wenches.

So let's bring up the matter of artificial intelligence and electronic sensors, as we inevitably must in this so very technical world. Take, for example, the fact that you see your wallet lying empty on the radio, the money taken by your lover. That is a disconcerting but easy mental act to perform. Upon analysis the wallet and the radio, sweet music, and the feel of the money being gone are complex indeed. So many geometrical and emotional shapes are involved, so many relations and so many possibilities of change of shape and relation, the underside, the other side and the insides enfold with flourish, not to mention color and smell and on and on and the erotic confusion. The analysis is never ending and, I suppose, a computer could perform, whatever perform means here, all the requisite tasks to get some kind of comprehensive read-out that would mention even the agitation in you. The mental act, though not the computer act, was so simple. You saw in an instant the "face" of the wallet and the radio and the lying, and of his face all in one simple knowing. That face, which I suppose to be the great analysis at once, is never arrived at by means of analysis. The analysis remains a many, not a One, and the infinity of that many never arrives at that one simple face. Nor do our electronic sensors have the ability to "see" that face of things. The prospect of arriving and seeing is no prospect at all. Artificial intelligence is not intelligence. Electronic sensing is not sensing. These metaphors have led us down a deathly primrose path.

So the nexus again. The one thing, the wallet, is somehow tied to its multifarious forms, but what is the nexus and how? A lovely problem. Does that nexus that ties have a face? Can we hope to see it? I do think that in philosophical intuition or whatever you want to call it, we can, and there at the heart of Being we are close to the place of the breaking out of the gods. Intellectual vertigo beckons and threatens and seduces the willing mind. Nothing has changed.

In philosophy ordinary things are broken up into ontological things, the things of Being. A brief list would include: universals (mental and non-mental) and universality, bare particulars and particularity, sets as distinct from elements, facts with the forms of atomicity and molecularity, and pervasion by actuality and potentiality, logical connectors and all the various nexus needed to unite all these things into a unified world, also existence, difference, sameness, identity and category itself. The great argument is not really what things are on this list, but whether they exist as mere words, vague concepts, something in ordinary objects, or whether they are things in themselves separate from ordinary objects in timelessness and placelessness, plain or Majestic. And if outside mind and language do we really have phenomenal awareness of them or do we only dialectically reason our way to some sort of ontological necessity for their being there. Things of Being, then, are for some merely things about beings. From the superlative to the mere.

I choose Being to match the intensity of the drive within me. I tear my self and some beloved thing I see there away from beings to That. Thus this philosophy is violent in its insistence on separation. It is extreme. I have seen something. I have directly seen the counter-intuitive.

I have not stayed put in my philosophical imagination. I have gone out and felt the real coming at me. Reality is always an attack. Even when it is sweet, it is violently so. And the hardness of the open road that is the real space-time is the cut of the intersection and the falling off because there was never enough time or money to finish the thing with a nice smooth finish. The real is the disjunct junction. The Boy sits there staring at me, incorrigible, able and willing to leave you alone. But sometimes Reality yields.

At times I do write so matter-of-factly and academically and then in the same spirit I name the spirit and the land of strange things and the rhythms are seen to have begun long ago. Dead-pan philosophy and dead Pan and an eerie longing. Jesus, hold my hand and walk with me in the sunlight.

It is important that you distinguish between a fact and a sensum. A fact such as - his hair curls gently behind his ear - is out there and separate from you. The sensa of the curling and the gentleness are close in your mind giving you no comfortable distance from it. The fact is known in an act of perception and the act and its object are distinctly other. The sensa, because of their invasion into the mind, give no room for any distinction of act from its object. Sensa are always questionable and that unsettling closeness is close to sin. Sin being the questioned and the suddenly too close.

Still, there is the question of the factness of facts and the separateness of the separate and then there is the second level questionableness of the questioned. Ontological things. They are even closer that sensa, known immediately, without any distinction giving act. The subject of these writings. Also perhaps sin. But then sin is such a highly questionable thing, so let us just say a slow moving uncomfortableness.

So I make a distinction between fact and sensa, act and sin, closeness and distinction. I cut. That is analysis. That is Platonism. This Platonism lies gently in the Cut. That is deconstructing, which in high parlance is also known as deconstructionism. The boy's room is a mess. A lovely mess.

As you read this you are probably not sitting in a monastery. You should be. This is a thing cut off. I am ever speaking of the boy cut off, who is being cut off from family and all things familiar. Cut off from himself. Cut off from the hiddenness of the night. Thus the sacrificial victim. Finally something not human. This is the uncanny. A herm was at the gate, in case you didn't notice.

This is a book of philosophical love, the love that sees the form of the beloved and that flesh, from afar, crawling all along the Beginning. And that has been called the Word, but that is surely a misappellation of this the Most Appealing.

This rushes on to be a book of philosophical love, that love which feels and tastes on the flesh of the beloved that sword that was in the Beginning.

Therefore these are rhythmical writings. Each paragraph is a solid self-turning. Each page expands and retracts. They are the workings of The One.

If they are breath, I don't know whose breath. Perhaps I know. I know.

The hushed drum beats. The blanket is thrown back. The spirit is continuous.

Such rhetoric is necessary because this is Eros. He has nothing aside from the ability to turn over so easily. To flash. And to wonder about himself.

And Jesus. It's inevitable that this god be here. He's all we have. Or at least, he's all I have and I have been drowning in Western thought for so long. I don't mind if you have another god; in fact I would prefer it, because I know jealousy well.

The incessant questioning of this boy, sitting on the edge of the bed, makes him shimmer in the dark.

Everything comes out of a swoon.

Jesus is claimed by so many that it probably makes no difference that I do also. That he is always in the company of lovers is a matter of often bitter contention. What to do? Jealousy is wild. This bastard son came so close to making his mother an outcast, and then claimed to be of the house of the highest. Just like his kind to do that. Such audacity. It's enough to make me a believer. I have seen that sure look out on the street. I fall for him. The entourage is clamoring. I drink in his ruby nighttime.

In this book of philosophical love, I will write the love that is his death and my drinking his spirit into me.

Let me repeat it all. Again and again I will say the same thing. I know the thought will not stick and you will dally and dreams come.

Philosophy breaks the world into glistening, subtle pieces that surely are too delicate to be of the real world. And surely the world is not just shattered slivers stuck in the mind. Surely there is a great unity to the pieces, albeit they must be united in not just any haphazard way. Particular with universal, set with elements, thought with its object, world with these very fine atoms of Being. Yes, of course, and that being so intimately together is called Nexus. And the Canon, the Ordering, that guides the uniting is a great mystery in the study of such a thing.

Realism is a belief that universal Forms exist, in addition to particulars. And that then there is a nexus to account for the fact that the universal and the particulars are so very close. It is a belief that thought exists, in addition to the objects of thought. And then because mind and its object are so very close there may not even be room for a nexus. Realism is a belief that because we know these things very well, the universal Form, the particular, the nexus, the closeness and our own knowing, that all these things also exist in splendid isolation, separate, alone, maddeningly beautiful. That I think these things, and you likewise, makes us gods; but what is that? Or so you might believe, my love.

If universals exist and they don't exist in space and time, then they are as gods, or they are gods. And the human response to their presence, their mysterious appearing in space and time, is worship. If they do exist.

It is said that such a state of affairs would be inhuman, anti-human, childish. Universal things as this and that. The placeless and the timeless and here and now. The here and now lifted up and out into a sweltering swirling dizziness. Surely we don't have time for such a lurid affair in this busy world. A fiery brain in ashes.

Religion is sacrifice, which is a killing, which is a call for self-defense. But for the believer it is a sweet dying and the defensive shields are soon dropped. Such is religion and worship and this walk in Beauty. Faggots burning under your feet.

Most of the attacks against the theory of universals take place on three battlegrounds. The first is that of infinite regress. The second is that of the absence of the presentation of any such thing. The third is that of the frightening nature of any such thing. Those three things are, of course, dialectically related. And I, as one who believes in universals, acknowledge the truth that is the charge leveled in each attack. The infinite, the transcendent absence of the Very Present and the Fright are real.

It is true that after the ordinary things of the world, that is to say, after the world has been broken up into its ontological pieces, the task of actually in a real actuality of putting them back together is a total mind-boggling impossibility. The ordinary cannot be gleaned from out of the extra-ordinary. Philosophy loses the world in its blinding perfection. In that perfection that came so easily. Nonetheless, philosophy made no mistakes in its ingress into the truth. Though now the regress reveals no end. Surely that is frightening and the presence and the absence are evident. As evident as the hue on a boy's brow. A terror that is easily denied.

The fact that the pieces do in fact make a fact, one fact, is a many that in its pure manyness remains, by all the airy laws of ontological judgment, and for all that nothing at all. Even in the most contorted high-flying explanations the one thing refuses to come down onto solid ground and deplane. The ground of grounding grinds the minds of the ethereal dancers. Universal, nexus, particular do not in the end make one thing and the world is gone, which is the pure smooth kiss of nirvana. Bham!

Realism is lavish. So many things existing, even possibilities and impossibilities. The highly inseparables are separated out. The Dance flies away from the dancer. Thought stands before thought itself and before the world. Even I am not myself. And lately I have seen that time is a thing, over there, very still. Enchantment. But also only a circus in a slum on the edge of a jungle. The bright lights blind. I sometimes long for the vast emptiness of the night sky and just one lover.

In the emptiness of extreme mahayanic nihilism, I could find the one kiss.

Until then, one more sideshow, one more come on, one more dialectical flight on the wings of Pteros.

As for space and time, there are no places or moments that things are at. There are the universals of space and time relations that particulars exemplify, but even they are not at any place or any time. As for when and where those universals are exemplified, there is no when or where. No fact is in time or in space, at a moment or at a place. Timelessness and placelessness are the occasion for my mysticism. A true mysticism.

In these writings I am not going to use the idea of cause. For philosophy there is only the appearing of the world from out of the swelter of timeless ontological things in the stillness of Being. And that nexus of cause is not there. The dialectic is difficult and confusing and may in the end just be a mistake. Unraveling this, dealing with it, living with it, dying with it is philosophy. The beauty and the incorrigibleness of it is the Boy of these writings. Strangeness and entanglement get all over the back seat of this car as it stops for a while in the heat of the intellectual night.

It's inevitable; every philosophy will fail. But Philosophy itself is sure. Alone among all the things for man, this religion is eternal. "Ah, what was there in that light-giving candle that it set fire to the heart, and snatched the heart away?"

These writings do not call for a response nor do they call for judgment. The erotic and the mystical require either that you move in closer or you move away. I am writing about the striking and the unspeakable. You are to find pleasure in that. As I will in you, completely your slave. I'm sure that faced with your beauty I will not be able to move. If I speak, as I do here, it will be only erotic mumblings. This god's claw will be in.

This philosophy does not lead finally to poetic emptiness. It is not my intention to resign myself to death. I am not a lover of sad songs. I am not a tragic figure battling inevitable doom. I have written nothing that is a fit topic for minstrels. This is Presence, not absence. Things revel in majuscule energy. The Beloved returns. The poet's longing is forgotten. And I become tedium to the lovers of lost innocence. They proclaim me shallow and ignorant. Such is the difference. They seem to have reason and the common knowledge on their side.

I do not translate twisted philosophy into the straight everyday. All philosophy is perverse. Its sentences or its flow or logical development or its wavering between here and There, something is wrong. Or its unnecessary intense difficulty. Or its perverted desire to make the obvious more obvious. Surely its insistence on the existence or non-existence of things is meaningless. That time either moves or doesn't is hopeless. That we crave its kisses more than wisdom is lurid. That we lust for philosophy makes us strange.

The question of unexemplified universals never occurs in these writings. None of them are exemplified in themselves. All of them are unexemplified in their self-identity. They all hang within Being in Splendid Isolation. The exemplification of a universal is another thing altogether. A bare particular exists and bare particulars exist. The nexus exists and the nexus exist. The Form exists and the Forms exist. Likewise, the fact of this particular exemplifying this Form exists and all the facts exist. Every fact exists, which statement is the image of every universal tied to a particular. Still, the Forms and the particulars and the nexus are all alone and something else again. The simple things and the facts they ground are other in a strange ontological otherness. The One, the many and everything in between.

Still and all, the fact cannot be another thing aside from the things that ground it. The identity is tight. And, though it's not ordinary identity, it is identity, and it's, nonetheless, a strange ontological otherness.

The words sui generis would only obfuscate. We are rather here in the very lucid consciousness. Understanding abounds. The clear and distinct differences glisten.

Philosophy has always been the escape. The puzzles are sheer pleasure. I sheer off into constriction and release. The turbidity of the erotic beckons. We will argue out the night.

The love in these writings is of the liberal arts. It serves no practical purpose in this world. It is in the freedom of the spirit roaming outside the world. It is a vision of timeless things. The mind spins around and around on the great circles of thought thinking the pure things of thought. The face of God appearing at every turn. This moon of sweet presence shining above the empyrean plain. In the dizziness of enchanted logic. The writer knowing a sure arm is there to guide him home.

I write this philosophy/poetry or philosophy/myth because I have run into the limits of mathematical philosophy, the limits of ontological analysis. It was inevitable. Every philosophy reaches this end. Religion appears. This is beyond Being in ……. What? In the One? In Love? In God? In the Flesh? In the Beloved? In a mystical vortex? Yes, no doubt all of that and more. My point is that the mind wants to go on, begs to go on, must go into that.

Is this the end of realism or a more intense realism? It is neither; there is nothing beyond Being. In intensity Being breaks and then returns. But that is myth and there you are.

I deal in the pieces of Being. I am a merchant all along the hermeneutical boundary. My writings are a Herm on the way. My currency is flesh and its nummular drops.

A great amount of philosophical words were handed to us in the twentieth century pointing us toward a road we should travel down to learn the true nature of logical form. Along which we could find out what there is in existence that accounts for it, or even if there is such a thing. The most traveled way demurred that it is merely a psychological matter or anthropological. A reflection of some general form of human language or the human nervous system. A tool man developed in his evolution in order to secure some end. To say that it is of human origin is, I suppose, to say that it is not itself a timeless, universal, ontological thing. It is, in fact, to say that no precise definition could, therefore, be given of its true form or forms, and that it is only locally applicable. All of that is to say that there really is no such thing as logical form. I, of course, have taken a different road.

Logical Form exists. That is to say logical forms abound, timelessly, in themselves.

When I was an adolescent and I studied Spanish and algebra, I had the good fortune of distance from my teacher and from the other students. Alone, in the quiet of my thought, I saw the pure forms of grammar and function. Unmolested by involvement in the practical use of these I fell in love with what I now see are transcendent things.

I deal in the One and the many. This is analysis. I make the final cuts purposefully and seriously. I am looking for the splendor. I do not ridicule my own efforts. I expect damage to be done to my earthly life.

The metered phrases here catch and swing the moments of the soul each onto the next until the singular point, then the descent. I write mathematically, parabolicly, antiphonicly.

These things exist in the splendor of unseen isolation. They are known only as mirrored in the complexities.

I see my friends lying quietly within God, but they are not God. I have no ontological doubt but that the Form that they are is God, that He has merely clothed them in that. And yet without that Form they are as nothing to me. Still, naked, they do pierce my mind.

I hold God and not-God together in a single thought, and that together, in a further thought, with the utter non-existence of the not-God. And yet, willing to be neither a pantheist nor an idolater, I fidget. Being seems to be jealous of the very Forms and names of Being and of other beings.

The excess and the fragmentariness of these images, these pawed at literary conceits, that they are distractions and of a sticky purpose, that they glibly speak and they are wet, is perhaps counter to good reading, but philosophy itself will not be read well. Anyway these idols are so idealized and stylized they are of no thing here. Slightly more than a sudden shock, they perhaps …. . They are the chest filling up. They are a groan. They are a falling. They are an embarrassment. Nonetheless, I am a real flesh and blood person and I have been written out in this writing that would be my writing. They are a help along the way leading out.

Dialectics gives one a sinking feeling not only because of the growing difficulty in maintaining order, but also because the one speaking to you is coming onto you. I am, of course, speaking of my speaking of the presence of God now become so close. You fidget. And half plan an escape. Half give in. And you fight the giving in. And you plan your escape from the escape. You have no right to offend or be offended.

The schools teach their students that in the Socratic method we learn the critical examination of ideas. That is not Socrates. Socrates is a Silenius filled with erotic desires. His dialectics is erotic combat. He is no more than a priest in an ancient religion. He intellectually consumes the boy. Today's professors are really trying the same thing, but like Lysius they pretend otherwise.

Thought thinking thought within this Christian civilization has spent most of its time fighting with itself. I suppose I am part of the fight. The Aristotelians will not like my Platonism, and if they are still like the Thomists of the last two centuries they will spare no effort is piling pious vitriol upon me. They're probably not now like that. The fire has subsided. Maybe not. Anyway, their claim is that the Platonist's other-worldly treble-voiced spirituality lands them in bed with lurid sensuality. As for the Platonists, they usually just insinuate that the Aristotelians never could dance, never knew the passions of love, never knew intellectual madness. The Aristotelians are far too moderate, far too helpful, far too boring. It's a question of just what the incarnation is all about. And where the escape from thinking lies. To quiet the fire down or to let it flame up into ethereal plasma.  We are made differently.

I learned of this from my frail Pentecostal Grandmother. From her I learned that religion is a fever or it is nothing.

As for the East, where I wrote much of this, it is a joy, in spite of its remaining right behind the closet door. The world is vast and exceedingly beautiful. With the great embrace of a Hindu, I want to take Kim in my arms.

I learned the philosophy of the schools from Gustav Bergmann. He never knew me. I have merely carried his books with me all around the world. I have no idea what he would think of these writings. He took philosophy very seriously. He was polite. He was ferocious in his dialectics. He was in love with something he saw there; I know he was, but he never said so. In the end he knew he had failed, but so what?

Let it only be known that I have poured over his words most of my life, I have loved his ideas, and they are my weapon when, in pleasant conversation, I dare approach the great entangled questions of ontology.

For those of you who have never heard of Gustav Bergmann, that is to say for almost all of you, let me say that his ideas have not gone down well with most who are or would be professional philosophers. His realism, at the end, strikes them as far from anything real. They say that it is counter-intuitive, to say the least. That it is surprising at best. It is a philosophy that many, no doubt, fear would be an embarrassment to be associated with. Poor Bergmann. He has become a mystic. But the Mystics have no interest in him. He is just simply too difficult to understand. The mysticism of the Intellectually Difficult.

In my opinion, this was all inevitable. Platonism, realism, is mystical. Look what has happened to Plato himself, the great source of western philosophy. No one in our universities claims to be a Platonist. Could it be the boys that are everywhere lounging around in his words? Even Bergmann didn't want to go there, though he was always mentioning that "Peter is blond". That I took his ideas where I have is strange, but inevitable, in my opinion. Out of politeness, I use the word "opinion", in spite of the fact that he tried to ground such ontological facts in luminous necessity.

I also admire the God-intoxicated Moltke Gram. Or so he was in real life. He looked directly at existence and stumbled. He was sure he had wasted too much time on earthly boys. When I knew him he told me he thought God would give him fifteen more years. He gave him only one.

The Iowa realists who found ontological things inside the facts of the world, never really believed in those things. They believed in the world, in facts, in Time's creating and destroying. They believed in Difference. And they believed that neither Time nor Difference existed.

This world, the ordinary world, is not the place of philosophical existence, that is to say, it is not the place of the existents. This world is that which is on the way to existence or on the way from existence. It is the passing by and the passing away. It is what could have been and the it once was so. Or so the poets tell us. It is the place of hope and the resultant tears. It is the home of sad songs and tragic tales. It is the place where if existence is given it is rejected as shallow, an affront to the deep knowledge of our Fathers.

In this world every thing receives its momentary shadow of bedewed meaning from another thing and hands it on in a profusion of disappearance. Existence would have been too much anyway for the frailty of this spidery web of delusion. Or so the authors of popular literature tell us. The dewdrops sparkle in the sun and become vapor. And the sun sets. Then the security of non-existence rises and the bedraggled commentary begins.

When I speak of existing things I am found to be a wearisome thing. I go to the boys who are still full of life and for a moment they understand.

I have assumed in all this, somewhat unintentionally, no doubt foolishly, that my reader is dauntingly familiar with the weighty mass of philosophical literature, the great questions and the ill-fated answers, the anguish of final success in reaching an end to thought and the eventual collapse. No one, of course, is familiar with philosophy. It is an unfamiliar weird. Likewise none of us is really daunted by all that. We go on blithely and seemingly willing to take the prize of heaven that is ours. Truth and the Light are easily come by. But the anguish never leaves.

This is realism, which is to say that those things that idealism happily puts in the mind as the work of the mind, the realist finds out in reality or if in the mind not as from the mind.

Consider a set of two things a and b, symbolize it as (a,b). The idealist will say that the setness of the set is contributed by the mind by acting upon a and b. The mind has the power to synthesize. The realist will agree that the set is a thing different from the two elements but that it is an existing thing not of the mind. It is real in the sense that the real is independence from thought. Then the inevitable question arises about the existence of a nexus to unite the set with "its" elements, and the idealists again say that is also of the mind but this time it is from the mind's power to separate. That is to say the ability to separate the unity of set and elements from the set and the elements. The realist sees the nexus as an existing thing not from out of his or anyone's mindworks.

If someone asks you what my philosophy is, tell him this. He believes in the mind-independent existence of strange otherworldly things. He believes that this world is full of particular things real and imagined because there exist particulars quite bare of any form. He believes that these particulars exemplify form because there are Forms for them to exemplify. And of course there is the nexus of exemplification to accomplish just that. He believes that all these many things are many and numbered because of Number and sheer Difference itself. And he believes that all these things gather into order by means of the existence of logical connectives ordered throughout by Order. None of these are in time nor space, time and space being no more than relations themselves exemplified. And if that same someone asks you if all these things are mere concepts provisionally provided for explaining the world, tell him most emphatically No. They are existing things and the world is of them.

You must also tell him that this philosopher sees no way to get from such a broken up collection of things back to the everyday world. Though the nexus was to have accounted for the unity of ordinary things into themselves and into great structures of Being, it failed. Existence, in this philosophy, remains a scattered thing. And the difference between all the pieces of Being is a blanking out returning. Just as the spaces between these words prevent these sentences from ever reaching the unity of thought that I am now and you are for an instant.

The mind, he will have to be told, for me, is not a creator nor a thing that divides or unites. It is an awareness of what is there only. It beholds analyses that move on and go deeper. It is not the analyzing. It merely watches the Cut that is of Being itself. It sees the sigh and the trepidation of existence and knows that that is not mere metaphor. This philosopher believes that the mind sees existence and existing things directly and in themselves.

All of this is way beyond the so-called atoms and quanta of the universe. Even they have given way to analysis. Tell him that those things rest on a more profound base found out only by Philosophy and his turning to look.

Of course there is much more that you could and should tell of me and my philosophy, but that is the subject of these writings and the love affair that is contained in them. None of it is of this place. And I have found no way back.

The twentieth century began in the paradoxes of the logic of logic and in the ineffable positivism of language speaking about language. With such definite description decidedly questionable. Then, after the years failed to overcome the slightest of these nuisances, I end the century in a glib mysticism of linguistic catastrophe, and I shift to a new millennium.

Russell built a ladder into the skies so he might climb out of the paradoxes. Wittgenstein tried to climb up in an instant, throw away the ladder and give up philosophy. He succeeded. And then wrote only the forgettable and the trivially true.

Others through the decades outdid Wittgenstein in writing the sensible and the excruciatingly boring. It was all very good for the drunks and addicts who wanted to prove their respectability. The mystics could speak calmly and scientifically and hide. They all, very much so much, wanted to be able to get a good job in a university and get away from the wars brought on by little men with big ideas. They would gladly accept the littleness of all ideas. And not be accused of corrupting the youth.

Soon the pseudo-science of science stopped. And meta-meta-logic metastasized into mind cancer. And all the innocuous little diacritical marks killed thought. And all the pretty logic and philosophy books were found with student cum stains all over them. The All being, not at all a mere quantifier, but an explosion in the nighttime brain. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, staved, misty clerical, naked angels, headed tripsters. All of whom and which I misquoted. Churchy copy editors tried to clean it all up, themselves having been overly worried by neurotic mothers. - What in the hell was that all about?

If I philosophically ask about the setness of a set then I have left the ordinary world of social conversation. I could adopt a casual style of writing indicating that the consideration is merely an intellectual insubstantiality, an abstracting that will eventually and always give way to the concretely real. The writing will not call attention to itself; it will be rather frumpy and dowdy; it will not pretend to be the dance of a dancer. It will be academic. I will be accepted by Them. That is nominalism. The setness of a set is only a matter of words from out of the meager existence of a philosopher, a marker on the wrong road to life. Or I could adopt a style caught up in the strangeness of the question itself, relieved to leave the ordinary for another place and thus enter into Philosophy.

Philosophical things are seen directly. Philosophical statements are direct and pointedly concise. Philosophical things do not move in the ways of ordinary things.

I suffer the cut between the world and that non-world where the setness of the set is cut off, that thing that is the set itself cut off from its elements cut off from the inseparableness of the impossibility of separating the set from its elements from the setness from the ordinary never to be reached. I am flickering fire. I am spirit. I am lost in a god. I have become strange. I stand in the ordinary and see my strangeness and I am unable to change anything.

Everything depends on whether or not one uses the word "exists" when speaking of these abstract things. If they do exist then they become philosophically concrete, that is to say, of a different kind of concreteness, and they force the mind into other ways.

Philosophical writings never contain within them a portion that is a summary of the philosophy suitable for an encyclopedia. That is not to say that the philosopher didn't try to write such a piece simply as a help for his readers and for himself; probably he was reaching for that on every page he wrote. But philosophy never appears as a neat little package. The neat little packages that do appear in encyclopedias merely point to a philosophical form in the distance, and that indeed is helpful. I have great respect for those who write them and I do envy them their talent, as I think every philosopher does.

Bergmann also never wrote down, I think never could write down, a succinct characterization of his whole philosophy. William Heald could and did admirably. I can see such a thing, for my own writing, in my mind's eye – sort of, but it is, for me, unwriteable. Why?

I do not have the calm assurance of direction that a faithful cleric has. In my thinking I am flung around like a ball in a pinball machine. The form is brilliantly there, but I am trapped inside it.

Bergmann was forced by the dialectic to dance a dance of contortions. He is hard to follow as he himself follows his unseen partner. He knew that and, I think, he worried about it. He had no choice. The movements of philosophy's dialectic are difficult and necessary.

The philosophical spirit leads wherever He wills and He wills always the most winding of byways. Others have to somehow gather and glean the meaning and meanings of the words that befell the philosopher following this torturous beloved. I thus wish for readers who have the strength required to listen to what are mostly complaints at the ways of love.