If you don't think of the world as being made up of discreet objects so much as processes or currents it is not so difficult to decouple word & thing. (Words would have to be part of the "process reality" too.)

"A question for you, Joe: Who would you regard as an artist (musician, painter, poet) who successfully presents chaos chaotically? Who captures the wildness with the greatest felicity?" Right, as your question implies, you can't really present chaos chaotically as an artist. If you want "felicity" you have to impose order or some kind. What I like about Dylan is how utterly careless he is, allowing just about anything to happen in his songs while usually managing to hold things together. But carelessness here is a kind of aesthetic principle, which is to say a way of making order. I like Ginsberg for similar reasons & find James Merrill hard to read, even as I recognize his enormous talent. But this is mostly personal taste, I suspect. Subject matter enters into it as well; while Merrill isn't an entirely private or personal poet, his main subjects seem interior to me & I have a pretty strong committment to the external in my own work.

"How fragile this adhesive holding language together really is!" Yes, all held together by human imagination.

A poem is a kind of game, but a game might also be a poem. Wittgenstein's great virtue in PI is that he makes it harder for us to get caught up in our own categories even while allowing as how those categories have a use, a function, in the world. Their use is nothing less than meaning, but of course the whole concept of meaning is altered if the philosopher comes to the poet's conclusion that the ambiguous can be true, or that more than one perspective can be valid.

What category do we put the DC snipers into, for instance? Are they "terrorists" because they terrorized a region? Or do we use the categories of medicine & seem them as mentally disturbed? Was the /meaning/ of their acts political or personal? It matters how we sort the answers to these questions out; it matters, that is, what meaning(s) we assign to the actions of these two men. What I'm suggesting is that we will almost certainly have to settle on a messy set of overlapping meanings. In this sense, simplicity is the enemy of clarity.

Hey, the bass player holds everything together. I'm going to try to make rehersals a bit more regularly now.

I've appreciated your comments on specific remarks. They have been road markers helping me find my way through my confusion. I haven't written much here recently partly because I got to the point where I had to pause & think about W's whole project for a while. In that process I've been reading a little about where he comes from philosophically. At one level, I "get" Wittgenstein just fine. That's the level (don't like the buried metaphor there in the word level, but I'm on my first cup of coffee this morning) on which he demonstrates that the world does not obey logical formulas but makes sense anyway--or we humans speak sense into the world. William Barrett, whom I've mentioned before, points out the distinction between the highly derived forms of symbolic logic & the lived-logic of everyday practice. It's pretty clear that people were able to think "logically" before the invention of the syllogism & that consequently the project of early 20th century logicism was misguided, though weirdly powerful. The idea that ordinary thought as expressed in language somehow constitutes a Fall from a prelapsarian world of pure logical certainty seems a relic of 18th century Anglican (imperial) Christianity. [Imperialism is much on my mind these days.] After trying in the Tractatus to provide a diagram of Eden, Wittgenstein in PI is arguing with his early self, a self infused with Russell's influence. But I often get bogged down in the details of Wittgenstein's analysis, if that's the right word. (Maybe I'm just like my freshmen, who complain, "How come Job's friends have to repeat themselves so many times? It's so repetitious!) "Well, Children," I tell them, "the author is pretty clearly trying to tell you something with those repetitions: This stuff is important!" And of course most of them miss the fact that we are talking about repetition with variation. Which seems to be what W. is doing in PI.

Okay, I'm trying to size up PI the best way I know how. Which is as a work of literature. As you have said, one couldn't do this with Kant or Russell, but with Wittgenstein or Plato it makes sense. I was thinking again over the weekend about that remark of W's that philosophy ought to be written as much like poetry as possible. It is conventional wisdom among rhetoricians that the poetic use of language is expressive. But expressive of what? Since the high water mark of German & British Romanticism, the poetic & thus the expressive have been largely confined to the realm of human feeling & emotion. Though Romanticism advertised itself as liberating the poet from the constraints of period style & conventional morality, this freedom came at a price: one was required to abstain from thinking. (I'm exaggerating a bit here, but you get the picture.) Poets have often since found themselves locked in the velvet box of the emotions. But we now know (turning to one of your neuro-scientists, Anthony Damasio) that emotion & thought are inseparable. Anyway, getting back to my point about the nature of the expressive, the conventional view of a poem, say, is that it seeks to both express an emotion & elicit an emotion from a reader / listener.

"What a mess!" indeed. The thing that I get, over & over, from Wittgenstein is that there is no "logical platform," as you so nicely put it, to our practice of language. It is, in fact, a practice, in the sense that we have to keep trying to get it right, but also in the sense of spiritual practice. Wittgenstein, with all the precision of a great intellect trained in mathematics & engineering, is also the person who crouched on the trenches of the losing side in WWI, scribbling notes for what would become the Tractatus, which is surely the final document of Western logicism, though many later philosophers are clearly unaware of this fact & go on producing texts in a sort of vague afterlife of the Analytic.

Is the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations one of these posthumous philosophers? The tension in this text--which I find both seductive & dismaying--between logic & poetry seems impossible of resolution, threatening to sink the whole enterprise. But of course it is just such intellectual (in the broadest sense) high-wire acts that fascinate & illuminate: the later poetry of James Wright, the novels of Thomas Mann, the late sonatas & quartets of Beethoven, most of Thelonious Monk, the remarks in PI . . .

We're all boxed in
no place to escape . . .
All my powers of expression
I thought so sublime
could never do you justice
In reason & rhyme.
Only one thing I did wrong--
stayed in Mississippi a day too long. [Bob Dylan, "Mississippi." From Love & Theft]

Where the hell am I going with this? How's this? Wittgenstein teaches us that there are no platforms, no foundations for our thought, just amazingly articulate games of language, while all the while longing desperately for certainty & encoding that longing into the very structure of the remarks.

I got a cravin' love for blazing speed
Got a hopped up Mustang Ford
Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard
I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind
I'm no pig without a wig
I hope you treat me kind
Things are breakin' up out there
High water everywhere [Bob Dylan, "High Water." From Love & Theft]

Things are breakin up out there. And yet we put the chaos into songs, into works of philosophy, into lectures & books of poems & conversations in the hallway. So all this attention to patches of color & brooms in the corner it's poetry. That's what W. means in Culture & Value when he says that philosophy should be written like poetry--not "pretty," not decorative, not superficial adornment, but the actual welter & shambles of getting through the day. It is, of course, an impossible prescription. But when did that ever stop us.

Been workin' on the mainline - workin' like the devil
The game is the same - it's just up on a different level
Poor boy - dressed in black
Police at your back [Dylan. ibid]

I think Dylan is about to lead me to a discussion of Husserl, but that will be tomorrow. As if I knew anything about Husserl. You keep talking about Wittgenstein. You're the bass player in this combo--I'm the addled guy on tenor sax.