[MD] A farewell to Bo

[Andy Skelton]

All through ZAMM I have been trying to lock onto what it is about Bo's
rhetoric that I hate. I just touched it on page 367.

"I myself am pretty much Aristotelian... but Phaedrus was clearly a
Platonist..."

That is the narrator speaking. He is to Phaedrus what an art history
professor is to Magritte.

The narrator, the foil of Phaedrus, is forced to bring Quality down
into his rhetoric and talk about it. He does this for practical
reasons (of which I, too, am guilty) and Phaedrus was always there,
behind the glass door, suffering in silence and trying to reach him to
strangle him.

The definitions of the levels can be held static or they can be left
indeterminate. Stasis is where things go after Quality has finished
with them. It leaves its mark but it can do no more. That is what's
meant by "leaving well enough alone."

Bo is trying to make a legacy for himself by making a dichotomy
(weak/strong, adverse static states) of the fourth level. This is pure
Aristotle. It demands stasis, which leads to the departure of Quality.
His dichotomy has a certain mark of quality but it is no longer
dynamic.

Some people have sided with him, some have sided against him. I refuse
to choose a side. I refuse to acknowledge the dichotomy in the first
place. I refuse to hold it static. I refuse to encase the MOQ in that
concrete. The mountain is always being thrust up from within and worn
down from without. It is not the subject of a photograph.

I insist that the MOQ's highest quality existence is as a formless,
substance-less, indeterminate non-pattern. When you need it, give it a
sharp form and use it to slice through the world and then let it
dissolve back out of existence for the next time.

My way up the mountain is the path away from dichotomy. Away from the
dialectic. Bo's way is down the mountain, toward the dialectic with
postcards from the mountain. I am interested in the mountain, not
postcards from other people's vacations. I will go up whenever I need
the view. I will not use postcards to try to invoke it.

So I bid farewell to Boristotle's interpretations and his followers
and his adversaries. Have fun being on the faculty in Chicago. I'm
going to sit by the fire and eventually piss myself. Again and again.

So much love,
Andy