Welcome to “The Flying Fish” Substack
Welcome to “The Flying Fish” Substack
I write about what bothers me—I air my grievances
Hidy. I intend to write The Flying Fish firstly because writing has been necessary for me to be able to “relieve my own troubled mind, and possibly also to comfort others”, as Antonio Rosmini would put it. I must find relief from thinking things that trouble me.
In my dream world, you wouldn’t be reading this on the internet. We would be sitting around a table, perhaps a few other people with us, perhaps five or six of us, and we’d each tell the others out loud what bothered us and what about what bothered us we were thinking.
Thinking. My writing of The Flying Fish comes from my thinking. What is it that I call “thinking”? That is hard to say with certainty. But, in short, isn’t thinking story-telling and isn’t story-telling logos, therefore mediation? What I call “thinking” is “mediation”. Thinking is mediation.
At the end of the day, the matter is simple: I can either think or I can drown myself. Thinking is a way of breathing. Or to put it less enigmatically, thinking is as necessary as breathing.
We read, therefore we think. We think, therefore I write. I write, therefore I think. I think, therefore I read.
And, on a good day, I’d hope to perhaps think things through, either to theirs or my own limit.
But, on not a good day when I, God help me, re-read my writing, all I see is illaudable blatherskite. The reader may need a diagram just to find out where the main verb is as he or she wrestles with my foolishness, vanity, inconsistencies, repetitions, biases, misconceptions, fallacies, (aah, the one irresistible, to me, argument: the argument ad hominem), wrong assumptions, and many other errors that may be found in my writing here and there. I am sure of it. This does not worry me, because who—apart from myself, with a gun to my head—would be persistent enough to read through the whole thing, anyway?
Just as the French quiet giant Houellebecq wrote somewhere, I, too, am “conscious of how difficult the simple operation of aligning words and organizing them into sentences could be without the whole lot collapsing into incoherence, or sinking into tedium”.
Where was I? . . . Oh, yes. Read. Think. Write. I want to read, think, and write in order to distance myself from the present “kingdom of man”. Born out of Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon’s prolatio terminorum humani imperii ad omne possibile (“The extension of the boundaries of human control to their greatest possible extent”), the kingdom here below has been carried further into vanity and vexation of spirit by the likes of Darwin, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and the Vatican II.
But I hope to be cautious so that I never feel as if I wholly figured anything out, and hope to tread carefully whenever and wherever I feel compelled to pronounce a judgment—even though I often feel, strongly, that I must say something because if I kept silent, “the stones would cry out”!
Language. When it comes to language, were I free to paraphrase a little something Karl Kraus gave me as an aphorism, I would say that my language is the common prostitute that I intend to turn into a virgin—isn’t that a lofty goal?
Anyways. This humble Substack is nothing without a Reader (you!), so please, look around and bring the fish to flight.
If you have something that you’d like to say, please use the ‘comment’ section below each article, or email the Present Author at tomaszgoe@protonmail.com, or send DM at the twitter.
I hope that you would comment on my stories because, to quote John Stuart Mill on this subject, “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”. Please comment and help me see the light!
No more to you at this time. Humbly craving the continuance of your reading eyes’ honorable favor towards me, and craving th’eternal establishment of your happiness, I humbly take leave.
Yours most affectionate
Tomasz Goetel
Do you think that “growing threats” to the Internet of Things trouble me? They do not. From The New Jerusalem, “cyber security”, “financial asset security”, and the likes, are coming to a device near you and me as we speak. All linked with your and mine “bio-security”, in our biopolitical, palliative, transparent society that is based on new “rules” for each “individual” who must always be a productive and compassionate and self-loving, and an all-loving part of an artificially solidarized “community”. In communitarianism, you and everyone will be “happy”. I will be happy. In communitarianism, each member’s “rights”, including yours, have been “secured” for you and your child—from zygote to organ harvest. Or, perhaps, that’s already happened... Didn’t you send your DNA samples recently somewhere for “testing”? Well, I’m just joking.
What troubles me the most, I suppose, is that I may not only be a witness to but one of the participants in this sad spectacle of the godless, greedy, rationalistically rapist, materialistic, “modern” world. The world is exhausted. Exhausted by its own self and by its own perpetual, ultra-efficient, and cost-effective “creating” of its “future”, and its own signaling of “progress” and “scientific truth” and “technology”, “democracy”, “equality”, “sustainability”, in the service of “minorities” and “humanity” and so on.
A self-exhausted world is gripped by the hands of the faceless fascist transhumanist gangsters whose parents formed a posse a long time ago, a global supranational private “trading” guild, who dictate the rules while pretending to be friends with liberty and to whom the entire spectacular fakery in this wag-the-dog think-tanked world of today is a mean toward obtaining ever more power, profit and property, collaboration and control, data, deviant satisfaction, blackmail from the gathered extortion material, and surely at least one more something as the ultimate goal that I don’t know what it is but, if forced to make an intuitive guess, I’d say it’s got to do with an obsessive hyper-pursuit of ever-elusive avoidance of their own mortality. Tik tok, tik tok, you goddamned scoundrels.
Martin Heidegger tells me that “the most thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age” is “that we are still not thinking”. Don Miguel de Unamuno says that “to think is to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks with himself, thanks to our having had to talk with one another”. Further, “to think, to think seriously philosophically and still more to think religiously, is to exist in thought. (…) Something confronts me. In thought, I struggle with it for its truth. But it is thereby that I also struggle with myself, for my truth”, as Romano Guardini writes in Pascal For Our Time. Isn’t, then, the thought process itself a religious act?
That’s what I think. I do not, however, claim to be any authority whatsoever in the subject of the works by the men mentioned in that paragraph. I have little education, average intelligence at best, no gift of insight and I am as lazy as a lord.
What world do I want to live in? The world of Dante’s Paradiso (IX, 108): “This world below is ordered toward the one above”.
Quaero non pono, nihil hic determino dictans Coniicio, conor, confero, tento, rogo.… (I inquire , I do not assert; I do not here determine anything with final assurance; I conjecture, try, compare, attempt, ask.…) —Motto to Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Adumbratio Kabbalae Christiane. Quoted, as an epigraph, by C. G. Jung in The Psychology of Transference (vol. 16 of the Collected Works).
I must be speaking carefully because I’m scared not to because I know that:
“What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”—Wittgenstein.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”—Paul, in 1 Cor 13:11, KJV.
“(…) every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.”—Matthew 12:36—37, KJV.