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⬅️ Previous capture (2022-04-28)
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Posted on 2022-03-05
Well, writing logs every day turns out to be much harder than I anticipated. You miss one, and then missing the next one doesn't seem like such a big deal, and then you're just not writing anymore.
Front squat: 145 x 5 -> 145 x 6
Focused on form and hitting proper depth in my squats today, which resulted in me only being able to hit 3 reps for my back squat. Deadlift still progressing nicely. Managed to hit 6 reps, with follow up doubles. I think for the next light lower day I can "bridge" over my heavy day deadlifts.
Started on _The Number and the Siren_ by Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux is one of the 4 members of the original Goldsmiths conference that originated the term "speculative realism". _The Number and the Siren_ is a strange book -- part literary criticism, part detective work, part philosophical treatise.
Stephane Mallarme's poem, "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard" (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) is a modernist poem composed in 1897. Its cryptic text is strewn across 12 double-page spreads (reproduced in the appendix, translated by Urbanomic founder Robin Mackay). It's almost completely impenetrable at first glance (at least to me), but a close reading reveals a tableaux of a ship's Master hesitating to throw the dice clutched in his hand as his ship disappears beneath the waves. It has something to do with the role of man as he faces a universe of utter randomness, but most of the meaning is utterly obscured.
Meillassoux believes that he has discovered a Number that is encoded into the text, which functions as a decryption key to the whole thing. He believes (well, it's hard to say if he "believes" -- more on that in a later post) that Mallarme shares a similar metaphysical outlook to himself -- that the world is radically contingent, that the only real principle is that anything could become anything else at any time in the future. "Coup de des" is thus a demonstration of this "absolutization of Chance".
It's a pretty engaging read so far, but I do benefit from the context of prior familiarity with Meillassoux through Graham Harman's _Speculative Realism: An Introduction_. It's interesting that what is regarded as Meillassoux's key text, _The Divine Inexistence_, which presents a radical argument for the future existence of God and the reincarnation of the dead, has never been published and exists only as roughly translated manuscripts passed around between academics.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/number-and-siren#
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Speculative+Realism%3A+An+Introduction-p-9781509519996