[Newspoetry] Representative Democracy

[Donald L Emerick]

Representative Democracy
comes ever so near to being news
and yet lies so far from it, too,
that I never tire of trying to think it,
even when I become confused,
or become aware of my confusions,
for I may only have lacked self-knowledge
and have always possessed confusions,
in which case the attribute owns me,
as I could not disown the attribute,
for one could never disavow
that which one does not avow,
in which confusion possesses me,
and I become aware of this conflict,
without having any power to end it,
or, perhaps, lack any right to do so,
or, perhaps, will to do anything at all:
How could anything democratically represent me?

Rid my riddle of confusion as riddled by confusion:
Laws of political masses on unity and magnitude.

The rule of unity says many things in one voice.
One thing that it says concerns representation.
A better representation is clearly whatever
Shall be given the authority of the unity:
What the representative says shall be taken
as the saying of all those within that unity.

By magnitude of a representation,
Some kind of inherent relationship
between it and the unity that is captured, as it were --
or immobilized, frozen, placated, paralyzed, dead --
as in a still life, painting, photo, picture, depiction,
or description -- a necessarily static quality --
for the word representation speaks of a dead moment
of a now beyond present meddling, for good or for ill,
for it has no pretenses at any physics or dynamics,
as might require continual reference, analogically,
to on-going qualities of independently living things.

A representation is given office,
perhaps for a limited period of time,
such as we find in notions of term of office,
which is not about the languages of power,
as may be discursively found in the word,
but are functions of reality, to limit power,
as they dissectively dis-cover the world.

Words of power draw upon haunts of the dead,
from a locale of abysmal chaos of inchoate hell,
for power overspeaks lies about representation,
to pretend that there is an ideal of representation,
the perfect copy in the mimetic idealization,
an excellence so good that it rises up divine --
and (dialectic could not deny any divine its tail) --
an evil so profound that it stands anti-divine,
devilish in its lavish details, miming the true,
counterfeiting the foreign coins of alien reality,
bankrupting all kinds of internal commerce
by robbing tokens of their unquestioned authority,
making it necessary to doubt any presentation,
making it necessary to find questionable branches
upon which pretenses may perch, perchance to nest.

A representation itself is never an investigation,
for it thinks that it happens as a proper result,
from a process that is already largely accepted
as more likely to produce a better representation.

An investigation into representation is thus dead --
either a priori and synthetic -- an arguing of ideals --
or else a posteriori and analytic -- a confirming of results.

The arguing and the confirming, as processes,
potentially oppose one another, dialectically:
sometimes, they occur together; as being one,
sometimes, separately and apart, as being many;
sometimes, sequentially, one after the other;
and, sometimes, both are absent and missing,
but not missed, a missing of missing itself,
that may not even be aware of its own dismissing,
its own refusal to represent itself, faithfully,
for ever divine-evil representation concerns
the fullness of faith by the emptiness of faithlessness,
and these acts of faith and faithlessness
give powers and limits to representations.

A representation's magnitude limits the size of its rule.

A representation that has no consequences for a unity
would have no size, for it would be an emptiness, itself,
an evil pretense that it betters the world by tautology,
as if formal, empty truths could ever better anything at all.

Every science, every mathematics, every human endeavor
(especially the representations of those that are religious)
constantly runs the risk of being taken only tautologically,
as empty promises that logic alone could fulfill human need...

and yet also runs the risk of being taken the opposite way,
as if it were the thing in itself, the very reality that it mimics,
so full to overflowing of itself that it stands against question,
as if the very fact of itself were to become that thing itself.

The middle way thus is a necessary and proper one,
even though it is excluded by either-or logics of representation,
which would have none of the potent unavoidable possibility
of error and mistake, such as found the invariance notions
of risk, uncertainty, futility, ignorance and imperfection --
denials of divine omnipotence and devilish echographies.

How big a lie is to be depends on how large its unity is:
for the sample (a lie) reports upon its imaginary unity,
the population as it really would happen to be.
One has to know what would be true of the latter
in order to discover, confirmatorily or not,
what one reasons that one knows to be true,
of the latter from the former as evidence of the same.

But also, then, the working out of the consequences
of the ideals (both good and evil) of one's representations
never stand up to anything except discursive viewings,
for values have no material consequences, as such,
nothing that could be discovered of them,
but only that they could be declaimed
by those who support their claims
of being the proper values to hold.

For instance, truth has no material consequences
that, in anyway or by any event, may disprove truth,
as being the way that things are (or not),
for truth does not possess, by being a standard,
for all other things and yet for nothing at all,
reflexively from those other things,
reflection on what truth itself would have to be,
of its own self nature, to be true to itself:
the true could only be premised on the rule of reason
against self-contradiction in the realm of its said,
for nothing happens without a reason,
a sufficient rule to rule all other reasons,
always more powerful than all others.

I keep skating away from the size of lies in representations,
perhaps because I know how to talk about lies, convincingly,
and yet also because I also know how to lie, convincingly,
to make myself believe that what is not true ought to be true.
Am I my own counter-example, an unconvincing liar, then?

Russell's self-implied representative logic asks
"Who shaves barbers who shave those who do not shave
and only those who do not self-shave does they shave?"
is answered, quite neatly, when the barbers are female
or children who are too young to shave, yet, or persons
who congenitally, perhaps, produce no facial hairs.

An unconvincing liar is an oxymoronic redundancy,
a waste of breath who gives an artificial attribute,
for either a person is convincing in representations,
in which case there could be no liar,
or else a person is unconvincing in representations,
in which case there would be a liar.

In the middle way, of course, we never equate
fully potential attributes of faithful representation
(sample, convincing or not, always grooms doubt)
with the absolute properties of an actual population,
in its absurd unity as a liar of itself as a being just so.
A convincing representation may, nonetheless, be false
unconvincing representations may, nevertheless, be true:
no representation would be either true or false,
by virtue of what it may only pretend to be.

Now, magnitude guards against representations
by asking how much is at stake, what risks do we take
when we mistakenly act imperfectly on our ignorance,
what things does these representations hide from us
that should or should not have been disclosed,
what does it conceal and reveal as to the proper,
and what is this that is proper to it,
before any time of its choosing?

Direction, of course, makes magnitude be so,
by cutting through representations and things,
to let each direction be a connection, up-down,
between whatever is somehow too similar
to whatever else is similar to its copy too,
which two, produced from the same one source,
are related: children-to-parents or else siblings,
as Nature never reproduces the same-in-itself twice,
no dichotomous twin null relationship is ever true.

Listening to these abstractions,
bizarre extractions form thinking,
thanks for listening to this telling,
thanks for being one with me,
thanks for being apart from me,
or else never find words to write,
as you never be listening to me,
Donald L Emerick