Night of Philosophy
Tags: Music, Philosophy, Life, Night, Conversations

Of the few times I have struggled to succumb sleep, I was running in a philosophy marathon, attending lectures the entire night, from evening to next morning. I remembered of a conversation I had with a law professor, discussing the implications of thought crimes and the ethics of pornography after midnight. The entire night was one of the greatest moments of gathering. An ode to the grace of night, that I could expand my capacity to discuss on concepts that have been haunting my sleep (questioning the nature of the mind, the experience of an object, or reality in regards the filters of our perception?).

Rather the library this time, we ran the same marathon in the New School. It was slightly different; lectures were reduced to 20 mins and there weren’t any discussion rooms on thought experiments. I wasn’t very much engaged with their monotonous reading of philosophy papers, except for topics on color perception and critical theory. Ideally we would just go to each lecture all night, but it’s exhausting despite any modes of caffeination.

I focus more when I close my eyes into a meditation state, shutting off my visual stimuli and listen to the tone first, the content second.

But there were also a lot of explorations need to be done, like flaneuring on the vertical floors, going into empty classrooms of course. We would just stumble upon one and look down at the room where the lectures are, voyeuring and imagining the experience of those who are being watched. It is easy that our attention is scattered amidst of lectures; but I realized that I focus more when I close my eyes into a meditation state, shutting off my visual stimuli and listen to the tone first, the content second. And then I open my eyes sometimes; we walked a bit more, to the terrace where conversations foster.

Ignorance sometimes struck us like we don’t know what we ought to say.

Once in a while, you go on and bother a person who is reading a tome of some sorts. Was it Proust, Dostoevsky, or Joyce? No it was Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Then we pretend ourselves to be ignorant, to attend to what one has to say about their reading experience. Though it occurs to me that conversation likes to take place in wrong premises, like that time I tried to invite a drunk person to join our table, but he just goes on confusing himself and leading us nowhere. Ignorance sometimes struck us like we don’t know what we ought to say. So we ascends in the elevator to regain our train of thoughts, going on from pre-cognition to self-identity.

Sometimes later they were playing Bowie in the reading room. You go in and dance a bit because there’s a crowd and everybody is singing the same lyrics. The night however, eventually turns down after the last song. Going back again few hours before sunrise, the reading of John Cage’s poetry and the fusion of abstract Hip Hop. Very few do turn their hips, but I was too tired to either dance or think. Except that I ascend again, to sleep for a few while listening to Raga, to tune away from the fainting voice of a Barcelonian. I was promised sunrises, but like many gray nights, who were shrouded by clouds.