Personally, I think that once one becomes more attuned to EXPECTING any slippage OUT of centrism or (to use my term, out of the insistence on “being” and into the recognition of the presence, as it were of “nonbeing”) one finds the kind of writing or gestures that always insist on the presence of “Being” (or, to use your terms somewhat, the dialectic of satisfaction and non-satisfaction) to be lacking in some fundamental capacity for recognition . For instance, I just read an article about the MH17, which is supposed to evoke our sense of drama. The relatives said goodbye to their smiling relatives at the airport and now what remains of these travelers are just broken body parts, hardly recognizable as the people to whom they’d said farewell. But this writing does not really evoke a sense of horror, because people insist on remaining at the level of “Being” with regard to all of this, when what is really horrific is the turning of Being into Nonbeing. If a journalist were able to portray the transition of Being into Nonbeing, THAT would truly be horrifying. It would also more accurately depict what has occurred. But journalists (and most people) write in very centrist prose.
And there is also a reason for this ACTUALLY VERY SAFE LANGUAGE of centrist prose, because it is very reassuring even in the midst of death, since such language cannot really acknowledge death or come to terms with it. It is, after all, necessarily centrist – DENOTING THE LANGUAGE OF BEING, even when the words themselves STRIVE VAINLY to connote the opposite. So you end up with newspaper headlines with all the pictures of the passengers saying, “BRING THEM HOME”. That is also centrist (conventional) logic – which is the logic of presence, even in circumstances of its MANIFEST OPPOSITE (death, non-presence, non-being).
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Language, it seems always leads us to speak in terms of an illusionary presence. So much is this so that in THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC there was a huge debate among logical positivists about whether language is misleading inherently, since one can make the assertion “Pegasus does not exist”, but the use of the label, “Pegasus”, already denotes existence. Similarly, the word “dead relatives, as a result of terrorists” also evokes the notion of their existence --- and so some people remain transfixed, if not completely, at least in part.
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I think that a useful way to look at the problem (although this way also can be misused, lending itself to the naïve and mystical formulations you have been critiquing), is in terms of the solidifications of meanings that becoming linguistic conventionalism. And what is language itself, other than a solidification of conventional terms and (even) relationships? We have (to take a trivial example), “man VERSUS woman”. We have “cats” – but all “cats”, having been labeled as such, now seem somehow are the same, unless we look at them more carefully and with a discerning eye. But language itself compels us to put them in the same bracket, hence one “cat” seems interchangeable with another, even if we already KNOW on some other levels of knowledge, that this is not so. When the hypnotic spell of language is broken, however, we start to see the variations and the unpredictability and are suddenly in the second dimension of experiencing.
And I think what you are also saying, if I put it in my own words, is that the ascetic tries to enter the second dimension by denying himself satisfaction ON PRINCIPLE, but that this leads to a false light as the dialectic he creates for himself is itself false or illusionary. You can’t enlighten yourself “on principle”, because you can’t really force the issue of enlightenment. It’s much more organic than that.
That said, we can’t avoid using language, or even (because of the way our brains function) evoking the metaphysics of presence. The whole obsession that some people have with their IDENTITIES expresses a desire to stabilize themselves in reality through the use of language. It’s really very narrow, because I cannot express to you or others who I am by using language. Unless I were a very conventional person myself and allowed language to pin me down and constrain my VERY BEHAVIOR, any strong labeling of myself would be misleading.
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But “non-presence” and “non-being” – isn’t that what Poe’s Raven was trying to communicate to us? And maybe dogs also sense it, but I think the ravens do as well. I was in the park one day and one flew very low, flapping sullenly on a horizontal path, and fixed me with its steely eye.
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