INTRODUCTION

The pages that appear on this blog were not meant for publication.  They were compiled largely haphazardly as raw material for a book to be titled Dystress: Through the Language Glass Falsely … Moribundly.  (Dsystress: dys-+ stress, i.e., faulty grammatical stress.)  Even so, the compilation’s absence of organization was itself not haphazard but planned. It was meant to serve two purposes: the necessity of my continuing to write–when I do my most productive thinking, which leads to unexpected problems while also sowing the seeds of resolving them–and at the same time providing my editor to be, a cherished friend of long standing, enough material to work with, roughly the fifty pages he’d suggested. We were to start work in late January.

While vacationing in Europe with his young bride in December last year, she was injured in a skiing mischance. The reports of the severity of her accident were punctuated two or three times over as many months by hopeful reports, each in time disappointed. He eventually told me that he couldn’t work up the freedom of mind to begin a literary collaboration.  He then recommended an editor to me, with whom he’d spoken of my project.

The misfortune that befell him practically on his honeymoon struck me as a personal sorrow, and it put an end to my desire to continue my project.  Aside from the bonds of friendship between us, of the more than a handful of people personally known to me whose view on my work-in progress I would value, he was the only one whose judgement of it–which entailed some unheard-of, even never-suspected, questioning of a large corpus of sacred beliefs, the secular kind included–I had enough confidence in to act according to: continue or discard.

Having repeatedly heard my reluctance to work with another editor and having come to know that I needed some feedback to continue, he recommended I give my “hypothesis” exposure.  “If it’s good it will be noticed.”  That led to the ways in which in the digital age such exposure can best be accomplished, with overlapping excursions by me on whether my raw material was worth exposure. “If it’s bad it’ll die an anonymous death, with no harm done; if it’s good its merits will out even as raw material,” he said laughing, repeating almost verbatim what I ‘d said to him once on a subject far from literary.” He even suggested that I had something like an ethical obligation to make my efforts known despite the writing being, under the circumstances, slapdash. I’m honoring his wish.

A considerable part of my “hypothesis,” to use my friend’s precise word, I have not worked out in my mind yet, which is to say that large swaths of it remain terra incognita to me.  But through the work I’ve grown by degrees more confident that I can master and illuminate the still elusive, those parts of it that are given to illumination. Certain core spokes of my wheel-hypothesis, however, anchored in the hub and the rim, are all-too clearly, if still inartistically, articulated.

I’m not a literary man, to say the necessary obvious, nor with any ambition ever to become one, although in the flush of youthful enthusiasm, so long ago, when literature was a solace, I did wish I could someday write a single book that would endure.  Which prompts a thought: now that I’m nearing the end of my seventh decade, when, it’s fair to assume, I may have more years behind me than ahead, I should not delay my project–which has been occupying my mind for five decades in narrower, cruder, more rudimentary forms–much longer.

The kindling for my enterprise are literary journals, American and British, largely of the book-reviewing variety. That’s where I see distinguished novelists and critics speak of fictions and fables, heartfelt and indelible—or what I’ve come to believe are (likely) fictions and fables. Given the high station these literary critics are afforded, one imagines that they have long been persuasive to a large audience and will now coast further on their cachet.  That together with their critical innocence one sees, not infrequently, depth and sometimes gift, admirably delightful, is what makes reading them, in the end, a sad experience.  What would they be capable of offering if they broke free from those centuries- or millennia-long hoax-woven ensarements!

The post immediately following the Introduction is a register of judgments by historical figures that have guided our lives, sometimes over the ages or millennia, each given a revision, or “correction,” by me.  The arguments for the purported corrections are given over time in individual posts, sometimes under larger rubrics.  Many of these “corrections” emerge out of a veer from descretism—the greatest crime of which is the murder of the negational–to contrastism (both to be expounded later; for a preview of the latter, see “Newton corrected,” next post, “To Err Is …”), one of the two pillars of my hypothesis, which must be subsumed under a panoptic axiom (see “Nietzsche corrected,” also in the next post). The post after the register takes up the specific question of dystress, which marks the inception of my wanderings, in my youth, my memory of them, and my protocol-causerie proper.

In the half century during which no wished-for Dystress Slayer–a Knight Undystresser, a Knight Rectress–has appeared among us, my wanderings have taken me beyond dystress/rectress and, for the moment, to a few axiom-doppelgangers. (Rectress: rect[i]+(st)ress: correct grammatical stress.)

One mental destination in my wanderings is a hypothesis (or theory) of truth. It takes its lead from pulsating daily existence.  But, remaining true to life, it is ethically ambiguous. Yet its inherent inability to provide an ethical guidance–together with some repeated instances of allusiveness that withstand every skeptical assault, and with “the resurrection of the negational”–seems to be a signpost to the validity of an asserted religious truth, not given to being proved on the plane of logic.

You’ll see that I write often as if I’ve come to believe the views I’m expressing.  This is not the case. My doubts about the views you read on this blog are significant.  It is rather a mode of expression that, as long as I alert the reader to it, frees me and spares the reader from a qualification every third sentence, which may itself require a disclaimer. Then, also, and for similar reasons, my project forces me, with a welcoming bow, to mostly large strokes, dispensing with minutiae. I will of course present these ideas, if they turn out to merit it, in a carefully organized, well-written book that, hopefully, will earn the right to rest on your bedside table for a night or two.

For all that, I don’t rule out the possibility that I’m building a sand wheel.  But even if it turns out I’m doing precisely that, I still make a single claim, which is ultimately the justification for my undertaking: that one or two thoughts in the pages that follow, notwithstanding their sorry state, deserve to be paused over by thinking people–even if it is to refute those thoughts.

Christopher Janfal                                                                                                                  New York City, July 30, 2023