Joseph Young 1980-2009
I first met Joe shortly before the start of the MA in Continental Philosophy at the
This interweaving of journeys in literary and philosophic intensities with journeys in the extensities of space and history proved highly eventful. Joe was in
‘I travelled up the Amazon and saw the sunset at its basin, I hunted caimon by torchlight, found tarantulas in trees, saw Anacondas in the waters, caught a piranah … and, one halcyon morning, I took a dug-out into the waters of a quiet tributary and read “Heart of Darkness” all alone in the wild centre of a lake… I strolled the heart of colonial Peruvian towns, I took a small boat out in Lake Titicaca and met people who had for centuries lived on islands made of reeds, just floating in the freezing wind, I bought a charm from an old lady… I took a dilapidated bus across the plains and saw unimagined forgotten villages enshrouded by snow-capped mountains, […] … I scaled the height of Machu Picchu and looked down with heavy eyes upon a lost civlization now ratted with creeping tourists… and I forged my own path down through the jungle, my own way in thought, and thought about Neruda and solitude and the coming events of our world… I sit here in an airport lounge and think of these things, these things but a tiny piece of all that’s happened every day over the last few months and I look at where I’m going. I can’t seem to make sense of all the connections…’
Joe rarely sought to publish his writing and often deleted or destroyed his work, echoing Franz Kafka and Ludwig Wittgenstein in his approach to his own oevre. This stemmed from a creativity that always demanded a ‘clearing of the ground’, that wasn’t to be encumbered by any body of work. He was never satisfied with what he had done in the past and practiced ‘creative destruction’ in order that the ground should be cleared for unencumbered creativity. In an e-mail from Laos he wrote …
‘… I decided that the most important thing for me to do was strip away the layers in life and get back to the real core of my existence, tear away the superfluous thought and rediscover some ontologically pure core and be satisfied with it, use it as a platform for thought …’.
Like Jean-Paul Sartre he sold or gave away books, sometimes to people he met at the bus stop or in a café and with whom he had enjoyed a conversation. Related to this was a search for roots but not roots in the conventional or romantic sense. Instead it was a search for roots in the sense that Martin Heidegger professed when he sought the ‘ontological’ rather than the ‘ontic’, the source of the world’s creativity and of the givenness of the world rather than what is given or accumulated in the world. This source is not to be confused with what is given in the world but with the giving of the world as such. Hence the creative destruction that subjected even Joseph’s own work to critique and deletion. This rigor and purity animated him in a creative practice that is extremely rare. He perpetually moved on in his thought and experience, in ideas and places, so as to be equal to the creation of the world, to be attuned to creativity on its own terms.
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