Day: March 3, 2013

The Nothingness of Symbols

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes10 Comments

a drowning.  a submersion.  a baptism (immersion)

I am drinking the arbitrary nothingness of symbols.

I am writing.

Writing is both a cry and a response.

Intuition / rationalization.

Nurtured and natural.

In the realm of symbols, I am safely between.  In the place of no safety.  The nowhere realm – a world of now here.

Where I am drowning.  Delirious.  Drunken on these symbols, arbitrary and well-developed, representative and unnecessary (?) signs.

I am alive.

Combining intellect to emotion to situation and its social constituents…I am writing, uttering, verbalizing –

– and, by chance, perhaps, you are here.

I am side-swiped.  Side-tracked.

In other words,

I set out to circumlocute on this very “subject” / “topic” / “matter”…yesterday…

resulting in a nothing of the kind.

Drowning in a limitation of symbols –

“composition,” we call it,

“For it is in the nature of language, as I have already noted briefly, that it is governed by the principle of ‘duality of functioning’,..to be more specific, the distinctive features of the sound system that constitute a language are determined by the limited set of phonemes employed in constructing the next unit up, morphemes.  And morphology is determined by the uses to which morphemes are put in forming lexemes or words.  Words, in their turn, are formally describable by the functions they perform in sentences.  Sentences, in turn, achieve their significance from the discourse in which they are embedded.  Discourse is governed by the communicative intentions of the speakers.  The communicative intentions of speakers, of course, are governed by the transactional requirements of the culture.  And along the way, there are further determinants of form that operate in this same way…”

-Jerome Bruner-

That sickness, that plenitude, those realistic illusions – as if one were totally absorbed in the unrealities of the human way of being-in-the-world.

“the world is not what we thought it was”

-Jim Harrison-

There will be a day my sons will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

My spouse will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

There is a word for things that hold too much (e.g. “things that can hold no more”)

Things at, or beyond, capacity.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  They are drunk, drowned, saturate.

And still there are fresh occurrences.

There are also #s, codes, algorithms, symbols…

I like the idea of doing something that matters, of being someone that matters, of my strange happenstance of existing as an organism having some effect, making some verifiable difference in a larger web of existing things

liking the idea certainly doesn’t make it so

and yet, perhaps,

My intention had been to talk about the wonder…

…that out of 26 letters…

this many years (generations, eons)

and variety

had even occurred.

Was all.

that meaning, is interesting, is cool

that, to (lil’ ol’) me…

it’s amazing…!

in 26 letters

#s, symbols, diagrams

we keep constructing…

Being Human – Voracious, Delusional, Fantastic

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Philosophy9 Comments

I get a little weary of philosophy.  It fascinates and intrigues, has its spectacular, glittering moments of what feels like beauty and “accomplishment” – like architecture, the sciences and arts, studies human and social and hard.  But with each human activity and behavior there can be too much of a good thing.  Perhaps it’s the fantasies involved in abstraction – in the feeling of “figuring things out,” or of “making sense” – our human super-additives to experience that are also experience themselves – that I, at times, weary of.  That eminently falsifiable intuition that everything is made up.

web perhaps called “self”
imagined universal web of matter & energy

It is extremely hard work to keep up a worldview.  Involving enormous complexities and details, layer up on layer and strand interweaving strand of biological and logical, illogical, psychological, irrational, emotional, – ologies and descriptions, manipulated perceptions and re-interpretations of interpretations reinterpreted (ad infinitum) – it takes matter and energy, and particular organisms, which grow tired.

Those same realities, capacities and activities are also extremely inspiring, enervating and exciting for organisms – the behaviors of productivity, creativity, imagination and survival – and our weird confounding capacity to think we can observe our perceptions/observations to an infinite regress, make for a very strange frenzy of energy and matter indeed.

In a possibly (?!) infinitely webbed interdependence with our surround copious possibilities of activity are available – all bewildering: chaos can be so generative.  Chaos can be so nullifying.

What might we know?

And why do we want to?

  • That we are organism within dynamic systems?  (How would we know that, from within the systems?)
  • That we are dynamic organisms alongside other dynamic forms of matter and energy?  (Sometimes seems to be our sense of it – that we might somehow step aside – wha-?!)

and…so…what!?

Alongside and within – in order to be – apparently (that is, according to OUR OWN perceptions) – however would could we exist either detached (abstracted) or without (independently, unattached).   To imagine distance, “objectivity,” without the imaginative capacities of fantasy – illusions – for example logic, mathematics, economics, philosophy, psychology – codes and symbols – DElusions in order to play the games in these forms of life we are with delusional sincerity – effectively.  And our fantastic delusions or profound poeitic creations are often effective, productive, pragmatic, dynamic and evolving – techniques and time – which would seem to imply that they also are part of being within a myriad of dynamic systems…

…one might suppose (i.e. “hypothesize”); or infer (i.e. “fantasize”)

All an immersion in symbols – languages – stipulated relations – codified behaviors –

– which is what I had set out to consider

drowning in symbols

the wonder and bewilderment of it

the sense of delusion and ecstasy

being human…