Toying with significance, practicing writing by hand.
Cause of which: online graduate school (hybrid) perhaps. Blackboard (not a blackboard + a hand moving chalk), wikis, MS Word, blogosphere…
Writing is a different word than typing (“keyboarding,” “texting,” “thumbing,” “fingering?”)
Handwriting – is there another?
Writings is different from typing.
not only pacing.
Significance
“People exist
to attach importance”
Exercise.
Once I had the most beautiful pen-man-ship. Admired, envied, revered.
My hand now working by jolts and shirts (“stammering”)
Wife says I jerk in the night, in my sleep. As if the wires were hot and crossed. “Traumatic,” she says.
Like my father.
Who has elegant penmanship – consistent, beautiful, and flowing.
What I aspired to.
And achieved.
Now interruptive. Herky. Stuttering. Multi-controlled. Cross-wired.
Muscles, nerves, vision, brain + its fabricating memory and prediction: out of sync.
I exercise a few moments in which I don’t feel particularly pressured and am thinking about significance.
“I listened with great interest and desire to have it be of no significance.
But you know how it goes. Significance abounded.”
Now my thoughts arrive sturdier through a machine. Body – extension – return. The pen was extension. The ink. Dependent on the body. Embodied, enminded. Transductive.
“‘transductive’ (a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituents)”
Tools. Media.
Humanity — technology.
Me : keyboard : thought : language.
Me : pen/paper : thought : language.
Transductive. Co-constituent. Interdependent.
Significant?
Dreaming of – imagining – my recovered penmanship.
Therefore, exercise.
Communication.
Transductive.
“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention. Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change. Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present. Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning. Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical. Even if the language is unknown. Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content. Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.”
(Percival Everett)
“A metaphor cannot be paraphrased”
All my Words are Silent 