The Heart and its Branches

“I do not want to know about the human heart.  I do not desire to speak at all about those indwelling, intimate reaches of the heart in which anguish is an undiminishing personal interrogation, much less to analytically enfetter those reaches.

I have the sense, the good sense, the decency, to have nothing to say.”

“Sick of all the you be’s?  Well, what do you say, you be you and I’ll be me?  What do you say?  We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead.  We can sleep while an old woman twangs away on a bad piano while rain keeps time in the empty street.  We can listen to and count the closings of a child’s fist as he tries to catch a fruit fly.  We can listen to the whistling of the bombs.  We can listen to each other.

I do not want to know about the human heart.”

“I am not a man of science.  I am not proficient in any branch of nature study.  I do not know the difference between an amphibian and a reptile.  I have no yearning for hard knowledge about the hard world.  And yet I have no affinity for anything spiritual.  In fact, I have a pronounced, conspicuous, and striking absence of an affinity for anything spiritual.

I know but one hard thing about the hard world and it is this:  from the sum of all theories, as arranged in accordance with ascertained facts, we make a few assumptions, that we have actually ascertained facts, that we are actually here to ascertain them, and that there is actually a here.”

-Percival Everett-

“Meaning is a collective phenomena…” – Jay Lemke

Material Sign Processes and Emergent Ecosocial Organization by Jay Lemke

Rhizome

Rhizome

(click for text)

with addendum: Deleuze-Guattari – Rhizome

“the word is a microcosm of human consciousness” – Lev Vygotsky

the Epilogue from Paul J. Thibault – Brain, mind, and the signifying body: an ecosocial semiotic theory

Dialogue

“You and I exchange lines of dialogue.  Each line is a trap, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by some standard upon which we  have previously agreed, if tacitly.  Thereby appears the nature of meaning.  It is a force that hazards to subjugate other forces, other meanings, other languages.  We understand this all too well and yet, and yet – well, it is like the infirmity, the defect at the base of a dam.  It will hold and it will hold and then it will give up, the dam will give up.  As do we all…

“Believe what you like.  Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me.  You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers.  Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.”

-Percival Everett-

A Meaning List

  • Mikhail Bakhtin
  • Jay Lemke
  • Lev Vygotsky
  • Humberto Maturana / Francisco Varela
  • Bruno Latour
  • Paul J. Thibault
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • Mark Bickhard
  • Charles S. Peirce
  • Roman Jakobson
  • V. N. Volosinov
  • Robert Musil
  • Kurt Ammon
  • Alan Turing
  • Jacob von Uexkull
  • Kurt Godel
  • et. al….

and not one without the other…

“The literary word resembles a person who roams at will” – Robert Musil

“The sentence not only derives its meaning from the words: the words derive their meaning from the sentence, and the relationship between page and sentence, whole work and page, is no different…the embracing and the embraced develop their meaning mutually out of each other, and the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it…”

“One can only explain that it is from all the details taken together, and through their mutual interpenetration, that the whole arises in a way that remains mysterious…a transformation of sense that eludes logic…but the meanings are related to each other, and when one grasps one meaning the others peep through beneath it…”

-Robert Musil – “Literati & Literature” –

“It is only meaningful to speak of originality where there is a tradition” – Robert Musil

“thus one could probably ‘dissect’ any writer whatever (formally, or according to subject matter, or even according to the intended meaning), and would find in him nothing but bits and pieces of his predecessors; by no means completely ‘taken apart’ and ‘newly assimilated,’ but preserved in broken shards”

“Thus in serious literature the peculiar situation emerges that the general ongoing tradition and the personal contribution of the individual cannot be separated from each other.  In this process the continuum does not grow in any dimension other than extent, nor does the personal element gain a solid position.  The whole consists of variations that randomly come to rest on each other.”

-Robert Musil, “Literati & Literature”-

Meeting the Requirements

For Friday Fictioneers – May 3, 2013

Copyright -KentBonham

Wobbling within our habitation – wandering and confused, almost wondering why, but still composing, constructing, rearranging and conceiving it again in different light at different angles in differing times from different points of view, almost like a structure or a form foaming out of content like both sides of a two-way mirror – what we’ve made of what we’re made of – making tremendous spackled multi-entried exits and shifting permeable boundaries – you push, I push, we pull – it changes – look again and reconsider, same as considering anew or forever beginning while still it’s taking shape, working it over even when we’re not working – not really – detail upon detail after detail ever only under one single purpose – to be functional.

N Filbert 2013

It’s complicated

“In a complex relationship with the environment, very similar substances with the same chemical structure can become quite different in their reality and form”

-Michael Gazzaniga-

“On the evolutionary tree, we humans are sitting at the tip of our lonely branch…We have the same roots as all living organisms.  All those similarities are there.  Our cellular processes depend upon the same biology, and we are subject to the same properties of physics and chemistry.  We are all carbon-based creatures.  Yet ever species is unique, and we are too.  Every species has answered the problem of survival with a different solution, filling a different niche…Homo sapiens entered a cognitive niche…

…in one sentence Garrison Keillor captures humanness…such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity…

BE WELL.  DO GOOD WORK.  KEEP IN TOUCH.

-Michael Gazzaniga-

Another strong recommendation from me for those interested in the what’s and how’s and some where’s and when’s of being a particular we.