Author: Alias Harlequin
"Arrange whatever pieces come your way" - Virginia Woolf
"Thinking about language, while thinking IN language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes" -James Gleick
"a word is a bridge thrown between myself and another...a territory shared" - V.N. Volosinov
"How words are understood is not told by words alone" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
How People are Made
How People are Made: Relation and the Myth of Anonymity
- Jonathan Franzen wrote a book entitled “How to Be Alone.”
- Here is the sunset as I drove to this spot to write. It is Kansas. This is not uncommon.
- Donne: “no man is an island.”
There is no shame to it. How many participants in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr? How many millions “chat,” “text,” visit sex or dating sites? It’s the history of communication, as I’m considering it. Gesture, sound, scent, language. Writing, correspondence, law, artefact. Telephone, computer, Pony Express, gmail. Travel. “Solitary walks.” Family. Friendship.
There IS NO HOW to be alone.
There is no ALONE to BEING.
I have been trying to be “alone.” Unattached. Separated. Theoretically, “divorced”: “dissolute,” “diverted,” “turned aside.” TO MYSELF, in-divid-ual. There is nothing there. No one. I AM UNIDENTIFIABLE outside of RELATIONSHIP.
At one time I considered this a weakness, a co-dependence, some personal immaturity. ANONYMITY (Related words: oblivion; inconspicuousness; invisibility; invisibleness; insignificance…”) DOES NOT EXIST. (or we do not).
I’ve watched the movie “Her” four times this week. I continue to breathe. I listen to, feed, tuck in, taxi my children. I feed the dogs. I lay in a bed. I drink water. I move, in air. I rely on ground, on floors, on walls, on doors, on oxygen. When no children or dogs or phone calls or “people” (humans, organisms) need my attention… I read, I write, I sit on chairs, walk, think, imagine, breathe, murmur, eat, exercise, “think.” THERE IS NOT ONE THING I DO WITHOUT OTHER THINGS. THERE IS NOT ONE THING THAT IS ME. THERE IS NOT ONE THING. THERE IS NOT ONE. (there is only one?). (“I” takes its shape from what surrounds it).
If you click into social media and comment. If you press the “chat” button. If you text or shoot an email. If you “answer.” If you read, write, compose, move. If you “think,” “imagine,” “daydream,” “fantasize,” – IT REQUIRES INTERACTION. MORE THAN YOUR”SELF.” Did I ever doubt that “self” existed as a SOMEthing, I would now state it as a tenet of my core beliefs: I believe: THERE IS NO SELF. “SELF” IS A CO-CONSTRUCTED ENTITY. THERE IS NO “SELF” WITHOUT “OTHER,” AND “SELF” BECOMES, INTERACTING.
Here’s the gist of this. As soon as a comment is posted, as soon as symbols typed, words breathed through sound, keys struck, a step taken, a breath inhaled, mark interpreted, sound perceived, an IDENTITY (the “identification” of an organism) occurs. Imagined, pretend, hoped-for, deceptive – NO MATTER – ACTIVITY BECOMES an organism – particularized. What is “I” utilizes and processes air from around me, utilizes and operates upon matter surrounding and constituting me, and TAKES ITS SHAPE IN RELATION TO WHATEVER IT INTERACTS WITH.
Otherwise, there is NO. Simply NO. I cannot think un-interactively. I cannot move sans interaction. I cannot BE alone, an island. There simply IS no HOW TO BE ALONE. No option exists for us. We are WITH, or we are NOT.
If you respond…you take on identity – are identified – you can twist, shape, invent, pretend, co-create that “self” through chat, gesture, speech, writing, breathing, reading, hearing, moving, INTERACTION – WE ARE IDENTIFIED (given “identities”) VIA INTERACTION. Otherwise, we are simply NOT. DO NOT EXIST. Not “don’t matter,” not “invisible,” not “ignored,” not “anonymous” (all identities in themselves) – simply NOT.
I used to want to be someONE. A writer, a man, a husband, a father, a thinker, artist, philosopher, significant, meaningful, AN IDENTITY, A PERSON. I CANNOT BE something on my own, alone, to-myself. Without oxygen, carbon, gravity, hydrogen, DNA, plasma, neurons, (energy + matter in specific combinations)…I’M JUST NOT. And that carries through from the atom to the identity to the universe. Whatever BEING I might be, can be, AM – depends. DEPENDS. UTTERLY DEPENDS. On each and every moment of interaction. And is CO-CREATED in each and every interaction. There is no STATIC, no CORE, no SELF (not even a possible way to get one’s “self” ALONE/APART from world to try to discover “WITH” oneself WHO one is – IF we are ALIVE – we ARE ALWAYS INTERACTING) – no singular ID-ENTITY. “I” is an organism identified by each interaction…
“I” AM A ROVING (DYNAMIC) BECOMING
…and nothing without you
…thank you ALL for shaping a self out of/into me…
“Reality does not exist beyond the activity and interactivity of systems” – Humberto Maturana Romesin, Fundamental Relativity: Reflections on Cognition and Reality
Modality Independence
the wonders to consider… thank you Multisense!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech
A striking feature of language is that it is modality-independent. Should an impaired child be prevented from hearing or producing sound, its innate capacity to master a language may equally find expression in signing […]
This feature is extraordinary. Animal communication systems routinely combine visible with audible properties and effects, but not one is modality independent. No vocally impaired whale, dolphin or songbird, for example, could express its song repertoire equally in visual display. “
This would be hard to explain if consciousness were due to information processing, as we would expect all communication to share a common logical basis. The fact that only human language is modality invariant suggests that communication, as an expression of consciousness is local to aesthetic textures rather than information-theoretic configurations.
Since only humans have evolved to create an abstraction layer that cuts across aesthetic modalities, it would appear that between aesthetic modality and…
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“Determining Gapless Playback”
Might it indeed be we passing through world as world makes its way through us?
In other words, we walk along, and call it “moon,” but once we’ve passed it goes on in its nameless and momentous being?
Likewise “Holly,” “daughter,” “self,” … “being”?
And anything else to which we lend ideas?
If “lending” (for practical purposes)
is not dictation.
.
Incise. Excise. Decide. – a definition.
Who of you likes to be told what you are?
Who of us can be? Even by our (many) selves?
Erosion, take two
II.
This is the story of how I began telling the truth. The truth I defined as “two truths and at least one lie.” The truth of my experience.
Poets often carry sorrow in their sockets – some underlying angst influencing attention. There’s sclera, iris, pupil, and a deepening mirror of perceived pain…or seared “ego.” Grief or grudge – and difficult to distinguish.
As much as there is to learn or to know, some simple patterns give the slip. Once you figure a composing context, the information is derived. Look out for what might constitute survival for each respective entity. Aim your inquiry there.
Parents hurt as much as heal. As do love and risk and wisdom (or well-being). All that is given in life is also taken away – exactly when it is given.
Everyone canvasses sorrow. The surgeons in their trembling hands, the librarians in their order. The therapist’s reflective stance, architect’s angles, businessman’s mettle. We all know that we’re going to die. Celebrities in their acclaim, the athletes in their strength, and whores in their affection. Everything is risk.
What = Now
EROSION
“to change patterns…expose the wounds…”
– Charlie Kaufman –
1. Truth is…truth was…truth is…
And this was the daily game of Reality-Telling…two truths with at least one lie. A morning-midday-evening list-assembling of continuous is-was-ises. Spilled coffee, set aright, sopped with towel. Triples. Thing – thing – relation. So many relations revising so many “things.” Complicating, co-creating, is-was-is.
“Change is never lossless,” it was written. Once comforted by the is of experience – that no matter the grief or anguish, no matter the disaster or rift, the poverty or destruction – experience kept accruing. “Experience is additive even in reduction.” Even deletion adds to experience. Isn’t it nice to know that regardless of what or who or how – for every living thing – at least something accumulates? Grows richer, more varied, expands?
But how calculate that every addition is reductive? That the raw fact of everything adding up = losing? At least this is one way of working the figures. An instant added is an instant taken away. “The Lord giveth…”
The very momentariness, unquantifiability of what happens seems to attest to this. Two precisely equal processes, or hands. The one inviting and offering, delivering; the other letting-go, sweeping aside, and waving goodbye. Moment in, moment past. Experience added, one less experience to have.
Life as a riverbank – new deposits and constant erosion.
The truth is: experience
The truth was: experience brought exactly what it took away
The truth is: experience
(therefore): NOW =
And thus it is known that living is equal to dying and “He who would save his life will lose it” is just a simple fact. Dying is equal to living. It all happens in the same instant. One step further = one step nearer to something else.
Sometimes people smile when they’re together. Sometimes they don’t. And sometimes other things happen.
You
Me. We are that we are, how we are, when we are, who.
What has gurgled in me throughout this week, and made it somewhat difficult to post much, is that I ran into these burls. Grief, change, adaptation, struggle – they all push us up against, or cause us to deny or flee from, these knots, these boundaries, these fabrications of how things ARE, how we’d wish they were, or could be. In myself, these evidence as anxieties, fears, verges of hopelessness. With the help of others – my children and their presentness, their being-into (ecstasy), being-out, unique ways of being-with – my therapist, and many other well-intentioned voices and persons who want good for me… I come to see that MOSTLY it’s ME and these burls, these knots, these imagined borders and boundaries in myself – MY IDEAS OF HOW IT WOULD BE NICE FOR THINGS TO BE, my ideas of my “self/ves,” my organismic survival instincts and ancestral tactics – that dislodge me, silence me, THAT I UTILIZE (choose or select) to withhold and diminish and undo my opportunities to be-in, be-with, be-out, be-for the rest of you – the world, my children, my work, my self/ves.
So I’ve been termiting around in these burls. Wondering how do I undo habit, instinct, ancient patterns of stanching, stoppering, limiting a potential flow of the world and my surround and my relationships and my knowledge and my emotions and my beliefs and my feelings and my thoughts and my dreams and my fears and my anger and my sorrow and my regret and my terror and my joy – work WITH those facts… and begin to erode my selections and choices of UNDOING and LIMITING and FEARING and DIMINISHING and instead tear or leap off these quantitative scales of evaluation, these assessments, these CVs and criteria – and JOIN. JOIN. OFFER. GIVE. BRING. SHOW UP. BE.
CHOOSE – slowly, granularly, deliberately, carefully, wildly – to INVITE the world (as it is) THROUGH, and OFFER the world (as it is) THROUGH…
ME
for…to…with…
YOU
…and All.
I don’t even have to reflect to be able to say that Synechdoche, NY – a film by Charlie Kaufman – is my favoritest made movie of my lifetime, or even of all time for my lifetime. And as I burrow in these burls of grinding away at the resistances, the terrors, the wishes, and the ecstasies of being a human alive, stumbling across this short lecture of his has been an invaluable gift. I do not know how to improve on it, so I let it pass THROUGH me… to you…
“Acceptance is nothing less
than the complete transformation
of what one has believed to be one’s self
and one’s reality.”
– Cheri Huber –
The Idea of Maturity (continued) – “Have a ‘good enough’ day”
“Since early years I have been cursed or blessed with a habit of mind – a character defect it may be – that likes to turn over problems that have no solution, or at least no solution that can be provided outside of thought itself (if there).”
– John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding –
This concept of “maturity” as I encountered it in John Armstrong’s Conditions of Love is caught like a burl in my system. Maturity as “not the idea, but the actual reduction of expectation.” Maturity is reductive. Is that so? Is the process of human living a progress of delimitation, scoping the range of experience to our actual organismic potentials? Process, progress, growth not expansive, extending operations, but boundarying and restraining limitations to our hopes?
I take my “problems” to my therapist. They always come back to me changed. “And what are the sources of expectation?” he asked. “Expectation is sourced in the past / oriented toward the future,” he answered. “If you reduce it – “YOU. ARE. HERE.”
Whenever I “get” something like that, I noticed I want to take off with it. Like a skipping stone, I feel inspired and start leaping the surface of things – making connections with this concept and that image, this thinker and that artist, that idea and this experience… activating PATTERNS from my past and projecting POSSIBILITIES toward the future… LEAVING THE PRESENT.
My therapist/guru(?) has been investigating the neuroscience of enlightenment – or being awake to reality / the actual…
…and working with the brain and body to (perhaps) soak or sink there
rather than skip along the surface from PAST toward FUTURE
My helpmeet described this as an interesting and fascinating capacity of brains excited by the ineffable to apply TOP-DOWN (or metacognitive, reflective, intentional attention, interpretive) strategies to BOTTOM-UP (automatic, subconscious, pattern-oriented, limbic or reactionary, survival-based) strategies in order to, in a way, burl them – mesh them – unite them with WHAT IS – the Umwelt – our actual EXPERIENCE of BEING a living organism PRESENTLY.
We NEED both strategies to survive, and thrive. Much of our life-world is uncertain and unknown to us – much we will never KNOW in any sense like “understand” or “comprehend.” Life constantly HAPPENS. We are quite limited, reduced, in our capacity to TAKE-IN, ABSORB, “com-prehend” (apprehend-with) all that our life-bubbles afford us and confront us with each moment… We NEED the emotive, reactive, pattern-based knee-jerk reactions to navigate much that could be life threatening (thought not much IS these days – WHAT IF something IS?)…no time to reflect or discourse or meta-cognize it if a car or snake or fire is about to strike you… but we also NEED the reflective, metacognitive capacities to distinguish between what is ACTUALLY life-threatening and what is ONGOING EXPERIENCE – opportunity – potential to comprehend, learn, understand, adapt, adjust, in-corporate, BE WITH.
That middle-point : tension-place : meeting-space (“like the appropriate tension of a string on a violin” he said) is perhaps where Armstrong’s maturity IS. Reduced to the present, what’s happening, our actualizing experience – NOT skipping the surface of automated connections drawn from past experience and projected toward possible futures…
In other words (again, in his words)
On Change, Perception and the Idea of Maturity
John Armstrong’s The Conditions of Love is obviously far from through with me, and I with it. My encounter with this writing has challenged me in so many ways. Principally, I think, in querying my bases of knowledge in neuroscience, literature, philosophy, psychology and art – and struggling what is known (or supposed, or observed) in these disciplines toward our lived experience of love, of loss, of change, of survival. Our brains, our stories, our bodies are all so very highly attuned to patterns in our world, perception, experience…how does that work itself out in our lives of loving and losing, changing and adapting? What is difficult, what is beautiful in such behavior and practice? What do domain-specific, developed human disciplines offer us in our mind/body organismic goings-on?
Enormous changes…you could say…REQUIRE all sorts of perspectival changes.
If only, simply, to adapt to the new WORLDS initiated by the universe-altering adjustments that major life changes (positive, negative, or, usually, BOTH) introduce: couplings and separations / relocations / employment, vocation, education / grief, loss, birth, reduction, addition / success and failure and so on…
Our experiential/perceptual “worlds” have been aptly described and ascribed as Umwelten (see also – Paul Bains, Primacy of Semiosis). In drastically simplified form: the concept that we are (each sort of organism) evolved in such a way as to perceive and engage with that in our environments that pertains to our survival and flourishing, our continuance of existence. Those elements or that structuring and interacting with what we select out of our replete environments and surroundings – including ourselves – constitutes our Umwelt – our little “life-world” – species-specific bubble of “reality” (what is real to us, for us).
The sorts of change(s) that provoke potential for maturity tend (I think) to be changes that evince larger (or larger-scaled) patterns of experience and events (although all the minute alterations ever occurring – to the attentive and aware – also constitute mature adaptations for the human – the meditator recognizes the flux in each moment and works to adapt to this flux with openness and acceptance) – in other words, such things as by their very occurrence create/disrupt/introduce significant and substantial structural alterations – profoundly unavoidable – changes to the content AND context of the individual organisms perceptual/experiential SURROUND.
Changes (like those listed above) that, if NOT adapted or adjusted to, evidence a socially recognizable UNreality – a person clearly maladapted to the realities of their situations. An example would be CHANGE or DIE; ADAPT or FAIL in some socially undeniable sense.
ADAPTING – in a “to-obvious-Umwelt-alteration-sense” is what I comprehend as an instance of maturity (a la Armstrong).
The loss of a child or spouse or health or limb. New employment, habitat, geography. Freshly developed abilities, knowledge, or lost capacities or income. New love, memory, trauma – and so on – all represent an altered human Umwelt – adaptation to the ever-changing “reality” would be an instance of maturity – while maladaptation/denial/resistance would be a kind of instantiation of insanity – dis- or mis-alignment/-integration/-accordance to the altered Umwelt/environment/world-circumstance/perceivable “reality.”
Maturity then is our relatively accurate adjustment and adaptation to – our expectations and perceptions – to the “realities” of our ALWAYS-changing life-world.
I think Armstrong is right that we have a love/hate relationship to maturity. It is something I (we?) HATE and HOPE for – the changes in our personal and public worlds so mostly beyond our control – air quality, abandonment, accident, reward, attention, ignor-ance, and so on. As he puts it: “maturity is not the idea but the actual reduction of expectation. That is why we fear as well as desire maturity.” I question whether the adaptation is always “reductive” – in some cases, where we tend to be ruled by “patterns” (our past, our available information, our individual perceptions, our nature/culture development, etc.) maturity would constitute expanding, extending and opening our perceptions to the wider, complex and dynamic possibilities of an ever-changing life-world (I think).
For myself: I HATE it (the death and loss implied in honest, authentic reductive maturity – mapping my individuality to my actual surroundings and situations) – I often resent and resist the ongoing change – erosion and eruptions – of the world I’m embedded in. AND I WELCOME it – the reality-check of it, the alteration, breath, fresh potentials of “new worlding” that constant change instigates and offers.
As if our “realities” were 1000 plateaus – layered, indistinct, overlapping, vague and enmeshed. As if “reality” were only (for me) what is perceivable (to me) and a dramatically altered Umwelt STRIKES into me whole new wild conceptions of what the world might be. Reduction / Expansion. Every change offers this. The death (amputation, loss, etc.) and birth (regeneration, appendices, new growth). Every vacancy corresponds with potential and unknown occupancy and vice-versa…
Or so I’m thinking…at this moment in this circumstance…
“Questioning places us in relation with what evades every question and exceeds all power of questioning…it seems that we question more than we are able to question”
-Maurice Blanchot-
…and so it goes…
All my Words are Silent 