Category: change
To 2016
I am uncertain why I am sharing this, it comes from a personal email response to a friend, but as I was writing it, things that were coming up resonated profoundly in me. Composition just does this for me. I suppose I want it on public record for my own remembering. That I learn things about me, that change is possible, that decay is transformative. Okay then I am posting a personal reflection for myself – to declare it more widely in lieu of a personal social group.
“leaning upon nothing because nothing offers support”
-Maurice Blanchot-
The following is a response to a scholarly conversation regarding philosophy, science, cognition and so on…entirely out of place or sync, but seemed a personal confession on the passage of time and what it reveals…
Greetings —-. It is good to hear from you. I’ve been inundated per usual with family activities – good and tiring – and disorienting to my habits of reflection to some extent. Feeling a bit bewildered re: semester start-up and the madness it brings, and yes, missing ANY considered interaction and dialogue. I feel lucky to have encountered you.
Wee, random breaks and work-from-home days incite my nostalgia and bodily recall of creating creative work in language. I ache for it. Loss of its regularity is a depletion that changes me. But then I read, “the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay” from a book about butterflies. And “we have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning” from a commentary on it by Rebecca Solnit, a fine book – A Field Guide to Getting Lost that I like to read while traveling.
I suppose as the library is closed and our work quiet and insect-like on research, curriculum, and admin reports back here…my sociality turns to the work of being open and refusing stress in interacting with my beautiful children. Which clicks onward into the ever-insistent questioning I face regarding whether there are adult relationships that can be predominately nourishing or reciprocally intimate. Do we offer one another boon? Any of us? Our interactions have consistently done so, and I am very thankful to you for that. So much conversation wears on me with the subterfuge and maneuvering to get anywhere near meaningful discourse. I suppose I am tired, and perhaps in a strain of melancholy. The wishing I could sit back with a drink and listen to intelligent talk without necessity of defense or critical acumen. Just enjoying that we can. Imagine and inform one another as humans. I want this to mean something for me. To mean I go about things variantly, shy from exhaustion and welcoming to possibilities. From where does this determination to endure come from? To “make the most of” idle repartee, body language, archaeology of behaviorisms and attitudes, – supplying too much (or inordinately) in order to learn in situations. I dream of the luxury of perception and interpretation without analysis. Reception. Or where analysis co-creates itself. Mutuality. Enjoyment versus labor. Or an effortless labor to enjoy. Ahem. Off-track and losing…
All this, I suppose, to apologize for my lack of acumen in the dear and full emails you and —- have provided…and probably an explanation of my messages of links rather than thought. Others’ works as hopefully substantial stand-ins for my intellectual lack or confusion. I do not know where the path is at present. Just spinning in a lot of literature and activity. Confession.
Trying to view decay in a hopeful manner. The slow tears in relationality that introduce distances. From friends, to partners, to ‘self’ – the flux of it all. Many seem to have a greater capacity than I for working thematically regardless of internal/external context. More flexible beings, I suppose, less bound by circumstance and scenario. Ah well, this is no relevant response to your missals. Apologies. They enliven me – simply that thought and invention are going on around me – so please share them all as they arise – it is a great matter of hope for me to watch thought and process in others. A stay against loneliness. Thank you. As I age along, some confusions do seem to dissipate…particularly confusions of my own blindnesses. What nourishes me: intimacy (emotional, intellectual and physical), the thought and imaginative work of others, people striving to process experience on multiple levels, quiet & rest & reflection. The commerce of ideas and bodies – entangled minds and bodies – passion and gentleness and reflection. When these dissipate or decay or are absent in some strange idiosyncratic equilibrium, life is just harder for me to insist on. And how terribly crucial the activity of writing is for me in my own ability to process my experiencing. A weird alchemical embodied activity for me that seems to bring forth learning, feeling, imagination and all those characteristics I would like to take root in myself, to be me. I am better when I write. Better when I love. Better when I rest. Better with meaningful dialogue. All sounds simple and general, but revealed ever more insistently to me as my epidermis thins.
Another turn of the wheel, bellows to the desire to thrive before the end.
To 2016 then. And hope.
Something better soon.
The Dual Activity of the Properties of Erosion
Having traveled 2000 miles: Wichita – to – Carlsbad, NM – to – Guadalupe Mountains Nat’l Park – to – Presidio, TX – to – Big Bend National Park – to – Wichita in the past few days, I was privy to the glories of erosion. What it builds, what it wears away.
My 10-year-old is studying erosion in 4th grade and reminds me that the current definition is simply the movement of material. What dwindles somewhere accretes in another…
and leaves or creates (absence or presence of absence?) some glorious ruins (or productions)…
In an accidental synchrony, we traveled the paths of a favorite album of mine – This Will Destroy You – This Will Destroy You, and the following clip has long moved me, perhaps as much as any music ever has…
…ever reminding me of how I’d like my living dying to go…the movements and decaying – its constructions – the thickened gradual swelling of the deep good of being alive, punctuated by weighty whiles of thriving and ecstasy, momentous significants of loss or gain, as materials move and their relations alter / evolve / generate and decompose. Its insistence and tocking inevitability. The (hopefully) delta-like depositing of the full lot, spreading throughout, in its end…
Here’s to our living-dying onlyness…and wishes toward beautiful erosion.
The Need for Help
“I am affected not just by this one other or a set of others, but by a world in which humans, institutions, and organic and inorganic processes all impress themselves upon this me who is, at the outset, susceptible in ways that are radically involuntary. The condition of the possibility of my exploitation presupposes that I am a being in need of support, dependent, given over to an infrastructural world in order to act, requiring an emotional infrastructure to survive. I am not only already in the hands of someone else before I start to work with my own hands, but I am also, as it were, in the ‘hands’ of institutions, discourses, environments, including technologies and life processes, handled by an organic and inorganic object field that exceeds the human”
- – Judith Butler –
“Help!?”
He cried, it cried, I cried. But help, it will not come, for me. And why should it? Who could owe me assistance, and why? And what would it benefit another? Even how might the crying become? Often silent, unheard; a gesture or tone; a constant “I am unable to do this alone.” There’s no reason. No reason that someone might help me.
Help has come. Many times, and that greatly. Otherwise I would not be alive. Irrational, inconceivable, as ‘last measure,’ – the cry’s been expressed, even shouted or posted: “I need help or we will not survive!” And it’s come. Never “I.” The yelp always weighted with “we.” In deep over my head as a man, as a father, a worker and thinker as well – always “help!?” Needing contact or touch or attention. Needing hearing or care or advice. Needing teaching, protection, support. Needing money or sitters or transport. Needing food. Needing shelter. Such needs.
I need help. “I.”
Whatever effects or affects, I believe that I do try to help. To have food for my children, and beds. To respond to emotional traumas, disturbs – to hear and attend and comply. To love others embodied and minded. Within (my) reason, I do what I can to assist, especially those gathered about me. I experience my’self’ as RESPONSE-able – once engaged there’s a sense that I must. Some say that we choose to do good – but I question. Many insist we always have choice, yet I seem unable to abandon or neglect, unless, perhaps, my “self” or theoretically. I am prone to the “people are people” – shaped by time and engagements – to behave in the world as they are, and continue the way that they be (in small measure). The issues of scale and of time. We do what we can to survive. Some prone to survival of others, some not. Depends on the value of “self,” so it seems. I help, which develops that value (I hope). To think I might matter, be dependable/depended on, be important – to someone, somewhere, at some time. Survive.
And I notice myself ever howling for help. Help!? As I age, I distinguish the needs. Need for contact and talk – to think and to feel; needing help with evolving demands. “Man,” “parent,” “student,” “professional,” – all extensions of what I once was – just a “human.” I can’t even survive being that, let alone all these complex designations. Artificial “helps” like alcohol or nicotine, religious belief or “self-help” seem to do as much harm as relief. As babies and aged we are weakened…our “primes” occasioned by a nexus of supports. In our weakness, we comprehend need(s).
I need. “Help!?”
Without knowing what it is or might look like. I know that I’m drowning. I age. I know no one owes it, the benefits would have to be rationalized. I fail. I can’t go on. I must go on. I go on.
You must go on, that’s all I know.
They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
You must go on.
I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.
–Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
A little secret
i hope all that goes into keeping me alive, is worth it
A Provisional Writing
He, frightened, uncertain, inexhaustible and weak, somehow mustered the strength to ask or act for what he wanted.
Perhaps she would not comply.
Or could not, and remain who she needed to be.
Yet there would always be response –
– even ignoring, diverting, pretending to sleep.
It hurt to ask. To attempt – its exposure – admission of lack and need – the venture, to try. The fear of undoing, of incompleteness, of rejection, impossibility.
Still he acted and asked.
The alternative grown unbearable over time – constructions and deconstructions, composition and erosion, the living through time and space.
Time approaches in which time isn’t worth it – without.
Without knowing and acknowledgment, honesty and rejection, awareness…
…until the response is given…isn’t there still chance?
Untoward, illusory, unlikely and so slim…and yet?
As if…
*******************************************************
Varieties of presence.
Certain opportunities of world.
Of doing. Being. Making.
As life runs out, so too the prospects of meaning, of experience.
Had begun to feel he must,
or never.
Discover, find out, uncover, unearth, reveal
at least for a moment.
This moment. The moment.
Nearing NOW.
But how? Who? And what sorts of whys were required?
What lent him the right and wherewithal, the luck, the chance, or desperation?
And why now? What for? How her?
Hesitates.
After all, perhaps?
Perhaps its merely panic, neuroses, a fracturing diminishing end?
What motivates? And why? And why this one? And this now? And here…in the midst of.
Always already in the midst of…and always already not-yet.
Between. Desiring a line to be drawn. As if the world depended on it. His world (perhaps theirs?). His life, his living, his NOW.
It remains to be seen.
Ever remains to be seen, evidenced, emergent,
Proven.
Can there be any proving? If things had been different, some slight change in the initial conditions, conditions so complex?
Could it be different?
He must, he has to, he is compelled to act / to ask.
What will she reply?
***********************************************************
The always begin. Begin, begun, always. Climbing the steps of his lack…behaving…becoming. Ever some begin – some something, something shifting, changing, altering, becoming something else, something altered and novel, new, not combined in quite this way before – submerged, emerged, converged…yet differently.
No?
Next?
With N (next) = Begin? +1, +1, +many + again, else, other…Equaling not before, prior, exact…NOT repetition but difference, remainder, chaos, complexity
Impossible,
seemed inexhaustible,
almost infinite,
not quite. Not remotely.
“He,” “She” will surely end (in a way)
as a form of beginning
As a form of
a form of
motion, movement, becoming.
Things happen, or happening produces things (at some scale, interaction, percept)
What becomes undoes becoming undoing
(and so on).
Uncertainty.
Mobility.
Activity.
Becoming.
Undoing.
Undone.
He becomes.
Unraveled enough, to a point (a seemingly certain threshold) he will risk,
wants risk,
feels compelled,
concerned,
for survival, needs, depends,
decides to act or ask for what he’s wanting (needing? lacking? desiring? believing?)
And where / who / what / why / is she?
And there and which and whom and when?
He will act, ask,
she will needs-be
in response to the violence of movement, address,
intruded perception, sensation,
respond.
In what way?
An Open Letter on Statistical Analysis
I used to shy away from Statistical Analysis as a means to meaning.
Now different thoughts occur.
Last night my daughter was struggling with 5th-grade division problems that involved endless remainders…
I used to be really uncomfortable with the “why?” of mathematics…
…last night I found it fascinating, as if it were opening entirely new sets of mysteries and unknowns to me trailing off as it did, like endless reflection and inquiry.
QUERY 1: “WHY?”
Common enough thought for a philosopher.
Seems to me the “good philosopher” (effective, useful, usable, relevant) consistently ponders and inquires into the Affect and Effect of whatever is under observation or scrutiny. What / How / Why / Where / & for Whom does it “mean” that we’re Doing / Being / Knowing this or that or what-not. Anything, really. Anything at all.
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
Which got me to thinking…
what/how/why/where/when/for-whom do all these infographics, demographics, assessments, quizzes, ticked responses, reviews, # of views, feedbacks, “likes,” “unlikes,” and so forth “mean” for our Doing/Being/Knowing?
(what’s it all mean, Big Data [pronounced “Big Dadda”?)
QUERY 2: “Huh?”
WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?
The question that drives, allows, enables any help a “philosopher” might be able to foster…
AND HERE COMES STATISTICAL ANALYSIS!
(the philosopher asks)…
For the moment, just…just-now, here, this-when…
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY MATTERS MOST TO YOU IN YOUR LIFE?
**************(Stop.)************
************(Breathe.)***********
************(Ponder.)*********
Let’s check out your personal statistics (YOU’LL have to do this part of the work – observation, comparison & contrast, open inquiry & interpretation)
for instance…WHAT things do you nudge toward qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis?
A few simple questions regarding:
- time with children/partner/self/nature/friends/world (in relation to) time at work?
- time scrolling Facebook / browsing internet (in relation to) time gazing at / listening to / caressing / doing-being-knowing-with your loved-ones?
- time realizing time-tested wishes or longings (in relation to) accepted responsibilities?
- time reading/moving/resting (in relation to) time watching/viewing/receiving
- pleasurable time (in relation to) suffering time
and so on….
[or how well do such things mesh up / converge / resolve, etc?)
(finding ways statistical analysis might mean)
and then, of course, there’s the more totalizing EXPERIENCING of such analysis / account / record / actuality [REALITY]…
…at least ONE way a statistical analysis might MEAN?
(and a humane use of philosophy?)
(science & mathematics?)
(humanities & arts?)
INQUIRY
-
WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOU?
(maybe think of 3-5…rank them?)
-
HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF YOURSELF?
(keep track of your minutes / hours for 3-5 days)
-
WHAT DOES YOUR ACTUAL BEING / DOING / KNOWING REPORT ABOUT WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?
(compare. contrast. assemble. interpret. reflect.)
CREATE.
[RESEARCH: it all depends on context]
and it’s all immersive EXPERIENCE
(…used my lunch break for grocery-shopping to alleviate evening stress after work when I need to get the kids to multiple locations and events, and prepare dinner while hopefully interacting with them, witnessing their goings-on in the ONE place I can be at a time, while finishing up that revised CV I need for perhaps continuing employment in a position I actually feel suited to, find challenging, and organizing an upcoming theater production, parceling energy with hopes I might have some left for my prime concern: my partner, or maybe myself – isn’t that part of all of it too? – and the reading/writing/reflecting I’d love to do, acquiring plane tickets and maps for upcoming family journeys, counting breaths to relax, aiming for meta-cognition and emotional awareness so that I don’t miss, ignore, injure, need to exercise, plus the laundry and housework, and…)
all the time, is just the time you have
Rambling
How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress. For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness. Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.
Is this another emerging effect of aging?
My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage. Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations. We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)
which means that I also approach 50.
So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…
I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.
One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE. Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss. Anything. The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…
FITS & STARTS
I shoulda wrote a letter. There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes. “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW. The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes. The breaths, the touches, the thoughts. The feel of it all.
The word/concept/term “Mashup.”
Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness. My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator. To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup. Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…
Perhaps each now is realization & threshold. And, as a friend recently pointed out…“hope is such a restless state”.
Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness. Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again. Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand. Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins. Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind. One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.
– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –
Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991.
For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.
Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.
Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Thinking.
Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,
the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,
grew redundant with desire…
…desire for language to do some certain things,
…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:
to write the ambiguities.
Repeatedly: to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal. Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear. That light in which even our shadows go unseen.
Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,
encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,
my writing desire grows more active,
toward the active,
and its happening,
writing verbally,
writing living:
to write losing.
Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity.
Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.
TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING
to loose losing
…perhaps to lose it…
…face to endlessness…
will he make it?
All my Words are Silent 