Category: Journallings

Just posted thoughts and reflections

Opening the Hand

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings7 Comments

Mapping the Meaning

What follows will most likely be of little interest to the bulk of you.  For the past few years I have been working to drive and weave the resources for my writing ever more densely into the thickety webs of my authentic experience of the world.  Normally I press this through interdisciplinary inquiry into ways we make meaning, or co-construct what we live as relational/relating realities, attempting the time and effort of translating and investigating these passions and fascinations through creative genres and forms.  However,  life events of the past couple of months have greatly constricted available moments or periods for research and reflection, and magnified the complexity and overwhelming magnitude of our multi-layered, cross-scaled, relativity-dimensioned (see Multi-Sense Realism, et. al.) actual experience of living as human beings.

The most authentic and naked (or base) way I have had of “making sense” of my experience has been, for most of my life, to do it on blank pieces of paper with a writing utensil in hand.  This has enabled my body, like a court stenographer or EKG, to jitter out marks and symbols of what happens to it, get strange glances at the process, notate various strata of its responsive-formative interactivity and selection, and extend/diminish/further and edit or retract (evolve) its activity of living survival.

The past 65 days have been characterized for me by grief and bewilderment, gratitude and wonder, tectonic shifts and rejoined connections, breakings and openings, terror and panic and archaic survival strategies, and desperate hope and frenzied imaginings…I suppose you could call it trauma, dramatic change, upheaval…LIFE.

I’ve been fairly caught up in processing it all (with dear good help), parenting my children, continuing academic study and frenetically seeking employment that it all might go on.  So I feel my posting of late has been fragmented, disorganized, spotty, haphazard, almost accidental…

I have found employment – fraught with uncertainty still, but employ – and something about that one structural determinant has triggered me to assay an account, as much for myself as for anything else…to make the time to manufacture a kind of map for myself of what has and is occurring in my life in this span.

All of this is to say that I plan a series of posts that will be intensely personal, self-revelant, my own way of reaching toward my experience, my being, and selecting language with which to mark it down – for re-memory, re-cognition, observation, reception, attention, account.  These are journal entries, frankly.  They are what I have to write.  I am calling them “Mapping the Meaning.”  Since I know very few of you personally, in your whole presence, I expect confession, inquiry, and its self-circular expression to genuinely interest or benefit very few of you.  For me, it is writing with an open hand.

photo 2-001

.

 

In Strange States and Finding Delight : Questions on Being Well and Doing Well

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections14 Comments

 “Nothing that is complete breathes.”

-Antonio Porchia-

Description:  Flux.  By its very nature, significant change is unsettling, disregulating and life-altering.  Over the past 6-8 weeks I have lost spouse, employment, my personal and relational rhythms and schedule, the savings in my bank account depleted.  I have applied for over 180 jobs, written as many cover letters, tweaked as many resumes, attempted to keep up with my coursework, and take good care of my four amazing children who abide with me.  Each week in therapy (without doubt a literal life-saving engagement) the session will end with something like curiosity at just how uncertain, good, terrifying, significant, painful, frightening, moving, difficult and meaningful the week’s happenings are.  I have felt I am living multiple lifetimes of experience in each 7-day period.  Inherently, overwhelming are experiences that cannot be described, portrayed, understood or explicated.  These are strange states, devoid of much that could be regulating or structuring, a wild gyre of hope and despair, connection and separation, exhaustion and inspiration.  Strange states.

One of the things that has pestered and picqued me this past week is a growing recognition that most of the people I know – friends, peers, acquaintances, relatives – are people that can DO almost anything well, even exceptionally.  Humans have such an uncanny adaptive ability to (as Kafka says) “wriggle through.”  My people are the sorts of persons who find satisfaction and contentment in being well – the activity of living itself, ever specific to context, is its own contentment and satisfaction, often regardless of what they are doing (it seems).

From early on, many of us were instructed to “follow your passions,” or “use your gifts and talents,” another way, I am thinking, of saying FIND DELIGHT.  Delight, it seems to me, is that tone of experience we incur when both being and doing provide utmost satisfaction and contentment for our individuated and particular “selves.”  Moments such as that first eye contact that seems comprehending, recognizing between the infant you have brought into the world and love so much and yourself.  Moments often termed “flow” – when your ache to express and the form of your expression seem to unite, resonate – in whatever medium you most enjoy – dancing, painting, writing, conversing, thinking, playing, sculpting, calculating, making music, serving others – whatever it is that brings you joy coupling with your own unique history and experience and way of being.

And here’s the rub:  in our authentic relationships, most of us have a good sense between us of what it is that makes our “others” tick, or thrive, their core desires and wishes, delights and strengths.  HOW they like to be WHO they are.  My friends who love to observe and capture beautiful moments, create photographs, artefacts of world/self combined are often selling insurance, teaching classes, running cash registers.  My friends with conceptual strengths and reflective panache – philosophers with ever-evolving ideas and visions of the world and how it functions – are often administering organizations, delivering mail, stocking grocery shelves.  My friends who thrive in drama and play, or sport and music, or math and surfing – end up spending their days repairing roofs or selling shoes, concocting coffee or serving food, mowing lawns or teaching children.  AND THEY ARE EXCEPTIONAL AT WHAT THEY DO!

The rub:  When people are being well, it seems they do well, regardless of whether the task or activity would inherently give them delight.  It is the being that delights them, and they infuse whatever they do with that wonder and wealth.  The query:  is there, when is there, how is there – the possibility of (remember, our lives are brief) – combining our capacities for being well with those things we most enjoy doing well and might that not result in a life characterized by delight ?  Is it possible to insist on?  And is one able to survive?  As I search for work – I realize just how many things I am able to do well – like so many others – and that doing well at things has a certain level of satisfaction because one is being well.  But what joy (remember, our lives are brief) if our lives might be characterized by being well/doing well those things that delight us (nourish our well-being)?  We are social, and because of that our survival depends/inter-depends on one another – and society needs certain things of us – teachers, mail deliverers, food service, grocers, manufacturers, administrators, tax accountants, waste management, shoe repairers, and so on.  We fill these positions FOR one another, for our greater good, making effort to infuse and tweak our responsibilities with as much as we are individually able to also gain some satisfaction and contentment with the ways that we be in those roles.

This question is unclear.  I suppose I am wondering the experience of all of you out there – Is it possible to live a life characterized by delight?  Where we are able to survive being well doing what we most enjoy doing well?  I have yet to fill out the application, sit through the interview for, or see the job posting that asks me to DO WELL WHAT I BE.  Perhaps that is the application of life itself.  Perhaps I will never run across the posting that says – actualize your desire to write – whatever you are compelled to write – and we will make sure you are sustained and healthy.  Any testimonies of conflated being and doing and surviving and thriving out there?

Scripturient“Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?”

-Antonio Porchia-

ReWritten / ReWriting

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, WritingLeave a comment

accidentally opened a file from the past that seemed related…

reading-writing

The Pleasure of Reading

In other words (than what?  than which?) we all of us are readers, all of us writers.

That is a pleasure.

And all of us, always, doing both.  Simultaneously.

 

Speaking of my textbooks (were we?) – information sciences, developmental and behavioral psychology, reference services, librarianship / and the research to the side – physics, evolutionary biology, neuro- and cognitive sciences / my pleasures – novels, poems, stories, others’ blogs, visual, aural, literary artifacts / my relational – wife, children, family, friends, society, culture – gestures and vibes and dialogues and signs / my “self” – sensations, perceptions, formulations of these, reformulations, adjustments and maneuvers.

In other words, at all times, I am reading, even if only my lack of memorable dreams, or pulses and breaths.  And writing it all in actions, movements, responses, adjustments of speaking and writing and making.

It is a metaphor, obviously.  Perhaps.

 

Roman Jakobsen purported that “all meaning is a form of translation, and multiple translation (polysemy) is the rule rather than the exception.”  (I am translating his text just now into another con-text).

Wolfgang Iser’s (perhaps, anyway insofar as I am translating it here) concept of actual text (text as it is recorded by an author) and virtual text (actual text as read by a reader).

This is an aspect of the deep living pleasures of reading/writing for me.

 

An author/speaker/artist/scientist/mother/etc. has an urge or sensation – a possibility of action/behavior/message/idea (a virtual text) and translates it through multiple processes and levels of activity through some medium into an actual text/painting/utterance/experiment/recorded idea/sound, etc.  There it is in the real world – a physical artifact in time and space – added – if only for a moment.  Transforming (simultaneously) its maker into a recipient (translating a now existent text/sound/behavior/gesture/sculpture/experience for him or herself) and if any witness/participant/auditor/recipient or reader is in his or her environment they are simultaneously interacting (via translation through their own tools, language, perceptions, sensations, mood, etc) with the actual text, writing a virtual text (translating) of their own.

And it goes on.  And can be done innumerable times, this process, whether using an identical actual text over and over, or simply writing/reading life as it occurs, making it occur.

 

Paul Ricouer:  “stories are models for the redescription of the world.”  Possibly.  Or at least redescriptions (translations) of models for redescription.

Iser: “the relative indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actualizations…literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves…the reader receives it by composing it.”

 

Language, action, behavior as possibilities rather than certainties.

So that I can encounter with all I’ve encountered/experienced an actual text by psychologist Jerome Bruner translating these very quotes and contents with all he has experienced and translate it with the multiple translations of family life and being a human organism and novels and pains, poems and stories, paintings and laws, translated with data and education, emotions and animals, translating with you and a computer, internet, digits and bits, translating into…

 

a great pleasure of reading is writing reading

or, “a writer’s (reader’s) greatest gift to a reader (writer) is to help him become a better writer (reader)” – Jerome Bruner (parentheses mine).

 

literary texts as “epiphanies of the ordinary”

-James Joyce-

Learning Life from Metadata

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, JournallingsLeave a comment

Life Lessons : Metadata

Resource Description

Say you have a product – an object of some sort –  a shirt or a song, an idea or a skill – and you’d like to share it, show it, sell it, make it useful.  How would you go about this?  Perhaps make an image of it, a recording, describe or depict it somehow, place it with similar objects but distinguish it, express what it’s made of, from, how, where, when, how one can find or obtain it.  None of these things – the image, the recording, the description, depiction, components, composition, etc. ARE the product itself – they are new and other objects – descriptive ones, administrative ones, structuring ones, among other things…potentially useful and actionable data about the resource itself.

The shirt is long-sleeved, it is stormy blue, size: large (16.5×42), it has 5 buttons made of sandalwood, it is hand-stitched and crafted from Indian muslin, and so on.  Metadata.  It applies to ideas, objects, events, persons, places, things, relations, sounds, senses.  It is a language.  It can be formal or informal, global or local, controlled or free.  It allows systems and processes, machines or functions, humans or networks to utilize resources toward purposes – to identify, select, obtain, organize, comprehend, etc…

The resource is separate from all this.

Metadata and Experience

             A rush of blood to the head.  An uncontrollable weeping.  Sudden awareness, a fear, a noticing.  Tightening throat, sorrow, excitement.  Vibrations on the inside, tingling along the spine, a feeling in the “gut.”  Things happen.  We move.  We sense.  We perceive.  We process all this automatically, at a bodily, neuronal, cellular, physiological scale : our resources for staying alive, for being.

Enter metadata…of which the above paragraph is an example (the descriptive type).  How describe, identify, narrativize (organize, administer), utilize, put to some constructed purpose all these goings-on of our felt experience (our primary resources)?  Create repeatable elements, qualifications (say “the flush in response to her text was ‘love,’ ‘infatuation,’ ‘shame,’ or ‘rage’”); encode it, fit it into the system, the processes (“I wouldn’t feel such pain if things were different, if she were here…”)…signify relations.

It is stormy blue, my grief, it has long sleeves with a long reach, it covers me entire, lays upon me like a veil, like a skin between.  I am clothed with absence, the buttons burn.

Metadata.  The resource (capacity for grief, for attachment, for longing; the ability to love, to fear, to wish, to compose metadata, to fabricate meaning/purpose/functions and relations for physiological experience – the Resources) – are separate from their description, depiction, events, experiences, persons, relations, constructed meanings…THE RESOURCES ARE OURS.

We tend, for ease of use and efficiency, consistency, sharability, continuity and so on (“interoperability”) to create for ourselves Application Profiles – when we experience this sort of felt happening I’ll call it love, anger, shelve it here, link it to…qualify it with shame, doubt, fear, happiness (all major experience-metadata schema elements).  So we create Core Elements or fields of experience and their Qualifiers, Sources, Rights, Techniques and Technicalities, and administer, structure, organize, identify and select (or reject) our felt experiences accordingly.  Our constant work of labeling, cataloging, categorizing, operationalizing, conditioning, meaning-making: our data about data – our profiles of description, selection, controls, language, encoding, linking, expressing…structuring our experience.

Our Resource Description Frameworks – statements – “this, has relation to, this” “is similar to” “causes” “is result of” “makes me” “hurts…” “means…” “is author of” “has title” and so on…ME.

Resources 

And then the Resources…apart from all that… our felt experiences…our capacities and abilities we label love, courage, loss, grief, ecstasy, pleasure, pain, generosity, grace, fear, anger, shame, hope…

…apart from the metadata we construct, the linkages we compose…

are OURS to utilize as we see fit, as we wish, as we choose.

emotions-scraped-from-wikipedia

and a poem by Philip White:

philip white - idyll

and a song from Nils Frahm

WHY DOES IT HURT SO MUCH TO BE?

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Music1 Comment

“Determining Gapless Playback”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Reflections, Writing3 Comments

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?

 

You

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings14 Comments

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”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Reflections4 Comments

“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.”

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)

Lord - Motto

On Change, Perception and the Idea of Maturity

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Music, ReflectionsLeave a comment

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?

Maturity - John Armstrong

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…

On Love

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings5 Comments

I will be up front with you:  this post is a failure.  If I were able to comprehend, understand or express what it is I have been struggling with myself to grasp and communicate – I would also have the expressive powers to irresistibly beckon my love.

Like many poets and artists, I am not a stranger to great expressions of love.  Tales of romance, of idealism, of sacrifice and charity.  Of endurance, persistence, obstacles and joy.  Of passion, beauty, devotion and charm.  Many of us spend the bulk of our lives searching it, attempting to become both loving and lovable, generous and worthy.

What I have wrestled with this past week is how I might convince all of you who have an interest in its meaning, its practice, its enjoyment and its pain that a book I have spent much time reading and reflecting over the past two weeks is worth your full attention.  It is entitled The Conditions of Love: the philosophy of intimacy and is written by John Armstrong.

Armstrong - Conditions of Love

For a while now I have been making effort at examining the “intolerable vulnerabilities” that intimacy evokes in us.  Armstrong addresses these in a deep variety of ways, such as “love craves closeness, and closeness always brings us face to face with something other than we expected.”  Upon meditating my way through his profound expository book, I have added “incalculable equation” to my sense of love.  “Most people are, it goes without saying, sometimes pathetic and sometimes quite competent…reciprocity requires us to hold in mind a complex image of our own nature.”  My felt sense upon concluding his words (and those of so many others he includes ever so skillfully) – was a strange sense that love combines the profound gravity of grief and the profound levity of hope.  

It is instructive to understand what Armstrong intends by a philosophical account of intimacy:  “One of the things which philosophy can do is to try to flesh out, with as much precision as the case allows, just what is at stake in the concepts we use.”  And he performs this so deftly.  “Hence the more subtle our thinking about love, the more intelligently we discriminate ideals from reality, the more interesting our autobiography becomes.”  His is the thinking of the ‘pandoxist.’  “A pandoxist doesn’t locate all the important insights and truths about life in a single system, but tries to seize upon the multitude of truths and insights which are located in many distinct – and often antagonistic – positions…most great systems of thought are founded upon lasting insights…but we generally don’t need to be completely consistent in our thinking…we are attempting to enrich our repertoire of ideas…thoughts which will be helpful at different times and in different situations.”  The Conditions of Love satisfies this expertly.

The book has been written.  I cannot possibly improve on it, and, although I’d dream of trying – what I most desire is that more humans will engage it toward the extension and enrichment of their lives and the relations they involve .  With that in mind I will simply copy some of my underscored passages from Armstrong’s writing – hopefully to successfully convince you that it could benefit you, too.

“The suggestion that love is deep carries the implication that it emerges from deep within us and that it reaches something deep within us.  It carries with it an image of the personality as layered.”

“Love isn’t a single thing but a complex of different concerns gives rise to a vision of some of the problems of love.  When we try to love we are not actually trying to undertake a single endeavour; rather, we are trying to do a whole range of different, and sometimes not very compatible, things simultaneously.”

“We need love, we have an inbuilt need to love and be loved, yet the two sexes have divergent evolutionary and genetic notions of how love works.  The unhappiness of love is the fault of the evolution of the species…which undertakes to show how extremely complex emotions and thoughts are enacted in material processes.”

“to show that love is natural is not in fact to show anything very important…what is given by nature is not necessarily good, and what is achieved by artifice is not necessarily worthless…the experience of love is open to change, but only in some ways.”

“Compatibility is an achievement of love, not a precondition for love…there is no such thing as perfect compatibility, therefore all loving relationships must accomodate some degree of incompatibility.”

“Perhaps the most fundamental fact of human experience is that the experience of being oneself differs radically from the experience we have of others…no other person can complete us…this is something we have to do for ourselves, even if we are lucky enough to find another person who is helpful and supportive and whose character tends to bring out the best in us.”

“friendship is a species of love…there is something about their mode of being, about the texture of their inner life, which seems familiar…it is when we discover, or suspect, some intimate correspondence between our own secret self and that of the other that we begin to move from liking to loving.”

“the very needs which take us into love play a role in the souring of love.”

“love involves a reorientation of our concerns.  We are in the habit of being immensely preoccupied by what immediately concerns our own well-being…yet caring for something, or someone, other than oneself can be immensely liberating.”

“the irony is that the more we invest in love, the harder it can be to love successfully.  To love another person often requires that we have further and independent sources of satisfaction and security in our lives.”

“of course it can be disturbing, even terrifying, to admit insufficiency to ourselves.  ‘Why do I need another person? Because I cannot be happy on my own?’  For some people at least, that is too painful an admission.  We sometimes avoid our need for love because it casts us in a vulnerable role…It suggests how deep the need for love goes in us, how hard it sometimes is for us to recognize what it is we are looking for, and how hard it is going to be for someone else to satisfy those needs.”

“infatuation – can be driven not just by a mistake about the other person (thinking they are nicer than they really are) but by a mistake about oneself (wanting to be other than one is)…in infatuation, we use another person as a prop in a fantasy about ourselves.”

“many persons imagine that it is the quality of current feeling that matters; in fact, current feeling is no guide for behaviour under multiple strains and stresses.  What infatuation does is to consecrate the present feeling and protect it from serious investigation.  Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current situation.”

“Cupid is the name of whatever it is in us which, without our consent or recognition, provokes the intense longing for attachment which we call falling in love…the fear of love as irrational is not simply the fear that love is in its genesis outside of our control, but that it is not amenable to reason once it is up and running.”

“the forces which make us long for another person to love – loneliness, the need for warmth and tenderness – can be so great that we behave as if we were starving…desperation overrides discrimination…the process of falling in love may be governed not by the intelligent sense of what is good for us but by unconscious forces which cause us to get attached to someone with whom we can – like an addict – repeat a self-harming pleasure – ‘this person is for me’ may be, ironically, true and yet true only in that we have identified a potential source of our preferred misery…a relationship does not start the day two people meet; it starts in the childhood of each partner.  for it is long before they meet that the template of their relationship is established.  We learn to love as children.  Or, more accurately, we learn a style of relating which governs our adult behaviour when it comes to love.”

“much depends on the way in which we find in them someone with whom we can continue the unfinished business of childhood…there is something about this person which coheres with an earlier pattern…Falling in love, then, is a result of two thing coming together: the longings which we have and the workings of our imagination.”

“Our sense of who another person really is is massively inflected by our own concerns…what it is to understand a person – involves having a clear conception of what that person’s real needs and qualities are – a conception which can be radically at variance with the self-image of that person.”

“Love alone can’t make another adult intelligent, generous, courageous, persistent and sociable – unless they are very close to possessing these qualities in the first place…it is axiomatic that people can be wrong about what is good for them; that is, they can be wrong about what will make them happy.  This is one of the key reasons why there is so much unhappiness in the world.”

“To love is to interpret another person with charity…of course we habitually go beyond the facts when we find fault with or condemn another…Anger and resentment are frequently founded upon what we suppose another person has intended, rather than on what we actually know about their motives.  Charity, therefore, need not ascribe benign motives, but keeps open the possibility that one doesn’t know what really goes on in another’s heart of hearts…to step aside is human…a charitable interpretation seeks out good qualities underneath evident failings and inadequacies – and take a sympathetic view of those failings..requiring a complex image of our own nature.”

“Most accounts of existence place love at the centre of life.  We live in order to grow in love – that is the meaning and purpose of each individual life.”

“Love requires the integration of all our powers: we have to be sensual, but also understanding; we need to be able to relax with our beloved, but must equally exercise self-control; we have to mix spontaneity with foresight; passionate, devouring sexual desire has to be tempered with respect…”

“What is wrong with capitalism is not so much that it fosters an unjust distribution of wealth but rather that it damages the personalities of all those who live within it, cutting each individual off from the realization of the true nature, giving rise to internal – as well as external – obstacles to love…If we have to devote our best energies, almost all of our time, to making a living, and if in doing so we have to become competitive, or ruthless, we don’t have much of ourselves left over for love.  We can only love on the margins of our lives and with the residue of our capacities…Love, which stands as the natural goal of living, is massively subordinated to the pursuit of the means of living.”

“the reality, here, is that we invest the people we encounter – particularly those we get close to – with characteristics which are not really their own but which derive from our own earlier relationships…construction and transference is an unconscious process – one which we are not only unaware of but which we positively resist becoming aware of.”

“Love, then, can never be the coming together of two perfectly compatible creatures.  We are not like jigsaw pieces which can, if only we find the correct piece, lock together in perfect accord.  It is as if each person actually belongs to several jigsaws at once and hence fits perfectly into none.”

“Much of the resulting pain of adult life can be traced back to the ways in which the child deals with ambivalence…it is impossible to have a loving relationship which does not involve negative aspects…because a perfectly right partner will still evoke fears and anxieties in us, will still – because of connections back to the roots of love and fear in childhood – become an object of envy or jealousy, will still be the privileged object of our aggression and disappointment…”

“Sex is direct, whereas love is diffuse.  Sometimes we need love to be made obvious – and sex is one of the most powerful ways in which this can happen…the troubling fact is that two positions are correct: we are inherently jealous and sexual desire is distinct from love.  To accept both claims is to admit a degree of incoherence in human nature…this is an invitation to be more imaginative about dignity.”

“Recuperation is essential to the survival of love because it is inevitable that love will come up against serious difficulties…the point is that even within a good relationship there are continual sources of hurt and disappointment which have to be overcome if love is to survive…their overcoming is actually the growth and development of loving…it is, therefore, extremely important that we work with a vision of love which sees problems not as the end of love, not as a sign that love is over, but as the ground upon which love operates.“

“This is the internal tragedy of love.  If love is successful, if our love is returned and develops into a relationship, the person we are with must turn out to be other than we imagined them to be…security can put us off our guard…the notion of maturity is humanity’s attempt to retain an optimistic picture of love in the face of disappointment and difficulty.”

“Maturity is our name for the hopeful strategy which is open to us when faced with something which is both an object of high value (a source of happiness) and, at the same time, threatening, difficult, disturbing..the very things which draw us into love and enable us to invest so highly in another person, to wish to bind our lives together, themselves give rise to disillusionment, frustration, disappointment, and evoke some of our deepest fears and most primitive defences.  What we mean by maturity is a change of perspective.”

“In this book I have tried to argue two things…Firstly, the need to love and be loved is deeply placed in human nature – we long to be understood, to be close to another person, to matter in another’s life…the factors which draw us into love also constitute the roots of love’s difficulties.  We long to be understood, but it is often awkward to have another see too much of one’s inner troubles…we do not go through life with a coherent set of desires, and anyone who charms us in one frame of mind may be annoying or threatening in another.  Secondly, love is an achievement, it is something we create, individually, not something which we just find…and yet it cannot be forced simply by effort…it is dependent on many other achievements – kindness of interpretations, sympathy and understanding, a sense of our own needs, and terrible vulnerability…each requires patient cultivation – we have to take whatever fragile presence each has in our lives and build upon that…in order to unlock our passions, recognize our need for another, and see our present loneliness…”

and so on – i simply took a quote or two from each chapter – hopefully you can imagine the depth of the whole…and will enjoy it for yourselves….!

see also:de Botton - On Love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDGGAC10mtc