Just posted thoughts and reflections
To all of you out there loving, protecting, nurturing, listening, comforting, engaging and delighting in your children:
which, as my wife’s card to me pointed out, cannot be incoincidentally unjumbled into:
oh the gifts and joys a good father offers!
and the unmeasurable joy and delight brought a man by fathering.
Greetings readers. I have spent the past few days to-and-froing from my son in the hospital undergoing a corrective surgery related to pectus carinatum, and full-family summer and researching the pros and cons of PDA (patron- or demand-driven acquisitions). I am very happy to say that after a nearly 5-hour surgery, in which we allowed “experts” to cut our son’s chest nipple to nipple, lay back the muscle, chip-scrape “excise” the cartilage out of his ribcage, crack his sternum, reshape him and insert a flexible metal bar…he is recovering smashingly, already walking about, playing card-games, and humorously retorting. This is the first “major” operation, injury, break, accident or otherwise that has occurred to my genetic offspring, and, although I’ve endured much trauma with the injuries and surgeries of my spouse, I was unsure what to anticipate going through in allowing invasive slicings and breakings to my precious son’s body.
Needless to say, it is affective.
At night I slept as if in a dark void.
I felt shamefully unattentive to my other children, lacking energy and focus.
I let deadline stressors and ongoing responsibilities take their places in my tissues and veins, deep recesses of my cortex, and let my eyes drift repeatedly into mid-point aether.
I don’t know.
Something like this went on in my son.
it was pretty foggy in me.
So now we enter “recovery.” Realignment. Exercise. Recall. Precision. Strengthening. Focus. Effort. Rest.
and facing the stack of avoidances.
Recall looks like this (for me):
My Medicine(s):
– regaining presence of mind –
“You could try to express what bliss it was in those days to be alive. Of course there were bothersome things here or there. Terrible things, if you looked too closely. There was the dreadful burden of everything that’s too much alive, all that mingles with air, earth and water in an attempt to destroy you. There was the malice of men, the voracity of beasts, and the indifference of objects. There were all the sounds and sights and smells like continual dagger-thrusts in the flesh. It wasn’t easy to live with all those things; no, no one could have said it was easy. But all the same it was funny in a way, touching and funny, a splendid adventure complete with emotion, language, consciousness, and perhaps, in some recess of the memory, a kind of nostalgia for silence and peace…Yes, what was happening to you was an unforgettable and unique adventure…”
-J.M.G. Le Clezio, Terra Amata–
HERE’S TO YOU SON
Warning: an unfortunate side-effect of immersion in summer, family and graduate studies is the near-impossibility of crafting fragments of writing into art. For the time being, then, if you choose to read this blog, it will consist primarily of recommendations, snippets, quotations and reflections with hopefully a weekly creative venture of flash fiction or a poem or two. The following will fall under the “Reflections” category.
I mentioned “transductive” a few posts ago. As defined by Gilbert Simondon, a transductive relationship is “a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituants: e.g. humanity and technics are indissociable” (from Bernard Stiegler, Technics & Time, vol 2: Disorientation).
I read books by piles. From time to time I post an updated “currently reading” list, usually comprised of 50 or more books that I keep lined about my desk as a privacy barrier and womb-like conversational enclosure. I dip in and out of these, ruled by something like mood or intuition – at times I sense exactly what voice or rhythm, style or subject I desire, crave, or need for some sort of equilibrium I lack, and slowly regain by engagement with these texts. In other words, for my own sense of sanity, well-being, provocation or anticipated growth, I need a collective of minds and voices, styles and subjects to wake me, challenge me, inform me, soothe me, spur me on. Here’s a smattering from each of the stacks surrounding me…
What I recognized today, is that the way I read is transductive – each voice, style, subject, mind I engage is co-constitutive of the others I take in.
For example, today I’ve been primarily soaking in Mark Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere, and Roland Barthes‘ The Preparation of the Novel lectures. Barthes describes the urge to change, to purpose singly, “to invest / disinvest / reinvest” as an experience of the “middle-of-the-journey” – an impossible location, but “nothing other than the moment when one realizes that death is real” and time changes, everything is re-evaluated, re-purposed, the familiar is questioned and made strange. I think (transductively) what Taylor refers to as “Elsewhere“: “not so much a place as a condition that renders whatever had seemed familiar utterly strange…the axis of the world shifts, even if ever so slightly, and what passes for normal changes.”
These books are filled with insight, interest and intrigue (as are the whole swoop of titles in the slideshow), but today, today, I am revelling in the company and conversation these writings (surrounding me) construct and carry one, the opportunity I have to be in the midst of it, my mind like a circuit-operator, pushing buttons, pulling plugs, reconnecting, crossing wires, silencing…reading this way is kind of like the work of conducting a symphony – except the melding sounds occur only within the ampitheatrical shell of my own neuronally-linked brain…transductively.
These works co-constitute me, and come to co-constitute my transductive relationships with my loved ones, environment, world. Taylor writes provocatively of all the betwixt and betweens of reality – “I am never sure whether light makes the mountains appear or the mountains make light visible…Darkness in the midst of light and light in the midst of darkness…There is a texture to light that allows – no, requires – the tissue of vision to be constantly woven anew…”
“Paradoxes and contradictions form the very stuff of our lives…the challenge of teaching, writing, and, indeed, living is to join the abstract and the concrete in thinking about questions that truly matter” (Taylor).
At this stage in my own biolography…I feel this acutely and persuasively. The “before / after” of which Barthes writes so fluidly – that there is not enough time left to go on creating projects for the future, what lies behind has not achieved the “wanting-to-write” sufficiently…Elsewhere has been visited (or has visited)…and change, choice and directions must be purposed…
“To Want-to-Write‘ (Vouloir-Ecrire) = attitude, drive, desire, I don’t know what: insufficiently studied, defined, situated. This is clearly indicated by the fact that there’s no word for this ‘wanting to’ – or rather, one exists, a delightful exception, but in decadent, late Latin: scripturire, used just once (in the fifth century) by Sidoine Apollinaire, the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand who defended Clermont against the Visigoths (major poetic work). What I mean to say is: since a word exists in one language, albeit only once, it is wanting in all the others…
Why? Probably because underrepresented, or perhaps, in a more complex manner, because here the relationship between the drive and the activity is autonymical: wanting-to-write is only a matter of the discourse of someone who has written – or is only received as discourse from someone who has managed to write. To say that you want to write – there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write – not scientific discourses…an order of knowledge where the product is indistinguishable from the production, the practice from the drive (and, in that case, belongs to an erotics) – Or, put differently again: writing is not fully writing unless there’s a renunciation of metalanguage; Wanting-to-Write can only be articulated in the language of Writing: this is the autonymy I referred to…”
-Roland Barthes-
I’m there. Elsewhere. Wanting-to-Write…
Toying with significance, practicing writing by hand.
Cause of which: online graduate school (hybrid) perhaps. Blackboard (not a blackboard + a hand moving chalk), wikis, MS Word, blogosphere…
Writing is a different word than typing (“keyboarding,” “texting,” “thumbing,” “fingering?”)
Handwriting – is there another?
Writings is different from typing.
not only pacing.
Significance
“People exist
to attach importance”
Exercise.
Once I had the most beautiful pen-man-ship. Admired, envied, revered.
My hand now working by jolts and shirts (“stammering”)
Wife says I jerk in the night, in my sleep. As if the wires were hot and crossed. “Traumatic,” she says.
Like my father.
Who has elegant penmanship – consistent, beautiful, and flowing.
What I aspired to.
And achieved.
Now interruptive. Herky. Stuttering. Multi-controlled. Cross-wired.
Muscles, nerves, vision, brain + its fabricating memory and prediction: out of sync.
I exercise a few moments in which I don’t feel particularly pressured and am thinking about significance.
“I listened with great interest and desire to have it be of no significance.
But you know how it goes. Significance abounded.”
Now my thoughts arrive sturdier through a machine. Body – extension – return. The pen was extension. The ink. Dependent on the body. Embodied, enminded. Transductive.
“‘transductive’ (a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituents)”
Tools. Media.
Humanity — technology.
Me : keyboard : thought : language.
Me : pen/paper : thought : language.
Transductive. Co-constituent. Interdependent.
Significant?
Dreaming of – imagining – my recovered penmanship.
Therefore, exercise.
Communication.
Transductive.
“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention. Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change. Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present. Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning. Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical. Even if the language is unknown. Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content. Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.”
(Percival Everett)
“A metaphor cannot be paraphrased”
Immersed in summer and studies, I find myself struggling with capacities of some purer form of origin beyond connections. The creativity that satiates me in relationship and studies is one of associations, extensions, combinatory experiments of life-experiences and informations and knowledges. Fiction and poetry, in a unique manner, seem to process the connectivities and associations invented somehow more within myself. Not so much in activities of external bonds and ties that loop within/without between concepts and voices, persons and family, and my own; but what bonds those activities and informations spawn within me. I am finding that these recognitions and constructions take a different sort of time and attention than the frenetic and immediate processings of conceptual knowledges and intimate relations. Those, of necessity, must be continuous, on the fly, in situ. Creative writing, in distinction, requires for me the ability for bracketing a space and time in which I am able to attend (somehow) to the recursive loops and dangling ganglia of my own organism of thoughts and emotions. A sort of internal processing vaguely distinguishable from reciprocal or social processing. It may not even be real, but only a sensation of process, a variant attention, a sidelong perspective. In any case, it emits something unique in my writing and reflection, feelings and sensations, and something that I cannot simply produce; something that must be prepared and allowed for, visited, beckoned, welcomed.
I recognized this as I struggle to create for a project, and also possess a yearning to be creating new fictions. The process art both provides and requires is unique and intense, difficult and serious. It calls to mind the “effortless efforts” of things like meditation and awareness, mindfulness and tolerance. The writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson piqued this recognition for me and I will share a couple of early paragraphs from her book The Telling.
“[1] There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told, but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.
[4] Everywhere can be seen a waiting for words that phrase the primary sense of human-being, and with a human finality, so that the words themselves are witness to what they tell. The waiting can be seen not only in the eager inclined posture of believers. It can be seen also on the faces of disbelievers, the idolizers of the evident: they are not happy in their impatient assurance of there being no cause but uncaused circumstance, they wear the pinched look of people whose convictions make them a meagre fare. In the eyes of all (in the opaque depths in them of unacknowledged presentness to one another) are mirrored (but scarcely discerned) concourses where our souls ever secretly assemble, in expectation of events of common understanding that continually fail to occur. We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.
[5] …A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time – the telling of what came first and before done forever…How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with one another for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.“
from The Telling by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 1967
Within the hallowed halls of Powell’s Books in Portland, OR with a next-to-nothing budget is not an easy thing to be for book-cravers. But it also picques the selectional impulse somewhere thrumming in our genetic bands. Survival of the “fittest” given current conditions and some self-observation through excruciating choice.
What came back with me:
what did not , purely due to economic constraints, and set aside at the last possible moment (at closing):
equivalency finds for my wife:
now to prepare pictures of those immaterial experiences – the fleeting profounds – that happen as we go
to be posted soon
we’re heading off to visit children and family in the Pac-NW for a week +…not sure how often I’ll “get back again” to ze blog, but aside from my amazing wife, I’m taking these….
Happy Trails….
Astounding – I’m in my fourth decade of life and this is the first day the beauty of this word has hit home…
which put me in mind of Rodin…
and of the cacophony of arguments followed by caressing clarifications toward shared understandings
of characters presented and nuanced, developed, made complex
of statements expanded and explained, extended into metaphors
vowels echoing sustained
hard Cs molding into soft
crashes dwindling into static
facts becoming rumors becoming murmurs, whispers, sighs
wailing come to weeping come to tears come to rest
Something that completes or enhances something else when added to it. |
“A point is considered one of the fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry. Without depth, breadth, or dimension it is a part that has no part. It is represented by a dot or period that has some dimension but is not a point, but must cover the point infinite times over. The point in the two-dimensional world is the intersection of lines and in three dimensions of another line as well and on and on. A point is only location. And isn’t that what we are? Mere points? Some points suggest beginnings, some ends, all divide, and when they connect or divide, where they are defined, it is always because of a turn, an angle, a shift toward another plane. How else could we see a point? The point is. The point made. Getting the point. Pointing the way. Points out. Points in. Point terminus…
…The meaning of life is the purpose of life…
…In similar fashion he came to some comprehension of the whole ballet, language being a small window through which very little passed and became helpful, the dance being nearly everything.”
Point being that there is no point. That a point is like an abstract sign – a two-sided symbol – of a non-place where relation occurs – where intersection, connection – moves, happens. Probabilistically? Infinite. Point being that getting the point involves a complex thinking
“going beyond itself in the direction of complexity…not from the simple to the complex, but from complexity to ever increasing complexity. Let us repeat: the simple is no more than a moment, an aspect among several complexities (micro-physical, macro-physical, biological, psychic, social). We attempt to consider the lines, the tendencies of a growing complexification…as they function (in relation to autonomy, individuality, richness of relations, aptitudes for learning, inventiveness, creativity, etc.)”
(Further reading): Overview of Complexity Thinking – Ferrara
Point being.
Something similar to that – we utilize points and pointing to signify a passing, passage, to trace – to attend to or refer at some intersectional context – thereby creating interactive referants/actants – you, I, the relation.
WordPress as a case in point.
I am ever-so-honored and thankful to have been considered and nominated in community awards insofar as they represent mobile points of connectivity and passage – where one or more of we and our “representation spaces” intersect in this “information common” of the blogosphere.
From Words that Flow like Water I received the “Sunshine Award”
and from CLisaWork, the “Versatile Blogger Award”
both of which I am very honored and thankful for.
The fantastic element to me about these WordPress community awards is that they allow us to introduce and further the connectivity and intersecting “points” of convergence and accordance that shiftily pertains to our activity and representation here.
The acceptance of the awards imply some obligation to self-report. I am unsure how I might bring “sunshine” to others through my working-spaces here, but am happy to live with the mysteries. I tried to find a “Sunshine award” icon that featured rain as rain is much more vitalizing, inspiring and motivating to me personally than sunshine, be that as it may. So, some things about myself:
I am going to use the “award-passing-along” as an opportunity to suggest blogs that (in the “sunshine” vein) inspire and inform me in ways that keep me at it myself, and that enhance my own “versatility” through what they offer and provide. Please visit them – I am confident that there are so many more that should be listed below (I follow 100s) but there is not world enough and time…
Philosophy of Information & Communication
Unwanted Advice: Reflections of a Self-Appointed Life Counselor
Spoondeep: Magazine of New Writings
and so on….(check my blogroll)…
Thank you all for the rain-like sunshine and versatility you bring to my days:
the connections…
Greetings all you who take the time to peruse my blog. I thank you. Let me begin this by saying how I have missed creating blog entries that feel creative to me, that require me to a degree that is nourishing and satiating, rather than feel like marginal notes to my studies. Thank goodness for a few projects and Friday Fictioneers that spur me to some dedicated time spent “creating” purposively – differently from intellectual processing toward understanding. And yet…
As I emerge into a brief pause between semesters, I find myself bewildered with experience and an oddly felt “freedom” that spawn confounding questions in me. As I completed my final semester paper this week, my mind and body revved to the thought that fictions, essays and poems that participate in the structure of my desk – beckoning and ready as I researched away – can be grasped and delighted in, engaged at will, enter my cranial conversation…but this is also true of my researching – I have been consistently able to construct academic projects that involve and enable my immersion in those things that inspire and enthrall me – that feed my “what do I want to know?” urges. So where this different nuance of feeling/experience in reading?
This is the question occupying me currently (or field of questions). As I re-entered Robert Musil’s writings these past few days, while skimming and browsing an unbelievable desk laid with exquisite appetizers (Hejinian, Okri, Danto, Deleuze, Shklovsky, Creeley, Fante and so on) I recognized a feeling I can only describe as “insight.” My preferential selections do not differ much between resources for academic work and resources for some other purpose. I am driven to “know” what I am driven to know – it is continuous, related, dynamic. Any sources from any genre or field or discipline that provide a certain “something” accomplish it. What felt like “insight” was the recognition as I ranged over very different styles (Floridi, Serres, Wittgenstein, DFW, Larry Levis and so on) that what I seek consistently (and an effect that Musil invariably realizes for me) is work that I must achieve, that challenges, that invents, wrestles, requires change and adaptation, innovation and labor on my part to be ingested, understood. That forces dialogue between my micro-world of knowledge and understanding and another. Be it in the mode of expression, the language employed, the ideas, questions and concepts examined or points of view – it must be something that invigorates and surprises, invites dialogue and conversation toward meaning and understanding to occur. Writing that requires change to be engaged.
At the same time I recognize that I read differently different writings. I expect poetry, aphorisms, fragments to require percolatory time, as if the texts and spaces sprinkle my mind-lawn and will find their way to the roots in their own time. I expect logical writings, perspectives or positions to argue with me, to have asked questions beyond what I have had the knowledge to ask, therefore pushing whatever I contain toward corrections and new formulations – adaptation and growth. If writing asks that I be passive, within sentences it is set aside.
These are the questions I’m formulating and troubling in this margin –
These are my offering for today – reports from the margins, the notations always accruing and collocating in my experience – given air through a shifting of immediate responsibilities…
“To accept questions consists in immersing oneself in the search for the answers that answer them. Furthermore, the questions specify the answers that they admit.”
-Humberto Maturana-
attached: a phenomenal recollective account of the theory of Autopoiesis – of creatively self-organizing systems like ourselves and our molecules that stuns me. I invite you to read and differently consider your experience of the world:
Humberto Maturana – Preface to “Tree of Knowledge”
“the pursuit of knowledge does not mean conquest, but invention, the establishment of new relations, which supplement already existing ones and can transform them, make them branch out into unexpected dimensions, rather than deny them, or discredit them as manifestations of opinion, illusion, ‘culture.'”
-Isabelle Stengers-
attached: a powerful account of “knowing” and how we conceive/relate to the acquisition of knowledge. Again, if these sorts of things interest you and you are not familiar with her work – I highly encourage you to browse this writing:
Isabelle Stengers – Do We Know How to Read Messages in the Sand?
And again, I thank you for indulging me in sharing some of my process of living
through this blog…
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Orthodox Christianity, Culture and Religion, Making the Journey of Faith
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"That's the big what happened."
Networking the complexity community since 1999
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All my Words are Silent 