Category: Language
Philosophy / Philosopher
Things happen.
Accidents.
Today, I was browsing the shelves of the library at which I work, looking for books most precious to me to “represent” me as a person – a librarian, human, father, partner, son, life-trajectory, organism, friend – in honor of (yet another inexplicable almost insane “let’s-find-a-reason-for-celebration-instead-of-accepting-reality” National arbitration of “National Library Week” among perhaps many other things we are trying to laud ourselves for being every day/week/month/year). And I stumbled across a title related to a hero of mine I had never seen – combining both the delights of the personage & thought I associate with him, and a favorite thing to ponder – communication or discourse:
From that point on, it has been what Eugene Gendlin might label felt experiencing: the occasional yet over-powering moments in life where we feel all-in, fully alive, in the flow, MET… RESONANT… acknowledged and identified.
The book opens with a prefatory essay by one of Wittgenstein’s students, literary executors, and, quite clearly, astute thinker in himself, Rush Rhees.
I include it here because it evinced that moment of relief, exhaustion, affirmation, Okay-ness, that comes from Emily-Dickinson-like “What – you too?” moments in our strange, convoluted, web-networked, chaotic and most-often-indecipherable human Who-Am-I existences…
All to say I read this brief and delightful (to me) report of a fellow human and thought: Okay, I let down, I collapse, I am guilty of what you describe… and elated to find I am not alone.
For what it’s worth… this seems to “get me” :
From
From
Breaking down breaking it down
He is breaking it down, they say, breaking both the mind and the meaning (was that ‘minding?’, ‘minding matter(s)?’).
– But is it undoing? someone asks, breaking down towards what’s beneath (or behind or before)? One might ask.
In other words, do we detect a purpose, an intention to his breaking? Is he listening? Does one see him look?
And what is his name? That is, what does it ‘stand for’? He once said “for the entirety.” At which point (as in moment, context, hic et nunc) it was assumed or inferred (interpreted, understood?) he meant. Meant, with those particular terms, within that saying (that action, movement, that changing of things), meant: every form and scale, layer and convergence of space and time, world and universe ever nexused, woven, tangled with this organism labeled thus. What was his name?
A beginning, like reality, reduced. Already begun when started, thereby limited by selection and activity. The sentence finds its way via the words and marks that follow, and while variation is potentially endless, it is not infinite. As this genetic package and all its cellular, processual interactions are inexhaustible and basely finite. And so on.
The breaking down reaches far and travels everywhere but won’t arrive, that is arrest, accomplish fullness. Breaking or building is ever partial. The sum never equaling parts.
Like his name (what was it?) – the one so applied (and distinctively so) – i.e. different from you and you and you – that name though is shared. He is not the only one, even if we cannot recall what it is.
– The only one of those variations though? you pipe in. Perhaps. He did not know. But not only the one so called.
His name, his form and structure, and many patterns of perception are quite common, however he goes about them. His going-about is even similar, when you think of it, as well he would, and we might, yet also not. Not precisely so, more variantly the same, as it were. Normality with particulars then, or occasional surprises.
Something unexpected then, about this one and his efforts of breaking it down while breaking down? Not exactly surprising, from a general fund, the process has its predecessors and is likely to go on in many person at many times, perhaps even widespread and concurrently – other places at the same time with slight anomalies, or other times in the same place with concordant alterations.
– Not uncommon then? Not uncertain?
Uncertain, sure. No more or less than anything. Uncommon perhaps in extent or intensity. Perhaps not as well, given principles of relativity.
– Relative to the subject/objects situation then? she says in a questioning manner, or in her questioning manner, or a manner of hers I take to be questioning (and so on).
Uncertainty, sure; relative, yes; unique, undoubtedly; repetitive – of course…
…he is breaking it down, breaking mind and meaning, breaking down…
– What is the matter? another inquires.
The matter of his senses, yes, that sounds right, for now, at this moment, where we are. What is the matter of his senses, or his sense of the matter that eventuates as breaking down, breaking it down, getting to the bottom of getting to the bottom?
– I doubt he’ll reach the bottom.
– The bottom quite unreachable then? someone adds.
The bottom has never been found or reached or approached for all we know we don’t know, they say. In fact, many question the use of ‘down’ for a practice of dissection – what is excavated in undoing, piecing apart, isolating aspects or fragments? Where does one get by reducing?
– Or what?
A lot of objects without sense? Locations with no map?
– Or less, meaning-less, she says with intonation generally accepted as interrogative.
Perhaps meaning less than when together as occurring – fitted, reciprocal, converging and emerging, like cells in Petrie dishes versus cells moving in the bloodstream, performing functions – but perhaps wildly possible and free, ready-to-use, available some other way, he doesn’t know, nor do I, nor do we.
Facets, elements, aspects that he cannot quite assemble and yet they already are by virtue of being broken yet held together in his failing efforts at assemblage. Welded in the effort – imagined apart in a situation of thought – thereby joined.
– It’s enchanting, someone speaks.
– And depressing, reports another.
But is it useful?
I find it of interest.
Boiling it down to words
Scope. Amount. Scale. Weight. Quantity. Quality.
Levels. Layers. Planes. Fields.
Discourses.
Genetic. Neuronal. Cellular.
Physio- Bio- Psycho- Logical.
Socio-cultural. Political. National. Natural. Regional. Personal. Familial.
Speci-al.
At what, which, and how many – ?
Aesthetic. Philosophical. Anthropological.
Spiritual. Zoological. Hermeneutical. Fantastical. Objective. Subjective.
Ontological. Object-oriented. Linguistic. Super-natural. Semantic.
Accounting. Assessing. Observing. Reflecting.
Positing. Reporting. Reviewing. Corroborating. Demonstrating. Scrutinizing.
Questioning. Replying.
to what depth, amount, extent?
Hypothesizing. Evaluating. Theorizing. Validating.
Claiming. Proving. Imagining. Dreaming. Making.
Inventing. Fabricating. Evidencing. Doing.
Acting. Thinking. Being.
Saying. Becoming. Asking.
Telling. Meaning.
Subconsciously. Unconsciously. Consciously. Aware. Remembering.
Hoping. Feeling. Sensing. Perceiving. Behaving. Conjuring. Constructing.
Deconstructing. Surmising. Testing. Forgetting. Trying. Grieving. Pretending.
Wanting. Wishing. Loving. Listening. Sounding. Hating. Dwindling.
Deciphering.
Archaeological. Historical. Sociological. Epistemological. Scientifically. Religiously. Experientially. Romantically. Poetically. Mathematically. Surreptitiously.
Doubting. Displaying. Marking. Determining. Undermining. Mistaking. Remarking.
Portraying. Representing. Creating. Erasing. Collaborating. Emitting. Evincing.
Eliminating. Describing. Exploring. Inscribing. Translating. Transmitting.
Mending. Lending. Tending.
how many ways on how many levels?
at what scope, scale, quality, quantity
depth, breadth, value, radius, remainder
quotient, sum, absence, addition
Discipline. Field. Behavior. Practice. Activity. Interaction. Stillness. Thoroughness. Modes.
Searching. Re-searching. Troubling. Uncovering. Accessing. De-accessioning. Programming. Deprogramming.
at what point, proof, progress, prospect, projection
is one’s EXPERIENCE VALIDATED
as GENUINE, AUTHENTIC, REAL?
Aware and acknowledged
Approved
and to whom? how? why?
the what?
Inexhaustibility Theorem
Incompleteness Theorem
Uncertainty Theorem
Chaos Theory
Complexity
unbound incalculable not demonstrable
Begin.
BECOMING: A Something-Writing …Provisionally (cont’d)
Say it – “Mikhail!”, say it “Lover,” “son,” or “dad.”
Give me a robe, a title, anything,
let me to be,
yet call me “Person.”
(same as you).
Just like with all our difference.
Generic sets.
And without cease.
What’s inexhaustible
and finite.
Here We Be.
Call us “Person(s)”
In order to get by, to get along, to carry on, I invade your body as if planned. Swapping breath and sounds and fluids. Making more. A “he” a “she.” A “husband,” “wife.” A “muse” and “lover.” We pretend in our pretense and we become.
Call us Person(s).
We raise the dead and name it “memory,” name it “history,” name it “god.”
We start to drown, but we’ve become, and name it “family,” name it “nation,” name it “state” or “land” or “friendship.”
We disperse.
We send out tracts: “PLEASE CALL US PERSON(S)!”
No response.
And we become what we will be.
**************************************************
I scream your name for I am helpless, “I” am hopeless without you. And so I grasp and shape your body, your behavior, your aplomb. I demand answer for my question is the telling and I need to be an I: “Call me Person!”
It begins.
And it is reckless, it is violent and warm.
I am coddled, moisty, fragile. I need purchase(d). I need won.
You are one, and there are many.
We begin.
“Mother.” “Lover.” “Child.”
Call me Person.
Call me something.
We grow limbs and we grow hair. We swap shapes and alter presence. We emerge and we invade.
I am Ishmael, I am
Allah, I am Sam.
You are giant, you are troll, you are fairy.
I can’t tell but for the asking (as if same, as if identical) – simple call.
Call me Person.
We begin.
**********************************************************************
In some ways our job [for survival] is simply to affirm one another.
To provide response (which is a call) to a call (a form of response).
I affirm you (which affirms I) by telling you (asking back) when you ask (telling me you are – where?).
Co-respondence is affirmation – positive or negative (each a both/and) [as with most things living].
You there –where?—ask me, I will acknowledge – thereby telling “you” –
both of us thereby affirmed, established…
…Being…
Thusly, there are Varieties of Presence.
I am Stephen K. Plato, Laurell H. Hardy, John
Quincy Locke,
call me “Person.”
“We” will therefore become via our calling, our response,
-mutually constituted identities
-for the moment.
Johann Sebastian Souza strikes a note
Federico Garcia Chopin hears that tone,
thereby constituting,
no, co-constituting…
…sound.
Sound, press of fingerpads on forearm, shoulder, buttocks, calf,
breast, or clay,
each,
each each,
resonance, difference, identification,
-a becoming, become-
Affirmation.
Compliance.
What might seem
passive, active, passing to-and-fro, creating “We,” “Us,” “People,” “Person(s)”
Trolls beneath the bridge.
Knocking, knocking.
We. Are. There.
(Which is “Here” for NOW).
*******************************************************************
Being. and Time.
(one might say)
Call me Friedrich, Ortega, Alfred.
or: Being + Event.
Address me Giorgio, Alain, Ricky G.
Actor, actant, the motion of bodies.
Ludwig Joycenstein;
rejoice in time;
Osip, Anna, the noise of time.
Being. Event.
kairos
“it is Time”
fullness.
redolent.
predilective. propicient. promising. proclamative.
NOW.
In the Beginning, the wormy End.
Every Ending a Begin.
Transference. Transmission. Translation.
It is love.
Call. Response.
Affirm
Telling Asking
Achieve.
Archive.
WE ARE
You/I a He/She
(not long before combine, breed, be/have)
–BE-COME–
WE.
“I” was lost, until you found me…
…in other words…
…varieties of presence.
bumping into brambles,
slipping into sea,
hearkening to shriek,
Ask Tell
yay/nay,
no matter,
what matters?
too much, too little?
near enough
Begin.
Become.
just BE.
Be. Be. Bee.
1. B. 2. C. D.
Dee Harvey Osmont.
Olivia Newton jaunt.
Wolfgang Adolf Heisman.
Prince Albert Nobel.
Call “me” “Person.”
Julio W. G. Sebold.
Sign on page,
raised to the eye,
digited “touch,”
BECOME.
Vocable. Insignia. Etching. Stroke. Motion.
WE.
Call us Person(s).
*********************************************
“The pen asks / much more than it can answer /
one word at a time”
-Philip Levine-
BECOMING: A Something-Writing …Provisionally
Provisionally: A Something-Writing
-What I Have in Me to Write Now-
I am Melville, I am Aristotle Dostoevsky. Address me as Plato, Poinsot, Peirce. Franz Ferdinand Pessoa. I don’t care.
Call me Person. Anyone madly bearded and wielding a pen.
The one writing, saying, speaking. The gesturer. Being-doing-becoming. The Nothing-sans-audition. The Singer-without-ears. Seer-without-vision. Images – begone!
Call me Person. Listen! – it becomes.
Wrapped in filthy sweet meconium and lies, lays, swaddling undone. Wrapt, swaddled, held: Become.
It begins. A sighing and a sound. A saying and a listener. Bronk, Bakhtin, Blanchot. Call it what you will. Call me Person-with-a-Pen. Number me “Frail Parcel.”
I utter, you reply. I gains an “I.”
She responds and “I” becomes a “He.”
Call me Shakespeare, call me Tolstoy, call me Sterne. I yelp a Joycean Woolf! It begins.
Call me Person.
Damaged, swollen and undone, without a reason, and yet a flailing voice.
We translate love and I become. We cobble names. “Honeywizz,” “Beastyballs,” “Xanadu.”
Say a word, and say again.
It sounds like singing.
Cry out Jeezus! Aquinas! and let us move.
Heidegger, Hegel, Haar. William Dewey, Tomas Pynchon. Another ring, another rung, another syllable.
Translation, transmission, footnoting insertions, assertion. I am John James, Alfred South Hampton. Bewildered and Amazed. Immanuel (God-with-us) Nietzsche, Darwin D. Descartes.
Just call me Person and I will answer, becoming “I” and I become.
The whisper and its hearing,
you moaned and I perked up.
“Yes?” “No!” Otherwise.
We are here.
Call us Person(s).
I/You, Self/Other, He/She, Says/Hears, Touches/Felt, Imagine the memory.
Begin.
**************************************************************************************
At long last, we arrive. Gilles and Jacques and Simon. Luce and Helen and Clarice. Paired, impaired, distorted.
You may call us Person(s). We are named.
Once called, for a response. The asking is the telling.
I cry out.
There is echo.
It begins.
Frail parcel.
Laurence Carlyle.
Samwell Bronte.
Simone de Cortazar.
Someone sings, it garners litany,
“We are here.”
please call us Person(s).
At first I was a scientist: a philosopher of stories,
for you I depicted scenes and portraits,
invented tools.
Everything a bridge.
The word “between.”
We gestured: “Call us Person(s)”
We said Moscow, India and Greece. We stuttered America. We shrieked of Arabia and England.
A run of names and numbers, symbols and beliefs. We made equations, normatives, reliefs. We consulted, constructed, and revised.
All us People. Call me Person. Calling “you.”
I made an image of yourself, and you became…along with “I.”
We shouted slogans, rafted rivers, swam the seas. We scaled the peaks. We dug beneath. We drifted out.
And kept on calling, calling back
and calling forth, all the asking that is telling, and the stating towards inquire.
It began. It formed a we, and that resulted in an I and a Thou, gone either way, but none other.
It plays with brain and body is the brain the body,
call us “Person(s)”
A kind of beast and gentle species.
We, animal and saint
because we said so.
“Call us Person(s)”
for the asking and the telling
the query-and-response
its to-and-fro
and the becoming
We will be.
******************************************************************************
What we intended – -ologies and –isms and parades.
And “we” begins
Call us People, call us Person(s)
The beasts, alive for NOW –
a simple Zone,
a sphere, an angle,
our “perception” as we say.
I am Maurice and Piaget, von Uexkull van Beethoven
Call me Person
And drunk on signs
(that We developed)
in-between
so we might BE.
(Let’s call them “words”)
Let’s call them breaches, bridges, dreams.
Let’s call it Love.
(and its undoing, its location, its domain)
Let’s call it governance or law.
Let’s make a Zoo with separate cages, create a Zone for disciplines and fields. Feelings. Cultivating crops and crafts and musics. Let’s call it “Science” and beg for silence, and beg for naming and for names, more names and names and things, more names and names for things.
Let’s mix them up and cause explosions.
Me + You.
and co-created.
Please call us “Person(s)”
And let us mark and underscore: Disprove. Debate. Erase.
Let’s say “adjust.”
Let’s try to capture or discover – now we’re we.
But call us “Person(s)”
We will be.
I have become.
(Parenthesis) : Swarm – Becomings
(Parenthesis) : Swarm
developing concept, ideas, form
Confession: for me the process involving humans crafting and innovating artifacts is (perhaps, nearly) as pleasurable and fascinating as the delight and enjoyment of the “accomplished” creation / artifact / best-of-my-ability result.
Today I plunged into a work I project for my future – a collection of poetic writings with a provisional cohesion designated by the titular nomenclature (Parenthesis) : Swarm. I am offering the beginnings, inchoate guesswork, anticipatory effort, languaging hoping to find some concretion or sense – in case others too are fascinated by the ways in which we humans find forms, structures, outlets, mediums for the expression of our experience.
Poetry depends on its realization to activate and actualize its purposes. I think that form and structure, metaphor and language rudiments all occur as potencies – possibilities, options, offerings – to both direct and elicit, open and enclose, what we are moved, determined, or curious to communicate.
Here lies (or rises) the inception of one of this year’s projects for me… for better or worse, I hope it provides instigation or inspiration in you concerning the prospects of concocting, explaining, depicting, describing, or mediating some forms of human experiencings of our living, our worlds.
(Parenthesis) : Swarm
assaying beginnings
(The blue was an empty sector of sky) :
before the ascending clamor of birds,
blackbirds, maybe. Or wrens, sparrows, the murther of crows
at which point : (monochrome)
(Soundless activities = black / white) : an argument of colors.
–
(White page. Blank. Emptiness. A void) : A chaos.
Sounds, ideas, emotions bum-rushing, flood-filling, desire-aching to mark up, cross out, cross-hatch, scribble-claim, create/destroy the unwanting, unwanted : (Blank page. White. Unlined. Refusing).
–
(White noise. A chaos. A filler) : (A Parenthesis) : A Swarm.
–
Rising up or rising down? Its violence, this freedom (this emptiness, bereavement) : this horde.
(If parenthesis sounds aside reflective calm) the lettered patterns are closing in, are pressing, encroaching (an erasured calm).
–
There are (Breath-gaps, Awareness) : while we survive.
Endure infinity, perception, experience : ALIVE (reflect. dream. prepare to become).
(Sleep-freedom) : surreality of anxious dreams.
(The “little deaths”) : vigorous and belabored, exhaustively lusted , our desires.
Like fires, like (Ash). (A remains, an inchoate.
A beginning) : an actuality.
–
If triggering happens – within swarm – directions will alter towards (flow)
An isolation (becomes compatible). (We thrive) or are disjointed.
Differentiation (in accord).
(This is how it ends) : in its beginnings.
–
You arrive – a great undoing – traumatic archive. I retreat
(or receive, select the join). Independence (community).
The surge : (the Swell). We swarm – the two, no six, no twelve
(of Us). The (love) : and discord. (Arrangements) interrupted.
(Habitude) : and nuance. (The Parenthesis) : The Swarm.
