Category: Philosophy

Philosophy / Philosopher

On By NW FilbertIn human, Language, love, meaning, Philosophy, Purpose, Wittgenstein, Writing1 Comment

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:

Rhees - Philosophy9

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” :

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From

From

Breaking down breaking it down

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, fiction, Language, meaning, PhilosophyLeave a comment

multimodal diagram

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.

BECOMING: A Something-Writing …Provisionally

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, human, Language, meaning, Philosophy, thought1 Comment

Provisionally: A Something-Writing

-What I Have in Me to Write Now-

Everyman

            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.

Spring Forward – Saving Daylight

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, life, meaning, Music, Philosophy, Poetry2 Comments

Flow-Stainless-Sculptures-001

Taken with a feeling of grandeur: a premonitory greatness arising with convergence.  There are uncertainty principles and the bafflings of mathematics as one ranges across scales.  Relationships over time and fictional emissions, philosophies, transpositions of experience…and sometimes, somehow, they inextricably and irreducibly link up, reciprocally foster…and generate moments of novelty.  Perhaps this is indicated with the term emergence.  There is music, too, and emotion.

A sense of sense.  Of universal process in which one plays a micro-part, participation.  For the time – being and becoming seem joined.  There may be love, generation, sometimes even intuition of revelation.  Simply processes – ongoing self-organization – of “selves,” and smaller and larger collective, complex, and dynamic systems.

Something like “meaning,” I suggest.  Nobody gets what I mean.

Which represents entropy.  Things falling apart even as they arise, conjoin…together.

Things I do not mind.  Emergence / entropy … it’s all dynamic – which is what I’m thankful for in the now.  “Alive” perhaps we’d call it, un-“dead,” – a state I’m thrilled to avoid.

****

Of course there’s a “Her,” and a “Them,” or “they,” – my spouse/partner/girlfriend/significance-of-Other … and the offspring numbering 1-4 – the “matterings that matter” in me… my hand and body, pen and paper, & the complicated processes between that emit some strange result.

Physics tells me “strange attractors” (at that relational scale), I suppose it’s literature’s “muse,” romance’s “one,” the what-fors and what-nots equaling “It,” equaling “unknown,” equaling “that to which things tend.”  Optimization, in a sense (if only a fantastical one).

Depending on the color of the glasses.  What hole is peered through, by whom, from what angle.  Perspective.  Outlook.  Relation.  Some mean free path I’m on.  Perhaps now a ‘we.’

“I” feels uncomfortable, unnatural.  The idea there might be a group-of-me consoles.  If only one (other, more).  If only a “you — too?!”

i'm_nobody_who_are_you2– Emily Dickinson

something like that.

Dancing like cancer survivors…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpndIFSA2jw&noredirect=1

At least grateful we’re experiencing

That’s a sort of Spring-Forward, is it not?

The Lovers Encyclopedia: or, Notes Toward Unlimited Signs

On By NW FilbertIn Philosophy, Reflections, Writing2 Comments

Gilbert Quote

Notes on an Encyclopedia of Signs: or, Limited Vocabularies, Limitless Meanings

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.”

“All entities move and nothing remains still”

“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream”

-Heraclitus of Ephesus-

“No man ever steps in the same river twice.”  No man ever steps the same into a river.  I believe that everyone, from time to time, aches to express what they mean.  We have experiences and we want to communicate them, and we experience a kind of veritable torment when nothing sounds, feels, expresses what we “mean” “quite right” (or adequately, authentically, completely, correctly).

How often this happens with joy, pleasure, desire, love.  There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  We shuffle and arrange them, add and delete, realign and recompose, punctuate and intone, mark-up, highlight, capitalize, emphasize, crescendo/decrescendo, lilt, shout, whisper the sounds and shapes we have mediated them through in this wild, often urgent attempt to forge understanding BETWEEN, comprehension, connection… MEANINGS (whole-person exchanges) betwixt ourselves and others, and world.

Our bodies have limited surfaces.  Certain numbers of organs, neurons, veins, muscles – motions, sensations, pulses, breaths, hums and groans.  We TOUCH to forge BETWEEN.  Caresses, grasps, pushes, pulls and entanglings.  WE ACHE TO GET ACROSS – adequately, authentically, comprehensively, fully.

“I love this pizza.”  “I have never seen anything like this!”  “OMG – watch that sky as it changes, explodes, implodes, whirls, colors!”  “I have never experienced love like this.”  “You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.”  “This is my favorite song.”  “You are incomparable.”  “You are incomparable.”  Our experiences – each – are in some very real sense… INCOMPARABLE.

And space.  And time.  Matter and energy, or material / apparently immaterial.  Emotion and sensation.  Cognition and affect.  We are ALWAYS (all of us) stepping in the river, and the river is always (all of it) flowing.  EVERY instant is our constant moving IN and WITH the constant moving of the world.

It hurts.  I look at, listen to, interact with, FEEL toward, receive from, snuggle, caress, kiss, desire, weep, converse with my current romantic partner – aching every time to express how additive, emergent, unique, INCOMPARABLE these NOW-experiences WITH her vary from, extend, surprise, fulfill, astound, affect, estrange from any other – and bewilder my ability to communicate them… because I have said “I love this pizza” a million times.  I have lost my breath at the views from a hundred mountain-tops.  I have gasped at four crashing oceans.  I have whimpered from the all-over expenditure of orgasm many times.  My fingers have disbelieved themselves and been overwhelmed by a life of plants, animals, surfaces and human fleshes.  “My favorite pie” has happened again and again and again – never the same me, never the same pie.  Down to my cells, my molecules, my quarks.

My love and I have imagined a new symbology.  Each time we ache to speak our love we will scramble new squiggles, letters, symbols, scratchings in order to designate:  THIS IS NOT LIKE BEFORE – I know I said it moments ago – BUT THIS IS SOMETHING MORE/OTHER/ PARTICULATED and specific from that.  This is NOW-LOVE, new and familiar, distinct and embodying all the particles prior.  There are not enough symbols.  Not enough sense.

Mikhail Bakhtin and any number of other thinkers, artists, poets, anthropologists (von Uexkull, Heidegger, William James, Charles Peirce, Paul Bains, Erin Manning, John Poinsot, John Deely, Paul Kockelman, Humberto Maturana, etc. etc. etc.) have attempted to unpack this strange tangle.  Poets and writers throughout history (as witnessed via Heraclitus at the start of this little assay), musicians, painters, explorers, historians – HUMANS have suffered, hurt, ached at this paradox of limitation and adequacy for expressing WHAT I MEAN / WHAT’S HAPPENING FOR ME NOW / throughout the life of our species.

The gist of it:  our bodies and vocabularies are VERY limited in relation to the never-ending changing and flood and flow of our relation to the world and others.  26 letters and 20 digits, a circumscribable surface of skin, a rate of cognition, a dictionary of emotions… never the same human stepping in never the same river.  This is where Bakhtin, et. al. assist us.  What language we’ve agreed on, what musical forms and sounds, what movements we are capable of, what gestures, groans, inflections, pressures of touch, coos and growls, whispers and howls – YES they are woefully limited to represent the vast variations of each NOW experience – with THIS person, THIS landscape, THIS particular food, THIS hearing of a song, THIS sunset, THIS ocean, THIS child, THIS reading – we repeat and repeat and repeat (in a kind of repulsive ad nauseum).  We proclaim our love as powerfully as we know how… and find we wrote the same thing to another person in a letter 15 years ago.  We massage and wriggle and lick and devour in lovemaking in a way we mean to be so particular to THIS passion, THIS relation, THIS other – and it mimics our gripping and caressing and kissing and intercourse of many other times, other passions, other relations, other others.  It hurts.

Bakhtin et. al. indicate that the MEANING is limitless.  That in order to communicate, each BETWEEN must be understood in the Heraclitean sense – WE ARE NOT IDENTICAL to ourselves – ever – and THIS EXPERIENCE being had is NOT IDENTICAL to any other – ever – our means of expression, our vocabularies for communication, our bodily capacities and emotive apparatus ARE LIMITED… but the meanings we create interacting with the world are not.  The MEANINGS ONLY OCCUR BETWEEN and AS we (ever-unique and different) participate, interact, engage one another and world (ever-unique and changing) … To comprehend the sometimes repulsive, apparently restrictive and woefully repetitive MEANS OF EXPRESSION we have and its FELT INADEQUACY to the new, unique, differentiated EXPERIENCE WE ACHE TO EXPRESS – would rely on the mutual understanding that EACH EXPRESSION WITH  COMPOSES NEW MEANING.

Our efforts, compulsions, desires, tastes, affections, pleasures, joys, hurts – EXPERIENCE – IS AUTHENTIC and GENUINELY NEW and DIFFERENT every moment – the means we have of COMMUNICATING, EXPRESSING, CONNECTING these experiences IS LIMITED and REPETITIVE – but we need not doubt the LIMITLESS CAPACITY FOR MEANING SOMETHING FRESH, AUTHENTIC, GENUINE, TRUE that each of those repeated words, phrases, emotions, gestures, interactions have… because…

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.”

“All entities move and nothing remains still”

“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream”

-Heraclitus of Ephesus-

We are a species of limited vocabularies, a constrained encyclopedia…

in a world of limitless meanings

let us trust one another.

-for Hallie

 

IN THE MIDST

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Philosophy, Reflections, Writing1 Comment

Moments: The reality of accrual and depletion, growth and diminishment

chicken-or-the-egg-550x550

“It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad things that form, persist and break up in its currents.”

Tim Ingold – Being Alive: Essays on knowledge, movement and description

            In the reading journal I keep, I record what I read each day in entries numbered according to my years.  For instance, today is Day 364 of 43.  Each day counts UP the days I have lived, simultaneously counting DOWN the days I have left.

If our weight in the world is conspired via our capacity for object-making, “perception,” – how we collate and identify active collective of particles, lending them shape and color, space and duration – in effect: “organize them according to our own purposes and facilities” – co-creating manageable entities with which we might interact and navigate life “sensibly” (body-minded)

then the “lightness” of vitality/movement/being comes from the constant (relatively frenetic) buzz and action of the unseen particles composing and constituting the scales we are able to perceive and conceive.

Does this sound workable?  I trust that I am a hive of vibrating, exchanging, bounding, colliding and connecting atoms/molecules/whatever, and that to certain interlinked bundles of material interactivities this can appear, be sensed, perceived, interacted with, as an apparently distinct “organism/being/organization of activities” constructing (or being constructed/perceived AS) almost a form, a differance, an “object.”

And likewise, and vice-versa.

Particles, drilled down or zoomed out in their interactivities and motion form ever-varying “wholes” (temporarily composed perceptible forms or variable entities).  Thus poets and scientists, thus Ovid and religions, philosophers…HUMANS…METAPHOR.  Taking various realities for another and one another, or, ALWAYS – in relation to.

Crossing and dipping, perceiving/conceiving, we are able to invent scenarios and subjects, conduits and concretions, whereby we are also able to communicate, invent, share, cognize imaginative possibilities for our temporary coagulates (or “life-forms,” ever active and morphing).  The tinier particles simply continue their trajectories and behaviors while their collaborated forms appear to be “born” (or formulated, occurring) and die (or dissolve, dismember, separate to join in other alignments, reactions and compounds).

Thinking is a lucky pleasure of our particular combo-formulations, as love, emotion, felt embodiment, enmindedness, entanglements…

I am grateful for all of it: lovely purposeful accidents to sense, perceive, grow, change, become, decease, connect and disconnect…attach and release…combine and unravel.

IN THE MIDST of which…and this is where the trembling, shifting, unstable, particularly and elaborately conditioned partial perception “I” initially chose (in languaging) to begin…”in the midst of…”

but then I realized that MIDST might beggar a belief-explanation (theory) as to what I was beginning in the midst of…ALWAYS…this strange living process…and so I diverted through the above contingent caveat.

i.e. EVERYTHING DEPENDS.  On context, formulations, occasions, circumstances, surroundings, kind, type, species, conditions composing NOW.

There is some longevity to “sticking together” (successfully? Symbiotically? Interactively linked or bonded for some formal survivable persistence) but it’s all quite temporary (the place-time from which an opinion is held or conceived, promulgated…changes slightly with each moment, more in an hour, a day, each “year,” each…occurrence).

To say: all is active and contingent.  I.e. DEPENDS – on multitudes of very specific things, unseen tiny things, enormous systemic things, situations, arrangements being…”the case.”

A Hal Hartley film or a novel by Dostoevsky, the face of my child or the sound waves of song; the body and voice of my beloved…won’t have any “effect” “meaning” “sense” when my particles realign and this particular arrangement is “dead,” “decayed,” “reorganized.”

Activity is a curious thing.

Although we experience “age,” “knowledge,” “experience,” as a kind of “growth” or accretion, it isn’t very long at all in our formulating as a human before we become profoundly aware that our “growth” is an indicator of cessation, “progress” a sign of our undoing…dismantling, shifting, and changing.

This central comprehension of human systems – paradoxical tension, momentary accretion/diminishment – likely fuels much of the emotion, trauma, passion, energy, delight, grief, disturbances and elations of our particular species instinctual cognitively embodied behaviors.

Angst, joy, terror, hope – perhaps all of these reside in this mysterious yin-yang of coming together / coming apart AT ONCE and ALWAYS.  Each addition is a removal, each connection another breakage, each revelation a forgetting.  Each next accrues a last and never.

NOW – the pivot point of addition/subtraction – for human living.

I crave, delight, wonder, rejoice, and find my survival with each NEXT while grieving, losing, aching, suffering, and ceasing with each movement as well.

There is no choice in the matter (that I can see) – it happens.  Everything we do effects and disaffects inherently.

Rising indeed IS falling.  Growing IS diminishing.  Living truly IS dying, while our dying is yet living for something else…Reciprocal, ongoing, continuous realignments.  Any departure is a novel thing joined.

And thus, simply process, simply going-on.  Not “us” but it.  Not you, I, we, but the particles and universal systems, arrangements.

And we, in the midst.

Perhaps.  That’s how I’m thinking it today.

As I count up and down the days.

ouroboros

Summer Recapitulation

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Language, Philosophy, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

Given the nature of things… withdrawal from school… disregulation of schedule / child-rearing / presences… obligated projects, desired collaborations, attempts… preponderance of labor… decrepitude and erosion of house, car, body…

Herein lies a revised Summer Reading List – old and new and recapitulatory…

“FICTION”

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“POETRY”

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“OTHER”

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Communication : Calibration

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Philosophy, Reflections8 Comments

Peanuts

Perhaps we join in a wooded area, wander about, espying for foxes and deer, or bunnies.

Maybe we just use our eyes.

Sometimes we use the term-containers – words of our languages – bring varieties of ourselves, our experiences, our learning, our responses to syllables and sounds, and craft new spaces whereby the potentials echo.

I raise my hand, you respond in kind.  A nod, a wave, a shake.

Perhaps the fuzzy boundaries of ourselves engage – we hug, we kiss, we make sounds one to another…

Both leaping over the log.  Both scrambling the scaffold.

Gazes infiltrating one another on the river, on the Van Gogh, on the sculpted heap.

“You heard that too?”

Footfalls.

Whispers.

atomic structures

Suppose we take up space.  Suppose we are compositions of compositions that make a kind of interactive boundary – both for ourselves and that which surrounds us.  The same, but different.  Suppose all that spins around me gives me a sort of “area.”  Suppose I lend the air, the water, the sound and ground a similar sort of “area” by my own buzzing, my own movements.  Call me color.  I am “blue.”  But when I engage you in my blustering – you, “yellow” – we don’t end up making stripes…

WE, are “green.”

overlap engageI breathe…my compositions of compositions exchange and interchange – some re-inhaled, some new and distinct, some left to re-compose.  I enter you.  I lend a boundary.  I find I do not dissolve.  And yet, exchange.

Our voices, carried by term-containers, expand, swell, contract, until there is a blend of meanings, intentions.

Maybe we only inflect.

Our fuzzy, buzzing boundaries.

Engage, exchange, co-constitute.

You move.  You lend me form.  I respond.  I interact in kind.

Fuzz, buzz, calibrate.

You said.  I replied.  I summarized.  You disagreed.  Partially.  Edit, recompose.

If “I” am a composition.  I am composed of compositions – recognizable.  Body.  Organs.  Veins.  Plasma.  Neurons.  Molecules.  Clusters.  DNA.  Synapses.  Atoms….

You, composition of compositions…a composition within compositions : surround, situation, “space” (is there such thing?).  Space, time – any emptied space to occupy?  No.  Displacement, exchange.  Calibrate.

Table.  A/C.  Drink glass.  Water.  Music.  Each element, action, “happening” altering, vibrating, co-creating the rest…

Calibrating BEING.

OCCURRING.

THIS.

Co-composing…compositions made of compositions made of…within compositions of compositions…making…

We calibrate.

I enter you.  We correlate.  Calibrate.  Collaborate.  Co-create.

I recede.

You, though different, remain.

How intimate it can be…and yet.

We lend and are lent.  Gift and are gifted.

Our fuzzy, buzzing borders.

Ever-exchanging.  Ever-engaging.

We climb.  We calibrate.

We dance, we speak, we respond, we laugh, we play, we swim…

We dream, we sleep, we breathe…

WE CALIBRATE…

…and become.

This is mysterious to me.  Mysterious and wonderful.  How I tend to think I “know” I am made of the same miniscule moving structures as you, as air, as mountain, as stream… And yet I retain a form… maintain an autopoietic and dynamic interchange and existence (for a time) as a cognizable (humanly) and dynamic “organism” or form of life.  Like a language, a rock, a helix, an artwork, an idea.  That I “know” these elemental spaces composed of tinier spaces making up larger spaces are all active, are full, are constantly coming and going, interacting and recombining, becoming and altering, editing and con-forming… and yet we identify, recognize, perceive…and do it again – come together, and calibrate…

Action.  Language.  Presence.  Exchange.

Remain.  Begin.  Engender.  Preserve.

BECOME.

Each of it: action, communication, gesture, touch, sense, perception, behavior, belief,

OPPORTUNITY and ENACTMENT of CALIBRATION…

COMMUNICATION

hello.

communication

Too Big to Know (Essential Readings in the Philosophy of LIS)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy, Reflections1 Comment

I’m currently reading Too Big To Know by David Weinberger and quite intrigued by his observations – Lane’s account is a cogent analysis of why.

 

Lane Wilkinson's avatarSense & Reference

If David Weinberger is to be believed, the Internet hasn’t just changed how we access information, it has altered the very meaning of ‘knowledge’. In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Weinberger claims that “for the coming generation, knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument.” Supposedly, the networked, collaborative, and social nature of the Internet has changed our very understanding of knowledge to the point that knowledge is no longer tied to concepts of truth, objectivity, or certainty. Instead, as Weinberger argues in his recent book, Too Big to Know, “knowledge is a property of the network” (p. xiii). That is, the Internet has profoundly changed what it means to be a fact, to be true, or to be known. This book has been making the rounds among librarians, so I thought it might be a good idea…

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“In short – who will archive cultures in the future – the state, corporations, or the public?”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy, Traces5 Comments

This article both combines and extends some of my favorite things to mull….

Archiving cultures – Mike Featherstone

Borges Aleph

coupled to concepts found in such texts as these:

“The archive fever is to attempt to return to the lived origin, the everyday experience, which is the source of the imperfect and distorted memories which are our archives and whose transience and forgetting makes us uncomfortable”

-Jacques derrida-