Given the miniscularity and brevity…and, say, the import or apparent heft – foils of mountain, sea, sky, and other incremental gravities or scale-altering engagements…
…what boils down in my insignificant, barely mappable blip of a space-form “life-span”?
What do I want? (Mountain. Man. Collective of actionable atoms.)
Or how about in another form: I, mountain, atom, want to write, am writing,
leaving record (partly), making record (partly), finding record (partly),
recording (partly), imagining (partly), learning (partly), playing (partly),
wondering (partly), thinking (partly), providing (manufacturing) company (partly),
because I can and it makes living-through delightful, meaningful, poignant, aware, alert…
Simply…I accounted for happiness recently as reading, writing and forms of companionship, because reading and writing (inseparable companions, or perhaps two aspects utterly meshed and merged, inextricably joined) – experiencing them seems to me to be enhanced when compatibly shared, mutually valued, reciprocated and informed.
I want to write. I want what I write to provide sustenance for my self and children and home. I want to write whatever I have it in me to make out of language, not what people ask me to write or pay me to write or suggest that I write.
PART ONE:
There is a grand, iconic, snow-capped mountain – Kilimanjaro, Hood, Vesuvius – symmetrical-seeming mounds of earth that simply and irreducibly and undeniably say – silently and continuously – “I AM HERE.”
Part One:
I exist. I mark. I testify to and quarry that existence in my way. I artefact.
[wants to be a writer. writes. AM a writer. wants to support existence by doing that which it wants : to write]
“the intersection of talents and joys”
[wants to parent well. to develop thoughtful, compassionate, productive child-persons of survivable health. parents.]
To artefact (not for longevity or endurance [perhaps partly – a kind of sustenance surely]) but to quarry the systems and processes – the multitude of unknowns to living-through.
I artefact – consciously to be present, to offer, to be worthwhile, to further matter (to participate in generation, ongoing complexity, collaboration, coordination and collocation – co-being, co-construction with world).
Write. Parent. Relate. (therefore) I, artifact (make ‘art’ in ‘fact’).
[take in artefacts via world – learn, adopt, adjust, adapt, extend – and artifact this process out]
These are wonderful, benign, banal, investigations.
The Simply Difficult: WHAT AM I? WHO AM I? WHY? HOW? : The Questions of Living-Through.
(I repeatedly note that life interests me insofar as I am querying WHY people think they exist and attending to HOW …)
What are your answers to these? (my present mobile answers provided in parentheses)
WHAT are you? (a temporary and dynamic collection of active molecules idiosyncratically coupled and formed)
WHO are you? (a fluid and alterable co-depending individuated space-form reciprocally coupled to its perceptual and perceiving, cognizable surround)
WHY are you? (a form of life…to be)
HOW are you? (idiosyncracies=personhood: the fluctuating continuum of activities and behaviors between what I contain and what contains me…the marginal substance where uniqueness exhibits)
Or… I, Mountain / You, Sky. Ocean. Flock. Field. Plain.
All of this to say that every object(form) at every moment is responsible for the possibilities of meaning.
We could be anyone (and will be, have been, are, plus…) individually (or ‘uniquely’ ANYone).
IN OTHER WORDS: I want to stop whatever this is and tell you.
Want to tell you I LOVE YOU. I am personally thankful that you exist and am convinced the entire world would be different (no matter how miniscule or brief you may be) if there were not you (seems to be the way EVERYthing – systemically – IS). So I am thankful (good or ill) that: ARE. IS.
Say there is/was a child. Mountain. Hypothesis. Arrangement. Beginning. Again. Scenario.
First of all, let me apologize for not being very consistent or active here the past week or two. And then apologize for the following length (somehow I felt it was okay, given the silence caused by entanglements of necessity and sustenance)…
If I were a mountain. This was my first thought, while reflecting on you, me, our children, planets and plants, birth, death, brains and bodies and societies of persons, nations, sciences and myths, plus at least 10,000 other things. The effort to consider everything – a total picture – my limited whole with as many details as possible. As if meanings were stars and knowledge all the darkness around them.
Taking time. If I conjure everything I know – time-saving habits and fixes, sundry scientific theories, the feel of my children’s hair, the path of a bee, each lip that’s found its way against mine, every person, voice, place I remember in part, pancake recipes, varieties of soil I’ve walked over, tasted, smelled, languages living and dead…don’t worry, I won’t list 10,000 things and their changing nuances…
What is common for me, when not immediately struggling to make ends meet up, are these attempts at collocating and corroborating my experiences and knowledge to date…and it inevitably leads to profound sensations of brevity and minisculity (?).
If what I have experienced, lived-through and wended into my body and brain represented stars (those sometimes recognizable flickering points of light)…
…all I have not heard of, thought, experienced, lived-through or felt
would be represented by the gargantuan dark – the endless, perhaps infinite, space.
My 43 years. Books I have read, courses taken, jobs held, skills learned, places inhabited and endured. Women I’ve loved, children I’ve borne and partially raised, persons I’ve met, objects and activities engaged and observed, skies, senses, stuff.
Pretend you are space.
A space that is full, perhaps something akin to our idea of atom. Imagine your space, of space, in space. In other words – your little flexible dynamic space is both made of space, contained in space, occupying and participating in space and spaces and shares its participatory space(s) with 10,000…10,000,000,000,000…uncountable space-forms and forms of space…
I, atom. Barely a point in space-time, hardly formally recognizable, and from what angle or distance? Limited space-form through limited space-times. A flexible, dynamic, ever-morphing relatively microscopic or enormous form-ish space-ish thingy.
An atom bounding, ricocheting, trembling and changing throughout a little universe…a variable assemblage of atom-like moments transforming in particular ways of a sort addicted to accounting for and measuring itself and its surroundings (a way of distinguishing presence in these manners of matters).
Forms and Objects
If I were a mountain (that is, in relation to “you”) I’d likely be quieter, perhaps slower, present and patient – you might reference or measure yourself by me (I was thinking). I might want less. Not have the same desires and activities formally compressed into 70-80 “years…”
And then if you were a sky full of stars or dawn, an enormous canvas of clouds and colors, ubiquitous…and there was that mountain…
So very small, so very brief: Me.
Couple all of that to the profound affects felt (in and on me) by other malleable collectives of atoms we refer to as “us” – plus mountains, valleys, rivers and seas, weather, events, animals, places and things: at our scale, and between ever-so-many scales, we have significant import and effect, albeit almost nothing at all viewed fractionally and/or noticeably at minimally larger scales (I suppose that could be argued…)
Anyway, we exist for ourselves primarily at our own shared scale, imagining (or inventing) other scales in order that we might examine ourselves, potentially compare or evaluate…us.
But if I were a mountain…how different would our relation be? I imagine it this way: You in your human scale, and me as mountain. In rain, ages, erosion and accretion, growing trees and dropping boulders…and you, briefly, tramping across me, perhaps admiring or photographing me, resting on me, using me as a direction or a landmark – always there, there, there. Other things, people, events, experiences of your immediate scale rise and fall, come and go, attach and detach, begin and end, flux and alter…
You as sky to me, and I – mountain.
This thinking – that it might help me somehow to imagine life at other scales… Perhaps this is why…
Fiction
Science
Philosophy
Art
Religion
History
…what might we mean at another scale? between scales? Not simply as we are to ourselves, as we experience or live-through our brief experiences as space-forms in space-times, but from alternate frames and scalar perspectives?
Imagine…from the view of our constituent elements and systems…over large ranges of processes (“history,” “time”) or briefer ones (Mayfly, ant, daisy)…from tectonic or astronomical lenses…where we can’t even register as an entity, object or form…and by the time whatever activity we mustered – energy or noise we emitted in our being reached a distant planet or star we’d have been gone for thousands and thousands of our decades?!
As if, even at our scale, we are molecules shaking in a beaker. Vibrating, jostling one another, coming together, splitting apart, sometimes bonding, sometimes break – but most often simply bouncing to and fro. Jiggling. Adapting and adjusting.
Mountain. Sky. Metaphors of import.
10,000 words on 10,000,000,000,000…things (or just the one)
I’ll admit – I’m pretty proud of this one. Seems I’m getting toward some of those true hard honest realities about how it is for some of us – the terror of actual intimacy, the joy at the idea or feel of it… let me know what you think.
accidentally opened a file from the past that seemed related…
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).
In any genre. Writer becomes when the needs disappear – needs like expression or dialogue, understanding or inquiry. The need to devise layers or multiples of perspective, to experiment or experience language or thought. To love.
When these needs are expunged or exhausted, and a human puts pen or pencil to page, writing might begin.
These needs are not expunged.
Needs complexly relocate.
Maybe they find a more suitable object, event, or entity. Writer attempts to construct love via language and page. This is also dialogue. But what is needed is resonance-WITH. What is longed for are moments of positive resonance with an other of Writer’s same kind. Where resonance would be acceptance, acknowledgment, empathy. Comprehension, understanding, attunement with Writer’s barest, most authentic expressions – Writer’s openness and risk, Writer’s life-experiencing, meaning-making processes.
[NOTE: Obviously it is literature being addressed herein – not formulaic, hack, commissioned, business or “professional,” aesthetic or philosophical – domain-specific languages, entertainment or communication-purposed compositions. Rather – writing that lays bare living– which can (also obviously) partake or occur within any and all of the above forms and kinds of inscriptions]
Writer, utilizing all accessible knowledge, craft and experience divulges (as best Writer can at this instant) Writer’s lived experience. Writer loves her. Writer grieves. Writer imagines. Writer pretends. Writer co-constructs (borrowing from the everywhere that language, experience, emotion, sensation, cognition, DNA, biology, physiology, dimensions etc. comprise) trails of letters, incipient sounds, rhythms, definitions, analogies and metaphors, socio-cultural baggage, spatio-temporal perceptions, historical variety and habitudes, toward some sort of text, artifact, writing.
In other words, Writer writes.
And as Writer writes, Reader reads (they are one and the same initially) and that reading also co-constructs the divulgence and activity-experience the writing com-poses.
Posing-with = Writing. An individual, posing-with, everything-at-disposal (its affordances and limitations) through language-inscribed.
[NOTE: pose1 pōz/
1. verb
1.
present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).
“the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area”
The needs remain because they’re needs. Needs oxygen, needs community, needs interaction, needs movement. Needs nutriments, needs love. Needs habits and practices, processes and conventions. Needs society, needs shelter, needs protection, needs…
As if folded-into. As if woven. As if inherent and intrinsic, automatic.
As of anything and everything, then, Writing is not solitary. “To write” is TO-WRITE-WITH the universe-encyclopedia of said individual, “writing.” Some languages verb this better than others, some will allow us to feign.
Writer will not feign, unless “to survive” necessitates “to feign.”
Writer intends to write-with, perhaps finally surpassing a former dream of being no one, no thing, instead edging toward and everything that one is, of necessity, Writing.
Theories exist that propose a process for primary and profound attachments. That as these attachments proceed, they will inevitably expose (or reach, come up against) individual limitations. As humans intermingle with increased intimacy and time, eventually the darker reaches, safer holdings in us (traumas, repression, grave fear or terror, shame) will be engaged and something will ensue – usually either openings or closures. The following was composed as an attempt at a relational account of this…
We Open Doors
We struggle. We stumble forth. We reach, we ramble, we run. We learn to walk. We tumble and waver, we stride. We overhear, we listen, we engage. We greet what we encounter, we welcome and inquire. We reciprocate. We open doors.
We gaze, we laugh, we remember and rejoinder. We wander, we wonder, we happily agree. We chide and we dispute, we recommend and reason, we exclaim. We open doors.
We step forth, step through, we open chambers. We confess. We beg, we plead, we rest and bless. We sing. We join, we sway, we dance. We kick and scream and wriggle. We resonate. We hurt and we forgive, we open doors.
We whisper while we shout, we worship and succumb. We praise and denigrate, argue, negotiate, we push and we budge. We hesitate. We wrestle with the locks, we suppress and unremember, we fabricate, we lie. We pry the doors.
We change the stories. We imagine. We concoct and recreate. We design a thread and tell a tale, we corroborate with doubt and love. We fear and we recall. We reassure. We swoon, we falter and we soothe. We open doors.
We enter dungeons. We smell the dark. We trigger mines. We panic and react. We flee aimless and return, we grasp and seek and hope. We lift the doors.
We reach the wetlands. Cross the plains. We clamber mountains holding onto rope. We knot and we undo. We disrobe and arm ourselves. We bleed. We heal. We stack the rocks. We open doors.
We attach and we press on. We scab and suffer. We get lost. We recover. We holler, we recoil, we respond. We widen cracks and we expose. We grope, we censor, we divide. We rage and we varnish, we forget. We ask and refuse the answer. We testify, profess. We strain and crawl. We collapse. We guard the doors.
We collaborate. We weave and tear and shape. We invent. We threaten cores. We gird our hearts and steel our minds, we clasp our hands. We jump and weep and fly. We grieve. We repose, we dialogue, we alchemize. We sear. We use our weight. We bolster. We open doors – they slam us.
We protect. We damage and arrange. We repair. We gossip with our notions. We theorize, we enter forests. We drown and cradle rocks, we float and we resign. We hear the latches, we peer downstairs, we take our steps and count the beats. We’re keeping time. We feel the tremors, we sense the snap, we open doors.
We break them down. We tremble. We contract. We slither, wriggle, wind. We explode, we come undone, we disappear. We hear the lock. We search the key. We gather, we conspire, we close in. We close doors. We seal, we paint, we turn. We shrink, explore, thin out. We look away, look forward, look about. We separate and margin. We barrier and bind. We open doors.
We pause, we blind, we wish. The doors shut tight on what we’ve opened.
All my Words are Silent 