An Open Letter on Statistical Analysis

On By Alias HarlequinIn being, change, Current Reading, doing, Experience, human, life, meaning, Reflections, research, statistical analysis, timeLeave a comment

Stat anal chart

I used to shy away from Statistical Analysis as a means to meaning.

Now different thoughts occur.

Last night my daughter was struggling with 5th-grade division problems that involved endless remainders…

I used to be really uncomfortable with the “why?” of mathematics…

…last night I found it fascinating, as if it were opening entirely new sets of mysteries and unknowns to me trailing off as it did, like endless reflection and inquiry.

QUERY 1: “WHY?”

rodin-thinker-detail-upper-body-right-side-landscape-view

Common enough thought for a philosopher.

Seems to me the “good philosopher” (effective, useful, usable, relevant) consistently ponders and inquires into the Affect and Effect of whatever is under observation or scrutiny.  What / How / Why / Where / & for Whom does it “mean” that we’re Doing / Being / Knowing this or that or what-not.  Anything, really.  Anything at all.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

Which got me to thinking…

what/how/why/where/when/for-whom do all these infographics, demographics, assessments, quizzes, ticked responses, reviews, # of views, feedbacks, “likes,” “unlikes,” and so forth “mean” for our Doing/Being/Knowing?

(what’s it all mean, Big Data [pronounced “Big Dadda”?)

QUERY 2: “Huh?”

confusion diagram

WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

The question that drives, allows, enables any help a “philosopher” might be able to foster…

AND HERE COMES STATISTICAL ANALYSIS!

(the philosopher asks)…

For the moment, just…just-now, here, this-when…

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY MATTERS MOST TO YOU IN YOUR LIFE?

**************(Stop.)************

************(Breathe.)***********

************(Ponder.)*********

Let’s check out your personal statistics (YOU’LL have to do this part of the work – observation, comparison & contrast, open inquiry & interpretation)

statistical control chart

for instance…WHAT things do you nudge toward qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis?

A few simple questions regarding:

  • time with children/partner/self/nature/friends/world (in relation to) time at work?
  • time scrolling Facebook / browsing internet (in relation to) time gazing at / listening to / caressing / doing-being-knowing-with your loved-ones?
  • time realizing time-tested wishes or longings (in relation to) accepted responsibilities?
  • time reading/moving/resting (in relation to) time watching/viewing/receiving
  • pleasurable time (in relation to) suffering time

and so on….

[or how well do such things mesh up / converge / resolve, etc?)

(finding ways statistical analysis might mean)

bodyaffectchart

and then, of course, there’s the more totalizing EXPERIENCING of such analysis / account / record / actuality [REALITY]…

Aha-moments

…at least ONE way a statistical analysis might MEAN?

(and a humane use of philosophy?)

(science & mathematics?)

(humanities & arts?)

INQUIRY

  • WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOU?

(maybe think of 3-5…rank them?)

  • HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF YOURSELF?

(keep track of your minutes / hours for 3-5 days)

  • WHAT DOES YOUR ACTUAL BEING / DOING / KNOWING REPORT ABOUT WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

(compare.  contrast.  assemble.  interpret.  reflect.)

CREATE.

[RESEARCH: it all depends on context]

and it’s all immersive EXPERIENCE

i-u-line_01-Context_click

(…used my lunch break for grocery-shopping to alleviate evening stress after work when I need to get the kids to multiple locations and events, and prepare dinner while hopefully interacting with them, witnessing their goings-on in the ONE place I can be at a time, while finishing up that revised CV I need for perhaps continuing employment in a position I actually feel suited to, find challenging, and organizing an upcoming theater production, parceling energy with hopes I might have some left for my prime concern: my partner, or maybe myself – isn’t that part of all of it too? – and the reading/writing/reflecting I’d love to do, acquiring plane tickets and maps for upcoming family journeys, counting breaths to relax, aiming for meta-cognition and emotional awareness so that I don’t miss, ignore, injure, need to exercise, plus the laundry and housework, and…)

why

all the time, is just the time you have

Rambling

On By Alias HarlequinIn Aging, change, Current Reading, family, Fear, hope, human, Journal, lifeLeave a comment

Fits and Starts

How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress.  For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness.  Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.

Is this another emerging effect of aging?

My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage.  Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations.  We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)  

mom and dad wedding

which means that I also approach 50.

So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…

I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.

One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE.  Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss.  Anything.  The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…

FITS & STARTS

I shoulda wrote a letter.  There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes.  “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW.  The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes.  The breaths, the touches, the thoughts.  The feel of it all.

The word/concept/term “Mashup.”

Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness.  My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator.  To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup.  Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…

Perhaps each now is realization & threshold.  And, as a friend recently pointed out…“hope is such a restless state”.

hope butterfly

Fits & Starts

On By Alias HarlequinIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, hope, life, Writing3 Comments

What scribbles out the sides, longing for a place to go…

while I’m busy with other things

743-C.TWOMBLY.

The sentences broke between them.  Not twisting or scrambling, no encrypted script noising up communication; more like letter parts and chunks of words crumbling away before they even bridged the gaps.  Sayings that collapsed on themselves as they emerged.

***********************************************************************************************************************************************************

At the point we begin imagining ourselves insane and institutionalized, conjuring car wrecks or dreaming deaths in the family to avoid our obligations…we are well-advised that something has gone wrong…

************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Whenever what might be called an “encounter” occurred between them, everything else grew less pressing, less…significant or unsurvivable.  She became a solution and a re-solution all at one go…

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

fragments, in other words.

The days have to be enough…they’re all we have.

Resources

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, human, life, Literature, meaning, Writing1 Comment

One of the many reasons (words-turned-to-meanings) he’s tattooed on my veins…

Jabes

Velocity and Friction

On By Alias HarlequinIn Aging, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, Fear, fiction, love, relationships, Self-Doubt, Writing2 Comments

This uncovered writing has parts that feel like 16-year-old wordplay mixed with the aging man…sigh.

FROM THE 9 NOTEBOOKS

desert driving

Velocity and Friction

9 Notebooks

On By Alias HarlequinIn communication, creative writing, Experience, identity, Kafka, life, notebooks, Writing1 Comment

In an act of rebellion and a kind of self-serving exorcism or slate-clearing (what blog is NOT an attempt at an entity’s expression, communication?), and facing the duress of weeks burdened with commitments and inescapable responsibilities…[in other words]…I intuit I am encountering a “time” (weeks / months / foreseeable futures?) that I deduce as laden – somehow preordained – for preoccupations of employment, previously established obligations – freighted with encumberances complexly negotiated…[under pressure I compose]…and so I search for a project [as is my way] that is FOR ME[?] (something autotrophic, self-cannibalizing and nourishing at once, individually comprised and contained) an insurrection and defiance honoring self [so I surmise] facing compulsion…

…and I unearth these 9 Notebooks…all aborted undertakings from the past 12 months…via which I propose to mount mutiny by posting all that seems potentially warranted in them [upon re-reading as if the first time, long forgotten]…toward little other purpose than for purging, opening, erasing – a clearinghouse of efforts – that might evolve toward some novel substitution, unforeseen modification, development, emergence…

“this is what directs him to learning – where he may encounter fragments of his own existence,

fragments that are still within the context…”

– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka – 

9 Notebooks

There will be stories, concepts, poems, characters, reflections, essays…and ephemeral scraps like these…

  • think feel – attune to meaning – reflect and refract
  • befriend your body, take care with your mind
  • be gentle, be open.  move fluidly, breathe
  • go alert to your dreams
  • wish more than hope, walk don’t run, run sometimes
  • be careful of rules, they’re always changing, it’s the nature of the rule, the measure, the standard
  • keep your eyes and ears open, along with heart and mind – only let things close into pleasure and pain – and that more of a wince
  • don’t be afraid of your story – write and rewrite it, edit and revise, revise, revise, and write it again
On By Alias HarlequinIn communication, creative writing, human, meaning, Writing6 Comments

Witt Quote

Sometimes it seems, it takes me so much time (it seems) to find whereof I can speak…

A Brief and Derivative Hello / Interview

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Experience, Literature, meaning1 Comment

An attempt viewed in incompletion

On By Alias HarlequinIn creative writing, Experimenctes, human, identity, Journal, Poetry1 Comment

sad skeleton

Impromptu

Arid time and things, they pass

Erase, not quite, deteriorate

Inexact as well, but depleting

Depleting.

Depleting.

.

Not exactly end, ending

Never a beginning

Ever picked up midstride

Midstream

Only ever in the midst

.

Tiring then,

Worn down,

Depleted, she said,

Exhausted,

.

and yet what from?

From what is he so tired

unto ruin?

What is ruin-ed?

What never was?

Perhaps.

.

Always midstride, then

Nearer to the end

this depletion

Depleting

.

nothing

Begun ever

Certainly nothing

ever completed.

Always midstride,

and nearer to the end,

incompleted, and

depleting

Depleting

.

Unable to keep up with 1/8 of the 9-year-old,

worrying the 10, the 17, the young man

fails the partner

fails the weather

failing his own mind

            own dreams

            his own body

.

ideas

.

Depleting

.

Always midstream,

frozen in place

nearer to the end

this present

Depleting

.

Would like to write it out

Write it off

Pick up again

Declare a start

But he can’t

or won’t

.

Nearing the end,

Never getting there,

(near completion, never that)

only begun and that just barely

joined midstride

nearer to the end

simply depleting

.

Inexorably

.

Without fail.

The one thing without fail.

The one absolute success.

The one almost-completion:

.

depletion.

Depleting

.

Always midstride

and nearer to the end –

very much like dancing

on bleeding broken legs

On By Alias HarlequinIn change, creative writing, Experience, Journal, life, Writing4 Comments

Losing

Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness.  Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again.  Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand.  Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind.  Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins.  Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind.  One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.

– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –

Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991. 

For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.

Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.

Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Thinking.

Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,

the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,

grew redundant with desire…

…desire for language to do some certain things,

…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:

to write the ambiguities.

Repeatedly:  to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal.  Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear.  That light in which even our shadows go unseen.

Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,

encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,

my writing desire grows more active,

toward the active,

and its happening,

writing verbally,

writing living:

to write losing.

Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity. 

Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.

TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING

to loose losing

…perhaps to lose it…

…face to endlessness…

will he make it?