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.
You know there was a particular kind of sorrow that came with confusion, or a certain feeling of being flustered.
She said: Between Point A and Point B is epic poetry, the pathways of taxis, the flights of birds and bees…the shortest distance…follows the molecule
She was surprised by what she saw, she said, I remember.
I don’t remember how to make stories, or ever tell what happens. I hardly remember the words.
Someone said they’d like to write like that, like me, that they would feel good about it. Maybe so. I don’t remember. I just place the words hoping one way or another they might end up meaning.
Something needs to shake, shake up, quiver and tremble.
I need to be rolled dice.
I am troubled (at times) by the absence of narrative. My impatience. Describe what you want, embellish the action and details, characters and plots – I’ll be reading for the meaning, watching for it to happen – we rarely need the bells and whistles.
Like a good poem might be – line after line – meaning.
Potentially.
Facts are of little use unless we doubt them. Without gaps we’ve nowhere to move.
I don’t know what to tell you, I want to write, and my brain rattles like a busted engine.
What if there were desire – if I wanted something, faced conflict, suffered,
So in the beginning was a context. In this case the context is words, and you, the screen or paper, the molecules filling distance and your apparatus of perception. The kind of being you are and the sorts of matter – ink, bits, paper, code, air, eye, flesh, neurons, etc… and what results.
The scenarios are endless.
And always many.
You/One/Many
could say – you (as a scenario) and
world as a convergence of particular scenarios
Squirrel scenario. Grass. Breeze scenario. Soil. The scenarios of Marriage. Tree scenario. Ear. Language scenarios. Thought. Memory scenarios. Emotion. Pencil scenario. Keyboard. Spiritual scenarios, movement, national scenarios, weather, (and so on…and so on…perhaps not so much nested as meshed and interactive – untold scenarios interacting…compoundly conditioning the scenario that we as individuals provide)
excepting not in those/these terms
the area of the angles
(arms, knees, uneven radius and circumference of heads – it doesn’t matter – it will change in a moment…even less than…)
Scattered experience. Over the past 90 days my life has been characterized by necessities. Scrambling to find sustainable work, scrambling to keep up with coursework. Scrambling to assist as best I can in the psychological health and stability of my family, children. Scrambling to keep my head above water in grief, loss, confusion, self-care and healing.
In these currents – their exhaustion, their novelty, their large and compounded emotions of helplessness, anger, frustration, anguish and fear, their realms of bewilderment – my last ditch scramble has been to note, feel, soak and pay attention to as much as I can, filling notebooks full of journalings, lists, to-dos, scenarios, something like prayers or wishes, something like tomes of notes intended for bottles and no one / anyone. My best last chance seemed to be to try to MAP things – maintain access to whole regions of variant experience, conflicts, desperations and strengths, plans and disappointments, resumes and rejections, therapy appointments and dependents-events, multiple employment schedules and deadlines, and so on…SCRAMBLING…but at least with some scattered semblance of shapes and places and events…
Recently reading through Joshua Cohen’s Four New Messages, I encountered a story in which the story is being drafted simultaneous to the story being the story of the difficulty of its drafting, messages to mother or father about how stuck and stunted the process of managing multiple lives (or roles), composing fiction, processing life, and maintaining the presence of mind to embody created worlds and encountered worlds...living.
It hasn’t worked out that way. As I’ve delved into depths of my history, experience, perceptions as cracked open by the recent grief, loss and confusion; as I’ve purposed more presentness with my children and family and friends; as I’ve filled my days with job searches – statements of my identity, skills, education and worth; as I’ve learned new labor and institutions and expectations; as I’ve rewritten survivable budgets, forged opportunities to keep some semblance of self-care about what I want to be about (art, literature, learning, meaning); as I’ve sought to stay fit, attend to my body; as I’ve filled pockets of moments with music and writings that nurture or comfort me… things have NOT found any design… but are scrambled, scattered, disparate, paradoxical, bewildering. For the notebooks of language I have emitted during these months… there is hardly a snippet that makes literary sense, is bloggable, expresses. Thus the erratic entries, the confusing sentiments, the uncertainty and unknowing…
For now… here are the texts I’m hanging on…
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Hopefully something will form… for now, scattered blurbs and reports, survival and bewilderment… SCRAMBLING…
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)
If the world were different, or its circumstances, so would he be – no use going down that avenue. Where he’d gotten to, he’d arrived of his own doing – his own choices, interactions and responses to his surroundings – his opportunities and limitations – his very own and very shared, complex experiences.
The “way of looking at it” is always only one way of looking at it – that’s the case of it, even when viewed through “multiple perspectives” – if its delivered of a human, it’s the processing of singular machines, however plural their construction may be.
So change is curious, in that, when any element alters, the entire effect is unknown, is of incalculable scales that can only be measured in probabilities. Probabilities, hypotheses, theories and beliefs have one tremendous thing in common: they are all of them uncertain. You’ve heard it said (or he has) – “the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself,” no, that doesn’t sound quite right, “the only thing we know for certain is that everything’s uncertain,” no, people don’t use the word certain and its relatives that often. “Change is truth, truth is change”?
She said: “A shared past isn’t forgotten even in change.” That works for him, for what is memory but the continuous recording of change?
It’s grown easy to confuse himself, he thinks.
He notes: “You find yourself in an encyclopedia of circumstance and then you wonder.” He only wonders because to inquire or investigate would mean to revise the encyclopedia by looking at it – selecting, perceiving, and thereby focusing an entry to the ignorance of the rest. A book-burning, a global apocalypse, a conflagration of reality. Not what he wants. So he sits and stews or simmers there. But the limiting fact of existing at “there” annihilates great distances. He can’t seem to avoid mass destruction. He takes deep breaths.
Writing like thinking like moving – all of it creating a splintered prism of mirrors, warped and shattering windows on presence. He loves her. And others beside. And himself. And the strange fanatic gifts of the world. People – “good,” “bad,” or otherwise – how can they not fascinate, be beautiful, in even their minimal capacities? Where had he edited this part of himself, during? How he loved her, benefit or ill.
He changes, along with everything about (or around) him.
Everything was changing (an enormous statement) and he along with it (the Everything). Self, selves, other, others – why did all seem unavoidably personal? Just what was this ‘person-ness’? He feeds encyclopedias to flames, and entertains the questions. Realizing that questions are the riddling workings of erasure.
His question swipes across its context, even when he’s asking of its context. In other words (his words) “focus obliterates the unclear.” And the unclear composes the context. The too-much and more-than, some even say “Beyond.” What’s not forgotten in the stylus of changing – our memory? What shared past is present? He looks at her photographs uniquely each time, each moment, each instance. Even in-stance he’s not stable.
How could he hold position on a spinning globe?
He asks Siri, the plastic voice of a Global Positioning System: “Where am I?” Her reply obliterates the world in a profession of some arbitrary gridwork (abstract and unreal) of names and points, streets and latitudes, longitudes, disabling fabrications designed to throw him off course and locate him against the constant movement. He remembers not to believe, that very re-membering dismembering the possibles.
Desiring connection – the security or perceived safety of a tightened weave, to be knotted in a tangle of threads – he spies squirrels and birds, fences and trees, a woman’s breast. To sense substance pressed against another, as if interacting a location that might not give. Or give precisely. An event.
He can’t remember what is not being forgotten. He wanted to, wanted to know what she didn’t forget, like a recipe or table of contents, a topographical map. He couldn’t imagine what response she would give – what saying or writing, what sculpting or paint – as an answer.
He stops guessing as an act of nonviolence. Most probably he lays down and opens his arms as a wishing and welcome. That is his practice now: bewildered? confused? give greeting and welcome. “Hello there, unclear and unknown, I am unable to re-cognize you or you would be known and familiar…and yet I am sensing a pattern,” he says. A family resemblance of mystery, a remembering of is. If no one’s written that, perhaps they should (he thinks – another act of violence). Pronouncements. Aphorisms. Like paradox-bombs, parables leaving remains.
As a first, he senses he understands “absolute truth” – that rage and genocide that attempts to rid the world of itself – its reality, complexity, multitudes. Truth the large red button signed “Do Not Press!” Depression must be a result of pressuring some truth, excluding all else?
Confused, he feels at home. Mismembering, bewildered, changing with change. Con-fused – isn’t that what he on some scale desires? To be fused-with, part-of, belonging and participant?
He’s in motion, there is music and breath and these thoughts – all things depending on change.
“…no longer a subjective bubble, but rather a limitless interface through which ontological or ‘pure’ relations and ‘becomings’ easily pass…Subjectivity is constitutively open, or has a being-toward, as do all relative beings…We are semiotic, existential territories rather than brains in vats, and these territories or ecologies are not contained within our physical anatomy, nor are they known only as immanent representations. The question becomes this: Where does your cognition or subjectivity terminate if it is a suprasubjective process and not a stable substance? The ‘self’ becomes a sign relation or interpretant rather than an unrelated, ontological entity…What is being constantly emphasized is a kind of semiotic ontology in which relations become crucial at every level of analysis and allow for the interweaving of corporeal and incorporeal factors. Relations are an intrinsic dimension of being, and every being becomes the active center of a web of relations with other beings…beings that are nevertheless in mobile relationships…the ‘truth of the relative’ rather than the ‘relativity of truth.”
– Paul Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations –
In my efforts to ground and attend to my experience and express it with honesty (see Opening the Hand) I have developed a map of locations – realms of the process that have risen as prominent regions within the difficulty, effort, grief, growth and procession of engaging dramatic change… You can view it here: Locations on the Map of Meaning.
To view the text for each mode, simply hover over the nodes title, click or press the + button or the down arrows beneath each location title to see full content. Some nodes lead to further nodes or you can use the buttons along the bottom of the screen. Repeating my former disclaimer…
“All of this is to say that I plan a series of posts that will be intensely personal, self-revelant, my own way of reaching toward my experience, my being, and selecting language with which to mark it down – for re-memory, re-cognition, observation, reception, attention, account. These are journal entries, frankly. They are what I have to write. I am calling them “Mapping the Meaning.” Since I know very few of you personally, in your whole presence, I expect confession, inquiry, and its self-circular expression to genuinely interest or benefit very few of you. For me, it is writing with an open hand.”
