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.
Say you have a product – an object of some sort – a shirt or a song, an idea or a skill – and you’d like to share it, show it, sell it, make it useful. How would you go about this? Perhaps make an image of it, a recording, describe or depict it somehow, place it with similar objects but distinguish it, express what it’s made of, from, how, where, when, how one can find or obtain it. None of these things – the image, the recording, the description, depiction, components, composition, etc. ARE the product itself – they are new and other objects – descriptive ones, administrative ones, structuring ones, among other things…potentially useful and actionable data about the resource itself.
The shirt is long-sleeved, it is stormy blue, size: large (16.5×42), it has 5 buttons made of sandalwood, it is hand-stitched and crafted from Indian muslin, and so on. Metadata. It applies to ideas, objects, events, persons, places, things, relations, sounds, senses. It is a language. It can be formal or informal, global or local, controlled or free. It allows systems and processes, machines or functions, humans or networks to utilize resources toward purposes – to identify, select, obtain, organize, comprehend, etc…
The resource is separate from all this.
Metadata and Experience
A rush of blood to the head. An uncontrollable weeping. Sudden awareness, a fear, a noticing. Tightening throat, sorrow, excitement. Vibrations on the inside, tingling along the spine, a feeling in the “gut.” Things happen. We move. We sense. We perceive. We process all this automatically, at a bodily, neuronal, cellular, physiological scale : our resources for staying alive, for being.
Enter metadata…of which the above paragraph is an example (the descriptive type). How describe, identify, narrativize (organize, administer), utilize, put to some constructed purpose all these goings-on of our felt experience (our primary resources)? Create repeatable elements, qualifications (say “the flush in response to her text was ‘love,’ ‘infatuation,’ ‘shame,’ or ‘rage’”); encode it, fit it into the system, the processes (“I wouldn’t feel such pain if things were different, if she were here…”)…signify relations.
It is stormy blue, my grief, it has long sleeves with a long reach, it covers me entire, lays upon me like a veil, like a skin between. I am clothed with absence, the buttons burn.
Metadata. The resource (capacity for grief, for attachment, for longing; the ability to love, to fear, to wish, to compose metadata, to fabricate meaning/purpose/functions and relations for physiological experience – the Resources) – are separate from their description, depiction, events, experiences, persons, relations, constructed meanings…THE RESOURCES ARE OURS.
We tend, for ease of use and efficiency, consistency, sharability, continuity and so on (“interoperability”) to create for ourselves Application Profiles – when we experience this sort of felt happening I’ll call it love, anger, shelve it here, link it to…qualify it with shame, doubt, fear, happiness (all major experience-metadata schema elements). So we create Core Elements or fields of experience and their Qualifiers, Sources, Rights, Techniques and Technicalities, and administer, structure, organize, identify and select (or reject) our felt experiences accordingly. Our constant work of labeling, cataloging, categorizing, operationalizing, conditioning, meaning-making: our data about data – our profiles of description, selection, controls, language, encoding, linking, expressing…structuring our experience.
Our Resource Description Frameworks – statements – “this, has relation to, this” “is similar to” “causes” “is result of” “makes me” “hurts…” “means…” “is author of” “has title” and so on…ME.
Resources
And then the Resources…apart from all that… our felt experiences…our capacities and abilities we label love, courage, loss, grief, ecstasy, pleasure, pain, generosity, grace, fear, anger, shame, hope…
…apart from the metadata we construct, the linkages we compose…
are OURS to utilize as we see fit, as we wish, as we choose.
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.
MEANING from EXPERIENCE: “What Begins as I, Ends as It”: A Form of Fiction
“Every movement resonates with its preacceleration and its overarticulation, active in a contagion of speeds and slownesses”
-Erin Manning, Always More than One–
I.
The erosion would be complete (or very nearly) now. What had once seemed an “inner life” or “personal experience,” perhaps “individuality” or some such, (as far as could be sensed) was wholly in absentia. No happening, event, or perception – let alone interpretation or meaning.
Now it was only something thesauri’d as anguish – maybe migraine, maybe ennui.
The emptying and erasure, incessant deterioration. Taking it back to the cells.
Movement.
Terror.
Survival.
Formulating a system. Psychology and reflection not necessary. Systems in relation for persistence. An added instant. Another day.
Flefzzhat, remune, it sounded like, and signifying nothing. Activity is all. Behavior. Quieted, plastic, rearranged. Emotion in hiding or exile. It would not be decease, and he could not seem to help it.
It was cold. Began to chill. Unable, apparently to warm itself. Something gave it liquid, which, though iced cold, seemed to flush it warm. Reaction, not response.
Activity observed, not intention. It shivered. A scribbling, not a mark. A murmur, not a sound. It seemed deflated. Otherwise.
Not like a rodent, really: not furtive or purposeful. How to describe it?
A wrapped tree or scarecrow – if the scarecrow was broken and crook’d. What would survival mean, without love for words, without relish? Without desire – is it pro-cess?
Dead crow in flannel. No future envisioned, no breathing to count by.
II.
Room after room over months all displacing. Pieces at a time – chair here, sock there, key, sign, and implement. A picture. Emptiness synonymed, a variant from loss. Loss implies gone; emptied – gone away. The figure shuffling toil devolves the way of water – seamless evisceration – an evaporate.
The labor worked like cancer on its host – a devouring accretion. Humans call it grief – the impression of depression. Unable to relate, all signs a bag of Scrabble tiles. A tick will move toward warmth, grass stems trigger to the sun. Scarecrow? – merely flux. Perhaps the wind.
At one time it forayed. The worlds of animals and humans. Would have named systemic processing: “living.” Drill down deep enough, or extend exponentially – the vitality recedes.
Vitality recedes.
Sonic elements, sense. Beyond the psychosocial, even basic physics began un-mattering.
Another room, another artifact, another particle of dust duly removed. The figure now a beach – sand devolving slowly toward rock.
Rock: elemental, unfeeling, simply there. Simply there, in its flux. Taking space by making it. Stupid, muted, dumb. Pointilism sans points – that sort of thing. The figure itself an oxymoron, an elision. Not illusion. From outside this is really happening.
From within, it’s only time. The songs of Orpheus, collected as poems. Dalliance in extinction, without a puffin’s reward or a dinosaur’s drama. Just scarecrow – a covered tree – limbing in almost dark.
Prime example of nearly. Nearly being, nearly attached, nearly meaningful – nearly perceived. Nearly alive – another way of saying (in a scientist’s tongue): NOT.
III.
If a statement of faith is “always more than one” then here we have a really hard problem: no statement, no faith, and ever only one…Beckett’s dissolution… How It Is.
“how last how last”…”vast tracts of time”
IV.
It echoes. The emptying room. A hollow. Blowing stiffly enough, some would say it howls. If a howl, then a cry. If a cry, a reaching out. Scarecrow doesn’t cry. But the drink kills the migraine, whites out the angst.
Wrapped tree in snow. You know it’s there.
It, without life or blood or brain. It now alone, now diminished, now slowly stripping bare.
Call it the Passenger Pigeon, the Ibex, Orpheo rising from the dead.
Call it Nothing and No-one.
Please do not call it at all.
V.
Someone said meaning was the sticky point. Point dislodged. Evaporate. Another: “this is love.” Love fucked and raped in eye socket, armpit, ass – then abandoned.
Another room cleared by the scarecrow. More bark removed from the tree, even while the burlap clings.
Life would astonish the gods – an elegy owed. It’s worse than that. It’s autopsy alive – with light everywhere. A copyist’s error.
Branches clack, and make impressions. That is all.
All my Words are Silent 