currently absorbing…
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Inebriation
currently absorbing…
Art of the Occurrence of Meaning
Art of the Occurrence of Meaning
I consider that I work strenuously to come to terms with (understand, be aware or conscious of, perceive and interpret) what it is I value, care about, intend, hope or purpose.
I am prodoundly interested in what is often referred to as “theory of mind” (TOM) – “that which hovers somewhere on the boundary between the explicit and the implicit, the conscious and the subconscious, the objective and subjective” – Maurice Bloch. And semiosis – what I understand to be the process and activity of utilizing available resources, situations, internal and external sensations to construct moments of meaning (“worlding” you could call it – co-here-ing in an embedded context). The seamless combination of culture/person-ality, internal/external, embodied/extended, conscious/subconscious – or selective/regulative – processes that occur in real-life human experiences.
Perhaps this is “Anthropology” as Maurice Bloch would have it:
“Anthropology, at least as I conceive it, presents the immense merit of uniting knowledge about human beings – that is constructed from the top down, by general theory, which in the case of cognitive psychology is supported by rigorous and controlled experiments – with knowledge of particular men and women that is constructed from the bottom up, based on the observation of people as they live their lives”
some commensurate multi-disciplinary examination of human life. I hear myself saying to myself…
[ASIDE: from high school through college when I envisioned being a great poet, I always wanted to be what I termed the “Master of Grey” – one able to plumb and express the indeterminate and indistinct – those liminal mixed and ambiguous realities of experience – exemplified by rain or fog or shadow – the betweens, the margins, the shades…]
Anyway, I hear myself saying to myself when I listen to myself speaking to myself (so very many variations of selves), that as much as I am fascinated and intrigued by the processes of the world (geological, biological, neurological, sociological and so forth) and the apparatuses and hows of human meaning-making (electro-neuro-biological, socio-cultural, etc…), I am yet more interested in the occurrences of human meaning experiences.
The “occurrence of meaning” seems to me the experience of all those elements and processes indiscretely conjoined and con-fused – wholes of which parts can’t be specified – signifieds/signifiers/significants indiscriminate: our PRESENT.
This is where art arises for me. Art and action, for art is action. Art seems to me – or processes of human making – an attempt at conjoining/confusing/commingling and co-relating of the many modes and motions, nodes and notions, processes and practices, influences confluencing the convergences we term experience.
Artistic acts are those where subject/object, conscious/subconscious, selective/regulative, internal/external, intentional/accidental distinctions in human processes do not apply – and these convergences, these realities of human living are sometimes actualized or embodied/externalized. Perhaps, in my way of thinking.
Modalities and genres, fields and spheres, behaviors, cognition and domains – social and personal intertwingled, the perceived and imperceptible carrying on simultaneously – CONverged – and that verge – that edge, rim, margin of activity – that liminal, boundary-zone open border-space is the essential –
a human way of mediately presenting occurrences of meaning, in their variety and multiplicity. Perhaps.
Or so I am thinking.
Answerability in the body of the world.
The meaning event seen in its total matrix.
Longuage
i suppose some people might not know that if i get a poetic impulse i let it out here…
Longuage
We stitch. We wend. The warp and woof (or weft).
We wept.
And made language.
.
Because beauty.*
.
If occasion is beautiful, we long –
Longuage.
Longing will depress
[equal and opposite force]
therefore, express.
.
We cry. Sigh and stutter. Susurrate.
We long: Compress. Express.
And make longuage.
.
“A thought leaves no print; leaves only the print of word in ink on page.”
–Dan Beachy-Quick
.
Without regard for Truth.
Aching willn’t analyze.
.
Fact fail.
Re-memory.
.
We perceive the beauty and we hurt
and know not what to name it –
object, emotion, experience,
response.
.
Falter, wend,
Weave and prove,
Longuage.
.
N Filbert 2014
*I consider the “beautiful” the ‘total matrix’ of experience, i.e. some sense of a whole
Remembering What Happens
It is very difficult to know what the “right” memory might be. Everything is actually: how it felt, how it seemed, what happened, in fact ALL of it is WHAT HAPPENS, and continues changing with each instant.
So I’m stuck selecting, revising, innovating, adapting – re-membering – we call it. The continuous process of limitedly attending to our experiences from as many angles and aspects as we are made of, and assembling them according to each moment’s need, or, our felt need to make new senses of being ongoingly alive.
However, not “stuck,” but rather tremendously active, pulsing, vibrating, jittering and triggering – “flowing” it seems to some – adjusting, adapting, regulating, surviving – ever re-membering my present. WHAT HAPPENS.
“Emerson thought the mind’s nature was volcanic…A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen. It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference. It looks the same but we are imagining it. Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one’s life, mountains’ forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one’s own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms.”
– Dan Beachy-Quick-
Immunity (Writing from Everywhere)
perhaps you will be able to play this WHILE you read the linked entry below (as it was written)
Immunity (Writings from Everywhere)
Swimming with the Helix in Laughter
A belated discovery of the intricate workings of a friend…dig deep!
by J. Celan Smith
Images by Melissa D. Johnston
I. Others: with
They are there, with us, creatively marauding our solitude. We carry them like extra hearts or like a bowl of sour fruit. It depends. Yet focus on the precious and everyday. From outside, where they meet us, we absorb them. Their forms, their words. Interiorized. We enter, joining them to our twisted strands. From then on, we are intertwined.
Maybe just an inner blimp of memories, their existence cruises in and out, never leaving our cardial space. Our lake grows full with their water. Not just any other: the important ones. Thin or plump, jocose or reticent, tough or tender. Often we swirl with them, eddies coyly dancing. Gradually, sometimes, they shadow away, tides leaving tiny caves like crab-peck in our sands. Where? We wear their skins as our own, cloak upon cloak of other lives placed in…
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Mechanics and Meaning
Grief.
I suspect this is an emotion with which we are all familiar. It connects to longing and sorrow like Siamese siblings sharing bodies.
Evidently I am able to conjure it at a moment’s notice, on a whim.
How we initiate suffering. Designate and signify it.
- Creating separations and distinctions in order to perceive
- Attempting to maintain stability, regularity, balance and order
- Envisioning opportunities and instinctively avoiding threats (real or imagined)
While what we have collectively learned about our world, its fluidity of matter and energy, its processes – subatomic to galaxian – would seem to infer that
- Everything is connected
- Everything keeps changing
- Opportunities routinely lose their luster or remain unfulfilled and most true threats are inescapable (aging, death, loss, etc.)
Metabolizing Change
“Grief,” “longing,” “sorrow” and the like seem often to highlight where triggered survival mechanisms (boundaries, maintenance of balance or stability, and bias toward perceiving dangers or threats) ratchet and crackle, kink and stumble in the flow of change.
I would like to open to the inferences. Soothe and calm survival mechanisms, more effectively metabolize connectivities and change. Participate in life’s process from smaller and larger perspectives of mechanics and meaning, measures and movements.
ideas stimulated by Rick Hanson, in – 
2014
To all we hope will come…
and all we do not know…
“Language is always focaled…
…it must be so since a word is a gigantic system of situation-changes
and other words”
-Eugene Gendlin-
A Division of Subjects
I am looking at my wife’s face for significance. Scrutinizing her as if MY meaning might come from there. The eyes and motion of my children, our puppies, the touching between them. I gaze, ravenously, melancholy, nostalgically, as if some sort of synching provided reason.
Observing, begging input for desired effect.
Words on a page in front of me. The sounds of the heat switching on and swishing (or swooshing) through an anatomy of ducts. Rememory. Fashioning bodied memories forward toward anticipated satisfaction of imagined desires.
Re-membering an already unknown future. As if to place it onto a pleasure/pain balance and put myself at risk for emotion. As if I am wanting to feel. Pleasure OR pain, satiation OR loss, grief or elation. Simply. To feel. And to be able to tell. To evaluate, process and produce. Perceive, procure and proceed.
Attend, assemble and assess. All componented in threes, a perspectival point of either/ors.
In other words – seeking options of experience through this-or-that, barely realizing the gargantuan disturbance of the field in which bi-polars conjoin – the third, the invested participant – “observer.”
I search her eyes – peering her into double bind by my own delimitations. Reflecting the kids play and laughter – deflecting – by framing-problems that lens my limited views of want and need.
Ravenous, melancholy, natural look of desire for pleasure and dread of pain – dualizing a multi-more intricate kaleidoscope of possible probables.
The implicit intricacies + the avoidance and/or discounting of “one’s own role” (the responsibility, culpability, of our ever-presentness we ever effort to escape) – being participatory. Being.
And what of the lens? If I expand the prism, rotate the glass – distort, blur, focus. How expansive, elastic, extensive are my tools? How effectual the how I look, the what I look for, the why?
I continue examining her face, and his and his, and his and hers. Listen for their sounds, their movements, borrowing moods from the connections I make, perceive, feel…asking now to fill out my arrival…more aware of many roles that depend on distant stories…now arising…participant…into now
as it happens, it occurs…
BE. HOME. NOW.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
2013-2014
Our 80/20 Vision and Rememory
“Nothing’s like anything else in the long run.
Nothing you write down is ever as true as you think it was.”
-Charles Wright, “Lost Souls”-
Rememory is just a thing we do when we “need” it – or, for reasons that aren’t really rational at all – we seem to feel we do. In other words, our experience (what our organism, our little assemblage of cells, lives through) works in us like nutrients that our neuronally connected organs (even smaller collectives of cellular functional troupes) select predictively – as probable perhapses – to aid our survival in each moment.
That it’s always subject to change, often flatly incoherent, or dreadfully inappropriate to any given situation proffers no guilt or dishonor – could we really expect accurate predictions of unforeseen and total novelty with infinite contingencies each next moment is?
We do the best with what we have. After all, we’re not even able to use our tools intentionally – they work on automatic algorithms we are not aware of unless there is a problem. Scientists might use machines and fabricated contraptions or instruments to measure and calculate “experiences/experiments” – something semi-controlled, devised and arranged in a lab. We, on the other hand (scientists included), do not have access to our controls (of which there really aren’t any – just meticulously interconnected and recursively interactive meshworks) – our controls (or rather, effects) result in their humming along.
Ah, rememory, refraction – there whenever we need it (or think/feel we do, or hadn’t even sensed it) – and never to the point but that we make it so – experiencing piecemeal fragments the system spits out in relation to itself and its environment, and puzzling them together as if encountered in the world – using them like stencils or frames through which to assess our surrounds.
What a tricky treat! Phantasms of deconstructed digestions floating a stream, plucked willy-nilly by impulsory triggers and collaged onto a canvas called Perception. Howdy-do! When 80% of the show is our relation to ourselves, it’s no wonder we feel criticized! (for a sensory example – here’s a breakdown of what influences what we see….):
– from Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge
Each of us with our 80/20 view on the realms between – the worlds we share – it’s no wonder we’re ill at ease arguing agreements. I’d have to ask my sons to calculate the potentials, but even from my 80+20 it’s infinitesimal – our shot at “sharing a moment” as we say.
-from Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain–
Perhaps to some Turing machine, or deep-distance galaxy view we’d look like a calibrated system, but the contingencies and unknown variables all changing with each changing change surpass even the weather…
So go on rememoring and adapting your stories, just keep in mind the bric-a-brac you’re rummaging in and it’s exponentially altering situation and experiencing states (by the millisecond), and consider offering those with and around you something in the neighborhood of 80% benefit of your doubt (your self-generated POV)!?
“I give you mine [dreams] for the same reason,
To summon the spirits up and set the body to music.”
-Charles Wright, Lost Souls-
All my Words are Silent 