The Argument Tunnel / A Chaos Tube

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes9 Comments

            From non-computational directions we arrive.

We may enter unaware or gingerly, with good and caring intentions.  We might have plans to rush right through – eyes cinched, hands clenched, heart throbbing – with risk and fear in angry justice or righteous defense.  We often stumble in.  We get tripped up.  It is possible we are shoved.  Sometimes we charge.

However we get there – within all that dark and churning – disorientation accompanies our arrival.  This temporal funnel – a passage where noise wins the day, interference scrambles messages, things fall apart and the center will not hold – renders us untethered, at loose ends – the chaos tube.

Occasionally we may notice our derailment as our words and thoughts cease mating, time travel whisks us to and fro ‘twixt past and present and some unknown yet desperately predictable future, full of echoey recalls, details smeared and marred, yet panic and terror renowned.  Feelings turn to Emotion – symbolic, iconic, religious.  We find ourselves grasping, delirious, snatching at this phrase and that, yowling or yelling, whimpering and weeping or delivering laws, lecturing truth.

Caught in the Argument Tunnel.  There’s a beginning and end, but they’re tricky, elusive and vague, and no matter.  Socially constructed – this moving event, experimental device – of a limiting duration.  At what point is haywire?  Do body and mind turn ape shit?  Humanity parenthetically undone?  What triggers, pressure, stress compress an organism toward self-destruction – deconstructive discombobulating dislocation?  Unhinged and multi-piloted, the divagations of entropy?

Wind tunnel, spin cycle, a sequencing coming apart at the seams, gyrating out of control, baffled and frazzled by fuzzy and unsolving sets – irrotational vortices of turbulent flow.

Spitting us unknown and misrepresented out the other side.  Episodic psychoses, neuroses, and unity.  Draining extremes, pushed through the wringer, all flushed and muddied – it’s blood and guts, a birth canal, an orifice, survival.

Of limiting duration.  A tunnel, a tubing, a way.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Supplement

On By Alias HarlequinIn Journallings1 Comment

Astounding – I’m in my fourth decade of life and this is the first day the beauty of this word has hit home…

supple-ment

which put me in mind of Rodin…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

and of the cacophony of arguments followed by caressing clarifications toward shared understandings

of characters presented and nuanced, developed, made complex

of statements expanded and explained, extended into metaphors

vowels echoing sustained

hard Cs molding into soft

crashes dwindling into static

facts becoming rumors becoming murmurs,  whispers,  sighs

wailing come to  weeping come to tears come to rest

Something that completes or enhances something else when added to it.

Getting to the Point : Tracing Complex Intersections

On By Alias HarlequinIn Journallings, Traces12 Comments

“A point is considered one of the fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry.  Without depth, breadth, or dimension it is a part that has no part.  It is represented by a dot or period that has some dimension but is not a point, but must cover the point infinite times over.  The point in the two-dimensional world is the intersection of lines and in three dimensions of another line as well and on and on.  A point is only location.  And isn’t that what we are?  Mere points?  Some points suggest beginnings, some ends, all divide, and when they connect or divide, where they are defined, it is always because of a turn, an angle, a shift toward another plane.  How else could we see a point?  The point is.  The point made.  Getting the point.  Pointing the way.  Points out.  Points in.  Point terminus…

…The meaning of life is the purpose of life…

…In similar fashion he came to some comprehension of the whole ballet, language being a small window through which very little passed and became helpful, the dance being nearly everything.”

–Percival Everett–

Point being that there is no point.  That a point is like an abstract sign – a two-sided symbol – of a non-place where relation occurs – where intersection, connection – moves, happens.  Probabilistically?  Infinite.  Point being that getting the point involves a complex thinking

“going beyond itself in the direction of complexity…not from the simple to the complex, but from complexity to ever increasing complexity.  Let us repeat: the simple is no more than a moment, an aspect among several complexities (micro-physical, macro-physical, biological, psychic, social).  We attempt to consider the lines, the tendencies of a growing complexification…as they function (in relation to autonomy, individuality, richness of relations, aptitudes for learning, inventiveness, creativity, etc.)” 

–Edgar Morin–

(Further reading): Overview of Complexity Thinking – Ferrara

Point being.

Something similar to that – we utilize points and pointing to signify a passing, passage, to trace – to attend to or refer at some intersectional context – thereby creating interactive referants/actants – you, I, the relation.

WordPress as a case in point.

I am ever-so-honored and thankful to have been considered and nominated in community awards insofar as they represent mobile points of connectivity and passage – where one or more of we and our “representation spaces” intersect in this “information common” of the blogosphere.

From Words that Flow like Water I received the “Sunshine Award”

 

and from  CLisaWork, the “Versatile Blogger Award”

both of which I am very honored and thankful for.

The fantastic element to me about these WordPress community awards is that they allow us to introduce and further the connectivity and intersecting “points” of convergence and accordance that shiftily pertains to our activity and representation here.

The acceptance of the awards imply some obligation to self-report.  I am unsure how I might bring “sunshine” to others through my working-spaces here, but am happy to live with the mysteries.  I tried to find a “Sunshine award” icon that featured rain as rain is much more vitalizing, inspiring and motivating to me personally than sunshine, be that as it may.  So, some things about myself:

  • I prefer rain to sunshine, having always felt the sun to be somewhat invasive and threatening in its brightness and exposure, and rain to be softening and safe, providing more subtle noticing.
  • I also find raw emotion  threatening, and much prefer rational expression of emotion (or musical or aesthetic or literary) to emotionally reported emotion.  In other words, I prefer emotion mediated through other things than body and voice.  I continue to try to understand why this is so.
  • I often feel helpless as a parent.
  • It is never my intention to report my knowledge or ideas as facts or certainties.  I find each day bringing with it so much information that the pattern of it is never symmetrical.
  • I am tremendously graced with a spouse and family that allow and enable me to inquire and pursue connections and concepts in the human universe of information that are far from profitable or sustainable economically.

I am going to use the “award-passing-along” as an opportunity to suggest blogs that (in the “sunshine” vein) inspire and inform me in ways that keep me at it myself, and that enhance my own “versatility” through what they offer and provide.  Please visit them – I am confident that there are so many more that should be listed below (I follow 100s) but there is not world enough and time…

Objects

Simon H. Lilly

Tocksin

Life in Relation to Art

[im]probability theory

Philosophy of Information & Communication

Asifoscope

Unwanted Advice: Reflections of a Self-Appointed Life Counselor

draw and shoot

biblioklept

Creativistic Philosophy

so very very

Searching to See

Spoondeep: Magazine of New Writings

Literary Man

The Unquiet Librarian

Petrujviljoen

Lunch Sketch

and so on….(check my blogroll)…

Thank you all for the rain-like sunshine and versatility you bring to my days:

the connections…

The Heart and its Branches

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Traces2 Comments

“I do not want to know about the human heart.  I do not desire to speak at all about those indwelling, intimate reaches of the heart in which anguish is an undiminishing personal interrogation, much less to analytically enfetter those reaches.

I have the sense, the good sense, the decency, to have nothing to say.”

“Sick of all the you be’s?  Well, what do you say, you be you and I’ll be me?  What do you say?  We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead.  We can sleep while an old woman twangs away on a bad piano while rain keeps time in the empty street.  We can listen to and count the closings of a child’s fist as he tries to catch a fruit fly.  We can listen to the whistling of the bombs.  We can listen to each other.

I do not want to know about the human heart.”

“I am not a man of science.  I am not proficient in any branch of nature study.  I do not know the difference between an amphibian and a reptile.  I have no yearning for hard knowledge about the hard world.  And yet I have no affinity for anything spiritual.  In fact, I have a pronounced, conspicuous, and striking absence of an affinity for anything spiritual.

I know but one hard thing about the hard world and it is this:  from the sum of all theories, as arranged in accordance with ascertained facts, we make a few assumptions, that we have actually ascertained facts, that we are actually here to ascertain them, and that there is actually a here.”

-Percival Everett-

“Meaning is a collective phenomena…” – Jay Lemke

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading2 Comments

Material Sign Processes and Emergent Ecosocial Organization by Jay Lemke

Rhizome

On By Alias HarlequinIn Poetry1 Comment

Rhizome

(click for text)

with addendum: Deleuze-Guattari – Rhizome

“the word is a microcosm of human consciousness” – Lev Vygotsky

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading5 Comments

the Epilogue from Paul J. Thibault – Brain, mind, and the signifying body: an ecosocial semiotic theory

Dialogue

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading1 Comment

“You and I exchange lines of dialogue.  Each line is a trap, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by some standard upon which we  have previously agreed, if tacitly.  Thereby appears the nature of meaning.  It is a force that hazards to subjugate other forces, other meanings, other languages.  We understand this all too well and yet, and yet – well, it is like the infirmity, the defect at the base of a dam.  It will hold and it will hold and then it will give up, the dam will give up.  As do we all…

“Believe what you like.  Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me.  You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers.  Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.”

-Percival Everett-

A Meaning List

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

  • Mikhail Bakhtin
  • Jay Lemke
  • Lev Vygotsky
  • Humberto Maturana / Francisco Varela
  • Bruno Latour
  • Paul J. Thibault
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • Mark Bickhard
  • Charles S. Peirce
  • Roman Jakobson
  • V. N. Volosinov
  • Robert Musil
  • Kurt Ammon
  • Alan Turing
  • Jacob von Uexkull
  • Kurt Godel
  • et. al….

and not one without the other…

“The literary word resembles a person who roams at will” – Robert Musil

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing2 Comments

“The sentence not only derives its meaning from the words: the words derive their meaning from the sentence, and the relationship between page and sentence, whole work and page, is no different…the embracing and the embraced develop their meaning mutually out of each other, and the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it…”

“One can only explain that it is from all the details taken together, and through their mutual interpenetration, that the whole arises in a way that remains mysterious…a transformation of sense that eludes logic…but the meanings are related to each other, and when one grasps one meaning the others peep through beneath it…”

-Robert Musil – “Literati & Literature” –