Going Back, Going Forward

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Poetry2 Comments

I hastily grabbed a notebook of primarily blank pages as I whooshed the children off for a swim.  I needed to study and make notes while they splashed about and played and require pen & paper for the process.  It turned out that the pages containing my writing dated some 15 years ago – journaling from a 4-day solo hike I had made in the Colorado mountains.  Included was this me-of-20-something’s poem:

Ars Poetica 1995

The whole notebook was nostalgic for me – my youthful vibrant concerns for solitude and justice, freedom and nature and virtue.  What struck me about this little number was how consistent (or persistent) the concerns and interests worded here have been (obviously) throughout most of my life.  Seeking purpose, expression, control – recognizing somehow that once language is entered, is invoked, everything changes.  Our purposes, searches, availabilities, capacities, expressions, knowledge, – all gets reworked and revised as we engage in the broader activity of language.

If, as John Canfield theorizes, “in language we never leave the sphere of the social” and that “language is a vague concept with unclear boundaries,” in part because it “grows as more language-games are added to the mix, and as existing ones are enriched in various ways,”  that, fundamentally “language is a set of customs in which words play a role, a set of patterned, culturally determined modes of interaction..” so that with “increasing cultural complexity come increasing complexity of our patterns of interaction” then my lifelong hunches that I’ll never get a handle on it, or master its use, or turn it explicitly to my purposes are a matter of course.

M. A. K. Halliday’s Triangle

Which is also what fascinates, compels and rewards its use.  Again, with such a limited arsenal of units – (take a look at your keyboard and consider for a moment to what gargantuan and variable use we put those 100 keys or so) – every engagement with the tool is interactive, reciprocally shaping and shaped by us, and unfailingly externalizing for our organism – the medium thrusts and immerses us into our society and culture and history and possible futures, as well as all the “thinks you can think” and more!

On the right day, then, my bewilderment in the face of language as my vocational practice gets to be an adventure of constant discovery, novelty, and learning – immersing me in some infinite-like context, warping and woofing my organism into a universe of threads…

all quotations from John Canfield’s Becoming Human: The Development of Language, Self and Self-Consciousness

The Nothingness of Symbols

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes10 Comments

a drowning.  a submersion.  a baptism (immersion)

I am drinking the arbitrary nothingness of symbols.

I am writing.

Writing is both a cry and a response.

Intuition / rationalization.

Nurtured and natural.

In the realm of symbols, I am safely between.  In the place of no safety.  The nowhere realm – a world of now here.

Where I am drowning.  Delirious.  Drunken on these symbols, arbitrary and well-developed, representative and unnecessary (?) signs.

I am alive.

Combining intellect to emotion to situation and its social constituents…I am writing, uttering, verbalizing –

– and, by chance, perhaps, you are here.

I am side-swiped.  Side-tracked.

In other words,

I set out to circumlocute on this very “subject” / “topic” / “matter”…yesterday…

resulting in a nothing of the kind.

Drowning in a limitation of symbols –

“composition,” we call it,

“For it is in the nature of language, as I have already noted briefly, that it is governed by the principle of ‘duality of functioning’,..to be more specific, the distinctive features of the sound system that constitute a language are determined by the limited set of phonemes employed in constructing the next unit up, morphemes.  And morphology is determined by the uses to which morphemes are put in forming lexemes or words.  Words, in their turn, are formally describable by the functions they perform in sentences.  Sentences, in turn, achieve their significance from the discourse in which they are embedded.  Discourse is governed by the communicative intentions of the speakers.  The communicative intentions of speakers, of course, are governed by the transactional requirements of the culture.  And along the way, there are further determinants of form that operate in this same way…”

-Jerome Bruner-

That sickness, that plenitude, those realistic illusions – as if one were totally absorbed in the unrealities of the human way of being-in-the-world.

“the world is not what we thought it was”

-Jim Harrison-

There will be a day my sons will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

My spouse will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

There is a word for things that hold too much (e.g. “things that can hold no more”)

Things at, or beyond, capacity.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  They are drunk, drowned, saturate.

And still there are fresh occurrences.

There are also #s, codes, algorithms, symbols…

I like the idea of doing something that matters, of being someone that matters, of my strange happenstance of existing as an organism having some effect, making some verifiable difference in a larger web of existing things

liking the idea certainly doesn’t make it so

and yet, perhaps,

My intention had been to talk about the wonder…

…that out of 26 letters…

this many years (generations, eons)

and variety

had even occurred.

Was all.

that meaning, is interesting, is cool

that, to (lil’ ol’) me…

it’s amazing…!

in 26 letters

#s, symbols, diagrams

we keep constructing…

Sunday – A Trinity of Influence(s?)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings7 Comments

Carpe Diem

Being Human – Voracious, Delusional, Fantastic

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Philosophy9 Comments

I get a little weary of philosophy.  It fascinates and intrigues, has its spectacular, glittering moments of what feels like beauty and “accomplishment” – like architecture, the sciences and arts, studies human and social and hard.  But with each human activity and behavior there can be too much of a good thing.  Perhaps it’s the fantasies involved in abstraction – in the feeling of “figuring things out,” or of “making sense” – our human super-additives to experience that are also experience themselves – that I, at times, weary of.  That eminently falsifiable intuition that everything is made up.

web perhaps called “self”
imagined universal web of matter & energy

It is extremely hard work to keep up a worldview.  Involving enormous complexities and details, layer up on layer and strand interweaving strand of biological and logical, illogical, psychological, irrational, emotional, – ologies and descriptions, manipulated perceptions and re-interpretations of interpretations reinterpreted (ad infinitum) – it takes matter and energy, and particular organisms, which grow tired.

Those same realities, capacities and activities are also extremely inspiring, enervating and exciting for organisms – the behaviors of productivity, creativity, imagination and survival – and our weird confounding capacity to think we can observe our perceptions/observations to an infinite regress, make for a very strange frenzy of energy and matter indeed.

In a possibly (?!) infinitely webbed interdependence with our surround copious possibilities of activity are available – all bewildering: chaos can be so generative.  Chaos can be so nullifying.

What might we know?

And why do we want to?

  • That we are organism within dynamic systems?  (How would we know that, from within the systems?)
  • That we are dynamic organisms alongside other dynamic forms of matter and energy?  (Sometimes seems to be our sense of it – that we might somehow step aside – wha-?!)

and…so…what!?

Alongside and within – in order to be – apparently (that is, according to OUR OWN perceptions) – however would could we exist either detached (abstracted) or without (independently, unattached).   To imagine distance, “objectivity,” without the imaginative capacities of fantasy – illusions – for example logic, mathematics, economics, philosophy, psychology – codes and symbols – DElusions in order to play the games in these forms of life we are with delusional sincerity – effectively.  And our fantastic delusions or profound poeitic creations are often effective, productive, pragmatic, dynamic and evolving – techniques and time – which would seem to imply that they also are part of being within a myriad of dynamic systems…

…one might suppose (i.e. “hypothesize”); or infer (i.e. “fantasize”)

All an immersion in symbols – languages – stipulated relations – codified behaviors –

– which is what I had set out to consider

drowning in symbols

the wonder and bewilderment of it

the sense of delusion and ecstasy

being human…

Sure it runs!

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing24 Comments

I wasn’t sure I had it in me this week, concocting something from a picture, worth a 100 words (you should try – visit Friday Fictioneers), but I battered and welded something together in the nick of time.   For what it’s worth –

Copyright - Beth Carter

We sang when we made it.  We laughed and we drank and we sang.  So many said that it couldn’t be done.  Not by philosophers.  But why not?  Sappy, crappy and happy we sang.  And we drank.  Marty stole the carts, Jerry supplied the pictures to spur us along – as if they were sure to result.  Trey provided visors and sunglasses, given the absence of roof.  We swore we’d take it 10,000 miles.  10,000 miles a year.  We ditched our courses, thirsty for reasons.

Of course it runs!  Look close – you can tell where it’s been.  Take it further.

What I Was Meaning To…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing1 Comment

“Abandoned Writing Projects” by R. M. Berry, from:

New Arrivals, digging in

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading6 Comments

We Are What We Write?

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing12 Comments

So, I followed Flickr Comments “amusing” journey into being “typealyzed” by algorithms,

and here were my results (thank you, Flickr for the prompt)

INTP Manoftheword

pretty much guilty as processed!

and yet….

Homo Fictus

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes6 Comments

“words are not a translation of something else that was there before they were”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

Homo Fictus

 “Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories”

-Jonathan Gottschall-

            Knowing how / knowing why.  Procedures and structures.  Diversify and unify.  Complexity-to-simplicity turned complex all over again.  Reuse and construction.  Stories.

We are saturate with story.  Each word of that sentence.  If I provide the skeleton – you’re sure to flesh it out.   The productivity of words, the how & why of humans.

Perhaps I’ll call it “making sense,” but the sense is there before, what follows is a meaning – through procedures and structures, reuse and construction, the wired and the firing, implicity spinning explicitly – and for reasons not yet fully known, I’ve gotta have mine.

“The knowledge of good and evil, all in one.  Both. 

Somebody finally said, I know my own mind.”

-Janet Kauffman-

            Experience is a complex collision I diversify and unite.  Following patterns infused by my own.  If you provide a list of observations and complaints, I may spend entire days reorganizing them – they didn’t quite “fit.”  Perhaps I’ll throw them back.  I’d like to be certain.

“the absence of doubt is of the essence of a language-game”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

            A personalized language-game full of cues, thesauri and symbols – my controlled vocabulary meshing your data…

“The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told.

I have to tell it myself.

What is it I have to tell myself again and again?

That there is always a new beginning, a different end.

I can change the story.  I am the story.

Begin.”

-Jeanette Winterson-

            …ah, now I’ve figured it out (made it fit  my form) – this is my story now, please listen and confirm (complexity-simplicity) – oh no?  you don’t? (complexity again) and back to the storyboards or diary…

The yearn is toward some balance, stasis, surety.  Re-cognizable re-currency.  Re-presentation.  Re-anything.  Want familiar.  The excitement may very well come with the disruptions, eruptions, defamiliarization, the constant change – it certainly heightens our senses and intension – the thrill is in the thunderous gathering of troops – flickering flashing neurons – dogs set on the intrusion…but soon we stabilize the perimeter again…incorporate the drama…

“the important thing is to consider the significance of things and not to worry about their authenticity…it’s difficult to tell at the end of the day whether it was theory or need that got you through it.”

-Joy Williams-

            …with our stories (and lies)…our illusory perceptions…needing organized to our organism…and tales are conjured, fiction begins, typing on our limited keys…

…even while the body’s at rest…

“in short, nothing so central to the human condition is so incompletely understood”

-Jonathan Gottschall-

this post inspired in part by

A Very Special Feature: Prominently Overlooked

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment