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.
I am desperately vulnerable to being unable to move beyond beginnings….as witnessed by the following attempts…INTOLERABLE VULNERABILITIES
I.
When we begin – anything – we begin with. We start out already always somewhere as some one, some thing. Some entity or element among others. There are no, is no, such thing as a ‘fresh start,’ as a living organism.
From our particular inceptions we are loaded and formed with genetic baggage – our cells and context shaped by conditions far beyond and external to ourselves. And nary a freedom is advanced. Sure we participate in the shaping and construction and continuance of us, but we are never extricated, abstracted, or independent from an environment, a shared and shaping surround – it’s the contingency for existing: Other(s).
A world not formed by us. A plural existence, NEVER a solitary, isolated or uniform one.
Many find these ever-initiating constraints intolerable. That one is unable EVER, to start from scratch, re-invent, re-formulate, or create ex nihilo. Nothing, absence, void, simply – is not.
Therefore, ever existing in the already-established, already formulating, already-begun, we come together and transform.
Cells and genes, energy, matter and air conscribe to carry on in ripples and subject/objects of being. Including, colluding us – we, you, me, I.
Wholly integrated (smoothly or with great difficulty) into the ongoing flux and flow of languages, practices, thoughts and behaviors of a very large and intricate, complex and dynamic world – we arise – conditioned, constrained and subject to our sort of organization – make-up, culture, circumstance, arrangement, perception, emotion, body, reason, available resources, types, renditions of being A being in this possible world. A world, impossibly, that is just this way.
And the task is (always has) already begun – how will/does this particular, unique combination and configuration of elementary particles (a living, bounded, active, exchanging system/organism) adapt, effect, adjust, infect, evolve with its environment?
An environment of people, places, activities and things ALWAYS ALREADY begun, and also always already NOT-YET…awaiting, accepting, adapting, adjusting with US.
Our configurations, energy, activities and behaviors. Nothing the same with us. Nothing without.
Incalculable.
You, me, we make all the difference – along with EVERYthing else.
Some call this a paradox. If you did not begin, it would make no difference. If you do, it makes all difference. Both, always, true.
Nothing is the same with you. Nothing would be the same without you.
The world is a situation = both / and / more. A complex and indiscernible system that just seems to work this way. Call it “Butterfly Effect,” “Creation” or “Evolution,” “Chaos,” “Order,” “Life” – it all makes NO difference AND ALL the difference to actual experience.
And it is so.
Thus we begin – embedded, embodied, and extended – in an environment always long established, ongoing and begun: constrained, constructed, collaborated, and free.
I begin. I beg – “let me start over”, fully incorporated, already begun – I: in.
For some time I have been lacking for representation. Processes and patterns go on, no doubt, but nothing materializes save scattered words, informed thoughts, scholarly papers, and so on. Spouse says of self: “I need something to shoot for, develop toward, to propel…otherwise I stagnate, repeat…” and I agree with her – I’ve been itching for fiction – a larger project – something to belong to and build while fulfilling responsibilities, learning, parenting, husbanding, being “professional.” But the pages have been blank. This morning I began, and it started like this:
And stared at the head of Buddha. As if literature were whatever could be fitted to symbols. There were experiences anyway. Complex goings-on.
He started. As if starting were the only thing he could do. He, she, self, other, organism – whatever. It had begun. If there were a god, it might know where, but they – for the life of them – could not figure it. Not literature.
And for all the anyway-experiences, also.
In other words.
They stitched and thatched and wove, tore through, ripped out, clipped and pasted and tagged. For all the cross-hatching and shading, foregrounding and back-, no image came through. Or if it did, it never matched.
Representation. Representamen – for a more mystical suggesting. Arcane. Obtuse. That which is metaphor’d. That which signals, indices, or forms. That which functions. Which can be acted on, or with, within, without. Functioning ephemera. To latch.
And undo. It passes. Lock on – decipher. Pass around the room. Agreeing by argument, it becomes. Difference. Evaporate.
The head of the Buddha is shaped out of stone. More likely poured, cast. More likely art – official. What is artificial? – But human construction of world. That radical deflect. That begin. In symbol.
At a certain time (constructed, invent), cross-purposes : experience. Anyway, perceived. So aroused – appreciation, cognition, desire, belief – purchased (bought, fallen-for, faith-in) : acquired. Experience, anyway – head in corner on bookshelf knick-knack antiques, money (that wasn’t there), and taken away.
Evaluation = meaning. Interpretation. Somewhere whereabouts and how, or when – experience, anyway. Action occurs. It’s started.
Along the networks of transductive reading, the following productive co-constitutive readings…
“The beginning is not the same as the origin. When the beginning emerges, the origin recedes, leaving in its wake a past that becomes our future to form a circle that never closes…It is important not to convuse beginning with origin. Origins are always obscure even when beginnings are not.”
“What if, instead of placing self-self interaction at the center of development, we were to posit relation as key to experience? Relation, understood here in a Jamesian sense, is a making apparent of a third space opened up for experience in the making. This third space (or interval) is active with the tendencies of interaction but is not limited to them. Relation folds experience into it such that what emerges is always more than the sum of its parts…”
bear with me – this is extended, but so merits reflection (I think)…
“What if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the complex interrelational matrix of being and worlding? Being and worlding depend on the activity of reaching-toward. Reaching-toward foregrounds the relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world. This tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level of the sensory-motor. It happens across strata, both actual and virtual. A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing. But not on the skin or in the body. Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage. This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world…”
“…In equal measure, the world also tends toward the becoming-body. Body-worlding is much more than containment, much more than envelope. It is a complex feeling-assemblage that is active between different co-constitutive milieus. It is individuation before it is self, a fielding of associated milius that fold in, on, and through one another. For the associated milieu is never ‘between’ constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders. Becoming-self is one of the ways in which this folding (body-worlding) expresses itself, but never toward a totalization of self – always toward continued individuation. ‘To think individuation it is necessary to consider being not as substance, matter or form, but as a tensile oversaturated system beyond the level of unity’ (Gilbert Simondon). Self is a modality – a singularity on the plane of individuation – always on the way toward new foldings. These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted human, already-contained, but co-constitutive strata of matter, content, form, substance, and expression. The self is not contained. It is a fold of immanent expressibility.”
one more paragraph worth considering?….
“senses of self are less bounded phases than fractal phase-spaces composed of interweaving strata. ‘Once formed, each sense of self remains fully functioning and active throughout life. All continue to grow and coexist’ (Daniel Stern). No stratum is ever completely disarticulated from another in the creation of emergent senses of self. Rather, strata veer through and across one another in the associated milieu’s intensive fielding. As the infant ages and becomes verbal, for instance, their sense of being a coherent, willful, physical entity – foregrounding strata phasing toward organization – may intermesh with the frustration of not being able to express the feeling-vector of intensity that remains a key aspect of the tending toward coherence – foregrounding the strata phasing toward the virtual or immanence. Every becoming is tinted with this double articulation. There is no stable pre- and postverbal state. There is no stable identity that emerges once and for all. Becoming-human is expressed singularly and repeatedly in the multiphasing passage from the feeling of content to the content of feeling, a shift from the force of divergent flows to a systematic integration. This is not a containment toward a stable self. It is a momentary cohesiveness, a sense of self that always remains colored by the interweaving of forces that both direct and destabilize the ‘self’s’ proto-unification into an ‘I.’ With all apparent cohesiveness there remains the effect of the ineffable that acts like a shadow on all dreams of containment. For double articulation reminds us that singular points of identification always remain mired within the complex forces of their prearticulation, prearticulation not strictly as the before of articulation, but the withness of the unutterable, the ineffable – the quasi-inexpressible share of expressibility – within language. There is no self that is not also emergent, preverbal, affectively oriented toward individuation.”
–Erin Manning, Always More than One–
“That from which I emerge approaches by withdrawing”
And so it begins, as it so often does, begun long ago.
With the tone of a quest – an inception, a conflict, a cure. Anxieties of disillusionment and fear, inadequacy and doubt, peppering the path. But hopes too, and promise – what seem like successes or substance occur ascend along the way. Perhaps desire with approximations of love, and frustrations translated to passion or anger. Always there is grief and loss, what marks out time, and makes our days memorable. Why we attend at all, the keeping track and transformations, insistent process of our undoing.
For once arrived in the scene, what else is there but the variegated haul to a destined demise? Is it, then, always the “same ol’” fresh story? A posited entity, a series of markings – accruals and deletions – to the closure of cessation? What else might be told? To what purpose?
There are moments, you say, moments of pause or release, elation or tragedy that form knots in the threads. These might be dislocated to some profit, no? At least for the living?
Midstream, and in motion you might trace it, you say, inscribing what’s open, what opens…emergence itself. The clutter that punctuates being – its in-forming and injury?
Perhaps. To guide others along possible pitfalls or options; to preserve instants and subjects; to fuel or to warn. Perhaps. Or simply to dream, to escape the inevitable awhile – what’s wrong with that? That we in the glory and grind take a break, imagined or not, and drift or pursue, engage or elope to some alternate, parallel course?
What is: possible.
All of it is. The values are relative, individuated. Personal. There’s no accounting for taste or of preference to dwell. The matter hardly matters, after all, can be apparently “explained” (see also – epigenetics, chaos, theory and the like). How we journey or survive, become or desist is an isolate concern. Effecting all.
And there’s the rub, this sense of pattern, of system, of interconnectivity. The impression that all might belong. It won’t be long. Insufficient gravity and incommensurate propulsion. And so we move, arrange, derange, seeking for forms like the banks, or directions like currents. We flow. And it begins again, beginning within, as it always does, begun so long ago…
Polysemic Stupor 