Scribbling – Formless Thing Things Form Being in Motion Exploring Complexity – week of 9/7/2013

Scribbling

Formless Thing Things Form   Being in Motion   Exploring Complexity

            In the first place (after a letter to Seth and moving and thinking and painting with wife and a few hours of homework – reviewing Management and Organization Theory and Design no less) the first thing to do is to write.  To simply write by hand, being in motion, that is, setting into motion, and all that follows, which usually happens (like today) first – after folding laundry, washing dishes, required reading, getting kiddos fed, dressed, off to school, checking email and phone messages and new assignments, touching base with wife, drinking (making and drinking) coffee, homework, family, tasks, events, chores, responsibilities, choices – after that the first thing to do is to write, after somehow quieting the buzziness of busyness, at the desk, reading something slow and singular like poems, philosophy, science, or art – something chosen, maybe a walk, maybe music, maybe a task, and then, oh then, the first thing to do is be in motion, set into motion, set being in motion at my desk with a ball-point pen (Bic) and blank, clean, beautiful, hungry, precious, anxious (anticipatory, aroused) lined notebook paper in a loose, forgiving stack, ready, ready, ready…

…for the first thing.

            Which is not to say I was an object before, or that anything was ever a thing, or still (static) prior to pen + paper by my hand – no – Formless Things were Thinging Forms in all the other ways of motion, movements, relationships between tools and water, emotions, skin, utensils and hands and mouths and sounds and voices and contact continuous through air, always movement, humming being in motion beings forming thingless things forming formlessness, changing motion swerves and stoops, bends and helps listening to movements vibrations tones noticing shapes and lines and particling waves of substances moving moving attaching disseminating shapes, sequencing, paces, difference all pointing out where everything connects to everything else – the joining nature of boundaries – what is always next to – observe how the line works:

ι

ι

ι

 

before which space was “empty” but now it holds together, walls like stitches, buildings like blocks stuck together so things stay gathered, movements, lines, dance, breeze, blood, noises, gluing, gluing, gluing every to-gether, difference repetition pattern

Categories.  To keep things adjoined, combined.  Lists, minutes, days, tasks, timelines, hours, keeping thingless things attached in their movements – different ways of sameness – being in motion – and so forth  →

→ Forth toward firstly, to write.  Being in motion, set in motion, slowly faster, faster by slowly, by hand instead of tapping, fluid choices – typing is stop-motion, discreet, discontinuous – comparatively faster but less efficient, slower (by hand) efficacy thinking images or imaginary thinking now less critical (embedded critique): fluid.  I stop.  Breathing continues with hand thought memory hope – NOW –

A kind of yearning motion movement in letters read as words, phrases, meanings, less representative more relational – unnatural to this and this and that and other.  Confusing writing, drawing, space and time, concept object sign symptom, doodle.

To communicate.  Being in motion together if sequentially the linking looping line (by hand) tracing where we meet, are joined, in movement against/with, with, with one another – here is where we meet, inadvertent/advertently.

Being in motion, set in motion by hand – to draw writing – an advert for connection, to construct lines to bring things together, to notice.  Exploring complexity through being in motion.  Reading is movement.

            We are.

 

We are Registry

Friday Fictioneers, July 26, 2013

maui-from-mauna-kea

Between you and me, of myriad conduits, the others.  We set out.  Toward.  Send messages made of signs and symbols, ripples, waves – our gestures.  We move.  Where we are.  It resonates.  When you touch down and look in my direction, molecules dither, there is some concord.  Generation. Gravitation.  I do not believe in “flow,” or that everything is One.  You set out, we are in relation.  Things pull, things press.  Hearing dribbles in the brain and puddles.  Echoes something else.  I am here.  I will be.  I set out.  Between the myriad conduits and air, water, fire.  We breathe.  We become a ground.  We register.

N Filbert 2013

Identities taking form…such brief individuations

Instigating a “family-tree” of sorts betwixt what I will call thinkers of relational ontology, I am providing another text to explore – this one from Erin Manning – the introduction from her book Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. 

You can see the heritage (or ontogeny) is vast – to trace it more completely investigate The Four Ages of Understanding by John DeelyA Thousand Plateaus  by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, or The Primacy of Semiosis by Paul Bains (among others).  Bakhtin, Whitehead, William James, Nietzsche and others give testimony to this sense of the entanglement and fluidity of being, the emergence and always co- or inter- of existing.  The “relational nexus of experience,” as Manning has it here.  The incipient potential of each pre-moment and then following “instant,” the elasticity of the almost, the threshold ALWAYS of expression-in-the-making and all of its co-constituents from throughout time and space and anything else we have segregated arbitrarily.  Without further ado – What Moves as a Body Returns as a Movement of Thought, Events of Relation – Concepts in the Making by Erin Manning:

 

feel free to click image or title to read – (it’s a much shorter text than the last) – but no less engaging, creative, and provocative…

 

The fluid character of the life process

Alright – I know that if you’re scrolling through a blogroll you aren’t looking to read intently, carefully and thoroughly some theoretical finely-tuned creative innovative rendition of what it is to “be alive.”  Beyond that, I’ve posted this before.

Here’s the thing.  Over a couple of years of this blog-o-sphere bus(y)ness, I’ve been happy to have network/meshworked into some pretty intriguing and instigative minds here.  And a few of these things that spur me – well, I get compelled again and again (as I reread them again and again) to share them – with the compulsion murmuring – “this is going to feel like home, elation and release” to these mind-persons.

So, I offer Tim Ingold’s “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials” once again – hoping that those of you (you’ll know who you are when you start into it – you’ll have a difficult time stopping) who accord with this sort of thing will take the time (when you’re able), NO, that you’ll MAKE some time, a nourishing opening – to pore through this one and respond or reverberate with it…

Tim Ingold – click image for article fulfillment

FYI in addition:

Tim Ingold: To Learn is to Improvise

I trust you’ll be delighted

When I speak of “Relations” – this is what I have in mind

the scales, the leaps, the constraints, affordances, limitations and opportunities of being alive…

…the modes and formats, forms and patterns, processes and movements…

the interdependencies

Jay Lemke
Jay Lemke

I can’t really add anything (currently) to this man’s work – without a doubt a hero of mine – thinking, being, creating…

if you have the interest and time…

I attest that this is brilliant…

and opens and opens and opens….

Feeling and Meaning – Jay Lemke

 

 

On Teaching: or, “going there, without knowing where,” with Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard - EGS
Jean-Francois Lyotard – EGS

Endurance and the Profession – Lyotard

(replete with approximations of my own markings and highlights – N Filbert)

Grenzsituationen II

Please read previous post with this in mind:

I would love for any/all to share what those “Limit Texts/Artifacts” are for you?

grenzsituationen

Please share via comment what encounters or engagements with works of art, science, philosophy, writing, music, and any other cultural artifactual form has altered from then on how you select, evaluate, engage other related artifacts from then on?

Thank you!

Lines, Meshwork, Aether…

I’ve recently acquired (via Inter-Library Loan!  Woo-hoo!!!) a collection of writings exhibited below:

Vital Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and Nature

which opens with an essay by anthropologist Tim Ingold who starts it off with a remarkable movement through slugs and storms, lines-earth-eather, Kandinsky, Klee, Merleau-Ponty, and others – investigating them through a concept of “meshwork.”

“By this I mean an entanglement of interwoven lines.  These lines may loop or twist around one another or weave in and out.  Crucially, however, they do not connect.  This is what distinguishes the meshwork from the network.  The lines of the network are connectors, each given as the relation between two points, independently and in advance of any movement from one toward the other…the lines of a meshwork, by contrast, are of movement or growth.  They are temporal ‘lines of becoming’…Life is a proliferation of loose ends.  It can only be carried on in a world that is not fully joined up.  Thus the very continuity of life – its sustainability, in current jargon – depends on the fact that nothing ever quite fits..”

-Tim Ingold, “Lines and the Eather”-

Journeying on from there through Deleuze and Guattari, mood and weather, meteorology and aesthetics he arrives at a conception of flesh as both meshwork (exhalation) and atmosphere (inhalation) – a whole-being experience of relation enabling and realizing animate life….

I’ve now been browsing numerous writings by Ingold, fascinated by the semiotic/anthropologico/ontological /scientific meshwork his production encompasses… Thankfully, he makes much of his work available full and free to us… if you’re interested – I risk the promise it will be worth your while…

Lines: A brief history by Tim Ingold

Being Alive by Tim Ingold

and a fascinating working paper as introduction:  Realities: Bringing Things to Life

 

 

Rhizome

Rhizome

(click for text)

with addendum: Deleuze-Guattari – Rhizome

Becoming Human: Asking after the Nature of Nobody

“What, in summary, is the nature of the singular entity referred to by the word ‘I’ in judgments like ‘I am in pain’?  Answer: since those uses of ‘I’ do not refer, the question is nonsensical.  One might as well ask after the nature of Nobody.”

-John Canfield-

“The ‘main point’ is rarely extricable from the digressions.  Every section spills into every other… [he] no longer knows what he was talking about.”

-R. M. Berry-

            It grows hair.  It remembers things differently.  It is singing as if in a mumbling voice.  Yesterday I got angry.

It thinks, but after talking with the child I was upset with, it revises its conception, taking into account that she said I exhibited joy.  Yesterday I was happy.

This glassy essence.

“I will need to accomplish a task tomorrow,” it thinks, in a manner different from image, music or text.  It can almost see me doing it – in a situated context – surrounded by people (other ones), objects, time and space.  Not essentially.  Well, maybe.

It calls to mind (read fabricates) what I was like two decades ago.  I was climbing mountains then, most often alone (i.e. not in the company of additional humans), still it is able to consider me there.  There where?  It imagines Long’s Peak in Colorado (in neither image, language nor feeling – it cannot recall particulars well enough to reconstruct)…it senses I was there.  It is reading in a diary.

Does this make it me?  The same as the I who wrote it, camping somewhere along the Eastern slope of Long’s Peak in 1995, apparently gladly absent of friend, foe, spouse or tamed animal counterpart?

I had a pack full of peanut butter and potatoes, a couple jugs of water, a tent, a cloak, a knife, an assortment of pens, books and blank journals.  It roughly remembers some of that.

It reflects (not to itself – that doesn’t even make sense) – must be a sort of nuanced synonym for thinking – (with itself? of itself? nonsense, it simply reflects) – I’m sitting cross-legged on a small clearing near a frothy crystalline stream within a circle of baby pines, trying to read philosophy texts packed in for the purpose of uninterrupted, or it could be me yet-to-come as distinguished by Swiss mountains and an understood language barrier protecting my solitude along with evident (it imagines) distance (and therefore time) between whatever residents might exist and I.  It (hypothetically) notices that (well, enough to pick out an “I” on the Jungfrau or Matterhorn).

But that has happened too.  Does the case that it conceives me thus proscribe an identity?   It isn’t sure, but there are similarities of some variety.  It isn’t saying for certain (the fact is it could say “for certain” but what might that establish as regards me?) – the appearance and accidents, character and behavior are in many ways inexact and altered – but for pragmatic and discriminatory purposes – it would designate me “me” (if it were in conversation or thinking extrinsically).

Could it really say, most definitely, that I was there?  Any more than that I will be?  It is uncertain, entirely possible.

This glassy essence.

It remains, for now.

Thinking of the time I was writing this (nearly now but just before).  It is writing, but not this, I have written this, it is aware, but only just before or just after – that it is I.

It writes.

“…man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.”

-Shakespeare, Measure for Measure