Tag: current reading

Quotation / Interpretation

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Hermeneutics, Language, meaning, relationships, WritingLeave a comment

“To read a distant text, distant in space, time, or conceptual world – is a utopian task…The task is one whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it…”

– Ortega y Gasset –

“In that sense the activity of language is in many particular ways utopian: One can never convey what one wants to convey.”

– A. L. Becker –

“it is deficient in the sense that it says less than it wishes to say, 

and it is exuberant in the sense that ‘it says more than it plans’

This utopian characteristic of language is a source of flexibility that results from signs that are simultaneously deficient and exuberant.”

– Yair Neuman –

communication utopia

Mechanics and Meaning

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections3 Comments

Flow2

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.

Flow

ideas stimulated by Rick Hanson, in – Hanson - Buddha's Brain

A lightening, a delicious weight

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings5 Comments

The semester is beginning to dissolve, moments opening up for readings that wander further afield… the pleasure of not squeezing freedoms into necessity however inextricably they are entwined… the reprieve arrives today in the form of:

“What is to be understood through seeing and hearing (even if not at first glance) cannot be too far removed from what is already known.  As incomparably as something unutterable may be expressed at times in a gesture, a grouping, a picture of feeling, or an event, this always happens only in immediate proximity to the word; as something hovering, so to speak, around its core of meaning, which is the real element of humanity…the essence of the person does not reside in his experiences and feelings but in his silent, persistent quarrelling and coming to terms with them.”

-Robert Musil-

Additional “freedom fare:”

New Categories? Paradigms? Readerly Ontology?

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment
Charles S Peirce stuff

“To understand how language works, what pitfalls it conceals, what its possibilities are is to understand a central aspect of the complicated business of living the life of a human being”

S. I. Hayakawa

“Thinking is a truceless act. / How it holds the injured yets and thens inside it, so many layers of barter /

and resist.  You who are all swerve, / Distance and blindfold when I try to find you – “

Laurie Sheck

“The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains splendidly immune to any overall commodification.  The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user.  That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole”

Jonathan Lethem