Tag: Experience

The Costume

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, fiction, Writing3 Comments

Bill Jacobsen - Untitled 1999

The Costume

            When there is dialogue, or perception.  When he’s awake.  But what to name it?  How describe?  Perhaps even while sleeping.

The lag.

At checkout counter, clerk addresses: to absorption, numbness, mumble.  Other.

Strikes Alfonse as he’s driving toward home:  there are trees bending, being present in their way.  Cars, pedestrians, small animals scurrying.  A school bus.  Neighborhoods – definite yards and homes.  A mail-delivery-person.  A filmy mist.  A fall-behind in his perception.  Gap.  Perhaps.

He initially considered it a veil.  A tremulous fog.  A curious “vagueness to things.”  Like long, cold Winter.  Haphazard inceptions:  tree, bus, children; cat, dog, car.  No attachment.  A muffling and delay.  A foreigner.  Driver inside steel mechanism, separate by seconds, very nearly removed – a skein, a skin, a veil.  An organism with apparatus.  The slow calculator.

The smeary light when she speaks:  lover, mother, friend.  Overlaps, palimpsests, a smudging feedback, a decay.  The children crying.  Vocalization evokes.  Indicates.  Needs.  Response.  Remembers he is human.  Particular understandings, expectations.  Affirmations and acknowledgments.  Times for saying yes.  Attentional assent.

Alfonse disbursed.  Pernicious regress.  As if he’d be immediate.  As if the others were.  As if it all were touching, interspersed and in exchange.  This thing and another.  He is embodied.  The body seems slow, or surprisingly fast, almost anticipatory (unbeckoned, unmeditated erections).  He can’t make sense from it.  Body makes sense he knows not of.  Who knows not of?  Of what?  Even how might be accurate here.  Alfonse cannot seem to know, this is his costume, a glassy shroud, the sluggishness between the here and now.  Without a zipper or a tag.

Inside a bottle within distorted frame, but without an image described so clearly.  Costumes are alive – expose the motions of the wearer.  Notions.  Reveal, conceal, but variant things.  Who dressed him this occasion?  This dismantled undoing and random erasure, perpetual hiatuses of interpretation?  His hesitant reality – a retardation, sensational slag, both slow-soaking sponge and absorbency-abdicator.

“I got nothing,” he murmurs, “didn’t catch a word you said…” as if in some other language of different rhythm and tune.  Not understood.  Multiple things unrelated, cannot tell, cannot smell, is uncertain where he is in his motions.  Not quick enough, just out of joint, who what where why when never equals now for him, nor how.  He is Alfonse and he seems costumed.

Making love – a metaphor for intimacy – those direct invasive actions – and yet he’s steps away, slow to the uptake, uncertain who is doing where and when.  That comes later and looks like smudges that he estimates with guessing.

Is this uncommon? – is what he wonders.  Am I the only one who cannot tell?  Does she know what she is doing, feeling it as it happens?  He’s asking something far away he cannot measure.  He wakes each morning, to himself, inside this costume, and dons the heavy cloak of it for sleep.  Asynchronous, distant, accidental and traumatic, but postponed – perpetual flush of shut-down, shock, bewilder.

He thinks “flamingo” inside a jar of unfocused space in alternate materials in artificial frame and anesthetic wall in analagesic scheme, so far, far, far, far… the clock is slipping.  The span from here from now, from him from there, from this to happening, happens.

And so it goes.  Costume he can’t remember wearing that encases and engulfs.  Awareness too long after to affect.  A lostness in the makeup or makeover, the becoming and become.  Too late.  Ineffective.  Ever after and begone.

Echoes.  Surely something must be said, something addressed to him, something interjected, interacted and applied – only ever now arriving quite beyond a sensibility toward response – apposite, inappropriate, out of line and time and sense.  Unsettled and uncouth.  A threatening out-of-sorts, off-color and unfelt.  Feeling suffocated, unrelating.

Alfonse swimming being, non-concurrent, unawares.  Ineffably indistinct.  Imperceptibly misinterpreted.  Not.  Never.  Was. But.  Here.  Where.  No.  Not.  Now.  It slides away.  He heard something (her mouth, lips, the child-in-walkway, bird, tree bent to breeze) – no, not yet, before, never always, when?  How?

Soughing in a muddy river, ice overhead shifting, yesterday.  Forever.  There is no today in the mix, the undertow, a disconnected untoward, who where when – not he – can’t remember, a caesura of consequence – plugging, plunging him far from present, dark and drear.

So far between the now and when – not-knowing.

Invisible costume.  Alfonse’s weight.  Indistinguishably unable – uncommonly common, this viscous opaque coating – no known axis or location – simply not.  Not.  Not.

Knots of not…not-knowing, not-quite-hearing, not-feeling, not-tasting, ever too late.  Undone for undoing.

Alfonse within costume, a muzzling muffle of indigestive guzzle, of life.  A weather and reprove, a restrictive deconstruction, a not-quite-absence in the presence of the everywhereabouts and everywhen of… of… everything.

Flamingo Robert Frank

Interstices – continuing in between

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

more sections arriving from the Beginnings and the Second

– 3 –

Message being – she looked at me, incredulously.

– “What and/or Who – are you?” she requests.

I don’t know.  No one knows, I said, half-joking, persisting, prolonging, staying alive.

Longing = staying alive.  Longing = I’m still alive.  And I look at her, longer.  Which means: if only I knew.  The interstice (according to me).  We converge.  A gaze.  I must go.

That’s what I wanted.  The choice.  The decision.  A godlike thing for a fragile, finite boy.  The both of them: god – a fragile, finite boy.

No one owns.

When I returned, I could have said “My love, I am not present with you now.  I am in a future predicted by a possible past.  I am afraid.  I am not here.”

She might have responded: “I see and hear and understand that you are not here with me.  I too will retreat, remove, go away, until you return to me – here, to here.”

I babble on.

But I don’t say “Hello, my love.  I am not present.”  No, what I speak instead is a muddled report of my feelings and fears, my ideas – my present experiencing – a gummy wad of future and past, uninformed by where I am (with you) or who I am with (you) or when (now).  Constructed instead by where I believe I have been (past), where I think we are heading (future), and how I feel about that (afraid).

She recoils.

“I’m going away now” she says.  Which is not where I am.  Not with me.

But I meant.  I meant to say (once I figure out where I actually am): “Hello love.  I am afraid.  I am past and future.  I am absent.”

To which she replies: “Good to know.  Tell me when you arrive, here.  With me.”

Here now.  Or, Nietzschean-ly now/here, is that, and “exactly” : unlocatable.  Nowhere.  NOW + HERE…present.  It can only be lived, not thought.  Thought is too slow.  Lags ahead, leaps behind.

Oh you, I might have said.  And she may have recognized me.  Perhaps.  Now.  Here.  Presently – in the nowhere – the between – the “Interstice.”  Where what occurs, occurs.

“Hello.  I love you.”

– 4 –

Finite, fragile boy.  The fragility and finitude are true, I suppose, but not unquestioned.  However they withstand (the questioning).  They withstand the questioning.  Because I don’t know, and it is not wisdom, this cloud of unknowing, it is finitude, and I am fragile, not only because it’s true.

I am fragile because not all the branches hold.  When climbing.

– “What is it we are speaking of?” she asks (she – the you – asks me – the I).

Past and future, I might have answered.  The unknowing.  But did not.  Instead said – “unreliable.”  Rises, passes away.  Novel-to-familiar.  First one thing then another, desire fades.  I am not stimulus.  Enough.  For no reason.

I, illogical.

You, burdened.  And thus you sigh.  (She sighs her burden, a question).

And I retort.  “No.”  Or, “don’t go.”  But you might, because I have gone (or didn’t arrive, not HERE, not NOW, but somewhere else made of cobbled up pasts and unpredictable aheads).

“I love you.”

But how can that be?

It can’t.  Yet it is.

Perhaps.

I don’t know.  But it is not wisdom.

Re-searching: Hope Questions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Language, Writing8 Comments

skeleton at desk

I archive.

– Edouard Leve –

At some point in the future this will be very important to someone: that I wrote.  Will be significant.  To someone.  That I disciplined my “self” determinedly, conspicuously to experience; to experience experience.  That I asked questions of as much as I could, and as many, and then held on to each question in a kind of world’s-largest-ball-of-twine or world’s-largest-bundle-of-wire or inter-cranial-neuronal-tangle, or… that each little curiosity that cropped up as I “came up against”, each discomfort, each discomfiting sensation, I translated – and when I rendered it, became something different, something new in the world (even though agelessly repetitious) and that new thing was another questioning animal – and those questions disappeared into the world’s-largest-body-of-water – doubt – oceans and underground marshes, or, in actual everyday life, simply a “questioning spirit,” an “inquiring mind,” a “researcher” (to search again) – a human that keeps turning round and around observing things, seeking, searching, asking, in other words, I feel like it will be important – to some other existent thing/individual/organism/ being – that I quizzed and catechized (and that, mostly genuinely, compunctionally) whatever discomposing-affective-awareness-alert occurred for me (thereafter losing them all, after their fashion, in the generalized posture or aspect of querying) followed it in accord with its continuance of interest and then released, lost, offered it to a larger sign:

question mark

Someday it will matter that every little thing, moment, perception (i.e. “experience”) that I noticed, felt, underwent – was aware of becoming-encountering – I interrogated, I archived, I disoriented, mislaid, lost track of in some larger point-of-view, mien or cast: I had reservations, I chronicled, I forgot.  And inscribed.  Addressed and assigned in whatever way I was capable of.  Marked and then faded, cancelled by the mere activity of demarcating.

Translating manifestations and intimations into gestures and cues delimited and distinguished (de-scribed) the perturbation and disconcertment into ambiguous and indeterminate denotations…opaque obfuscations or auguries that bore little substance or portent.

My questioning, rather than resulting in poignant prognostications or revealing adumbrations simply fed the murky mass of life’s analysis – a scrupulous and turbid scrutiny.

I beggared the question and then repented.  Metanoia.  I aimed and turned, aimed and swerved, and turned again.

When the engagement perturbed, I transliterated, diverted, and sacrificed it to a chaotic deity … discovering … language.

 

 

 

Narrating Fragments

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Photography, Traces, Writing3 Comments
“And in life, meaning is not instantaneous.  Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development.  Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning.  Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning.  Facts can be fed into a computer and become factors in a calculation.  No meaning, however, comes out of computers, for when we give meaning to an event, that meaning is a response, not only to the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can exist without the passing of time.  Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration: meaning is born of the two.  An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself.  When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.”

-John Berger, Another Way of Telling –

Paul Kenny -

Invisible Man Chronicles, cont’d

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, relationships2 Comments

Click HERE for parts 1 and 2

2-xray handshake

III.

 

            Rattling bones, deep-falling diaphragm – through continuous sightings and encounters with “H” (“her”) these consistently occur – even over hours, days, and months.

            I might say that what characterizes our particular version of intimacy are curiosity and wonder and the ecstasy of discovery and finding – imbuing apparently abandoned spaces with vitality and imagination.

 

            A week later was a potluck for the visiting artist.  Small-talking with “her” in the kitchen – I felt inadequate to be occupying her time and “let her go” to mingle with the many I was certain were desirous of her indomitable and imaginative company.  I spoke with her partner, the farm-inhabiting-best-friend-artist-lady, and H sidled in.  There was much laughter (their minds are contagious and entertaining – as if the structures of adulthood and professional culture never quite ‘took’ or corralled possibilities)…around “her” my breath dissipates.  We’d both been hired as rural mail carrier associates with joint training to occur the week following; both commissioned to respond to this artist’s intimately relational performance work; both in love with abandoned places and their loss and decay – both committed to discovering lost or overlooked things. 

            There we were.

            I in poverty. 

            Day one of training sat us next to one another, her length and beauty, doodles and read-alouds from the training manual enthralling.  I worked to breathe and lived through my peripheral perception – registering her movements, hair, wrist, knee, hands, mouth pronouncing acronyms, quirky nervous habits, footwear, scent and clothing…

            She suggested (did she?) lunch together.  I’m quite certain that converged through a clumsy stumbling and fragmented semblance of conversation.  I had planned only banana and peanut butter on my budget – yet each day we went – for that amazing hour – somewhere I’d never been before in a city I’d spent over three decades in and around.  An abandoned hotel, a nature trail, small chain restaurants, of which one, perhaps, constituted a first “date,” as, after placing our orders, she removed to the restroom and I was left to pay the bill!  (Delightful things like that).

 

            Blessings.  I was gaining practice in “soaking in the good” – a strategy instructed through my therapy, and H was much better than I ever imagined, a remarkable alchemy of behaviors and body parts – co-constituting an unknown ‘ideal’ to my mind, sensations, experience and history.  I was dumbstruck, amazed, bewildered, befuddled – in other words – alive and in hope.

 

            I’d been asking her coterie of creator-friends to visit my home for fire or food or an art-making party – to no response or avail.  Everyone taking a read.  She agreed, then doubted, then declared she thought she might appear via an internet message.  Thus she arrived, of a Sunday afternoon in April, to my home.

             We parlayed and exchanged – art, family, friends, lives, plans, hopes, strategies, likes and dislikes, ideas and tears, meanings and lies and other truths.  I ached toward her – finding romance and desire and a periscope of loving peeking out, looking round, checking for safety.  It isn’t safe.  It’s unlikely, bizarre, fantastical : sixteen years between us and four marriages – her blossoming while I fade to grey, her popping with –larity, my struggling for place.  She asked me to sit next to her.

            The sides of our arms.  Legs.  Eventually fingers becoming entangled.  We talked staring straight ahead, caught in some astronaut training module machine, no gravity, no reference, dizzied and desirous, disbelieving and desirous, frightened and desirous, with just the right amount of belonging and estrangement, novelty to craft courage and excitement throughout our neural nets.

             We concocted funnel cakes of cinnamon and sugar, mustard, jalapenos and sausage.  They flopped and sickened, we laughed and she left.  I think perhaps we loved, even then, that day.  She left behind a bevy of hands from a book she created, by extraction.  Our hands were open, our minds and hearts, a letting-go, with patterns and a freeing, a dance: in common, in Kansas, in history, in hope, in commitments, in fears and neuroses.

             Letting-go.

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Locations in the Mapping of Meaning

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Reflections, Traces11 Comments

In my efforts to ground and attend to my experience and express it with honesty (see Opening the Hand) I have developed a map of locations – realms of the process that have risen as prominent regions within the difficulty, effort, grief, growth and procession of engaging dramatic change…  You can view it here:  Locations on the Map of Meaning.

To view the text for each mode, simply hover over the nodes title, click or press the + button or the down arrows beneath each location title to see full content.  Some nodes lead to further nodes or you can use the buttons along the bottom of the screen.  Repeating my former disclaimer…

“All of this is to say that I plan a series of posts that will be intensely personal, self-revelant, my own way of reaching toward my experience, my being, and selecting language with which to mark it down – for re-memory, re-cognition, observation, reception, attention, account.  These are journal entries, frankly.  They are what I have to write.  I am calling them “Mapping the Meaning.”  Since I know very few of you personally, in your whole presence, I expect confession, inquiry, and its self-circular expression to genuinely interest or benefit very few of you.  For me, it is writing with an open hand.”

Locations on the Map of Meaning

Learning Life from Metadata

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, JournallingsLeave a comment

Life Lessons : Metadata

Resource Description

Say you have a product – an object of some sort –  a shirt or a song, an idea or a skill – and you’d like to share it, show it, sell it, make it useful.  How would you go about this?  Perhaps make an image of it, a recording, describe or depict it somehow, place it with similar objects but distinguish it, express what it’s made of, from, how, where, when, how one can find or obtain it.  None of these things – the image, the recording, the description, depiction, components, composition, etc. ARE the product itself – they are new and other objects – descriptive ones, administrative ones, structuring ones, among other things…potentially useful and actionable data about the resource itself.

The shirt is long-sleeved, it is stormy blue, size: large (16.5×42), it has 5 buttons made of sandalwood, it is hand-stitched and crafted from Indian muslin, and so on.  Metadata.  It applies to ideas, objects, events, persons, places, things, relations, sounds, senses.  It is a language.  It can be formal or informal, global or local, controlled or free.  It allows systems and processes, machines or functions, humans or networks to utilize resources toward purposes – to identify, select, obtain, organize, comprehend, etc…

The resource is separate from all this.

Metadata and Experience

             A rush of blood to the head.  An uncontrollable weeping.  Sudden awareness, a fear, a noticing.  Tightening throat, sorrow, excitement.  Vibrations on the inside, tingling along the spine, a feeling in the “gut.”  Things happen.  We move.  We sense.  We perceive.  We process all this automatically, at a bodily, neuronal, cellular, physiological scale : our resources for staying alive, for being.

Enter metadata…of which the above paragraph is an example (the descriptive type).  How describe, identify, narrativize (organize, administer), utilize, put to some constructed purpose all these goings-on of our felt experience (our primary resources)?  Create repeatable elements, qualifications (say “the flush in response to her text was ‘love,’ ‘infatuation,’ ‘shame,’ or ‘rage’”); encode it, fit it into the system, the processes (“I wouldn’t feel such pain if things were different, if she were here…”)…signify relations.

It is stormy blue, my grief, it has long sleeves with a long reach, it covers me entire, lays upon me like a veil, like a skin between.  I am clothed with absence, the buttons burn.

Metadata.  The resource (capacity for grief, for attachment, for longing; the ability to love, to fear, to wish, to compose metadata, to fabricate meaning/purpose/functions and relations for physiological experience – the Resources) – are separate from their description, depiction, events, experiences, persons, relations, constructed meanings…THE RESOURCES ARE OURS.

We tend, for ease of use and efficiency, consistency, sharability, continuity and so on (“interoperability”) to create for ourselves Application Profiles – when we experience this sort of felt happening I’ll call it love, anger, shelve it here, link it to…qualify it with shame, doubt, fear, happiness (all major experience-metadata schema elements).  So we create Core Elements or fields of experience and their Qualifiers, Sources, Rights, Techniques and Technicalities, and administer, structure, organize, identify and select (or reject) our felt experiences accordingly.  Our constant work of labeling, cataloging, categorizing, operationalizing, conditioning, meaning-making: our data about data – our profiles of description, selection, controls, language, encoding, linking, expressing…structuring our experience.

Our Resource Description Frameworks – statements – “this, has relation to, this” “is similar to” “causes” “is result of” “makes me” “hurts…” “means…” “is author of” “has title” and so on…ME.

Resources 

And then the Resources…apart from all that… our felt experiences…our capacities and abilities we label love, courage, loss, grief, ecstasy, pleasure, pain, generosity, grace, fear, anger, shame, hope…

…apart from the metadata we construct, the linkages we compose…

are OURS to utilize as we see fit, as we wish, as we choose.

emotions-scraped-from-wikipedia

and a poem by Philip White:

philip white - idyll

and a song from Nils Frahm

Art of the Occurrence of Meaning

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Journallings, Reflections13 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

Interconnection

Art of the Occurrence of Meaning

 

    I consider that I work strenuously to come to terms with (understand, be aware or conscious of, perceive and interpret) what it is I value, care about, intend, hope or purpose. 

            I am prodoundly interested in what is often referred to as “theory of mind” (TOM) – “that which hovers somewhere on the boundary between the explicit and the implicit, the conscious and the subconscious, the objective and subjective” – Maurice Bloch.  And semiosis – what I understand to be the process and activity of utilizing available resources, situations, internal and external sensations to construct moments of meaning (“worlding” you could call it – co-here-ing in an embedded context).  The seamless combination of culture/person-ality, internal/external, embodied/extended, conscious/subconscious – or selective/regulative – processes that occur in real-life human experiences. 

 

            Perhaps this is “Anthropology” as Maurice Bloch would have it: 

 

“Anthropology, at least as I conceive it, presents the immense merit of uniting knowledge about human beings – that is constructed from the top down, by general theory, which in the case of cognitive psychology is supported by rigorous and controlled experiments – with knowledge of particular men and women that is constructed from the bottom up, based on the observation of people as they live their lives” 

 

some commensurate multi-disciplinary examination of human life.  I hear myself saying to myself… 

 

[ASIDE: from high school through college when I envisioned being a great poet, I always wanted to be what I termed the “Master of Grey” – one able to plumb and express the indeterminate and indistinct – those liminal mixed and ambiguous realities of experience – exemplified by rain or fog or shadow – the betweens, the margins, the shades…] 

 

       Anyway, I hear myself saying to myself when I listen to myself speaking to myself (so very many variations of selves), that as much as I am fascinated and intrigued by the processes of the world (geological, biological, neurological, sociological and so forth) and the apparatuses and hows of human meaning-making (electro-neuro-biological, socio-cultural, etc…), I am yet more interested in the occurrences of human  meaning experiences. 

 

            The “occurrence of meaning” seems to me the experience of all those elements and processes indiscretely conjoined and con-fused – wholes of which parts can’t be specified – signifieds/signifiers/significants indiscriminate: our PRESENT. 

 

            This is where art arises for me.  Art and action, for art is action.  Art seems to me – or processes of human making – an attempt at conjoining/confusing/commingling and co-relating of the many modes and motions, nodes and notions, processes and practices, influences confluencing the convergences we term experience. 

 

            Artistic acts are those where subject/object, conscious/subconscious, selective/regulative, internal/external, intentional/accidental distinctions in human processes do not apply – and these convergences, these realities of human living are sometimes actualized or embodied/externalized.  Perhaps, in my way of thinking. 

 

            Modalities and genres, fields and spheres, behaviors, cognition and domains – social and personal intertwingled, the perceived and imperceptible carrying on simultaneously – CONverged – and that verge – that edge, rim, margin of activity – that liminal, boundary-zone open border-space is the essential – 

 

            a human way of mediately presenting occurrences of meaning, in their variety and multiplicity.  Perhaps. 

 

Or so I am thinking. 

 

Answerability in the body of the world. 

 

The meaning event seen in its total matrix.

 

 

dimensions of experience Interconnection

 

thanks to UX/dimensions for image and dimension labelings

On Perturbations (Transformations)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings7 Comments

Maturana-Varela - co-relations

I learned today that I am an “operationally closed system.”

Essentially – a living multicellular organism with no “inside” or “outside” (as far as that system or the environment is concerned) – a set of dynamically and reciprocally interconnected cells with remarkably complex, diverse, and plastic (transformable, adaptable) abilities interacting continually to fluctuations, pressures (or lack thereof), movements (perturbations) of a molecular milieu.  That what you interpret (are “perturbed” by) as my “behavior” (you observers, you) is “a view of the dance of my internal relations” – part of “the dynamics of interactions of this organism in its environment” (and vice-versa).

Each of us, adapting, CONSTANTLY, “modified by every experience” in our efforts to maintain “effective correlation, compatibility” between our “selves” (organismic structural possibilities) and our environment (that which we are structurally coupled to…momentarily).  Always effecting, always effected by.  A thoroughfare of thorough-going perturbations/ transformations…i.e., ALIVE.

I’m sorry if “I” offend and/or disturb (as I am bound to) in my attempts and efforts to maintain compatibility (to SURVIVE!) with/IN my environment – I realize that every action, vibration, movement I express or perform = a perturbance for you, which will (sometimes) resonate, but unfailingly structurally couple us, if we are to live-on… yes, I’m talking to you – squirrel, leaf, fly, spouse, air particle, plant, piano, atmosphere…  Down to our electrons and quarks we effect.  And that effect is on entire systems, without observable (or measurable) end.

In other words – respons-ability.

This began to dawn on me as I was considering (perhaps unwarranted) my hopes, desires, expectations.  As realities (perceived/ interpreted) perturbed these (my situational, contextual constraints and affordances)…I “thought/felt” (who knows which – synapses) that many of my most (felt/thought) agitating (interpreted) perturbances (transformations) are ANTICIPATED more than encountered/lived-through.  In other words – I’m experiencing my anticipations – my internal dynamics – as perturbations – NOT my organisms’ “environment.”

In other words – my “operationally closed system” anticipates change as potential threat or danger – when actually I would (most likely) – am operationally equipped to – maintain my structural inter-relations compatibly with the ongoing interactivities / relations of my environment.

Our kind of being is fantastically diverse and adaptable (with unimaginable flexibility and complexity) to vast fluctuations / perturbations / transformations – we are plastic to our cells.  It takes a LOT to “disintegrate” us, in our “ongoing structural drift” (that which transforms and develops and differentiates us moment-to-moment as the organism we are).

Our cellular behavior:  a sensory surface, a motor surface and a system of coordination dynamically related in never-ending change (until disintegration).  And ALL in co-relation.  No movement, sensation, quiver, thought, emotion, pulse or charge that is not CO-RELATION with activities and molecules making up our “milieu” (the middle, the surround – BOTH/AND).

Maturana-Varela - co-relations

The swirling circle is me with my organismic operational closure always moving and changing in relation to its components – equally effecting and effected by – you / air / “matter” / “energy” (the wavy line) as reciprocal “perturbations.”

it’s complicated…

sensational…

ecstatic…

Reality (for the likes of moi): “I” might be much  more “naturally” compatible with an enormous diversity of environments and situations (others) than I internally coordinate myself to be (at least biologically, operationally, cognitively speaking).  Ahem.  Alas.  My organismic systemic co-relations often get the best of me.

apologies nearest and dearest…

Maturana-Varela - Realitydiagrams and conceptual perturbations compliments of:

 

A Real-ization?

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Reflections, Writing10 Comments

A Real-ization(?)

“…And here begins my despair as a writer”

–Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph”

 

I should say, “began.”  And not “as a writer,” per se, or even primarily, no, I should more accurately portray the experience “…and so began, and ever continues to begin, my despair as a human.”

For experiences, no matter where or when, in full matter of where and when, are multitude that begin such despair.  They are occurrences of a process we call variously “knowing,” “comprehending,” “understanding” – encounters with unlimited and unnecessary contents we might describe as “revelatory,” “visionary,” or “true.”  We describe their feeling and fumble with content.

For they seem to circumscribe an everything – as contained and opening out – well-metaphored by the scientifically religious Big Bang, an un-caused cause or some like.  Experiences we couch in the babbles of mystery: synchronicity, omniscience, omnivorous, omnipotent and omnipresent.  We feel them like an orb or spiral, a series of looping waves without succession.

A.k.a “convergence,” simultaneity and emergence coming together at now and here.

I write “as a human” because I cannot be anything else.  And a human, as a living being, is characterized by limitations and potentials.  Although kinds of things never exhaust their potentials (as far as we know) – thereby always altering what might constitute affordances and constraints lists – nevertheless, in order to be unique (or anything at all – “what –so-ever”) humans must be limited, those limitations providing the very contexts for exploring potentials and potency.

One such environment or niche is the operation of our living processes in space and through time.  I.e. a simultaneous occurrence of everything cannot be processed, cannot be shared, as such.  It must needs be dissected and dismembered via many spaces and over time in order to be perceived by such an animal as we – re-membered and imaged-in (imagined) according to our nature (our processes and practices in our environments).

This is why moments we might re(in)fer to as “transcendent” or “wholistic” perhaps “encapsulating” or “converging” – compressing and expanding (synonymously) some happening that seems “total” generate despair for our kind or species.

I am unable to deny what comes to experience, but with labels and descriptions (interpretation) must take care.  One often turns to symbols or metaphors: icons that serve to absorb a variegated but comprehensible share of human experiences.  Accrued via descriptions and depictions over time, these symbols resonate and traverse times and boundaries in order to gather experiences of a kind.  Take for example the term “hunger,” or a drawing of an eye.  Mirrors, or a resolving I-IV-V progression.  These activities of reference and participation, renewal and recognition, present and re-present for us experiences that seem to extend or equal (again, synonymously) us.

Despair comes in the desired specificity each individual of the species wishes to convey (form of convergence – communicate meaning for our kind can be spotted by our use of the prefix co-).  That experience (in itself necessarily co-), in order to have meaning(humanly speaking) must be shared – we find that telling/singing/dancing/painting/acting/writing/ filming/making/working/sculpting/creating/crafting or any combination of them all and the human-specific processes this entails are unable to re-present such “totalizing” experiences, except at certain angles, perspectives, fragments, over time.

Yet, were it otherwise, we would have no need of any of our abilities – for we would know.  The relations, practices, potentials and processes depend on this inability (limitation) to be.  For us to be, as humans, what and whom, where and when, we are.

Unity would undo this.  In fact, we have no evidence that ANY living entity “shares alike” – reciprocates perfect understanding or replication (or reproduction, ex-ist-ing) exactly…down beyond our cells…there is difference, mis-matching, variation.  In fact, all the co-operations that provide con-vergence and co-mmunity, me-and-ing (meaning) depend on the disjunctions we strive to come over or through in order to express, be understood, known, “as one.”

So, though never “of the same mind,” perspective, or feeling, even when we experience me-and-ing together (gathered) – – this is also how we are.

Perhaps then, less despair than real-ization?