To live, deeply

British Museum mummy

There was earth inside them, and

They dug.

– Paul Celan

 

Spillage.2 – ecce homo

 

another entry from the distant past…

ouroboros5.jpg

I am that I am

(click title to view)

 

 

Art of the Occurrence of Meaning

 

 

 

 

 

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

The Perfect Sense of Embodiment

I have recently had the good fortune of correspondence with a tremendous thinker of whose work I have greatly admired and utilized continuously.  At some point he queried me as to my central concern or research interest which I pondered over a number of days.  About a year ago I recognized that filtering through all of my curiosities and fascinations (passionate inquiries) – in the end they were all about ways that meaning might be made for humans.  Thus I figured semiosis or semiotics was my central field of concern.  How we forge meaning in our surrounds.  As I’ve pursued library and information science I have attuned to the eagerness with which we as a species produce, hoard and waste information.  We’ve produced veritable clouds of data/information/knowledge and now it seems as if we swoon and drown in it.  For meaning, this cosmos of affordances must be utilized, integrated, incorporated.  As technologies explode and become increasingly symbiotic or synergistic with our own bodies and purposes, I have found that my responsive concern is one of remembering that the nexus or filament-combining locus for humans is the body.  No meaning can be had without the physical processes on which our being relies.  Every think I can think rests on the chemistry and material flows that comprise my organism.  It seems that even while we seek to develop intelligent robots and machines, ubiquitous data-recording and instinct-responsive computing, work with data sets increasingly monumental and robust, that a strong percentage of the human populace has the idea that the stigmergy and emergence of virtual social realities construct meaning, promise, potentiality.  I am not denying the fascinating quality of our rhizomic replications of our actual interconnectedness, overlap and interdependent influence, but I am committed to the fact that meaning only arises as relations are incorporated.  The translation and transformation of continuous relational events whether electronic and virtual or face-to-face and co-present into MEANING only occurs organismically, physically, presently in the knotting of convergences through our embodied existence.  Emotion, sensation, cognition, movement all ALWAYS play a part in the construction of meaning.  These are my thinkings/feelings.

In keeping with that, serendipitously my wife and I happened to view “The Perfect Sense” – a movie pursued to listen to Max Richter‘s incredible soundtrack in action – but resulting in a sort of visual commentary on my above thoughts.  We recommend it!  And would love to hear what you think!

Person-al Interference

Stigmergy - Swarm

 

more on stigmergy here

swarm intelligence here

Self-writing / Autography

web I

 

I want to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including wanting to know how wanting to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including wanting to know how wanting to know how wanting to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including…

 

A Real-ization?

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?

 

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

 

 

Ah, vitality

Nietzsche

“Nietzsche is the most sarcastic son of a bitch ever to set foot on this
earth. Just say that; then write whatever else you want, like he would.” —
— So my friend Werner Timmermann tells me, with a gleam in his eye.
He helped with my translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a four-year-long
labor of love, so he knows what he is talking about. Zarathustra (1885)
was Nietzsche’s magnum opus; everything before it was preparation,
everything after it expatiation and elucidation.
But, for some, the question remains: Why Nietzsche? Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was quite simply one of the most original and
influential philosophers who ever lived; in addition, his writing style was
brilliant, epigrammatic, idiosyncratic [“It is my ambition to say in ten
sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does
not say in a book.”] The language dances, prances, whirls and twirls; it
ranges from ghetto-verbalizations and vulgarizations to high art, from
lyricism to sardonicism, from satyr-play to passion play. No one really
writes like Nietzsche, though the number of his stylistic apes and
imitators is legion (especially in the ranks of academe).

-from the introduction 2004 translation of Ecce HomoThe Antichrist

Ecce Homo & The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche (2004)

sympatico-ally discovered via Time’s Flow Stemmed (take a look!)

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!