via J.M.G. Le Clezio
On entering the world(s) of the text: Prologue
via J.M.G. Le Clezio
Tag: Human
a tidbit on writing
“every thing is a parliament of lines”
I think many people sense a difference between typing, printing, and writing. But very few, I surmise, might be able to speak clearly about what those differences are. There’s the kinesthetic difference, the disjunction of flow between thought forming through the body into theories of letters on paper. There’s a temporal difference, between the stenography of lightning-thought tapped like Morse code onto a keyboard, versus the individuated pacing of each writers body, hand, and facility of digits. Some may even say there’s a personality difference between interpreting standardized typography as a communication, and the erratics and imperfections of the same terms from a writing hand.
My desk is dominated by books with titles like Chaos, Incompleteness, Complexity, Information, Emergence, Touch, Telling, Lines and Erasure. Aspects of being human that glance across gaps or dawdle on edges – where knowledge isn’t comprehensive (and where might it be?) – are the processes and activities that fascinate my fancy.
Coupling an article I chanced upon (thank you Scholarly Kitchen) about Technology and Cursive Writing, with my current readings in Tim Ingold’s Lines: A brief history, I begin to slowly realize that how we interact with lines, with writing, is sourced far beyond and beneath our immediate experience.
Ingold begins with the consideration of what we understand by the words “song” and “music.” How “music has become wordless; language has been silenced.” In the past music referred to sonorous words set to harmony and rhythm, sounds alone were an embellishment to language, but not the principle purpose. Language was the sound-filled reality, like animal chirps or barks, the human’s vocal verbality. With inscription, language began to silence. Sound encountered a gap with meaning, or took on meaning of a different kind.
Similar worldview realities are exhibited in ways of inscribing. “In typing and printing, the intimate link between the manual gesture and the inscriptive trace is broken. The author conveys feeling by his choice of words, not by the expressiveness of his lines.” And writing experienced gaps in relation to drawing, language further abstracted.
“Yet whether encountered as a woven thread or as a written trace, the line is still perceived as one of movement and growth. How come, then, that so many of the lines we come up against today seem so static? Why does the very mention of the word ‘line’ or ‘linearity’, for so many contemporary thinkers conjure up an image of the alleged narrow-mindedness and sterility, as well as the single-track logic, of modern analytic thought?”
“It seems that what modern thought has done to place – fixing it to spatial locations – it has also done to people, wrapping their lives into temporal moments…If we were but to reverse this procedure, and to imagine life itself not as a fan of dotted lines – but as a manifold woven from the countless threads spun by beings of all sorts, both human and non-human, as they find their ways through the tangle of relationships in which they are enmeshed, then our entire understanding of evolution would be irrevocably altered…It would lead us to an open-ended view of the evolutionary process, and of our own history within that process, as one in which inhabitants, through their own activities, continually forge the conditions for their own and each other’s lives. Indeed, lines have the power to change the world!” (Ingold)
Bringing it back to the inscription of language, it is easy to see the bias of expression in the meaning of signs – but that meaning abstracted into disconnected idea-banks of terms, rather than the entire gesture of activity of inscribing. My talent diminishing to equational finesse – the fiddling and play or arrangement of alphabets like numbers – rather than a being expressing its thought through gesture and individuated agreed-upon symbols and signs. Perhaps our sense of difference betwixt the typescript and handwritten is that there is a little less of ourselves as individuated organism, and a lot more of standardized general practices and beliefs. Perhaps we feel a little less in- when our scripts are preformed? I do not know, I am foraging the questions…
“every thing is a parliament of lines”
-Tim Ingold
The Human in Humans (accd’g to Edgar Morin)
“Man fulfills himself as a thoroughly human being only in and by culture. There is no culture in the human brain (biological apparatus able to act, perceive, know, learn), but there is no mind, no spirit, no capacity for consciousness and thought, without culture. The human mind is an emergence, created and affirmed in the brain/culture relationship. Once the mind has emerged it intervenes in cerebral function and retroacts with it. This gives us interdependent and indispensable triads:
brain – mind – culture loop
reason – emotion – impulse loop
individual – society – species loop”
–Edgar Morin, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future–
It’s complicated
“In a complex relationship with the environment, very similar substances with the same chemical structure can become quite different in their reality and form”
-Michael Gazzaniga-
“On the evolutionary tree, we humans are sitting at the tip of our lonely branch…We have the same roots as all living organisms. All those similarities are there. Our cellular processes depend upon the same biology, and we are subject to the same properties of physics and chemistry. We are all carbon-based creatures. Yet ever species is unique, and we are too. Every species has answered the problem of survival with a different solution, filling a different niche…Homo sapiens entered a cognitive niche…
…in one sentence Garrison Keillor captures humanness…such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity…
BE WELL. DO GOOD WORK. KEEP IN TOUCH.“
-Michael Gazzaniga-
Another strong recommendation from me for those interested in the what’s and how’s and some where’s and when’s of being a particular we.
It is Still with Me
Last night Holly and I viewed Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, having no preparation or knowledge about subject or style. One of those films you throw in the bag at the library so you have a variety to select from should the time offer itself.
turns out as a meditation, the oscillatory experiences of nature/grace; faith/doubt; hope/cynicism; mother/father…
and so on.
A kind of imaging of dialectics.
Aside from the choice of personal pronouns relating to “ultimate questions” it has stayed with me.
Ruminatively.
The oddities of learning development for the human organism; the broader context our lives happen within; contexts and networks, systems from family-to-universe, from cell-to-individual.
The developments of guilt and shame. The nostalgia for innocence, the wonder of betterment, of choice.
What experiences “stick” and become paradigms to fit new experiences within.
The music was glorious and suited expertly to the images and tone.
I guess I recommend it.
It is a worthwhile experience to add to your complex and idiosyncratic mix.
In the arena of my recommendation that humans watch Synechdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufmann at least once every six months, to retain self-awareness and humility…
Or perhaps correspondence…(Asking after the Nature of Nobody, pt. 3)
from pt. 2:
It writes this as “my world,” or “the world that I in-habit.”
Or perhaps correspondence…
(Asking after the Nature of Nobody, pt. 3)
…is precisely what is occurring.
“Each biological life-form, by reason of its distinctive bodily constitution (its ‘biological heritage,’ as we might say), is suited only to certain parts and aspects of the vast physical universe. And when this ‘suitedness to’ takes the bodily form of cognitive organs, such as our own senses, or the often quite different sensory modalities discovered in other lifeforms, then those aspects and only those aspects of the physical environment which are proportioned to those modalities become ‘objectified,’ that is to say, made present not merely physically but cognitively as well…the difference between objects of experience and elements of sensation is determined primarily not by anything in the physical environment as such but by the relation or, rather, network and set of relations that obtains between whatever may be ‘in fact’ present physically in the surroundings and the cognitive constitution of the biological organism interacting with those surrounding here and now.”
-John Deely, Umwelt–
Given the apparent disjunction of its maps to the potential largesse and intricacy (unknowns) of the territory, it reconsiders.
It thinks it may be inextricably related to the territory. In no way accurately or exhaustively (in relation to the territory) yet constitutively via what kind of co-respondence pertains (in relation to the species of which it is an example).
In other words, by inter-relation to the territory, and by nature of its dynamic organismal systems of sensation-perception-cognition and communication (+ language – the capacity to model the above relational systems): it is I.
It co-evolves personhood. The capacity to refer to an I among Is. An individual personality among a We.
Map and territory, co-respondent. The map being a model of that correspondence and correlation. Therefore, of course it is idiosyncratic and fraught with misperceptions, disjunctions and erroneously organized interpretations and representations of the networked environments…yet the map = correspondence with the territory in species-specific experience.
Perhaps?
Correspondences of one to many and many to one, and to a very delimited aspect of the territory, but still constructed by real linkages (reciprocal relations and responses) to that “Territory.”
Bees’ links look different. If a lion were to speak we would not understand. Every organism its own relations to the territory, selecting and responding, sensing and processing various aspects of the territory into species-specific lifeworlds, but correlated and corresponding particular to their kind.
Or…our maps are our maps. Ever changing, adapting, responding to our environments and experiences, genuinely related to the territory, representations of our habits of being in the world (in-habit-ing it as humans).
I can’t lay claim to truth about the territory, but my maps derive from it and shape my forays within it, can be shared and examined, evaluated and adjusted with other mapmakers, and trusted as the experience of a peculiar entity of a particular species modeled in reciprocal relation to specific environs of the territory.
“The map is not the territory” but a model, a depiction, a fragment co-evolved in and with that territory, a specific kind of rendering and representation, and valuable for the explorer-species of the sign.
Disjunctive Cartography – Our Propensities, Asking after the Nature of Nobody, cont’d
“The map is not the territory. That’s an expression which means
the world does not match the picture in our heads”
-Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions, vol. 1–
It thinks. It considers that it has not done with it. It reasons that I will know more tomorrow. Its hope of reading, of selecting and organizing, of patterning and arranging toward some partial whole, toward an item, an element, a concept or thought (any Other) that it might also become (or have been, an “I”).
In other words, it requires difference.
Yesterday I played soccer with my son, it concocts. I was the Other experiencing, moving, tripping-shouting-laughing – discretely – other than the ball or grassy ground, other than the leafy trees and wind, the boy (the one I called son), it was anOther yesterday, and therefore it may refer to that example of human-in-a-context (a surround of not-it) by a meaningful (adequately functional) pronoun (name-toward), namely “he” or “I.”
I gained definition by my surroundings, it conjures. Any object will do (it’s perceiving assorted matter and energy, its limbs rest on some as “desk,” the 10” fence as “books” and the process of sensing, transforming to perception as “time” and mediates “it” as separate-though-connected – of the same stuff (matter) but in motion and of a unique form (relating to) – and names its organized system “self,” “me,” “I”).
It meditates (categorizes, classifies, identifies, compares and contrasts) on these sensations/percpetions/affectations and wonders. “It was I,” it hears without sound – a confession aimed at a photo of a boy-child near against an aged man I knew as “grandpa.” I looked so different – of different cells and height and weight, blood pressure and vision, facial contours, bones, hair and skin – so very different (it looks at a reflection) – how is it the “same” (identical to) “I” it is now?
Or might be tomorrow – through an utterly unknowable future of events, weather, interactivities, sensations, affectations and cognitions. Will it be me tomorrow? It wonders how identity can withstand such difference – variance, change, even replacement and erasure – and still meaningfully or validly considered “same”?
It places its’ head on its’ wrists. It writes these words (is writing) in order to create (or craft) a recognizable trace, an effect, communally learned, socially agreed-upon marks that construct a momentary reflexivity its’ own existence. A sort of extrinsic, partial it, to feel like also an I, at a moment.
It in-scribes in a medium, borrowed from others – borrowed, acquired, manipulated, stolen – a kind of proof to it that it is, and is unique, separatively connected, yea, conjoined seamlessly, molecularly, and yet… distinguishable… therefore I-able. Referable. Nominal.
It senses discomfort in parts labeled (categorized, classified, i.e. generalized and lumped indiscriminately/arbitrarily or learned) “head” and “neck” and “shoulders.” It shuts its eyes. I slept well last night, that is, I woke refreshed, my discomforts (aches) diminished. It remembers I went to bed dry-eyed and suffering allergic responses to Springtime. It drinks coffee. It is not the same.
This is a portion of a map that does not represent the territory. There are, perhaps, moments – instances – in which I fit with my surround – but usually it is organizing a mapping conference of sensation, affect, percept and infinite inputs coupling to pre-formed acquired categories and classes, fuzzy generalizations to stencil lines and rivers, mounds and fissures with very little correspondence to the world.
It writes this as “my world,” or “the world that I in-habit.”
Our Propensities
“identifying a function for dreams or pretend play or fiction doesn’t mean that we’ve identified the function”
-Jonathan Gottschall-
I am enjoying this book more than I expected. Often overview-type books of aspects of human phenomena leave me with a touch of “yeah, we all know that (i.e. we experience that), but tell us something new, give us opportunities to create knowledge from new data!” Gottschall’s book is a well-written tour (akin to the work of de Botton on aspects of human life) – representative of current knowledge, suggestive rather than pedantic, and fluidly engaging.
“Consider the following information:
Todd rushed to the store for flowers.
Greg walked her dog.
Sally stayed in bed all day.
Quick, what were you thinking?…
In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story…studies show that if you give people random, unpatterned information, they have a very limited ability not to weave it into a story…the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t…it’s usual method is to fabricate the most confident and complete explanatory stories from the most ambiguous clues…the Sherlock Holmes in our brains job is to ‘reason backwards’ from what we can observe in the present and show what orderly series of causes led to particular effects…we will always rather fabulate a story than leave experience unexplained.”
And so on. In fact, the sentences he writes above are on-the-fly conjured random fact-statements unrelated. Most of us probably had already begun to fit it into something ‘meaningful to us’ before we finished the third one. Does this help you see how your view and perspective on reality – your ‘automatic’ or instinctual or deferral mode comprehension ALWAYS needs sorted out with CONTEXT and the empirical world? Our minds are amazing and unbelievable in their functions and operations (literally), factories of fictions based on ancient genetic messages qua homo sapien, empirical experiences from our own individual lifespans, and an untangleable web of socio-cultural input and in-formation. We’re fascinating…and utterly unreliable. Thus we have each other, and our senses and myths and science and all sorts of other-world perspectives to adjust and possibilize our own stories. Perhaps there are moments our thoughts align with facts, but those will be rare in our lives.
Taken in a context of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, John Canfield’s Becoming Human and Alan Singer’s The Self-Deceiving Muse, Gottschall’s delightful foray into the impulsivity of fiction-like brain behavior makes for a savory meal. I’m concocting stories about it even now (it’s sure).
All my Words are Silent 