Tag: Individual

Heroes Ringing True

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Robert Musil

On “the writer type”:

“One can describe this type as the person in whom the irredeemable solitude of the self in the world and among people comes most forcefully to mind:  as the sensitive person who is never given his due;  whose emotions react more to imponderable reasons than to compelling ones; who despises people of strong character with the anxious superiority a child has over an adult who will die half a lifetime before he will; who feels even in friendship and love that breath of antipathy that keeps every being distant from others and constitutes the painful, nihilistic secret of individuality; who is even able to hate his own ideals because they appear to him not as goals but as the products of the decay of his idealism.  These are only isolated and individual instances, but corresponding to all of them, or rather underlying them, is a specific attitude toward and experience of knowledge, as well as of the material world that corresponds to it.”

On the writer’s region (“nonratioid”):

“There is no better way to characterize this region than to point out that it is the area of the individual’s reactivity to the world and other individuals, the realm of values and valuations, of ethical and aesthetic relationships, the realm of the idea…in this region facts do not submit, laws are sieves, events do not repeat themselves but are infinitely variable and individual…there is in the writer’s territory from the start no end of unknowns, of equations, and of possible solutions.  The task is to discover ever new solutions, connections, constellations, variables, to set up prototypes of an order of events, appealing models of how one can be human, to invent the inner person…which then nevertheless branches out somewhere into a boundless thicket, although not without somehow fulfilling its purpose…”

These quotes come from his exceptional small essay Sketch of What the Writer Knows

which I desperately wanted to reproduce here…

if it “rings true” for you – please find a mentor and friend in Robert Musil:

Decompression Addendum: Redefining Terminologies: Finding Words

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

“The variety of words is another error…I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood…I now recognize among the thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

Rudiments: Places of Operation

Redefining Core Existence Terminology

 

Family: those with whom one “belongs,” chosen and not, like it or not, one’s “tribe” – born into and/or evolved and developed.

Home:  states of being or locations, settings in which one IS.  Settings in which one is freest to be.

Love:    shared and mutual, reciprocal regard, respect, desire and preference.  Those with whom one thrives and incites the thriving of.  Intention and attention ( a relation between not inhering in beings)

Friendship:  unmitigated affirmation, reciprocal and intentional.  Native complementarity of being.

World:  internal and external context at any given moment

Self:  whom one is or shows up as in one’s world – at any given moment: individual weave or presentation in circumstantial contexts and settings.

Language:  whatever serves as communique betwixt individual and others and world (internal/ external)

I:  utterer of language, behaver of behaviors, actor of actions, feeler of feelings – as regards the “self”

Other:  any and all beings not the self-regarding individual

Vocation:  that which one IS and DOES; self-perpetuating passion – that which drives and rewards, fulfills and seduces, nourishes and excites desire for an individual…one’s propulsion, desire and satisfaction in being.

Leisure:  rest, reprieve, de-stressification

Fun/Play:  light enjoyment, carbonated experience

Sex:  whole-cloth woven world of contexts of one or more individuals

Art:  combinatory effect of an individual’s self, world, vocation and play; any “otherwise-not” creation of a living being’s given and concocted whole

Thought:  a self’s languaging of “world”

Habits:  automatic or instinctual activities of an individual, supposedly self-soothing or self-managing

Perception:  individual sifting of “world” and “self” (see also: interpretation)

Reading:  engaging the language of others or world or self-as-other

Intepretation:  an individual or group of individual’s “spin” on “universe”

Universe:  arbitrary boundary comprehending all that can be perceived/conceived by an individual or group at a given moment

Conception:  consideration and invention of possibilities of “universe”

Writing:  an effort to live, to exist