another entry from the distant past…
I am that I am
(click title to view)
Tag: meaning
Spillage.1 : Action Writing
In searching through the files on my computer for particular photos, I have been running across many files of which the names are unrecognizable to me, many dating from months and moons ago. Β Some of them startle me, some are encouraging, all provide record of where I’ve been, how I’m thinking, what’s at work in me at various given moments. Β I thought I’d share a few that seem worthy of being shared, they will arrive under the tag “Spillage” – detritus left to the side when my focus is on projects. Β Here’s a sample, found labelled: Action:Writing. (simply click on title link to view)
Action Writing
Empathy…Intersubjectivity…efforts…
Empathy: A Way, but not My Way
O.E.D. β Empathy / einfuhlung
- βThe power of projecting oneβs personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplationβ
- βto feel oneself into itβ
- βthe feeling-out of other mindsβ
- βa form of imaginative identification of self with non-self, a feeling-intoβ
Β
Feeling out, feeling into, projecting oneβs experience in order to absorb the experience of another.Β βIn and out of one anotherβs bodiesβ (Maurice Bloch), βintersubjectivityβ (Daniel Stern).
Notebooks full of conjuring, Iβve dreamt and striven to elucidate or embody, to caress and coerce language to convey or carry-like-a-message the interpersonal convergence, experiential agreement we might be signifying with the syntax and semantics of empathy.
There were moments, instants, it seemed evident, nearly obvious β as when a child ran itself across a brittle late-summer yard, lodging a prickled sticker in the pad of its heel, and hearing its friend following close behind, sensing its similar fateβ¦a kind of βpredictive apprehensionβ become co-mprehension as experience is multiplied, at least observably shared β at least sympathy β a feeling-with, if not βout; and βinto.
Two humans losing their loved ones, or spouses enduring the same tragedy?
Experience-learning applied to replicated or duplicated occasions.Β Similar, perhaps, sympathic.
But βfully comprehendingβ journeys beyond this.
Apparently, empathy happens when one extends emotion beyond the individual body and absorbs, joins, or feels-into another β a verge of meeting, movement,
beyond into between, meshing as a sunset goes about forming itself, or the creation of fog β something like con-gene-ial requirements.Β Some of us, hell, all of us (and more) share genes, so this must be possible (we have a word for it after all!).
Our forms, our reach, must be flexible.Β We share-with, finally, down to our atoms out through our environment, galaxy, and beyond.
EXTENDED β EMBODIED β EMBEDDED
-components of empathy-
Β
β¦a coordination of coordinations of actionsβ¦
(Humberto Maturana / Francisco Varela)
Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Perhaps empathy, a possibility of intersubjectivity, occurs when subjects extend awareness through a mutual orientation into a consensual domainβ¦each feeling-out the other by feeling-into a shared sensual arena, learned by experience and therefore anticipated predictivelyβ¦in rare occasions of empathyβ¦simultaneously!?
In other words, based out of our shared genetic realities, generated by the kinds of experiences and βworldsβ our species can have, we feel-out of our heartbreak, grief, joy, ecstasy, fear β emotive and sensual experiences β into con-sensual co-ordinated domains of those experiences occurring in some liminal, marginal space verging each; similarly to the way a coastline clearly separates and thoroughly connects sea and land, while both continue going on underneath one another.
Perhaps.Β But I was not seeking to describe, explain, or indicate empathy in language, my desire was to enact it, evoke itβ¦and in that I have failedβ¦ever to try again.
“A book begins by defining ‘Who I am’; Β it ends by asking ‘Who am I?’ Β
We are allergic to the world; consciousness is an allergic reaction to the fact of the world; it is our understanding that is a form of irritation, a rewarding irritation, and we think, because we think, we have accomplished something noble, something valorous, that we can say what it is something means; but it is just a symptom of the allergy, the mind trying to rid itself of itself, of what enters it by casting it back out, words for world.”
-Dan Beachy-Quick-
Inebriation
currently absorbing…
Art of the Occurrence of Meaning
Art of the Occurrence of Meaning
Β Β Β 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.Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β I am prodoundly interested in what is often referred to as βtheory of mindβ (TOM) β βthat which hovers somewhere on the boundary between the explicit and the implicit, the conscious and the subconscious, the objective and subjectiveβ β Maurice Bloch.Β And semiosis β what I understand to be the process and activity of utilizing available resources, situations, internal and external sensations to construct moments of meaning (βworldingβ you could call it β co-here-ing in an embedded context).Β The seamless combination of culture/person-ality, internal/external, embodied/extended, conscious/subconscious β or selective/regulative β processes that occur in real-life human experiences.Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Perhaps this is βAnthropologyβ as Maurice Bloch would have it:Β
βAnthropology, at least as I conceive it, presents the immense merit of uniting knowledge about human beings β that is constructed from the top down, by general theory, which in the case of cognitive psychology is supported by rigorous and controlled experiments β with knowledge of particular men and women that is constructed from the bottom up, based on the observation of people as they live their livesβΒ
some commensurate multi-disciplinary examination of human life.Β I hear myself saying to myselfβ¦Β
[ASIDE: from high school through college when I envisioned being a great poet, I always wanted to be what I termed the βMaster of Greyβ β one able to plumb and express the indeterminate and indistinct β those liminal mixed and ambiguous realities of experience β exemplified by rain or fog or shadow β the betweens, the margins, the shadesβ¦]Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β 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, etcβ¦), I am yet more interested in the occurrences of humanΒ meaning experiences.Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β The βoccurrence of meaningβ seems to me the experience of all those elements and processes indiscretely conjoined and con-fused β wholes of which parts canβt be specified β signifieds/signifiers/significants indiscriminate: our PRESENT.Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β This is where art arises for me.Β Art and action, for art is action.Β Art seems to me β or processes of human making β 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.Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Artistic acts are those where subject/object, conscious/subconscious, selective/regulative, internal/external, intentional/accidental distinctions in human processes do not apply β and these convergences, these realities of human living are sometimes actualized or embodied/externalized.Β Perhaps, in my way of thinking.Β
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Modalities and genres, fields and spheres, behaviors, cognition and domains β social and personal intertwingled, the perceived and imperceptible carrying on simultaneously β CONverged β and that verge β that edge, rim, margin of activity β that liminal, boundary-zone open border-space is the essential βΒ
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β a human way of mediately presenting occurrences of meaning, in their variety and multiplicity.Β Perhaps.Β
Or so I am thinking.Β
Answerability in the body of the world.Β
The meaning event seen in its total matrix.
Immunity (Writing from Everywhere)
perhaps you will be able to play this WHILE you read the linked entry below (as it was written)
Immunity (Writings from Everywhere)
Mechanics and Meaning
Grief.
I suspect this is an emotion with which we are all familiar. Β 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. Β 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. Β Soothe and calm survival mechanisms, more effectively metabolize connectivities and change. Β Participate in life’s process from smaller and larger perspectives of mechanics and meaning, measures and movements.
ideas stimulated by Rick Hanson, in –Β 
2014
To all we hope will come…
and all we do not know…
“Language is always focaled…
…it must be so since a word is a gigantic system of situation-changes
and other words”
-Eugene Gendlin-
A Division of Subjects
I am looking at my wife’s face for significance. Β Scrutinizing her as if MY meaning might come from there. Β The eyes and motion of my children, our puppies, the touching between them. Β I gaze, ravenously, melancholy, nostalgically, as if some sort of synching provided reason.
Observing, begging input for desired effect.
Words on a page in front of me. Β The sounds of the heat switching on and swishing (or swooshing) through an anatomy of ducts. Β Rememory. Β Fashioning bodied memories forward toward anticipated satisfaction of imagined desires.
Re-membering an already unknown future. Β As if to place it onto a pleasure/pain balance and put myself at risk for emotion. Β As if I amΒ wanting to feel. Β Pleasure OR pain, satiation OR loss, grief or elation. Β Simply. Β To feel. Β And to be able to tell. Β To evaluate, process and produce. Β Perceive, procure and proceed.
Attend, assemble and assess. Β All componented in threes, a perspectival point of either/ors.
In other words – seeking options of experience through this-or-that, barely realizing the gargantuan disturbance of the field in which bi-polars conjoin – the third, the invested participant – “observer.”
I search her eyes – peering her into double bind by my own delimitations. Β Reflecting the kids play and laughter – deflecting – by framing-problems that lens my limited views of want and need.
Ravenous, melancholy, natural look of desire for pleasure and dread of pain – dualizing a multi-more intricate kaleidoscope of possible probables.
The implicit intricacies + the avoidance and/or discounting of “one’s own role” (the responsibility, culpability, of our ever-presentness we ever effort to escape) – being participatory. Β Being.
And what of the lens? Β If I expand the prism, rotate the glass – distort, blur, focus. Β How expansive, elastic, extensive are my tools? Β How effectual the how I look, the what I look for, the why?
I continue examining her face, and his and his, and his and hers. Β Listen for their sounds, their movements, borrowing moods from the connections I make, perceive, feel…asking now to fill out my arrival…more aware of many roles that depend on distant stories…now arising…participant…into now
as it happens, it occurs…
BE. Β HOME. Β NOW.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
2013-2014
All my Words are Silent 