Tag: meaning

Our 80/20 Vision and Rememory

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

“Nothing’s like anything else in the long run.

Nothing you write down is ever as true as you think it was.”

-Charles Wright, “Lost Souls”-

Rememory is just a thing we do when we “need” it – or, for reasons that aren’t really rational at all – we seem to feel we do.  In other words, our experience (what our organism, our little assemblage of cells, lives through) works in us like nutrients that our neuronally connected organs (even smaller collectives of cellular functional troupes) select predictively – as probable perhapses – to aid our survival in each moment.

That it’s always subject to change, often flatly incoherent, or dreadfully inappropriate to any given situation proffers no guilt or dishonor – could we really expect accurate predictions of unforeseen and total novelty with infinite contingencies each next moment is?

We do the best with what we have.  After all, we’re not even able to use our tools intentionally – they work on automatic algorithms we are not aware of unless there is a problem.  Scientists might use machines and fabricated contraptions or instruments to measure and calculate “experiences/experiments” – something semi-controlled, devised and arranged in a lab.  We, on the other hand (scientists included), do not have access to our controls (of which there really aren’t any – just meticulously interconnected and recursively interactive meshworks) – our controls (or rather, effects) result in their humming along.

Ah, rememory, refraction – there whenever we need it (or think/feel we do, or hadn’t even sensed it) – and never to the point but that we make it so – experiencing piecemeal fragments the system spits out in relation to itself and its environment, and puzzling them together as if encountered in the world – using them like stencils or frames through which to assess our surrounds.

What a tricky treat!  Phantasms of deconstructed digestions floating a stream, plucked willy-nilly by impulsory triggers and collaged onto a canvas called Perception.  Howdy-do!  When 80% of the show is our relation to ourselves, it’s no wonder we feel criticized!  (for a sensory example – here’s a breakdown of what influences what we see….):

Vis Path 3

– from Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge

Each of us with our 80/20 view on the realms between – the worlds we share – it’s no wonder we’re ill at ease arguing agreements.  I’d have to ask my sons to calculate the potentials, but even from my 80+20 it’s infinitesimal – our shot at “sharing a moment” as we say.

Hanson brain

-from Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain–

Perhaps to some Turing machine, or deep-distance galaxy view we’d look like a calibrated system, but the contingencies and unknown variables all changing with each changing change surpass even the weather…

So go on rememoring and adapting your stories, just keep in mind the bric-a-brac you’re rummaging in and it’s exponentially altering situation and experiencing states (by the millisecond), and consider offering those with and around you something in the neighborhood of 80% benefit of your doubt (your self-generated POV)!?

“I give you mine [dreams] for the same reason,

To summon the spirits up and set the body to music.”

-Charles Wright, Lost Souls-

 

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:

 

Reading/Writing: Complex Transactions

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

“Every reading act is an event, or a transaction involving a particular reader and a particular pattern of signs, a text, and occurring at a particular time in a particular context…the reader and the text are two aspects of a total dynamic situation”

–Louise Rosenblatt–

Rosenblatt - Making Meaning

Writing and Reading: A Transactional Theory

by Louise Rosenblatt

(click to read full article)

“Writing is always an event in time, occurring at a particular moment in the writer’s biography, in particular circumstances, under particular external as well as internal pressures…the writer is always transacting with a personal, social and cultural environment”

-Louise Rosenblatt

louise rosenblatt

and more “…” more “…” more-than

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

“the more than us in us that is at that moment irreducible to meaning or satisfaction”

–Jacques Lacan–

“our repeated baffling by the trauma of a Real”

-Peter Schwenger-

“the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny”

–Martin Heidegger–

WORDS AND THE MURDER OF THE THING 

by Peter Schwenger

(read online for free!)

Juame Plensa sculpture

“What hope do I have of attaining the thing that I push away?

My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are things too…A name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a solid mass of existence; language, abandoning the sense, the meaning which was all it wanted to be, tries to become senseless”

–Maurice Blanchot–

More “….”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading1 Comment

“We might just have to engage with concepts whose existence we do not even suspect, or which we have become blind towards. 

Thought might just have an interesting future creating and sustaining new relations – perhaps the most elemental philosophical act.”

-Paul Bains-

Bains - Primacy of Semiosis

There’s a story behind it

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings6 Comments

blank notebook

 

notebook paper

 

wrinkled paper

Sources of Inspiration

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current ReadingLeave a comment

Thinking with “more than”…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Writing4 Comments

some more possible insight into the processes of “forming…” Through somewhere somehow recently I was alerted to the works of Eugene Gendlin – probably through the work of Mark Johnson, Andy Clark, or Don Tucker…but could be elsewise.  Embedded experience, embodied minds, enminded bodies – the whole mess of entanglement our simply being consists of.

and how that might apply to “writer’s block” or that reaching we experience when creating –

that feeling that we can feel it – know more than we’re able to articulate or organize or perform…

This article helps elucidate some of that, perhaps.  It has certainly stimulated my imagination and attention in attempting to write more than I seem to know how to….

Eugene Gendlin – Primacy of Body not Perception

“All thinking involves the bodily … to some degree.  Take for example any ordinary sentence.  In the middle of it you have an unfinished sense of how … You don’t know the end, and yet, all through it, as the sentence wends its way … “

Eugene T. Gendlin

PLEASE READ MORE TO FIND OUT!

 

“To touch in the between of words”

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Reflections, Writing2 Comments

Screen Shot 2013-09-24 at 2.48.04 AM

 

Fiery, Luminous, Scary – Erin Manning

The above is a snapshot from a participatory art project entitled “Folds to Infinity” – you can further investigate here.  The verbal link is to an article by Erin Manning that reflects on some possible interactions and responses participatory art and movement enable or frustrate.  As I read this article, with its focus on space-time relations such as event-spaces, materials, sound, rooms, fields etc., I could not help but be curious about the shared space-time relational field of texts, pages, pixels, blogsites and wonder about the more-than that authors/designers/readers/viewers compose – co-create – in these pages we invent each day.  The will toward participation that affects any work’s unfolding.  The design of our syntax and placement of images, types of terms and content of pictures all go toward constraining our viewer/reader participations towards meanings prefigured in our compositions.  And yet, I would wager that the majority of us hope for our creations to be participated-with, engaged, even co-created with the sensing minds of those these spaces open up.  “Spacetimes of relation are never neutral.  They are fiery, luminous, scary.”  I am hoping for ways and words and ways with words that allow, perhaps even create, spacetimes of relation that facilitate the more-than possibilities each engagement with them have potential of.

erin and others certainly activate the seeming “folds to infinity” of the matter in my cranium.

 

For Restoring, for Keeping Connections

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Music1 Comment