Tag: meaning

Pectus Carinatum – Recovery

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings17 Comments

Greetings readers.  I have spent the past few days to-and-froing from my son in the hospital undergoing a corrective surgery related to pectus carinatum, and full-family summer and researching the pros and cons of PDA (patron- or demand-driven acquisitions).  I am very happy to say that after a nearly 5-hour surgery, in which we allowed “experts” to cut our son’s chest nipple to nipple, lay back the muscle, chip-scrape “excise” the cartilage out of his ribcage, crack his sternum, reshape him and insert a flexible metal bar…he is recovering smashingly, already walking about, playing card-games, and humorously retorting.  This is the first “major” operation, injury, break, accident or otherwise that has occurred to my genetic offspring, and, although I’ve endured much trauma with the injuries and surgeries of my spouse, I was unsure what to anticipate going through in allowing invasive slicings and breakings to my precious son’s body.

Needless to say, it is affective.

At night I slept as if in a dark void.

I felt shamefully unattentive to my other children, lacking energy and focus.

I let deadline stressors and ongoing responsibilities take their places in my tissues and veins, deep recesses of my cortex, and let my eyes drift repeatedly into mid-point aether.

I don’t know.

Something like this went on in my son.

it was pretty foggy in me.

So now we enter “recovery.”  Realignment.  Exercise.  Recall.  Precision.  Strengthening.  Focus.  Effort.  Rest.

and facing the stack of avoidances.

Recall looks like this (for me):

My Medicine(s):

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– regaining presence of mind –

“You could try to express what bliss it was in those days to be alive.  Of course there were bothersome things here or there.  Terrible things, if you looked too closely.  There was the dreadful burden of everything that’s too much alive, all that mingles with air, earth and water in an attempt to destroy you.  There was the malice of men, the voracity of beasts, and the indifference of objects.  There were all the sounds and sights and smells like continual dagger-thrusts in the flesh.  It wasn’t easy to live with all those things; no, no one could have said it was easy.  But all the same it was funny in a way, touching and funny, a splendid adventure complete with emotion, language, consciousness, and perhaps, in some recess of the memory, a kind of nostalgia for silence and peace…Yes, what was happening to you was an unforgettable and unique adventure…”

-J.M.G. Le Clezio, Terra Amata–

HERE’S TO YOU SON

Making Trouble….er…Making Meaning (via Jay Lemke)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces1 Comment

I personally attempt to read every writing I am able to obtain by my favorites.  Some of my blog entries may therefore be redundant, as redundancy is a way that I am able to sense patterns and make connections and thereby forge what I experience as meaning.  The following is one of the summary writings (nah, that’s not quite right – even with redundancies and retellings I rarely find a summary-type writing by my favorites – there’s always difference – and that is what snags me!)… Okay, for your interaction, pleasure, and engagement, without further ado…

Making Meaning, Making Trouble

by Jay Lemke (1995)

Lines, Meshwork, Aether…

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Philosophy, Traces6 Comments

I’ve recently acquired (via Inter-Library Loan!  Woo-hoo!!!) a collection of writings exhibited below:

Vital Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and Nature

which opens with an essay by anthropologist Tim Ingold who starts it off with a remarkable movement through slugs and storms, lines-earth-eather, Kandinsky, Klee, Merleau-Ponty, and others – investigating them through a concept of “meshwork.”

“By this I mean an entanglement of interwoven lines.  These lines may loop or twist around one another or weave in and out.  Crucially, however, they do not connect.  This is what distinguishes the meshwork from the network.  The lines of the network are connectors, each given as the relation between two points, independently and in advance of any movement from one toward the other…the lines of a meshwork, by contrast, are of movement or growth.  They are temporal ‘lines of becoming’…Life is a proliferation of loose ends.  It can only be carried on in a world that is not fully joined up.  Thus the very continuity of life – its sustainability, in current jargon – depends on the fact that nothing ever quite fits..”

-Tim Ingold, “Lines and the Eather”-

Journeying on from there through Deleuze and Guattari, mood and weather, meteorology and aesthetics he arrives at a conception of flesh as both meshwork (exhalation) and atmosphere (inhalation) – a whole-being experience of relation enabling and realizing animate life….

I’ve now been browsing numerous writings by Ingold, fascinated by the semiotic/anthropologico/ontological /scientific meshwork his production encompasses… Thankfully, he makes much of his work available full and free to us… if you’re interested – I risk the promise it will be worth your while…

Lines: A brief history by Tim Ingold

Being Alive by Tim Ingold

and a fascinating working paper as introduction:  Realities: Bringing Things to Life

 

 

Percival Everett on Meaning

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

Systems Everywhere

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On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (excerpt) – Viktor Shklovsky

“A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning…” – M. M. Bakhtin

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading1 Comment

Response to a Question from Novy Mir

– M. M. Bakhtin –

The Joy of Incompleteness

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“By Godel’s theorem the following statement is generally meant:

  • In any formal system adequate for number theory there exists and undecidable formula – that is, a formula that is not provable and whose negation is not provable
  • A corollary to the theorem is that the consistency of a formal system adequate for number theory cannot be proved within the system”

–Rebecca Goldstein–

“…there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; [anything that can be understood] always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, which in its totality is the only thing that can be real.  In historical life this chain continues infinitely, and therefore each individual link in it is renewed again and again, as though it were being reborn…”

-M.M. Bakhtin-

“And so the world is interior to our mind, which is inside the world.  Subject and object in this process are constitutive of each other.  This doesn’t lead to a unifying and harmonious vision; we can’t escape from a generalized principle of uncertainty.  In the same way that as in microphysics, the observer disturbs the object, which disturbs the perception, in the same way the notions of object and subject are profoundly disturbed each by the other: each opens a crack in the other.  There is, we will see, a fundamental, ontological, uncertainty in the relation between the subject and the environment…a new conception emerges both from the complex relation between the subject and the object, and the insufficient and incomplete character of the two notions.  The subject must remain open, deprived of all decidability in itself; the object itself must remain open toward the subject and toward its environment, which, in turn, necessarily opens and continues to open beyond the limits of our understanding…

All this incites us toward an open epistemology…Epistemology is not pontifical nor judiciary.  It is the place of both uncertainty and dialogics.  In fact, all the uncertainties we have raised must confront and correct each another; there must be dialogue, without, however, hoping to stop the ultimate crack with an ideological Band-Aid.

“If this gap is recognized, then the gap becomes an opening of one toward the other, opening toward the world, opening toward a possible surmounting of the either/or alternative, toward a possible progress of knowledge…”

–Edgar Morin-

Supplement

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment

Astounding – I’m in my fourth decade of life and this is the first day the beauty of this word has hit home…

supple-ment

which put me in mind of Rodin…

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and of the cacophony of arguments followed by caressing clarifications toward shared understandings

of characters presented and nuanced, developed, made complex

of statements expanded and explained, extended into metaphors

vowels echoing sustained

hard Cs molding into soft

crashes dwindling into static

facts becoming rumors becoming murmurs,  whispers,  sighs

wailing come to  weeping come to tears come to rest

Something that completes or enhances something else when added to it.

Getting to the Point : Tracing Complex Intersections

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces12 Comments

“A point is considered one of the fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry.  Without depth, breadth, or dimension it is a part that has no part.  It is represented by a dot or period that has some dimension but is not a point, but must cover the point infinite times over.  The point in the two-dimensional world is the intersection of lines and in three dimensions of another line as well and on and on.  A point is only location.  And isn’t that what we are?  Mere points?  Some points suggest beginnings, some ends, all divide, and when they connect or divide, where they are defined, it is always because of a turn, an angle, a shift toward another plane.  How else could we see a point?  The point is.  The point made.  Getting the point.  Pointing the way.  Points out.  Points in.  Point terminus…

…The meaning of life is the purpose of life…

…In similar fashion he came to some comprehension of the whole ballet, language being a small window through which very little passed and became helpful, the dance being nearly everything.”

–Percival Everett–

Point being that there is no point.  That a point is like an abstract sign – a two-sided symbol – of a non-place where relation occurs – where intersection, connection – moves, happens.  Probabilistically?  Infinite.  Point being that getting the point involves a complex thinking

“going beyond itself in the direction of complexity…not from the simple to the complex, but from complexity to ever increasing complexity.  Let us repeat: the simple is no more than a moment, an aspect among several complexities (micro-physical, macro-physical, biological, psychic, social).  We attempt to consider the lines, the tendencies of a growing complexification…as they function (in relation to autonomy, individuality, richness of relations, aptitudes for learning, inventiveness, creativity, etc.)” 

–Edgar Morin–

(Further reading): Overview of Complexity Thinking – Ferrara

Point being.

Something similar to that – we utilize points and pointing to signify a passing, passage, to trace – to attend to or refer at some intersectional context – thereby creating interactive referants/actants – you, I, the relation.

WordPress as a case in point.

I am ever-so-honored and thankful to have been considered and nominated in community awards insofar as they represent mobile points of connectivity and passage – where one or more of we and our “representation spaces” intersect in this “information common” of the blogosphere.

From Words that Flow like Water I received the “Sunshine Award”

 

and from  CLisaWork, the “Versatile Blogger Award”

both of which I am very honored and thankful for.

The fantastic element to me about these WordPress community awards is that they allow us to introduce and further the connectivity and intersecting “points” of convergence and accordance that shiftily pertains to our activity and representation here.

The acceptance of the awards imply some obligation to self-report.  I am unsure how I might bring “sunshine” to others through my working-spaces here, but am happy to live with the mysteries.  I tried to find a “Sunshine award” icon that featured rain as rain is much more vitalizing, inspiring and motivating to me personally than sunshine, be that as it may.  So, some things about myself:

  • I prefer rain to sunshine, having always felt the sun to be somewhat invasive and threatening in its brightness and exposure, and rain to be softening and safe, providing more subtle noticing.
  • I also find raw emotion  threatening, and much prefer rational expression of emotion (or musical or aesthetic or literary) to emotionally reported emotion.  In other words, I prefer emotion mediated through other things than body and voice.  I continue to try to understand why this is so.
  • I often feel helpless as a parent.
  • It is never my intention to report my knowledge or ideas as facts or certainties.  I find each day bringing with it so much information that the pattern of it is never symmetrical.
  • I am tremendously graced with a spouse and family that allow and enable me to inquire and pursue connections and concepts in the human universe of information that are far from profitable or sustainable economically.

I am going to use the “award-passing-along” as an opportunity to suggest blogs that (in the “sunshine” vein) inspire and inform me in ways that keep me at it myself, and that enhance my own “versatility” through what they offer and provide.  Please visit them – I am confident that there are so many more that should be listed below (I follow 100s) but there is not world enough and time…

Objects

Simon H. Lilly

Tocksin

Life in Relation to Art

[im]probability theory

Philosophy of Information & Communication

Asifoscope

Unwanted Advice: Reflections of a Self-Appointed Life Counselor

draw and shoot

biblioklept

Creativistic Philosophy

so very very

Searching to See

Spoondeep: Magazine of New Writings

Literary Man

The Unquiet Librarian

Petrujviljoen

Lunch Sketch

and so on….(check my blogroll)…

Thank you all for the rain-like sunshine and versatility you bring to my days:

the connections…

The Heart and its Branches

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces2 Comments

“I do not want to know about the human heart.  I do not desire to speak at all about those indwelling, intimate reaches of the heart in which anguish is an undiminishing personal interrogation, much less to analytically enfetter those reaches.

I have the sense, the good sense, the decency, to have nothing to say.”

“Sick of all the you be’s?  Well, what do you say, you be you and I’ll be me?  What do you say?  We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead.  We can sleep while an old woman twangs away on a bad piano while rain keeps time in the empty street.  We can listen to and count the closings of a child’s fist as he tries to catch a fruit fly.  We can listen to the whistling of the bombs.  We can listen to each other.

I do not want to know about the human heart.”

“I am not a man of science.  I am not proficient in any branch of nature study.  I do not know the difference between an amphibian and a reptile.  I have no yearning for hard knowledge about the hard world.  And yet I have no affinity for anything spiritual.  In fact, I have a pronounced, conspicuous, and striking absence of an affinity for anything spiritual.

I know but one hard thing about the hard world and it is this:  from the sum of all theories, as arranged in accordance with ascertained facts, we make a few assumptions, that we have actually ascertained facts, that we are actually here to ascertain them, and that there is actually a here.”

-Percival Everett-