(alas, the notebooks keep filling…but the time to type does not avail)
Deviser
If I. If something stirred, was stirring. The dying. Any of us. Were something stirring. For me. If I. The lonely. Any of us. The longing. The longing lonely. Were something stirring. Were I. If I.
If only. Could be any. If one. If only. If I. For me. An other. Any of us. A stirring. I, only dying lonely longing one. If. A stirring. An other. Someone to speak “we.” To say “you.” A whispered “us.” For me.
If I.
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What would I (if I, if other) say, if something stirred, if stirring an other, some other who, who might say “you,” “we,” whisper “us,” something stirring then, what would I say. If I. If you or we, I whisper “us,” stirring still, what would I say?
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When might a story begin? Who could start the unknown? Only language. Perhaps only language knows what can’t be said. What is yet to exist. Or may not. Ever. What is that to me? If I. If indeed that is what I do.
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Touching other to make us. If I. If other. Then a voice, a touch, an extra, an excess, we. If you. If I. What is story to that? How so?
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From anywhere: impermanence. If an other. If I. Some story’s beginning, how begun. If there were a sound, as it were, so to speak.
“The more ways of articulating human experience one knows the better.”
– Eugene Gendlin
I would like very much to say/write something today. Something resonant and broad, something that would stimulate empathy, reflection, acute sensations, self-awareness and some renewed purposiveness toward what any reader might consider their own “good” and the larger “good” of the “world.” That would motivate us to be more fully, attentive to what we most value, what we most wish to value; that would tickle, trigger and activate that within each of our experiencings whatever it is in us that occurs in those sweet, heartbreaking and perception-exploding moments in which we feel like WE matter, that the WORLD we participate in matters, that meaning is worth, well, Life…and that Life as we are living it, we live together.
But I haven’t the first idea, concept or “hook” to know how to do that. I have nothing to say. I have urges, wishes, passions, dreams and a kind of crushing, yearning hope – that we might focus a little, shape ourselves, choose something for ourselves and one another and act with and toward ourselves, one another and the world in ways and fashions that could soothe, nourish, calm, comfort, extend and enhance our collective experience of being humans in a world full of so many other things we depend and inter-depend and co-depend on and with. Rather than our easy, disruptive, erratic, dissatisfying instinctual and common practice of reacting, responding, self-protecting, guarding, distancing, lashing out, closing in…separating, hurting and harming, frightened, cowardly and weak.
I don’t know where to start with that. I would that I could write the experience of others, could find synchrony and sympatico with my friends, family and acquaintances, could articulate the complexity and depth, mystery and reticulated implicit intricacies of their experiencings: their pains, joys, desires, griefs, knowings & doubts, wonderings and certainties, histories and prognoses, lusts and woundings… that I might be so much more tender to them, embracing, receptive, unthreatened and inclusive, gentle and comprehending.
I would like so desperately to be able to articulate the human experience of the world accurately…yet I am always wrong when I speak another, always deficient even when I speak myself…
Taken with a feeling of grandeur: a premonitory greatness arising with convergence. There are uncertainty principles and the bafflings of mathematics as one ranges across scales. Relationships over time and fictional emissions, philosophies, transpositions of experience…and sometimes, somehow, they inextricably and irreducibly link up, reciprocally foster…and generate moments of novelty. Perhaps this is indicated with the term emergence. There is music, too, and emotion.
A sense of sense. Of universal process in which one plays a micro-part, participation. For the time – being and becoming seem joined. There may be love, generation, sometimes even intuition of revelation. Simply processes – ongoing self-organization – of “selves,” and smaller and larger collective, complex, and dynamic systems.
Something like “meaning,” I suggest. Nobody gets what I mean.
Which represents entropy. Things falling apart even as they arise, conjoin…together.
Things I do not mind. Emergence / entropy … it’s all dynamic – which is what I’m thankful for in the now. “Alive” perhaps we’d call it, un-“dead,” – a state I’m thrilled to avoid.
****
Of course there’s a “Her,” and a “Them,” or “they,” – my spouse/partner/girlfriend/significance-of-Other … and the offspring numbering 1-4 – the “matterings that matter” in me… my hand and body, pen and paper, & the complicated processes between that emit some strange result.
Physics tells me “strange attractors” (at that relational scale), I suppose it’s literature’s “muse,” romance’s “one,” the what-fors and what-nots equaling “It,” equaling “unknown,” equaling “that to which things tend.” Optimization, in a sense (if only a fantastical one).
Depending on the color of the glasses. What hole is peered through, by whom, from what angle. Perspective. Outlook. Relation. Some mean free path I’m on. Perhaps now a ‘we.’
“I” feels uncomfortable, unnatural. The idea there might be a group-of-me consoles. If only one (other, more). If only a “you — too?!”
First of all, let me apologize for not being very consistent or active here the past week or two. And then apologize for the following length (somehow I felt it was okay, given the silence caused by entanglements of necessity and sustenance)…
If I were a mountain. This was my first thought, while reflecting on you, me, our children, planets and plants, birth, death, brains and bodies and societies of persons, nations, sciences and myths, plus at least 10,000 other things. The effort to consider everything – a total picture – my limited whole with as many details as possible. As if meanings were stars and knowledge all the darkness around them.
Taking time. If I conjure everything I know – time-saving habits and fixes, sundry scientific theories, the feel of my children’s hair, the path of a bee, each lip that’s found its way against mine, every person, voice, place I remember in part, pancake recipes, varieties of soil I’ve walked over, tasted, smelled, languages living and dead…don’t worry, I won’t list 10,000 things and their changing nuances…
What is common for me, when not immediately struggling to make ends meet up, are these attempts at collocating and corroborating my experiences and knowledge to date…and it inevitably leads to profound sensations of brevity and minisculity (?).
If what I have experienced, lived-through and wended into my body and brain represented stars (those sometimes recognizable flickering points of light)…
…all I have not heard of, thought, experienced, lived-through or felt
would be represented by the gargantuan dark – the endless, perhaps infinite, space.
My 43 years. Books I have read, courses taken, jobs held, skills learned, places inhabited and endured. Women I’ve loved, children I’ve borne and partially raised, persons I’ve met, objects and activities engaged and observed, skies, senses, stuff.
Pretend you are space.
A space that is full, perhaps something akin to our idea of atom. Imagine your space, of space, in space. In other words – your little flexible dynamic space is both made of space, contained in space, occupying and participating in space and spaces and shares its participatory space(s) with 10,000…10,000,000,000,000…uncountable space-forms and forms of space…
I, atom. Barely a point in space-time, hardly formally recognizable, and from what angle or distance? Limited space-form through limited space-times. A flexible, dynamic, ever-morphing relatively microscopic or enormous form-ish space-ish thingy.
An atom bounding, ricocheting, trembling and changing throughout a little universe…a variable assemblage of atom-like moments transforming in particular ways of a sort addicted to accounting for and measuring itself and its surroundings (a way of distinguishing presence in these manners of matters).
Forms and Objects
If I were a mountain (that is, in relation to “you”) I’d likely be quieter, perhaps slower, present and patient – you might reference or measure yourself by me (I was thinking). I might want less. Not have the same desires and activities formally compressed into 70-80 “years…”
And then if you were a sky full of stars or dawn, an enormous canvas of clouds and colors, ubiquitous…and there was that mountain…
So very small, so very brief: Me.
Couple all of that to the profound affects felt (in and on me) by other malleable collectives of atoms we refer to as “us” – plus mountains, valleys, rivers and seas, weather, events, animals, places and things: at our scale, and between ever-so-many scales, we have significant import and effect, albeit almost nothing at all viewed fractionally and/or noticeably at minimally larger scales (I suppose that could be argued…)
Anyway, we exist for ourselves primarily at our own shared scale, imagining (or inventing) other scales in order that we might examine ourselves, potentially compare or evaluate…us.
But if I were a mountain…how different would our relation be? I imagine it this way: You in your human scale, and me as mountain. In rain, ages, erosion and accretion, growing trees and dropping boulders…and you, briefly, tramping across me, perhaps admiring or photographing me, resting on me, using me as a direction or a landmark – always there, there, there. Other things, people, events, experiences of your immediate scale rise and fall, come and go, attach and detach, begin and end, flux and alter…
You as sky to me, and I – mountain.
This thinking – that it might help me somehow to imagine life at other scales… Perhaps this is why…
Fiction
Science
Philosophy
Art
Religion
History
…what might we mean at another scale? between scales? Not simply as we are to ourselves, as we experience or live-through our brief experiences as space-forms in space-times, but from alternate frames and scalar perspectives?
Imagine…from the view of our constituent elements and systems…over large ranges of processes (“history,” “time”) or briefer ones (Mayfly, ant, daisy)…from tectonic or astronomical lenses…where we can’t even register as an entity, object or form…and by the time whatever activity we mustered – energy or noise we emitted in our being reached a distant planet or star we’d have been gone for thousands and thousands of our decades?!
As if, even at our scale, we are molecules shaking in a beaker. Vibrating, jostling one another, coming together, splitting apart, sometimes bonding, sometimes break – but most often simply bouncing to and fro. Jiggling. Adapting and adjusting.
Mountain. Sky. Metaphors of import.
10,000 words on 10,000,000,000,000…things (or just the one)
Polysemic Stupor 