If you happen to have curiosity around the function and latitude of the letter “I” in the human realms (as “I” certainly do)…here is a book that delightfully provides an invigorating wealth of instants and instances to consider…
Vanishing Point by Ander Monson
and I recommend it to all levels of readers…highly
“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
“We spontaneously obey and follow an inner voice because we know it to be personal.
What would we say if we learned that in descending into ourselves to find our solitary voice we meet an alien one,
the voice of words?”
-Edmond Jabes-
Mystery Text #1: Of Origins and Ends
Many have participated – untranslatable translations and definitions undefined – signals of the ineffable.
Speaking of texts…writings and utterances, organizations of alphabets.
Writingreading, readingwriting – with an existing text – pray tell me the difference?
On the one hand – anyone. On the other – the same.
Between = a text.
Words on a page are a circle.
No origin, no conclusion.
Who writes this? Is it me? Who is “me”? Was it you? Who were “you”?
Who deciphers? Is it me? And when “I” read again – is it the same “me”? Later this evening in the quiet? Saturday at the cafe? In bed while a movie plays? Is it you?
Reading as continual rewriting in the same alphabets, same words and phrases. But the content? Denotation(s)? Connotation(s)? Connections? Disjunctions? Referents? References?
Who leads? What follows? Who follows? What leads?
I venture to commend the signs of the text are the subject, the object we observe and receive, perceive and interpret.
Who authors? And what is authored by that who?
Author following, adapting, borrowing and conceiving the text’s arrangement. Or reader authoring the significations, meanings, referents(-ces) and possibilities of thusly arranged words?
Double absence. Absence of the one constructing the text, absence of the possible recipient. Anyone (or no one) at the origin, no one / anyone at the end. Text(s) of no closure and of ever-questionable intent.
Text as ever-ready presents(-ations), like letters – always between the past, the void of dead, or the future, the empty potential and the unformed future, unknowable recipient.
Remarkable, to me, to be capable of participation in such a vital and energetic, ever-evolving and malleable, yet lifeless matter – able to be as stable as an inscription in marble –
the artifact: word or image, painting, photograph, text: gestures of the dead or the missing, yet constantly enlivened, resurrected with each encounter! This is passing strange! Out of the unknown, toward the unknown and lifeless in-between!
Ever a-rising out of no-more and availing the not-yet: unnecessary necessity of authorial entities – the necessary unnecessary of receipt. The still spinning wheel of lifeless matter on a page… in potentia.
A marvelous mystery to behold
“& knowing from
the look of the others
that a panic has come
into your own eye
to know yourself only
as an instance”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
Am I indeed no/w/here – is this a place to founder?
Are you here too? Now? And what might that mean? (Or is that already to abstract, extract, exit to a changing no/w/here?)
I have my concepts. I have my doubts.
I am unidentifiable, no/w/here.
If you happen to find me (or dis-cover?) would you please point me out? Just a gesture will do.
You can use the simplest sign, that concept, just a dash, a briefest line – “/”.
Or a slapdash curly loop to momentarily contain it all in, all of that malleable nothing with thousands of experiences passing through: .
Loop-the-loop-de-loop go the organs and wires, the pores of the flesh, the nerves and the neurons, the veins and cells…
I am bewildered.
I think I am a concept. (I thought I was a verb).
I get the joke! “I think” – I am a verb.
So runs the conception.
Selah.
The ?/’I’ Barrels On…(the Unknown and Unnamed recalculates)
Empty concept or full flow, he advances (advances?) – he verbs.
Verbalizes.
He acts. The marking concept, the tiny scratch – ‘/’ – goes on, regardless (of my regarding).
No/w/here.
This is IT. (was IT and becomes so again) as ‘/’ act.
This unknown, unnamed subject/object absent presence moves like a filter screen being swished through a tub of air always tagged “IT,” (if this were a game). Is IT?
Beginning from no/w/here and heading there too, and always at once…
it’s downright unsettling! (literally – there is no settling or pause!)
I find (without actually locating a thing, even a speck or a fragment, not “conceived”) I am always no/w/here, and that no-place is always (ALWAYS) changing, moving, different(ly).
Unknown(-able?) Unnamed(-able?) Unlocated(-able?)
Homo Scribus (homo-anything!) – person-as-verb – erases as it writes, deletes as it constructs, falsifies as it truths, acts in its passivity,
ever equaling the equation at zero!
(no/w/here)
I’ve gotta steer clear of math, of physics…I don’t compute!
Should you have the time…and it requires a bit…I would love to hear responses to the following essay by E.M. Cioran from all you interesting minds I observe! Thanks –
-E.M. Cioran-
The Unknown and Unnamed: the Conception
A few days naked and I’ve bewildered myself.
I was never good at math.
But I do love the rain (absorption, immersion, ambiguity).
There’s no accounting for taste.
I think I am a concept.
“a concept is a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more”
What’s in a name?
“the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and the validity of a concept consists in the impossibility of reducing the content…to unity, without the introduction of it…the conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content.”
I ran into a sign.
I was flooded, I saw and I seemed, I heard and replied, have been undone in my doing… I’m a roving mark, like a vessel constantly being filled and emptied, at once.
I can’t perceive without a concept, why not the simplest one – a single mark, a dash, say “/”?
/ fear it “plainly has no content.”
/’m confused.
“I am what surrounds me”
Advancing “empty,” a flesh-coated collection of organs replete with a coding of operational signs (we’ll call them ‘language’), I foundered. Considering no one in pursuit of no/w/here, I became wherever that was (is?).
“This conception of the present in general, or IT in general…is before any comparison or discrimination can be made between – what is present – must have been recognized as such, as IT without parts abstracted and attributed to it…”
-C.S. Peirce-
No/w/here – nothing – no one: “embracing thousands of distinct experiences (while attributable or identical to none of them) and ready to take in thousands more.” ALWAYS.
Every/w/here, everything, every/one: I conceptualize a concept, a mark to attribute an infinity of experiences toward : “/”.
Names changing by the millisecond.
A concept without content, or all conceivable content.
A baffle, a paradox, distinct and unidentifiable (in essence).
Here “/” come! (the unknown and unnamed) possibly sporting any knowledge, any name – perhaps heading your way even now! Beware! It’s conceivable, whether intended or not, that all of us are empty concepts, flooded concepts, without content, and all of us heading no/w/here at once!
“Here is where one seems to be”
“The place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now”
“’I’ can only be identified by the instance of speech which contains it, and by that alone”
(to read all the Unknown/Unnamed writings thusfar accumulated
visit my Experimenctes pages! Thanks)
[please bear with these ramblings…they are taking shape…and each stumbling advance leads…i promise…:)]
Standing in rain. Under rain. Understand.
Unknown, unnamed, still wet. Still cleansed. Garnering names…
One. Other. Wet one. Lost one. Un-one. More.
Hearing one. The replier. Seeing one, seems, seams, semes.
No/w/here: under rain, understanding some thing(s).
The wet can flood and drown, or cleanse and caress.
Can surround, come down, or buoy and uphold.
Understanding rain.
One water-name, countless individuals.
Unknown infinity, possibly.
Unnamed – an incalculable number of names – possibly.
The Writing One and the One Who Reads. The One-Standing-Under-Rain and The One Rain Falls Upon.
The One Reaching the Other and The Other Receiving One. A One Necessary Other for joinder and boundary, their rift and cleft, the possibilities.
If “to understand” counts as knowledge, he is many-known and many-named as he engages, encounters no/w/here.
[if w always presents we]
so that without w there is no-here and no now.
N/amed
O/ther
W/e
+/= here. now here. how here. now here.
He realizes this direction is constantly unknown, even at its end. If he can know it is raining, he cannot know how many. And whenever it ceases, the water will be elsewhere, other-wise.
The Thinking One. Confused Other.
He is unable to inscribe or translate even a fraction of his names in a single no/w/here…which are not singular, ever.
Names rain when he looks, listens, feels. Attends.
Ecstatic One. Diluted Other. Watery One. Solid Other.
Who?
Unknown and unnamed begins to understand, standing under (and in) no/w/here’s rain.
Muchly known, muchly named, ennui…
in-we
he goes on…
standing under rain,
in the middle of,
no/w/here.
Running into Melodies, Lyrically
(the unknown and unnamed hears and replies)
Or picture it this way: a runner yearning to the tape.
Arms flung back as if flagged by a gale, chin and neck making way for the shoulders – a pure strive.
And rushing against, past and around…force and flow. Learning the body by all that surrounds, through which it hums and throbs.
The air is full of waves. The waves are full of particles – particles agitating, dancing. Or the fragments are waving, threading this way and that – streaming and winding – I feel it.
Over the curves of my shoulders, the chorus. Deep in my belly – the bass and the drum – caverns of mind. The ticking, the singing, the whispers and thrums. Brass flowers into blooming curlicues, echoing labyrinths – my ears.
In such a wind the eyes will close, and the legs will strive and stride. No matter my position, in the medium of music, I am always moving forward, setting forth – possibly sailing, possibly struggling with every ounce – but making progress.
It glances off the elbows, reverberates the bones. Fills the mouth, stuffs the nostrils – can make it hard to breathe. Sound. Shuddering loins and quaking knees, a tremor-massage, a tumbling. A sleep.
I lean in. Becoming a shaping of waves – reaching, aching and out of breath. Receiving the blast and caress. The force and the flow. I listen, I feel. I am drowning, aware of each inch of my skin. I am falling in flight, my organs engorged. I am musically shaped as a man.
Music, Musicology, and related Matters
a photographic pilgrimage to Orthodox Christian monasteries across the continent
Meandering Through a Literary Life
Orthodox Christianity, Culture and Religion, Making the Journey of Faith
Erik Kwakkel blogging about medieval manuscripts
"That's the big what happened."
Networking the complexity community since 1999
All my Words are Silent 
