“I had another friend who was so certain that the only way he could identify himself was through language and further by losing himself as object within language that he lost his mind, possibly within language as well, but I never knew what the hell he was talking about.”
– Percival Everett by Virgil Russell-
and highly recommended
-Bernard Wolfe, Limbo–
as information-processing organisms, we are amazing.
in relation to nonbiological elements, wow.
i am typing this and you’ll be able to view, read, interpret, apply it.
we become persons, individuals, agents only by relating to what is around us.
we are fascinating.
I recommend.
In the midst of a day of feeling overwhelm faced with school projects, group projects, and individual research assignments, I woke anxious and needing voices to recall my core – the vibratory physiology of the aim of my experience – to write, creatively, freely, integrated and symbiotically brain-body-world…
I scanned my shelves for emergency care, and found it here:
People seem to blog for very many reasons. For all who follow or glance at The Daily Post blog with its tips and hints and prompts it is clear that some use these community-spaces for singular aspects of their lives (say to showcase or try out their poetry or paintings, photography or thoughts); others to engage in philosophical dialogues or take culture’s pulse; other’s as a form of public journaling, travel albums and so on. And then there are those that swirl round a broad flux of themes and forms, artefacts and issues. A versatile blog can be hard to come by, as, unless fueled by a collaborating group, most blogs sprout from individual minds and lives. Yet we are socially-constructed beings. A species made up out of context and interrelation. Versatility is inherent in our adapting and survival. All that to say that I am honored to have been chosen by maxadaland blog to receive the:
award.
Much thanks. Sometimes I think we can feel pretty vorticed in our own imaginations…the paradigms and preformulating grids our experience passes through can start seeming quite idiosyncratic and even incommunicable. Like a catch in an audio file, skipping and repeating such small fragments of possibility – like solipsistic feedback loops – and one can wonder whether interaction / intersubjectivity / reciprocation / communication is happening or not. If we are hearing, being heard.
One thing I greatly appreciate for my life about having taken the leap of tending to and creating a blog is the daily (or almost) wander through the “Reader” feature of WordPress. Artists, writers, commentators, philosophers, dramatists and encyclopedic representations of images, texts and audio from all around the world, out of every imaginable cognitive perspective drift past us, triggering synapses and volting neurons in places forgotten or buzzing dormant throughout our bodies. It presents the wonderful possibility of contrast and integration, stimulae to creation and juxtapositions fundamental to our growth as organisms. I thank you all for that.
Below, please find a few blogs I follow that in themselves seem to offer worlds of variety – of voices, of inputs and outputs, of interests and concerns – blogs I find that continuously spur new connections, unknown avenues, concepts or artefacts I otherwise would have perhaps never engaged. Thank you to all – and it is taken for granted that we all know this worldwideweb is full of such spaces, ever only incorrect finger-splotches away.
for starters….
THANKS TO ALL!
“identifying a function for dreams or pretend play or fiction doesn’t mean that we’ve identified the function”
-Jonathan Gottschall-
I am enjoying this book more than I expected. Often overview-type books of aspects of human phenomena leave me with a touch of “yeah, we all know that (i.e. we experience that), but tell us something new, give us opportunities to create knowledge from new data!” Gottschall’s book is a well-written tour (akin to the work of de Botton on aspects of human life) – representative of current knowledge, suggestive rather than pedantic, and fluidly engaging.
“Consider the following information:
Todd rushed to the store for flowers.
Greg walked her dog.
Sally stayed in bed all day.
Quick, what were you thinking?…
In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story…studies show that if you give people random, unpatterned information, they have a very limited ability not to weave it into a story…the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t…it’s usual method is to fabricate the most confident and complete explanatory stories from the most ambiguous clues…the Sherlock Holmes in our brains job is to ‘reason backwards’ from what we can observe in the present and show what orderly series of causes led to particular effects…we will always rather fabulate a story than leave experience unexplained.”
And so on. In fact, the sentences he writes above are on-the-fly conjured random fact-statements unrelated. Most of us probably had already begun to fit it into something ‘meaningful to us’ before we finished the third one. Does this help you see how your view and perspective on reality – your ‘automatic’ or instinctual or deferral mode comprehension ALWAYS needs sorted out with CONTEXT and the empirical world? Our minds are amazing and unbelievable in their functions and operations (literally), factories of fictions based on ancient genetic messages qua homo sapien, empirical experiences from our own individual lifespans, and an untangleable web of socio-cultural input and in-formation. We’re fascinating…and utterly unreliable. Thus we have each other, and our senses and myths and science and all sorts of other-world perspectives to adjust and possibilize our own stories. Perhaps there are moments our thoughts align with facts, but those will be rare in our lives.
Taken in a context of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, John Canfield’s Becoming Human and Alan Singer’s The Self-Deceiving Muse, Gottschall’s delightful foray into the impulsivity of fiction-like brain behavior makes for a savory meal. I’m concocting stories about it even now (it’s sure).
3,111 words into a midterm exam…welcome breaks:
So, I followed Flickr Comments “amusing” journey into being “typealyzed” by algorithms,
and here were my results (thank you, Flickr for the prompt)
pretty much guilty as processed!
and yet….
Greetings and so many thanks for those of you who take the time to investigate my works here. Our lives have been a bit topsy-turvy in the ekphrastic household – I’m adjusting back into another semester of Library & Information Science, Holly is busy practicing and painting and starting more graduate education in Expressive Arts Therapy, the kids are growing and struggling and succeeding and being beautiful young people in our world. All that to say I haven’t had the open spaces for creative composition that function effectively for creating new verbal connections – I’m sure they’re happening, I just haven’t had the time to attend very closely and note them down. I received a request to update my Currently Reading page, which I usually do 2 or 3 times a year, or as the books-at-hand protecting my desk/work area experience significant change. My “To the Library” post offered a number of new (to me) books that I’m currently intently poring through, and here are a few more titles this week:
and I’ll work on a refresher of my Currently Reading page soon!
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 