One week along…European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Switzerland). It’s like nothing I’ve ever engaged, participated in, encountered before.
To learn
“…so quiet a thing as thinking.”
Martin Heidegger
Tag: thinking
“Whereof one cannot speak…” More Writings Unearthed
this repeated event of searching for blank pages only to find potential fertility in those already filled…
entries uncovered from March 2015
“WHEREOF ONE CANNOT SPEAK, THEREOF ONE MUST BE SILENT”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
HO SCIENCES, LOGICS, TECHNO-LOGICS AND MATHEMATICIANS!
PROGRAMMERS, DOCTORS, PHILOSOPHERS & ANALYSTS!
You have your discourses and discoveries, practices and spheres of operability!
You designate your domains through terms and definitions –
What is allowed and disallowed.
Vowed and disavowed.
Then silence.
EXPERIENCE
Whoever’s drawing lines of this and that, of here or there, of yes and no.
Whomever feeds the fuel of contradiction, against the singing speaking styles.
Whoever revels in dichotomy, clarity and divisions –
DIVERGE and then stay silent.
In complexity you must not speak,
on recursion and convergences be still,
traversing intersects and margins,
knotting nexuses and networks,
these zones your symbols will not call,
fringes disciplined discourses unable to name, locate, determine (undermine?)
WE UNDERLINE
AND HIGHLIGHT
HERE
REVEAL in complex approach – our work of ambiguity – perplexing and puzzling, unfathomable and obscure – in-determinate we sing, in language hard to cipher, discourse discomposing and dispossessed, polyphonious and multi-vocal, holding harmonies in dissonance
sing-speaking over/under/with
**********************************
Whereof can I speak?
I speak of pie. Fruit pies. My mother’s. Yet I cannot speak, for I have never figured out how they can be the way they are.
I sing to love. Great love. Experiences and events so totalizing in kind that one fears one will not survive them. And then does. Yet I cannot speak to it because I am unable to account for it, explain it, or…
WRITING MEANS CLIMBING THE STEPS OF OUR LACK
-Edmond Jabes-
as if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as launching pad for reading the writing to come
Philosophy / Philosopher
Things happen.
Accidents.
Today, I was browsing the shelves of the library at which I work, looking for books most precious to me to “represent” me as a person – a librarian, human, father, partner, son, life-trajectory, organism, friend – in honor of (yet another inexplicable almost insane “let’s-find-a-reason-for-celebration-instead-of-accepting-reality” National arbitration of “National Library Week” among perhaps many other things we are trying to laud ourselves for being every day/week/month/year). And I stumbled across a title related to a hero of mine I had never seen – combining both the delights of the personage & thought I associate with him, and a favorite thing to ponder – communication or discourse:
From that point on, it has been what Eugene Gendlin might label felt experiencing: the occasional yet over-powering moments in life where we feel all-in, fully alive, in the flow, MET… RESONANT… acknowledged and identified.
The book opens with a prefatory essay by one of Wittgenstein’s students, literary executors, and, quite clearly, astute thinker in himself, Rush Rhees.
I include it here because it evinced that moment of relief, exhaustion, affirmation, Okay-ness, that comes from Emily-Dickinson-like “What – you too?” moments in our strange, convoluted, web-networked, chaotic and most-often-indecipherable human Who-Am-I existences…
All to say I read this brief and delightful (to me) report of a fellow human and thought: Okay, I let down, I collapse, I am guilty of what you describe… and elated to find I am not alone.
For what it’s worth… this seems to “get me” :
From
From
Breaking down breaking it down
He is breaking it down, they say, breaking both the mind and the meaning (was that ‘minding?’, ‘minding matter(s)?’).
– But is it undoing? someone asks, breaking down towards what’s beneath (or behind or before)? One might ask.
In other words, do we detect a purpose, an intention to his breaking? Is he listening? Does one see him look?
And what is his name? That is, what does it ‘stand for’? He once said “for the entirety.” At which point (as in moment, context, hic et nunc) it was assumed or inferred (interpreted, understood?) he meant. Meant, with those particular terms, within that saying (that action, movement, that changing of things), meant: every form and scale, layer and convergence of space and time, world and universe ever nexused, woven, tangled with this organism labeled thus. What was his name?
A beginning, like reality, reduced. Already begun when started, thereby limited by selection and activity. The sentence finds its way via the words and marks that follow, and while variation is potentially endless, it is not infinite. As this genetic package and all its cellular, processual interactions are inexhaustible and basely finite. And so on.
The breaking down reaches far and travels everywhere but won’t arrive, that is arrest, accomplish fullness. Breaking or building is ever partial. The sum never equaling parts.
Like his name (what was it?) – the one so applied (and distinctively so) – i.e. different from you and you and you – that name though is shared. He is not the only one, even if we cannot recall what it is.
– The only one of those variations though? you pipe in. Perhaps. He did not know. But not only the one so called.
His name, his form and structure, and many patterns of perception are quite common, however he goes about them. His going-about is even similar, when you think of it, as well he would, and we might, yet also not. Not precisely so, more variantly the same, as it were. Normality with particulars then, or occasional surprises.
Something unexpected then, about this one and his efforts of breaking it down while breaking down? Not exactly surprising, from a general fund, the process has its predecessors and is likely to go on in many person at many times, perhaps even widespread and concurrently – other places at the same time with slight anomalies, or other times in the same place with concordant alterations.
– Not uncommon then? Not uncertain?
Uncertain, sure. No more or less than anything. Uncommon perhaps in extent or intensity. Perhaps not as well, given principles of relativity.
– Relative to the subject/objects situation then? she says in a questioning manner, or in her questioning manner, or a manner of hers I take to be questioning (and so on).
Uncertainty, sure; relative, yes; unique, undoubtedly; repetitive – of course…
…he is breaking it down, breaking mind and meaning, breaking down…
– What is the matter? another inquires.
The matter of his senses, yes, that sounds right, for now, at this moment, where we are. What is the matter of his senses, or his sense of the matter that eventuates as breaking down, breaking it down, getting to the bottom of getting to the bottom?
– I doubt he’ll reach the bottom.
– The bottom quite unreachable then? someone adds.
The bottom has never been found or reached or approached for all we know we don’t know, they say. In fact, many question the use of ‘down’ for a practice of dissection – what is excavated in undoing, piecing apart, isolating aspects or fragments? Where does one get by reducing?
– Or what?
A lot of objects without sense? Locations with no map?
– Or less, meaning-less, she says with intonation generally accepted as interrogative.
Perhaps meaning less than when together as occurring – fitted, reciprocal, converging and emerging, like cells in Petrie dishes versus cells moving in the bloodstream, performing functions – but perhaps wildly possible and free, ready-to-use, available some other way, he doesn’t know, nor do I, nor do we.
Facets, elements, aspects that he cannot quite assemble and yet they already are by virtue of being broken yet held together in his failing efforts at assemblage. Welded in the effort – imagined apart in a situation of thought – thereby joined.
– It’s enchanting, someone speaks.
– And depressing, reports another.
But is it useful?
I find it of interest.
“Not another word.”
“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it you can ever let anyone know…this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you.” – DFW.
I don’t know what to tell you. If this piece by DFW doesn’t resonate and “work” on you, well, ok. Perhaps he’s not for you. Please give it a read, again, if you have…
click for link to “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace
IN THE MIDST
Moments: The reality of accrual and depletion, growth and diminishment
“It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad things that form, persist and break up in its currents.”
Tim Ingold – Being Alive: Essays on knowledge, movement and description
In the reading journal I keep, I record what I read each day in entries numbered according to my years. For instance, today is Day 364 of 43. Each day counts UP the days I have lived, simultaneously counting DOWN the days I have left.
If our weight in the world is conspired via our capacity for object-making, “perception,” – how we collate and identify active collective of particles, lending them shape and color, space and duration – in effect: “organize them according to our own purposes and facilities” – co-creating manageable entities with which we might interact and navigate life “sensibly” (body-minded)
then the “lightness” of vitality/movement/being comes from the constant (relatively frenetic) buzz and action of the unseen particles composing and constituting the scales we are able to perceive and conceive.
Does this sound workable? I trust that I am a hive of vibrating, exchanging, bounding, colliding and connecting atoms/molecules/whatever, and that to certain interlinked bundles of material interactivities this can appear, be sensed, perceived, interacted with, as an apparently distinct “organism/being/organization of activities” constructing (or being constructed/perceived AS) almost a form, a differance, an “object.”
And likewise, and vice-versa.
Particles, drilled down or zoomed out in their interactivities and motion form ever-varying “wholes” (temporarily composed perceptible forms or variable entities). Thus poets and scientists, thus Ovid and religions, philosophers…HUMANS…METAPHOR. Taking various realities for another and one another, or, ALWAYS – in relation to.
Crossing and dipping, perceiving/conceiving, we are able to invent scenarios and subjects, conduits and concretions, whereby we are also able to communicate, invent, share, cognize imaginative possibilities for our temporary coagulates (or “life-forms,” ever active and morphing). The tinier particles simply continue their trajectories and behaviors while their collaborated forms appear to be “born” (or formulated, occurring) and die (or dissolve, dismember, separate to join in other alignments, reactions and compounds).
Thinking is a lucky pleasure of our particular combo-formulations, as love, emotion, felt embodiment, enmindedness, entanglements…
I am grateful for all of it: lovely purposeful accidents to sense, perceive, grow, change, become, decease, connect and disconnect…attach and release…combine and unravel.
IN THE MIDST of which…and this is where the trembling, shifting, unstable, particularly and elaborately conditioned partial perception “I” initially chose (in languaging) to begin…”in the midst of…”
but then I realized that MIDST might beggar a belief-explanation (theory) as to what I was beginning in the midst of…ALWAYS…this strange living process…and so I diverted through the above contingent caveat.
i.e. EVERYTHING DEPENDS. On context, formulations, occasions, circumstances, surroundings, kind, type, species, conditions composing NOW.
There is some longevity to “sticking together” (successfully? Symbiotically? Interactively linked or bonded for some formal survivable persistence) but it’s all quite temporary (the place-time from which an opinion is held or conceived, promulgated…changes slightly with each moment, more in an hour, a day, each “year,” each…occurrence).
To say: all is active and contingent. I.e. DEPENDS – on multitudes of very specific things, unseen tiny things, enormous systemic things, situations, arrangements being…”the case.”
A Hal Hartley film or a novel by Dostoevsky, the face of my child or the sound waves of song; the body and voice of my beloved…won’t have any “effect” “meaning” “sense” when my particles realign and this particular arrangement is “dead,” “decayed,” “reorganized.”
Activity is a curious thing.
Although we experience “age,” “knowledge,” “experience,” as a kind of “growth” or accretion, it isn’t very long at all in our formulating as a human before we become profoundly aware that our “growth” is an indicator of cessation, “progress” a sign of our undoing…dismantling, shifting, and changing.
This central comprehension of human systems – paradoxical tension, momentary accretion/diminishment – likely fuels much of the emotion, trauma, passion, energy, delight, grief, disturbances and elations of our particular species instinctual cognitively embodied behaviors.
Angst, joy, terror, hope – perhaps all of these reside in this mysterious yin-yang of coming together / coming apart AT ONCE and ALWAYS. Each addition is a removal, each connection another breakage, each revelation a forgetting. Each next accrues a last and never.
NOW – the pivot point of addition/subtraction – for human living.
I crave, delight, wonder, rejoice, and find my survival with each NEXT while grieving, losing, aching, suffering, and ceasing with each movement as well.
There is no choice in the matter (that I can see) – it happens. Everything we do effects and disaffects inherently.
Rising indeed IS falling. Growing IS diminishing. Living truly IS dying, while our dying is yet living for something else…Reciprocal, ongoing, continuous realignments. Any departure is a novel thing joined.
And thus, simply process, simply going-on. Not “us” but it. Not you, I, we, but the particles and universal systems, arrangements.
And we, in the midst.
Perhaps. That’s how I’m thinking it today.
As I count up and down the days.
Where we exist…how
I was going to type a long set of excerpts…but so much nicer for you to get some of the full sense yourselves… if you have the time… it’s worth it – to interact with a resource external to yourself and see how that creates what we commonly think of as “cognition”… like my hands typing this message that you are going ‘outside’ of yourself to utilize toward meanings….
(click on the picture for extended excerpts…and extending your world)
“The Creators Curse” – a raw deal – and everything is practice
When I stood up from the couch I thought. I’m tired of everything being practice. Each character sketch, each poetic fragment, each novel attempt, each theory, each relationship, each parenting moment, each breath. All participated in as if the engagement might provide benefit, as if the pain will promote healing, as if the mistakes will prove corrective, as if fitness might improve health. “Lifelong learning” – how nice it sounds, how endless.
But learning for what – ? There’s just more life until… and then it’s probably simply (well, complexly) variantly continued – one situation hardly informs another – for the next now the context has changed, as well the elements, the matter, the flow.
So then I think again – perhaps it’s fear. That lifelong learning, or anything meta- entails a splitting off – a doing WITH the observation; and thinking WITH reflection; the subject’s objectification. A remove. And so it feels like practice rather than NOW.
Earlier today (apologies – I’m really just rambling this post – no pre-write, no consideration or filtering) my son shared this with me:
– The “Creators Curse” from Cyanide & Happiness. In our making we extend and become in the risking required to attempt…to craft… to work… so it cannot end, for if we grow or move or change (which we will) the work will need to go farther, be finer, account for those fluctuations… ever stepping into new, fresh, dynamic, complex realities… PRACTICE IS IMPOSSIBLE.
But if we turn and try to bring the effort up to speed, in that turning, that editing, that effort, nothing stops. Nothing stops moving into that next moment, next ream of realities, heart-beat’s context, juggling atoms and muscles and breath… “Improvement”? Who knows. But different for sure. And even if we reach and stretch toward the work we imagine versus the work we are capable of…it all changes in kind…as change.
In optimistic moments this is cause for hope. The possibility that something might improve, benefit may come, a temporary health could be achieved. But not achieved only altered. And not altered only changing. I’ve argued before that we must lose our tenses to be honest to living – everything must become verb.
But I don’t want anything to be practice anymore…rather maybe process – doing, making, saying thinking in or with … everything.
I’m very tired of the hesitation, illusory gap, the pretend-vision of seeing our seeing, or feeling our feeling; loving our loving, writing our writing, thinking our thinking our thinking…
I want to be : living, writing, parenting, loving, doing, making, saying, thinking NOW and HERE as IS.
On Teaching: or, “going there, without knowing where,” with Jean-Francois Lyotard
Endurance and the Profession – Lyotard
(replete with approximations of my own markings and highlights – N Filbert)
Nourishment during a lunch break
“Here, I will observe simply that fundamental research (in the humanities) diverges from much theory in that it is always seeking the limits of its language in responding to that to which it seeks to answer: those dimensions of experience and symbolic expression that summon it (as a kind of exigency for thought) and to which no concept will ever be quite adequate. Such research is impelled by its own neediness and its sense of being answerable, whereas theory, governed by the concept, proceeds with ever-expanding appropriations; fundamental research proceeds from encounter (always from a sense that something has happened to which it must answer), and it seeks encounter. In theory, there are no encounters.”
– Christopher Fynsk –
All my Words are Silent 