Tag: thoughts

Qualia…an introduction of sorts

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy2 Comments

Qualia

“Most of each lobe is employed in the grand human saga of making associations among events, ideas, personal experiences, strategies and people.  It seems absurd to lump all that tempest together, but we do: thought.  The word even sounds like a thick knot.  Endless raveling and unraveling, thought combines colorful yarns to clothe each moment”

-Diane Ackerman-

“This is why we create: to keep our demons down without banishing them entirely”

-Marie Palermo-

“It is hard to seize what is”

-Laurie Scheck-

“Raw feel, a name for the peculiar quale of experience”

-E.C. Tolman-

“It is possible to hold that certain properties of certain mental states, namely those I’ve called qualia, are such that their possession or absence makes no difference to the physical world”

-Philosophical Quarterly 32/133-

“an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us”
-Daniel Dennett-

“[Qualia are] the whole ensemble of consciousness or experiences”

-Gerald Edelman-

“When I do not know the ‘quid’ of anything how can I know the ‘quale’?”

-Plato, The Dialogues-

“The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective”

-C.I. Lewis-

“’what kind,’ ‘that sort,’ unobservable in others and unquantifiable in us”

-Wikipedia-

“…a proposition flaunts every logical scratch that follows from it…

Then I saw you were trying to lean against the weight of missing words, a wall at the end of the world”

-Rosmarie Waldrop-

Inescapable Intersubjectivity

Ineffaceable Tentativeness

“No self is thus separate from the total venture of language”

(Wikipedia entry – “Qualia”)

“Inside the workings of language clear vision is impossible”

-Rosmarie Waldrop-

“The brain is embodied and the body is embedded” (Gerald Edelman, 2006).  A phrase like that implies mysteries.  As if something might be explained or described.  At least.  Scribbling maps at random: entailment, entangled.

She said, “memory – a mirror with ambition,” I questioned the memory and the mirror both.  A quail quickly turns tail, coveys away, Blanchot’s ever-ultimate (as in final), question: questioning itself.

That is, what is unquestionable?

Or, everything unfinished.

 

I’ve introduced this all before, and now I’m building with logical scratches.  Sketching plans.

I meant to address this before, but someone’s former second grade teacher (actually only a substitute), assigned his class a writing as a way to pass the time.  “Write about the process of choosing.”

Entailment, entanglement, words with activity in me, like haunting.  The concept of selection.  What must be going on.

I must be moving on.

 

Earlier and consistently, the lusting of language toward the intrinsic, the ineffable.  What is private and immediate.  What cancels out in signs or symbols.  Gordian knot of tricker, Ouroborous.  So much so as to seem identified.  Inherent.

What is not possible.

 

My wife’s eyes swell large in a blue as yet reproduced.  This elicits in me what science designates “raw feels.”  By the time I’ve gazed enough to start cooking them, they’re a meal in themselves.  Or, “knowledge as illusion (delusion).”  At any instant, process.

Accepting awards from strangers one strangely respects.  Not profound enough for tears, significant enough to change.

I can’t explain it.

(Meaning: it doesn’t accord my theories, or, “what’s wired together, fires…”)

Entanglement.  Arbitrary associations.  Blips and bits.  Intention.

You (can’t) get the picture.

What we mean is like this.

 

When I first stood in the grandeur of Il Duomo, Milan.  First naked body different from mine own.  Learning differance.  Similarity.  Metaphor versus analogue.  Random maps of light and entropy.

In ambiguity lies possibilities.

Where we’ve doubted.

Those final questions.

 

All those books I’ve written, published under others’ names.

 

N Filbert 2012

Altitude

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

Altitude

 

“A proposition is only a pretext to go over the limits of what’s proposed…A man in a room does not have strict boundaries until the moment when something forces him to take up one or another activity…

…I don’t have to write all this to be convinced that what is written exists.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Don’t blame me.  I measure the shadow of the shadow with the shadow,

signifying here.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees” (Paul Valery)

 

I hear a bewildering variety of birds – singing, cawing, chirping, saying.  It exists whether I say so or not.  Some things exist because I say so.

Like dolumbritz and community.

The steps being easy and difficult between.

They leave shadows.  Sometimes.

Metaphor avoids this.

 

If we got to the bottom of it all, we would fall.  Perhaps upward, if direction had anything to do with it (it doesn’t).  So we say “alas.”  Which once was short for the bottom – a-ha! “at last!” there is (here is) THIS.  But now is code for sigh.

She said so, and I heard her, at last.  I sigh.

“I have the feeling that the meaning of things will never be sorted out” is a paraphrase of a poet.  Alas.

Like philosophy: the sequence of excitable sighs, then exhaustion.

 

I am here (wherever that is).  I could describe it and become able to forget, having given it you.  But once described, something else, and then poetry – “always something else.”  Metaphor.  Not likeness but difference.

I am here.

I would know this insofar as it were validated – verified : affirmed.  But that would change and then unknown.  I reach out as like to open without a demonstration, only signs or their perceivers.  Senseless gestures filled with sense.  First one and then another “like meanings smashing each other (I don’t say metaphor)” (Dragomoshchenko).

 

A family of deer just walked in front of me, led by the elder, stopping to curiously stare (extending their field) – a simultaneity.  I gazed back and added noise to which a tail flap and head cock, followed by a smile and a welcoming.  While you notice people on the street, in the office, over lunch.  And a child hears a fairy’s call.  What is and what is not need each other to exist.

“Imagination differs from fantasy as the form ‘is’ from the form ‘if.’  The scope of my imagination is no less than the scope of desire” (Dragomoshchenko).  If he seems to make more sense or to express it is because I provide a context and steal a fragment, thus expanding what it is by what it’s not, which also is if only ‘if’ therefore as written.

“I do not have to write all this to be convinced…”

In fact an opposite’s expanding here…

N Filbert, Pike’s Peak CO, 2012

The Secret(s). The Key(s). For Everyone. The Next One.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

“He opens Nothing, with a nothing key” (Macedonio Fernandez)

 (Arkadii Dragomoschenko) “Everything begins as an error of vision…”

 

            Time.  How it fluctuates.  The excruciating and seemingly eternal wait…and that which occurs suddenly.  Whether it exists or not, we live on its terms.  Experienced, as with everything, to varying intensities.

Interruption.

Arrival.

Topical, temporal, terms.

Age-old commonplace: does movement (spatial) fragment a continuum (temporal)? or does some urge toward continuance (temporal) spawn diverse actions (spatial)?  Chicken or egg?  Or chicken in egg withwhile an egg in the chicken?  Choose your poisons.  Or not.  The terms preside.

 

When are we most apt to accede to the passage (spatial) that is (of) time?  Alternately referred to as “aging,” “progress,” “growth,” “erosion,” “deterioration,” “process” and so on.  Some quote/unquote “motion” variously rendered (perspectivally perceived).

Serial designations.  Arbitrarily “first,” “second,” “third,” “last.”  “Beginning,” “middling,” “end” (-ing).  Sounds and rhythms (consonant-verb syllables) tick-tock du-thrum heartbeat breath clock gesture

Everything marking something.  But what?

“Signs kill things” (Fernandez).

I hold a nothing key.

It’s a sign.

It unlocks the mysteries.

The secret heart of being.

All those questions.

 

If you’d like to know, I can begin writing them down for you.  For my duration here.  Or find them yourself (the keys, the mysteries, the secrets at the heart of existing) – simply add a question mark to every thought, dream, emotion, hunch, word, sight, sound, sense or reason that occurs to you.

Which will leave you with.  In.

Smackdab in the center of it all.  Ever-presently.  At always.

 

WITH/IN will synonym you, so that you will be.  Always.

– ? –

            The wise are correct when they say that everyone has access to the (nothing) key.  The slender cracks in the thresholds doors, available indiscriminately.  Received the same way you take language.  Inbreathed.  Freely (you have been given) freely (you receive).

 

From knee-crease tracing the calf to the fine-pointed ankle bones is a passage, preferably a smooth and easy one, knowing age and growth.

As she departs, time stretches into space; when she arrives all compresses.  Only machines are regulated (for a time).  Heart’s skip, muscles seize, organs expand and contract.  Movement is erratic.  Composed.  Fluid.  Harmony and dissonance make melody.  A sentence.  A phrase.  Selah.  Gaps.  Seams.  A nothing key.

 

– ? –

            Do you get my meaning?  Meaning is an interrogative juncture.  Is all.  The nothing key to open it.

 

We tell by our surroundings, i.e. specific spaces at particular times (or vice-versa), i.e. contexts and structures that hold us…allow us recognition, description, difference.

In other words, hiking in the Rockies is not taking dictation at an office desk.  But both mark something, at varying tempos.

There are no true clocks.

Or standard times, any more than we all may inhabit the same location.

Or enter the same stream.

 

Only meaning to say I am hoping to open a door with my simple key.  A possibly operative threshold.

Into the secret heart of things…

– ? –

“why does an intense mental state happen?  Why does it pass on to others?

These ‘whys’ do not exist: this is how it happens, and that’s all.”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

 

Where Am I?

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

Where Am I?

“Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we’re forever meeting people who have watches, very seldom people who have compasses.  We always need to know what time it is (who still knows how to deduce it from the position of the sun?) but we never ask ourselves where we are.  We think we know…”

-Georges Perec-

 

            Feeling displaced, it seemed like the time had come to ask into it.

Judging by the quilted charcoal sky, this must have occurred in the hours between night and day or that malleable period in which what’s bright becomes the dark.

I discovered that I was uncertain as to where, indeed, I was.

 

I cast about, but given the diffuse and myopic atmosphere, my bearings were difficult to draw.

My question just grew longer.

 

Within the nondescript what seek we to describe?

 

My whereabouts.  For even about can provide a circumference of radial lines, fashioned carefully.

It seemed to me that I must have been partway.  Having begun some time ago, though ill-remembered, I must have set out in some direction, making this a point along that plane or trajectory, on the way to the someplace I am going.  But where?  Whereto?  And wherefrom?  (the brain adds wherefore?)

I’m uncertain.

Most people do certain things at certain times, so time must be a deed, I guess.  Needing neither to eat, nor to relieve myself, it must not be too early or late, nor a mealtime.  The dim and the greys, they confuse me.

The ground being solid, but whether a road or a path or a field lying fallow, I could not say.  A fogging has thickened and the chalky gravel pierced with grasses and weeds does not provide location.

The best I can wager is midst.  I appear to be in the midst of things:  of my life, of this land, of my journey and day (or evening) – beyond this it just is not clear.

 

By the look of my hands and my feet – we say “character” – it would seem I am no longer “young.”  Hair has grown dark in places, I have visible veins, and numerous scarrings and wrinkles.  I never expect them to grow and they haven’t for many years, yet they can’t be called webbed with their linings, nor aged.  The skin is tanned and supple, not spotted, the knuckles aren’t gnarly or constricted.  Improvement or beauty I do not anticipate, but it appears I am not quite undone, not decrepit.

I’d guess I am “over the hill,” as they say, but still in reach of my prime.  A certain flair or panache, but the style of the action requires more will.  And attention.  Strong, yet not powerful.  Active, not quite agile.  Competent, not convincing.

 

I sit down.  The weeds and the grass are grey-green, grown in tufts.  The gravel is packed and yet dusty.  The stones are not worn but all small.

I trace my palms over the surface.

My legs feel the pain of my back.

I rise up.

I would find it much easier to lean.

I step forth.

 

I smell no particular smells – almost rain, dusty remnants, a particular quality of air, but what?  (From where?)  Neither salted nor briny exactly, I must not be near to the sea.  Not fuelly or floral, musty nor pale, I scratch off city and countryside, forests or plains.  And not fertile.  The air is just as you’d imagine it wherever the sky meets the land – in the absence of obvious effects (are they causes?) – just me.

 

It hasn’t grown lighter, nor darkened.

I breathe.

From the sound of it (silent) and its fullness, my lungs must be doing their job, performing their roles without much complaint.  As also my heart and my brain, liver and plumbworks.  I think I may have heard insects or birds, but the distance so vast I’d fail to call the sense knowledge.  And I mentioned I cannot see far.  These conditions.

 

I’d say it’s uncanny – to find myself here – but that’s exactly what I cannot find.

 

I reach out.

I step forth.

I breathe in.

 

Where am I?

 

If my memory served, as to where I’d last been, such info would greatly assist me.  But the best I remember is “home,” and that has been so many places.

I spread my arms and slowly spin, they cut the air like freedom.  I feel like a ray of light or drop of rain, something passing quickly, staying still.  As if I belonged…

belonged just here…

but where…

…am I?…

 

(How long do I have?)

A Serial Struggle

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, PhilosophyLeave a comment

Writing: the Blocks

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing5 Comments

Writing: the Blocks

“and everything here like an incomprehensible explanation”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

 

There are those times of overwhelm.  Edit?  Create?  Organize?  Submit?  Wander about (for “inspiration”)? or sit and stare (“meditation”)?

There are those times.  So much written, nothing sold.  Years of working, thinking, learning, feeling…orphaned.  Turned away.  Left out.  Sent back.

Rejection.

Here’s the open field and some more ever-uncertain time.  Feels fragile.  I feel I should be making, arranging words toward unknown meanings or inferences, but I’m also drowning in them – so many of my own, millions of others as well.  Approved words, theirs, successful words, words now “bound,” where mine (I try the positive) are “free,” “independent,” “loose”… not owned by any other hands or minds.

But the words seem to want it.  They emit their own desires.  For partners, for dances, for strolls.  Attachment.  They even like to work!  Anything at all – they just want to be, active.

Mine aren’t.  They jimmied their way around my emotions and spleen; infested every nook, cranny and fold of my brain; strained my throat and cramped my hand…but once I’d rid myself of them – sealed them between the bars of blue lines, they began to wither and starve.  Atrophy.  My words – these voiceless victims.

They’ve got plenty of company all lined up and folded together – hell, they’re stacked on top of each other…but they need human parts for life.  Need eyes and mouths, lungs and ears, hands and minds, perceptors, receivers and nerves.  I look down on them all like leaves from last winter, or hidden away in mausoleum-like drawers.  I feel sorrow.

There are zillions of others – exactly the same as mine but for their order – speeding all over the world – through wires and lights – through voices, canals – held gently in hands – slick and shiny on mags – proclaimed on billboards and signs.  But not mine.  Not these innumerable identical versions but for my script, my experience, my faulty manipulation.

What gives?

What gives at these moments, these gulag-ish terms of withholding and stasis?

A letter or email perhaps.  A talk with my wife or my sons or my daughter.  A glance at a spine or a page.  Some music with lyrics.  A friend.  They are moving, alert.  Every-ready for use.  In use.  Wording their function.  My continued submissions might be jail-breaks for them.  My blogs and my posts and my readings.  The phone calls.  We could try it?  See how they still work?

Or even something like this.  This query of what do they want?  Working them into myself.  Materializing them.

I don’t know.  I don’t know if it helps.  I can’t tell at this moment.  They seem stuck.  And yet not.  Here they are, ever coming, ever becoming, nothing.

Like us.  Maybe I’m stuck.  Becoming nothing (inevitably) but becoming nonetheless, all the while.

I guess I’m suggesting that there’s really no such thing as stasis or block in living beings.  Regardless what or who or how, we’re becoming (the 5 Ws all taken care of).  Now & Here all five essential questions are active whether I write down answers or not.  As long as we breathe.  Work is going on.

And words, so eagerly activated.

N Filbert 2012

Metaphors of Mind

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, Philosophy6 Comments

Metaphors of Mind

 

I thought about the East like sunrise, or, the bright shadow of sun as it sets on the sea.  Opening out, up, growing wider from a perceptive center.

 

I thought of my own like a spider rushing to complete its web and attachments to structures while the prey already wriggles in its core.  Spinning quickly, creating patterns, finding foundations so one might approach, carefully, and engage.

 

And of the wise, “responding with the submissiveness of a mirror to a completely unthinkable array of things where there’s no space or time” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia).  “And which I can’t accept” (he adds immediately afterwords).

 

My wife like a field of slender grasses made out of senses waving in rain.  It touches everywhere and then is guided and drawn into the veins and roots in a natural process.

 

An ecstatic: the moon hovering above, without details, yet influencing tides.

 

Fundamentalists jackhammering surfaces to shape; drilling from the riggings a far cylindrical bore.

 

The verbavore – translating, translating, translating…signs, digits, numbers.

 

Intuitionists: winds situationally directed by unseen prompts or hidden obstacles.

 

Perhaps the thing itself – sensual and complex machine – absorbing, recording, repeating and combining – crafting temperaments at the switchboard?

N Filbert 2012

Writing: the Characters

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

Writing: the Characters (1)

 

Not beginning from anywhere but here.

Here being where I am looking for a character, a someone, and specific, with a mind, a body, and particular knowledge and actions, whom I might observe and record.  On whom I might test out my language.  Whom I create.

Exercise in perception, then.  To see what I could see, perhaps, if I looked a certain way, at or into a certain person.  What I might hear, and how to say it.  What would be felt and its work of translation.  The smells and the tastes and the histories, for both of us.  Or perhaps even all.  No, that’s too far.

Right here, though, investigating perception, that preform vehicle, formed by our surroundings – imagination – the multiplex of learning structures allowing me to sense, to perceive.  That also, is here.

Imagination and perception – their invention we call world, and a character, a subject/object like my hand I might observe, hold aside of me while attached by nerves and cells, tissues and blood, by life, its embodiment.

Non-abstract abstracted – that conundrum – here.  The truthfulness of experiencing becoming honest lies.  The words, the print of hand, what tells (or who), and how.

Perhaps another thinks this way?  Well, not exactly, but shares concerns with idiomatic nuances?  Perhaps his education (or hers) was difficult, or pleasurably a breeze, they mastered information like a large and thirsty sponge?  Absorbed and were absorbed in such interstitial structures.  Or not.  Not at all.

An uneducated person with adaptive gifts for resonance.  A mimicking trickster riddling what is heard into naïve and complex wisdoms?  That would be fun.

Perhaps another world – country, continent, planet?  Someone observed for years suddenly inserted in a strange context, situation.  How do they behave, react, manage and survive?  I could use myself in a planet of clouds, or the tunnels of worms, what would characterize me?  How would I change?  What might I effect?  If I were made of clay or had a thousand lovers in a desert?

The only edge to possibility is what experience brings.

 

But pretending to begin right now, I see him clear.  There is a woman he is watching he finds beautiful.  When she works he sees the curve of her small breast which he desires.  He is ruddy yet refined, of middling age.  He’d like to court her but fears all pain that can’t be bandaged.  He’s afraid of words and their millions of ropes and anchors.  Reality feels like conflict, for him, a continual coming-against, and adjustment.  Adaptation he experiences as loss.  Of unrealized ideals.  And so he walks, spinning narratives in his head.

 

Here, that possible visitor handmade.  But who?  And how would I know him?  And where was he from?  How was he formed?  Who does he belive?  And so forth…

One way to be here.

One way to press your hand against the wall.

 

 

 

An Opinionated Review

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Uncategorized6 Comments

Eat.  Pray.  Love.

 

On a wonderful jaunt to our public library yesterday, my wife spotted a movie based on a mega-bestselling memoir that she’d been curious to see since its release a couple of years ago.  We checked it out and viewed it last night in hopes of a light, relaxing fare to happy us toward slumber.

It was excruciating.  My first reaction was – can a person’s biography truly resemble such a cliché’d American self-realization mythology?  Basically a woman goes on a journey away from her responsibilities to others to “find” or “heal” herself, in the process (and apparently justifiably since it delivers her to a goal of peace, happiness, pleasure and love with a seasoning of spirituality) wrecking others’ lives and forgiving herself for it, ending in the arms of a handsome foreigner on a tropical island with some standard religious “truths” in tow.

Here are things I realized about myself:

I am suspicious of personal pleasure that causes others pain.

I am oh-so-glad and grateful that I grew up in a reserved Western culture with Continental philosophy and theologies at its roots.  I much prefer battling to wisdom and calm through the frenetic and anxiety-ridden vertigo of a convoluted mind ferociously doubting and investigating than through some “be here now” philosophies of higher unities and cosmic accord.  Rather interrogate now than “let go” and “let be.”  I am attached to the workings of our brains and our languages, pestering perception and scrutinizing sense experience with imaginative and skeptical rationales.

I radically doubt “gurus,” “prayer,” “saviors,” and other spiritual or “wholistic” practices of “balance” that accomplish “goals.”  Outcome-based anything feels totalitarian and programmatic and therefore facile to me, as if there were a form or behavior we might fit ourselves to that would lessen the struggle or suffering of “to be.”

The film’s story took a year’s time, replete with life-changing habits of mind and body and some claimed resultant growth.  As if wisdom came from Apple or McDonald’s.  The past was hardly processed, responsibilities released like thoughts during Zen, and no effort to apologize or repair any damage or hurts the main character had caused those close to her along the way (thank goodness no children were involved!).

It was the time-tested failure of the American Dream: do what you want to get yourself comfortable in your own skin (whatever beliefs, illusions and experiences that might seem to require) and everything will be alright in your world.

I simply don’t buy it.  And I won’t.  If we are socially constructed realities (and my point-of-view on the cosmos supports this) then final import is not in a self, but in a system.  Not toward results but a how of processing.  Not a personal calm or pleasantness but a social accord.

The film made me terrifically thankful for scrutiny and doubt, fervent self-questioning in light of surroundings, and the “wisdom of no escape.”  It just goes on.

For what it’s worth,

here lies a steaming pile of my opinions.

N Filbert 2012

A Parable

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

A Parable

Perhaps one day you will ask for something that you want but do not need, or even need but don’t quite understand.  On a lark, let’s say, out of a “why not?” not exactly exasperation nor as fueled as curiosity, almost a simple value, who knows, but perhaps you do.

How will they respond to your free request (a spontaneity without expectation) now having burdened them with options?  You had thought it a gift, an eruption, a “no harm done,” “nothing to lose,” but of course, in the world, there is more.

So your request floats out, on the air, like a streamer, swaying and curving, rippling past the subjects to which it’s addressed.  For some it’s a slap, for others a trial, still others just dodge it and head for silent hills.

You had thought it a good, an offering of joy, a connection and possibility, not something to wind or to bind.  Never something so knotty.  A kind of safe enclosure that’s open, a meadow of sorts, where gentle counterparts might convene when they wanted or needed and whomever appeared could relate.

But in order to appear each required a turn, of attention, of glance, of an ear – to surmise and to meet, to attend.  Bodies incapable of severance.  Could they send an arm, an eye, a knee or other organ, they happily would, provided it would not be missed any elsewhere (their “here”) – and this proved impossible.

One respondent, upon lending a hand, was not able to help his young son tie his shoes.  Another offered her hair only to find herself fired from her workplace.  Each was affected by your generous request while you were left with dismembered parts in your park.

Unintentional, no doubt, you found as well that it was not spare fragments you were needing for your want.  The severed hand grew stiff and cold under your knees; the hair like strands of sand in the night on your chest.  The smells were changing.  The eyes you’d assembled were distracted, neither here nor there the parts were failing.

In an awkward flashing of a dream a teacher’s voice arrived with cliché: “be careful what you wish for.”  You’ve been waking to that for awhile.