Monday, May 30, 2011
playhouse notes
I’ve spent most free time of the past couple of weeks doing meta-writing or textual programming. A novelist mapping out the story is programming.
A resultant set of textual points or themes can orient a future free play along the path (I’ve intimated so often, one way or another). So, creativity can be as much about travel planning as narrating the trip.
I love metaplay.
It can be obtuse to represent—almost discursive—but every page I’ve put online that’s not a blog posting resulted from writing [relative] to a thematic set, like a line sketch that guides full-color work. A small set of themes (200 words, say) can draw me into a long page of work I didn’t altogether foresee, as if finding part of myself only through the play.
I have a very large set of themes, more than I’ll ever play out, probably, because I suppose further pathmaking will always accompany the unpredictable days, offering new branches, new forks.
The process of crystallizing themes might become the subject of writing whose motive is meta-thematic or genealogical. That would allow a comprehensive appreciation of the overdrawn set. But I prefer to move on, rather than detailing the process (he said, rendering the process).
I’m happy with the recent weeks, particularly the concentrated past several days. If a demon prevented anymore metaplay, I do have enough structure to empath some years, especially relative to a reading list that will change due to emergent titles—a set of readings that’s less a list (linear) than a virtual array spread around a floor, a gross pointillism of textual garden, whose tending will be relative to my mood and response to happenstance.
Meanwhile, I generate notes and themes like the days yield advents. Meta-themes combine into meta-metathemes, like variably-leveled tables of contents or syllabi, more landscaping, including a rich sense of Flourishing (capped to distinguish my literary idealism from modest senses which are common to positive psychology and health professions), including fascination with the scale of scientific humanity, and including the horizon of our evolving.
In recent months, I set up a path of writing about literary discourse which I’ve barely played out, though I’ve done a lot of prefacing. I might write myself into details of phenomenality (including narrativity, emergent storiality, plights of textuality as such, and more on notions of presence); details of interpsychality (including variations on stance, dramatic sense, transpersonal action, intimacy, and shared Meaning); topics of authoring (including characterization, writing as performance, authorship apart from narrative voice, and creativity as scenic mindfulness); aspects of Literarity (too numerous for a fair short list now); aspects of intertextuality (including my bibliophilia, more on textual intimacy, authorial self effacement and reflective transformation, and textual intimacy as limiting condition); and more on intrapsychality (solitude, inworldness as inwordness, authenticity, discursiveness, abstraction, synergistic longing, and conceptuality).
So it might go for a near-term pathway into literary discourse, merely near-term. I’m ambivalent about following through on that (the meta-play was quite fulfilling), instead letting the notes age in light of other endeavors.
It’s all part of that richer sense of flourishing, my Flourishing reborn so variably by intrinsic appeals, resulting in sundry elations, intoxicating transgressions, creative eros, fascination with the high creativity of others (beyond me, but not beyond admiration—and maybe a little osmosis).
What’s possible for entwinements of love and creativity? What darkness awaits my particular psyche in literary mirrors? What artistic bearing might grow out of facing the unfaced? How might this transform my horizons of conceptual venturing?
Conceptual venturing: I want to know everything about leading mental science (not the same as merely cognitive science), how mathematicians and scientists think, and what leading philosophical theories of truth, knowledge, goodness, and human nature are prospecting.
All in all, our evolving isn’t something to discover, rather something we write, we make, ongoing, like the development of a life is found to be ongoing, and furthered only by engaging oneself with its receding horizons.
So, there’s some kind of artistry in human evolution? Is there a high humanity to which we all belong? Can conceptuality (philosophy) fruitfully contribute to progressive flourishing? What might this mean for a sense of Literature that draws all humanities into itself? Could it be a consilience of poetic thinking that’s valid (i.e., a conceptual cohering that’s not ultimately idiosyncratic or authorially self-absolutizing)?
I want a comprehensive sense of lifeworld, artfulness, and our evolving which is fully contemporary, having a good hold on feeling, creativity, flourishing, childhood (including affirmation of happy adult living without having one’s own little beings necessary to make life worthwhile), creatively ethical life, real happiness, lasting value, and “The” Good (i.e., risking a general sense of our manifold cultural lives). Materially, my desires are modest. But that’s just me.
All certainty may belong to only days going by: that the advents often outstrip all pretensions.
All the evolving artfulness he would pretend to capture expresses the capability of one Earthling facing that black cosmos that is no mirror, no matter, no relevance for the pleasure of the play.
