life world

a validity of candor

2012-01-18T06:37:00.000-08:00

For decades, I’ve lived with or felt nearest to persons who are emotionally open, trusting, caring, and therefore candid. I’d welcome being told by a friend that I seemed, say, “emotionally disabled,” because—well firstly, that would be funny to hear; but mainly that would be a chance to understand myself better through their sensibility, a chance to learn something about myself, as well as better understand her or him. Yet, knowing myself quite well (I’m not emotionally disabled—but what fun it is to think I’m crazy—like a Woody Allen?)—knowing myself quite well, I’d enjoy helping my friend understand me better while understanding my friend better.

Many persons aren’t like this, which is OK. But I’m usually wanting openness, come what may—which must always be for the better, right? (To whom it can concern: Remember those days when “tripping” together was a sacred Event?)

I’m comfortable with myself—and with all the aspects that a life may be made of, I believe. I’m like a physician who lives with the reality of things—or idealizes that we get to there. (I’m not an MD.) I’ve lived for decades in a world of “physicians” of self and “mind”: psychotherapists, literary kindreds, philosophers—not as an elitism—please—nor as a matter of being oriented by troubles that would seem to be resolved by sublimation (a motif of poetics) or conceptual height. Cherishing Openness may be anewing because It’s a font of creativity and discovery. I want to exemplify what I welcome, implicitly being a promoter of flourishing (which I tirelessly iterate for philosophical concerns I’ll later pursue relative to others’ work). The expressiveness in that makes me, I guess, a dramatist of sorts, philosophically invested in openings. (But I also have a dramaturgical sense of action I’ve begun to conceptualize in recent months.)

I’m thankful to have been drawn as much as I have by avid minds (mostly through text), trying out ideas like sketch artists may try to capture a moment, seeking the better representation of being drawn; or seeking to go with feeling for the sake of its apparent validity—but with no need to turn away from reality, because reality is another chance to be drawn and furthered.

That may seem precious or self possessed, but it’s not. Being in love with the play is not about esteeming myself or gaining admiration. It’s about love of the play. Learning never ends for those who live long (given a lack of terminal disease and healthy humoring). I’m aiming for 100.

Whatever you want to say, whatever we might talk about, I’m open. Though I never volunteer confessions about what suffering I’ve survived, it’s a hardwon part of my easily seeming to have suffered little. I’m happy (more or less), honestly (not stuck in pretensions that are self-soothing deceptions—I hope). However blind I may remain about the truth of things, I hope that I’m always open to understanding how a time or a life may go better to actualize aspirations or heartfelt desire—or not, and then I so want to be there with you, whomever, to make it all go better, inasmuch as I’m able.

Largely online so far, I’ve turned confessional desire into conceptual venturing (as if theorizing confession?). I now live far beyond simply needing confession. (I’ve done journaling since my early 20s—all packed away somewhere!, now digital and archived safely.)

Theorizing is a healthy aspect of enduring curiosity. So, for example, sometimes I’m implicitly asking: What’s going on at boundaries (liminalities!) between authentic autobiography and authentically ventured fiction? What’s the difference between authentic confession and authentic venturing?

I referred to myself recently as a “philosophical character,” relishing the pretense that “I” is a fiction, because it’s fun to live in a resonance of narrative hiding and display. Living with a liminality of the difference is fun.

But I’m generally not wanting to hide. It’s theorizing shyness, maybe (or implicitly confessing humility, I want to believe). It’s living an irony validly, I hope: largely not hiding here, in the online, vastly accessible clearing, so contrary to chances of daily light and ordinary days; yet, not letting myself get presumptuous about difficulties of staying open to mySelf, just as I would hope to do in being really with you, whomever. With you, I’m so with my vulnerability (which can turn me into a caricature of myself, defending against being unable to show I’m not disabled). So—ha!—here I’m protected by the textuality between us. My mastery of textuality is impeccable ensurance against terminal unease.

That I so loved you would never be put in quote marks—unless I’m feeling self deprecative (a nice word)—which only happens because I’m honest (I hope) about questioning what I easily say, after surprising myself that it happened so easily.

There are echoes of wanting pure confession which have been restrained—though not enough (I learned), too easily being intrusive to read—failing to recognize that I’m uninvited?—failing to remember that mutuality is integral to giving validity to our time that would be so cathartically borne by presumptions. Mutuality grounds a welcomed hearing.

I forgot. I’m not perfect.

And so it came to pass that there would be literature made of this thing called writing, not just accounting and recording oral stories too involuted to remember across time. The voice without audience reconciles herself, him, its Self to some unmet future hearing through traces, letters.

OK, I’m in love with myself. No, I “fail” to hold back because I’m not egoistic about it all. I’m trusting. I just hoped too much—my fault—my fault, which can be retraced like a fiction, as if I’m a character of myself in being validly guileless, but finding nothing to admire in restraint for its own sake.

Writing openly—be it poetic or even conceptual, as well as purely confessional—is about valuing trust and care and living curiosity. Living an ethically shameless opening should never be made to feel regrettable—except when it turns you away permanently. (But who are you who would let yourself be turned away by love of openness?)

Even a maudlin Eros of transgression can be authentically luscious, such-as-I-am, if that’s truly where I am, as if living a nude question: Why am I here?

And there you are, still with me here. We go on, as if there’s more engaging me than living fiction—as if, well, see how fiction affords?

So, you get intergenric, transgenric, whatever writing because that’s what I love to explore and share, as much as I can.

You didn’t ask to be really with me; you were just playing along.

Well, I was really there, still now here with you when I write—not with pretense (not to frame My Being With you, as if I should be praised for candor here-and-there in my site). I’m just here.

I knew you when you were very happy. I recall vividly how you love to be. I adored it all. It’s your living gift to your daughter: She will have you, taking for granted her good fortune, as if it’s just the way the world should be: that she is causing you to love her so, just by being herself openly.

You’ll be a darling, dedicated, good enough mother.

But I feel you don’t yet agree.

Nonsense! Love yourself. Look at me. (Don’t turn away.) I believe in you. I do, I do, and I will always.

intimacies

2012-01-02T22:56:00.001-08:00

Here are the six sections of “intimacies,” which ends “Elations of solitude,” a book-length project.

• therapeutic living

• letter

• true love and fun with confession

• love in manifold

• textual intimacy, Take 2

• singularity

bearing, standing, baring, and moving on

2011-12-31T23:10:00.000-08:00

I’ve been unwittingly very unfair too many times. Thankfullly, I’ve soon recognized my unfairness more often than I’ve been confronted by it.

Anyway, the person most deserving of apology would not welcome being notified of that, not to mention reading how well I realize how wittingly unfair I can be: “I love you who doesn’t deserve it, so that makes me doubly better than you.”

I’m so deeply sorry I hurt you with impulsive candor, then hurt you more with lots of self-serving explanation, which feels to me now irreparable, as well as inexcusable. I’m so sorry.

I try to face myself truly, candidly, and deeply (re: all the years passed—all the years to come?). I hope that, altogether, the facing is authentic (“brutally” honest, when that’s correctively needed). I hope I’m always willing to accept actual culpability.

But all that’s between me and myself, isn’t it?

All in all, I feel very good about myself, my life, despite stark facing of crimes occasionally. I don’t spurn myself. I deserve to love myself, and I do. I have lived in good conscience far more than in bad conscience, because I’ve generally had enough courage to face my mistakes and learn. I hope.

I live in good conscience. I’m open to whatever others wish to confront me with, about how I should have lived otherwise than they experienced. That’s a chance to learn. I have nothing to hide. (But we would pursue that privately.)

In retrospect, a lot of foolishness in my life was because I was young and learning to live. I’m still learning to live, but I make better errors now.

I also still make errors that allow for no sense of humor about what I did. But I don’t repeat those errors (given that I recognize them), I hope.

I suffer losses, due to my mistakes, and I suffer from that, which is good.

I stand up and move on, hopefully better for it all.

Feeling rich empathy is not about pity. It’s being there with the other (or heartfully believing so). When the other apparently can’t be reached, empathy is painful—which is OK.

Also, suffering my foolishness is OK, if it’s fruitful: letting go of a daughter I never had; accepting that a cherished student turned away; realizing I unconsciously wanted a teenage love to return decades later; dissolving resentment toward a dear friend who killed herself without prior notice (as if I might have saved her); no longer mourning that a prospect of deep friendship across decades of difference in age is fiction.

Tomorrow! Melancholy is easily dissolved into exuberance—without bipolarity, too! (Never lived with that issue.)

Retain capability for modulation in all endeavors.

Happy New Year!

Eros of flourishing

2011-12-30T21:37:00.000-08:00

Here is the 5^th section of “autotelic mind.”

rattlebox

2011-12-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

You were the most beautiful being I’d ever met. It’s not a matter of prettiness (though you are pretty). It was you, in all your smart silliness and willful, retro aesthetic—and sensitive, protective love of art: You captured me one day, Sept. 2008, when I came by your desk and you flashed a moment of anger that I’d interrupted your reading of a great novel.

Over the months, enough happened with you (and relative to your presence in my life) that a long novel about it all could be made. (Ulysses was staged as one day.)

I won’t begin the story soon. Yet, I won’t forget (nor lose any of the things you gave me, nor the narratives you unwittingly evinced—nor our IM-ing transcripts I later lied about having not captured and kept).

Ha, it was a great Moment of the early 21^st century between a very aspiring Millennial (no matter what you avowed otherwise) and one Self.

selformativity of Self

2011-12-27T21:45:00.000-08:00

Here is the 4^th section of “autotelic mind.”

highly minding

2011-12-18T22:30:00.000-08:00

Here is the last section of “philosophy of ‘mind’.”

concept of mind

2011-12-11T21:01:00.001-08:00

Here is section 2 of “philosophy of ‘mind’.”

a sense of one self musing

2011-12-10T23:03:00.000-08:00

Here is section 1 of “philosophy of ‘mind’: a love story,” which becomes part 3 of “autotelic mind,” which (you eagerly recall) is the penultimate part of “elations of solitude,” probably to end early spring.

naturalized phenomenology of the developmental interest

2011-11-25T16:40:00.000-08:00

This is section 4, the ending, of “biomindality.” It’s possibly the most portentious (pretentious?) thing I’ve ever written.

after speaking for trillions of communicating, evolving microbes...

2011-11-24T23:40:00.000-08:00

...Lynn Margulis dies.

“Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.”

Genesis of self-regulativity—> quorum sensing—> symbiogenesis—> autopoiesis—> autogeny —> self formativity constitutes the intelligence of Earth.

sundaynote

2011-11-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

Elations of solitude go where they are carried.

I thought last week that I’d quickly finish my synoptic about a biogenic mode of thinking about “mind,” but I didn’t feel like returning to the task yesterday, because I so wanted to move on (though I didn’t). After weekly shopping and other chores, I saw a good movie, hung out in Moe’s, prattled at home. (You want to know.)

I returned to the synoptic task this morning, which was no chore because I really want to do it. But the want got out of hand, and now I have a population of sources listed that I have to work my way away from—which was exciting (as it brought me back into an aspect of The Project that partly motivated the formation of it, many years ago through several years ago), like wanting to write briefly about a lost love, but getting drawn into an album of photographs. “O, dear, my longing for you was not an updated version of The Sorrows of Young Werther.” (I saw “Young Goethe in Love” yesterday afternoon.)

In the flow of getting drawn this morning, I got momentarily distracted by interest in statistical reasoning (thanks to a colleague last week), which led to searching for a related Internet article at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which caused me to check to see if an unrelated article, long overdue on a particular philosopher, had finally turned up. Literally for years, I’ve checked from time to time (as the SEP’s Table of Contents lists all the articles that are to appear, as well as those already available). I’d bugged the slated author more than once about his scheduled intent.

Alas! His article was there. But I found it disappointing. So, I spent the rest of the day writing to him about this, in terms of details from his article.

Relative to the long view of The Project, that was quite appropriate to do. I surprised myself: I really do embody the thinking of the essayed philosopher (dare I claim).

Actually, I don’t want reply from the essay author (a professor in England). I don’t want an argument with him. But his misconceived article was a great occasion for me to clarify my sense of the essayed philosopher.

And now the day is mostly passed. Do I want to now watch a documentary on Woody Allen? I don’t think so.

I’m going to walk up into the hills and entertain the night.

ontogenic phenomenology of the developmental interest

2011-11-07T21:30:00.001-08:00

This is section 3 of “biomindality.”

intelligence of nature

2011-11-07T00:45:00.000-08:00

This is section 2 of “biomindality.”

preface to rendering a conception of “mind” in nature

2011-11-07T00:40:00.000-08:00

This is section 1 of the “biomindality” part of (sigh) “autotelic mind” in “elations of solitude.”

message to the world

2011-11-06T22:00:00.000-08:00

After I left “Sarah’s Key” early Saturday evening, I walked to Moe’s Books and spent several hours amusing myself. I left very expensively amused, but what the hell: adding to a truly great library is like adding new kinds of plants to a great garden: Gravity’s appeal leads to more gravity. It’s natural. A congregation of importances composes an appellant cohering. Valuing—books, in my case—flows into a telic cohering of more and more mindedness (or mindality). It’s human.

Let there be as much gardening of importances as we can really afford (and blogs to that effect not left to sleep).

I’m so easily unbearable: I made a list of the books bought last evening, then a list of the titles noted for archival lists; then a list of my favorite findings from the 3 most-recent issues of The New York Review of Books late night; and listed other interesting findings. I sequenced that, and voilà: I had an unwieldy syllabus I could write a book in light of: One night in a bookstore and sundry reading.

“He wrote well about that night, but died before completion.”

Princeton philosopher/theologian Mark Johnston reads the essence of the great religions as proffering that “persons are protean” (283ff.). Lucky me.

Reporting on the carnival of human variability didn’t begin with the modern European novel; rather, the protean novel emerged from the hybridity of Mediterranean cultures and European outlands before modernity.

The essence of the novelistic motive might be enchantment by the variability of lives. Surely, that’s part of why I fall in love with women I can’t have. Next!

I surely cannot resist enchantment by creative intimacies. Imagine two painters married to each other, having their studios adjacent: the surrealists Yves Tanguy (a longstanding favorite painter) and Kay Sage (who? sorry, dear). Alas, I bought a painting by a friend years ago (stored away) that looks like a Kay Sage work, I could not have known. Philip Guston’s work looks like Son-Of-Kay (but not son-of-Yves—though Philip looks like Yves’ son).

Talk about a feeling for the thing: How about Evocative Objects: things we think with? The Table of Contents makes me giggle.

But I was really inspired by Kit White’s 101 Things to Learn in Art School. I must write about that. It’s a gem. (It has a thick rubber cover, very tactile).

I must hurry along. (The need for hurrying drives me crazy.)

Wisdom: from philosophy to neuroscience is an oddity, cribbing trends of applying evolutionary psychology to moral theory, which is deeply interesting to me, but not as a trade paperback. However, the book is emblematic of naturalism’s appeal (as well as the appeal of quick routes to wisdom); check out the Table of Contents for a taste of what draws me into evolutionary theory (though I’ll be working with others’ original research, not freelance ventures—though what am I?). Seriously, though, evolutionary theory is becoming a central tenet of philosophical ethics: The highly-esteemed philosopher Philip Kitcher has just published The Ethical Project which argues that “we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper.” Great, as far as normative understanding goes. But what about the creativity that formulates ethical projects in the first place? Doing philosophical ethics is not about doing sociology or anthropology of normativity. I’m working toward a sense of “evolutionary” ethics in a transitive sense of ‘evolving’ (fostering progressive processes), rather than explanatory sense. But I’ll obtain Kitcher’s book soon. It’s one with which I shall have to come to terms, and I look forward to that.

Love notions of EcoMind: changing the way we think, to create the world we want, which is the name of Frances Moore Lappé’s new book (agri-political mother of Michael Pollan, one might say). She provides a good sense of progressive planetary thinking as a practical venture—a good complement to Stewart Brand’s recent Whole Earth Discipline: an ecopragmatist manifesto.

OK, I’m quitting here. The landscape of just one evening is more than I’ll take time to further render—except to say I bought a beautiful book titled The Poet’s Freedom: a notebook on making, by Susan Stewart, Professor of Humanities at Princeton (another woman to fall for).

And I bought a “remaindered” book of drawings done to the artist’s favorite Emily Dickinson poems, The World in a Frame, because a lover of Emily (whom I’ve not met) would know what’s best about her, including…

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me —
The simple News that Nature told —
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see —
For love of Her— Sweet —countrymen —
Judge tenderly — of Me

about fictionally surviving the Holocaust

2011-11-05T23:30:00.000-07:00

The key of “Sarah’s Key” is not the closet key that Sarah holds (which betrays her), but her character driving her to survive. The story is about Sarah’s key to surviving, in two senses: Firstly, her attachment to her brother that drives her escape from the Nazi camp before she’s shipped off to where her cohorts would be killed. This is a self-determination typical of persons who survived the Nazi camps. Afterward, she lives for many years fruitfully due to her self determination. The essentially human response to bearing witness to incomprehensible horror is to exemplify life—to go on well, partly in honor of those who were denied the chance, but essentially as expression of our ownmost participation in humanity, not as point in a living mass, but exactly the opposite: as singular gift of our nature, singular example of human potential, which might be the Simple Meaning of It All for us: that we are fruitful potentials able to thrive in love with life.

I’ve mentioned the research of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton on the thriving character of survivors of great suffering, titled The Protean Self. I feel It in irreverent Jewish humor. (A Jewish friend—a psychotherapist—includes me on a private email list fed mainly by a Jewish psychiatrist, friend of hers.)

Secondly, Sarah’s key is her drive to record her story that gives her a continuity of identity across eras of later life that sustains her long enough to leave a legacy of a child of her own in good family. Though her writing is only diaries and letters, an implicit truth is the importance of articulation for the self-begetting life. Abundant research confirms the renewing power of finding one’s ownmost words—firstly, distancing trauma onto the page (or into a scene with another, e.g., the therapeutic alliance), making the trauma an Other that, secondly, documents what one valuably remains: a survivor beyond surviving, able to thrive, even beyond thriving: making a good life and a legacy of lastingness. Writing may mirror an everlastingness of what is no longer which altogether frees in terms of the potentials of life hereon.

Lastly, Sarah’s key is for the viewer/reader: It is a key for the reader/viewer to learn about what can be overcome and to not forget what is best in our humanity instanced by our lives. Sarah’s writing gives her son a way into the truth of her gift of Innocence to him. I’ve done as much as I can to understand the Holocaust. But, at the end of 10 hours of The Shoah in 1985, I felt that the Holocaust means Nothing. To try to give meaning to the Holocaust is an obscenity against the notion of meaning. There is no meaning to the Holocaust. A child deserves to grow into a world where suffering does not exist until one’s old enough to relativize the message. Our nature is not in any way signaled in what we have suffered, rather in what we are becoming. This is why excellent parenting is a horizon of fictionality for the child who gets to be the center of the world, given chances to bruise oneself in one’s own time, heal oneself in one’s own way, and find one’s ownmost place in a world whose reality emerges through one’s ownmost time. Yes, the world includes tragedy of incomprehensible proportion. But it’s ultimately irrelevant to flourishing, no matter how realistic our flourishing must grow to be.

So, this backgrounds why I will now say that “Sarah’s Key,” as novelist’s story, is basically phony by relying on Sarah’s suicide to move the story forward to its closure. That’s the work of a fictionist who doesn’t understand what she’s writing about. Everything in Sarah’s story “argues” against choosing suicide when she has a lovely life outside New York City, a lovely-hearted husband (we learn), and a lovely-hearted son (we learn) who was so on the road to a fruitful life while Sarah was still alive to be his mom, apparently very well. She has every reason to sustain the beautiful life she has. The viewer is given no reason for her suicide. The suicide is contrary to the reality of survivors who are already making good lives. The frictional suicide (a typo I’ll retain) is contrary to the details of the novelist’s own story. The viewer is supposed to project something unendurable in Sarah’s adult life? The novelist’s story has shown the falsity of such a projection. If the novelist’s contemporary journalist-inquirer’s later having a child named Sarah can preciously redeem the death of the adult Sarah, then adult Sarah’s earlier having a son redeemed her well-intentioned, childhood act of hiding her beloved brother in the closet. Sarah’s life (as fabricated by the novelist) redeemed the girl’s horror of discovering her brother in the closet rotting. Besides, hungry, scared kids locked in closets scream and pound to get out (in a building of little apartments in a dense neighborhood). The thin wooden door of the closet had a weak little lock for that key. Little boys don’t keep sibling promises to stay quiet when they are hungry and scared. The novelist has insulted human reality to make the viewer mourn some insurmountable suffering in the adult Sarah which is psychologically naïve and implausible. While the reality of Vichy France should be appreciated (especially by the French) and prospects of overcoming great suffering in a thriving life should be taken to heart, the novelist has exploited history and fictionalized psychology for the sake of a precious ending.

vigilance for emergents

2011-10-30T21:20:00.000-07:00

anticipating primordial potential

This is section 4, the last section, of “feeling for the ‘thing’.”

wise guy

2011-10-27T18:57:00.000-07:00

Late summer, 2010, I thought it would be great to become pregnant nine months before one’s wedding anniversary (and I blogged about that elsewhere, still there); or nine months before one's own birthday, or nine months before spring—a poetic assertion of one's own sense of home and gardening.

Some weeks later, I wrote a wonderful posting here (if I may say so), worth recalling (though not wholly about parenting).

Over the years, I’ve loved knowing couples in early parenting, being a friend of the family, like a vicarious in-law. It’s been a good reason to start friendships.

Though I don’t have children of my own, I’m an expert child development resource (if I may say so)—surely, partly compensatory (fine)—and I have a large library of materials on child development. That’s why I was so enthused about getting philosophical about parenting, some years ago. To any reader here, that might seem to have been some kind of disembodied relationship to “ontogeny”; but it was actually a then-newly conceptual complement to longstanding, “down-to-earth” (as they say) or realistic, embodied rapport with little beings. (OK: I never grew up—thank goodness.)

My love of the notion of the Inner Child in creativity is kindred (an idea I share with the Jungian tradition of individuational psychology, though I outgrew the especially-Jungian version of individuation, I think) .

I wrote, summer, 2010 (in small part),…

… your happiness is clear and inspiring, which will be so clear and inspiring for your children, who will feel the pervasive happiness of your home in their bones….you’re now destined to live happily ever after because you truly, freely came to know your heart.

O what a story there may be in ellipses, reaching into horizons of years to come. What is the liminality of reality and fiction?

I could mine my archive on child development by era of a life, writing soon about early infancy, then write about later months of infancy months later here; write about the first year of childhood a year-or-so from now—year after year, mixing autobiography, musing, and conceptual things—endless fun for a child who would discover way, way into their life that the play was all for her or his mother, until I died.

She named the son Gary, or the daughter Ana. That would be a story! Call it all to be part of the early 21st century for a hopelessly horizoning (if not overly precious) Child.

liminalities of phenomenal life

2011-10-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

This is section 3 of “feeling for the ‘thing’.”

intuition and reliabilism

2011-10-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

This is section 2 of “feeling for the ‘thing’.”

phenomenality (again)

2011-10-23T23:00:00.000-07:00

This is section 1 of “feeling for the ‘thing’,” which is part 1 of “autotelic mind…,” which is part 7 of my “Elations of Solitude” project—which was supposed to be brief (a long preface to dwelling with others’ things as a very long road), but mitosis of creative play is transporting things into a very phenomenal autumn.

solitude as tiresome theme

2011-10-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

Elations of solitude don’t entail perpetual elation about it.

subliming

2011-10-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

8:50 am

I can’t (I won’t) start a day at the keyboard without fresh-dripped coffee.

I think I’ll skip going online to see news, but I anticipate wanting to link here to some earlier things as I write today (linking as shorthand coverage-by-citation of a theme more salient to me than I’m taking time today to express), so I now connect to the Internet (which is not really yet to “go online”), but why not check mail; why not see the daily word from Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Day”?...

October 21: “sublimate SUB-luh-mayt.” I’ll keep that one for the archive because it’s so longly important to me.

My archive of recent years’ retained M-W emails numbers 1300+ presently, all words that are evocatively unusual to me and that I want to appropriate; or words well known to me that I shouldn’t have forgotten. I imagine going through the archive one day, free associating each with some project theme or plot point in my trekking.

1:55 pm

‘Sublimate’ makes a good example.

humanity’s Eros

2011-10-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

expanded Sunday, 10.16

As the oldest of institutions, marriage seems outdated in modern times, when each individual is encouraged to break with tradition in order to fulfill him- or herself.

So begins the book jacket inner front panel of The Love Lives of the Artists, Daniel Bullen, 2011: “Five Stories of Creative Intimacy”—stories of pioneering artistic couples of the early 20^thC, telling of “a brave, new kind of marriage, where spouses would be allowed—even encouraged—to fulfill different aspects of themselves in outside relationships.”

Shared creativity, they believed, would transcend their jealousies and compensate their sufferings: through art, they would rise above conventional marital fidelity and prove a higher fidelity to art and to themselves.

The Love Lives of the Artists tells the stories of Rainer Marie Rilke and Lou Andreas Salomé, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keefe, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin—five couples who approached their relationships with the same rebellious creativity as they practiced in their art….

Whence comes the encouragement? one might wonder. The Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt might trace the appeal to the nature of our modernity, exemplified in the Eros of nature that Lucretius exudes in the beginning of The Nature of Things. In his new book on the matter, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Greenblatt finds a Renaissance vision quest in an itinerant 15thC scholar’s searches through dusty monastery libraries which turns up the almost-Lost manuscript by Lucretius, a quest which is exemplary of the Renaissance “swerve” of cultural evolution that led to modernity. Greenblatt, in his “Preface”:

Lucretius begins with an ardent hymn to Venus, the goddess of love, whose coming in the spring has scattered the clouds, flooded the sky with light, and filled the entire world with frenzied sexual desire….

The book jacket indicates that

The copying and translation of this ancient book—the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age—fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Ah, yes, so much waywardness, so much transgression shapes originality.

From their early artistic development and their first experiences in love to their artistic marriages and their affairs—and then to their fights and reconciliations, nervous breakdowns and further creativity—The Love Lives of the Artists describes the promise and the price of freedom and creativity in love.

My early-20s infatuation with Miller and Nin (Americans in Paris, early 1930s) greatly affected my life before discovering Sartre or Rilke. Finding Love Lives… and Swerve tonight caused me to also recall Marcuse’s great (but now outdated) Eros and Civilization (1955), which I absorbed in my mid-20s. But I’m way beyond that now. As I wrote last April (before I chose to prefer ‘psychal-’ to ‘psycho-’):

My reflectively exploratory interest isn’t exactly psychoanalytic, but that’s pertinent, in a generic sense (not a therapeutic sense) that’s as philosophical or literary (writerly) as psychological (again, not as a therapeutic approach—but that interests me, too). My psychological interests are generally drawn by appeals of self expansiveness (not egoistic self possession) for the sake of self enrichment. With a smirk, I call it interest in psychoenhancement (accepting appearances of eccentricity).

Calling a venture psychoenhancive might be apt for much that goes on in academic rhetoric, e.g., Kaja Silverman, World Spectators which allegedly pursues “a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround [...and] demonstrates the inseparability of philosophy and psychoanalysis” in terms of “visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies.” (Later, I’ll let Kaja draw me into her text, and I’ll render the play.) [4.15.11]

Jennifer in dark waywardness

2011-10-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

“Full moon tonight—,” Jen said as she got into bed, her back to my chest. We become a quasi-fetal dyad. “—behind ethereal haze.”

She was disturbed—creatively so—about how to capsulate her proposal.

Eventually, I said “Suppose now is do or die: You have to say simply what you want to do.”

She sighed.

Silence, except breathing.

“I want to offer an original account of the poetic self.”

“OK.” I knew what she wants to do, but she hadn’t put it so succinctly before. Original? Improbably, but maybe?

“Glad to have your permission.”

“Anytime.”

“It’s possible that poetic thinking, when tethered to an account of the poetic self—or a poetic account of the self—puts us in a position to overcome the seemingly irreparable rift between modernism, with its belief in subjectivity and truth—and postmodernism, which has yet to fully articulate an account of the subject in the wake of its deconstruction. A new poetics of Dasein [German: psychal existence; transliteral: “there-being”], I hope, can do for philosophy what string theory has aimed to do for theoretical physics, that is, reconcile convincing but incompatible and incomplete models of the universe.”

“Our universe, now. A humanity.” A philosophical universe. The? Adorable. Inspired, inspiring.

“Of course.”

“Yes, let’s not try to compete with theoretical physics.”

She elbowed me. “Yet, it’s toward those possibilities that my thinking—and the poetic theory that emerges—is aimed.”

quoting from the “Preface”
of Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei’s
Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language, 2004

I haven’t read her book, but I’m delighted to have recently discovered it. She wrote that a few years prior to her Ecstatic Quotidian, 2007. And now (November), she’s coming out with a $110 tome on Exotic Spaces in German Modernism.

Yeah, I could go for exotic. But I’m unsure of the cost.

a sense of inworldness

2011-10-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

Being easily entranced by mental things, I resist surrendering to it all online, because that feels so self-possessive. But I have to write from where I love to live, so I’m gradually dancing away.

you, too, can easily be popular.

2011-10-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

“You should write something that sells,” they say; or: “You should write something that gets you a big audience.” And in the latter case, I “should” channel the success through a social networking account which shows the online world how popular I seem to be with all those friends I’ve never met.

Look, I love to be loved, but I’m more interested in doing the difficult long-term project that I want to do—which then can be tailored (translated, appropriated, etc.) for love or/and money. Think I’m not a fun guy? You’d be one of very few who do.

What I’m striving to do results, supplementally, in piecemeal expressions online (i.e., the Webpages) because I like writing online. I love writing! But my online sketches (carefully written as they are, though creatures of their time) are not elements of The Project. My online work is for its own sake, what draws me at the time (as I plod along offline), which I put online because I enjoy sharing.

If you’re interested, great. If you’re not interested (very likely), that’s OK. In the flesh, I’m a good time without pop quizes about my blogging or Webpages. I live in the same world you do (as much as any two people do, with enough in common that they choose to sit at the same table, hike the same trail, whatever).

Yet there’s a very interesting kind of issue here: living in the same world as another, an other, “you”—fluidly so (rapport is easy for me), enjoyably so—yet having (too often hiding) a very—well—pluralistic sense of reality—which works fine in the background, until the degree of difference between self and “our” presence becomes thematic (as if my non-homogenity of identity shows ingenuineness). As long as I’m, say, 25 (and, having actually been that, it’s easy—an honest aspect of me!) with a 25-year-old, I’m seen to be comfortable to be with. But seeing my interest in letting you know the difference—not as an abstraction, but bringing you into the difference—easily seems creepy, if not daimonic.

wednesdaynote

2011-10-05T18:10:00.000-07:00

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Steve Jobs

[end of his Stanford Commencement Address, 2005,
quoting the end of the The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971]

.Near the end of his long Address (already having lived for some years with the reality of pancreatic cancer), he says:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

[…]

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

an exemplary day

2011-10-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

I intended today to write the next section of “Elations of solitude,” this time on a sense of inworldness, but the reality of the solitude I love is that I have to go with emergent appeals, which didn’t take me into doing the next section.

Rather, it took me on a wonderful excursion into recent academic work that’s integral to my long-term Project. I’m excited by emerging work of others.

Robert Bellah has just finished his opus magnum on religion in human evolution—which isn’t a near-term interest of mine, but I spent a good portion of Saturday afternoon in University Press Books reading the synoptic beginning of his book before I bought it. The background of my interest here is a long story, including his long relationship to Habermas (personally), their shared interest in theories of social evolution (both influenced by Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons—Bellah decisively, he notes in his “Acknowledgements”), my Habermasian interest in issues of religious life in secular modernity, and emails between Bellah and I last year (I was to address him as “Bob”).

After my reading in UPB, I went to Moe’s and bought a group of books (first large book purchase in months) that would blow your mind (interesting cliché). So, my exemplary day included realizing, when I woke up, that I really did purchase those books. (It wasn’t a dream. One tome is by a well-known professor of Hebrew and the Kabbala who decided, for his 50th birthday, to let his mind go wherever he chose, resulting in a 500+ page excursion titled A Dream Interpreted Within A Dream: oneiropoiesis and the prism of imagination, 2011. This is directly relevant to my intent to interplay evolutionary-cognitive aspects of mind with phenomenological excursions, which the author, E.R. Wolfson, is also venturing—in his very different way, of course.)

Bellah’s stance on cultural evolution made me wonder what Terrence Deacon might think of Bob’s opus magnum. (Both are/were UCB faculty—Bellah’s very emeritus: 83 years old), and I’ve been waiting years for Terrence Deacon to finish his opus magnum. So, I turn to Bellah’s Index, and what do you know!: many citations of Deacon, including a long discussion of Deacon’s sense of evolution!

Then, I went to Deacon’s faculty Webpage and yea!!, his book is coming out in November. Better yet, it apparently fits in better with work on consilience between the sciences and the humanities than I anticipated (according to the book description). Deacon’s Webpage lists his recent articles with links to PDF downloads! What great luck. So, that occupied a couple of hours—which led me to wondering about updates from Mark Turner, whose approach to cognition (“conceptual blending”) I’ve presumed for years as an approach I’m advocating. Deacon is overtly fitting in his work with Turner’s. This led me to The National Humanities Center, which I’ll mention further below.

Bellah’s approach to religion in evolution appropriates a leading model of cultural evolution (congruent with my view that religion is a special kind of culture, not anything essentially different from interests of cultural evolution) that gels with Deacon’s approach to bioanthropology (which argues, on massive evidence, that symbolic capacity is not primordially linguistic, just as I’ve been convinced for many years), which gels with Turner’s approach to cognition, which (going back to my interest in Turner in the first place, years ago) gels with Sternberg’s long-leading approach to the nature of intelligence (which I discuss briefly in “developmentality as generative modeling,” section 2 on “modeling as at least conceptual prospecting.”)

And the story goes on: The priority focus for the National Humanities Center Project “on the Human” (which is overtly linked up with the new work on concilience I mentioned) is “Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity,” directly congruent with my own focus, growing for over a decade as The Project that I so vaguely allude to.

So, today was definitely made of elating solitude.

quite the contrary

2011-09-30T23:02:00.000-07:00

Though implicitly, all

I’ve shown, the past

three years, has been (and will be) thanks

to, honoring, and (in this ongoing

sense) for

you.

something (or someone) to cultivate

2011-09-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

authentic happiness without one’s own children

An elementary school teacher presumably cherishes children; likewise with a pediatrician or child psychologist. Choosing to not have any children of one’s own can be a valid life choice for persons who nonetheless cherish children. Contrary pressures from family, social presumptions about good lives, and dominance of reproductive economics in the market can be severe. Bravery may be required, especially for women, to stand for one’s ownmost life (an inner-directing basis for outer-directed life) when the ecology trains one to feel otherwise (an outer-directing basis for inner-directed life).

Children didn’t happen in my life, due to happenstance (being a child of my era), which I grew to realize, over my adult decades, was unwitting choice. This gradual realization caused me to look into this advent, which came to seem like a nonconscious deliberation over many years expressed in how lovely relationships went and how so many not-yets accumulated into my ownmost life so far. It’s an interesting story that I won’t try to capsulate now, except to say that I loved feminists who were adamant about their own preferences during a generational escape from so much chronic unhappiness in their suburban ’50s families, ’60s families, etc. And I loved women who already had their children (I surely got a good share of parenting experience over the decades!), and they were looking for anewal.

Anyway, as I pursued the topic apart from my own life, I was amazed to discover that many women choose not to have children and have truly happy lives. Indeed, many persons decide that, maybe “it’s just me, but…” not having their own children is their preferred route to an authentically happy life.

This posting prefaces a longer discussion about its subject which I expect to post soon as an expansion of this posting. I’ll later link from here to a Webpage discussion that expands on this further. (I’ll note that via a later “daynote.”)

This is an important issue for the topic of lifespan happiness: Some persons make the uncommon choice for the sake of their ownmost direction of life. It’s also a confessional issue for me: I’ve had a freedom of time and cost that is wholly congruent, I think, with my rather intense (lifelong) interest in the literature, research, and theories on child development and education. My earlier play with the topic betrays my deep interest in good individuation and prospects for fruitful happiness.

At heart, I’m a hedonist about high meaning. I’m for joyous, beautiful living—be it with children or without.

“you”

2011-09-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

This is a revised improvisation from Monday, 9.26, 9 pm or so.

I’m obviously at times alluding to “you” in this blog (and on Webpages), but only one person would know whom that could specifically be. Other readers are supposed to see a general writerly, textualist, literary issue represented. I’ll carry that theme to heights which a typical reader might not anticipate. What fun.

But there’s also a privacy that’s alive at another blog. This abstract fact serves my public interest in inner/outer differences I’ve recently expressed via Webpages linked from here. But the content of the inner complement is nobody else’s business. Yet, writing in light of that here (in a way that no one but you could discern) is an elating prospect.

However, the abstract point is useful, in two ways: Firstly, conceptual venturing about intimate life is one side of a living byway that belongs to each of us, in our private ways; so, portraying inner/outer differences here expresses something living for anyone (within bounds of public confession).

What might be generally said about individuality? What might be exemplified in narrated individuality or confession? These kinds of questions are implicit to all of Literature (if not philosophy and psychology, too).

Secondly, the ambiguity of ‘you’ is validly valuable here. Other readers are potential intimates, at least in the sense that intimacy belongs to each of us in our own way, our own life, yet as shared potential of presence (though here, only via text), such that conceptual excursion may confess things that our anonymity to each other makes easier, in a humanity of intimacy (so to speak).

What is truly loving?, for example. (Letting go, as well as letting be, are integral.) Such a question is as old as ethical thought. It’s integral to Literary sensibility (obviously) and psychological understanding (e.g., genuine happiness). How far with you, in anonymity, might I pursue this usefully and credibly? How genuinely might I anticipate you? (Or: whom is really anticipated? Whom am I becoming in you?) I’m not confessional because I need your validation. I’m endeavoring to share what I hope is useful. Yet, what is this wanting to be fruitful to the stranger intimately? What’s the nature of the boundary between credibility and incredibility, plausibility and implausibility, creativity and symptomology?

Good questions, no?, regardless of details from a life named factually.

The boundaries of textuality are deliciously fluid, sometimes deserving of lamentation.

Perhaps you, general reader (a Victorian idiom?), are a kindred far away I’d love to know.

Anyway, I’ve lived too long to bother hiding themes of intimacy we all live. I don’t mind seeming to make a fool of myself in public by being candid.

At the inner blog (or to your sensibility unknowable to me), you’re always the only other reader (or I write to you as if there’s no one else), because you want that, wrote me so—told me you’d accept my invitation—so, [t]here we are, in a liminality of text, like an allegory of human Time, since all that may remain between the dead and the living, the idealist and the realist, is text, which other kinds of tangibles are, too, in their own way: photographs, personal treasures, ….

circumspective living

2011-09-25T21:19:00.001-07:00

Freshly brewed french roast, turmeric almonds, and a little Beemster Classic Extra Aged Gouda (@ US$17/lb.) supplements my solitude.

Should I be concerned about the effectiveness of morning coffee as a mood enhancer? Does that make my emergent sense of exuberant self possession invalid? Many persons would choose fresh pastry or fruit with their coffee, but I get enough exhilaration without sugary things.

To wit: continuing elations, today on being an interplay, mirrorplay, whatever.

elations of solitude

2011-09-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

Suppose I had dissected all I’ve recently put online and organized it into a new set of thematics that would provide positive constraints (or generative, telic structure) for future writing in light of planned reading (a lengthy syllabus) that ensured fidelity to a well-formed sense of recently-past excursions.

Then, I get persistently enchanted with the oddness of my own creative process, which faces me with a sense of incredible extravagance that I think no one could enjoy, and I wonder why.

Yet, that ultimately matters little, as the validity of what I’m doing and where I am is clear to me, though representing that will take awhile.

Today, I’ve made 4 points or stories in a constellation of 10 and will finish the others (already named) soon, which I’ll note here as each becomes available, beginning today with the first 4.

saucy life

2011-09-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

Smart cuisine prevails in the north Berkeley area that’s the geocenter of my life, the so-called “Gourmet Ghetto,” which is arrayed today with white tents and traffic barriers for the “Spice of Life” festival under clear, warm skys (not hot) with cool breezes and happy people everywhere, all ages, all geopoints of origin. The scene would make a Parisian pointillist hungry. I think I’ll write about Sex, expansively and extensively, Eros without bounds, as I’ve been so long fascinated by the games of bodies, the mating mind of aspiring youth, idealizing an aesthos (my coining) of self-enhancing humanity, Deep Time echoing in boulevard strolls there partly to be seen “oblivious” to being seen.

I’ll write of our sexuality so intensely—Eros so elaborately—you’ll be amazed, I suppose (though I’m not interested in amazing you, rather in a full phenomenology of bodied atmospheres). I will capture the heart of Literature, psychalogy [sic], and “existential” philosophy in a height of all that can be said of somatic play.

But not today. Yet, the thought occurs to me as I’m witnessing the ambiance while eating a slice of Cheeseboard pizza (not a sexy moment, I know) before grocery shopping, after my Saturday coffee at Peet’s up the way, each time there still occupied with a few pages of Peggy Kamuf’s To Follow: the wake of Jacques Derrida because I only open her book for the few minutes of coffee. So, traversing her recollections is taking forever, fine. “To look him in the eyes was to see someone seeing you see, which sounds a bit dizzying,…” (72)

…and perhaps it was, but I would say rather that one had then the physical sensation of trembling in the awareness of being more-than-one to see. His gaze held yours, did not let it disappear into the merely seen or looked at of an object of perception. Wordlessly his eyes said: you are another, altogether other, looking now at me. This quality of the gaze was neither transfixing nor piercing, but…expansive and moving. It moved one into the open space where one’s own look does not return to itself and can never see itself.

—as if affirming a “blindness” (a very Derridean theme) in joys of disclosure.

Indeed for Jacques, writes Peggy, “the central trait of every self-portrait is blindness. The blind man or woman would thus be the supreme figure of the artist.”

We find each other in the dark with all our senses that absence of light may heighten. Entwining arms and legs, a metonym of woven selves (at best), serve listening and feeling expression that may move all the times of our lives into a singular geotrophy, lovely fabrications, and all elations.

“…[A] gaze or eyes that touched one as if they were fingers…,” figuring, implying sensibility embracing saucy darkness, I’d think, in love with all possible transposing beyond tangible geologies (e.g., literal gardens).

His great text on the sense of touch at the heart of the work of his friend Jean-Luc Nancy begins with just such an image[, sans my transposing,] in the form of a phrase that, he writes, invaded and touched him before he saw it coming: “When our eyes touch, is it day or is it night?” (Touching, 2)….He asks: “let’s see, can eyes manage to touch, first of all, to press together like lips?” (ibid.). He who pretends to ask that question would surely have known that, yes, they could—and they did.

I will mention one last trait about the immeasurable radius of Derrida’s radiance at the gatherings his work made happen….

Her phrasing recalls to me Heidegger’s rubric, during his “Conversation on a country path”: a “regioning of that which regions,” like a radiant gravity, starring some mind’s telic cohering, I say.

His taste for laughter never seemed to fail him,….and indeed in all his writings, laughter punctuates even the most serious discussions….a sustaining tone always running in the background….

From our backstage we wrote in the dark, we improvise to others’ need to believe in literality (without literarity) and lightness dimly touched by insight.

All of the public events with Jacques that I recall, including all the weekly seminars I attended in Paris or at UC Irvine, were visited by bursts of laughter, usually provoked by his own exuberant sense of wonderful absurdities and ironies or by his incomparable attention to the surprises of language. With each outburst, one sensed his immense joy in being alive to and with others.

believing in you

2011-09-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

When I stop to think about it, “believing in” is an odd phrase—or, at least, yet another phrase (or term) worth thought.

That’s why I’m so likely to put ordinary words or phrases in quote marks, readily calling that “Derridean” because I’ve been so influenced by a sensibility I associate with his work—not to claim that my association is itself appropriately or “really” Derridean. And I have special affection (deeply so, actually) for someone who would balk at turning proper last names into adjectives.

Quote marks are a compromise irt a very common act: Platonic, Austenian, etc.—or taking any word to heart: ‘of’ or ‘is,’ etc. Such a compromise would be at least about believing in a Literary/artistic sensibility that aptly takes a tongue-in-cheek stance toward believing in anyone—or anything—though I live so beyond nihilism.

OK, so two months have passed since I posted here, and you’ve lost “faith” in a reliability of this blog’s ongoingness, as if some ending came by my expressing, two months ago, fascination with beginning.

But you know the truth of the matter—and other readers face the ambiguity of whom “you” are, as if you are any reader, and idealized textual intimacy belongs to us in a way I’ll never know apart from finding you here in my own way.

Let’s pretend I’ll never know you except that I believe in your presence, as if a True Love somewhere far away could not break silence, yet must be reading because our belief in our bond is irrevocable (as if an inner blog continues to one who wants to be invited, inside every word here).

So it’s delicious to me that a beginning seems to have been “the end.” (Yea, telic endlessness in a null time.)

A moment expressing outrageous desire is followed by disappearance, when actually it was as if only beginning transposition from a 2-dimensional (lateral) world to depart “up” (or/and) “down.”

Derrida very well knew he was a precursor, in a sense of that which is late Heideggerian, the elder looking into an ever-emerging horizon.

Believing in our potential, believing in the future, implies primordial openness and entails prevalent yielding in light of a joy beholding the lived time (a self-orienting, self oriented finitude) of a relatively young life—friend, student, intimate—as if something millennial is possibly emerging within you.

At the UC, Irvine, memorial for Derrida, December 2004, Peggy Kamuf remarks on her 30 years of influence by him, including note that, after 1974,

…by telling you that my friendship for him never thereafter looked back, I confess as well my belief that neither did his for me. For that was the very nature of what was sealed and consigned: a belief in the friend, which was and remains the belief that thereafter, henceforth, désormais, he would always believe me, believe in me.

I feel that I was drawn into the best of myself, thanks to the advent of you—and loved you so defenselessly that I’m left dissolved into the opening of it all, as if standing on a high dive or a cliff nearly releasing myself into confidence I can fly over elating landscape.

note of an iterative glyphicist

2011-07-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned to you elsewhere (yes, I’ll write you here, too), the postings of my various blogs (axially, this one) and web pages are improvisational pieces (the web pages relatively unimprovised) in a developing Project which will lead to all being thematically disassembled into pieces figuring into a large-scale work. (I didn’t put the matter quite so succinctly elsewhere). Current little ventures are provisional pieces, trOpical genes in a genealogy.

So, all kinds of approaches could be taken to the beginning of such a hybrid. Indeed, as most large-scale works probably do their “Introduction” after the large share of the main work is finished, the issue of how the beginning should go is very different from an issue of how to begin the generation of the main work (which is a matter of conceptual organization, influences, presentational structure, writing schedule, etc.).

Beginning as such has been an important topic in literary philosophy (Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and others). Derrida’s main translator, Peggy Kamuf, honors this matter in a lecture (included in To Follow) about the beginnings of Derrida’s various works, a different matter from the theme of beginning in Derrida’s works (though Derrida often has both matters in mind: beginning a work with the issue of beginning in mind, even when the opening theme isn't about beginning as such—which is Kamuf’s interest). She begins her lecture, “Coming to the beginning,” by imagining Derrida beginning to write something:

Let us imagine him: he sits down before a keyboard, stretches his hands over the keys, and, after a slight hesitation, begins to strike them very quickly. Other than the noise of keys being struck, there is silence and no one else is nearby. There is nothing happening in the room with the exception of this movement of fingers above the little plastic cubes each bearing some kind of mark….So let us start again at the beginning, the beginnings….

She cites a few opening lines, then notes:

These are all incipits [beginnings] that begin only by echoing “someone” who is unnamed and unnameable, without name or face,….Offstage or with what is called in French a voix-off (voiceover), he or she calls forth the first words that appear on the page or screen, which would thus come along in second place to awaken the impression of what the other has let be heard but without sound or sign. Before any sign, there is a speaking or saying that comes forward, advances, and takes place, thereby giving place and giving rise to the beginning of writing.

this is your life

2011-07-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

November, 2009, my long-alienated partner of 24 years, Janna (a psychotherapist)—from whom I’d been more or less separated for 15 months—killed herself soon after discovering I’d fallen in love the year before with a woman in my department. I expect one would react like “You must be joking”: Psychotherapists are the persons who prevent suicides. Janna had a veritable village in San Francisco of persons who loved her, including professional colleagues who were dear friends—and me.

Even though we remained family to each other in the few years before her act, she gave me no advance sign that her despairs (which I knew intimately) were overtaking her. I was so shocked by her sister’s email to everyone on Janna’s contact list that my first reaction was anger that Janna hadn’t let me know she was overtaken. I expressed my anger in a blog, including a photo of one of her clients who’d recently stopped chemotherapy, as if that was Janna surrendering to her empathy (which was one of Janna’s issues: difficulty bearing so much of others’ suffering she couldn’t dissolve).

I received a long letter from Janna via snailmail two days later. She had not let anyone know of her plan, which wasn’t sudden but deliberately hidden for months.

In retrospect—but over a year later—I realized that I might have seen it coming. It was not about us, she insisted. Janna’s learning of—call her Paula—wasn’t mentioned in her letter. The topic had only come up in conversation, due to offhand comments from a mutual friend. [My Event happened the fall of 2008—no “mid-life crisis,” just luscious inspiration and fun. Janna and I had been non-partners, but still family, since 2006.] For several years, our separating lives had seemed to be good for each of us (after two decades). We still loved doing things together.

However, there were points of evidence I might have kept in mind that might have gelled presciently. Janna’s letter intimated as much (though she was occupied with her own despairs, intent on absolving me and everyone else of responsbility). I could have been more sensitive to her immersion in her practice, 2006 onward (giving less and less time to her own needs, evidently), as if—now it dawns—she was letting herself merge with their lives (which she knew better than to do, I presumed). She was not terminally ill physically. My life was not the reason for Janna ending her life. She was haunted; she became a therapist in light of dealing with chronic issues from her youth (including anorexia, then bulimia—surface syndromes of deeper issues). The fair story isn’t short.

But hindsight is a cruel shadow. Couples drift apart, not fully understanding why, as they pursue the differing validities that drew them apart. Abstraction about it is partly compensatory, I recognize. But we’re all unwitting players in being human: New parts of oneself emerge in relationships, without intrinsic guidance for “Us”—or older parts (once younger, thus potentially prevailing newly) or just other parts of oneself emerge into already-diverging courses of shared lives that often fail to find new, durable ways to continue sharing most of their time and interests and plans with each other.

Anyway, we reach for explanatory patterns that may dissolve the shadows. We want to believe our specialness is irreplaceable—or that our capabilities can match any challenge; then discover how commonly that belief turns out to be true for those who moved on, cherished their vulnerability (found enough self compassion), or did not.

I was a teenage tri-psychal

2011-06-27T20:09:00.001-07:00

Literature, philosophy, and psychology is the sequence of domains that bridged late high school (philosophy in “English Seminar”) and college years (philosophy and psychology, double major). Then I got “politicized,” as they say (and sociologized, which I regret), which prevailed for graduate school and later.

But time has taught me that I belong to a nexus of literature, philosophy, and psychology. The dispositions of the 19 year-old have been the chord evidently integral to who I am. I went through decades outwardly sociopolitical but inwardly psychaliterary (better, to me, than ‘psycholiterary’). Even grad school in philosophy included regular involvement with the Creative Writing Program, as well as with Psychology. My unwieldy library certifies the point for succeeding decades.

Until a few years ago, the rubric “literary psychology” didn’t occur to me. In my early 20s, I sought to create a new domain called “literary anthropology,” but I knew I was being eccentric and shelved the matter. Now “litarary Darwinism” is a recognized area of literary studies.

I place myself in an intersection of streams: psychology, philosophy, and literature (a reversal of the sequence, like a homecoming). I’m living in a learning nexus of philosophy, psychology, and literature. I’m a literary philosophical psychologist—a psychaliterary philosopher, a philopsychal literary writer.

can we talk?

2011-06-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

What’s a writer to do when reality’s more interesting than imagination, but a right to privacy exists for the inspiring, strange, or culpable beings passing through one’s life—like a psychotherapist stuck with knowledge of a real extraterrestrial?

No, I wouldn’t write about that.

was it something I said ?

2011-06-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

When I see a candid photo of myself (a Department event, not having known I was being pic’ed), I know that the outward twerp hides me, as I’m inwardly not him (though I’m a creature of bad physical breeding).

Look, I’ve got decent aesthetic sensibility: I see that he doesn’t have a cute face (anymore—though his little smile can be cute).

I’m inwardly seen firstly through my eyes (after taking off the awfully thick lenses): aging pretty well. Inwardly, you’ve met me secondly (or firstly) only here.

My twerpy oral voice would have manly resonance if I talked alot.

Anyway, I have a mind that’s singular, if a bit weird in its (my) sense of humor.

His unsolicitous face protects him from others’ ordinary fusion of outer and inner (“Stay away!”) and avoids my unwitting confusion (I love ‘unwitting’) of another’s unusual interest in me, as such interest must be about something I said.

Take me as I am or leave. I can’t surrender what life’s done to keep me laughing. For example, impersonating (fictioning) forlorn love to a “humorless” degree that might scare the hair off a princess is fun.

But hey, there’s no loss in learning what love has been in some lives by imagining a validity of It All in longing.

O-kay, I’m evil—well, no, a little daemonic.

Ha, after I one day show how all my conceptions of Better Living Through A Garden gel, I’ll die laughing (not that I’m the type who’d intend to ever die—never).

Isn’t it hilarious that, before T.S. Eliot titled his great poem “The Wasteland,” he wanted to title it “He Do The Police In Different Voices”?

It’s not my fault I have several heads. Though philosophical acuity is a wonderful thing (Don’t we agree), so too an intimacy of flourishing that’s erotic.

You’ll readily grant great appeal to a synergy of elation, infatuation, and inspiration (which isn’t manic—I’m never manic, just possessed on occasion by Woody Allen’s youth—when the voice was fresh). So, trust that high claims about conceptual gardening advance the Eros (which, you might recall from an earlier discussion, C.S. Peirce associates with the appeal of science—love that).

Yes, psychal highness is a fine affair—good for philosophy, good for joyous, beautiful living—through which I would enrapt you with the body I “have” (though embodiment is our way of being, not an accoutrement—notwithstanding The Market’s dependence otherwise). I would enwrap us as I’m given, into a slow making of love that lasts forever (given that you won’t die, too—or first—otherwise as textual trace).

“My complex subject is how love makes novels, how novels make love, how faith makes art, how art makes faith,” writes R.M. Polhemus, beginning Erotic Faith: being in love from Jane Austen to D.H. Lawrence.

Voices play to weave novel lives, whose threads (worn tropes) are narrating lines (threads speak for themselves), anticipating and recalling to amuse, one’s love.

aura of the hydra-headed wise guy

2011-06-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

Near the beginning of chapter 1 of To Follow: the wake of Jacques Derrida (2010), Peggy Kamuf notes “...the dialogic or polylogic form of texts published under Derrida’s name alone,” i.e., bearing a pretense of unifiability (or implicit monology) due to a singularity of the author (presuming a singularity of authorship in being “Derrida”), though there’s “plurivocality in Derrida’s thought,” just as one might expect of a richly imaginative novelist. The singularity of Derrida (the living writer, now long dead) may be trivial relative to the plural interpsychality of the writing (the living written) in light of inestimable influence (a wake of life, manifold Trace) originally.

But the singularity is not trivial as existing life, trivial only for conceptual tourism that would keep philosophy mirroring one’s presumptions. (One book by Derrida is titled Whose Afraid of Philosophy?, playing on the title of the famous Edward Albee play, I suppose.) The singularity of Derrida’s originality may be primordially plural, proximally interpsychal, yet intrapsychally plural at heart; but not thusly so: The intrapsychality isn’t a mere gestalt of its interpsychality; the intrapsychality isn’t translatable or reducible to an interpsychality of the Trace (the wake of a life’s time). Instead, the plural psychality belongs to Derrida singularly, such that any cohering conception of interpsychality derives from the intrapsychality so conceiving that (which only Derrida might have done—but would not do, as a matter of principle), a cohering otherwise being merely another’s proffered conception (by a theorist, a philosophical biographer, etc.) of singularity imputed.

I look forward to seeing what Timothy Clark does in The Poetics of Singularity: the counter-culturalist turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and the later Gadamer (2005) one of these days.

playhouse notes

2011-05-30T20:16:00.001-07:00

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.

a Habermasian sense of cultural evolution

2011-05-13T17:54:00.001-07:00

I do want to get away from Habermasian issues, but I’m so good at it, I easily fall into trying to appropriate his thinking into my own Project.

I don’t wish to invite students of Habermas’s work into my Project, so the “after Habermas” blog is cut off from linking to this blog or my website. But I’m not against their interest in my non-Habermasian work, just not promoting it.

However, I am now promoting their interest in my recent Habermas blog, because I’ve been inspired to do a major Habermasian posting to the group, which—I told them (200+ academic subscribers to [mostly] my views, the past 10 years)—I’ve turned into a posting for the blog.

Now, back to literary living or whatever.

idealizing a protean intrapsychality Of being in Time

2011-05-08T21:18:00.001-07:00

part 3 of 3.

appropriative thinking

2011-05-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

part 2 of 3.

a sense of manifold selfidentity alive through stable character

2011-05-07T21:16:00.000-07:00

part 1 of 3.

booknote

2011-05-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

I looked forward to receiving today’s book order via shipping to my department, but the pleasure of seeing Harold Bloom’s final book was special, even moving, because the book, he says, is his last (of tens). Old Harold has a renown in late 20th C academic literary studies comparable to Samuel Johnson in his era. He’s obsessed with Literature (he says at the beginning of his new book). For years, photos on book jackets show his white hair as disheveled as someone just out of bed, like Einstein or Mark Twain.

His name is engraved on the book jacket cover in larger font than the title of the book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. His “Praeludium” begins

When I began writing this book,….My model was to be Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)….Traces of Burton’s marvelous madness abide in this book….Burton’s melancholy emanated from his fantastic learning: he wrote to cure his own learnedness….

Bloom’s first chapter is titled “Literary Love.” “When I was very young, freedom beckoned through the poets I first loved: Hart Crane, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, John Milton, and above all William Shakespeare….” | May 20 update: Bloom’s book is extensively featured in this week’s New York Times Book Review.

Also received today is neuroscientist David J. Linden’s new The Compass of Pleasure: how our brains make orgasm, exercise, generosity, learning, [and other things] feel so good. I’m interested in the evolutionary roots of motivation, as it relates to enaction, aspiration, individuation, etc.

I received Enaction: toward a new paradigm for cognitive science (MIT Press, 2011). Believe it or not, my enactional orientation to human development is many years old; so, I’m glad to see the notion formally explored.

I received J. Hillis Miller’s On Literature, which expresses a global approach to Literature, especially relative to his close friend Jacques Derrida.

Lastly, I received Jacques Derrida’s Parages (which means something like ‘equals in dignity’), a gathering of key essays of his that were previously only available in separate locations. I have a complete collection of Derrida-in-translation.

So there he was in a balmy oasis with only the intimacy of those books weaving into each other….

Actually, their potential intimacy is a projective part of a net spanning a couple of seasons with others I thought I’d take into myself months ago, like missed appointments I manage to not be blamed for, yet so many ventures I “can’t wait” to inhabit, but do (not admiring my restraint).

sundaynote

2011-05-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

The weekend was so good: gorgeous weather, a new desk chair (the old one fell apart after 20 years), and the writing I’m offering tonight, done Friday through today and posted as having been done over these 3 days.

transpersonal differencing

2011-05-01T23:12:00.001-07:00

The title is strange, but it makes sense in light of what else I’ve written this weekend. And this is easy reading, an expression of practicality in the series of pieces, yet also a preface to upcoming work.

a sense of Self / [inter]personal difference

2011-05-01T22:32:00.001-07:00

Though this isn’t difficult to read (relatively speaking), it was one of the more difficult pieces I’ve ever done, because it’s so important to me. Doing this was the general plan of recent days, but earlier, unplanned work this weekend seemed importantly preliminary to this. I suppose the plan was implicitly all of what led to this discussion.

differencing: being variably a part

2011-04-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

This is analytically tedious, the first few paragraphs, but it apparently had to be done for the non-tedious discussions which follow, since I started as a felt like starting and went on as I felt like going on: into an analysis of action resonant (to my mind) with the ironical condition of indwelling (previous post).

indwelling

2011-04-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

Being in the world contains the mind appreciating itself as being in the world (containing a conception of its conceiving). Is psychality ironical or what?

thursdaynote — part 2

2011-04-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

part 1: a morning of perspective

It’s important to have balanced attitude toward the theater of world affairs. Is it my fault I get infatuated with Gail? Ms. Collins used to be the NYTimes Editorial Page Editor. One only achieves that royal position if one has a great nose for narrative called “news.”

part 2: an evening of conceptual art

Julie Cloutier leaves pebble portraits around S.F. She finds a pebble, does a drawing of it, then places the drawing exactly where she found the pebble. Also, there is a map of the locations. It’s uncertain whether any of the drawings will be at those locations at a later time.

rock of ages

2011-04-24T20:27:00.001-07:00

for all the jazz of our Time.

showing growth, growing the show

2011-04-24T20:20:00.000-07:00

notes on storial sensibility and developmental interest.

an horizonal beauty

2011-04-19T09:40:00.001-07:00

Should you think (in the sense of affectation that means: In case you do so think) that I’m lost to some idiosyncratic way of mind, look at an account of Peggy Kamuf’s mourning of her dear friend Jacques Derrida, which may be about a sense of beauty on each side of mourning, which would be a principle of hope on the other side of lost potential. “Another name for this special kind of receptive vigilance—without which there would be no surprise— is ‘reading.’ Only when one approaches a text as an unknown other can one be surprised by it. To encounter the other, therefore, is to be on the watch for surprising encounters that can only take place when one encounters the other as text.”

among evolving characters

2011-04-17T19:47:00.001-07:00

Anymore, the ultimate condition of philosophy as conceptual design is in a sense poetic.

once upon a time

2011-04-16T18:34:00.001-07:00

This is an entrancement.

about psychological exploration

2011-04-15T16:38:00.001-07:00

Psychological reflectivity as conceptual prospecting is not intended to be philosophically pretentious.

abstract flesh

2011-04-15T15:48:00.001-07:00

Fresh from a good night’s sleep and having lots of time ahead of me for the day, I feel a little thrill sitting with my pages. I tend to be elated by solitude when I want to write (especially in light of excellent coffee).

about lifeworldliness

2011-04-13T14:51:00.001-07:00

I’m ambivalent about getting into a new, long discussion at “my” Habermas group, but I’ve responded to a subscriber, which has led to me responding to 2 subscribers, and I’ve gotten more formal about it today, which I’ll indicate in a moment.

My history of involvement with the group would be incomprehensible to most others. How far I am away from all that feels impossible to represent, yet I appreciate others’ interest in Habermas immensely and intend to return to all that someday.

So, my social-theoretical identity hasn’t died. He’s just become a distant kindred I’m not currently influenced by. But writing to a Habermasian view (from a Habermasian perspective) is like riding a bicycle.

frametime

2011-04-10T20:13:00.001-07:00

an excursion on evocative enframing.

phenomenality

2011-04-10T18:48:00.001-07:00

I hope this can be considered a good way to understand phenomenology as primarily existential.

a cohering

2011-04-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

a possibly-overwhelming appeal
of a conceptual nexus—no: comprehensiveness—implicated
in something, anything
of “the” world, one’s world
affairs—World
Affairs!—so many kinds of energies
forming so many kinds of flows
scenes
assemblages
personalities
species of idea
possibilities of design
Eros and Psyche possessing
conversations, unwittingly
improvised odysseys
pensive stillness, here: one more
thing to say
then another

fridaynote

2011-04-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

I did some revision to the second half of “playing for keeps,” which makes it more complementary to “a validating frame of mind,” which has been honed alot. There’s now much more cogency to the road.

I say more about that elsewhere, to you. (I still can’t only write you privately.) I want to add more there today that’s less academic.

Maybe you have new blogwork to appreciate.

I hope you had an unusually pleasant day.

a validating frame of mind

2011-03-20T21:48:00.001-07:00

One should not feel aversion to the notion of phenomenology. It’s not at heart about conceptual analysis, rather—to my mind—it’s educive translation.

playing for keeps

2011-03-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

A short posting last night here became a long posting today which is now elsewhere longer, better, and truer, in a sense.

swimming notes

2011-03-17T19:19:00.001-07:00

I occasionally emphasize my obsession with news because the vague reminder is the most I make time to do online, to remind myself that writing of tragedy could consume me. I’m often embarrassed to seem oblivious.

But the reality is opposite: I strive to keep on track with what I can do, which happens to now be so many details of a writing project (sensitive to happy happenstances) that may seem to have no direction.

But the reality is opposite. I’m no Beckett willfully, anti-nihilistically going on. I’m in love with life, partly in honor of what life might have been for those who never had, or lost, chances. It’s not a self serving ethic. (I dislike even mentioning it.)

I’ve been near death and survived. I know that my wish for others, should I be dying, is that they live as fully as they can. That’s no play to seem sentimental or precious. It’s none of your business that I cry easily when confronted by stories of so much tragedy.

Here’s a photo. Can words do it justice? A woman kneels outdoors, holding onto just fingers reaching out of mud. The caption says “Yoshie Murakami cries out as she holds onto the hands of her dead mother still buried beneath the rubble where her home once stood….”

We would stop to hold her (comfort her grief), if we had the chance. We would stay with her awhile, though her grief would have a life of its own longer than we can stay. One learns to move on. We all can only move on.

Here: Have some hopeful news in an unrelated venue: Private “Satellites Offer New Window Into Documenting, Preventing Genocide.”

Here: Help motivate an aging philosopher to develop a languishing, undeveloped blog: “humanistic union,” expressing desire to do things beyond abstractions of the critical spirit, having no single point on the horizon toward where to swim. Just begin, anywhere, by living well, as some so well do. (Quote yourself, if that feels apt.)

I seem to retire into art. But the reality is exactly that: How so much might tenably cohere in textual co-hearing, step by step—albeit, for my part (at my age), in a way that pleases my sensibility, a long and high view.

sweet transgression

2011-03-13T20:25:00.001-07:00

To traverse a hill, begin at some lowland and go upward.

uphill, downhill—highland, midland

2011-03-06T21:27:00.001-08:00

8:06 pm

OK, the evening’s not over yet. I’ve had a productive weekend, but you’ve heard that one before: It doesn’t bear fruit, such productiveness.

“The fruit spent so much time setting up the pieces of the game that there was no time left to play. Maybe he finished. We left him to his designs.”

Yes, I finished (in a manner of speaking). But now I have to take a walk—in the rain which will cease its weekend reign in the upcoming days we have to go to the office where we may be thankful for little breaks.

So, ummm, if God is Good luck, then right now God is dead.

9:20 pm

—which was a frivolous comment from someone who long ago (and deeply) took to heart the issues of “Being”—which wouldn’t help much in an office, given the character of that. It also awards no control over the rain. But it provides much gratitude for the fact that a little rain is the worst of my complaints.

However, an interesting point about practical inefficacy of admirable thinking might pertain to academic life altogether which lacks the comfortably good sense to stay ensconced in an ivory tower, relative to your average corporate office—an interesting reality, even fascinating for awhile: to fully inhabit all manner of Differences.

It wouldn’t have to be in any way elitist, just as ethnography isn’t as such elitist. How else is one to understand Differences other than by living them?—maybe living them so effectively that there seems to others to be little notable difference altogether, like being accepted as a tribal native, no extraterrestrial at all—except for our academic’s occasional bursts of intolerance for chronically slacker relations s/he has no “discretionary authority” to mentor, save by—let’s call it—a realism of “provocative therapy” (which, in such a setting, would require accepting the disciplinary consequences of appearing to not know what one is doing—thereby playing the character that others need in order for them to feel comfortable with their presumptions).

I surmise—just doing fiction there. But it’s good entertainment. The point of the little simulation above is to wonder about living a Difference fully. It could be amazing—provided one doesn’t get stuck there, due to a recession and a sparse market for academic attitude.

circus note

2011-02-22T08:23:00.000-08:00

From The New York Times today, the end of “A Romp…,” by Dennis Overbye:

Some scientists say we won’t really understand life until we can make it ourselves.

On the last day of the conference, J. Craig Venter, the genome decoding entrepreneur and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, described his adventures trying to create an organism with a computer for a parent.

Using mail-order snippets of DNA, Dr. Venter and his colleagues stitched together the million-letter genetic code of a bacterium of a goat parasite last year and inserted it into another bacterium’s cell, where it took over, churning out blue-stained copies of itself. Dr. Venter advertised his genome as the wave of future migration to the stars. Send a kit of chemicals and a digitized genome across space.

“We’ll create panspermia if it didn’t already exist,” he said.

The new genome included what Dr. Venter called a watermark. Along with the names of the researchers were three quotations, from the author James Joyce; Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the building of the atomic bomb; and the Caltech physicist Richard Feynman: “What I cannot build, I do not understand.”

When the news came out, last year, Dr. Venter said, the James Joyce estate called up and threatened to sue, claiming that Joyce’s copyright had been violated. To date there has been no lawsuit.

Then Caltech called up and complained that Dr. Venter’s genome was misquoting Feynman. The institute sent a photograph of an old blackboard on which Feynman had written, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

And so his genome is now in the process of acquiring its first, non-Darwinian mutation.

touch

2011-02-21T23:15:00.000-08:00

A narrative began mid-story—or a story began as ending—better living through rebirth in context; and a circus brought to touch a bi-cycle of lives were altogether removed to leave our narrator in a short pathos of too many titles in his dreams, dismissed through idle play with a keyword, as if cohering axis, troping uncounted possibilities for relationship.

Part of my thousands of books surround my bed, as if they might inhabit me during sleep. Hundreds of titles weave into databases of notes and themes. An idle moment of curiosity today caused me to search ‘touch,’ which turns up in the title of only three books, a disappointment. Is that trivial?

What does it say of me across the decades, those three I brought to lay with me (so far neglected)? What kind of pattern in the patternless pointillism of so many titles could that be?

an abridged sense of ‘touch’ (somewhat relative to The Unabridged)

getting courtesies out of the way: the state or fact of being in contact or communication [bridging]

a method of inducing someone to buy or to accept a deal [covert misbridging]

the playing of an instrument (as a friend or confidante) with one’s sensibility [abridging by as if bridging]

a near approach : a close call [being seen, in all events, to have a deeply good heart]

a light stroke of wit or satire

a light or delicate stroke in creating or improving an artistic composition

characteristic or distinguishing trait or quality

mental or moral sensitiveness, responsiveness, or tact...

a visible effect

a light gesture of fingers or words

the act of taking to heart a touchstone

characteristic skill of an artist in the manipulation of her materials

a brief mention (as: selected and revised meanings of ‘touch’)

a way of beginning again

a flash of feeling

a transient emotion

a coincidental threefold

I have The Touchstone of Life by biophysicist W.R. Lowenstein, who describes life (according to Amazon.com—I cheat here to quickly touch on each book) as a circus: “Flowing in from the cosmos, information loops back onto itself to produce the circular information complex we call Life.... To those who are inside the Circus [Lowenstein is quoted to say], it will always seem the greatest show on Earth, though I can't speak for the One who is outside it.” “One” there might be a Deist notion or anticipation of They who Await Out There.

I have On Touching—Jean-luc Nancy by J. Derrida, which vines a philosophy of touch, “a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body),” says the back cover. The cover might have better said “a veritable encyclopedia,” since there is a real book (while the idea of a wikipedia of the body could get wicked).

Peggy Kamuf (Derrida translator and scholar) says “The translation of On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy is a momentous event, for this is one of the greatest, most important works in Derrida’s immense oeuvre. It undertakes nothing less than a deconstruction of the phenomenological principle of principles, intuitionism, and the touchstone experience called touching. In a circulation through the history of philosophy since Aristotle up to the work of his contemporary and beloved friend Jean-Luc Nancy, the epochal thinker of touch, this book comes from and goes to the very heart of Derrida’s thought.”

Deeply touching might be a circulation up to a beloved expressing the heart of one’s thought.

Thirdly, if you must know, I have Touching fire: erotic writings by women, edited by several. I’ve not read it (Nancy Friday was fun, years ago.) Such a book is one of many in my legacy of philosophical interest in embodiment (from Merleau-Ponty through philosophical psychology generally to Mark Johnson, and many other recent theorists of embodiment, especially feminist), also as a legacy of literary-psychological interest (wanting a post-psychoanalytic ethic of wholly being): What is sought in erotic writing? However badly one ventures to capture the Eros of one’s Psyche or conversely (Greek mythical complements), the desire to capture all aspects of human energies is integral to our being—and even doing so badly is interesting, clinically at least.

Indeed, so much can be interesting that it gets rather stunning—dear as headlight: Aletheia swaying.

days go by.3

2011-02-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

Ironically, I’m obsessed with the news each day, yet don’t let that distract me from a venture that actually resulted, in part, from decades of obsession with the news—which, by the way, dissolved any dependence on notions that a past has clearly-causal efficacy (contrary to persons still, in effect, living in Cold War thinking), as if conceptions of history can well serve (not) understanding the emergent, evolving present out of evolving Time—though of course planetary life has inestimably definite structures and dynamics, but these are evolving in generative interplays (and mirrorplays) also evolving, just as a tangible organism has definite structure, yet thereby unpredictable plasticity.

So, the news is the news. Track it diligently enough, and you may be confident of what the narrative of our evolving is all—is all—about. But that won’t give you mastery of the future (which the gods were supposed to provide, then science).

Every day emerges from itself, not from the models that estimate its ultimately ruleless game (anyway, more fascinating in unpredictability).

A group of idiots can change the tone of an era, but tone is so much less than tapestry, which can prevail such that the effect of idiots is forgotten through a cumulative, though elusive, intelligence of the tapestry. As if suddenly, perpendicular to all presumption, an era dissolves into emerging netweaves of events, whose inter/mirrorplaying profusions seem unprecedented, if not impossible.

In retrospect, an Event might have been predictable. But it wasn’t predicted, even barely anticipated.

humility of a venture

2011-02-20T20:30:00.001-08:00

Originally communal idealization in a pantheon of gods (which became humanistic idealization in God) wasn’t at heart an expression of implicitly given selfidentity (not a mirrorvanity of proffered perfection), but a venture of learning—adventuring self-formative advancement (which became “progress,” which was mapped back into nature as “evolutionary”— which, by the way, ecological natural selection, as such, is not)—progressivity that would (one hoped) enrich sensibility (beyond estate!) into/unto the richest conceivable senses of sensibility—broad, deep, high sense—and educe inhabitation by found heights.

One’s belief in human perfectibility at least promoted development and cultural evolution, even though the horizon always receded.

Perfection isn’t possible, but innocence is generative.

Accordingly, I don’t consider my upcoming narrative excursions as self expression, but as presentation—renderings of venturings, reporting on exploratory inhabitation—partial reports on, so to speak, Ontogenic indwelling far away.

Laugh. I’ll laugh with you.

loving to make an academic issue

2011-02-20T19:50:00.000-08:00

“The” current issue for me is literary psychological inquiry.

That isn’t the same as saying: “I’m currently interested in literary psychological inquiry.“ Yes, I’m interested in that (have been “forever”), but these days I’m seeing the interest especially in a large-scale context of philosophical interest that my literary-psychlological interests (call it, for short, LP interests) didn’t imply years ago. I’m now moving into a focus on LP inquiry that’s part of the larger-scale interest (or—choose your favorite cliché of mine—the larger-scale venturing, journeying, seafaring, vining, or pathmaking), which includes my LP interests as issue.

An issue commonly may be a problem (seeking resolution) as well as an interest (wanting fulfillment or enjoyment). “The” issue isn’t simply how LP interests elusively relate to a givenness (e.g., how did it all autobiographically gain philosophical appeal?; what exactly now is existentially gained by philosophically inspirational efficacy?)—in any case, a sense of dilemma as well as desired mystery. The issue is to clarify a troubled desire, like aching to see the view from atop a peak which no one knows the way to (as far as I know) “What peak?” must be resolved first, in order to know what one’s asking of possible others.

“Have you heard of anyone who’s been there?”

“Where?”

“To the place where....”

“I don’t make sense of your interest, sorry.”

What is the sense of “literary psychological inquiry” (promise in the nebulous phrase) as literary psychological inquiry (promise in the nebulous domain of inquiry)? Presumably the nebulous kind of inquiry dissolves into a landscape of kindred interests and inquiries (so ‘the’ in “‘The’ current issue...” is definitely indefinite).

Naming an issue is a proximal step into godknows what. But whatever, it shouldn’t be idiosyncratic (for a reader’s sake). Inevitably, though, it’s a venture which must be individualized (because any person expresses a nebulously particular background). One hopes (can’t expect) to be useful for someone (if not exemplary, i.e., useful for many).

An odyssey might not be useful for others, though amply worthwhile for the sojourner, as in a personal education (gaining sophistication that others might already presume) or a therapeutic project. Sharing that might offer some good example for others, even when far from exemplary (e.g., a narrative of error and tribulation that steers others away from a path). That would be a rather negative value (like learning about dangers). Positive value—generative value, good potential, good promise of fruitfulness—may best belong to the venture itself (i.e., not to its instancing a given concept of positive value, generativity, etc) because explorations are at best no reiteration. They may be at best instancing a new kind of fruitfulness, not by design (you can’t will originality), but by the high individuality of the pathmaking itself, which is shown by milestones of a domain, whether poetry (Rilkean) or science (Hawkian)—or conceptual design (which becomes identified with its designer: Aristotelian, Jungian, Derridean, etc).

High individuality as such may be the greatest mystery (short of “Where Are They?,” re: any real gods). But what can be the “as such” of primordially-diverse differences (individualities) of the “Same” species? What are we, such differencing: paradoxically the same in differentiating, ironically our identity-in-difference, eerily seeming to be a different person today than yesterday, numinously channeling archetypes manifoldly, gems, spheres, gardens, topologies?

That’s not mere rhetoric: The boundaries of a journey that gets somewhere must exist, yet the boundaries of the landscape might be transformed by the journeying (not like ruining a land, but by enriching its nature—which was Heidegger’s venture late in life, in terms sometimes of a “topology of Being” that was at heart a conceptual poiesis—an improvisation on peaks—of his era).

It’s good to acknowledge boundaries—yet also interesting to make that thematic (which may eventually dissolve them in emergences of new ones—transforming as manifold emerging born perpendicularly, so to speak, as 3-space is transformed by time). Beyond extending given boundaries in lifelong learning—beyond transgressing given boundaries which can be critically important—transcending boundaries can be nontrivially creative, if not truly original.

Transposing a notion of kindredness, from what we (persons) may have to what domains have, can be very fruitful, for those who are interested. I associate this kind of interest with what’s especially conceptual, and I defensively stand (in a world of idle curiosities) for the potential merit of persisting in a conceptual venture.

What’s the nature of any notion of kindredness? Is that an essentially “logical” point?—“ontological” point? Does conceptuality reduce to issues of “natural” kinds due to the evolutionary character of minds? Or has our evolutionarity evinced its own nature (without anymore need of metaphysicalist ideology)? Do not realists in mathematics have to take seriously a question like “Where are They?”?

I love conceptual adventuring. I don’t mind being more or less alone in this…. Well, I’m far from wholly alone: There’s Susan Carey’s The Origin of Concepts, 2009 (psychological theory); Denis Mareschal et al., The Making of Human Concepts, 2010 (metaevolutionary theory); various recent philosophical works on conceptuality as such, which is intrinsic to philosophy as such, as well as being recently topical (at issue); and various ventures by the various domains of the humanities to conceptualize the integral/intrinsic character of their own endeavors—altogether an elating mix of character issues.

A mind issues as the child. An era issues from Time.

But I’m not seeking to love, going in, with any pretense of comprehensive conception. Rather, what I’ll do, up the road, is partial, stylized—biased by other relatively-near-term interests of mind—which are my conceptual issues, yet not like finding a story (doing autobiography)—but not exactly being “theoretical,” as conceptualizing a writer’s work as such (allowing for an author to become, in a sense, a genre unto herself or himself, which is done commonly; e.g., “Proustian” or “Derridean”—not to here give favor to being “French,” by the way) is not exactly a theory of art form (let alone being French). Let there be profusion of confusion in a fission that may flower into some synergy of topogenically weaving branches.

And there may be some virtue in long sentences as metonyms of thinking itself (not to veil lack of insight with obtusity—?).

The conceptual interest (as kind of interest), to my mind, becomes indeed philosophical (by now: needless to say). Marrying that to conceptualizing artists’ work may have philosophical merit for generally better understanding the genre(s) that happened to be integral to his/her career, even good for understanding domains as such (a kind of speciation?)—which is different, I would argue, from gaining a theory of their genre (or genres generally or domains as such), since theory commonly pertains to generalizable or universal features of something that is, in principle, translatable into methodic inquiry. Nevertheless, interdomainal understanding may be primordially fruitful—what John Briggs (Prof. of English) figured years ago as a “fire in the crucible” (talk about “love” of things).

Maybe what I want to do can be transposed into theory, methodically understood (i.e., as formal conception prevailing on evidentiary inquiry); but I’m not thinking of that presently by intimating conceptual loves.

Coming downhill, so to speak: My own sense of psychological inquiry doesn’t evidently imply anything like a known artist’s lifework. But thinking analogously about art seems pertinent: Psychological inquiry is intrinsically worthwhile.

That’s not a trivial point, given that many persons aren’t comfortable with psychological inquiry, so pursuit of a psychological path into a philosophically LP venture can isolate the inquirer, to say the least (not to entertain getting oral vegetables thrown at me).

Philosophical interest is suspect to many persons (coincidently, this month a new book on Socrates drinking hemlock appeared—but I’m not worried about my own isolation in my department, though this kind of issue is very real in functionalistic organizations). The conceptual oddball produces anxiety because inquiry can be too self-implicative. One might not be able to make sense of the other (my issues) without thinking about themselves in ways they don’t want to do. (E.g., in some quarters, questioning someone’s intentions is a way of learning, not an indictment.)

So, The Other’s (my) issue has to be dismissed, typically with a courteously vacuous reason like “I just don’t have time for that” or “I’m just not a psychological kind of person” or “It’s too academic.”

Whatever. In some quarters, persons are intrinsically curious and love to make time together for inquirial venturing—which tends to keep us oddballs near a campus (thank you: not known out there as a planetary netweave, green world, distributed mindal arcadia—yea, EarthMind—we can be through text).

leaving the stage to rethink a theater

2011-02-12T17:36:00.000-08:00

a substantial change of address
(and appendix to “creative fidelity”)

version 1

I’ve gone for awhile. Take what you please. In the meantime, I don’t forget you. I’ll be back to you in spring.

version 2

One can only share something (e.g., stage a play) if there’s something (the play) to share, obviously. Wanting to share something substantial implies having something substantial to share, first wanting to do the substantial work (or to obtain the substantial thing) that one wants to share.

Doing the work is drawn by aspiration integral to the working, not anticipations of a given audience (unless the work is essentially about or to a given audience). Work that seems to others to not be relevant to them might be just their prejudging—the judging of their own presumptions (or projections)—about what the work is to be. Benefit of the doubt toward creative fidelity may be deserved because something really new is unlikely to be what’s expected (and, in complement, creative fidelity can’t expect something really new, just venture as well as one can). Though the work can’t be about undermining expectations, really new work also is not about conforming to given expectations.

Bear with me. Doing the math comes before explaining it. Is there something wrong with putting pieces of it online? What’s obscure in upcoming months can get clearer in light of mediating it down the road with what’s inherently interesting to you (given your contact). Don’t blame the work for not being primarily oriented to you. The work’s own appeal is no devaluation of your interests! Proximal strangeness is no sign of ultimate incompatibility of sensibilities.

It’s simply that a work’s own appeal calls for a way of working that may be not yet comprehensible to others because doing the work is prior to, thus different from, the derivative work of making sense of it, i.e., mediation (at best with someone specifically). The Work and the work of sharing are different kinds of work, like an ordinary difference between creation and presentation. Writing the play is not the same as staging it (which can be done variably, for different readings of anticipated audience). To be creatively “lost” to the writing—and sharing that online—is no sign of disinterest in future staging or disregard for any audience.

“Leaving me during the writing because the staging didn’t come soon enough deserves a salutation of ‘good riddance’”—or else an appeal to your patience or generosity, which this note is.

Don’t lose my address. Don’t forget me.

creative fidelity

2011-01-30T18:00:00.001-08:00

Here’s a little treatise on creativity as such, fidelity as such, and wandering toward intimately empathic time.

landscaping notes: 2010

2011-01-16T22:35:00.001-08:00

This is about project-ive prospecting as bibliophilia. Initially, I’m entranced by a sense of friendship as appeals of bibliophilic intimacy.

In the long run, I’m pursuing a sense of “our evolving nature” as having long ago become no longer primarily biological. I allude to “a large-scale interest in cultural evolution, including literary modernity (with other modes of mode-rnity)”—such an expansive excursion.

feeling for each other

2011-01-16T14:47:00.000-08:00

We prefer solidarity to common sociality, prefer kindredness to solidarity, and prefer intimacy to kindredness, though all need each other. But not every fidelity is equally worthwhile.

relation ships

2011-01-15T20:20:00.000-08:00

Waters of time may be better traversed through gems of coalescent relations we find in our lives.

as if there’s no news

2011-01-15T16:20:00.000-08:00

a note on dancing lightly in a thematological map

I know the leading news of the day, the past week, every week (of recent decades). If you’re reading this years from now (Jan. 15, 2011), you might have no idea what the leading news has recently been, probably in part because time dissolves a vibrant Moment into so many wakes. However, I don’t wish to give long-range salience to this week’s leading news. Besides, significance to Time is likely not immanent, though intimated in the Moment, invisibly to most witnesses (and commentators).

There are themes that become trends, and some that last for the lot of us, even some born fully in a Moment. But we likely don’t know which Moments, themes, or trends will endure. This season’s leading events will vine with uncounted others to give a weave to their season (which, you know, I rendered earlier), maybe at the scale of an era to be later defined by those who define eras.

The lasting stories are likely “simpler” than their genetic Moments because time caters to accessibility, not favoring conceptions of miasmas or subtle views, because general importances tend to pertain to the common ground. So generally lasting stories are tangibly “transcendent” of complexity, abstracted by reduction to what most persons would find durably important. A shrewd artist may wrap her/his high story in address that appeals broadly.

Besides, high ground requires wide midlands for support, and midlands require vast lowlands—particularly for things that sell well and durably, becoming “classics” in their stereotypical or archetypal appeal because they’re readily assimilated.

My little metastory here isn’t a lament, merely an embellishment of the obvious. A near-term reader might feel I’m isolated from our 24/7 conversations because I don’t acknowledge the obvious or analyze the present much. Conceptual prospecting is easily dismissed as solitudinous luxury.

But what worthwhile work is done without extended solitude, except the work of common sense? Even the work of society is only advanced by the solitudinous work that finds ways to advance our common senses. Innovation is not a wisdom of the crowd. Maybe I’m going somewhere new, which the market for news (like most art and science) doesn’t afford.

Maybe not. Maybe you couldn’t care less. (Such a soul might best stay away.)

pre-positional soup

2011-01-14T23:26:00.001-08:00

He’s in love
with a complex, some Intimacy of Flourishing
in resonance with questions
of domainity as such (thus interdomainity),
legacy and scholarship irt lifeworld
consolidation of learning, reading, and thinking—a world
irt (and/or versus) a life, easily
presuming on itself an implicature
of the world, the World—to a life, at least,
surely (if unclearly) the world of one life,
nebulously open to where it’s going,
how best to further its wayfaring,
as the world does idealize a confidence expressed
by the rhetorical lucidity of the specialist,
like a professional theorist,
let alone a connoisseur of conceptual design,
classically the organotechnologist called a “philosopher,”
now to be a strange hybrid of academia
entwined in our evolutionarity of mind:
no happenstance but enactive
mirrorplay of drawing and evincing,
argument and teaching.

deconstructive nostalgia

2011-01-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

One chapter of Designing Positive Psychology (re: yesterday’s posting) criticizes the field for not enough appreciation of “dark sides of the human psyche” (that’s part of a chapter title).

I know those sides, home to transgression of comfortable boundaries, thrilling for some of us (not frightening). I came to know what the shadows know.

We come back to comfortable light and we smile, like Maureen Dowd confessing on Christmas a Patti Smith behind her eyes.

designing minds

2011-01-12T22:40:00.001-08:00

Just now, I had a little inspiration of inquiring mindfulness about academically designing lives.

one more day

2011-01-08T22:44:00.000-08:00

I can’t be fair to this piece with any short statement that occurs to me. Sometimes, I write without clearly knowing why.

tale

2011-01-07T22:43:00.000-08:00

Romanticism returns in us like anewing youth that never left belonging to one’s sensibility.

nothing else

2011-01-06T22:42:00.000-08:00

Here, I’m writing to a poem titled nothing else.

haunted entertaining

2011-01-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

Can a truly postmodern mind mate with its time?

Seriously, we quite playfully sought a communicative intimacy that cannot last apart from letters.

Joyous, beautiful life dies with those who live it, save for our tangible designs.

wake

2011-01-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

Feeling like a narrative figure has become second nature to me, good for a mind easily seeming to be engulfed by its own pretentions.

However, the woman across the way from me may not be so entertained.

descent time

2011-01-02T23:16:00.001-08:00

Holidays away from a scheduled world cause happy warps in lived time. It’s like 2 weeks ago that the past 11 days began. Posting a story 22 hours ago, anchored by a party 48 hours earlier, seems 4 days ago.

It’s time to forget, as I’m back in HyperNet City tomorow, but not possibly of it all.

Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together, evidently details the pathos of the social networking planet that keeps everything pervasively vacuous for maximal marketing effect. Do I want to read about that? No. But one should. Facebook today was valued by investors at $50 billion. The only reason could be that Facebook is a marketer’s dream. Know what? I’ve been on the web from the beginning, but I’m not on Facebook (not actively; I have one of the earliest accounts, but don’t use it). You can know nothing more about me on the web than I’ve chosen.

The ideology of marketing promotes a technology of the self (which Foucault warned decades ago; and Heidegger before that posed “the question of technology” as heir to the Question of Being).

It’s the new nihilism: the bravado and obsessiveness of social networking. And this week, Heidegger’s student, philosopher Burt Dreyfus, here in Berkeley (with whom I spent a good deal of time disagreeing years ago about Heidegger), is publishing a trade book (i.e., general audience book), All Things Shining, with Sean Kelly, Chair of the Philosophy Dept. at Harvard (here’s a recent column by him from the Times), that’s evidently a response to such nihilism, typified (ch. 2 of their book) by “David Foster Wallace’s nihilism” (which is the chapter title). They want to capture the attention of Millennials, in terms of Great Literature, like Herman Melville and I-don’t-know-who-else; I just bought it yesterday, and it’s not near the top of my list (impossible list), but interesting that two very different books come out at the same time overtly addressing technological nihilism. (Here’s a review of their book.)

Meanwhile, I’m distracted by more interesting things that distract me from what I’m “supposed” to do: I’m not supposed to try to integrate 7 Sunday NY Times articles on forgotten importance of criticism, which I’m dying to do.

Or what about Ashbery’s translation of Baudelaire from the recent NY Review of Books or the review of Tony Judt’s last book of autobiographical candors written as the professor of European intellectual history was withering away from ALS?

What matters?

The scheduled world returns tomorrow because the scheduled world returns tomorrow. My rampant enthusiasms are mine alone.

Your letter, written with such care, dwelling to dwelling, meets little time for equal care in return.

Then there are those agendaed issues of mine, re: surfaces as emergent from depths, things to say about the nature of relationships and friendship, how we are a plural psyche with aspirational audacities no less mindful of pragmatics.

How does creative fidelity meld with empathic time in us?

What may be the virtue of Literary (capped) presence, textual intimacy (again), and imaginative life letting itself be engulfed by a flesh of words in the body of an authorial communion?

What about intrinsic value and generative feeling at heights of what their minds can be brought together to do?

The scheduled world returns, and my pretentiousness here will be dissolved into the common ground.

No loss to anyone but me.

So sad.

new year

2011-01-02T00:00:00.001-08:00

I got my agenda together for coming months. It might have happened sooner, had I not gone to a party last night.

a manifold sense of self formativity

2010-12-28T13:41:00.001-08:00

One might find a philosopher’s obsession with child development rather odd, especially my interplay of phenomenological and psychological stances. Yet, it’s easy to appreciate that somehow the nature of our humanity is ontogenic (actually, evolutionarily developmental). Living beyond eras that took the gods to heart, we can only appreciate ourselves as somehow-natural inquirers cycling a young star in nothingness, lusciously growing and assembling what matters in light of legacies that don’t portend how creatively we may further them, even originating what they could not even imagine.

I do my little things with the time I have. I’ve more or less finished my current excursion through child development (though I have one more near-term topic to do, probably mid-January), all of which was intended, this past season, to preface an extended excursion into positive psychology’s sense of developing authentic happiness. And that is medial for more ambitious work, planned a couple of seasons ago, that being medial to a Project that has grown hilariously elaborate in recent years.

So, back to childsplay: I’ve “completed” my little phenomenology of developmental learning (including some spun-off postings noted in that page); and true to form, it just makes me eager to move on.

developmentality as generative modeling

2010-12-26T01:14:00.000-08:00

There are many ways to approach human development as such. My way of thinking about it is very hybrid, in terms of well-worn clinical and empirical research. But currently, I only want to highlight the scale of possibility that the notion of development may provide for integrative inquiry.

christmas

2010-12-25T14:02:00.001-08:00

My preciously-titled posting yesterday has implicit motives related to my implicitly prevailing Project; but I also had in mind the Christian originality of highlighting the extraordinary child—indeed an extraordinariness belonging to human potential as such, symbolized in an initial possibility of wonderful potential, exemplified (in principle) by every birth. Strip away all the theocentrically cultic aura and practices, we still have a universalistic, humanistic valuing of human potential in a gift to one’s world we may presume as the gift of the child. (This is about the born and desired child, not a politics of “Life” that posits theologized humanity in the unviable fetus. We all agree that the born and desired child deserves all our hopes and grants of opportunity.)

Christmas day is an oasis in an unfortunate economy of consumption. It’s about a retroactive sanctification of a teacher’s short life, in the folkloric Image of an impoverished birth (as Christianity as such didn’t arise for decades after the death of Jesus, didn’t become doctrinal for centuries, and didn’t cause prevalence of this holiday until a millennium later).

Love has become such a trite notion, bandied about by vacuous lives that sustain vacuous economies. Finding philosophical importance in the notion is like expecting appreciation of a great poet in a mall. Many philosophical ethicists may find dim importance to the likes of Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, whose stellar career might be capsulated as one of finding love of reason in reasons of love—like finding a love of humanity in one’s humanity of “love.”

To love our own nature is to love our ownmost futurity, and this is reflected in one’s child, but not as ours—not as one’s own (not as a child living for us—for our satisfaction, for there being fulfillment to the adult’s life, as if the meaning of life is to reproduce and have the result mirror our hopes, let alone our expectations). The “our” belongs to us, all together loving the mystery of a new generation that will carry on, even forgetting us in most genuinely embodying our legacies.

The light of the child is the child of the light: time and being.

dear diary

2010-12-24T22:08:00.000-08:00

It’s not surprising
that clearly-unextraordinary minds
(including myself) might want
to understand clearly-extraordinary minds as well
as one can, dwelling
with their traces (their works)
of peak experience, Moments
in evolving weaves and histories of high
humanity: peaks or points a dweller may
design into novel meshes
for further dwelling
and weaving

broadening oneself

2010-12-19T22:43:00.001-08:00

Notions of enriching oneself are innumerable. But I’m gradually introducing a specific model of learning in creative individuation that has persuasive empirical bases. Part of that is the notion of building oneself, discussed last week. Today, I’m exploring one more aspect of the model (albeit in my own way): the intrinsic appeal of broadening oneself.

with respect to post-religious spirituality

2010-12-19T15:28:00.001-08:00

I’m fond of the California legacy first associated with the “human potential” movement of the ’60s, especially inasmuch as it (or they or one) avoids/avoided (in the ’70s and ’80s) “New Age”y fantasy rhetorics.

My history here is long. I’ll just note that I’m also fond of authentic Jungian views of “individuation” (now an ordinary term in my thinking, but it came into my life from Jungian engagements many years ago, though I would not call myself Jungian). I’m not as enthusiastic about Buddhist views, but I have affection for their studied simplicity. I believe that the Esalen Institute has a fine legacy, and regional resources such as Tassajara, Green Gulch, and Spirit Rock are darling. MindBody interweaving should be integral to health care, and mindfulness is integral to living well.

Those modes or levels of engagement and appreciation can have wide relevance for folks—offering important aspects of living well that may be widely relevant. This pertains to, let’s say, the midland of our humanity, which is the great common ground of our belonging together in our humanity. Aspiring to explore heights is wise to appreciate that the heights depend on the surrounding midlands.

I’m aspiring to explore heights, but that presupposes good (excellent, I hope) appreciation of midland conditions of possibility, which explorations of human development in general must include. However, conceptualizing generally-relevant developmental aspects of flourishing, relative to an interest in aspiring to explore heights, likely doesn’t relate well to a general audience that the aspects can be about. In other words, the “same” belonging together in “living well” may be understood in various ways (e.g., relative to all kinds of approaches to living well by various health care specialists and various psychologists). What I’m doing—on a road to doing—is not exclusive of other views of living well. But a good inclusiveness depends on the developed view that would show how the inclusiveness can go well or work well. So, my attention to showing inclusion is distant, while my influence by those I feel inclusive with continues in the background of the road displayed. (See narrative like a road—ancient trope.)

I can’t imagine agreeing wholly with everyone I feel good inclusion with. I might even cringe at some choices of understanding. For example, I’m quite wary of most “spiritual” modes of expression (or rhetoric, in the best sense that good philosophy involves a high acuity of rhetoric). Yet, I’m appreciative of what authentic expression is seeking to evince or show. Usually, I have no trouble being rapportous (another of my little neologisms).

I bought a nice book yesterday, titlted to sell, but written by someone who seems to be a very wise psychotherapist, in the best sense of the California legacy: Daring to Trust: opening ourselves to real love and intimacy, by David Richo. Like many therapists, he survives (I suppose) in a difficult economy for wise guys and extended learning processes by giving workshops and publishing books through little presses. Part of the economic “problem” here is that desire to do good prevails over desire to make money. So, “Dave,” who has many books (though I hadn’t heard of him earlier), has taken kernals from many and put them into a sequenced presentation of what he’s doing, which makes an interesting synopsis of what the California legacy is, called “human becoming.” It’s endearing—well-suited for a mind/body communication for couples workshop in a medical center.

I note that as a good example of what I find inclusive (in a very accessible mode) of what I’m exploring in my own way, which is going to go uphill for a little while before coming back to aspects of ordinary empathy, good relationship, love, and mindfulness in that pursuit of mine to understand “authentic happiness” (mid-2011). Then, the road will go uphill again, into highly conceptual adventuring (late 2011? onward—onward), unlike anything I’ve done online so far (having rather rigorous, very discursive focus).

building oneself

2010-12-12T22:52:00.001-08:00

Generative feeling of childsplay makes itself into aspiration and sustained purpose having promise of fulfillment.