sporting life

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One more week, two at the most, before I’m back to posting more often than Sunday.

I’m really tired of saying things like that. I want to just get on with it! But “it” won’t be worth the time if it’s not set up well.

If I didn’t have to go to the office every week—if I had continuous time to do this work I want to do—I’d have gotten through my fecund mess of notes earlier.

It’s like trying to build a house on weekends. “I just wanna get on with the party here.”

So to speak.

Enjoy life (in good health) and leave a good (memorable) legacy, I say.

I say, good show in London—but I’m not giving time to viewing it.
[Olympics] In the beginning, B.C.E. Athens could create olympics because wealth without war (i.e., leisure culture) gives time for turning freedom to sport. For the living well—who thrive continuously—life becomes commonly sporting.

So it is with adventures and drama and other arts of living—gardening, too (conceptual and otherwise) beyond vanity fairs.

“It’s all about the hunt, old sport”—first, roots and berries, sex, land, monumental memory, great things, realized peaks or other highs...

However, corporate sports (what turns up in a sports section of a newspaper) is boring. In that regard, I’m not a good sport.

Yet, I have olympic aspirations for conceptual gardening! [smirk]

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solar-systemic living

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We’re commonly a world of inestimable volumes of little messages born of episodic attentions (which is all a market needs) grown from ephemeral interests. We give more attention to what’s shocking than to what matters. A string of “newsfeeds” fills our need for narrative (which hardly needs integrative sense when one’s own life mirrors the limitless improvisation of being in time), as if a simulacrum of meaningfulness is a sophisticated realism.

The essayist is a nuisance, along with moralists.

Anyway, a writer has a pleasure of defining by exclusion what’s not worth attention, as well as a burden of scarce time to detail all that’s so worth appreciation, so much that truly matters.

yea, earthlings

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The music video “Where the Hell is Matt? 2012” (link below—but hasn’t everyone seen it?) starts off nicely, then quickly seems kitschy, but quickly gets delightful, inspiring, and deeply touching.

Note the marginality of locales (“where in the world…”), the sweetly simple vs. grand choreography, an incredible happiness in the concept, as if there’s an ethic of humanity in it all. A daddy’s wonderful gift addresses the immortal, aspiring child in our being.

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P.S. After you’ve seen the thing, here’s some history.

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imparting text

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I guess vanity causes me anxiety about not posting recently, as if my tiresome promises of major departures were more vanity.

Non sequitur: “Texting” isn’t talking literally, but is talking-as-text—enamored with its abbrevity, but unconcerned with its textuality as such. Yet, writing has always been texting, and the structuring of narratives (stories, cases, verbal displays, etc.) has always involved architextual design, and conceptual design is environmental, implied by later detailing it routes or constrains, like a scripting that provides lots of freedom for stance and movement, inter-stancing and performative enriching, but determines to its degree what’s there worth determining, including (to my mind) some love of abstraction, true also to painting, dance, poetry, reflective conversation, and so on and on, generally speaking (texting).

Enough non sequiturs bricolaged in a given space through some design can compose a good Thing.

I got a lot of textual designing done the past few weeks, even gaining a sense of an ending yesterday which was elating, but oddly caused Ana to tease me dismissively, invisibly, making me a caricature of accomplishment, which I enjoyed. (I love her so much I can’t stand it sometimes.) But a bit of post-partum blues came this morning: What now? Too much still to do before departing.

Soon, I promise.

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Habermas and news, realism with idealism

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While I’m privately integrating everything I’ve shared online during the past year (given free time, for the sake of specifically benefitting from upcoming readings of others), I feed my addiction to news, including Habermas’s view of EU politics, which I give too little time now to fairly discuss, because I prefer to “lose” myself (no, regain myself) in thinking through what I’ve earlier written, even substantially clarifying some of it, e.g., my idealism of mind.

I love a living resonance between dailiness and conceptual venturing. And I so wish for more free time sooner than later. (But the extended freedom will happen later: early 2013.)

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saturdaynote

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Today’s weather is as perfect as I can remember—another day
in paradise.

At Cheeseboard Pizza (pesto and mushrooms today, sprinkling of blue cheese), I sat on a sidewalk bench next to a lone girl-woman in breezy rose-colored dress, old high-laced shoes, old denim jacket (vintage sartorialist), and dissheveled dark brown hair, finishing her baklava
from somewhere.

She remained afterward, aimlessly entertaining the surround.

I knew she thought I wanted to talk to her.

True—yet, I didn’t.

Two strangers under a tree’s gentle sway.

I almost blurted chirpily “Another day in paradise.”
But I was more interested in the silent dramaturgy of my desire
to start an entertainment.

I watched a very old guy walk by “us” with his manicured poodle.
I felt like Woody Allen in “Annie Hall” exuberantly scripting passers by. I might have turned to her and started babbling—as she was standing up, and walked away.

She admired my restraint.

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“Dear Professor Jennifer,...”

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I sent a letter (email) today to Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Professor of Philosophy, and I actually began it “Dear Professor Jennifer.” You’ll see shortly (a posting) that I wasn’t presumptuous. But I was a little vain.

Anyway, J.A.G-F masterfully exemplifies what philosophy of literature can be. 

remnants of a letter on Habermas’s “Heidegger”

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revised ending, May 20

I began my day with the news, which led to a curiosity about the “free rider problem,” relative to my interest in the constitutionality of the “individual mandate” to have health insurance being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. (They took their first vote on the matter today, in secret.)

That led to noticing that the article on “Authority” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy failed to mention Habermas, though Habermas’s career is about that as much as anything. 

writing for writing

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“But now, I just want to get back to what I love,” I ended Thursday
(“ sunrise, sunset,...”).

He seems resolute.

I am. Yet, what I love is too much to distill into something both cogently fair to the love and brief (one would hope).

In particular, intending to write a good long posting today drew itself
into a skeletal mitosis by late afternoon that could be fleshed out as
at-least-nine essays.

That’s good—but not practical.

However, I could turn out a focused essay quickly, if I had an imposed
deadline.

But given free time, I thoroughly enjoy the mental heights. I do know to stop when there’s need—to transpose ongoing elation into a promise of future time I make room for, in terms of points in my garden (themes, notes, allusions, resources) that would be obscure to anyone else, but which work for me. 

creative life as manifold order

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Have you ever wondered, faced with a definition of a personality disorder, what the correlate order might be? For example, what’s a bipolar order?

Consider the upside of it (relative to DSM-IV): I know very well that there’s nothing inherently problematic about exuberance or elation that extends over a week or more. This is one reason I love vacation periods. Extended “elevation of mood” is a great thing! What becomes problematic is not being able to effectively divide fidelity to the heights from needing to work with persons who can’t share your enthusiasm while intensely needing their appreciation of you (which can be a mistake). If you can keep the heights from intimidating others (i.e., pretend well that you’re as vacuous as the persons you need to collaborate with) and not need their recognition of the value of your inspiration, then you can better make the heights work for you, and not overly concern yourself that it doesn’t work for them.  

sunrise, sunset, winter, spring

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1976, a “girl” (25), Kathryne, loses a love, Gary (27), because the boy returned to a doctoral program (already half-finished) a continent away, as she’s beginning hers. The passion of mental growth in the life of each separately causes them to reconcile to time. He was supposed to return, but didn’t. Decades later, each one’s partner died, but neither knew that about the other. So it goes. 

mondaynote

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I can’t stand it. I might have gone my whole life without looking up ‘nulliparous’.

I can stand it. No sheepishness for me. I’m a master of stoicality (whatever).

You can make such lovely images of your day. Or be so funny, then heartrending.

Your foot documentation lives!

I thank the gods you crossed my path.

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a validity of candor

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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. 

bearing, standing, bearing, and moving on

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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. 

AEros: enthralling high appeal

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February 2024

In a phrase, my coinage idealizes a generative enthrall of artistic engagement.

But “high”ness, to my mind, is about prospects of higher conceptual insightfulness in being well, analogously as “higher” education provides better opportunities for being well than “lower” insightfulness.

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

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...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.

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message to the world

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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).

about fictionally surviving the Holocaust

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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.

wise guy

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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). 

subliming

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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.

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1:55 pm

‘Sublimate’ makes a good example.

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humanity’s Eros

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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.”

Jennifer in dark waywardness

“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.

a sense of inworldness

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.

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wednesdaynote

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Steve Jobs


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

.

an exemplary day

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. 

“you”

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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.

saucy life

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.

believing in you

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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.

note of an iterative glyphicist

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.

I was a teenage tri-psychal

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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.

aura of the hydra-headed wise guy

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 interpsychalness 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 intrapsychalness isn’t a mere gestalt of its interpsychalness; the intrapsychalness isn’t translatable or reducible to an interpsychalness of the Trace (the wake of a life’s time). Instead, the plural psychalness belongs to Derrida singularly, such that any cohering conception of interpsychalness derives from the intrapsychalness 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.

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playhouse notes

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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.

booknote

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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.

thursdaynote — part 2

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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.”

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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.

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an horizonal beauty

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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.”

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a cohering

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

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swimming notes

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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.

uphill, downhill—highland, midland

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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.

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circus note

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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.

touch

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.

days go by.3

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.

humility of a venture

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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.

loving to make an academic issue

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“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.

leaving the stage to rethink a theater

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

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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.

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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.

backstage notes

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Finishing “creative fidelity” feels like a milestone, not because it’s especially comprehensive of what I want to do going forward (it’s not) or difficult (not), but because it draws closure on something that began over a year ago, and this is somewhat represented by “c.f.”’s frequent linking back to earlier pages. I feel I’ve won a justified freedom now to write as eccentrically as I please without contradicting (or undermining) my fidelity to living very ordinarily wherever that’s apt—ethically, cogently, and graciously. But that’s as if life isn’t theater; yet life is theater, to my sensibility. Particularly theatrical is the pretense that life isn’t theater.

to be really realistic...

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I’m simply me. It’s not complicated. I can make it complicated.
But I don’t seek that.

I have the interests I have. So it goes. I get enthusiastic about things easily, and I’m thankful. It’s not egoistic to be thankfully enthused about things that don’t interest many others, if I don’t blame others for not having my interests (which would otherwise be very silly.

as if there’s no news

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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.

pre-positional soup

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.

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deconstructive nostalgia

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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.

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descent time

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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.

a manifold sense of self formativity

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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.

christmas

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My preciously-titled posting yesterday has implicit motives related
to my implicitly prevailing Project. Yet I also had in mind the Christian originality of highlighting the extraordinary child—indeed an extra-ordinariness 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.

(That’s 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.)

dear diary

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

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with respect to post-religious spirituality

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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.

ontic lightness with an orange

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“An orange” is one among oranges, including a hue of orange among hues of orange. “Orange,” then, is an emblem for a range of hues whose boundaries might be a matter of taste.

What, after all, is a hue? Life is full of spectra, and we have innumerable emblems for innumerable characters. So, thinking of conceptuality in light of orange might make of its gathering of hues a symbol of conceptuality.

aspects of Saul’s century

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This week in The NY Times Book Review, Saul Bellow’s friend Leon Wieseltier (literary editor of The New Republic) reviews the recent publication of a selection of Saul’s letters. Here’s my selection of things from the review:

…and here I must disclose, or confess, or boast, that the volume includes also some gorgeous letters to me, written in the fullness of our friendship decades ago, when we used to worry over metaphysics and the novel as we chopped wood….the poetry of his prose, its force of consciousness, lay always in its fidelity to….the revelatory details.

a kind of feeling for what happens

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Wanting to understand “the” mind—my own apparently-intrinsic philosophicality (?), literary mindedness—is integral to me.
I’m intrinsically curious, which takes me to The Edge, too readily perhaps. I play with transgression because that creatively leads to discoveries (often enough). But I’m a rigorously ethical person,
so I know I’m harmless. And I’m not afraid of falling.

All in all, I trust my intuition. Writing myself through psychological fascinations (via “life world,” etc.) ultimately into some horizonal mystery—be it eventually “literary” or not—expresses a true love, worth avowing. Meanwhile, my near-term excursion into a conceptuality of authentic happiness isn’t a compensatory symptomology. It’ll lead
(I hope) into creatively good work.

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where am i?

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In my next life, maybe I’ll become a molecular animator.

I guess I’d need a good background in molecular biology to understand the dynamics. But look at this!

The emergence of life from proper function of complex molecules looks like a little self-contained ecology having an intrinsic intelligence.
We project or posit intelligence from proper function. Astoundingly,
life is itself.

Millions of cells make up emergent tissue, of course, and cellularly-huge volumes of tissue make up an emergent organ in a manifold organization of an emergent being who can inhabit so many days to be able to sit here and realize millions of cells….

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an article of faith

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We put obviously-gifted kids in special programs, though (but so that)
a very few will actualize their potential in some lasting way. Likewise, we must proffer and facilitate curiosity, imaginative feeling, and creativity everywhere in order for as much talent as possible to be eventually actualized in some lasting way.

Education is, at best, an extended wager of hope, good faith, and generous “reading” of the early days of others’ journeys. We simply must believe in the implicit presence of creative potential around us.

There is no better faith than this.

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a note on being drawn by intrinsic appeals

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Saturday, 10.30 — 9:44 pm

I want to exemplify how the generativity of our evolving through creative and empathic human development can have a philosophically tenable conceptuality.

“…you hear a feel,…and you really absorb it somehow.”

Keeping a sense of humor in good stead is very wise for mental health. For example, if someone won’t talk about their alienation from me (e.g., someone’s teen self sense resurrected by my presence), I keep a sense of humor about it (or try my best). If their alienation is innocuous (let me call it good faith alienation), they’ll see that teasing them about it is innocent; I just want to understand. If the alienation is in bad faith (e.g., projecting bad feeling into me that isn’t actually mine), then they’ll likely have no tolerance for being teased about their alienation.

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be a partner in my odyssey

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Who am I to say that [insert any broad-stroke truth-functional claim
or any apparently-speculative audacity in any of my postings or webpages ]?

I imagine what would happen if one of the Wikipedia police assessed one of my pages, if it was at Wikipedia: There would be many scoldings like “Needs Citation,” “Original Writing Needs Authoritative Reference,” etc.

an Emersonian moment

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When Ralph Waldo Emerson was 61 (1864), he wrote in his journal “Within, I do not find wrinkles & used heart, but unspent youth.”

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, the reviewer of the recent publication by The Library of America of Selected Journals, 1820-1877 (2 vols.) begins by noting that “Emerson’s dominant passion was not to know but to grow. ‘Expression is all we want,’ he wrote in his journals….What must grow, ever anew, day in and day out, is one’s inner genius, which his essay ‘Self-Reliance’ defines thus: ‘To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.’”

Well, not quite—

memo to Rilke and others

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The themes I want to address soon, relative to the entire idea of
my website (an idea that’s not represented anywhere yet [Jan. 16, 2018: expressed in 2010 as what is now “Cycle 1” of the Project]), are like focusing on a few plants in a garden that has scattered kinds of plants, yet
no design (like a pointillism without enough points to make a gestalt). Yet, there’s an implicit philosophical design that I’m confident of, though it’ll emerge gradually. Topical excursions deserve to stand on their own. (Up the road, the website will gain better design. What I have now serves developmental purposes.)

I feel eventual emergence of an inner conversation to be known through synergistic pages, finding the singularity of the Project, discursive and poietic, in a conceptuality that’s evolving, as if the language of philosophy beyond metaphysicalism stands in the topography of Time like a long poem cohering peaks of mind.

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conceptual gardening as jazz doing 70

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interviewer: [Now 70,] Herbie Hancock’s own musical journey began as a boy in Chicago. Classically trained, he was good enough to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at a youth concert at age 11. Turning to jazz, Hancock gained sudden and international fame in his early 20s with his first great collaborator and mentor, Miles Davis. An early lesson came at a concert in Europe. At first, Hancock says, everything was going right.

HH: We had the audience in the palm of our hands. And right as everything was really peaking, and Miles was soloing, I played this chord, and it was completely wrong. [laughter] …And Miles took a breath and then played some notes, and the notes made my chord right….

passing time

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The days of freedom are too short, too few. Prefacing, intended, gets pushed back by prefacing to that. It’s frustrating enough that a past is preface, being a potential narrative that calls for lots of time, as if the genesis of any life is feasible (as [auto]biography is likely a metonymic gesture). So, a theory of genesis might represent so many untold lives? How a horizoning child may, in a sense, parent the adult is just so long a story. So, a few conceptual touchstones stand for more than they should.

“God” as Good luck

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This is a test: In any situation where someone speaks of “God” (as, it seems, no two persons ever imply the same meaning for the term ‘God’), substitute “luck” or “Good luck” (capping the ‘G’ to express high esteem for goodness). That gives fictional God a proximal connection to realism that better complements the psychology of Faith and the anthropological nature of worship, part of our cultural evolution which is expressive of our ultimately evolving developmentalities....

freestanding combine

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Musing. Amusing myself with free association, like hunting aimlessly through an antique show. Or wandering from Web page to page.

On my desktop, what an odd array of things (icons metonymic of things) have resulted from recent days, including URL icons of things to be read in the next few days (indexically reaching into the planetary ether), merely belonging in what they have: shared location in a life advancing some proximally incongruous array of interests—interests that are not primordially incongruous (I claim).

Take a gathering of ideas, points, calling for an unfound coherence,
like a Rauschenbergian heir on his studio floor before a thing is concerted out of the mess that looks like a child’s playroom.

chat

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A NY Times headline reads “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime.” It’s the busyness—so much “necessity”—of extrinsic life.

Once upon a time, long ago and far away... The literary reader is rapt in lingering through a story (scary popularity!), like true friends in a garden, absorbing shared solitude—like willows in slight breeze.

Stories are free to presume what makes totally no sense to literal days, like outrageous improvising.

There, vulnerable candor is immune to distrust.

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for anewing play, with true feeling

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Creatively speaking, fidelity to one’s development (or art) tends to (wants to—as if the developing has a mind of its own that carries one’s reflectivity in its current) override the importance of relations to non-instrumental others. So, it’s easy to question its ethicality, like a teenage love of transgression. But clearly to me, creative fidelity is not egoism.

But how so, exactly? Though I’ve been familiar with pathogenic narcissism for many years, I didn’t feel I knew enough about it, this past spring; so, I delved into the subject, which led to stunning realizations about narcissism in my life (not me, but—well, we all could stand to admit narcissism in ourselves, especially when seeing egoism easily—too easily?—evident nearby), quite beyond the vanity fair of “sophistication” instanced “everywhere.”

before theorizing authentic happiness

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Simplicity, heartfulness, no presumptiveness, no veils, no masking, transparency without question of fidelity because the Flow is me, because I’m where I can be so, letting go, without fear, accepting
what happens, easily laughing about what I should have learned
and learning it—easily crying when that’s happily evinced
(e.g., giving in to a sappy movie—good release)....

But “normal” life doesn’t easily afford unguarded opennes,
so veils defend against veils, veils reflecting veils, appealing to me
for some theory of genuineness in the drama of being “social,”
because I hope for dissolutions (veil as entrance, prelude) and then happily learning from what happens in the Open of simple presence.

creative self absorption can also bequite empathic

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I’m not a depressive person. Expressionless serenity may look depressive, but it’s not: Pensiveness, daydreaming, thinking, being in love with self-absorption may “fail” to attend to how I look, but only because I’m not attending to being seen, though I easily can so attend (which can feel vain).

I love sharing what absorbs me. I love absorbing the other into myself, as well as being absorbed by the other—being absorbed by-and-to the other, as well as absorbing the other. This isn’t empathic, but it’s ideally what empathy can educe. (Empathy itself involves understanding the other’s situation through feeling and imagining their point of view or situation as they understand it—which requires asking and talking and seeking to shape understanding with the other of the other’s felt sense of things.)

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note to baby

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I had a genuine “Eureka!” experience last weekend, elatedly echoing deep into my belatedly-blooming background feeling for what gives
in a healthy self-absorption, from an accomplished general trustfulness
to a durably purposive life—the hedonic basis of “eudaimonic” humanism!—how infant fascination with surrounds grows into durable love of learning others (potentially beautiful) and landscapes (with their rocky challenges—trOpically speaking)—love of learning that’s the basis of lasting Relationships, born from loves of the day (a grand book
on “positive psychology,” a moment of culinary genius, a Literary mind overwhelming an era of a life) and friends—toward love of eudaimonia, about which I’ll soon have much to say (rather mundanely, in the short run) about a great giving way of time echoing in durable appeals
(after intoxicating elation) sealed in our vitality of engaging sensibility—in the long run for a primordial play, an artistic bearing, deeply
from a textual intimacy that hides from casual entertaining.

So what (I would say to those casual others) that we tend to be alone
in aspiring, beyond archetype, to embody—well, “the” meaning of all humanity through our weaving.

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there he goes again: “symphonicity”—laughter

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Jeffrey Brown of the PBS News Hour interviews Sting today, who’s touring with parts of the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra:

[…]

JB: But is something lost? I mean, as someone who grew up with rock ‘n’ roll, including your music, much of the power of that [to me] is the rawness and the edge.

Sting: Yes.

JB: What happens without that?

one as yet

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Originality is difficult, improbable. It’s best to just seek to express what you have to express, let others worry about the originality. Is what you have to show fullfilling?

The road to that may be long. I go through periods of feeling I have nothing to say anymore; also, periods of knowing I have something I deeply want to say, but don’t know what it is. Elated, I write to find out.

to whom it may concern

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Posts may seem arbitrary, as a matter of what purpose the blog serves (“Whatever you choose, evidently”—and why not?), but there is a plan—though little time to carry on.

I sometimes respond to appealing ephemera, you know (e.g., appearance of an appealing book) or to some issue suggested by someone’s presence. Yet, a stable agenda exists.

I have an enduring interest in better understanding creative growth, you know, relative to making good lives, understanding the range of “loves,” and for making good sense of our ultimate condition.

empathy for persons with little empathy

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Some people don’t easily empathize, so they may be alienated from those who do easily empathize. The non-empathizer may be ashamed of their lack of empathy, not realizing that empathizers would want to understand the non-empathizer’s lack of empathy and would accept the non-empathizer as they are. This acceptance is very alien to the non-empathizer. It can cause chronic avoidance of others which is misinterpreted by those caring others, because the non-empathizer’s lack of communication leaves others trying to imagine the non-empathizer’s behavior from a common point of view, which may look rude and narcissistic to others, though the non-empathizer is not intending to be rude.

Non-empathic persons can be easily loved, but that’s scary to non-empathic persons: how they could be easily accepted when they don’t understand their own confusions of feeling.

aging is fun

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I might regret to inform you that my idea of fun, on a day off from work, is to read some chapters from The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, but I have no such regret.

a little formidability

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“So, you think I’ve got some problem, wanting to research love and intimacy”—as if our narrator is pursuing some absence mirrored in the dance of life, yea!, in the house of some summer night where we were writing our cosmos of poiesis….

So, this is how I look at you—

No...

for a deeper prattle

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Today, W.S. Merwin was made Poet Laureate of the U.S.

This is greatly satisfying to me, since he’s been one of my favorite poets for decades—no mere coincidence of private taste, but recognition early on that became part of my mindal fiber. He reads on the PBS News Hour today from The Shadow of Sirius I wanted to swim through in my own narrative way.

talk about “love”

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If one wants to understand love (beyond “love”)—presuming one doesn’t adequately understand it so far (safe bet)—look to a woman rather than a man, right?

“You do not know who I am”

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So says Emma Recchi (embodied by Tilda Swinton) to her husband
at one great plot point of “I Am Love,” which I saw last night.

According to a reviewer: The Italian Director/Writer Luca Guadagnino “calls food ‘a tool to express the utter giving that a lover can display to the other without words.’” At an earlier great plot point, Emma dines on glazed prawns (atop ratatouille with sweet and sour sauce)—a sparse-covered plate looking like prototypical California cuisine, a matter of delicate flavors and textures to be savored, not quantity to fill (but it’s genuinely Italian, evidently: inspired by a well-known Milan chef, advisor to the film). She convincingly conveys an erotic experience of the flavors (seriously, not comical; it’s revelatory for her character Emma) “Ms. Swinton herself calls the moment ‘prawn-ography.’”

being here now, there then

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More quiet tonight in that high field, wind through the surrounding
forest of eucalyptuses, soothing (if you need soothing), serene.

Walking back, a car with loud music passes: rhythm of voice
and sound texture a hybrid of reggae and hiphop. What intensely-practiced performance-spontaneity pop music is.

Flow of play in true spontaneity—unwitting self expression
(shameless incrimination)—bricolagic, impromptu, ad hoc truth
of presence doesn’t resort to such terms as “unwitting self expression”
or et ceterationalities.

welcome, summer

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I didn't’t start the day intending to write a long letter that I didn’t send. But the presumption early on that I’d send a short email flowered into—what the hell—a long email that would surely be sent soon (actual intent to send draws it all on). I was indeed enjoying myself. Paragraphs became pages.

days go by.2

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Fermenting, gestating—synergistic liminalities—fission…. Flow again would be a good topic for writing to these luscious early days of summer so filling me with things to say. I want to revel in the pleasure.

I love the phrase “halcyon days,” though mine’s not yet Walt Whitman’s sense of life waning (link to his poem is upcoming).

Bloomsday

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Happy birthday to me.

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carrot love

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In 2007, Michael Pollan, the culinary journalist, was being interviewed by the NYTimes when he blurted “But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?” This became the epigram, on a page all its own, at the beginning of Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: cognition, culture, narrative, by Lisa Zunshine, Johns Hopkins U.Press, 2008.

I could relate. Some time ago, I found a carrot with a violet soul—
the color, it so happened, of my years-old “gary e. davis” header—
abandoned header, still cherished color.

Though I prefer the word ‘amethyst’ to ‘violet’, it’s a royal violet I like—still standing for ideas I love, and for influence made lasting in light
of findings.

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work finely made may be never finally done

version 1

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Thanks to this medium, there is, when needed, rebirth. Elations of solitude bearing sketches among sketches, merged into a singular piece, pieces among pieces composing a clear horizon can inspire distant transforms returning to have been destined for somewhere else.

It was only literary psychology, aspects of a tropical mind.

serial affairs

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Wandering through a beautiful array of books in a nearby store (not Moe’s) on a perfect spring afternoon, I purchased—well, [insert extended narrative of literary prattle proving allegorical the passage of his days] imagine writing 700+ pages (small font) on how all Literature tends toward The Seven Basic Plots: overcoming the monster, rags to riches. the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth.

romancing conceptuality

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Monday, 5.24 — 9:30 pm

Twelve days without posting...

One day included a short romance with Edward Slingerland’s desire to shape a new sense of “consilience.”

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Thursday, 5.27 — 12:50 pm

So, my sense of Flourishing—Flow of bricolagic days, elations of solitude, intimacies, joyful and beautiful living, finding fulfillment and happiness—lives somewhere between good enough days—warmheartedly, wholeheartedly embodied—and such romancing.

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living fruitfully

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Now done, this longest part of the “conceptuality...” project highlights aspects of living fruitfully, biased toward what I want to dwell with later. Indeed, the entire project feels like a preface (which I say in the discussions too often, maybe).

telic appeal

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Yes, “living fruitfully,” where a nectarine of license may weave into a narrative sorbet.

Yet, that’s an ever-arriving futurity, not the thereby ever-distancing past, as making life a working “art” is an aspirational importance of ever-anewing potential in things (and quote marks, a sign of humility, as well as ever-present questioning).

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night note

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Standing “under” the stars, at a jogging track carved into a hill
above the university, surrounded by Berkeley, next to the black Bay waters, and the pointillistic carpet of San Francisco lights in the black distance—so many lights, each for the little surround below each, for its street. Only the likes of me and airliners see the metro array. It all

“From this I reach…philosophy”

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from Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being:

“The shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow, but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token

warmheartedness

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I’m most certainly no masochist, but I get warm fuzzies from a put-down by someone who has clear warmheartedness with me, such that the tease might seem otherwise (to someone just entering the room) dismissive or coldhearted. I love being teased by a friend.

For example, I say: “I didn’t know the software could do that,” and my friend replies: “There’s lots of things you don’t know.” I get a good laugh.

thinking of excellent ontogeny without egoism

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What is the developmental basis of a very good sense of self, independent yet easily empathic? A well-enabled sense of self avoids habitual and extreme egoism. Egoism expresses, ironically, disabled self sense. How goes developmental avoidance of egoistic personality, resulting in strong, constructive self efficacy with very good empathy?

midland days

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I make notes offline to a variably larger extent than writing online (let us hope). I sometimes put here what interests me during the day to have online (daynotes), and postings are part of a piecemeal journal toward actualizing a large-scale project (or Project) already largely realized, yet

a serene elation of wealth

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X amount of force in a depth of water may cause a serene flow where that same amount of force in shallow water causes a frenzied flow (same energy; less space for it to flow in). The frenzied energy of a young mind (having a relative thinness of neural connectivity for given available energy) may be serene in later years, as the older mind (so rich in density of associativity) is actually doing more with given energy than the younger mind can, but far less overtly, maybe appearing passive to youth. The attention span of the young mind may be very episodic; its listening shallow, where the much-older mind may seem passive (even inattentive) when such a mind is deeply receptive.

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life as literary psychology

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Thursday morning, 4/1

The New York Times reports on recent interest in bridging cognitive psychology and literary studies, something that’s been going on for many years. But commonly in interdomainal inquiry, there are new vistas to explore. I think it’s a can of worms, but I wouldn’t want less for my leading edges. The Times article has many aspects that are valuable to me, so I’m going to use themes from the article for a series of five postings.

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irt: in relation to—or better: in relation with

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‘irt’ means “in relating to.” It’s easier to keystroke than ‘vis-à-vis.’

Yet, I understand with as the basis for “…to”: being in relation with, thus in relation to. I want to understand being-with as the basis for a sense of being in relation to, relating. That’s not always apt, as in simply asserting a semantic connection, yet we’re always doing things with words, enacting a relation that can be reflectively regarded as relating to.

[Nov. 13, 2011: Excuse my linking to this posting so often
from other pages, if that has become tedious for you.]

I think so much vis-à-vis things being vis-à-vis that I always use ‘irt’
in my notes. I might as well use it online, and have this little posting.

Besides, I don’t do French, so ‘vis-à-vis’ feels unduly pretentious,
even though it’s now common for English (and I commonly have
no compunction about being pretentious).

Basically, though, ‘irt’’s a time saver for someone obsessed
with interfacing, interplay, interality, inter-intering (recursive potential), and so on.

[revised April 9, 2019 and June 4, 2024.]

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