speculative pleasure

---

“So, Gary, what’s it all really about?”

I’m glad you asked.

But expect that a penultimate foray deserves to presume its terms
(no links to earlier discussions).

It is what it is.
(Can’t go wrong there.)

---

discursive moments

---

“Discursive moments” is done (for this winter—come spring).
The subtitle probably seems precious: “…: mind evolving.”
Think of ‘moments’ as “importances” and ‘mind’ as verbal “care.”

Play is the thing of course

---

I’ve divided the very conceptual “philological play” Area of The Project into a 4-section first part, “Play is the thing of course: from ‘-ology’ to philogeny,” which prefaces the 4-section main part of “philological play.”

Altogether, it’s happily quite long—major work (for me).

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“genius”

---

It’s a good-spirited (eudaimonic) mystery.

---

for a good story of a “worthwhile” life

---

Generalities, generalities… That can be good, if the terms are durable, for a life that’s always growing up, achieving lots, paying forward, moving on.

---

“The” past is never finally written

---

“The” past is made to serve future-oriented living. The past didn’t create the world. One’s always rewriting one’s past.

---

turn of the year and a plight of inspired writing

---

The short story is that I have a lot of new material online (links upcoming). The long story is that writing process can get as tedious as this posting.

Late December, I began a set of short paragraphs to provide a good sense of what each Area of Cycle 4 of The Project is to be about. I suceeded, but “short” (e.g., “wholly flourshing”) led to much longer, preface after preface (e.g., “creative conceptuality”). This began to cause feeling need to do postings later this month that would preface what I wanted to presume for my Area prefaces now, but hadn’t introduced. So, that caused me to more or less stop earlier than I’d intended, until I get the postings done.

saturdaynote

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Conceptual work is going well, but I don’t have anything to say about it now.

I streamed “Things To Come” (“L’avenir,” 2016), starring Isabelle Huppert. I’d seen it in a theater when it first came to town, but I needed it again. And I got infatuated with its everydayness (so French, you know—having the legacy of Cinéma vérité).

So affirming is Nathalie’s authenticity amid so much pretentiousness around her—going with the flow amid personal chaos, having serenity about endings, beginnings, loss, and renewal—being her ownmost unchained melody of life.

a conception of The Project

---

a postcard on conceptual mountaineering.

---

soliloquy to J. D. Salinger

---

Related notes from recent years that became outtakes while doing
the Web set, “love of being better” (introduced below, Web link
at the end there), were sequenced into a singular thing.

The set, from 2015—2018, makes a confessional prelude to “…being better,” which is a preface to upcoming stuff.

---

love of better being

---

Keywords of our lives may be so overwrought, they mean little anymore—or merely serve specific contexts, having that—but no more singular integrity than scale and horizon of a life has singular definability.

The poets who keep it simple implicitly appeal to us to feel truly
each point that’s here.

saturdaynotes, 9/29—12/8

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I’ve begun actually writing the new cycle of web work for cohering.net. But I’m in the middle of merely-prefacial narrative that I don’t want to upload until I write myself out of that, by the middle of next week, I expect (as I am actively progressing, section by section, day by day).

extraterrestrial love in hiding

---

I’ve posted lots of astrobiological reveries recently, via my Disqus account (only during the past month), which show at the Daily Galaxy articles that I’m commenting on. I want to transfer those as independent postings at the blog where I posted a long reverie today.

---

“I am my art,” where doing art is necessary to being

---

Last night, I was spellbound by the new American Masters documentary on Eva Hesse. I stared at the screen for the entire 1.5 hours as if I was meeting the sister I wasn’t told I had. Her joy, fearlessness, devotion to living her artistry, and obsession with the uncanniness, the ephemerality of being, was awing.

saturdaynotes, 9/29—12/8

---

I’m too occupied to do an update beyond the August 4 g.com update. Sorry.

But that update links to a new posting on Habermas.

In the future, I’m going to note all new cohering.net-related material at Twitter, as well as here. That includes blog postings elsewhere that I also indicate here. Separately, I’m going to note all new gedavis.com-related material at my other Twitter account.

---

interview silences troped with some confession

---

In a filmic sense, my social life is largely voiceover.

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wayfaring

---

Saturday, I vowed to no longer spotlight that my birthday is Bloomsday, though I violate my vow this one time, to publicly seal it.

And I realized that I’m so immersed in gestations that I had, I have nothing more to say soon, publicly.

Writing, creativity offline is so lovely, why say more than what is,
in effect, letters to a muse?

So, for now, there’s my recent update at g.com, and I schedule another date with you here—far away, because gestation is that way, even with a due date.

But you know you can trust me to return.

---

sundaynote

---

May 26: “...I’ll do something non-trivial.”
Done: the May 27 posting below: “intimations.”

I reneged on my June 2 promise to do a substantive update at g.com.
“I’m doing intensive work. I don’t want to explain.” Ditto here.

But I never know in advance when I’ll feel like sharing something before the next promised update.

intimations

---

When I set out to plan for Cycle 4 of cohering.net, February 15, I linked to a placeholder page that was to be developed, which I’ve now done.

I kept its earlier beginning, but added text that has been removed from the “sense of site” page at gedavis.com; added some new notes; and copied into the page some quotes that remain at the current version of “sense of site.”

This may be boring news, but what’s been acted out is a modest withdrawal of myself (this life) from g.com (that world)—having earlier there been too self possessed for what that site is supposed to become.

But I have no general problem with self possession.

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feeling for story: dramatic appeal (value) in emotional novelty

---

This is § b of “Section 3: Fake views exploit the appeal of valid drama.”

---

Why is a chid enchanted by fabulous prospects? Childlike appeal of fabulism (i.e., proffering fables) echoes fantastic cultural stories, once upon a time guided by mythologies that conceptualized worldviews which gave telic cohering and comfort to cycles of life. Such appeal in that kind of narrative echoes in “true” feeling of fictionality and in romanticism (widely conceived, including every mode of safe thrill). A tropological “realism” constitutes dramatic life.

story as scaffold of uncapturable life

---

Narrative can be invitation to imagination, such that the more minimal it is, the more gracious toward reader imaginability the line is.

“This is my confession,” as if narrativity in quote marks is distanced pretense without commitment to authorial candor. Characted confession may cloak a candor that thereby escapes others’ want of elaboration, as if her or his innerwordliness has no more to share beyond a brevity of time passing too quickly, which the story shows.

saturdaynote

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Too much to say, too little time to say it now…

How a flawed film has so much promise that I spend over six hours, across three evenings, doing notes on scenes and shots and dialogue—streaming a few seconds, stop, notes, stream...

filmic fems

---

I’m in love with a girl—well, enchanted. In my next life, I’m coming back as Lale (age 11 or so) in the Turkish film “Mustang” (2016), played by Günes Sensoy (4 shots there). If you haven’t seen it, you absolutely must (especially if you’re a girl-woman).

a perfectly made film

---

Friday, Mar. 9, 11:28 pm

I’m befuddled about why I missed Jane Campion’s “Portrait of a Lady” when it was first released, 1996. I can recall that the year was somewhat chaotic for me. But I loved “The Piano” (1993).

...then winter imposed again.

---

I’m not ready to say more about Cycle 4 of The Project than I did last week.

The Feb. 8 g.com “sense of site” was enhanced yesterday.

days go by...

---

Tree twigs are flowering that spring’s already here.

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coda

---

Jasper Johns is still painting.

The reviewer, Deborah Solomon, ends her review: “... Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first masters that Mr. Johns admired. He was especially captivated by the ‘Deluge’ drawings,... When he was in mid-30s, Mr. Johns had a chance to actually see the drawings..... Was it an exciting experience? ‘Yes,’ he replied with typical terseness, and a little laugh, ‘except that they looked exactly like the reproductions.’”

I began my “Comment” at the article: “Solomon’s article ending is lovely. It reminds me of Jacques Derrida’s iconic point that writing in speech—displaced authoriality in authorship—makes all originals quotational.”

about “a heartwarming work ofawe-filling genius”

---

To say that sundry gardening is “1000+ pages” is an understatement, because that’s actually 1000+ documents, most of which are more than one typical-book page long (though many are much less than a book page). It’s fair to say that the documents average 3 book pages.

It’s fair to say that sundry gardening is 3,000 pages—longer than Proust’s Time Regained (commonly titled Remembrance of Things Past), let alone Ulysses.

sundry gardening

---

I’m devoted to my love of writing—I’m serious—but the point of life is fun. So, I have serious fun.

Love you, wording!

Seriousness of devotion to appreciability calls for humility of pretense.

There’s no sacrilege in lightness about enlightening woods.

Call me license of happy old age there.

Hear: We are each other’s window, each’s mirror.

---

Progressive practice (“in a world”) presumes conceptual background (“descent: midlanding”), which presumes development of conceptuality (“of worlding”), which is itself a venue of inquiry (“Love ascending.”) about development of potential and formative process. Possible scientific artistry from that presumes a creative life that has its own character, born of wholly enthralled engagements.

Yet, the mindful heart of a highland is writing itself—seafaring waves for finding good new ways.

And posting from waypoints—ascending, flying, landscaping, descending—home. Then going on.

---

All the postings in “sundry gardening” didn’t happen with anticipation of the topic groups they are now gathered into.

The sets of 16 new project Areas trope The Project that remains its own evolving woods.

So, “sundry gardening” provides a unifying sense of earlier explorations and prospecting relative now to topics of Areas that will be integral to going on, to furthering clarity of woolly time in tropogenic woods.

Thanks for your interest.

---

November 5, 2024

Cycle 3 of the Project currently led to Cycle 4, now Cycle 5. A simple listing of links to each cycle and better background discussion is here.

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saturdaynote

---

One more week? No more than two: I’m formatting listings, no longer doing text editing. I never bothered to count how many pages I’ve accumulated. I’m aghast that it’s 850+ Webpages and postings. Over the years, when I finished something, I didn’t much go back to it. I moved on to whatever’s next, and had no idea of the volume of work done.

---

the delicious other of disclosure

---

I was dreading to update the gedavis.com home page with a disappointing apology for having nothing much to say. But I came up with a note that I’m happy with—especially the ending, in implicit honor of my streaming last night of “That Obscure Object of Desire” (1977, but remastered in 2001), which is now a dated (rather outdated) experiment in scripting sexist stereotypes and playing with elderly auteurial despair about life in 1977, not only as times which were shockingly insane, but also as absurd, perhaps, as sending a satellite-bound gold plaque of nude humans waving into interstellar space?—and having learned to parody aging without a partner in misogynist society.

archetropal spring day to never forget

---

Beautiful day—and short line at the grocery checkout. Lucky me. The only thing ahead on the conveyor belt was a huge bottle of vodka (half gallon!)—which seemed odd, but none of my business. Someone’s pretty stupid about alcohol, I might have thought (if I’d given it my attention).

I put my stuff on behind the bottle. A short old man in front of me was bubbly, talking with a middle-aged woman who was enjoying him immensely, also helping him pay with his plastic card. I was in no hurry, but didn’t really notice them (but recall in retrospect—before I forget).

“I’m 95!,” he heralded to her, which she cheerfully praised. This caused me to turn toward him. He didn’t look 95. So, I joked. “You’re not 95!” He turned to me, looking surprised through his thick lens, bubbly as, say, a 70 year-old.

I said, “You don’t look 95.” Grinning, seeming flattered, he finished his purchase.

for love of conceptual inquiry

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May 19, 2018

A set of topics, listed here, began in late December, 2016, but added nothing until late April, 2017. I had a long explanation of that, but deleted it, late 2017, because it was outdated. But I discovered today that I had linked to this spot for the sake of “a little story worth recounting, maybe.” Maybe, someday.

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loving north of La La Land

---

So I said (with Mick): Be expert craft in a world that accepts itself—authentic striving at home with kitschiness, scripts we write, scripts
we inherit.

We can trust in our career dreams with our love, finding a way to make them flourish together.

Reconciliation transcends, but so does devotion to making things work.

---

moments flung across a seeing

---

Well, Ana, I’ve found a new obsession, so delightful, I don’t want to pretend to capture it, see: I write to movie streaming, stopping every few minutes or, as the story gains full flourishing, every few seconds, maybe going back several times to a moment, becoming the moment, writing to the intimacy of the moment: to an expression, to a stance. I can’t tell you aptly and briefly how sublime this can be.

among squirrels

---

One can wander around crazy on campus and feel confident that others would presume that the wandering one is in some high revery
(if they notice at all).

Fortunately, in my case, they’d be correct (though Berkeley has more than its urban share of crazies wandering the streets, you know).
My common standing in woods, lost in high boughs, is rich.

free association

---

Creative process is too complicated to discuss briefly (as I
noted August 13).

Free association goes where it may, regardless of thematic constraints. This is good, but it can cause a very broad—apparently unmanageable—array of notes. Suppose that over time, interests have gravitated into 10 areas. That itself is an emergence that could lead to pages of discussion (i.e., a genealogy of thematic gravities; a genesis of theme-ology).

Suppose (for the sake of present points) that each of the resultant 10 areas (in light of time’s gravities) has evolved around 10 foci per area, such that free association at a given time (while I’m out walking, 3x5 notepad in back pocket; or while I’m at my desk doing whatever) likely pertains to any of the 100 or so foci. I don’t take time to organize things; I make a note and move on.

flyday note

---

The April 20 set has 18 sections dated from March 21 through April 20, which actualizes a plan that was more or less set in late February,
but I didn’t actually write it until late June through July 12.

after “I'm gone,” an echo may remain

---

A genius of performance art, an exuberant space oddity, is no longer fallen to Earth: Davie Jones of London is gone, but all-Earth David Bowie rises from the grave, through “Lazarus” (the music video) and “Lazarus” (the play).

mondaynote

---

I want to post here more than I want to post at the other site; so I feel frustrated by my commitment to get to a certain point with development there (outerworldly, so to speak) before devoting time here—then most of my online time here.

love lace

---

Emergences from woolly Logos can be finely designed, a lace of sorts, maybe beyond “poetic” when texted conceptuality eyes a muse
beyond tropical latticing.

Love of lace—of the lace, like authorial love of a story’s evolving,
the mystery drawing her on—would be a love of singularity, like any high poetry (or philosophy itself), though a narrated life (the lacing) evades narrative capture (some “definitive” biographical discourse),
for the sake of potential staying flourishive. Even a story about the dead may never really end, because how one lived is rewritten, as well as reincarnated, in new reading, forever waiting to be.

woolly Logos

---

Strictly speaking, fuzzy logic pertains to cognitive computing.

Yet, alive mentalities involve living conceptualities that may seem ultimately fuzzy in no computable sense, more generative in their appellant ambiguities than algorithmicity can manage. Fuzzy temporality of a life shows itself born of fuzzy ontogeny that cannot be comprehensively retraced.

Topography may imply topology (domain) which may imply topogeny (individuation of conceptual facility). Tropology may become tropogeny, so to speak.

The most rigorously tenable conceptual inquiry can bring one to splendid heights of fuzziness, except inasmuch as we stipulate, axiomatize—or better: design—yet, by what orienting artistry, where to?

postsecret

---

Reasons of love may suggest that fuzzy logic can be good—exactly so, as tropes may be discursively refined, like philospher Harry Frankfurt’s Reasons of Love that, I wonder, may be found to gel with a sentimentalist theory of mind and ethical life (so-called “moral” sentimentalism), for It’s all about reasoning to live—flourishing highly.

---

conceptualities of literary living

---

You see via “days..” (below) how easily I can cause you to feel comfortable forgetting about Gary’s bricolagic web siting,
as he apparently forgets his own site (no posting since mid-June)—
a site which is so in need of updating that he fails to even begin.

Yet, my capacity for new versions of promissory note is undaunted.
I do have a grand agenda! (I’m not merely a narrative figure.)

where are we?

---

The Pentagon’s research people—DARPA—are overtly planning to terraform Mars.

I’ve known for years that something like that was in the works.

Doing such things is Our destiny, not only because We want it, and We can do it. We'll employ the resources of Our solar system for Our evolving Good—and We'll take an artificial planetoid or two with Us to the next star.

happy trails

---

A June 1 “site update” note at the gedavis.com blog [March 16, 2017: which has been abandoned in preference for the “discursive living” blog] got cavalier with an unnamed friend who’s a psychiatrist to the rich in a very wealthy corner of a southern state. We’ve been corresponding for years as compatriats of interest in some areas of philosophy.

Would you like to read about a psychoanalyst’s confused sense of “Intelligence”? That is with a capital ‘I’ (while equating ‘daimon’ and ‘demon’). (I prefer the spelling ‘daimon’ rather than ‘daemon’ because the Aristolelian notion of being well is standardly spelled ‘eudaimonia’—not that I’m Aristotelian, but as Greek terms go….)

When I wrote that about ‘daimon / daemon’, I didn’t know that great Harold Bloom last month published The Daemon Knows: literary greatness and the American sublime. American sensibility is fundamentally different from European sensibility. Bloom has argued that America is basically a "post-Christian" land (The American Religion, 1992).

“I’ll see you in my dreams” indeed.

---

So I said to Mick (quoting from his review of the film), “Mick, you’re right: I thought about Blythe Danner’s Carol for days after. She ‘brings a history of emotion to’ the entire story.”

Then I said to Mick, “This glorious little movie has that authenticity I can’t get enough of. ‘Unforced and true’ life itself has enough romance, comedy, tragedy, and irony (Shakespeare’s four seasons of life).”

“Intelligent dramatic art gives us the ‘honesty and virtue’ that we too often lack in life.

“Let’s have more of life be unpretentious art,” I said to Mick.

outerworldliness...innerworldliness...O!

---

Happy birthday, Will.

And more!

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designing woods

---

Soon, my runarounds there and here about writing offline without posting will be vindicated by the volume of posting that will happen regularly.

“So, that’s what had been gestating in dark woods.”

Presentation emerges, in a sense, backwards from development toward what’s to be presented. The storyteller knows the story before finding a fun translation (to be as if re-telling is the First Ever telling for the teller, too—as if there was no translation—as we are in this together, because we always were, though that was not yet known).

“you're not serious.”

---

There’s always a kind of substance to style. Seriousness belongs with speaking truth, but too much truth (e.g., exposition that evinces reader questions of their own conscience) “should” be kept light.

Lightness—style—is a normal way to signal that there’s not a lot of truth to be had. It’s entertaining, but not to be seriously entertained. Opinion writers in mass media know they must show style and not get too serious about matters. Besides, sophisticated persons show style. This is often more important than what’s said. Whatever you got to say, let style give it merit because presenter posture is easily regarded as primarily important for reception of what’s said—especially if you want a good impression to last long after others have forgotten what you said (and you’ve forgotten, too, but treasure being remembered).

sitting with confessions of a dispossessed memoirist who can’t do fiction

---

Jeffrey interviews Alexandra—long gone from where she grew up in white Rhodesia, but feeling in America like an alien—about her new memoir.

[…]

A: And my agent...she said, you may have a minuscule bit of talent, but you have got no story, and so you’re on your own with fiction.

I perked up:

G: I know that feeling—though I don’t have an agent.

She ignored me.

A: And I thought, no, wait, I do have a story.

J: You have got a story.

A: Yes, I have got a story.

G: I do, too.

sundaynote

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OMG, simply googling ‘gary’ results in a first page that includes G+ postings by me [Jan. 18, 2018: no longer true]—let alone googling ‘gary e. davis berkeley’. I found this out because I was on a little trail of etymological interest, starting with ‘Edinburgh’ (caused by interest in the Scottish Enlightenment—very interesting), which has an interesting root for ‘edin’ to which ‘edward’ (my middle name) is related. So, what about ‘gary’?

Gary never sought ranking. Gary enjoys sharing stuff.

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dear Vivian

---

The story about you today at the News Hour was good, you’d agree, but ultimately clueless. I attached a long “Comment” to the website transcript, but there’s no link for that, so I’m archiving it here:

Was it masquerading?

This wonderful story of a wonderful artist highlights trying “to understand how a brilliant photographer was able to lead this sort of secret life while masquerading really daily as a nanny for over five decades,...”

There are at least three dimensions or modes to this issue. Firstly, what’s a woman artist to do in her era?

Are the soft carillon chimes heard?

---

The composition is evidently the player’s own.

Or is it atmosphere hardly noticed?
[Persons walk around campus on this sunny day as if oblivious.]

The music plays. It’s done well.
It is beautiful, no matter that it’s not heard.
No matter that the beauty was to and for itself.
It was there,
and might have been witnessed.
If not—or inasmuch as not—
no matter. It lived—and knew
a lusciousness of itself.

Our flash in the Dark of Time is a joy
all its own, gently concerting voices among the trees.

So, we play along among the senseless constellations.

What fun
making sense of things.

---

beauty of our finitude

---

My cheeks were often teary through the second half of “The Theory of Everything.” Though the story of Stephen and Jane is heartrending, her True Love and his desire to know—Earthling facing The Cosmos—transcended cruel happenstance of Nature—Nature having no regard for mind, no regard for anything, for there’s no intent to Nature. Only minds love and desire.

among earthlings

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“Fun finding” flowers, though too there’s fun “finding flowers.”
Yet, it’s Flow that’s fun; so, Flow-ers are fun to find, Flow in flourishing, such flowering.

My fun, of course, has been an alledgedly high flowering in conceptual gardening, a trope that has seen its day.

Yet, epochal flowering can happen. So, I want to find such hybrids and bring them home.

Meanwhile, I had fun today glossing a sense of literary living.

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fun finding flowers

---

Thinking of Wally, who has ALS, but doesn’t know I know. Earlier today, before I knew, I responded to an unrelated news article by him, after he sent me his e-mail address in reply to my query to his paper. This was before I googled to find more articles by him about Asheville, NC (since I, too, grew up in the Old South); and found him taking care to ensure that others will carry on, November, 2011. So, at least three years after his knowing he had ALS, he’s still writing!—enthusiastically. Maybe it’s common that deterioration is slow, so I shouldn’t be surprised…. Recalling also Stephen Hawking and a fluttering eye.

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so wayfaring

---

A way to gain distance on the recent present is to nest it in narrative frames, the more frames the better for the gaining.

So, finished with Habermasian philosophy, I created a new home page framework for gedavis.com which anticipates unnamed work through a page called “wayfaring,” about which I had no intent of feeling at one point your voice happening in my writing “I love it”— though I said “like one may love an era of their life: integral to moving on.”

That page will move on, too. Only its first version would be so short, so ending that way. Yet, it wasn’t a unique moment. Your voice happens. There seems to be no week in which you’ve gone away.

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for love of enhancing humanity

---

My title is the header for my gedavis.com homepage today, a Google+ posting, a Facebook posting, and a line in a Tweet. It's also a key theme of the “humanistic union” project at the gedavis.com site.

I’d be surprised if anyone noticed that the same person “owns” both the Facebook/Habermas Page and the Facebook/Heidegger Page. It’s evident, though: Both Pages list the same Website in the “About” information. Then there’s this posting. 

days of laughing

---

May 13: revised and expanded

[May 11} A gorgeous day, especially on campus. At the Faculty Club (traditionally “The Men’s Faculty Club,” no more), I got a tickle noticing newly that a tree beside the patio shades nearby tables perfectly: The tree was planted by design, of course. Yet, the planter would likely never enjoy his (her?) result, because the slow growth of trees doesn’t afford shade soon. Perhaps the planter was very young and now, very old, she enjoys seeing the comfort she caused. But likely not. The planting was a gift to the future, a little like building a cathedral (or striving to help Us all undo risks of climate change).

O, the history that the trees could tell.

Soon after I got home from my daily walk, I wrote a little poem for my Facebook Heidegger page [May 13: Little poem now deleted], there linking to a cohering.net page, which of course links [would, if I’d kept the posting] to the entire Website, for whomever cares to venture. [Monday, 5/12: Ha! Then tonight I attached a “Comment” there that’s a little essay introducing more. The whole event—largely unseen, fine—was fun. [May 13: Now gone; Comments disappear with deleted postings. So, I’ll put it all here, after…]

another day in paradise

---

Balmy breeze of a perfect spring day in woods by a little creek carries distant, lightly chiming melody from carillon counterpointing water babble in slices of sunlight through redwoods and deciduous twigs heralding.

Still alive!

Every day can be at heart delicacy.

Every early afternoon, mostly, I still walk to that place on campus, making notes along the way to there, then back to my keyboard and inner woods of memory, manifolds.

Soon, I’ll post regularly here again, May onward, I expect.

Still mapping. The months have been fun and difficult, yet good. I’m living well, with enough generative presence, happily, and with minimal pretentiousness, though still wanting to capture horizons, as if the Song of Earth is wholly there.

---

prospecting a conception of cognitive artistry

---

Sunday, 10:53 pm

I had fun writing to a philosopher in Germany, Matthias Vogel, today (in English) about his recently-translated Media of Reason, reviewed last week by someone. I suppose that Vogel will balk at the excessiveness of my enthusiasm. But we may be somewhat kindred in spirit.

Anyway, to update you on my explorations must not be regarded as vanity, because it’s just a desire to share what I’m doing—because I believe in the integrity of the exploration. I’m not presuming you’re interested, and I’m not soliciting.

But I’m enjoying myself. Status update: flourishing, happy, fascinated—and often frustrated by the 24-hour turn of Earth, my need for sleep, chores that are necessary distractions, and failure to provide more substantive news to you. Also, I’m sorry that I won’t take time to mediate or explicate what I report, but I can promise to make considerate sense of it all for you someday.

I believe I’ve said that before, about promised explications.

I’m still relatively young (the elderly like to believe).

---

Monday

That posting—“kindred in spirit”—is very long. I’m not going to extend it. If Matthias replies, it’ll become part of new posting. I’ll use what I did yesterday for extracting themes for elsewhere later. Online work is all part of creative process.

---

vistas of gardening

---

Don’t ya love it. But you know, Chauncey Gardiner had it right in Being There, as did Shakespeare: All has its summer and fall. There is winter, yet then comes spring—in the tropology of gardening lives, the literary mind*, societies, economies, and even democracy.

One could rightly argue that Annette Lareau’s discovery of “concerted cultivation” in good parenting is a kind of gardening. What’s progressive education, if not a kind of gardening. What is artistic venturing, what is inquiry.

Maybe I’ve pushed the so-called envelop of “conceptual gardening” as far as it might usefully go.

But the tropology is alive: The Gardens of Democracy: A new American story of citizenship, the economy, and the role of government has apparently inspired a special issue of the journal Democracy, captured in the trope of “the middle-out moment” of economic progressivism that Obama has used a lot and will focus intently tomorrow and in coming months.

We are called upon to garden our lives—and our humanity—well.

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*Northrop Frye finds the seasonal cycle integral to Shakespearean thinking.

topology, tropology, who do you love?

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In middle school, I “discovered” with a drawn circle, given points put uniformly all around it (10º apart, let’s say), that connecting each point to every other point caused a pretty, symmetrical pattern (like a cathedral window) that tended to show circles within itself emerging from the intersections of all the lines connecting every point on the periphery with every other point, circles emergent within circles within the beginning circle, because the symmetry of intersections was subcircular. (The more points on the initial circle, the more emergent circles-within-circles that are rendered by the symmetry of intersecting lines—the more horizons within horizons, relative to a virtual, circular center, smaller and smaller, the more lines there are from the more points there are.) For a 12 year-old, still bothered by having his 8 year-old question to mommy, “Where is God?,” answered senselessly by “Everywhere, dear,” the fascination I found with constructing things in an ultimately senseless world felt insatiable, thus endless (though I probably didn’t yet use ‘ultimately’ and ‘insatiable’ for feelings of wonder and capability).

Where are you?

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I waited to find the house and waited
to buy furniture and all until you turned up, so
we’d choose everything together.
(I tell folks I’ve chosen a life of poverty.)
The hunting and gathering would be little odysseys
which chosen stuff would emblemize only to us.
You’d accept my library, though. But it’s too big,
legacy of a life though it be. I’ve waited for you
to cull the massive thing with me for giving
books to libraries. Where are you?
There are so many places we have to find—never to be
tourists, we swear, rather living wherever
as long as we choose.

engaging by degree

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“feeling for each other,” redux

When I now reread my long-past webpages, I feel a little like I’m reading someone else. The pages belong to their time. The improviser is someone I know well.

And you care about my creative processing.

Let’s pretend.

I’ll be brief. It’s about sex.

a way to inter-textuality

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Someday, I'll give more time to improving the graphical appeal of cohering.net. I’m into wording, so graphical simplicity for that sake
suits me. But that’ll change, all in good time.

I don’t want to be confusing, but my overall Project there is sometimes cross-subprojectual or inter-project-ive, so to speak, though each page is more-or-less autonomous (but sometimes reading like very conceptual prose poems that easily don't seem coherent—sorry! It all does cohere).

Believe it or not, my projects do cohere in offline work. Online, I’ve been improvising for the sake of an expressive holism that doesn't pretend to be formally presented. Free time has been scarce, the past decade. That's changed now, but I've generated so much stuff here, all of which was carefully done, yet expressing an era of life which came to closure, I think, January 2012.

The effusive online and offline work of that era of my life (circa 2004-2011) remains there and elsewhere for later use, but I don't want to look back now. I've got too much to do that's barely begun.

Implicitly, I'm very engaged with creative process, only the result of which—and only some of it—gets online.

The Internet is a de-centering intertextuality—no, interglyphality (given it’s multi-medial nature). It’s a hyper-semiosis, the hyper-coded “global brain,” people analogized around the turn of the century. So, too each mind is a globality of sorts. And project netweaving is a faint trope of Our form of life. 



Over the years, I played out facets of It All, and I'll continue to do that. It'll all be drawn together into a well-formed conceptuality or landscape eventually (if I don’t get hit by a bus in a crosswalk, etc.—protect me, Ana), but that future cohering will be relative to work yet to do.

In the meantime, there is an evolving that inches forward through a beautiful garden, if I may so say, whose horizon always recedes (thank goodness) because Its appeal stays highly generative. 



The essence of life—the birds know—is fun.

Onward.

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Frame within frame within frame

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Sandy Hook teacher Kaitlin Roig who acted so virtuously that day shared with Daine Sawyer how she came to terms with the tragedy and made it a teachable moment. She lets herself be exploited by corporate TV so that her children’s project can be publicized. She is a true heroine.

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adamental flourishing

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revised Feb. 15, 2016

I know the difference between adamant and the word I’m coining.
I like the association between -ment and mind—mentality, mentability, which antedates the inanimacy (another coinage, re: inanimateness) of ‘adamant’ for a resoluteness of well-purposed mind. I want to advance
a generative sense of adamant irt high desire, e.g., a baby’s intrinsic joy in learning; or indomitable engagement, e.g., an artist’s work or
a researcher’s intrepid curiosity.

Many persons shy away from adamental living, i.e, wholly flourishing: insistent mind (not inflexible), headstrong aspiration (not obstinate), implacable love (not obdurate), etc.


The adjectival ‘adamant’ is derived from the noun, an adamant: being like a diamond. A mind may be as evidently manifold, as multi-faceted as appreciability (i.e., capability to be appreciative) can be—and undauntably beautiful.

See a growing mind play in the light, play off appreciativity, playing to loving the fourfold colors “we” make, being many facets of adamental living.

The Inner Child’s horizoning is ever insistent, indomitable, and implacable, ever risking excess aspiration, ever in love with learning, ever eager to be engaged, finding self-efficacy through more envisioning, never enough comprehensiveness of inspiration.

Give me more fair flourishing, more true love, more caring, too (please). Give me high fidelity to the good of our humanity.

Am I too adament?

In my word I hear Ada, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov (actually, it’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle) which I want to discuss someday (influential when I was 25).

But there’s always too much to appreciate fairly, too little time to share enough. For now, I’m adament about my own mind—of course (”What else is new?”)—not to be vain; just grateful, just longing more to show gratitude for the life I have that I may grow better or make enactively happy (beyond feeling—but that too) in some new way of being fruitful, if not as lastingly as may be some texts that play into diamonds.

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no time for the news

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We’re so busy—so little time to care for our tenuous relations to things, including words. Simple recounting can pass us by pallidly, like a too-jaded monotone of the journalist trained to simply recount. “Jackie Finken and her daughters have lived through different phases of mourning for their lost husband and father...” (NYTimes, 1/13/13).

In another world, poetry may stay in simple words because they say so resonantly. Yet, I’ve no verse for you today. “In other news, there’s more to recount for our distractions.”

“A Desert Cold and Wet Multiplies the Misery of Syrian Refugees” (NYTimes, ibid.). Nearly a million of them now. Nearly a million of them now. “…‘We were waiting for our deaths, so we came out [of Syria], but we found our second deaths here,’ said...Abu Tarik from the Dhulash family....”

But cheer up, people! Going forward is our remedy.

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mondaynote

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Beginning again, after a long hiatus, should be cheery, like greeting someone after returning from a long trip. Aren’t we glad to be here today.

It’s not a question, but the kind of thing a first grade Teacher might say to her kids—and it would be “her.” “Let me see your smile.”

One first grader last Friday said, while their terrified teacher’s entire class huddled in their bathroom, “I know karate, so it’s OK. I’ll lead the way out.”

That night, another was quoted as saying “One thing good today: I didn’t die.”

I thought this morning my tearing up was gone. It was all news now, beyond active grief, for my part. But this Sunday photo broke me again.

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night forest shrouded in fog with full moon beams

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Late evening tonight on a Berkeley hillside overlooking the bay
behind me: glowing expanse of rays through so many eucalyptus arms

ethereal

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flowers and leaves

from the May 11 NYTimes review of “Lives of the Novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives.”

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My posting title is originally from a collection of poems by Guy Davenport, now-dead Professor of English at the University of Kentucky—a title which became an attitude of mine toward child development, teaching, romances, and how learning never ends, from one era of life growing and going into an other.

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to a skillful violin playing far awayin a summer night

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I don’t know where exactly you are among trees on the woody street. Some window you’re near, as if serenely singing to the quiet dark without need of being held or bowed.

I should have some expansively poetic pithiness in complement, something prepared for days or weeks to which you’re a preface.

What I have is having given lots of time to a new web-based discussion group that’s very unique, and lovely—which I can’t fairly depict briefly. But they’ll be implicitly integral to writing I’ll link to, from here later.

One member of the group wrote earlier this month (which I quoted in my comments for one post tonight, in part) about her:

…soulmate....the one your heart, body, mind, and soul are screaming out for, and that love really is something so special, that so many others will never find.

—which I mourn a little [I replied], as I wanted that so much in the loves I had—loves I’m no less thankful for, yet—

I’m a creature of my own romanticism. Where you all (some of you) found your soulmate …and made it the love of your life, I wanted the love of my life to be the other side of myself I never found, which I idealized as a sister I didn’t have.

So, I support the best in others, and enjoy my romanticism as something known to be realistic for the hopes of those who haven’t yet found The One.

It’s not that the Love of your life should be like Love [you’ve found], but that Love be what is expressed at best here. Lovers’ experiences will always be so varying, at least in the terms we choose. Yet, what we want is what’s expressed here—which is something never finished! It’s always to be reached or kept thriving. We fall away and journey back wiser, better mates. I know that. I found that. But I didn’t find the soulmate. That’s OK!

[…]

…because knowing The Gift can be given whatever way we can.

...though my confessional posture was fiction.

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mondaynote

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Life is rough, when you’re trying to have fun and life’s business unwittingly throws wrenches in the works.

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.