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.