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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