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!

---

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

---

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.

---

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

---

“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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---