still enhancing my own humanity, so far

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A while back, I had a near-term plan for 40+ topics. I transposed that into about 28, one of which was (is) “living well,” as rubric, as well as boundless topic. Boundless, indeed: Seeking much delimitation (a long webpage, I anticipated), it’s become notes for 42 postings! Maybe I’ll cover the other 27 topics before I die. But that was supposed to be a long detour from a larger project that has been ongoing for some years (which the prospected “conceptual adventuring” of the website is supposed to supplement). Talk about flourishing. I’m ready for biomedical enhancement of longevity to 120+ years. Just keep dementia at bay.

the fabric of our lives

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Narrative adjacency is not always narrative continuity.

That’s important—or rather, it reminds me of something very important to me: The narratives that we do provide as stances of continuity and coherence are always selective. That allows for the coherence of the story, a sense of singularity of narrativity or integrity of the narrating,
for there is no story without coherence which expresses the integrity
that the story is a story.

bibliotropographical enchantment

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The library as...

myth, order, space, power, shadow, shape, chance, workshop, mind, island, survival, oblivion, imagination, identity, home.

That’s the “Contents” page listing of the chapters in The Library at Night, by Argentine writer Alberto Manguel, Yale UP, 2009 (2006).

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things as looking up

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Not “things are looking up.”

As a kid, I liked to sit on a high branch in a large old tree, quietly as someone walked below not noticing I was there. All I had to do was move or say something, and I’d be discovered. The stealth, the power of secreted presence, was thrilling. I didn’t yet anticipate the archetype, from the cyclicality of life to figures of evolution (invalidated by “lateral gene transfer”) and relations of knowledge infusing one’s subconscious.

tweeting in the Milky Way

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I immerse myself in news every morning. I keep a thematized archive of articles that has been growing for many years.

Days go by. What’s interesting now?

Living well; and ethical, cultural, epistemic, philosophical, artful, political, and progressive life—Attachment, Engagement, Involvement, Habituation, Securing, Dwelling, Belonging....

Are we somehow on the way to governing our evolution?

What happens after SETI succeeds? Will we have reached Contact competence?

Do we write life to silent Awaiting?

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July 2020

Dennis Overbye published a stunning article in his NYTimes, “Beyond the Milkey Way, a Galactic Wall,” which caused me to comment to his Twitter account note of his article:

Why We're here is only by Our creative positing of reasons for being—which no deity (such anthropomorphism!) of the Big Bang could care to know. 

“Night neighbors the stars,” wrote Heidegger.

Be neighborly. It's all there is.

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the dead

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When someone you know well dies, it matters to you immensely.
You feel the loss. You appreciate the life lost. You “appreciate” the death as death. It may be life changing.

longing for peak dwelling

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I haven’t read Magic Mountain, but the figure of cultural heights where somehow the upshot of all humanity is brought to dwell in itself appeals to me deeply. On the peak, the view is of other peaks.

Is history our preferred gathering of peaks—conceptions of the past with respect to conceptions of who we were to become? Were they as different from our reconstructions of them as we are relative to their anticipations?

Human evolution is the story, some rhizome, some weaving we make by dwelling among the peaks?

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art as ethical transgression

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Transgression is integral to the history of art, as ethically-transgressive art (from the allure of dark spirits through contemporary performance art); but commonly as formally transgressive: Once upon a time, perspective in art was transgressive. Pointillism was transgressive.
The notion of avant garde was inherited from aspirations to be “revolutionary.” A history of art in the ‘60s and ‘70s, written in the ‘90s, was titled Shock of the New. That’s apart from overtly political art. Google ‘art and transgression,’ you get a list of directly-related results (with “transgressive art” at the top of the list).

contracts of body vs. freedom of mind?

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Problems associable with the difference between ethical interpersonal relations and aesthetic Self may originate in the natural difference between necessary bodily attachments and freedom of mind. I don’t know. I’m trying to work it out.

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