prospecting a conception of cognitive artistry

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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).

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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.

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vistas of gardening

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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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