“You do not know who I am”

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So says Emma Recchi (embodied by Tilda Swinton) to her husband
at one great plot point of “I Am Love,” which I saw last night.

According to a reviewer: The Italian Director/Writer Luca Guadagnino “calls food ‘a tool to express the utter giving that a lover can display to the other without words.’” At an earlier great plot point, Emma dines on glazed prawns (atop ratatouille with sweet and sour sauce)—a sparse-covered plate looking like prototypical California cuisine, a matter of delicate flavors and textures to be savored, not quantity to fill (but it’s genuinely Italian, evidently: inspired by a well-known Milan chef, advisor to the film). She convincingly conveys an erotic experience of the flavors (seriously, not comical; it’s revelatory for her character Emma) “Ms. Swinton herself calls the moment ‘prawn-ography.’”

being here now, there then

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More quiet tonight in that high field, wind through the surrounding
forest of eucalyptuses, soothing (if you need soothing), serene.

Walking back, a car with loud music passes: rhythm of voice
and sound texture a hybrid of reggae and hiphop. What intensely-practiced performance-spontaneity pop music is.

Flow of play in true spontaneity—unwitting self expression
(shameless incrimination)—bricolagic, impromptu, ad hoc truth
of presence doesn’t resort to such terms as “unwitting self expression”
or et ceterationalities.

welcome, summer

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I didn't’t start the day intending to write a long letter that I didn’t send. But the presumption early on that I’d send a short email flowered into—what the hell—a long email that would surely be sent soon (actual intent to send draws it all on). I was indeed enjoying myself. Paragraphs became pages.

days go by.2

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Fermenting, gestating—synergistic liminalities—fission…. Flow again would be a good topic for writing to these luscious early days of summer so filling me with things to say. I want to revel in the pleasure.

I love the phrase “halcyon days,” though mine’s not yet Walt Whitman’s sense of life waning (link to his poem is upcoming).

Bloomsday

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Happy birthday to me.

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carrot love

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In 2007, Michael Pollan, the culinary journalist, was being interviewed by the NYTimes when he blurted “But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?” This became the epigram, on a page all its own, at the beginning of Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: cognition, culture, narrative, by Lisa Zunshine, Johns Hopkins U.Press, 2008.

I could relate. Some time ago, I found a carrot with a violet soul—
the color, it so happened, of my years-old “gary e. davis” header—
abandoned header, still cherished color.

Though I prefer the word ‘amethyst’ to ‘violet’, it’s a royal violet I like—still standing for ideas I love, and for influence made lasting in light
of findings.

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work finely made may be never finally done

version 1

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Thanks to this medium, there is, when needed, rebirth. Elations of solitude bearing sketches among sketches, merged into a singular piece, pieces among pieces composing a clear horizon can inspire distant transforms returning to have been destined for somewhere else.

It was only literary psychology, aspects of a tropical mind.

serial affairs

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Wandering through a beautiful array of books in a nearby store (not Moe’s) on a perfect spring afternoon, I purchased—well, [insert extended narrative of literary prattle proving allegorical the passage of his days] imagine writing 700+ pages (small font) on how all Literature tends toward The Seven Basic Plots: overcoming the monster, rags to riches. the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth.

romancing conceptuality

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Monday, 5.24 — 9:30 pm

Twelve days without posting...

One day included a short romance with Edward Slingerland’s desire to shape a new sense of “consilience.”

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Thursday, 5.27 — 12:50 pm

So, my sense of Flourishing—Flow of bricolagic days, elations of solitude, intimacies, joyful and beautiful living, finding fulfillment and happiness—lives somewhere between good enough days—warmheartedly, wholeheartedly embodied—and such romancing.

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living fruitfully

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Now done, this longest part of the “conceptuality...” project highlights aspects of living fruitfully, biased toward what I want to dwell with later. Indeed, the entire project feels like a preface (which I say in the discussions too often, maybe).

telic appeal

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Yes, “living fruitfully,” where a nectarine of license may weave into a narrative sorbet.

Yet, that’s an ever-arriving futurity, not the thereby ever-distancing past, as making life a working “art” is an aspirational importance of ever-anewing potential in things (and quote marks, a sign of humility, as well as ever-present questioning).

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night note

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Standing “under” the stars, at a jogging track carved into a hill
above the university, surrounded by Berkeley, next to the black Bay waters, and the pointillistic carpet of San Francisco lights in the black distance—so many lights, each for the little surround below each, for its street. Only the likes of me and airliners see the metro array. It all

“From this I reach…philosophy”

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from Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being:

“The shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow, but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token

warmheartedness

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I’m most certainly no masochist, but I get warm fuzzies from a put-down by someone who has clear warmheartedness with me, such that the tease might seem otherwise (to someone just entering the room) dismissive or coldhearted. I love being teased by a friend.

For example, I say: “I didn’t know the software could do that,” and my friend replies: “There’s lots of things you don’t know.” I get a good laugh.

thinking of excellent ontogeny without egoism

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What is the developmental basis of a very good sense of self, independent yet easily empathic? A well-enabled sense of self avoids habitual and extreme egoism. Egoism expresses, ironically, disabled self sense. How goes developmental avoidance of egoistic personality, resulting in strong, constructive self efficacy with very good empathy?

midland days

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I make notes offline to a variably larger extent than writing online (let us hope). I sometimes put here what interests me during the day to have online (daynotes), and postings are part of a piecemeal journal toward actualizing a large-scale project (or Project) already largely realized, yet

a serene elation of wealth

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X amount of force in a depth of water may cause a serene flow where that same amount of force in shallow water causes a frenzied flow (same energy; less space for it to flow in). The frenzied energy of a young mind (having a relative thinness of neural connectivity for given available energy) may be serene in later years, as the older mind (so rich in density of associativity) is actually doing more with given energy than the younger mind can, but far less overtly, maybe appearing passive to youth. The attention span of the young mind may be very episodic; its listening shallow, where the much-older mind may seem passive (even inattentive) when such a mind is deeply receptive.

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life as literary psychology

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Thursday morning, 4/1

The New York Times reports on recent interest in bridging cognitive psychology and literary studies, something that’s been going on for many years. But commonly in interdomainal inquiry, there are new vistas to explore. I think it’s a can of worms, but I wouldn’t want less for my leading edges. The Times article has many aspects that are valuable to me, so I’m going to use themes from the article for a series of five postings.

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irt: in relation to—or better: in relation with

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‘irt’ means “in relating to.” It’s easier to keystroke than ‘vis-à-vis.’

Yet, I understand with as the basis for “…to”: being in relation with, thus in relation to. I want to understand being-with as the basis for a sense of being in relation to, relating. That’s not always apt, as in simply asserting a semantic connection, yet we’re always doing things with words, enacting a relation that can be reflectively regarded as relating to.

[Nov. 13, 2011: Excuse my linking to this posting so often
from other pages, if that has become tedious for you.]

I think so much vis-à-vis things being vis-à-vis that I always use ‘irt’
in my notes. I might as well use it online, and have this little posting.

Besides, I don’t do French, so ‘vis-à-vis’ feels unduly pretentious,
even though it’s now common for English (and I commonly have
no compunction about being pretentious).

Basically, though, ‘irt’’s a time saver for someone obsessed
with interfacing, interplay, interality, inter-intering (recursive potential), and so on.

[revised April 9, 2019 and June 4, 2024.]

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reading time: between simulacrumand literary legacy

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Monday, 3/29

The simulacral condition of hyperNetted textuality has become vertiginous, though still a kind of lowland (and very “noisy,” in the info sense). “Literary” textuality is very different, involving complex appreciation, giving time to reading, solitude.

memo from the library

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If you publish something, you want it read. You want to be influential.

There is so much published, and they all sought to be influential. Some lasted. Indeed, so much lasted, one might think that nearly everything that can be said about life, world, humanity, is said, waiting to be influential again, to be brought into another centripetal appreciation of legacies; or more, advancing what might last beyond our bones.

philosophy pre- and post-quake

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Long back in this posting trek, I quoted philosopher Philippa Foot quoting philosopher Normal Malcolm quoting his mentor Ludwig Wittgenstein on the latter’s deathbed, Ludwig saying he’d had a “good life”— not difficult when one comes from a wealthy family and has
the leisure to wander Cambridge, go away into the heights to write Philosophical Investigations, come back when he pleases.

a topologist in flatland

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The day can feel defined by a sense of living in two separate worlds
at once, where others, in casual relations, have apparently no idea of
the possibility, so we interact in common sense, with common sense, as if that’s everything. The other’s comfort may depend (I feel) on an unrealized common-sense attitude that wouldn’t know what that is as such (it seems to me), because there’s just “the” day, the world
in common. The notion of common-sense attitude only makes sense
(as such) relative to there being a different way of understanding
that becomes, relatively speaking, an “uncommon” attitude (the issue
of eccentricity again).

individuational writing on individuation

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Well, finally, the “individuation” section of the “conceptuality...” project is done. It’s intended to be read as is, without some background explanation. But I can’t let well enough alone, I guess. I’ve posted a background explanation.

inFlowering

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Self-reflectivity ultimately becomes a play of the world, the way that being in the world or inWorldness happens, worlds (verb), Self worlding, self-worlding in the play of things in reflection. The horizoning child is ultimately phenomenological. The artist plays, improvises, sketches, stands back to see whom she is now, changes his mind, plays more.

Self-reflectivity proximally may seem withdrawing, abstractive,
yet flowers into its self-horizoning.

So it goes—will go—beyond my discussion of individuation
for the “conceptuality...” project in its ending sense of flourishing.

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holding time in being held

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Persons make their own way by way of actualizing potential based within herself/himself, inasmuch as s/he’s true to his/her own venturing.

Unsightly slashes for a language lacking gender-neutral indicators.

Why not coin some neologisms: ‘hiers’ for “her/his”; ‘hiermself’ for “her/himself”? Is etymogeny malleable or what?

If individuation seeks gender balance—which was the Jungian-archetypal idea of Anima/Animus Shadowing on the way to one’s ownmost humanity in “the second half of life”—how are we to denote that female and male may each embody a balance of feminine and masculine?

At least, one may need the question for intimacies feeling all those so-gendered complementarities of Literature and psychology as ours, recountable in some singular way, as if in one name.

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December 10, 2019

OK, so ‘they’ gets to be Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” as non-gendered option. One can get used to that.

“Persons make their own way by way of actualizing potential based within themself, inasmuch as they are true to their own venturing.”

But my point above had been about gynandry (or androgyny): acknowledging gender balance in oneself, not washing away gender.
I wouldn’t say of you that I love them.

Of course, it’s very odd to highlight your gynandry by saying of you that I love hierm.

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wondering a way

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Friday, 3/19 — 6:41 am

Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Day”: wanderlust

My way into spring will be magniloquent.

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Friday / Saturday

Idealism is good. But it doesn’t presume actuality of the ideal.
It’s not a given by which others are evaluated. My idealism is
aspirational for myself, so I don’t regard myself as some exemplar
of ideality actualized. I want to be influential, but I don’t expect it.

value of individuation

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I don’t regularly go back in my blogs’ recent archives looking for threads, though I know I’ll find some when I do.

empathy through individuation

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This complements last month’s posting on genuineness in learning from the experience of others, as well as briefly addressing—one could argue (as I would)—the basis of caring about and desiring to care for others,
in parenting, teaching, and ethical life.

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some points of philosophical corroboration

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Speaking of philosophical work, I’m really not quite so odd as I self-effacingly say. Joseph Margolis (a senior member of America’s philosophical community, author of 30 books, it’s said) has just published Pragmatism’s Advantage, evidently the culminating work of his life, which seeks no less than to prospect and recommend a sense of philosophy as such for the 21st century—and I’m beyond him!—though I’m the only one who knows that, and I lack his erudition (which will be useful for me to appropriate—with all due credit), which is not especially important, by his own argument, for scoping a sense of the future of philosophy, where we’re all girl/boy scouts.

inhabited

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Fascination with the diverse scale of the days, making a fine-grained incohering of labyrinthine times a sign of some fantastic artistry in our evolving, a wealth of a library that interests a few, so much good reason for happy conversation—and serenely fruitful solitude.

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self-reflectivity: where learning never ends

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Genuineness is one mode of validity, which is also about realism/factuality and appropriateness/exemplarity, including a welcoming of critique as a chance to grow.

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a note on “philosophical work”

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6:51 am

Question for today: Why does—might—philosophical work matter?

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2:27 pm

I asked that morning question because...hmmm, I forget. The question is about a kind of work, not: Why does...philosophy matter? That question pertains to lecturing about philosophical topics; but is such lecturing philosophical work? Is “doing” philosophy the same as presenting well-organized explications of philosophical material, i.e., themes, arguments, ideas, taken from standardly “philosophical” works? What can be distinctively said about a kind of work, appropriately called “philosophical”? Why does that matter?

words of love from a mind being disembodied

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“…remember Rilke's admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish…,” Tony Judt, ”Historian’s Progress,” The New York Review of Books, March 11 issue.

Maybe Salinger read Rilke.

Judt is an esteemed intellectual historian who has written for the NYRB for years. He’s writing a lot these days, and each of his articles have the narrative smoothness and lucidity one might expect of NYRB. His present one is on love of trains. There’s no hint of the growing ALS “imprisonment,” which he recently wrote about matter-of-factly.

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good sense of holistic well-being

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I’m enjoying myself. One person’s inappropriateness might be
another’s good conscience. Inquiring minds are open on the matter.

Some persons might think me callous; others, that I need adult supervision. Or I’m essentially and inconsiderately obtuse.

No, I care. But life has to be fun, and I make mine conceptual.

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Searching for Signs of Intelligent Lifein the Universe

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Catching up on news of the day online—“Whose news?” is a relevant question—can be like traipsing through a mall: so much busyness graphically casting for eyeballs, be it a leading site (e.g., The New York Times) or partisan streetlife (e.g., The Huffington Post, from which I stay away)—isn’t it mindboggling?

I cope by relying on Google News’s sense of “Top Stories.”

Here, this blog, is a quiet place, a “green world.”

semantic compression of developmentality

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I know I don’t write plainly sometimes. But that’s not because I can’t. Writing can be the sharing of an exploration, not just conveyance.

Yet, my choices—semantic compressions?—can serve me well for orientation to open-minded, improvised dailiness.

That’s not to say that I’m always satisfied the next day or the next week with what I’ve done. But eventually, things get to a form that stays (compressed and not), though sometimes the staying expresses a developmental period. I’m big on developmentality, you know.

All of that occurred to me this afternoon as I was midstream with some paragraphs of “living brightly,” which I just uploaded.

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one’s [your?] projections may not be the other’s [my?] unconsciousness

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I’m deliberately avoiding allusion to philosophical views that come easily to mind when I do my discursive sketches, because I’m gradually setting up a perspective that would be the basis for traditional philosophical engagements.

conceptuality of a good life

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Sunday, 2/14 — 11:47 pm

Extended free time exposes the suppressed reality that my circadian rhythm doesn’t gel with the turn of the Earth. I want 27 hour days. I want to not need sleep.

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Monday, 11:03 am

The day’s so pretty for you.

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a note on discursive reading

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11:53 am

A philosophical book review can be a useful occasion for discursive inquiry apart from depending on its reading of the book reviewed (having no pretense of letting the review substitute for the richness and detail of the book). Here’s how the story goes.

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fielding resonant feeling

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I may seem foolish by seeking a resonant sense of living relationship with textuality—ambivalence of reading, a marrying of genres, fiction and realism mirroring each other. I want characterization that provides a site for fielding narratology, for gardening inwordness, down the road.
If I have to seem foolish in the process, so be it.

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an unsynoptably-complex feeling for what happens

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revised Friday, 2/12

Each day has too many interesting advents in the news for me to put time into noting that here. So, the archiving process in the morning is comforting: All those things are gradually, aggregatedly shaping the uncounted topics (limited in number, though) that are “self-assembling,” in that sense.

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I’m enthusiastic about Michael Slote’s Moral Sentimentalism, 2010, for many reasons, but especially as excursion into a sense of “natural virtue” that would (I hope) accord significantly with Philipa Foot’s sense of “natural goodness” (which I’ve fleshed out, offline).

ethical art, artful living: discursive homemaking

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E.M. Dadlez argues her book title that David Hume and Jane Austen are “Mirrors to One Another.” What a darling idea.

You think I’m some kind of Romantic, wanting to marry philosophical and literary value. But wanting a mirrorplay of sensibility figured in
an idealized venue of human Relationship is not itself Romantic.
Dadlez, in effect, proves that through her example.

recollective prospecting

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Recapitulation may reorient, recall, and be an appealing, a gathering,
for better intent—granting more promise (potential for constructiveness), thus durability (maybe).

I periodically go back through recent postings and pages to gather up appealing themes that become implicit in the upcoming agenda. I want to do that again soon. But I’m going to shelve that desire for awhile (which causes unwanted repetition).

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you and me and everyone we know

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A creative writer may have an interpretive plight unlike a reader with text in hand: the writer “reading” the invisible audience, if not living with an audacity of anticipating a specific character of mind.

Here we are, where I must trust in your graciousness toward our presence.

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a note on phenomenology

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I’m writing here. There’s writing here. Here in the writing, with the action, it’s there for reading, to myself as reader. One reads what’s there. I’m here with what’s there. You’re “here” (for yourself) for what’s there. For me, you’re there for what’s here.

all the world as high school

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notes in honor of Holden Caulfield

For example: adding insult to injury. A typical injury by teens is
to excommunicate a “friend.” The insult is to play clueless that
the excommunication happened. “O, what could you be talking about?” But the exclusiveness continues, as if the scene denying it never
took place.

being With, inwordly

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Reveling in the sensuous, Keats, in an 1819 letter, writes: “Talking of Pleasure, ... holding to my Mouth a Nectarine—Good God how fine. It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry.”

“...a scientist by early inclination...”

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“...[So many] reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty,...not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind,....and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” (Wm. Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, on line 4 of Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet, quoted by Jonathan Raban, “Summer with Empson,” London Review of Books, 31:21, 5 Nov ‘09).

some educive growths by a sidewalk, picked for replanting

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It’s not that city life is chaotic. So much is happening, no order can be discerned before the inestimable assemblage of events have transposed into another question of order. The ecology is change by change within change within change, levels of cycles and process, our evolving humanity easily seeming like some eternal recurrence. Another day.

one life to live

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You can rightly regard yesterday’s “for a higher quality…” as an expression of guilt about absorption in self-formative interests,
relative to decades of engagement with political-philosophical issues.
I wanted to reaffirm a sense of continuity, such that self-formative interests are generally complementary and—given the greater importance of our shared humanity, relative to one life—supplementary: Self-formative interests, relative to our humanity, are supplementary to our shared interest in human progress.

Integral to my self-identity is easy feelings of guilt for pursuing self-formative interests. So, in going my own way, I hope for something useful for others in writing about it. I hope, at best, for something exemplary.

But I’ll “have to” update my posting on the issue of unleashed corporatist license. An expanded page will eventually become a part of my long-standing interest in U.S. democracy.

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recourse

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Enough of that depressive position this morning:

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1/18 — 8:53 am

I say I’m a “news junkie,” but that trivializes my desire to understand details of how we, humanity, are evolving—to understand particulars (often tedious) in “how it goes.”

So, I risk depression in the face of catastrophe’s narrative.
(Thank goodness, I’m not living the quake[—Jan. 2018: in Haiti.])

The weekend before last (Sunday, 1/9), I happily intended to write something by yesterday that might be creative and satisfying. But I didn’t.

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what goes without saying

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I’m not a moralist, and I dislike didactic tones. But, on the one hand, our rightly busy lives do tend to marginalize (if not forget) what supposedly “goes without saying,” the so-called “needless to say.” If you accept
the chaoticness of daily life or, in my case, would promote a license
of harmless play, it’s important to not occlude what’s central to anchoring good lives, central to good sense—for prudence, lest we forget (not just marginalize) what really matters.

“the common humanity that we all share”

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At the moment (Friday, 1/15), officials say that the earthquake may have killed two hundred thousand. “This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share,” President Obama said Wednesday morning.

But a reminder is soon forgotten, because our attention has to be centered on managing our own lives. Time, energy, and resources are probably already fully encumbered, because the world works with little slack, especially in recessionary times.

creative play

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Playfully, I declare my right to write obtusely! Taking time to offer ideas while more or less in the middle of doing other things has its downside.

Monday, for example, which began nicely enough—until the second paragraph (which I’ll clarify)....

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anticipatory departing

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Friday, 1/8 — 9:29 am

So—to follow up further from near the end of “free association”—why care whether or not poetic thinking can be rigorous?

Poetics can “yield [something importantly] reliable in our evolving reality...after humanity’s self-undermining of Godly metaphysicalism.”

So, again, why? And why care?

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boy seeks genuine fun

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About “vacuous dailiness” (near the end of “free association”): Realize, please, that I wasn’t positing some equivalence between dailiness and vacuousness! I had in mind the pro forma chat or phony pretense of rapport that expresses, among other things, a common anxiety about the other’s presence. People so habitually miss chances to just be serenely silent together—or even to say something one’s listener remembers for a while; something thoughtful? something thoughtfully funny? I know a persiflager who’s brilliant at this (when she feels like it). In an affectionate sense, I want to strangle people who are habitually dismissive or who talk as if it’s really about their presence.

figuring

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A recognizably figurative work—not Frankenthaler’s “Westwind”—might be imagined to have begun by the artist’s sketching forms, maybe pencil or charcoal whisps emerging from white space.

But with abstraction, the color areas emerge such that any pattern on the canvas (as set of color areas, at least—counterpoints and complements, etc.) implies the imaginable brush stroking that gives “form” in the first place to each area. There’s no substructure, apparently, as the color structure of the space apparently has emerged from the imaginable brushing, rather than the brushing fleshing out

free association

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A recent orchestral composer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work recounted how he spent so much of his time apparently doing nothing, gazing out the window of his study.

A well-known poet reports, before reading his poem on video, that
the short poem took 3 years to finish, because he would come back to it and come back to it—presumably until it had just the elements that let him feel the poem was complete enough at last in the details enough
that its conception was full enough.

dear Naomi, I lost your address!

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May 15, 2010

This posting was moved to teleglyph, same date. She didn’t contact me again, so I couldn’t respond to her lovely long letter.

This posting was supposed to capture your attention about that, since your letter clearly implied you know about this blog. Surely you knew.

I guess you decided to not write me again.

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“love” of unhappiness

I’m enjoying a synopsis of good parenting by a couple of child development specialists, and my experience tells me that they’re very enlightened. Let me share a little from a Webpage by them (linked at the bottom here) that I find especially important, before focusing briefly on my subject title, inspired by their page.

Infants bring into the world the feeling that “they are causing their parents, whom they adore more than life itself, to pay loving attention to their developmental needs.”

Infants are absolutely certain that whatever happens to them is for the best, because their beloved parents have caused or intended whatever happens. Your brand-new baby believes both that he is engaging your love, and also that the care he receives is ideal. When these inborn convictions are confirmed day after day, your child grows up to possess a lasting inner happiness.

Attention breeds independence. Lots of loving attention will make your child independent, not dependent or “spoiled.” A wholly child-centered approach to parenting with “loving regulation&rdquo (no “tough love”) that facilitates their confidence in their own power to cause being loved and in their own potential to gain competence

can provide your child with a reliable, enduring core happiness that is unwavering even in the face of life's unavoidable disappointments and misfortunes. Your child's inner well-being rests on her certain knowledge that she has caused you to love caring for her. Of all the gifts you can give your child, this is the most important, because it is the foundation of all happiness and goodness and the shield against self-caused unhappiness.

The authors indicate that, since a child wholly seeks a parent’s attention, the child will seek whatever the parent has to give. Obvious. But here’s the rub: If the parent is unhappy, the child will want the parent’s unhappiness. The child will grow up seeking unhappiness because that’s what love is. Also, if gaining attention means getting the attention of unhappiness, then becoming unhappy is the way to be loved. But if the parent is unhappy, then they aren’t going to respond sufficiently to the child’s unhappiness, which the child cultivates in order to be loved. Getting insufficient response to one’s own unhappiness by the unhappy parent increases the child’s unhappiness, all the more securing unhappiness as who one is as truly one’s parent’s child, like a bond of unhappiness. “We” belong together in our mirrorplay of unhappiness.

Surely, though, no one seeks unhappiness! But clearly, a child idealizes the parent, so a parent’s unhappiness would be idealized.

As we have said, all babies meet their parents as optimists with regard to relationships. Each infant believes that his parents are perfect caregivers who are perfectly devoted to him. He has an inborn conviction that everything that happens to him is for the best because it is intended and approved by his parents. As a result, we believe, when for some reason parents are consistently unable to satisfy a child's developmental needs [e.g., the career-stressed mother], the infant reacts by believing that his unhappy or alienated feelings are intended and approved of by his parents. Out of love for their parents, and in an attempt to care for themselves exactly as their beloved parents care for them, such children unknowingly develop the desire to cause themselves exactly the same discomfort they believe their parents want for them. These children believe that they are seeking happiness when they strive to recreate the feelings they experienced in their parents' presence.

If this is unhappy, thus malaptive for motivation in school, etc., then more and more through childhood, there is a lack of inner motivation. Needing to succeed and be admired has to come from desire formed from external rewards, and inner unhappiness has to be suppressed through willful attention away from that by desperate desire for things unrelated to inner happiness. “Happy” desire for others and for things becomes a way to preserve suppression of inner unhappiness and get a life of one’s own.

When faced with situations calling for an inner fullness of feeling, such as empathy, feeling has to be strictly bounded and controlled, if not withheld, because a depth of feeling gives way to inner unhappiness. Another’s great loss has to be regarded casually, because the loss to the child, in reconciling to inner unhappiness as essential to their being, is unfathomable and must remain displaced.

A boy’s love for an unhappy mother or girl’s for an unhappy father becomes, in adolescent love and adulthood, a sense of caring for unhappiness. For example, a high-achieving mother might be married to a man made unhappy by his wife’s success. But he is more available to his daughter than a father usually is, because the mother is less available than a mother usually is. So, the unhappy daughter feels especially bonded to the unhappy father. One can grow to depend on a loved one’s unhappiness in order to “truly” love. One even may “love” the other’s unhappiness.

Yet, one doesn’t want to cause unhappiness, so conflict in feeling becomes natural, and causing unhappiness may seem to be one’s fate, because it’s the firefly’s flame. It’s thus best to avoid close friendships, because they too easily become conflicted. A full social life keeps the reality forgotten. Loving a few others in one’s unhappiness takes all the feeling one can afford. But there’s plenty of energy (especially a lot) for things that can be easily forgotten or discarded. Novelty saves.

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I occasionally read about parenting, such as I’m doing today, because I like to periodically test my sense of child development, since I’ve been so occupied with child development for so many years that I’m sometimes wary of my own presumptuousness, especially since I’m beyond actual parenting. I’m happy to feel that I do indeed understand child development and parenting very well. I thought today that a notion of “smart love” might be neat to consider, so I read the long Webpage that I’m quoting from above. In my opinion, it’s an excellent cheat sheet on how to be an excellent parent. The page may seem trite at the beginning; but keep reading. It becomes profoundly useful in its details. Especially useful, I think, is the distinction between primary and secondary happiness (halfway down the page).

Here’s a nice way to end here:

By establishing a pleasurable relationship and not by frustrating your child's needs or depriving her of your attention..., you can provide your child with a reliable, enduring core happiness that is unwavering even in the face of life's unavoidable disappointments and misfortunes. Your child's inner well-being rests on her certain knowledge that she has caused you to love caring for her. Of all the gifts you can give your child, this is the most important, because it is the foundation of all happiness and goodness and the shield against self-caused unhappiness.

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4 reasons to have childrenand 1 reason for philosophy

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2/12/2010 — 9:45 pm

This week’s Science is a special issue on “Food Security,” i.e.: how to feed 9 billion people (the estimated upper limit of Earth’s carrying capacity).

Deciding to not have children, or to adopt instead, is like voting: One vote has to be part of a mass preference, for one’s vote to seem important. But one vote is all one has.

Anyway, population growth is out of control, particularly among the poor and illiterate. Last December, I took an eccentric perspective here on having children.

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the horizoning child

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Somewhere in the late 1970s, a profound little cartoon that I treasured appeared on a magazine page. I believe it was a New Yorker cartoon, but I haven’t found it in available anthologies of New Yorker cartoons.

Like the Russian doll within a doll within a doll, the cartoon on a black background is firstly, in the center of the frame, a little white-line drawing of a very old man sitting cross-legged on the Earth. (He covers the entire Arctic area of the globe), taking up 10% maybe of the space, his back to the viewer, as we see him over his right shoulder, with some profile of his face, as he is looking up, as if into the black horizon (which is speckled with stars). He’s sitting inside a larger line drawing of a middle-aged man in the same cross-legged pose, who is sitting within a drawing of a young man, sitting inside a boy inside an infant. The old man sees the cosmos through the eyes of the middle-aged man seeing the cosmos, etc., etc., through the infant.

dear persiflager

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All tolled, our times were wonderful for me. I’m deeply thankful.
I wish you every happiness, wholly—with all my heart, as I’ve said—
and will always.

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adorations

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I know you love me.

Would I dare write about love—without feeling to be on a stage of so much tired rhetoric that invisible quote marks would be on everything?

a constellating garden party

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Back from my evening hike—tonight under a starkly black sky, crystalline stars, half moon, Venus soon to disappear over the Western horizon this time of night, this time of year (and wintry cold—glad to be warm again), I see my bookcases (300+ books) as if I’m a guest here.

It’s amazing, intimidating to think he’s all that.

But I’m not. That gathering, distilled over years from thousands I own (stored away)—that aggregate bet on the leading ideas, issues, etc., of Our Time (all published in the past decade or so), an English estate—
that somewhat sequenced concert, is what I aim to understand and integrate, not where I’ve been.

I’m happily surprised by my own audacity, anewed by it, making me laugh.

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a perpetual project

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Thursday — 12/10 — 10 pm

President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize address provides an ostensible sense of our evolving as a perpetual project—The Perpetual Project of our species.

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Monday — 12/14 — 4:20 pm

Remarks on the Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century
Secretary of State Clinton
Georgetown University

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eros of a collaborative prospect

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Twyla Tharp has a new book out, The Collaborative Habit: life lessons for working together. Flipping through it (just bought), I find this:

Intimacy married to creativity—it’s hard to resist, this idea of working with people you know and like. Especially when you’re having dinner with friends. There you are, everyone relaxed, and the conversation shifts to How It Might Be if you could only spend your days doing something worthy with people who share your ideas/politics/religion/values.

In such a marrying, interplays of intersubjectivity are untranslatable
into the interactions of interpersonal life, such as a dinner party itself
(as normally experienced). A thrill of the “shift” in conversation is
an anticipated ecstasis of generative rapport, thinking in sync, a synergy, a love of entwined sensibilities that deserves to be called an eros
that makes the sexual meaning of ‘eros’ irrelevant.

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days of letters

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My comment yesterday about intimacy and letters (middle: “There are intimate letters...”) had implicitly in mind a recent book I came across: Yours Ever: people and their letters, by Thomas Mallon, so lovely—about the art of letterwriting in the 20th century. Remember the 20th century? I so remember regularly spending hours a week writing long letters with a fountain pen. (I kept a copy of everything, packed away.)

Here’s a random passage from the book (truly random): “Probably no one who’s held the job [of U.S. President] before or since [Theodore Roosevelt] has left behind a more spontaneous bundle of correspondence—with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, who for months on end would neglect his job to type besotted love notes…to a woman across town” (111).

Maybe I’ll shelve desire for intellectual legacy and become an expert at besottedness.

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psychological self-implicature

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Noelle Oxenhandler shows a lot of courage in Eros of Parenthood, 2001 (hereafter: Noelle), by candidly expressing the energies and the exuberance of parenting, but also the ambivalence and darkness. None of it has to do with sexualizing parenting. Though her courage is especially in confronting the boundary between healthy feeling and abuse, her topic is about the intensity of feeling in healthy parenting that others easily (and self-incriminatingly) sexualize, when there’s nothing “erotic” about the energized innocence of children and about being attuned to that openly (which she at times very poetically expresses).

Align your life with leading trends in innovation

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days go by... 7:15 am

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Hunger is spreading while the number of homeless families is increasing as a result of the recession and other factors, according to a report on Tuesday.....

All I can do is put time into understanding reality, impress on others to not forget the importance of understanding reality, endorse endeavors that appropriately address the reality, and do my best to live a life that is congruent with evolution of a better world—a life which is also fair to my own talents and opportunities I have or create.

Jim ’n I

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Praise refreshing validity of an ordinary day—dailiness as simply beautiful. Friendship, kindredness, intimacy are vitally integral to the natural validity of dailiness in all the common ground and experience we have together and may share to make our lives go well.

I’m proud to say truly that I was born June 16, Bloomsday (the single day of Leopold Bloom that Joyce’s Ulysses narrates), so I’m a Gemini.

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Ulysses and Us
Friday, 12/4 — 8:52 pm

Waking, Learning, Thinking, Walking, Praying, Dying, Reporting, Eating, Reading, Wandering, Singing, Drinking, Ogling, Birthing, Dreaming, Parenting, Teaching, Loving.

—chapter titles of Ulysses and Us: the art of everyday life in Joyce’s masterpiece, Declan Kibard, Norton 2009.

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discursive art

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“Many visual artists working today appear preoccupied with how to integrate literary or discursive content into their work,” writes Kenneth Baker, Art Critic for the S.F. Chronicle.

I wanted to email him (but didn’t) to ask what caused him to say “many...appear,” because I’d love to believe what he says is a trend,
since I have high interest in discursive and “literary” things.

How about integrating what’s discursive and literary?
Literary discourse as discursive Literature?

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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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“...but for the artist’s creative concept...”

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Part of my earlier-said, but vaguely referenced, writerly itinerary of vignetted vining is, I confess, to be “severely” affectionate dwelling in the tropography of conceptual art. So, it’s worth noting that the history of said “art” continues, as the market loves itself so much.

But the real matter here, according to the philosopher of art writing the NY Times article (linked above), is the evolutionary appeal of the idea
(as such, unto itself), as well as appeal of the idea of art.

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etymophilia

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I created that word just now.

Etymology is about tracing a history. An etymon is an original form within the story—an apparently original form, for who knows?
The historiography is all a matter of traces left in extant texts. How much of one’s life now gets into written word? How must it have been
when literacy was slight. Origins are some diffuse ether of lost time.

so many topics, so little time

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40+ topics? (rendered here) [Jan. 12, 2018: now so antedated, because:...]. What is a topic anyway?

One topic I wanted to play through is merely a little inhabitation of ‘graciousness,’ another, way down the road, a massive consideration of art after the overt “Conceptual Art” movement. (But isn’t all art involved with conceptuality? So, what’s especially “Conceptual”?)

And when does an identified movement end? Is it, like a concert or a great novel or a life, just a matter of closure of attention (but an afterlife continues inasmuch as we keep one alive to our own going on?).

“let me hear your long lifted note”

That’s the second line of Merwin’s “The Nomad Flute.”

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stepwise waymaking

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The sequentiality of this blog expresses and complements an ordered agenda of topics—42 presently—that changes through the days and weeks due to advents and distractions, due to the effects of what I’m reading (scarce free time for that), and due to surprising myself by what “he” writes (or disappointing himself).

the whole world happens all the time

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I’m no less a valley news junkie by trekking into hills of poetic thinking (no matter how long the coming trail). I do the New York Times every morning (much of it, not all). Reuters is nearby all day and evening.
PBS News Hour after work.

where I find you

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The Ecstatic Quotidian—isn’t that a lovely book title?—subtitled: “Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature,”
by a philosopher who’s evidently an accomplished poet, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (don’t know of her). The book is premised, a reviewer notes, on the reality that “everydayness is transformed as soon as we try to reflect on it.”

a sense of ethical life

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bridging artful flourishing and humanistic care
9/3

I’m explicating a general account of ethical life relative to a long review, titled “Morality and Virtue” (Ethics, 2004), very well done, by David Copp (editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, 2006) and David Sobel (editor of Reasons for Action, 2009). The review, pro and con, is about Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (2001); Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (2001); and Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (1999)—altogether a millennial moment for virtue-ethical theory.

one flowers and leaves: love as letting-be

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Caring is integral to ethical life and an essential aspect of love,
which of course includes attachment and desire—keeping near, holding dear. But I think the most important feature of love is letting be
(in an existential, humanistic sense), which includes, if called for, letting go.

finding true love where we can

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So, I prove to you, reader, how a voyeur belongs to your nature: wanting to vicariously participate in others’ intimacy—why?

To learn something for managing your own? That’s admirable. Learning never ends, and activism toward growth is good.

To compensate for what you lack? That’s okay! We all have our stories.

You would inebriate, assimilate, accomodate, appropriate—yet be unwittingly entertained.

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sailing, a way...

...of life, inhabiting a world.

Tacking excellently without becoming crusty in salted winds, I’ll own flourishing time in coming days, seafaring happily.

I've lost you, as I move on

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I’m sorry, but I can’t wait. Trust that I’ll keep sending updates along the way.

Remember that email I sent with the subject line "I went crazy..." that you trashed unread? It wasn’t about you. The subject line’s sentence was completed about a book I felt desperate to find among all the boxes of my stored books. It was about an obsession with literary calling I can’t satisfy.

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play everlasting

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I’m deeply affected by the Event of Ted Kennedy’s death—as a very public death, as a Kennedy death, and as American Event.

As American Event: Not merely an American event rightly spread all over the news cycle, it’s a story of the dependence of democracy on leadership that can be irreplaceable.

a fulfilling life is a good life

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In Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot is haunted by Wittgenstein:

“For one recalls [which she does several times in her short book] Wittgenstein's famous death-bed insistence that he had had a wonderful life....Interpreted in terms of happy states of mind it would, however, have been very puzzling indeed if a life as troubled as his had been described as a good life. What Wittgenstein said rang true because of
the things he had done, with rare passion and genius, and especially
on account of his philosophy. Did he not say elsewhere ‘The joy
of my thoughts is the joy of my own strange life’?”

(p. 85 of NG, quoting Norman Malcolm quoting LW)

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mien

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The simplicity of this white page appeals to me, against the shallow busyness of so much imagism—nothing against digital tatooing—brachylogically troping—proudly celebrating—one's consumption
by metro bricolage.

"Cute."

fruitful asymmetry, hybridization, kluge, montage, bricolage...

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Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
New York Times, 10:36 AM ET

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century—and echoes here—died Monday night.

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giving myself a break

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Way back, I ended a post by saying, in part: "OK: If The Silence lasts more than a couple of months, I'm dead."

So, maybe that iteration (as this posting) is reassuring to someone—or else The Afterlife (Ha!) gives one material access to the Internet.

Actually, The Afterlife is one's trace of being remembered among survivors, which now may mean those anonymous readers of Web pages that never disappear from the Internet's kluge archive (thanks to Googlish designs), our current era's version of surviving The Library.

finitude, the gardener

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I’m looking at a humongous library of unread tomes (and the publishing world endlessly flowers new titles, of course—wonderful world), so I’m frustrated by the impossibility of absorbing all of it at once (or keeping up with all that draws me).

“The Inner Child and magical thinking echo in ambition,’ he confessed, as if one might absorb it all before writing further?

one's philological condition

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Days go by, and I digress, reminded of our universe, anticipating our evolving nature, accelerating Time, our capability for facilitating broad-based human development.