after “I'm gone,” an echo may remain

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A genius of performance art, an exuberant space oddity, is no longer fallen to Earth: Davie Jones of London is gone, but all-Earth David Bowie rises from the grave, through “Lazarus” (the music video) and “Lazarus” (the play).

mondaynote

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I want to post here more than I want to post at the other site; so I feel frustrated by my commitment to get to a certain point with development there (outerworldly, so to speak) before devoting time here—then most of my online time here.

love lace

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Emergences from woolly Logos can be finely designed, a lace of sorts, maybe beyond “poetic” when texted conceptuality eyes a muse
beyond tropical latticing.

Love of lace—of the lace, like authorial love of a story’s evolving,
the mystery drawing her on—would be a love of singularity, like any high poetry (or philosophy itself), though a narrated life (the lacing) evades narrative capture (some “definitive” biographical discourse),
for the sake of potential staying flourishive. Even a story about the dead may never really end, because how one lived is rewritten, as well as reincarnated, in new reading, forever waiting to be.

woolly Logos

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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

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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.

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conceptualities of literary living

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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?

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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

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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.

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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!

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Happy birthday, Will.

And more!

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designing woods

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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.”

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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

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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

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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.

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dear Vivian

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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?

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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.

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beauty of our finitude

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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

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“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.

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fun finding flowers

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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.

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so wayfaring

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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.

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for love of enhancing humanity

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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

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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

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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.

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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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mondaynote

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Beginning again, after a long hiatus, should be cheery, like greeting someone after returning from a long trip. Aren’t we glad to be here today.

It’s not a question, but the kind of thing a first grade Teacher might say to her kids—and it would be “her.” “Let me see your smile.”

One first grader last Friday said, while their terrified teacher’s entire class huddled in their bathroom, “I know karate, so it’s OK. I’ll lead the way out.”

That night, another was quoted as saying “One thing good today: I didn’t die.”

I thought this morning my tearing up was gone. It was all news now, beyond active grief, for my part. But this Sunday photo broke me again.

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night forest shrouded in fog with full moon beams

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Late evening tonight on a Berkeley hillside overlooking the bay
behind me: glowing expanse of rays through so many eucalyptus arms

ethereal

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flowers and leaves

from the May 11 NYTimes review of “Lives of the Novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives.”

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My posting title is originally from a collection of poems by Guy Davenport, now-dead Professor of English at the University of Kentucky—a title which became an attitude of mine toward child development, teaching, romances, and how learning never ends, from one era of life growing and going into an other.

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to a skillful violin playing far awayin a summer night

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I don’t know where exactly you are among trees on the woody street. Some window you’re near, as if serenely singing to the quiet dark without need of being held or bowed.

I should have some expansively poetic pithiness in complement, something prepared for days or weeks to which you’re a preface.

What I have is having given lots of time to a new web-based discussion group that’s very unique, and lovely—which I can’t fairly depict briefly. But they’ll be implicitly integral to writing I’ll link to, from here later.

One member of the group wrote earlier this month (which I quoted in my comments for one post tonight, in part) about her:

…soulmate....the one your heart, body, mind, and soul are screaming out for, and that love really is something so special, that so many others will never find.

—which I mourn a little [I replied], as I wanted that so much in the loves I had—loves I’m no less thankful for, yet—

I’m a creature of my own romanticism. Where you all (some of you) found your soulmate …and made it the love of your life, I wanted the love of my life to be the other side of myself I never found, which I idealized as a sister I didn’t have.

So, I support the best in others, and enjoy my romanticism as something known to be realistic for the hopes of those who haven’t yet found The One.

It’s not that the Love of your life should be like Love [you’ve found], but that Love be what is expressed at best here. Lovers’ experiences will always be so varying, at least in the terms we choose. Yet, what we want is what’s expressed here—which is something never finished! It’s always to be reached or kept thriving. We fall away and journey back wiser, better mates. I know that. I found that. But I didn’t find the soulmate. That’s OK!

[…]

…because knowing The Gift can be given whatever way we can.

...though my confessional posture was fiction.

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mondaynote

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Life is rough, when you’re trying to have fun and life’s business unwittingly throws wrenches in the works.

sporting life

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One more week, two at the most, before I’m back to posting more often than Sunday.

I’m really tired of saying things like that. I want to just get on with it! But “it” won’t be worth the time if it’s not set up well.

If I didn’t have to go to the office every week—if I had continuous time to do this work I want to do—I’d have gotten through my fecund mess of notes earlier.

It’s like trying to build a house on weekends. “I just wanna get on with the party here.”

So to speak.

Enjoy life (in good health) and leave a good (memorable) legacy, I say.

I say, good show in London—but I’m not giving time to viewing it.
[Olympics] In the beginning, B.C.E. Athens could create olympics because wealth without war (i.e., leisure culture) gives time for turning freedom to sport. For the living well—who thrive continuously—life becomes commonly sporting.

So it is with adventures and drama and other arts of living—gardening, too (conceptual and otherwise) beyond vanity fairs.

“It’s all about the hunt, old sport”—first, roots and berries, sex, land, monumental memory, great things, realized peaks or other highs...

However, corporate sports (what turns up in a sports section of a newspaper) is boring. In that regard, I’m not a good sport.

Yet, I have olympic aspirations for conceptual gardening! [smirk]

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solar-systemic living

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We’re commonly a world of inestimable volumes of little messages born of episodic attentions (which is all a market needs) grown from ephemeral interests. We give more attention to what’s shocking than to what matters. A string of “newsfeeds” fills our need for narrative (which hardly needs integrative sense when one’s own life mirrors the limitless improvisation of being in time), as if a simulacrum of meaningfulness is a sophisticated realism.

The essayist is a nuisance, along with moralists.

Anyway, a writer has a pleasure of defining by exclusion what’s not worth attention, as well as a burden of scarce time to detail all that’s so worth appreciation, so much that truly matters.

yea, earthlings

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The music video “Where the Hell is Matt? 2012” (link below—but hasn’t everyone seen it?) starts off nicely, then quickly seems kitschy, but quickly gets delightful, inspiring, and deeply touching.

Note the marginality of locales (“where in the world…”), the sweetly simple vs. grand choreography, an incredible happiness in the concept, as if there’s an ethic of humanity in it all. A daddy’s wonderful gift addresses the immortal, aspiring child in our being.

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P.S. After you’ve seen the thing, here’s some history.

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imparting text

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I guess vanity causes me anxiety about not posting recently, as if my tiresome promises of major departures were more vanity.

Non sequitur: “Texting” isn’t talking literally, but is talking-as-text—enamored with its abbrevity, but unconcerned with its textuality as such. Yet, writing has always been texting, and the structuring of narratives (stories, cases, verbal displays, etc.) has always involved architextual design, and conceptual design is environmental, implied by later detailing it routes or constrains, like a scripting that provides lots of freedom for stance and movement, inter-stancing and performative enriching, but determines to its degree what’s there worth determining, including (to my mind) some love of abstraction, true also to painting, dance, poetry, reflective conversation, and so on and on, generally speaking (texting).

Enough non sequiturs bricolaged in a given space through some design can compose a good Thing.

I got a lot of textual designing done the past few weeks, even gaining a sense of an ending yesterday which was elating, but oddly caused Ana to tease me dismissively, invisibly, making me a caricature of accomplishment, which I enjoyed. (I love her so much I can’t stand it sometimes.) But a bit of post-partum blues came this morning: What now? Too much still to do before departing.

Soon, I promise.

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Habermas and news, realism with idealism

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While I’m privately integrating everything I’ve shared online during the past year (given free time, for the sake of specifically benefitting from upcoming readings of others), I feed my addiction to news, including Habermas’s view of EU politics, which I give too little time now to fairly discuss, because I prefer to “lose” myself (no, regain myself) in thinking through what I’ve earlier written, even substantially clarifying some of it, e.g., my idealism of mind.

I love a living resonance between dailiness and conceptual venturing. And I so wish for more free time sooner than later. (But the extended freedom will happen later: early 2013.)

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saturdaynote

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Today’s weather is as perfect as I can remember—another day
in paradise.

At Cheeseboard Pizza (pesto and mushrooms today, sprinkling of blue cheese), I sat on a sidewalk bench next to a lone girl-woman in breezy rose-colored dress, old high-laced shoes, old denim jacket (vintage sartorialist), and dissheveled dark brown hair, finishing her baklava
from somewhere.

She remained afterward, aimlessly entertaining the surround.

I knew she thought I wanted to talk to her.

True—yet, I didn’t.

Two strangers under a tree’s gentle sway.

I almost blurted chirpily “Another day in paradise.”
But I was more interested in the silent dramaturgy of my desire
to start an entertainment.

I watched a very old guy walk by “us” with his manicured poodle.
I felt like Woody Allen in “Annie Hall” exuberantly scripting passers by. I might have turned to her and started babbling—as she was standing up, and walked away.

She admired my restraint.

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“Dear Professor Jennifer,...”

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I sent a letter (email) today to Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Professor of Philosophy, and I actually began it “Dear Professor Jennifer.” You’ll see shortly (a posting) that I wasn’t presumptuous. But I was a little vain.

Anyway, J.A.G-F masterfully exemplifies what philosophy of literature can be. 

remnants of a letter on Habermas’s “Heidegger”

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revised ending, May 20

I began my day with the news, which led to a curiosity about the “free rider problem,” relative to my interest in the constitutionality of the “individual mandate” to have health insurance being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. (They took their first vote on the matter today, in secret.)

That led to noticing that the article on “Authority” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy failed to mention Habermas, though Habermas’s career is about that as much as anything. 

writing for writing

---

“But now, I just want to get back to what I love,” I ended Thursday
(“ sunrise, sunset,...”).

He seems resolute.

I am. Yet, what I love is too much to distill into something both cogently fair to the love and brief (one would hope).

In particular, intending to write a good long posting today drew itself
into a skeletal mitosis by late afternoon that could be fleshed out as
at-least-nine essays.

That’s good—but not practical.

However, I could turn out a focused essay quickly, if I had an imposed
deadline.

But given free time, I thoroughly enjoy the mental heights. I do know to stop when there’s need—to transpose ongoing elation into a promise of future time I make room for, in terms of points in my garden (themes, notes, allusions, resources) that would be obscure to anyone else, but which work for me. 

creative life as manifold order

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Have you ever wondered, faced with a definition of a personality disorder, what the correlate order might be? For example, what’s a bipolar order?

Consider the upside of it (relative to DSM-IV): I know very well that there’s nothing inherently problematic about exuberance or elation that extends over a week or more. This is one reason I love vacation periods. Extended “elevation of mood” is a great thing! What becomes problematic is not being able to effectively divide fidelity to the heights from needing to work with persons who can’t share your enthusiasm while intensely needing their appreciation of you (which can be a mistake). If you can keep the heights from intimidating others (i.e., pretend well that you’re as vacuous as the persons you need to collaborate with) and not need their recognition of the value of your inspiration, then you can better make the heights work for you, and not overly concern yourself that it doesn’t work for them.  

sunrise, sunset, winter, spring

---

1976, a “girl” (25), Kathryne, loses a love, Gary (27), because the boy returned to a doctoral program (already half-finished) a continent away, as she’s beginning hers. The passion of mental growth in the life of each separately causes them to reconcile to time. He was supposed to return, but didn’t. Decades later, each one’s partner died, but neither knew that about the other. So it goes. 

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

---

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

---

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...

---

...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

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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”

---

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

---

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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playhouse notes

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I’ve spent most free time of the past couple of weeks doing meta-writing or textual programming. A novelist mapping out the story is programming.

A resultant set of textual points or themes can orient a future free play along the path (I’ve intimated so often, one way or another). So, creativity can be as much about travel planning as narrating the trip.

I love metaplay.

booknote

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I looked forward to receiving today’s book order via shipping to my department, but the pleasure of seeing Harold Bloom’s final book was special, even moving, because the book, he says, is his last (of tens).
Old Harold has a renown in late 20th C academic literary studies comparable to Samuel Johnson in his era. He’s obsessed with Literature (he says at the beginning of his new book). For years, photos on book jackets show his white hair as disheveled as someone just out of bed,
like Einstein or Mark Twain.

thursdaynote — part 2

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part 1: a morning of perspective

It’s important to have balanced attitude toward the theater of world affairs. Is it my fault I get infatuated with Gail? Ms. Collins used to be the NYTimes Editorial Page Editor. One only achieves that royal position if one has a great nose for narrative called “news.”

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part 2: an evening of conceptual art

Julie Cloutier leaves pebble portraits around S.F. She finds a pebble, does a drawing of it, then places the drawing exactly where she found the pebble. Also, there is a map of the locations. It’s uncertain whether any of the drawings will be at those locations at a later time.

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an horizonal beauty

---

Should you think (in the sense of affectation that means: In case you do so think) that I’m lost to some idiosyncratic way of mind, look at an account of Peggy Kamuf’s mourning of her dear friend Jacques Derrida, which may be about a sense of beauty on each side of mourning, which would be a principle of hope on the other side of lost potential. “Another name for this special kind of receptive vigilance—without which there would be no surprise— is ‘reading.’ Only when one approaches a text as an unknown other can one be surprised by it. To encounter the other, therefore, is to be on the watch for surprising encounters that can only take place when one encounters the other as text.”

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a cohering

a possibly-overwhelming appeal
of a conceptual nexus—no: comprehensiveness—implicated
in something, anything
of “the” world, one’s world
affairs—World
Affairs!—so many kinds of energies
forming so many kinds of flows
scenes
assemblages
personalities
species of idea
possibilities of design
Eros and Psyche possessing
conversations, unwittingly
improvised odysseys
pensive stillness, here: one more
thing to say
then another

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swimming notes

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I occasionally emphasize my obsession with news because the vague reminder is the most I make time to do online, to remind myself that writing of tragedy could consume me. I’m often embarrassed to seem oblivious.

But the reality is opposite: I strive to keep on track with what I can do, which happens to now be so many details of a writing project (sensitive to happy happenstances) that may seem to have no direction.

uphill, downhill—highland, midland

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8:06 pm

OK, the evening’s not over yet. I’ve had a productive weekend, but you’ve heard that one before: It doesn’t bear fruit, such productiveness.

“The fruit spent so much time setting up the pieces of the game that there was no time left to play. Maybe he finished. We left him to his designs.”

Yes, I finished (in a manner of speaking). But now I have to take a walk—in the rain which will cease its weekend reign in the upcoming days we have to go to the office where we may be thankful for little breaks.

So, ummm, if God is Good luck, then right now God is dead.

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circus note

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From The New York Times today, the end of “A Romp…,” by Dennis Overbye:

Some scientists say we won’t really understand life until we can make it ourselves.

On the last day of the conference, J. Craig Venter, the genome decoding entrepreneur and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, described his adventures trying to create an organism with a computer for a parent.

touch

A narrative began mid-story—or a story began as ending—better living through rebirth in context; and a circus brought to touch a bi-cycle of lives were altogether removed to leave our narrator in a short pathos of too many titles in his dreams, dismissed through idle play with a keyword, as if cohering axis, troping uncounted possibilities for relationship.

days go by.3

Ironically, I’m obsessed with the news each day, yet don’t let that distract me from a venture that actually resulted, in part, from decades of obsession with the news—which, by the way, dissolved any dependence on notions that a past has clearly-causal efficacy (contrary to persons still, in effect, living in Cold War thinking), as if conceptions of history can well serve (not) understanding the emergent, evolving present out of evolving Time—though of course planetary life has inestimably definite structures and dynamics, but these are evolving in generative interplays (and mirrorplays) also evolving, just as a tangible organism has definite structure, yet thereby unpredictable plasticity.

humility of a venture

---

Originally communal idealization in a pantheon of gods (which became humanistic idealization in God) wasn’t at heart an expression of implicitly given selfidentity (not a mirrorvanity of proffered perfection), but a venture of learning—adventuring self-formative advancement (which became “progress,” which was mapped back into nature as “evolutionary”— which, by the way, ecological natural selection, as such, is not)—progressivity that would (one hoped) enrich sensibility (beyond estate!) into/unto the richest conceivable senses of sensibility—broad, deep, high sense—and educe inhabitation by found heights.

One’s belief in human perfectibility at least promoted development and cultural evolution, even though the horizon always receded.

loving to make an academic issue

---

“The” current issue for me is literary psychological inquiry.

That isn’t the same as saying: “I’m currently interested in literary psychological inquiry.“ Yes, I’m interested in that (have been “forever”), but these days I’m seeing the interest especially in a large-scale context of philosophical interest that my literary-psychlological interests (call it, for short, LP interests) didn’t imply years ago. I’m now moving into a focus on LP inquiry that’s part of the larger-scale interest (or—choose your favorite cliché of mine—the larger-scale venturing, journeying, seafaring, vining, or pathmaking), which includes my LP interests as issue.

leaving the stage to rethink a theater

---

a substantial change of address
(and appendix to “creative fidelity”)

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version 1

I’ve gone for awhile. Take what you please. In the meantime, I don’t forget you. I’ll be back to you in spring.

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version 2

One can only share something (e.g., stage a play) if there’s something (the play) to share, obviously. Wanting to share something substantial implies having something substantial to share, first wanting to do the substantial work (or to obtain the substantial thing) that one wants to share.

backstage notes

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Finishing “creative fidelity” feels like a milestone, not because it’s especially comprehensive of what I want to do going forward (it’s not) or difficult (not), but because it draws closure on something that began over a year ago, and this is somewhat represented by “c.f.”’s frequent linking back to earlier pages. I feel I’ve won a justified freedom now to write as eccentrically as I please without contradicting (or undermining) my fidelity to living very ordinarily wherever that’s apt—ethically, cogently, and graciously. But that’s as if life isn’t theater; yet life is theater, to my sensibility. Particularly theatrical is the pretense that life isn’t theater.

to be really realistic...

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I’m simply me. It’s not complicated. I can make it complicated.
But I don’t seek that.

I have the interests I have. So it goes. I get enthusiastic about things easily, and I’m thankful. It’s not egoistic to be thankfully enthused about things that don’t interest many others, if I don’t blame others for not having my interests (which would otherwise be very silly.

as if there’s no news

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a note on dancing lightly in a thematological map

I know the leading news of the day, the past week, every week (of recent decades). If you’re reading this years from now (Jan. 15, 2011), you might have no idea what the leading news has recently been, probably in part because time dissolves a vibrant Moment into so many wakes. However, I don’t wish to give long-range salience to this week’s leading news. Besides, significance to Time is likely not immanent, though intimated in the Moment, invisibly to most witnesses (and commentators).

There are themes that become trends, and some that last for the lot of us, even some born fully in a Moment. But we likely don’t know which Moments, themes, or trends will endure. This season’s leading events will vine with uncounted others to give a weave to their season (which, you know, I rendered earlier), maybe at the scale of an era to be later defined by those who define eras.

pre-positional soup

He’s in love
with a complex, some Intimacy of Flourishing
in resonance with questions
of domainity as such (thus interdomainity),
legacy and scholarship irt lifeworld
consolidation of learning, reading, and thinking—a world
irt (and/or versus) a life, easily
presuming on itself an implicature
of the world, the World—to a life, at least,
surely (if unclearly) the world of one life,
nebulously open to where it’s going,
how best to further its wayfaring,
as the world does idealize a confidence expressed
by the rhetorical lucidity of the specialist,
like a professional theorist,
let alone a connoisseur of conceptual design,
classically the organotechnologist called a “philosopher,”
now to be a strange hybrid of academia
entwined in our evolutionarity of mind:
no happenstance but enactive
mirrorplay of drawing and evincing,
argument and teaching.

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deconstructive nostalgia

---

One chapter of Designing Positive Psychology (re: yesterday’s posting) criticizes the field for not enough appreciation of “dark sides of the human psyche” (that’s part of a chapter title).

I know those sides, home to transgression of comfortable boundaries, thrilling for some of us (not frightening). I came to know what the shadows know.

We come back to comfortable light and we smile, like Maureen Dowd confessing on Christmas a Patti Smith behind her eyes.

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descent time

---

Holidays away from a scheduled world cause happy warps in lived time. It’s like 2 weeks ago that the past 11 days began. Posting a story 22 hours ago, anchored by a party 48 hours earlier, seems 4 days ago.

It’s time to forget, as I’m back in HyperNet City tomorow, but not possibly of it all.

Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together, evidently details the pathos of the social networking planet that keeps everything pervasively vacuous for maximal marketing effect. Do I want to read about that? No. But one should. Facebook today was valued by investors at $50 billion. The only reason could be that Facebook is a marketer’s dream. Know what? I’ve been on the web from the beginning, but I’m not on Facebook (not actively; I have one of the earliest accounts, but don’t use it). You can know nothing more about me on the web than I’ve chosen.

a manifold sense of self formativity

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One might find a philosopher’s obsession with child development rather odd, especially my interplay of phenomenological and psychological stances. Yet, it’s easy to appreciate that somehow the nature of our humanity is ontogenic (actually, evolutionarily developmental). Living beyond eras that took the gods to heart, we can only appreciate ourselves as somehow-natural inquirers cycling a young star in nothingness, lusciously growing and assembling what matters in light of legacies that don’t portend how creatively we may further them, even originating what they could not even imagine.

christmas

---

My preciously-titled posting yesterday has implicit motives related
to my implicitly prevailing Project. Yet I also had in mind the Christian originality of highlighting the extraordinary child—indeed an extra-ordinariness belonging to human potential as such, symbolized in
an initial possibility of wonderful potential, exemplified (in principle) by every birth.

Strip away all the theocentrically cultic aura and practices, we still have
a universalistic, humanistic valuing of human potential in a gift to one’s world we may presume as the gift of the child.

(That’s about the born and desired child, not a politics of “Life”
that posits theologized humanity in the unviable fetus. We all agree that the born and desired child deserves all our hopes and grants
of opportunity.)

dear diary

It’s not surprising
that clearly-unextraordinary minds
(including myself) might want
to understand clearly-extraordinary minds as well
as one can, dwelling
with their traces (their works)
of peak experience, Moments
in evolving weaves and histories of high
humanity: peaks or points a dweller may
design into novel meshes
for further dwelling
and weaving

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with respect to post-religious spirituality

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I’m fond of the California legacy first associated with the “human potential” movement of the ’60s, especially inasmuch as it (or they or one) avoids/avoided (in the ’70s and ’80s) “New Age”y fantasy rhetorics.

My history here is long. I’ll just note that I’m also fond of authentic Jungian views of “individuation” (now an ordinary term in my thinking, but it came into my life from Jungian engagements many years ago, though I would not call myself Jungian). I’m not as enthusiastic about Buddhist views, but I have affection for their studied simplicity. I believe that the Esalen Institute has a fine legacy, and regional resources such as Tassajara, Green Gulch, and Spirit Rock are darling. MindBody interweaving should be integral to health care, and mindfulness is integral to living well.

ontic lightness with an orange

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“An orange” is one among oranges, including a hue of orange among hues of orange. “Orange,” then, is an emblem for a range of hues whose boundaries might be a matter of taste.

What, after all, is a hue? Life is full of spectra, and we have innumerable emblems for innumerable characters. So, thinking of conceptuality in light of orange might make of its gathering of hues a symbol of conceptuality.

aspects of Saul’s century

---

This week in The NY Times Book Review, Saul Bellow’s friend Leon Wieseltier (literary editor of The New Republic) reviews the recent publication of a selection of Saul’s letters. Here’s my selection of things from the review:

…and here I must disclose, or confess, or boast, that the volume includes also some gorgeous letters to me, written in the fullness of our friendship decades ago, when we used to worry over metaphysics and the novel as we chopped wood….the poetry of his prose, its force of consciousness, lay always in its fidelity to….the revelatory details.

a kind of feeling for what happens

---

Wanting to understand “the” mind—my own apparently-intrinsic philosophicality (?), literary mindedness—is integral to me.
I’m intrinsically curious, which takes me to The Edge, too readily perhaps. I play with transgression because that creatively leads to discoveries (often enough). But I’m a rigorously ethical person,
so I know I’m harmless. And I’m not afraid of falling.

All in all, I trust my intuition. Writing myself through psychological fascinations (via “life world,” etc.) ultimately into some horizonal mystery—be it eventually “literary” or not—expresses a true love, worth avowing. Meanwhile, my near-term excursion into a conceptuality of authentic happiness isn’t a compensatory symptomology. It’ll lead
(I hope) into creatively good work.

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where am i?

---

In my next life, maybe I’ll become a molecular animator.

I guess I’d need a good background in molecular biology to understand the dynamics. But look at this!

The emergence of life from proper function of complex molecules looks like a little self-contained ecology having an intrinsic intelligence.
We project or posit intelligence from proper function. Astoundingly,
life is itself.

Millions of cells make up emergent tissue, of course, and cellularly-huge volumes of tissue make up an emergent organ in a manifold organization of an emergent being who can inhabit so many days to be able to sit here and realize millions of cells….

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an article of faith

---

We put obviously-gifted kids in special programs, though (but so that)
a very few will actualize their potential in some lasting way. Likewise, we must proffer and facilitate curiosity, imaginative feeling, and creativity everywhere in order for as much talent as possible to be eventually actualized in some lasting way.

Education is, at best, an extended wager of hope, good faith, and generous “reading” of the early days of others’ journeys. We simply must believe in the implicit presence of creative potential around us.

There is no better faith than this.

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a note on being drawn by intrinsic appeals

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Saturday, 10.30 — 9:44 pm

I want to exemplify how the generativity of our evolving through creative and empathic human development can have a philosophically tenable conceptuality.

“…you hear a feel,…and you really absorb it somehow.”

Keeping a sense of humor in good stead is very wise for mental health. For example, if someone won’t talk about their alienation from me (e.g., someone’s teen self sense resurrected by my presence), I keep a sense of humor about it (or try my best). If their alienation is innocuous (let me call it good faith alienation), they’ll see that teasing them about it is innocent; I just want to understand. If the alienation is in bad faith (e.g., projecting bad feeling into me that isn’t actually mine), then they’ll likely have no tolerance for being teased about their alienation.

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be a partner in my odyssey

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Who am I to say that [insert any broad-stroke truth-functional claim
or any apparently-speculative audacity in any of my postings or webpages ]?

I imagine what would happen if one of the Wikipedia police assessed one of my pages, if it was at Wikipedia: There would be many scoldings like “Needs Citation,” “Original Writing Needs Authoritative Reference,” etc.

an Emersonian moment

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When Ralph Waldo Emerson was 61 (1864), he wrote in his journal “Within, I do not find wrinkles & used heart, but unspent youth.”

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, the reviewer of the recent publication by The Library of America of Selected Journals, 1820-1877 (2 vols.) begins by noting that “Emerson’s dominant passion was not to know but to grow. ‘Expression is all we want,’ he wrote in his journals….What must grow, ever anew, day in and day out, is one’s inner genius, which his essay ‘Self-Reliance’ defines thus: ‘To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.’”

Well, not quite—