the horizoning child

---

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

---

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.

---

adorations

---

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

---

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.

---

a perpetual project

---

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.

---

Monday — 12/14 — 4:20 pm

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

---

eros of a collaborative prospect

---

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.

---

days of letters

---

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.

---

psychological self-implicature

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

discursive art

---

“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?

---

still enhancing my own humanity, so far

---

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

---

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

---

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).

---

things as looking up

---

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

---

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?

---

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.

---

the dead

---

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

---

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?

---

art as ethical transgression

---

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?

---

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.

---