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—

memo to Rilke and others

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The themes I want to address soon, relative to the entire idea of
my website (an idea that’s not represented anywhere yet [Jan. 16, 2018: expressed in 2010 as what is now “Cycle 1” of the Project]), are like focusing on a few plants in a garden that has scattered kinds of plants, yet
no design (like a pointillism without enough points to make a gestalt). Yet, there’s an implicit philosophical design that I’m confident of, though it’ll emerge gradually. Topical excursions deserve to stand on their own. (Up the road, the website will gain better design. What I have now serves developmental purposes.)

I feel eventual emergence of an inner conversation to be known through synergistic pages, finding the singularity of the Project, discursive and poietic, in a conceptuality that’s evolving, as if the language of philosophy beyond metaphysicalism stands in the topography of Time like a long poem cohering peaks of mind.

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conceptual gardening as jazz doing 70

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interviewer: [Now 70,] Herbie Hancock’s own musical journey began as a boy in Chicago. Classically trained, he was good enough to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at a youth concert at age 11. Turning to jazz, Hancock gained sudden and international fame in his early 20s with his first great collaborator and mentor, Miles Davis. An early lesson came at a concert in Europe. At first, Hancock says, everything was going right.

HH: We had the audience in the palm of our hands. And right as everything was really peaking, and Miles was soloing, I played this chord, and it was completely wrong. [laughter] …And Miles took a breath and then played some notes, and the notes made my chord right….

passing time

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The days of freedom are too short, too few. Prefacing, intended, gets pushed back by prefacing to that. It’s frustrating enough that a past is preface, being a potential narrative that calls for lots of time, as if the genesis of any life is feasible (as [auto]biography is likely a metonymic gesture). So, a theory of genesis might represent so many untold lives? How a horizoning child may, in a sense, parent the adult is just so long a story. So, a few conceptual touchstones stand for more than they should.

“God” as Good luck

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This is a test: In any situation where someone speaks of “God” (as, it seems, no two persons ever imply the same meaning for the term ‘God’), substitute “luck” or “Good luck” (capping the ‘G’ to express high esteem for goodness). That gives fictional God a proximal connection to realism that better complements the psychology of Faith and the anthropological nature of worship, part of our cultural evolution which is expressive of our ultimately evolving developmentalities....

freestanding combine

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Musing. Amusing myself with free association, like hunting aimlessly through an antique show. Or wandering from Web page to page.

On my desktop, what an odd array of things (icons metonymic of things) have resulted from recent days, including URL icons of things to be read in the next few days (indexically reaching into the planetary ether), merely belonging in what they have: shared location in a life advancing some proximally incongruous array of interests—interests that are not primordially incongruous (I claim).

Take a gathering of ideas, points, calling for an unfound coherence,
like a Rauschenbergian heir on his studio floor before a thing is concerted out of the mess that looks like a child’s playroom.

chat

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A NY Times headline reads “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime.” It’s the busyness—so much “necessity”—of extrinsic life.

Once upon a time, long ago and far away... The literary reader is rapt in lingering through a story (scary popularity!), like true friends in a garden, absorbing shared solitude—like willows in slight breeze.

Stories are free to presume what makes totally no sense to literal days, like outrageous improvising.

There, vulnerable candor is immune to distrust.

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for anewing play, with true feeling

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Creatively speaking, fidelity to one’s development (or art) tends to (wants to—as if the developing has a mind of its own that carries one’s reflectivity in its current) override the importance of relations to non-instrumental others. So, it’s easy to question its ethicality, like a teenage love of transgression. But clearly to me, creative fidelity is not egoism.

But how so, exactly? Though I’ve been familiar with pathogenic narcissism for many years, I didn’t feel I knew enough about it, this past spring; so, I delved into the subject, which led to stunning realizations about narcissism in my life (not me, but—well, we all could stand to admit narcissism in ourselves, especially when seeing egoism easily—too easily?—evident nearby), quite beyond the vanity fair of “sophistication” instanced “everywhere.”

before theorizing authentic happiness

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Simplicity, heartfulness, no presumptiveness, no veils, no masking, transparency without question of fidelity because the Flow is me, because I’m where I can be so, letting go, without fear, accepting
what happens, easily laughing about what I should have learned
and learning it—easily crying when that’s happily evinced
(e.g., giving in to a sappy movie—good release)....

But “normal” life doesn’t easily afford unguarded opennes,
so veils defend against veils, veils reflecting veils, appealing to me
for some theory of genuineness in the drama of being “social,”
because I hope for dissolutions (veil as entrance, prelude) and then happily learning from what happens in the Open of simple presence.

creative self absorption can also bequite empathic

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I’m not a depressive person. Expressionless serenity may look depressive, but it’s not: Pensiveness, daydreaming, thinking, being in love with self-absorption may “fail” to attend to how I look, but only because I’m not attending to being seen, though I easily can so attend (which can feel vain).

I love sharing what absorbs me. I love absorbing the other into myself, as well as being absorbed by the other—being absorbed by-and-to the other, as well as absorbing the other. This isn’t empathic, but it’s ideally what empathy can educe. (Empathy itself involves understanding the other’s situation through feeling and imagining their point of view or situation as they understand it—which requires asking and talking and seeking to shape understanding with the other of the other’s felt sense of things.)

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note to baby

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I had a genuine “Eureka!” experience last weekend, elatedly echoing deep into my belatedly-blooming background feeling for what gives
in a healthy self-absorption, from an accomplished general trustfulness
to a durably purposive life—the hedonic basis of “eudaimonic” humanism!—how infant fascination with surrounds grows into durable love of learning others (potentially beautiful) and landscapes (with their rocky challenges—trOpically speaking)—love of learning that’s the basis of lasting Relationships, born from loves of the day (a grand book
on “positive psychology,” a moment of culinary genius, a Literary mind overwhelming an era of a life) and friends—toward love of eudaimonia, about which I’ll soon have much to say (rather mundanely, in the short run) about a great giving way of time echoing in durable appeals
(after intoxicating elation) sealed in our vitality of engaging sensibility—in the long run for a primordial play, an artistic bearing, deeply
from a textual intimacy that hides from casual entertaining.

So what (I would say to those casual others) that we tend to be alone
in aspiring, beyond archetype, to embody—well, “the” meaning of all humanity through our weaving.

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there he goes again: “symphonicity”—laughter

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Jeffrey Brown of the PBS News Hour interviews Sting today, who’s touring with parts of the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra:

[…]

JB: But is something lost? I mean, as someone who grew up with rock ‘n’ roll, including your music, much of the power of that [to me] is the rawness and the edge.

Sting: Yes.

JB: What happens without that?

one as yet

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Originality is difficult, improbable. It’s best to just seek to express what you have to express, let others worry about the originality. Is what you have to show fullfilling?

The road to that may be long. I go through periods of feeling I have nothing to say anymore; also, periods of knowing I have something I deeply want to say, but don’t know what it is. Elated, I write to find out.

to whom it may concern

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Posts may seem arbitrary, as a matter of what purpose the blog serves (“Whatever you choose, evidently”—and why not?), but there is a plan—though little time to carry on.

I sometimes respond to appealing ephemera, you know (e.g., appearance of an appealing book) or to some issue suggested by someone’s presence. Yet, a stable agenda exists.

I have an enduring interest in better understanding creative growth, you know, relative to making good lives, understanding the range of “loves,” and for making good sense of our ultimate condition.

empathy for persons with little empathy

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Some people don’t easily empathize, so they may be alienated from those who do easily empathize. The non-empathizer may be ashamed of their lack of empathy, not realizing that empathizers would want to understand the non-empathizer’s lack of empathy and would accept the non-empathizer as they are. This acceptance is very alien to the non-empathizer. It can cause chronic avoidance of others which is misinterpreted by those caring others, because the non-empathizer’s lack of communication leaves others trying to imagine the non-empathizer’s behavior from a common point of view, which may look rude and narcissistic to others, though the non-empathizer is not intending to be rude.

Non-empathic persons can be easily loved, but that’s scary to non-empathic persons: how they could be easily accepted when they don’t understand their own confusions of feeling.

aging is fun

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I might regret to inform you that my idea of fun, on a day off from work, is to read some chapters from The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, but I have no such regret.

a little formidability

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“So, you think I’ve got some problem, wanting to research love and intimacy”—as if our narrator is pursuing some absence mirrored in the dance of life, yea!, in the house of some summer night where we were writing our cosmos of poiesis….

So, this is how I look at you—

No...