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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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 20thC, telling of “a brave, new kind of marriage, where spouses would be allowed—even encouraged—to fulfill different aspects of themselves in outside relationships.”
“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.
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.
“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
Steve Jobs
[end of his Stanford Commencement Address, 2005,
quoting the end of the The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971]
.
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.
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.
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.
