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.