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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