archetropal spring day to never forget

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Beautiful day—and short line at the grocery checkout. Lucky me. The only thing ahead on the conveyor belt was a huge bottle of vodka (half gallon!)—which seemed odd, but none of my business. Someone’s pretty stupid about alcohol, I might have thought (if I’d given it my attention).

I put my stuff on behind the bottle. A short old man in front of me was bubbly, talking with a middle-aged woman who was enjoying him immensely, also helping him pay with his plastic card. I was in no hurry, but didn’t really notice them (but recall in retrospect—before I forget).

“I’m 95!,” he heralded to her, which she cheerfully praised. This caused me to turn toward him. He didn’t look 95. So, I joked. “You’re not 95!” He turned to me, looking surprised through his thick lens, bubbly as, say, a 70 year-old.

I said, “You don’t look 95.” Grinning, seeming flattered, he finished his purchase.

for love of conceptual inquiry

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May 19, 2018

A set of topics, listed here, began in late December, 2016, but added nothing until late April, 2017. I had a long explanation of that, but deleted it, late 2017, because it was outdated. But I discovered today that I had linked to this spot for the sake of “a little story worth recounting, maybe.” Maybe, someday.

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loving north of La La Land

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So I said (with Mick): Be expert craft in a world that accepts itself—authentic striving at home with kitschiness, scripts we write, scripts
we inherit.

We can trust in our career dreams with our love, finding a way to make them flourish together.

Reconciliation transcends, but so does devotion to making things work.

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moments flung across a seeing

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Well, Ana, I’ve found a new obsession, so delightful, I don’t want to pretend to capture it, see: I write to movie streaming, stopping every few minutes or, as the story gains full flourishing, every few seconds, maybe going back several times to a moment, becoming the moment, writing to the intimacy of the moment: to an expression, to a stance. I can’t tell you aptly and briefly how sublime this can be.

among squirrels

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One can wander around crazy on campus and feel confident that others would presume that the wandering one is in some high revery
(if they notice at all).

Fortunately, in my case, they’d be correct (though Berkeley has more than its urban share of crazies wandering the streets, you know).
My common standing in woods, lost in high boughs, is rich.

free association

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Creative process is too complicated to discuss briefly (as I
noted August 13).

Free association goes where it may, regardless of thematic constraints. This is good, but it can cause a very broad—apparently unmanageable—array of notes. Suppose that over time, interests have gravitated into 10 areas. That itself is an emergence that could lead to pages of discussion (i.e., a genealogy of thematic gravities; a genesis of theme-ology).

Suppose (for the sake of present points) that each of the resultant 10 areas (in light of time’s gravities) has evolved around 10 foci per area, such that free association at a given time (while I’m out walking, 3x5 notepad in back pocket; or while I’m at my desk doing whatever) likely pertains to any of the 100 or so foci. I don’t take time to organize things; I make a note and move on.

flyday note

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The April 20 set has 18 sections dated from March 21 through April 20, which actualizes a plan that was more or less set in late February,
but I didn’t actually write it until late June through July 12.

after “I'm gone,” an echo may remain

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A genius of performance art, an exuberant space oddity, is no longer fallen to Earth: Davie Jones of London is gone, but all-Earth David Bowie rises from the grave, through “Lazarus” (the music video) and “Lazarus” (the play).

mondaynote

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I want to post here more than I want to post at the other site; so I feel frustrated by my commitment to get to a certain point with development there (outerworldly, so to speak) before devoting time here—then most of my online time here.

love lace

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Emergences from woolly Logos can be finely designed, a lace of sorts, maybe beyond “poetic” when texted conceptuality eyes a muse
beyond tropical latticing.

Love of lace—of the lace, like authorial love of a story’s evolving,
the mystery drawing her on—would be a love of singularity, like any high poetry (or philosophy itself), though a narrated life (the lacing) evades narrative capture (some “definitive” biographical discourse),
for the sake of potential staying flourishive. Even a story about the dead may never really end, because how one lived is rewritten, as well as reincarnated, in new reading, forever waiting to be.

woolly Logos

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Strictly speaking, fuzzy logic pertains to cognitive computing.

Yet, alive mentalities involve living conceptualities that may seem ultimately fuzzy in no computable sense, more generative in their appellant ambiguities than algorithmicity can manage. Fuzzy temporality of a life shows itself born of fuzzy ontogeny that cannot be comprehensively retraced.

Topography may imply topology (domain) which may imply topogeny (individuation of conceptual facility). Tropology may become tropogeny, so to speak.

The most rigorously tenable conceptual inquiry can bring one to splendid heights of fuzziness, except inasmuch as we stipulate, axiomatize—or better: design—yet, by what orienting artistry, where to?

postsecret

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Reasons of love may suggest that fuzzy logic can be good—exactly so, as tropes may be discursively refined, like philospher Harry Frankfurt’s Reasons of Love that, I wonder, may be found to gel with a sentimentalist theory of mind and ethical life (so-called “moral” sentimentalism), for It’s all about reasoning to live—flourishing highly.

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conceptualities of literary living

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You see via “days..” (below) how easily I can cause you to feel comfortable forgetting about Gary’s bricolagic web siting,
as he apparently forgets his own site (no posting since mid-June)—
a site which is so in need of updating that he fails to even begin.

Yet, my capacity for new versions of promissory note is undaunted.
I do have a grand agenda! (I’m not merely a narrative figure.)

where are we?

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The Pentagon’s research people—DARPA—are overtly planning to terraform Mars.

I’ve known for years that something like that was in the works.

Doing such things is Our destiny, not only because We want it, and We can do it. We'll employ the resources of Our solar system for Our evolving Good—and We'll take an artificial planetoid or two with Us to the next star.

happy trails

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A June 1 “site update” note at the gedavis.com blog [March 16, 2017: which has been abandoned in preference for the “discursive living” blog] got cavalier with an unnamed friend who’s a psychiatrist to the rich in a very wealthy corner of a southern state. We’ve been corresponding for years as compatriats of interest in some areas of philosophy.

Would you like to read about a psychoanalyst’s confused sense of “Intelligence”? That is with a capital ‘I’ (while equating ‘daimon’ and ‘demon’). (I prefer the spelling ‘daimon’ rather than ‘daemon’ because the Aristolelian notion of being well is standardly spelled ‘eudaimonia’—not that I’m Aristotelian, but as Greek terms go….)

When I wrote that about ‘daimon / daemon’, I didn’t know that great Harold Bloom last month published The Daemon Knows: literary greatness and the American sublime. American sensibility is fundamentally different from European sensibility. Bloom has argued that America is basically a "post-Christian" land (The American Religion, 1992).

“I’ll see you in my dreams” indeed.

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So I said to Mick (quoting from his review of the film), “Mick, you’re right: I thought about Blythe Danner’s Carol for days after. She ‘brings a history of emotion to’ the entire story.”

Then I said to Mick, “This glorious little movie has that authenticity I can’t get enough of. ‘Unforced and true’ life itself has enough romance, comedy, tragedy, and irony (Shakespeare’s four seasons of life).”

“Intelligent dramatic art gives us the ‘honesty and virtue’ that we too often lack in life.

“Let’s have more of life be unpretentious art,” I said to Mick.

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.