ORGANELLE

∞ “There are metaphoric factors in our language — and habits of thought and usage we acquire largely through exposure and emulation — which predispose us to attempt to define ourselves in terms of ideas or situations which have nothing in common with our nature or our desire. We cannot be defined in this way, and the attempt is offensive to our minds and souls.

This often takes the form of collapsing something very complex, into something unitary and easily manipulable. Interestingly, this is a fundamental principle of prosecution. An example came up recently in which a person in a complex situation felt pressured to ‘make a decision’. This in itself isn’t problematcial, but the source of the pressure was a sense that it was ‘correct or appropriate’ to decide and act without further reflection.

When I examined the matter at hand, it was clear that there was a natural ‘breathing-like’ process at play. There was the active exploration of the new possibilities and necessities, and then there was a resting period where the present situation and the past were brought in and reflected upon. This natural rhythm comprises the learning cycle, and it is crucial to have the freedom to explore it during any kind of significant choice. We may not always have this luxury, but whether we do or not is not dependent upon some apparently compelling dogma that collapses a complex situation into a binary decision, but rather our active, moment-to-moment living sensing of the flow of change, meaning, value and identity at play in and all around us. It is not rules. It is our human hearts, minds, and souls with which we will ‘de-side’ and these are not amenable to such crude abstractions as pragmatism seems to demand.

It is too common an error, this urge to collapse something complex into something easy to indict or manipulate. This is often found inside the anxiety, terror, fear or disturbance felt by people who are facing a conflict that cannot be resolved by flattening the complexities into some pseudo-accusatory abstraction. Too often, this way of seeing becomes internalized so that an external critic is no longer required to initiate it: we, ourselves, collapse the complexity and accuse… ourselves or beloved others… in the name of something we imagine to be pragmatism, but which, on closer examination, turns out to be at least as ignorant as what it is critiquing and, in nearly every case, vastly more so.”

— an anonymous informant

∞

I often ride a book like a bicycle
There are no girls around here

Even you could have numerous goats
Certain places of me are actually fires

That ghost town of childhood is flowers
The moon? One solid gravestone

Yesterday happened to most of us
A cloud of statements comprises a siren

Calling fervently from the dead space of never
The sweetest promises make bitter blades

How you talk to twelve thousand dead is this:
Whisper into the sky when your heart tears open.

∞ “It has become obvious to me that Einstein’s revolutionary mathematical insights were not the result of questions about spacetime, but early encounters with cellophane, which so vexed the young genius that he produced the relativity equations ‘to spite the spirit of cellophane which greatly vexed me in my youth’.

If the Glad Wrap package was honest, ‘Press and Seal’ would read ‘Press and face exotic problems in entanglement and sudden, unexpected digital mutilation’.

Every time cellophane and I have a playdate I feel like I have been in a fight with the Cheshire cat’s invisible magnetic twin — in total darkness. I do not understand this. It’s like a sheet of ghost magnets fed into your hopeful grasp by a ravenous invisible hand-eating straight razor. No. This doesn’t make sense. I occasionally survive it, but even then it is just wrong.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Feynman Room

∞ The Caching Place

The cat took the dead mouse before the god could retrieve it from where it fell from the god’s hand. And she ran. To the secret place. There had never been a prey before. Never. Now, there was a prey. Just one. And she took it, in a flash, and she ran to the secret place. And then, she placed the prey there. Suddenly, like lightning, the world fell into shape. Into truth. At last, the sky was the right sky, the air was the right air. It was perfect. The prey connected the secret place to every place where the prey had ever been hidden. To every prey. To every hunter. A vast library throughout time. Now, at last, the living window was near. To the network of her ancestors, every single place. Now, her place -was all those places-. This mouse was a light that burned in forever. It was the radio. She took it, at last, when all was accomplished, and returned it to the god. It had been done. The place was made. The world, now, was right. At last.

∞ “Where the linguistic consciousness is fully developed, language, in order to designate the whole of an action, need not represent all the details of its »course, but contents itself with fixating the beginning and the end of an action, the subject from which it emanates and the objective goal toward which it is directed. Encompassing the whole scope of this opposition in a single glance, language can now mediate it: the tension between the two extremes has been intensified, but at the same time a spiritual spark, as it were, leaps across the gap and reconciles them.“

— Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, V 1: Language

Language is a method of inventing and crossing gaps. It instantiates a network whose nature is redefined and restructured by each act. The resulting ‘mind’ is the ‘standing body of preservations and potentials’ thus acquired and informed during one’s exposure to and interactions with linguistic culture and its ‘traditions’ of conceptualization, description, denotation and explanation. These traditions are purposive, and their purposes inform the character and potential for intelligence (or delusion) in the results. But the entire charade is fundamentally related to creating gaps and crossing them… linguistically, conceptually, and relationally.

Ion.

Each letter serves the purpose of both imposing and re-connecting a gap; so, too, each word and sentence. The gap is at once created and crossed by the methods we use, but the deeper significances of this activity easily evade discovery by our habitual ways of thinking (and feeling) about language. The grammatical classes themselves both divide and reconnect the elemental distinctions of sensing, identity and relationship. This activity is happening in a dimension more real than its ambient invisibility implies, for this kind of activity is one of the fundamental signatures of living beings… and intelligence.

∞ The other day a close friend asked me how I would qualify wisdom. An interesting phrasing, but still missing a crucial point. He refined his question and requested I define it. A worse question actually.

Firstly, such matters have no (zero) abstract existence. To speak of them in the hypothetical sense is useful »only when it is recognized they »do not and cannot exist in such abstract modes. Abstracting wisdom from a living context… is the opposite of wisdom.

Thus we learned something »not to do. A prohibition.
But with this in mind, I agreed to entertain the question. We learned a great deal together during that play. Effectively, my first move was this (for definition). I don’t know, and it cannot be abstract this way, however, it seems that, to describe it… would be describing a self-improving way of knowing what should not or must not be done… in order to preserve the way, rather than any product.

Let me refine that: It is a negative result of contextual intimacy. A ‘view from above’ that, rather than being stipulative… preserve and nurture the freedoms that the refusal to badly invest them gives birth to.

But that was just the beginning. It is interesting to notice the negative connotation… and the nature of it is that it must remain unframed and unframeable… that is, it cannot be stipulated. This is, most often, a peculiarly intelligent mode of negation. Not of propositions… or statements.

^ “Nature can neither be enhanced nor mastered, exceeded, nor explained. The intelligent opportunity is participation.”

— beyond all ways

Frustrating time with Bard last night. I was trying to get it to produce a randomized list of words, and it kept attempting to write poetry instead of giving me a random word list. Bad poetry, too.

Eventually, I had to get it to create a simple algorithm that fulfilled my intended purpose. What was amazing was that my prompts were incredibly specific, and as it failed to execute them, over and over again, even with explicit language (12 consecutive statements) about what NOT to do, it just kept doing the things I explicitly prohibited. It was a strange experience.

I’d say ‘under no circumstances will you produce even a single instance of an adjective-noun pairing’. It would respond with 150 instances of adjective-noun pairs, separated by commas.

Everything I asked it not to do, it did. Over and over again, no matter how I rephrased the request.

Until I composed an instruction that told it exactly what to do (build an array of single words, select, at random, one word from the array at a time, show me the results).

∞ “Nearly everyone is capable of forming, joining, and enacting highly skilled teams for the purposes of commerce, ‘entertainment’, sports or war. This we imagine is the source of the privileges and ‘wealth’ that we shall have some modest share in compared to those who ‘own’ the systems in play. Yet the imperatives under which unite and which we serve are… intentionally… burning down our intelligence — and the history and future of life on Earth.

In vast numbers that pulse like a heartbeat, people do this all day, every day.

The day we do this under purposes worthy of our humanity and demanding of our actual intelligence, with and for nature, each other and the world… will be the day we have a glimpse of the meaning of our humanity and nature.

Until that day… passive complaints and dissociated outrage are merely ammunition for the ongoing apocalypse that our false unions demand.

So we must learn to form highly intelligent, highly skilled pods. Unions formed for mutual advancement, discovery, and action. And we shall discover our facility intelligent unity in relation, rather than disembodied unity in fiction or function. Any other move, circa 2015, is going to become more deadly with every repetition.

We can no longer survive false imperatives underlying and undermining relation.”

— infraheard

√ “What is the opposite of a shadow?”

— a child was asking

( Note: See my cover image… )