I began to feel myself caught up in thought when I posted What's With Thinking about a week ago. Written several years ago, but unearthed just recently, I has begun to challenge me.
All this last year I've been exploring the idea of the direct encounter with an Other or otherness as the unit of value in human life in the form of a 'diary' of reflected on encounters. But is that all? The Thinking essay made me think, as did my reading of Watson's The Modern Mind, as did the reluctance I began to feel in addressing myself to a You other than my readers. Like someone trying to find a comfortable position in an airplane seat, I've twisted, rearranged, stretched, tucked, until finally I've come up with the following that I think shows a way forward.
This has required going back to the framework and expanding it (while keeping the core premises intact.) It's been a thought project in its own right, what I would now call an 'invented encounter,' a form of making, a move of (more or less) mastery (in the art of thinking). It's been a awhile since I've lost myself in such a project and, oh, did it feel good. When thinking about thinking, I used to do this day after day, experiencing frustration, exertion and exhilaration regularly. That project ended (for then); I moved on to inventing the framework. That completed, testing began, and now is the time to evaluate the results.
Thinking is a kind of encounter, it seems to me, as is making generally. Octavia Butler's Blood Child, which I reread this morning. exemplifies the point. This science fiction tale was conceived and composed, as she wrote in her afterword, on three levels: a love story between two very different beings; then, a coming-of-age story, then 'my pregnant man story. I've always wanted to explore what it might be like for a man to be put into that most unlikely of all positions.'
I wonder if all making, by which I mean design and fabrication, of furniture and films and fabrics, anything, doesn't fall under this heading. The maker engages with the thought project from the 'germ or squirm' of an idea as if it were an other, sometimes cooperative, sometimes recalcitrant, right through to the presentable which represents something new in the plenitude of all things to be encountered by the maker at first but anybody after. A maker addresses the project and perhaps afterwards the presentable, and indirectly we address the maker through the presentable.
There's another thing, though. It came to me as a single word when I stood on the corner of the highway waiting to cross, two minutes from my home. Inform. I use this word to illustrate the stress shift that occurs in 'i' suffix words: in-form' vs in-form-a'-tion. But it's hung in my mind: in, as in inwardly; form, as in shape, construct, build. To inform is to tell someone something, to be informed is to be told something, and my mini-epiphany applied to my thinking up to and beyond the intersection in this way: if we want to learn something so that we remember and make us of it, we should teach it. This has always been my experience--and in this blog may still be. Preparing information in order to teach it requires me to give it a form, and it has to be my form, so that after the lesson is delivered, the form and its contents remain in me, alive and accessible.
As I've been reading Watson's book, reviewing names and stories and themes most of which I've been familiar with for years, I realize how much I want to tell someone both to in-form myself but also another, and the two dialectically related.
I spend a lot of time reading and watching and listening to not just news but information about science, history, economics, philosophy, and so on. And as I do I feel I am encountering what I've come to refer to as the plentitude, the wealth of stuff to be known (and beyond knowing.) The word 'universe' suggests, first of all, material things but plenitude presents us with abundance, superabundance, concrete and conceptual, depth and breadth, actuality and possibility, literal and implied, once and will be.
To learn about, say, the underfunded and under-supported Varian Fry and the many European arts, musicians and intellectuals he managed to help escape the Nazis is to be in-formed. Not just a new story, it's also provocative, in the sense of provoking thought about people and possibilities, in effect an indirect encounter with others and othernesses.
When I read (or watch or listen, etc.), part of the plenitude is formed in me. Keeping in-formed, I make new space in me for the plenitude, as the plenitude is where all things are. Shapes, edges, nodes, geometries and geographies of content are present in me, not rigid or static but flexible, dynamic, subject to discriminations and judgments redrawing lines and reordering statuses. This is not so much thinking as in the pursuit of thought projects as a free-flowing and incessant incorporation and adjustment to our circumstances, to the plenitude.
Making as invented encounter, in-forming as indirect encounter, and doing, or daring face to face 2nd person meeting, as direct encounter, what I've been writing about all this last year: these three more fully represent the challenge and opportunity offered us, the beloved Other, by God-in-love, G'luv; more fully describe the life of presence, adventure and (I believe) lastingness we can live; more fully completely liberate me to read and think, as well as meet. Teaching, in my experience, is the sweet spot where all these intersect most purely; but then, I'm a teacher; why wouldn't I feel this way?
You, spider, as I've been writing this standing up on my back porch, have been lolling in your hammock of silk strands strung between the corner of the house and the gutter downspout, your paired front legs extended to monitor the strands. Now you face this way, now reversed. Does time pass for you as it does for me writing this, grindingly slow or breakneck fast? The wind blows your web so you toss like a sailor. I know the feeling. Hang on.
All this last year I've been exploring the idea of the direct encounter with an Other or otherness as the unit of value in human life in the form of a 'diary' of reflected on encounters. But is that all? The Thinking essay made me think, as did my reading of Watson's The Modern Mind, as did the reluctance I began to feel in addressing myself to a You other than my readers. Like someone trying to find a comfortable position in an airplane seat, I've twisted, rearranged, stretched, tucked, until finally I've come up with the following that I think shows a way forward.
This has required going back to the framework and expanding it (while keeping the core premises intact.) It's been a thought project in its own right, what I would now call an 'invented encounter,' a form of making, a move of (more or less) mastery (in the art of thinking). It's been a awhile since I've lost myself in such a project and, oh, did it feel good. When thinking about thinking, I used to do this day after day, experiencing frustration, exertion and exhilaration regularly. That project ended (for then); I moved on to inventing the framework. That completed, testing began, and now is the time to evaluate the results.
Thinking is a kind of encounter, it seems to me, as is making generally. Octavia Butler's Blood Child, which I reread this morning. exemplifies the point. This science fiction tale was conceived and composed, as she wrote in her afterword, on three levels: a love story between two very different beings; then, a coming-of-age story, then 'my pregnant man story. I've always wanted to explore what it might be like for a man to be put into that most unlikely of all positions.'
I wonder if all making, by which I mean design and fabrication, of furniture and films and fabrics, anything, doesn't fall under this heading. The maker engages with the thought project from the 'germ or squirm' of an idea as if it were an other, sometimes cooperative, sometimes recalcitrant, right through to the presentable which represents something new in the plenitude of all things to be encountered by the maker at first but anybody after. A maker addresses the project and perhaps afterwards the presentable, and indirectly we address the maker through the presentable.
There's another thing, though. It came to me as a single word when I stood on the corner of the highway waiting to cross, two minutes from my home. Inform. I use this word to illustrate the stress shift that occurs in 'i' suffix words: in-form' vs in-form-a'-tion. But it's hung in my mind: in, as in inwardly; form, as in shape, construct, build. To inform is to tell someone something, to be informed is to be told something, and my mini-epiphany applied to my thinking up to and beyond the intersection in this way: if we want to learn something so that we remember and make us of it, we should teach it. This has always been my experience--and in this blog may still be. Preparing information in order to teach it requires me to give it a form, and it has to be my form, so that after the lesson is delivered, the form and its contents remain in me, alive and accessible.
As I've been reading Watson's book, reviewing names and stories and themes most of which I've been familiar with for years, I realize how much I want to tell someone both to in-form myself but also another, and the two dialectically related.
I spend a lot of time reading and watching and listening to not just news but information about science, history, economics, philosophy, and so on. And as I do I feel I am encountering what I've come to refer to as the plentitude, the wealth of stuff to be known (and beyond knowing.) The word 'universe' suggests, first of all, material things but plenitude presents us with abundance, superabundance, concrete and conceptual, depth and breadth, actuality and possibility, literal and implied, once and will be.
To learn about, say, the underfunded and under-supported Varian Fry and the many European arts, musicians and intellectuals he managed to help escape the Nazis is to be in-formed. Not just a new story, it's also provocative, in the sense of provoking thought about people and possibilities, in effect an indirect encounter with others and othernesses.
When I read (or watch or listen, etc.), part of the plenitude is formed in me. Keeping in-formed, I make new space in me for the plenitude, as the plenitude is where all things are. Shapes, edges, nodes, geometries and geographies of content are present in me, not rigid or static but flexible, dynamic, subject to discriminations and judgments redrawing lines and reordering statuses. This is not so much thinking as in the pursuit of thought projects as a free-flowing and incessant incorporation and adjustment to our circumstances, to the plenitude.
Making as invented encounter, in-forming as indirect encounter, and doing, or daring face to face 2nd person meeting, as direct encounter, what I've been writing about all this last year: these three more fully represent the challenge and opportunity offered us, the beloved Other, by God-in-love, G'luv; more fully describe the life of presence, adventure and (I believe) lastingness we can live; more fully completely liberate me to read and think, as well as meet. Teaching, in my experience, is the sweet spot where all these intersect most purely; but then, I'm a teacher; why wouldn't I feel this way?
You, spider, as I've been writing this standing up on my back porch, have been lolling in your hammock of silk strands strung between the corner of the house and the gutter downspout, your paired front legs extended to monitor the strands. Now you face this way, now reversed. Does time pass for you as it does for me writing this, grindingly slow or breakneck fast? The wind blows your web so you toss like a sailor. I know the feeling. Hang on.
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