Walking: A Reconciliation

It is likely impossible to untangle the mass of errors that have brought humans to this place of global destructive potential.  Yet...

Sitting may be the basic problem.  It is a posture for receiving.  A defenselessness.

Done in solitude as in meditation, as a release from irrelevant modes of constructivism...as a silencing of the "blocking" signal that is our daily noise, then we might call it a good.

Sitting in the Western cultures isn't resting, it is a kind of ending, a quietus.

Walking is a vital opposition.  I can't think of a better one.  But I say this as a foundational proposition.  Walking leads to a kind of contemplative thinking in bodily action and this seems to me the best way to reach a harmony between the body as it is in time, in its material becoming and ending, and the mind as a capacity to travel in endless spheres of speculation, backward and forward.

The body keeps us located, the mind will dislocate us.

The two must be wed.

We are realizing the consequences of the modern separation: a creation of the irreconcilable.

One and One and One and One

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale perhaps offers the best explication of thinking that seems specific to gender.  That is, men think this way, women think that way.

Women can't add, he once said, jokingly.  When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. 

What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. 

Just one and one and one and one, he said.

This is dropped here but is returned to later .

What the Commander said is true.  One and one and one and one doesn't equal four.  Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together.  They cannot be exchanged, one for the other.  They cannot replace each other.

This is illustrated by a flashback to the time just before Offred (the handmaid is "Of Fred"--she will carry his child) is captured and loses her husband and her own little girl (never knowing what has become of them).  The three of them are preparing to make a run for the border and in considering this they wonder what they can do with the cat.  They're supposed to be pretending to a day trip for a picnic and so should not take the cat.  They can't "give the cat away" as that would be suspicious and they can't just leave it outside (set it free) because it would "hang around and mew at the door."

I'll take care of it, Luke said.  And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill.  That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought.  You have to create an it, where none was before.  You do that first, in your head and then you make it real.  So that's how they do it, I thought.  I seem never to have known that before.

A calculus is not a good.  A cat becomes an it.  A woman becomes a handmaid--an it, a pet, a replaceable one adding up to the way it should be according to...whom?

There is another section detailing what I'd call a "solidifying" of "being."  Offred flashes back to memories with her mother--her mother's actions and conversation with friends that Offred either participates in or just listens to--and in one she is considering baby pictures.

You were a wanted child, God knows, she would say at other moments, linger over the photo albums in which she had me framed; these albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit by some plague.  She would say this a little regretfully, as though I hadn't turned out entirely as she'd expected.  

(The reference to "replicas" and "plague" seem telling here.)

These too are kinds of one and one and one and one...that add up to one.  But each one, each fresh capture of the being in one moment will be replaced by another.  It is as if this baby might become this imagining (as I expect); no, it's THIS baby that will become THAT child--the one I don't expect...or something else maybe?  Each photo a future superseded by the next photo.  But that then will be superseded by the REAL human person you begin to solidify into.  No need for another picture of what might be; pictures now become representations of what is (will be) lost.

One and one and one and one...

It Started Rings

Charlie Demuth once told me that he did not like the taste of liquor, for which he was thankful, but that he found the effect it had on his mind to be delightful. Of course Li Po is reported to have written his best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor's attendants and with a dancing-girl to hold his tablet. He was also a great poet. Wine is merely the latchstring.

The virtue of it all is in an opening of the doors, though some rooms of course will be empty, a break with banality, the continual hardening which habit enforces. There is nothing left in me but the virtue of curiosity, Demuth puts in. The poet should be forever at the ship's prow.

An acrobat seldom learns really a new trick, but he must exercise continually to keep his joints free. When I made this discovery it started rings in my memory that keep following one after the other to this day.

WCW, Kora in Hell (Prologue)

Food for Thought

I can't think out of this particular box...ready?

Part I

The (human) Self (Mind and Representation) is outside of biology while being contained by biology.

The Self is a creation of mind as receptive organ.

The Self is an individual in space and time--local and family "geography".

The Self as Ego requires defining characteristics. The "I am" is not enough. The "what" is necessary.

The Self lives a fiction.

Part II

The Brain (where Mind lives) is organic material.

The Brain works biologically.

The Brain acts of necessity. As the heart beats the brain sends and receives electrical "pulses".

The Brain interprets these first biologically--needing X to continue to exist, to not be dead.

The Brain may USE the Mind as necessary.

Part III

However, Mind does not understand this.

Mind desires to be out of time and hence out of body, out of brain...to be eternal.

This is a "fiction" of living (not dying).

Mind creates mythologies.

Our history, our literature, our science is a creation of MIND outside of time.

Mind is forever struggling against the truth of the organism...it is very basically, food...humus.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The world is wrapped up tight within us. And yet towards externalities are we driven--do we drive ourselves. Imagination sets us moving; ambition paves the way; we set our sites and embark.

Imagination is thinking is seeing. Seeing is believing (though Thomas, wisely, doubts). Doubting is seeing something else.

If so, what is the imagined self?

Melville's Ishmael, in the chapter Nightgown: "Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part."

Vision is light.
Light is vision.

Congenial to our dust and less our essence.

Ishmael, elsewhere, in The Mast-Head (look-out): ..."There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you..."

"...but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;"

"There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror."

Breathe that in; close your enslaving eyes and be more attuned while less attentive.