I often pause to re-evalute those arts which support narrative. Especially in writing and literature, and allied or adjacent crafts.

One of these is Carl Jung, or at least his disciples Jungian-ish creations.

An example of one of these is Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the basic structure of a man’s life is the hero’s journey. At this stage I have to add that this, as a male, and perhaps even a manboy, never quite gelled for me, for reasons we will leave aside in this essay.

I was aware that he regarded this as not the journey, or any journey, for women because they are “already there”, and I relegate this to the influence and history that lately I have learned is well described by Denis de Rougmont’s work. See Passion and Society and its Part Two) on his delayering of Manichaeanism, troubadours and Arthurian romance.

In that vane of book reaction I am focussing on a book a colleague loaned to me.

Reading another’s journey

The colleague mentioned it in reply to some comments I had made about Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen, which I regard as the most accurate work a piece of fiction can be, as opposed to Joseph Campbell’s The hero’s journey and its instantiated incarnations.

This loaned book began in reaction to Campbell’s statement ex cathedra of how women are “already there” and so have no need to journey in a quest to get there (back) to themselves. As they are what men seek in a destination or return (see the above mentioned Denis de Rougemont for the deep backstory on that motif).

Maureen Murdock here, in response, reacts but also remains squarely within that Jungian framework used as a type of folk phenomenology. Folk because it is sees itself as uncovering a heritage, and phenomenology because this is an intentional effort to uncover (even if that uncovered is twee and quite restrictive).

So there is some exploration of worlding but it is within a selfing derived from the clinic or prestbyrterian house of help or healing. Balances abounding in circles of assistance I guess. Here I remember again the first talking cure is a lullaby. Its successes lie in communicating calm and safety, and not esoteric claims and tribulations. The words give comfort not information, at least not data. We are human because we have meetings, so my description does not seek to dismiss it entirely. The first meetings are infants in arms, not infantry at arms.

Within the Jungian frame, the feminine and the masculine are acknowledged of course as structuring elements, an eternal ontology if fluid at times. But here the dyad of mother-child breaking then is structured as a separation from the feminine to be re-forged with one eye on the masculine, and so the Heroine’s journey becomes one of repetitively leaving, the stages are a recurrence of the first break whenever the new stage is encountered, which of course then returns to the begining in one’s own motherhood (unsplitting) with an internalisation of the father’s heart, into an undoubled induality. Apparently the self should be a one, like a circle closed. (More thanks to de Rougemont there.) Neat as a fairy-tale.

Neatness is often what we seek in worlding, not always in a sense of control, but in ordering our lives, as when we comb out our matted hair into the lives we wish to lead.

Reading Thumbelina

I read Thumbelina numerous times to my two girls as their father, when they were young and they paid a great deal of attention to it. Higher focus, less relaxed. It was different. Eyes and ears opened wide. And more so than other stories, a certain fixed attentiveness. More scarey?

In one way it is an orphan’s story, but without the apparent or intentional search of the true self via a true inheritance, the perfect match arrives, but it is all happenstance. Instead we lurch from strange opportunities to odd couplings wth a resilient survival despite the contexts one is thrown into. Only at the very end, does one have to finally suspend disbelief for a happy ending of a match. I guess stories always have to end eventually. Life goes on, of course.

What is life? you ask child. Well let me tell you a story where you fall into a hole and marry a toad.

This is much more life-like a hero’s quest for self.

An orphan’s life can go either way of course. Perhaps we should consider that real life actuality in seeking out these structures, as more as the memory-hole of the dyad “breaking” than otherwise. Afterall some orphans never leave home, the hole comes to them in the form of family expectations. Traditions a causeless rebel might seek out in desperation (when the world has already moved on to something else) to finally have something to smash. The rebel without a cause is no champion, merely an energy champing at the bits of their inheritance. A romantic who does not like the ruins at their feet, so they move even faster and break things, when really they have already broken things and now have to run away.

The stories we tell ourselves hide as much stupidity as they cure.

In terms of my claim that good stories arise in some stupidty that a suspension of disbelief must allow, these Jungian scaffolds to bolster the stories themselves as expression of their Jungianess, remove the suspension, and thus replace disbelief with a misty dogmatism.

If we take literature to be some invocation of development of a character then a stupidity early in the plot gives the writer a free kick, I guess, in returning the narrative arc to correct or even forgive that stupidity. This character development is deeply imbedded in Western form of stories now. So perhaps it is stupid to assume it is a good fit everywhere.

And with storying as a proxy for worlding, the interuption by Jungian motifs or methods in mid-20th century writing is now worse than any effort or manifesto used creatively, but it does in a sense mask with a bright light of conviction throwing shade, that life is a storying, and can be fixed with fictional techniques (Freud, Jung, Adler,) which help ease the narrative arc of one’s life back to wholeness and the correction of error, as if everyone is stuck crying in an orphanage of their own making. Or even after you are dead.

Despite the lullaby being the earliest talking cure. Stories are not (just) there to cure, nor to mediate balance/nature/soul. They world, and the narrative arc does more and less than heal, help and individuate.

See also:

The fable that is modern literature paired with Parables of Submission, Fables of Truth-Based Creativity.

Stupidity, Dostoevsky & Glenorchy Boy

Moral development (The Lovely Bones)

More on writing etc at Posts on writing, consciousness and altered states.

Organised because:

• the names mark us, we never make our mark otherwise,

• thus marked we relate to one another, and,

• there are names between us, however badly remembered.

Names remembered mark the way, this is why forgetting someone’s name causes so much pain.

When a young man I used to not care about the name, and whose genius idea, I went straight to the ideas. This is very dis-organising, but it did make me a little bit immune to the branding marketeers and 30 million Louis used dynastically when hijacking that organisation.

Take the name Nietzsche. As a name we may remember he is the son of a Lutheran pastor. But generally he is now a brand, a firebrand.

Look at the name Nietzsche, it may look like a German philosopher’s name. But mostly he re-evaluates all values while we still think we know the price of everything. We see he sees efforts and ascension while we see costs and lost opportunities. See the name Nietzsche, as a roadsign he belabours his efforts with which we now worry about our young men, all because of a young man who died old, and the baby barbarians at the gate, still cannot keep their grave-markers tidy. If you pay more you get marble headstones with your own name.

I learned these ideas are still not the names that mark them, however many points you make, however many makes you point out, so remember your name is never really yours. Names given or taken are the stones on the way, the steps of our meetings.

But if you remember you own name at the end, perhaps your life is a smile.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com. This is an entry in the taphonomy of worlding project.

I’ve recently discovered James J. Gibsons work from the 1960s. His ecological psychology is critical of perceptual explanations that do not credit an active apprehension of incoming ‘data streams’ to our selfing/body/mind, i.e. critical of passive only explanations. He did the empirical work to support it.

One good thing I would like to pick up from James Jerome Gibson, is the notice that when you have a cold pebble placed in you hand, or you lean against the cold rock, one feels the cold, one feel the coldness on one’s self. However, if you grasp the pebble in your hand one feels or senses the stone itself as cold.

The object lesson’s moral here is that one senses through the tool, such that the tool is unnoticed, or, as I said above of the world, forgotten. Even if we never think of our hands or bodies or selves as tools.

Another parallel is the following from wikipedia.

I’d call that the umwelt-body necker-cube of [selfing the world]::[worlding the self]. And that’s why we noticed, where we do not forget, affordances in the environment for our good selves to survive with, as opportunities for action, even if not always in the flow or zone of perfection. I.E. we perceived opportunities and not qualities or data points. I’d call that foundation biases in a compositional vector of body/landscape. Things are not objects but avenues of use and interaction, but if used as tools we will perceive through the tool to the augmented action. That’s what I mean by forgetting the tool of the world, or the self for that matter, if we are in nthe zone perhaps. This is a also a different take on the unconscious, it’s not always repression, most times its just a lack of time and energy to notice every damn thing.

The lack of notice can be many types of absence: forgetting, repressing (active forgetting? that takes energy maybe best spent elsewhere), but the outcome is often movement through or with the environment.

Like children smudging all the exhibits in a museum. Looking with their hands, or noses, with no awareness of those contacts. The body gets forgotten as we experience the world. And vice-versa.

These things never quite become objects except when we measure them in logical hindsight, when we have to come to some agreement about the world we so compose.

This forgetting of the tool is the result of an active process, but also explains why we (as cultures etc) forget or repress even the world in a type of kosmophasia, especially our active part in its creation of our lives. World-blindness is not the result of selfing too much, mind, but living well enough, or scrabbling too hard. Self-blindness happens just as often, even if we can never forget ourselves.

The world is a shared tool, so we are happy to argue about it, even if we cannot even sense by any means this elephant in the room that is the world, when we are full of our selves. Even as we deny ourselves, we forget the tool that makes it possible. When we become more ourselves, found or unfound, the practical result can be a dogmaticism call selfishness, a narcissism called egotism (even deeper world-blindnesses). Admittedly the world often does not care. Except that we argue (engage)(actively perceive) and thus world the world.

Covarrubias, Pablo, et al. “The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems: The Revolutionary Ideas of Gibson’s 1966 Book, 50 Years Later - Part 1.” Ecological Psychology, vol. 29, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 69–71. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2017.1297680.

Sedgwick, H. A. “J. J. Gibson’s ‘Ground Theory of Space Perception.’” I-Perception, vol. 12, no. 3, May 2021, p. 20416695211021111. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695211021111.

Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson, James J. “Observations on Active Touch.” Psychological Review, vol. 69, no. 6, Nov. 1962, pp. 477–91. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046962.

Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. ( Original work published 1979)

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

Here performance is singled out from the blur of

The mini-worlds, either personalised as an ascetic withdrawal in Weil’s lived example, or written into a personal creative whole in the case of Tolkien, are both lived. When we live we perform the world as much as we live our lives. And in contrasting these two examples they are doing no different thing to the rest of all of us. The first example of Weil is saintly, a type of ego and its own devotional commitments, while Tolkien performs more a more ecumenical lesson through his philological self.

Both withdrawal from the world in decreation and turtling the world down in sub-creation are performed in the world. Even should they escape the world they do not escape their own performance of worlding the self. As Eddie Jaku says “One good friend is my whole world.”

In On Worlding as performance I indicate that Shakespeare’s All the world’s a stage, is the ‘wrong’ way around. For the stage is a mini-world performed. The stage is a sub-creation, and can potentially decreate by microcosm, or distillation.

The issue with decreation, is the gap between the ascetic intention and a lived life, and so ‘it’ can start to appear fake to us, and we become an audience to our own traditions, and tourists in our birthplace. This is why, as I write the side note to On Worlding as performance, the word performative now is used to accuse others of acting in bad faith, as a KPI of one’s fake-maxxing to others, if not the world. This is sad.

So currently the word performance is strongly connoted with playacting, either as part of a play or drama, or in play, i.e. in entertaining a set of hypotheticals for fun or profit. When you are at work you are not yourself despite your passion for the role. The passion play is all played out.

All this tomfoolery unwisely dismisses the activity of life, this is because we take the mighty metaphor “all the world’s a stage’ a little too far. I curse the power of the bard.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

— William Shakespeare

Now some taphonomy of worlding: Drama is the outcome of ritual and ceremony abstracted, in contrast to the way our late religions compound, from the manners and customs of a population, which tradition organises to maintain its transmission of the world. A living fossil of itself.

The effort to repeat in teaching and nurture, with honour and respect, of itself in renewal and avowed surrender to the seasonal allowances, is to submit to our past successes. The constraints of those performances past, celebrated in ceremony, is the world in which our stages of life but pass by. Even if it is in our tradition to enforce roles of no authenticity, or a late blessing by the icons of our own choosing (decreation/subcreation).

As we pass through these stages, our roles are played out more or less related to one’s everyday life, even if it is a formal occupation, in which one acts the part, so we re-act and feel it is all an act, as in a lie, and separate from one’s true self, or true place in a fair society far from this lie (world turned upside down) of fiction (this is why stupidity is important in storytelling). The worlding urge is strong despite us being so often blind to the world.

Thus it is, that, in the word performance there is always now a late hint of the inauthentic, an insincerity of presence, that the one performing is not really there. A hint born of our economies of scale, in which one is just playing a role others have instructed, or expected, or demanded. This usage always focusses on the individual and their mark on the stage, as staging, and not on a self worlding, partly because we are world-blind. (See the neologism kosmophasic as well as Kosmosōtēría – I’ll be moving onto why or how we are blind to the world next time).

But all those aspects are good parts of performance if we consider performance as an allowance which activity and thus our actions, affords us, because we are alive.

Performance is a movement that life maintains, as animals the world is a landscape, a stage, but is a part of (itself) removed and yet not removed.

To live is to perform.

This includes lying of course, the true liar authentic in their deceit, but all of this is a derivative feature of the living we do, make or breathe.

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com. Part of a small series on performance.

The word decreation assumes a creator, in Weil’s case this assumption met the problems of theodicy. If god is X, why does Y exist in creation. X may equal good or omnipotence, and Y may equal evil.

Weil’s theology answers this issue by saying God withdraws from creation to allow us to be. This act by God is decreative. Without it we cannot experience creation, as ourselves at least. This is almost a Manichaean position except for Weil’s intercessory Catholic visions of Christ.

Back then I had read J. R. R. Tolkien, including his essays, and he writes of acts of sub-creation. Now I also see that sub-creation as an act in imitatio, where we can also create subworlds in God’s honour. This theology has not influenced my take on worlding, even if worldbuilding is directly informed by Tolkien’s take on Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief and Tolkien’s disagreement/conversation with C. S. Lewis. (Suspension of disbelief as sub-creation, hmmmm!???).

Simone Weil further lived her life with the decreative act in imitatio, of Christ at least, to honour God by also withdrawing from creation. Weil is famously known for starving herself to die of tuberculosis, which was a choice to suffer in sympathy those who were starving on the continent of Europe during WW2.

I guess they/we all imitate God in their/our own way. If you are susceptible to an eating disorder, or escapism, then that is how you create your gods. Remember to believe in god is already an act of making a god, these xcreative refinements merely align or adorn that idolatry (worlding) with one’s inclinations (selfing).

These two positions on creation are like the opposite of each other. But both are outcomes of the worlding urge. Both are adornments combing out their aligning orders from life alive into/out-from the self in the world.

They do not negate each other. But now, noticed, or compared, they provide pathways across the territory of the world we find so hard to see, and all we can do is map them with compassion, with or without the self-idolising concept of a creator.

Humans make things, we think we are clever, so we think gods must make things only cleverer, what is then the biggest thing they could make? Why existence itself!! The Universe! OH… —what puny things gods really are are if they are just us and our idiosyncracies turned up to 11.

The world does not care about our mistakes, merely that we keep making them. The idea of creations and their creators is one such.

“Creation” is more a mistake than an effort.

Suggested reading & resources

Zaretsky, Robert. “The Decreationist.” The American Scholar, 24 Aug. 2023, https://theamericanscholar.org/the-decreationist/.

Excerpts from Simone Weil‘s Gravity and Grace. First French edition 1947. Translated by Emma Crawford. English language edition 1963. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

References Copied from https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Sub-creation:

1. J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Silmarillion, “Quenta Silmarillion: Of Aulë and Yavanna“

2. J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter, Christopher Tolkien (eds.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 212, (dated 14 October 1958)

3. J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter, Christopher Tolkien (eds.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 183, (undated, probably written 1956)

4. J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter, Christopher Tolkien (eds.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 153, (dated September 1954)

5. J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Silmarillion, “Ainulindalë: The Music of the Ainur“

6. J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter, Christopher Tolkien (eds.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 180, (dated 14 January 1956)

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

morality/religion/polity/culture/art/performance/market/…

This series will look at one of those words performance from a number of angles provided by realising it is not cut from whole cloth. Even if in everyday usage we see this word and think it must have it’s own origin story. (I usually omit mythology from the short list above because it gets really confusing.)

A recent taphonomy of usage

morality/religion/polity/culture/art/performance/market/…

I originally listed them like this (unordered) to indicate that asking, for example, “What is the origin of art?” was ridiculous because that separation of each member of the unordered set is only possible in later worlds, especially viewed more in/from economically sophisticated contexts. I.E. that they are all the same thing but expressed in different ecologically possible economies with different emphasis.

One item I always included in a longer shortlist was performance.

I always had a little moment adding it to the list because it seemed too obvious to me to add, and by the same token less obvious to others. Often I would add rites/rituals/drama, or replace it with them. The word performance is both too general (good for a blur) and often, well, badly used, at least in this current era.

In particular, there is a form of the word use to dis others, to disrespect them in order to dismiss them or their acts. The word is performative.

Not often used, performative is slowly lifting up from near-zero. Interestingly this moment is correlated with an arrested decline from a two-decade old peak for the word performance itself.

My critique of people who use this word performative to dismiss others is that you are being performative when you say it that way, so fuck you too.

I disagree, yet here we are. We are still in the world despite our disagreements.

All the world’s a stage

I ‘disagree’ with Shakespeare’s use of this older metaphor here from As you like it, but I will save that for another day.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.[…]

However using that well known speech from a drama, one can see the link between dismissing people for playing a role (as crisis actors for example, or making plays for status via virtue signalling etc.). However to do so means that one has some sort of gnostic access to a objective view of the world that itself is not a role on that stage that is the world. Like, you know, like you know the playwright personally, or like the banker who financed the theatre. Like you know.

This is laziness parading as knowledge, performed as a position. This performance of use of the word performative to dismiss others seeks to remove those other players from the world, or to indicate the speaker are not part of the world, because they are above all that (because of their Darwin Award level genes or something). It’s a moral decision, which of course is part of worlding, i.e. it is also performative. One can labelled that hypocrisy, and walk away pure or knowing the truth is out there, but the gaps we spin out of, and the stuff we throw back into the gap, are many and much.

A better way is to disagree with what people say, or say they say, is to play in that disagreement, and so one works with what they say, and not make a pious dive for the fourth wall you cannot reach. If you are performing in the world you cannot claim to be outside the world because of your special knowledge, or special relationships with others of your kind. Especially if it is just narcissistic gnostic dross, or scaredy-cat cult membership talk. Come on, let’s actually talk to each other.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

— William Shakespeare

A side note on performative reading

I work in a library and so I see people reading in public. I have never seen anyone reading performatively here, if only because the ‘staging’ is a library. That’s what you do there. However when I see people read I do wonder if their reading face is different to their resting face.

My daughter, who as I do, read in public, in and outside libraries, do so because we would rather read than stand there and publicly dismiss people for doing what they do in the world quite naturally, even if these activities create the world one can perform in, worlding activities which can include unwisely dismissing others for being themselves.

Claiming other people are performing performatively in the world is unwise, and reflectively lazy.

Or to put it in terms of worlding, to claim that someone who is worlding the self, is selfing the self into the world, is a useless redundancy, even as it then fails as a tautology.

Crossposed at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.

But the question of stupidity in stories smacking into my eye, first arrived in the stupidty of characters’ decisions when reading novels, particularly Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, they were so annoying, and this made the novels unreadable. I just sat in a sit-in of annoyance about the stupidity, and then I read Glenorchy Boy.

Basically I now saw, in looking back on my reading of Dostoevsky, I could not suspend my disbelief that anyone could be so stupid. And so much modern literature is based on that conceit in order to foist character development centre-stage into all stories. (See also my stuff on fables ( The fable that is modern literature & Parables of Submission, Fables of Truth-Based Creativity ).

The poet Coleridge invented that term ‘suspension of disbelief’ though I know it mostly via science fiction and fantasy literature’s critical discourses on world-building.

And Tolkien’s On Fairy Tales when I investigated:

“I once saw a so-called “children's pantomime,” the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful it would either have terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, though done with some ingenuity of lighting, disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

Which pretty much sums up my experience with Dostoevsky, whose fans I always give a side-eye. You need that much stupidity in your tales? It makes a crystal palace look fine to me.

Anyway, soon after reading Glenorchy Boy I ran smack into this stupidty as a discourse. In reading Philip A. Glotzbach’s What Hansel and Gretel Teaches Us About Moral Responsibility. 6 Oct. 2026 (Philip is not stupid, please don’t take that away, this story is about me coming to terms with stupidity in stories).

I created a couple of notes, one for Glenorchy Boy:

and another expanding on that for Philip Glotzbach’s post on Hansel and Gretel:

Basically if you cannot get past the stupidity of the father in the story (can you even remember him?) you’ll be feeling like I do about Dostoevsky’s candle-burning characters. Why many readers indulge Dostoyevky in this regard is beyond my competence to understand. In Hansel and Gretel the true ogre is not put forward to centre-stage at all, while in Dostoevsky there is often only the centre stage and stupidity has been miss-cast as a stage.

Unlike Glenorchy Boy.

John Dale. Glenorchy Boy. Forty South Publishing, 2026, Hobart. https://shop.fortysouth.com.au/products/glenorchy-boy-by-john-dale-pb.

Philip A. Glotzbach. What Hansel and Gretel Teaches Us About Moral Responsibility. 6 Oct. 2026,

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What Hansel and Gretel Teaches Us About Moral Responsibility

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a month ago · 7 likes · Philip A. GLOTZBACH

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J. R. R. Tolkien. “On Fairy-Stories.” Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 1947, Oxford.

Crossposed at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

The shortest form of this “I feel I am getting somewhere” is:

A point of view (POV) subsumes the world into itself.

Or, longer:

a point of view subsumes the world as a secondary subject, the outward sense and not quite abject, and so easily confused with object, the point of view is thus often then solely attributed to the subject when we throw the world out as object out 'there' [reification?]. We then trap ourselves in this unstable state, for in subsuming the world into itself the (POV & world) begin a flickering existence (a type of intersequential blur) (so if not trapped then alienated or spooked).

or,

[(POV(world)) :: ((POV)world)]

To repeat this with a linguistic turn:

A point of view subsumes the world into itself — we get trapped there.

Here the word “itself” is a tripwire, as a reflexive pronoun doing a lot of Janus dancing, between (POV(world)) and ((POV)world). In one moment of attention it looks like flipping out (POV(world)) but then flips in ((POV)world) and so forth and so on, or vice versa, inside and outside, flipflopping.

Without empathy to share the effort there is no end to it, the butterfly is dreaming it is a butterfly, the world and the self are not distinguishable. This is what a prosocial species takes on in order to survive. Otherwise fear and anxiety must do it all, for an animal’s [(POV::umwelt)chomp] survival’s strategy.

It is empathy which create the special-ness of a baby, some can not grow out of being special. Narcissists should really be regarded as a type of Darwin award candidate (being unable to distinguish between the POV of self and world) except they can take the world down with them when they go.

So this week “art is his religion” re-appeared before me, and I could track it down a bit more. It’s a reference to critical practises dealing with James Joyce’s first novel Portrait of the artist as a young man as a Künstlerroman or Bildungsroman. In particular dealing with the end of Chapter 4. So I went and re-read that chapter and into chapter 5.

This penultimate chapter deals with a ‘secular’ epiphany in which career choices or vocations a’calling (to the priesthood) (and a certain nationalism) is overshadowed by the almost ‘courtly love’ experience of a moment (sort a bathing in nature)(or bathing in not-city??)(As an Australian, it’s all a bit hard to tell. Where’s the esky?).

I guess baptism is also hinted at with:

—Stephaneforos!

Thus:

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

I’m including that quote because I can again point to Denis de Rougemont’s Passion and Society (as foreshadowed, they don’t kiss and so death is avoided and thus ? the artist is born). As well as connecting to an even more recent post on Marginal notes to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus covering the exact same thing. (A comparison of Rilke’s thing-poems & Joyce’s aesthetics in chapter 5 will have to wait for another time).

I mentioned that word Bildungsroman because when I read this work as a young man I did not quite get die Bildung as referring to that practise in which one gets exposed to art, culture and aesthetic discourse as a way to develop the person (a romantic hero as artist or self-practice as much as an instructive regimen). And how this arty-farty stuff became its own thing. I.E. here in Joyce the artist baptises or ordains themselves as a member of a non-religious religious order (of painters, or writers, or brand names instead of monks or nuns, or saints). Back then I just read Bildungsroman to mean a ‘coming of age novel’ and from that, a long time ago, I wrote, what I mis-labelled (mischievously), an attempt at an Aufhebungsroman. But that dialectic (Inside Outback) is also a story for another time.

Maybe I missed the rabbit-hole that is Bildung because I was already seeing a blur between art and religion (without any sense of worlding). ??? I was like twenty years old. Hmmm.

And all this is the background to me wondering about the google ngram of all those worldings which think themselves as different in our heads, and between them, and so not the same thing at all: religion, art, polity, market, culture, performance etc.

If you squint it looks like they are mostly heading into the same frequency, so there is hope for us yet for a world in which worlding is worlding and

religion/art/politymarket/culture/performance

melt into a healthy blur. I feel baptised by that ngram. Unkissed.

I guess we will still have coming of age stories, but where worlding is their worlding, even if an Aufhebungsroman will never see the light of day.

James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin, 2003.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.

Witness the first paragraph of the translators introduction below.

I am currently reading Peter Sloterdijk’s You must change your life, so this also supports that planet.

The key thing from de Rougemont, is that a Manichaean soteriological theology survives this way and that through many eras and genres, this saving of a true spirit is illustrated by a union, often with the other of the self as a woman, perhaps with a kiss, at death of the body ( that fleshy prison made by the demon Ašaqloun wherein your true spirit is held). Remember courtly lovers never kiss. Tristan and Iseult die in each other arms, finally. Union in death is a freeing of the spirit.

I myself know positively that it is not the transformation at first but the “generation” so that percievings should be generated between the spirits of male-female as unit in another to “perfect” them, otherwise a state of UN-balance occurs, --

These small songs were written as a monument to the death of a young woman and friend of Rilke’s daughter, taken too soon. Written with speed, and of their own urging, the poet re-sings the mythic hero Orpehus who returns from the underworld almost successfully with his wife Eurydice.

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com as an addendum to Denis de Rougemont’s Passion and Society (substack.com) under Taphonomy of worlding.

Denis de Rougemont. Passion and Society. Translated by Montgomery Belgion, Revised and Augmented edition, Faber & Faber, 1956.

Rainer Maria Rilke. Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by J. B. Leishman, Hogarth, 1949.

I dust the books on their shelves. As I dust I note books passing by. I’ve read that one. I should read that one.

So one of these mornings I saw Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek‘s A beautiful question : finding nature’s deep design. I read that one a decade ago, I said to myself.

I wasn’t really taken by it. It is a bit too, well, Platonic; symmetry as an ideal form. Supersymmetry. Time Crystals. The mathematics is way above my head. So it just took up room in my annoyance warehouse, mine is not quite a mind palace.

Then I saw, a few days later, Oxonian physicist Frank Close‘s Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry, and book that is fifteen years older.

Emphasis on asymmetry is much more my style. (And I’ll get back to Iain Gilchrist and lateralisation another time.)

Both circulate around Higgs, Lucifer’s Legacy perhaps more so.

Now both Wilczek and Close reckon when symmetry breaks is important, for Wilczek it provides evidence of those higher energy states and their (super) symmetry pointing at creation. Both sort of say, that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, but disagree what has been proven by the lower world's asymmetrical breakages. Is it Wilczek’s change without change in supersymmetry and time crystals, or Close’s more fundamental view that without that breakage there is no reality for us to experience.

Symmetry is a type of alignment we might, or ‘should’, regard as an almost pre-existing condition, and so will always be popular in both popular and specialist imaginations. Symmetry is notable, or noticeable, because much of the natural world we live in hides it from us. We have to uncover it with effort, or make our own symmetries. Perhaps as a show of power over nature, and thus as a performance of our special prowess.

Symmetry has this special preference among us, because it underlines the animal’s ability to align, and not just in parallel or getting our ducks in a row. Our basic animal grammars rely on movement to structure the world of things (and from which the derivative idea of objects and human grammar based-ontologies and their reifications come much, much later). Symmetry is special because it aligns itself with itself, from a seed to a crystal, from an explosion out. Writers with major physics background with this type of preference include Frank Wilczek. Writers with major physics background with a preference for questioning that alignment as based include Frank Close.

With that questioning in mind, if symmetry were the originary state, it is the moment it breaks that reality appears. So if reality hides those fecund symmetries, a platonic search for them may not reveal any better informed gnosticism, for the breaking of symmetry does more stuff.

In a fully symmetrical cosmos can anything happen, at least, is anything at all noticeable?

Is the cosmos we experience formed by symmetry or its failure (at lower energy densities)? Or, rather, is the reality we experience only available to us where it fails? And life or consciousness or evolution is only possible in a cosmos where symmetry has broken down? And then, by contrast, where symmetry remains unbroken are “points of view” impossible, and while universes may exist where symmetry remains unbroken, and so no point of view can arises out of the commodity of flow of energys in such a universe, because everything is symmetrical and undifferrentiable, then no change with change is possible. And so… —no selection, no evolution, no life, no reproduction, no genetics, no senses, no consciousness, no self-consciousness. No point of view all the way up.

No questions will be taken for there is no time available, or at least no arrow of time thereof as some functiom of entropy and complexity.

In a symmetrical forest not only can no one hear a tree falling because no point of view can exist, no tree can even fall.

In this case supersymmetry might be another gap-filling kludge.

Looks like we have yet another dance at the edge of chaos, or should we say asymmetry.

Resources amid the dust of ages:

Frank Close. Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Frank Wilczek. A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design. Penguin, 2015.

This is crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

See also other posts on alignment as a method common to our worlding urges, a sub-project within the taphonomy of worlding. In comparison to alignment efforts one might also consider our efforts to enjoy the straight line, see A wonderful straightedge of a book, Lorraine Daston's Rules: A Short History of What We Live By or on substack.com:

So reading substack author Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People oddly bookends this blog Why we should, with my rambling roundabouts and layered reflections into, the worlding urge we self each day. I did not expect this bookend when I opened the book. And in between that post and this I have discovered ‘the world’‘ more fully, developed more atttitude to the gap and mostly, discovered even more to read in areas adjacent to moral philosophy and evolution. I think the biggest learning has been about how layers are more important than lines. Taphonomy more important than genealogy, even when they twist through each other. As they must.

That and the animal grammar of alignment.

Note on the method herein

Bergson was a dual French-English speaker, his major works are in French. I cannot read French, even if through the mist it sometimes looks like a styrange dialect of English. Thus it is, even if I read a translation, I am seeing foreign language writer’s efforts through the layers of other people’s efforts, all of which then layer into my own efforts. I often tend to prefer, or lazily accept, the derivative literature on a foreign language speaker’s work, compared to the translations themselves, because their cross-language efforts might be more fruitful.

Some look at that series “of people’s versions of each other’s efforts” as a genealogy of disciples, or a mafia, but I like to think of those interleaved strata as best understood by moving with the metaphor, a methodology closer to taphonomy, i.e. how to understand how fossils and stratigraphy come to be as they appear when we happen to notice them. And how they underground all our efforts to figure things out.

I also put it forward of how I read as opposed to how we write.

Bergson & me and Emily Herring’s Bergson

As mentioned, this blog originally opened with Bergsonism as one of those layer cakes, with Casewell’s Jaspers, but meika’s Deleuzian Bergsonism (crossposted). Then it was an semi-conscious cake ingredient, but now I dumped it in. And that opening has a follow up at About time – how little we have (crossposted) which is really about my time as an late hippy in the 1980s, while looking into Julian Barbour’s more recent take on time. There is quite a bit of 1980s youth revisited in this blog now, but as that is where my searching started… —and then there is a slumbering gap of three decades while I did practical things, like failing in business (a family tradition it turns out).

In Teapots and cutting boards: the personal occupation of rhizomatic ideal intensities (substack.com) I lift the layer up on Deleuze saying he lets evolution into philosophy. In this regard, it is in reading Emily Herring’s biography Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People that I see this allowance is in common with Henri Bergson. I now appreciate more that Bergson’s Darwin is via Herbert Spencer, with a subsequent reaction at the more mechanistic reduction of evolution which Spencer’s positivism encourages. And then I learn about Bergson’s youthful choice of philosophy over mathematics. Disappointing his teachers.
As an aisde it would then appear that the dearth of evolution in 20th century’s more “analytical” philosophy, or logical positivisms’ re-incarnations, — the dearth is a gap I decry —is that, in terms of these layers of lives, Bertrand Russell’s success in trumping Bergson’s super-stardom… —got rid of the baby with the bath water. I mean we do get Wittgenstein and Gödel, but really, was that avoidance necessary?

Perhaps the avoidance let Herbert Spencer’s views dominate culturally for slave-seeking controllers, where geneaology becomes a #whoseyourfather deal on stupidity, with Blut und Boden.

With taphonomy, if you re-layer the right way, you can lever up/out/over really interesting questions about de-layering. Sometimes these questions are better than other more critical questions. Straitigraphic work is better than analysis I reckon, even if it does not suport careereist moves. I mean once you’ve got the bits everywhere, you then have layers dusting surfaces.

Reading Emily Hering’s book lets me consider that personalities like Spencer, Bergson, Russell pursue their efforts in developing a career amid our prosocially pooled efforts (the world) that nurture these movements in composing their social positions (self-s) from the substance of the social substrates, i.e. the rest of our common lives (often) not regarded as efforts. A career is (perhaps) an over-valued effort, as if everybody must or anybody can be William the Conqueror, or his best brown-noser.

A career is almost a type of dogmatism. Make it til you fake it.

Bergson’s intuition, durée & Élan vital

I would argue Bergson’s “irrationality” as described by others aligned with more positivisitic movements, was an attempt at looking into the human umwelt, in particular the lived animal experience we call consciousness. I would also argue this arises from Bergson’s engagement with evolution.

I guess it then is an early type of evo-phenomenology, without sharing that later movement’s intentional stance, which is why it appears as romantic or irrational in the context of Bergson’s time and in his wake. This is also why it was so well received in both more metaphysical and more spiritual-ist movements compared to the rise of clockpunk logicians of the same period.

By the way, his ‘‘stance’’ on intuition, being that movement which adjusts instinct with learning, reminds me a lot of imperial Christianity’s claim to authority over its flock by way of Reason between Faith and Tradition in order to head-off the perhaps more devotee-ist origins and flavours of Christianity. But the reception of his use of the word intuition is not seen as Reason at all.

So Bergson’s intuition is also a hybrid intentional attitude, where intutition is defined as that guiding effort between instinct, and perhaps emotion, but tempered with learning. This definition is not what more determinedly logicalists were necessarily dismissing when using the term irrational.

It is from this lived experience of intution that Bergson’s other key terms are framed, even if intutition does not precedes these terms.

I personally have a intutitional block on durée. I never quite get it. I’ll come back to it right (sometime or other) when I get back to talking about movement, the animal life that grammars us, both genealogically and taphonomically (extended phenotypically in various orthogonal directions).

Élan vital is more interesting. Over time I have also mostly looked at it as ‘life force’, some spark which motivates life, a type of incarnating soul. This is how it is generally dismissed, a type of spirited homunculi, which if not going all the way down like turtles, merely delays the question of “how?” exactly. For understanding Bergson it might be better to see life or consciousness as where there a gap in understanding and intuition comes up with a leap of life over the gap, rather than a gap-filler per se. But…

The leap is interesting as the original French élan means a sudden movement, a rush, dash, or like start as in a big startle, and not so much as a beginning. You are already alive. Élan is often now used as momentum.

Movement as a commodity is the beginning (see notes on Nick Lane’s The Vital Question below). Life pulls us out of that stream into a miniscule point of view.

This French word élan has come to be used in English closer in spirit to “dashing”, or like spunk, vim, vigour. I.E. ‘force’ but as a charactistic momentum, with flair, or style. So something has been lost in the not-even translation. The English usage has lost it’s original French élan, as movement/momentum (since the 1860s or so). Of course momentum does have a vector. The term “life force” loses that vector, life force has no POV. It’s a return to the useless commodity. Not even dust.

Anyways, the ‘rush of life’ might be a better frame, to get what Bergson was getting at. A desccription. But of course (phenomenalogical) descriptions are so easily then reified.

So ignoring Bergson’s élan vital what I took most from Deleuze’s Bergsonism and from Deleuze & Guatarri more generally beforehand, were lines of movements, of flight etc, and in reading Bergsonism I took the sense of these lines as being compositions. Movement bringing together and lifting out to enfold, and refold, such that we compose both the body (and the body’s encapsulation of its own layers, with a POV) and the landscape (or world in a prosocial species) from the substance of the terrain (and so thereafter also the world).

Levering the lines into layers with Bergson

It is in my reading of Deleuze’s Bergsonism (soon after/before) and having been to Central Australia, and in a very limted way, introduced to a living hunter-gather culture, Aṉangu, is where I recognised, connected, re-layered, and learnt that negotiating movement is central to the humanity’s deep past’s cultural efforts. I cannot overstate that. One step took me towards multi-voice compositional poetry, and the other towards moral philosophy. Because evolution. (not elan vital, not intuition, definitely not duree).

Hunter-gatherer movements made us human, or at least even more ape-like than baboon-like.

The world is at base, at the start… which we often mis-label as a sedentary source or origin— a tool for extending the phenotype of a species to maintain and negotiate multiple umwelten within one species. We are a species with multiple niches occupied, and have the ability to construct new niches in addition to the old. I.E. making, maintaining, layering and enfolding them. That is the basic human experience of its own modernity. It took hundreds of thousands of years. The ‘start’ as a rush of life is already a bunch of layers.

We often get stuck on the making and maintaining of them. The first is stuck on making a creator god and the other we made excuses for the idol-keeper’s control.

and

What did ‘begin’ it then? Not with hunting or scavenging, but being able to both “hunt and gather” as a single species. It is the “and” that is important; doing both. The ability to compose and negotiate a new way to move. Everything we do after than is an elaboration. It is the singularity, the techno-rapture has already happened.

Most species are defined by their niche in the fitness landscape. One species | one niche. We humans occupy many niches, and many niches staying in communication, in negotiation, at the same time, and this is the world, a tool of re-perception and re-tooling, and by worlding our selves we multiply the potentials and dimensions to further learn adaptions and resilience, and that has lead to the creation of new niches, and a whole recursive niche that we re-layer into something we can call the economy, when we forget to call it the world, because the world is so much more.

The economy (the hearth, the home, the camp) begins in having meals together, meals that share successes and loss, that with empty stomachs become meetings about tomorrow (the world is a tomorrow more than yesterday’s accounting).

But it is that face to face, kiss to kiss, negotiation which is our success, that prosociality from which all other efforts are possible. A kiss is a promise about tomorrow’s better luck.

This is also why genealogical approaches get it all wrong. As natural as that process is, and as vital as it is, when required as a base, the world does not really care, it “cares” about tomorrow after all. If you copy a technique from a monkey or a spider in a cave and share it, the world will accede. The mistake is that the soul has been mistaken for the bloodline’s instantiation. Now ensoulment is an élan vital of sorts, of course, but even that error is gained/used/discussed/traditioned in a noyaux of our efforts in surviving together, it is a jump we encourage and not inherit. Or, not only inherit. It is why we worry about children but also often answer “that the orphans are alright”. It is why we worry about attribution or cultural appropriation, but tomorrow does not care.

It is interesting to note that bloodline enthusiasts choose to expend a lot of energy in looking backwards, with which to quell uprisings which emphasise non-genealogical based framings of life. They will frame expressions of the élan vital as only a causal agent, like god or gods intruding into the physical sphere as saviours and heros and meddling scientists. This frame for élan vital misses the point, with a gap-filling stupidity, either in accusation, or as in the case of bloodline enthusiasts, in lazy, if not narcissistic, indulgence, that they need make no efforts but merely be proud of their true selves, while others must adjust to their requirements. The past here is a type of narcissism. And where the future is a pool of narcissism, it is a version of the past. Tomorrow does not care so it will suck all of that laziness up if we let it.

Yes, the world doesn’t care all of that. So you copied a spider in a cave? Whatever, try again, mate.

You can make a movement, a biological niche, and proof it as an animal totem, a emblematic identity, but it is the arguing about it, the trading, the negotiating, that makes us human, the layering of society, not the identities or outcomes of that argy-bargy themselves that we must study to “discover”our humanity.

Nick Lane’s The Vital Question, or, it is the hollow that makes it useful

Following from noticing these compositional modes of movement that we survive as animals, and which I brought to reading Nick Lane's The Vital Question… —I had a sudden insight, about the base of evolution, and not its most layered experience, that Bergson might call the durée. As I said above I do not get durée.

take a deep breath

Nick Lane’ exposition of a potential pathways out from a flow of protons into life, in particular from part-open hollow latencies in a substrate, rocks near thermal vents perhaps, in providing a framework for molecules to shelter and copy and so compose rather than crystallize their own enclosures we call bodies: as cells from the substance of the substrate, and form from them both the body and the landscape from the movement into/of/from the flow, that I saw, there is always a gap in explanation.

Perhaps it was later than this part in his book, perhaps it was in the mathematics about energy production (ATP cycles) in why mitochondria or other incomers in forming the eukaryotic cell have never been truly absorbed, information wise, into the nucleic DNA. They maintain their own bloodlines despite the co-operation, refusing the easy life that viruses exploit.

If you re-read the above two paragraphs you’ll see that the terminology I used to read- write that story of Nick Lane’s come from my reading of Deleueze’s translated Bergsonism. Which I read in my late 20s. I am now 60.

It’s a long project. (Posts on the… —gap)

Anyway, that gap I noticed, is what precipitated the essay I wrote some ten years ago, and after which this blog is named. The adjacency it has to moral philosophy is no where near where it began.

There is always a gap.

The gap differs depending on one’s framing. How do you get from clockwork to qualia? How do you get from the umwelt of the individual view of a species to the world? Or to tomorrow? How do you get from that intersubjectively constructed world back to objective reality? Is it even a thing then? At one end life arrives out of determinist physics just in time, at the other consciousness looks around confused by its success. Blinded by its insights. Are they linked? Are life and cosnciousness the same thing? Are they a spectrum of discrete jumps? Or starts? Are they gap-filling gap-dancers? At the edge of chaos? Aligning order, refusing service?

When we world the self and throw god into that gap of effort, is that lazy or labourious? A curse or our success? Snakes alive!

If we throw consciouness into the gap is that worse? When we self the world and unite with what we throw into the gap is that dissolution or union? Or neither, but will ‘will’ make it so?

The world is a tool, it doesn’t care. When we make that tool a god, and seek epiphany, transfiguring our selves into our own-made images of god (world-building as the idolatry of (ich) meine Weltbildung), the world doesn’t care, because we are active, alive, even if it is a lazy self-satisfied effort. This is why truth matters nothing to the world, but only to us as we world, and we will call that effort, that flair, that soul… —the true self, if a la mode of more formal laziness. A cakewalk perhaps. As a a doubling down of effort into dogma and over-ordered rational positivistic movements and compositions of righteousness. In fear lies the control that no-action can forestall, in seeking control anxiety can never be unrelieved.

Yes, you are special, and this is true of everyone, this is why the world doesn’t care about your nihilism, or your godhood, especially when you feel they are the same thing.

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Does Bergson give names to the gap?

Whether or not Bergson’s durée, élan vital and intution, are gap fillers or thrower’s of the fill into the gap (here our animal grammar breaks down at the gap of course, verbs and nouns are not even gerunds at this stage) is another matter. An effort is not by itself a gap filler, that is often a seperate effort and is most easily seen in moves dogmatic, and perhaps even the merely strident. The true believer first worships their own power to believe, perhaps replacing the devotee-ist’s passionate or mystic state of "being in love with love" with "believing in belief". Perhaps they will point out the error, like St Augustine of Hippo confesses, but not learn that the lesson is about the sin of doubling-down, not the variety of movement doubled down on (love/faith/loyalty) itself, so they jockey the team to change it's colours, forgetting red and blue make imperial purple. How convenient for the empire!

Discerning the gap, noticing the gap, remarking on the game around the gap, can all call out the gap and therefore, all can name the gap.

That is my question for Bergson’s (durée & élan vital & intutition).

As it is for Reason, chiliastic Possession, or even just Apollo’s moderation in moderation, and is it any use where it puts the gap aside.. once it has found itself so self-satisfying?

If I dance the gap, do I fill it, do I name it, or is that ontological framing the first misstep into using the gap as a landfill for all our hopes and fears, preferences and inclinations, and past lives? Is it unavoidable? Is the void ever present? It makes being there all the more problematic.

Is durée another name for consciousness/life/dao but… —phenomenalogically separate from space, and so very much an animal grammar. It highlights movement through space, not time arising within space’s de-commodifications by POV (movements pint of moving).

If you ignore the gap it swallows you, is gap-filling a technique to avoid being swallowed, and truth is sacrificed in the name of survival. The success of some survival/s removes truth from our world?

Poltically we answer with moderation and reason, but who watchers the watchers?
And I wonder can I throw the gap into the gap?? Can I throw the gap into the gap or is it already there? Or throw it in anyways, like some have love or belief or godhood or…

You betcha. Dogmaticism is always with us, but it begins not in intentionality, not in the attitude of the one who lives, but in their successes. Success which the world also does not care about. For care is our job, which yes, you can call intutition, or the good, or Reason or grace or any effort we label virtue, but not sin, and thus the world goes on.

Resources and references

Herring, Emily. Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People. Basic Books, 2024.

Robert Ardrey. The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into Animal Origins of Property and Nations; Illustrated by Berdine Ardrey. London: Collins, 1967.

Canales, Jimena. The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Gilles Deleuze. Bergsonism. Zone Books, 1988.

Lane, Nick. The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? Profile Books, 2016.

Wrangham, Richard W. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Basic Books, 2009.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.

This book has sat on our recipe bookshelf ever since I met Mona. I’ve never looked in it. Originally bought by Mona’s mother Sigrid in 1983, Sigrid handed it on in 1989. I can sort of see why this was gifted, the book is what we used to call fusion in the 1990s, and as such has a lot of cooking “from scratch” instructions: as if you have no idea idea how to cook (but you started a restaurant anyway). Sigrid definitely knew how to cook, but must have liked the title, and then thought of her twenty-something-year old daughter out there in group or share houses.

I should have looked at it earlier because her family writes in their cookbooks, adding in notes on their attempts, as well as in review, of their additions and make-dos with ingredients, and who they invited to dinner. The flatmates also wrote in the books. Usually with dates… —a historian’s delicacy!

It’s published by Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California, who in the 70s published another restaurant’s vegetarian how-to cookbook, the Moosewood Cookbook. It was a big hit. I mention this because Mona wrote to Mollie Katzen and still has her reply.

We tend to be more kanga-tarian now.

The Tao of Cooking is named after the restaurant in Bloomingdale, Indiana, which would appear to be an effort to maintain an income stream for a yoga practicing ashram. So this book, by the 1980s, is a part of that New-Age-y market, much like the previously mentioned but late 1990s Tao of the Traveller.

So no Daoism at all really, not even in yinyanging ingrediential balance really. Does this emptiness make it useful?

So here are some pictures. No new notes after the early 1990s.

BTW, back then there was a book called Real men don't eat quiche. We need more efforts like that to take down the man-o-sphere of incelchadmaxxers.

Crosposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com as part of the series “Tao of” X books.

Feirstein, Bruce, and Lee Lorenz. Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. Pocket Books, 1982

Katzen, Mollie. The Moosewood Cookbook: Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca, New York. With Moosewood Restaurant, Ten Speed Press, 1977.

Moosewood Restaurant and Moosewood Collective, editors. Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. Simon and Schuster, 1990.

Pasley, Sally. The Tao of Cooking. Ten Speed Press, 1982.

By this time I had written out by hand a copy of Jane’s English’s translation in a notebook I still have. And a reminder this is part of my series looking at the reception of Daosim, looking at books with a title of the form “Tao of” X.

Recently, when I read Tao of the traveller I was a little mystified at how such a squarely Brahminic outlook was pushed through the round gate of all mysteries, but Capra provides a way. He quickly lumps together everything non-western under the label “Tao of”, while repeatedly announcing their many diverse streams. Tao of the Traveller slip-streams through on its tail. Perhaps the writer had ended up travelling in India after reading Capra’s book, or seen it lying around in hostels on their travels.

Back in the 80s I did not notice that so much. I was more interested in the Physics parallelisms than the cultural chunking or blurring. Which in any case was alternately still all-pervasive ‘counter-culturally’. And in the early 80s it had not quite dated as yet, but had by the end of the 80s. For example original edition opens with a quote by Carlos Castaneda. Hmmm. The preface to the first edition basically says the vision of the book came to him in a trip. If you know, you know. Not a micro-dose I imagine.

Trust me, reading such a 70s book in the early 80s was like reading an ancient tome, tangible but other worldly. It was written pre-AIDS. Remember pre-covid? Like that only more imaginary. So close in time the hippy adventures were both despised and ever-present. It was a bit like taking a decade old tab of LSD and have it wash over you like a summer shower from the bluest sky. Did you get wet at all?

I had also already read ideas on soma and that practices (we’ll get back to that word soon in future posts) increase in complexity the further from the source of the drug one’s gets. The framing being that the ceremony increases in complexity and effort the harder the drug is to source, such that, eventually, there is only the “practices” left. Arising out of such routines that rites and performance allow in the remains of the day. What started as a welcome ceremony ends up as meditation or shamanic gymnosophistry.

So re-reading The Tao of Physics now… —that chunking of non-analytic traditions into one monolith, despite the disclaimers, just seems odd.

I won’t go into his position, it feels determinedly “everything is connected” in that very wholesome sense, not the schizo-paranoid sense. Also because the book was such a cultural event it is well covered by many other people. At the time the metaphor used for/by this ‘market’ was searching, as in ‘searching for meaning’, and modern physics had generations before circled back to the issues of “point of view” or “observer” that analytical or positivist framing could not find a gap-filler for. So the union of soulware and meatware just worked.

I will say it had more diagrams than I remembered.

Overall it feels like the mysticism shifts the POV debates into a platonic union with god, and not that we in a degraded imitation of ideal forms so much, as that we forget to celebrate we have such direct access to that sphere, that flow. This is quite over-connected, schizo-ly really, I mean I can see the parallels, but true Reason would see this as a heresy (e.g de Rougemont on Catharist heresies in becoming passionate mysticism : compare dispassionate enlightenment modes as in Buddhism). And the analyticals would spew about all that if they had guts to spew from.

It underlines our inability to get to grips with the basis of our abilities to world the self. That “point of view” thing/issue that never goes away, both enables us and cripples us. Enables us to live and survive, exist as “beings” while at the same time these animal grammars structure our inability to get past that POV, to get past our selves, or our worlds to e.g. pure forms, or being, or Truth, or various mystic experience involving dissolution of the self/world or union with divinity, or enlightenment. #ProTip: the narcissists always pick godhood.

Capra ends on the dance of Shiva as the guiding metaphor for that messs (it is written pre-chaos and complexity theory BTW). But I would argue, that dance is our job, our life as lived, the effort of survival, and foisting it on the kosmos misses the point. however mystically.

You can put god there, but it just us in the gap.

That’s why Janus is a better choice for this problem. The dancing on the threshold is no solution mind, no union, no dissolution even. It just gives it a name, and a face, or two.

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

This note is about reaching my 250^th article on substack since January 2023, starting with In the olden days a blogpost was a link and a word or two: why “why we should”. Self-hosting came later.

I am now feeling the need to turn this bloggy exploration into something with more structure. I am calling this the book. This is a working title, as the exact format or genre is not known. Part of the work on the blog will be to work through this question, hopefully not to re-invent any wheels.

The writing began as an effort to make a multi-voice compostional poem out of the essay why we should. I did invent compostional poetry, so there may be an expression of it as a compositional poem, but, isn’t quite what I mean by the book.

In preparation for the book I am moving some of my writing process to obsidan with espanso and exploring git, as I want the book to be forkable.

Currently I write in notebooks by hand and directly into Libreoffice, these drafts then get re-worked and edited on transfer to my static website builder Publii, and then to substack.com. Usually to Publii first, unless I am travelling.

Below this process-dump, is the first one written in obsidian, it deals directly with the mess of philosophy and how that relates to the choice of structures in structuring our choices, with relation to how people received those decisions and constraints. By way of story and process.

End consumers do not care about process because they want to be Monarchs. At least that’s want some producers tell them they want to care about. If only because they do not have enough time because of other commitments where they are not sovereigns.

This bit above is crossposted here.

wording into the world

This is part of the book project. Introduced here.

wording into the world

A writer relating the story of how they wrote a story is not the same story as the story itself. Writing is its own story, and a part of the writer’s life.

Now the story itself may re-tell well known stories which tell the same plot, which themselves reframe a tale’s fabula of chronological events with: reminiscences, pre-shadowings and other convolutions based not only on time-slips. For example, by varying a point of view by character, omniscience or tense, depending on the theme, or moral even.

However, writing a story is the same process as a story, in that the human effort to live is lived and represented, as a series of things happening.

Some writers write in cafes, some write in secluded huts. Some plot out a web of intrique and comlications, some shamanically sweat an altered consciousness.

However, while that story about the writer may help the marketing of the book, and some of us may be interested in that more than the story, in many outcomes of the story, many readers, do not care about the process, even if they admire the craft in the telling they have read, or heard. It might ruin the magic of the sausage before us.

When presented in a reading, or a telling, a story is performed in a line of movement
It shadows the choices made and told, in terms of a fabula, but this finished product can forget the labour of its making. That may in fact define part of its success, for the show presented for applause is not the effort workshopping into rehearsal. The shine is not the polishing. That is a different story.

Within storytelling, a theme or moral or entertainment frames a plot, that selection of events out of a potential field we call the fabula. How that is ‘chosen’ or fallen on is a question of process not often included in a story (See meta-fiction, and fourth walls). Choices given to story-telling’s characters can be very limited, or not at all, as in the case of Thumbelina survival. Story-telling is a reduction of many elements. Much of that reduction is expected by the reader to have been done (with or without special consideration by the writer/s.) In traditional examples that work has been done by the workshop of generations.

When writing non-storys, technical documentation and scientific or managerial reports, the process can be more important to the readership, the writing becomes a record of a process, and the choices are more limited by the themes of planning, and investigation or exoneration. It supports choices made or dwells on choices to be made. The record of choices is its primary process, and that writing process is actively made explicit. This is why they are dry reading.

Philosophy, taken in the round as literature, is caught between these two impulses, philosophy is a confusion between theme and record, between process and moral. It is this confusion which each ism tries to avoid, exclude, exorcise.

I mention philosophy here as the example because I have found myself by accident doing moral philosophy in this project. It is not by choice, its no hero-quest.

We often want the skills of non-story-telling to give us a proper story on how to live. Without the process of choices-made intruding on the process of choosing. We are aligning our movements awkwardly.

For with the choice, to make an effort about “how to live”, living is already a dance between, choices or contraints given as well as the lines of movement requiring their own vectors in worlding choices versus selfing choices, and philosophy lives out this dynamic. It may look like a Valhalla of shouty dialectics, but there is more than that going on, gone on, and to be gone.

Go on.

2026-09-02 - Leslie Vale, Tasmania

Crossposted

From hand written notes, which are generally unreadable. You may note I do not make notes on his numerous examples of literature.

Paraphrasing Denis de Rougemont.

The quotes show what he wrote, the paraphrasing shows what I read.

2026-AUG-26

This sort of accepts a more skeptical position akin to a suspension of judgement. Judgement still pulls Denis de Rougemont towards some genealogical attachements.

The first structuralism is time.

So chaste adultery is then okay? Would we call this emotional cheating nowadays? Are some emotionally-charged types of feminism also a form of (inverse) Courtly Love? I.E. Wrong-way love rather than heresy??? The world will contain all of them/us.

Analogous of course to Christ passions suffering for us so we don’t have to ever again (if only), which the Church’s more orthdox mystics pick up on, modelling Christ rather than union (which according to de Rougemont is heretical), in a re-rendering unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s sort of way. #whosyourceasar?

They fell in love with love (How St Augustine describes his earlier phase --- is this the Manichaean Phase – need to check Confessions, de Rougemont does not say...??)

In love with love they fail to move on (teenagers doom and gloom is forever) — fail to learn — they double-down — while some in moving on turn the error into a repeating series of mis-takes (cycles of self-abuse).

Worlding the self :: selfing the world: Irish legend — disaster — eternal fate —courtly love — internal tragedy

Excellent example of the proportions that function in Worlding the self :: selfing the world. One can see the use of this error, when marginal, helps the young adult move away from their kin in selecting mates, to the kith, as that old world of childhood has to die, which is what initiation rites and those rites’ inspiration of mensuration also indicate. The stories of wrong-way love illustrates the bounds of that choice, who is actually kin, who is actually kith in small bands of (unrelated and related) humans??

I say Eros can open that world and with it childhood can die. Passion is the story of first love made into something eternal, rather than reckonising its power to end childhood, in a way it seeks to maintain a purity of innocence into the world where it may not belong (wait till the babies show up man)(whoseyourfather).

A powerfully statement about evolution really.

Passion — as a type of emotional dogmaticism can it be more primal or only a derivative which re-inforces it primalness (first true love)??—???— This Eros is already a lost innocence? Speak now or never. The loss is thus not allowed to become an absence, the world moves on despite your lack of grief.

2026-AUG-27

Passion is a teenager, an obstruction to adulthood. Passion is its own obstruction. (de Rougemont == of the Redhill … — to die on? Calvary).

Passion is a Peter Pan (as in Romeo oh Romeo and Romance).

Worlding the self :: selfing the world

Worlding the self :: selfing the world can be the exact same activity, because Janus faces two directions, the potential vectors can therefore be completely opposite and add up to zero (My power is zero despite the activity on the threshold).

Vectors are attempted, indicated, but always cancel each other out to some degree. The dogmatic make them align.

De Rougemont’s example of Passion is one such error.

Represssion, if it exists, does not just have one direction, or at least, must some how cope with more than one direction. Freud’s return of the repressed is a miscellaneous category, perhaps a useful blur, perhaps not. Dogma is defined by desiring one direction over every which way.

Janus dances, the outcome of beauty in motion is not guaranteed, nor any motion across the world at all.

By the way, I do class structuralisms (gnostic or not) as a type akin to genealogical impulses, if perhaps without the daddy issues of #whosyourfather and the begats arguing from authority, or not. (As with Beckwith’s linguistic begats, and Henrich’s (Review ① ② ③) Church ban on cousin marriage, the attraction to genealogy is always strong, they could be right of course, but the world doesn’t care.)

Quite good writing on narcissism generally by de Rougemont.

The world is so big, empires confuse the world with their leader. Not that the world cares.

Carl Jung in passing on page 294, Robert Graves on 295.

Prior is not a gene (nor even a rede.)

To end on a repetition — passion is a type of emotional dogma. And if this is an effort chosen (however immmaturely) it then differs from narcissism which by definintion allows no personal development (and does so only in fiction, the lie that character development is availble to all is what makes modern story telling a fiction and rarely fabulous.)

Overall I agree with Denis de Rougemont’s position on agape. However, I do not think an order based on celibacy can safeguard the wisdom of it though.

Resources

Denis de Rougemont. Passion and Society. Translated by Montgomery Belgion, Revised and Augmented edition, Faber & Faber, 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_de_Rougemont

https://archive.org/details/passionsociety0000roug (not yet in public domain)

Petherick, Simon. “Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.” Simon Petherick, 9 Oct. 2017, https://simonpetherick.com/2017/10/09/denis-de-rougemont-and-books-that-change-your-life/.

Carla Rogers. “What’s With Wrong Skin.” Evolve Communities Pty Ltd, 31 July 2018, https://www.evolves.com.au/whats-with-wrong-skin/.

It contained page-staining newsclippings from decades ago, they reported the successes of amateur theatrical endeavours from Forbes in New South Wales. I hope the reader of the book was an actor and in an adulterous liason with an American involved in the reception of signals fom the moon-landing in 1969. See also The Dish.

A good precis of the book can be found on Simon Petherick’s 2017 post Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.

The general schema in reaction

Denis de Rougemont attempts a project of etymology (page 18). This is a method which I am keen to indulge as I see it as a precursor to a taphonomical methodology, even so, despite some disavowals, Passion and Society does end up having the odd genealogical moment, which is difficult to avoid when one is passionate about a subject, or just overly committed.

In this regard, it reminds me of a review I did of Beckwith’s The Scythians, where the thesis is well worth entertaining, and for which the supporting documentation is perhaps not really necessary, except as future leads for research. Research which may or may not end up where the passion leads. De Rougemont is less given to this, but it is still there, the position is not detached so much as self-satisfied (if only just).

A taphonomic methodology would temper these inclinations even more so, less stridency would produce a better work, even if then such a book is less scratch-your-face publishable.

For me the word passion is completely neutered by its recent use in our careerist workplace and platforms. So on picking up the book I was coming to the word passion completely cold. Any freshness the word passion might have had in the workplace must have died in about 2001, if not earlier. It zombied on.

So then, learning from Denis de Rougemont that passion requires suffering for one’s self, if not for one’s love of love, and if not suffering then definitely death… I saw that perhaps the workplace’s use of the term was indeed apt, if not in an expected way: like, the corporate team that is splayed together, robots together.

I find the general literary arguments de Rougemont makes, or his proto-taphonomy as I would call it, all quite acceptable.

De Rougemont puts it forward that that Manichaean-style heresies provide the base, locally by way of the Cathars, were then re-purposed by the efforts of troubadour into Courtly Love, which then re-used by the Northern French in adapting Irish stories and other Celtic efforts, if not Iron Age use of Bronze Age heroics, as then written into Arthurian romances. Both Courtly Love and Arthurian Romances influenced both more Catholic orthodox mystics and many many writers of later romances across Europe und so weiter…A fantastic argument of layered and re-used and sneaky filtrated substitutions.

There does appear even in this post-WW2 revised edition (the original was 1943) a feeling for a need for tighter genealogical movements, i.e. that Troubadours were Cathar agents) for example. Quite why there is such a pull maybe due to publishing requirements or expectations for evidence where there is none and so a likelihood is pursued too far. there may be no book otherwise I guess. I mentioned Beckwith above with his extremely long linguistic begats. But another example is Henrich’s focus on Catholicism’s bans on cousin marriage in his WEIRD book (Review ① ② ③). I mention that because comparing Henrich’s WEIRD anthropological meta-data context on the social institution of the individual alongside de Rougemont’s argument on passion and orthodoxy’s sensibleness about agape, would provide some interesting comparisons for a taphonomy of worlding.

Taphonomies can produce dates, absolute and relative, but genealogies merely date by listing generations. And family trees rarely forest. Some smarter societies forget the begats and instead cycle every other cohort through a limited number of skins or totems of whatever classifier for categories you want to use. This is a better fit with how the world is maintained as a tool. The begats are a Bronze age heroic fixation, even if their animal grammar lies in an appreciation of causal relations. Genealogy is not a physics. Begats are a passion for origins, in love with the love of originality.

Genealogies require proof of actual blood relations, but the world itself does not. As a tool the world is wise to remember that it is possible the first person, or people, the first population, who first twined fibres into thread and string and knots and fabrics, have no living descendants. It’s also possible that the first lovers of love who suffered for their passions, have no descendants, and yet the world goes on. Genealogies are a very restricted way to look at this. Taphonomic methodologies will be much more powerful, by allowing the stratigraphy of dates, and their improprieties, more things can be tested than #whosyourfather?

Above all Passion and Society is a literary endeavour, the latter sections bring forth that taphonomy with much record, the final lines from Romeo by Juliet’s corpse is particularly instructive. As is learning Verona was a hotbed of Catharist heresy.

How much taphonomy can or will only be a literary endeavour remains to be seen. Some see the text as all consuming, some see orality as a lost purity, both of these are outcomes of the worlding urge, among nostalgics and deconstructionists both. The world prefigures us. I.E. a certain ‘literariness’ is as much native and suited to worlding and its study as a tool, as the economics of trade is. Certainly ideas of imaginative world-building have been instrumental in my conceiving of a worlding urge, and the kosmophasia we often suffer from.

Things I learn reading

Obstacles are often social categories (some people think of them as the system or an ideology). But wrong-way love is common everywhere.

In mid-century French discourse this subject was referred to by the term ascèse or askesis, from the Greek for exercise/training/practice (translator’s footnote page 55). These selfings of the self are often as narcissistic as any special project can be. A pilgrim’s progress might be another practice. All these practices predate monotheistic religions, as they often world the self into seclusion, enlightenment or special occupations.

This is why when storied there are so many obstacles, actually meeting up with one’s true love is often only at or near death. (One can see how this compared to Henrich’s emphaisis on banning cousin marriage is much more a severe condition for the survival of the species than cousin marriage.) (This is also why in orthodoxy passion is restricted to the son of god and mystic saints, passion is not a ‘devinizing’ askesis for the rest of us --- who are we to judge ourselves? That is what the church is for.). (We not each supposed to ask what would Jesus do?)

Passion is a bit teenagery, passion is a type of emotional dogmaticism, an attachment made in the form of a vow (all that feudal fealty and loyalty stuff which is way messed-up).

In terms of what we now call a narrative arc, the death of the lovers returns things to balance. In more heretical modes the kiss of the lady is also in that sense of the saying “death is a lady” and we return to the true realm of our spirit from this evil realm that traps us, when the body is not a temple of the soul so much as its infernal prison. Chastity maintains passion, the suffering is it revelation or epiphany, thus the later link to Orthodox mystics use of passionate suffering expressions and the language of lovers.

De Rougemont contrasts all that suffering [with chastity as suffering, with adultery not-so-much bad as indicating the path of passion, in true love’s embrace of one’s love of true love, and all its confusions]… —with agape, which is that sense of Christian love that informs the sensible end of Catholic teachings (e.g. solidarity, see Reading Beyer: Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both?).

I came to this realisation as well when I said to a friend that boring is good.

It terms of a potential taphonomy it is interesting that both orthodoxy and heresy might be argued to give rise to the social institutionof the individual as we know it in WEIRD societies. The world is more than an outcome of genealogies. Its a mess, we need asystem to work with the mess, and sure, reducing the mess into simplicities is one way, but often it just adds to the mess. Much like true love and passion do by execerbating teenaged mistakes rather than learningfrom them in a safe place.

Everyone in the Bronze age was a teenager. Life was passionate, brutish and short. Consider that as you dwell on the past.

Resources

Denis de Rougemont. Passion and Society. Translated by Montgomery Belgion, Revised and Augmented edition, Faber & Faber, 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_de_Rougemont

https://archive.org/details/passionsociety0000roug (not yet in public domain)

Petherick, Simon. “Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.” Simon Petherick, 9 Oct. 2017, https://simonpetherick.com/2017/10/09/denis-de-rougemont-and-books-that-change-your-life/.

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com. I’ll follow this up with more piecemeal notes from pages here and there in Passion and Society.

Update: This also has a marginal note as supporting evidence for Denis de Rougemont argument, found in a 1949 copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus translated by J. B. Leishman.

In 2011 an exhibition called Awfully wonderful, science fiction in contemporary art took place in Sydney. In the library I work in a colleague asked me about the following paragraph from the exhibition’s book:

What caught my eye, and my reaction, was the second sentence “He suggests…” and its verbing.

The reference, with footnote ³, is:

Here I will clarify that, “our consciousness” has more need of being aware of ‘worlding’ than of our ‘relationship to the world’. The relationship is so taken for granted that a new frame would be helpful, even in “bringing to consciousness our relationship to the world.” Especially if we are mostly kosmophasiac because of the relationship to the world (I know this sounds weird).

This might be a fine hair to split, but works of art are outcomes of worlding, and so if the work of art as verb is to raise consciousness, it is raising consciousness of a late and derivative effort. We may need to do it earlier. It’s possible we never live long enough to be able to do this.

Now I would add here, that bringing our consciousness to our worlding is not at all always very likely, and perhaps this is John Dewey’s hope for art (only?). I feel it still suffers from kosmophasia. If only, I say, the verbing here was worlding instead of working. Work (verb or noun) like art or religion or trade is an outcome of the worlding urge. Remember, hunger does not tell you how to bake a cake, let alone someone’s birthday cake.

The work of art (the responsibility of art) is thus like the responsibility of religion or society should or 'the system'. This responsibility is a should, but where does that should come from?

I certainly can see that John Dewey here does account for the efforts of transmission from one to another, particularly from parents to children. (See Ellen Dissanayake‘s “work” on ‘making special’ -- she has lectured in Hobart.) And such pedagogies are important, both practically and in explanatory power, but do not account for all that is art, let alone the world and why we should.

So to repeat my position: I do not think this is wrong so much as backwards. I appreciate the verbing of “work” but would like to suggest that what ‘should’ be verbed is the word “world”.

‘Worlding’ brings consciousness in which we self special moments and things into art, giving us the ability to self the world and world the self. Some children never get through this of course. And they become presidents and such.

This does make it a bit of a tautology, but putting work to work as a verb misses the actual bootstrapping process.

As a derivative verb, work (or art or religion or trade or status) removes the effort from evolutions’ gambit, and places it too securely within the more derivative animal grammars that “made us” turn our abilities “to make” into (for example) the godhood of a creator we made, shame-facedly, in our own image. This is unwise because it removes us from our place in the world. I guess it is work to then bring it back, as Dewey suggests, but, if we use ‘world’ for this verb verbing the effort, then it is less work, with less recursively computationally high loads, and so we are less unlikely to world-build badly. Nor suffer from kosmophasia.

You can swap in other worlding outcomes in place of art there, like religion, or even less special outcomes like sport or trade. It’snot just art and aesthetics.

This is where blurring categories can help more than defining them. After all the world is the biggest blur of all.

In worlding we produce art (for various purposes). Just as worlding the self allows us to pray with others, or engage in trade, etc etc etc.

Now an aside on science fiction and fantasy in regard to worldbuilding.

Characters in these imagined worlds (fictional, not the inherited and shared unintentional world of traditional reality) are often more aware of worlding than the reader is, even if the awareness is only there to help characters plot their narrative arc back into the original balance by ‘saving the world’ they grew up in. (Compare here the posthumous character development ‘work’ of the lovely bones.)

At one time before settling on ‘worlding urge’ I had a halfway-house of ‘worldbuilding urge’, perhaps it only lasted five minutes after using ‘moral urge’ for some months/years, but ‘worldbuilding’ does capture the sense of a certain effort or intention. I tend to use ‘worldbuilding’ negatively now, as a type of worlding akin to more committed ideological or religiously dogmatic efforts rather than the neutral worldview geographical survey work.

I do see being aware of worlding is a wise thing, and being unaware as potentially disastrous. A negative worldbuilding is judged to cause more damage than good despite its intentions, I would hope if worlding were more acknowledged negative worldbuilding would not be so attractive, and thus less used by narcissists to set up binary choices in seeking narcissistic supply. Negative worldbuilding is full of shoulds shoulding the world of one true self on others while ignoring them, like a toddler in a tantrum.

Lizzie Muller. “Speculative Objects and the Total Perspective Vortex.” Awfully Wonderful : Science Fiction in Contemporary Art, Performance Space, 2011.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

Tam, gdzie zielona ściele się dolina
I droga, trawą zarosła na poły,
Przez gaj dębowy, co kwitnąć zaczyna,
Dzieci wracają do domu ze szkoły.

W piórniku, który na wskos się otwiera,
Chrobocą kredki wśród okruchów bułki
I grosz miedziany, który każde zbiera
Na powitanie wiosennej kukułki.

Berecik siostry i czapeczka brata
Migają między puszystą krzewiną.
Sójka skrzekocząc po gałęziach lata
I długie chmury nad drzewami płyną.

Już dach czerwony widać za zakrętem.
Przed domem ojciec, wsparty na motyce,
Schyla się, trąca listki rozwinięte
I z grządki całą widzi okolicę.

[Dzienkujé bardzo literatura.wywrota.pl]

I’ve rendered this into English as:

The road

There, where green stretches valley
and road half-grassed
through oakdales sketching out flowers,
children come home from school.

Opening crosswise, a pencil case
rattles with crayons amid breadcrumbs
embracing a copper, saved,
to welcome the cuckoo’s spring.

Beret sistered and brothered cap,
they both flash through thicket and bush,
so a jay screeches in clearing the twigs,
but longer clouds float over the trees.

Already a bend reveals the red roof,
father at home, leaning on hoe,
reaches down to the leaves returning
to the earth, here he watches all that surrounds.

Originally I found this poem in:

Czesław Miłosz. Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004. Ecco, 2011. [Introduction by Seamus Heaney]

Introduction to the rendering project

In these renderings I will put the original first, then my rendering, and then, lastly, some discussion and bloggy meanderings.

This is to honour both the work and the site called only the recipe, which strips all the POV or introductory material, people often present on cooking blogs. I actually enjoy that material, but when needing to look at a recipe and not someone’s journey, it can be a little frustrating. It is also in the spirit of TL;DR.

However, it is inverse in spirit to origins of the radio show The Moth, where the stories people told introducing their ‘poems’ were more interesting than the poems per se. Something got lost in the poetry.

I’ll do these renderings like I did, rather undiplomatically, on the poetryetc email list run by John Kinsella in the 1990s & 2000s, which produced things like Interactive Geographies.

On that list I would quickly re-write a recently posted poem (not mine), not so much to make it better, nor to criticise it but to

<special project warning> investigate the poetic experience available to the reader (me)</end of special project warning indicating that is all I had access to and is not narcissism though co-morbity is a thing, it’s a fine line>.

I was jealous of musicians who jam. But not jealous of painters who refuse to let others smear over their own shit.

Introduction to rendering Droga [from Świat] by Czesław Miłosz

Tasmania, late 20th Century

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stripped of citizenship and booted out of the Soviet Union, for continuing to write what he wrote since Khrushchev, Western ‘intelligencia’ and intelligence services thought they were getting another Czesław Miłosz, only Russian not Polish.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once repeated that the misdeeds and culpabilities of the 20th century were because “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” (see my post on the… —gap for this sort of use of a landfill to forget stuff.) Miłosz would never had said that.

Sozhenitsyn was a trained chemist and writer who portrayed Soviet gulags and the great patriotic war as an inmate and artillery Captain, and came to the west as a cold-war dissident. He favoured a pan-Slavic presidential-style republic rooted in an Orthodox Christinity unmarred by the schism of 1666, and blamed the tsars and the Soviet Union for ruining this potential. His mother’s family was of Ukrainian background, but he was vehemently against Ukrainian independance because of this romantic but imperial worlding. Vladimir Putin and Solzenitsyn got along just fine.

For now, we will leave alone the Russian romanticism directing an official mystical approach (мир = world/peace/system) to its identity issues, to note that I heard more about Solzhenitsyn in Tasmania growing up than Miłosz, despite the Polish diaspora in Tasmania. No doubt because of the closer to home stories of ‘Syberyjski’ who walked out of Siberia to Iran… —and Miłosz’s professorship in Berkely was too far away. Perhaps unheard of.

“I also walked out from Siberia,” they would say.

It is thus late in life I have begun reading Miłosz in translation. It is good to read love in translation.

Firstly, with a series or cycle called Świat [The World] which contains 20 poems written during World War 2 in 1943, and A Song On The End Of The World in 1944.

Of course I will look at The world.

So, starting with the expectations of the first cuckoo of spring, I’ll find the Polish original, present the standard translation from Czesław Miłosz Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004. Ecco, 2011 [Introduction by Seamus Heaney].

Both versions of Droga or The Road are placed above.

Subsequently, I will then render my own, by this I mean a translation but more my reading of it than trying to channel the poet himself. Who probably spoke better English than me anyway.

I’ll do this like I did, rather undiplomatically, in the poetryetc email list run by John Kinsella in the 90s & 00s, which produced things like Interactive Geographies. On that list I would quickly re-write a recently posted poem, not so much to make it better, nor to criticise ti but to (special project warning) investigate the poetic experience available to the reader (me)(end of special project wanring indicating that is all I had access to and is not narcissism though co-morbity is a thing, it’s a fine line)

Unlike my readings in review or reaction to poetryetc, these will be a bit more considered.

Notes on rendering

Reading the English I was first caught by the folkloric reference to cuckoos who bring the spring, and making sure you have pennies in your pocket to jingle in order to have more financial good fortune. It’s not just Polish. But I had never heard it before.

Second was the naivety, of which this is indeed classed. But later, how sophisticatedly it was structured, by…

—thirdly, the figure of the father.

Reading the Polish is near impossible for me with any “fluency”. The best I can do is work on dimly percieved proto-indo-european roots as a way into the emotional loading. And then I just fake it. Particularly hard was gałęziach lata and okolica. Ouch.

That said I am much more engaged by the problem of understanding Polish poetry here than in reading any poem in my mother tongue. This is why I re-write them undiplomatically, and why I do not like being in an audience.

The scan

In addition, I found the official English version didn’t scan well with my breathing, it sat uncomfortably between limerick and carefully enunciated free verse (without the sing-song spoken word effect). Thinking this slow American voice does not gel with my voice, and might be a artefact of my accent, or speech rhythms, as a part of my Irish/Polish/Scots-Jewish mixed into Brummie English here in Australia… I went to ‘AI’.

Given that LLMs began life as textual analysis tools, I fed both the official translation and mine into claude.ai (no real reason for this choice) and asked it to do some scansion (scan the rhythmic structure of poems).

I’ll report two things (the original Polish was not mentioned, but that it was a ‘translation’ of something):

1. Claude reported mine with : Monosyllabic end-stresses closing most lines (school, spring, cap, roof, surrounds) — this creates a percussive, settled cadence at each line’s end, echoing a folk-song/ballad ancestry (common in translated Central/Eastern European pastoral verse). [OMG]

2. and the other: loose accentual verse with prose tendencies (I think that’s what I said)

When I added the original, it, of course, told me it used strict Polish syllabic verse. This is partly why gałęziach lata and trąca listki rozwinięte were hell, Polish hendecasyllable is dense! But it also said:

The first translation, with its shorter, more clipped lines, actually lands closer to the tone of the original’s rocking regularity, even without reproducing its mechanics.

Completely smart-arsed it.

Notes on rendering as ‘sitting with’

What is available to me now is how Christian it is. As in,

“Narnia is good isn’t!”
“Well, yeah, but its a bit, you know, Christian, isn’t it?”

Written in 1943. WW2. There’s a war on, you know. Many children of god die for no reason at all.

Resources used in this rendering

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/czeslaw-milosz

https://www.poemhunter.com/czeslaw-milosz/poems/

https://allpoetry.com/Czeslaw_Milosz

https://poezja.org/wz/Czeslaw_Milosz/

https://literatura.wywrota.pl/wiersz-klasyka/39928-czeslaw-milosz-droga.html

claude.ai

So now at 60 I will define “asystems anarchism”.

As far as I got back then was to say, no system can be complete, so a system cannot be relied on, so we need asystem. Like we were agnostic on the matter. Or sceptical.

I’ve also said that frame before more recently, but not connected it up with that youthful play on systems analyst. But it might be helpful in a new “aixial age”.

We do not need a perfect world, either by waiting for the revolution or great leap forwards, nor any eschatological romanticism at all. There’s no need to delay, nor even reform, if only we just police narcissists a little more actively. Waiting for the messiah is lazy.

PS: This 80s period is before any pomo influence, or chaos and complexity theory as I said. Also I hate that “meta” is now commonplace and abused by corporate types. Bastards.