tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68816501903790566512024-03-06T17:53:42.032-08:00gary e. davis | berkeley | literary livingliterary livinggary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comBlogger71125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-21595540317905283482024-02-15T11:22:00.000-08:002024-02-16T12:04:32.633-08:00we invent each other here, to some degree<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
Jacques Derrida’s <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=5458">1987 preface</a> to <i>Psyche: Inventions of the Other</i> seems to express an essential aspect of his self-analytical sensibility, which places author and reader in a mirrorplay of discernment and invention, inevitably.
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Finding “you” to inform my self-analytical interest isn’t egoistic when I’m sensitive to the difference between fair perception of you and mirroring of my <b>S</b>elf (the temporally deep implicity of being futural life with ever-rewritable past).
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The challenge for conscience is to sustain the balance fairly, yet with engaged love of learning which enhances my sense of each of us through genuine (with you) and authentic (for myself) engagement.
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So, I partnered with Jacques, who <a href="https://erealism.blogspot.com/2004/10/derrida.html">died in the fall of 2004</a> at the age that I am now, but who remains <a href="https://cohering.net/c52/21/1c52.21.html">alive to textual presence</a>.
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-15682487359358669052023-12-16T12:20:00.000-08:002023-12-16T12:32:47.091-08:00a luscious parody of man abusing nature (and Eves)<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
After reading admiring reviews of “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlbR5N6veqw">Poor Things</a>” in several leading media, <br>
I saw the first showing in Berkeley (in the darling Elmwood district). I loved it!
<br><br>
The surreally comical allegory is a stellar polemic aimed at misogynistic desire to control nature and girl-women. But as cinema, it’s a delight in every mode—a masterly parody of abusive mankind.
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It's a no-brainer that historically women have been regarded as imbeciles. It's a no-brainer that repressions of polite society are brainless fears. It's a no-brainer that compassion for the poor can feel pointless, but a no-brainer that generosity should be impulsive. It's a no-brainer that the world's oldest profession was forced onto women. It's a no-brainer that men sexualize girls because girls can be controlled and autonomous women cannot.
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And it's a no-brainer that imaginative entertainment can draw viewers into thinking about issues of misogyny and sexual repression (which leads to sexual crime) that are as topical now as they were in the 19th century.
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I should add that my sense of its critical mirrorplay—“you“ think girls and women always want sex because <i>you</i>, guy, do?—was affected by my having streamed, the previous evening, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FXCSXuGTF4">Asteroid City</a>" (William Defoe was in that, too—along with most of Hollywood). The ensemble working with Yorgos Lanthimos for "Poor Things" is in a postmodern, steampunk world that some reviewers fail to Get (<a href="https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/movies-tv/poor-things-emma-stone-18530863">one, at least</a>).
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(“And by the way, guys, a girl can take care of her want just fine without you.”)
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-45945351218273993102023-09-03T21:58:00.061-07:002023-11-27T11:59:37.708-08:00looking well at "Never Look Away"<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
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Hi, Lisa,
<br><br>
I saw ”<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Look_Away">Never Look Away</a>,” after so many evenings when I wanted to, but couldn't fit 3 hours of viewing into available time. So, I'm glad that the occasion of <a href="https://www.academia.edu/105718128/Dont_be_too_good_at_reading_other_peoples_minds">your essay</a> caused me to make the time.
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I didn't read your discussion of the film (or, rather, that scene) until today, since<br>
I avoid reading about a film that I want to see, before I've seen it.
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The film disappointed me, though again I'm glad I saw it. Auteur von Donner-<br>
smarck did a masterful essay, as the film, about art in mid-20th century Germany, though anchored by cardboard characters' changing eras of life relative to box office-sure contexts of struggle and tragedy (as if Germany needs more), done with compelling cinematic expertise. It's great enter-<br>
tainment! Von Donnersmarck did great service to art history. My disap-<br>
pointment is no discredit to the film. (I want psychological depth—insightful plausibility between characters—beyond another proper indictment of satanic nazi minds.)
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The opening scenes in the nazi museum are delightfully pathological, which reminds me of fascist Trump's routine of finding hoaxes everywhere else but his own mouth. The mid-film contrasts between Socialist Realism and German importations of New York Abstraction, Minimalism, Happenings, etc., is dramatic and fun, particularly as the phony, but entertaining, experimentalists in hallways surrealize the difference between ”art” in Communist Germany and art in the Federal Republic. The dialogue on art is von Donnersmarck's best scripting. He provides a fine venue for distinguishing the work of art (working toward the artwork) as inquiry (experimentation with materials) and working as therapeutic (”working through,” in the remedial sense, relative to the German experience, in this case).
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Not so insightful is his sense of what draws two persons to love each other, apart from dramatist convenience for drama-led story (distinct from character-driven drama). Particularly relative to psychological interest (your angle), von Donnersmarck is not very insightful about durable love, though he's a fine dramatist, well exemplified by the scene which you discuss (pp. 18-21).
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But who can gain any insight into why Kurt and Ellie are together, apart from normal romantic passion of youth? What's so special about Kurt to Ellie that she chooses him? Why is Kurt unsure that Ellie loves him, and insists that she verbally avow that she loves him? There is no ”I know you love me,” let alone<br>
”I know you know, because it shows.”
<br><br>
Oh, youth: so unsure about knowing anything about others...
<br><br>
There's a dynamic in the film which von Donnersmarck may not have realized—though I doubt that it eluded him (but wasn't highlighted by him in interviews?)—which isn't easy to represent, though the details are clear:
<br><br>
Seebald's <i>wife</i> looks like an older version of Kurt's <i>aunt</i> Elisabeth, and Seebald's <i>daughter</i> looks like Kurt's aunt, but with dark hair. So, the woman in the critical photo would look to Kurt like aunt Elisabeth holding him as a boy, though it's a photo obtained from Ellie. The photo is actually (I presume) the Russian protector's wife holding the son whom Seebald delivered.
<br><br>
So, there's a visual isomorphism there which belongs to von Donnersmarck, which he expresses through his work. Is von Donnersmarck intending to help exorcize the archetypal witch?
<br><br>
Kurt's aunt, as she's being dragged from Seebald's office to be sterilized, begs for her life in desperate terms of being "as if" his daughter, who happens to actually look like the woman Seebald married—though he might be already fucking the housekeeper (evident later), and would want to disown recognizing that Elisabeth (who has the name of his own daughter) is like his "abandoned" wife: another woman <i>too insightful</i> to be left uncontrolled.
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Seebald's misogyny—so tragically ironic, given that he's a gynecologist—is not a supplement of his nazi purism (defending against the impurity of his own fucking life). It's archetypal misogyny that drives his career which <i>thereby</i> welcomes serving Hitler, as both are participants in a Holy Roman Empire of excluding women from knowledge and power.
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So, a theme of Ellie's liberation from daddy deserves to be matched with Kurt's liberation from his father's suicide. For the viewer, she channels a feminist revenge in the montage which Seebald sees baldly facing him, thanks to Kurt's love for Ellie which becomes Kurt's longing for his aunt's embrace of the “tone“ of all things considered to cohere. But that cohering belongs to the art—artist and viewer in the resonance of the event—not to Seebald.
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Von Donnersmarck can be read to have channeled more than he admits. Or, at least, it's me finding a lot to note. (There surely is good reason to admire the film!) In any case, Kurt is on a path (as vehicle for von Donnersmarck's want of discoursing on art) which belongs to Kurt—to the art—apart from the ultimate irrelevance of Seebald's repetition (to German viewers) of German denial of commonplace guilt, which is a prop for von Donnersmarck's interest in the “I..,I..I” of emancipatory potential in art. Without Seebald's character, Kurt's journey of finding himself would have had just as much integrity. Seebald was indeed as ultimately irrelevant to Kurt’s odyssey as nazism was to art history.
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Anyway, this reader of your discussion wonders what belongs to a fair reading of the scene discussed; and what belongs to your creativity.
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You write: "One day Seebald comes to visit Kurt’s studio and encounters a series of paintings that seem to point toward Seebald’s role in the death of Kurt’s aunt."
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"Seems" to the <i>viewer</i>, of course. What <i>Seebald</i> recognizes isn't evident. But the numinous woman in the painting is from a photo of the Russian official’s wife whose suffering in childbirth was ended when Seebald, as imprisoned gynecologist, intervened, a small redemptive act which allows him to escape facing his own barbarity (and saves his own life). But the woman in the painting also looks like his daughter, whom he's deliberately caused to suffer from believing she can never have a child.
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But the woman in the image is <i>not</i>, to Seebald, Kurt's aunt. Another photo painting in the room shows Seebald <i>with</i> the hunted nazi official. Fatherly guilt (one photo painting) is assaulted by an exterminator’s terror (the other photo painting).
<br><br>
To Kurt, the montaged photo painting most likely suggests Ellie with magical child who points to Seebold as the one who kept the boy imaginary for Ellie and Kurt. Otherwise, it’s aunt Elisabeth with dark hair, holding Kurt. The godly viewer knows more, but neither Kurt nor Seebald have reason to intuit that.
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"Deeply shaken, Seebald walks out of the studio and disappears from his daughter’s life."
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We don't know that. He disappears from the theater, like a Satanic figure ex-<br>
communicated from the Church, because von Donnersmarck's script is made of extended vignettes, like random numbers which gain significance through juxtaposition by the god of random happenstance: Seebald might not have shown up at all, but the viewer is there—immersed in the lives of others, like all immersed readers—to witness a fortuitous accident which could have been absent, while the story would still have had integrity as <i>Bildungsroman</i>.
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"Looking at Kurt’s paintings [which causes the viewer to be] remembering the young woman whom he had sent to her death," we have no textual reason to claim anything about what Seebald sees, particularly since (presumably) he sent so many blond young German women to their death.
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"Seebald can’t help assuming that the young man knows about his war crimes..."
<br><br>
No, we can't help wondering whether Seebald <i>can</i> grant Kurt such perceptibility at all, this artist of "emptiness on emptiness" (to Seebold, if I recall correctly) who isn't worthy of his daughter. More credibly, we <i>can</i> claim that Seebald can't help assuming that his crimes will be discovered by the anticipated publicity of Kurt's art. His terror likely has nothing at all to do with thoughts about Kurt's appreciability.
<br><br>
So, a mindreading dynamic isn't credibly ascribable because the dramatic action involves much more than egoist Seebald's interest in what Kurt knows, which is irrelevant to the threat posed to Seebald by the image. Indeed, "Seebald [has no basis for an] assumption that Kurt knows his secrets," and there's no hint anywhere in the story that Kurt "stage[s]" scenes, though von Donnersmarck—god of scripting coincidences, as all authors are—is expertly staging due mortification of Seebald being found out as exterminator-in-cheif of intimidating women.
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"The superior knowledge seems to reside with the paintings themselves," but actually the richness of phenomenality between witnessed art and witnessing "writer" (in "reading") has created a mirrorplay of who's writing whom, which doesn't primarily involve the characters' relations to each other in the scene. That is, any mindreading which is ascribed is enscribed by the reader/viewer in phenomenal play with the author's very calculated presentation.
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A delightful prospect, though, is your prospected cosmic justice of aunt Elisabeth having an afterlife presence, intending to mortify her crucifier through the boy-man she cherished like no other woman who ever entered Kurt's life. But that prospect calls for more than mindreading. It calls for supernaturalism. Aunt Elisabeth is <i>certainly</i> alive to Kurt in his artwork. No doubt, her "spirit" had a hand in his therapeutic odyssey. But supernaturalism isn't suggested. Your want of Magical Realism <i>is</i>.
<br><br>
When Gerhard Richter says that "my paintings know more than I do," know that he's patronizing the interviewer. He knows more about his paintings than a viewer is entitled to know; yet the artist learns more about his works' efficacy from viewer response than he anticipated.
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And yes, too, an archetypal process is involved in the mystery of the artist being thrown into self-discovery by obsession with the work which is on its way to the artwork: Deeper self is thrown by free release into the emerging artwork as venue of self-discovery, fabulously incompleted for the artist when the artwork is framed as "done" (as if).
<br><br>
The artwork goes into display. The work of art remains unfinished. It's enchant-<br>
ing and true that the work of art is an odyssey for the artist which s/he gladly finds still mysterious.
<br><br>
But what the artist knows is for the few and the rare, which Professor van Verten attests when he not only confesses to Kurt (among so few?) the suffering in his past, but <i>alas</i>, he takes off his hat (letting Kurt see his bald, scared skull) to the promising artist who is now close to finding his true calling.
<br><br>
To rightly note "the more relevant question...: What did his paintings know?" is a personification of what can be known in the resonant mirrorplay between text and viewer, troped by the event of presentation. "I," the viewer, authors the reading of the author having read her/himself into performing another authorship for the life of a work whose progeny of readings belongs to its times.
<br><br>
No wonder that philosophers muse over whether personal identity is the same over time: youth before horror, life surviving time...Picasso performed "Picasso" as neo-Impressionisti, then performed as Cubist. And so on. Who/what is the singularity of the named artist?
<br><br>
Gerhard Richter sits for an interview, a performance, giving the event its 15 minutes. "You" think it's candor.
<br><br>
Seebald's exit from the stage avows that the story was never about Kurt caring what Seebald saw (a moment in the film, there and gone), because the ultimate plot point is Kurt discovering the redemptive potential of art. "Kurt's life changes" when he gets the revelation of art's redemptive power.
<br><br>
What "I...I...I" wants is the truth of life itself, which art may grant. That's Professor van Verten's point in the film's main lecture scene, which is von Donnersmarck speaking: Art is freedom for the pursuit of truth (though von Donnersmarck gets phony with van Verten's adolescent enflaming of political posters).
<br><br>
Von Donnersmarck is the child of very, very privileged Germans who were part of the generation of denial after the war: in von Donnersmarck's growth, parents probably so conscientious about the German Condition that they lived survivor guilt which the auteur maybe sought to redeem through his own art.
<br><br>
As Heidegger avowed, 1936—"Art is history, in the essential sense that it is <br>
the ground of history" ("Origin of the Work of Art").
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-57986497581011267122023-08-18T12:52:00.018-07:002023-08-22T14:29:41.355-07:00whose mind am i reading?<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr /><br>
In the beginning, there were no words, but we know now that there was caring: good enough attachment of infant to mother…In the beginning, there was no other, just the caring, so-called “relationality,” primal inter-ing. Everything was interal—unrepresentable interality, what Antonio Damasio, decades ago, called “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0156010755/">the feeling of what happens</a>” (though he wasn’t primarily oriented by relating-ness).
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Then, one day—or gradually emerging from all nebulosity—there was an other: mother, which is first primal personification.
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One, two, three,…infinity: Everything is personified.
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If it moves, it’s alive; and if it’s alive, it intends.
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The wind through the trees “proves” a spirit that children need not fear.
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The sun gives us life because it intends that.
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There are gods, dear, because everything has its place. As Leibniz assured us, “nothing is without reason” (Heidegger, <i>The Principle of Reason</i>).
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feeling, belonging, intending—and representation!: cognition with conation with feeling with belonging.
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But mentability conceals itself by giving prevailing value to cognition, because caring made possible belonging, which made possible importance, which kept interesting whatever: others, events, things.
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Before so-called “<a href="https://www.academia.edu/105718128/Dont_be_too_good_at_reading_other_peoples_minds?email_work_card=thumbnail">mindreading</a>,” there was mind ascribing: personifying.
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Toys that move have intentions (batteries not imputed). Barbie and Ken need each other, because children are gods of ensuring that mommy and daddy will stay true to each other. And a girl can become anyone. Somewhere, there is the boy of one’s dreams.
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Talk to your teddy bear. Talk to your dog.
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Says Woody Allen: “When I pray to ‘God’ I’m talking to myself.”
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Don’t look at the Sun, but never cease to hold holy awe for the power of intending light in all which matters.
<br /><br /><hr><br>
I’m enthralled, yet haunted, by the spirit of personification: Biologists readily say cells “communicate.”
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The deathly storm was “an act of God” for some hidden sin “we“ must have overlooked.
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The power of myth is to prove that the gods are watching, like viewers through the camera that dwells with characters’ privacy as not <i>there</i> to <i>them</i> at all; or<br />
the reader of omniscient narratability thrills to personify godly access to minds<br />
of others, there through ascribing, like any text presumed to have an author<br />
(not ChatGPT!), authoriality ascribed—and no one “reads” the same author of <br />
a given text—as if there <i>is</i> one text which is the same for any two readers,<br />
let alone matching senses of authorial implicature.
<br /><br />
So, Derrida got enthralled with writing in speech: One is always appropriating oneself, as if there’s one self being “here,” there: a mindfulness (or -lessness) made for you to incarnate, as if merely read.
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Drama, drama everywhere: Everybody’s an actor in ever-incomplete plays, impersonating whom one is, who “you” are (to be “witnessed”), personifying advents, objectifying misread intents, pretending, pretensing, fabulating—mygod, what’s not partly fiction?
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So, Literature tropes all being. Everything’s phenomenology, which “cognitive” science barely discerns.
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Feeling in belonging with intending representations is all we care about and for: purpose which we create, otherwise no point at all.
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Endless ending is The End, thank goodness (not that one knows that thanks is heard).
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We live in mirrorplays of ascribed and discerned intending, “bearing” and “granting,” Heidegger said of “The Thing.”
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The presence of presencing lives in the interality of there being the medial text (“Da-sein”), whose presence is by godknows who’s presencing, echoed in specific coherings.
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-59771047230622936872022-05-30T19:02:00.005-07:002022-06-10T20:06:29.968-07:00enthralling appeal<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
Be<i><b>ing</b></i> drawn into experience (of a person, a phenomenon, a text, etc.) responds to appeal as if being enacted <i>by</i> the appellant, rather than (<i>as if</i> not) by oneself.
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It <i>is</i> one<b>S</b>elf, of course: already receptive to experience of who (or what) evinces response—but one’s not being <i>thrown</i> by the experience (which would be impositional, like surprise, albeit welcomed).
<br><br>
A serenity may precede the drawing <i>or</i> be instilled by it. A play of engagement may be evinced by phenomenality, to be savored, maybe evincing enchantment<br>
or a delicate entrancement.
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For an <i>inquiring</i> mind, phenomenography of the drawing hopes for discovery<br>
(thrown by surprise? or delighted?—a <i>eureka!</i> moment, in any event)—for furthered enlightenment and heightened appreciability.
<br><br>
<b>S</b>elf-mirroring in that shows one’s capability and implicit perspectivity, framed and, hopefully, challenged, enriched, etc. Appreci<i>ability</i> may be “heightened,” “deepened,” or/and “extended,” in a <b>S</b>elf-implicative trans-horizoning of one’s prior conceivability.
<br><br>
A new <i>kind</i> of love, mindfulness, or openness may be drawn from phenomeno-<br>
genic appeals (generative emergence). Enriched conceivability may potentiate new kinds of creativity from inspiration, enable a better scale of capability<br>
for dwelling immanently and, at best, lead to constellating It All into useful presentation, as if being <i>merely</i> “poetic,” though really translating an era<br>
of wholly flourishing life into a relatively short story.
<br><br><hr>
This is associated with the “<a href="https://cohering.net/ca43/d4/d00.html">creative life</a>” Area of my general project
<br><br>
next—> “<a href="https://cohering.net/ca43/i9/i02.html">conceptual appeal</a>”
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-69407687212292389342022-03-26T13:59:00.011-07:002023-07-06T13:49:48.273-07:00As: a history, an outline<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
“<i>As: a history, an outline</i>” is a set of poems I’ll share by link here (at the end), composed 45 years ago.
<br><br>
During the summer of my 29<sup>th</sup> year, I got involved with a largely-disappointing tome of poems, <i>The Young American Poets</i>, a very thick thing which had been published nearly a decade earlier (1968, Paul Carroll, ed.). It had many good lines in its lot of forgettable verse. Nearly each poem had <i>some</i> good lines—“good” there mirroring my preferences. I underlined each.
<br><br>
Next, I copied each preferred line by typewriter (years before consumer “word processing” platforms came along), and cut each line from its page, resulting in many hundreds of short textual noodles. Then, during episodes of entrancement,<br>
I grouped the lines on my floor, first as regions of tens of lines (piles of text noodles) that shared an emergent spirit of sensibility, as if each line had its own integral gravity.
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Next, each region was parsed into smaller groups of kindred significance, then<br>
I sequenced the grouped lines into stanzas, as suited my preferences and revised each sequence into altogether a weave of waves through eerie waters for ready sailing out of my youth, a long tongue-in-cheek variation on T. S. Eliot’s epithet that “mature poets steal”—no: The best (to me) of many promising voices were absorbed as clarifying the calling of a muse into some new odyssey, like Eros constellating Psyche.
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The result was the voice of a woman who has left a man and an era behind, before he comes back to her transformed too late, as if she hadn’t transformed herself and long ago moved on.
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It was 12 poems—which I shared with no one—until the turn of the year, winter 2008. In the meantime, I forgot about it—except one week in spring of 1994 when it gained more context. This turns out to be vital to what Terese received.
<br><br>
When the set was constellated and composed, summer of 1977, each of the twelve lacked a title. They were roman numeraled, I—XII. May of 1994, I wrote and sent a letter to an old friend, Catherine, which I soon placed in an autobio-<br>
graphical story, and used phrases of my letter as section headers in the story, which was done in the wake of the recent (ongoing?) butchery in Rwanda.
<br><br>
One set of phrases from my letter to her was used at headers for the 12 <i>As</i> <br>
poems, which were inserted into the story, giving <i>As</i> a frame that was completely unrelated to the composition of them, but as the set of 12 came back to me <br>
that May, 1994 (I don’t recall why), I read them again in the wake of what was happening in Rwanda.
<br><br>
The autobiographical story was haunted by the butchery, but that was placed<br>
in a context of history and evolution (the overwhelming lack of humanity which echoes tribal animality). The phrases from my letter to Catherine spanned three paragraphs, the end of one, the beginning of a third:<blockquote>
…In a universe of intelligent life that does not bother with our kind: beings of so many
channels going nowhere.
<br><br>
“In the beginning, all the world was America,” wrote John Locke, 1690. So too will this be said in 3990, when the difference between natural and self-designed humanity will be lore for children.
<br><br>
In the beginning, intelligence emerged among primates in the mists of Rwanda, and it came to pass that their luny, nomadic children left and learned to change the course of rivers and create Time,…</blockquote>
Fourteen years later (31 years after my constellational composition of <i>As</i>),<br>
Terese, 25, unwittingly caused me to think of <i>As</i> again because I was 25 when<br>
the sensibility which emerged as the set of poems seemed to have been born<br>
(four years before that composition), and Terese was clearly to me someone other than she was to herself (inevitably) as—I believed—flowering writer of her own way.
<br><br>
So, I sent <i>As</i> to her during the turn of the year, 2008, but without any explanation other than: Here’s a sample of writing by me. I don’t recall whether she had invited me to send her something, but we were obsessively in <a href="https://teleglyph.blogspot.com/2009/12/thanks.html#t">email contact with each other</a> (outside of the department office, the origin of our secret friendship), so she eagerly received the set during a Christmas dinner with her parents and siblings, and hid away in the house to read them.
<br><br>
I recalled that eight years later (2016) for the birthday of her first daughter, Ada, four years earlier (2012), which I recounted online briefly, as if <i>As</i> was my literary rattlebox child, though there I referred to Terese as “Ana” because that better suited the reality of writing to a muse.
<br><br>
As far as I know, Terese had (and has) no idea I did that online writing, April 2016. She cut contact with me when she at last legally married her partner of many years, 2010. (I’ve added a link to that 2016 narrative at the bottom of the last page of <i>As</i>, linked below. That very long project, “As Aide of Sophiana,” honors Ada as its last section, which ends by linking to <i>As</i>.)
<br><br>
Anyway, that 1977 experiment in creativity, generativity, appellant semio-magnetism, whatever, was a far call from high literary theory I happily weathered soon after composing <i>As</i>—years of literary-conceptual odyssey, including a very <i>non</i>-“literary” dissertation on Jürgen Habermas, 1979 (which led to voluminous online writing, 1997 onward).
<br><br><hr><br>
But again, all that is long ago; and everybody’s an allegory of ultimate singularity.
<br><br>
We bring into presence <i>Possibility</i>, as our capability for conceptuality created<br>
the gods, mirroring our imaginability and aspirations.
<br><br>
And it came to pass that the gods transformed themselves into highly discursive formations, aspiring, perhaps, to become wholly scientific arts—or poetical science.
<br><br>
I draw conceptual ecosphericality into wholly enthralled joys, then want to
theorize it.
<br><br>
What is this thing: chalice of mind, jug of mental ecology, urn of Sophial love?
<br><br>
philoSophiana: literary philosophy as tropoconceptual prospecting.
<br><br>
Well, “philosophy” is tropal enough, between you and me.
<br><br>
Anyway, Ada, intimacies of inwordness can portend radiant gravities of mind so awing beyond one, it’s like gods channeling and reflecting all potentials of receptive and responsive divining as yours to further genesis, though history is always <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HADzxPz3rrJDH6Oy8tI0sbYvL9f4UpBs/view?usp=share_link">mere outline to a muse</a>.
<br><br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-59393373490574035852022-02-05T11:29:00.005-08:002022-02-11T23:29:07.213-08:00an ended call is called the ending<font color="#0e0b6b"><hr><br>
The week has been a crazy series of exchanges between me and ATT Internet employees who don’t know how to solve the problems they’re employed to address, re: why I didin’t have connectivity most of the time anymore—which is an irony of human being: needing connectivity in order to fruitfully complain about its absence.
<br><br><a name='more'></a>
Loss of connectivity in the session of complaining about the lack of it not only looks like abandonment of the problem, but requires starting all over again when connectivity returns, trying to explain to some new “agent” (addicted to his/her customer relations protocols) what I’d recently spent an hour trying to make clear to the previous agent (addicted to the same snail-paced protocols).
<br><br>
Maybe an analogy is that interpersonal relations need mutual bonds in order to address their waning fairly. A friendship ends, and the new one takes so much time to get to the point of avoiding what caused the previous ending.
<br><br>
A lover grows to resent being a muse for the writer’s characterizations, as if <i>that</i> is the writer’s actual conception of their love. Yet, she wanted to love <i>The Artist</i>. The writer mixes true love with inspiration it affords, which undermines<br>
the other’s trust in love, inasmuch as she doesn’t anymore enjoy enough<br>
the difference that she loved—and reads the writer’s inspired explaining (dramatically characterized) as lack of true love for her.
<br><br>
Or the lover resents that the story is not <i>actually</i> about her: She never wanted<br>
to <i>not</i> be actually dramatized. She <i>wanted</i> to be the story. “And if you really loved me, you’d not <i>use</i> me for fiction. You’d honor our love by making the story truly about <i>us</i>.”
<br><br>
I didn’t know. You didn’t say.
<br><br>
How many an affair to remember.
</font><br><br>
<hr>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-48006450910907179152021-12-31T20:47:00.008-08:002022-01-01T15:09:47.029-08:00avoiding autobiography<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
Years ago on New Year’s Eve, I wrote to an old friend a letter which has extractable paragraphs about my aversion to autobiographical writing, which<br>
I want to overcome during 2022:<blockquote>
One reason I resisted autobiography was that I was so oriented to new experiences, new learning, always trekking on, as if looking back was infidelity to a glorious horizon.
<br><br>
And who would care to read the story? Everybody’s got a story...<br>
[...]<br>
Stories are usually for some market, which I could never care to entertain. My life, any life, is really nobody else’s concern.
<br><a name='more'></a><br>
People—readers, viewers—are voyeurs of others’ lives, almost pruriently seeking a godly magic of narrated access into privacies, like a camera’s eye that presciently shifts scenes—out of intimate conversations (and beds) or sudden surprises, etc., etc.—in con-<br>
fidence about what the implicit story is to be, which its characters can’t anticipate, while the consuming viewer / reader enters into<br>
a self-chosen time-space catered by an author—or/and production team—who wants a profit from a manageably contained world having hidden destiny that will end resolutely and coherently, contrary to most real lives.
<br><br>
Why not just live on without sacrificing time to look back? Love life’s horizonal emergences as much as possible—<i>make</i> moving on a cohering gravity, like a calling that never finishes its lovely poem.
<br><br>
Then die in the unsaid flow of things, like most all life does?
<br><br>
Ultimately anyway, we’re like the vastly unseen flowers. </blockquote>
<br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-71708668822947460652021-11-10T00:01:00.006-08:002021-11-28T22:46:55.060-08:00in honor of letters<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
Today is the 75th anniversary of the day, 1946, when jean sent his questions to martin which resulted in the <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-uGyW1Q1MeMa0wxcVBNMm9rdG8/view?resourcekey=0-ZMLvb-ezRvgfAEm5cIm_CQ">letter on humanism</a>, some weeks later (the same period in which martin was preparing “What are poets for?”).
<br><br>
I recall this like an encounter between friends because humanism is at home informally. Also, I’ve wanted to write relative to martin’s letter as part of developing my sense of “person-al” humanism, which understands our humanity (“being” sacredly “human”) relative to <a href="https://cohering.net/lst/pf02.html">being a person fully</a>. I hope to do that before the middle of December.
<br><br>
I lament techumanity’s waning of letters, slow writing. I wrote by lovely fountain pen, decades ago.
<br><br>
I wrote a long thing yesterday (not by pen), but prudently decided not to send it <br>
to you. But here’s its ending:
<br><br><a name='more'></a>
...love after seizing the day, happiness after love, and <i>life</i>—dear artistry working for “us,” like real poetic intimacy <i>shared</i> because its emergence from solitude was always <i>to be</i> shared, to belong together through the same text.
<br><br>
Philosophical scholars don’t do close reading often, it seems. Yet, literary reading is at home there, especially with poems. Philosophical reading can learn a lot by taking to heart the care for reading that literary work loves.
<br><br>
How literary work loves: Deconstruction’s self-undermining texts can bloom<br>
into new ways of conceiving (the <i>enabling</i> truth of poetic thinking); creativity beyond imagination (i.e., beyond imagistic conceiving); conceiving beyond meta-structuralism (i.e., beyond ontological longing mirrored in transcending contexts); loving a story’s end as potential to <i>be</i> more, to begin again where being just <i>is</i> becoming—without anxiety toward death, without regret for one’s era of life let be (being let go), <a href="https://discursive-living.blogspot.com/2021/10/considerations.html">loving to move on</a> thankfully.
<br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-84730479441861187772021-10-24T18:54:00.037-07:002022-08-18T21:39:05.201-07:00What is there to a muse? <span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr />
<br />
Before I leave my <a href="https://cohering.net/ca43/i9/i01.html">bibliophilic museum</a> for more timely amusements about our political life—and presuming I’ll have lost my current inspiration when I return, some weeks ahead—I want to express fascination with the notion of “the” muse which writers sometimes cite to explain their aspiration.
<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8kPf6MIKUiIz5tQte_AkllrATpIRewFpANak0SKNdg8e1tN8Y-FmS__P_IbVefVjmYhAdOos7iH9hsk8dx7fNK6GkLz4K3oSQl74DSb9PsnCSDOfHXJIrVzd3469YDQckjHB-hGE05vbp5nQBZGoMTLPBE2Xdj6ekAwJ6i2-51xHFDm8c9AYONLUJhA/s1338/Pygmalion%20and%20Galatea%20Sculptor%20Kissing%20his%20Statue%201890%20French%20Painting%20by%20Jean-Le%CC%81on%20Ge%CC%81ro%CC%82me%20.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1338" data-original-width="902" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8kPf6MIKUiIz5tQte_AkllrATpIRewFpANak0SKNdg8e1tN8Y-FmS__P_IbVefVjmYhAdOos7iH9hsk8dx7fNK6GkLz4K3oSQl74DSb9PsnCSDOfHXJIrVzd3469YDQckjHB-hGE05vbp5nQBZGoMTLPBE2Xdj6ekAwJ6i2-51xHFDm8c9AYONLUJhA/s320/Pygmalion%20and%20Galatea%20Sculptor%20Kissing%20his%20Statue%201890%20French%20Painting%20by%20Jean-Le%CC%81on%20Ge%CC%81ro%CC%82me%20.png" width="216" /></a></div>
Standardly, fables of personified creative capability flow from the posited muse <i>into</i> one’s own voice. It’s a Janus-faced venture of speaking in light of earlier listening, as if a “spirit” is channeled.
<br /><br />
Here,“you” are more than witness. You are addressed through the voicing in a triadic mediation(2) of enspiration(1) to you(3). The music(1) fills(2) “me,” which is heralded(3).
<br /><br />
Yet, one may posture their audience as the muse itself, e.g., writing <i>to</i> Orpheus. Here, one lets another listen in to “my” addressing enspiration—a triadic venture of “you” now witnessing an interplay. [That’s “Pygmalion and Galatea Sculptor Kissing his Statue,” 1890 French Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme.]
<br /><br />
Both ventures may echo each other—or merge, one fused (if not confused) with the other. A present person may be personified as a muse, which is common for creativity, <i>respecting</i> the difference (the other person trusts); and playing with appreciated liminality.
<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>
<i>Or</i>, concealing the difference (common in romanticism) prevails, as if there’s no such thing as self-concealing blindness <i>that</i> there’s a difference (not even possible). There’s “no” self-undermining textuality to the appeal of “you.”
<br /><br />
<i>No matter</i>—one way or the other—for risky <i>creative</i> possession by the so-called muse, which is the original sense of <a href="https://cohering.net/ca4/c413.10c.html">‘genius’: a resident spirit</a> guiding one onward like wind for gliding birds.
<br /><br />
A personification of mysterious capability is born and grows from there being persons in baby’s primal times, becoming sophisticated into possibly conceptual (even allegedly “primordial”) presences, like goddesses of poetry and other inspirations.
<br /><br />
<i>History!</i>: Clio (one of the Greek Muses), were you secretly born from Calliope (epic)?
<br /><br />
Does love (Erato) bear sacredness (Polyhumnia)? Is tragedy healed through dance to music making the stars constellate divine comedy?
<br /><br />
“Ever <a href="https://gedavis.com/mh/heid007.html">to the child in man</a>, night neighbors the stars”—night itself!
<br /><br />
It gives way through irresistible personification of the Appeal.
<br /><br />
Speaking of Clio becoming unprecedented dance: What <i>fun</i> was the fable<br />
of the Titans (older generation of classical Greek gods) battling the Olympians (younger generation of gods). The Olympians won: The new generations<br />
(the moderns) were to carry on the dancing. New beginnning was to prevail<br />
over tradition (which is <i>not</i> to imply that history—high literacy—isn’t to be appropriately appropriated).
<br /><br />
Indeed, youth lives as if the world came into being with their generation.<br />
At heart, they give no mind to <i>rebelling</i> (merely) from the past. Though<br />
the formally Modernist impulse was defined relative to a burned out pantheon<br />
that a generation seeks freedom <i>from</i> (such a Eurocentric motive, contrary to<br />
the freedom <i>to be</i> one’s ownmost generation, which is “the real American dream,” according to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674003837/">Andrew Delbanco</a>, 1999, which Nietzsche in particular cribbed from Emerson) modernism itself is a recurring contemporaneity of progressive generativity.
<br /><br />
The Olympians win. A “Second Beginning” emerges with every generation—before seeing Its pretensions dissolve into Our ongoing inter-generational evolving where nonetheless, orienting value to prospects for heirs’ better lives prevails over longing to newly appreciate ancestry.
<br /><br />
Futurity prevails over historialtiy in authentic life. The fallen don’t stand in order to go back. They stand to move on—with all due appreciation of the parents, the teachers, the canon.
<br /><br />
<hr /><br />
Greeks personified the Sun as Helios; Egyptians, Ra. Does not the singularity<br /> of the Sun originate the idea of ultimate singularity?
<br /><br />
But the classical Greeks found rather that <i>cohering constellations</i> didn’t need personified singularity, though self-constellating constellations of the gods are conceived by the protean poet of self-transforming <i>there</i> (not originating from<br />
the poet herself) in the variety of constellating light.
<br /><br />
The heavens speak. The nature of Earth speaks. The marriage of Time and Nature is generative (not singular conception) across generations—no homeostatic <i>Logos</i>; rather, heavenly <i>poiesis</i> (new building), appropriating <i>logos</i> (new dwelling) to advance <i>ethos</i> (new thinking).
<br /><br />
The genius of the richly-worlded ones is to horizonally look to future generations. Yet, only inasmuch as the futurity of inter-generationality can be personified—as living heirs to come—can their entitlement to <i>their own</i> good be appealing to provision (e.g., paying forward thankfully for the sake of their humanity, their Earth), even sanctified like honoring a god to later—yet, reliably—be arriving.
<br /><br />
Personification: born from infant attachment, to grow itself into bonded feeling, then into enowned loves and friendships, deliberate (selfidentical) fidelities, lasting commitments, occasioned solidarities, and manifold kinds of investments.
<br /><br />
<hr /><br />
In feeling for “you”—in feeling there being “our” presence, making good, realizing promise, <i>conceiving</i> (beyond mere imagining—that notion of creativity born from imagistic tangibility)—conceiving how we can be, <i>there</i> is Heidegger’s “Da-sein”: there being, It gives, <i>our</i> there-ing within which things are—<i>not</i> to be <i>primarily</i> context-transcended (a materialist supervenience echoing supernaturalism); rather, to be enabled, like musing souls possessed by our precedence, our intimately shared granting and bearing, trans-generational humanity which gathers us into futural regioning of that which regions—the Appeal: “She binds together without seam or edge or thread. She neighbors because she works only with nearness.”
<br /><br />
Heidegger would reincarnate the feminine—analogous to Jung’s <i>Anima</i>—in the world of overbrearing <i>Animus</i>, so that no longer some god threatens wrath against disobedience, but rather expresses the news that love—care, trust in the other’s promise—is the kingdom that already always belongs among us, if we let it; thus, belonging with each of us.
<br /><br />
Father, be not paternalist or/and quick to anger. Be concerted cultivation: authentic parenting, genuine teaching, enablative leadership.
<br /><br />
<hr /><br />
Husserl’s great error was to be motivated by relating to objects, rather than by belonging with dear others. Reading Heidegger after consolidating one’s sense<br />
of phenomenology objectivationally yields a pantheon of dependent miscon-<br />
struals about Heidegger’s sense of being—which was never analogous to some transcendental <i>a priori</i> (contrary to what Husserl understood—and contrary<br />
to how Heidegger is commonly read).
<br /><br />
So, by the way, it came to pass that generations of misreading would become<br />
a canon about what’s culpably “obvious” in Heidegger’s survival of nazism.
<br /><br />
Heidegger’s calling was never to retrieve or gain some transcendentality; rather, thinking was called to inhabit and be inhabited by conceptual muses, by tr<i><b>o</b></i>pics of “that which regions”: intelligent life in its highest (sky), farthest (Earthly horizon), deepest (divined possession), and most intimate (mortal) senses. “Poetic thinking” is about the conceptuality of inquiry, not primarily some sublime resort (though that appeal follows <i>derivatively</i>).
<br /><br />
<hr /><br />
A few days ago, I mentioned to an email friend a rubric, “historizing immance,” without explication. The mention was not implicitly about retrieving Titans into the present (though there’s great value to be found in appreciating the canon). Rather, I wanted potentiating presence—in teaching, paradigmatically—for the sake of <i>futural</i> lastingness (as if <i>making</i> history is feasible, while not being conceited about one’s prospects by doing one’s best).
<br /><br />
Such hopeful historizing is no longing for preceding transcendentality; rather,<br />
a generativity exemplified by aspiring creativity, inspiring fruitfully—at best originarily, where subsequent genealogy is retrojective, unforeseen by some later-inferred <i>a priori</i> (not retrospective). Appropriative recollection is given genealogical value—holding good (even sanctified humanistically) as spirit, muse, constitutive principles worth retaining and transmitting.
<br /><br />
By virtue of creative remembrance: In the beginning, our story began there—<br />
or here, <a href="https://gedavis.com/mh/heid002.html">whatever</a>.
<br /><br /><br />
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-4256734416612593162021-08-22T14:58:00.008-07:002021-08-22T15:14:37.818-07:00tell us more<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
The home page of feminist performance artist <a href="https://www.suzykellemsdominik.com">Suzy Kellems Dominik</a> has two buttons at the bottom: “Learn more” and “Stay in touch.” Though those are functional, I read them also as autonomous texts, in the spirit of <a href="https://projects.jennyholzer.com">Jenny Holzer</a>: Yes, learning never ends. Yes, stay engaged.
<br><br>
Her site’s “contact” feature includes the request “Tell us more.” I wondered who “us” is. I wrote a dialogue in the message box, also quoting from her short biographical statement (two quotations below within one of my fanciful quote marked responses by me as character with characterization of her):<blockquote><a name='more'></a>
“’Us’”?
<br><br>
Yes, a protean sense of self became necessary. Now, I’m the woman he can never know, later the man he can’t become.
<br><br>
“This morning I was re-organizing some old notes, ephemera of days I’d forgotten. The phrase ‘conceptual artist’ from years ago linked to your site.”
<br><br>
Thanks for your interest.
<br><br>
“How can being ‘fearlessly confrontational’ be ‘underscored by a profound empathy for the vulnerability of the human condition’?”
<br><br>
Because I won’t let superficial interest turn my own experience of survival and loss into something no longer mine.
<br><br>
“But, then, you’re displaying how essentially hidden you are. How does anyone find a way to collaborate?”
<br><br>
Be open.
<br><br>
“I am old and glad to be merely a little note for eonic Gaia’s song of being.”
<br><br>
That’s precious.
<br><br>
“If I’d been with you when you did the sepia performance for your site home page, I’d have wanted you to end your act at so precisely where it began that a viewer wouldn’t see where the loop ends<br>
to begin again, because life, you know, goes on as if it has no<br>
ending—”
<br><br>
—if not being an eternal return of the same.
<br><br>
“Though learning never ends.”
<br><br>
in love and art
<br><br>
“Touching.” </blockquote>
<br><br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-26742918211478902672021-08-20T22:21:00.023-07:002021-08-21T18:14:38.562-07:00Adam of Eve’s immaculate self-conceiving<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
Mid-2007, I met a man in Peet’s Coffee, Walnut Square (Berkeley), which I’d forgotten these days until this week due to an amazing occurrence I’ll mention later here.
<br><br>
We had our first conversation when I saw him reading a book on Ingmar Bergman. The Dutch man, named Gerrit, called himself Geri, pronounced “Gary,” which I guess ruins my credibility here about my recounting. But there <i>are</i> coincidences in life.
<br><br>
He was an art historian getting more deeply interested in film history, visiting from Amsterdam as a UCB resident scholar. We crossed paths numerous Saturdays because I had the habit of hanging out there before doing my weekly grocery run.
<br><br>
Early 2009, I began to tell him about my relationship to Terese (a <i>very long</i> story) which was frustrating because I wanted to see her <i>not</i> commit to a marriage that she seemed to not really want (which would be <a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2009/12/of-unhappiness.html">felt by her future children</a>, which she also seemed to not want, but her future husband <i>did</i>; so, she was acquiescent—actually, depressive; a bad omen). Since I had enough challenge finding time away from our department for what I loved, I couldn’t accept that a talented woman would reject the appeal of creative independence (especially since she entered college wanting creative independence).
<br><br><a name='more'></a>
Terese <i>said</i> she wished to become a writer (after having discontinued her college path into filmmaking). I wanted both of us to be writers (a romanticism of partnership suggestive of de Beauvoir and Sartre, I realized). Her authenticity would help me with mine. In early 2009, I had no idea yet that she might have been merely patronizing me.
<br><br>
My experiences with Terese remained an off-and-on topic with Geri, through 2009. More interesting, he would talk about his bohemian life in Amsterdam during the ‘60s, which fascinated me. He was 60+ years old, I guessed.
<br><br>
He went through many romantic relationships after his daughter, Helena, was born, 1968 (a legendary year!) because he didn’t marry after Helena’s mother “disappeared.” That caused difficulty for his daughter, needing a mother. We had in common attraction to feminist women who are very independent. My admiration of that probably kept me unmarried, I joked, because my loves continued to leave town, and I didn’t follow. By 2009, he’d been married for several years, but it was a long road to there.
<br><br>
<i>So</i> important to Geri was that Helena should find her own way. She did: She became a filmmaker, according to Geri. In 2009, Helena, age 40, was working in Amsterdam on a film about a girl searching for her biological mother.
<br><br>
I was fascinated by Geri’s deep feelings about “growing up” through parenting, which I didn’t have the chance to experience. I always wanted parenting, but only with the woman I felt I could live decades with, and who also wanted parenting. The two never melded. Janna and I were “together” for over 20 years, but I never really wanted parenting with her, and she—so involved with her career as psychotherapist—never sought anyone else in her romantic life (which was very good for me).
<br><br>
Geri was haunted, he says, by the habit of men who try to “make” women into their own image of love—the “Eve” complex, he called it. He learned about this the hard way with Helena, which he shared in pieces over several months, while I felt sometimes despaired about my “Pygmalion” complex with Terese.
<br><br>
When <a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2009/11/dead.html">Janna killed herself</a> in November of ’09, I talked to Geri about it, which caused him to confess that the “disappearance” of Helena’s mother was actually her suicide, which he hadn’t confessed to Helena.
<br><br>
Helena’s mother, Mila, was The One who was supposed to end Geri’s romantic transience. But Mila didn’t want a child. She was angry about Geri letting the pregnancy happen (those days when men were responsible for preventing pregnancy). She didn’t want to give up the novelty of her bohemian life.
<br><br>
Geri persuaded her to stay in their relationship and have the baby. A part of her wanted to believe that Geri was the proof that there <i>can</i> be The One who stays without inhibiting a woman’s commitment to her own life apart from him. He was committed to that, he said. He convinced her of that. He was totally in love with Mila. To his mind, they transformed each others’ lives only for the better.
<br><br>
That’s how it should be with The One. But the months of the pregnancy were emotionally hard on Mila’s late ‘60s feminist sensibility, causing her to feel trapped in anticipated years of motherhood she didn’t want.
<br><br>
When their girl arrived, Geri was completely engaged with fatherhood and with his True Love. But emotional distress overwhelmed Mila. She didn’t believe she could be a good enough mother. She resented the baby’s needs. She couldn’t bear the conflict of being regularly reminded of her unhappiness growing up (cold-hearted parents), living with never enough freedom for her own way through life…and other things, Geri said, that caused Mila to leave. She <i>did</i> merely disappear. He learned later that she eventually killed herself.
<br><br>
Geri blamed himself: He and Helena trapped Mila in a relationship she knew she couldn’t sustain. Objectively, he knew that he wasn’t at fault for normal commitment, but he never shook off the feeling that he failed to listen.
<br><br>
He could never tell Helena that her mother killed herself soon after Helena was born. He couldn’t find a way to avoid Helena feeling that she caused her mother’s suicide. He also had to ensure that he never failed to listen.
<br><br>
Geri parented Helena alone. He was father <i>and</i> mother, most of the time, as best as he could be, while having more romantic relationships that didn’t lead to marriage. There <i>was</i> a marriage when Helena was a teen, but that didn’t last.
<br><br>
Meanwhile, Geri became regularly troubled by how he let Helena increasingly remind him deeply of Mila, while other romances were unwittingly, inevitably failures to replace her.
<br><br>
While he was committed to ensuring that Helena would not become the hopeless woman that Mila was, “Adam” unwittingly parented his Eve, as Geri put it. As Helena reached late adolescence, he became aghast that Helena was becoming so much like Mila. That was <i>not</i> about incestuous attraction, Geri emphasized. It was about Helena’s idealization of her freedom relative to his apparent life and the artistic world he lived in. But like Mila, she lacked confidence about the point of her own life. Geri feared that he had failed to be the enabling parent that she needed. He became afraid that he unconsciously sought to reincarnate Mila as Helena. He <i>did</i> become afraid of incestuous desire, because Helena was so shamelessly candid with him, as if she’d always be his “girl,” his wife without the sex. He had to break her away.
<br><br>
In any case, Geri wasn’t as candid as he might have been with Helena as a young adult, who after all was, in her early years. too young to fully understand the aging bohemian’s complex life, his loves while she was growing up, his fears about parenting—and the hidden issue of his idyllic love for Mila which, he felt certain, caused her suicide. In particular, he didn’t share with adult Helena his sense of mourning that he sought to heal through parenting her, which became feeling that he’d too closely reiterated the love that he lost in youth. Helena deserved to have her own sense of life, of course. And she deserved to be no longer regarded as his girl.
<br><br>
So, Geri felt he had somehow caused Helena to remain too dependent on the <i>suface</i> romance of his own life, rather than regarding her young adulthood as chances to dissolve veils. Helena rightly saw through that, but couldn’t conceive what was on the other side of the veils, which she hungered to know (acting out sexually) and which made her cynical and mocking of most everything. It made her transgressively candid, as if everyone is phony and essentially hidden.
<br><br>
Also, Geri knew that Helena deserved to not be strapped with the caretaker role during his old age. She couldn’t anticipate trying to stay his girl when he’s frail. She <i>must</i> break away from him. She <i>must</i> find her own way, just as her mother demanded of herself, but failed.
<br><br>
For Geri’s part, there <i>had</i> to be a final partner with whom he could grow old with, and be completely candid with, about everything in his past, which shouldn’t further bond young adult Helena to his life. He found that woman. Helena disdained it.
<br><br>
Geri returned to Amsterdam in 2010, as far as I know. I forgot about our conversations. But this week, I happened across a Dutch film, “Hemel” (2012), <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LVXWG86/">on Amazon PrimeVideo</a>, and realized that the screenwriter, Helena van der Meulen, is Geri’s daughter. (It’s a mature feminist film directed by a very talented young woman director. It is not soft porn, though the early minutes seem to intend to hook a viewer into believing otherwise. That’s artistically duplicitous and actually integral to the story.)
<br><br>
The film so eerily complements what Geri told me that I’m awed by what the ordinary viewer doesn’t get to know.
<br><br>
A work of art stands for itself, but the wayfaring that leads to the work of art is always “there” <i>for</i> the artist’s own sense of the work. The background staging always has a playwright haunting the show, beyond the viewer-inferrable authorship. Even the protean days of “our” ordinary life secretly trope an authorship that only the author can know.
<br><br>
Years before “Hemel,” I was given, through Geri, special access to the backstage. So, this week, I was overwhelmed by the simplicity of the film: what it doesn’t say, but implicitly shows. That’s the fineness of finished art: It is itself, and no more than it stands to be. Yet, it stands to be witnessed by a life it can’t anticipate.
<br><br>
Evidently (the film proves), Helena learned about her mother’s suicide after Geri returned to Amsterdam, but the film mentions Hemel’s mother (as something that the father, “Gijs,” can’t tell his daughter, Hemel) as a passing affair with no meaning. So, Geri’s secret stayed with him (and others like me who would never meet Helena).
<br><br>
Helena—Hemel—doesn’t know that her wonderful father lived with the “error” of his unwitting success: feeling that he mistakenly reincarnated Hemel’s biological mother, who had been the love of his youth.
<br><br>
Anyway, Helena’s screenwriting about <i>not</i> yet knowing where she was, as a girl-woman in the comfort of her father’s art world, became the film. The story pertains to the months before Hemel makes herself at last free from longing for her ownmost life relative to her dear, exciting, inspiring, father who was her model for the man she couldn’t find—that man with whom she was to have the incredible rapport she has with her father, Gijs, as if some other man <i>could</i> be wholly of her, and she <i>of</i> him (a theme late in the film when Hemel is in bed with a colleague of her father).
<br><br>
Hemel, not knowing how much Gijs (as she always addresses him) kept from her, believed that everything to be had in love between herself and a man was what she had with Gijs, plus sex, which is—young Hemel says, in a key scene—that each lover knows everything about the other.
<br><br>
Old Gijs gently counters (like the good father that he is) that “differences” keep love alive.
<br><br>
The film ends with Hemel realizing that she’s on her own, terrifyingly, mournfully.
<br><br>
But before that, the Director (Sacha Polak) has Hemel brooding (in beautifully done shots), which challenges the women viewers whom van der Meulen and Polak overtly address: What is your ownmost life to be?
<br><br>
Where’s your authentic being? Whom are you to make yourself be?
<br><br>
The great flaw of Geri’s parenting (he said years back) was being “too much there for her,” with her; and too little celebrating <i>her constructive</i> freedom.
<br><br>
Hemel has difficulty in young adulthood conceiving how she could <i>make</i> love—the love of her life—with a man comparable to her father, because Eve (Hemel/Helena) unwittingly sought to find her own Adam.
<br><br>
Hemel has the challenge, in the film, of overcoming her aimless freedom of loveless sex—or, it so happens, only finding lovely sexual romance with a man (colleague of her father, <i>like</i> her father) who stays clearly committed to his own marriage (as will Gijs).
<br><br>
Though Hemel is clearly in control of her own life—her own aimless assertiveness (especially her own sexuality), while enjoying mockery of others’ apparent inauthenticity or lack of capability for candor—she has no conception of what she wants for her own future.
<br><br>
She—for all her shameless candor—has not yet learned to love her own potential constructively and to make love mutually: Eve and Adam creating each other.
<br><br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-50694595926882242852020-12-30T18:52:00.002-08:002020-12-30T20:20:12.541-08:00being mirrored in telic cohering of The Appeal<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
I write things, then forget their there<br>
because I’m drawn toward writing the next<br>
thing. I forget, then happen by, being<br>
<i>amazed!</i>: <i>I</i> did that?<br>
<br>
From altitude, the tropography is simply clear,<br>
having a curious prettiness. Who’d surmise<br>
a mode’s emerging tropology intimates a beauty<br>
of tropogeny through awed praise?<br>
<br>
Dear Appealing, what’s the singularity<br>
of sourcing so cohering, having no name<br>
for all the centripetality flowering<br>
<a href="https://cohering.net/ca2/ca003.html">in itself</a>?
<br><br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-15588156960391876682020-12-20T14:34:00.003-08:002023-11-22T14:44:08.350-08:00being minds thinking newly<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
philo-Sophia: A stargazer might think that love beyond all reason is the insatiable curiosity that a black night sky coldly, Silently mirrors.
<br><br>
So, finding archetype mirrored in actual affection is a healthy modulation of enspirited appeal.
<br><br>
Such was evidenced in recent reading of new things by J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei (and some old things I regrettably missed).
<br><br>
Fun!, I had—more than she probably knows, given my burying of affectionate irreverance (premised on <a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2012/04/professor-jennifer.html">authentic engagement</a>) in blog-al woods. But I was disappointed that she’s not really a Heidegger scholar—which is <i>fine</i>: My admiration of her path isn’t dependent on her sense of Heidegger!: She shows bad faith reading, furthered in her recent book on existentialism (which I’ll discuss later). But her own, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231189087/">authentic pathmaking</a> is a continuing pleasure to follow.
<br><br><a name='more'></a>
Jennifer G.-F. was (2004) an intimate partisan of Hölderlin, there and ever since <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190913657/">an explorer of ways</a> to marry philosophy and Literature, which is basically why I enjoy keeping in touch with her publishing.
<br><br>
Early December, I sent her a short note of appreciation (though asserting a starkly different view of her sense of Heidegger), to which she responded briefly, in part: “Dear Gary, I am grateful for your so careful and engaged reading of my work, and for your sense of a trajectory including my own efforts to think newly…..” Unsurprisingly, she’s “snowed under with end of semester matters,”—probably literally (living under “nor’easter” weather rivers).
<br><br>
A few days later, I wrote her something she can read when she gets time, reproduced below.
<br><br>
Why that takes the path it does is a long story. I’ll give more context later,<br>
not relevant to my overt points.
<br><br>
<hr><font color="#c60">December 7</font>
<br>
subject: <b>on “efforts to think newly”</b>
<br><br>
That’s what students want from teaching: thinking newly. I admire “my own efforts to think newly.”
<br><br>
In light of that, new paths begin—which is so trite to say? But regarded in terms of inspiring young careers or helping student formation of flexible thinking, it’s not trite at all, because they’ll have multiple careers (little can they foretell!) calling for creative adaptability. O, save the humanities, university budget hawks!
<br><br>
Thinking newly launches. Poetic revealing contributes to that—contributes<br>
to opening and instilling senses of manifold perspectivity.
<br><br>
So, the designs of Heidegger’s thinking are not primarily aesthetic. He is being therapeutic. The prevailing motif of his life is teaching, and the prevailing motif of <i>his</i> teaching is emancipatory: evincing openings <i>by</i> others’ ownmost experience. Heidegger is merely a midwife—a hermeneutical middleman (“from enowning”).
<br><br>
You probably saw the video of Heidegger—TV interview—toward the end of his life where he so reticently said (I’m paraphrasing) that the point of thinking is to draw our shared terms into new thinking, not institute new vocabulary.
<br><br>
A difficulty there is that common ways of thinking are commonly intractable.<br>
A therapeutic can’t work like critique because critique doesn’t work for that with which one’s life is <i>invested</i>. Psychotherapists know that well: displacement, resistance, projective identification,.. It’s no wonder that Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being” puts a listener/reader into a boring trance, only to suddenly interject ritualized narrative about “denial” and “withholding” and “withdrawal” vis-à-vis matters of “time.”
<br><br>
A common strategy in change processes is to nudge—something which has become popular in progressive public policy. Heidegger talks of “hints.”
<br><br>
A delightful example of that: I had a colleague who was somewhat narcissistic, but also remarkably talented. One effect of that was that she was a workaholic who was dismissive of criticism because no one could touch her control of her job. She was also hurting herself (stress, depression, intolerance). But you couldn’t tell her she was being unusually hard on herself.
<br><br>
So, when I came across a fabulous article on self-compassion (a clinician-based step-by-step process for gaining compassion toward yourself), I knew I couldn’t route it to her. So, I sent it to <i>everyone</i> in my department, in the spirit of “<i>Hey</i>, here’s something interesting!” The <i>only</i> person who emailed me back to thank me for sending it around was her—which she said with a tone of gratitude that she never showed to anyone in person.
<br><br>
That gave her permission—control—over <i>enowning</i> the insightful process.<br>
The event of my sharing with everyone allowed her fragile dignity to own<br>
the event of its distribution as especially hers to acknowledge.
<br><br>
We can’t imagine how intractable Heidegger’s colleagues were about thinking newly, outside of their Kantian mandarin-ized complexes of Catholic-aristocratic-careerist pretenses that fed into why the German university lacked authentic self-assertion.
<br><br>
For instance, how were elites to own the need to be “in the shoes” of folks like whomever wore those shoes framed by Van Gogh? What is it to be able to be there in the shoes of the man Van Gogh hallmarked? It’s like asking the elite to face the strife between feeling and idea in their own lives—between body and mind, in principle—between earth and world.
<br><br>
But experience-distant tropography can evince enowning by others what they will not let be said directly <i>to</i> them.
<br><br>
Heidegger notes in <i>Being and Time</i> “Common sense misunderstands under-<br>
standing. And therefore common sense must necessarily pass off as ‘violent’ anything that lies beyond the reach of its understanding, or any attempt to go out so far” (363). Note the internal quote marks: the so-calledness.
<br><br>
So, the epochal struggle between Earth (one’s life) and world is an archetype<br>
of how strife may go for oneself, mirrored by experience-distant art. The work of art faces one with the “violence” of strife-ridden embodied self-identity, exemplifying the violating of oneself that the times do to us all, but in a way that can be safely enowned in one’s solitude.
<br><br>
Relatedly, the artists’ Shock of the New echoes the incessant future shock of modernity with which we strive to come to terms. Recall Cher in “Moonstruck” <i>lovingly</i> slapping Nicolas Cage: “<i>Snap</i> out of it!”: Open yourself to the care that you already always are.
<br><br>
Heidegger hesitates in <i>Being and Time</i> to venture “the most violent of Interpretations. But if not, what does it mean to ‘summon one to guilty being’?” (333). “It may be that our method demands this ‘violent’ presentation of possibilities of existence” (360).
<br><br>
How do we learn to deal with the violence of being violated by the strife of embodied identity?
<br><br>
Thinking newly—Heidegger notes at the beginning of “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” is not about representing (grasping) a different perspective (just as, in <i>What Is Called Thinking?</i>, that’s not about re-present-<br>ation of views). It’s about experiencing renewal in one’s ownmost way—enowning the experience, be it even due to a provocative event that may re-appropriate one whose mirrored strife must be owned freely, not by confront-<br>
ation (especially not by the Negative Critique of the German Idealist tradition that can’t find a basis for itself in shared identity-in-difference: a basis of belonging together in the same humanity, lack of which leads to nihilism—already portending another war in the mid-1930s for want of a valid sense of nation—like Biden pleading to re-found “the soul of America” in the face of authoritarian audacity).
<br><br>
But immanence of avoidable war-again is posed modestly in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: Says Heidegger, “...Occasionally we still have the feeling that violence has long been done to the thingly element of things and that thought has played a part in this violence…” Occasionally, as thought has played to make thing<i>ness</i> of us all.
<br><br>
Seeing the violence done to things, mirrored at a scale of world and Earth, gives experience permission to appreciate in solitude the violence done to oneself at a scale of one’s whole life—the scale of that "lifeworld" (Earth/World) that Husserl cribbed from Heidegger (which was Husserl’s effort to shape his own idiom for Heidegger’s notion of in-the-world-being, in Husserl’s <i>Crisis</i> lectures—contemporaneous with Heidegger delivering his “Origin…” lecture repeatedly). Indeed, art is being-historical thinking.
<br><br>
And who neighbors the stars in the night? “<i>To</i> the child in man,” the stars constellate themselves, gain meaning, gain gestalt—<i>show</i> cohering, like poetic revealing: mirroring one’s own <i>potential</i> for belonging to our intrinsic openness to “finding” meaning, like a rapture of self-constellating stars—the gods themselves mirroring us like a play of “The Thing” [Heidegger lecture]<br>
because [at the end of “Conversation on a Country Path] “<i>she</i> binds together.... <i>she</i> neighbors [by] work[ing] only with nearness.”
<br><br>
The archetypal feminine, lost from man, is the key—as much as anything—<br>
to finding care, empathy, and compassion that she gives one in—as one clinical psychoanalyst calls—"the motherhood constellation.” It is already always one’s own.
<br><br>
But, as every woman knows, you can’t tell a traditional man what’s best.<br>
You have to show him in a way that lets him discover what-gives, as if it’s his idea. “It just came to you out of nowhere”: the granting that gave up self-withholding, the bearing that gave up self-denial, the belonging that gave up<br>
self-withdrawal. It gives time. It gives being well.
<br><br>
I find a cosmic joke in the very beginning of “Time and Being”: You think he hasn’t started yet, but actually he’s ending: Klee is artist of the Earth. Trakl is artist of mortality. Heisenberg is artist of the cosmos. So, where’s the artist of<br>
the divine, rounding out the fourfold?
<br><br>
It gives the lecture. But he’d be the last to say that the fourfold was in play through him. Everything is about “we”: “If we were shown...”; if the poem was “recited to us”; and, re: Heisenberg, he’s with “the rest of us.”
<br><br>
With “us,” like “Why I stay in the provinces,” he is ultimately calling for enowning: “The new concept of finitude is thought in this manner,” ends the “Summary of a Seminar”: “that is, in terms of Appropriation itself, in terms of the concept of one’s own.”
<br><br>
“The following lecture calls...,” not him calling. As the end of the “Summary<br>
of a Seminar” fiinally quotes: “One had to be there, if one was called, but to call oneself was the greatest error that one could make.”
<br><br>
He was, he avowed, “a precursor” in a strife of world and Earth that was so commonly shocking that no foretelling was conceivable.
<br><br>
From enowning, he echoes the history of being, he plays forth with poetic revealings, he takes leaps at unexpected points, and <i>We</i> ground things for ones<br>
to come. The Appropriation appropriates through manifold events, appealing through poetic revealing.
<br><br>
We are to stand for a long while (<i>our</i> earth), to hear often (<i>our</i> mortality),<br>
to follow with challenge (<i>our</i> cosmic situation—Alone together)—to give time (which is divine).
<br><br>
Yet, what are we to give the diviner—the teacher who contributes to philosophy “from enowning”? We are, I surmise, to proactively, authentically <i>be</i> well with our time.
<br><br>
<hr><font color="#c60">March 2021</font><br><br>
No response yet, three months later. She was apparently still snowed. Go figure.
<br><br>
<i>No</i> biggie. I didn’t ask for response. That’s the way it goes with <a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/p/creative.html">gifts of time</a>.
<br><br>
<hr><font color="#c60">July 29, 2022</font>
<br><br>
I deleted the above posting, late autumn 2021, but I’ve decided to make it part of a <a href="https://teleglyph.blogspot.com/p/haunted.html#back">true story</a>.
<br><br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-33050504273120428612020-09-08T13:39:00.007-07:002020-09-10T21:45:04.765-07:00singularity of a life<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr />
This is part 1 of—prefacing—“<a href="https://cohering.net/lst/soSi00.html">soul of <b>S</b>elf interest</a>”
<hr /><br />
Normally for me, I don’t use ‘soul’, except relative to others’ use; but I’m fascinated by <a href="https://cohering.net/tropic/soT01.html">common appeal</a> of that sense of Self (which is what “soul” <i>is</i>), which is of course <a href="https://cohering.net/tropic/soT02.html">historically rich</a>.
<br /><br />
I’m fascinated like an ethnographer might be fascinated—or a philologist<br />
or psychoanalyst.
<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>
The more one dwells in one’s <i>own</i> soul, <b>S</b>elf, being, the more singular the representation (the narrative) for another person will become (having less usefulness for the ethnophilologist, more use for the psychoanalyst), because<br />
no one else has become you or I. More explication shows more singularity (idiosyncrasy, too, as if another’s life is an odd outsider pretense).
<br /><br />
But my upcoming example of thinking about singularity isn’t autobiographical<br />
(a <i>quite</i> odd life); rather, about themes <i>I</i> like that may be generally relevant to one’s singularity—which, here, isn’t intended to be a comprehensive conception,<br />
just as autobiography probably doesn’t bear the soul of its life. We each constellate understanding in our own way, always partially, as we live by<br />
time given.
<br /><br /> <br />
<hr />
next—> “<a href="https://cohering.net/lst/soSi01.html" target="_blank">being of The World</a>”
<br /><br />
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-5145939092837832622020-09-04T21:28:00.005-07:002020-09-12T11:39:50.198-07:00creativity<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr />
This is part 13 of “<a href="https://cohering.net/lst/soSi00.html">soul of <b>S</b>elf interest</a>”
<hr /><br />
“I <i>love</i> audacities of creative life, even if you <i>don’t</i> forever want philological wonders.”
<br /><br />
So said <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804737959/" target="_blank">Jacques to Hélène</a> via my imagination.
<br /><br />
“<i>No</i>, because you’ll <a href="https://erealism.blogspot.com/2004/10/derrida.html" target="_blank">die in six years</a> anyway. My grief must someday end.”
<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>
Quote marks are redundant, he reminded us. Everything is writing: moments, auratic liminality of tr<i><b>o</b></i>picalities in reading you across the hyperNet.
<br /><br />
Meanwhile, more lives emerge for ultimizing human potential.
<br /><br />
It is paradise enough. </span><div><span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><br /><br /><br />
<hr />
next—> “<a href="https://erealism.blogspot.com/2020/09/singularity.html" target="_blank">ensouled worldliness of a singularity</a>”
<br /><br />
</span></div>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-6021002782070853212020-09-03T19:55:00.003-07:002020-09-03T19:56:17.528-07:00souls in Time<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
He took that she would always want <a href="https://cohering.net/tropic/soT00.html">philological wonder</a>.
<br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-69144818756788735902020-08-28T14:32:00.008-07:002020-12-20T10:00:40.010-08:00happy solitude<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
<br>
Life is life, so only tr<i><b>o</b></i>pical tangibles remain at death: <i>words</i> worth retaining about being in Time?
<br><br>
Events go by.
<br><br>
We may strive to be good neighbors, but we remain mostly unknown.<br>
Little dramas of lifeworldliness frame ordinary pretense, causing my want<br>
of solitude nearly every day.
<br><br>
Besides, <b>S</b>elf interest is intrinsically worthwhile for creative kinds of enjoyment: self-differentiations, idealisms valued as such.
<br><br><a name='more'></a>
Wholly flourishing life is about being <i>with</i> well, making dramatic sense of<br>
The Uncanniness, living graciously with the days, sustaining flexible perspect-<br>
ivity and humanitarian <i>ethos</i>, flow<i>ing</i> with Time.
<br><br>
Creative living requires fortitude, seeming to others maybe as mere eccentricity. But I make no apology. Savoring presence alone, phenomenal appeal of play<br>
in highlands where we may be voyeurs of gods we divine, originating “Literature” for other lives going by, I am.
<br><br>
Wordy moments of reading another may make actual intimacy derivative, <i>living</i> tr<b><i>o</i></b>pical of inwordness.
<br><br>
So goes “literairity,” ultimizing actualization of one’s potential in pretenses<br>
that may last.
<br><br>
I think appeals of exemplary humanity promise the best senses of humanism.<br>
That’s a happy proteany, inquiry as literary venturing, where <b>S</b>elf-reflectivity<br>
in the <b>W</b>ork becomes themagenic aspiring for engagement that’s comprehensive of conceivability, without losing appreciation for midland variability of lives that may become audience (beyond being mirrors of authorial vanity that maintain manifold humility).
<br><br>
Indeed, venturing protean <b>S</b>elformativity of comprehensive comprehension faces its finitude by turning available means of expression into singularities composing at best a narratology of Our evolving.
<br><br>
Yet, that <i>is</i> an <i>AEros</i> of Our humanity worth treasuring, troping how Time may be, since every word is fatedly in quote marks <i>any</i>way, especially being.
<br><br><br>
</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-61150627481832346152020-08-21T21:16:00.004-07:002020-08-21T21:59:11.396-07:00years go by<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr />
<br />
I’m starting a section of the “being in Time” Area of <i>gedavis.com</i> titled “<a href="https://gedavis.com/bt/dgb01/000dgb.html">days go by</a>,” which is a rubric of resignation and understated sense of uncanniness. But the section itself will be largely short posting-like reactions to news of whatever week I feel like reacting to. It won’t be about capturing our historicality<br />
(I expect).
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I note that here because an interesting result of searching my blogs, years past, for the phrase ‘days go by’ turns up numerous postings—mostly not titled “days go by,” but most related to this blog, though not all <i>from</i> this blog. (I got tired of the rubric, for the most part, after 2011.) </span><div><span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #0e0b6b;">It all shows a sense of <b>S</b>elf interest that is creatively oriented, rather than egoistic. This is useful for the “<a href="https://gedavis.com/bt/sc/000sc.html">summer constellation</a>” project. They can be made into an interesting confessional sequence.<br /><br />
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So, I’m listing the old “days go by” posts below in improvised order, non-chronological, vaguely echoing the continuum of <a href="https://cohering.net/ca3/cp16.html">The Project</a>, retrojected to ordering those postings made years before The Project began (though I refer to “the perpetual project” in past years, before I had lots of time to devote to it). </span></div><div><span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #0e0b6b;">Some of the postings have been earlier listed with “<a href="https://cohering.net/ca3/cp01.html">sundry gardening</a>” (“s.g.” at the end of a title link below: 4 of those); some were earlier listed with the “<a href="https://cohering.net/st/wl.html">writing lives</a>” project (“w.l.”: 5); half were earlier listed only at their blog location.<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/2010/01/salinger.html">J. D. Salinger has died</a>. -| <span style="font-size: small;">w.l.</span> </li><li><a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/2010/02/rainer.html">dear Rainer</a> -| <span style="font-size: small;">w.l. </span></li><li><a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/2009/10/farther.html">‘I can think farther than that but I forget’</a> -| <span style="font-size: small;">w.l.</span> </li><li><a href="https://teleglyph.blogspot.com/2016/03/critical-artist-as-obituarial-character_21.html">critical artist as obituarial character</a> -| <span style="font-size: small;">s.g. </span></li><li><a href="https://teleglyph.blogspot.com/2015/02/there-will-be-spring_21.html">There will be spring!...</a></li><li><a href="https://teleglyph.blogspot.com/2017/05/philologist-saunters-by-glade_13.html">philologist saunters by glade</a></li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2010/01/free-association.html">free association</a> -| <span style="font-size: small;">s.g.</span> </li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2009/12/days-go-by.html">Align your life with leading trends in innovation</a> -| <span style="font-size: small;">s.g.</span> </li><li><a href="https://teleglyph.blogspot.com/2011/07/this-is-your-life.html">this is your life</a> </li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2018/02/days-go-by.html">days go by...</a></li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2020/03/saturdaynote.html">days go by, too</a></li><li><a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/2011/07/yes.html">yes, I’m having fun</a> -| <span style="font-size: small;">w.l.</span> </li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2011/02/days-go-by3.html">days go by.3</a> </li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2010/06/days-go-by-2.html">days go by.2</a> -| <span style="font-size: small;">w.l.</span> </li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2007/10/ones-philological-condition.html">one's philological condition</a> -|<span style="font-size: small;"> s.g.</span> </li><li><a href="https://coherings.blogspot.com/2009/11/tweeting-in-milky-way.html">tweeting in the Milky Way</a> </li><li><a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/2019/03/acl.html">genealogy of ‘a creative life’</a> </li></ul><br /><br />
</span></div>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-20197989404254871432020-04-30T12:39:00.001-07:002020-05-14T13:47:17.932-07:00being within and among simultaneously<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
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First century BCE Palestine had been Hellenistic for centuries. So, Greek influence surely created a hybrid sense of Aramaic understanding.
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When Jesus—a well-educated rabbi—“said.” according to the Gospel of Luke, that “the kingdom of God is within you,” Luke’s Greek is confusing (according to Stephen Mitchell, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060923210/"><i>The Gospel According to Jesus</i></a>, p. 146): Luke allegedly means ‘among’, but uses a Greek meaning for ‘within’. So, Luke’s Jesus is “saying” an ambiguity: The kingdom of God is at once within “you” (singular) and among “you” (plural). “In other words,” Mitchell notes, “the ultimate reality, though it is revealed in history, essentially belongs to the spiritual order…”
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Luke’s Jesus is <i>positing</i> (avowing, acclaiming), on the one hand, that the spirituality of the kingdom is available to anyone, thus everyone. Spirituality is immanent, rather than displaced (only accessible by the priests).
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On the other hand, the <i>locality</i> of the kingdom (Heaven) is, in principle, available to everyone, rather than inevitably postponed (only accessible in death).
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So, the mystery of being at once within/among of God/Heaven potentially demystifies spirituality and de-postpones the possibility of continuously good life. In short, dependence on royalist gatekeepers can be overcome by emancipatory interest in at once being well within one among everyone.
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The genius of Jesus for his time was to show how immanence of spirituality could be a tangibility of possibly good life for oneself with everyone. The “kingdom” is <i>at once</i> being the spirituality of being well. Born again is one’s sense of entire life (“being in the pristine state” [Mitchell, 147]) which heals<br>
the potential to enown being well for the sake of everyone’s good.
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That’s no news nowadays. But for colonialized Palestine, such <a href="https://cohering.net/ca4/c413.10c.html">genius</a> could not be tolerated by royalists.
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-41804105006758679032019-12-25T15:43:00.000-08:002020-03-09T19:27:25.298-07:00traces of artistry gone poof!<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
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<a href="https://cohering.net/lst/ob00.html">you need this</a>
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-4671012149099685972019-10-14T16:20:00.000-07:002020-05-14T12:08:05.461-07:00Bloom of English humanity dies at 89<hr />
<span style="color: #0e0b6b;">
<br />
Harold was haunted by “genius.”
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv3bYeDtUzS2EMtGH_3NBnt1M4Dzy0LD_LKMXxtjio6Zo59tClC_PePKNToJhoZ17W7ItlB1cF8tEeIixHJrENFK03gf6MLHbrDMGc_8itHkvgjV-Jt0SoYbe5EKo6JqfHwu0YhT1qRPXx/s1600/640x0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="799" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv3bYeDtUzS2EMtGH_3NBnt1M4Dzy0LD_LKMXxtjio6Zo59tClC_PePKNToJhoZ17W7ItlB1cF8tEeIixHJrENFK03gf6MLHbrDMGc_8itHkvgjV-Jt0SoYbe5EKo6JqfHwu0YhT1qRPXx/s320/640x0.jpg" width="256" /></a><span style="color: #0e0b6b;"></span></div>
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The image comes from the <a href="https://nyti.ms/2MFgpbF"><i>NYTimes</i> obituary</a>.
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The haunting is <a href="https://cohering.net/ca4/c413.10h.html">ultimately ironic</a>.
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-34503938933287760662019-07-26T13:44:00.002-07:002019-07-27T15:16:24.315-07:00extraterrestrial reply<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr /><br />
Yes, Elizabeth, I'm glad too [that “…{I’m} writing and reading things that matter”].
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Send me your poem from your upcoming collection of poetry that most importantly expresses your sense of why you're doing poetry.
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Also, what, at <i>heart</i>, is poetry's calling, to you?
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Thanks,
<br /><br />
gary
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<hr />
<span style="color: #cc6600;">deleted from draft email to her:</span>
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“Why do you do poetry?” would surely be a high schooler's question. Yet, it’s also a question implicitly addressed by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cohering/posts/10156243316981175">anyone who cares</a> for our humanity.
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There’s so much poetry about. Why do more?
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“I must.”
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Good. Why?
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So many obituaries in the <i>New York Times</i>: Yet another forgotten figure is remembered post mortem in the 24/7 news cycle, always moving on.
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Shaggy-haired Harold Bloom, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525520880/"><i>Possessed by Memory</i></a>, “says”: “The dead long to speak again. What could you possibly have new to say?”
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I’m struck silent. I don’t read enough. I’m humbled. I’m naïve.
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Maybe I can speak for my time well.
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No, I lack the capability.
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Well, I do what I can, a point of being.
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The philosopher Martin Heidegger was frightened, 1968, when he saw the now iconic image of Earthrise from the Moon. Yesterday, in the <i>Times</i>, a writer recounted that the Apollo 11 astronauts had difficulty adjusting to the frivolity of their return. The writer asks:
<br /><blockquote>
What do you do after you’ve had a transcendent experience? Do you just go back to work?</blockquote>
—as if the wonder leaves one forever extraterrestrial, as does war—that wasting of life, the horror.
<br /><blockquote>
At one celebratory banquet, Mr. Aldrin was breathlessly asked, “Tell us how it really felt to be on the moon!”
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<br />
Afterward, he rushed outside <a href="https://nyti.ms/2JXMHx7">into an alley and wept</a>.</blockquote>
<i>Here</i> is heaven, being wasted.
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-81069576837122657312019-03-20T00:03:00.004-07:002022-04-17T16:33:06.776-07:00genealogy of “a creative life”<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
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The emergence of “<a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/p/creative.html">a creative life</a>” may be interesting, but likely only in light of the set of pages. If you enjoy that, this posting might matter. This is intended for reading afterward.
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In midstream of doing the January pages of The Project (starting “<a href="http://cohering.net/ca4/c413.00.html">philological play</a>”), I thought of <a href="https://gary-e-davis.blogspot.com/2015/09/about-conceptualities-of-literary-living.html">Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei</a> again, then checked Amazon.com to see if she had another book. I’ve done that several times per year. She hasn’t had a book since 2011. But I was happily surprised that she had published <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231189087/"><i>The Life of Imagination</i></a> in October. I immediately ordered it.
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The description of the book surprised me, because it’s so suggestive of what I’ve been up to, as if my postings and couple of email exchanges with her over the years had some direct influence. <i>My imagination</i>, undoubtedly. But that was interesting in itself. Though I dismissed the feeling, I wanted to respond to the book description before I received the book, having only the book description at hand. So, I sent her an email, writing to the description, and we had a delightful set of exchanges before I received the book.
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<i>Meanwhile</i>, I continued with my January/February pages on The Project. But over the next few days, I became a little haunted by the feeling of similarity between her project (apparently) and my own. So, when the book arrived, I decided not to even open it, until I had finished my February pages on The Project. That happened at the end of the month.
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Meanwhile, I had been accumulating thoughts, including variations on the notion of “the life of imagination.” The notes seemed to gravitate into sections of discussion. I identified all of the phrases of the book description and associated each with the growing sections of notes. This resulted in a schema of grouped themes.
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I began to write to the notes. As I did so, aspects of The Project came to mind. As the days went on, the writing seemed to gravitate into versions of Project Areas, like implicit introductions to some of The Project Areas, but now in light of having finished the January/February notes. The sections of “a creative life” began to feel like a derived version of Areas of The Project.
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For a long time, I’ve had a set of books I wanted to attend to, deciding to <i>at last</i> begin appropriating them into The Project after doing the January/February pages. As the sections of “a creative life” emerged, I was associating to some of those books, so I incorporated reference to them and gave each some anticipatory context.
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The result is a hybrid, derived version of The Project in light of dwelling intently with book description themes of <i>The Life</i> and free associating on what I <i>want</i> to pursue for The Project relative to books that are primarily interesting to me. But the result is something all its own.
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So, “a creative life” expresses a creative life as derived mode of <i>futuring</i> The Project.
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881650190379056651.post-50364619082970266752019-03-15T19:54:00.001-07:002023-10-30T14:43:10.040-07:00still the poetry<span style="color: #0e0b6b;"><hr>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy_vmLDJJIfGoBjWh5MhTmgGxe6VvKckBd6FzLtxZkSnnzHfHvOydUJKEA4cvhEWQXKUehe4QxDJ4itMKa5GCS5cKoIDTndKIioDotH0jqm6kyAQuVUYFW5vrThaEwKUGDN-5mBUByxr5X/s1600/merwin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy_vmLDJJIfGoBjWh5MhTmgGxe6VvKckBd6FzLtxZkSnnzHfHvOydUJKEA4cvhEWQXKUehe4QxDJ4itMKa5GCS5cKoIDTndKIioDotH0jqm6kyAQuVUYFW5vrThaEwKUGDN-5mBUByxr5X/s200/merwin.jpg" width="133" height="200" data-original-width="854" data-original-height="1280" /></a></div>
It’s eerie: a long memorial appreciation<br>
of you is uploaded, complete<br>
with a selection of your poems,<br>
the day you die, as if they were ready<br>
and waiting for the immanence which escaped<br>
them each morning you awoke again. <br>
“Still here. Another day.” <u><a href="https://nyti.ms/2F4hoyj">Or not</a></u>.
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</span>gary e. davishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09876167242748081399noreply@blogger.com