In the Time of Chimpanzees

I was talking with a friend about Midwestern greetings customs, the ways in which public exchanges occur, the commonality and repeatability of the phrases uttered, facial expressions displayed, and gestures performed between strangers over generations as a social lubricant to ease the friction of intersection, not quite an interaction, more of a passing by in close proximity with a short phrase acting as a blinker on a car does, letting the other know "I'm doing this immediately and then you can anticipate from there." 

The other responds with spatial deference to the other's movement so as not to physically collide, usually with a smile to let the other know that "It's okay that you asserted your dominance over that space by occupying it instead of allowing me to do so before you." Then perhaps a spoken phrase, "After you," to let the other know that he's offering something the other was clearly taking anyway but, again, adding lubricant to make the penetration more tolerable with an appearance of pleasance. 

But "After you," depending on the inflection, can also mean, "I'm letting you do this, but I'm speaking so you'll know I'm here and in a tone that you'll understand as 'do this again, and I may not be so tolerant.'" That means something more in a smaller city, a town, a place where people see each other regularly at restaurants, grocery stores, schools, workplaces, in the neighborhood, etc. People are not anonymous and don't expect to be considered invisible. 

This expectation of a certain type of discourse, though, prevents other possibilities from occurring. While on the surface it is more open than the ignoring of one another in public spaces in urban environments and to a lesser degree in suburban environments, the smaller town expectation of momentary or minutes-long acknowledgment of the other's existence through the idle question of "How about this weather?" can be felt as an imposition on the focus of one's attention in relation to the demand for a response about the weather. 

In such a situation, I've often wondered what would happen if I said, "My answer in this context is of no more importance than speculation on the peculiar shape of an imaginary pebble's existence on any given beach in Australia. I implore you, ask me no more and allow me to continue my existence without any more consideration from you or of you." 

But I don't do that because it seems just as reasonable to say, "About this weather, I could say that it is cold or it is hot. I would say neither, though. I would also not say it is raining, snowing, or hailing nor that there is a tornado, wildfire, or flood. If the sky could be said to be blue, it could also be said to be partially white. There may be no end to what could be said about how this weather is, but by the time I really get into it, the weather will have likely changed."

Maybe I could print up copies of that and give them to others when they ask such questions. Maybe I'll just make an app for small talk. It's not like anything authentic would be being replaced by using an app that voices "How are you?" and allowing the other person to either answer themselves or let their smart phone Small Talk app respond. Small Talk? Small? Talk? SMALT? SMALK? SMAK? 

Hmm. smak. It's four letters, one syllable, short for small talk but easily read as talking smack, the brand/logo is easily seen and read in its entirety on a display of apps. There's no need for reading an underlying caption beneath an app image because the word within a 2D box of one color as the brand image serves as its own caption. It steals back focus from an underlying caption by making the caption redundant. And perhaps provides a cheap laugh. 

I foresee four people sitting at a dining table enjoying wine and a meal while each of their four smart phones converse with one another through the SMAK app. Different settings: generic and impersonal questions and answers, trivia, weather, current events, politics, movies, and so on. Different identities ... nah, lawsuits. But, hey, who says you can't hack the app if it doesn't yet exist, right? 

Havoc. Chaos. Deviancy. Vulgarity. Obscenity. Ferocity. 

I am the most courageous coward he's ever met. I've got alcohol on my hands as I hand my plan to ditch myself to a guy who wants to get someone else on the outside. There's nothing like dancing women throwing plates, decapitating their laughing dates, as an appetizer for insurrection.

"Sir, are you calling for an invasion?"

I saw swirling chickens caught in flight, out of focus and much too bright, seen only through one eye, the left one, the right one to see through, that left one, is right be me, be it my right to say or I'd have left long ago, having come down with shiny teeth as game show suckers try to breathe the wealth of television prizes into their lives while pretending the canned laughter is laughing with them rather than at them.

But I got a drug and a bug, something better than love. Do you like me now? "Oh, yeah, I think you're pretty good." Going on, feeling strong.

I quit my job blowing leaves, telephone bills up my sleeves, choking on an old man's dusty bone, blasting freedom rock with my bass, streamlining slimeballs talking in code. We went down, long after dark, lit up the shack, grabbed a beer out of a sack, watched the place burn to the ground, the screams of those alive like a symphony of hell's angels calling souls to the devil. 

Everybody was bent over twice, painting the walls with loaded dice, leaping up into the air, getting juiced up beyond belief, they were singin' like this: Winos throwing frisbees at the sun, burnt my soul between the bun, now I'm wounded, now I'm done, running like an antelope, fast and free; scraping off the attitude, old man eating all my food, don't be kind, don't be rude, just shaking my boots, letting it all hang loose as the fluffy clouds and lovely rainbows become a sad, soft, and snuggly place as unhappy as an upside-down watermark for a fifty lying in the sun, burning or won, kind of wounded, rudely drunk, running like an antelope out of control.

Scraping off the attitude or watching an old man eat my food. He thinks I'm kind, I'm actually rude. He took his boots off, his hair got loose, and he made an oof. "You be kind, I'll be rude. Just shake off your boots and let your hair get loose." No, take me down to the depot, put me down on a bus, never stop me again.

Scraping off that attitude, off the old man's boots, he thinks I'm kind, I'm kind of rude, my hair's getting loose in places, too. You speak with a twang and wish that I wasn't, walking barefoot and bowlegged on a Wednesday that wasn't, and wishing for a fluffy cloud over a rainbow of sadness, a soft and snuggly dream-warm gladness, but you have a scowl for a soul, a bun for the young, and a wounded moose in heaven. 

Time to call it in. It's tomorrow already.

Tom Brady and the Futility of Equality

Do you want me to be equal to you? Would you rather I be inferior to you so that you could dominate me? Would you rather I be superior to you so that I could assist you in beneficial ways?

Imagine it's 1995, you're a burglar in Brazil. You've broken into a house, you're in the process of picking up the TV to steal it, and then Royce Gracie and the rest of his black-belted jiu-jitsu family appear dressed in Gi, standing between you and the doorway. Do you shit yourself immediately or do you drop the TV and then shit yourself?

This issue may not be debatable any more, but Tom Brady seems to be the modern American equivalent of a Greek God. But ... which Greek God? I think Athena. Forget the gender, we're talking gods here. Look at who Athena was: born fully grown from the head of Zeus, dressed in a football helmet and body armor; skilled in the art of quarterbacking leadership; victorious when it matters most. Athena  never lost a battle, so Tom is inferior in that sense. Athena never had a spouse nor children whereas Tom has nested (fail, Tom.; Athena taught women to cook, sew, and weave and ... what have you done for women, Tom? Tom is still alive and appears to be ageless and immortal so he and Athena share those traits.

Given all of that, maybe he's like a minor god who was born from a woman's hoohah rather than the crown of a God's head. That can't be a fun way to be born. As if being born could be fun in any way, going from a cozy womb to the hellish world. There's your Garden of Eden, by the way, inside the womb. Who puts the Tree of Knowledge in a womb? Or is the apple in the birth canal? If so, if you're born through a C-section or the head of a Greek God, I guess you wouldn't have Original Sin that way. 

Wouldn't that be something? If the moral trend of the future was to make a moral judgment on another person based on whether they were born through a vagina or through a C-section? You're born with Original Sin if you come out of the pussy, but you're like Jesus in the sense of being sin-free. The pussy, Judaic, Christian, and Muslim genesis of sin. Was the Fall of Man the fall from the womb into the vagina and out into the world? Was the woman walking when she gave birth? 

Maybe she was in those days. Pre-civilization, including all known civilizations around the world, whichever is suspected to be oldest, way before that even, maybe women walked and the baby slid right out, fell from Grace (apparently the mother's name), all filled up with Original Sin, maybe a physical substance that gets in all of the orifices of the baby being born. The possibilities are endless if we're just here to speculate.

But what are we really doing, and where and when are we doing it? We've got five senses (many of us) and apparently six questions: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Why and how have already happened. The who is us. Where is wherever each of us are and when is now and the future. Those are the parameters. What is whatever we decide to do (and everything else that we choose not to do). 

What if professional sports athletes around the world dropped their competitive pro careers for contemporary dance, ballet, acrobatics, and other physical performance art? What would be the impact of many of the world's greatest athletes appearing in a modern dance ensemble or, as individual performers, taking on Danny Kaye's role in "Holiday Inn":

Note the sequence where Danny Kaye performs a modern dance routine entitled, "Choreography," a kind of spoof on the contrast between modern dance, jazz and tap dance. The movements in "Choreography" are deliberately exaggerated to show the purpose of modern dance steps and movements. Modern Dance 

Imagine the impact of troupes made up of LeBron James, Anthony Edwards, Derrick Henry, Ronaldo, Israel Adesanya, Megan Rapinoe, and other internationally renowned athletes dropping their sports for greater performance challenges, moving their bodies in ways they've never explored, discovering movements that in their personal experience and public display provide intimacies of expression and reception neither they nor we ever knew were possible, all while traveling the world to display these gifts in person, to create experiences substantively beyond winning, losing, profiting, and spectating for everyone involved. Imagine.

Could Tom Brady be great in roles other than team-leader and quarterback-conqueror? I can understand the desire to continue experiencing the same experience over and over again, but every pinnacle I've ever reached did not beg for repeated experiences. Instead, they whispered, "Appreciate this even as it gives way to what comes next." At a certain point, mastering any given game becomes either a lifetime achievement or one achievement among many over the course of a life. 

But even that is to think only in relation to achievement. Achievement is, of course, important to each of us no matter the public reception -- though if it is only for public reception it is inadequate for fulfillment -- but it is not all we are or all which we experience being. Viewing the bedding of a sexual partner as the bedding of a sexual partner is a dominating attitude. It need not even be perceived or felt by the other as such and, thus, their experience is detached from one another. This detached bedding is an inadequate act in relation to the potentiality inherently possible within a bedding experience. 

And, yes, I'm enjoying using the word "bedding" here because I childishly find it amusing to use the word in such a sterilized context. But passion narrowly expressed in such an attitude diminishes the possibility of becoming more than a thing that attempts to dominate. It's of a low quality within the satisfaction-index of experiences. If there's anything that is desired in such a sex act, it is to see within the eyes of the other the flicker of recognition that they* are being dominated and whatever subsequent messages the eyes may give in the following moments: will it be "Oh my God, I'm being raped!" or "Oh my God! Am I being raped? Am I turned on by this or not? I'm going to let this continue for a bit longer to explore how I feel about this." or "Oh, wow, they* really want to devour me! This is so fucking hot!"

*I love this LGBTQ use of the pronoun "they" as a stand-in for he, she, s/he, etc.; it's so liberating as a writer to not have to think that way using language. I can focus energy on other phrasing possibilities without having to give such weight to hyper-individualistic pronoun distinctions or the gendered identity of a person, especially if I'm writing of a person as a being rather than as a set of identities. It's all "they" all the time! See how moral distinctions of good or bad and factual distinctions of true or false don't have to be used in the assessment of value? 

Inadequacy or underfulfillment due to narrowness of focus on achieving a specific desired outcome is a way of saying "less than, but not zero or less than zero." There exists content, that much can be said with levels of certainty even scientists agree upon. If they didn't, they wouldn't have become and remained scientists. But it's a leap to make a moral or factual judgment without first understanding how one came to demand such interpretations of perceptual content. One could say brain research is still exploring the emergence of content within oneself. That is fine, but a narrow project in scope even though potential meanings are innumerable. 

The psychology that has anything adequate to say about experience is found in relation to neuropsychology. Much of psychology's historical content is proving to be inadequate and childish in the face of biology's discoveries the past twenty-to-thirty years. We are social creatures through and through. Even the so-called introverts are extroverts on the lower end of the extroversion scale. The idea that any person is not outward-facing is a lie. Even Ted Kaczynski sent his bombs into the world to specific people with whom he felt a relationship. A disturbed relationship, but still a relationship in spite of most of his time being spent in physical seclusion. He made his presence felt, this extreme introvert.

So we all present ourselves to one another in some way, intentionally or otherwise. We don't live in caves and even those who do seem to come down the mountain for supplies and mail every now and then. We are interdependent and that is biologically, economically, politically, culturally, educationally, socially, and otherwise dependent on one another. Our mutual well-being better insures our individual well-being. To think about the group is to think in a more expansive way about the self and one's self-interests. 

Manipulation is exhausting and can lead to 3000-year grudges (See Israel/Palestine). Transparency and the refusal to be morally or factually demanding of the other can be more successful than deception and oppositional strategy. Collaboration creates exponentially more than is necessary for all participating whereas competition assures that half lose out on what is necessary while half gain access to something that is always in jeopardy of being taken away against their will. It's a strategy for winning very little of value while losing most of what is meaningful. 

If what is being discovered in neurobiology and neuropsychology provide relatively new scientific insights on human experience, phenomenology and art long ago anticipated these recent scientific findings. Even Kant was onto some things that were critical, but it was especially Hegel who directed explorations toward the experience of being that have produced results that science is only now beginning to realize. If one is versed in Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Adorno, and others, one is way ahead of the scientific game of providing insight into what experiences may be constitutively. 

Because biology and psychology are "determinative" creators of knowledge, data is never allowed to remain raw and mysterious. Attachments, rather than associations, are made between specific points of data to say, "This is the pattern and the pattern tells us such is as it is." At least they leave behind the data for others to study ... oh, if only that were true! Organizations and institutions own the raw data. It's not accessible by just anyone. Credentials or money are required for institutional access. The data is owned so only a few are allowed to make interpretations of the raw data. We don't know if they are the best at interpreting raw data, but that is a story we are sold as true. Science is impregnable, according to capitalist and democratic mythology -- and even though scientists know this isn't true, they don't object because they are gatekeepers and high-powered stakeholders for the most important sets of information in the economic and political world: math, physics, chemistry, biology. They are invested in their own importance within the political, economic, and educational systems throughout the world.

Because of this, phenomenology exists as an "other" related to understanding human experience. This is especially true in English-language countries. Phenomenology barely exists outside of a few academic departments in universities in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and possibly even New Zealand. South Africa? I don't know. But because of this outsider status, phenomenology has been able to maintain a degree of "purity" that even the art world hasn't as they, too, are deeply invested in the economic world even if less so the political. Phenomenologists really just exist within the university, though sometimes a legal theory or public policy theory will attach itself to certain ideas within phenomenology, but as dissociated golden nuggets of phenomenological knowledge combined with certain dissociated gold nuggets from biology, psychology, sociology, statistics, contemporary political liberalism, and others. The creativity is fun! But adequate? No.

Is it even possible for a non-dialectic discursivity to arise in a dominantly English-language country? If a country is too deeply embedded within one source of symbolism -- in this case, reason -- as the primary if not entirely exclusive lens through which to create knowledge and meanings from visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, vestibular, and procioreceptive experience, then that country will eventually become detached from actual experience and its people have no idea why they are suffering in the ways they are. Leaving dissociated so many different known variables is not exclusive to reason, but it is central to reason. It passes on to computers associations that could be understood by the individual human mind and certainly a community of minds. 

This works within university departments throughout the world. The professionals within the field of neurobiology, for example, may think in relation to ownership and intellectual "teams" as specifically attached university departments they may operate within, but they collaborate with scientists from other universities commonly. Essentially, even. Knowledge has to traverse university borders.

 Interdepartmental knowledge, is another issue entirely, though. How does the biology department communicate with the literature department or the history department? Both literature and history incorporate biology into the knowledge content within their fields, but biology does not do the same with other disciplines. It trusts only its own data and resultant knowledge. The sciences, in particular, hold fast to hyper-specialization and the prevention of dilution of their knowledge within their departments. They may give out knowledge, but they won't take it in "as it is in the world," but through isolation of world-content within the framework of biological knowledge. Within literature, biology can have a meaning within politics and art whereas politics and art cannot have life within academic biology (even though biological research is at least in part politically driven).

These oddities of how associations and attachments are seen through different lenses of understanding others and the world shape our lives. Our collective daily confusion and exhaustion are evidence of systemic failures. The particulars are not difficult to spot for one who thinks using more than just reason (logical, moral, etc.) in interpreting and evaluating relationships of all sorts. 

Equality, in such ways, is absurd. Do we really want equality or do we want to be acknowledged and allowed to participate in our own lives in all ways that are meaningful within our lives without our efforts necessarily being competitive or combative? Do we want to be able to say with confidence that we will be heard and seriously considered when we say, "I want an MRI and I expect to get one for these reasons"? Do we want to be able to say, "This dwelling and surrounding area is insufficient for my family's needs. There are five of us in two rooms alongside other two-room dwellings filled with between 4 and 12 people. There are no parks or public spaces for us to gather outside these walls. We are becoming physically and emotionally ill. We have ideas of how we can reorganize this geographic space to accommodate our needs. Here are our proposed plans for consideration. We're willing to negotiate, but this is a starting point in our discussions."?

We have to have agency. Phenomenology says so, biology says so, psychology says so. It's only economically and politically that "no" is being said and that is being said with authority through very exclusively empowered institutions. It need not be that way. A political overhaul of societies that allows for participative agency-oriented economics of people taking in the account the fullness of one another's needs is necessary. We have to see each of us including ourselves as meaningful to each other even if through distant association. We have basic understandings of the world from a variety of fields of study of the world that suggest that governments and economics based on 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s views of the world are way off base. A wise people would incorporate new knowledge in ways that provide opportunities for widespread enrichment of quality of life. 

Tom Brady knows this. That's why he left the Boston for Tampa, Bill Belichick for Bruce Arians, the the institutionalist nationalism of Patriots for the social anarchy of Buccaneers. It's all in the tea leaves, bruh. 

Reproducibility, Rauschenberg, and waRhol

I was recently shown a collage created by my friend, Bayleenda. She is a creative powerhouse, her artistic output in a day exceeding what mere mortals accomplish in months or years. But that's been through the development of her senses and sensibilities. 

However, that is not why that collage bubbled to my consciousness. It was triggered by the use of the phrase "collage thinking" in the chronologically previous post. As I was thinking of the collage, I remembered she had compiled it as a specific story by using captions. Together the images, captions, and objects attached created a jigsaw puzzle one had to put together within the mind to find the intended story. But one would never know the intended story unless she walked one through the story as she did me. But even then, I can't say that was the only story she intended.

But I recalled what I'd read about captions in Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." He wrote,

[In 1900] With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time, picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at photos in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones. 

This is not applicable to Bayleenda's collage as it was not a reproduction of an image or photo in a magazine; it was (and is) a physical collage she created and, as far as I know, has no representation online, in print, or in any other way. If it does exist online, perchance, then the reproduction online is baked with meanings not evident in the work of art itself while perceived as in its physical presence in proximity to a person. 

Distance (which is discussed by Benjamin but not in this particular way) is forever altered by reproduction as the distance is between the viewer and the reproduction rather than the viewer and the original physical piece. But photography differs entirely because it is itself removed from the place and time it is representing through image. This provides insight into the arising of abstract art, abstract expression, as non-representational, as the thing itself rather than the thing the work represents. By being itself, the so-called abstraction (as well as collage and many other artistic expressions), which is more concrete than a portrait or a landscape painting as they represent something that is not there while being a thing that is there, can be considered without a direct relation to something else (other than, invisibly, the author of the work). 

One thing perhaps overlooked in relation to Rauschenberg's White Paintings is that he forever associated himself as a creator of whiteness. When one encounters a white wall or white surface, let alone a painting, Rauschenberg's perception is evoked by anyone familiar with Rauschenberg's work. I have to concentrate to unsee Rauschenberg's influence on my perception of a blank white wall. I rarely hang or display art on walls or adorn the walls with anything because I prefer the white blankness. I so successfully purged an intuitive association between whiteness and Rauschenberg that I can see whiteness with one fewer association attached to it. By dissociating whiteness from as many interpretive meanings as possible, whiteness becomes more of what it is as I perceive it sensorially. 

I can attach or detach interpretations consciously, but the deeper structural work of dissociation takes time. The process is the dissolution of the content within the ideas linked as well as the content existing between the links within the association itself. The experience is biological, physiological, emotional, and ... inexplicable and, thus, mysterious or mystical, but only to the extent that I can't explain the totality of each of my experiences let alone the immeasurable connections between all of them. Whenever I encounter a previously unencountered idea, I have to do the work of determining whether it is worthy of incorporating it into my "worldview" which is sort of an "ego-connective" web of content placing "self" within a particular location associated to all else as "me." 

The fewer connections, the more streamlined everything is. Most ideas or content that I've encountered in life have been devoid of nutrients useful for adequate meaning-making. Too many bad ideas, broken ideas, lies, distortions, misrepresentations, misintepretations, and so on, too much detritus was caught in a web built for understanding the world, trapping me in relation to ideas I never wanted to become important, but the repeated formulas of content "wire the brain" in such a way that well-worn neural pathways had developed for three-act stories and the like. All the tricks of narrative, played over and over, like repetitive motion injuries within the brain, possibly existing in the real world as X number of hours watching romantic comedies is equal to the same number of hours of repeatedly stomping my left foot on the ground. What sort of damage do stories like that do to the psyche, to the appearance of others, of the world?

The importance here of Rauschenberg, though, as he continues to develop as an interest, is related to Benjamin's interpretations of reproduction and reproducibility. Rauschenberg did not always paint or repaint his triptych or other iterations of his White Paintings, yet the painters of these pieces being displayed at a particular exhibition were not credited for painting them. The captioned credits belonged to Rauschenberg. This ownership and attribution of what was not reproduced by Rauschenberg belongs to Rauschenberg. The painters are laborers in this sense, not creators, not artists. They are mechanics, assembly-line workers. 

Warhol later incorporated these ideas (whether influenced by Rauschenberg or the art movements of the time, I don't know) through the Factory, inviting others to reproduce his works (through his name-as-brand) as prints and whatnot as creditable to and owned by Warhol in exchange for "15 minutes of fame" for the laborers with the potential opportunity to become an artist-owner as well, eventually. Being paid in currency was not done. Providing the platforms for celebrity of his laborers was Warhol's transactional "payment" for services rendered. Noncontractual and Nontaxable exchange.

In this sense, reproducibility allows the originator of an idea to never actually create a time-and-place original. The idea itself is what is owned; intellectual property, as it were. By creating an association to a type of art, Warhol is credited with much that he never even directed. Subsequent Pop Art from pop artists is associatively attributable to him. Thus, even works that have an original time and place are occurring after the idea first reproduced by Warhol. All Pop Art with his distinctive styles of presentation has an ancestry traced back to him. This is control; this is imposition; this is domination.

Bayleenda sometimes leaves artworks of hers as gifts left in public, sometimes wrapped or presented as presents with maybe a card saying "For You" as well as other messages. She claims no authorship or ownership of those works. They are left absent possessive intentions other than as an invitation for the possession of them by whoever encounters them. 

The relationship is not exclusively with the object, but authorship remains a mystery even though there is clearly evidence of authorship of some kind. This mystery adds to the value of the gift as it could have come from almost anyone who had been in the vicinity. Or, it could have been left by the third person who had temporarily taken possession of it as a found object. 

In your mind's eye, have you visualized a particular gift, a particular presentation? I have. Even though I have seen some of Bayleenda's left art, I still picture a box about 8x8x8 in dimension, a two-inch wide Christmas metallic-green bow criss-crossing each side of the box tied over a metallic-red Christmas wrapping paper, sitting at the peak rounding of a canal bridge on a sidewalk in Amsterdam, a cloudy day, a slight drizzle, the water beading on the wrapping paper and the tied bow. I never picture anyone picking it up or even encountering it. Not purposefully. It's just what happens at times as a visualization within my mind. 

What does any of that mean? For me? I don't know. I haven't applied a meaning. I can't even think of a meaning to apply, certainly not the imposition of one that isn't related to whatever feelings I have in relation to leaving artworks in public (without credited authorship) intended as gifts. I'm not applying a comparative judgment, such as "I like art as gift more than art as transaction." I'm not allowing the prior genesis of particularity to occur through the process of assessment and interpretation making preferential or moral or other judgments possible. 

What we associate to ideas of interest to us creates a meaning for seemingly disparate objects of thought. We develop our relationship to what we cared about for just a moment in the beginning to something that contains a vast interdependent association with all other interests, part of a larger normative value framework as well as an ongoing metaphysical project of understanding and ordering the universe of interrelatedness. But ordering only through association so that coherent and meaningful interaction is possible at any moment with whatever is encountered. 

Narrowing the lens to that of the moral or aesthetic or psychological limits the perception of what is evident that is present. Taking into account the greater interconnected variables related to an event provides a potency of understanding that allows security and other forms of satisfaction to arise without willing them into existence through concerted and directed effort (which is exhausting over time). To remain fresh, young, vibrant, strong, resilient, flexible, adaptable, honest, transparent, trusting, courageous, generous, appreciative, humble, and caring one must allow oneself to spread out rather than constrict and contract through a possessive attitude. 

To "own" is to be trapped by what is owned. It's an attachment rather than an association. It pulls the center out of balance with great gravity, creating an internal asymmetry that harmfully impacts physical, emotional, psychological, thinking, social, and other interrelated subjects of personal health. Holding oneself together with many different attachments pulling in all directions is exhausting and unsustainable. Allowance of expansion without the constrictive pressure to hold everything together provides a healthy way to continue becoming whatever one becomes as they change, knowing that there is no such thing as a full culmination of being in a singular time and place. Neither is an individual lifetime or the evolutionary lifetime of a species or the evolutionary lifetime of all life. 

There could always be more and there could always be less. But better and worse need not apply for recognition and acknowledgment. "This is what I'm doing" is sufficient. "Please stop that out of consideration for my well-being" can be offered in response. Reasons why need not apply. The attitude of "I don't need to do this; I can stop for that person's sake and do something else in my quest for moment-to-moment fulfillment" may be chosen. 

These are possibilities. Opportunities. Possessing and Hoarding prevent us from expanding our capacity for fulfillment. They lead to the inevitability of the same moments being lived obsessively, the perceived height of possibility reached through attachment being an anchor mooring one in place over time. The same experiences of possessiveness and the fear of loss continuous until what is held tightly is lost to death, theft, confiscation, or any other snatching of what was owned through attachment. Warhol, for example, is Pop Art, the Factory, Studio 54, and the like, always associated with them. No one, perhaps no one, imagines Andy Warhol or Robert Rauschenberg as country peasants in France in the 14th century. Infected with the plague. Dying all alone, existing bloated along a river, spreading cholera, diseasing the nearby population.

Is that bad, those circumstances, imagining Warhol in that environment? Or is it an opportunity for new meanings? Does it create what was previously unimaginable? Are such wonderings leavings as gifts or impositions on the mind of readers? I intend this writing as neither. I intend it only as it is even though it contains so much more than my specific intentions, however broad and deep those intentions may be.

Walter Benjamin and the Ten Commandments

Do you believe what I write? When you encounter a singular writing of mine, a "post" as it is commonly called, do you feel you know me, that one particular expression encapsulates all I think? Not only "all I think," but all I think that I have developed well enough to express coherently, to communicate a greater volume of what I think that is merely ready for communication as I determine it is so? Do you know what Anti-Dada is?

Each post is a snapshot, not even a narrative. Slices, I used to call them. I've discovered better words, more descriptive, more complex, more accurate. But to suggest any description I provide is a totality of my thought? No, not at all. A fragment, with barely even the fullness of a particular fractal. How could you develop a belief based on them? And yet, you could.

Even nonsense and absurdity provide fodder for beliefs. We don't believe just to believe. We don't do so to consciously direct our functionality, our capacity for finding the manipulativability of all we encounter. We do so to provide specific meanings in context, through subtext, collaboratively (without even consciousness) creating the superstructure of the world.

These thoughts followed in a sequence that began well before anything I've written, but to provide a partial sequence of events, certainly not the whole, the sequence was publishing "Light and Shadow" as well as "Art and Trust" then checking out My Fall Semester and reading Doc's "Summer Tinkering," making a comment, reading a comment he left recommending Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and then followed by reading the work (I've only gotten through V at this point, but certainly enough to generate further thought).

This provides a greater context that is true sequentially though certainly not true comprehensively even within chronological sequence. Rather than futilely try to connect more dots, I'll focus on the thoughts that arose while reading without specifying exactly what prompted their genesis, only ever partially known by me. 

"Summer Tinkering" and "The Work of Art in ..." develop ideas I used to call relational thinking, but just as easily could be called associative thinking. For seemingly no reason at all, concepts of Judaic, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christian sin surfaced as of interest within my conscious awareness. The arising of a specific interest. That is not a statement of belief, mind you; it is the interpretive description I placed on what occurred. 

What I felt was, "this is meaningful," specifically as a feeling. It was only upon assessment that thought became engaged. After the fact. My friend Steven, Once of Portland, has developed ideas related to Heidegger's phenomenology that I am vaguely touching upon, but I am drastically limiting what I understand of his thought within this expression because those are his thoughts and they are best understood within the context he created for them. My usage is only ever a distortion of their greater meanings within the vast associative network Steven, Now of Somewhere Else, has fractionally expressed in discussion with me (fractional because he can only communicate so much over a given time frame and I only have so much time to engage and communicate as well). 

But that's to point out but one influence of a vast associative network of my own making, purposefully and through what I perceive but don't consciously process. In some sense, this is related to authenticity of experience. There may be a misconception that to only be partially aware is to be inauthentic. Or, that if one's worldview contains contradictions, it is a lie. Or, if confusion is experienced, it's evidence of misconceptions about reality. 

But my confusion is real (props to Henry Rollins). Should we give more credit to the influences that contribute content, new associations between existing ideas, new muscle added to strengthen the integrity of thought, developed as such over ongoing consideration into greater meanings than first perceived, whether intended as such or not, becoming part of an independent organism of thought, the original conveyance incorporated beyond the author's intentions into the greater web of existing and ongoing thought, thought so deeply embodied over time that whatever was original in its perception and subsequent internalized genesis is buried beneath runoff soil and silt, new vegetations, incorporated through root entanglement, ingested as nutrients and distributed throughout the ecosystem called life?

Credit is due, but as you can see the attributions become so integrated over time as something unintended by the author that the author sees them as abominations (if seeing them at all) diverging profanely from original intent, as new life that built itself into something new, a different species arising from a mutative genetic adaptation best suited for the existing internal environment, or a new life that has strongly inherited its parents' genes and developed in such a way that it closely resembles the author's earlier developments within a given idea (perhaps the most surprising potential development). 

That the concept of sin arose said something, but it was not a moral tale being told. It was a tale of integration of a comprehensive concept of sin related to the Ten Commandments. To violate one often means violating more than one in the process. Lying and stealing. Coveting and adultery. Arrogance and killing. Those associations are embedded within each commandment. And it is possible each is always related to all of the others in an associative (what is called indirect) sense. The butterfly effect is a rudimentary metaphor for the associative relationships that exist in the world. It gives up on identifying variables, ultimately, though the goal of science as an ongoing field is always to strive toward omniscience.

In the same way I chose to view the importance of the Ten Commandments in the context of associative thinking, all interests arise to tell us something important to us. What are other possible meanings I could create to identify what was valuable about the arising of the idea? Infinite. We're never without possibility in this sense and, thus, never out of ideas. It's a matter of activation. 

It's also possible to observe and sit with such a seemingly spontaneous thought without interpreting it or making a judgment of any sort. Most of what we observe in such ways goes unreported. For example, I sat with the ongoing eruption of thoughts related to sin and never once directed them through assessment or judgment. That allowed them to surface continuously until I needed to refuel (fruit) and then continue afterward. It's possible to withhold judgment indefinitely if one considers thinking interpretively, morally, or ethically (or in any particular way which may also arise) as temporary breaks from the ongoing, lifelong observation of the arising of interests. 

Without a possessive attitude toward what one experiences. If one perceives what one experiences at one time as "superior" to that which is experienced another time, then a judgment has occurred. The view of all that follows then falls within the newly created categories of better and worse experiences related to many unknown variables that combine to create the impression that one experience was worthy of attachment while the other is not, instead creating the impulse to avoid and repel it, to prevent even experiential contact. 

We call what we like of such experiences our preferences. Preferences, as constructed through an interpretation of judgment, are integrated into our identities as part of "who we are" or our personalit(y/ies) or the basis of justifying our relationships with others. Good or bad, the moral interpretation of personal experience or of the other, need not be present throughout every moment. It is not inevitable except perhaps in moments. There is no permanence to it, no omnipresence that persists through the variety of moment-to-moment experiences. They come and go and are applied often without our awareness and insight into what we are doing when this occurs. 

"I'd rather do this than that right now" does not diminish "that" as a future possibility. "That" is not condemned as bad and thus never considered again. To never consider what "that" means ever again denies the development of a more complex understanding of whether there is any benefit to "that" at all or if it should be incorporated into our lives in some capacity ... just not right now. 

Our awareness is directed by our attentiveness so focusing intently on one thing means missing what else is present. While such a thing may become impregnated with a past, present, and future as it is in actuality in addition to what it has been and done and what it may continue to be and do, an observational perspective allows for a greater variety of perceived variables each moment. The beginning of assessment and interpretation prevents what is present from being present within one's awareness. It does not mean it isn't being perceived through the senses and incorporated into experiential memory. 

The meanings of such perceptions are created through the existing underlying interpretive (intuitive) framework without our awareness. That does not mean they are "wrong" or "bad." They have existential integrity. As I have applied names to Steven, Who Was Born Not in Portland Nor Where He Is Now, I provide a story of his past and present. When I call him Steven, Who Is Not Yet When He Will Be, I orient him in relation to the future, giving him a future-based identity to incorporate within the whole of his identities as I perceive them. 

As such, I am imposing upon him potentials he does not necessarily mean to project. They could be said to be true names or potentials, but they couldn't be said to be comprehensive names or potentials. Nor may they be how Steven, Who Is Not Where I Am would want to be identified by me. 

But you can see how it all comes together, these slices. They are small, one-time associative salads compiled from the garden of life. They are also metaphors. They are also collages. This is collage-thinking, associations that expand exponentially as they are related to all the rest rather than existing as a hierarchical ordering of thought, accessible only through the rigidity of chronological sequence, through moral lenses, as ethical content, as related to original intent, as moments in a process, as specific functions in an ongoing equation, as more than I could ever communicate. 

They are not, ever, final answers. They are morsels that could be made into a meal or a feast if combined with a variety of others, a celebration of life, a representation of a moment, or an association between you and I, an ongoing conversation, with my expressive voice coming through here, this blog, and your receptivity of my voice emanating from this blog. Inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale ...