Growing up with a loveably eccentric mom, I have to say there were some wonderfully memorable moments. Like the time she plastered our whole bedroom walls with pages of old National Geographic magazines. Or how she would drive my dad crazy sometimes going out to look up at where Jesus would come again from inside the Orion nebula. And then once she made Stone Soup and actually put a stone in the pot. But I wouldn't trade anything for those times. If anything she passed on to me that daring and wildness of spirit to do whatever you want no matter what anybody thinks about it.
They were saying on the news just now how social media is lowering teens' sense of well-being and that it seems to be worse for girls than it is for boys. I suspect that is because girls at that age are so appearance-oriented, trying to conform to the popular standards of beauty they see in the media. So social media magnifies their angst that they not measuring up to those standards. Which isn't really their fault.
We live in a superficial culture that teaches girls from a young age that looks is their main asset. It is so sad to watch so many of them trying so hard to imitate that ideal and only feeling more empty on the inside. An emptiness that often continues all thru life, prompting many aging women to get plastic surgery to stave off the dreaded ravages of time. Personally speaking, I hate that plastic surgery face. The bulbous lips. The apple cheeks. The taut cadaverous smoothness of the skin. I recognize it the moment I see it. It makes the women look all the same, no longer with a face but with an immobile death mask.
Nowadays with AI it's even worse. In this image-obsessed time of ours, AI is now generating the perfect images for us to gawk at. We live in an age where images are everything and now don't even have to be real at all! It's the Simulacrum Baudrillard warned us about:
“The media represents a world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world."---JB
People say the most interesting things when they don't know what they are going to say next. What needs and wants to be said only reveals itself in the action of conversing, like a bird that has to jump off the branch before his own wings take over and he starts to fly.
In the physical universe we observe how things can be broken down into their components and still exist as meaningful things without being the whole thing they were constituting. But in our minds parts are not separable from their wholes. The whole meaning of the parts lies in the overall structure and nature of the whole. We see this with language and thought, where the whole meaning of words in sentences and paragraphs is derived from the ideational whole that they are part of. If you tried to reduce descriptions and statements and propositions down to their discrete words, those words wouldn't make any sense. There is a dynamic interdependence between the words and the whole meaning they are unifying together as. The words require temporalization in the form of sequence and previous context and the unifying meaning they are aiming at, all of which derive from the whole. Wholes are composed of their parts iow, but the parts only have their meaning and function from the whole. Physicality appears to be reductionistic, while meaning and understanding appears to be holistic.
“What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.”― Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, Vol. 1
The word "word" is the only noun I know that represents exactly what it is and nothing more.
Bingo! And maybe "text"..
Evolution understood long ago, before there was anything like human beings, that the world is better experienced from two spatial perspectives at once instead of just one. Hence the universality of two eyes, two ears, and even pairs of limbs. Even ants have 2 eyes and 2 antennae. The cognitive dissonance or error produced by experiencing these slightly offset perspectives at the same time gets remedied by the brain as the illusion of depth or 3 dimensionality. Hence there arose the perception of space not as an objective thing in itself but as the ability to predict accurately the varying distances and directions of things and other creatures we see and hear around us. It was in essence an illusion that helped us to survive and hunt and better navigate our environment. It's why animals that are typically predators have their eyes in the front of their heads and animals that are typically prey have their eyes on both sides of it. One to better hunt with and one to better see around itself. Space then not as an abstract continuum existing outside of us but as the dialectically-revealed mobility among and proximity to things and creatures either for use by the physical body or else threatening to its own life.
Between the breaking down into components that is reductionism and the combinational summing of them into one whole that is holism there must be a dynamic interplay. On a daily basis we use both ways of understanding the world, going back and forth between them with no problem. They are the end stops of a knob we keep turning up and down. Neither represents the true situation. It is the turning that is reality--the phenomenal experience of the alternating disjunction and conjunction of things and events not as some objective third state but as one activity by which we live in the world. We have a fundamental intuition or visceral "feel" for how the explainability of experience which is science and the meaningfulness of experience which is spirituality work together even if we can never rationally grasp how.
Isn't it strange that as much as we spend time remembering events and people in our past that we never remember remembering itself? The remembered past thus seems to consist of nothing but a succession of discrete present moments, like vintage snap shots, that had no past in themselves. No rhyme or reason to them. Just images frozen in time. In reality the past happened just like now, with its own emergence out of an unknown but much anticipated future into a present totally rooted and impelled by its own fading past.
“I rebel; therefore, we exist.” ~Albert Camus
"Rebel is Trickster. Trickster is Rebel. The laughter in the whirlwind. The jest in the apocalypse.
He neither cries nor quibbles. Rather than balk at being the punchline of the cosmic joke, he laughs and laughs hard. Rather than fear the perceived power of authority, he gets power OVER power through high humor. The kind of humor that somersaults over itself; gaining momentum while picking up jest and ashes, smiles and razors, thorns and laughter. It’s a cutting, unorthodox humor that takes thesis and antithesis and smashes it into synthesis.
Trickster as Rebel embraces the absurdity of existence and rolls with it. Juxtaposing juxtapositions. He is full-frontal dissidence and in-your-face dissonance. Too busy transforming demons into diamonds and wounds into wisdom to pay courtesy to your so-called authority.
Contumacious to a fault, Trickster aims to lay fault lines into all power constructs. Earthquake and upheaval are just his game. He turns everything upside down and lets the chips fall where they may. He breaks all compasses so that nobody gets stuck on a destination and the journey remains “the thing.”
Written by Gary Z McGee
Image: Bound by Doug Hoppes