Creative writing and artful observations

[Magical Realist]

The problem with many reductionistic explanations is that they always assume linear sequencing and an incremental inferential chronology of events. A happens, then B happens, then C happens, and so on. The whole theory thus acts as a mechanistic model demonstrating one-to-one cause and effect, much like how a pinball machine operates.

But in reality there are lots of phenomena that occur in the universe in a non-linear fashion, entailing a parallelism and a synchrony between many linear sequences that itself influences and shapes the happening of those events. Thus there is a need for a system level approach to theorizing that preserves the subtle interconnectedness of seeming discrete events within a larger and more formally determinative structure.

Take consciousness for example. Science takes great pains to reduce this phenomenon to the linear event streams of our own brain's synaptic firings. Exactly like how we understand an electronic device and its circuitry. But we know from the nature of fields and holistic top-down determination that there is much more going on than just this. The various physically-discrete modules of the brain themselves--ones for memory and motion and vision and speech and even spatiality-- are all functioning in one self-coordinating system where things are happening at the same time as well as at different times. And then there is this deeply embedded dendritic pattern of our neurons, each one connected to around 10,000 other ones!

There is thus exponential as well a sequential causation going on, global as well as compositional agencies afoot, which introduce the richly self-entangled properties of spatiality and synergy allowing for multiple event streams to converge and diverge into thousands of others. It is clear we are going to need to think more in terms of system-wide functioning if we are ever going to decipher the strange goings-on of the brain. Think less a pinball machine and more a weather system! Think less in terms of seriality and numericity and more in terms of dimensionality and geometry. There IS sequence going on still to be sure, but there is also dialecticality and atemporal processing and verticality going on as well.

"While human perception relies heavily on temporal processing (the brain tracking rhythm, speech cadence, and the passage of time), psychological frameworks discussing the "atemporal self" or atemporal perception refer to states of consciousness where the mind stops projecting past memories or future anxieties, processing the present moment as a simultaneous, unfragmented field."---Google AI

[Magical Realist]

What happens when the world we are so anxiously anticipating, one filled with magic and mystical beings and other dimensions, actually starts happening? What happens when the magical and anomalous calcify into mundane everyday events? The synchronicities so regular we barely notice them. The precognitions, the serendipities, the epiphanies, all accepted and lived as routinely as our physical world. I call this miracle burnout, because invariably it seems to be a blind spot in our much anticipated scenarios of the future. The mystics and futurists and transhumanists and experiencers and new agers just don't think beyond the dawning of a whole new age of wonder and awe. We will need a whole new spirituality---a meaningful narrative of yet another liberation--but this time from a world that was itself sensational and escapist and full of promise at one time.

Thus are we always in the world but not of the world, worldliness itself a nihilistic and desolate state none of can be satisfied with. As Emily Dickinson put it, "I dwell in possibilities." We live not in what is real and gritty and now. We live for what's coming next--- enchanted by yet impatient for that imagined and idyllic Shangri-La that forever lies just over the horizon. The Promised Land of milk and honey awaiting our momentous arrival. The Undiscovered Country that gives us something to live for.

“The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

[Magical Realist]

Language is like a house of mirrors, each mirror never showing itself but only reflecting its own endlessly iterated reflection and "elsewhereness" or transparence to other reflections. And when we mistake the reflection for something real in itself, we only ever run into another mirror.

“Is," "is," "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Nature's God

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In a world of beliefs and ideologies, where thoughts and ideas are taught to us by powerful authoritative social institutions like Science and Religion and the State, the one who can come up with his own thoughts and ideas will always be an outsider--a despised yet dangerous pariah---the ever prowling wolf out on the outskirts of the flock of sheep.

"The domino method operates on the assumption that people believe what their group
believes, no more and no less. One unique individual would foul it up. One man who originated
his own idea, instead of getting it from his domino block."

Mrs Frost said: "How
interesting. An idea out of nothing."

"Out of the individual human mind," Allen
said, aware that he wasn’t being politic, but feeling, at the same time, that Mrs Frost
respected him and really wanted to hear what he had to offer.

"A rare situation," he
admitted. "But it could occur."

The Man Who Japed (1956) Philip K Dick

[Magical Realist]

A thing is "real"--that is cognitively phenomenal-- only to the extent that we can refer to and describe it. But this is not to say that we can't refer to and describe unreal things as well. It is this inherent slipperiness and ambiguity of language that condemns us all to living inside our own subjective interpretation bubbles.

[Magical Realist]

Kant was both right and wrong. He was wrong that what is real sits beyond our experience of it as some unknowable thing-in-itself. There is no being, iow, beyond the phenomenal appearance of things. And yet he was right that we can know things by intuitively enacting their phenomenally present basis of our own sentient physicality. This is why all our abstract knowledge of the world never seems to turn up anything but more abstractions and yet assumes a realness for us thru metaphors and representations of our own bodily sensations.



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[Magical Realist]

As soon as language burst upon the scene, there was now generalization beyond the specific, intelligibility beyond brute fact, promise beyond the chaotic, and magic beyond the mundane. If there are philosophers like Max Tegmark who are seriously proposing that mathematics is the substrate of the physical universe, how much more should they consider that language is the substrate of Reality itself.

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." ---Wittgenstein

[Magical Realist]

Language is what bestows possibility to the phenomenally-given, elsewhereness to the here and now, what ifness to what is, and optionality to the intentional. An animal is only ever totally consumed by its immediate experiences of its sensations and environment. When something happens for it, they are all in for that alone, and so can be efficiently and fluently driven solely by their instincts. There is no future for them but what needs to be done next.

For us as language-users experiences are hyperlinked to alternative ways of having been caused and of turning out. Parallelism is conjured out of the blindly sequential. A virtual imaginarium rises up before us full of implications and haunted by otherwiseness--an ideational playland teeming with interconnecting meanings, coalescing metaphors, and shifting contexts. Language is the rich fertile soil out of which is always sprouting human soulfulness---the abounding ectstasis of the deific Logos within us.

“He surrendered utterly to the power that to him seemed the highest on earth, to whose service he felt called, which promised him elevation and honours: the power of intellect, the power of the Word, that lords it with a smile over the unconscious and inarticulate. To this power he surrendered with all the passion of youth, and it rewarded him with all it had to give, taking from him inexorably, in return, all that it is wont to take.

It sharpened his eyes and made him see through the large words which puff out the bosoms of mankind; it opened for him men’s souls and his own, made him clairvoyant, showed him the inwardness of the world and the ultimate behind men’s words and deeds. And all that he saw could be put in two words: the comedy and the tragedy of life.

And then, with knowledge, its torment and its arrogance, came solitude; because he could not endure the blithe and innocent with their darkened understanding, while they in turn were troubled by the sign on his brow. But his love of the word kept growing sweeter and sweeter, and his love of form; for he used to say (and had already said it in writing) that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.”― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories

[Magical Realist]

My headmate Bobby asked me pointedly how I know when something is magic. It was a good question. I was tempted to just say "I know it when I see it" like that judge said of pornography, but that seems like a copout. So I thought about it and concluded this: magic is when the impossible happens and stays impossible even after it happens. There is no cause or explanation for it in terms of this physical world. WHY does it happen? That's the kicker. To me it seems to happen to point us towards something real beyond this mundane materialist wasteland we all wander about barely conscious in. Think of it as a sudden "redirect" in the stream of your perceptions. It's like a Zen gong that wakes us up to the "more than this" that we all want to be real but always brush off as just wishful thinking. If the unexplainable happens to you, it is meant for you and only you. It is a lucky nudge of otherworldliness amidst the doldrums of our everyday reality--usually right when you need it the most.

[Magical Realist]

Ahh yes..the eternal struggle of the creative writer: to say something that is totally new and original and yet easily comprehensible and relatable.

[Magical Realist]

Sometimes a pearl of something important to say rises up in us in the course of a casual conversation and we just swallow it back down, leaving it to die like some festering bit of grub. I say let that pearl come out your mouth and adorn itself in the words and phrases it finds suitable for itself. People may get offended, but in the long term you have spoken a truth that will only raise the collective consciousness of the conversants.

LOL Synchronistically this clip from "Field of Dreams"just appeared on my newsfeed!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1717903523670760