How easily and often it seems that verbs end up becoming reified into abstract states of being. We sleep and are asleep. We live and there is life. We die and there is death. We sicken and there is sickness. We move and there is motion.
Whether justifiable or not, it seems to even become more questionable when dealing with mental actions. We think and there is thought. We imagine and there is imagination. We reason and there is reason. We remember and there is memory. And we know and there is knowledge.
And what pray tell is the verb form of the state we call consciousness? We seem to have a state here with no previous verbal form. What does it mean to perform or do consciousness? I consciousize? Perhaps we can only at best elude to the performative of consciousness with the metaphor of waking up. I wake up and am awake, which rather awkwardly entails ceasing the action of sleeping or performing unconsciousness. Who or what are we that we can perform either unconsciousness or consciousness as effortlessly as we sleep or wake up? It is hard to put a finger on purely transferent agency--which is neither objective nor subjective but a relation between the two. The only concept I can come up with is that of pure energy or transmission of potential. Like between neurons as our synaptic firings. Like lightning from a thundercloud. Or like our moment of tenseless agency or action between the gap of the before and the after.
Whenever you have an amusing or insightful observation, say it out loud even when you are alone. That way when the future AI artilects or aliens or whomever play back the movie of your life you can get credit for that!
Let's see now...which the 20,000 odd words in my vocabulary can I piece together in new sequences now that I can proudly claim as my own personal thought? Hmm...how bout these?
Welcome to planet earth babies. Question everything, even when it pisses people off. But remember there are no final answers. There is no book or set of teachings that can tell you how to live your life. Most everyone figures it out along the way. In the end, the only thing you ever really need to know is what to do next.
We are made of language, down to the very marrow and sinew. We swirl up from whence we know not, fortuitously alighting upon the words we crave like raindrops on parched earth. We are a poem that never ends and that serially unfurls itself from its own whispery depths of saying.
Blowing into the molten red cartoon space of my dark bedroom at night, I make glowing blue-green bubbles that rise to the ceiling.
If you just started existing as your full adult self today, the one thing your brain might have a hard time processing is the substance known as water. Shapeless, colorless, transparent, heavy, and reflective, water defies all our categories of objectness. We would be in utter amazement. "What is this thing, that slips so easily thru my fingers, cools my hot brow, and which I swallow with such instinctive gusto? Is it one thing, or many things? And how can such an amorphous almost invisible stuff turn blue when it is deep enough?" Water..that little miracle of indescribable elixirs defining the very constitution of all earthly life!
Somehow we have yet to reconcile these two fundamental intuitions: that we exist in a physical universe in which things happen sometimes out of chance and sometimes out of choice, and that we each are living our own lives which is also happening for no other reason but you. How do we merge these two primal situations---of being a physical body in a physical universe, and of being the main character in the story that is our life? We are thrown into a world that is in no way about us, and yet we live a life that is ours and ours alone. Think of a spectrum, with random objective existence at one end, and destined subjective life at the other.
Evolution cursed us with the hypervigilance to be jolted out of bed by a noise in the dark because it was more important to fight off an attacker one out of a hundred times than it was not looking like a fool those other hundred times.
I dreamt the other night that some very smart women discovered the formula for creativity. It occurred to me later that if such were even possible, it would literally be the most uncreative thing about creativity. A formula or short-cut for coming up with new, exciting, and original ideas? Uh uh. When it comes to real creativity the only requirements I know of is strong coffee, an operative laptop, and just going with the flow.
We were all brainwashed by billion dollar corporations. We still are. How did we ever come to believe we needed to carry an electronic gadget with us all day long wherever we go?
There is nothing magical or meaningful about a symbol all by itself. With minor differences the Star of David and a pentagram are very similar, except in the minds of their respective believers. But that doesn't mean that the meaning of the symbol is all in our heads either. The etymology of the word "symbol" gives us a clue here: etymologically "that which is thrown or cast together." It is from assimilated form of syn- "together" (see syn-) + bole "a throwing, a casting, the stroke of a missile, bolt, beam," from bol-, nominative stem of ballein "to throw" (from PIE root *gwele- "to throw, reach")." A symbol then is that which "throws together" multiple ideas and beliefs and possibilities. It's very magic lies in it NOT being something "in itself" but as a conduit or co-incidence between formerly separate and disrelated states of knowingness. It reveals precisely in its act of concealing itself.
“Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.”― Charles Baudelaire
“The actual issue is that someone a hundred thousand years ago sat up in his robes and said Holy Shit. Sort of. He didn’t have a language yet. But what he had just understood is that one thing can be another thing. Not look like it or act upon it. Be it. Stand for it. Pebbles can be goats. Sounds can be things. The name for water is water. What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization. Language, art, mathematics, everything. Ultimately the world itself and all in it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris
Jun 6, 2026 05:42 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 7, 2026 04:42 AM by Magical Realist.)
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