reclamation or “art”
“Why?” Someone might ask, wondering at the action’s origins. An existential question, some might ask. But really, it’s just a desire for truth, like any science. And the increasing models of understanding/defining an individual there-in (through falsifiability, like popper suggests) are exactly what lead people to feel one another. However, ultimately, the individual always retains the right to those actions and their meaning. But, there is this dialectical battle between the units and the plural. Does the unit find it’s own place (conscious or unconscious), or does the plural decide the units place (conscious or unconscious)–I figure, the unit defines the plural (consciously)–and this is where actions truly take place. When another feels hurt by an individuals action, it is emotionally within the definition of the plural (right?). Admittedly, then, some take responsibility in this way at the cost of some hurt for the greater good (academic war):
Man is
the symbol using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal
Inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)
Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making
Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)
And rotten with perfection-Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essay’s on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkley: University of California Press 1968. p.16
And so on. I find myself in these conversations often, and now feel the need to ask, when having them, if I am “living in quiet desperation.” For I am a human (this is a knot). So, I proceed slower, the urgency is a cause of problems (perhaps this is my nature). Thoreau, who emotionally took his time at the cost of his individuality and humanity, took the fourth line to heart (perhaps this is my nature). He took responsibility for each of those charges, before they were charged in this language, and tried to reclaim his humanity (perhaps this is my nature). Several of his peers accepted his reclamation (Ralph Waldo Emerson). What is this process: with it’s ambiguous duty, the ambiguous action, the ambiguous participant(s), the ambiguous emotion, and the ambiguous reclamation? Could it be the right brain’s struggle, after there are quite a few left handed president’s surely that is no accident (this is a self referential statement designed to take note of a recent discussion regarding how the right brained people will rule the world–whatever that means). I think this process is the human condition (the ambiguous one). Martha Nussbaum speaks of this in capability, an interesting and quite notable contemporary attempt to pursue similar notions. Anyway, it was time for Sagan to go to work. And neither of us had said any of this exactly, as near as I can remember.
I shipped my first of three packages, in it’s crummy recycled and overly taped box, to a military base. A copy of the expansion pack for Diablo 2 (Lord of Destruction) was declared on the customs form required for the shipment. Camp Taji in Iraq was the destination. Surely the addressee will enjoy it more than I was (as it sat unused on my shelf). Before Sagan and I even left to make even on buying plane tickets together, I noticed (with Sagan’s help and for the second time) that Jessie left her copy of Big Sur. Sagan told me about the book, and Jack Kerouac’s experiences and travels in the book. I am not going to dissappear, I think. The real me, I think. Sometimes I feel like we all dissappear, but some of us take responsibility for it. Some of us never have the capability.
Art is designed to make people think, Someone once said.
The thing about nature is that, when you look back at it, it seems like everything was just re-arranged from it. If it seems new, and unique, and without a source, then maybe you’re not aware enough of the nature of it. Everything was there all along, humans just re-arranged it and re-engineered it and re-built it to their own necessity. The thing here, is that it’s hard to say where nature begins, and what nature is. That’s why I’m a “little one”, I think (what?). It seems like if this is true, there must always be people early on who do things that everyone will take for granted later, and furthermore that these people have had to exist throughout time. The struggle is to find their nature, and what may be common in their nature that lead to their profound affect on a greater number of people than the average person has. This is the complication of social science, and the postmodern idea that really these people are deleted in exchange for their representation (or something like that). I do remember talking about that with Sagan. These ideas are arguable, and I have not take responsibility for arguing against them.
How does one find themselves in an unexpected place? Perhaps chance, and chaos, should be respected deliberately. Maybe that’s why Eleanor Roosevelt said everyone should face a fear everyday and find their true cinvictions on that bumpersticker.
