Monday, September 13, 2010
We get lost in a web of stories built tangentially off of each other until the origin, the spark of initial awareness, is gone: a math equation with missing parenthesis and brackets of closure. Seven seems to be the number repeating itself today, partially because I left "Seven" on repeat while I was baking cupcakes in the kitchen. It all seems to fit--creating new tines in the fork--from my story, to that of a seven year old imagining mermaids in the clouds, to my earlier thoughts of my cousin's seven year old daughter trying to process the death of her father in the heat of the Ohio summer. Something is feeding on my memory, causing me to scribble out strange Rules & Obstructions from the place where my brain cannot separate the senses. Synesthetics began the evening by tasting the muddled murmurs of the funerary feast; their stiffly pressed pant legs of coarse cotton clung to bruised kneecaps while rumpled handkerchiefs hung limply with discarded grief.
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This is wonderful!
ReplyDeleteFirst, the loss of initial awareness is so much like the (so far) futile efforts of particle physicists and cosmologists to arrive at the start of everything, at what banged in the big bang (some call this banging stuff the God Particle —perhaps you know it even within pop culture as the central resonance of Angels & Demons, the film and novel.
—some Lichtenberg figures come about in between searches for that particle.
The significance of seven is intriguing —no less your baking of cupcakes, because for the first time ever, I watched cupcake wars last night!
Seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven —it was during heat of ohio summers that I saw such clouds, that I needed to configure mermaids —and it was during an Ohio summer that my father died in the hospital after —why didn't I drive faster— I rushed him there in the first car I ever owned, a Toyota Corolla that became a shrine, that was nearly a hearse considering how soon after arriving at Suburban Hospital's emergency room he died.
If you find hat you must, please continue this tine set. I would love to experience sonic iterations of this component, parts or all of it.
Perhaps what we make can continue to speak with each other in ways and forms yet to emerge.
Something separates the atoms into forms. The initial awareness, the oneness of all things, is lost. Consciousness strays from the origin in haphazard chance. Perhaps the pattern is too big to perceive or maybe it's a fractal we have yet to understand, or cannot understand because we are limited by our dimensionality.
ReplyDeleteScience is the measured observation, the explanation, the definitive system of rules that defines our universe. The smoothness of mathematics feels like an appealing way to explain the world around us. The chaos of entropy denied because math is so exact that it starts to have a weight and a truth that is more compelling than the imperfections of our senses, of the unknown.
Yet we forget that human bodies are mangled and broken pieces of equipment which cannot be calibrated to the same standard as a machine. Circles are never perfectly round; the earth is not a sphere, but a lumpy ball with many crevices and peaks forming a mashing, flaky crust wobbling through space.
We organize the world into the various compartments of our brains, filing away each piece of information so we can build our picture of the cosmos with tiny data inputs. We use numbers to represent transitory things, as an attempt to measure a motion that cannot be stopped. It is the birth of concept.
Seven years, but how many days? And hours? And minutes? Dare we go beyond the seconds? A precise mechanization of each metered breath is filed for later.
Our hearts beat so we count along with global meter. What happens if everything stops? The stories depend upon the metronome never changing nor ceasing to tick with assured cadence. Time unites all things.
Another story presents itself in the realm of Ohio that is fitting to the mood I feel growing up and down the spinal column of this tine. "Blood Buzz Ohio" by the National
ReplyDeleteStand up straight at the foot of your love
I lift my shirt up
Stand up straight at the foot of your love
I lift my shirt up
I'll rest my eyes till the fevers outta me
I'll rest my eyes to the rivers in the sea
I'll rest my eyes till the fevers outta me
I'll rest my eyes to the rivers in the sea
I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I'll never marry but Ohio don't remember me
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
I never thought about love when I thought about home
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
The floors are falling out from everybody I know
I'm on a blood buzz
Yes I am
I'm on a blood buzz
I'm on a blood buzz
God I am
I'm on a blood buzz
Lay my head on the hood of your car
I'll take it too far
Lay my head on the hood of your car
I'll take it too far
I'll rest my eyes till the fevers outta me
I'll rest my eyes to the rivers in the sea
I'll rest my eyes till the fevers outta me
I'll rest my eyes to the rivers in the sea
I'm on a blood buzz
Yes I am
I'm on a blood buzz
I'm on a blood buzz
God I am
I'm on a blood buzz
I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I'll never marry but Ohio don't remember me
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
I never thought about love when I thought about home
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
The floors are falling out from everybody I know
I'm on a blood buzz
Yes I am
I'm on a blood buzz
I'm on a blood buzz
God I am
I'm on a blood buzz
And yet this science, this definitive system providing the comfort and sometimes despair of the definitive —the rules of this definitive system of measure and meaning are framed with obstruction; devices with which measurements underlying meaning are made are limited to measure what they can measure, within parameters human determine. We program and calibrate. There is context in which measurement occurs. What is outside the context may be unmeasurable for being outside the context. Rule and obstruction converge, diverge. What may exist outside limitations of a device's functionality might not be accessed by the device.
ReplyDeleteWhat is knowable and unknowable changes —over time.
Understandings hold until technology enables measurement beyond current device parameters, updating the definitive.
It is probably unwise to assume that any system of measure has in fact detected or determined the boundaries of knowing that will prove definitive at all scales in all locations for all durations of time.
We can't help but organize, sort, make associations, group information for possible retrieval on demand; retrieval or thinking depends on a logic of intersection, a making of a geometry (multi-faceted) of idea out of pieces of information that combine temporarily into an architecture of knowing.
Pieces of informations (or tines) may be part of multiple architectures of knowing simultaneously. Including multiple architectures of time which is not the same on all scales in all locations —look at the challenges of now, the differences in how time is reported in the now that is associated with every location. Light that arrives now may no longer be linked to an existing source. And time, remember, is linked to the location of its moment, which is to say that time is also the space in which that time (moment of time) occurs, and time can be bent, folded —imagination, which also exists in time, can fold time, twist time, etc. That there is cadence seems so true, multiple cadences, many forma of cadence in partnership with many configurations of configurable time. a story is a bit of time architecture, a (flexible) geometrical structure —sometimes the clock is a mermaid.
I think science is often perceived as definitive, but I am coming to realize that there is a limit, a range of error, to everything that exists. Once something exists, there are rules in place that support its existence. How do we even know what exists? For all we know, objective reality is false and the universe is a giant hologram. Science is really the antonym of definitive: incomplete, inconclusive, inexact, interim, temporary, unreliable.
ReplyDeleteAll I can wonder now is where our certainty stems from in a world where the definitive cannot be reached. We approach the truth, but fact strays just past our reach. There is a feeling of clarity and a strength in diction that makes the truth seem tangible, but many of our truths, especially those about ourselves, are based on memory. We can solemnly swear or promise that we are telling the truth, but are we? Memory falters. The more you access a memory, the more it changes. This article explains that "memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated."
I am still left wondering: what is awareness?