Mindful Mindworks

Antonin Artaud "Le théâtre et la peste" Le théâtre et son double sets up a brilliant parallel between the brain and lungs.

La seconde remarque est que les deux seuls organes réellement atteints et lésés par la peste : le cerveau et les poumons, se trouvent être tous deux sous la dépendance directe de la conscience et de la volonté. On peut s'empêcher de respirer ou de penser, on peut précipiter sa respiration, la rythmer à son gré, la rendre à volonté consciente ou inconsciente, introduire un équilibre entre les deux sortes de respirations ; l'automatique, qui est sous le commandement direct du grand sympathique, et l'autre, qui obéit aux réflexes redevenus conscients du cerveau.

On peut également précipiter, ralentir et rythmer sa pensée. On peut réglementer le jeu inconscient de l'esprit.

Speed up, slow down. Adjust the rhythm. Of thought. Regulate the play not of the unconscious but the unconscious play of the mind.

As aptly put by Mary Caroline Richards:

The second observation is that the only two organs really affected and injured by the plague, the brain and the lungs, are both directly dependent upon the consciousness and the will. We can keep ourselves from breathing or from thinking, can speed up our respiration, give it any rhythm we choose, make it conscious or unconscious at will, introduce a balance between two kinds of breathing: the automatic, which is under the direct control of the sympathetic nervous system, and the other, which is subject to those reflexes of the brain which have once again become conscious.

We can similarly accelerate, retard, and give an arbitrary rhythm to our thinking—can regulate the unconscious play of the mind.

Regulate -- not regiment.

And so for day 2277
08.03.2013

Respect of Not Knowing

Murmur is a novel by Will Eaves that is patterned on the life of Alan Turing. It's a plunge into the mindset of a character receiving treatments for chemical castration and in passing is a meditation on how one makes meaning and the reach of intelligent machines. This struck me:

It isn't knowing what another person thinks or feels that makes us who we are. It's the respect for not knowing.

This hard won realization is prefaced by the speaker in distress: "He breathes into a point of infinite and traceless pain. He stares hard at a carpet tile that's come unstuck and wanted to say: It isn't knowing [...]".

The respect of not knowing opens a sort of plenitude:

We are consoled by someone's efforts to conceive us, and that effort's keen shortfall. We are unreachable. A shared mind has no self-knowledge. A field awareness cannot be unique or self-conceal: it has no privacy of mind.

A nice slide from efforts to the shortfall of one. Something is happening in this passage from plurality to unicity. Something unknowable, unreachable, private.

The notion of respect is complicated.

And so for day 2190
11.12.2012

Rest and Replay

The dust jacket is shiny blue. Inside the book has a red cover. It seemed all blue to me in memory. It appears that sea of blue had a moon reflected in waves — all a blur to me — I was concentrating on the title words and the background — the title actually bisects the image making it a challenge to see it whole.

We consolidate memories mostly when we are either at rest or asleep, because these are the quieter times when we are not processing any new external events. […] Spontaneous replaying tendencies at rest have a second set of implications. Both our ordinary leaps of creative intuition and extraordinary peak experiences usually occur during pauses. Each requires an extra, dynamic ingredient, not just the mere replaying of a problem long incubated but still unsolved. Novel closures often means that some new item or motive source of energy has closed the information gap. Instantly, large networks shift into brand-new configurations.

James H. Austin. Zen-Brain Reflections

And so for day 2011
15.06.2012

Let Us Compare Ecstasies

With apologies to Leonard Cohen (Let Us Compare Mythologies)

Body and mind — words and things.

Les extases de Nane Yelle, dans l'histoire de sa passion pour un chamane de l'enchâssement vertigineux du réel, ces extases mentales ne sont rien à côté des désirs dont le halètement de feu dans tous mon corps me ravit au gré de mes investissements libidinaux sur le timbre de voix, le grain de la peau, l'œil bleu de noir, le corps variable de mes jeunes amants qui, tous, s'allègent dans le sommeil au point que l'extase matérielle se diffuse en réverbérations heureuses dans le continuum de l'amour fou des mots et des choses.

Yolande Villemaire La Vie en prose (Montreal: Les Herbes Rouges, 1980)

And so for day 1970
05.05.2012

Noetic Fallacy Fallacy

The reading below hinges on the distinction between "Snowman" (a being made of snow) and "Snow Man" (a being observing snow). It is a nicety not found in Fowler's. Search engines readily respond to either strings with image sets of anthropomorphic snow sculptures.

It is the making human of the inanimate that brought the distinction to the fore for me via C.D. Lewis reading Robert Langbaum. Lewis picks up a discussion of pathetic fallacy and identifies a subspecies "noetic fallacy" (see Lewis The Lyric Impulse).

Mr. Langbaum sees the subject [... comments on Langbaum's reading of poems by Marianne Moore ...] It is salutary to be reminded that natural objects do not have human purposiveness or feelings; but I do not see that such reminders constitute a new nature poetry.

On the other hand, Mr. Langbaum adduces Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man", "which contrasts the inevitably anthropomorphic human apprehension of a landscape with the landscape as it might be apprehended by the mindless 'mind' of a snow man". I have studied this poem very attentively, and come to the conclusion that the poem is attempting the impossible. He has tried to put himself into the mind not even of an animal, but of an artifact — a snow man which has no sentience whatsoever. Mr. Langbaum's "as it might be apprehended" gives the game away: the poet has sought by this means to convey the absolute purity, the essence, of a winter landscape; but his method is not purely objective. Side-stepping, the pathetic fallacy, he has tumbled into another pitfall — let us call it the noetic fallacy.

Let's sort out what the poet has sought to accomplish and what the critic sees at work. Langbaum does suggest that impossible attempt that pushed Lewis to new coinage. He writes in "The New Nature Poetry" (collected in The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature)

Take as an example of the new sense of nature Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man," which contrasts the inevitable anthropomorphic human apprehension of a winter landscape with the landscape as it might be apprehended by the mindless "mind" of a snow man.

Langbaum then cites the beginning of the poem ("One must have a mind of winter [..]") and provides the last stanzas as both proof and illustration.

                                  not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Lewis accepts Langbaum's assertion that the reader is invited to identify with an attempt to apprehend a mindless mind. But there are three "nothings" at play that could very well be the counters of a contemplative mind: nothing from the subjective self observing is placed into the landscape, nothing is observed that is not in the landscape including the nothing that is in the landscape. Queue de poisson.

Abrupt end or beginning? The nothing that is the self. We need not be in the mindless mind or mindless. We can call upon Buddhist tradition to explore emptiness. I quote from Hōsaku Matsuo's preface to The Logic of Unity: The Discovery of Zero and Emptiness in Prajñāpāramitā Thought [Translated by Kenneth K. Inada] who is quoting from the Heart Sutra: "Consciousness is at once emptiness and emptiness is at once consciousness." Is this not one having a mind of winter?

And so for day 1311
16.07.2010