10 Years Ago

Darin Stevenson updated his status.

Oct 20, 2015 11:02:06 am

In the sun, I was watching mist rise from the eave next-door and I was musing about, as I often do, what ancient peoples made of phenomenon, because, they didn’t know physics, they didn’t have a representational relationship with phenomenon. Language didn’t tell them what things were — relation told them what things were — language was something they used to talk about this. In watching the mist I realized that no one knows what this is, and if I don’t know what it »is… what is it? So I forgot about mist and models and steam and all that for a moment, and I just really immersed myself in the visual phenomenon — the phenomenon. And it was quite incredible — I don’t know what I can say about it except that I realized that our technological, our technical understanding of phenomenon is ruining our intelligence — because we relate with the phenomenon as though it has the ontological status of the technical derivatives in language… and nothing more. And, as you can see, that would be like amputating the body at the ankle of one foot, because, well, you know, that’s the part of the body that ‘has purchase on reality’, it’s the sole of the foot. Then you could shave that down until you just have a thin sheaf of flesh, the ‘sole itself’, and say ‘this is the person; the rest of this body just rests on this’. Right? Except in our minds, of course, we cannot see how ridiculous this kind of thinking or speaking really is. So it becomes our minds and thought, speech and… sometimes…action. I saw the face of time, what minds are like, how it is to dream, what an organism is, what life and death are about. Even now, as I speak, threads of light glisten between plants in the garden next-door as the sunlight transits them in moving atmosphere. But those are »not webs; no one knows what those are and no one knew. So they didn’t »see what they had not »categorized. We would see strands of light come to life between plants as if light was traveling back and forth, I am watching it right now, as if two plants are having a conversation across an almost invisible thread with flashings of light. We would not think of ‘a web’, we would see ‘the between’ of the plants come to life with signals in light across ‘tiny hairs’. Like neurons, like minds… and I can see this, right now, in front of me… but the mind of ‘knowing what things are’ destroys it. If I ‘know what things are’, I don’t really see much beyond what the labels and my historied observations incline me to notice…” In the mists — as they vorticed in the sun — there were prismatic rainbow changing shapes of iridescent color shot throughout the transformations of the tendrils. Living color. Changing, living, arising, dying… color. And anyone who saw this and did not know ‘what’ it was, would be instructed by it… but all of those who know ‘what’ it is, cannot see it. I am learning again how to see… beyond ‘what’.

∞ “We would see strands of light come to life between plants as if light was traveling back and forth, I am watching it right now, as if two plants are having a conversation across an almost invisible thread with flashings of light. We would not think of ‘a web’, we would see ‘the between’ of the plants come to life with signals in light across ‘tiny hairs’. Like neurons, like minds… and I can see this, right now, in front of me… but the mind of ‘knowing what things are’ destroys it. If I ‘know what things are’, I don’t really see much beyond what the labels and my historied observations incline me to notice…”