Today’s thoughts.

I have been in a dialogue about the interpretation vs. objectivity of art, how it relates to the commodification of nature. My roots are showing, I find Kant’s transcendental idealism very compelling, though incomplete. His is that there is a real beyond the experience of the senses, which cannot be comprehended except as a bare abstraction. The world is mediated through our perception, and we cannot know a world except as we have it in representation. The sharing of representational frames expands our understanding of the world, but only as representation. When we know the world as such, as being a projection of our senses but as originating beyond our senses, we are being honest to our influence as subjects on the objective world, but also recognizing the beyondness of the world in itself. A la Schopenhauer, there is another side to the world, an intuitive aspect that is prior to the specified forms of representation, and we can know it through pure expressions of representation itself. Music and art speak to us on a level that is beneath our reasoning, he asserts, they speak on the level of our being itself, as coming from the same force within us that generates the world, a force of willing beyond subject and object, which then makes sense of the aesthetic power that art can have. There are other German critical philosophers whose opinions I know as other presences in that neighborhood, though less intimately.

When I go up into mountains, I touch something something simultaneously more visceral and more abstract. The immense, bare forms of granite around Mount Whitney and the way the light struck them left a profound impression on me. It is otherworldly. There are places and moments where the psychedelic seems tangible, not so much as a thrill, but for the dissolving of apparent categorizations into some kind of transcendental synthesis. Pure geometric forms are a thing of mathematical abstraction, but when they compile an enormous mountain face and the whole world around it, something so incredibly present, concrete, real—it is like seeing a pure bridge between two things we commonly separate in human experience. Abstract forms far more solid than myself. They are not there for me, they are indifferent to me, even somewhat hostile. If you follow in the direction of otherness in nature to its limit, it seems to correspond to Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction (i.e., the world as we can experience it is phenomenon, the world as we don’t is noumenon). There is mystery beyond that the further we go, the more we see ourself as subject, the more we see the world as object, the more we see ourself as object, the more we see the world as subject. When I go into the backcountry, I do become a sort of cosmonaut, an explorer of worlds, worlds within the world. The world’s nature has always been interesting to me to learn about, a passion I love to spread, I love education and connecting with people through understanding, but it has not been until more recently that I have accessed nature by acting it out with my body. “Hiking,” which is really just a stupid word used for differentiating people who like to walk in more remote areas—hiking is really just walking, and marketing wants to make it seem like hikers need all sorts of gear, most of which only really matters for someone who goes on challenging hikes that could put them at risk—is challenging is a sort of embodied relating to the world, one that is the soil for all sorts of other activities.

As always, this is prone to change and addition.

Like this:
I’m thinking that the storm vs sea myth does have relation to climate cycles and their effects on civilization. I’m also thinking that they pertain to the relation of patriarchal order over feminine chaos. I’m thinking that latent within the myth is a double-narrative, in which the ostracization of the nonlinear is preeminent, but hidden within is something that shows how the linear was wrong to do so and there is a redeemed version of reading into the myth. What is the Lord (Baal, Yahweh, Zeus, Marduk, Indra, Thor) if one is many, if El is Elohim, if there is complexity that is neither being nor nonbeing present at the creation of the world, integrally involved in all interrelativity? I’m thinking that the commentary of climate cycles confers with the sociocultural/psychological side of the myth, because both are emanations of the same patterns in the field of complexity. More to come.
I read a little myth from the Australians about how there was a great drought when the giant frog drank all the water up. All the animals tried to entertain him to make him laugh out the water. Kookaburra made jokes until he himself laughed, but frog stayed silent and stoic. Kangaroo jumped over emu, but frog stayed silent and stoic. Then eel slithered up to frog and began wiggling itself into knots, at first slowly, then more and more vigorously, and frog began laughing, and all the water rushed back out of his belly. Strong intonations of climate dynamics and turbulence theory.


Gorda