Tuesday, March 1, 2022
winter 2022
See the site home page for the current update.
Coordinated global response to the deluded despot’s invasion of Ukraine hallmarks the best of humanity at planetary, historic scale.
Feb. 26 | I believe I’m ready to begin a long project online piecemeal, maybe offering several named pieces per week, but at least one new posting weekly.
The unnamed project conception won’t be obvious from the pieces, but gradually the accumulation of postings will imply a clearing sense of what the project is, where it’s going, its pieces becoming sequenced aspects of its emerging conception.
Any sense of mystery there isn’t being coy, rather preserving my freedom to let the project emerge its own way from the well-defined blueprint I’ve developed.
That includes sometimes posting pieces very precursorily for elaboration later,
as if a topic is merely its title with short annotation.
Feb. 11 | “Idealizing better being for better humanity” preludes discussions of others’ work, beginning soon.
But it’s implicitly motivated by feeling from others so much complacency (slackerism); and so much consumerist pandering in journalism.
Highly engaged artists and inquirers are commonly regarded by market society as aliens—or curiosities. Highly better-advised action and expertise easily seem elitist.
Feb. 7 | What’s the better (“best”?) cohering potpourri of this month’s leading ephemera?
It’s anyone’s guess. Sensibility progresses—and finds progress in contempor-
aneity—by articulate responsiveness to news, shaping new projects, new themes, new regions of thematics, as times call for.
There’s no theory of Our evolving that captures a Telos, because We are ultimately Open ended, as if Endless.
We make The Point: Of wanting better life (better being, thus better being)—then better humanity?
Inquiring minds aim to design futures. The artful species ultimately coheres Itself, its Self, like gods of conceiving authors, gods always mirroring one’s subjection to revision.
So, here’s a sense of “Humanity today”
mid-December through January | Turn of the year without students in town was heaven, since I live near campus. Creative peace!
But I would have gotten lots done anyway, as I did this autumn.
I know that vagueness here about what I’m doing is uninteresting. But it’s important to simply avow that I’m enjoying good progress—albeit slower than anticipated, like a hiker finding more steep hills than expected: Good pace, disappointing distance covered. (Secretly, I dare “you” to presume I’m not doing something grand—while keeping a humble sense of humor, I hope, about smug quipping.)
I used the above topographical trope for the earlier home page update note, then he obliquely called that “apt for a mindscape of variably clear and variably challenging paths” (easily regarding myself as narrative figure) because odd terms become all I can readily improvise sensibly about a venture of conceptual prospecting that is in uncharted territory—to me anyway.
Well, I should say: regardless of me, because I know the existing territories well.
I am working in a lovely wilderness (except for postcards home: the update notes, like this one).
The difference gets eerie: feeling confident that my work isn’t idiosyncratic, but witnessing that others’ well-known views are commonly misunderstood; so, what’s the point of new kinds of work, if accessible existing work of conceptualists is regarded casually or defensively—or dismissively?
Scholars make lives explicating others, but who (outside of the guild) knows
the difference between notable insight about the other and fictioning that other, because the common reader isn’t in a position to know the difference?
“What was the original author really doing?“
Who knows; who cares?
So, I do what pleases me, with all due respect for new readers, but with increasing weariness about caring whether it’s useful.
Why not only keep to my own register?—and if “you” care to understand something obtuse (to you), you’ll let me know. I’m easy to contact.
