DABBLER

Habit

Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort : it is dogged by automatism. The most living thought becomes frigid in the formula that expresses it. The word turns against the idea. The letter kills the spirit. 

-Bergson 

The Palliative of the Empirical

The empirical, with its entropic geometry of plane surfaces and perspectival depths, with its closed forms and stable objects, is but a phase shift in this perpetual event of experience’s self-renewing passage. Empirical grounding-the entropy, closure, and stability of formed perception- is provisional, but a beat in a rhythm. Its solidity is continually moved, removed, and refreshed by iterations of force.

Invisible force. Newton did not see gravity. He felt its effect: a pain in the head. The newly visioned blind do not see things. They feel a pain in their eyes. “He could not distinguish objects. The pain produced by the light forced him to close the eye immediately.” The forced opening of sense experience can only figure at first as unlocalized, unspecified pain. “She couldn’t even be positive these strange new sensations were coming through her eyes.” With more experience, the feeling of the effect comes to be identified. Reactions in different sense modes are cross-referenced. Through that cross-referencing, the feeling is consistently indexed to what have become recognizable regions of experience. The regions are distributed on either side of an inside/outside divide. The effect is now perceived as the result of localizable interactions between formed organs and objects. The experience has been determined, objectified, empiricized. Only now that it has become determinately intermodal is it experienced as a sight. The passage into empirical appearance coincides with an integration/differentiation of sense modes. With that passage, and that determination, the pain is (provisionally) assuaged.

Assuaged: the empirical is a palliative. Objects are anesthetic specifications of the growth pain of perception’s passing into and out of itself. The anesthetic is the perceived, us distinguished from the perceiving: objects passing into empirical existence, sensation passing out of itself into that objectivity. Perceived objects are side-effects of the appearing of force, by-products of its quelling. Side-effects: because the force of emergence also continues, along with and past the empirical, into simultaneous and repeated self-abstraction from it. The “pain” also continues: simultaneous and bifurcating paths of perception’s passing. If the empirical is the anesthetic, then the pain accompanying perception’s passing forcefully into itself and continuing superempirically in flight from its objective quelling-what can this be but the aesthetic?

The pain is the beauty (of the world emergent).

-Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual 160-1

2011

What I like about Susan Miller is when she tells me exactly what I was already thinking:

From January 22 on, your social life will quiet down and not be as active as it has been over the past year. At that time, Jupiter will enter Aries and will ready you for your big moment coming when Jupiter moves into Taurus on June 4, 2011, to stay a year until June 12, 2012. This is a big moment to anticipate, for clearly you are about to enter a golden phase, and it will be one of the most important and beneficial phases of your life. We only get about seven or eight visits of Jupiter in our own sign in a lifetime, and you are coming up on one of those rare seasons later this year.

With Jupiter moving into the last sign, Aries, before it visits yours, you may now start to see many elements of your old life fade away. Do not be concerned when this happens. At the end of any big cycle, the major planet involved sees to it that outworn elements of your life fade away so that you can enjoy new opportunities. If you didn’t unload things, the universe would not be able to give you anything new - there would be no room for the new! Life is a continual process of change - letting go of all that is no longer vital to you and sowing new seeds for the future. This happens to all of us, no matter how old we happen to be. You will benefit from this energy, dear Taurus - trust in that!