bodies and minds

We are not unique.

We are all trapped within a universe of our making. To consider for a moment that our awareness is our ability to fix time and that this is uniquely tied to our ability to store memory in word, what makes our condition so freeing yet so utterly trapping.

That's the issue. We see the end to our abilities within the framework of our abilities. To language is to bring meaning to the world, meaning that accrues the sediment of history. And that history defines what and who we are. Sure each moment is filled with the potential for freedom from this history, a new beginning. But what are we beginning? What first step are we taking and from what do we step? We're still tethered to a polestar of meaning, and it is that familiar patina of interpretation through which we see everything, even ourselves. Our consciousness has a flatness. We're trapped on a mobius strip of historically constituted awareness. Out of what it springs is an initial desire for speaking into the world and at that moment the full creation of the world as spoken rushes in to fill a void, a void presupposed by meaning, by position in semiotic space.

We're trapped along this oddly flat dimension of awareness, and it is that awareness which enables the awareness of being trapped. When we recognize the potential for a new beginning we see it's contours. When we see the same thing differently than another we recognize its dimensions. In symbolizing we usher in a reality that is symbol based. We mine the potential of our thought, and in that thought we fall as it were an abyss.

So being is an issue of symbol using and symbol using traps us in world of our own making. No, a clarification is needed. Our entrapment is in chasing for that chimera of significance, meaning. What a flag means to you and to mean can be utterly different yet a flag remains before us. Now what is this triad? It's simply a condition for recognizing the potential for meaning making and its utter failure. We may use the same word but it's meaning to us is often fleeting. We can draw an assumption that the two of us are in agreement concerning meaning, but that assumption, once again, gives rise to the perennial breakdown in coordinating action.

Yet we somehow find ways to continue our progress together or alone in some kind of working construction of social organization. How does this happen? I for one can speak to the ability to put my body through pain in order to exact money. Granted these jobs are fleeting, they insult my intellect, and my physical abilities insult their meaning of hard work. But that body in pain brings to reality something that was always there but lost sometimes in the world world of symbols. We've only granted ourselves a modicum of levitation from the real by the symbolic world, but that's all that's required. And given this modicum of levitation from reality we recognize it all too often when world comes crashing through word.

The strength of the base of a foundation is a body in pain. That's an investment in labor--a necessary condition of creations that transcend time that--once the bodies that have sacrificed to create them are gone--become artifacts in time.

Nothing new emerges from this writing that hasn't already been said and thought of in a million different ways--some better, some worse. I wonder why I do this.