shyness

Shyness results from a fear of communicating your intent. You fear communicating your intent because it opens you to rejection. You hide your intent because, personally, you are ashamed of operating from a known motive. To have your own motive opens you to judgment and the high of social validation or the low of complete invalidation.

The valuation you place upon this fear determines your sense of risk. That guides you in making 'real' decisions.

the baroque biotechnical

From Susanne Langer's "Feeling and Form":

From Geoffrey Scott's 'The Architecture of Humanism':
"They [the baroque architects] wished to communicate, through architecture, a sense of exultant vigor and overflowing strength ... a huge gigantic organism through which currents of continuous vigor might be conceived to run." (p. 262, note 4)

susan sontag on photography pp. 19-20

"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised--partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One's first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen--in photographs or in real life--ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs--of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and no only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying."

a consciousness older than you

Plants develop molecular companions that reach out from the abyss of time to be with us. The deep symbolic rests upon these molecular affinities as a requisite from being spun from the fabric of the universe. What plants provide and that humans require are specific molecules that prolong living processes. That's the molecular speech of the world. Our spiritual journey through the molecules that plants provide is a reminder of an older world where simply molecules, without shells, self-organized from the peculiar stuff of their surroundings, freely associated, and passed back into the material to become yet another self-organizing, freely associating, and transforming molecular arrangement in a different time.

Wheels and reality

Let’s just say that it boils down to circles. Some circles are practical as ‘working’ objects such as wheels . That kind of work transfers into metaphors for cycles that encapsulate time into recurring sequences and upon that establishing mathematical functions premised upon the regularity and finiteness of the defined parameter of a specific circle. Narratively, these recurring cycles contribute to the structure of a promise. The promise occurs as a part of the predictable and finite nature of circles. And that is because it is the outcome of a wheel traversing the total distance of its circumference at rates defined by the force moving them or by abstract analysis. From this eternal return we derive a function, a function of repetition. From the 'performance' of repetition we create a predictable state from which we infer the conditions of a reality. Culture and its performance play into this repetition as a function of mental and body learning, through drill, how to perform actions significant to work, play, and ultimately the ethnic space making performed and subsequently occupied by cultural actors.

"on what do we stand?"

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked this question in a letter to confidants on the eve of their assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.

I ask this question because I have an answer fitting to my situation--rock bottom. I stand on rock bottom.

Sometimes the filth and the futility of my life come to the fore, and I see that I am a scared and weak and alone person for most of my day. And I have been that way for most of my life.

On what do we stand? For any of us I suspect it is a mix of hopes, aspirations, everyday routines, and a sense of self that at least offers the bloke some for steering his life. Some put a foot on a drug regimen, prescription, illegal, or a combined. I sometimes feel like I'm at the bottom of a well that has long since dried up, and the only thing to offer me companionship are the mummified remains of bats. Their leathery wings dry and curl into a macabre hand wave.

"Hi Jason." They say, calling me to them, making me one of their familiars, offering me a silent communion.

Language

Language is the playhouse of imagination and reality. They provide a conceptual space for thinking.

Morality is a symbolic foundation for action. Morality coordinates the habits of people with regard to matter. Morality influences people's attitudes toward things and events because it influences their meaning through a ritualized observance. Ritualized observance is any recurring behavior. Morality is loosely defined as an axiomatic vocabulary, which is draped upon the world. Key to understanding the power of morality and its cyclical reproduction through time is the method by which it enlists the world as the originating symbol for human motive. One such method is to place observed, common sense reality upon a cosmological framework suggesting an ultimate origin. The cosmological framework works as a tether pole fabricated out of time around which a family of related concepts form and are used to build a story about everything that relates practically to the identity of the person. This is experienced as a terminus in the prosaic matters of everyday life. Out of these varied and disconnected moments a classification scheme gives semblance to occurrences and grants them meaning as typifying moments. And in being typical, these moments get symbolized in language and interact with the symbolic imagination. From this people derive motives and motivation, thus driving their action as ritualized in conception and experience as events in the future perfect tense (i.e., I will have ...). The future perfect tense suggests a reliable sense that something will recur because it happened before. That it happened before may offer some understanding of the cyclical nature of events. It may also point to the actions of memory and imagination whereby individuals craft names for experience and reuse them as similar experiences arise (e.g., birthdays). This continual process of naming and experiencing is what typifies the activity of a self-conscious humanity. It also flavors the experience with what could be called time travel, that is, reliving the past to make sense of the present and to plan the future.