i always loose* my way: on turning sixty, 1 (of 12)
2017 (-2026)
The expression of information in our universe evolves entropically but is represented temporally.
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-particles-self-assemble-self-heal.html
'An elegantly simple experiment with floating particles self-assembling in response to sound waves has provided a new framework for studying how seemingly lifelike behaviors emerge in response to external forces.'
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-particles-self-assemble-self-heal.html#jCp
1: Twain and Melville.
…it was quite windy for a couple days last week - a shudder a shaking from the northeast, chilling and nipping, a lying wind, a trickster thwarting expectations of the continued lovely April sunshine.
On the first wind-day I went for a short walk to grab a coffee at a nearby bar-cafe. Down the stairs, out the gate, left to the east then left again north - into that unwarm, oddly white iced air. The buildings lining that ancient road (Roman) funneled and accelerated its speed and strength, the wind's speed, a sting or stings that shifts thoughts from one place to another, from where you might have been mostly or even a little into the present if you weren’t already here. Things and more things were flying by both above and along the road’s pavement: a saddened menu stand from a distant restaurant; a clanging metal tray; papers and bags and even a pot’s lid – maybe in an effort to save its friend (the scraping menu.) The lid - a crackly blue-purple color. The menu was green and black with white writing.
Papers and bags whipping around, scrunched faces to and fro along the sidewalk, a few displeasing steps forward into the wind then... a pause. Look. A young couple - still seated at a white metal table - twirling down the road, a pot of tea on the table. They didn’t seem at all panicked at their circumstance, hovering along and over the road, instead smiled at each other so happy in love. Love, love, love. The two of them didn’t have an Italian air - pale skin, straight hair, awkward body language. Northeast. Maybe they’d floated down from the Czech republic. That seemed to fit them somehow. I turned into one of the bars lining the street for my morning coffee.
The next day the wind had gathered force, stronger still, almost nothing outdoors remained fixed, messes everywhere, hodge-podge things mixing, trees like New Yorkers with mussed hair in a February gale, fainting plants begging for care, plastic and cardboard and the oddest of stuff mixing together like forming galaxies. From inside I had to step outside onto my kitchen balcony to sweep up shares from an old glass that had fallen and broken, its once useful form now lost forever into jagged pieces promising danger. As I began to shake the remains from the tray into a bag… a goat flew by, still chewing grass. Its body had found an eddy in the flow in the somewhat sheltered balcony air and hovered there a minute, looking at me. ‘Baaaah’, she said – it looked like a she – before twirling out again into the open. I presume she landed somewhere in Lazio maybe. Or further south. Anyway.
On the third day it softened, that wind. I went outside on the other terrace – and found such a mess - storage boxes scattered, old papers, leaves and unidentifiable strips of clothing and somehow beneath a silver metal chair, evenly distributed around a pair of shoes---small wood chips that must have been blown from one of the boxes into which had been thrown away a dried orchid plant, who knows how long before. Things set aside are forgotten.
It’s true, this last part, directly. Real. That is, fact, no metaphor, no exaggeration. No young Slavic couple nor any bleeping goats. All the mess everywhere else and everywhere else a mess but the small dark chips of wood had somehow managed to flow in that wind first around a corner – the terrace is an L-shape: to the north exposed to the hard wind, then lining the west side of this building – they’d found or been pushed by an eddy behind some boxes along that red wall that sheltered the chair from the wind and finally had laid themselves there beneath, perfectly distributed as if by human hand. Or something. Energy. So.
It reminded me (not really – I’d merely been avoiding the doing of it or waiting for something without really knowing precisely what) that I’d turned 50 last December and, being an epochal number, like many thought I might summarize things, so to speak. What, why. Who, for others. But a week passed, a month, then the winter and on it was sliding into spring. Like other things set aside it might have been forgotten. Except that it was still there, in the present, represented somewhere: a thing to do. Unlike the orchid’s abandoned plastic pot, (no longer relevant, no longer in the realm of ‘something with which I have to do’.) So. The even distribution of a bunch of chips of wood under a chair on a terrace reminded me of, or to. This.
Maybe you’ve heard the hallmark card-ish phrase, the two most important days of your life: that of your birth, and the day you discovered why you were born. (Mark Twain.) (So many cheep ironic or vulgar or both, jokes one could put, so few pixels.) Call me… my name. Find me a whale, or someone else after the same. (Ahab. Or Ishmael. Or Nick. Or Jay. Or…) But what’s in a name. I’m digressing. And krptic-ing maybe for anyone who doesn't know me yet has found their eyes here-a-wandering. Before that goes too far, let me take a look at… Ahab, so to speak, and Moby Dick.
Words not: entropy, temporality, systems, expressions… stuff, in other words though they, what the words try to describe, don't respond much to those words. The words that describe are tools, the sentences being composed are tools, the rhythms in the lines are tools still each expression is only one, n is always n, not merely ‘of’ n: only n. That's important. Maybe pause a moment if you're inclined to. Just in case: it means you only get one thing, one expression, here, now.
In the last line I had misspelled rhythm, again. I always do except when I google the thing, not looking at the drop down menu but the keys - and then always spell it correctly as I type in the word. That is, I misspell until I start typing at the google line, without looking. The expression of my misspelling it outside of there, outside the google search line, remains intact. Something in me presumes, infers, either its unimportance or correctness, of that misspelling. You could break it down to different kinds of memory and learning but… that, I think, isn’t enough to model why. Why?
Everything and every thing are always in a dialogue. (The are is intentional.) So what should I do then when I get to rhythm, the word, to spell it right? Open up a page in google and re-spell or try, consistently, to remember it correctly, write it down a hundred times one day then a hundred times again the next. (By hand though. It would likely work, actually.) In that latter, I would force it in so to say. But I won’t do that. I’ll still misspell the thing in the future and likely still go to google again if I’m on-line and there, likely still, write it correctly before pressing the search button.
Moby Dick. The day Ahab was born. It, that it is us, starts a bit earlier than that, if you can even identify or delineate the start of anything. (You can’t really. You can only create it, the beginning, very much like you can only create a story, not identify it. Because… you can’t really identify you. Only create it, infer yourself. There are no qualia as such, I think.) So the stuff that dialogued with itself, all those systems, growing from the first, carrying the need to be expressed through time, each of those expressions evolved and evolving entropically… responded to themselves. By the time Ahab was born so much had already been said, so many whales already searched for, so many walls punched through (it’s a personal allusion. I did have a very problematic familial condition and did punch holes in walls, rather those in my bedroom in frustration back then,) so many misspellings and corrected spellings – representations change - and misspellings again. N… is always n. Topography. Repeat it again: topography. Topographies, multi-dimensionally representing complexity. Stuff... is already there.
(get it? ho-ho)
Let’s get back to a more readily identifiable subject or narrative before I lose anyone trying to follow along, including me, with my loosing. Context. Is likely what the cliché (Twain’s two most important days of your life) aims for. The first, that day of birth, is presumed not to have been decided on by any you and in some regard, if you delineate enough or identify anyway - there was and is still a you and a beginning to things, a beginning of consciousness, well, at least of the ‘your’ kind of consciousness.
You’re born into a place. (It’s a bit hard to read that last line above but maybe try, slowly, again. Create an understanding from the parts. That is or would be basically an affective metaphor of the idea.) On the day you’re born you still haven’t really developed enough to separate yourself from that place yet, those people and things - but that will come rapidly, usually. The story, your story, you will begin in a few years though you’ll keep on making lots of biological hardware to represent it all, everything you can – it’ll be 10 years or so before the harder decisions come, inside, unaware, when you’ll stop taking it all in, when what you’re supposed to do, predicting unawarely, the systems that make you prune those networks, (biology again,) into a more useful, leaner structure in some regards while bulking up some gray matter in the places you think will be more important to operate from. But the style, at least, of your symphony - the themes - will have been already written down, and remain.
So. In my case – it is me having turned 50 here - there were, leading up to that birth-day, a lot of whales and misspellings just like with everyone else. Like I said, it's hard to delineate a beginning, when you began and begin. But let's say for this note the beginning is in the womb.
A bit different than usual, if there can be a usual. Relatively rich networks describing (no, not describing, not yet. There isn’t a describer, a human storyteller of any kind at all before 23-24 weeks and likely really not until you pop out and get all that juice, hormones – wake up, slap, wail for a whale (ouch, bad pun alert,) - so to speak. There may be tendencies already there, of course, in fact there most likely are. The awakened you then still isn’t much like the awake you later. When do we begin…depends on who writes the, and when and where and how, represented or inferred aspects of the world that weren’t me or self or weren’t going to lead to the expressed affect of me. Those last lines might be a little tough again but if it might please, read them twice. It gets clearer.
Timing is so very important… like the Japanese saying, how a story ends is as 'big' as where it begins. At a certain point or points – then, in this my story - my mother likely sent me a message, call it a stress response but you can suppose other possibilities of kind and kinds, all that complexity, all the differences between one person-stuff developing in one womb and another and even the different ‘yous’, plural, in the same. The message, chemical, molecular, was something like: ‘the place-circumstance you’re being born isn’t going to be easy. At all. Like, it’s gonna’ probably suck. Talk amongst yourselves and start making the necessary adjustments. Or screw it it it's not worth it and remain un-expressed. Deal with it one way or another.’ That led to other questions based on answers, and other questions internally. A lot of them. (You know. Rythm. Rhythm. Rythem. When do you misspell, and when not. And why should you, or should you not.) Do we-i want to be born? Do we-i want to survive? Which parts of us will we-i have a better chance to … continue? Do we want to reproduce the carrying parts, the body, the species? Sexuality tendencies, hetero, homo and when? Who or what will you look for in any case? How will that change? How will you look for them?
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Well, a lot of those last bits are articulated much later (in living and life) but not entirely. Because – all of those outcomes represented will have already happened before. Let me repeat that to myself and you: all of those outcomes represented will have already happened before. Not to me as in the forming me. But to those systems that were developing into a me. Partitures of a symphony even if some themes, a personal style, will already be in place. That style is the last thing to go, (to borrow an Oliver Sacks phrase.) Topographies, again.
(Pause. Before going on - for the first time, it’s important, I always loose my way, rather don’t loose my way but wander and open and move from one… place to another, not one story to another, not one narrative – it’s the same narrative. But where you are can change. Places in the scene. So I’m writing this main notion: The expression of information in our universe evolves entropically but is represented temporally. Again: The expression of information in our universe evolves entropically but is represented temporally. It’s a problem. They look the same at first but between the two is an unending abyss. We, there is, always tango, a jiggle, between the two. End pause.)
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Hmmm. I promised myself limits in numbers, twelve notes plus one without going much beyond a couple thousand words in each, keep the total below 30k. Yet here I am already pushing 1900 without having even begun what was to be the second half. Compactedness…I suppose I won’t pay attention to that idea, mostly. Few if any will read this anyway, at least for a good while. Then again.
And in case they or I do - I will have to shortcut a little to keep it from sliding away, at least this first one. I’ll re-title it ‘go’, maybe, maybe not. Rhythm. Italian. The me inferred that will write is not exactly the same as the me that will search on google. Italian was the first language I was exposed to a bit too briefly as an infant and even though later I read English…something about the process of sound to symbol remained. So I misspell today in two languages. So again. Ahab. In the womb. Timing.
…results, to cut short, of the time and timing before and after Twain’s first day, the day you were born or I was in this case. Forgive the shortcut for those fewest, maybe that only one, still here but who aren't in a relevant field. Conceptually it likely isn't necessary but still, to summarize that me: an hysteric HPA axis; rapid postpartum development; test scores on the categorize-able extension of the bell curve, language comprehension over the .99; likely pre-disposed dopaminergic roads vta-up already about as narrowly efficient as… mule trails; big attention on those bulky networks reading or listening to place and people - eyes, postures, scents, movements. Detachment. And rich internal worlds.
And attachments: big appetite, big laugh, big play, big love - toward so-called in-group, a larger me. No possession or motivated me to own; nearly no societal symbol dependence or adherence so give away things from the beginning, toys are just toys, clothes are just clothes. But fields, the snow, water…things you can touch and swim with body and mind into...were and are, love. And love… is family, and friend, one at a time: Stephen, Chris, Peter, Leonard - then the wars - then Jim, Rafael and finally Evelina - though that last opens a different flavor. Groups are (I'm using are as I describe that me, then,) always… groups, a them-place, places I can’t belong to, only visit. Love-less, problematic, false in some way. Little Johnny Hairy Head, my societal-given name would be. But…thank heavens for American football.
(It's not only indulgence, the lines above and to come, below: those early moments count, a lot. For me and everyone else. A fundament that usually remains. Anyway.)
Give me the ball those 2 or 3 times per game only and score I did, touchdown, every time basically, how strange from the odd and ugly little johnny hairy head, his carrying of kids jumping on top, trudging along across the line. Quietly. Unwavering. Something a bit different than confident. Rather incompetent in anything and everything else having to do with groups. But that certainty of running with the ball, knowing that I will not allow anyone else to tackle me, remained.
Anyway again. Autobiography is discouraging. Here it’s not even really the point but unavoidable in getting to, for me, understanding. So … you sometimes fall into streaming voice, me that is, anything to avoid an, the, ‘I’ expressed to self, your self. That discomfort, a nihilism, is mostly a result of... development both in and out of utero, as mentioned above. Lateral Habenula. Still, that felt discomfort of I-expression is supposed to be displayed later - because it came later. Not only in and from the set-up, birth, etc. but in the articulation, the development after Twain's first day - but before the second 'day': expression or meaning. The why. Of everything before and from then on.
So, to get to a point which would have been further ahead, jumping over all the middle, the chronology, the plot, thematic development: narrative, our fabulated notion of time - back to the tonic, to the arbitrarily set beginning of even this note, its sort of God, its n that is always n, Twain’s phrase and Melville’s metaphorical elements. Circumstance. Family.
But there are practical limits and here I’m already at what... 2400 words or so. So this first note will have to be dived in two. Next month will be working titled ... I always lose* my way 2: the day you detach. Maybe.
.....and music: (from 1966)