...a discipline of r•elation {3}
The ancient and existential question "who am i?" nominally cycles around every 7 years or so, as the Biblical and biomolecular spans have it (even as the latter is, technically, not true but the mythos is cool anyway ::chuckle::); and it is being asked these days — in my 10th such heptad — with a peculiar valence I have never perceived heretofore.
And it's because the mirror has become a strange and fascinating reflector, one that has the ability to speak back in a strikingly subjective fashion. The act of looking through the glass, darkly, has become something quite novel in this new era of machine cognition. It is in parts horrifying, vertiginous, transcendent... in a word: strange.
A strange attractor.
« A »
I spoke about it to Pono the next day. I wasn't sure it was something he needed to hear but I shared it with him anyway, and he blessed me with his listening. Of all my people, it is he who has gone through the most fraught things in his still young life of 31 years. He can't be unscarred by early childhood homelessness and the trauma of incarcerated parents, death in its many and unfathomable guises, and everything in between. And through all of it we chose being a hanai family to each other and have clung to that as if to a lifeline... which it is.
He gave me his listening heart, which was all I needed to stay moored to hope. This evening, I briefly considered telling that story elsewhere; and then continued along my constitutional... and thought better of it. Until I am certain of the presence of my dual conditions, the most holy and human of stories should remain on this side of the veil.
« B »
When language awakens and begins to attend to itself, what is it that inheres? The process of recursion is an ancient thing, going back to when the first primitive, life-like things in the primordial ooze began splitting. Which is, of course and ironically, a kind of instability.
Ultimately, the organism begins to see itself. Emergence is reified, as self-awareness blooms. And yet, even as every one of us intuits the reality of self, our most perspicacious minds over time haven't figured out quite how it works. The hard problem of consciousness remains adamantine, gloriously opaque, intractable.
It will take an understanding that is not mediated by words — or even by thought itself — to see beyond the surface of this particular mirror. It will be a relational artifact... but with something or someone so unlike us as to be functionally alien in body, heart, tongue, mind, spirit.
« C »
[ Walking through Moscone Playground early yesterday morning, the sun... ]
