Here there be... Something Else

[ineffabelle]

This post is cut for length and images, but please read on. This one's big.
"Seek ye the gnarl" - Rudy Rucker

In any widespread debate among human beings, there tends to be a portrayal of the situation as a binary conflict. As an example, let's take "democrat vs. republican" - not that the content matters here, but it's a common example that most of you will be familiar with. But this translates to gender, sexuality, and many other human "dialogues" (note the already implicit binary)...
Most of the time it's portrayed something like this:


Depending on who is portraying the situation, the left circle might be bigger or the right or the middle more or less overlapping, but it's still a binary venn diagram of some sort. Of course what is missing from the picture is what makes this post worth posting... the Excluded Other, the Damned Thing as Robert Anton Wilson put it, the thing that is semiotically made invisible by those who fear it. In reality, though this is also an over-simplification, the venn diagram should look more like this:


Of course, it would be more accurate to portray a vast multidimensional grid of interlocking rings in all directions, but for the purpose of this post, this will suffice...

The excluded other has to fight just to get acknowledgement of its own existence, it is not debated or even scorned (except to say 'oh, that's crazy talk!') because it is not known of/acknowledged by most. It has been buried and forgotten, so that the powers that be (in whichever sphere happens to be 'in dialogue') can keep the minds of people on their two favored options. This binary portrayal may just be a function of the human brain or it may be an ontological condition of those who attempt to control debate, that it is always in their interest to keep things in a dialogue rather than a true analysis.

In the art of pharminatrix, the writing of salimondo, the music of bibble, the sociological screeds of daoistraver, and the works of many others whom I would consider 'in this thing of ours', there is an attempt to re-awaken an awareness of the Something Else, to remind us that there are "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"...
This is perhaps the primary thing that draws us together - as a different kind of revolution, a semiotic revolution, a disinhibitory stimulus to reawaken the god within us, that the false rulers of our minds don't want us to reclaim for ourselves.

There are two basic understandings that buddhism (at least of the zen or chan variety), daoism and existentialism share:
1. Desire can be a trap.
2. Whatever you say it is, it is precisely not that.

In existentialism the way 2 is explained is that we are always at least one step ahead of ourselves, that to enclose the totality of our understanding, we must be larger than that totality... this totality is re-totalizing in every moment...
Thus we are always incomplete, a work in progress, which leads back to 1.
Where daoism and existentialism perhaps branch off from buddhism is in seeing this incompleteness as necessary for existence. We cannot complete ourselves. In the moment we are complete, we are no longer "here" except as an object to be used by those still incomplete.
But what we 'are' is trapped within the time span of our incompleteness. So make the most of it.

Where desire fails is when we actually strive for completion through any incomplete means. To be a 'true believer', and thus to seek this binary in which all things can be understood and collected.

This is why the metaphor of "spectrums" fail for me, whether in politics, sexuality, gender or otherwise...

Comments

[gaspaheangea.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about category theory and buddhism the past few days. For any countable network of things -- that is one with a countable number of nodes and whatever linkages between them (for the moment I'll stave off further structuring on this), there is what is perpetually not on the network. The degree to which one is aware of what cannot be on the network depends on how the network is shored. An easy example is the kind of regular oscillations of people's sensoria: the waking state is held to be principal, and sleep is thought to be something different (dream-life has different rules than waking life). The network of the species is not the same as the network of individuals. I said 'shore', so I'll call the sleep-wakefullness stuff the tide. I think there's a tide for most networks. Some nodes regularly are on, and regularly are off those networks. The classical existentialist or nihilist will consolingly brood about nodes not on the network, thrillingly though not exultingly aware of the nothingness of which they cogitate. Tightly-shored networks, particularly those which do their damndest to deny those nodes which dwell in the tidezone, aren't that adaptive, or tend to have a lot of internal node synthesis to make up for the tide-zone denying rationalizations they make.

You said "we are always at least one step ahead of ourselves, that to enclose the totatlity of our understanding, we must be larger than that totality... this totality is re-totalizing in every moment", which I read as "if we assert the existence of an Ur-object, universal object, etc. which is a cone or cocone over all objects in the particular network in question, then that object is just as anonymous as the rest because we can create a new object Ur', and thus Ur and Ur' are distinct, therefore neither is truly universal'. The network/category in question is sticky that way.

The escape clause, if you will, is a kind of Godelization. Obviously we want something which cannot link up in any way to any of the objects in the network. The important thing I've realized is that this cannot be done uniquely. It's like, on one side, you've got this network which is sticky, adhesive, which attaches to everything possible, and on the other side, suchness/tathata/nothingness which cannot be got at, is entirely inaccessible to the node-synthesis process, etc - it's not inviolate, but slippery, infinitely frictionless, but the zones of Tumbolia near whatever the local context might be are turbulent and frictionless in ways that language is incapable of expressing. This is why the buddhist schools say that the mind is still with respect to objects which neither exist or do not exist: not that they're particularly inviolate, but they are too slippery and too hard to grasp. You can't really hold them in your hand. But I can make examples of such objects: for instance, take the question of: where was the Mandelbrot set in 1781? That question has pretty much the same answer as where was I in 1932.

I (quite foolishly) desire the type of knowledge which cannot be obtained by any currently available epistemologies except imagination. Like the development of mathematics by primates in the milky way over several million year timespans, and so forth and so on. I can't satisfy that desire by appealing to reference works or simulations, and I certainly don't have the type of tools which would allow me to collect that sort of information.

I'm sitting here thinking that what I want most spread around the place is the kind of functions which will just astonish their users. I think there are some amazing portable function libraries which will completely astonish those who witness them, and so on and so forth.

[bibble.livejournal.com]

i was listening to an interview with rucker the other day and he said that michael gondry has optioned mathematicians in love as his next film project.

[adrienmundi]

In my internal lexicon, I tend to refer to binarists as People of the Line, with full implication of scorn at a one dimensional model, and meaning to allude to People of the Book as well. I've never understood why peole insist on thinking unidimensionally when life is much greater than that, but maybe my answer is already present in the question and I don't want to face it.

People of the Hypercube

[ineffabelle]

Perhaps the important thing is simply to remember that no matter how we cover the ground, there is always "Something Else" beyond the far reaches of our maps.

Re: People of the Hypercube

[adrienmundi]

I hope so; the thought of having mapped everything, of never encountering novelty or difference, seems incredibly depressing.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Adding this to the stuff that I revisit periodically to remind me who I am.

[alektraunic.livejournal.com]

NYC to Change ID Rules for Transgendered
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NEW_GENDER_RECORDS

and this too....

[alektraunic.livejournal.com]

if ideas are like fractals
then on the same zoom path of this post
you would find "the best choice is always 'neither'"

Re: and this too....

[ineffabelle]

it's funny, I think you're one of the few people with an even higher "compression ratio" than me... I like that!

Re: and this too....

[alektraunic.livejournal.com]

and yet
i am obsessed with white noise