"The Flesh of Language" by David Abram [Cosmos Café 2021-09-30]

Commons Cosmos Café
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Upon some time reading Civic Jazz after our Cafe ', I came across this sentence on page 12;“Kenneth Burke came to see things in much the same way(as Walt Whitman),observing that any “complex social organization” must be “maintained by a state of mind” and that states of mind must be “constructed
out of art”…”

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Lyrics

I’ve got a hard road to travel
And a rough rough way to go
Said it’s a hard road to travel
And a rough rough way to go
But I can’t turn back, my heart is fixed
My mind’s made up, I’ll never stop
My faith will see, see me through

Let me tell you
I’m all alone, this lonesome road I roam
I’ve got no love to call my very own
Oh, the river gets deeper
The hills get steeper
And the pain gets deeper every day, yeah

I’ve got a hard road to travel
And a rough rough way to go
Said it’s a hard road to travel
And a rough rough way to go
But I can’t turn back, my heart is fixed
My mind’s made up, I’ll never stop
My faith will see, see me through

Aah, aah, one more thing

I dream of a home far beyond the sea
Where there is love and peace and joy for me
Oh, in my eyes I see troubles and dangers for me
But destiny where it leads me I must go, hey

I’ve got a hard road to travel
And a rough rough way to go
Said it’s a hard road to travel
And a rough rough way to go
But I can’t turn back, my heart is fixed
My mind’s made up, I’ll never stop
My faith will see, see me through

Aah, no, help me somebody
Aah, somebody please, help me right now

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45

Just to clarify, I believe I said that non-integrative human technology is “not natural”, did not say it wasn’t part of nature. Non-integral technology’s narrow-focus/short-term goals leave out the body/earth/other beings, and therefore are “unfitted” to natural ecosystems which have definite limits and built-inways of balancing needs.
“In evolution, things always start small,” said Dr. Greg Fournier, a researcher in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT." In human technologies, things almost always attempt to start big, narrow, and without thorough “testing”.
Which is what I mean by unnatural.

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46

Thanks for the clarifying remarks, Maía. Your diagnosis of the limits of “non-integral technology” seems especially spot on. Does that mean you can imagine an “integral technology”? Would this be Nature it/her/him/themself? Or is it some involving/evolving divine fusion phenomenon in our present/past/future?

(Please excuse the pronounal agglomeration and split/screen words—here English, or my usage of it, is lacking elegance; but of course it could be an issue that in English we tend to associate Nature with the feminine, and Technology—assumed a product of Logos, Reason, and Spirit—with the masculine gender. How is the Flesh of Language gendered?)

I propose: a poetic aesthetics that supports ecologies and technologies of integrality.

Greetings to you both! I hope you are having a wonderful time. “See” you soon… (“in our dreams”).

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" O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!"- Hamlet

We are in a triple bind. The immune system of humanity collides with short term, politically and financially motivated, deficient mental science. Bad actors dominate. Can we hold these tensions as we find complimentarities? Or will we crash and burn?

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49

Marco, that’s quite a wonderful reply/question! Yes, there COULD be an integral technology, which is what nature beings actually do all the time around us, we just often don’t see it’s brilliance. Plant photosynthesis is practically miraculous “technology” which humans often speak of as “inefficient” because plants don’t devote a higher percentage of their light harvest to this or that, but actually create many many different things that benefit the whole world by being “inefficient”. Reminds me of saying that art is inefficient! Or poetry: Why don’t you just spit it out, get to the point, man!! :slight_smile:
Oh the loveliness of inefficiency, of going slowly, luxuriously, erotically, and somehow spilling over into the world all of those bounteous “extras” created by un-machine-like and even non-logical give-aways!!
Plants are doing artwork, beautifying, feeding, breathing the world, even making rain clouds and as we recently discovered, getting breezes going via updrafts and evaporation, breezes which in turn becomes winds and weathers, near and far…

Btw, I do love “split/words” because they say so much with so few strokes, and at a deeper level, do a kind of philosophical labor, reminding us of the complexities of language and reality. Btw, again, that Susan Langer (?) quote was fabulous. I read her ages ago, and what she’s say about human’s actual need to symbolize and story-make, Tsalagi might say that’s Grandmother Spider at work in us, her gift to us. She is not a trickster, as is Hermes the Western deity and giver of language is. She is not arrogant, she is small and quiet and loves to give away things that have gotten overly concentrated in one spot, so to speak. She is Thought-Woman, and also bringer of light/warmth/fire. We cannot live without her gifts, In the Native American Tarot deck I used to have, she is shown in the sky in her web of stars.

In SYIOD, toward the end, there is mention of spiritual-technology… but we’d have to write a book to really go into it, a book of dialogues, maybe?
How is the Flesh of Language gendered? Maybe more as the fungal beings are gendered, with dozens of genders…or else perhaps none because language is a shape-shifter that doesn’t have to stop with a definite number of genders, and so why should it, except when it feels like it! But yes, we humans have mistakenly divided things up far far too neatly, and thus deprived ourselves and our world of the gloriously queer actuality of all things!

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I really admire this take on things. I would extend “jazz” into a mode, not limited to the playing of musical instruments. Jazz is a way of being with, a way of swinging with, whatever the particulars. It’s a kind of play which requires a lot of experience and “practice”, yes, indeed. It’s experimental, spontaneous and also as the article said, responding to tradition, ie, the givens, whatever they are, in whatever realm. It’s interactive and potentially infinite, and if aroused, this mode is transformative, participants are changed in mutually in-form-ative ways. I believe language has a jazz mode as music does. And cooking, and every kind of creative act. We can insist on following recipes or we can experiment together. The thing is, it requires a certain openness to risk… there is no fail-safe jazzing! So whoever is willing to risk jazzing around (together) with democratic traditions, has a shot at swinging into a new song. Jazzing is not “disrupting”, which is the dangerous trend these days, because there’s no cooperation in that kind of “let’s break it and see what we’ve got left” attitude. No, let’s love it, study it, explore it, jazz it, and see what emerges as we do this, deliberately, together, for the long-term benefit and thriving of all.

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Another take, but with a language focus.

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I appreciate Buhner’s enlightened prose over a Kentucky senator’s any day. I found this chapter to be the most informative and trustworthy source on the subject.

Chapter 3 from Stephen Harrod Buhner - Herbal Antivirals, 2nd Edition_ Natural Remedies for Emerging & Resistant Viral Infections-Storey Publishing, LLC (2021).pdf (1.1 MB)

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Thanks, Doug, for including Buhner. He is a theorist and practitioner of deep art and science. A Goethean and an Integralist, I treasure his dialogues with the great biologist, Lynn Margulis. Zach Bush MD is another lone wolf who is howling in the distance. A new integral science has yet to awaken but voices are out there and we need to learn how to listen. The Senator from Kentucky hopefully will be retiring soon opening up possibilities for the next generations to re-kindle the torch which has almost been put out. I will add this to the Open Frame page you have just posted.

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This is a fascinating idea, Maia. The dialogic form is one of my favorite, and a much less lonely way to write a book. I look forward to reaching this part of the book and seeing what comes up.

Thanks also for introducing the image of Grandmother Spider amid her web of stars. Much more attracting than a Fuhrer AI with his global network of resource-extraction and mind-control! I love how ‘natural technology’ is so open-ended, serving the whole as much as the part.

I imagine an integral technology would work similarly, though encompassing the human sphere and cosmosphere as a whole, along with the biosphere. We still have so much to learn about inhabiting this earthly cosmos we call home.

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