Month: May 2016

The Meaning of Confidence: A Brief Appendix to Direct and Indirect Meaning

negativegeography5 Comments

emptiness-creative

I’d like to build this brief consideration directly on the back of Direct and Indiret Meaning.

When words, ideas, beliefs all become transparently ersatz, the question of what is real becomes extraordinarily urgent.

Where is the still point in this bending and spinning hall of mirrors that is consciousness?

When nothing that I know about myself is real, when everything is only a story, whose narrative lines are always being bent by ferocious headwinds of fight and flight, by a desire for admiration, where do I find a foundation upon which to live a confident and humane life?Read More »

Direct and Indirect Meaning (Being and Constructing)

negativegeography5 Comments

birdsmind

The first 14 essays tried to “come to terms” with the limitations of language. By extension this included all of thought and imagination – the whole category of construct-making.

How can we discover the “limitations” of something that covers the whole of experience? An all-enveloping fluid from which we can’t leap free, like lucky fish?

In Part II of “Imagine the Limits of the Imagination” I suggested that this can be done by considering the category of “odd words”:

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
— Wislawa Szymborska

Read More »