FRAGMENTS
A revived and revised diary entry from 6 June 2020:
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In my 1960’s Manhattan years, I edited and produced a “little magazine” titled “FRAGMENTS.” Snips of prose, poems, artwork, commentary were printed and distributed to a tiny audience of friends, colleagues that produced similar magazines, and random curious customers at a handful of bookshops and coffee shops around town. My handful of subscribers also received a small package that included items such as sea shells, mineral specimens, seed pods, & scrolls with comments of appropriate aphorisms that resembled fortune cookie inserts, with the understanding/expectation that they would be seen as clues to a narrative of their own devising.
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I’ve always been drawn to aphorisms: the essences or pithy crystallizations of more complex ideas. A kind of shorthand. But also–as brief, compact, and singular–they can, like fixed stars, be rearranged in various constellations. When introducing Art & Organism Seminar to a new cohort, I try to make this clear. I think of alternative ways of perceiving the world as alternative realities constituted by varying constellations of cognitive functions. I keep–and encourage participants in A&O to keep–a diary, a “commonplace book” –see A&O DIARY –like memory, itself a reconstruction based on fragments of past experience, this will help provide the atoms or molecules of new experiences. (recalling the phenomenon of the overlapping physiological substrate of memory and imagination–look in on A&O notes on The Future of Memory)
The biology of consciousness suggests our stream (sensu William James) may actually be a series of related fragments, flickering by in such rapid succession that they appear continuous (sensu David Hume and Henri Bergson)–read Oliver Sacks “In the River of Consciousness” for perspective.
- (think of a motion picture—and recalling (to enlarge our metaphor) that there is room to insert information that we might not be consciously aware of receiving: subliminal stimuli that can activate various integrative centers in the brain (For example, as Sapolsky (2003) points out in a discussion of stress, “The amygdala also takes in sensory information that bypasses the cortex. As a result, a subliminal preconscious menace can activate the amygdala, even before there is conscious awareness of the trigger.”)
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- Andrew Hui‘s brief essay in AEON (excerpt below) speaks to aphorisms and in his writing I found views that fit my own quite well. (Confirmation bias?) In particular, he refers to Nietzsche’s “… method [which] like Heraclitus’ [is] intense, difficult, aporetic maxims and arrows that strike at the heart of readers, seizing or destabilising their habits of thought. They are required to do much work, to investigate what is ‘between and behind’ his sharp words.” Their accumulation in class notes resembles then “… the wisdom literature of the Sumerians and Egyptians onward, [who] find strength in the social collective of anthologies.
- Each aphorism might very well be ‘complete in itself’, as Schlegel claims, but it also forms a node in a network, often a transnational one with great longevity, capable of continuous expansion.” This resonates with my habit of diarizing and note-taking ever since I can remember … “…what could be called ‘personal writing’: taking notes on the readings, conversations, and reflections that one hears or has or does; keeping notebooks of one sort or another on important subjects (what the Greeks call hupomnemata), which must be reread from time to time so as to reactualise what they contain …”
From an A&O reading about aphorisms
