Category Archives: Everso

Everso and the four worlds

Esoterism, Everso, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil

I understand that most of my recent philosophical focus has concentrated in Yesod-Malchut within the world of Beriah, which corresponds with Keter-Da’at within the world of Yetzirah. This is where the plurality of Yetzirah’s forms converge and are constrained by the supraformal Absolute.

(The closest thing we can have to “absolute truth” are truths which are faithful to the supraformal Absolute as they grasp whatever content they comprehend. We can clearly and consistently comprehend all kinds of forms, but only some of these help us maintain our roots in transcendent reality. Many, in fact, sever these roots, in order to grasp more comprehensively, clearly or consistently. This is what Technic systematically, methodically does, in fact.)

Prior to this, I focused on Yesod-Malchut within the world of Yetzirah and Keter-Da’at of the world of Assiyah. This is where the “Everso” eversion occurs. This is where subjective potential “concavity” manifests in actual grasping of “convex” objects of experience — where intentionality finds intentional objects. Those material objects we call “objectively real” are the entities of Malchut in the world of Assiyah. And the truths we call “subjective” are, in fact, the imaginative and emotional objects of Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Geverah and Chesed. The purely conceptual, abstract objects of modern philosophy reach up into Beriah and Chokhmah within Assiyah. Modern theology extends to Keter within Assiyah.

Assiyah is objective top to bottom, and even what it calls “subjective” (meaning “nonmaterial”) is, in terms of form, objective.

Yetzirah, though essentially formal, is formation — the act of forming — the How of formation. We cannot understand formation in direct formal terms. New terms — new How and new What — are needed to get at this level of truth. The Tree of Yetzirah is known by its objective fruits in Assiyah. Yetzirah conceives and enwords, and manifests an enworldment of Assiyah.

When it seems that we inhabit different worlds, this is because we enworld Malchut by different states of Yetzirah.

And when it seems that some of these worlds are nihilistic, alienated and alienating (or to themselves, uncompromisingly scientific, rigorous, and fully in touch with objective reality) and others of these worlds are saturated with meaning and divine light (or to others subjective, irrational, fantastical, retrograde, woowoo or dogmatic), this is because some enworldments are focused solely on Assiyah, where others are focused primarily or exclusively on Beriah.

Judaism tries to enworld transparently between Beriah and Assiyah. A transparent Yetzirah is angelic, in its proper sense. A Yetzirah that attempts ultimacy and autonomy (from Beriah) is ideological.

Yetzirah, alone with Assiyah, without Beriah, seems pluralistic. The question is only what conceptual systems — Kuhnian paradigms — can adequately organize our material actualities so we can understand and control matter.

Things get considerably more complex and constrained if we consider the subjective effect of our paradigms. Do they flood reality with meaning, beauty and hope, or do they drain it of meaning and drown us in despair? This is a function of Yetzirah’s relationship with Beriah. Now the question is whether our conceptual systems organize our material actualities together with a relationship with the Divine One of whom we are an organic part.

One way I have expressed this is that, since the Enlightenment, we have focused exclusively on the What and the How of our experience, and bracketed the Why. Scientific method excludes all Why considerations. Liberal-Democracies proceduralize public life, and relegate all meaning to the private realm of home, business and faith community.

This moment in history witnesses a popular implosion of nihilism. It seems most people cannot find meaning in the condition we’ve created for ourselves — the enworldment of Technic, the enworldment that capitalism and communism alike enworld and inhabit — both uncritically, unconsciously and with pseudo-divine omniscience.

Mystical topology

Esoterism, Everso, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we apprehend realities that transcend our comprehension, and find that our minds cannot find objective edges around which a concept may be gripped, we can ignore these realities into oblivion and see them as dead nonexistence. Or we may accept them as living nothingness — divine ground — and attempt to relate ourselves within them in ways that compulsively reduce all realities to objective terms. That is, we can take part in what involves and surpasses objectivity: we participate in being to whom we are subject — in life in whom we are organ. And when we do so knowingly we assuage the apprehension of incomprehensibility in a new kind of awareness of being within being — a knowing we might call suprehension. The old insult “his reach exceeds his grasp” loses its sting. Is it really so bad to have a capacity to touch without grabbing? Everso.

Design and form

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Everso, Philosophy

We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.

If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.

If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.

To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.

Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.

When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.

Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.

Everso II

Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Metaphysics

Having broken free of the bolts that gripped my skull and held me in place, I turned away from the glaring screen and began to grope in the nothingness around me — that off-screen nowhere where nothing happens. As the blindness gradually abated, I could see silhouettes and shadows cast against the ambient glow of the screen. I felt the edges of objects around me, wrapping my fingers around their contours and comprehending what they were and how they were situated relative to one another within this space. But as I explored further, beyond where light could reach, I found dark edgeless surfaces that could only be touched but not defined. I sought the limits of this space, and finally apprehended that it was an inner surface, which comprehended me in every dimension, confining me and all I could comprehend within its own interior.

Seventh aphorism of Scholem

Esoterism, Everso, Judaism, Kabbalah

I have been very slowly reading Gershom Scholem’s mysterious “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”. This is the seventh:

As the actual misfortune of the Kabbalah (as with many nonindigenous forms of mysticism), one ought to consider the doctrine of emanation. The insights of the Kabbalah concern the structure of what exists. Nothing would be more disastrous than to confuse the connections of this structure with the doctrine of emanation. This confusion perverts its promising formulations in favor of the most comfortable and intellectually lazy of all theories. Cordovero would be much more at home as a phenomenologist than as a disciple of Plotinus. The attempt to construct the thought of the Kabbalists without the doctrine of emanation (and to think it through to the end) would have to pay the debt that a true disciple of Cordovero would incur, if one should ever exist. In the form of theosophical topography, which Kabbalistic teachings have assumed in the literature, its objective content remains inaccessible. The conflict between mystical nominalism and its light symbolism in Kabbalistic writings derives from the irreconcilable tension between the Kabbalists’ most significant intentions and their inability to help bring these to pure expression.

To evert subjectivity into object is — and I mean this as literally as I can mean anything — the original sin of religion. And to evert religion back to its proper relational (participatory) non-form is esoterism’s proper goal, within religion.

As I’ve said before, every subjectivity is an objectivity within which certain kinds of objects of experience (intentional objects) are taken (conveived, perceived, -ceived) as givens. Our subjects — both personal subjects (I, we) and academic subjects (subjects of study) — are finite manifestations within the infinite subject, God, who transcends not only every possible subjectivity and objectivity, but subjectivity and objectivity, per se. This is the most radical panentheism, the dialectical sublation of subject-object.

Radical panentheism is the hermetic androgyne, which today’s antireligious fundamentalists misread as gender fluidity, and cling to and enforce as sacrosanct doctrine.

Fundamentalism is the original sin taken to extremes. The fundamentalist is oblivious to the first-person garden, experiencing only the third-person objects of the garden. The foreground eclipses the divine background. Fundamentalists compulsively grasp at and mis-comprehend finite “holy” things instead cultivating awareness of who comprehends us even as we comprehend the myriad things of the world.

Twenty years ago I thought myself into social alienation. I learned that human beings need shared truth or they lose community. I’m thinking my way back to the same places now, but this time I have company. Scholem, Kaplan, Schaya, Idel…

My next sacred pamplet will be Everso.

Content-container distinction

Enworldment, Everso, Murmurations, Philosophy

A quote attributed to Jung has been circulating in the digital aether for the last several years: “We don’t have ideas; ideas have us.”

It turns out that the real quote is from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche:

Everyone knows nowadays that people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

This difference makes all the difference: A complex is not an idea or a set of ideas. Complexes are that by which ideas — and pre-ideational intuitions — are experienced. What I call “enception” is synonymous with “complex”.

But complexes are not ideas. They are not content. They are better understood as containers for content.

The content-container distinction is a necessary shift in understanding esoteric truths.

Our minds are attuned to objective understanding. I do not mean “objective” in the vulgar and naive realist sense (that a truth claim is free of subjective distortion, and therefore a true truth about a real reality). When I say objective I am speaking only about form, not about its veracity. An objective idea claim is a defined, comprehensible, given bit of information. But for that objective idea to be taken as given, it must have a corresponding container — a subjectivity capable of receiving it — a subjectivity with an enception suited to the idea’s conception.

If we lack this container-content distinction we will constantly evert and distort subjectivity into yet more objectivity and make the deepest category mistakes.

One of the worst examples I see of this today is confusing that first-person subjectivity who we actually are — to whom objective truth is given — with data about our personas and the categories to which we assign our attributes.

Likewise, religious faiths — and ideological faiths — are not beliefs. To view religions as belief systems is to confuse doctrinal or theological content with that by which these beliefs are understood and felt to be true. We confuse wine for wineskin.

Maybe I really should focus on making my Everso book.

What is a container? An object which contains content? Yes. A wineskin, for example, is a container for wine. But a container may also be a subject — one who contains.

A container is a subject who does the containing of some form of objective content.

May your wanting… wait, no — letterpress

Autobiography, Design, Everso, Letterpress

Rabbi Jeff Roth taught my wife a blessing: “May your wanting be wiser.”

This is something very much worth letterpress printing.

I do not see how I can go on without a printing press.

Some other things I want to print:

  • The Pragmatic Maxim: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception — and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. — Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • The full Shema prayer in Hebrew and English. Basically, I want to print the full text of a mezuzah, but printed and with translation.
  • Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two slips of paper: 1) “I am a speck of dust.” 2) “The world was created for me.”
  • Shabbat prayers chapbook
  • Pesach Seder chapbooks (this is ambitious. I will design these specifically to “wear it well” — bearing the patina of wine and food stains with grace, like a yixing teapot, an oriental carpet, a well-used lugged steel bicycle, one of Christopher Alexander’s clay garden path tiles, or an old family Bible. We need more things in our lives who gain, not lose, value through wear!)
  • “For the Last Wolverine” by James Dickey. (I already typeset it.)
  • The Emerald Tablet. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • Phi (the Golden Ratio) to the 10,000th decimal place. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • My weird little snakes and trees poem, which I’ve been rewriting since the early 2000s, and I believe accurately anticipated the absurd metanaivety of now, a time when fancy folks using fancy jargon naively accept at face value their theory-infused perceptions of other folk’s naive perceptions, without a twinge of irony. A gorging ouroboros, starving as it stuffs itself on itself.

Or maybe I should just write and print my Enworldment book one chapbook at a time.

My very next project, though, is re-printing the Sefirot on a variety of papers (some hand-made) that are wandering their way across the country to my door. And hopefully, a third plate will also arrive from the die-maker soon, and unlike the first two, will be unblemished. I’m doing all these with the magical glow-gold ink I used on the 2025 pi posters.

I really need a printing press.

Eversive knowing

Everso, Philosophy

For better or worse, my own mind is radically wired for vision.

I understand that this is generally true for all human beings. Our species’s primary sense is sight, and our visual processing apparatus, relative to other animals, is hypertrophied. But experience has demonstrated to me that I rely on visual intelligence more heavily than most. I use the visual mode of understanding for cognitive functions other people might (and maybe should) assign to linguistic or logical or even kinetic intelligence.

My over-reliance on visual intelligence allows me to understand things other people miss, but it also makes me mentally incompetent wherever visual intelligence is the wrong tool for the job. Luckily, visual intelligence is a flexible instrument, and I’ve gotten it to do all kinds of things it shouldn’t. But where it fails, I fail. And it fails in some pretty simple workaday competencies that people reasonably assume is basic to adult functioning, where nobody even suspects failure is possible. Polite political euphemisms normally obscure painful truths, but applied to me “differently abled” is revelatory.

Anyway!

I understand reality in geometric and topological terms. I do this despite knowing that this necessarily introduces distortions, blindness and nonsensical noise and artifacts into my understanding. I try to rely on “complementarily abled” others to compensate.

And a central operation of understanding for me is eversion.

I recently read in a trusted source that inside-outside is the primary relationship the horizontal, worldly plane, and that above and below is the relationship on the vertical plane. I can’t decide if this means that I am unconsciously trapped in a horizontal mode of understanding, or if eversive knowing (eversivity) is a synthesis of verticality and horizontality.

Weird post, I know.

Thanks for reading.

(I live on that magenta line.)

Intuition versus alienation

Enworldment, Everso, Judaism, Pragmatism

Intuition is direct response to experience, unmediated by language.

Confusingly, though, our most spontaneous utterances and immediate responses to language are also intuitive.

When we say “experience-near” this means using words that directly refer to intuited experience. We can use and understand experience-near language intuitively. We do not need to use words to help us use other words. We simply speak, and what we say means what we mean to convey.

Language becomes unintuitive when speaking or understanding requires long intermediating chains of language. We must speak to ourselves inwardly about our speech, and pick our words carefully, word by word. With each layer of meta-talk, the connection between word and experience grows more remote and attenuated. This is what is meant by “experience-distant.”

Destruction of intuition is alienation — from the world, from others, and from oneself. It begins with over-reliance on experience-distant language. Alienation is complete when the experience-distant language detaches from its alleged object and begins to refer only to itself.

In alienation, whatever one experiences is subjected to elaborate interpretive processing and explained in theoretical language. We psychoanalyze ourselves, explain our biological brain states, interrogate our power relations, theorize on how our social conditioning might be distorting our perceptions snd feelings, speculate how we might be perceived by others, and so on, before simply experiencing what we might otherwise experience. Our intuitions are diffused among many fragmentary notions, or redirected into one compulsive direction, away from one’s immediate or thinly mediated experience.

Same with actions. One no longer interacts directly and wordlessly with objects in ones environment. One no longer picks up a pen and writes, or picks up a knife and cuts. One must anticipate, set goals and plan before acting. One must recall directions and then follow them. One must ask what the next best move is, pick it, then execute it. And at each step one must document the move, to provide transparency. The more a person’s actions are of this kind, the less intuitive contact with the world one has. One’s intuitive connection is primarily with one’s own instruction set. There is no craft, just foresight and execution.

Same with speech and interactions among people. Speaking becomes a risky endeavor. People must carefully consider and select every word or gesture before using it. Words become dangerous things to be handled with thick gloves, carefully assembled and inspected unit by unit before any sentence is delivered. Beliefs are charged with extreme moral significance. Asserting the truth of some facts makes one a good person, where denying their truth, or wrongly asserting the truth of false opinions makes one a bad person. We must constantly reassure one another where we stand, and wherever possible demonstrate our true belief of true beliefs.

But personal beliefs are viewed as constructs — conventions acquired through habit, shaped by social conditioning. Beliefs should never be left to personal judgment, but rather determined by ethical experts who can calculate the effects of various beliefs upon society, and select beliefs capable of generating maximum justice for those who most need and deserve it. Bad beliefs are beliefs left to organic distortion or intuition, which, more likely than not, serve only one group or one person.

With sufficient degree and duration of alienation, a person can be made to lose all direct connection with self, with others, with reality beyond one’s alienated language.

And sadly, one cannot avoid alienation from the alienated. In alienated times, those with functioning intuitions must find one another, offer one another refuge, commune with one’s ancestors — and recommit to future generations beyond this human void.

The key is to develop experience-near language that does full justice to the wordless realities we intuit in our midst.

We intuit energies, tones, vibrations around us and emanating from others and concentrated in certain places and objects. What can we do with them, when we intuit them and speak of them in such nebulous language? Nothing. And that is why the alienated world approves of leaving them in such a wispy, flaky, woo-woo state. Belief in energies and vibes has very little pragmatic consequence.

But these realities of which we are unable to speak are the most consequential. They move mountains.

We do not know how to think and speak and share the most crucial realities of our lives. Our language is optimized to physics and technological manipulation. So we talk about our brains and hormones and social conditioning when what really concerns us are our minds, our hearts and our place in the world.

We have it all everted.

Things can and must be otherwise.

Visitations

Everso, Judaism

If we somehow manage to stop interposing concepts between ourselves and reality — something that any meditator will tell you is easier to think about than to do — and to simply attend to the present, can we spontaneously receive what we — I — now find here in this present?

Is receiving the given present only a matter of opening the door so the present can enter — or, everso, so we can get out of ourselves to meet it?

Or is there an effort of some kind to enable ourselves capable of accommodation — a preparation for each new given? A spiritual hospitality?

Or is the effort of accommodation only for those givens we ask to stay and to join our household, where some givens are only guests who are welcome to come and go?

Or does our hospitality for present givens allow accommodation to develop in collaboration with our guest — to instaurate residence if our given chooses to stay and share our home?

Invitation, hospitality, then accommodation, then residence…

*

The door is often locked shut by the thought of openness, which substitutes opening with thinking about opening and striving for an experience of openness.

If you have meditated for long hours, you might know what I mean.

If you have not meditated for long hours, you will certainly know what I mean.

This is a religious matter, and with religion one always already knows, unless by some miracle one stops always already knowing so something new can happen.

Sense of nothingness

Enworldment, Everso

We have a deficient sense of nothingness.

*

When we lose vision, we do not see blackness. Instead, we see boiling chrome.

When we lose a leg, instead of numbness, we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.

When we lose our hearing, rather than submersion in silence, we hear intolerable hypersonic ringing.

When we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless. It reeks of burning rubber, sulphur and brimstone.

When we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.

*

When we lose sense of purpose, we do not become serene or care-free.

We feel ennui.

When we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective.

On the contrary, this lovelessness is depression.

When we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance.

Instead, we experience a combination of apprehension and intuitive omniscience. We don’t want to know the particulars — we already comprehend them in principle.

(Only if we press against this ignorant omniscience, or if it presses on us, will it break. And when it breaks we are rewarded with disorientation, perplexity, hellish angst… and the possibility of new conception.)

*

When we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless. Instead, we become nebulas of nihilism and ressentiment. The phantom self seethes with hostility and plots vengeful dismantlement of its miscreator.

When we lose our sense of world, we don’t become otherworldly nor innocent. Instead, we become paranoid residents of a phantom world — a realm of concealed demonic machinations, a tangle of puppets and puppet strings, traceable to a baleful beyond.

*

Wherever we lack a sense of God, we mistake ourselves for gods. We succumb to misapotheosis. We believe ourselves final judges of what is good and evil, of what is what is “ok” and “not ok”.

*

Wherever we know God we are of God, toward God, participating in God.

We dance the God with God.

Some of us count and perform steps, hoping they will smooth out and become a fluid motion.

Others of us intuit the dance and spontaneously move with the dance, hoping the movements will gain articulate precision.

This dance is done together, or not at all, with synesse.

Linguistic nacre

Everso, Philosophy

Is my shell-and-pearl metaphor improved by mapping nacre to language and the enveloping and pervading irritants to language-defiant realities?

Or is it better to map nacre to objectivity and the the nacre-necessitating irritants to whatever rejects objective comprehension?

Does this difference make a difference?

*

“And our condition is linguistic: we say non-metaphorically first.” — Jan Zwicky

Changed by writing

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Everso

I can feel how this process of writing a book is changing me. It is changing how I think, feel and speak, which is strange because what I believe I’m doing is conveying a philosophy I’ve been using, more or less unchanged since at least 2014 and maybe as early as 2011 (basically, once Latour and ANT helped me transcend my natural ideocentric brain-in-a-vatism).

Yet, here I am, experiencing a real change in my enworldment, interspersed with intense apprehension — so clearly my code-freeze has thawed and substantial philosophical work (not just conveyance) is happening.

In some ways this process has been a recovery of simplicity that I’ve gradually lost over years of elaboration on my core philosophy. Perhaps I’ve suffered scope-creep trying to incorporate concepts from ANT and ethnomethodology into my repertoire. Some of this knowledge remains undigested synthesis, and has not really been conceived and fully integrated. (Nietzsche mocked this condition as “indigestion”.)

My earliest experiences of metanoia were simple and overwhelmingly powerful. They shifted — everted, in fact – my fundamental understanding of the world to one that was more intensely felt, more immediately intuited and more practical in orientation. These qualities map to Liz Sanders’s desirability, usability and usefulness, respectively, and I will develop this extensively in my book.

By contrast, the thoughts I had as a young man tended toward abstraction and uselessness. The thoughts were mostly aesthetic. My thinking produced works of art to contemplate and savor, not beautiful tools to carry out into the world and use to do things. In other words, my early thoughts focused exclusively on desirability. I used the concepts I’d passively acquired from school and work for usefulness. And usability was all on me. Complicated ideas would become usable with practice.

I was using philosophy exactly the way many people use religion. Weekdays are for usefulness. Weekends have one day set aside for profane desirability and another for sacred desirability. And on all seven days of the week, life is complicated. Learn what you can figure out, and trust experts for the rest.

This all changed for me starting in 2001, when I emerged from the worst depression of my life, able once again to see in color, furious with the work ethic that preferred death to professional disgrace. I decided that despair was something I owed nobody, and that I would reorganize my life around different, more immediate principles. I checked myself into a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, the fifth day of which was September 11, 2001. So, I missed the collective national trauma, the looping image of plane hitting the World Trade Centers, the bewildered phone calls where we worked out what to make of this. I sat in silence, working out what to make of it by myself, turning and turning and turning it, allowing my opinion to change, untethered by any stand-taking. When I came out of the course, there were flags everywhere – more flags, bigger flags, aggressive flags –suffocating flags. I never got back in joint with my people. What I chose to read in the years following made it much worse. Christopher Alexander set my mind on fire and made me feel the importance of design all seven days of the week, and along with Grant Peterson shifted and liberated my aesthetic ideals. Jane Jacobs gave me a whole new understanding of how cities work, and inspired Susan and me to move up to Toronto. And up there, I became so disgusted with my Canadian colleagues – their slavish obedience, their desire to be given a purpose by other people, their willingness to be pushed around and told what to think and feel, their appalling passionless passivity that I was moved to read Nietzsche, just to understand the “slave mentality”. Except… I was the slave. I decided to end that. And that is the point when I became feral. It tooks years to find any reason to cooperate with anyone. But thanks to the deep humane genius of American Pragmatism, I did, so here I am.

Anyway, I should probably edit out that digression, but I suppose I won’t.

So, I want to get back to some of that immediate, intuitive and meaningful simplicity of my earlier philosophical work. The requirement to find a red-thread to narratively and logically connect all my areas of interest, capable of relating ideas belonging to different times and regions of my thinking, has forced me to edit — to choose what is essential and central, and to omit what distracts or complicates it.

And I’m trying to control my linguistic palette, to limit my vocabulary and to discipline it, so that once someone understands the wacko way I’m using a word, they can count on it to keep that meaning. Years ago, usability god, Jakob Nielsen taught me “learn once, use often.” Having learned it, I use this principle often, and plan to use it in this book. But doing this requires a much deeper integration of concept and word than my sloppy self usually bothers with. I’ve lost weeks on dead-end or swamp-end attempts to nail down my words. I think I have it now, but I’ve thought I had it several times, only to excise major sections and move them into my scrapheap doc.

But the process has been worthwhile, and I think it is forcing new, deep integrations between older thoughts I’m trying to incorporate. This is like all design. The design is far, far more than the sum of the features. The parts and the whole develop together, and both change. I’m noticing I’m far more ready with words, now – more able to really nail explanations of ideas that I used to have to talk around indirectly.

Sorry for the rambling. I’m venting all my slop on this blog now, and reserving my hardass discipline for my book.

Defining eversals

Etymology, Everso, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Two common words I use in a very precise, but unusual sense, are apprehension and surprise. What I mean by them is clearer when they are defined against their opposites.

I define apprehension against comprehension. Where comprehension provides a convex form around which one can cognitively grasp (com- “together” + -prehend “hold”) a concept (con- “together” + -cept “together”), apprehension defies grasp (ap- “toward” + -prehend “hold” despite the fact that cognition can feel the reality of what remains ungraspable. It is analogous to touching the inner surface of a concave surface with one’s fingertips, feeling for nonexistent edges around which one can secure a grip. Apprehending but not comprehending makes us aware of a boundary between comprehensibility and (as yet) incomprehensible reality, and this awareness induces apprehension, anxiety in the face of an inconceivable beyond. The relationship is that of eversion, of flipping inside out. Apprehension is everted comprehension.

I define surprise against comprise. When we comprehend something objectively the contents of the comprehension is all the beliefs the understanding comprises (and if you are a pragmatist, all the implications of these beliefs). (“-prise” and “-prehend” are both forms of the same Latin root, “-prehendere“, “to hold”.) Surprise is that which is not comprehended which surrounds the comprehension with what was not grasped, due to its being beyond or over what is held, (sur- “beyond”/”over” + -prise “hold”), and which therefore is in a position to irrupt into what was comprehended and potentially to disrupt it. Here, also, is a relationship of eversion. It resembles the old “Russian reversal” joke: in Soviet Russia surprise comprises you.

Both of these words reflect a basic topological structure of my conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity. That is, they are eversions of one another. Every subjectivity comprises an objectivity derived from its interactions with its environing reality. But on the other side of these interactions, transcendent to its subjectivity and objectivity is a fellow subjectivity with an objectivity of its own which will both harmonize with and clash against the objectivity of other subjectivities. To make matters more complex, to the degree subjectivities manage to harmonize and share objectivity they form new, more expansive subjectivities. I participates within a transcendent We, without experiencing the kind of apprehension or surprise that signals transcendent otherness, radical alterity.

Without this subjective-objective topology, my ideas can only be partially comprehended — and largely only apprehended.

I think my next book will need to be another chapbook, I’ve been calling “the pearl book”. It might also be called Everso, every possible pun intended.

Faith as intuition system

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Everso, Philosophy

Let’s define faith as an configuration of intuitive faculties (which I will simply call intuitions) within a psyche.

Different intuitions (again, the faculties, not their content) coordinate themselves societally, which produce a certain form of subjectivity, with its own ways of conceiving, perceiving, interpreting, inferring, responding, etc.

Subjectivity can be changed if these intuition systems are reordered.

Religious conversion occurs if an intuition system is radically reordered to a degree that the world itself seems transfigured.

There are at least three notable implications in this way of conceiving faith:

  1. Faith is not belief. Faith is that which does the believing, and it does far more than that. Faith enworlds.
  2. The unconscious is not submerged conscious content. It is the very working of faith to produce, and often re-produce, content. We don’t have suppressed thoughts. We have malfunctioning faiths that keep producing unwanted content.
  3. Because faiths are changeable, we are not stuck with them if they produce ugly, depressing beliefs, ineffective or destructive responses, or utter bewilderment toward our most pressing issues. If our life experience leaves us perplexed, faltering, indifferent or otherwise miserable, and all our attempts to redesign the world around fail for material or political reasons, we can also ask if maybe the problem isn’t with malfunctioning faiths. We can, if we wish, plough these bad faiths under, and try to instaurate better ones that provide us better options to enword ourselves better.

I’ve been arguing for some time that philosophy ought to be redescribed and reconceived as a design discipline, rather than as a search for truth, especially when truth is imagined to preexist out there, ready for excavation.

But, as with all words of a certain kind, philosophy is burdened with connotations that interfere with discussing it in new ways. Philosophy is about thought, ideas, arguments. Same with religion. Religion is about forcing ourselves to accept unprovable if not ludicrous superstitious speculations as true and momentously important. And forget design. Design is about making better things in the broadest sense, and when experiential language is introduced to suggest that the ultimate goal of design is not the objects it shapes, but the subjectivity resulting from interacting with it.

In each case, notice, the source of content is confused with its content.

Philosophy philosophizes philosophies. Design designs designs. Perception perceives perceptions. Intuition intuits intuitions. See the pattern? (I’m curious, though: why doesn’t faith have its verb form? Faith believes faiths?)

The problem here is not with the words.

The problem is at the faith-level.

An objectivist faith everts subjectivist faiths, turning container into contained, concavity into convexity, convexity into concavity, doer into done, intuition into intuition, design into designs, philosophy into philosophies.

Apprehend, comprehend, suprehend

Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Metaphysics, Philosophy

To apprehend is to know-that.

To comprehend is to know-what.

When know-that stubbornly resists know-what, when we touch with the tips of our fingers something that cannot be grasped by the hand of our thought, we feel ourselves situated within something incomprehensible. We comprehend the fact that we are comprehended by something incomprehensible. The relation we take to that which comprehends us cannot be comprehension, but the eversion of comprehension, something which might be called suprehension.

When suprehending, we must situate ourselves and everything we comprehend and apprehend within a more-than-everything we will know primarily by radical surprise — by the irruptions into the little cognitive bubbles inside which we float within infinity, that can flood us with dread, love or both at any moment.

To suprehend is to know-why.

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Wisdom is suprehension.

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Each everything is a universe-size, lifetime-long oyster.

Outside the oyster’s outer shell is an infinite sea of water, salt and particles. The ocean knows the oyster as one of its myriad objects, one of its innumerable everythings — a convexity in an unbounded concavity.

The convex object in the ocean is, seen from the inside by the oyster, a concave habitat. Everything it knows, it knows from the inside of its shell.

The world the oyster knows is pearly lucre, a substance the oyster excretes so naturally it often is not aware of its origin. Anything from the ocean that enters the shell is either digested, or expelled or coated with lucre, so it cannot irritate the oyster’s delicate flesh.

The oyster’s inner-shell is also lucre.

It is essentially a mother-of-pearl bubble which the oyster has painted around its own space. It has coated the ocean itself with lucre, and this lucre bubble is now its universe — or at least that part of the universe it can apprehend.

Anything from the outside, anything indigestible that gets inside, is also painted with lucre, and is transformed into pearls.

The oyster is enworlded in pearl.

Above and around the oyster is a pearly dome, and inside the dome are scattered pearls of various size and luster. The oyster senses these pearls are of the same substance as its heaven.

The oyster continuously anoints its pearls and its dome with fresh lucre, to make the surfaces iridesce and glow, and to protect and honor something it loves and fears, its source and home, the very surrounding ground of existence.

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I’ve written and rewritten this same idea for years, compulsively.

I need to sit down with everything I’ve secreted on this topic and change perspectives. I need to stop looking from the oyster’s perspective and start seeing it like a jeweler.

I want this idea to irridesce and glow.

This could be a pretty book, if I can get the language under control. It would be a chapbook, with a coarse, dark gray board outer cover, and a light pearlescent flyleaf, and  pulpy cream paper for the content.

Everso

Autobiography, Chord, Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy, Poetry, Taoism

I was sent an image of an everting sphere.

Notice how the sphere becomes a shell-like torus midway through the eversion.

Note that we human beings can view reality from an inner first-person and outer third-person and experiences at once a metaphysical behind and a metaphysical beyond.

Recall that the Chinese coin was understood to be the negative space of Tao, the inner square, yin, the outer infinity, yang — but it is obvious these two are one and the same from everywhere beyond the coin.

In the creation myth this everting sphere just spawned, human being, human existence exists everywhere that the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and periphery is nowhere forms a torus at mid-eversion, creating a unique everything, a soul, a person.

I wonder if I could make a book on images of eversions and the torus. I would make a chapbook, a second signature, to Geometric Meditations, and it would be called Everso.

Here’s the material I have so far, starting, of course with a dedication to the gorging torus, who I am now wondering is more complicated than I thought only days ago…


Ouroboros,
Gorging torus,
Rolled up like an egg
Before us.

Definition of evert:

I have needed the word “evert” many times, but had to resort to flipping, reversing, inverting, turning… inside-out.

Evert – verb [with obj.]

Turn (a structure or organ) outward or inside out.

DERIVATIVES

eversible – adjective.
eversion –  noun

ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the sense ‘upset, overthrow’): from Latin evertere, from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + vertere ‘to turn.’

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Now I can say things like:

  • Everything in the world is the world everted.
  • A comedy is an everted tragedy. A tragedy is an everted comedy.
  • A pearl is an everted oyster shell. An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl. Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean. Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, which ceaselessly coats everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl. It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.
  • Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl everting to an all-ensconcing shell as Pandora opened it, and Eden as an all-ensconcing shell everted to a pearl upon Adam’s eviction.
  • An object is an everted subject.

 

In the end:

In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood;
and the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
they will lie about on the ground
like broken branches.

Shells and Pearls (a collection of previous pearl posts):

An oyster’s flesh is delicate. It cannot tolerate anything harsh, abrasive or threatening. So it coats everything around it with a lustrously smooth surface of nacre.

The harshest, most abrasive and threatening thing for an oyster is the ocean. The oyster coats the entire ocean with a mother-of-pearl inner shell. And anything from the outside that gets inside the shell is also coated, until it becomes a pearl.

Outside the shell is ocean; inside the pearl is ocean.

A pearl, then, can be seen as an everted oyster shell; a shell’s inner lining, an everted pearl. That which requires coating can be called father-of-pearl.

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Minds secrete knowing like mother-of-pearl, coating reality with lustrous likeness.

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Nacre

You are absurd. You defy comprehension.

That is, you defy my way of understanding. I cannot continue to understand my world as I understand it and also understand you.

That is, you do not fit inside my soul.

I am faced with the most fundamental moral choice: Do I break open my soul? or do I bury you in mother-of-pearl?

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Father-of-Pearl

(A meditation on Levinas’s use of the term “exception” in Otherwise Than Being.)

We make category mistakes when attempting to understand metaphysics, conceiving what must be exceived.

Positive metaphysics are objectionable, in the most etymologically literal way, when they try to conceptualize what can only be exceptualized, to objectify that to which we are subject, to comprehend what comprehends — in order to achieve certainty about what is radically surprising.

In my own religious life, this category mistake is made tacitly at the practical and moral level, and then, consequentially, explicitly and consciously. Just as the retinas of our eyes see things upside-down, our mind’s eye sees things inside-out. We naturally confuse insidedness and outsidedness. By this view, human nature is less perverse than it is everse.

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Imagine, with as much topological precision as you can muster, expulsion from Eden as belonging-at-home flipped inside-out.

That galut in the pit of your gut: everted Eden?

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A garden is an everted fruit, and a fruit, an everted garden.

The nacre inner lining of a shell is an everted pearl, and a pearl, an everted nacre lining.

The exception is the everted conception, and the conception, the everted exception.

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Nacre

Pearls are inside-out oyster shells. Or are oyster shells inside-out pearls?

The oyster coats its world with layers of iridescent calcium. With the same substance it protects itself from the dangers concaving in from the outside and the irritants convexing it from the inside.

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Irridescent Irritation

Some random notes on the inner topology of oysters…

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A pearl is an inside-out oyster shell.

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An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl.

Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean.

Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, ceaselessly coating everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl.

It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.

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Every pearl is an iridescent tomb with an irritant sealed inside. We love the luster of the outer coat, but inside is what was once known as filth.

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We could also think of the oyster shell as the fortress walls and the pearl as a prison cell.

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We make pearls of what is Other, then love what we’ve made of the Other, which is ourselves.

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We love our misunderstandings. We never cut into what we love with critique. Inside is just a grain or a fragment, of interest only to other grains and fragments.

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Sometimes an alien bit of beyond gets inside one’s horizon, but it can always be explained.

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Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl turned outside-side in upon its being opened, and Eden as an oyster’s interior turned inside-out into a pearl with Adam’s eviction.