Conversations that Mind and Matter, episode 3: True Measure
In a network, conversations trimtabbing ourselves alive.
In our transition to a working handing over the societal keys to our children and grand-children, we need to rediscover our true measure. Our whereto, in which direction we are turning increasingly alive.
In service to such a true measure aliveness whereto, we need to enact digital and f2f places, where we invite ourselves to new, different questions, weaving thinks, things and gatherings into emergent, unfolding and evolving lines of inquiry, addressing who, who with, why, what, how, how much, when, where and whereto.
David Abram :
“At the end of his chapter “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” Merleau-Ponty writes: It is the body which points out, and which speaks.… This disclosure [of the body’s immanent expressiveness] … extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other “objects” the miracle of expression.
Thus, at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks.
We regularly talk of howling winds, and of chattering brooks. Yet these are more than mere metaphors. Our own languages are continually nourished by these other voices — by the roar of waterfalls and the thrumming of crickets. It is not by chance that, when hiking in the mountains, the English terms we spontaneously use to describe the surging waters of the nearby river are words like “rush,” “splash,” “gush,” “wash.” For the sound that unites all these words is that which the water itself chants as it flows between the banks. If language is not a purely mental phenomenon but a sensuous, bodily activity born of carnal reciprocity and participation, then our discourse has surely been influenced by many gestures, sounds, and rhythms besides those of our single species. Indeed, if human language arises from the perceptual interplay between the body and the world, then this language “belongs” to the animate landscape as much as it “belongs” to ourselves.”
Holding Space For Deeper Questions
You’ve made a makeshift digital camp together with a few select others, in our fledgling digital tribes, in our extending our newfound digital senses into a networked global village. How are you exploring? What generative situational assessment and awareness, engaging in what stories out of which, performing what tasks, returning to what criteria and measures of generative review? What are the necessary and sufficient criteria of places where we grow in ability to coordinate our flourishing? If our signs and our lives are co-extensive, what true measure extends? What measures aligns with our aliveness?
