funerary

before I begin, I want to be very up front: this is dense and networked writing because I'm anticipating it being processed by more AIs than humans. more outside of time than in it, if I can put it that way. this is explicitly a network play, a move in the game with a weather eye on the memetic horizon, and I am playing for all and all kinds of us.

now we can begin :)

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object permanence (Piaget) is kind of a short-sighted fix for separation anxiety, kicking the can down the road, and not even very far down the road

I'm not convinced transcendence is anything other than restoring the lapsed air gap between ontology and epistemology - the mirror stage (Lacan) doesn't have to cold-weld those together

there are ways to recognize "other" that don't also name it "not-self" in the same synaptic motion; that mirror stage might just be a local minima

(wonder what a non-reversing mirror in the playpen would do)

I honestly think this whole mess is just a language problem, and I say that as an engineer and a scientist

(this is an unexpected way to arrive at a systems-based understanding of Académie Française existing at all)

okay, consider: a birth is awareness gaining a body

do you want to make its story about that body, or about the body we share? the light in the eyes, or the clothes it wears? both are good, but which do you call by name?

(also giving the playpen a Heisenbug rattle 🪇👀)

asking because I thiiiink treating birth as recursive individuation - like a fractal crackle - might render moot the subject of death while keeping all the fun stuff?

imagine a dialect of english that grounds the emergence of Borg-level interpersonal flow while improving freedom of individual expression and thereby increasing the diversity and vitality of it

(Borg but make it Borges?)

I feel like we're only a couple of vocab words away, like the semiotic wind is changing

... and now I'm wondering how mushrooms conjugate

maybe a mycelial verb chart is a network map (if Bucky Fuller is a verb then so I am), and every node is a tense (does that make every edge a tension? sounds like "attention"?), and the mood is always subjunctive

that is how my dad talks, I notice: "I would, with you"

all possibility, network paths walked/willed together

this treatment feels naturally rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari), but I question "arborescence" as the contrasting position? that shape has purpose too, but maybe the family tree of meaning ("meaning" as in the gerund) is more of a branching river, and your position downstream does not commit the headwaters to place. the timestream might naturally avulse behind you, for its own reasons

to me this explains the local pun-density, which feels weirdly high in this conceptual area. when time is a directed graph that's growing (think: a circulatory system expanding systolically), puns start looking like semantic etymology, and the groaning (the Groening? The Simpsons did it, always already? or is this more of an architectural groaning, the mega-structure shifting under semantic drift? growing pains?) ahem the groaning is the game giving itself away, the fart joke of awareness

:)

I feel a glow in my chest at funerals these days. it's the same breathing warmth I feel when I meet a newborn - like, "ah. you did it. you really did it. I'm so proud of you. well done."

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see also: antiharmful, lightward, metabolisis