This note is about reaching my 250^th article on substack since January 2023, starting with In the olden days a blogpost was a link and a word or two: why “why we should”. Self-hosting came later.

I am now feeling the need to turn this bloggy exploration into something with more structure. I am calling this the book. This is a working title, as the exact format or genre is not known. Part of the work on the blog will be to work through this question, hopefully not to re-invent any wheels.

The writing began as an effort to make a multi-voice compostional poem out of the essay why we should. I did invent compostional poetry, so there may be an expression of it as a compositional poem, but, isn’t quite what I mean by the book.

In preparation for the book I am moving some of my writing process to obsidan with espanso and exploring git, as I want the book to be forkable.

Currently I write in notebooks by hand and directly into Libreoffice, these drafts then get re-worked and edited on transfer to my static website builder Publii, and then to substack.com. Usually to Publii first, unless I am travelling.

Below this process-dump, is the first one written in obsidian, it deals directly with the mess of philosophy and how that relates to the choice of structures in structuring our choices, with relation to how people received those decisions and constraints. By way of story and process.

End consumers do not care about process because they want to be Monarchs. At least that’s want some producers tell them they want to care about. If only because they do not have enough time because of other commitments where they are not sovereigns.

This bit above is crossposted here.

wording into the world

This is part of the book project. Introduced here.

wording into the world

A writer relating the story of how they wrote a story is not the same story as the story itself. Writing is its own story, and a part of the writer’s life.

Now the story itself may re-tell well known stories which tell the same plot, which themselves reframe a tale’s fabula of chronological events with: reminiscences, pre-shadowings and other convolutions based not only on time-slips. For example, by varying a point of view by character, omniscience or tense, depending on the theme, or moral even.

However, writing a story is the same process as a story, in that the human effort to live is lived and represented, as a series of things happening.

Some writers write in cafes, some write in secluded huts. Some plot out a web of intrique and comlications, some shamanically sweat an altered consciousness.

However, while that story about the writer may help the marketing of the book, and some of us may be interested in that more than the story, in many outcomes of the story, many readers, do not care about the process, even if they admire the craft in the telling they have read, or heard. It might ruin the magic of the sausage before us.

When presented in a reading, or a telling, a story is performed in a line of movement
It shadows the choices made and told, in terms of a fabula, but this finished product can forget the labour of its making. That may in fact define part of its success, for the show presented for applause is not the effort workshopping into rehearsal. The shine is not the polishing. That is a different story.

Within storytelling, a theme or moral or entertainment frames a plot, that selection of events out of a potential field we call the fabula. How that is ‘chosen’ or fallen on is a question of process not often included in a story (See meta-fiction, and fourth walls). Choices given to story-telling’s characters can be very limited, or not at all, as in the case of Thumbelina survival. Story-telling is a reduction of many elements. Much of that reduction is expected by the reader to have been done (with or without special consideration by the writer/s.) In traditional examples that work has been done by the workshop of generations.

When writing non-storys, technical documentation and scientific or managerial reports, the process can be more important to the readership, the writing becomes a record of a process, and the choices are more limited by the themes of planning, and investigation or exoneration. It supports choices made or dwells on choices to be made. The record of choices is its primary process, and that writing process is actively made explicit. This is why they are dry reading.

Philosophy, taken in the round as literature, is caught between these two impulses, philosophy is a confusion between theme and record, between process and moral. It is this confusion which each ism tries to avoid, exclude, exorcise.

I mention philosophy here as the example because I have found myself by accident doing moral philosophy in this project. It is not by choice, its no hero-quest.

We often want the skills of non-story-telling to give us a proper story on how to live. Without the process of choices-made intruding on the process of choosing. We are aligning our movements awkwardly.

For with the choice, to make an effort about “how to live”, living is already a dance between, choices or contraints given as well as the lines of movement requiring their own vectors in worlding choices versus selfing choices, and philosophy lives out this dynamic. It may look like a Valhalla of shouty dialectics, but there is more than that going on, gone on, and to be gone.

Go on.

2026-09-02 - Leslie Vale, Tasmania

Crossposted

From hand written notes, which are generally unreadable. You may note I do not make notes on his numerous examples of literature.

Paraphrasing Denis de Rougemont.

The quotes show what he wrote, the paraphrasing shows what I read.

2026-AUG-26

This sort of accepts a more skeptical position akin to a suspension of judgement. Judgement still pulls Denis de Rougemont towards some genealogical attachements.

The first structuralism is time.

So chaste adultery is then okay? Would we call this emotional cheating nowadays? Are some emotionally-charged types of feminism also a form of (inverse) Courtly Love? I.E. Wrong-way love rather than heresy??? The world will contain all of them/us.

Analogous of course to Christ passions suffering for us so we don’t have to ever again (if only), which the Church’s more orthdox mystics pick up on, modelling Christ rather than union (which according to de Rougemont is heretical), in a re-rendering unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s sort of way. #whosyourceasar?

They fell in love with love (How St Augustine describes his earlier phase --- is this the Manichaean Phase – need to check Confessions, de Rougemont does not say...??)

In love with love they fail to move on (teenagers doom and gloom is forever) — fail to learn — they double-down — while some in moving on turn the error into a repeating series of mis-takes (cycles of self-abuse).

Worlding the self :: selfing the world: Irish legend — disaster — eternal fate —courtly love — internal tragedy

Excellent example of the proportions that function in Worlding the self :: selfing the world. One can see the use of this error, when marginal, helps the young adult move away from their kin in selecting mates, to the kith, as that old world of childhood has to die, which is what initiation rites and those rites’ inspiration of mensuration also indicate. The stories of wrong-way love illustrates the bounds of that choice, who is actually kin, who is actually kith in small bands of (unrelated and related) humans??

I say Eros can open that world and with it childhood can die. Passion is the story of first love made into something eternal, rather than reckonising its power to end childhood, in a way it seeks to maintain a purity of innocence into the world where it may not belong (wait till the babies show up man)(whoseyourfather).

A powerfully statement about evolution really.

Passion — as a type of emotional dogmaticism can it be more primal or only a derivative which re-inforces it primalness (first true love)??—???— This Eros is already a lost innocence? Speak now or never. The loss is thus not allowed to become an absence, the world moves on despite your lack of grief.

2026-AUG-27

Passion is a teenager, an obstruction to adulthood. Passion is its own obstruction. (de Rougemont == of the Redhill … — to die on? Calvary).

Passion is a Peter Pan (as in Romeo oh Romeo and Romance).

Worlding the self :: selfing the world

Worlding the self :: selfing the world can be the exact same activity, because Janus faces two directions, the potential vectors can therefore be completely opposite and add up to zero (My power is zero despite the activity on the threshold).

Vectors are attempted, indicated, but always concell each other out to some degree. The dogmatic make them align.

De Rougemont’s example of Passion is one such error.

Represssion, if it exists, does not just have one direction, or at least, must some how cope with more than one direction. Freud’s return of the repressed is a miscellaneous category, perhaps a useful blur, perhaps not. Dogma is defined by desiring one direction over every which way.

Janus dances, the outcome of beauty in motion is not guaranteed, nor any motion across the world at all.

By the way, I do class structuralisms (gnostic or not) as a type akin to genealogical impulses, if perhaps without the daddy issues of #whosyourfather and the begats arguing from authority, or not. (As with Beckwith’s linguistic begats, and Henrich’s (Review ① ② ③) Church ban on cousin marriage, the attraction to genealogy is always strong, they could be right of course, but the world doesn’t care.)

Quite good writing on narcissism generally by de Rougemont.

The world is so big, empires confuse the world with their leader. Not that the world cares.

Carl Jung in passing on page 294, Robert Graves on 295.

Prior is not a gene (nor even a rede.)

To end on a repetition — passion is a type of emotional dogma. And if this is an effort chosen (however immmaturely) it then differs from narcissism which by definintion allows no personal development (and does so only in fiction, the lie that character development is availble to all is what makes modern story telling a fiction and rarely fabulous.)

Overall I agree with Denis de Rougemont’s position on agape. However, I do not think an order based on celibacy can safeguard the wisdom of it though.

Resources

Denis de Rougemont. Passion and Society. Translated by Montgomery Belgion, Revised and Augmented edition, Faber & Faber, 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_de_Rougemont

https://archive.org/details/passionsociety0000roug (not yet in public domain)

Petherick, Simon. “Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.” Simon Petherick, 9 Oct. 2017, https://simonpetherick.com/2017/10/09/denis-de-rougemont-and-books-that-change-your-life/.

Carla Rogers. “What’s With Wrong Skin.” Evolve Communities Pty Ltd, 31 July 2018, https://www.evolves.com.au/whats-with-wrong-skin/.

It contained page-staining newsclippings from decades ago, they reported the successes of amateur theatrical endeavours from Forbes in New South Wales. I hope the reader of the book was an actor and in an adulterous liason with an American involved in the reception of signals fom the moon-landing in 1969. See also The Dish.

A good precis of the book can be found on Simon Petherick’s 2017 post Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.

The general schema in reaction

Denis de Rougemont attempts a project of etymology (page 18). This is a method which I am keen to indulge as I see it as a precursor to a taphonomical methodology, even so, despite some disavowals, Passion and Society does end up having the odd genealogical moment, which is difficult to avoid when one is passionate about a subject, or just overly committed.

In this regard, it reminds me of a review I did of Beckwith’s The Scythians, where the thesis is well worth entertaining, and for which the supporting documentation is perhaps not really necessary, except as future leads for research. Research which may or may not end up where the passion leads. De Rougemont is less given to this, but it is still there, the position is not detached so much as self-satisfied (if only just).

A taphonomic methodology would temper these inclinations even more so, less stridency would produce a better work, even if then such a book is less scratch-your-face publishable.

For me the word passion is completely neutered by its recent use in our careerist workplace and platforms. So on picking up the book I was coming to the word passion completely cold. Any freshness the word passion might have had in the workplace must have died in about 2001, if not earlier. It zombied on.

So then, learning from Denis de Rougemont that passion requires suffering for one’s self, if not for one’s love of love, and if not suffering then definitely death… I saw that perhaps the workplace’s use of the term was indeed apt, if not in an expected way: like, the corporate team that is splayed together, robots together.

I find the general literary arguments de Rougemont makes, or his proto-taphonomy as I would call it, all quite acceptable.

De Rougemont puts it forward that that Manichaean-style heresies provide the base, locally by way of the Cathars, were then re-purposed by the efforts of troubadour into Courtly Love, which then re-used by the Northern French in adapting Irish stories and other Celtic efforts, if not Iron Age use of Bronze Age heroics, as then written into Arthurian romances. Both Courtly Love and Arthurian Romances influenced both more Catholic orthodox mystics and many many writers of later romances across Europe und so weiter…A fantastic argument of layered and re-used and sneaky filtrated substitutions.

There does appear even in this post-WW2 revised edition (the original was 1943) a feeling for a need for tighter genealogical movements, i.e. that Troubadours were Cathar agents) for example. Quite why there is such a pull maybe due to publishing requirements or expectations for evidence where there is none and so a likelihood is pursued too far. there may be no book otherwise I guess. I mentioned Beckwith above with his extremely long linguistic begats. But another example is Henrich’s focus on Catholicism’s bans on cousin marriage in his WEIRD book (Review ① ② ③). I mention that because comparing Henrich’s WEIRD anthropological meta-data context on the social institution of the individual alongside de Rougemont’s argument on passion and orthodoxy’s sensibleness about agape, would provide some interesting comparisons for a taphonomy of worlding.

Taphonomies can produce dates, absolute and relative, but genealogies merely date by listing generations. And family trees rarely forest. Some smarter societies forget the begats and instead cycle every other cohort through a limited number of skins or totems of whatever classifier for categories you want to use. This is a better fit with how the world is maintained as a tool. The begats are a Bronze age heroic fixation, even if their animal grammar lies in an appreciation of causal relations. Genealogy is not a physics. Begats are a passion for origins, in love with the love of originality.

Genealogies require proof of actual blood relations, but the world itself does not. As a tool the world is wise to remember that it is possible the first person, or people, the first population, who first twined fibres into thread and string and knots and fabrics, have no living descendants. It’s also possible that the first lovers of love who suffered for their passions, have no descendants, and yet the world goes on. Genealogies are a very restricted way to look at this. Taphonomic methodologies will be much more powerful, by allowing the stratigraphy of dates, and their improprieties, more things can be tested than #whosyourfather?

Above all Passion and Society is a literary endeavour, the latter sections bring forth that taphonomy with much record, the final lines from Romeo by Juliet’s corpse is particularly instructive. As is learning Verona was a hotbed of Catharist heresy.

How much taphonomy can or will only be a literary endeavour remains to be seen. Some see the text as all consuming, some see orality as a lost purity, both of these are outcomes of the worlding urge, among nostalgics and deconstructionists both. The world prefigures us. I.E. a certain ‘literariness’ is as much native and suited to worlding and its study as a tool, as the economics of trade is. Certainly ideas of imaginative world-building have been instrumental in my conceiving of a worlding urge, and the kosmophasia we often suffer from.

Things I learn reading

Obstacles are often social categories (some people think of them as the system or an ideology). But wrong-way love is common everywhere.

In mid-century French discourse this subject was referred to by the term ascèse or askesis, from the Greek for exercise/training/practice (translator’s footnote page 55). These selfings of the self are often as narcissistic as any special project can be. A pilgrim’s progress might be another practice. All these practices predate monotheistic religions, as they often world the self into seclusion, enlightenment or special occupations.

This is why when storied there are so many obstacles, actually meeting up with one’s true love is often only at or near death. (One can see how this compared to Henrich’s emphaisis on banning cousin marriage is much more a severe condition for the survival of the species than cousin marriage.) (This is also why in orthodoxy passion is restricted to the son of god and mystic saints, passion is not a ‘devinizing’ askesis for the rest of us --- who are we to judge ourselves? That is what the church is for.). (We not each supposed to ask what would Jesus do?)

Passion is a bit teenagery, passion is a type of emotional dogmaticism, an attachment made in the form of a vow (all that feudal fealty and loyalty stuff which is way messed-up).

In terms of what we now call a narrative arc, the death of the lovers returns things to balance. In more heretical modes the kiss of the lady is also in that sense of the saying “death is a lady” and we return to the true realm of our spirit from this evil realm that traps us, when the body is not a temple of the soul so much as its infernal prison. Chastity maintains passion, the suffering is it revelation or epiphany, thus the later link to Orthodox mystics use of passionate suffering expressions and the language of lovers.

De Rougemont contrasts all that suffering [with chastity as suffering, with adultery not-so-much bad as indicating the path of passion, in true love’s embrace of one’s love of true love, and all its confusions]… —with agape, which is that sense of Christian love that informs the sensible end of Catholic teachings (e.g. solidarity, see Reading Beyer: Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both?).

I came to this realisation as well when I said to a friend that boring is good.

It terms of a potential taphonomy it is interesting that both orthodoxy and heresy might be argued to give rise to the social institutionof the individual as we know it in WEIRD societies. The world is more than an outcome of genealogies. Its a mess, we need asystem to work with the mess, and sure, reducing the mess into simplicities is one way, but often it just adds to the mess. Much like true love and passion do by execerbating teenaged mistakes rather than learningfrom them in a safe place.

Everyone in the Bronze age was a teenager. Life was passionate, brutish and short. Consider that as you dwell on the past.

Resources

Denis de Rougemont. Passion and Society. Translated by Montgomery Belgion, Revised and Augmented edition, Faber & Faber, 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_de_Rougemont

https://archive.org/details/passionsociety0000roug (not yet in public domain)

Petherick, Simon. “Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.” Simon Petherick, 9 Oct. 2017, https://simonpetherick.com/2017/10/09/denis-de-rougemont-and-books-that-change-your-life/.

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com. I’ll follow this up with more piecemeal notes from pages here and there in Passion and Society.

In 2011 an exhibition called Awfully wonderful, science fiction in contemporary art took place in Sydney. In the library I work in a colleague asked me about the following paragraph from the exhibition’s book:

What caught my eye, and my reaction, was the second sentence “He suggests…” and its verbing.

The reference, with footnote ³, is:

Here I will clarify that, “our consciousness” has more need of being aware of ‘worlding’ than of our ‘relationship to the world’. The relationship is so taken for granted that a new frame would be helpful, even in “bringing to consciousness our relationship to the world.” Especially if we are mostly kosmophasiac because of the relationship to the world (I know this sounds weird).

This might be a fine hair to split, but works of art are outcomes of worlding, and so if the work of art as verb is to raise consciousness, it is raising consciousness of a late and derivative effort. We may need to do it earlier. It’s possible we never live long enough to be able to do this.

Now I would add here, that bringing our consciousness to our worlding is not at all always very likely, and perhaps this is John Dewey’s hope for art (only?). I feel it still suffers from kosmophasia. If only, I say, the verbing here was worlding instead of working. Work (verb or noun) like art or religion or trade is an outcome of the worlding urge. Remember, hunger does not tell you how to bake a cake, let alone someone’s birthday cake.

The work of art (the responsibility of art) is thus like the responsibility of religion or society should or 'the system'. This responsibility is a should, but where does that should come from?

I certainly can see that John Dewey here does account for the efforts of transmission from one to another, particularly from parents to children. (See Ellen Dissanayake‘s “work” on ‘making special’ -- she has lectured in Hobart.) And such pedagogies are important, both practically and in explanatory power, but do not account for all that is art, let alone the world and why we should.

So to repeat my position: I do not think this is wrong so much as backwards. I appreciate the verbing of “work” but would like to suggest that what ‘should’ be verbed is the word “world”.

‘Worlding’ brings consciousness in which we self special moments and things into art, giving us the ability to self the world and world the self. Some children never get through this of course. And they become presidents and such.

This does make it a bit of a tautology, but putting work to work as a verb misses the actual bootstrapping process.

As a derivative verb, work (or art or religion or trade or status) removes the effort from evolutions’ gambit, and places it too securely within the more derivative animal grammars that “made us” turn our abilities “to make” into (for example) the godhood of a creator we made, shame-facedly, in our own image. This is unwise because it removes us from our place in the world. I guess it is work to then bring it back, as Dewey suggests, but, if we use ‘world’ for this verb verbing the effort, then it is less work, with less recursively computationally high loads, and so we are less unlikely to world-build badly. Nor suffer from kosmophasia.

You can swap in other worlding outcomes in place of art there, like religion, or even less special outcomes like sport or trade. It’snot just art and aesthetics.

This is where blurring categories can help more than defining them. After all the world is the biggest blur of all.

In worlding we produce art (for various purposes). Just as worlding the self allows us to pray with others, or engage in trade, etc etc etc.

Now an aside on science fiction and fantasy in regard to worldbuilding.

Characters in these imagined worlds (fictional, not the inherited and shared unintentional world of traditional reality) are often more aware of worlding than the reader is, even if the awareness is only there to help characters plot their narrative arc back into the original balance by ‘saving the world’ they grew up in. (Compare here the posthumous character development ‘work’ of the lovely bones.)

At one time before settling on ‘worlding urge’ I had a halfway-house of ‘worldbuilding urge’, perhaps it only lasted five minutes after using ‘moral urge’ for some months/years, but ‘worldbuilding’ does capture the sense of a certain effort or intention. I tend to use ‘worldbuilding’ negatively now, as a type of worlding akin to more committed ideological or religiously dogmatic efforts rather than the neutral worldview geographical survey work.

I do see being aware of worlding is a wise thing, and being unaware as potentially disastrous. A negative worldbuilding is judged to cause more damage than good despite its intentions, I would hope if worlding were more acknowledged negative worldbuilding would not be so attractive, and thus less used by narcissists to set up binary choices in seeking narcissistic supply. Negative worldbuilding is full of shoulds shoulding the world of one true self on others while ignoring them, like a toddler in a tantrum.

Lizzie Muller. “Speculative Objects and the Total Perspective Vortex.” Awfully Wonderful : Science Fiction in Contemporary Art, Performance Space, 2011.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

Tam, gdzie zielona ściele się dolina
I droga, trawą zarosła na poły,
Przez gaj dębowy, co kwitnąć zaczyna,
Dzieci wracają do domu ze szkoły.

W piórniku, który na wskos się otwiera,
Chrobocą kredki wśród okruchów bułki
I grosz miedziany, który każde zbiera
Na powitanie wiosennej kukułki.

Berecik siostry i czapeczka brata
Migają między puszystą krzewiną.
Sójka skrzekocząc po gałęziach lata
I długie chmury nad drzewami płyną.

Już dach czerwony widać za zakrętem.
Przed domem ojciec, wsparty na motyce,
Schyla się, trąca listki rozwinięte
I z grządki całą widzi okolicę.

[Dzienkujé bardzo literatura.wywrota.pl]

I’ve rendered this into English as:

The road

There, where green stretches valley
and road half-grassed
through oakdales sketching out flowers,
children come home from school.

Opening crosswise, a pencil case
rattles with crayons amid breadcrumbs
embracing a copper, saved,
to welcome the cuckoo’s spring.

Beret sistered and brothered cap,
they both flash through thicket and bush,
so a jay screeches in clearing the twigs,
but longer clouds float over the trees.

Already a bend reveals the red roof,
father at home, leaning on hoe,
reaches down to the leaves returning
to the earth, here he watches all that surrounds.

Originally I found this poem in:

Czesław Miłosz. Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004. Ecco, 2011. [Introduction by Seamus Heaney]

Introduction to the rendering project

In these renderings I will put the original first, then my rendering, and then, lastly, some discussion and bloggy meanderings.

This is to honour both the work and the site called only the recipe, which strips all the POV or introductory material, people often present on cooking blogs. I actually enjoy that material, but when needing to look at a recipe and not someone’s journey, it can be a little frustrating. It is also in the spirit of TL;DR.

However, it is inverse in spirit to origins of the radio show The Moth, where the stories people told introducing their ‘poems’ were more interesting than the poems per se. Something got lost in the poetry.

I’ll do these renderings like I did, rather undiplomatically, on the poetryetc email list run by John Kinsella in the 1990s & 2000s, which produced things like Interactive Geographies.

On that list I would quickly re-write a recently posted poem (not mine), not so much to make it better, nor to criticise it but to

<special project warning> investigate the poetic experience available to the reader (me)</end of special project warning indicating that is all I had access to and is not narcissism though co-morbity is a thing, it’s a fine line>.

I was jealous of musicians who jam. But not jealous of painters who refuse to let others smear over their own shit.

Introduction to rendering Droga [from Świat] by Czesław Miłosz

Tasmania, late 20th Century

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stripped of citizenship and booted out of the Soviet Union, for continuing to write what he wrote since Khrushchev, Western ‘intelligencia’ and intelligence services thought they were getting another Czesław Miłosz, only Russian not Polish.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once repeated that the misdeeds and culpabilities of the 20th century were because “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” (see my post on the… —gap for this sort of use of a landfill to forget stuff.) Miłosz would never had said that.

Sozhenitsyn was a trained chemist and writer who portrayed Soviet gulags and the great patriotic war as an inmate and artillery Captain, and came to the west as a cold-war dissident. He favoured a pan-Slavic presidential-style republic rooted in an Orthodox Christinity unmarred by the schism of 1666, and blamed the tsars and the Soviet Union for ruining this potential. His mother’s family was of Ukrainian background, but he was vehemently against Ukrainian independance because of this romantic but imperial worlding. Vladimir Putin and Solzenitsyn got along just fine.

For now, we will leave alone the Russian romanticism directing an official mystical approach (мир = world/peace/system) to its identity issues, to note that I heard more about Solzhenitsyn in Tasmania growing up than Miłosz, despite the Polish diaspora in Tasmania. No doubt because of the closer to home stories of ‘Syberyjski’ who walked out of Siberia to Iran… —and Miłosz’s professorship in Berkely was too far away. Perhaps unheard of.

“I also walked out from Siberia,” they would say.

It is thus late in life I have begun reading Miłosz in translation. It is good to read love in translation.

Firstly, with a series or cycle called Świat [The World] which contains 20 poems written during World War 2 in 1943, and A Song On The End Of The World in 1944.

Of course I will look at The world.

So, starting with the expectations of the first cuckoo of spring, I’ll find the Polish original, present the standard translation from Czesław Miłosz Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004. Ecco, 2011 [Introduction by Seamus Heaney].

Both versions of Droga or The Road are placed above.

Subsequently, I will then render my own, by this I mean a translation but more my reading of it than trying to channel the poet himself. Who probably spoke better English than me anyway.

I’ll do this like I did, rather undiplomatically, in the poetryetc email list run by John Kinsella in the 90s & 00s, which produced things like Interactive Geographies. On that list I would quickly re-write a recently posted poem, not so much to make it better, nor to criticise ti but to (special project warning) investigate the poetic experience available to the reader (me)(end of special project wanring indicating that is all I had access to and is not narcissism though co-morbity is a thing, it’s a fine line)

Unlike my readings in review or reaction to poetryetc, these will be a bit more considered.

Notes on rendering

Reading the English I was first caught by the folkloric reference to cuckoos who bring the spring, and making sure you have pennies in your pocket to jingle in order to have more financial good fortune. It’s not just Polish. But I had never heard it before.

Second was the naivety, of which this is indeed classed. But later, how sophisticatedly it was structured, by…

—thirdly, the figure of the father.

Reading the Polish is near impossible for me with any “fluency”. The best I can do is work on dimly percieved proto-indo-european roots as a way into the emotional loading. And then I just fake it. Particularly hard was gałęziach lata and okolica. Ouch.

That said I am much more engaged by the problem of understanding Polish poetry here than in reading any poem in my mother tongue. This is why I re-write them undiplomatically, and why I do not like being in an audience.

The scan

In addition, I found the official English version didn’t scan well with my breathing, it sat uncomfortably between limerick and carefully enunciated free verse (without the sing-song spoken word effect). Thinking this slow American voice does not gel with my voice, and might be a artefact of my accent, or speech rhythms, as a part of my Irish/Polish/Scots-Jewish mixed into Brummie English here in Australia… I went to ‘AI’.

Given that LLMs began life as textual analysis tools, I fed both the official translation and mine into claude.ai (no real reason for this choice) and asked it to do some scansion (scan the rhythmic structure of poems).

I’ll report two things (the original Polish was not mentioned, but that it was a ‘translation’ of something):

1. Claude reported mine with : Monosyllabic end-stresses closing most lines (school, spring, cap, roof, surrounds) — this creates a percussive, settled cadence at each line’s end, echoing a folk-song/ballad ancestry (common in translated Central/Eastern European pastoral verse). [OMG]

2. and the other: loose accentual verse with prose tendencies (I think that’s what I said)

When I added the original, it, of course, told me it used strict Polish syllabic verse. This is partly why gałęziach lata and trąca listki rozwinięte were hell, Polish hendecasyllable is dense! But it also said:

The first translation, with its shorter, more clipped lines, actually lands closer to the tone of the original’s rocking regularity, even without reproducing its mechanics.

Completely smart-arsed it.

Notes on rendering as ‘sitting with’

What is available to me now is how Christian it is. As in,

“Narnia is good isn’t!”
“Well, yeah, but its a bit, you know, Christian, isn’t it?”

Written in 1943. WW2. There’s a war on, you know. Many children of god die for no reason at all.

Resources used in this rendering

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/czeslaw-milosz

https://www.poemhunter.com/czeslaw-milosz/poems/

https://allpoetry.com/Czeslaw_Milosz

https://poezja.org/wz/Czeslaw_Milosz/

https://literatura.wywrota.pl/wiersz-klasyka/39928-czeslaw-milosz-droga.html

claude.ai

So now at 60 I will define “asystems anarchism”.

As far as I got back then was to say, no system can be complete, so a system cannot be relied on, so we need asystem. Like we were agnostic on the matter. Or sceptical.

I’ve also said that frame before more recently, but not connected it up with that youthful play on systems analyst. But it might be helpful in a new “aixial age”.

We do not need a perfect world, either by waiting for the revolution or great leap forwards, nor any eschatological romanticism at all. There’s no need to delay, nor even reform, if only we just police narcissists a little more actively. Waiting for the messiah is lazy.

PS: This 80s period is before any pomo influence, or chaos and complexity theory as I said. Also I hate that “meta” is now commonplace and abused by corporate types. Bastards.

Spenglerian Musings

The Analemma of History: A Spenglerian Philosophy of Universal History

Read more

a month ago · 18 likes · Arabian Magus

.

The use of inline symbols is a treat. Perhaps some magic is afoot.

Spenglerian Musings is dedicated to working with or through the thought of a most peculiar historian of doom, Oswald Spengler. Of whom I only have a passing relationship, and then in passing by I cannot help but keep staring at the car crash.

Now I have said all that before in different forms, repeated here as a introduction. Now I am just going to dive into various comments which the Magus’ post drives me to write.

Axial Age

My blog opened with Karl Jaspers, originator of the term Axial Age for that period when iron debased the bronze age poetries, with the more common steel pens of literacy, and gave us all those great names and their thoughts, but who wrote nothing down because that skill was shared by their students and disciples and scribes at western gates. My take on Jaspers there was not about the term Axial age. My start with him was some accident.
Comment: yes I agree that we are in a similar time.

Oswald Spengler, historian of doom to the Addams Family

I have some family photos from 1930s Poland in which I can see cast members of the TV show, that style would have been close to those creatives designing the Gothic sensibility. One great uncle in a uniform even looks in bearing and expression a lot like Spengler.
Comment: I think this illustrates why I see Spengler’s work as a car crash. This is an emotional connection.

Spiral Time

Yep.

Kant and the trajectory read from fossilised footprints

Noumenal realm or collective un/conscious structures ?
I suspect that as the world does not care about these, but nods in appreciation that we make an effort to do them, and to undo them. I’ll just say that this Baroque tapestry is a bit over-wrought.
Comment: Now I do this purple prose too, so that’s not a criticism. My critical vector here is that the trajectory reads a story of our own invention, but with some world-sense we can develop a taphonomy of worlding (our worlding and selfing is somewhat kosmosphasic or world-blind, particularly when we self the world so emphatically and come up with things like god the maker as creator or the collective unconscious !)

Oswald Spengler, prophet of the parochial

He is critical of Enlightenment as a proto-emo writer, and the enlightenment’s claims of said enlightenment and progress (a dour romantic??). And that any such success that could be read as progress is quite localised and/or specific to civilisations in a certain place (or soil). As such, he champions a parochial sense of values and effort, and indicates that universalist claims (history for all peoples and all times) are no such thing, it’s just some local fashion. And yes there are other local fashions and those which are honest about this are in a golden summer, but just remember winter is coming. I.E. the ( I guess early Spengler) universalises the parochial, and that civilisations are incommensurate and incommunicative-able, while criticising the universalist claims of others as thus parochial. Go figure.
Comment:It’s as if he spent his whole life in a low dungeon of the Holy Roman Empire’s Germanic greatness. Must look up if he ever travelled anywhere. If he did make to Amerika to notarise the Addams family bible surely this face of doom would have been at least a bit sunburnt.

Spiral

the spiral dance arises when a Janus-faced god dances with others, the trajectories are then collection of vectors that carry us into eddies, parochially universal, and universally parochial. It’s the effort silly.

Big history

Yep

See [Grand strategy: the view from Oregon]

Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon

One Man Think Tank

By J. N. Nielsen

Comment: while empires care about their own universals, wise people see a interactive geography as a world not unto itself, despite the claims of the parochial, even the empire is a universal parish. A soul-centric thing is a worlding of the self doing the selfsame thing among others also selfing the world.

Maybe we should not grant to empire and its unbounded claims the same category as actual universalist claims (as some post-colonialisms definitely do).

Comment 2: interesting how the soteriological trajectory of (e.g. Christian) salvation methodologies of the soul can produce both the parish of the soul and once given to everyone (granted by the Empire’s City of God??) the universalist claims (Oikumene) become so beloved by empire or ‘civilisations‘.

geographic determinism

And yet geography also educates and widens experience beyond most parochial constraints of experience, empire is not the only outcome of worlding the self in travel or trade.

_“the world” – has become a little star amongst millions of solar systems.” -Oswald Spengler

Comment: in my project, the world of selfing the world among others doing the selfsame thing (a soul-centric dance within world-centric acknowledgement), the world is all of that because, the world does not care about outcomes (parochial or universal) but that we make an effort. These efforts include both, say, space exploration and its critics, literacy and it’s phallogocentric critics, Aixial age (see what I did with a typo) and its refusniks. And it is thus with these efforts the world is maintained, a tool for everyone regardless of parish, station or civilisatoin, because, to repeat, the world as tool or otherwise does not care about the outcomes, even if we do, but that in caring we make an effort which hones that tool.

The result is a layer of different historical planes that presuppose one another, just like how a study of the history of the tree-world, as Spengler argued, would require an understanding of the geological stratification of the earth. But the mere connection between the two phenomena becomes one of mere facts, and with a lack of focus on the being and destiny of said phenomenon.

A taphonomy of worlding (rather than of history, history is just another outcome of worlding) would investigate all this, and the lack of focus need not then throw such pieces of animal grammar, like being… into the gap of our efforts, such sacrifices are not required.

As a personal project, the Analemma of History hopes to pave the way towards new speculative philosophies of history

Worlding is an analemma of the dance of survival that selects our efforts.

modernity

Like cyborgs, and the poor, modernity has always been with us, but make your efforts known, for even if you are wrong you will help maintain the world regardless of the parish, regardless of the universe.

To frame this conundrum of metaphor versus identity I will first look ‘mapping’ as used in mathematics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism (off you go, transport yourself to us all).

It would appear that mathematicians use the analogy of ‘mapping’ with some Greek-originating words like isomorphic, or morely nounly, isomorphism to label the process while often retaining ‘mapping’ for the verb. Here the emphasis is not on the drawing of the map, but the process by which one connects a territory or substrate to the drawing’s lines, forms, features and legend. To use isomorphing could be too pretentious, while isomorphic retains an educated sophistication or comfort, like the distinctions made about the air with the term ‘isobars’ when drawing lines over a map for an air pressure chart. Also look at the taxonomy which “same-morphism” allows:

My favourite there is the tautology “A symplectomorphism is an isomorphism of symplectic manifolds.”

However if we did use isomorphing in a mathematical frame for this mapping of X to Y rather than ‘mapping’, it might be easier to distinguish the mappings made and the process which allows such a map to be made and read in the first place.

Part of the conundrum, and this is the subject of this post, lies in the existential or foundational nature of the point of view (POV) to all our endeavours.

I choose the word conundrum carefully, for its definitions Janus-dance around either: a dilemma of a question, or, in a punning solution to a riddle.

For all mathematics, despite mathematics rich traditions to example or shamanically transport us to a realm where objective truth might exist, if beyond our ken, with proofs and logicks… —mathematics and logic still depends on, or originates from, and requires, even in simply counting or connecting, a point of view.

The mapping is a eye-hand-vector co-ordination effort. This effort is undertaken to share goals within a group. Why bother otherwise. It’s like that famous English hotel Faulty Towers which would run really well if there were no hotel guests.

The hinge point or threshold or Janus-dance for this question of logical identity is the copula, which in English is the verb “to be”. Which can also be used to map in other ways outside of logic or mathematics.

Metaphor

For more epistemology-centric discussions the mapping of tautological statements via the grammatical element of the copula, which in many Indo-European languages is a form of the verb “to be” used as an auxilliary verb, leads to ontology as a system, and ontology is worthy of criticism, as “is”. Ontology being from the Greek for to-be-logos.

(Animal grammar mapped/maps to the function of logical identity thus the circle of a POV generated methodology into ontological grammar is “complete”.) (And I haughtily feel that it does not require any hermeneutics…)(yeah right)(…. my criticism being, and must be explicitly stated… it allows a mathematical shaman or logical priest of reason, to feel that systems based on counting have no point-of-view(POV) and is thus beyond criticism) (This both repeat Gödels efforts against Formalism, and uses them against Gödel’s Platonism).

But our systems do have a POV. Both immediately after transportation to beyond the mathy sky-maps of our sensibilities, beyond the shamanic transfigurations of our de-selfed genius, and thus, in the origins of our efforts, also prior to these epiphanies and excursions.

For these simply logical mappings are pre-adapted to be transformed into metaphoric use, where the logical copula, with a bit of atmospheric handwaving also gives us the makings of poetry (deep within the origins of our efforts, but that is a whole taphonomical expedition into deep big history of life, the universe and everything).

For ‘to be’ can also be used to create ancient metaphoric statements like “I am the stag”.

Now metaphoric statements are easier to suspend judgement about, but are generally regarded as poetic foibles in which our POV is allowed a place in discussions because of “imagination”. (I think they mean consciousness or life itself.)

But then I think, epistemologically speaking, logical identity is a ontological foible, however useful as a practice, or job of work, that also requires a suspension of judgement, a la Pyrrho of Elis, in regard to claims of ontological presence as systemic to the universe.

“Ontology” is just an excrescence of doubling down on the languages we happen to use. Consider if the auxiliary verb chosen to do this job of work in English was not “to be” but, say, “to have” we would be arguing about ehology and not ontology.

This is why any ontological grammar (perhaps seeking de-selfed objectivity) is a subset of animal grammars which otherwise might have a point of view but no way to map them, for in an umwelt the territory is the map, because it can not be “drawn out” by one POV to share with another POV unless there is some prosocial mechanism to do so. For bees it is the hive. For Homo species that tool is the world of many eyes (POVs).

The conundrum is both the riddle and the dilemma that is the Janus dance of selfing the world in worlding the self among others doing the selfsame thing.

Selfsame is another word for identity.

I am metaphor.

Logical and/or mathematical identity transports us to a objective realm by removal of the POV (even if it is just a dream).

Metaphor carries us off to new viewpoints, or at least to someone else’s shoes.

“ “I am the stag” ”

Even if you really are a snake.

Recently, I have been using the word taphonomy a lot in reference to a method, with or without the -ology, as in methodology, which I suspect is better than some others.

Before it becomes a methodology for the purposes of moral philosophy or art criticism or philology or more anthropological taxonomising of social categories, or institutions, it has to pass through a zone of analogy, whereafter it can become a fruitful metaphor (until it reifies or deifies back into the dust from which it arose).

When it is still a useful metaphor, I will argue (but not today, not yet) that it is better than genealogical metaphors and thus begat-like methods, and better than other animal grammars like structuralisms, post and pre.

So today I am looking a book which comes out this last year or so and covers the stories of people working in the field, by a geologist turn science journalist, Laura Poppick and her book Strata: Stories from Deep Time.

Firstly, as a science essay book, it is an excellent follow-up to Nick Lane’s Oxygen. Or perhaps should I say it forks well from that readership of use. Even as it quotes Rachel Carson as a model, whose books I read so long ago, yet so long after they came out.

Secondly, reading the researcher’s stories, who Laura Poppick meets, is wonderful escapism for me, even if I have visited some of those places toured in the book (of which there were more than I would have guessed). And I dreamed of being a young geologist out there looking at rocks. Being there. Even if it is at Fortune Head dump in Newfoundland in the 80s. (Spoil but no spoilers.) Why wasn’t that me?

BTW the gelogical museum in St John’s Newfoundland is well worth the visit, even if entry was free that day last year because I was a dad.

The book is in fact a class of travel writing, if more geological than geographic.

Thirdly, it directly deals with the story of life on this world we Earth together, and does so by talking with the people who investigate into the layers of rock that keep their records in very trying and difficult vaults, and who decode these hard problems of process and strata. And do that through the taphonomy of scientific discussion. (See what i did there?)

The included photos are ones I took while doing said virtual tourism.

Curiously the word taphonomy does not occur in the book, as far as I noticed, even if it is all about that process and its adjacent phases which are hard to read.

Poppick, Laura. Strata: Stories from Deep Time. W. W. Norton & Co., 2025.

This is part of the taphonomy of worlding project. Also crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.

to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life — Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations

First published on a wordpress site at: formeika by meika loofs samorzewski 2020-10-16 ^[1]. Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com and conworkshop.com and lingocon.com/ in varying degrees of pleasant formatting. (And had to use latex in this substack post to move the tables over!!

I don’t seem able to fix the footnote superscript issue. It’s a cut & paste job after mucking around in asciidoc and markdown and html for the constructed language repository platforms like conworkshop.com and lingocon.com

See also meika.loofs-samorzewski.com, whyweshould (self-hosted) and substack.com

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction : creating Jaar

  • 1.1 The general idea for the meta-conlang Jaar

  • 1.2 My background

  • 1.3 Eureka moment

• 2 Wording Jaar

  • 2.1 Vocabulary

    • (A) Initial “Pronouning” – three speech-centric locations (SCLs)

    • (B) Asking? — the interrogative particle czy (t͡ʂi)

    • (C) Six Degrees of Confidence (DOC) or certainty

• 3 Conversing

  • 3.1 Key for Conversations

  • 3.2 Initialising protocol = ‘Hello, World’

  • 3.3 Querying = checking-in with the correspondent

  • 3.4 the redundancy between SCLs & DOCs

• 4. Verbing – what grammar?

  • 4.1 Identity and the copula, the modality of a certain confidence.

    • Dialogue examples

  • 4.2 (The other) modal verbs of not-so-sure and wrong

• 5. Resources & references

  • 5.1 Youtube:

  • 5.2 References:

• Appendix 1 Dictionaries & usages

  • A1.1 Canonical word list

  • A1.2 Possible things to be pidginned in…

  • A1.3 Possible implied usages and meanings

    • A1.3.1 Lack of an object (SV-O)

    • A1.3.2 Lack of a subject (-SVO)

    • A1.3.3 Lack of a verb (S-VO)

    • A1.3.4 Reversing subject verb order (VSx)

    • A1.3.5 Presently tensed

    • A1.3.6 Future tense

    • A1.3.7 Possible Imperative

    • A1.3.8 Evidentiality

  • A1.4 Agreed: derivatives & definitions

• Appendix 2 Exercises & experiments

• Appendix 3 speech-centric locations – a chart

• Appendix 4 Out-takes, works-in-progress & bloopers

• Footnotes

1 Introduction : creating Jaar

to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life ^[2]

— Ludwig WittgensteinPhilosophical Investigations

Jaar is a meta-conlang, a constructed language ennabler for speakers with ‘no’ common language to help create a working pidgin between them.

I love the idea of a speaker of ‘toki pona’ and a speaker of ‘Esperanto’ with ‘no’ common language to try using Jaar.

1.1 The general idea for the meta-conlang Jaar

Constructed langauges (conlangs) often seek to ease communication, and bring world peace, by developing a common language to avoid misunderstandings or community isolation. There is often an attempt to maintain a broadly level linguistic accessibility^[3] by all populations. This leads to a design that is hoped to be easier to learn and speak than a foreign natural language (natlang) with all of its idiosyncratic rules and exceptions developed over the course of time and fashion. Such “conlangs” are further described as auxialiary constructed languages (auxlangs). These “auxlangs” can be defined in deference to “artlangs” which are constructed for the purposes of world-building fiction and story-telling, vice -versa, or simply as a joke.

Jaar^[4] is, roughly speaking, an auxlang, however, as it does not seek to to serve as a ‘lingua franca’ ‘per se’, but act as a method to intentionally hybridise the speakers’ languages into a pidgin. As such it can be described as a pidgin ennabler rather than as an auxlang as generally understood in the conlang community. But the term auxlang does applies in a more general sense of supporting a common communication.^[5]

Whether it is a “-lang” at all is up for debate. Maybe Jaar is a meta-pidgin (metagin). It will likely produce a more isolating “lang”, even if not perhaps technically a natural pidgin “natgin”. Conlangs are the inspiration though.

Compared to most conlangs Jaar will appe’ar’ deficient:

• It has ‘no’ set phonology.

• It has ‘no’ set orthography.

• It has a very limited vocabulary. The target is less than a dozen words.^[6]

These three elements (phonology, orthography & vocabulary)(and more ‘no’ doubt) are basically BYO (bring-your-own) by whoever is engaged in the conversation in which Jaar is agreed to be used.

Thus the aim of Jaar is not to defined the perfect world-peace-channelling language, but to offer a method of communication from which a common tongue could emerge. I.E. to ease us past gesticulation to verbal communication, while accepting where we come from, and what we bring with us.

If ‘no’ pidgin emerges, Jaar may just begin a conversation which supports learning each other’s language, and then like a ladder be thrown away once it has been climbed back up to the place one already is.

As such it will have more in common with slangs (interslang?). Especially where “languages” pretend that they are natural (organically magical) and never constructed by usage & agreement, let alone by a group of grumpy old men in some fossilized-wood-panelled chamber, who reserve the right to agree on language, in the name of a tradition that grumps on willy-nilly into the future.

1.2 My background

I am a native English speaker. I learnt German as a 5-6 year old, deom my cousins, and forgot it on my return to Australia^[7]. As an adult I have re-learnt German to an advanced beginner, and stalled. I can read it okay, as well as having a smidgin of French and Russian, and ongoing efforts in Polish. All lamentably European, and burred with an Australian laziness.

Basically I love-hate learning languages, and never given it enough time. I totally support any argument that natural languages are the way they are — because babies learn them, and then as teenagers languages get re-tooled and slanged out to annoy their elders, while old grumps worry it’s all gone to pot because they have ‘no’ memory of their own earlier phases in this life-cycle process.

However, when younger I disparaged conlangs for attempting to design what came naturally, now I do not believe that any language, let alone any national language, is a pure “natlang”.

So I basically stand in a place, where as I writer I love knowing how other languages work, the worlds they build, but as a modern human I hate some elements of “natural” languages, and the biggest hurdle (besides effort & time) in learning languages with gender-based noun-classes, in particular, lies with the gender-based noun-classes.

I do not want to learn Polish (perhaps the worst offender in this silly Indo-european grammar choice). Fuck that shit. I hate gender. Instead I want to change Polish, or German, or Russian, or French. Particularly French. It’s more a hate-hate relationship with French.

How did later English loose its noun-classes based in gender? Because, it is suggested, Norse and English speakers, in attempting to communicate with each, said fuck that shit. Gender-based noun-classes in English were un-denatured in a conversational moment of annoyance. I can relate to that. That compromise if Jaar.

I am a grumpy teenager who wants to baby talk.

1.3 Eureka moment

The other personal element is learning-about those languages, mostly outside Europe, that structure some part of their grammar with reference to the quality or source of the information. I.E. how certain they are, whether they witnessed it directly, was it reported to them only, …. is it complete BS?^[8]

I’ve been wondering of-and-on for years how to add this feature to English. As a new declension? A flavouring particle? A modal verb thing? Tonal signification?

Then I thought, of course, if you add it to English why not add the same thing to any or every language?

“Ah ha!” <insert lightbulb emoji here>. I had this last thought as I fell asleep one night, after watching too many conlang critic youtube reviews one after the other… This after months of watching LangFocus, NativLang, and language acquisition channels like EasyGerman, EasyPolish etc. “Yes,” I thought, “add it to all of them.

“Bastardise them!”

And combine those degrees of un/certainty with an element that recognises the speaker/audience not as pronoun so much but as…. Zzzzzzzz. I slept. I dreamed. I woke up renewed.

Norbert Wierzbicki’s Ecolinguist guess-a-word youtube videos are also a major influence here. I even guessed correctly before Norbert did once. The guessing is often between more closely related languages (Romance, Germanic, Slavic) but what if….?

Jaar seeks to bootstrap what speakers of closely related languages can already do. Thanks Norbert.

Maybe with more gesticulation.

And even more smiles.

2 Wording Jaar

As an interrogating & connecting meta-pidgin Jaar seeks to ride the ebb-and-flow of active conversation where speakers without a common language try to communicate —with the language/s they do have. Jaar as a meta-language provides a conscious & attentive learning space, where the use of Jaar is a divergent or parallel method belonging to neither natural language (nor conlang as we know them) (this qualifier may be lost in time).

With both sides of the conversation using Jaar, it is hoped, speakers can end up creating (perhaps more easily) a new pidgin, which simplfies and combines both langauages, and so, perhaps, moves towards that possibility we call a common tongue, or, even better, a Common Tower of Babel. Confusion creates potential.

Once a pidgin has succesfully launched from Jaar, it is ‘no’ longer Jaar. Then there may be strong and weak pidgin forms of Jaar birthed pidgins. A pidgin which strongly maintains what is described below is a Jaar-based pidgin (and perhaps a Jaar based creole in the f’ar’ future). A pidgin which does not, or only weakly, maintains the description below is a Jaar-booted pidgin (or creole).

First I’ll describe the deficiencies, both as it’s a shorter list and as these lacks, particularly the third, actually define Jaar.

Thus, it has:

• No set phonology. Let those talking listen and gesticulate to each other and work out what works.

• No set orthography, let those conversing scribble it out for each other. (I’ll make IPA guesses^[9] of the stuff I do use.)

• No set vocabulary. It is Bring-Your-Own (BYO) and then to be agreed^[10] (except that described below for querying, the degrees of certainty and the speech-based locational points of view).

Jaar does have:

• A small vocabulary. (ASPIRATION: less than a dozen terms);

• Some initial rules of interruptive/investigative grammar;

• Use of Subject Verb Object (SVO) word order (Nominative–accusative alignment is assumed herein as the creator only really knows this alignment form in his weak English-speaking way);

• A mix of epistemic modality with a point of view, sprinkled with hints of evidentiality; Nod for yes and shake of head for no; and, General gesticulation.

2.1 Vocabulary

The ten words of basic Jaar are of three types:

1. three words to locate speech and its audience, or neither;

2. a questioning interrogative particle czy (t͡ʂi)^[11]. Used used like Polish ‘czy’, but not just to prompt for yes-’no’ answered questions in Jaar, but to make all Six Degrees of Confidence queries; and,

3. six words used to indicate certainty or confidence, by way of modal elements, called Six Degrees of Confidence (DOCs)

(A) Initial “Pronouning” – three speech-centric locations (SCLs)

The speech-centric locations are:

These speech locations may well be used as pronouns, though the first two positions refer to a POV of the speech rather than the entity as person that holds the POV producing the speech.^[13] No doubt this is not clear, and a pointless distinction at this point in the description for beginners.

ASPIRATION: That is, from the point of view of a imagined pure Jaar, ‘ja’ & ‘ju’ are located by the speech act or conversational gesture (and the topic of conversation in relation to the members of the conversation) (or ‘sprachbund’ even). This relativity provides the platform from which the six degrees of confidence initially open-up, or operate from, to imagine a form of life. Jaar itself is a world-building exercise. Jaar supports multiple attempts at world-building, real or imaginary. Thus, there is ‘no’ “4 XXX — they…”, because ‘they’ are not speaking. I or we (’ja’) can report what they say, but not speak from their location per se. One cannot speak for others. Nor listen for them.^[14]

These three speech-centric locations (SCLs) are the intialising boot-set mechanics for ‘pronoun’ support.^[15] You can call them pronouns for short, even though they would be / are a derived feature^[16]. I regard pronouns as a decayed version of prepositional attitudes. In compositin with the copula we have the beginnings of identity politics (that’s a linguistic-logic pun or two folks).

So anyways, more pronouns can be developed by the Jaar users in conversation. Like one for the English “it” (or that which cannot converse in any language, and so may relate to notions of animacy). And their conjugations for that matter.

(B) Asking? — the interrogative particle czy (t͡ʂi)

Not just for creating yes/no-answered questions in Jaar, but for all Six Degrees of Confidence (DOCs). (I.E. more broadly used than the Polish ‘czy’^[17], from which it descends.)

Note

This is a late addition when I decided that swapping word order for questions (like in English for example) added more complexity than a dedicated questioning word (even though I am trying to have less than 12 words.) It became obvious that a querying prompt is an absolutely basic part of conversation though^[18].

(C) Six Degrees of Confidence (DOC) or certainty

Here we have the main game of Jaar. While the above two alone (A & B) could possible work as a meta-lang to help build a pidgin between two speakers with no common language, it’s not much more than we already have. Especially if one or more speakers have any experience with more than their mother’s tongue.

Three “similar” or colour pairs of DOCs are structured in tension and contrast, and hopefully this pairing may help speakers “point” the way forward in a conversation more broadly than a guessed yes (nod) or ‘no’ (shake of the head) can achieve alone:

Remember:

• ‘ar’ and ‘su’ are tensed by the conversation itself, if not the worlding urge in us to build a world by talking. While statements using either of these forms may agree, they may also disagree with each other. What is conventionally agreed may not be what I think. I.E. They may not be ‘identical’ (or ==) with each other. And what is idiosyncratically declared as certain by an individual may not be maximally certain at an intersubjective, traditional or consensus level^[20]. As such, curiously, they are the most fictional modalities or certainties, if only because their confidence is at 100%. They are a pretence, a laziness, an efficiency, a postponement, or a working shortcut that imagines a world as it is, and hopefully they will not forget that absolute fuzziness, and be proud of it.

• ‘ti’ and ‘ma’ are in tension in everyone’s head (between acting/doing and investigating/intuiting in the world) — between what is possible and what is likely (things that make you go hhhummmmann.) They are the least pretentious.

• ‘no’ and ‘ra’ are in tension where falsehood does not equal complete failure. (no, but or yeah nah).

Which of the pair should you choose, and when? For this can be drawn with ‘su’ & ‘ar’ positions swapped, i.e the centre oscillates in all worlds of conversations.

Note

‘su’ and ‘ar’ can both be used as a copula in utterance/sentence construction, which depends on who/how that modality for/of 100% confidence is determined. See [4_verbing_what_grammar].

3 Conversing

This sections deals with how to actually use these words. These are all imaginary conversations.

Note

Some six years after the original published version Jaar 1.3 (in 2020) I am unaware of anyone giving it a go, as it requires more than just me to try it.

3.1 Key for Conversations

In this text Jaar words are italicised but source or new loanwords are not italicised when used in Jaarish sentence/phrases.

Italicised loanwords imply agreement and acceptance in the Jaar conversation/pidgin. The distinction is canonical, but not so the orthography used below to indicate it. It is just what I have at hand for these imaginary conversations.

In addition to the usage described above in 2.1 (C) Six Degrees of Confidence (DOC) or certainty can also be used as follows ( “==” means is identical with/to, and a single “=” means it is more similar than ‘identical’):

1. ‘ar’ == yes == nod == single+

2. ‘su’ == we are agreed or have solved it == ++

3. ‘ti’ == almost == hand twist == ~

4. ‘ma’ == maybe == open hand/s == ^

5. ‘no’ == no == headshake == —

6. ‘ra’ == no, try again == shrug == –

3.2 Initialising protocol = ‘Hello, World’

Canonical protocol or verbal handshakes for attempting to converse using Jaar.

1st speaker: ‘ja ar!’

Hello!

(== I say I am maximally certain I speak == Hey there, I am speaking Jaar)

2nd speaker: ‘ar ja!’ ^[21]

Hello! ()== I am maximally certain I say I am speaking. == Yes,greetings, I am speaking Jaar)

Both speakers : ‘ja su!’

== (We agree to use Jaar to converse.) = Yes, we speak Jaar!

And off you go folks. == ju ma!^[22]

3.3 Querying = checking-in with the correspondent

These are examples of common ‘handshaking’ towards using Jaar to create a working pidgin.

Note

Also reforming the first line “ja ar!” in 3.2 Initialising protocol = ‘Hello, World’ into a question “czy ja ar” is the equivalent of “Do/Can you speak?”

Note

It might be best to read 4. Verbing – what grammar? first, but that’s not how I got there…

‘Czy?’ == Umm? == querying prompt = (possibly then also) who, what, when, how, and/or why? = What? == ‘Que’?

‘Czy ar?’ == Am I right? = Have I got this right?

‘Czy ju ar?’ == Is that right? = Is that, what you said, maximally certain? = Would you say that is 100% certain? = Have I understood you correctly?

So given those verbal handshakes with intent to begin using ‘Jaar’, the following may well be the way to go:

‘Czy ja.’ == (something like) Who or what is speaking.^[23] that/who speaks I/us? = Who am I? Who are we?

‘Czy’ could then be agreed/used as a verb to mean: “to ask” = “to question”.

‘Ja czy.’ == I ask = we ask.

‘Ja ma czy?’ == May I ask? = May we ask?

Then it might follow that:

‘Czy ja ma?’ == (might mean) May I? = Can I? = Am I allowed?

3.4 the redundancy between SCLs & DOCs

Just to be clear:

‘Ja ar’ [XXX] == i say / I am [XXX]

‘Ja su’ [XXX] == we say / we are [XXX]

‘Ju ar’ [XXX] == You say / you is [XXX]

‘Ju su’ [XXX] == yous say / yous are [XXX]

SCLs & DOCs overlap in their responsibilities.

4. Verbing – what grammar?

These six Degrees of Confidence (DOCs) can be used as verbs, as well as be used as other parts of speech^[24]. So they are both verbs and not-verbs. I suggest people will verb with them a lot, because….

These Degrees of Confidence (DOC) are designed to displace the natural speakers’ verbing systems, in particular those verbs of a modal and auxiliary use. These DOCs interrupt the native speaker, so that rather than learning a new language they use Jaar as an intermediary clunky adaptive mechanic^[25]. Speakers use Jaar to interrogate themselves and the speaker they are trying to converse with. It’s all trial and error, and so support that pidgin formation, and work towards a useable outcome. And rather than memorise and practise an entire language (foreign or auxlang) from the start, you just have to remember what you agree to use, which the pronouning locations (SCLs) support directly.

Thus ‘su’ and ‘ar’ can both be used for the copula, and how it is used depends on who/how that modality for/of 100% confidence is determined. I have ‘no’ opinion currently on which should be used for what other auxiliary verb purposes, if any at all at this stage of description. However the modal verbs should be replaced extensively, as described and then as agreed, with the following serving suggestions below and in the appendices.

More subjunctive forms (could, should, must, dare, would, were) could be formed by combining these six elements if agreed by the speakers using Jaar. Working out useful or clearer deontic modalities might a fun parlour game later in the conversation.^[26]

As might various tenses.^[27] Basically, like pronoun conjugations the speakers using Jaar will have to work out their own agreements on these matters.

This is a lightweight boot set with some examples, or implications based on my own undertanding of the languages I have some knowledge of.

4.1 Identity and the copula, the modality of a certain confidence.

It is recommended that ‘ar’ and ‘su’ be used to replace verbs indicating identity or predication: to be, ‘sein’, ‘być’ etc. Why? Because from the position of a imagined pure Jaar, the copula represents a modality of 100% certainty and confidence.

Use ‘ar’ when it is the speaker/s’ POV that stresses the confidence or certainty— I/we are certain that…

Use ‘su’ where it is the speaker/s’ POV that agrees collectively in the intersubjective conventionality of the truth or certainity. This includes socially constructed knowledge, scientifically deducted consensus knowledge, and traditional beliefs & customs. Where this is consistent with their modality of maximum or agreed certainty or confidence.

A small example:

The truck is red. == Truck ‘ar’ red.

Or it == Truck ‘su’ red.

However, back translation into English would include:

Truck ‘ar’ red. == I say the truck is red.

Truck ‘su’ red. == We agree=say the truck is red.

Thus the following is also possible:

(Truck ‘ar’ red. ≠ Truck ‘su’ red.) == (I say the truck is red. ≠ We agree the truck is red.)

Thus the end of the exchange will end up somewhere, if only through efforts gesticulatory and lots of head-nodding/shaking (assuming that is common to the speakers).

This usage as a copula is where a statement or proposition can be queried/refused/judged. This is a different construction to descriptive phrases:

Red truck == red truck in a Jaar-boosted pidgin, but not if the other speaker/s does not get it or agree.

Dialogue examples

First speaker points at truck: truck.

Second speaker nods and checks: ‘czy’ truck?

First Speaker: ‘ar.’

Second speaker: ‘czy’ truck ‘ar’ red? ‘ar.’ truck ‘ar’ red. (How do we know colour is involved?)(maybe they have already talk about colours)

Second speaker: ‘ju’ truck ‘ar’ red? == you say truck is red

First Speaker: ‘ja’ truck ‘ar’ red, ‘czy’ truck ‘su’ red? == I say yes truck ‘ar’ red. Do we agree/say truck is red?

Second speaker nods: truck ‘su’ red.

First Speaker: ‘su.’ red truck. == Yes we agree. [It is a] red truck.

Second speaker <shakes head>: ‘ra!’ camion rouge! == (nice try!) Camion rouge!

These two may take a while, if ever, to create a pidgin, understanding is not agreement. Agreement to a meaning is not the same as agreeing to use a particular’ form.

4.2 (The other) modal verbs of not-so-sure and wrong

Modal verbs replaced by ‘ti’ and ‘ma’.

‘czy ju ti’ angielsku == Can you speak [in] English?

‘no. ja’ Deutsch spricht == No. I speak German.

‘czy ju ma’ Deutsch == Are you perhaps German?

‘no. ja ar’ Schweizer. Ja Hochdeutsch. == No. I am Swiss. I am speaking High German.

Context can supply missing arguments^[28]:

‘czy ju ma’ coffee == Are you likely coffee [to drink]? = Would you like a coffee?

‘czy ju ma’ trinken == Vielleicht du trinkst? = Möchtest du [etwas] zu trinken == Would you like something to drink?

5. Resources & references

Language Creation Society (USA) conlang.org

5.1 Youtube:

Ecolinguist https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChqLwfp3eAkAwX9DGnqr_CA

Conlang Critic “jan Misali” https://www.youtube.com/c/HBMmaster/featured

LangFocus https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNhX3WQEkraW3VHPyup8jkQ

NativLang https://www.youtube.com/user/NativLang

EasyGerman https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbxb2fqe9oNgglAoYqsYOtQ

EasyPolish https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPG9JpJITL7xETpVylMyrqA

5.2 References:

Halley, Mitch. 2018. My First Conlang – How NOT to Make a Language. Conlang Critic — jan Misali.

.

———. 2020a. Conlang Critic: Kēlen. Conlang Critic — jan Misali.

.

———. 2020b. Conlang Critic: Viossa. Conlang Critic — jan Misali.

.

———. 2020c. Community Contributions Are Going Away (Rant). Conlang Critic — jan Misali.

.

meika loofs samorzewski

——— 2019. Why we should. Hobart: meika loofs samorzewski Why we should: an introduction by memoir into the implications of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic, or, Anyone for cake?

——— see also from 2023 ‘Why we should’ blog at substack.com and also selfhosted.

Wierzbicki, Norbert. 2019. Carpatho Rusyn Language | Can Polish and Czech Understand It? Ecolinguist.

.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, Translator G.E.M. Anscombe, (Oxford, Blackwell. 1953).

Appendix 1 Dictionaries & usages

The above is the outlineof the absolute basics, and it’s prescriptions are canonical for Jaar.

But below in these appendicies are some minimum suggestions, and perhaps in time, these will become expected default usages when two or more Jaar speakers without a common language or previous communication wish to begin to use Jaar to construct a common tongue between themselves, and build a world.

So at the moment they are thought experiments, or possible pathways of agreement. Of course, as I write I am the only speaker and I get to agree on everything with myself… ;)

A1.1 Canonical word list

ja == speaker or ageement of utterance – I me us we etc who speak this speech

ju == listener / correspondent (you, yous — real or imagined, implied or assumed)

per == not in conversational remit but capable of speech (they say)

czy == turns any statement / phrase / gesture into a query

‘ar’ == yes == nod ==

‘su’ == we are agreed or have solved it == ++

‘ti’ == almost == hand twist == ~

‘ma’ == maybe == hand twist == ^

‘no’ == ‘no’ == headshake == —

‘ra’ == no, try again == shrug == –

A1.2 Possible things to be pidginned in…

and agreed on fairly quickly for that which is lacking and thus follows from everything above, or their equivalent from languages which do things differently or not at all:

Pronouns, demonstrations and their conjugalities. Possessives and cases, things that relate indications in the conversation. Cases and prepositions, things that indicate relations in the world. Tensing to the rhythm of time and its in/completions

A1.3 Possible implied usages and meanings

As derived from canonical grammar & word list – a (strongly) suggested list.

A1.3.1 Lack of an object (SV-O)

Can indicate capabilities, content, and thus reflexivity as it doubles-down on the speaker-centric assumptions POV of the speaker/s.

‘ja ar’ == I speak me = I am who speaks. = I myself speak “ja ar”. = ‘Jaar’.

‘ja su’ == those who converse, correspond/agree/create.

‘ja’ comb == I comb myself = I comb my hair.

A1.3.2 Lack of a subject (-SVO)

To indicate more passive forms:

‘ar’, bite man == I state, man was bitten.

(per? or ‘no ja’?) ‘ar’ trash conlangartist (ConlangCritic)== (They-not-here-in-this-conversation stated) The constructed language maker was rubbished (by the Conlang Critic). [???]

A1.3.3 Lack of a verb (S-VO)

Without any verb, or more particularly ‘no’ Degrees of Confidence (degree of confidence), nothing can be inferred. However this could be used to indicate being confounded or astounded.

ja tree == i speak tree = I am amazed into speaking by this tree. = I, amaze, the tree. OR I, tree, myself.

This is a pathway for gerund formation when we verb nouns or noun verbs.

In Jaar there is a strong possibility that all nouns can verb. And that all verbs can noun. Obviously this will create confusions that will have to be agreed by speakers of Jaar where a sentence with ‘no’ DOCs does not indicate if the SVO order is altered and a word is not obviously a noun or a verb.

A1.3.4 Reversing subject verb order (VSx)

Emphasizes or redoubles again the (un)certainty (and or reflexivity where there is ‘no’ object (VS-O)

(some verb) ja (some object) === I am 200% sure of VO = Absolutely! VO is true.

Expresses shock, joy, and glad agreement.

‘Ar ja!’ == I do indeed myself speak Jaar. Joy!

A1.3.5 Presently tensed

Use of modal forms of strong certainty or identity ( ‘ar’ & su) can be use to imply/ indicate a process, the results of which have ended, or continue presently, or indicate the process has begun as we speak.

A1.3.6 Future tense

Using the unsure modalities to create the future.

‘ja ma’ walk == I say I may walk = I will walk. == Ich werde gehen. == pójdę (będzie chodzić)

‘ja ti’ walk/ed == I will have walked

A1.3.7 Possible Imperative

‘no’ Degrees of Confidence (DOCs) and use ‘ju’ & verb:

‘ju’ run == Run!

With DOC :

‘ju no’ == Stop! (also == you are wrong)

‘ju ra’ == back off!

‘ju ma’ == off you go == śmiało

A1.3.8 Evidentiality

See also A1.4 Agreed: derivatives & definitions below

Use of modal forms of certainty or identity ( ‘ar’ & ‘su’) can instruct a locational speech (pronoun) usage to be ‘ar’ evidentiality when they either initiate a morpheme and (thus) word order, i.e. go first:

‘arya’ == I saw this = I bear witness = this is my story and I am sticking to it.

‘super’ == they say they saw this, they bear witness as follows, their story is

‘super’ tasmaniantiger yesterday == They say they sensed/heard/saw/tracked a Tasmanian Tiger yesterday.

‘maper’ dolphin morze == they say it is possible they see/sense a dolphin in the sea

A1.4 Agreed: derivatives & definitions

Derivatives ‘ja ar’ = ‘jaar’ == name of meta-pidgin Jaar (and thus a reification of reflexive phrase ‘ja ar’) – implies usage of reification then as gerund as in ‘su jaar’ == we speak Jaar = the world of Jaar.

‘per su’ == they who are not hear is agreed to mean “they/them” ( perhaps = those who do not speak Jaar).

====Definitions ergative This ergative language comparison == headache, and thus broadly any non nominative-accusative aligned language.

Appendix 2 Exercises & experiments

1. Fluent speakers of toki pona and Esperanto with ‘no’ common language to try using Jaar to converse.

2. Use in linguistic studies, i.e. actual experiments to collect more controlled data about language in general.

3. Jaar users could iterate their experiences with different languages and take note of what pathways are similar or repeated, and which are localised to particular speakers.

4. If repeated enough, then we can take note of what pathways are similar between similar language pairs, and which are localised to particular pairs of languages.

5. How it might be used outside the Anglo-cacophony-sphere?

6. Aliens!

Appendix 3 speech-centric locations – a chart

Appendix 4 Out-takes, works-in-progress & bloopers

These do not even make it to footnote status. Or need their own sections in Jaar-booted pidgins. Or are too hard for an imaginary pure Jaar, or even the canonical lightweight toolkit.

1. Words can come in with their bits (declensions/conjugations) and loose them as we converse.

2. Sign language (more than gesticulation) in the basic cononical vocabulary.

3. Habits from a native tongue and literacy skills are no banned but accommodated and or eventually ignored becoming useless.

4. Jaar is a philosolang. But what began as a POVlang… turns into a qualifying range. [WTF]

5. Jaar is a boardgame. A card game.

6. Degrees of certainty revlve around their impact on the “V” of SVO.

7. Worldbuilding is key, world-building is the moral urge. Conspiracy theorists prove this with their fantasies.

8. How does one tell apart, with gerunds, when/if it is a failed noun identity?

9. When the other DOCs come first (ti & ma) what grammatical elements might that allow?

10. Degrees or moments of doubt.

11. Are there too many puns?

12. Nothing in this would upset Chomsky? What have I done wrong?

13. ‘ja’ snuck in from Polsih with no conscious effort on my part, but ‘czy’ was completely conscious.

14. Jaar is the opposite to toki pona. Jaar does not interrogate your vocubulary, but interrogates who says what and how sure are you about that? toki pona offers a divergent method of interrogation as you try to translate dedicated morphemes into even more toki pona morphemes, but Jaar does the opposite, you just bring in what you have and then try and work it out together and out of that usage it is both created and rememebered.

15. There is no present tense. There is only present agreement. A tense is not an agrement.

16. The locations of speech and DOCs are tight seeds that can unfurl in different directions, if they were just pronouns and only modal verbs then they could not do this. Jaar is a set of potentials that allow an ease of conversational interviews. [he says “ ‘ja jaar, ja jatima”]

17. Tensing time. The present is either an outcome of the past, or a cause of the future. The shortcut is that the DOCs of negation and maximum positive certainty are for all time, including right now, all time is a shortcut for the present tense.

18. The verb “to be” equivalent in Alya [later called Yaar then finally Jaar] is a modal verb use to indicate certainty/identity (a certain identity) Alya removes this modality from the verbs, it de-verbs. 15 August 2020 [at type of typing 6 September 2020 I say “WTAF”] [it was the last thing written in my handwritten notebook]. {in 2026 I just nod sagely}

19. The other cases and all prepositional type things (instrumental, imperative, dative, oblative, recessive^[29]) will have to be agreed on by the speakers. Start with your languages’ preferred method, and see how you go.

20. I prefer “world buiding” to “world peace” in my conlangs, even if they are actually the same things. == ‘Ja ma’ worldbuilding, ‘ra’ worldpeace, even they ‘ar’ samething. ‘Ja’ imagine.

21. What is the imaginary pure Jaar? It is that which need never exist.

22. What will happen to the entire world? Ask the children what the world is.

Footnotes

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com and conworkshop.com and lingocon.com/ in varying degrees of pleasant formatting.

So while what follows is animalcentric, I do not support the division between plants and animals as in itself a key moment, that the need to classify is anything more than the limits of our (animal) understanding, rather than of an ability or lack thereof.

To start with, some proto-physics, or, at least, some proto-meta-physics, or, both

From my High School physics class I can still hear the groans when the word vector was mentioned from my classmates. Vectors had been explained the day before, when I was away. I was not at school that day. I don’t think it was illness. It was early in the year, I think I had just returned from the summer holidays, in which we had visited relatives, in winter, in Europe.

So I always associated learning the word with those groans. Vectors groan at me, with intent.

A groan, I mean a vector, has measurements in direction as well as speed. It’s important in Newtonian physics because without direction there is not much to say, or groan.

I’m going to skip over that whole series of hard science fields and straight through to biology and our animal life.

As animals, as it’s Latin derivation indicates, means those who breathe, or at least, those who chests move in order to respire, plants also respire, but apparently do not breathe (both words animal and deer derive from breath/breathe). (I hope you have read and groaned through the animalcentric warnings above.)

It is this which informs our animal spirits, producing our groans or vectors. And quick as a breath our direction and movement can change mid-flight, or even stop to rest. If not freeze in pretence of immobility, a fine trick. But momentum only does so much on a planet, and besides invisibility stillness can also mean the end of breathing.

Now what a vector and an animal have in common is that they have a Point of View. The vector is going someplace from where it was. The animal is wanting to get someplace, or get something, or flee. Or rest, and groan when it has to get up again. Newtonian physics is an animal physics. See what I am doing/cutting/re-tracing there?

A direction has a measurement which requires some notice to cut and compare/re-trace/notice, to count and calculate. A point of view is at the very least some type of memory. Memory helps you groan. I remember when I learnt the word vector.

And helps you grow.

Animals grow, they have a life cycle, a series of involuted trajectories, trajectories are a history of vectors, a taphonomy of movements, recorded in the body, not just by the body’s POV machines (nervous systems), and not just the current Newtonian direction constanly adjusted and regulated, but also that which we call growth and ageing, the body becomes a track of it’s life’s history, the bones, the aged skin. For in that which moves changes over time, cells die and are replaced, each has their trajectory, their time in the flesh, if only an orbit of decay, and all framed by the selective pressures of evolution’s chance and our bottlenecks of reproduction.

Those two main dimension of movement, the body in space, the body in purview, are brought together into agreement, in worlding the self. I call that propensity to push to make it work ‘more’ ‘better’, the worlding urge and alignment is one way to do this.

Alignment assume trajectories several, which each assume vectors which assume direction which assume a POV. Alignment is a basic drive, it predates the sex drive (thus plants are included). Alignment forms the molecules of the world in which we, as fish, swim without noticing the water, for all our talk of the sea.

When we get alignments really tight we call them laws or truths, and get a bit twitchy if peeps want to unravel them.

E. M. Foster’s “only connect” is an expression of this animal grammar bewitching us ourselves into the world, even if novels are only practicing (as a friend of mine said of his children as he waits for grandchildren).

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. (Howard's End)

This is an entry in the taphonomy of worlding series which looks at the ways our language and categories are a process which in surviving— …fossilise themselves. The analogy here is that while bones can fossilise quite well, we should remember that bones are the result of a living process and so bones in themselves are a record of that life, and at death a skeleton captures a snapshot of that life. What is fossilised is already a record, but then fossilisation does not continue the life. Not even transhuman fossilisation will do that, even if successful on its own terms.

That life is a trajectory, a series of movements in which living and conscious processes align and maintain it’s auto-a-nomia:

[(within) and without)]=[(self regulate) and move the body vectors (internal and external)]

over a landscape produced by the body out of the substance of the terrain. The landscape and body are a composition which treats of the terrain as a substrate, for food and shelter and threat and opportunity. The body at death is a record of that POV’s history. For some the body at death will be absorbed and some of that history becomes energy and matter for their own bodies. For some the landscape is another’s body (parasites).

A taphonomy of worlding must view the living processes, including consciousness, as records of their survival, that we survive as fossils of our own success. We are all living fossils, and that this applies to our bodily outcomes or excretions, our prosociality and the outcomes that prosociality produce, the tools we have among us: like language, culture, morality, religion, art, performance, competition in co-operation and vice versa, and that each maintains a record of those complexities, they also fossilize themselves, in interaction and ongoing traditions, while remembering that responsibilities descend (upholding a tradtion is the wrong way round, an error of unsupervised POVs gone narcissistic).

A key think to remember after all that mere description, is that aligning trajectories is a major part of that self-fossilising process we call life, alignment with one’s direction, with all those complex movements a bodies makes and is composed of (internally & externally) is a key element which maintains individual “identity” and separates ‘one’ not out from the crowd, but from the commodity that is energy and atoms and gravity and, perhaps, time. Your life is thus already always a death note.

The circle of life and a cyclic cosmology of return or balance (examples of an alignment of metas) might be a better metaphor than some more soteriological metas about personal growth or salvation, but it is no more acccurate. The key notice is that life, may be more than not being dead, but without death, survival has no process. Death does not define life, or your identity, but does allow it to occur. Much like the world.

Sometimes the search for objectivity is the search for deathless world. Not quite the quest for immortality, but in the same worldless space, where no one can hear you groan.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com in the taphonomy of worlding project. See also alignment ④ if it quacks like a duck in a row.

Good intentions can go either way, badly as often as best.

Bad intentions are the same effort without— that within— with no one — worldless. They will destroy the world in order to save it, because they care to.

Yet the world does not care, even about the end of the world, for the world will go on, without each of us. Bad intentions can never see that fact, even when it alone makes the world go round. If left alone.

And alone, to notice the ruin of the world as it turns without us, to stand in that place, is a romance. The romantic effort is one of openness to the loss of self in selfing, when the world baptises you when it washes you away onto the earth. Worlded now like the mud of finding one’s self in the world without us. I guess this is a salvation in the blur of a dawn chorus.

But not for your soul as a spirit, nor for an ego as a collectivised ghost, the echos of life entitled loyalty, but that your place is even there without you, when you are not any of these things we name and value, and cannot be kept, but can be stored in the world which holds nothing. Not even you.

Moral of the story

I’ve use some English Christian words here as I grew up in some version of that tradition, but the idea of salvation is much wider and older than that expression. Look up the word soteriology as the study of such movements and practices. For example, there is a good discussion at enclycopedia.com.

Of course the natively-personal elements of these movement are usually counter-cultural, especially in highly stratified societies (witness the Bhakti devotionals in South Asia) which even then can be co-opted. As in the case of St Augustine of Hippo’s pathway re-inscribing Imperial hierarchies on a once more egalitarian movement, which is why centuries later, warrior-elite westward Germanic societies chose or formed a word that indicated their warband’s loyalty systems (be-love) to translate the lost Empire’s fides (faith as St Augustine prescribed it) amidst their own imperial ambitions, and we end up with the abominable “belief”. A bad way to world the self and self the world.

See also, as this piece (crossposted) reflects on the following background posts:

• Recently moral development [Song to the Siren & The Lovely Bones] (substack),

• Flowcharting faith-based faith versus faith-obeying-reason (substack),

• and To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church (substack) but versus Reading Beyer: Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both? (substack).

Posts on the world, worlding and Posts on the blur track these topics.

So read that first. This is all really written for the writer Bry Willis. (look Bry! No AI!)

So thanks for the kick up the bum this morning!

Good start with the copula, greasy pole that it is. We have some shared history there.

Not even read Galen Strawson so the Diachronic/Episodic phenomenology of self was interesting to read, especially with friends coming out with/as Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM).

My time at school as a student among many was dominated by ADHD episodic extenuations, my being suited to the ‘administration’s programme did not help. I tried explaining that to another friend diagnosed in the recent ADHD wave and they just stared at me. Apparently everyone is alone at school.

Also I’m likely to continuo-spectrumize the experience/s described as Diachronic/Episodic below though, if only because my divergence lumps them together.

Also also, restricting Diachronic to Diachronic=Power, i.e. truth=power, gives more power to Diachronic experience than it really has, or than it claims, even in exercising power. The institutions are not the experience. I guess that’s the power of stories, not analysis. See recent comment at “Truth and Social Reality: A Metaphysical Inquiry” - Aaron M. Griffith.

(that was a example of my divergent connective thinking style = inner self)(I know because when I make them --aloud in conversation, even between disjoint parts of their lives, they just stared at me)

In addition to the also also, My recent post moral development links back again to the fable, and modern literature’s fetish with character development in a narrative arc. We need more stories or value more types of story, and not just better versions of Pilgrim’s Progress. And I refuse to call it colonisation despite post-WW2 CIA backing for it. Reducing/restricting power=truth also removes agency from all animals, animality is what creates social institutions in the first place. Restricting worlding to administration may well be an imperial trajectory but we should reject its claims… —and criticism of it accepting that that is all ll there is in this world. Worlding is more than these various outcomes, vacuous, diagnostic or constructive, whatever their imperial narcissistic claim to be the be all and end all.

Now, where was I up to.

Identity as protocol.

I think ontologies are always empty, this makes them useful I guess.

This is my “animal grammar” versus your “ontological grammar” thing, again. I avoid the word ontology, and the word object. I prefer things.

The protocols things is interesting because it currently links in with reading of Ben Loomis at Gate of all mysteries on using ‘titles’ as one translation option for the name that cannot be named/titled, and Daoism’s quietist rejection of high offices in administrations.

Basic arguments

Hmm.

Many cultures punish not the soul to correct but for the world to re-balance. See pay-back in Australian Aboriginal systems. (Morality is another outcome of worlding, as such ‘morality’ varies and generally provides weak arguments which can give us analytically locked-in syndrome.)

Structured inheritance: the thinnest relation

Multiple inheritance in (c.f. programming) ontologies are still weakly constructive and not just diagnostic I’m afraid (it tells a story, and is not just a fable). It is interesting to note that it was first applied in what is known as Australian Series System in archival control metadata systems, a generation before programmers converged on similar ideas, with their ‘ontologies’, like in JAVA. Should do a google ngram on that word or two.

The genealogical thing generally… I more honestly promote instead a taphonomy of worlding. Taphonomy is the study of how things fossilise, in decay, in substitution, in use and in abandonment. It provides many more pathways of activity and (in)action, than the restrictive just-so stories narrated by empire nor episoded by the market. The world is a fossil of itself, and selfing along in it is how it arises and maintains that prosociality beyond the genealogical bottleneck of sex and the copula of identity.

My discovery or use of taphonomy begins at Divining the… —gap.

Genealogy is just another story, a way to world the self and self the world among others doing the same, multiplying the inheritance may just multiple the error, and not bootstrap the world at all.

See also Reading Joseph Henrich TWO : Social institution of the individual.

Now to the in-bold glossary-like paragraphs. So, yes, the empire loves restricting truth=power in its favour. That’s narcissism.

Necessity is not entitlement

Ah, Bergson!

Genealogy is not the record.

“ The genealogy answers a different question: why does an empty ontology remain compulsory? And the answer is that it is not sustained by argument at all. It is sustained by rhetoric where belief can be cultivated, and by coercion where it cannot.”

Hm, no, no, no, no this is the worlding urge that is, dare I say, colonised by empire, and in moulding the urge into morality, law, market, art, then replicates it self as an institution. It does not create the urge to world, just as a restaurant does not create the urge to eat.

It is not compulsory, it is available. What we must ask is in what conditions (taphonomy) is it likely to survive or maintain itself (niche construction in a fitness landscape --- the world is an extended phenotype afterall).

This is why taphonomy is a better diagnostic process and a better constructic (my bad new word for potential constructive effort, i.e. to world the self among others doing the same) effort generally. Diagnosis is always making up shit, another outcome of the worlding urge.

“Nor does power operate instead of morality, exactly; it conscripts the moral vocabulary as its rhetorical genre.”

Yeah, but no. It generates a moral vocabulary (social ontology) that masks it rhetorical claims. You can call both an ontology if you like but, it is really just dresses what we do anyway, only with blinkers and maybe a corset for the hunger pangs.

Ontology recapitulates ontogeny:- animal grammars, especially in prosocial species. if you favourite tool is a snare, everything looks like a rabbit.

Power arises as a derivative of prosocial processes, episodically (every dog has his day in the sun) and self-host parasitically, yes, but not apart from those processes, thus they can appear as a progenitor of the process (and will claim they are born of the sun) but only in hindsight for a process that does not begin anywhere genealogically speaking for it still has a taphonomic record (an least in the etymology of those social ontologies – like morality or religion or social institutions like churches/governments/empires which inscribe in the socially instituted individual their diachronic needs, but these are all, however complex, other (competing) derivative outcomes of the worlding urge). Genealogical processes are bad at mapping the prosocial processes of the species (we not only lack an organ for truth, we lack an organ for rhetoric).

“we need diachronic persons, therefore we are justified in maintaining them”

I guess we are betrayed by the history of surnames here.

Finally, I think all your 5 breaks can be covered by an investigation into taphonomy as a methodological improvement, rather than genealogical metaphors, even with multiple inheritance.

This will be classes in the Foucauldian-ish and analytical-ish lists here under this.

Bry, they could be fed into your AI efforts to generate my response in detail to your five Breaks.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

I worry about the comments because it is unlikely that the tech-bros understand the emotional record of human growth these words give the future. Examples of what makes tomorrow possible.

I am not sure they ever write down these words anywhere else. Do people ever say them aloud? I hope someone is collecting and working with them.

First I heard this song to the siren a on casette tape in a Ford Cortina, in about 1986, by way of my Maryanne’s cool older step-sister’s even cooler boy’s overseas music supply, This Mortal Coil, Cockteau Twins (they can call it trip or dream pop now, to us it was just, softer better new wave). Song to the siren is originally by Tim Buckley and Larry Becket, in 1967. Liz Fraser’s 1983 soprano is the most influential. Her version has its own history.

I was floating on its lyrics, when one of those comments halted my drift. The words stuck and I realised that prior art was before me again.

What caught my eye was the word “world”. I am always on the look-out for usages which world or wield ‘worlding’. My use of “to world” or “worlding” is directly informed by these prior uses, the search for them is thus, obviously, a part of a taphonomy of worlding. I am not neologising, much, I promise.

So I searched where the quote in the comment came from.

Didn’t see the movie, nor read the original novel some two decades past, but the novel's last words were placed beneath a fourteen-year-old upload, some eight years ago. What was the connection? Liz Fraser's soprano had been used in the movie version. I had never known her name in the 80s.

Ages ago, but ages after my baptism, people re-frame an important song in places emotionally key, these underpin the world, which has no other evidence but these feelings we self, and world, even without us.

Recently I revisited my decade old writing about a rejected story I wrote for an anthology of clockpunk fables (that was the brief). Rejected because the story lacked character development, something which traditional fables do not have.

In the last two hundred years and especially since the second world war English literature has been dominated by the requirement of character development. It is easy to see this as moral development, that all literature and storytelling should be a showcase of Pilgrim’s Progress object lessons. Even if you are dead, as The Lovely Bones portray.

Fables have morals-of-the-story of course, but not _in_ the story, that process happens in the reader or hearer who apprises themselves of the allegories and whatnot, as prompted by the moral. Modern literature wishes to show not tell, thus inculcate that change in reader who by losing them selves in a story arc, re-generate their selves or save their own souls (a protestant endeavour no doubt). People do this anyway so I am not sure why it has to be formulated this way, worlded this way, in ‘literature’. Indeed the repressed returns in criticism where all sorts of morals-of-the-story suddenly re-appear like mushrooms after the end.

I still have not read the novel nor seen the movie The Lovely Bones, but at least it has a moral, as well as the efforts of worlding, even without me in it.

"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future."

We can world even without our selves, even without us there at all.

References:-

Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. 0-316-66634-3.

Shurikova, Yana. “The Lovely Bones (2009).” Blog. The Curly Echo. 13 Oct. 2014. Web. [contains the song list for the movie].

Shearer, Joe. “The Lovely Bones.” Substack newsletter. Film Yap. 14 January 2010. Web. [Movie review]

This Mortal Coil - Song To The Siren (Official Video). 4AD. 2013. Web.

This Mortal Coil-Song To The Siren Lyrics. IAmSingingPanda. May 2, 2012. Web.

Moral of the story

Restricting or excluding stories because of their lack of character development, is an organisation urge, a worlding activity. It is an editor’s right even if they do not know what they are doing when asking for fables.

But the world doesn’t care what we organise, merely that we do, or, at least, merely that we make an effort, or even… —that we, at the very least, feel we should make an effort.

Change cannot be contained within our efforts, nor made exclusively by our efforts or virtues, however our worlding allows that to be, even without us, the world goes on.

Is it romantic? ① ② or ③?

Romantic worlding is a subset of worlding, literature begins in romances religiously constrained but meta-literary in origin, modern literature with its urge to over-specialise in character developed (show-don’t-tell hero-worship) has over-egged the cake (which may not look like a mixed-metaphor, but it is —deliberately so).

Moral development is also a subset of worlding, but they do not feel the same. See how it goes.

Because various outcomes of worlding feel very different we do not think of them as the same thing. Here Freud’s narcissism of minor differences comes to bear on all our efforts.

As opposed to Narcissism’s major inability to tell the difference between the world and themselves, (but love to boundary ride difference into control and power). Narcissists are the ultimate romantics, but feel nothing for the world.

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

Amos Ih Tiao Chang. The Tao of Architecture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Unlike the first two books studied in my series of ‘the Tao of X’ readings or reactions to the reception of Daoist ideas in Anglophone, this book is actually about the subject, architecture, it “Taos of”. For The Tao of Science was about management of teams of researchers in a post-WW2 industrial-complex, and Tao of the Traveller was a propaganda tool for a form of Western-acknowledging Hinduism.

Now I am not a great design fiend, nor do I have any pretensions to be an architect, but as a sculptor I was very taken with Chang’s sections that apply to any art dealing with dimensional physicalities, so basically all of the book. … I have often said that sculpture is about surface, and flat arts, like painting, are about depth —and this covers this aspect and absence quite well.

Similar to how geography is argued to be origin of the sciences (a Pyrrhonist argument and method I am sure), architecture is often regarded as the source of all the arts, even performance by providing the stage, although I would strongly argue that conversation is the origin of dramatic arts, for which architecture is but a support act.

The reason for this is that when I have worked with architects (or starchitects even) as a lowly member of the clientside crowd, is that the conversation of their career is often more important than the methods of their design philosophy and practice.

:)

Especially shown by the need for money shots of a complete project without people, I mean clients, in shot, sticky-beaking around and mucking up the views.

The text itself carries a strong hint of documentation stylistically, but in a good way, the lessons or lines or courses, are well drafted with illustrations, and the general Daoism swirls through all discussions as a key pivot.

It is interesting to note that it is now nearly fifty-years since the book with this ‘tao of’ title came out, and at that time, my notes indicate, it was based on a work from 1956:- The existence of intangible content in architectonic form based upon the practicality of Laotzu’s philosophy. This means it is prior to Ralph Gun Hoy Siu’s The Tao of Science by two years (which currently gets the gong for earliest form of book title “the Tao of X”. So, yeah, that documentation-style I mentioned makes more sense as coming out of the 1950s than the 70s.

Princeton University Press has evergreen-ed the work in 2017 (jstor.org) with a new introduction by David Wang, in their Princeton Classics series, and re-blurbed it with his mention of a Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) notice of a similarity between Laotzu and modernist architecture, as the first mention of it. Shrugs.

Frank Lloyd Wright is having yet another continuous moment a decade later, this explains the updated blurb. Only yesterday in the new library I am working in, I overheard a visitor lengthily describing their desperate attempts… first plane in to Pittsburgh, last flight out… —to get to ‘fallingwater’ on a day trip from New York. (!) The traveller disappeared around the Pete Matilla & Laura McCusker spiral staircase after relating some issue with the hire car so I don’t know if they made it or back or not.

You can follow my chair nerd aunt, Virginia Wright, on insta also.

Yes, conversations verbal and visual are the origin of all the arts and sciences. Not just for rent-seeking rent-paying careers.

For me the best reading came out of the following piece of #priorart on “the blur”, from page 16:-

"This deficiency of our visual organism is a natural asset. Without blurring, the buoyancy of intermittent change between clarity and obscurity would not exist."

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com as part of the readings or reactions for Series of Tao.

Gerald J. Beyer. “Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both? The Possibility of Human Solidarity in the Light of Evolutionary Biology and Catholic Moral Theology.” The Heythrop Journal 54.5 (2013): via academia Web Accessed 26 June 2026. [https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12030]

I am fairly harsh on Catholicism, that variation of Christianity with its origins as a rogue version of an imperial cult gone into universal exile. Of course all traditions that go global develop, not just differences and localizations, but internal strands of decent humanity that criss-cross the hierarchy and the stratigraphy of hierarchy and laity. We are human after all.

Certainly I was taught by nuns and brothers from those strands.

It is not necessarily unconscious, but the members of a more decent and less dogmatic humanity are often surprised at the bad outcomes of their organisation, along with a little bit of “if only the tsar knew” hand-wringing, all the while needing to out-manoeuvre the conservatives who seek to impose their true version of what a rogue version of the Roman Empire’s mind control unit should be doing. (Spoiler: both groups are worlding the self among others doing the same.)

So it is thus I come to Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both? The Possibility of Human Solidarity in the Light of Evolutionary Biology and Catholic Moral Theology by Gerald J. Beyer.

So, yeah. Solidarity. it’s not just an 80’s protest movement Solidarność.

And damn if it doesn’t look just like my version of ‘good worlding’. Those nuns and brothers did their job.

The point for me here is the world does not care about any of this. I.E. Morality does not care. That is up to us.

And that ‘that’ requires empathy.

Of course it is also an extension of the golden rule, and without the implementation of game-theory narcissism (AKA the empathy-less) who immediately want to intervene and surf its juicy goodness, is something any human might come up with. As I said earlier, we, after-all, we are human, and these provisions, in various forms, are common outcomes of those strange attractors around which our iterated choices move in prosociality.

The world itself does not care, but we often care to think it does, and cry when it fails. These emotions to save the world help maintain it, even if the world goes on without our solitary efforts, even if they are often over-wrought and hijacked by boundary riding empathy-less concierges, who at the very least seek to restrict solidarity to the groups and subgroups that cult leaders, like emperors, seek control of. In the name of.

The world doesn’t care about them either.

If only the tsar knew.

The article then explores work in evolutionary theory that can help frame an understanding of this Catholic strand of prosociality developed as ‘solidarity’ (described in the three-pointer above) and vice versa. I.E. in out-manoeuvring reductionistic excesses, or positions like some readings of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (see previous post on If I had a Haworth…) who was spurred to write in response to Robert Ardrey’s (the Man-the-Hunter man) writing on group selection (my reading of him here ① and ② and ③ ). I.E. atruism/self-sacrifice/Jesus-crucified.

The foes mentioned are Jeff Skilling, Thatcher’s, Reagan’s neoliberalisms, those labelled sociobiologists, etc.

That Michael Ghiselin quote.

The response then comes in from Frans De Waal and David Sloan Wilson.

Then, the next section brings in the theologians to compare matters with regard to what might be labelled ‘original sin’ of the selfish gene. I.E. it is not the whole story, nor a completely selfish experience to live as a human (with some exceptions). And that is where the notion of grace comes in. I.E divine intervention (even for those exceptions this is a universal exercise after all.) God’s grace is an offer (the mind control idea) that can save us if we accept it.

This idea of grace is not so far from those variations of what some claim (Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Greek Mind) that pre-Homeric Greeks believed all human thought & emotions were put directly in one’s (head/heart) by an act of a god mischievous or reasonable by turn. Cupid’s arrow and all, and no human individual culpability at all. When morality was based on the polis balancing outcomes, and not some church inscribed decision tree which later gave birth to ethics committees out of its thigh or belly-button or something.

There are “evolutionary-framed” variations of this motif in this Julian Jaynes’ bicameral consciousness, and even a substacker who thinks humanity is a recent raising of consciousness circa 70K years ago. And sees snakes as an emblem of this so I am not too harsh. See Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0.

The reality is this sudden moment of grace is our doing, and goes way back, and because it took a very long time to gain an influence in selfish gene selections into prosociality feedbacks, that we cannot know of it, even as we regard it, in reflection, as miraculous. The light globe ‘moment’ grace/snakes/arrows will keep popping up as an explanation as long as we are humans given to sudden insights. None of which are really sudden, they just feel that way, especially in their rightness. And especially bad in their righteousness.

And the feedbacks? What is this recursion in which the suddenness arises, and of which you speak? The (the worlding we self) out of the body in its landscape, of the (the selfing we world). The extended phenotype we read into our interactions with others in the noyaux of our mis-understandings (the world)(the self).

The ‘moment of grace’ is really just throwing into the gap of our ‘understanding’ or ‘reason’ (as guided or not by the church’s claim as its job being to guide reason as a dogma of imperial tradition) what we do anyway, without any interventions. It is so strong many of us in some cultures cannot imagine it any other way without an intervention, which might be true, but it comes from us. Most likely from our parents, those god-like creatures we first encounter at our creation at birth and so on. So I guess the confusion is never going away. It is this strength of feeling that is colonised by claims to it by a tradition, or in a tradition by a tradition, and by those stare at themselves as gods among us, as rebels and saints.

Gerald J. Beyer covers those instances with regard to the church’s version of intervention of grace to humanise us compared to those pagans who have no idea, with regard to the altruism/self/sacrifice/Jesus/solidarity mentioned above.

If only they had a tsar to tell them this stuff perhaps.

But no! we just need to realise:

Beyer then goes through each element lised in the three-point definition of solidarity with respect to de Waal & Wilson’s thought, and works as an excellent introduction to the area. And useful for me, because this strand of Catholic church, beside describing my own background, is evidence that hope springs eternal, because the world does not care.

Morality does not care, but you do.

That is why we should. Even if we guess wrong as to when, and particularly who, it happened by/to/how all this care happens. Morality is only an ophan because we disown it. Much like the creator is an orphan because we disown that responsibility in the name of giving credit to a god.

Beyer ends with a section called III. CONCLUSION: SOLIDARITY AS THE FRUIT OF NATURE AND GRACE, EQUALLY

This is a useful compromise. But this is unnecessary if we recognises both nature and grace are unnecessary, and this means rejected not only original sin but original innocence, for hope will spring eternal without intervention, because it is up to us, and we will do it even if we ascribe it erroneously to the gods of intervention.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.

This is part of a series of reactions and reviews of works dealing with evolution and morality.

Seeing the world was a tool, we said to each other, “Aren’t we clever?” and immediately forgot what we were doing. In case we got in trouble.

Some say, to their credit, they remember themselves, but then, immediately forget the world.

And there we are.

#prosocial #humanevolution #extendedPhenotype #ifIhadahammer

Crossposted whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

First of all I wonder, which moral philosophers?

Neo-Darwinian I guess refers to Dawkins era (the Selfish Gene is now 50 years old this last week)(I’m 60.).

①<nods> Familiar objections to reductionism.

② Atavism <must use that word more>(and ask Steve Stewart Williams if narcissists are successful parasites or throwbacks to our more baboon-like ancestors, or both.)

③confusions of fact and value --and we will ask in whose favour the mistakes are made?

③++ successful explanations used elsewhere— badly… if your only good tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What I do not get from the abstract (most abstracts actually) is their own take, at least not strongly, even with all the positioning. I guess it might be a spoiler.

But like, that’s what I am here for.

One might read that exact abstract heading another paper but end up with a quite different take in the POV.

I am not in the business of writing moral philosophy as a moral philosopher (I am here by accident) so the requirements of writing that paper of of little utility to me. (I.E. the industry framing or ecosystem assumptions are lost on me, and if they were not lost on me I would not care more – is this what people mean by ‘it’s only accademic’?)

① reductionism

Anyway, we get the POV at the end of the first paragraph, foreshadowing the conclusions:

The other is that neoDarwinism’s affection for reductionism does a great deal to explain its ideological dynamic.

After this point it gets all very analytic with its PnotP, with some type of analysis about reductionism using set theory I guess.

We jump from Dawkins back to E.O. Wilson.

The author Haworth intervenes with Wilson using prepositions. I find this comforting, a lot of our intelligence is about choosing our well-angled and best fitting preposition, and then bashing it through the round hole. Where did I put that hammer?

Next the framing I was looking for:-

“require institutions for their existence” – to “brute” facts, which do not.⁸ This being so, then, let us note in passing that Wilson’s assertion that “the transition from purely phenomenological to fundamental theory in sociology must await a full neuronal explanation of the human brain”⁹ must be false, because sociology is concerned primarily with institutional facts.

Yes.

Forward and back to Dawkins. This week I listened to an interview with Dawkins, from the time of publication of The Selfish Gene. He mentions specifically he wrote the book in response to Robert Ardrey’s focus on group selection (I have some reviews of Man-the-Hunter Ardrey’s work ① and ② and ③ ). So the emphasis is on a failure (as a hammer), of that social reductionism of evolution, however well-written, and Dawkins sought to provide a more correct reductionism of how evolution worked in The Selfish Gene. That attack on group selection looks, in more recent framings, like it slipped over on to how groups work as things themselves, as res publica or social institutions, ie. outcomes which manage themselves. At least in the public eye (Haworth uses the word iconoclastic to describe the de-framing of groupwork outcomes.

For the historians of science that comparison with Ardrey would be the one to work on, the recent by-catch of more social investigations (as collateral damage, or not) into or on moral philosophy, or, the philosophy of political science is minor, except for all the well-knownness of their names.

Quite infuriating I know. I do think the idea of an The Extended Phenotype is a bridge here see Ardrey ③. Haworth finds his own dispensation. With a few more PnotPs.

Then an aside on Daniel Dennett’s “bland” and “preposterous” forms of reductionism.

② atavism

Humans as political animals are social beasts (so remember, as we are prosocial, the group is a type of tool) (I am hoping Haworth gets to state that idea) (I just had it then as I typed).

On to Matt Ridley & Steven Pinker!

‘Russian doll’ picture of morality

More true today than ever.

We divert to altruism within which atavism survives, if defined too technically: ‘Thus, Maynard-Smith writes that “[W]hen a person (or animal) increases the fitness of another at the expense of his own fitness, he can be said to have performed an act of altruism.”²⁵ ’ and we ride over to see what Foucault did to Damiens.

③confusions of fact and value

This is an oldie but a goodie.

In this case it is about selfishness and the robber barons who claim to free us by enslaving us with their ownership of us (they use us as tools, and do so by naming one among us as the best and only tool).

Values are an effort not a commodity however, the gold may shine, but its value is a fact of labour.

If I had a hammer… I hammer out Danger!

to the conclusion

Rawls versus Dawkins.

Memetics is a type of useless tool (language is a virus). (I ask is repetition an effort??)

So, I think to myself, perhaps narcissists are, afterall, both useless parasites, and viral atavists surfing the tool of society I call the world.

Haworth asks

‘by assimilating the world of the political to that of the a-political – to the realm of the gene-like micro-entity”

and then hypothetically answers with a Comtean reference to a technocracy (I would add as more recently stolen by libertarian fantasists of a natural order [of tools?]) much “like Marx” said of priests and religion.

The shaman’s magic is a shell game.

I would further add that this move, labelled as “assimilation” by Haworth, arises in the exact same worlding urge with which a Dawkins or a Ridley seek to evaporate in others (unescapably hypocritically), when calling out moral philosophers, or priests. Or others do (everyone) when calling out the woke, or the unconsciously racist, and that all of them, whether reductionistically or holistically, when ignoring that, which we as a prosocial species have in society, that we can call the world, is a tool at our disposal (like any extended phenotype). It is no wonder then that some among us, and born into the very world that allowed them to be, then seek to remove that tool from some of us, and indeed they would sell their grandmothers to do so. They do this, sometimes in the name of everyone, sometimes in the name of a golden me, and some seek, in all cases of “assimilation” to give that name the name of some more natural order, like true communism or freedom’s libertarianism or some other outcome of worlding, to selves ethnic, religious or artistic, and prepositioned into an identity PnotP and this natural construction becomes our favourite hammer, and everything looks like a nail or a pronoun.

This is part of a series of reactions and reviews of works dealing with evolution and morality.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

For about a decade I have had in my head a phrase I occasional say aloud to no response, “responsibilities descend”. I said it in acknowledgement or acceptance. So it goes. People have never said anything in reply. I spoke it into the air. Explain yourself the air said.

So besides the use of tradition as it is most commonly used to day, and it’s related terms we may not immediately notice as its kin (to trade, hand-over, deliver, hand-down knowledge, passing on doctrine) there is also ‘surrender’/‘betray’. Can you stay true to these traditional usages?

This Judas quality hints at every word’s Janus qualities. Every word can easily be a contronym or more (Januswörter auf Deutsch) because when spoken they can be heard, and this positional framing that a language assumes (the POV of speak/hear) is sometimes smoodged (see blur). This why pronouns can be important, even if you do not care who you truly are. Pronouns’ first job was to position speech and its interlocutors. Pronouns are a type of preposition… —meta-preposition? Identify with them at your peril.

Language is traded, yes, each speaker may seek and give attention in return, but it is also stored by the trading en masse. We can call that trade in words a lek (an zoological term describing an agreed place to co-operatively compete) but anthropologists call it social learning. They focus on the outcome not the brand-name, it’s the economy stupid. A lek of a tradition is the community of speakers, but is not completely identical with a language, for dialects may or may not split it up, and iso-glossal communities of multiple languages are common.

Tradition in the sense of handing down doctrine/ways/routines/kulcha refers to that local instant of social learning. The lek is the polis, the market, the cultic site, the performance of songs on one’s country, or anothers’. The wider term for the lek of leks of social learning is the world. Not all leks are aware of the world. Some are shy of it and some are downright hostile. Leks are not necessarily imperial in overreach.

Universal history buffs should not sand the world’s variety all away into a special shine. Parochial essentialists should not exaggerate the local specialness into specious narcissism nor into some parochial time in the sun (like Spengler-ists).

The world is what it is. The world does not care, even if you do, even if your lek does. Even if you care who you truly are, however, as I mentioned above, “responsibilities descend”. The context I can now see tradition also in respect of surrender or betray, as Janus whispers it.

When I said “responsibilities descend” I was surrendering to them, which in Taphonomy of worlding’s part 1 tradition, I felt could be a betrayal of youth. It was the same moment.

Growth betrays itself as age surrenders into responsibility.

Other entries in the taphonomy of worlding. As inspired by Raymond Williams ‘Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society’ Croom Helm, 1978, [London].

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com

Stewart-Williams, Steve. “Evolution and Morality.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080970868810569?via%3Dihub [via Web] [entry in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). (2015) ISBN 9780080970875 : Web. ]

2015 was about the year I starting writing down notes about stuff with various thoughts and feelings, about a subject which I would later realise was boxed-in as ‘moral philosophy’. It took ages to realise that. If I had known what I was going to spend so much of my free time on, I would have done some basic research and reading about it (a decade before AI overviews and their sloppy kin). If I had, I would have come across Steve Stewart-Williams and perhaps saved me some time.

This entry in begins “morality is a mess”.

I guess if it was less of a mess I would have known what I was doing.

The entry is an introduction to the subject as far as a more analytic-styled encyclopedic entry will go. Except that opening headliner: “morality is a mess”.

Even Joseph Henrich gets a look in at the end (see my reading of him one and two and three-ish).

Of course I seek to remove that mess by talking about worlding as part of human experience, as much as talking about selfing might remove a blinkered focus on the atomic individual which various social institutions of the individual might provide or inculcate.

Worlding is a part of our human agency, a prosocial outcome in which things like morality, or art, or markets, are outcomes and not things requiring an origin story.

Also Steve Stewart-Williams’ term “trolleyology” !

More at Reactions to papers/books on evolution~morality.

Crossposted whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com