I am of my world and my world is of me.

Image by spanaut via FlickrI am sitting here on a sunny afternoon, and the warm air is entering behind me. I can hear a radio coming from my neighbour's kitchen. The odd door opens and closes. above the humdrum of the city that surrounds me, I can hear birds and gentle sounds all around me.

This is the background to my existence. I am amidst the world, not alone. The world was there before me and will continue after me. In another sense, I have always been and will always be a part of this world. That I have experienced life and that that life will pass, is but a miracle of the world I inhabit, and of the consciousness of it which i was born and educated into by others like me.

This is far from trivial. This forms the essence of who I am, and the perception I have been granted by the miracle of nature. These others who have come before me and will follow me share a similarity which i recognize. This recognition is so potent that I look and see it in other objects around me, and see those objects in myself and the other bodies who I recognize as equals.

Sometimes I try to mimic the bird calls i hear when i am out and about. A dog barks at me and I growl back in a distinctive more or less dog-like manner. I can snort like a pig, neigh like a horse, indeed, some have said that at times I am as stubborn as a mule. The human animal is remarkable precisely because its body can metamorphisize into that of others at will.

Other objects outside of me can also be rendered mirror-like into the terms of my own perception of myself and those I identify with as equals. The way the dog looks sad when I am about to go out, the cat that panics when i am preparing to move house, the horse that is startled by a small piece of paper floating through its field of vision. I interpret the responses of these other mammals from the perspective of a human: I have an empathy with them because I can see that they too are similar though different to me. They too feed there children milk, have emotions and behaviours that I can recognize as coming from a similar source and myself, and that they too are similarly a part of my family, if only distant cousins.

Image by ecstaticist via FlickrThis relationship with mammals is much more obvious than the way I see beyond into the world as a whole. The relationship between me and my fellow embodied humans and the environment we share, is an extension of this primary recognition of myself in others, namely my family, friends and the wider human society and even spreading beyond that as described above.I see the world itself as an embodied being. there I have a tendency to see it as a whole; a world or universe beyond my immediate environment.

This process is reversible in that I am the world and the world is me. While I am stardust the world is also there for me. There are constellations in the sky that I recognize as part of my tribe. Like the expansive ocean, it draws me too it, while its vastness fills me with awe and dread. There is a mystery to its very existence precisely because my own existence is tenuous. It draws me to toward it, to understand it and the patterning that seems to emanate from it. Even though I can recognize in the universe a beingness, it is a beingness which gave birth to me and my kind. More than that even, to all like me, both animate and inanimate. It's power transcends me and my kind, and yet, gives me power to act upon it.

Is it any wonder than that throughout the ages, people have personified this relationship with our creator the universe as a human-like being, which created us in his or her image? Perhaps such a metaphor is a truly honest and open expression of who we are. Sure, this personified God is created by us, but nevertheless exists as an infinite environment that we witness when we look at the stars at night, when we see the sun being drawn across the skies during the day, when I sit here typing against the background provided for it, and which my mind can imagine thanks to it, not because of it.

The universe doesn't exist for me to understand and exploit it, but it understands me and exploits me in its development. I am of it and it is not of me. The universe is my God and it is the creator of me. I can c
                         Image via Wikipediareate because of this God, and any god I create is less than. The universe, after all, my be just one of a myriad of other infinite beings. Even a glimpse of this imaginary scenario makes my head whirl. But there can only be one creator of me, and that creator is the totality of all possible universes including my own.

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Just another lazy Sunday afternoon.

Image via Wikipedia

It is a warm Sunday afternoon for this time of year. The sun has been shining all day and the wind has been progressively abating. Children can be heard playing in a back yard nearby, and the birds are preparing for the onset of evening. I sit at the computer which hums gently as I type. This scene is composed of spatial elements and social conventions much more than it is by my psychology apart from a desire to understand and communicate this understanding.

There is a world of relationships that exist beyond my body. It enters my body only as an after-image of that reality and in the form of language patterns given to me by others. It is true that as a poet I have invented the odd word and often in syncronicity shared that with others who too have invented the same or similar words and phrases in isolation. but this is, and always will remain, the exception rather than the rule. We are born into a world of concepts and relationships and are introduced to these through language and social conventions.

Sunday is not just any day. I live in a society predominately descended from the Western Judeao-christian tradition. As such, Sunday is the first day of the week through convention and traditionally a day of peace. I like this idea and so try to project that onto my world and read it in a way in accordance with the concept that I have inherited along with others. It is quieter because the week ended yesterday and the children can play and the adults relax in preparation of another week of work and learning.

The spatial relationship is also important. While the computer sits foregrounded as I seek to write another blog prompted by a Facebook friend, the children are some distance off and perceptible only through earshot. If they happened to be in my tiny flat it would not be as serene and peaceful. Indeed, if they were playing at the same distance but in the middle of a busy intersection during tomorrow morning's peak hour, I would probably be quite distressed with a feeling of responsibility for their combined safety.

The birds, too, would be problematic if they were in the room with me. Full of fear and anxiety as they tried vainly to escape the confines of my bungalow, they would know doubt fly into walls, me and my computer, making it almost impossible for me to write anything.

I can imagine all this only through prior experience, either personal or conveyed to me in linguistic blocks and phrases, which describe certain behaviours and preclude others. These social relationships that are present in language are appear always already there, to have an a priori existence and come to me in the forms of bodily feelings and postures.

At the moment I am relaxed and peaceful because of what I have described above as the scenario that exists in my immediate surroundings. If it were as I have imaginatively described my body would start to feel anxious and affect the very words and behaviours that are necessary to communicate with others.

This is not trivial. Objects in our perceptual field exist in relation to me and to each other. That relationship is inseparable except in text books that seek to isolate and focus on one object to the exclusion of others momentarily so as to seek an understanding of that object's essential characteristics. In reality, however, an object can never be fully understood in such isolation in its complexity.

Concepts and ideas, like objects, are also in such a relationship with each and the particular social milieu that they inhabit, that is, they exist defined by space and time and as such are essentially historical in nature. A table is built from already existing materials according to the fashions of the time. At times fashion itself is backward looking and so it may be a reproduction design from an earlier era. At others its design will be inspired by an imaginary future.

In either case, what is being built is a functional contemporary object whether its creators see it this way or not. As well as this, the table is built from pre-existing materials and transformed into an object which its makers recognise as an object with the functional attributes of a table. Furthermore, at some future time it will cease being a table and the materials consumed in its transformation will either be utilised for some other human purpose or return again to a static state able to be re-transformed into some other object of utility either by human, animal or some other naturally occurring force.

Ideas, concepts and memories, that is, those human constructions that exist on the Invisible rather than  Visible plane, are no different. Sure, they can be externalised in the form of the written word and transmitted via books, texts or indeed performances, yet they are still constructed in much the same way from the linguistic fragments of 'natural world' and given life through the spoken or written word, music and paintings, mathematical concepts and the body of knowledge described, recorded and experimented with in some sort of 'scientific' endeavour.

The Invisible realm is just as real as that which we can directly perceive. Indeed, as I began, this realm always seems to be already present before we even try to speak, just sitting around encapsulating the solidity of the reality we move amidst. 

'It is Sunday' seems like such a simple statement, yet is pregnant with social and historical connotations, in constant flux as an object precisely because it exists amidst the flux of ideas that we as humans continually project and receive through our various perceptual apparati. It is our failing as Image by JanetandPhil via Flickranimals that we need to isolate to understand, and so to come to a richer understanding we need to constantly remember this limitation of the way we are in the world.

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