quest
- ions
Here I am. Alive. My eyes see and my hands encode
an analog of my conscious intention in letters. But I am as much
question as answer. In many ways — I am nothing but question.
When I type or think of the term itself I cannot help but remember
what an unexpected visitor once revealed to me about it in passing:
“You’re an eye, on a quest — and an ion of quest.
You live in light, seeing something where nothing is, and nothing
where something is. Everywhere you look, what you see contains yourself.
You are looking, looking everywhere, for the mirror that transforms
into a living window. You’ll find it in the thing you’re
looking with. Like turning over couch pillows with the hand holding
the key you are looking for in their recesses. You’re a question.
Eventually, the current ion and the quest unify, and a new ion of
quest arises.”
I was struck by the singular congruence of question and ‘eye
on a quest’. In exploring these relations directly, I eventually
discovered that there is more to an eye than we think, and more
kinds of eyes as well. There is, for example, the hand-eye, the
foot-eye, the mouth-eye. We are a thing of many eyes — like
the beasts of revelation with eyes in front and behind — we
are an instance of something that assembles not only eyes —
but systems and hypersystems of eyes.
We can see that at one scale we are the embodiment of the organismal
intention of the Earth. Like a question seeking opportunity to elaborate
its contexts, our world has complexified to the degree that it can
produce and at least briefly sustain symbolically cognitive children.
In our hands and eyes, in our hearts, the questions of a living
universe are asking themselves. I must believe that that many of
the answers we seek, and perhaps require for our survival are in
what we’ve cast away, and what our systems of knowing have
long designated as primitive, or without rational clout. We ourselves
are primitive. We are without any clout whatsoever, unless we are
in a ring — joined in the symbiotic expression of a common
goal of mutual uplift, rescue, and preservation. I wonder how many
of our modern rings are authentic in this way. I suppose it is,
much as it has always been, a matter of the company one keeps.
Like an eye building an internal storyWorld, we are assembling ourselves
according to our experience and the semantic pressures and codicils
of our language and society. The shape of our questions and thus
what we will reach for, is too largely tipped toward the implications
of our language. We must return together to a position of mastery
over our metaphors. To a place where we can again experience the
epic quest implicit in our birth, rather than the mimetic replacements
multiplying within our peoples and cultures like some modern Egyptian
plague.
5
double-you’s & an aytch
Our questions about the real nature of Life and our origins in all
their variety spring from something like a single flower. We are
at home in the core of the flower from one perspective — while
from others we appear as participants. In English, the condensations
of these questions present us with a small family of double-you’s
and an aytch.
I had to guess at the spellings of the letter-names,
because although a letter has a potentially multi-syllabic name
— it has no ‘spelling’. Instead, it ‘spells
its own name with itself’. This is a singular feature: it
reveals that there is something unique about letters as things,
a property of spelling themselves — of indicating their own
name, merely by being present as a single symbol. Even one of our
most sacred symbols, the cross, has a spelling. Letters, having
names, yet have none.
A double-you requires, essentially, a simulated-you, and an observer-you.
The letter itself, seen as a terrain, implies a window into a set
of peaks and valleys. Perhaps it is recalling to our minds that
one of me is atop a peak, and the other me is in a valley. Though
we might not generally believe that our written language holds such
depth and subtlety in the formations of our letters — and
this appears rational at first glance — my own experience
with the intelligence of language is that each letter is a poem
conserving a specific set of event-relations with the rungs of the
ladders we’ve climbed to symbolic sentience. It is my hope
that we will one day experience this together, directly —
and that we as a species will again share it, rather than merely
talking or theorizing about these matters. We need only agreement,
to proceed.
Getting back to the flower, however, we can see that this is but
one of many possible flowers. As an extractive toy, it is useful
as long as we don’t make it a law. Each of the question-forms
posits a peculiar and specific set of ‘spaces’ in which
simulations of their answers may be constructed, opposed, integrated,
parsed, etc. Often, the space of one must include analogs of one
or more of the others in order to exist and function.
We can see the flower in action more clearly if we briefly sample
some possible questions regarding our origins:
How did we come to arise on Earth?
How did we become significantly different from
animals? Why?
Why are we here? Why are we aware of such questions?
What (if any) is the most accurate purpose of our
lives, and Life, as individuals and collectives?
What are the intention-goals of Earth as a living
symmetry?
Where did what we are come from?
Why did it come?
What are we? Are we just human and humans?
What does it mean to be human?
What is awareness for?
What were the significant events in our genesis and
ascension to sentience?
What is the correct holophore for
our metaphors?
(Where - Who - How - Why - What is God / Universe?)
Most of us have pondered these or closely related
questions, perhaps more significantly during moments of stress and
crisis. Watching how we assemble our questions and answers from
outside our normal perspective, we might observe that we tend to
organize them sequentially, imbue tokenized simulations of participants
with character, and basically stage an inward play whose plot is
the production of a sequence of events and relations which can be
reduced. This is one of the heuristic methods of our semantic and
conscious minds. After many repetitions and modulations, we will
reduce them to a symbol, so that, for example, we may get
on to the next thing.
Part of this process is motivated by disconnection. Generally we
are either re-shaping a question (from precursors) or rePresenting
an answer. Once we are satisfied with our process and its outcomes
(be they questions or answers) we may then store the result and
set the process aside. So part of our intention, is to become empowered
to ignore something. Maybe more than half. The active side of this
coin is the generative activity of forming a positive and semi-permanant
structure: a token, which highlights certain connectivities, participants,
characters and relations. It is interesting to note that our habits
of logic and rationality tend to inspire us to freeze a question,
and begin modulating answers. We really should have equal access
and experience of both positions: rapid modulation of questions
in relation to an answer, and our more common experience of the
opposite.
There is a way to reduce all of these questions rapidly. In each
of these questions we are seeking access to the sources of our metaphors.
We want to know them from having touched them directly — not
from being sold tokens. I believe every aspect of our being is silently
crying our for this, and we as a species are diagnosing it away.
Why should we not have the experience of the sources of our metaphors,
rather than what they present a charicatured excerption of? Something
is broken here, or still arising and is so new we have not yet glimpsed
it clearly. There are at least two domains of knowing alive in us,
and they are so divided from each other that a war is being played
out between them on a global scale. How did such a circumstance
arise? We return again to our questions of origin. By now we can
see that they are really questions about containers, contexts, and
circumstances. Our perspectives on the questions will as much form
the answers as the results of exploring them directly.
What we are really hoping for, I believe, is a single experiential
answer which we can touch, rather than ponder. We want psybiocognitive
contact with the sources of our metaphors. I believe we each contain
this, and it is geometrically more available in small highly enthusiastic
groups. My sense is that what we are seeking, and require —
is literally in the palm of our hands — but we must be able
to renew our creativity with perspective in order to find our way
in. Regardless, there is as much a single unnamable question as
there is a menu of them. The six petals of our flower of questions
resolve in their ponderer to a unity, and a mere token will not
suffice to quiet the essential organismal curiosity we embody —
nor to represent our human, animalian and biospheric potentials.
We want, and need contact with our sources, not merely tokens.
Yet for now, we are profoundly enmeshed in our struggle
with language, and also with our ways of knowing. These use tokens,
and metaphors. This leads us to look more closely at questions about
the nature and activity of our metaphors. And also into their genesis.
o:O:o
