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Wonderers

Tonight I was reading books with my daughter before bed. We could hear her ten month-old brother in the other room being fussy while mom cooed him to sleep. He's had laryngitis all week. It's a fairly mild case the doctor said, but his temper is anything but. It has been exhausting for all of us. If only I had just a fraction of the energy this infermed infant has! As we listed to my son whine in the other room, I commented to my daughter that I hope he feels better in the morning so I can get some work done on my book. She has always been interested in the fact that I'm writing a "book," which is really a dissertation. She told me that she wanted to see it.

I took her into my mini-study---a small desk in a small nook in a small room full of books, guitars, ukuleles, and whatever else needs to stay out of baby's reach. We woke up my snoozing laptop, which greeted us with several panes of notes and a scrawling manuscript in Vim. We scrolled around for a second, and she told me she'd like to see some pictures. I had been browsing gopher earlier, so I decided to show her some beautiful ASCII art I had come across. After briefly perusing a few phlogs I decided to show her my own gemlog.

I ended up reading a few of my poems to her out loud. We read books and poems together all the time, but I was somewhat surprised that she listened to these poems so actively. She seemed interested in them for the special fact that I had written them---like she had gotten a peek into my world a little bit. I've written her so many poems over the years, but the majority of them are poems beyond the grasp of a four year-old. Often I write them wondering what she'll think about them when she's older. But tonight I realized how much she has grown, and how even when she encounters something outside her reach, it is still there on the horizon, that it colors her experience like the rising sun alters the mood of everything it illuminates.

We are wonderers, first and foremost. That is how we are in the world. It's something any living thing can't escape so long as it _is_ a live thing in a world which grows because things live in it---live _of_ it. A living organism is involved in so many transactions with so many aspects of an envrionment, and because life, or growth, demands that we respond to the myriad conditions of our present situation, a sensitivity and responsiveness to them is modally basic to the life process itself. Nothing exists in isolation, and certainly nothing could _live_ unless it was capable of being receptive and responsive to the world of which it is a part.

We are so accustomed to the use of language that we fail to appreciate how all of the meanings of language, logic, and all symbolic thought are experimental developments out of just such a basic, non-cognitive, qualitatively immediate experience. My daughter may not have the conceptual tools at hand to understand the meanings of most of the things I write, but all of those words and ideas are not _just_ those words and ideas. They are experiences. They are encountered _as_ something, and the way _that_ feels is always determined by the immediacy of the situation---the quality which unifies it _as_ a situation. Just such a _wondering about_ is how anything is ever learned; how anything ever grows.

For now, those poems will reach my daughter primarily as moods---moods communicated not so much through the words themselves, but through the situation. The way it feels to sit on papa's lap at his desk, using his cool computer to look at clever text-art, etc. And through those moods she will naturally be stirred to wonder why they feel that way, and what is peculiar and uncertain about that experience will stand out. The questions begin to present themselves, not as readymade ideas and concepts, but as feelings, moods, and the desire to explore them; to wonder through them.