Ric @ Melissa's 11.05.11
I have used a number of related terms in my Brief Two and in my last presentation. I need to check with you on how we are getting on with these terms. Do these terms make sense to you? Do they help to evoke a shared sense of our own locatedness in the Now! I want to draw attention to our immediate present perception of this nowness! of which our present context, purpose and attention is an integral part.
I have selected a number of quotes relating to each term. They are
1. The here and now
“If only the mind could bring out the reserve of things, if only the mind could recapture the lost past, then we would at the same time experience the mystery of beauty, love, living out the hour of intoxication (a state of subjective idealism) in which the experiential world would exist in the mind. No love or beauty. Proust tells us, fills us that is not already there in the reserve. "mais déplacé ne pesant plus sur nous, satisfait de la sensation que lui accorde le présent et qui nous suffit, car de cc qui n’est pas actuel nous ne nous soucions pas" (R. 916).
Love, then, takes form in these pleasant hours, in the here and now, when the self transcends the phenomenal world, the life of habit, for the sake of that love that constitutes the joy beyond all joys and comes to live in the authentic world of impression. This is the world of the artist, whose knowledge includes the unsatisfied longing to apprehend the hidden forms of things and to express them truthfully, that is. in the paradoxical tension between subjective and objective reality, inner life and outer form, work of art and living forms.” (Proust the creative silence (1990) Angelo Caranfa p. 113)
2. An actual occasion
“For all practical purposes the phrases actual occasion and actual entity are interchangeable. Whitehead notes only one difference: the word occasion implies a spatiotemporal location.” (Sherburne 1966, p. 205-7)
“An actual entity is a microscopic entity; the macroscopic entities of everyday experience – men, trees, houses – are groupings of entities termed nexus or societies.” (Whitehead 1960, p. 238) [Thesis]
3. Momentary first order experience
In his book Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and multiplicity, John Marks explains C. S Peirce’s notion of firstness “Firstness is the world as it is in itself, what might be called the ‘haecceity’ of the world. The experience of firstness is an experience of immediate and unreflected consciousness” (Marks 1998, p. 38) [Thesis]
“Perceiving the affordances of our environment is the first order experience that is manifested in the flow of our ongoing perceiving and acting. By first order experience I mean experience that is direct and unmediated. We are simply immersed into situated doing and being. We have first-order non-analytical awareness.
We can also shift our attentional focus and isolate particular portions of immediate experience holding it in the awareness for analysis. When we are engaged in this second-order knowing we experience objects and events of the world largely in relation to each other rather than experiencing them in relation to us as perceivers-actors, that is as affordances (Heft, 2003)”” (<http://tihane.wordpress.com/category/awareness/> )
4. Living present
“The past and the future do not designate instants distinct from a supposed present instant, but rather the dimensions of the present itself insofar as it is a contraction of instants … the living present goes … from the particulars which it envelops by contraction to the general which it develops in the field of its expectation …” [Gilles Deleuze Difference & Repetition, pg. 71 ]
“… now might be conceived as a definite perspective on the past and future, and a perspective without which there is no past and no future … If what is now is "present" then past and future can in this sense be conceived as "present". [Chris Hasty Meter as Rhythm, pg. 77]
[Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music. Brian Clarence Hulse, Nick Nesbitt p.38] Quoted in (http://www.operascore.com/files/Crystals_of_Time.pdf)
5. (Immediate) present perception
The diagram above appears in Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory (pp. 152 and 162). The image of the cone is constructed with a plane and an inverted cone whose summit is inserted into the plane. The plane, “plane P,” as Bergson calls it, is the “plane of my actual representation of the universe.” The cone “SAB,” of course, is supposed to symbolize memory, specifically, the true memory or regressive memory. At the cone's base, “AB,” we have unconscious memories, the oldest surviving memories, which come forward spontaneously, for example, in dreams. As we descend, we have an indefinite number of different regions of the past ordered by their distance or nearness to the present. The second cone image represents these different regions with horizontal lines trisecting the cone. At the summit of the cone, “S,” we have the image of my body which is concentrated into a point, into the present perception. The summit is inserted into the plane and thus the image of my body “participates in the plane” of my actual representation of the universe.(<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/> )
NOW!
6. My presentation is concerned with Now! as the frame in which we think, act and live. To recognize what is meant by NOW! it must be placed sous rature so appears as Now! . To appreciate Now! sous rature (under erasure), involves getting inside of every sign of life - every signified and every signifier that language provides us with (including thought, memory, knowledge, dreams, recognition, sensation, perception, cognition). The initial difficulty in activating this intuition is that amongst these signs are "my self", "myself", "me" and all the other pricklings that indicate the inescapable fact that "I" exists and that I exist. We are therefore turning our attention and turning ourselves to that border territory where "my" existence is comparable with it's non-existence and then intuitively appreciating that difference between the two. Whilst I actually do exist the tension between "this" (existence) and "that "(non-existence) is a signal that the vital forces of the world are continuing to produce me as a living organism. This difference can not be collapsed! However it is on this word difference that attention can turn. Whilst the things that are different change from moment to moment, difference (placed sous rature) appreciates the perpetual nature of Now!. Within this somewhat convoluted logic it is difference itself that frames Now! So to appreciate Now! Is simply to pay attention to differences.
7. appreciate, v. (OED online)
b. esp. To be sensitive to, or sensible of, any delicate impression or distinction.
1832 D. Brewster Lett. Nat. Magic ii. 32 The retina has not appreciated the influence of the simple red rays.
1862 F. Hall tr. N. N. Gore Rational Refut. Hindu Philos. Syst. 236 In like manner, a blind man is able to appreciate sound, touch, etc., but not colours.
1879 G. B. Prescott Speaking Telephone 7 If the number of vibrations exceeds forty thousand per second, the ear becomes incapable of appreciating the sound.
8. NOW! Keeps pace with the beat of my heart. And. The beat of my heart keeps pace with Now!
9. We have to explore for ourselves the way in which we consciously and critically locate the sense from which we recognize ourselves to be in the present (in the Now!) and the specific way that this situates us in relation to things perceived directly, things past (memory) and things future (anticipation).
10. Now! Is "A temporal complex or multiplicity in continuous flux." http://www.operascore.com/files/Crystals_of_Time.pdf
11. My key point is that the intelligibility of the present and the sense of presence is something that we have to learn. Without it we can never learn to pay attention. If we do not observe, we can not care - this is at the heart of the Quaker notion of "Bearing witness".
12. Past and future relate fundamentally to the present to the point where the present itself becomes inseparable from a presence of a past and a presence of a future incorporated within it. THE past (the historical past or the past in general) is of lesser importance in the sense that it does not sustain any dynamic presence within the present, a present that is lived. What interests Hasty and Deleuze is how multiple events, both past and yet to come, constitute coextensive dimensions of a present becoming.
http://www.operascore.com/files/Crystals_of_Time.pdf
13. The way we live in the present is as far as I know one of the most important determinants of our lives. Creative insight, revelation, epiphanies, visions, religious experience, emergence, the sense of becoming all take place in immediate present perception.
:)
