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WILD_MIND
September 13, 2007
RYDING_THE_BURN
The introduction (titled
simply "Note") of "A Space
in Place" (1996) by Gary
Snyder is a single
elegantly phrased page
that says a number of
really striking things:
(striking to me, any way).
"Ethics and aesthetics are Hell yeah: BEAUTIFUL_GOODS
deeply intertwined. Art,
beauty, craft have always
drawn on the self-organizing Right: CONTROL
'wild' side of language and mind."
But then... is he
associating intuition
with instinct?
By all means pay
attention to the
"animalistic" qualitites
of the human animal, but
if you abandon the
human/animal distinction,
then you really are
running wild.
From BURNING_WILD
wild mind = spontaneous intuition?
But then, what has that
to do with wilderness?
Animals follow their instinctive
rote, intuition is a human thing.
(Bertrand Russell discusses
a turn-of-the-century mystic
So... what does Snyder really named Bergson that made
mean by this wild side? an equation between instinct
and intuition. See
From the essay "Philosophy in the 20th Century",
"Language Goes Two Ways": p. 265 of the "Basic Writings".)
"Language is considered by some
to be a flawed mathematics, and
the idea that mathematics might
even supplant language has been A problem with
flirted with. This idea still many a wikipedian...
colors the commonplace thinking
of many engineer types and
possibly some mathematicians and
scientists." p. 173
"But the world ... remains forever
unpredictable. The weather, for "hoary example"
hoary example. And take the very heh.
mind that ponders these thoughts:
in spite of years of personhood, we
remain unpredictable even to our CONSILIENCE_PRIZE
own selves. Often we wouldn't be
able to guess what our next
thoughts will be. But that clearly
does not mean we are living in
hopeless confusion; it only means
that we live in a realm in which
many patterns remain mysteriously
inaccessible to us." p.173-174
"Languages were not the
intellectual inventions of
archaic schoolteachers, but are
naturally evolved wild systems
whose complexity eludes the
descriptive attempts of the
rational mind." p.174
" 'Wild' alludes to a process of
self-organization that generates
systems and organisms, all of which
are within the constraints of -- and
constitute components of -- larger
systems that again are wild, such as
major ecosystems or the water cycle in
the biosphere. Wildness can be said
to be the essential nature of nature.
As reflected in consciousness, it can
be seen as a kind of open awareness --
full of imagination but also the
source of alert survival intelligence.
The workings of the human mind at its
very richest reflect this
self-organizing wildness. So language
does not impose order on a chaotic
universe, but reflects its own
wildness back." p.174
From the essay
"Unnatural Writing":
"So I will argue that consciousness, mind,
imagination, *and* language are fundamentally
wild. 'wild' as in wild ecosystems -- richly
interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly
complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of
information. At root the real question is how
we understand the concepts of order, freedom,
and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on
chaotic natures, or is art (also read
'language') a matter of discovering the grain
of things, of uncovering the measured chaos
that structures the natural world?
Observation, reflection, and practice show
artistic process to be the latter." p. 168
"The 'art of the wild' is to see art in the
context of the process of nature -- nature
*as* process rather than as product or
commodity -- because 'wild' is a name for
the way that phenomena continually actualize
themselves. Seeing this also serves to
acknowledge the autonomy and integrity of
the nonhuman part of the world, an 'Other'
that we are barely beginning to be able to
know." p. 168, 169
"The truth is language is part and parcel of
consciousness, and we know virtually nothing
about either one." p. 167
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