Two Concepts & A Epiphany

I have come to realize over the past month or so the role two conceptions about the world play out in how I experience and explain the world to myself and others. I am weary and it is late (for me), so forgive any absurdities--though contradictions are often recognized--as I go about this business; but I have been considering writing this for the past few days and if I don't do it soon, it may sublimate away or drive me mad.

The first notion is that of the Underworld. No, I do not refer to the enjoyable ridiculousness that is a trilogy of horror-action movies, nor do I refer to any obvious notion of the afterlife, despite the term underworld and afterlife often having traditional interchangeability. By Underworld, I mean just that: That a or many worlds coexist simultaneously beneath the most empirically obvious one. In some ways, this in misleading or arbitrary terminology, because such realms may exist adjacent or above, behind or in front of this one, but vocabulary such as metaworld do not readily appear in everyday usage; so underworld it is. Recently, I have spoken of experiencing the skin of experience, of the world-as-usual, which in itself suggests the great depth, the muscle, sinew, bone, marrow, organs, and the like that simultaneously exist in the body that composes a more complete world than just the flesh of our usual understanding. When Spinoza attempts to explain why we are ignorant of the omnipresence of God/Nature, he describes a worm floating in the bloodstream, completely unaware of the body in which it exists. This is a parallel if distinct narrative to my present subject. Mythologies concerning divine and daemonic realms, the coexistence of terrible and foreign cosmic forces, and the movement of unseen animals or spirits or adversaries also provide rich, cross-cultural examples. I am not arguing for everyday battles between angels and demons, nor do I think sleeping Cthulhu is inspiring madness in unaware disciples, or that Tibetan Buddhist demon manifestations ever walked with humans. What I am saying is that these are narratives that do express a set of meaningful foundational assumptions about the multi-layered existence in which we find ourselves and of which we are sometimes made aware.

The other is synthesis-hybridity. Though this is probably highly rooted in Bruno Latour's writing about hybridity, I first picked it up in critical and fictional writing on cyborgs which plays up the notion that experiencing, living entities are never deducible to a single, primordial unity, but to distinct, but mutually intelligible units in the midst of synthesis. Donna Haraway writes beautifully--and sometimes painfully--on this notion, but it is the subject of Marge Piercy's He, She, and It as well as abundant other feminist science fiction. These narratives challenge the highly romanticized primal heritage of simplicity and solitary being-ness of early persons, which have become convoluted and confused into multiplicity (think Adam & Eve); where the dominant myth supports singularity, universality, and god-like objectivity, the challenging myth supports mulitplicity, subjectivity, cooperation (natural, necessary, and unwanted), and--of course--synthesis despite substantial differences. (I use "substantial" here in multiple ways, suggesting both significance and constitution or material; the new myth is often allegorically the cyborg, most obviously the techno-organic person, whose "humanity" is neither built from machinery nor encoded in genes and tissues, but the result of both of these realities and the process of cooperation.) Hybridity is one aspect of the fundamental importance I place on creativity in expressing personhood and has much to do with how I have written (in my still incomplete) senior thesis on intellectual property; that is, personhood manifests most obviously when an entity acts by reassembling aspects of the environment into novel, intentional, and/or metaphorical ways. Without the synthesis between different subjects and objects in the world, then invention, art, and discourse dissolve and our ability to struggle, puzzle, and become impassioned over them is destroyed. Therefore, my notion of character is one that supports the ability and passion for creative synthesis in others as well as one self--or put differently, being both a creativity educator and a student of one's own passions.

Sometimes my friends express confusion or befuddlement about my rhetoric or connections and I think that that is often because these ideas are not as fundamental with others as they are with me. I cannot say exactly how these two ideas in particular landed themselves--or, more likely--insinuated themselves--into my worldview, but here they are, sitting around and looking me straight in the face or putting themselves up to my eyes and forcing myself to see through them. In Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, the first character introduced dreams of people walking past and picking up one idea, or sometimes many, until those ideas weigh heavily on the appearance and behavior of those persons until they become grotesque: bizarre monsters of themselves, warped by their attachment to these ideas that have become weapons and curses. I do not know if I have become a grotesque in this way, but think and hope that Underworld and synthesis-hybridity continue to function in explicatory and illuminating ways. For the moment at least, such aesthetic grotesqueness will have to suffice.