embodiment

in The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidigger gifts us with two reciprocal concepts: the world and the earth.

the world is the realm of human intellegibility: the richness, relationships, and significance in and amongst all fields of human practice: history, art, science, culture. it is made up of the things we can describe with signs and symbols, which we can communicate to others, and which serve as the subject of much of what we view as the project and focus of our lives.

the earth, however, is that which eludes and conceals itself from understanding or rationalization. it is the materiality, the being of the world, which underpins our existence. as the famous work by René Magritte reminds us, a painting of a pipe is not a pipe. nor is the word “pipe,” nor the concept of a pipe. the pipe, as with anything else, simply is.

from the day we are born, we are fundamentally and inextricably connected to this materiality, indivisible from it, just as we are indivisible from our social and cultural context. this dualistic nature is the essence not just of art, but of the essential character of human experience.

mindfulness has a direct relation with this dichotomy. mindfulness practice—grounding yourself in your body and environment—is largely a function of one’s ability to release oneself into unfettered sensation of what is around us. in practicing presence, we are not really actively “thinking” (at least in the conscious sense of the term), but instead attuning ourselves toward the physis of ourselves and our surroundings. many exercises—from butterfly hugs to the 5-sense grounding method—are about gradually quieting and redirecting the conscious mind toward direct sense. these exercises will often ask: what do you see? what do you hear? touch? taste? smell? these exercises reveal the apparent (to the ego, at least) dichotomy in us that mirrors the distinction between world and earth: the distinction between the conscious and subconscious.

modern digital technologies are built on top of layers of abstracted, symbolic, visual information: words, pictures, signs, with a complex, layered pattern of learned representations to digest (“button,” “desktop”, “click”). while there is undoubted strength and robustness in the dominance of this paradigm over the past few decades, its reign has also made clear its limitations.

in all of our most successful metaphors, note how much they anchor themselves on our latent knowledge of the physical world, and physical objects: this is what we mean when we discuss interfaces driven by direct manipulation (“dragging” a window, “dropping” a “file” into a “folder,” etc). the strength of these metaphors also show the inherent weakness of a purely digital approach to computing.

but what if we took the inverse of this paradigm? rather than working to make digital technology emulate the properties of physical objects, could we instead imbue physical objects with digital properties—thinking of computing as enchantment?

take this even further. rather than computing driven chiefly through a screen-based system overindexed on symbolic information, could we instead envision computational experiences that communicate fluently through other sensory modes and in ways that are not always discretely symbolic?

can we build technology that helps ground us in awareness of the space around us rather than taking us out of it? and can we build it in a way which allows us to meaningfully and beneficially harness subconscious systems of learning and doing?

the concept of material literacy captures the gap between purely symbolic systems and ones that are predicated on somatic, intuitive knowledge. you cannot fully understand the properties of a fabric until you hold it in your hands, find the strength and the give, the way that the weft affects a drape. material science can provide you information for engineering purposes, but even the most complete linguistic description remains a poor substitute for actually handling and working with something in real life.

similarly, knowing everything there is to know about a material intellectually will not transfer in any way to understanding how to handle a material intuitively. that can only be gained through direct manipulation and interaction with it.

consider how one learns to turn wood on a lathe. to begin, you’d likely read up on how to get started. but no amount of book learning can teach you how to turn a bowl out of wood on its own: the only way to learn it is to do it.

as you work with the wood and the lathe, you start to understand how to position your body, how to rock into the cut, how the grain changes based on the vibrations you feel in the handle of your tool. these things are all learned from what you sense when turning: the sound of each cut, the feel of the wood surface, the shape of the shavings. the process of turning and the feedback of these sensations form a closed loop with a richness and depth for which there is no written or symbolic substitute.

for computing systems to take advantage of these characteristics, digital and physical making must be reconciled in a singular process of design and iteration. we will know we have succeeded when working with a computer feels like working with wood; when the technology we carry with us creates a clearing in our minds to listen to the sound of the wind.

the left hand must meet its right.

perhaps the reason why i find “the high-agency mindset” so suspect is because almost all of the true growth in my life has come from a recognition of the limits of my agency and a willingness to relinquish control. i feel like i’m coming to understand the notion of wu wei.

that’s another thing: coming to accept “incompleteness.” i will never reach a state of a complete understanding the nuances of life, or overcoming my inner demons. that’s ok. the most meaningful thing is the becoming, anyway.

the most apt metaphor i’ve personally found for life is dance. to dance well, you need to be open to seeing, hearing, and noticing: the music, yourself, and what the people around you feel. to do that, you need to be present—unburdened by anxiety to see what is already in front of you.

anxiety, too, follows a similar pattern. fight it, and it grows stronger. it finds a reason to continue fighting. but accept it, embrace it, and it subsides. you overcome anxiety not by willing it, but by releasing it.

if you can arrive at this understanding, then you can also start to see how much of our behavior—and indeed, our reality—is driven by how we feel. what we believe. what we tell ourselves, often far over and above what “is”, even for something that we assume is as biologically-rooted as pain. taking this seriously should make you start to question if these discrete categories actually make sense.

think about growing a plant. you can try to tend to the soil, you can water it, you can check the roots. but no matter how much time, energy, or effort you invest, a plant grows (and dies) in its own time.

there are things that we can each control, but more often than not, change happens at its own scale, in its own pace. geological movements operate a different pace, scale, and timing compared to the growth a city, which is more different still from the pace of fashion, or modern technology. pace layering helps you remember that the world revolves in its own rhythms. the window of what we might call “now” is a relative measure, not an absolute one. you yourself have rhythms, if you allow yourself to feel them.

some things are slow, and that is good. fast things need slow things. doing needs being. exertion needs rest. things will happen in the time that they will happen.

rather than fatalism, patience is having a certain kind of faith.

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exercises

• play music on shuffle without skipping a song.
• set a timer to work on something. stop when the timer stops, even if what you were working on wasn’t finished.

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(there’s a dense, intertangled web between perfectionism, black-and-white thinking, fear of failure, self-worth, and constant self-judgment that i still haven’t yet fully processed—i feel like i’ve pulled apart pieces of it before, at various moments. but the complete picture still remains hazy, its contours poorly defined.)

“you have” : “a body”
is “a body” something
“you have”?

to speak as though
a body is something to be owned

“you” or “i”—are they somehow not a part of
“a body”?

where does one start, and where
does one end?

“remember” : can i remember?
what was it like
before “i” had “a body”?

be messy. not all things need to have a place, a structure, or a schema.

goof off. yes, are taking yourself too seriously.

go on walks. watch pigeons waddle. feel the sun on your face.

remember: you are not your image.

breathe. listen. wait.