What can we know but what appears to us, what we attend to and experience? What can mind apprehend but what the senses deliver to the brain—mysterious expressions that a deaf, blind, dumb, balanceless, and generally insensitive thing can somehow understand, or does it? Maybe it’s all made up, nonsense, ripples in darkness. A waking sleep?
Transduced energy from the external world is all we may know, all we can know. That shadow of the outerworld—its inward reflection—is something transcripted and translated into us—bodied—via receptors, signal receivers, coiled ladders of bonded pairs that kiss each other with sugars and phosphates.
We are messengers. We send in letters to ourselves, messages that move through tissued time fabricated for and by the heady hermit who hides behind a moat-like barrier atop these founts of being.
Despite so many degrees of separation, information travels mostly unimpeded within us. It moves by various parcels as currency converted to whatever the next trader trades in—air or mechanical pressure, photon, chemical, inertia, action potential, neurotransmitter. All that commerce becomes us.
We are bankers and interpreters—coining values and exchanging things, and we bet on and pay ourselves. Are we not strange record keepers, making so much up as we go along, something we could just as easily thank as blame the left-lateralized aspect of self for?
Still, what of it? This aesthetic life—something modal, experiential, active, awake—is phenomenological, even if it doesn’t really mean anything. We write meaning over it, whatever that may be. We metaphorize; the scribe within us, that poet, silvers the transparent face of colorless existence with its own likeness and fashions itself eyes. We call that phenomenon self, and then it is.
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