Eating Dressing Talking

I feel the immediate squeeze of circumstance. But what circumstance? There is the circumstance of weather, which is all around me, and time, which is monotonous as a bedspring. These are not the nectarines I had in mind. The sensation is more scattered, more intermittent, more like drawing or cartilage. I believe there are forces at work, few of which involve the concertina, but rub against the bulwark, creating gracefulness and the color green.

That's what happens if you watch proteins build a mussel from scratch.

French buttons roar their annotations into muslin. This is where we begin to drift into leather. The sonorities of maidenhair transmit teakettle reveries in the shadows of the opera we call life.

Feelings pull us in and out of history. A prodigious energy animates the sky. There’s a form of magnet that functions like a library to capture the flow of ideas and stimulate them with a spirit of revolt and contradiction. A murder of crows awaits me outside.

Some people walk poodles. Others walk postulation.

Some people posit sand. Others posit seeds.

There’s a sky stirring in my brain. Fluffy thoughts drift through dropping pirates and pioneers on the softness of a boundless equivocation. A huge flower blooms from my throat. It declares itself a cylinder of being and pounds its way into chiaroscuro. A doorknob in a powdered wig declares the door officially open. And I can’t help but feel a little glad. My favorite hat confesses to counterfeiting the spontaneity of dogs.

Is it possible to think a sky? To think it into being? Why not? What is thinking, anyway? It's some kind of activity in the brain. Thoughts getting shaped, molded, assembled, greased, polished, disassembled, broken, repaired, the mechanism is uncertain, but the formations resemble rock, trees, mesas, ravines, the feeling of mental activity acquires the shape and color of a landscape, the pathos of distance, incalculable reaches, of outer space, moments when the mind focuses, or tries to focus, on space, on nothingness, on the hard cold reality of existence, a million stars bubbling in a cauldron of time.

What the fuck?!?

This is the phrase that pops into my brain the most on a daily basis.

I’m really not an expert on thinking. I do very little of it. I do as little as possible. Thinking isn’t fun. Sometimes it’s fun, but mostly, it’s not fun. Thinking takes my mind to places I would prefer to avoid.

So let’s think about something else.

Let’s think about judgment. What’s that? It’s a form of thinking, but what kind of thinking?

According to Kant, a judgment is a specific type of cognition. It’s a form of structural creativity with respect to its representations. Which means what?

It means that judgments are propositional cognitions. Humans are propositional animals. A judgment is an act of logical predication whereby a concept is applied to a thing, as expressed by the copula ‘is’ or ‘are.’

Ok, sounds simple enough. The mockingbird is a songbird. It’s also a perching bird. The box is a container. The paper towel is absorbent. Most vowels are sounds produced by a vibration of the vocal cords. Vocal cords are sometimes gravelly, sometimes silky. Do you see how it works? Reality is assembled by using the formula ‘is’ and ‘are.’

Kant believed that the human mind has two essential cognitive faculties: an understanding of concepts and thoughts and intuitions about sense perception and mental imagery. Both are served by the faculty of imagination, which is the engine of synthesis. Imagination mediates between understanding and sensibility by virtue of being a third, autonomous cognitive capacity. It doesn’t weigh anything, but it can thunder, and bend, and tumble around in the brain like a load of wash in a Maytag dryer.

Imagination imposes coherence and consistency on all sorts of cognitions, helps carry out pragmatic or moral choices and recognizes categorically normative concepts. It does this by putting the world on exhibition and meditating on mediation with gymnastics and ointment.  

Paradox is convulsive, as are greed and mirrors. When we stand in awe of a hot dog, what we are truly doing is wondering to apply mustard or not, or paddle our canoe further up the river.

Judgment is the central cognitive faculty of the human mind.

One must distinguish between an experiential state (eating, dressing, talking, smelling, listening, pressing, pushing, pulling, etc.) and our judgement or belief underlying this experience: this cookie tastes good, why is that woman talking so loudly, should I wear my red shirt or my green shirt, this new laundry detergent is extremely fragrant and lingers a long time in the wool of my gloves, is there a benign intelligence moving and imbuing everything in existence, how is it possible that something as brilliant as a hand or an eyeball could evolve without some inner force or consciousness guiding the atoms and molecules into this shape and function, I know that it takes billions of years of natural selection and adaptation to form a hand or an eyeball but who or what created the process we call natural selection?

What is consciousness, is my consciousness singularly bound to the neurotransmitters in my brain or is it larger, integrated into something far more vast than I could ever imagine?

Is it possible that what I perceive as a direct awareness of my inner thoughts and judgments is, in fact, a highly inferential process that only gives the impression of immediacy?

I leave a string of words here like a trail of gunpowder. Reading them is a form of ignition. Reading them is tantamount to giving them meaning. The words intend explosivity. We have minutes to run behind a wall. Kaboom!

The knowledge that anyone can use is the only knowledge, the only knowledge that has life and growth in it, and becomes throw rugs and shrugs. The world belongs to cats.