Notes Toward Amateur perspectives pt.1
For mercurial north nodes as Uranus moves with Gemini
I’m in love, I’m not in love! I’m insane, I’m not insane! - Anakreon
Reading a book about monsters, by Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, led me to an essay by the former (Women, Gender, and Utopia, The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Modern Science) that introduced me to the term, hyper-professionalism.
In her essay, Park searches among the ambivalent receptions of a book very dear to me called The Death of Nature, by Carolyn Merchant. She also discusses a similar reception (one that influenced Merchant’s book) to the oeuvre of another author whose work I hold equally close, Frances A. Yates, notably her book, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.
Park states that the work of both authors ran up against what Steve Shapin terms, hyper-professionalism, the tendency to shun as heretics those who stray too far from approved disciplinary terrain. For Park, this was most keen in Yates’s additive inclusion of astrology and magic, and Merchant’s focus on ecology and the oppression of women.
This, what Shapin calls a crisis of readership, has guided the slow development of amateur perspectives, which is to say, selves who love.
Amateur perspectives (whilst concerned with critiques of monotheistic wholeness) often appear in hologrammatic multiplicities, forms held in processes of content and context, matrices of mythopoetic imaginations.
Such perspectives, as loving selves and as soul making, are holes in an amateur ear who is themselves part of whole, with body and their myriad fields, whether animate, astral, feminine, medicinal, historical, imaginal, fieldless, pathological… all these ears (auricles as oracles) listen in adumbral dimensions as ways of participating with living cosmos.
Amateur is a fragment of a person ever-oscillating with depths of interior realities (changing shape), attempting to help open who William James called a prematurely closed (concluded) universe of conventional scientific belief by going about subjective universes, articulating and sharing experiences in ways not solely confined to literal, measurable, and objective.
This incipient text unfurls with space weather and desire work, a fat encased nerve language cultivating desire, waiting to see who stars bring.
As I observe this text and watch them essentially re-writing themselves I realise what’s happening is a blurring of boundaries, a grotesque, a grotto with whom superposition and intertextuality come together as little gods, as twins, Gemini souls, lovers and beloveds and the personified third space in between them. They are always conversing, bringing thought and language into question, as eroticism.
There’s a curious knot in the diffractions of these waters, because desire, ancestrally, is to wait and see who stars will bring, and I bring this up, and call this down, in part because when Friedrich Nietzsche first met Lou Andreas Salome, he asked her (though I’m not sur ehe listened for an answer):
…from what stars have we fallen to meet here?
For Lou, spirituality and eroticism are integral parts of each other… so waiting to see who stars will bring isn’t just about literally waiting, it’s about who appears when moon gets too close, a lunar condition concerned with not being afraid of propinquity, enfolding with intimate proximity of celestial bodies as polytheistic light.
Lou tried several times to show Sigmund Freud that love requires personifying. She felt we can be in an emotional relationship only with whomsoever we experience anthropomorphically (asking us to extend what it means to personify, getting our hands in dirt, co-creating celestial earth) addressing sticky hu-matter… she said only such can we include in our love, and by contrast, if we encounter nature only objectively and scientifically, we run the risk of alienation.
Lou said that when we fall in love, we fall in love with two entities at once (she lamented how one-sided erotic had become), the person (again asking us to extend the boundaries of this term) and the image (double, effluvia, eidola, plasma).
In between these creatures sprout tension, beauty, pain, chaos, wild roots and old night. Doubles are everywhere, ever more and ever less than doubles.
If we hold this as participatory act, we consider the art of asking questions, and also the ecology of listening for answers.
In Bruce Fink’s book on Lacan’s Seminar VIII we learn that ta erotika is a play on erôtan, the very art of asking questions. Fink goes on to say that by asking the ‘right’ questions, we highlight the lack in the, in this case, analysand, who then comes to believe that we, in this case the psychoanalyst, must have the answers since we have asked the questions…
So in between psychoanalyst and analysand is a personfied third space of they who are supposed to know. But in the holding we also come to another relationship–anamnesis–with whom we might both speak and listen as animating energy, where memory is not only repetition and mimesis, but active imagination and aisthesis, an enchanting gasp, an Orphic chant.
As Ursula Le Guin says in an essay called Telling is Listening, listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in, become part, enfold, as others may then also join… Such experiences gift place within world soul, articulating through mercurial word drifts, myths, gestures, dreams, symbols, emotions, signs, energies, and imaginations (manifesting as wave-like avoidance of categories in relation to studying with vibrations… appearances and reappearances, culture as second nature we might say). Such drifts are not so much set over and against from a position of conscious autonomy, as they are embedded in a cosmos of subjects where boundaries exist, but they are permeable, not absolute.
Le Guin says listening is an act of community, and this takes space, time, and silence. We can participate without losing or resolutely holding onto our edges, without negating the stratified and transformational realities of others, wherein all beings are personal, conscious, multidimensional, multidirectional. As Richard Tarnas says, the ‘modern mind’ believes that to project ‘what’ is human onto ‘the nonhuman’ is a basic epistemological fallacy, ergo, whatever beauty and value human beings may perceive in universe, that universe is in themselves mere matter and motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity.
We are not the only humans in cosmos, in as much as qualities we attribute to being human are not exclusive to us. We forget selves precisely to recall selves, a practise of paradox, unlearning, unhabiting phase-place of anamnesis and amnesia as labyrinth, as cinnabar grotto.
In the same essay of Le Guin’s, from her aptly titled book The Wave in the Mind, she also says that all living beings are oscillators. We all vibrate, whether amoeba or human (her model for intersubjectivity is amoebas having sex, literally extending each other and melding their pseudopodia into connecting channels, reminding me of the Eleusinian mysteries, cyclical chamber of life and death, as a passage viewed through metaphysical union between lovers across a body of water), we pulse, we move rhythmically, change rhythmically, vibrating as interwoven frequencies, cosmic, atomic, molecular, subcellular, ultracellular, liquid crystalline…
Constant and delicate throbbing is a process of life made visible, resonating with cosmos in each other, enhancing and refining bewildered wisdom.
In mind of Lou Salome and Nietzsche, Anne Dufourmantelle writes that cosmos pulsates in between like blood, lodged in spaces of languages, fantasies, dreams made of slightest touches and cries, sobs never heard, whole constellations of gestures never made, desires put into words before and after, star spangled time who surrounds desire (she also says that many felt Lou could not differentiate between people, books, and flowers) .
…from what star have we fallen together here?
We recall that Nietszche said these words to Lou upon first meeting, later realising that the alchemical stone of the philosophers, the lapis, was in fact a heart.
Dufourmantelle speaks of this as living life in amplitude, entering into life upon submitting to fascination of limits as they press upon our lives… a truth, a heart who cannot be found in flatlands of existence, asking of us to cultivate space within for disturbance ecologies, pathologies, unreconciliation, and enigma, a heart with whom we intuit and visualise asymmetrical wave forms.
This is whom we can think with as anamnesis, lived experiences of listening with plants, roots, animals, stars, crystals, symbols… Such cosmic sympathy is a practise of corresponding, an ethics of fine feeling, a celebration with cosmos as ritual practise of fluid identities where subjects are part of us, thus develop an ongoing emphatic relationship with them as with ourselves.
This can easily tip into exploitation in this human-centred world, but if we treat everyone as truly alive, not just hypothetically (where Gaia is more than a hypothesis), everyone as radial eros, as much part of our own bodies as we are theirs, an art of questioning and listening reveal their twins, their doubles, in spiritual ecologies.