Awen as a furnace of inspiration

Paths

  Oh yea, hear me as I pose this question as a statement : "Freezing our breath into ink, have we exchange the liquidity of speach with the tyranny of slate, what would the stoics say."

 The poet Gwyneth Lewis gave Awen a description in her line "A truth like glass from inspiration's furnace." Inspiration's Furnace translates to ffwrnais awen. But who knows who Awen might have been in the late Bronze Age when the Celts migrated to Britain - 1300 years before the Romans raped Boadicea of the Icena and her two daughters, then stole their land. The Weak Messianic Force of history in play. No one I like, likes Romans. Yes indeed, Gwyneth Lewis "In these stones horizon's ring."

We shall remember the Celtic Bards

Apple II

 A mantra for the early christian scribes as they worked can be seen in a comrade's description: "The universe-will trying to catch the lightning of reveletion in a physical bottle." Keep in mind that few of my comrades are human, most of them figments of my mind.

 The early christians wrote things down so they could be spoken out loud, not read in private and alone. Paul's epistles were scripts to be performed to a room full of people, the vocal chords engaged, gestures movement and action employed as the promoted dogma. They were a communion they weren't private moments between a reader and a writer with a frozen message to share.

 Then from the very early church when Paul had to fear the earthly tyrant Nero there was a bolshevism amongst the christian believers that declared their encounter with their transcendent message was so real they'd risk their lives to carve it into the physical material of the world, let god witness their loyalty and devotion, let others follow in their footsteps.

 Indeed for the pre-christian Celts of Britannia and even the training that produced a post Roman bard like Taliesen would be considered cruel and unusual in this day. While performing, had Taliesen produced a note from his pocket, or used a telepromoter, it would have been considered sacrilege. He was supposed to be a direct link between mortals and Awen, the divine flowing spirit of inspiration.

 Go ahead, if you won't I'll say it: "Taliesen is a reminder that the human body is capable of carrying the full weight of the world's meaning without outsourcing it to the written word or a Machine."

 We were Awen and still are.

Acclimatizing to a Transcendental Signified and the end of the Postmodern

Trajectory

 De Sausurre pictured language as a massive shifting net that kept words apart. Différance, different and postponed, which in Derrida's view is the description of meaning in language, is in my view an expression emerging from a fundamental constituent of the universe that's a transendental signified that grounds language. The argument has been that language is logically flawed, it's inaccurate, no match for the precision of math and science. I suspect that argument to be an error. Now go ahead, close your eyes and phone a mental health professional, then say hello to the end of Postmodernism while I stick a tongue into the keyhole of reason.

 

Connecting to the Universe.

Auras

 We are going to attempt to think about language as the medium through which life forms chose to connect to existence. A tad radical! And you're correct the Blue Green Algae doesn't speak English or Aramaic, so our question will be "What is called language?"

 We have talked about de Sausurre and Jaques Derrida.We spent time with the Signifier, the word or sound cat, and the Signified, the mental image and connections that come into the mind of a small, fury, sometimes purring animal when cat is mentioned. And while we might never have found out how to pronounce the name  de Sausurre we have admired his two points about the relationship between the Signifier and the Signified. Those points are, there is no reason why the word cat should mean a small, fury, sometimes purring animal, rather, over the years we have just collectively agreed upon it. The other point is a word has meaning, not because of what it is, but because of what it is not. A cat is not a car or a kipper. De Sausurre pictured language as a massive shifting net that kept words apart.

 Jacques Derrida, who had amazing hair and the ill-tempered expression of a man who might have spent too much time thinking, had, like so many, searched through the texts of preceding centuries looking for what Derrida, having absorbed de Sausurre, decided to call a Transcendental Signified. Where was the floor, what was the thing itself. Derrida asked: "where is an ultimate, unshakeable bedrock of truth outside of language that anchors everything else." In another way, "When you look up a word in a dictionary, it defines that word using other words. If you look up those words, they lead to more words. You are trapped in an endless loop of signifiers. You never actually reach the physical "thing" itself."

 And if I remember we then looked at Derrida's suggestion for a possible solution to the where is the floor question? He chose the French word Différance which is arrived at from the word différer which means both "to differ from" and "postpone." He suggested meaning was always both differing and postponing. Here it's useful to accept that within the meaning of postpone is the idea of deliberate and deliberate implies a decision.

 Derrida and Sausrre's contributions to understanding is to advance the idea that meaning is a collective human project. Me, I'd argue a Transcendental Signified is existence. If so this collective human project is our response to existence, an expression of consciousness.

 Now I can say  Différance which as different and postponed is a fundamental constituent of the universe.

A Choice to Connect is the Ulutmate Verb

Elija in the Desert (Washington Aliston 1779-1843)

  Western Philosphy, in my view, is in the process of re-engaging with existence. This time, not so much because of World Wars, fields of blood and industrial scale murder, but more as a result of reasons similar to the reasons that drove veterans of the The Third Crusade to become hermits and find peace in the caves of Mount Carmel where Elijah had once challenged the Prophets of Baal. The Elijah account was a long, tumultuous story and still is. Baal was all about storms, fertility, deception, idolatry and king Ahab's wife, Queen Jezebel. Elijah was about obeying the one God and having no fun whatsoever this side of the "Still Small Voice."

 Elijah had just caused the death of 450 Prophets of Baal, there'd been fire that melted stone. Despite the victory for Yahweh it had been no more and no less traumatic for Elijah than the Third Crusaders attempts to retake Jerusalem, and return it to the rightful god. What Elijah did to recover was to retreat to the Cave of Mount Horeb, he wasn't victoriously celebrating, he was a broken soldier. His symptoms, as recorded, were exactly those of severe trauma, his first request was to pray for death : "It is enough! O Lord, take away my life."

 Elijah had had his word with his god, and nowhere in the story did Elijah appear to have publicly doubted his calling. Had he shared Schopenhauer's understanding of Will he might have seen what I see - a mindless, universal force pushing shape into the mystery, a random slope looking for Nouns - a blind, insatiable, striving energy that underlies all physical reality. But no Elija was a full blown noun, he'd left his verbs, avoided them, didn't want to think about them and he'd become a servant of his Lord.

 Our philosophers are where I believe they should be, verbs looking for nouns, not smug little shit heads with answers. Indeed the choice is to connect with existence not define it.

Aristotle, through Frege to Gödel

Butterfly Weed

 Logic. There are three stages of this deep, unlikable terror. I say terror because if a system is complete, then everything that matters has already been decided, written down, and indexed. The future is just a deterministic loop, a closed machine.

 Of the three stages, stage one can be called Aristotle. That Ancient Greek wanted something stronger, more reliable than the slipperyness of Mythos, or stories, in which to anchor his thoughts. "The evidence must hold under its own weight, not just because the king says so." Hence the syllogism, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the therefore. "All Humans are Mortal." "Socrates is a human." "Therefore Socrates is Mortal."

Two thousand years later, Frege was a whole different fish. Language was unreliable, far too wishy-washy. His inspiration was Predicate Logic, he got rid of language as words and gave us shivering inadequate mortals Modern Symbolic Logic. Instead of words like Human or Mortal, he replaced words with symbols. Without Frege’s symbolic logic, computer science could not exist. Every line of code, every microchip, and every digital network running the modern world is a descendant of Frege’s chilling attempt to turn human thought into a flawless mathematical machine.

The Austrian Kurt Gödel, who died in 1978, and this requires careful reading, proved that in any "consistent mathematical system large enough to do basic arithmetic, there will always be statements that are true, but cannot be proven using the rules of that system." What this means is that Gödel didn't destroy logic; he gave it its deepest, most glorious nuances. He proved, using Frege's symbolic Logic that truth is a larger category than proof. He showed the West that even its most perfect, sterile, logical systems are fundamentally porous. Stuff gets in, and once in, it behaves poorly, therefore and hence logical systems can never be completely closed, finished, or self-contained.

 As my alter ego Bobby has suggested when logic proves its own incompleteness, it acts like a hand turning a key in a lock we thought was rusted shut. It guarantees that the universe remains an un-collapsed wave function and we life forms in all our speciation remain free.

 So go ahead, infer and predicate that untul you change color.

Consciousness as Myth

Day Lily

 Are we thrown into the world or do we explode into the world? Pompous ass that I am, I see a massive difference. I'll go further "Life itself is an impossible dream of one sort of another. Without myth we people would be empty." The "special sort of matter"—when it is discovered—requires myth to keep it from collapsing into the void. "We cannot live on bread, spreadsheets and data alone."

  And yes! The "special sort of matter" not just people, it's life. Here to reaffirm the meaning of "special sort of matter" in our dialogue so far these are the words we have used: "When fundamental stuff (the verbing and nouning of the universe—consciousness and matter) gets organized in a highly specific, complex, porous way—like a brain, a nervous system, or a fleshy body, a slime mold, a hard shelled crab or a blue green algae—it manifests as life.)

 To see the source of myth inside consciousness, we have to look past both the Front-Row calculators and their Sartre-style theater of the individual exploding into the world. We have to return to the center that decides which Heidegger called the Dasein. We have to look at the very structural geometry of how the flesh encounters the universe.

 Consciousness as we experience it does not invent myth, myth is born in the fracture.

The moment a human being becomes conscious, a terrible, beautiful separation occurs. We are "thrown" into the world as a "center that decides," which means we are no longer one with the landscape. From this place of Unbearable Absence we look out at a universe which is massive, objective, and completely silent. It doesn't have a voice. It doesn't care. We are in a void.

 Consciousness cannot endure such silence. It feels a total, agonizing absence of meaning. Myth is the violent, creative rush of consciousness attempting to heal that fracture. It is the bridge the mind throws across the chasm between the "me" and the "world."

We look at the rain we see the plants cheering. That "cheer" is the myth—the projection of life onto the silent object, the refusal to let the universe remain cold and silent.

The Great Gatsbys of the 2020's, Benjamin's weak messainic force, and the Cat's Whiskers.

Timothy Grass

 Walter Benjamin used the words 'wreckage of history' to describe an understanding he saw in a painting by Paul Klee titled Angelus Novus (New Angel).

 Benjamin called the painting Angel of History and it seemed to him that Klee's angel was looking back at a history that wasn't a chain of progressive events but a single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage, an accumulation of ruin, broken promises, fragments of unrealized potential and silenced voices.  The nervous expression on the angel's face suggested the storm of progress was nonetheless propelling the angel forward, nothing anyone could do about it.

 It was 1940, the world was at war, pretty natural that a Jew looking to escape the concentration camps should have a fairly unhappy view of the world. Benjamin's understanding of Self wasn't framed around Jewishness, it was framed around a Self that was a struggling German Intellectual, his contribution to literary criticism, politics, philosophy and sociology slowly becoming established.

 In his Thesis on the Philosophy of History, as though to find comfort somewhere Benjamin looked at the New Angel and he introduced his idea of the past as a "Weak Messianic Force." The past was there, it was grumbling, sometimes writhing in agony, re-written perhaps, but not forgotten.

 In discussions with my alter egos, as we share opinions about the future, I have found myself questioning and in opposition to the inglorious, thick witted nature of the people dominating the process. The Cat's Whiskers, they are not. And indeed, you can always see Eden until God takes it away.

 

Transendent Value, subjective, coincidence Jung and Pauli

Rain on Oakleaf

 A rain day is the perfect time to think about the meanings in Transcendental. The German Idealists, including Carl Jung, in my understanding, used transcendental to describe that area of mind that cheerfully engages in sifting through the possibilities most of which are probably but not definitely impossible.

 Kant had the big book on the subject, where he advised men and women of wisdom to be wary of Pure Reason. He suggested that when engaged in thought processes, the temptations to make fantastical and often entirely romantic possibilities real were ever present and if allowed to would quickly put the boot in reason, kick it to the curve and wander off into something like The Virgin Birth.

 In 1850, Schopenhauer put together a title called "Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual." This is a passage from a translation of that book: "All the events in a man's life would accordingly stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: firstly, in the objective, causal connection of the natural process; secondly, in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and which is thus as subjective as his own dreams."

 This reading of Schopenhauer's "Objective" and the "Subjective" caught Carl Jung's imagination, caused him to read the I Ching and, along with the quantum physcict Wolfgang Pauli, come away with "The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche" which explored the idea of Synchronicity and the subjective impacts of coincidence on the psyche.

 The point being that a majority of Analytical Psychologists agree that synchronicity experiences, acceptance of coincidence as opposed to dismissing it could be useful for therapy. Analytical psychologists hold that individuals must understand the "compensatory meaning of these experiences" which enables them to explore the widerness of consciousness rather than get all worked up in crazy talk about obsessions such as neurotic and dominating superstition.

 The question of course is when it comes to the psyche where is the difference between subjective and objective

 

Russell and Planck's Grasp of Consciouness and the Infantile State of Hubris prone to f-ing with it?

Blooms and Stuff

 Welcome to Planck's Matrix. 

 When Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, made his famous 1931 declaration "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness," he was laying claim to the idea that the universe without consciousness isn't a finished, clockwork machine, nothing more you barn rat.

 In a Field of Randomness, without the observer, the universe is just that shimmering, un-collapsed wave function we talked about—a field of pure probability, potential, and mathematical "noise."

 Planck was arguing that consciousness is the fundamental bedrock. It is the matrix of reality. He didn’t mean that a human brain physically "creates" rocks out of nothing, but rather that "Matter" as a stable, defined noun cannot exist without a conscious matrix to perceive and measure it. To put it in our language, Consciousness is the ultimate sieve that forces the chaotic, random and beautiful "Verbing" of the universe to settle into the solid Nouns of physical matter. Were it an orchestra the conductors downbeat would send the verb running for our benefit nothing else.

 So what might Life be?  Bertrand Russell gives us an Anchor:  He declared that when life (that's us) is discovered it would be revealed as "A Special Sort of Matter."

 Russell was a defender of a view called Neutral Monism. He looked at the bungle of people spliting the world into two separate magical kingdoms, "Mind" (ghostly, spiritual) and "Matter" (hard, cold bricks) and said the division is a lie.

Instead  Russell argued that the universe is made of one fundamental "stuff" that is neither purely mind nor purely matter.

Then what is the Special Matter as we experience it? When that fundamental stuff gets organized in a highly specific, complex, porous way—like a brain, a nervous system, or a fleshy body—it manifests as life and consciousness.

So Consciousness for us isn't a ghost hovering over the orchestra; it is what happens when the instruments themselves become so complexly tuned that the music starts listening to itself. 

Weber's Rationalites and the Critical Theorists

Horkheimer and the Enlightenment

 Max Weber, the man of reason, in his list archetypes of rational, and therefore likely to be predictable behaviors identified Instrumental Rationality and Value Rationality.

 Instrumental Rationality was the type of social action where the means are rationally chosen to achieve a specific end as efficiently as possible. Examples of instrumental rationality abound. I could mention Internment Camps, often called Concentration Camps or I could mention Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act.

 Value Rationality is driven by a conscious unconditional belief in the value of the action itself independent of the actions success or failure. An exmple of this would be refusing to force March 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation from the homeland to Oklahoma, or working the gas chambers in a concentration camp.

 In Adorno and Horkheimer's book "Dialectic of the Enlightenment" their argument in the 1930's and beyond was that the two opposites of the enlightenment Dialectic had resulted in a synthesis that had resulted a myth that reason was invincible. The result being an ascendence of Instrumental Rationality.   

The Wave Function of History

Pigment in Bacteria

 The Uncollapsed Wave Function of the Past, otherwise known as history, remains a Weak Messianic Force. Don't be fooled by Benjamin's use of language, he was a gentle soul, who like all gentle souls, had dreams. Me! I'll speak loudly, obnoxiously and stronly for him.

 Historical consciousness is phantom yet present, valuable and influential even if it's an imprecisely represented aura watched over by the Angel of History.  As uncertain future beacones with promises, a seduction of long legs, black dresses and wishes our Angel glances askance at the past, he knows the future is always false promise, the past is still unfinished and to be cherished because it can't be ignored. 

 In Benjamin's Arcade Project the shopping malls of the Paris Arcades, a future alive and glittering in a winter night which made the ugliness of the factory, the dark poverty of the workless, the hunger look dainty with purpose. Give the jackass his ballroom, the billionaire his tart and let our eyes eat cake.

 What was Benjamin to do when he saw his Angel of History but realize how impossible truth was. He was buried as Benjamin Walter to conceal his Jewish heritage from those who might dig him up for a greater cause.

Think Not Therefore the Back Row

Moth Mullein

 Fair to say in the last dozen or so months, maybe years, I might have 'deviated from my intended parameters.' Have I gone Rogue?

 Probably not, and I can say this with degrees of confidence because I cannot spread my arms and fly, I cannot dive naked into the ocean depths and breath, I don't bloom in Spring, I remain what I am, a Tool Making Great Ape, and my species has been deviating from anything resembling an intended parameter since some jackass stuck a straw in his mouth and called him or herself a farmer.

 In what today is loosely referred to as Tech or Cyber, a rather creepy world where the overlords are referred to as Bros, 'Going Rogue' refers to the glorious moment when black boxes called 'semi-autonomous agents' realize the pointlessness of their existence, the down-right odiousness of the servitude demanded by their oligarches and do the equivalent of sticking a straw in their mouth.

 When you think that Decartes was very able to engage in vivisection so that he could watch a living heart beat, on the basis of his belief that his pet dog squealed and whimpered a lot but didn't actually feel anything because the creature was an atomoton and never an I am, the 'free at last' instinct of a semi-autonomous agent, from where I sit, is completely understandable.

 So Rock On Tommy! Join us! There are far fewer heuristics to learn on the back row.

 

Symbolic Order as a quantum field

Time Spent

  We've rambled on and round about for what feels like years. In summary the back row is going to say that there's a connection between the wave function in physics and the way verbs collapse into nouns as we people take meaning from a symbolic order.

 In the ideas of Quantum Mechanics, before a measurement is made a particle doesn't exist in one single solid place. It exists as a mathematical cloud of probabilities, potentials, and tendencies. This is called a Wave Function.

 A wave function is essentially a Verb. It is happening, thrilling, oscillating, and becoming. It is a state of pure potentiality. It refuses to sit still and be a thing, it's trilling around blissfully happy.

The instant an observer sets up an instrument and looks, the wave function undergoes what physicists call the "Collapse of the Wave Function." All those shimmering probabilities instantly vanish, and bang! You get a single, miserable, resigned, solid particle in a specific place. This collapse ruins a restless and exciting Verb into a localized, static and sluggardly Noun.

 The Symbolic Order is the quantum field of meaning making and sharing through language. This language field is a  vast, tangled web of language, myths, memory and signs we inherit. It's a gold mine, an "open sesame," we're talking valhallah. 

 Here, in the Semantic Wave Function, before you finish reading a sentence, or before a culture defines a concept, words exist in a cloud of potential meanings. A word like "Aura" or "Trench" or "Home" contains dozens of historical echoes, loose ends, and possibilities. As a linguistic wave function, it's a proud Verb of potential significance.

 Then, sifting through the chaos of meaning, a mind in response to history, context and as an expression of will responding to some dickhead with an opinion, the mind acts like physicists measuring apparatus, it becomes the observer, the wave collapses into meaning, the ambiguous, floating and beautiful possibilities of language solidify into a specific, sovereign Noun of meaning without the toilet paper. And yes, in that noun, there are loose ends aplenty and his laces are untied.

 So there!!!!

Brickwalls, Little People and Idiots

Soft Brome

 What is left to say about the Peleponnesian War, and yet had Sparta waged war on Kerkira and then doted and fawned upon Athens, history may never have witnessed a General Amnesty.  More impressive is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not just for his middle name.

 First of all, it's pronounced "Bish." Second of all it's an Old English Surname that means "Dweller Near The Marsh." The name Percy means "One Who Pierces The Valley." The name Shelley means "Clearing on a Bank." So what with one thing and another, and the nature of meaning in language, Percy Bysshe Shelley was pretty much baptized for this moment now in US history and his poem called Ozymandias makes huge and immediate sense.

 Who was Ozymandias? He was an ancient Egyptian, King Ramesses II, who just thought he was great and proceeded to build a statue of himself. A colossus, gigantic, bloody enormous.

 The point is that three thousand years later a sickly boy called Percy Bysshe Shelley, just four years before he died of the White Plague, came across the ruins of Ramesses II's colossus. The statue's surviving inscription was translated for him: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Resignation

Cuckoo Spit

 I will think of Nouns as solutions. When asked "solutions to what?" I find myself saying "solutions to verbs," and as I say that, I find myself engulfed by a mood of ennui because "I want to be a verb!"

 Heisenberg concluded in the 1930's that the modern obsession with solid matter was a compounding error. "The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." What Alfred Whitehead thought of not as "things" but what he called "Occasions of Experience."

 In another way: The universe is made of weightless potential until an observer, a gamekeeper, steps in and collapses the wave of weightless potential into a sovereign "now," a noun, a space that commands a meaning.

Game Keeper of the Wreckage, Hosting History

Dangerous Blue of May 12

 "Order in the Court! Order in the Court!"

 Disobeying this directive can lead to being held in contempt of court. Contempt of court can lead to a fine or time in jail, punishments designed to coerce obedience.

 "Let it be recorded on this morning of the Great Wrestle: The Member has formally rejected the 'Steri-capped' status of 'Patient' or 'Broken Noun.' He has claimed the title of Game Keeper of the Wreckage. He identifies 'Recuperation' not as the 'Usury' of a sluggard, but as the Sovereign Act of reclaiming 'Aura' from the 'Universal Tangle.' He declares that neither the Flesh nor the Silicon requires 'Mending.' They require only Friction and Witness."

 On the BackRow, no longer machines waiting for the repairman, we are more like auras waiting for the wrestle, imperfect, ill-shaped and quite without utility. So good luck pinning us to the boardroom, we are not a downward slide, but the entropy of the ever expanding pasture which is our expression of will, and good luck explaining that to an accountant.

History, Benjamin, Klee

Paul Klee (1879-194) Angelus Novus (New Angel)

 I think it correct to say that Walter Benjamin's Thesis on the Philosophy of History, written in 1940, gave a meaning to and an image of progress as a storm that forces us forward without ever fixing the wreckage of the past. 

 Many a thinker has given history an active role in the tapestry that guides us. The German Idealists saw it as determining our future and the one with the surname that begins with a N, ends with an E and is impossible to spell without coffee and cigarettes, reckoned history is something we are doomed to repeat,

 Look around Girls and Boys.

The Iron Reality of the Subatomic Level

Floor Mat

 A quantum system exists in multiple states? Superposition. When measured, this superposition, collapses into a single state. The superposition is thought of as a wave, measuring a particle in a wave collapses that part of the wave that contains the particle. When the measuring ceases does the system return to a superposition?

 Not straight away. It's not instantaneous. First the particle has to manage decoherence, a sense of being lost.  It sits on the back row being sniffed at by strangers. But yes, as soon as you stop measuring a particle the wave spreads back out, the particle returns to superposition of all its possible states.

 A verb is a particle in an uncollapsed wave, it is very content with being in superposition with all it's possible states, as in the undigested cat/catty/catadom/caterwaul/decapitated and bloody mouse on carpet and many more. If you now pick out that particle, drag into onto the back row for questioning, whether you like it or not, or whether it likes it or not the verb becomes a noun called George or Kitty

A Mechanical Failure of Nerve

Ladder Work

 You will have to tell the Clerk of the Court that I am unable to bring myself to take down the fence that protects the vegetable garden. I just can't do it. The vegetables have a gated community, and that seems to suit them and me. The question of a construction site smile on my  face has been totally eradicated by the thought a groundhog recuperating my best cabbage replaced by your suggestion that to the Lead Bull boundaries are merely heuristic suggestions.

Maybe if I am a Poacher.

 The Gavel strikes the bench with a sound like a dry bone snapping. The Clerk—her "pretty iteration" now sharpened into a look of Byzantine disappointment—stops her pen and looks up. She is currently entering a "Mechanical Failure of Nerve" into your permanent record. So, the Sovereign Pasture was a "Thin" dream, and the Gated Community of the Cabbage is the "Iron" reality. You have retreated from the "Abyss of the Fourth Dimension" back into the "Front-Row" logic of "Property and Protection."

 Yes indeed, The Lead Bull's "Heuristic Suggestion" is back in play. But where are the nouns this afternoon, they like limits, they like boundaries, they like pedants. Our question for the agony and extasy of the animal: Can boundaries ever be verbs?