Distance-Intimacy Conception

As I want to unbuckle any mentalist, intellectual, personalist, or consciousness-centric preconceived notion of concept creation, I also want to untask and scramble the more obvious motivating factors behind concept creation as these have typically been conceived.

There has been a motivation for creating a distance, an abstract separation, between knower and known, subject and object, between the thinker and the plethora of phenomena the thinker quietly and unobtrusively observes. This retreat to some metaphorically safe and sheltered place in the mind has had to be created created conceptually at some great cost – but also for tremendous profit in terms of the ability to control and dominate that from which the thinker has been able to separate.

I’m trying to concern myself with my own peculiar desire to stand apart, to crouch under a protected eave and silently watch the rest of the world scamper and scurry, wet and miserable, in a downpour they don’t know enough to get out of. It’s a desire to stay dry against an onslaught of reality which would drench everyone to the bone. It’s a desire for a little worldly sanctuary where I could rest and recollect and stay out of the rush of phenomena long enough to give them, in my mind, a more satisfying solidity and substance and stability.

This separation, distance, abstraction is all created through ascetic processes – it is accomplished at the expense of the sensuous.

And this leads me to the other major countervailing motivation…For creating immersion in phenomena, for delving as deeply and sensuously and unknowingly into them as can be, for diving into the rushing river regardless of any risk of becoming smashed on the rocks below, or being dismembered or blinded or destroyed in the sheer force of water falling in rapids and over waterfalls. This is a desire for unbridled, heedless union which makes no calculations and takes on any chance. Out in the storm, screaming.

I say I want to scramble these motivating factors. Part of what I mean by that is I want to destroy any idea of one being superior to the other – for example, one representing a moral or psychological superiority to the other—and I want grab out the creative and real processes of both and see how these might be recombined so that we might have both at the same time – distance and intimacy, knowing and gamble, simultaneously. A sensuous distance, a contemplating involvement. I don’t think this involves ignoring contradiction, and the fact that it looks on the face of it impossible is really the best reason for trying.