Category Archives: Existential

09-Bord

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Tombstone

The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.

Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.

Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows.

A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.

Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.

The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

07-Beon

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Hymenoptera Apocrita

On our fence, near the trash cans, every year.

As you eliminate your body on the web, you recuperate it in your physical location.

Sometimes you have a body, sometimes you don’t.

If you don’t have a body, you’re not there.

If you have a body, you are so there that your relationship with the world is what I call proprioceptive. It’s tactile. It’s not visual as it was during the Renaissance.

In the Renaissance, what was your identity? It was the outer limit of skin, a head that processed information, a dumb universe shown as a spectacle.

Identity became a point of view.

Today, identity is a point of being. We add the new possibilities of mixed identities, collective identities, just-in-time identities, fabricated identities.

There’s great flexibility, but the core business of self remains, just extended all over the planet by electronic extensions.

Derrick de Kerckhove – Wired October 1996

pro·pri·o·cep·tive – relating to stimuli that are produced and perceived within an organism, especially those connected with the position and movement of the body.