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Thinking Alive Written by Pierre Petiot
The fact is, that I like to feel the power of thought in my guts.
I could just have said : the power of life because I do not have such an understanding of thought that would be in any way different than my understanding of life.
They are one. It seems obvious at first from the most basic point of view but I came to understand lately that there is REALLY no difference. By "really", I mean from a scientific point of view. But that would be long to explain...
Yet from the most immediate point of view, I must say that I think with my fingers and my legs and my toes - don't laugh - and my skin, and my hair and my belly and - again don't laugh - with my muscles too.
This I know for being the normal surrealist way of thinking that is, the normal way of thinking.
I know that this is the normal surrealist way of thinking because Arthur Cravan was like that and Louis Scutenaire was like that. Both were poets and boxers. Anf what should we say of Apollinaire ?
I regret not to be a boxer in some way. And in some way I have little doubt that I am a kind of boxer too.
It's all bloody Plato's fault, you see that thought appears as something "high" whereas it is neither high not low but just the human way of being. Just the ANIMAL way of being for a human being.
Just as immediate as catching a mouse for a cat. Just as immediate as catching a fly for a cameleon. Just as immediate as moving your tail when you are a dog. Just as immediate as collecting pollen when you are a bee.
Cats leap. Men think. The same root, the same vital origin for the same basic movement. Cats play with mice, men play with ideas Mice sometimes escape, so do ideas. Cats are rarely in control of mice, men are not either in control of their thoughts
Worse. Cats are not changed by the mice they catch Men are permanently changed by the ideas that flow into them. Cats are not afraid of mice. Men are permanently afraid of their own minds. Mice do not play with cats, but ideas do play with men.
Our condition is something like a permanent hallucination Thousands of images are permanently raging in our skulls. No way to escape, no way out because that's what we are made of.
There is no such thing as a representation outside Both chaos and determinism are images, approximations of what the Real is and reasonably good ones But yet... Images ! Images ! Images !
We now know that all the possible intermediate grades between pure chaos and pure determinism do exist. This says aloud that chaos and determinism are just images and that the Real is yet something else something that we DO approach by means of images but however something that cannot be grasped accurately by means of images because there are no images out there. No images outside of our skulls.
Images are something specific to Life. They have no meaning to a stone and they are of no use to a stone simply because a stone has no need for predicting the next deadly event whereas any living being needs to predict in some way - chemistry also predicts - to anticipate the next accident.
Any living being predicts - but we usually say "adapts".
Gerald Edelman and some others have shown that both the immunity system and the brain are cognitive systems.
In both systems, "imagination" is at the very core of the way things work We "dream" antigenes that are yet to appear or that just will never appear, just as we dreams representations that have no equivalent in the Real.
In both systems, darwinian selection is set to work. Immunity cells are selected - and self-dangerous "bloodlines" discarded - poorly stimulated neurons die shaping the future paths of perception and thought.
In both systems, chance is set to work. Random mutations and re-assembly produce such a huge diversity of immunity cells that we are protected against dangers yet to imagine. Chaos in the production of images within our minds produces forms for things yet to be built.
So is it not so strange that both systems have common biological roots So is it not so strange that they work somewhat alike.
This way of bending chance and chaos towards survival this way of using the enemy to survive - that's what selection is - this way of amplifying chance by means of reproduction - hence transforming chance into determinism - are typical of Life. Just as they are typical of thought.
This is why I say and I feel that the oldest, deepest ANIMAL part of me thinks. And that Life has been thinking and thinkin from the very first RNA molecule on.
And hence, I am sure Plato has gone to Hell and I won't ever rescue him out of there until he's changed his mind.
Life is Thought and Thought is Life Both belong to this world and act in this world.
And both are magic and wonder. |
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