venturing mindfully • gary e. davis • berkeley


		love of better being

	wholly flourishing creativity venturing mindfully gary e. davis	Dec. 11, 2018

Today is pretty spring, though it’s a late autumn day.

There’s lots of fruitfulness to come from the work, he thought, “after doing what’s required, doing what I can.”

Life to Live: the Point of being: “wholly flourishing creativity”?

In the beginning—intrinsic to life—is the value of enjoying creativity, born from creative learning. (Well, actually, born from the self-enhancive interest of infant wakefulness, empirically established intrinsic value [heads up, philosophers]; but that’s a topic for later.)

Call the best of that, enacted through one’s years of “growing up” enowned individuation. ‘Enown’ isn’t in any dictionary, apparently, but I’m not the one who coined it. The first English translator of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie: vom Ereignis titled the book, Contributions to Philosophy: from enowning.

But I’m not importing Heidegger’s technical sense of German “Ereignis,” which is standardly translated as a rubric: “event of appropriation.”

However, one does appropriate one’s life in the world of one’s life, the life of one’s world.

Authentic individuation would be “True” to one’s own life, not just conformance to some general conception of individuation (e.g., a discourse on cultivation of one’s humanity through education, discrete capabilities, and admirable personality). One’s ownmost individuation is lived through “taking” ownership of one’s potential, one’s intrinsic love of self-enhancive learning, and so on—enowning futurally (project-ively) being one well.

I value my life as it is, however it is, for its own sake, yet also—mainly—because I love what I’m doing. I get esteem from the satisfaction of my work.

I’ve survived loss to my life of persons I love by loving the life I have—and loving again through available others.

So, I can feel no absence of you, as presence of cherished solitude is enowned. And I’m free to love life without obligated writing to others, other than you who are no other.

I am free to live into my scalarity of flourishing—my protean pretense of productive creativity—centripetal gathering, upland gardening: ventures of poiesis.

I give myself to being pleasure in absorption of experiencing, intense attention (Flow of immersion), pleasure in novelty, sensuality, and thrilling vitality (“pushing the envelop,” as they say); giving myself to an appeal of complex mystery (having audacity to confront the monster, daring the horizons to not open), owning efficacy (mastery), furthered by exoticness, surrendering to an eros of secrecy, savoring transgression (ethically so !), being transported or transformed, possessed of numinosity, ecstatic ideality, elational gravity, then inspirational promise, becoming an expansive joy of free-playing ideas and images, and working myself into some creative thing, manifoldly fulfilling.

“Dear Gary, would you be like Rilke’s Duino Elegies, always written ‘Now’ because you were discovering them?”

—so many decades ago—rather tired now.

I’m developing into the unknown, writing to the unmet, in my own pace, my own time, as if writing to peaks across eras—as if I could: speaking to an archetypal recurrence of youth, love, loss, as if one can live wholly with all eras of a life, all modes of being human, all places—wholly being in Time.

I’m to fly in my own sphere of creative individuation, finding, making promising constellations from happenstantial bricolage—composing free standing combines from categorial innovations, inventions.

Endeavoring to comprehensively comprehend—to differentially conceptualize—the time of a life may be ultimately self-referential, but I don't mind being incomprehensible, because I know what I'm doing: achieving my hedonic, individuative, and maybe orginary happiness.

“I am an artist. I’m a scientist.”

I’m truly yours.

I’m an Earthan gazing into the black cosmos at stars.