the nature of consciousness

[hermeneut]

The nature
of experience
just so
happens to be
the experience
of nature.

Experience is always already
interpretation of...
understanding of...
consciousness of...

of nature, of being,
of that which opens
the possibility of
impossibility.

Comments

[kinderheldin]

I like this ... especially the second stanza. Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm in the present, experiencing it, because I'm so conscious of analyzing the present -- "excessive consciousness" as the Underground Man (Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground) might say. I suppose excessive consciousness is part of the experience of experience. No wonder we're so alone!

I can't find the exact wording, but Kierkegaard said something (either exactly or very close): "The future is possible until it it actual." This poem made me recall that thought.

[hermeneut]

Thank you for your comment. I've been away from the internet for a while, and I was very pleased to find your comment waiting for me. Many thanks.

This poem is very much a Kierkegaardian gesture, or perhaps an existentialist gesture: to communicate an experience of the actual as that which is no longer possible, an experience of the world as the death of possibility and birth of impossibility. Execssive consciousness, nihilism, inauthenticity, bad faith, mortality, solitude, finitude, difference, fragmentation -- we destroy ourselves insofar as we "are" ourselves. Indeed, no wonder we're so alone. Still, somehow, this loneliness is not something merely "I" experience. WE are so alone. We can see the loneliness in the very look of our inscriptions here in cyberspace. Every sign is a sign of the im-possible.

Every year or so, I think maybe I'm done with these existential writers. Like anything, such thoughts are always short lived. After all, we exist.