Conundrum
(begun 24v26)
A couple of days ago Wende challenged me thusly:
...and I've been working on my Input. My conclusion of the moment (always changeable of course) is in the form of a general Question, a Conundrum we are all engaged with:
...which provides plenty of ambit and elbow room for thought and discussion. This weblet is intended to provide a place in which to gather materials that seem ...useful... as I think and write and explore my own recipe for what to DO, and how to set about. I'll try to keep Notes to Self updated as a crumb trail/metacommentary/fragment collector.
Ursula Le Guin gives us a shove:
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.
We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how.
If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind (2004)and
immortality has never worked out well for anyone. Avoid it at all costs.
My first thought was for Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Fortuitously, Lapham's Quarterly dangled Socrates just at that moment:
"And now, son of Axiochus, let me put a question to you: Do not all men desire happiness? And yet perhaps this is one of those ridiculous questions I am afraid to ask, and which should not be asked by a sensible man. For what human being is there who does not desire happiness?"(the ensuing dialog is properly Socratic in form, with lots of agreeing by Cleinias) ...And tell me, I said, what do possessions profit a man if he has neither sense nor wisdom? Would a man be better off having and doing many things without wisdom or a few things with wisdom?
...Seeing that all men desire happiness, and happiness, as has been shown, is gained by a use, and a right use, of the things of life, and the right use of them, and good fortune in the use of them, is given by knowledge, the inference is that every man should by all means to try and make himself as wise as he can?
...Nor is anyone to be blamed for doing any honorable service or ministration to any man, whether a lover or not, if his aim is wisdom. Do you agree to that, I said.
Yes, he said, I quite agree and think that you are right.
Yes, I said, Cleinias, if only wisdom can be taught, and does not come to man spontaneously. For that is a point which has still to be considered, and is not yet agreed upon by you and me.
But I think, Socrates, that wisdom can be taught, he said.
Best of men, I said, I am delighted to hear you say that. I am also grateful to you for having saved me from a long and tiresome speculation as to whether wisdom can be taught or not. But now, as you think that wisdom can be taught, and that wisdom only can make a man happy and fortunate, will you not acknowledge that all of us should love wisdom, and that you in particular should be of this mind and try to love her?
Certainly, Socrates, he said, and I will do my best.
So MY answer of the moment to my Conundrum of What to DO with the 80s is: seek Wisdom, which launches me on a Quest to inquire what others have said about Wisdom that might guide me toward an enhanced understanding. Off to the races...
I'll try keeping track of how my unfolding adventure declares itself.
25v26
Exploring Wisdom ...which prompts the Conclusion of the Moment:
26v26
Wende says: please say more about pondering the 80's...
Well, here we are bobbing along in those 80s, living our lives pretty much as we wish. Strategies and findings seem discussable. So how are we proceeding to develop our lives?Me, I seem to be doing it by writing my own life on those yellow pads, in various daybooks and journals, and (for 20 years now) in html at oook.info. I recently recognized that I've been doing that sort of writing all of my adult life, and that I find it interesting/revealing/constructive to see what I thought then evolve into what I am thinking about now. I'm not sure that I know how to talk about that process, and still less sure that anybody else wants to hear me rabbit on about it...well, there's Informing Others again. And the rabbiting.
In October 2025 I characterized my activities as Octogenarian Reckoning, which turns out (according to the Google results) to be my coinage. Here's that Story. And two recent uses:
...the soul of this story is Margaret: an unforgettable, elusive octogenarian reckoning with love, loss, legacy, and the cost of truth. Her story, and the generations of heartbreak and hope she carries, completely captivated me.
(Book Smart Kate) (26iv25)and
Samuel Chimezie Okechukwu (Great Nigeria - Story Teller) (8v26)
The Weight of the Badge: An Octogenarian's Reckoning at the Crossroads of History
(The Long Blue Line: Memory, Power, and the Architecture of Legacy'Reckoning' has the flavor of totting up, assessing, the rear-view mirror... and, applied to one's own doings and encounters, seems to fascinate endlessly. Some persons domesticate reckoning by constructing autobiographies; others preserve their archives for uncertain posterity; and others consign all to the Flames. And occasionally Joe Wilner comes along. and leaves a box of snapshots as a legacy.
And 'Reckoning' involves opening literal and figurative boxes stored in the attic and ...
Today's exploration was in and around Apotheoses, the Golden Moments of Reckoning
...but I'm not sure what the fate of this summary page will be. It seems to me to be continuous with Convivium 2018-2024, in that I'm gathering a whole lot of stuff I've encountered as I followed my nose across landscapes of rabbit holes. On the other hand, it's the familiar overkill number, show-and-tell, basically for ME ...thing that I've been doing all my life <==(there's a bit of Reckoning)
27v26
Good old Happenstance presented me with Where Images Make Their Wonder: An Introduction Alessandro Cavazzana and Francesco Urbano Ragazzi in The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts (2021) (pdf), which poses this Question:
...What do we see when we see an image? Is it possible, in an image, to see immaterial phenomena such as movement, emotion, or even the expression of an ethical-political value? When is this the result of perception and when is it the result of interpretation?...which reminds me of my Gallery of Photographic Inspiration, and of my collection of Curiosa, which imbricate a number of texts from /Conviv that seem (at the moment) to bear upon the Conundrum of Making Sense of the 80s:
'Curate' as Word of the Year (2024)
Objects of Contemplation
Objects of Contemplation and Time
Imagination
Boffo: Nonsense, foolishness, and the comedic
Convivium Meta 24ii24
So all of the above exemplifies MY Octogenarian Reckoning, its irrepressibility and the surprises it keeps casting before me, which are among MY chief joys. And of course I'd love to SHARE the process and the findings with like-minded others.
28v26
Curate, Curation wants explication, since I take it to be a prime activity of my 80s.
30v26
So where are we on Saturday afternoon? My own Octogenarian Reckoning Conundrum is rolling downhill, gathering whatever will stick in the familiar fashion, including material in my Lifebox and especially the lexicon project. I am finding epiphanies and apotheoses a-plenty as I explore my collections and writings.
Epiphany (feeling) Wikipedia
I'm pretty sure that my next foray will be into the (heretofore) mostly-private preserve of MYKeywords, ground central for the work of Reckoning and the continued building of my own World Model.
As an antidote to the sonorities of Dylan Thomas, I wonder what Ursula Le Guin has to say?
To Refuse Death Is To Refuse Life Robin Bates 2018Ursula K. Le Guin — Death Quotes
Listening to Death and Ursula Le Guin in the Transition to the Ecozoic Laurie Cone
my Kindle Notebook for No Time To Spare
31v26
of the Sublime
12vi26
...and that fortnight was as usual full of the familiar broad array of discoveries and incomings and curiosities, captured fitfully to yellow pads, and to June 2026 links pages. Much thinking about the comforts and circumspections of the octogenarian perspective I seem to find many ways to explore, including memory spelunking and the old reliable yellow-pad recording of stream-of-consciousness Argosies, which is pretty long on the explaining-self-to-self suite...
...and I'm led to thinking about how to repair my understandings of basic science, in physics and chemistry ...just what is a photon, anyway? [answer: the particle-like and wave-like properties of energy are both relevant:...particles are not described by wavelength or frequency, but as having a mass and a volume and as occupying a distinct location in space......which pretty directly leads to wondering about electrons, and then to the bridge to organic [carbon] chemistry, and then to Life, and eventually to Ecology and thence to Gaia... and all of that being One Vast Interconnected Thing, in which Homo sapiens is blundering about, piling hubris on arrogance in self-congratulation and creature comforts, among which can be found our notions of 'Civilization' and progress and ... the Anthropocene, and where Anthropology took me, and where Anthropology went, and where its going has left me. And so on....the currency is energy; the photon is the carrier of that energy
Cory Doctorow cites and invokes Stephen King's Dark Towers: "the world has moved on" , and quotes Douglas Adams:
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.and then I read today's post by Timothy Burke (Academia: What Was "Digital Literacy"?), which says
...all the effort to talk about "prompt engineering" as a new deployment of the ancient core of "liberal education" is about to be rendered irrelevant. In fact, most of what educators have tried to do frantically in the last year to make AI tractable as a focus for training and learning is likely to have be useless within a year or two....The rapidity with which one method for "teaching about AI" that was both practical and theoretical is likely to become irrelevant has made me think about three decades of trying to incorporate information technology and "digital literacy" into my teaching. I'm feeling that most of what I did in that respect—and what many faculty, librarians and information technologists did—was just kind of a waste of time and money.
...there have been some enduring digital and IT tools whose impact on work, culture and creativity has been substantial that remain a part of our basic lives. Some of these are taken for granted and not taught about or studied nearly as much as they ought to be. The word processor (and other online text-composing interfaces) is a good example
...History is a literacy when it comes to information technology: it can show young people in the present that there have been other possibilities, other uses, other aspirations that have been taken away from them. You can't really understand enshittification if you don't understand what preceded it.
...The discouraging thought for me involves all the time I spent in workshops and conferences and unconferences where I and other academic professionals either talked to each other about how to do this or that with information technology or we taught people who came to us wanting to know what to do, how to do it, and what they could do with it once they learned it. Most of that was wasted effort. We taught about tools that disappeared within a few scant years. We provided FAQs for platforms that were merged, bought out, enfolded, obviated, obliterated. We evangelized, however skeptically, about techniques and technologies that we thought had potential, that we thought could serve as an alternative to dominant corporate bloatware, that we felt were the next new thing or were the new enduring standard. Much of the time, we were wrong. Even when we were right about the possibilities, we were wrong.
Yup, the octogenarian perspective is continually watching the world moving on...