Thinkfeel

In a post I wrote a while ago I referred to Timothy Morton's use of the term 'thinkfeel', which I took to be about 'grasping the ungraspability of a thing'. A few years later after getting involved with attempts to visualise things that are invisible, I'm even more impressed with Morton's ability to put words together in order to explain the unexplainably difficult nature of our reality. Morton told us that reality was populated by 'strange strangers', by which they (they use the 'they' pronoun) meant that the things around us, books, chairs, houses, soil, plastics, sunshine, water, trees and whatever you might encounter, are all weird. So how is the world weird? Perhaps its because we use language as a sort of screen behind which we hide from reality, we use words to single things out, 'books, chairs, houses' etc. which makes it seem as if there are nicely separate objects out there, but in reality everything is interconnected; a state that in Buddhism is termed 'dependent arising'. I have in the past when considering organic objects such as trees or humans, looked at the Markov Blanket effect, which explains how nothing living can ever in reality be an isolated fixed thing. This time, as I return to thinking about the issue, I'm more aware of animist approaches to the world, and that there is a long history of understanding everything we encounter as a fluid arrangement of energies. This both allows us to inhabit non living things mentally, (as in animist cultures as well as in the extended mind theory), and enables us to think about a life force energy, as something that gives agency to all things, not just organic forms. 

Starbucks cup

If we take a basic plastic cup, something we often use when travelling, we find that the cup is involved in a complex journey too, one that involves vast time periods and which is often interwoven with our own path through life. The primary component of plastic cups is polypropylene and the main reason you are given the cup you have been given, is its affordable price. Polypropylene is made from chains of the monomer (a small, reactive molecule, that can be joined with other similar molecules) propylene, which is a hydrocarbon obtained from natural gas and crude oil. The monomer propylene is subjected to a polymerisation process, where it bonds with other propylene molecules to create polypropylene. One journey is back into deep history and the conversion over millions of years of organic matter into natural gas and oil. Another is into the anthropocene, our current geological age and is associated with the greenhouse gas emissions released during oil extraction, plastic processing, and consumption. We also journey into the world of material properties, where we find that polypropylene's structure provides good insulation, allowing a disposable cup to contain hot coffee without you being burnt. A journey into economics, might lead some people to believe that its use is cost-effective. It has a structure that allows for both crystalline and amorphous regions, therefore it can be strong and resilient, as well as flexible and pliant. This gives it as a material great versatility, helping to make it quite straightforward to produce, which drives costs down, because there are a lot of manufacturers who can afford and know how to use the technologies of its production; which leads to significant competition, that further drives down prices. It also has a very low density compared to other plastics and less weight means less cost in terms of transportation. We can now begin to see the cup as an aspect of a series of wider economic processes, which are themselves driven by material properties. The cup is now in my hand and I'm drinking from it, so it is now totally interwoven with my biological processes and my ecological network. I have already observed how the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to people, can be thought of as places where one energy meets another form of energy. These systems are also where interactions take place that help to stabilise them. This being a situation that is operating alongside our perceptual awareness of the particular biological entity we are considering. A Markov blanket concept can be used to define the boundaries of this situation in a statistical sense. I.e. instead of a solid entity you have a series of probabilities whereby something is and isn't at the same time, something that can also be thought of as an active inference scheme. As you infer something is in existence, when you look at it directly it hardens up and becomes a fixed probability, called in this case a plastic cup.

Thinkfeel meditation on a plastic cup

Timothy Morton was at one time a Buddhist and therefore would have been very aware of the concept of 'dependent arising'. This awareness has I'm sure helped them to move away from the Western ideal of humans always attempting to master the world and its objects and to have more respect for the complexity of interconnected processes. What we might feel is a disturbing and difficult compaction, is perhaps a new 'beauty'. When we confront reality it is far too complex to experience, but encounters with objects always reveal something, even though they also make you aware that other things are not available to our experience. Everything and everywhere is real in its own way, and it is constantly interacting with everything else, including you.

There are diagrams that have been drawn to help us get to grips with the Buddhist concept of dependent arising and as I'm always fascinated by how diagrams help us rethink the world, it's perhaps time to look at some. 

Dependent arising three lives model

The diagram above uses a circular format based on the Tibetan “Wheel of Life”, with twelve links on the rim of the wheel. The circular format clearly illustrates the concept of “rebirth linking” connecting kamma (action) and consciousness. It also graphically displays the central role played by unwholesome roots (kilesa) of attachment (lobha), aversion (dosa) and delusion (moha). It uses the “three lives” elaboration. Links one and two are in a “past life” whereby ignorance or false knowledge sets the conditions for formations or pre-dispositions to arise. Links three to ten are said to be in the “present-life”, commencing with the arising of consciousness and the mind-body, which in turn condition further links to “becoming” (link ten). Links eleven and twelve are “future lives” linked to re-birth, old-age, death and inevitable suffering. Woven into an understanding of the diagram is both a macrocosmic viewpoint, encompassing “physical” rebirth and life in general; and a microcosmic viewpoint emphasising “moment-to-moment” phenomena of the mind and consciousness. Both perspectives are relevant to how kamma and rebirth relate to dependent arising. Kamma is associated with the idea that all actions (no matter how big or small) have consequences. However, for Buddhists it is more specific than that, as they believe that there are skilful and unskilful actions. A skilful action is one that produces happiness, whereas an unskilful action is one that produces suffering. It is this final point that has helped me to rethink my role as an artist within all this. The concept of 'skilful' action is I believe very important as it allows 'agency' into the framework. It allows for some sort of moral compass and helps us to think about the types of agreements that could be drawn up between humans and the Earth. It would be useful to have a contract on being born into this world, that states our responsibilities to it, as well as to each other. Well that's what I 'thinkfeel' at the moment, a time when I'm unsure about so many things and which finds me trying to 'thinkfeel' my way through a fog of uncertainty, any clarity or firm intellectual framework being blown away by current world events.

I see it more like this

Circular forms are useful when thinking about stuff of this sort as they imply never ending returns, suggesting wheels that rotate through themselves but also the axes that they turn around may lead to holes into which things can fall. I once thought of the lasso as something like this, perhaps more akin to a whirlpool or spiral galaxy, which was also a thing that could be tightened up until it had closed tightly upon the object that had been lassoed.

The lasso: Another of life's circles.

I produced these Western World cards at a time when an earlier US president was engaging in a Gulf War, a war that exposed a gap between world views, that seemed at the time to be a product of lies and wishful thinking, rather than a response to reality. Give us enough rope and we will repeat our mistakes over and over again.

Spike Milligan understood how 'thinkfeel' worked, he wrote as if he knew that poetry would one day leave science behind.

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in
But they're ever so small
That's why the rain is thin.

The 'thinkfeel' answer to why rain comes in very small thin drops.

See also:

Art, eco-awareness and OOO

Object orientated ontology and drawing

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Uncertain certainty 

The influence of the Tarot