letterclub - Energeia

[droqen]

After reading Mer's "More questions than answers" I find myself a little grounded, which is nice. A new tangent.

Noting my thoughts here before I lose them...

- What is it that makes you feel alive? Environments, cities, languages, worlds, people

- Organic, tree, city. I still haven't read it (I'm meaning to) but Christopher Alexander wrote an essay called A City is not a Tree which... well, the name is too too similar!

. . . what is a DEAD game then? // Are we talking about LIVING games in opposition to what?

^ The One-Straw Revolution quote, responding, moving toward the center. The center!

* The short stories Ezra shared with me. Their singleness. Is this haiku games? (butterfly emoji)

"When you are becoming ALIVE you can feel it deeply.", Then how do you feel when you're not? Like when you get stuck at an idle game that you feel like it's sucking the life out of you?

^ I think so. If pressed I would say that when not alive I feel like I have no reason to exist, no deep reason to exist. It is not the feeling of being dead but the feeling of I might as well be dead, I guess, to be very messy and blunt about it. i feel alive when i am doing something, and there is a reason for doing it, and there is a reason for having that reason, and there is a reason for having that reason, and so on and so on and so on until my mind cannot fathom any further depth of reason and I give in to the illusion that there are reasons for my reasons stretching back as far as the beginning of the universe, the beginning of everything, and i feel whole.

[droqen]

In 2013, nearly one decade ago, I wrote that "Nothing created can answer why forever."

This was one line in Whyproof to 5,000 feet, a blog post which I see now as my early attempts to understand wholeness -- and my assignment of failure in that respect to the nature of things, rather than to my limited perspective.

As melancholy as the nihilist beauty is in that statement, it is no longer something that I believe in, but that depends on your relationship to one word in particular: "created."

In a sense, I think that any dead thing is created. But as I've had many conversations on the topic of the awkwardness of using a so-loaded term since writing some of my other letters, I'd like to perform a little terminological surgery.

Let's say, from this point on, that we are talking about the nature of wholeness.

[droqen]

"If we want a flower, we do not build it cell by cell. We grow it from a seed." (Paraphrased from my memory of The Process of Creating Life)

A flower that is built cell by cell will be dead.

[droqen]

lost the thread! it's over :)