work.

I far-too-easily get caught in the 'work-ness' of work lately, conceptualizing my writing as a job, as stress, as an overwhelming and undesirable task. This is how we tend to think of work. "The dissertation" looms as a formidable task, its moniker uttered by others with a combination of awe and fear. And though I rarely forget the privilege of what I do (something chosen, not forced, that does not endanger my life, that allows me freedom and independence and thought), I often forget the pleasure.

Today, I remember the pleasure, the beauty of thinking, of crafting sentences, of weaving narratives of life and theory. I remember that I've chosen to pursue interests that I think--hope--resonate beyond academia's sometimes-impenetrable walls. And, I remember what I learn, beyond the philosophies, theories, books (which I love).

My body revolts lately. My response to stress is physical, and thus my interventions are also physical. This week, I was craniosacrally therapied, and engaged in my normal body-beating exercise. Monday's running cleared my head, but left my knee a wreck (I'm still limping); other attempts at exercise elicited less pain and less relief; I finally settled on swimming for its impacts (on joints, less; overall, more). Despite and because of this, stress today manifests in swollen muscles. I list these complaints not for general whining, nor to evoke sympathy, nor to offer excuses, but because they intrude when attempting to sit still and write and think. They can feel like excuses to walk away, to take a nap, to do anything but maintain this primarily mental activity. This, combined with the solitude of writing, and the aforementioned sneaky and pejorative perspectives on work, only intensifies all of these. I'm lost in my head, struggling not with the work, but with myself, my seemingly lacking will and inspiration.

And then, in the process of this struggle, I read this:

"I'm not disabled, I just don't have any legs."

This, a noble comment for anyone in such a scenario, was uttered by Oscar Pistorius, a South African competitive sprinter, when he was 18.

Pretty cool.

As a result, I do feel like a whiner, but one laughing at herself. My struggles? Not that big a deal, with a little perspective. My inspiration? To give Pistorius (and the rest of us) a critical read, a theoretical ground, a new epistomology for his self-philosophy.

Yeah, I love my job.

adaptive athletes

Extreme sitting pretty much rocks, as do these athletes.

John Haugeland

from Having Thought: Essays in the metaphysics of mind

"In particular, interrelationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal--a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical vocabulary.[...] The contrary of this separation--or battery of separations--is not interrelationist holism, but something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body, and world--that is, to undermine their very distinctness." (208)

"It is particularly important for our purposes to counter this impression, since the corporeal discontinuity between our bodies and the world--the very discontinuity that determines these bodies as bodies--misleadingly enhances the apparent significance of bodily surfaces as relevant interfaces for the understanding of other phenomena, such as intelligence." (214)

"In other words, which close interactions matter, when considering the scope and structure of systems, depends fundamentally on what we're interested in--that is, what we're trying to understand." (217)

"If, on the other hand, there is constant close coupling between the ant and the details of the beach surface, and if this coupling is crucial in determining the actual path, then, for the purposes of understanding that path, the and and beach must be regarded more as an integrated unit than as a pair of distinct components. This is the simplest archetype of what I mean by intimacy." (217)

"On the contracy, however, I want to suggest that the human mind may be more intimately intermingled with its body and its world than is any other, and that this is one of its distinctive advantages." (223)

"By contrast, the alternative that I have been sketching sees these nerves as carrying high-bandwidth interactions (high-intensity, in Simon's terms), without any simple, well-defined structure. Thus, by the same criterion, we would not get two relatively independent separable components--a rational mind and a physical body, meeting at an interface--but rather a single closely-knit unity." (227)

"The unity of mind and body can be promoted wholesale, perhaps, on the basis of general principles of monism or the unity of science. Such arguments are indifferent to variety and substructure within either the mental or teh physical: everything is unceremoniously lumped together at one swoop. Here, by contrast, integration is offered at retail. In attempting to undermine the idea of an interface between the mind and the fingers, I am staking no claim to the liver or intestines. (Simon may be right about the glands and viscera.) The idea is not to wipe otu all distinctions and homogenize everything on general principles, but rather to call certain very familiar divisions into question, on the basis of considerations highly peculiar to them." (228)

"As our ability to cope with the absent and covert, human intelligence abides in the meaningful--which, far from being restricted to representations, extends to the entire human world. Mind, therefore, is not incidentally but intimately embodied and intimately embedded in its world." (237)