I was walking to my local bakery only 20 minutes ago wondering if I had got anywhere near getting this across. My bakers are a little bit sovcit and evangelical. Thinking about explaining anything like 'worlding' can be very local affair.
Footprints on the beach.
You can notice the pattern of impressions of movement, or you can see the impressions as gaps, blemishes in what the beach looked like after the last tide of history. That's a figure/ground gap. What do you focus on (that's your ontology of things) footprints or what they imprint over? As animals we focus on the footprints. Big history is thus difficult for us. This is why I'd like to have the dual perspective (impossible) of a lichen on a high boulder overlooking the sea and living hundreds of years. Algae-fungi coadaptive POV?
Fossilised footprints of our ancestors will always be the most excited, closely following by stampeding dinosaurs.
I realised walking back from the bakery that while I say there are many types of gap, which I sort of lump together and throw into the gap of my understanding/ability-to-explain (figure/ground), that I do not distinguish them very well. So I'll need a taxonomy.
While I have been aware of these gaps for a while I have only been writing about them recently and my efforts are a bit juvenile. I guess at nearly 60 it keeps me young at heart.
As practice, I'll repeat the Clear Island church story here. It's a type of figure/ground gap perception practise. As logic demands, I'll do it backwards beginning with the recent knowings.
I pick up a book on West Cork archaeological sites because I am living on Mizen Head. It's all ground to me, no figure. I have to figure it out. My ancestors are from Ireland but not sure where exactly. (I'm not yet 30yo, I don't have the family history yet).
the Condren book provides a certain context for this atlas of sites. It's all outside my door. Even morning I look across Roaring Water Bay to Clear Island. It's a gaeltacht. It has amazing standing stones, to get there one has to take a small ferry from Baltimore. [Whose population was once entirely taken by Barbary pirates (led by an Ulsterman?? can't remember need to fact-gap check that.).]
I can also see Baltimore's white guide pillars to harbour but it a way away from Goleen. I eventually visit the island via ferry, with some German sisters and I 'marry' one when we connect hands through the marriage stone hole.
Anyway, on Clear Island, or maybe (more fact checking) on an islet off Clear Island there is a ruined church, attributed to St Kieran, one of the four pre-Patrician saints of Ireland (also Bridget who was a goddess before being demoted). Most of these four saints are associated with sites that related to trade. Mizen head is full of copper ore, a handy ting if you want to make bronze with the more famous Cornwall tin. These saints reflect a Christianity that bypassed Roman Christianity, at least in part, and developed a Christianity some argue has more Coptic elements. In this frame Patrick represents the Romano-british catholicism conversion of Ireland, and perhaps the population did not really identify with it until persecution by the protestant ascendancy (they were conspiracy hunting with religious blinkers). The later invasions of Ireland begin when a English pope tells his brother King of England that yes, good idea to invade, because the Irish marriage laws aren't quite right (I guess because of those stones).
now back to the stone ruin of the church, to archaeologists it is obvious that the stones laid, indicate it was built against another structure, which was long gone. Likely the first church or chapel there, perhaps just a holy person's humble lodging. Turning the elders house into shrines seem to be a long standing feature of settled agricultural life, there are a lots of way to do it.
However they cannot dig up the ground beneath the long lost wooden structure because it has washed away into the sea. All we have is/are gaps in the stone wall indicated what has rotted and thus what has washed away. We have gaps indicated more gaps, we can build a methodology, a taphonomy, of gaps which helps us see the series of gaps. Each gap is a new figure/ground issues, where the last gap becomes figure to the next gap/ground, we have a series of dates but no idea what they are the further we go back. Perhaps a study of gaps can help us.
We are more likely to notice the pattern of footprints as a series of figures, than the gap between and around them, and we can animated those snapshots into the film of history, but if we just regard the sand as a film stock and our animal eyes as the correct & present reagent (whiggishism), then we will miss the big history of the sand & tide, we may never see the series of churches we fill the gaps of the previous church with. This is especially true where we focus on outcomes and try to find their origin (a gene for fashion, a gene for being an evangelical christian) this blinkers our efforts in developing a taphonomy of social products/outcomes/constructions/deconstructions/ruinations/exhaustions/degeneracies/vigour/morality/religion/art/performace/rites/rituals/routines/walking to the bakery/pray they dont ask me about my relationship to christ
Taphonomy is a better methodological metaphor than say, genealogy, because while genes play a role, and are the pivot of natural selection, there is a whole world out there it grinds about in as well. Celibate priests do not have children, but even they grind. If history has a focus on records, then it needs to develop a taphonomy of the gaps in records, and not just throw up our hands and say we will never know. A taphonomy of the gaps will not tell us facts that answer mysteries, but will allow us to avoid the genetic fallacies. Study gaps, find more patterns. Notice the pattern. notice the gap & so on.
If we notice the pattern we should be able to notice the gaps (pattern thereof no doubt)
figure/ground
where the 'ground' babushka-dolls into/up/out-of the figure with its own ground now washed away into the sea, and we seek the echo of prayers said at mass in the wooden church lost to the wind, or the curse of its builder striking his thumb..
like the way Catholicism washed away the legal power of the marriage stones, and people forget the old ways that worlded their lives, unrecorded or effaced, but how lost is it really? Or, rather, something is lost, but is it still meaningless?
my writing, in part, is a metaphysics about where we seem to run out of evidence, or understanding, at that fractal edge of epistemological chaos
this is why I find Pyrrhonism so useful as it has a practice involving a suspension of judgement, but worlding on nonetheless
"A palimpsest of survival" is nicely put.
I'm not sure yet that I understand "taphonomy of the gaps," but it is an intriguing idea.
I love it when ideas are indelibly associated in a place, as that brings thought and life into harmony.
Nick
I was walking to my local bakery only 20 minutes ago wondering if I had got anywhere near getting this across. My bakers are a little bit sovcit and evangelical. Thinking about explaining anything like 'worlding' can be very local affair.
Footprints on the beach.
You can notice the pattern of impressions of movement, or you can see the impressions as gaps, blemishes in what the beach looked like after the last tide of history. That's a figure/ground gap. What do you focus on (that's your ontology of things) footprints or what they imprint over? As animals we focus on the footprints. Big history is thus difficult for us. This is why I'd like to have the dual perspective (impossible) of a lichen on a high boulder overlooking the sea and living hundreds of years. Algae-fungi coadaptive POV?
Fossilised footprints of our ancestors will always be the most excited, closely following by stampeding dinosaurs.
I realised walking back from the bakery that while I say there are many types of gap, which I sort of lump together and throw into the gap of my understanding/ability-to-explain (figure/ground), that I do not distinguish them very well. So I'll need a taxonomy.
While I have been aware of these gaps for a while I have only been writing about them recently and my efforts are a bit juvenile. I guess at nearly 60 it keeps me young at heart.
As practice, I'll repeat the Clear Island church story here. It's a type of figure/ground gap perception practise. As logic demands, I'll do it backwards beginning with the recent knowings.
I pick up a book on West Cork archaeological sites because I am living on Mizen Head. It's all ground to me, no figure. I have to figure it out. My ancestors are from Ireland but not sure where exactly. (I'm not yet 30yo, I don't have the family history yet).
the Condren book provides a certain context for this atlas of sites. It's all outside my door. Even morning I look across Roaring Water Bay to Clear Island. It's a gaeltacht. It has amazing standing stones, to get there one has to take a small ferry from Baltimore. [Whose population was once entirely taken by Barbary pirates (led by an Ulsterman?? can't remember need to fact-gap check that.).]
I can also see Baltimore's white guide pillars to harbour but it a way away from Goleen. I eventually visit the island via ferry, with some German sisters and I 'marry' one when we connect hands through the marriage stone hole.
Anyway, on Clear Island, or maybe (more fact checking) on an islet off Clear Island there is a ruined church, attributed to St Kieran, one of the four pre-Patrician saints of Ireland (also Bridget who was a goddess before being demoted). Most of these four saints are associated with sites that related to trade. Mizen head is full of copper ore, a handy ting if you want to make bronze with the more famous Cornwall tin. These saints reflect a Christianity that bypassed Roman Christianity, at least in part, and developed a Christianity some argue has more Coptic elements. In this frame Patrick represents the Romano-british catholicism conversion of Ireland, and perhaps the population did not really identify with it until persecution by the protestant ascendancy (they were conspiracy hunting with religious blinkers). The later invasions of Ireland begin when a English pope tells his brother King of England that yes, good idea to invade, because the Irish marriage laws aren't quite right (I guess because of those stones).
now back to the stone ruin of the church, to archaeologists it is obvious that the stones laid, indicate it was built against another structure, which was long gone. Likely the first church or chapel there, perhaps just a holy person's humble lodging. Turning the elders house into shrines seem to be a long standing feature of settled agricultural life, there are a lots of way to do it.
However they cannot dig up the ground beneath the long lost wooden structure because it has washed away into the sea. All we have is/are gaps in the stone wall indicated what has rotted and thus what has washed away. We have gaps indicated more gaps, we can build a methodology, a taphonomy, of gaps which helps us see the series of gaps. Each gap is a new figure/ground issues, where the last gap becomes figure to the next gap/ground, we have a series of dates but no idea what they are the further we go back. Perhaps a study of gaps can help us.
We are more likely to notice the pattern of footprints as a series of figures, than the gap between and around them, and we can animated those snapshots into the film of history, but if we just regard the sand as a film stock and our animal eyes as the correct & present reagent (whiggishism), then we will miss the big history of the sand & tide, we may never see the series of churches we fill the gaps of the previous church with. This is especially true where we focus on outcomes and try to find their origin (a gene for fashion, a gene for being an evangelical christian) this blinkers our efforts in developing a taphonomy of social products/outcomes/constructions/deconstructions/ruinations/exhaustions/degeneracies/vigour/morality/religion/art/performace/rites/rituals/routines/walking to the bakery/pray they dont ask me about my relationship to christ
Taphonomy is a better methodological metaphor than say, genealogy, because while genes play a role, and are the pivot of natural selection, there is a whole world out there it grinds about in as well. Celibate priests do not have children, but even they grind. If history has a focus on records, then it needs to develop a taphonomy of the gaps in records, and not just throw up our hands and say we will never know. A taphonomy of the gaps will not tell us facts that answer mysteries, but will allow us to avoid the genetic fallacies. Study gaps, find more patterns. Notice the pattern. notice the gap & so on.
If we notice the pattern we should be able to notice the gaps (pattern thereof no doubt)
figure/ground
where the 'ground' babushka-dolls into/up/out-of the figure with its own ground now washed away into the sea, and we seek the echo of prayers said at mass in the wooden church lost to the wind, or the curse of its builder striking his thumb..
like the way Catholicism washed away the legal power of the marriage stones, and people forget the old ways that worlded their lives, unrecorded or effaced, but how lost is it really? Or, rather, something is lost, but is it still meaningless?
Its' evidence Jim, but not as we know it.