⚘Branches: Constellations and the human mind (as above, so below)
Nothing in the world as we experience it through our human perspective is static.
The constant motion of things (their interacting, evolving, combining, disaggregating) and their impermanence constitute a universal law as unobjectionable as the passing of time itself – perhaps because impermanence and time are both cause and consequence of each other.
So, given that within our limited minds (in their working memory and their long-term memory) we cannot do more than select and preserve only an infinitesimal part of what we are really experiencing, we need concepts, signs -such as words-, symbols, and imagery that will capture and bundle together aspects of a perceived reality. Through this kind of preservation, we freeze bundles of a partially perceived reality in time, suitable for later reflection, consultation or re-evocation.
What are words, symbols and ideas if not attempts to appropriate some part of reality so that we can later observe it in the out-of-time tranquillity of our imaginations? And perhaps we will follow this with an ideation process: we combine these elements with other elements, along with other impressions we collect in our experience of reality, in order to form new symbolic resources.
However, concepts, language, ideas, symbols… they all require a degree of conventionality so that they can be understood by more than one person. We educate each other so that we can exchange these with the reassurance that the other more or less gets the picture of the captured aspect of reality this concept is meant to contain. Others need to construct a frozen model in their heads similar enough to the one we offer by at least covering its fundamental parts. When we achieve this, we are indeed communicating: making our understanding of this mental object common to both of us.
Every culture and every language (great interconnected webs of frozen bundles of perceived reality and the products of reflection) is also unfolding in a particular moment in time. Even if its available resources for concepts, words, symbols, references, or imagery, are exceptionally large and extensive, the truth is that in every historical moment only a small fraction of this repertoire is deemed acceptable and natural within the conventions of daily life, thus circulating freely in everyday expression, in creation, in how we choose to interpret reality, what to pay attention to, what to retain in our minds for ideation, etc.
What is conventionally facilitated restrains cultural resources, negating the use of the actual entirety of available resources. This results in a great many mental objects (especially words) becoming difficult to use. This can engender distrust and negative dispositions in the guise of accusation of pretentiousness, of eccentricity, of nefarious intentions, of sensibilities that are only adequate for those belonging to an artistic profession, of archaisms, etc.
In essence, the amount of resources that a particular culture offers is vastly superior to what is actually used in almost every context where that culture is involved. The rest lays dormant, frozen in time, a standing reserve awaiting the moment when somehow the arbitrary laws of cultural acceptability makes it common currency instead of rattling incongruity. Fortunately enough, at least they have already been captured in some codified, symbolic form that can be understandable, and therefore potentially communicable, to others familiarised with the same culture.
To confront the chaos of existing in an impermanent and overwhelmingly rich reality, we filter our perception and we capture some of it to hold it together in some permanent form. We are putting a sieve on everything that is happening, selectively freezing certain aspects in time, and some of these resources somehow became the captured elements by default at the expense of all others, preserved in the pages of seldom-read books, works of art, small intellectual circles, niche societies.
Someday their moment might come to become conventional, be it by sheer chance, destiny, or the determination of a determined human will recognising its importance and driving it into the culture.
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