I sent the post below on Sept 19 when there was some discussion of
musement, but it appears it did not go thru so I'm posting again. Apologies
if it did go thru the first time. Gene H
…and musement musings…
Peirce’s “The play of musement” is a beautiful way of putting
it. It is a portal to a way of opening one’s body soul mind to experience.
But what if, on entering that realm of spontaneity and freedom through the
“play of musement” portal, one begins to realize there are shadings of
musement as various as, for example, the varieties of signs Peirce
outlined?
And what if you allowed yourself to enter the realm of musement
and found your Indo-European or related noun-centered language left behind?
A realm where your noun-God, your concept-God, could not enter? You have
entered the musement language world, alive in verb processes, occasionally
stopping at a noun here and there, but never lingering; alive in the
wonder.
In this realm you realize through energetic projaculation that
the Neglected Argument lies not in picturing Big Daddy Noun-concept in the
Sky, fixed and unspontaneous, but rather, as D. H. Lawrence put it in
describing Walt Whitman’s poetry, “lies in the sheer appreciation of the
instant moment, life surging itself into utterance at its very
well-head…The quivering nimble hour of the present, this is the quick of
Time. This is the immanence.”
You conjecture that not only, as Peirce put it, “When we gaze
upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face
of a living spontaneity” (Peirce, 1887, 6.553), but that you yourself are
participant in that living spontaneity. You realize that Peirce is not
claiming “intelligent design” for the universe, but rather an “intelligent
sign” argument energizing into being, a universe in active creation.
And there you find yourself, back from the play of musement, yet still
immersed in the living spontaneity.
Gene Halton
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