Arts and Minds

Topological Morphology of Cats and Consciousness

Topological Morphology of Cats and Consciousness

Mayer Spivack
10/31/03

I am not Gregor Samsa, but as I awoke this morning from complicated dreams I found my chin and chest transformed into a bed for a black cat.

My chin and chest belong to cats at the beginning and end of the day. However, what made this morning unusual was that I had gone to sleep after reading the first half of the wonderful prose, recently published in The New Yorker, of Gabriel Garcia Marquez entitled “personal History, The Challenge” (Oct. 6 2003, pg. 100, [as in “One Hundred Years Of Solitude”—this, in the New Yorker, could not be accidental].

Marquez, in his fantastic and real meditations is always more accurate about human experience than most psychology, because as he states in his article, he… “realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects possible: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart.” And so he made a lifelong project to become infinitely graceful dancing in this mysterious fog that drifts only at the mind’s “heart”. I share his first “defect”, my only similarity with this great writer and thinker, and I am now revealing the extent of my struggle with the second. In the case of G. Marquez, both defects are corrected.

Breaking Boundaries - The Syncretic Mind In Search Of Meaning

One Node in a Network of Thought-Experiments, Hypotheses, and Essays

© Mayer Spivack 1996

Definitions of the term syncretic loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language give us the following understanding: “Syn-cre-tism...1. the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion. 2. Gram. The merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more categories in a specified environment into one...”

In a series of posts, beginning with this one, I will publish thoughts and essays on syncretic and associative learning that I call "Breaking Boundaries". This writing will explore how meaning and creative process germinate and bloom in the mind. I offer the proposition that syncretic association is a mental process essential to both art and science, and suggest that it is the means by which our associative minds seek meaning in a world of disorganized raw information. Until we have detected some order within the chaos of raw experience, and have begun to form patterns that are significant to our understanding of that experience, we have only made simple percepts that are without meaning. I am exploring how the detection of pattern and order—the finding-out of cognizable features (that may be inherent in the fractal ‘raw’ experience of nature)—are synonymous with the detection and invention of meaning, and how they, together, may constitute the organic process of our creativity.