The Expanded Present by david phelps
Tweet:
- 1/13 so i tripped balls this weekend and had a vision of something i’m calling The Expanded Present. and i wanted to share it in case it’s as helpful to anyone else as it is for me:
- 2/ a preface: when you’re tripping balls, you can feel like you’re cocreating your reality, bilingual in the languages of God and Earth. then you come down, courting ridicule, struggling to articulate ridiculous ideas in the clunky vernacular of us mortals. but lemme try
- 3/ we normally think of The Present as our current space and time—and struggle to connect to this fleeting instant. the Expanded Present is something else. it’s the psychological terrain where you’re alive when anyone is thinking about you. we live and die 1000 lives there.
- 4/ in The Expanded Present, you are continually conjured and dissolved by anyone who’s encountered you and your work. at any given moment, you traipse The Expanded Present in hundreds of versions of yourself at different stages of your life, some hated, some feared, some loved.
- 5/ anyway, these versions of yourself wandering The Expanded Present? each is cocreated with the people who are imagining you at that moment. some versions of yourself are more fully authored by you, some by them.
- 6/ and this is the point—none of these versions of yourself are really *true.* you are the glue-sticked collage, the mishmashed congregation, the constellation of all these versions of yourself roving The Expanded Present.
- 7/ and all we can do is approach each other with vulnerability and love to try to ensure others aren’t authoring some false version, some weird isotope of ourselves.
- 8/ now if you’re a close-close friend, you know i’ve been going through some personal shit recently—haven’t we all? i made the fatal move we often do of constituting my ego according to how i thought one other person saw me. a wonderful person, and i was wrong. but still
- 9/ so what does The Expanded Present do? it lets me reconstitute my ego according to all the versions of myself that live across the imaginations of my friends—as well as those i’ve hurt. it’s a polytheistic version of myself, reminding me my identity is decentralized.
- 10/ and just importantly, The Expanded Present reminds us that we have a constant opportunity to rewrite ourselves in each other’s imaginations. not totally, not fully, not without their co-authorship. but we can try.
- 11/ now this is, nominally, a web3 account, though web3 is a bit boring these days. but let’s admit: the internet is one form of The Expanded Present, and blockchains another. and The Expanded Present is how i’d like to imagine the future of online identity.
also, this tweet
A Bid, Adieu by Irena Wang in Reboot
- “In my head, I burned through thousands of theories of the self, of him, of me, of us, our story”
- “At base, all of us are (generously) atomic subjectivities stranded in our own minds. To believe another’s testimony is an act of faith. To act as though their experience of pain and pleasure were something like your own is another. Your purple is only my purple because this evidence-less bid is what underwrites the possibility of human connection”
- “I have come to see the unified self as another useful illusion, given its objective force by the symbol of the physical body.”
- “What is personhood, but the wishful conflation of disparate social and personal identities across time with a body? What is the body, if not the objectification of personhood, a symbol for the hope that those incompatibilities will one day be resolved?”
- “Like capitalism, like catholicism, the edifice of human relations rests on a floated premise. A bit. A bid.”
- “Expectation/reality, setup/punchline, premise/consequence. Abstraction. Reality. It’s all continuous, isn’t it? Continuous even with that most human act, of suddenly seeing in media res that things could be otherwise, and choosing to follow through anyway. Acknowledging the premise as moth-eaten and beleaguered while seeing the good that is possible in living as though it were true. Recognizing the polite fiction of a coherent self, capable of making and keeping promises. Marrying them anyway”
Kin Relationality
Celidwen, 2021: an ethics of belonging, that we share a fundamental sameness with all living beings
- A common life force
- “There are no others” is a quote attributed to Ramana Maharshi. It means that we have no separate existence from the universe, and that everyone is ultimately one. When someone asked Maharshi how to help others, he replied, “There are no others”.
- Ecological belonging: part of nature, not separate from it
- ~ reverence for nature
<> being embodied
the cosmos, only communally
“man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.”
humans as members of a habitat. we are creatures! we have habitats, we function within a system!
Associated experiences
- Standing in the eucalyptus grove at Cal, seeing the way the golden light filters through the canopy, the peeling tans and browns of the trunks, all the way to the dry crackle of dead foliage underfoot
- When the world hums, and it’s almost like you could hear what it’s saying
- The roar of a waterfall in Yosemite’s spring, and the answering silence in my mind. I’m just a drop tumbling over the rocks
- A landscape of stars overhead, nothing but the light of the moon — and even then, the familiar sight of Orion, arrow primed the way he used to welcome me back to my childhood home