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this is a bitch and a love all in one.
pothole crews: you did a great job fixing the roads this spring. just as i was about to come up upon my daily dodge on potholes i had previously mentally noted, it would be filled! hooray!
then i would meet another pothole a week later, same vintage as the others, similarly sized as the others, just 20 feet away from the newly filled ones, sadly, left unfilled. i go back to sad and angry.
i’m not sure who plots out these things and not sure how you can do such a good job in one spot and neglect entirely another within view of the first. but it happened. so i guess all i can say is keep up the good work. you’re not done yet. —downtown leroy brown
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2015.
THE STRUCTURE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUS AWARENESS
“i’m not sure who plots these things and not sure how you can do such a good job in one spot and neglect entirely another within full view of the first.” downtown leroy brown
The first point is incoherent since nobody “plots these things.” The pot-hole filler simply fills the potholes as he comes upon them. No “plotting” is involved. However, the second point is more interesting. It concerns the structural nature of human conscious awareness.
In his “The Tacit Dimension” the philosopher Michael Polanyi maintained that the structure of consciousness consists of a dual subsidiary-focal awareness. For example, while reading this comment you do not direct your focal attention to the written words themselves but rather to their meaning, what the words convey. However, this does not mean that you are completely unaware of the words themselves but rather that you rely subsidiarily upon them while directing your focal attention to their meaning. If you reversed the subsidiary structure, if you directed focal attention on the words themselves the “tacit integration” of subsidiaries into their focal meaning would collapse.
Similarly, while directing his focal awareness at the music he is playing, the pianist is only subsidiarily aware of the position of his fingers on the keyboard. If he reversed the subsidiary-focal structure, if he focused directly on the position of his fingers on the keyboard, the performance would collapse. All acts of consciousness for Polanyi has this bi-focal quality.
In the case of the pot-hole filler, he was directing his focal awareness on the one spot for which he did such a good job but the other, in full view of the first, was neglected. To say that it was neglected “entirely” however, is misleading. What happened is that his awareness of the latter had fallen into the subsidiary mode but, in time, it would be retrieved and become the object of his focal awareness. He would then proceed to a good job filling it.
A pleasure as always,
Cheerio!
The pothole crew was probably stoned out of its gourd as usual.