MRPJ#21/age and the trajectory of the body in time: “Premises for a Transition on Form, Becoming, Aging and Dissipating” by Marlon Barrios Solano

“But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather there is no form, since form is immovable and reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition.”

—Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1913)

I situate my human body as an alive form. As a transition.

We enter life being a body that observes and is observed.

Embodiment is the emergence of form in our awareness.

Our notions of stability and change delineate our perception and are, therefore, fundamental for autonomy.

Our nervous system has evolved to maximize coordination of actions between bodies.

Human is embodied intercorporality.

Movement is a change of form.

Growth is gaining space.

Our somatic morphic sameness/difference distinctions are the ground for aesthetic, moral and behavioral notions.

Meaning is emergent expansion of maximized coordination acquired after millions of years of evolution of life.

We are self-organizing systems that keep its integrity in a flux of entropic matter and dissipating energy. We are aging matter.

The fact that our bodies don’t conserve energy and age following a genetically programed development and decay is why we have a linear notion of time. Time itself doesn’t have direction.

We represent time as a line, as an arrow. The future is a frontal space for action and the past is a walked path with the objects of our awareness felt behind. The body is living present. Awareness is always sequential.

Because we age, in biological time the cause will always occur before the effect.

The making of narratives is rooted in our biology.

The present is only metabolic.

We register life as a history of the sequential interactions of our organisms within environments.

We have a spatial metaphor for the past. We call that place “memory.”

History is a technological expansion of memory. Our biological bodies progressively become biographies.

We age in time, leaving traces of our own material disappearance.

We bring forth our model of reality in related wholes and parts.

My dissipating body lifts itself, managing and resisting physical forces in order to enjoy contextual autonomy. We call it intention and experience it as chaos. Freedom is a contextual illusion.

Our lives are open-ended processes that release information within a bundle of systemic relevance that we call culture.

Our bodies are augmented with directional, radial, interconnecting, replicative and reproductive embodiments.

Because we exist within communicational fields, our embodiment is both central and distributed and the notion of presence is plastic/mutable. We are shaped by interaction.

We experience a stable quality within a changing body.

Growing is to embody space. We use spatial metaphors in order to understand time.

Aging is experienced time.

Aging implies changes in autonomy and control.

Biotechnology, computer science, and new media technologies are modifying experience and recreating the notions of humanness and nature.

Our interacting human bodies coordinate actions and secrete stories, creating new events, invisible agents, secrets and superstitions.

Science and technology are a pervasive narrative, our most recent mythology of creation, transformation and immortality.

I am a big-headed noisy proud biped creature and I tend to forget I am only one [of] the many throbbing embodiments of time.

We continue to change the way we change.