&now (&later)

one of the things about going places is that you never go to as many places as you want to or do as many things as you want to do. At &now I talked about women and animals and presented research into my question: are they real? Wondering now if I could/should have talked about the different ways to get to that question. I realized, listening to folks discussing metaphor, that so many things are already so deconstructed in my mind that I often have to reconstruct and/or remember them to follow the conversation. Like the thing about language and metaphor. I kept thinking...but *all* words are metaphor. The word "bench" is bound to a bench, not because the material of bench-ness emanates a particular, specific word, but because that word gets made and bound to it and conventionally associated with it and its like this semiotic conjugation as all signs are conjugations, multiples. And so, for me, asking about whether things are "real" is this very layered, multiplied question. Part of what I wish I had said has to do with the connection between "reality" and the construction of knowledge -- a critique, really, of the subject/object relationship, or empiricism. It's also a question about mutuality...not a mirror, but a "being with" that, independent of anything else, honors the manifestation of the many materials and selves that are always plastic, always changing, but may be perceived, held, engaged...and the question is how we create/enter that moment, that engagement, and whether or not this is some version of the real.