Dancing the Innenwelt at the Umgebung

Dancing the Innenwelt at the Umgebung

Umwelten, Umwelten
Wherefore art though, Umwelten?
I am here, I am there, I am everywhere...
I am, after all, all that there is

 

but for you, a tiny zen window
into the multiverse
Umwelt becomes Innenwelt
your Umwelt, my Umgebung
undt vice-versa

 

perched on hard chairs
in an auditorium among thousands.
A sea of gray hair, long yellowed teeth,
bright eyes and bowed shuffles
phones muted and hearing aids on high
cybernetics insert themselves

 

We stare at the dull big screen,
projecting the conversationalists below.
We hear their amplified voices
surrounded by speakers
as tall as any of us

 

later, a line of people
to meet the author
maybe snag
a signature
sniff him
take his hand in yours
feel the heat, the texture
is it firm?
clammy?

 

the author wears a breathing mask
as do you.
We keep our microbiome
to ourselves

our umwelt is our ballroom

Steve Smith
Otowi, NM
May 2023


Author's note: This in response to a public interview by Science Writer Sandra Blakeslee of Ed Yong whose latest book is "The Immense World", essentially a popular science tome about the umwelt of any and all living things real and imagined, not the least that of humans.


From Wikipedia:


In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very center of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal"

The term is usually translated as "self-centered world".[2] Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. The term umwelt, together with companion terms Umgebung (an Umwelt as seen by another observer) and Innenwelt (the mapping of the self to the world of objects),[3] have special relevance for cognitive philosophers, roboticists and cyberneticians because they offer a potential solution to the conundrum of the infinite regress of the Cartesian Theater.

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