Gins - Architectural Body

Born into a new territory, and that territory is myself as organism. There is no place to go but here. Each organism that persons finds the new territory that is itself, and, having found it, adjusts it. This is so only if systematically organized events, fields in which relations among events have some degree of order, can count as territories. An organism-person-environment has given birth to an organism-person-environment.

The organism we are speaking of persons the world; other types of organisms dog, giraffe, or cockroach the world. While members of lower species routinely produce behavior that is true to type, the organism that persons, not always able to summon up all it must to produce a person, has a higher probability of failure. Various instances of an organism's having behaved as a person, many in succession, sum up as a person. It may seem that an organism has a person with which it is associated, but rather than actually having a person, an organism has a long-term association only with behaving as a person. Who has been accepted as a person by other persons is really nothing more than the set of ways an organism that persons behaves.

The momentum an organism is able to gain on being a person, or rather, on behaving as onethat set of conditions, born of actions taken, that makes person-formation possibledepends directly on how it positions its body. Surroundings invite, provoke, and entice persons to perform actions, and the enacting motions of these actions not only serve up alternate vantage points but also inevitably shift sense organs about. The shifting about of the sense organs naturally affects how a person fields her surroundings and has much to do with what of the surroundings ends up standing for or approximating the surroundings.

This that is Ian organism behaving as a personascribes. I do so ascribe. Organisms deploy; (organisms behaving as) persons ascribe. Not enough information on what obtains between organism and person has been collected, and the ebb and flow of each entity of this dynamic two-in-one duo remains uncharted. Any term that purports to reveal the dynamics of person formation but which fails to suggest the body's intricate relation to the environment muddies the view. Terms such as ego, consciousness, and psyche, losing the body as they do, lack those air passages through which the body draws in atmospheric wherewithal.

Close observations have yet to be made of the effect of type of habitation on persons. Those who would minutely observe the effect of habitation on human beings must begin to discern how and why surroundings give or withhold from organisms of the type that can person the means to behave as persons. Even as the concept of person can stay put (everyone knows what a person is), it needs to be greatly dilated (particularly within a book entitled Architectural Body). We have adopted the admittedly clumsy term organism that persons because it portrays persons as being intermittent and transitory outcomes of coordinated forming rather than honest-to-goodness entities; now that we have launched the term, we use the following less cumbersome terms synonymously with it: body, body proper, human being, organism, organism-person, person. When studying what goes on between the body proper and its surroundings, it will be necessary to consider the extent to which persons are behavioral subsets of the organisms from which they emanate and out of which they compose themselves as agents of action. The organism that persons is the first step on the path to the architectural body. Or neonates come equipped with set-to-go architectural bodies that their first movements activate and help shapeeach newborn organism-person-environment an Atlas shouldering the world in its entirety. The toddler, taking its first steps as an organism that persons, drags its whole world along as pull toy (architectural body).

Although finding where organism leaves off and person begins would seem an impossible task, keeping the question starkly unresolved will most likely provide the best view of what is in play. With less glossing and less generalizing going on, there are increases in both overall tentativeness of the situation and in a free-ranging on-the-spot observing that leads to direct mapping. Good scout that a human being is, ever bent on making do, on glossing interrupted melodies into tunes, she takes scattered moments of an organism's (herself ) behaving as a person and smooths them into a whole, herself. D. W. Winnicott's principle of good enough holds not only for mothers (according to Winnicott, any mother who is genuinely able to be there for her baby is a good enough mother) but also for persons (as we see it, any organism that genuinely exhibits person behavior is a good enough person).