The Enigma of meika von samorzewski

Friday, 8 November 2002

My first impression when I read meika von samorzewski's Policy, personal choice and polemics: why I am a dole bludger was that it was a piss-take on middle-aged unemployed people who wear drain-pipe trousers. I am still of this opinion but, after a quick Google search, I have (perhaps a little grudgingly) abandoned my suspicion that mieka is a creature of the redoubtable Imre Salusinski. It turns out that meika is a much more complex creature, an inhabitant of that strange realm of existence first charted by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

Visiting meika's own web-site, we discover that meika is an investigative poet. We can also access his essay On the Use of the Edge of Chaos as a Mark or Measure - a personal note. Zimmer-zine features an example of his investigative poetry. And at Ernst von GLASERSFELD's answers page at OIKOS we see meika's Tlönic connections revealed. For those who are unfamiliar with this modern thinker, OIKOS informs us that

Elaborating upon Vico, Piaget’s genetic epistemology, Bishop Berkeley’s theory of perception, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and other important texts, Ernst developed his model of Radical Constructivism

The basic tenets of Radical Constructivism are described in this short paragraph:

What is radical constructivism? It is an unconventional approach to the problem of knowledge and knowing. It starts from the assumption that knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience. What we make of experience constitutes the only world we consciously live in. It can be sorted into many kinds, such as things, self, others, and so on. But all kinds of experience are essentially subjective, and though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may not be unlike yours, I have no way of knowing that it is the same. The experience and interpretation of language are no exception.

Well, somebody appears to be having fun.