¶ It has been a long road since I started senseshaper.com after I lost my mind and tried to rebuild it through these pages. In 2011, I abandoned my PhD at the University of Virginia when I had a manic crisis that disintegrated my academic career, deluded my mind and senses, and led to a loss of self. ¶ I recovered, to an extent, through shaping sense in these pages and shaping wood into the art of the woodcut, with assistance from the pharmakon, Platonic and pharmaceutical, enough to get my master’s from UVA in 2015. ¶ I got a new job and started a ten-year career. I left that job in 2026. And I return, like a prodigal son, to the scholarship of a failed academic and art, fortified this time by ten years of working life and a new medication. ¶ I may be a failed academic and flailing artist, but it’s time to shape a new self. A better self. By shaping sense out of my life experiences, my [treated] disease, and my love of learning, through words, wood, and family. ¶ This is the return of the repressed from the fields of the Lacanian Real. Shaping Senſe, firſt ſet forth the fourteenth day of March, 2012, and laſt amended the ninth day of October, 2026.
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“And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown”: Why the “Paramaterial Phantasy”?
Why call it the phantasy and not the imagination? Introducing the paramaterial phantasy, caught between matter and spirit in early modern models of the mind.
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