AN OVERTURE OF/FOR A PROLOGUE OF/FOR AN OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

for a public presentation of current works

school of the art institute chicago

Begin and end with a "that's enough" which would have nothing to do with the sufficing or self-sufficing of sufficiency, nothing to do with satisfaction. Reconsider. Further on, the whole syntax of these untranslatable locutions, the with of the nothing to do. Write, if possible, finally, without with, not without but without with, finally, not even oneself. Opening with the satis, the enough (inside and outside, above and below, to left and right, satire, farce on the edge of excess.

Metaphor of the circle of circles, of training as philosophical encyclopedia. Organic metaphor, finalized as a whole whose parts conspire. Biological metaphor too. But it is also a metaphor, if it is a metaphor, for art and for the work of art. The totality of philosophy, the encyclopedic corpus is described as a living organism or as a work of art. It is represented on the model of one of its parts, which thus becomes greater than the whole of which it forms part, which it makes into a part. As always, the communication between the problem of aesthetic judgment and that of organic finality is internal.

If it occurred to man to create his own images, it's because he discovered them all around him, almost formed, already within his grasp. He saw them in a bone, in the irregular surfaces of cavern walls, in a piece of wood. One form might suggest a woman, another a bison, and still another the head of a demon. He came this route by perception of meta-patterns, those circles, spheres, borders, and centers, binaries, layers, cycles, breaks, and other geometric configurations that occur repeatedly in nature and provide easily recognized clues to the identity of more complicated objects.

Today when labored symbolic cryptograms, romantic effusions of beautiful words, or anguished, contorted faces outside the church's gate seem to be the only marketable alternatives, the option of a concrete form must also be put forward. Its starting point is: everything that can be expressed in language and every linguistic expression in itself has equal status in any context if it enhances the value of that context. To endow form again with its own system of values, the possibility of several interpretations corresponding to the free movement of the eyes.

There is no similitude and no distinction, even for the wholly untrained perception, that is not the result of a precise operation and of the application of a preliminary criterion. A 'system of elements' -- a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude -- is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order. Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.

Now, the same order reigns over wills as reigns in biology. The same random and automatic regulation applies to will in our operational universe as applies in the distribution of sexes at birth or in the freely expressed opinions of millions of citizens, which produces the same statistical outcome as would be achieved by consulting monkeys.

For the world does not seek to exist more, nor to persist in existing. It seeks, rather the wittiest way to escape reality. It seeks, by way of thought, what can lead to its doom. The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us: unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.

Before material 'objectivity' there is the primal void, which is defined as a space without any real particles. Not nothingness but an ocean of virtual particles, which give it an energy of its own, a potential energy, which is nothing, but can transform itself into everything that is. A capricious energy, from before the precipitation of matter into the cycle of causes and effects. Such is the Nothing, the Void, primal scene of the material illusion, and continuation of the Nothing as perpetuation of that state. This enables us to sketch out what illusion is, as opposed to the real. Illusion is the quality of a world which, by the antinomic structure of matter, retains the potentiality of the nullification and immaterial return of energy. Illusion is the characteristic of what retains the possibility of wiping itself out by a violent reversion (matter/anti-matter abreaction) and, therefore, of passing beyond 'material' objectivity (matter and anti-matter are indistinguishable in the absolute; they shine with the same light; they are distinct, linked to each other, only by virtue of the possibility of cancelling each other out). Only energy bound to restricted materiality -- to our materiality -- is doomed to dissipation and entropy.

To think extreme phenomena, thought must itself become an extreme phenomena; it must abandon any critical pretensions, any dialectical illusions, any rational hope, and move, like the world, into a paradoxical phase, an ironic and paroxystic phase. One has to be even more positive than the positive to take in both the total positivity of the world and the illusion of that pure positivity.

When, in the wrong place, there is something, that's disorder.

When, in the right place, there is nothing, that's order.

The question is, where do we want to go? And, do we want to take our baggage with us or travel light? The answer to the second question is contained in the first. Wherever we go, we must go naked and alone. We must each of us learn what no other can teach us. We must do the ridiculous in order to touch the sublime.

Intelligence becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human life-world, an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it, a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form. To deal with the world as if it were a formal puzzle, to privilege informational patterns over material instantiation, consciousness regarded as the seat of human identity, as an epiphenomenon, to view the body as the original prosthesis we call learn to manipulate. The subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.

Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates, and tends notoriously towards infinite regress. The observer of systems can himself be constituted as a system to be observed. Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self-organization. Their one and only goal is continually to produce and reproduce the organization that defines them as systems. Hence, they not only are self-organizing but also are autopoietic, or self-making. In the autopoietic view, no information crosses the boundary separating the system from its environment. We do not see a world "out there" that exists apart from us. Rather, we see only what our systemic organization allows us to see. The emphasis now is on the mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system rather than on message, signal, or information. Indeed, one could say either that information does not exist in this paradigm or that it has sunk so deeply into the system as to become indistinguishable from the organizational properties defining the system as such. A cosmic computer running a universal informational code underlies the structure of matter, energy, spacetime -- everything that exists.

People have a need of something more than merely to live and enjoy themselves; they are called to more than simply grasping the phenomena surrounding them. It is precisely the utter lack of connection among phenomena that makes them an all the more accurate sensuous image of pure reason. If one removes from a series of things every manner of connection among them, then one has a concept of independence that is in surprising agreement with pure reason's concept of freedom. Under this idea of freedom that it derives from itself, reason thus encompasses a unity that is known. Through this idea reason subjects the endless play of phenomena to itself and thus at the same time asserts its power over the understanding as a faculty conditioned by senses.

The world as a historical object is at bottom nothing but the conflict of natural forces among themselves and with human freedom. Viewed as a whole, nature flaunts all the rules prescribed to it by our understanding; going its own willful, uninhibited way, it tramples into the dust the creations of both wisdom and chance with the same indifference; it sweeps away the important as well as the trivial, bringing the noble as well as the ordinary down with it in the same demise. The supreme ideal we strive after is to remain on friendly terms with the physical world as the guardian of our happiness without on that account being required to break with the moral world that determines our dignity. The capacity to feel the sublime is thus one of the most glorious dispositions in human nature, deserving our respect due to its origin in a self-sufficient capacity to think and will; because of its influence on moral human beings, it deserves as well to be developed in the most complete possible manner. Without sublime things, beauty would make us forget our dignity.

Like the analytical chemist, the philosopher can only discover how things are combined by analyzing them, only lay bare the workings of spontaneous nature by subjecting them to the torment of his own techniqus. I hope to convince you that the theme I have chosen is far less alien to the needs of our age than to its taste. More than this: if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom. It would, therefore, be a question of abstracting from man's physical character its arbitrariness, and from his moral character its freedom; of making the first conformable to laws, and the second dependent upon sense impressions; of removing the former somewhat further from matter, and bringing the latter somewhat closer to it; and all this with the aim of bringing into being a third character that, kin to both the others, might prepare the way for a transition from the rule of mere force to the rule of law, and that, without in any way impeding the development of moral character, might on the contrary serve as a pledge in the sensible world of a morality as yet unseen. Every individual human being, one may say, carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal (wo)man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life's task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal.

Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, make sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of state necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdraw in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in the one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled. Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, (wo)man herself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in her ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that she turns, she never develops the harmony of her being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon her own nature, she becomes nothing more than the imprint of her occupation or of her specialized knowledge. If the manifold potentialities in (wo)man were ever to be developed, there was no other way but to pit them one against the other. Driven to despair by a pedantic tutelage, silently projecting into the infinity of time. In the eyes of a reason that knows no limits, the direction is at once the destination, and the way is completed from the moment it is trodden. This changing material within her is accompanied by her never-changing "I" -- and to remain perpetually herself throughout all change, to convert all that she apprehends into experience, i.e., to organize it into a unity that has significance, and to transform all her modes of existence in time into a law for all times: this is the injunction laid upon her by her rational nature. Only inasmuch as she changes does she EXIST; only inasmuch as she remains unchangeable does SHE exist. (Wo)man, imagined in her perfection, would therefore be the constant unity that remains eternally itself amidst the floods of change.

We did not make either the world or ourselves; we live by using life, not by creating it.

The use of phase patterns and tape loops in this context could be said to be only a mechanical approximation of the barely imperceptible shifts in improvisation that occur within a West African drum-choir playing continually over a long period.

A piece of improvisation is done, and after it's done, there's nothing to be said about it because it affects your life whether you like it or not.

In the next period of music, the musicians will make their own instruments. Those instruments developed for today relate to the system of music they were designed for, and the music that will happen in the future has nothing to do with that outside of acknowledging the systems that are happening now. We don't need NOTES anymore. I'm looking for instruments that are not concerned with actual fixed pitches, instruments with WHIRLS OF SOUND in them.

What most people accept as being creative for the most part are standard sorts of systems either technically or conceptually. At some point these have been embraced to the degree where it's not so much about creativity any more as much as it's about fulfilling other people's ideas about form.

There's nothing like learning to play, believe me, because I stayed in the house week after week -- and week after year, as a matter of fact -- learning how to play. And what I was learning might have been old, but it made playing something else in the future much easier because I knew how to manipulate my instrument -- just some, I mean. I'm not a master yet, but that's what I'm after -- to be able to play whatever I hear at any time. Then I won't have anything to say at all; all I'll be able to do is play. I would like to get everything down that small where that is all I do. When I become my instrument and my instrument becomes me, I'm not a person any more. I would like to walk around the street looking like a trumpet if possible, because that's what I am.

There are ways but the Way is uncharted;

There are names but not nature in words:

Nameless indeed is the source of creation

But things have a mother and she has a name.

The secret waits for the insight

Of eyes unclouded by longing;

Those who are bound by desire

See only the outward container.

These two come paired but distinct

By their names.

Of all things profound,

Say that their pairing is deepest,

The gate to the root of the world.

The Way is a void,

Used but never filled:

An abyss it is,

Like an ancestor

From which all things come.

It blunts sharpness,

Resolves tangles;

It tempers light,

Subdues turmoil.

A deep pool it is,

Never to run dry!

Whose offspring it may be

I do not know:

It is like a preface to God.

Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity. Only so far as history serves life will we serve it: but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating of life: a phenomenon which is now as necessary as it may be painful to bring to consciousness through some remarkable symptoms of our age. I believe that all of us suffer from a consuming historical fever and should at least realize that we suffer from it. Then man says "I remember" and envies the animal which immediately forgets and sees each moment really die, sink back into deep night extinguished for ever.

The unhistorical resembles an enveloping atmosphere in which alone life is generated only to disappear again with the destruction of this atmosphere. It is true: only so far as man, by thinking, reflecting, comparing, dividing and joining, limits that unhistorical element; only so far as a bright lightning flash of light occurs within that encircling cloud of mist -- that is, only through the power to use the past for life and to refashion what has happened into history, does man become man: but with an excess of history man ceases again, and without that cloak of the unhistorical he would never have begun and dared to begin.

A historical phenomenon clearly and completely understood and reduced to an intellectual phenomenon, is for him who has understood it dead: for in it he has understood the mania, the injustice, the blind passion, and in general the whole earthly darkened horizon of that phenomenon, and just in this he has understood its historical power. So far as he is a knower this power has now become powerless for him: not yet perhaps so far as he is a living being.

Man excels in complexity and minuteness of differentiations. This very fact constitutes the necessity for many more comprehensive and exact relationships among the constitutents of his being.

Because perception of the relationships between that is done and what is undergone constitutes the work of intelligence, and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd. A painter must consciously undergo the effect of his every brush stroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce. To apprehend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes of thought.

Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist a detached and aesthetic vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the aesthetically chaotic and accidental contemplation of forms and colours begins to crystallize into a harmony; and, as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm that is set up within him. Certain relations of line become for him full of meaning; he apprehends them no longer curiously but passionately, and these lines begin to be so stressed and stand out so clearly from the rest that he sees them more distinctly than he did at first. Similarly, colours which in nature have almost always a certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him, owing to their now so necessary relation to other colors, that, if he chooses to paint his vision, the objects as such tend to disappear, to lose their separate unities and to take their place as so many bits in the whole mosaic of vision.

The conception that objects have fixed and unalterable values is precisely the prejudice from which art emancipates us. The intrinsic qualities of things come out with startling vigor and freshness just because conventional associations are removed.

Space thus becomes something more than a void in which to roam about, dotted here and there with dangerous things and things that satisfy appetite. It becomes a comprehensive and enclosed scene within which are ordered the multiplicity of doings and undergoings in which man engages. Time ceases to be either the endless and uniform flow or the succession of instantaneous points which some philosophers have asserted it to be. It, too, is the organized and organizing medium of the rhythmic ebb and flow of expectant impulse, forward and retracted movement, resistance and suspense, with fulfillment and consummation. Time as organization in change is growth, and growth signifies that a varied series of changes enters upon intervals of pause and rest; of completions that become the initial points of new processes of development. Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of blood ensues.

Suppose there is something which a person cannot understand. He happens to notice the similarity of this something to some other thing which he understands quite well. By comparing them he may come to understand the thing which he could not understand up to that moment. If his understanding turns out to be appropriate and nobody else has ever come to such an understanding, he can claim that his thinking was really creative.

I'm having an idea to write a letter, not of a diaristic form to myself but addressed to particular people, as an exercise in notation formats, to get the ideas out of my head and onto the table - to process ideas into a material instantiation that I can continue to work with. The letters will also of course function as letters, being written and sent off in the hopes of receiving a response, an ongoing conversation, continuous contact. The letters can be printed, stamped, typewritten, screen printed, enlarged. They could also contain idiosyncratic details: hand drawn signatures, stamped dates and locations, "from the desk of TJW," various colors of ink, and other evocations of the history of mail/correspondence art. The letters will be written to everyone I know, strategically, based on the concerns for the day as they are constantly in motion so that every new day will generate a new letter for a particular individual who may be able to engage with the current content.

The letters will trace a symbolic arch of importance and meaning through my position in contemporary art, but also greater and lesser curvatures, with conversations tracing through my own historical trajectories.

Retrieve SAIC notebooks, readings, and other primary source materials from NM.

David Raskin, art historian concerned with the legacy of Donald Judd, observed my graduate artwork during a critique, noting that it amounted "to a lot of nothing," pejoratively - to be sure. At first this was offensive but now it takes on a new relevance. Perhaps he was correct, even acute in recognizing my own motivations and being able to articulate them more frankly than I could let on - minus the profundity I infused them with.

This SAIC work should be revisited, written about, reimagined, reincorporated, re-mythologized. The compost pile will sprout new subtle bodies.

There are many other recipients both living and dead whom I would like to direct letters, not for sake of pure fantasy but to direct pertinent questions to primary sources concerning my multifarious inspirations in art, music, etc., to serve as sounding boards for my ongoing vocal echo location tactics.

"Famous" or established or successful or validated artists and theorists vs. peers, colleagues, friends, close to my age/generation. There would be a difference in tone, character, formalism, language usage, conceptual formulations, and other factors going into the composition of these letters. The more casual letters would be a continuation of a dialogue already undergoing - perhaps with large gaps - concerning the ramifications of their work, and my own, in the grand scheme of things, towards a support structure of mutual exchange.

Charting the trajectories of dialogue from within grad school compared to those occurring outside, variance of personal connection, etc. How do the relational force-dynamics oscillate? Where are the threats located, when am I the threat?

Dear ___ - I have a lot that I want to say. I'm seeking your sympathetic ear as someone perhaps motivated to respond to my condition. I have been dwelling in some dark thoughts as of late, and while I can say they are desperate they have yet to get the best of me. You have always served as an embodiment of darkness for me, in your demeanor, your attitude, your aesthetic... Your project is a shimmering mineral of the darkest ore.

Articulations of the CASTE OF CHARACTERS: ___ as the node of darkness. Here's a real person that personifies qualities that I would hope to embody, yet struggle to contain. Writing to ___ is writing through ___.

We observed darkness in each other immediately upon meeting, reflections of the same shadows manifest through music and imagery of morbid fecundity, a violent corporeal disfiguration, of veins and innards turned outwards, shit and piss, puss and cum, swirling together as a productive life-force flow, shadow music of low guttural tones, of the earth silken rock cold and still, blood colors and muscular textures, masticating and grinding harmonies to spit out a frayed realism. If I were to formulate a question for you, I would ask how you conceive of your position within all of this, as I paradoxically also consider you to be one of the more luminous and positively charged human beings I've ever encountered, miraculously adept at keeping your head above water while continuously wading through the shit of bottom feeders. So what is this position you put yourself in? Is it swelling, inevitable, stewing in fantasy or mythology, or something more banal, mundane?

I'm interested in how you orient yourself to your work specifically. How do you carve out your projects everyday, and in the long term? Your trajectory seems steady, tried and true, "dialed in" (as you say) to a lineage and a history, knowing where you come from and what you stand for and (seemingly) where you are going, permeating a confidence which is intimidating while also radiating your charismatic allure. You and I are probably more different than we are similar concerning our modes of expression, but this is precisely the point, exactly why and how you come to mind, to my mind, in attempting to articulate my own relationship to the discipline of art making before the gaping chasm of continuous looming dread endured through relating to the material world - the difference between those two worlds. Are your drawings, with all their mind warbling details, a form of engagement or escapism from the world? A silken cocoon woven around your existence, over your eyes, a constrictive world harboring dreams, a delicate instrument for manifesting internalized desires, although I wonder how they dance through populations organizing their knowledge with signs, symbols, prices, and percentages. We understand what something is by comparing it to what is already known, hesitating before novel articulations of the void, mistaking the effluvial space between cracks for substance where there may be none - we are fallible and it's a beautiful and horrific condition. Graphite and ink on paper, of profound scale and detail, is bound to particular lineages - albeit rich - dating back to Persian manuscripts, Indian scrolls, Chinese maps. Where do you derive your influences? What do you see in them? Your position is truly original, always brewing and creating, in the true modernist sense of genius, yet you also are reluctant to take pride in any title of recognition, always so humble in supporting the work of your peers. Is the darkness the goal, the symptom, or an obstacle along the path of some place more elated?

___ - you are missed as our friendship seemed unique. I'm writing you to rekindle a memory of the radicality of those times. Wherever you are I hope you are still painting because I think the world needs your images now more than ever, which is to say desperately, as desperate as you are to produce them, or once were, in the flames of my memory. I remember your practice of Aikido as a striving for an impossible equilibrium, offset by the disastrous relationship you have with art - serving more as a poison than a nourishment, but perhaps a necessary illness. I wonder if you feel healthier now that you have divorced yourself from the creative curse. What does it take to be an artist? Would you consider yourself to be one, still, now or even then? I would, of the highest caliber, which is to compliment your internal integrity if not your external composure. You always had supremely satisfying answers to that question, concerning individual responsibility and powerful statements of energy and intuited truth towards your practice. Your project was clearly formulated, consistent, not to say static. On the contrary, you and it were perpetually in flux, crawling inside to out and back again, leading me to believe I never knew (or could ever know) any semblance of your wholeness.

What is ___ the archetype of? The fool or the genius? An apprentice with no patience, eventually seduced by the sensual world, or else doomed to perpetual struggle brought on from lack of connection. Desperation honing the edge of a quivering blade. If he were to play a role, what would it be? How could I convince him to play it for me, to play himself? That was always the dream: ___ walking around the city, eating food, painting in the studio, and I'm always behind the camera, behind the scenes, facilitating everything so he can simply create.

I want to ask you: where does it come from? How have we become so desperate, and for what? How would you classify it, this condition? I want to ask you about sacrifice, sabotage, your willingness - even eagerness - to self-immolate according to a higher cause. Does your art practice - to the extent that you still have one - aid in keeping you integrated or contribute to your ever-increasing alienation? Is it the source of your alienation?

We once formulated a master plan for art world infiltration, to perpetuate our own propaganda, an ideological virus through which we might implant our influence upon the world via clandestine conduits, through the back door. It consisted of you in the role of the artist with me serving to negotiate your relations to the world, an ambassador to your genius and juggler of words, so that in the end we would both be satisfied in achieving what we wanted from the arrangement - art that kills without compromise and without regard to any other. This mythology of the tortured bohemian, standing at the periphery as outcast pariah, would be interpreted through the historical-critical-philosophical-theoretical language system to make it legitimate, to build a bridge with language so that the public could engage with it, between the psychosomatic/psycho-sexual/dream-like fantasy miasma that you inhabited and the cold concrete reality of the world looming beyond the canvas. We agreed at the time that no one can - or should - do it alone, as everyone must succumb to the toxic allure of the dollar.

You betrayed me. You threw your paintings away and I rescued them from the dumpster, only to have you sell them off the wall without me knowing it. I won't hold it against you because I've been betrayed by many of my closest friends of this period... You always made it clear that you didn't want to get too close, that you would eventually break away and I would never see you again, so I can't be too surprised or disappointed now that this reality has come to pass. I admit my own role in it all as well. I was a mess, probably still am, but I was also honest about it, as were you. It's the honesty which bound us, I believed.

I need collaborators. The works we produced together were incredibly significant for me, especially and more so because they were collaborative, occurring through extended processes of dialogue, and for this realization I thank you.

The letter to ___ should emphasize the dislocation from social norms and the resolidification of the independent unified individual in contradiction to the normalizing tendencies of society to an absurdist level of heroicism.

ALL THAT I CAN SAY IS THAT I AM SAYING SOMETHING IMPORTANT

DESPERATELY

EVEN WHILE REALIZING THAT THE GREAT "IT ALL" AMOUNTS TO NO-THING

LITERALLY

POETICS OF DIRT, DUST, EARTH, SHIT

AESTHETICS OF FILTH, GRIME, ALGAE, MICROCELLULAR ARCHITECTURE

MOVEMENT OF MEMORY, REPRESENTATIVE OF THOUGHT: STICKY GLUTINOUS PORRIDGE POURING OVER THE CONCRETIZED CRUST OF THE WORLD

FORMALISM OF THE VASE, GOURD, BUCKET: HOLY, NATURAL, FUNCTIONAL

TECHNIQUE OF STACKING, LAYERING, DIRECTIONAL FLOWS: AGAINST GRAVITY, STRATIFIED GEOLOGY, COSMOCOCIC CARTOGRAPHY

THIS WAY OF SPEAKING IN SMALL FRAGMENTS FOR EASE OF RETENTION

ALL THESE MYRIAD DECISIONS ONE MAKES IN SCULPTING THEIR NEURAL BRANCHES

I PONTIFICATE, I AM A PONTIFICATOR, PONTIFICATUS [office], PONTIFEX [high]

BUT FOR WHAT, OF WHAT, FOR WHOM, I DO NOT KNOW

EVERYDAY I WAKE UP AND HAVE THE SAME DESIRE TO ACCOMPLISH

THAT INFINITE TASK WHICH I KNOW WILL NEVER BE FINISHED

EXPERIENCE THE SAME DISAPPOINTMENT FOR HOW LITTLE WAS ACHIEVED

YESTERDAY

EVERYNIGHT I GO TO SLEEP DEPRESSED BY HOW LITTLE WAS ACCOMPLISHED

BUT ALSO STRENGTHENED BY THE FRESH TASKS UNEARTHED

IN MY ATTEMPTS TO EXECUTE THE PREVIOUS INFINITE TASKS

EVERYDAY MORE TASKS EVERYDAY LESS TIME TO ACCOMPLISH

EVERYDAY THE REALIZATION THAT NOTHING WILL BE COMPLETED

NOTHING SEALED EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADY OPENING UP

TO REVEL IN THIS CHAOS TO WADE FEARLESSLY INTO THIS DEEP ABYSS

IS ALL I WANT AND ALL I CAN AFFORD

EVERYDAY THAT FOLLOWS FLOWS FALLOW MINUTAE

YESTERDAY

MIND OF THE MORNING

MIND OF THE EVENING

MIND IN THE MORNING

MIND IN THE EVENING

METAPHORS FOR BODY:

SCRIM, MANIFOLD, FOG, HAZE, SPONGE, WEIGHT, RADIATOR, SACK, PUPPET, SHELL, BURDEN, SAUSAGE, TUBE, CONTAINER, PRISM, CONSTELLATION, TREE, STONE, DEATH, RED, AMOEBAE, BUILDING, GRAY, CAKE, CHASSIS, TENEMENT, COMPONENT, LIFE, BEIGE, FIELD, BED, FUSELAGE, PITH, HEART, PURPLE, TEXT, BULK, GROSS, WORK, ENCHILADA, AGGREGATE, QUANTUM, SOAP, BOX, VALLEY, REEF, BOTTLE, PILE, EGG, PINK, ROUND, "S", VISIBLE, SACCHARINE, WORM, HAIR, WAX, CHAIR, HOT, FAT

By comparing every thing to every other possible thing, art is capable of surpassing a representation of life by becoming it. There will be shown emergent properties between all things - if we could only learn to see them in continuous comparison. When art catches up to the speed of life, both will change forever, and ourselves in turn, from how we have come to know them, fusing fuselage to ligament as a perpetual consortium of realization -- adaptive consciousness. When one's art becomes solely about the dedication to understanding and one's life adapts accordingly, bending gently towards the quest of self-realization (as a modality of mactive model making), the merger rattles and shatters the reflective reductionism of autonomous being-becoming. When the thing becomes nothing and then one, and the self as a result by awareness and assimilation, activity will resonate to ashes all concepts of work and labor to birth a destructively divergent reality of blissful redemption. One day all work will cease and life will truly begin, when the thing becomes being, into being, through being.

ON BIRTHING DAY

One hand is for creation, another hand for destruction

a body lingers and collapses through space, leaning on the earth for support

an eye dazzled mesmerized by liquid sheen of propagandistic wallpapers

and upholsteries

an inebriated man crossing the street follows the light

tripping in trance one becomes not oneself but none other

the philo-logos-ontologic-ocular mechanism self-maintaining

pooling seas of seizure and tragic reductionism

the dissociated self as mechanic, weaver of tapestry, welder, proctologist

Gastroenterological discourse

take any philosophic postulate as potentiated momentum

through the only voice left, a poetics of technè

ŦàœşŦ ÜĺūŴíůŵ

ôõijöø ŝļěļș

ŗťśóĭÚ

åïī

æĺĺ

àłľ

äŀļ

ăľŀ

ġćæŇŧŧÿīęł őôŶÝŪņóö ĺij

ĺĺijķ ùŝŇαΧĘ

πνβζ

φÆϖĠ

βξθπφϕϖĎ

ŒŇĬ

an ancient tradition is taken up

referential to the cosmic "all" primary plenum of experience diffused

mysticism reinvigorated through a rigorous collapse of logic architectures

witnessed firsthand

this body dissipates into a vacuum of potentiated diaphragms

culminating in seemingly infinite honeycombed chasms of interior ego chambers

technocratic bohemianism conceived as barbaric vigilantes

a call to arms by the silence itself, for waste not want not

i would say yes, certainly these plants and animals stewed a sweating tea

and my i is indeed indifferentiatable (sic, italics mine), undifferentiated, indistinguishable

hence a song to/through the aether

to vibrate the bridge between that medium and this one

MATERIALS: ENAMEL PAINT OF NEUTRALIZING ANTICHROMA (WHITE, GRAY, BLACK, BROWN), EARTH, ALGAE, SHIT, UNREFINED RUBBER, ORGANIC HALLUCINOGENIC PLANTS, BOOKS OF ARCANE KNOWLEDGE, CRYSTALS OF YELLOW-RED FREQUENCY, MINERALS OF MEDIUM-HARD DENSITY, IRON ORE, ARTIST'S CLOTHING AND OTHER PARAPHERNALIA

PROCESS:

I. COLLECT MATERIALS AND ORGANIZE CATEGORICALLY BY HIERARCHY OF LOGICAL DECOMPOSITION / TERRESTRIAL SPIRITUALISM =

CRYSTAL, ORE, ANIMAL, PLANT, SHIT, EARTH, NOTHING

HEAVEN, PURGATORY, AIR, LAND, SEA, CIVILIZATION, HELL

[IDEALLY THERE WOULD BE A MASSIVE ARCHIVE CONSTRUCTED ACCORDING TO THE DIMENSIONS OF EACH PIECE/MATERIAL COLLECTED, TO REMAIN AS A CHRONOLOGICAL FURNITURE OF NEGATIVE SPACE AND NEGATED ONTOLOGIES]

II. COMBINE MATERIALS IN VARIOUS CONFIGURATIONS BASED ON A PREDETERMINED SET OF FORMAL VARIABLES =

ASTRONOMICAL CHARTS / DIAGRAMS, BURIAL MOUNDS, DEATH CHAMBERS OF EGYPTIAN / MAYAN / INCAN PYRAMIDS, GEOLOGICAL TOPOGRAPHIES, STRATIFICATIONS OF BIOLOGICAL AURAS, MATERIAL EXCAVATION AND REFINING PROCEDURES, ETC.

[HEAPS WILL BE PHOTOGRAPHED OR OTHERWISE DOCUMENTED TO EXIST AS TOTEMS OF POWER AND INFLUENCE IN THEIR OWN RIGHT]

III. ATTACH MATERIALS TO ARMATURE, DEPENDING ON SPECIFIC CONFIGURATIONS AND COMBINATIONS THEREIN, TO DETERMINE WHETHER THEY SHALL BE VIEWED ON THE WALL (TO ADDRESS VISION DIRECTLY), ON THE FLOOR (TO ADDRESS THE BODY INDIRECTLY), WITHIN A VITRINE (TO ENGAGE THE MIND IN ISOLATION FROM ITS SENSES), ETC. =

LINEN - FINE QUALITY PICTURES

WOOD PANEL - SPAN DIVIDE BETWEEN PAINTING + SCULPTURE

PLEXIGLASS - INSTITUTIONAL DISPARITY

METAL + GLASS - ARCHIVAL VACUUM

PEDESTAL - ALTAR ELEVATING SCULPTURE ABOVE TERRA FIRMA

CRATE - MOBILITY, NOMADISM, STORAGE, ANTIQUITY

[ARMATURES CREATE A SERIES OF CONSIDERATIONS IN THEMSELVES AND CAN BE DISPLAYED WITHOUT OBJECT FOR DISPLAY, AN EXHIBITION OF EDIFICE]

IV. PAINT THE COALESCED MATERIALS A MONOCHROME HUE, TO BE CHOSEN IN CONSIDERATION OF THE MEAN OF THE CEREBRAL FREQUENCIES AND CONCEPTUAL DESIGNATIONS CONTAINED THEREIN =

WHITE - ERASURE THROUGH SATURATION, THE ALL, EVERYTHING, REVEALING LIGHT

GRAY - MELTING OF CONTENT THROUGH DISSOLUTION, SHIMMERING NEUTRAL, UN-NOT

BROWN - EARTH, BASE, NATURE, NULLIFIED VIA LIFE, CHAOS, TIME, SHIT, ALSO SKIN

BLACK - ERASURE THROUGH ABSENCE, THE NOT, NOTHING, ABSORBING LIGHT.

Instantiation, Remuneration, Articulation, Proclamation [Choose].

To begin and end with a that's enough (Derrida).

A (dialogue) that begins at the head with recourse throughout the body.

Of and for the body, through and upon, as the primary apparatus.

A question of morals and ethics in situ, due course, dependent upon specific scenarios.

What form (forum) might this text occupy?

To whom is it being dictated, explained, and for what aim?

A simple postulate (variations of variables):

I will hold myself accountable - no one/thing to blame for who/how I am.

I will take responsibility - no guilt/regret/remorse for my decisions/actions.

I will choose for myself - to be free, to relinquish privilege, to decide the right for now.

I will live without impeding the life of others - according to my self-described idealism.

I will purge my life of excess - parsimony of means, glorified necessities.

I will leave the world more absurd than how I found it.

MANIFESTO for the Discontinuation of Artist Production

A Declaration of Ethics, A Call for Defiance

I maintain that the Production of Contemporary Art is....

• Excessive and wasteful in materials - filling dumpsters with trash and impressionable minds with archaic theory/techniques.

• Negligent and naive in ideology - concepts are trite, inconsequential, perpetuate incapacitating mythologies of the subject/society/culture, over tantalize the senses and numb the mind.

• Nepotistic and pretentious - hermetically sealed self-serving system of redundancy and idiocy, sacrificing a relation to the spiritual/natural/mysterious flux of the cosmos for economic gain, publicity, empirical history.

• Callous, pedestrian, boring - humor as a dissociative mechanism devoid of hope (articulations of alternatives) and is a drug (of the manufactured pharmaceutical order, a pain killer). Art that is oriented towards specialists gets lost in cognitive jest just as art fabricated for the philistine is hopelessly distracted with the theatrics of drama and geometry.

• Racist, classist, ageist... - discrimination or glorification of works based on skin color, socioeconomic orientation, generational affiliation, institutional spawn, industrialized status of home country, articulation of diaspora, technophilia/technophobia, etc, is regressive, offensive, stagnant, and misguided. Artists must be visionaries and should be capable of surpassing such trivial delineations between seemingly disparate psyches.

• Inept, uncommunicative, sterile - unable to compete with the diversity of experiences in non-mundane lived existence, that is to say, the potential fullness that one might experience if life is not reduced to a "daily routine," kept dynamic. As long as art purports to eradicate the boundaries between "Art" and "Life" (or "art" and "life", or any combination therein), or even to address such an absurd dialectic, it shall continue to perpetuate its own vain, vapid, virtueless, virulent mythology.

• Ultimately boring and ineffectual - uninteresting, monotonous, cumbersome, coarse, low-fidelity, tragically dramatic, sardonic, acerbic, and dull.

WE MUST FIGHT AGAINST THE SUPPRESSION OF DYNAMIC EXPERIENCE!

WE MUST TAKE DOWN THE ANESTHETIZING MACHINE OF CULTURE!

WE MUST STOP WORK, STOP LEISURE, STOP PROGRESS, STOP TIME!

DOWN WITH THE ECONOMY OF EXCESS!

****

LIFE

• Articulate relationship with ___. The relationship needs to integrate into my current aspirations or else risks becoming a burden. Address the limits of attention and restrictions of time. Take the time. Meditate on the potentials of love.

• Sell the Volvo.

• Return to a highly regulated diet of mostly raw organic whole foods.

  • Fruit+Veg Smoothies in the morning

  • Grain+Bean+Veg Salad for lunch

  • Soup or other entrée for dinner

  • Quit drinking and smoking. Maté in the morning and green tea at night.

PROSE

• Compile writing into a cohesive packet and begin formatting aesthetic type layout.

• Cosmococcic corpus: the beginning to the end, settling debts to the present, the continuation into the non-time. Do not end with the beginning, but instate the event as having already begun.

• Make drawings based on the corpus of texts to be written (map). Continue writing intuitively and begin placing texts to their appropriate position on the map.

• Begin collecting images and assembling collages for the texts.

ART

• Articulate the variables that the collages might take on:

  • Totems/Statuary/Heaps/Monuments: isolated objects on ground.

  • Schematic of consciousness osmosisizing with the aether: everything nothing.

  • Collections of objects arranged in space as glyphs.

  • Modules to a large architecture: make diagrams of possible configurations.

  • NEVER A PURE ABSTRACTION.

SOUND

• Compose in long form, according to a metaform:

  • Music for astrological calendar, Music for seasons, Music of and for stones, Music for Plants, Music of the body, Music of Pure Reason (12 scales 12 colors 12 modes), etc.

• Experiment in abstract notational forms: symmetry, texture, color, saturation, etc.

Simple. Perfect.

A daily writing exercise without filtration through complete articulations of lived and imagined existence. Words will fall as a marking of time, uncorked outlet of flow, continuous recounting of research, motivation to perpetuate focused consortiums. A book of liquid form, perpetual change; a book that defies reading, a book that reads itself. Illustrations from divergent sources, pulled from the internet, original source material, original artwork, photographs. Sentimental, rigorous, and deadly serious.

Abstract Goals:

• Expanded Vocabulary; Honing of Vocabulary - words as instrument

• Articulation of Unconscious Desires

• Further Reticulation of Conscious Motivators

• Complexification and Integration of Research

• Expansions upon the Unforeseeable, Unpredictable, Unexpected; in Form and Content

Specific Goals:

• Read more books, read with focus, and draft correlations between texts.

Ie: Esoterics, linguistics, on writing, on seeing, poetry, philosophy

• Conduct regular reviews of art exhibitions, art works, artists, or other art world-related phenomena. Potentially publish on a blog along with diagrams, pictures, etc., detailing networked relationships.

• Write more focused and coherent poetry, to be distinguished from open-form writing, criticism, lyrics, etc.

• Formulate thesis often and allow for rapid dynamic change.

• Make writing a daily exercise, shaving off and molding little bits every day. Meditation, mantra, mandala of mind matter.

I apologize for being out of contact for so long. Indeed I have been intending to write to you for so long and have so much to say that I find the task daunting. Perhaps you can agree with me that the two of us have had an ongoing dialogue of sorts since we've known each other? Well, the reason for this here letter is to suggest a method for us to stay in better communication by and through a process of focused dialogue over time.

Please forgive the impersonal tone of this note, but be assured that I am not sending it to just anyone. Your extremely specialized interests as they meld with my own are more intriguing and significant than deserving mere reduction to mundane chatter shuffled away into desensitized email archives. I would like to initiate a conversation of a dynamic nature - propelled by a sense of purpose - that may prove to be more radically immersive, affectively massaged, and cerebrally stimulating than a dialogue not otherwise conceived of or contextualized in such a manner. Dig?

Of course this is vague, meant to be articulated individually, and discerned by you and I as we talk, as our communication unfolds. Yes, I understand that this is a contrivance, an "idea of talking" and perhaps slightly dissociative from a "naturalized" communicative exchange, but that's precisely the point. There are no stakes, so why not try something different? This process is perhaps conceivable as a project, theorizable as a subjective histrionics, and even contextually indistinguishable from art-oriented banter (considering we are both artists whom have had discussions at length concerning the nature of our own art, of Art in general, or related theories of ART). However, my intentions are sincere, not motivated by manipulation or empirical scientific observation, but primarily concerned with deepening and strengthening a real human relationship, ours.

Let's talk more. If you like this idea, let's initiate a dialogue of the sort. If you hate this idea, let's discuss it. This is what I have been thinking about.

How are you?

I hope this letter finds you well.

A BOOK OF TEXTWERKS AND COLLAGES

CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

FILLED WITH RANDOMLY SCANNED PRINT MATERIAL MANIPULATIONS

AND SUFFICIENT CONCRETE POETRY

WITH ADDITIONAL METACOMMENTARIES

SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS -- GENEALOGY OF SELF

AND MANIFESTOS OF PRAXIS / PRACTICE

TEXTS + VISUAL WORK CONTEXTUALIZING EACH OTHER

A SUPPLEMENTARY CODEX OF SCANNED NOTEBOOKS

EXPANDED BY PRINTED DOCUMENTATION OF OEUVRE

FROM BEGINNING TO THE PRESENT

INCOMPLETE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

INTERTWINED EXAGGERATED INFORMATION

HIGH QUALITY OFFSET PRINT EDITION

SELF-PUBLISH, PRINT ON DEMAND, DISTRIBUTED FOR FREE

MUST LEARN PUBLISHING SOFTWARE TO PROCEED

CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS COLLECTED ON A WEBSITE

CUSTOM INNOVATIVE LAYOUT

MUST LEARN WEBSITE SOFTWARE TO PROCEED

A PRINT SERIES OF TAXONOMICAL ARRANGEMENTS

FROM EXPANDED ARCHIVE

LIBRARY MATERIAL COMBINED WITH INTERNET RANDOM

STANDARDIZED SIZES

MANDALAS OBELISKS TOTEMS AXIS MUNDI TULPA

T SHIRTS OF SYMBOLS SYLLOGISMS AND SACRED SCHEMATICS

UNIQUE ONE-OFFS CONTINUOUS VARIATION

VIDEO SCROLL OF ALCHEMICAL POETRY

TRANSMOGRIFICATION THROUGH MEDIA

DISSEMINATION OF APRIORI HOLISTIC SENSE THROUGH THE INTERFACE OF SCREEN AND SPEAKER

VIOLENT EXTREME EXPERIMENTS IN ENDURANCE

DESTRUCTION OF THE IMAGE

INCANTATORY NARRATION DIRECTING TO REFLEXIVE DISCOVERY

INTERSPERSED WITH HIGH QUALITY STILLS

AND ALWAYS MORE RF MODULATION

PUBLISHED TO THE INTERNET

SUPPLEMENTARY SOURCE MATERIAL WEBSITE TO TAXONOMICALLY DISPLAY DATA MINING PROCESS

EXTENSIVE THEORETICAL-POETICAL WRITING

LARGE SCALE SCULPTURE INSTALLATIONS

ALL SYSTEMS THEORIZED:

COLOR CODED ONTOLOGICAL TAXONOMY

SYMBOLIC ORDERING OF PROFANE SIGNIFICANCE

PLAYING ANTAGONIZING OF THE EDIFICE OF INSTITUTIONAL DISPLAY

SKETCHES MADE IN ILLUSTRATOR, PHOTOSHOP COLLAGE

DIAGRAMS ASSEMBLED FOR SMALL EDITIONS OR WEBSITE

ONGOING NEVER ENDING SYSTEM OF REGURGITATION

AND SPECTACLE

These activities should not be considered work: products or results of deterministic labor. These processes are not useful, are situated as counterproductive, agonized and antagonizing to normative equilibrium. These objects are not living nor are they simply dead matter, they are not natural nor do they represent a passive flow, abstract diagrams of sense data, or birth continuations of nullity.

The Objets Fatale can be said to exist to the extent that they are felt. The unraveling of its tenuous terrestrial relations equates to the unbraiding of one's own anchors to culturally mandated reality architectures. To interact with these objects is to face one's own undoing by phantom limbs.

The universe is sweeping through the windows, pouring in through the cracks, humming tides of insatiable cosmic flow, woven tapestry of flux, pure horror, hallucinatory beauty. Everything, everyone, everywhere is adrift in its currents, save only Art. Art is unnatural; it is the epitome of the synthetic, the primary contrivance, to be distinguished from nature at every point except perhaps its material instantiation in tragically poetic frames of stasis. All material decays, all life is consumed. The locus where physical material meets aetheric miasma delineates my obsession with artistic production, describes the site of my research, transfixes the flux under a lens for momentary observation. Even this will change.

****

Put all the material in order and the system of its arrangement will emerge. The content arranges itself. The archive itself is the work. All of its aspects can be displayed in an infinite number of ways: individual pieces drawn out to impossible lengths, or models of the entirety presented simply, concisely, nonchalant. Images linking to other images, real time hyper text writings, films with frames leading to other films = all the points are connected. The emphasis is always upon the relationships between points. Boolean algebra, mandelbrot sets, brownian motion: not chaos but ordered entropy, highly structured thinking. The art presents good (sound) thinking, acts of thought, not to be confused with positivity.

A film as a document of everything to reduce content to nil. A film which starts here and ends somewhere else, shot in short increments and compiled steadily. It starts anywhere - here - and as it ends the frame closed in upon a target-object, the beginning of the next clip. Every shot begins and ends on a crosshairs, texture, pure field of color, etc., so that the clips can link together organically. The end of the entire film is "the arrival" to "there". Every film is the charting of a distance, between here and there. Perhaps the beginning and the end are the same, arbitrary, benign, ambivalent. No preamble, no beginning, no prologue: scene one just begins so that its origin is immediately forgotten. At the end we are brought back to the beginning to seamlessly suture the cycle of viewing reference and blurring the discrepancies between time-edits: the emphasis being upon the closing of the concept of cinematic time, of where or when one is.

The formal constraints for a cinematic idea: speed, time, signature. The opportunities for the modulation of time, of a human perception of visual time, by removing the factor of visual lag from the perspectival equation: ability to adjust frame rate. Film = a journey (in space) of modulated time, a structure populated by mundane content. An aesthetics of migratory response, observation slowing down, perception and attention elongated through the space of cinema; plus the secondary attentions through the editing, the structural modulation of time. The possibilities of autonomous intelligent algorithmic editing, intended to destroy narrative continuity and reorient towards the medium and its continuity, to turn away from destinations/arrivals, to instead levitate within a perpetual/infinite echo ocean, a matter of increased buoyancy of perception; then the tertiary consideration of posing the action on frame - with effects or raw - on particular subject matter conducive to exhibiting an attention to fluctuation of/in/through time: the gnats in the afternoon sun being modulated by the sound of the voice. If one can choreograph a dynamic walk through the woods (or other space) and record it with an extreme clarity, strategically composed, using the crosshair cutaway editing technique to seamlessly transition between different spaces, times of day, depths of field, aesthetic sensibilities, ecological states, without the propulsion of a narrative or characters at all.

An algorithm of film: an infinite number of films could be made: an endless experiment in cinema, algorithms, and time-based existence conducted consciously (although not tentatively).

The VIDEO SCROLL is a conversation; a dialogue, a linguistic exchange of cultural signifiers, a symbolic exchange of psychic data. Conceived as an infinite autopoietic loop (roughly self-contained and self-referencing) of mythological scale, it is difficult to precisely locate the beginning and end of the reciprocating sequence unique to each video. Consequently the viewer is offered entrance into the perpetually unfurling system at any stage of its development. Indeed it is the viewing experience itself that maintains continuous reflexive examination throughout the series and while many specific references contained within each disparate work may be highlighted, one inevitably finds herself oscillating between micro sentient pulsations and macro tectonic shifts.

The VIDEO SCROLL is not an entropic system. On the contrary, each video piece is meticulously and consciously assembled according to a predetermined formula which in itself allows for a certain degree of flux and metamorphosis over time. To put it simply, each video begins with the creation of a text. This piece of writing is envisaged as a hybrid structure, containing a spectrum of articulations ranging from the subjectively poetic to the critical-theoretical, historical, and philosophical. The structural components of the text and the allegorical potential of the signifiers involved are then transmogrified into short video clips, image sequences, audio recordings, and other dynamic media, often sourced from a variety of public free-use internet archives and user-supported search engines. The composition of this pooled information is determined by the original text work, concretized by a narration by the artist, and presented in a manner so that one videotext continues the ideas, impressions, or logic structures of the previous.

It is through the process outlined above that the first installment of the VIDEO SCROLL was constructed. However, as each video acts as a contribution to a self-referencing dialogue, the second installment began to efface subtly nuanced shifts in methodology. The video sequencing began asserting influence over the text architectures, audio and video media affected placement of each other, and the entire installment began to indicate a redirection of concerns for future works. The third installment can be said to be determined more by pure sound than concrete language -- derivative information from speaking a text, which has survived as only a subliminal presence in the video itself. A fourth installment is currently under construction and will contain thousands of still images of various resolutions sourced from multifarious search engine manipulations, as well as other media. The entire corpus of the VIDEO SCROLL can be referenced as a text, consisting of words on a page or screen, as an autonomous video work, or perhaps most appropriately as an adhesive saturating and binding the interstitial concerns of all such communicative media.

Dear ____,

We had a confrontation last night that is still brewing fresh realizations in my mind. I don't feel like I handled myself -- or you -- very well in the heat of the moment, so I feel compelled to recount and digest through these words here. I've always worked better this way, on paper or on screen - through writing. It's a slow process defined by pause, by reflection, by the ability to edit and coagulate meaning. It's my own therapy, a truer reflection of myself than I could ever hope to gain from psychoanalysis. I don't expect a response from you, at least not in the form of a letter. I just want to try to sort out what I'm feeling about all this and be honest with you.

How do I even begin to get into this... I want to talk about death, about life, and the in-between. I want to meditate on a death that is deserved and a life that is worthy of remembering. I'm also thinking about music in relationship to dynamic experience: something you said recently about how music is the most dynamic mode of expression and what that says about you as a person, about your music, and about the fallibility of your words. There is also something to be said about the nature of friendship, of the multitudinous dimensions of romance in the world and towards each other, of love for fellow man and shared dispositions to the social terrors raging at large. At some point we have to discuss the ramifications and repercussions of suicide -- perhaps the ultimate act of selfishness or selflessness but not both simultaneously (?) -- as well as what it means to be a martyr and the possibilities of living a selfless life in service (subservience? subordination?) of/to others. And how do we approach the subject of knowledge, when will it be appropriate, and under what conditions? Such matters seem so sterile and uncompassionate at this moment, but I believe there is a relation here: of what one knows of themselves and what one believes they can determine or direct in their own existence, the power of determining one's own destiny. Many of these are recurring themes in our relationship, and others we have perhaps only superficially penetrated.

All these lyrics keep entering into my head. "This music effaces itself before no sophomoric slander." What we have been doing these past few months is powerful, emergent, undeniably potent, and potentially influential. I have never been part of something this unruly, this captivating. This band could never have existed before because none of us were ready, none of us could have possibly known how to put it together until now, and even now we don't totally understand how it came to be. There is a magic and mystery to this which surpasses metaphor, that I feel is wrapped up in the mess of life, by which I mean the fluid and dynamic existence that I want to live always in relation and in response to the revolving aetheric currents swirling around us. Beyond the aesthetic considerations of punk, hardcore, and power violence, of the freest jazz or the loosest chamber ensemble, there is an element within CTA which pertains to the primary apparatus of language, interpersonal communication (with each other as individuals, as well as we four acting collectively as a unified body exchanging ineffable information packets within the larger cultural corpus), and sonic vocalization of something undeniably political. We have outlined a platform that we can all stand upon and as long as we can keep a handle on our motivations I believe this may serve as a launching pad for a life closer to that which I have always envisioned being possible. I don't want to lose this, I don't think any of us do, I believe that you most of all would regret any decision that would prevent this magnanimous force from blooming into its potential fruition. Yes, I am moving to Sweden, but I don't want to abandon CTA. Indeed I intend to do everything within my limited powers to make the most of this project before I leave and I sincerely hope that we will be able to adapt to the new conditions and continue our experiments once I am gone, in some form or another.

Because like I said before, there is more at stake here than just some punk band. There is communication happening here, and whether or not people hear it at some local shithole venue is the least of my concern. That is not to say that I don't care about playing out in the world, but only to emphasize that it's the interpersonal communication that I find to be at the root of what we are doing. As long as we are participating, it is alive and we are activating experience in the present. Once we stop believing in the power or importance of our enterprise, it will mute and begin to be forgotten. It will begin to die. Moving beyond the concerns of our music, I believe this is the nature of human relationships in general. As long as they remain active, in the present, they are kept alive and contribute to the realization and expansion of human lives. Once they are stifled, suppressed, malnourished, and silenced, they begin to be forgotten, begin to die. All of these little deaths create a burden upon existence, one which I feel everyday but that I try to remain active in combatting by maintaining deep and intoxicating relationships with those that are important to me. You are one of these few rare creatures.

Selflessness and selfishness seems like a false dichotomy. Who can say that they are either one or the other, of course we are all always already both, or else not human. You have certainly proved yourself to be more empathetic, generous, and ultimately self-sacrificing of yourself for others than I have encountered in my own life and this is something that I admire in you. I applaud your decision to take more time for yourself, to act upon these impulses that you have been brewing upon for years, to make something manifest in your life that is not entirely dedicated to someone else's cause. My friend, you need to find balance. I am no sage and no saint. I have a degree that is worthless in most ways - as currency or credential at least - and certainly does not put me above you on any hierarchy. What I can say is that I was able to articulate to myself very early on that I was interested in a pursuit of truth, however it is that I was able to define it, and specifically in discovering the languages that might aid one in communicating these relations in various arenas. One of my major concerns for myself is to cultivate humility before the wellspring of potential in the universe. To this extent I have always tried to share with you what I know, or what I think I know, so that you might glean what you need to get yourself to where you want to go, not as your teacher, your master, or any other source of empirical truth, but as your friend, your compatriot, your fellow peer lost amongst the seemingly infinite options laid out before us. Whether I have proven this or not, I feel I have always tried to close the gap between us, to express the fact that I see more similarities than differences between us. It always pains me when you widen these gaps by describing how irreparably separate you will always be, how varied our experiences will inevitably remain, or how futile is the proposition that we might share an understanding of ourselves in relation considering our varied histories.

I have always believed, and still do, that the only one that has the ability to shift the course of your life is yourself and I continue to believe that you are strong enough in will and motivation to do so, if you would only believe that yourself. Some things you said last night made me believe that you are steering off course and that perhaps you need more help from me, from us, from your friends, than you are willing to admit. I don't believe you are weak, but it has become apparent that you see yourself this way, and I don't understand how you will be able to proceed in a healthy manner from this standpoint. This is not an irreparable problem, not in my mind. I know we don't think alike, and that is for the better. Believe me I have my own bullshit to sort through minute by minute, but perhaps the burden you have been hauling has become more than you can handle alone. You can't run away from your problems and you shouldn't always have to solve them alone. You need to understand that you have people here -- in this world, in this band, in these friends -- that want to see you succeed, and want to help you succeed. Let's figure out what we can do and get started. Don't shut down, don't push us out. Let us help you carry some of this so we can get back to work and make this happen.

JOSHUA TREE, CALIFORNIA

This will be a stream of consciousness written on the morning following our first day apart across a great seize of water and seas of memory. I am already remembering you, your color beamed luminosity, the magnetized ore of your eyes, the sap that runs thick in summer and winter between us. As you are landing in the archipelago I am rolled in warmth and dust curled up in woolen rugs sprawled out on floors and rising with bitter strong coffee with syrupy Joshua honey flicking spliffs at the tearlessly untiring ants rummaging around in our footsteps. Yesterday, as I ascended the crest of the valley a looming orange purple fumed cloud combed by windmills and crested by graduated golden rainbows split the creviced skies between one stage and another. Crafting a new language gilded by moons glowing tempered by sun fueled by Peruvian exports, we build rafts from dissonant tones and hum to a swaying flow manifest in cicada songs and quail soft shoes.

The anticipation of moving to a new green corner of the world splits and divides into branched appendages of hope and guiltless desire for what might become from a well-nourished future garden. I am a person and must engage with a public, even if I inhabit an alienated self-prescribed position within the stock market of personality. Stockholm holds a promise for revitalized focus married with the anticipation of immanent radical change sending shivers down my column and lending speed to my thunder tongue finger tips, tapping off alliterations ameliorating anathema analgesics.

I spend long vibratory hours passing outside overlooking a wide-open expanse of dirt clinging to brush sweeping violet and ochre shadows over the valley. The clouds swim as though an inverted ocean and I sit and coo at the birds and bats and rabbits gathering and arranging the gravel into continually wider degrees of chaos cocktails for my sights to stir within as I plant and wait for the music of the spheres and reeds to tickle in from over the hill somewhere right over there. The green lives in the rocks while the low scrub claims yellows, burnt umbers, and opalescent purple stripes. In the early morning and late evening, the colors organize themselves into sharp horizontal bands which stretch ever wider and thicker until blurring into a grayscale yellowed outline map of itself, guiding. As the sun sets it draws out the chromos from the land and all that sits on it. Reds fade to blue and then finally black ink spills over the world illuminating my nose with a sickly pale cyan internal glow. Everything is quiet and moving imperceptibly slow, grinding ever to a violet halt.

I take coffee with Ornette Coleman, vibrate some keyboards with afternoon elevation rituals, sip rum with heavy lime with the days playback in the evening, and emolliate my minds with further variously abrasive chemical abstractions throughout the blackness. I somehow awaken to a solar tone and find myself getting heavily caffeinated pouring over words creaming and swirling from recounting the previous days activities. The shape of jazz to come is bulbous and also tapered in relation to the gelatinous corpuscule we are designing here on the landing pad of the earth. We five soothsayers are accumulating a cosmic woolgathering sieve that will inevitably burst into a fractalline lattice promising further explorations into deeper chasms of the subject-in-relation-to increasingly compounding into myriad contortions of my conduits of focus. I am optimistic for what our woven fields may reap for we are certainly sowing a swollen saccharine seed seeped in simmering brine. I do not know what is approaching but I am certain of its crystallized synergistic synthesis of our probing troglodytic vision.

I am always the one who goes to sleep first and I am always the first to rise in the morning. For some reason I am neurotically conscious of these hours -- the first and the final of the day -- as they hold a special importance over the rest of the waning suns passing. There are few particular settings in which one can be truly productive and such moments must be cultivated, protected, and conserved. Every morning I challenge myself to wake up earlier, then even earlier, so that I can revel in the silence of the new day, so that I can think, and be alone. I sneak out of the dim blue room in which we make our sleeping fort and slide into the cool desert air, taking large steps towards the mountain, raising my feet quickly over the stones as I hurry to elevate myself into the young light. I bring strong coffee and take easy stall for breath and sips. I try out different peaks and compare their vantages. When I am full of wind and heat, milky with sweat and dusted in purple ash, I descend back down to our bohemian bunker to hunker down on the day's agenda. Everyday a list of things to do: a short list, but an essential one.

1. Make a smoothie

2. Sweep around the house

3. Write a letter to ___

4. Make a collage for ___

5. Listen to and mix the music from the previous day

6. Prepare to record more music

7. Record music

8. Make a salad

9. Record more music

10. Go see the sun set

I think I have decided to make art again, to make Art again. I have many ideas but do not feel overwhelmed. My first task will be to collect my thoughts and organize them, or rather to let them organize themselves. Many of my ideas have to do with color, with the experience of color and novel theories of color. It makes me feel really good, makes me feel like a painter, and that makes me feel exceptionally alive. I have never seen so many shades and hues of rich saturated chroma than here in the desert and I hope my memory is strong enough to maintain these impressions. I am hopeful for the future. I can't wait to be with you.

It is sometimes difficult to live in close quarters with other human beings. I can't help but feel like some of my friends lack discipline, which deteriorates their application, ultimately making me feel frustration at their condition. Yesterday folks were in a particularly ripe mood. I don't let such things distract me too much, and except for a few guilty feelings as though I should be doing more to attend to my partners, I keep on pushing my grains of sand around into their labyrinthine configurations. Even if I sleep in hours past when I would prefer to rise, I still have the house to myself for many hours. I rather like that part of the deal.

Yesterday we put all the drums into one little red room with cement floors and conducted ourselves into a whirlwind orchestration. Yesterday we discussed the pros and cons of consuming psilocybin as a tea in regards to our emotional capacitance. Yesterday I climbed into the valley and sat on a large iron ore for what felt like minutes but may have been hours. Yesterday we drove into town to drink margaritas and snack chips, during which ___ and I gently explained to ___ the nuances of various degrees of inebriation by alcohol. Yesterday we drank frontier whiskey with sarsaparilla root beer and puffed hand rolled cigarettes and pontificated warbling flights of fancy. Yesterday was a pretty good day in hindsight.

And today I am hung over, just a little. I am drinking strong coffee and devouring a gluten free pancake and thinking about the colors laid out before me. Today we will ingest hallucinatory concoctions and release our ears into the viscous fluids blending through our chromofrost cave. I am planning on retreating at some point, into a quiet corner, a darkened room, a softer place, and stretching out my limbs to climb the ladder of my mind back to its source and attempt to fetter out the fluff and dander from delirium and archived volumes of my inner-being. When I return I will be recalibrated, refocused, recalcitrant, ready for my recital of reality.

Since we have been out here in the desert we have been experimenting with various hallucinatory substances in various conditions for social engagement and music making and this continued process has become a very important aspect to what we are doing. There has been discussion bubbling up about just that -- "what we are doing" -- that has left each of us to flounder for some sense of purpose and meaning that resonates with the subjective sense of self. At times I feel conflict brewing with ___, who certainly believes that I am no wise man but perhaps am somehow impervious to his charms and therefore a considerable threat to his fortified identity and manipulative means. ___ and ___ keep more to themselves as they are calm and contemplative during these episodes, but their silence often leads me to neurotic realizations that perhaps I just talk way too fucking much for other peoples' comfort. I feel an impulse to speak! However, last night I became tangled in a less emotive web of very familiar laser beam architecture that reminded me of a great many extremely important points and has since instilled within me a potent conviction for what I must now do.

I don't want to be too explicit in these letters, but last night I entered a trance state that I have not allowed myself to experience for many years. This substance was very influential during my nascent stages of articulating my ego and its relation to the world and when I returned to that warm comforting space last night I remembered something of who I really am. More importantly I realized some essential links that have been missing between my own self-aggrandized worldview and the functioning of the civilization as a whole. I believe I have uncovered particular points of focus and described very specific projects which will help fuel my creative energy well into the future, if I can only keep the ideas fresh in my mind long enough to act upon them. Let me see if I can sketch out what I'm thinking, for your benefit as well as my own:

1. Certain chemical compounds have had more of a lasting impact on my conception of self, my articulation of self-in-relation, my creative endeavors, and my hopeful attitude towards life than anything else. I need to stop perpetuating the taboo of psychedelics and recognize that there is a real body of knowledge (or at least a wellspring of intuitive wisdom garnered through heightened relations to the environment) that needs to be synthesized with a greater corpus of human history. I have particular skills and abilities that put me in an especially critical position to do so. I need to begin considering these experiences to be not only real, but also important and worth talking about.

2. Human life is based on relationships and without those relationships there is nothing and one is alone. I don't want to be alone. More than that, I have met many wonderful people that have helped me develop these ideas about who I am and what is possible and I owe it to them and to myself to maintain those relationships. It will be difficult, and in many ways doesn't make much sense, but when I move to Sweden I hope to get in better contact with certain people from my past in order to let them know how much they mean to me. These individually tailored letters have been on the back burner for years now and I am ready to motivate more energy towards this essential function of life.

3. I have realized something simple and essential about money, power, and competition, something so deceivingly simple that I don't know if it will even make sense. I find these human traits to be evil (not just bad or unethical), that is, to work against my conception of a peaceful existence. I can see in the world that the time is ripe for young entrepreneurial spirits to capitalize off of their ecological perspectives, and perhaps it is time that I begin manufacturing some kind of product to distribute my influence throughout the civilization that might also benefit myself. I can't really go into specifics here, but I have realized an essential connection between visionary articulations of utopia and the trade winds of the market place. I don't yet know how, but I hope to devise a plan to begin making money without having to work for others in manufacturing more excess. To invest into the landscape directly, bypassing the allure of material desire.

4. I need a space, but not just any kind of space. I need a space to think, to experiment, and to interact with the world on my own terms. This space does not exist so I have to make it. I have to will it into existence, and I think that it will be both a physical space as well as a virtual space. I also want to construct a web space where I can upload my own content and organize it how I see fit. From this virtual archive, I will be able to work with how all of my creative works link together in order to fabricate an idealized scenario for experiencing my art, music, and writing. I believe this is an essential step towards exhibiting my work again and will be one of my main goals when I am in Sweden.

5. I am full of love for a great many things although this love is not universal. I do not feel love for everything or everyone, and I wonder about this. All the spiritual texts teach an unconditional love, but I do not feel loved unconditionally by the universe and so feel no obligation to love it unconditionally in return. I have conditions, and I owe it to myself to define them. This will be a very interesting and controversial experiment. I am more than a dissociated philosopher panged by the guilt of profound empathy. I am alive and I want to be more alive, more in love.

Yesterday we drank some mushroom tea and recorded some of the most profound music to have flowed and flowered out of us yet. VERY exciting. I'm working on a rough mix that I can send to you so you can hear what we have been up to out here. After the throb of anxiety began climbing up the back of our spines and we could no longer sit still to manipulate our instruments, we took off running for the top of the hill to catch a magnificent orange fire sphere dipping behind purple taffy moisture silos in the sky. I sat on a rock and thought about thinking while my eyes gently reclined over the gradations of color pouring over me from the ionosphere: yellow beams of light cut through by emerald shadows, looming purple cotton clouds fading to burnt orange and sienna as though a photograph degrading by time and light itself, the sharp line of the burning sky as it meets the chilled blue mountains, and then all the nuances of the gradient as those jagged oceanic swells of iron ore and rusted rock approach my own, melting from aquamarine to jade, ivory, and obsidian.

On the mountain I had many realizations. I normally don't like to discuss my drug-infused visions so nonchalantly as the default language of my tongue always fails to properly value the ephemeral, ineffable, incredible descriptions attempted by my eyes, pineal gland, and other loci of my frontal lobe, but I also feel an obligation to be as honest and open with you as I can so that even if it doesn't come off the way I intended, at least we are working towards an understanding and description of each other's interiors. Basically, all my ideas pertain to ART and art-making, specifically to the visual senses and how the modulation of some might elicit a response from others. I keep asking myself, how can I make a painting that devastates the eye, an image that is magnetized to vision, or else a picture that repulses the gaze to such a degree that it is never seen? Or perhaps a video of a landscape, of a sunset, perhaps of the very sunset I was observing, shot at extremely high definition, the highest possible quality of detail and color pixilation. I would take this video and compress it down, so instead of the INFINITE varietal shades of our visible color spectrum, it would utilize maybe a million, or a hundred. Then I would try to touch every one of these colors and replace them with textures, patterns, or perhaps even other images! When one gazes upon this video -- of a mountain and a sky and a sun -- they would see through the screen to all the multifarious layers of experience that I have embedded, yet seem naturally integrated, or perhaps it is those images that would be seen first and the mountain would be that which would require great exertion of will to see.

I am so excited to be going to a place where no one has formed an opinion of me yet. There is great freedom in that. During various psychedelic interludes throughout this month I have found myself slowly closing my eyes to lose myself in a brief reverie, of you and me and our feet moving as we glide around the earth seeking out strange plants, colorful animals, ancient stones resonating cosmic tones, exotic spices and foods, and together sharing in the wealth of what this world has to offer. I want to quit smoking, stop all self-destructive behavior. I want to live longer, live better, be stronger. I am concentrating and compacting my volition, so that when I arrive in Stockholm I will be filled with a great determinism to push out into the unknown and sculpt my future tense into what I always knew it should always be.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

ART:

1. EVERYDAY FIND A NEW WAY OF MAKING ART

2. INVENT FICTIONAL BODIES OF WORK TO MAKE UP FOR LOST TIME

3. DO OTHER ACTIVITIES AND CALL IT ART

4. THINK HARDER ABOUT WHAT LIFE NECESSARILY, ESSENTIALLY, OR ALREADY CONSISTS OF AND CALL THAT ART

5. MAKE DESIGNS AND CALL THAT ART UNTIL SOMEONE WANTS TO PAY FOR IT AND THEN CALL IT FUNCTIONAL DESIGN UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO BUY THE DESIGN IDEA AND NOT THE OBJECT BEING DESIGNED IN WHICH CASE CALL IT ART

6. FIND A WAY TO MAKE ART AUTOMATICALLY, WITHOUT TRYING

7. TAKE PICTURES OF ART THAT EXISTS IN THE WORLD THAT PEOPLE ARE EITHER TOO SMART OR TOO STUPID TO RECOGNIZE

8. CALL THE SMALL AMOUNT OF POPULAR MEDIA THAT INADVERTENTLY TRICKLES INTO LIFE EVERYDAY ART

9. MAKE ART WITH FRUIT, VEGETABLES, LEAVES, SEEDS, AND OTHER PLANTS

10. MAKE ART FROM, WITH, OR BY THE BODY

MUSIC:

1. FINISH MIXING CTASSAULTS TRACKS

2. DESIGN CTASSAULTS WEBSITE

3. MAKE COLLAGES FOR WEBSITE

4. MODIFY COLLAGES FOR SHIRTS + PATCHES FOR ___ TO PRINT

5. COMPILE LYRICS + WRITE NEW LYRICS TO RECORD

6. FIND DIGITAL INTERFACE FOR RECORDING

7. PLAY GUITAR EVERYDAY. 10,000 HOURS. FIND NEW TECHNIQUES TO STUDY.

8. RESEARCH RECORD LABELS THAT MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN CTA.

WRITING:

1. WRITE ABOUT AN IDEALIZED ART, MUSIC, LIFE

2. WRITE POETRY THAT IS FREE. 10,000 HOURS

3. WRITE LETTERS TO FRIENDS. KEEP CONTACTS ALIVE

4. REINVIGORATE WRITING PROJECT WITH PEERS. KEEP DIALOGUE ALIVE

5. RESEARCH RESIDENCIES AND GRANTS. WRITE PROPOSALS FOR PROJECTS

PERSONAL:

1. THE BODY IS A TOOL THAT REQUIRES HONING. WORK TOWARDS ACUTE FOCUS IN DAILY ACTIONS, WORK AGAINST BECOMING DULL

2. DEVELOP A STRICT DIET. RESEARCH + PLAN DAILY CONSUMPTION. ALIGN EATING + FOOD WITH THE REST OF THE ALREADY IMPLEMENTED DISCIPLINES OF DAILY EXISTENCE

3. EXERCISE EVERYDAY, EVEN WHEN IT SEEMS DISTRACTING OR WASTEFUL. RECOGNIZE THE IMPORTANCE OF MOVEMENT TO BECOME MORE INTENTIONAL IN ACTION

4. RESEARCH DENTISTS. VISIT A DOCTOR. TRY NOT TO DIE PREMATURELY.

5. RESEARCH + PRACTICE A METHOD OF MEDITATION. TEMPER AND CONTROL THE MIND TO ENRICH FOCUS. DEVELOP A DISCOURSE OF + THROUGH BREATH

6. MEASURE DAILY INTAKE. TRACK WEEKLY DEVELOPMENTS. PHOTOGRAPH MAJOR CHANGES. DOCUMENT EVOLUTIONARY INEVITABILITY

7. STRETCH TO OPEN CONDUITS OF ENERGY

8. CREATE A SCHEDULE FOR LEARNING SWEDISH. 10,000 HOURS

9. COMPILE ALL PREVIOUS SELF-REFERENCING IMPROVEMENT LISTS. REREAD THIS LIST EVERYDAY. MAKE AMENDMENTS AS NECESSARY

I would like to describe the phenomenon of observing the world of stars on the one hand and the world of plants on the other, from the point of view of inner experience. My explanation will not be supported by any tradition, literary or otherwise, though may rest lightly upon various information gleaned across the libraries of human knowledge. I perceive archetypal forms present in the cosmos, and that they are mirrored in the earth, not as reflected images of lifeless, unreal, nebulous forms, but as concrete reflections created by the earth in the form of living plants, terrestrial and aquatic biologies, and the mineral material of the earth itself. I propose a consciousness that works independently of sensory impressions which offers to provide an empathetic and symbiotic perspective upon what we might call the spiritual ocean of the universe, in order to develop the capacity to perceive clairvoyantly not only the animal and plant kingdoms, but also the mineral kingdom and especially that part which is crystalline in structure.

To maintain a presence of mind while meditating upon the potential spiritual vistas evoked by the material world, directing a spiritual eye from cosmic space to the earth suspended over a terrifying abyss, a void of the unknown and unknowable. Suspended by this sensation, I am obliged to contemplate relationships of the total environment, to see the kingdoms as a totality, everywhere converging currents of energy flowing through various degrees of resistance. Everything is mirrored in its own element. Crystals can be formed as cubes, octahedrons, tetrahedrons, rhomboids, dodecahedrons, monoclinics, triclinics, every conceivable kind of structure in fact, and as constituents of the earth -- are indeed the earth itself -- reveal the multitude of beings whose activities culminate in the mathematical-spatial forms of the crystals. They were once used to recognize the presence of the gods (the possibility of whose existence we no longer entertain) as an expression of reverence, of adoration even towards the universe, full of sublime secrets of our souls rather than theoretical knowledge of a purely intellectual basis.

The reality of this world is illusory in comparison with that sublime reality which is revealed to us when we follow an idea/experience beyond the gateway of death (of the ego). Not a loss in consciousness, but rather to make it deeply infused and interfused through the relinquishment of the physical body. A human being is the prisoner of a single, insulated world because she knows only one state of consciousness; in all other states she is asleep. If we awaken and develop them, we can experience other worlds. The secret of spiritual investigation is that human beings transform themselves through transmutation of mind. One cannot penetrate into other worlds by adopting conventional methods of research and investigation; we must undergo metamorphosis, transform our consciousness into the new forms.

[SOLO ARTWORK DIGITAL COLLAGES MADE AT POSTER SCALE]{.underline}

-Variations on a theme, utilizing images already sourced as well as more from both analog and digital sources. Revisit prior ways of works: write text that translates into psychosomatic metaphor via image condensation.

[INDIVIDUAL MEDITATIVE/KUNG FU MARTIAL PRACTICE OF BREATHING]{.underline}

-Physical attunement has become necessary in order to continue the intellectual refinement. I must dedicate myself to some form of practice to temper the body and make it a more useful tool towards achieving my goals. If my recent state of mind can be said to reflect my physical condition, I am not healthy. I want to be healthy, happy, thriving, without obscuring my focus and derailing my ambitions. Research: Transcendental Meditation, various Yogic forms, martial arts, gym membership, etc.

[CTASSSALTS MUSIC VIDEOS]{.underline}

-Old Kung Fu movies edited for speed, synchronized hits of the fist to hits of the drums, various characters associated with particular sounds (RZA doing folly, Peter and the Wolf), different sonic textures equated to the shifting of colored warriors on screen.

-Write text for bastard CTASS tracks. Use tracks as lyrics (to be dubbed when the proper interface is sourced), but also as an image guide for allocating video data from the web (alla VIDEO SCROLL experiment).

-Revitalized color-field-flicker-strobe experiments for abstract segments of songs.

RESEARCHING BLACK HERITAGE VIA FAMILY INTERVIEWS

STEADY-CAM SHOT OF TEETH BRUSHING IN BEVELED MIRROR

SCANNER PORTRAITS OF OBJECTS: OBJECT-MEMORY

ADVANCED PHILOSOPHY PHD, FINE ART PHD: RESIDENCY TRACK

DIGITAL SKETCHES FOR WORKS TO BE ACTUALIZED: RESIDENCY PROPOSAL

SCAN ALL OLD SKETCH BOOKS: SELF-PUBLISH

CONCERNING PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography necessarily defers emotional response, delays psychological affect, derails personal connection. As a practice of mechanized fetishism it is always already impersonal in product while also absolutely irredeemably social in process. A photograph reveals nothing about the person that captured it and deceivingly portrays the subject of focus. The camera is a clumsy, brittle, excessively logical machine that functions more as a prophylactic of capitalism and prosthetic of the eye; desacralizing metaphor, devaluing symbolism, denaturing the environment, degenerating direct human experience.

While the photographic mechanism is the quintessential propagandist hologram of authenticity, the temporal-social experience of taking the photograph has become an essential component of the techno-social paradigm of digital culture. The world in its entirety -- in all of its myriad terrestrial and celestial parallax perspectives -- has become mundane to the mind and banal to the blogosphere. The photograph as process -- rather than product -- can and should be employed as an (admittedly artificial) mechanical process of social injection, to produce scenarios of social extraction (rather than the illusion of exchange), and as a resourceful response to the contemporary excesses of dissociated and disenfranchised social engagement.

Ok so I guess I should respond to these epic letters you have sent me, but I don't really know how to do that. I'll just go line by line...

I never expected us to go this way either, nor did I want it to! However I don't share your perspective that we gave up. Neither of us gave up, perhaps we worked too hard to solve something which should have come naturally, hence the "unnatural" roles we played. Our plans were all conceived with good intentions, but there was never TIME to enact them because you were so impatient and I became exhausted with the perpetual regression. Yes I do realize that you sincerely wanted to make this work and you feel like you did everything you could to prove that to me -- you have proved that to me -- but you didn't allow enough time for the changes to take effect; you acted like it was going to happen immediately, but there was too much repressed trauma to break down first. To this extent, I never felt like you truly took possession of your own situation -- what I always referred to as "taking responsibility for your actions" -- so that I could re-center in my self and we could meet again in this "middle" that you are always proposing so abstractly. I see that you were (and still are) struggling to keep the faith, to maintain a positive outlook, but you still don't have one. You say you don't blame me for wanting to defend my own right to feel, my desire to preserve my own sense of self, my desire to maintain a balanced day-to-day, but it sure seems like you are passing judgement when you accuse me of giving up, of betraying you, of abandoning you.

I feel naïve, downright foolish, for opening up myself so much to you, but I certainly don't regret it. That was the only way! The only way I could show you that I was committed: that I would tell you everything, that I would make myself vulnerable, and sacrifice everything in order to make this work between us. I feel foolish, not because you don't recognize those efforts, but because I expected you to. You feel betrayed; well I also feel betrayed, so I understand. The "power" I wanted you to realize is in yourself, not external. You think you have something to teach me about myself? About how I am so stubborn in guarding my sense of self and unwilling to listen to outside criticism? I'm not saying you're wrong in that, only that it's ridiculous for you to tell me because I have been telling you that since the day we met and you were never able to process it. I know who I am, have had experience in how people react to me, and have calculated my own trajectory towards the kind of orbit I want to inhabit. I'm sorry you see this as narrow, and I understand why because in a sociological sense you may be correct in saying it's "unhealthy" in the same sense that it's not "normal," but I am quite at peace with this oppositional position I have placed myself (in relation to the world) and have been very clear that this has been my intention, that this is something I have been searching for, was reluctant to occupy, and now boldly and bravely carry with my as my intended goal. (Hence my obsession with the immoral ranting of Henry Miller.)

So what if the person you are with is angry, depressed, preoccupied with death, uncomfortable with their own inner workings, suppresses feelings into destructive outlets... do you abandon your lover? Do you accept all that volatility? Do you love those aspects of humanity without judgment or persecution? You have posed a profound moral dilemma for me and I can't say that I took the right path in deciding to share with you how I overcame these obstacles and offering strategies in dissipating the dark shadow of the existential parallax, but I have no guilt and no regrets about that decision. I feel no shame, and I don't think you should feel any either. To the extent that I could recognize and declare them, I felt a responsibility to share these observations with you thinking that you might view them through different eyes and step upon my shoulders to a higher plateau of thought. It's not that I intended to change you, but I did very much want you to be able to see the person you were and perhaps realize that there was so much more that you could realize. I believe you are now on a path towards that realization, and all of this suffering that is rising to the surface is symptomatic of this, but unfortunately you have mistaken me for working against you rather than in your (and our) interest.

I love so many things about you, but I see so little of them anymore since all you want to talk about is your problems with me and your frustrations with your self. I wish we could just have coffee, have dinner, do anything for that matter, without getting sucked into this horrible squabbling. It's like quicksand, and we are sinking, and whether you struggle with all your energy or I try to stay still we are still both sinking together, suffocating together. I have tried to tell you that I want to put all of this aside in order for us to be able to focus on LIVING, but you are obsessed and I can't take it anymore. Of course there's also the issue of jealousy and entitled ownership, my general feeling of a lack of emotional freedom, and the strange cycles of domestic interdependence that we have been falling into... but those things are also indicative of other, deeper underlying issues. My frustration is that you can't become aware of this, that I always have to remind you, and that we both feel helpless in changing these negative cycles.

I am aware of my lonely path, no need to remind me. I'm sorry you are filled with so much regret -- that you feel pathetic - and I encourage you to try to release that somehow. You can't change the past. You have to change how you feel in the present... this has always been your struggle, to be oriented too much towards the future while being trapped by the nightmares of the past, which causes nothing but fear. You doubt yourself continuously, even in these heartfelt letters, and I hope that you can overcome this to be at peace with yourself, and with this situation.

I am willing to change, I want to change, and I am open to what is to come. What will be will be, and for now that's all I can say. I find all of this talk about compromise to be so unsavory for some reason... maybe it strikes you as horribly wrong, but I no longer feel like compromising, nor asking you to compromise, but instead to let this relationship be whatever it can be from where it naturally settles. I want to realize more, continuously, and I wish the same for you. Let's meet there. I can't talk anymore about disappointment, trust (or lack thereof), support, or even processes of transformation. I wish to enact the change I want to see.

Devotion involves profound sacrifice, which I feel I have made and it went under recognized, so now I have to work towards overcoming my feelings of betrayal and cannot sacrifice anymore without fear of dissolving into something I have worked so long and hard to prevent. I don't know what will happen but I think I have some places to stay so we don't have to see each other if that is your wish.

DRUMS SPREAD AROUND THE ROOM WITH MOTORIZED ROCKS BEING LIFTED AND FELLED. DIFFERENT LENGTHS OF ROPE FOR SYNCOPATED BEATS.

GUITARS SPREAD AROUND THE ROOM OPEN TUNED TO DISSONANT CHORDS BEING PLAYED WITH BEADED WIRES PULLED THROUGH THE STRINGS WITH MOTORS.

A (NAKED) WOMAN IN THE BATHROOM (ON THE TOILET) READING HENRY MILLER THROUGH A MICROPHONE BROADCAST INTO THE MAIN SPACE. ALSO READS TEXT MESSAGES THAT I SEND PERIODICALLY. NO ONE SEES THE WOMAN, HER NUDITY ONLY IN HEIGHTEN THE VULNERABILITY OF THE READING.

LIVE SECRET MICROPHONES INSTALLED IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE SPACE, BROADCASTING INTERIOR SOUNDS TO THE OUTSIDE.

ALL THE FURNITURE AND OTHER OBJECTS OF THE STORE PUSHED INTO THE CENTER, INTO A LARGE PILE LIKE A COMPOST HEAP, POSSIBLY WITH LINES OF CANDLES SURROUNDING THE PERIMETER.

VARIATION: ALL THE FURNITURES ARRANGED INTO A STRAIGHT LINE FROM ONE WALL OF THE SPACE TO THE OTHER, CREATING A BARRIER OR WALL.

VARIATION: PHOTOGRAPHS OF ARRANGEMENTS OF FURNITURES IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE SPACE, PRINTED AT ACTUAL SIZE ON FABRIC, HUNG ON METAL PIPE FRAMES OR FROM THE CEILING SO THAT THE BACKGROUND LINES UP WITH THE PHYSICAL SPACE.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF SINGLE OBJECTS AGAINST WALLS OR ON FLOORS, FRAMED TO BE THE EXACT SCALE OF THE WALL WHEN THE PHOTO IS PRINTED AND INSTALLED, OF THE BOTTOM OF THE OBJECT, WITH THE ACTUAL OBJECT MOUNTED TO THE PICTURE TO CREATE A MIRROR IMAGE OF ITSELF.

WORK LAMPS EVENLY ILLUMINATING ALL THE WHITE PORTIONS OF THE SPACE. NO LIGHT POINTED AT THE FURNITURE OR ART OBJECTS.

LARGE LIGHTBOXES LEANING ON KICKSTANDS [GO BACK TO STORE AND INQUIRE ABOUT WHO MADE THEM!] DISPLAYING COLLAGES.

VARIATIONS: WALL MOUNTED LIGHT BOXES, LIMITED EDITION POSTERS ALL DISPLAYED TOGETHER (EXAMPLE, 10 PRINTS OF THE SAME IMAGE ON A WALL OR ALONG THE FLOOR)

BRANCUSI-ESQUE GROTESQUE PEDESTAL-SCULPTURES MADE FOR DIGITAL PROJECTS WHICH ARE PROJECTING FLICKER ANIMATIONS

UNWANTED FURNITURES PURCHASED FROM THRIFT STORES AND DEALERS, LIT ON FIRE, PHOTOGRAPHED, ASHES COLLECTED, MADE INTO BLACK PIGMENTS, PAINTED ON CANVAS.

PORTRAITS OF INDIVIDUAL OBJECTS MADE BY COLLECTING THEIR DUST, EXTRACTING WITH ALCOHOL, DISTILLING INTO A PIGMENT, PAINTED ON CANVAS

A List of Possible Falsifications

or A List of Impossible Realities

[New Cloud Formations]{.underline}

Pictures of clouds are pulled from the internet & manipulated to take on forms never observed in nature (but that's not to say "unnatural" forms). Infinite variations are possible.

[Eye Signatures/Eye Music]{.underline}

Screen shots & video captures are made of individual eyes, mostly sourced from the internet but can also be original footage of our own eyes or of others. Small compilations are made of various eyes, followed by a short writing describing a communicative mode, psychological tendency, or other meaning inferred by the movements. The patterns can also be used as a "notation" or chance/aleatoric music.

[New Skin Color]{.underline}

Randomly selected (or not) colors are chosen from any source material & applied to the skin. Documented with studio portrait photos &/or video vignettes of ourselves with face paint, painted hands, or otherwise colored body parts. Many options for variations. Followed by an explanatory text that applies a new theory of embodied color.

[New Clothes]{.underline}

A new article of clothing is invented, either using virgin materials or by mixing & matching various preexisting garments in ways that defy their original intentions. The goal is to make a "fashion" that is neither male, female, or purely androgynous, but rather ambiguous. Documented through a series of photographs. Example: TW wears everything in ___'s wardrobe, or vice verse. Example: apply marble-dying process to a regular bed sheet & document the various configurations on the body.

[Meditation Drawings]{.underline}

A drawing of anything, as long as it's nothing specific. Followed by a text describing a real/fictional meditation experience.

[Visualized Telekinesis]{.underline}

A photo/video series of ourselves sleeping in various positions. Followed by a text describing the formulation of telekinetic sculptures that are transferred between us.

[Manifesto of Self-Manifestation]{.underline}

A manifesto is written using a collage method, drawing upon as many different & opposing manifestos that we can find, rewritten to elaborate & reinforce the difference, ie: absurdist manifesto. Towards a theory of non-knowledge, learned dumbness, non-thought, un-learning. A "false thesis" motivated by what? Dissatisfaction? Illusion? Disruption? Describes a reversal of the scientific method, so that action is followed by explanation: experiential not experimental.

Related: [Reversed/Inverted Science]{.underline}: an ongoing integrative process of charting the imaginary space of the interstice between expression & understanding, opening up a place of non-knowledge under & between all that is currently known to exist. Example: defining a new categorization of matter inbetween animal/vegetable/mineral, or elucidating a third option to any dualistic/metaphysical/dialectical system such as knowing/not knowing, truth/false, etc. A new theory of aether, between the empirical/scientific & the mystical/mythological?

[Satanic Baking]{.underline}

Bread is a holy food for Christians, rice is sacred to Buddhists, Peruvians worship maca & quinoa, Egyptians thought wheat to be sacred: so let's make unholy or secular food.

[Taxonomy of a Colon]{.underline}

Pictures of human shit, organized by color &/or texture. A system of shit. Associated to real information regarding the nutritional evaluation of feces, but also just an excuse to photograph shit. Related to [Satanic Baking]{.underline}: different unholy foods are photographed. Accompanied by a text elaborating on the gut as the new core of the central nervous system = a movement from mind to body, or dissolving the separation between the two.

[Unreal Poetry]{.underline}

Images are taken/sourced of the sky, random walls, dark rooms, etc. Photoshopped text is added of randomly generated words to create poems that appear to be written in the sky, scrawled on walls, or neon light installations in art galleries. Possibilities for further variations....

[Historically Relevant Artifacts]{.underline}

Photographs are taken of any singular object, followed by a text describing the supposed historical significance of said object. This process can also be utilized to describe any found/appropriated object as an a fabricated object, ie: a sculpture.

[New CV]{.underline}

A collaborative Curriculum Vitae is written describing a long history of performances, events, exhibitions, etc. Places are invented, but always keeping within a reasonable expectation of reality. This document is added to continuously.

[New Theory of Color]{.underline}

An anti-theory, not in the sense of being negative, but as a reversal of science (see above). Various experiments are conducted with various color combinations & applications, ie: ___'s marbling technique applied to various objects, TW's chroma-shadow technique applied to various backdrops, new operations devised through collaborative discussions. Decisions are made from intuition, subjective aesthetic preference, & other non-concrete/non-objective processes. Objects/installations are accompanied by elaborate absurdist diagrams & elaborative texts describing the various emotional/psychological/philosophical/cosmological meanings evoked by the color combinations.

[Books of Non-Knowledge]{.underline}

Any of the above or following ideas elaborated into a "book jacket description," translated into a single image, formatted as a book cover for a specific pre-existing book. The finalized book is photographed, listed on our websites as sold out, marked as being sponsored by various art grants, supported by specific publishers, & otherwise distributed by fictional means.

Examples: Anthroposophy, theories of new star formations, new pedagogic ideology with art as the core, communication with different species/animals, biography of a fictional band, a new theory of color, a new theory of feminism, a new technique of meditation, a biography of Olla Vogala.

[Posters for Non-Knowledge Symposia]{.underline}

Similar to the book idea, these will be graphic design experiments to represent any of the above or following ideas in a single image, formatted as a poster as often accompanies an exhibition or performance-event, withholding or falsifying the time & location of the non-event.

[Websites of Non-Knowledge]{.underline}

Similar to the book & poster ideas, these will be graphic design experiments to represent any of the above or following ideas in a single image, formatted as a single or series of websites, documented in our portfolios as screen shots captured with inauthentic domain names typed in the address bar. Accompanied by text relaying a certain controversy circulating the contents of the website, the short-lived active days of its existence on the web, & the date (from the past) of its removal due to its conflict with a certain corporate identity.

[Lectures/Presentations of New Theories of Non-Knowledge]{.underline}

Photographs depicting us presenting before a fictional audience. Audience photos pulled from the Internet contextualized with new photographs of us presenting in front of digital projectors on various walls wearing various outfits to create the illusion of a past event.

[Languages of Non-Knowledge]{.underline}

Various activities captured on video, subtitled with randomly generated text, & presented as an experiential exploration into a new language system. Examples: laughing, recreating insect sounds, recreating human biodynamic feedback frequencies, superimposing wind/breathing sounds directly into a microphone over video of a mouth being open, etc. Infinite variations possible.

Related: [Silence Language]{.underline}: A new form of communication based on not speaking, or based on listening, receiving, assimilating, rather than speaking, acting, creating. Akin to the way that music is mixed or paintings are "understood" & responded to: an active process of reception.

[Technological Innovations for Languages of Non-Knowledge]{.underline}

Examples: an app/website that translates upper level vocabulary words into "dumb" words like colloquialisms, a filter applied to audio recording of people talking that transforms the speaking into absurdist non-sense sounds, a visual filter that can transform pictures of printed text into scrambled symbols & other general nonsense (emojis?).

[New Theory of Gender: Post-Feminism for a Post-Male World (working title)]{.underline}

Various plans for various possible socio-cultural interventions to empower the feminine in contemporary society without utilizing the traditional aesthetic means, ie: relying upon subversive, psychically penetrative, psychologically nuanced, & otherwise experiential not experimental means of shifting the "power dynamic" away from the globalizing masculine tendencies & towards the stifled female potential.

[Astrological Perfume]{.underline}

Not actually scents that are mixed, but rather poetic associations of materials printed as labels & presented on bottles filled with various colorful liquids (related to New Theory of Color, New Theory of Gender). Scents can have a variety of inspirations, including: a scent for a new gender, exotic or fictional plants used as ingredients, smells that capture psychological associations of different seasons, 12 different scents for 12 different astrological signs, scents that are tuned to particular human frequency.

[One Painting with a Thousand Meanings]{.underline}

Build 1-3 canvases. Paint and repaint these canvases into a variety of paintings, photo documenting every stage as a new/original painting. Lies & Deception: photograph the raw linen as a graphite drawing, photograph the white gessoed surface as a white monochrome painted from some mysterious handmade paint, photograph a black ground as being from ashes, glue objects to surface and photograph as photorealism, paint silver as cinema screen, gold/bronze leaf.

[Allegory of the Window-Mirror]{.underline}

Find old frames of interest. Paint them, or not. Have mirror cut to size. Photograph with camera or self in the reflection.

[Allegory of the Filled Void: The Design of Everything/Nothing]{.underline}

Find objects that signify nothingness: vessels, phallic/vaginal forms, circles, transparent things. Photograph as reproductions. Also, find/make a cube of any material. Paint, applique, refinish this cube and present it as a variety of material: charcoal, graphite, poured paint, human skin, decaying plant matter, meat, plutonium, whatever.

[Schematics of the Melancholic Cosmos]{.underline}

New collage series consisting of random assortments of images laid out in schematized flow diagrams. Use graphite or digital lines to create flows through the system.

[Everything Spun into Negating Motion]{.underline}

Random image search utilizing key words sourced from readings. All images dumped into video timeline and made into a random flicker animation of potentially infinite length. Each key word creates a new film. Related idea: random keyword search to produce images of people for a portrait series.

[Post-Existential Abstraction]{.underline}

Make one canvas. Paint a new painting every day using only black and white paint, one color per session, alternating every session. One day is additive, the next is subtractive, but which is which? Also: a series of monochromes using middle gray on various objects. Create interior spaces of the middle gray objects, using only full spectrum light to illuminate, so that the only color is of the room itself. !!!

I've been thinking for so long now on how to begin, but I must remember that we have already begun, and begun again, over and over again and again, so that this cannot be considered a true beginning nor a false start but always already a continuation leveraged more towards the future of what we can and should be rather than our past follies. What perplexes me is why it should be so difficult to communicate with you now, still, after all these years. What is within me that holds me back even now? What is it about you that intimidates me so? What is this dance we are stepping, how is it working on me and where is it taking us? I have so many questions and so few answers, but I cannot send you a rambling list of inquiries lest you attempt to provide for all of them, which you very well may and as you have noticed is a difference that separates us. Let me address as best I can the last letter you sent me two months ago and all the space in between....

I do not struggle with my feelings for you, as it seems you often suspect. I have ceased to do so since our powerful cathartic scenario in the fading summer days of 2013, an experience I continue to cherish and will not soon forget. This remains to be true and lasting, despite my ignoble silence nor whether you feel this to be true as I know it to be so. Concerning this point of how do I love you, I am no longer interested in elucidating grand mysteries with broken syllogisms and would choose instead to let the mystery remain ineffable and the language to remain broken so as to appreciate them both as grand ruins of our transcendent potential and inevitable misery in deciphering the absurdity of human emotions. Yet I realize you want to detect and dissect, to hold and turn in turns, so I continue now even as I maintain that concretization is not in either of our best interests.

I am not floating, on the contrary I am beginning to take root. Yes, we have no promises which means no economy and no currency. This seems like an overwhelmingly positive attribute of our relationship, yet you continually describe it in the pejorative, as an absence, or perhaps as too abstract, something you struggle to see clearly. You doubt that anything has ever happened, has ever been said or revealed, that we have ever found each other, and all of our efforts to fortify these excavations so as not to repeat old woes. This doubt is not mine, not shared by me, and I am not convinced that it is completely your own or that the origins lie within you but rather from without, infecting and demoralizing everything which we have shared. Maybe this is symptomatic of the language which has formed the majority of our shared experience so that things could become qualitatively different with more physical presence -- that is to say, maybe things would be different if we lived together more with bodies than these sprawling letters - but I have always sensed this overwhelming potent doubt in you, even while we were together, and have repeatedly pointed it out to you. I would like to kill it! To free us both, to invigorate a hibernating energy in our spines and reclaim the throne of our attention for faith in the unknown, for wonder, enchantment, and imagination. It seems to me that these are the things our relationship is based on (when it is flourishing), the antithesis of reason, the parallax of accountability, freedom.

I want to address the crystal clear fact that you have needs that I cannot sufficiently cater to. For your part, you have made every sincere effort to explain these needs in grandiose detail, elucidating their origins and transmutations from the free flowing affective core then processed and mechanized into a logical codex that you seem convinced is closer to my native tongue. You ask for accountability, to be made time for, and for perpetual explications of the present, all of which I have failed to reciprocate. I realize this. For my part, I have not provided you with a clear list of objectives for which you might serve more successfully as my lover, though I have attempted various forays in the past and even recently in NY. I do not feel guilty or apologetic for not providing something that I have been clear about not finding desirable, but I feel a great amount of shame and sadness for not being able to negotiate an understanding with you even after all these years and all these letters, and mostly for your feeling unsatisfied by me. I am sorry that I am so obstinate to your needs, that I am so diligent in refusing your wants, that I consciously and repeatedly deny giving you what you consciously and repeatedly ask for. In the months leading up to August 2014 when we were finally reunited I tried to describe to you a scenario for love that is not based on a standardized economy of value exchange, of buying or trading. I desire to sacrifice myself to another -- to you -- and in a way would consider the willingness of the other to sacrifice themselves for me to be the ultimate symbolic exchange of love that I could never accept, so that it is only through this tragic embrace, the potlatch of creation and destruction, this cosmic dance of love without regret, that we could be joined into a singular entity without competing identities. I did not know what was going to happen in NY that summer (how could I!?) but I do know that I came with an open heart, prepared to put everything on the table if only you would do the same. Maybe I'm fucked up, a fool in believing that I was in fact willing or able to offer this, but regardless you made it very clear that you were not willing, too tentative and skeptical and honestly a bit jaded after everything that we have been through. I cannot provide you the presence and promises you have requested, and you cannot assist me in attempting this admittedly insane and antisocial alternative economy of love. This has always been the case, so there has always been a distance between us.

You are often in my thoughts, often on my mind. I long to share conversation with you, to jump back in to the shimmering pool of free exchange we once had. Our exchanges in NY and all communication since has seem castrated -- to use your words -- by a kind of visceral violence. I can no longer bear your warring nature, and while I still find your thunder tongue endearing I cannot absorb the brute of its force when it's directed at me. It makes me feel literally castrated, impotent, and numb -- psychically and physically. As attracted as I am to your body and your spirit, your temperament sends chills through my corpus, as we both observed through our failed intimate encounters. I have always been more interested in the psychic dimension of sex than the physical release, of mental flow rather than streams of pleasure, so upon reflection this encounter makes sense to me even if at the time I felt humiliated and confused, even more so by not being able to provide you with a reasonable explanation. I'm not trying to pass blame on you or make you ashamed for who you are. I love who you are. I'm just being transparent with you about the effects you have on me, on how you affect me. It has become so that I almost dread our interactions, so saturated with doubt and fear and judgment have they become. My anxiety has manifested in more and less conscious avoidance and denial, which has only made things worse. I am only sorry that I do not have the energy to continually remind you of who we are and where we stand, that I don't have any more fight left in me, that I have come to feel that this time and energy in reassuring you has become destructive to myself.

You asked me to be transparent about my feelings for you. Well, I love you deeply, sincerely, and without regret. I also feel a toxicity between us which in the past I have unfairly attributed to an aspect of your identity that you were refusing to acknowledge and now have come to understand as a result of our gyroscopic dynamic - I acknowledge my role in the dance. All of our attempts to dissipate this shadowed presence seem to have ended positively, in some new headspace with fresh eyes and open hearts, even though it was bloody war to get there. However, you exhibit a recurrent amnesia followed by an inevitable nostalgia so that I find myself dealing with the same problem over and over again. I am not fond of this process, of the war or the explanations or the conveyer belt. I love you and want to be with you but it seems I cannot, I refuse to. I will not fight anymore, with anyone, especially someone that should know me so well. I would rather not participate. I would rather not be present. I was very clear about this in August and the months preceding. Neither of us feel this relationship is "healthy" so it should not be maintained. We both feel excluded from the other's desires and we share in seeing the obstacle outside of ourselves.

Yes, I want you to forget me, all of me. Or else remember me completely. When you forget just a portion I become fractured, muted, mutated, incapacitated. Keep me whole, whether within you or not. I do not feel "tangled" in a paper reality, I use words for what they are, juggle the signifiers and relish in the infinite stream of associations. There is no fucking piece of paper, if anything you are the piece of paper, there is no you or me, there is no signified, even the language is a compromise. Nothing concrete, nothing more real than anything else. When it's all thrown out it can all come rushing back in again. Clichés are wonderful memes for collating bygone histories (I'm not against them!) but I want new words, new combinations, new patterns of thought to describe a reality in the making, an anticipation of what could be, otherwise what else am I living for? We make the reality we want to inhabit and I no longer wish to live in the past or the present. No more expectations, no more rules, total emancipatory anarchy. Maybe this sounds like I'm running away from you or something? That I don't want to commit, be tied down? That I am a fool, or just an idiot, or more kindly just overly idealistic? I want this reality, and can describe it more and more clearly so that I can inhabit it, but only alone it seems as no one else will accompany me there. I thought we could build this together, live there together, but it requires a dramatic split with the world that you have been clear in being uninterested in. Hence, we continue: separately. I will not tie things up, synch it all up into a tactile form -- however malleable -- for you to contemplate. I refuse this world and its previous inhabitants. In my mind it is they that are the fools, as foolish as I am at least, so there is no reason that I cannot carve my own path through the crust. This is a letter to tell you why I left.

I was also thinking about relationships for a period, specifically during the summer when I wrote so many letters to so many loved ones and was conducting so many conversations about so many things with you. All the letters went out and nothing came back, except from my parents and from you. Maybe you and they are all that I have in this world. Maybe you know me better than anyone ever has or ever will, that we are bound eternally and inextricably. I think so, I choose to think so, and that is not something that can easily be tossed aside nor would I want to. I never question what constitutes our relationship. I never question who you are or why I love you. I know these things and I won't forget these things. I have no doubts about you, about us, about what we have had or what we have, or ever question that it will continue. This fortifies me, fills me up, makes me feel alive. You are my pharmakon.

Perhaps this is still all inconclusive, unsatisfying, or otherwise unsavory. I never want to take you for granted. We cannot be together, not because of time or space but because we both realize that it is in fact not healthy for either of us, and this is not news. I know you will love some portions of this letter and completely despise other aspects, just as you respond to how I think in general. I accept this, I accept you, and I look forward to our ongoing relationship which is very true and very real, always already.

I'm relieved that you received the letter as I feared my most intimate confessions were being ridiculed by a gang of disgruntled postal workers somewhere, or else were merely lost forever. I also appreciate your response and understand your desire for context. I will give it to you the best I can. Where to begin...

Last summer I wrote many letters to many people.

Wait, before that.... How far back?

In 2009 I fell in love with someone who was in conflict with themselves in a way that I recognized, for it was the same reflexive war that I waged with myself back in 2004-2007. I was living in Chicago for graduate school when this relationship ultimately blew up in a cantankerous mess of dismembered words and fragmented emotions. It was during this time that I should have been so light and focused upon my art but instead drowned myself in books, in absurdity, and in whiskey. I began to doubt everything about who I was in the past, all of the logical aesthetics and reasonable conduct began to implode. I externalized the war stemming from my insides and unleashed a mess upon my art, my peers, my faculty, my faculties. All my relationships were a mess for a few years... In 2011 I moved to Los Angeles and was living with another woman whom I had no business being with. One day it just clicked, all made sense, and I immediately began making changes. I regretted how I had been conducting myself for the last few years and tried to build an outlet in which to reconcile myself with the world. I made a bunch of fucked up crazy music -- which soothed my soul in some ways but also stirred up different issues -- and worked my ass off in numerous humbling positions in service to others -- as a form of foolish repentance. I met a Swedish woman who seemed to signify all that I could not realize in myself, all of the selflessness and empathy that I felt I wanted to cultivate, and I gave up myself to her completely. I gave up too much in fact. I suppressed my own desires for this other and during this time felt a unique form of happiness in refusing to assert my own will. I followed this person back to Sweden, convinced that all the fucking clocks and calculators of Los Angeles were tearing me apart. It's a long story.... But suffice it to say that this person became unbalanced through her giving and through a great loss which she did not know how to grieve, so only a few months after coming to Sweden we were separated. I struggled with what to do next. I did not yet find the catharsis in my relationships that I was looking for and I had given up everything that was important to me -- my art, my music -- in order to focus upon others. I was convinced to stay in this country by the person I worked for, a very kind guy with an incredible furniture shop, so I took it as an opportunity to be alone and isolated for awhile while I reinvigorated my creative practices. I was homeless in Stockholm in the middle of winter, but as the spring approached things began falling into place - and it was all quite healthy for my ego. I found cheap rent in a great artist studio, began recording music inspired by the melancholia of the Swedish landscape and people, started making lots of new collages and videos, and was quite happy being alone with no attachments for awhile. I did a lot of thinking about those individuals that were the most important for my development and it was while reading a text by Georges Bataille on his theory of potlatch that I decided to dedicate myself to a sacrificial task of writing letters to those beacons. The list consisted of maybe 15-20 names, distilled down to the 8 most significant, of which you were 1 of them. The letters were written spontaneously -- the typewriter provides the perfect tempo for this quality of thought. I would meditate on this individual, on our history of shared experiences both positive and negative, brew on it, chew it over for days sometimes, then one morning just sit down and let it all flow out. Some letters were very abstract and some where painfully concrete, but always I tried to be as transparent as possible. I finally found the catharsis I was looking for, but I maintain that I was not motivated by selfishness but rather to give up as much of myself as I could to those that deserved it most, how I wish I would have acted when I was still in their presence, in a way that they would understand and hopefully appreciate, without any expectation for them to ever respond or reciprocate. I meant what I said and I'm glad you received it.

Fuck ok so when I put it like this it all sounds like some therapeutic exercise, which I guess is true in a way, but I was focused on the more profound philosophical ramifications. I saved copies of these letters and when viewed all together -- only by myself of course -- they help me remember who I am and what the fuck I am doing in this world, and that is extremely important. I often forget... strange to admit that. Anyways, it doesn't have to end here, if you don't want it to. Let's have a conversation, or more letters, or some pictures perhaps, or some kind of active (not passive) interaction, whatever you can stomach. If you're not up for it, fine. No pressure, no stress. That's it.

In the living room of my apartment, Stockholm Sweden, having an idea for an art installation: to recreate the living room wall, the MD40 lamp shining in through the blinds of the window from a high powered street lamp about 50 meters away. A closer, more focused MD40 five meters outside of the triple paned glass, trio of windows, projected onto the far wall, everything triangulated and striped. A stack of books emulates the horizontal line. A color shift can be seen, blues and purples in the vertical lines separating the windows. The horizontal cast from the blinds span the entire room so that as I walk before it my own shadow is cast, repeated, split, fractured, parallax span of blue gray silver purples cast from the most distant street lamp and the perfect white cinematic patterns of passing cars casting a range of movements, then butterscotch yellow of the closer streetlamp casting a blurred moiré over the other corner wall. The closer an object is to the wall the more stark and clear the contrast of its shadow, so that casting these light patterns over various object before a scrim would be a profound environment for a psychedelic experience or phantasmagoric theater background - a psychotropic projection screen of movement-speed velocity, flickering frame rate of the mind programmed by body movements and a visual mechanics in automatically composing what is before the eyes. The experience correlates to the shadows of moon through a forest upon the winter snow, dust dancing in the air between sun beams, the 2D+3D intermingling, connected to the photosynthesis of plants drinking up pure light through tendrilled fingers unfurling towards the source, muscle fibers in animals reduced to their most essential state of striations visually imposed upon a world of things. Daniel Buren's paintings of stripes and their relation to wood grain, lines on a page, writing, the power of reduction to permeate all things - towards a universal language of forms. Distinguish the black of the text from the white of the page.

1. Compile all the voice memos and notes into a meta-form that can be referenced, a personal operating manual.

2. Collect various natural materials: grass, plants, trees, bark, stones, mud, etc., and make into a palate for a series of gray paintings - make my own oil paint for monochromes.

3. Make a series of art historical lectures of a pseudo philosophical nature. Method: appropriate many different texts, collaged together (via CCP - Creative Conceptual Plagiarism) to form a script which is read/narrated via voice-over either by myself or others, in relation to images which are combining my own original works and appropriated philosophical/scientific diagrams. These meta-videos are ongoing, streamed on the website, a continuation of VIDEOSCROLL.

4. Use studio lights/flashes, set up a white background, shoot a series of found natural objects and lie (blatantly, subversively) to display them as "life-like" or "realistic" sculptures fabricated from strange or exotic materials: unpronounceable chemical substrates, rare mineral varieties, esoteric animal and plant species, indigenous food stuffs, expensive art materials, absurdities, etc. Examples: present rocks as "rocks," as well as special stones containing unsensible qualities, invisible or pataphysical properties.

5. I can't remember.

6. Rocks made from mulched paper, moulded from real rock specimens, to craft a series of "studio stones."

7. Aeolian harp, a wind harp, to use the cracks between windows to produce music - to let the building play itself.

8. First thoughts of a book form, to compile everything that has ever been made into a singular object.

To produce something which might be consumed in popular culture that I can still be satisfied by: to take the cue from Swedish photographers, focus upon the nude figure, as pornography is universal.

Prints are the easiest things to sell.

The first articulations of cast-resin sculptures: orgone accumulators.

Reverberation chambers and isolation boxes for various scaled amplifiers: a box that fits over the amp with a microphone inside and contact mics on the box itself. Boxes can be made from different materials - glass, plexi, metal - maybe padded inside or outside for dampening, make it into a piece of furniture (aestheticized) upholstered for looks, routing the sound through various chambers, in relation to plants or foliage, through various dimensions or directs - pointed up to filter sound through various membranes, barriers separating the input/output of the microphone to produce different resonations - planular material slipped in, simulated earth elements, etc. A continuation of the studio stone sculpture idea: amplified rock elements, serving as living room furniture, incorporating bass drivers into the sculptures, etc. Boxes buried under ground - glass, plexi, metal - to insulate sound into the earth. Go out and dig a hole in the forest. *Les Paul's buried reverberation tanks. An Ö-specific reverb unit to filter the entire album through - to run it through the Swedish earth!!

"Letter writing flourished before the days of the railroad because people who wrote to each other tended to live closer together and meet from time to time. What one can say to strangers or to those who have become strangers by distance is better printed than postmarked because it concerns everybody. The letters exchanged between Goethe and Schiller, or Flaubert and his mistress, drew much of their life from being bridges between interrupted conversations. Today the airplane has brought us closer together again but the telephone replaces writing and chatter replaces speech."

-Rudolf Arnheim: Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, The Arts, and the Rest

An ethics/pathos to collecting, choosing plants from the ground or rounding up stones - "hounding." One has a choice, to take a piece or the whole, a sample or the whole being, to take all or just a bit - and what is more violent? To keep intact or separate into pieces? The stone was there first and will remain after me, so is it really I who am choosing the stone or is it somehow the stone who is choosing me?

ARTIST STATEMENT FOR WORK IN HARLÖSA

I make collages because everything that can be known about our human universe can be found in books and I want to use everything that's available to present a simple truth, that everything is intertwined. Forest for the trees. I am currently focused on making trees: cosmic trees that hold all of the things of the world in their branches; colossal trees with roots that form the base of the world; astrological trees that sail the solar winds of imagination; cabalistic trees that hold secrets to our origins; ancient trees that are wild untamable spirit keepers of the forest; bonsai trees that attempt to further the aesthetic perfection of nature; dynamic trees that breathe sky and communicate with tickling mushroom toes all around us all the time.

I feel the transference of invisible energy passing between all things and want to participate with my surroundings in a positive way. My orgone-generating sculptures utilize natural materials collected from my walks around Harlösa in order to create powerful objects of pure form, pure place, and pure intention, so that the owner can always keep the essence of Skåne close at hand.

It has been too long since we have reciprocated our minds and I have begun to feel a familiar emptiness creep up inside by the hole left from our inter-necessitated wholeness. My side aches with our umbilical scar so I rub the chroma wound and determine to send you a sail carrying a ripple of voice and a mist of hulled emotion from the valley in which I sit here at the edgy end of civilization. I also will be the first to admit that I need to do some thinking, profound deep undulatory silence-form meditations, but also exclamatory exultations screaming towards the sunshine kind of smooth-rined condensations, so this letter perhaps will be a way of venting my ego into the vapor of language while also orienting my consciousness towards your coordinates thereby sharing my inner softnesses with my outer softness (you) and percolating the effervescent wellspring boiling up within me, drawn forth from the froth of the fjords of the eastern iced lands.

I am sitting in a room.

I am sitting on a gray sofa of thick soft canvas, my gray-wooled toes sliding on a shiny cement floor, my periphery glinted with slate and iron. I am sitting at the hearth of a house in the navel of the town of Seyðisfjörður, the home of Dieter Roth whom has strewn his wares throughout every corner, a quiet somnambulist fishing village dangling by a gutted filament on the rough precipice of the known world, a flowering mineral deposit vibrating a gentle coo to the cool slow metonymic hum of the mountain wall scrawling up the peripheries of vision on all sides, ancient stone masonry washing up on all hides like petrified knives slicing through the multi-tiered cake of time and palpable clouds and glass syrup sapphire ocean. Walking up into the hills at night or in the morning or at any time of the day - which always feels like the same time of day because the sun is in the same place and the moisture wicks at the same tempo - one can observe vast fields of prehistoric mosses dancing a spore ballet with pure color flames camouflaged as lichens, nests of wild blueberries that are still pink in the cold summer glow and also little black berries that promise yet undiscovered sweetness, invasive flowers from Alaska that colonized the mountain with their purple-death flower penises spreading the cancers of the mainlands over the face of the sleeping giant. Everywhere there are waterfalls sliding down to the center, great veins bleeding iron liquid life of waning glaciers that never deplete, hidden up beyond view.

((( A silence settles as I look out the house port to observe the mineral manifold spread out over my field of eyes, a curtain shading the window of my perception, a mirror of the mind made opaque with silty knowledge and the ashes of cindered ontologies. )))

I have been traveling and working hard in Stockholm in the weeks leading up to this moment from which I am writing to you. I was busy with many things which seem so trivial in the present stillness, and a few things which seem so much more important now that I am isolated on this other plane of existence. I was in Berlin, Hamburg, Kiel, Copenhagen... each had a certain charm but I have no desire to live in any of these cities. On May 13^th^ I was dropped off in the Swedish avian kingdom for a month -- we spoke briefly while I was there -- where I attempted to rebuild myself into some semblance of the creature I once was while maintaining the possibility of unfolding into an as-of-yet unpredictable form. It was in Skåne that I reconnected with 'making' as a primary focus after what seems many years of distracted melancholy. I reengaged with the action of mindful remembrance, rehabilitated my hands as direct tendrils of my eyes which in turn shimmer the invisible forces of the intangible ocean through the deep black pools of my mind which is me and not me also. I learned how to make collages again, in the same way but also in the new way, and it was like a wonderful cliché of being reintroduced to an old friend that knows you better than you know yourself. There were also many walks conducted into rolling fields of raps, forests of an archaic density, phosphorescent marshlands of wind sculptured rocks and matted blankets of ferns, and vast fields of birds, so many birds, a grand garden of aviary chatter, a conference of flying sages congregating on the plush sandy knolls to exchange tastes of the solar currents. The landscape in this land was long and flat, so wide that one could rest easy upon its surface, quiet and gentle and blissfully boring. This time and space and silence and solitude were very important for me in uncovering some essential facets of my art practice. Let me tell you:

1. I have come to understand the digestive processes of my collage practice so thoroughly that I can no longer compartmentalize it to the medium of books. BOOKS or more accurately THE BOOK used to emanate such profundity for me -- and in a way always will -- but slowly, initiated by my psychotropic expansion in the desert of Joshua Tree in July 2013, I have come to understand that the process is more dynamic and integral than the musty foxed pages can maintain. (I remember you mentioning a similar observation of me, that I should leave the book behind to explore more fertile pastures, but I needed to process this more in order to understand why). So, I will attempt to chart the coordinates of the process and free it from its materiality so I might begin to apply it to other processes and techniques thereby dissolving into the continuum of the primary plenum of existence and map a new existential cartography.

2. My work is focused upon both a cosmic expansion as well as a terrestrial condensation and my previous attempts to distill the entirety of the universe of relations into a single image, or set of images, or exhibition, or body of work, or ideological premise, has been foolish and misguided. Instead of assembling illustrative visions of an integrated universe which can so easily be misconstrued as moralistic topographies of utopian worlds, I have in fact always desired to build descriptions of the world in which we live -- a tooth with no root, a body without organs, a cavity which we endlessly fill with contraptions of perpetuated motion simulating epigenetic phenomena. The work I make from now on should be more narrow in focus, smaller slices of individuated particles that are refracted from the larger beams and shown as singular compounds, condensed specific articulate essays detailing the processes I observe. This will be my ongoing education -- always the motivation -- while also serving as a model pedagogic for social dissemination.

3. There is no inside and there is no outside. There can be activity for myself and for an other, and this might be the same activity. There can be multiple truths as a matter of scale but not everything must or should be revealed together. I am more interested in fostering inclusivity than prescribing exclusive pedagogics. I can contextualize some works as commodities and others as viruses without fear of computational corruption. I will be a shopkeeper in the marketplace and a visionary on the mountain -- these mustn't be mutually exclusive, but in fact there is a possible desirable achievable inclusion that I should be striving for.

4. There is an essential divide between me and the world, and the struggle to reconcile with it should be abandoned in favor of the more difficult and noble pursuit of occupying the interstice. The fortification of this heterotopia will become the material, the path leading to its gooey center will be my process, and the play required to pass between this place which is not no place but the only place I can inhabit will be the experiential unfurling of my sociality. I don't want to live in a world shrouded in mythology and magic -- I can't be a folk artist because I have no folk: I am a person of course but I have no people of which I can associate myself with and therefore I have no sociocultural corpus with which to justify my leger or enchant my incantations. I also cannot be a popular artist because the culture which contains such entities is a giant throbbing corpuscle of burgundy phlegm and acidic pus which thrives in the manner of cancer, whose meaning is washing off the pages of decaying old books written by foolish logicians and nepotistic egoists who call themselves gods but can't remember their own names, and of course because the result of the activity within this roman-esque arena is to circulate vessels of vacuity in order to proliferate an infinite insatiable desire for more where there can only ever be null. I want both of course: to be a mystic that believes with body and soul in order to fill heart hearths with warmth and the world with wonder, while also negotiating a socially-politically-culturally-epistemologically-ontologically-relevant practice wielding dynamic theoretical propulsions and hypertexted materiality in simple rhyming structures that folks can understand with an attention to meter that the dignitaries of the intelligentsia will pick up and play with in order to instigate an infectious attitude of platitude and crass worship.

So I've been making some things since March 13^th^, continuing to the present. Some things are connected and some are not, which is very pleasant and satisfying to consider. I will try to outline them for you, which is also admittedly for myself as a useful tool in delineating between the convoluted state of isolation and the revitalized centrifugal motions of foresight. And you are a wonderfully intelligent human being with brilliant depth and unpredictable complexities to your artistic endeavors, so maybe you will have some insights to offer me on my present follies.

So another list:

1. I recently completed a series of collages based on the form of the axis mundi and accentuated by the metaphorical dendrites of the cabalistic tree. I will now supplement these hand-cut paper collages with a series of web-gleaned digital collages that will attempt to utilize the same digestive process with slight modifications accounting for the level of information saturation that differentiates the book form from the medium of the internet data stream. As opposed to the book collages which maintain the scale of the medium from which they are derived these new collages can and should be printed on various materials and at different scales. These decisions need to be correlated to the manner in which they were created, but what that is exactly is as-of-yet undecided.

2. I also recently finished some material experiments with embedding local natural materials into polyester resin in the form of Reichian orgone generators. This work is problematic for me, but I knew it would be and I'm following through with it. I think of them as a kind of "literal" painting form through the utilization of chromatic material of the landscape suspended in a natural medium akin to the methods of manufacturing that artist pigments, so they are perhaps occupying some intermediary space between paint and painting and to that extent are more interesting to me as oscillating between the metaphorical picture plane and their inherent materiality than they would be as objects engaged in a purely sculptural or performative dialogue. Of course the metaphysical discourse circulating around Reich's articulated vision of the invisible orgone ocean is also very present in this work and something which I am trying not to shy away from but rather embrace and focus upon.

3. These two projects were made at the same time and over the course of my month-long residency and therefore I inevitably associate them together and now have begun to understand them as two divergent scales permeating out from the same central focus which is me, but more specifically is the me which is not me at the center of the universe, a universal human concerned with the universality of the universe. To be even more specific, I have realized something perhaps very obvious which is the fact that these two projects that I considered to be so very different are in fact very much related through their shared emphasis on the energy that circulates throughout a system by abstracting the representation of the system itself, and should therefore be joined through some kind of tertiary process or medium in order to allow me (or a viewer, or the me-as-universal-viewer) to more easily grasp this correlation. I will therefore design the documentation of these two bodies of work into two self-published books which will in fact be a single book in two parts aimed at articulating a more-and-less concise treatise on energy. The first component will dwell into the especially human-scale associations of energies as they apply, affect, absorb, and aspire within the human organism, while the second component will be oriented towards the larger ecology of intermingling planetary physics, cosmic mythologies, terrestrial magnetizations, and other extra-human forces that propel the movements of the extra-human world.

4. For the last 10 days I have been organizing and mixing the music I have been recording over the course of the last two years of my life into a kind of meta-album describing the melancholic affect of the Swedish landscape upon my psychology. What was originally conceived as quick sketches of many different song ideas has now become long-form sprawls of one song and perhaps the only song I am currently capable of playing depicted in various textural states. Like the orgone generators, I think that this album will exist as a kind of portrait of the landscape which itself must necessarily be represented in a gargantuan spatio-temporal scale, the difference being that this album of music aims to dwell upon the emotional resonances, psychological currents, and synesthetic idiosyncrasies of the place rather than the visual, physical, and energetic components. It currently exists as an album in 5 movements, each movement being further divided into three sections, in total forming a kind of calendric system alluding to the interconnected relations of meteorological seasons and associated shifts in movement, color, tone, and frequency. I hope to devise some kind of planetary system for the cover art: perhaps a poster of some kind that is divided into five parts which will hold visions and incantations associated with the different movements, or I was also considering something much more visually abstract. Just today I discovered that all of Dieter Roth's printing machines have been preserved at the local 'technical museum' and may be available for my use, so perhaps it would be nice to make a series of etchings, wood blocks, lithographs, or other kinds of print for the cover.

5. I just finished mixing and mastering the new Perpeteia album that ___ and I recorded during his 10 day visit to Stockholm in April. As much as I love the flowing Riley-esque continuity of Music for Mesmer I believe that this album has far surpassed my expectations of what I thought we were capable of making. We will begin some collaborative drawings for what will become the recover cover of this beast and probably release it as a cassette tape, but the fidelity is so richly saturated that it really needs to be released on vinyl or as a high quality digital album. This music -- which we loosely refer to as The Conference Table -- is based on an idea elucidated by ___ which in turn influenced a conversation between ___ and myself on the nature and characteristics of a frictive dialectic without pejorative connotations. More on that later if you want...

6. Connected to this album and also in collaboration with ___, I will be rehabilitating the VIDEOSCROLL series which has laid dormant for about 3 years now. This is for some reason the most exciting prospect on the table for me at the moment because it seems to be the axis of all of the previous involvements: it utilizes the digestive process articulated by the collage practice to collect, collate, and contextualize video material into a homogenous form; the result seems to be a kind of portrait of the landscape or essential material distillation from which it was spawned, which in this case is the public video archive of the internet; even though it has up until now been a solo endeavor that I have conducted by myself in a vacuum the project is ultimately motivated by the desire to interact with another -- at first ___, which was then diverted towards a more universal subject, and now back to ___-as-universal-subject -- which makes it the most obliquely social activity I am involved with; the videos seem so diaphanous to me, strange hybrids of philosophy-infused visual essays and animated abstract paintings.

So that's what I've been thinking about artistically from May until now. There's a few other things to sprinkle on top as well of course -- there always is. This idea of making large digital prints is pretty exciting to me as an opportunity of making cheap and affordable but still high-quality reproductions of my work so that it gets out there in the world as well as to deal in "print on demand" processes of high quality production to sell to rich people in Stockholm. On the other end of the spectrum the possibility of making some dry point etchings or perhaps photolithographs on Dieter Roth's printing presses is a very exciting prospect for me and maybe I will pursue this way of working a bit farther while I have access to the resource. Lastly, I'm trying to convince ___ to come to Iceland in the winter or early spring to spend a few weeks rehearsing a live Perpeteia performance for 4 channel audio and 2 channel HD video (projecting the VIDEOSCROLL into public space on custom projection screens) and then tour it around Iceland for a few weeks. This was really a kind of pipe dream until I arrived here and realized how accommodating the house, the people, and the society would be in manifesting this, so now I'm really pushing for it...

I've been sleeping in everyday.

The light that permeates the dense fog of this fjord comes in low base frequencies so that it often appears to rise from below, an inner lamination or lamentation radiating out from the pores of the rocks making the plants glow like unnatural nylons and polyesters and spreading everywhere an eerie illusion as the optics of the diffuse cool wooly air intermingle with the spray of the gray sea. This is my 12^th^ day in Seyðisfjörður; in one way I can't believe that much time has already transpired and in another way I sense some disarming familiarity with this place, not a belonging but a recognition where others describe wonder. I have shared this experience of quiet understanding with a few of the other residents here as well, as if an element of the landscape is drawing a magnetic current from some clandestine mineral deposit of the body, embedding bone into stone, pulling it back down into the volcanic gurgling just under the surface from which it was spawned or smelted. Of course these mountains have a power the likes of which I have never borne witness to -- even as the human element continues on with its oh-so-human business in the shadows of the sleeping giant. I want you to come here with me, to validate its reality and my own, you as an outside element that might cross the periphery of universes and unify the eyes into a singular axis of entrainment, and also of course to share in the experience of being isolated in the world while simultaneously sending out terrestrial tendrils straight and spindled deep under the soil, a consistency of sense rather than mobility.

When I first arrived on the island I was dropped into the middle of a youth festival undergoing its 15^th^ anniversary called Lunga. What began as a festival has developed into a school, organized and conducted by the same visionary Danish "chaos pilots" that have built the house I am currently residing in. The festival consisted of numerous artistic workshops conducted at various points throughout the small town by notable artists of various fields of inquiry -- dance, electronic music, theatrical performance, social engagement -- with numerous small satellite performances by these artists as well as many more occurring throughout the night. The HEIMA house (that I am a part of) hosted a visionary-narrative-based life-theater workshop about envisioning a positive group-think post-apocalypse and also self-organized various musical events in our workshop. I was invited to play during the festival and I accepted and executed my first solo show since the Chicago days, which consisted of myself sitting quietly barefoot in a room built entirely of wood tickling the sympathetic vibrations of a wonderfully aged acoustic guitar that I rigged to interact with a fucking gigantic subwoofer that was hidden behind a wall behind the audience of ragged colorful art children so that as I played the frequencies intermingled in the material structure of the space as though we were all sitting on the insides of the instrument itself, the feedback flowing through our collective bodies like the consilient current of consciousness coursing from mind to digit to steel stringed strum. It was an amazing show, which was completely site-specific, and I loved to do it, and now I want to do it more. The next day I played another show of a different order, a conversation through percussive sounds between me and a total stranger: ___ from France, another resident of the house. We faced two drumsets together with a dual-tubed fluorescent light creating a luminous line between us in an otherwise dark room, then suspended a small cymbal from a wire affixed to the roof which swung between us like a pendulum of death offering interaction or decapitation. It was a short performance but I believe a successful one. Both experiences inspire me to make much more music, but also instill a kind of determinism to hone the skill, to practice and hone edges, to learn new words in order to transcend the common tongue into a polyrhythmic world of alien dialects. I have no space for this at the moment, but I am determined to find some like my life depends on it which it also feels it does.

Yesterday I set off on a road out of town on foot with another resident. It was a cold gray morning but spirits were high. We both wore all black, which for me has taken on a new meaning in this small fishing village at the end of the world: to serve as an aesthetic signifier of subtle but determined distinction of mind and body from the place which surrounds, that is, to wear proudly the mark of the outsider by adorning with cloth of the night rather than celebrations of day, but it also serves a practical utility which becomes very present and real every time the slightest glimpse of solar beams descend to warm my midnight body. We two bricklayers of tautological masonry -- each adorning our own set of toolings -- set a course for the heart of the fog to follow the curvature of the fjord around the fractals of its axis to see what we might not have seen, to hear invisible birds and witness the retinal burn of ancient beasts skipping on the sensuous scrim of the atmospheric blanket like phantasmagoric phantoms of the primordial mind projecting out ancient cave fears into the ever-widening universe. We two monastic road warriors walked fast and hard, pushing each other forward with subtle corporeal inclinations and mesmerizing words describing curvatures of solar plexi, depths of graveled graves filled with unspeakable vowels, the taboos and fetishizations of materials that are leading humanity like lemmings over the precipice of the rational into an unforgiveable oblivion, as well as more lubricated joints and lotioned knees. Although I had company out there in the wild I felt completely alone, and I want more of it. After 4 hours of walking we reached our destination: a wonderfully lonely cabin on the tip of the fjord that shelters local biological, botanical, and mineralogical researchers that venture to the outer Auslands to find pieces of themselves scattered in the detritious of the archeological plentitudes frothing up from the granulated earth. We ran from the rain to the hearth and immediately stripped down all of our heavy iced clothes to follow the promise of a hand-built subterranean sauna, which we were stuffed into only minutes later. We pushed our bodies up into the ceiling to press the hair into the hot wood and inhale deeply the inferno vapors into the nostrils where they seemed to singe to the smell of our own bodies burning diffusing evaporating and recondensing like gelatinous dough in a pressure pot. When the line of reason was transgressed and even the irrationality of further endurance escaped us we flung open the door and ran down the hill past the pigs and the ducks through the cabbage patch and potato fingers through the crystalized tall grasses down down down to the black salty beach to run into the frothy void and inverse the numbness of the skin from boil to bubbles. I rolled in the sand and scrubbed my body raw, climbed the shiny rubber cliffs back to the rune-adorned sanctuary, cracked a bottle of homebrew, and settled a smooth soft curve into a red velvet chair carved densely with beared gods and voluptuous temptresses.

(((break)))

Later in the evening -- yesterday evening -- after a stew of turnips and fresh potatoes and carrots and dark sweet bread -- after fables of lost foxes and confused walruses and seals with overgrown heads and birds that followed the wrong butterfly and a famous polar bear skin that passed over many hands before ending up just out of reach of the grandson of the hunter - after discussions of self-sustainable ecosystems and biocuriosities on the iris -- after many languages and many quiet moments -- we separated and coagulated again to run to the edge of the cliff to resaturate our clothes in the atmosphere and glimpse the puffins basking in their sanctuary out there at the edge of the world. Another resident artist had constructed a gigantic wooden polar bear monument and after a series of logistical headaches had managed to transport it the 19km down the shaking gravel road and install it upon the slopes of the purple cascades, ever so delicately on the loamy soil that seemed more moss blanket than terra firma, in ordinance of a uniquely fabricated ceremony to celebrate the end of a real species at the end of a possible future, as an offering of ephemeral time travel through a collectivized imagination of the last bear on the last island remembered by the last people standing at the edge of a precipice both literal of landscape and metaphorical of mind. Alex cocked the shotgun took aim and fired, paused to reload, check the sight and pulled a line down the center of the looming plywood beast until the invisible strings twanged and stretched and retracted it apart into two equal halves. After the sawdust settled and the documentation was verified we again all assembled our tribal hands to lift up the dripping remains and let loose the gravity of the gray descension to rush up the sizzling rocks below and obliterate the remainder of the mythological form. A fire was lit, which destroyed the evidence and warmed our marinated bodies and smelted the air into solid visions while anointing our foreheads with the residues of what will always already be the was will be. Tired and sore, hoarse from the toxic steam, we all piled into raised beds to stumble back down across the 3 rising rivers into the lights of town, the glowing amber embers of nightly fed electric fires cinging out the landslides of the long form poems. Whiskey was shared, memories of the memorialization of the monument recounted, and now cookies are baked to christen the dawning of possibility which may or may not circle back to a reliving of the previous nights mountain murder by the progeny of the unknown future present.

Now I'm back in the warm now, sitting here, ruminating, deciding what comes next. Getting out this letter to you, to reestablish some intimate contact with my most intimate friend whom I have neglected for far too long. This has been my major priority for the last 2 days. Now that this is done -- until the next neglect at least -- I will move forward and beyond to the above mentioned projects, as well as many more that have percolated up in the meantime. I will begin my research on energy, the energy exchange of the human and the interchange with the ecosystem and the transmogrification of the energy into vision and theory and knowledge, and I will begin a study of the book form in relation to the distribution form of immaterial data, and I will begin a process of intensive gleaning in order to organize my oracle for expanded vision.

The structure of love poetry is still very appealing for its ability to draw from so many far reaching disparate elements in attempting to illustrate a multifaceted impression of a single subject: the lover. ___'s poems are an inspiration in their freedom from conventions or tropes, but also because the images evoked betray a bold vulnerability that is so shockingly fragile that one is instantly led to assume an air of irony in their tone. With or without sarcasm there is an undeniable universal appeal to the love poem that contains a power like an ancient spell that should be studied further.

This house is huge even with so many people in it but to leave its lofty caverns to inhale the sunlight of day and transverse the outer rim of the fjord to the far edge reduces the scale of this architecture very quickly. As I ascend up the slope of the valley the world of men and letters drops away -- immediately from ear shot and slowly also from all peripheral sight -- becoming a kind of memory even though only moments before I was shrouded in its mists. It's always better to walk up than down; each step higher with the body, foot over rock, steps up the sheer threshold of time, seeming to propel the thoughts through physical platitudes as though the noosphere of Teilhard de Chardin were palpable, certainly not a visual encounter but one which can be felt emanating from the atmosphere at increasing intensity as one propels away from the core of the earth. Many philosophes describe sensations of levity, emotional ascensions, or fleeting encounters with the ecstatic when faced with the sublimity of nature, and this certainly has much to do with a simply comprehended shift in scale from regulated urbanity to almost incomprehensible natural monstrosity, but I also believe that altitude is as much at play in extracting these emotional resonances. Following the narrow sheep paths along the grass-bearded stones one begins to pick up their tones vibrating up through the material underfoot. The plants grow up through the cracks of course but also up from the vibratory earth, skipping their expanding cellular stalks across the scrim of a vertical ocean of ecstatic flux. Talking to myself as I walk, yelling out to hear in the deafening silence, at other moments whispering in the intimacies of the nestling foliage, great inspirations are tripped over like invisible objects placed like trail markers at the high water line of the universe. Other motivations are destroyed, residues of calculated urbanity and mechanisms of civilization that have embedded their heavy metals into the hot oozing tissues of the mental scrim which flows a fluid fleshy flux around the indissoluble impediments like the glacial streams hurrying past the blood-clot stones of the valley, rolling them over in the icy hands to smooth off the edges into heavy purple calcifications like fossilized effervescence. These unnatural machines with their schematized skins and metonymic membranes are quickly made brittle by the gentle cooing of the clouds, leaving a cavity in the mind gums of cancerous vapors which must be expelled out to the valley breeze to be whisked away and drunk up by the savory sea. I pull out forgotten tools and carve new marks into my arms, turning one biscuit into many loaves, lapping up the morsels of clarity beaming out from the sun behind the purple mountain and shitting out the black greasy residues of city life in the tradition of the sheep whom I follow. The old tatters of past lives that I was clinging to so desperately are seen in the light of day as soiled bandages scabbed in to the wounds which they were intended to mend. I leave behind as much as possible and restrain my hands from fondling the cold stones for too long, I want to leave the mountain with less than what I arrived with, bury it up at the top to be forgotten by all. On the way down the air becomes slower, colder, stinging my proprioception like a freshly shaven chin, casting short flickering shadows along the crests of the waves down in the navel of the beast as the sun rolls around the far side of the peaks in a perpetual handshake with the formless condensation. Now lower, now lower still, my feet land upon ground made more stable by more feet trekking the same steps before me while the tendrils of my thought remain wrapped around the pink and orange lichen speckled monoliths drilling swords through spaceship earth like gargantuan pins in a plush cushion of moss and ever present dew. I return to the city and its noises and asphalt tinctures, I return to the house and its dirty clothes and throbbing radiators, I return to this goddamn screen with its radioactive hallucinations and imperceptible cancers. I need to sew up a fucking space suit with an umbilical conduit to the mountain peak. I need to invent a machine that destroys the mechanisms of progress instilled within me while maintaining the oh-so-human cavity without refilling it, just letting it sit and be vacant, a fleshy pore of nothingness maintaining a cooler glacial air inside the fuming gates of my city boy body.

Begin with a question concerning what a proper question should consist of. Begin with a consideration for the other that is generous and loose -- soft pliable eyes, passive stance in the body, gentle inquisitive inflections of the voice. Begin with an instantiation of trust -- the first to give without asking in return (potlatch vs gifting), an offering of great importance and potential intimacy that can be burned upon an alter that both parties are equally involved in erecting so that both may equally enjoy in the ecstatic pleasures witnessed in the deterioration of material ideas. Begin with a declaration of etiquette suggesting an equality in potential although not in capacity(?). Lay a ground work upon which both can stand but both must be active in maintaining with the risk of mutual destruction: declare the necessity of mutual dependence while maintaining autonomy, offer up descriptions of the arena while calling attention to the subtleties of the floor tiles, examine the minutiae of one's own hand with inquisitive rigor -- to use one's own body as a relief of every body -- without succeeding that this hand could ever be every hand, and even further, that this hand is a sensory tool for interacting with the palpable external all-pervasive-all but can only trace the smallest circles back into its own palm.

Make a leap in the dark! Jump in! Surf the wave of the present with total disregard to repercussions in order to discover what one is capable of saying. Orient the questions to the other while drawing as much material up from the internal well as the bucket can hold. Let loose all inhibitions to revel in the search for an inner voice, a personal voice that resonates from the deep-within permeating thoroughly throughout, the voice of self-creation that molds all aspects of the ethereal and corporeal body, the signature sound of the psyche shivering in its mortal coil tied taut to heart strings quivering through the umbilicals of physiology and extending out through the luminescent projectiles of subjective ontology. Define the voice, refine the voice. Take up the pieces and press them back into the hot clay with confident strides, always taking care to breath in drips of moist reflection into the reflex shins of the mineral mind, wetting the words while whetting the whimsy. Continue asking questions, to offer a course while determining to veer over and through the imagine circumferences at the periphery of consideration: decide to steer and relinquish to be steered in a single gesture, not in turns but together-as-other, a new hand reaching through the scrim of differentiated cogitos into diaphanous ocean currents like one-of-two-of-many toes of Heraclitus.

Make a play of the theater. Make light of the spot lamps hidden in the eves. Call attention to the conductor with her own baton. Reach out to ring the bell and open the eyes to initiate the meditation. Pull back the curtains to let the light in but also the air with its crisp scents and deadly pollutions and the insects with their pollination instincts and poisonous long shanks and all the other stuffs of the world which would otherwise remain invisible unless we take a stand in calling attention to the nuanced delineations of their surfaces. Go off the path, out into the wilderness, past the pines and promethean pileups to the farthest cavern in order to fall in to the void, past the Platonic proletariat with their phantasmagoric sideshows, beyond the salty stalactites of fossilized dialectics and stalagmites of calcified consonants, over the tongues of temptation and into the throat of the terra firma, to pop out of the navel of the sleeping giant back at the head of the trail and realize that the trajectory we were plotting was only the self-same finger caressing the epidermal creases drawing out the epistemological maps spreading out the fate upon the palm, the same palm which is now a map and now a navel and now a cave and now not my palm but yours as it could be any other.

Put the thing on the table and call it a spade. Now call it a cup and fill it with all the containers that cupness can coddle. Now put down another thing and call it a cup or a "cup" or a "cup also" or "another cup" or perhaps by another name that might better delineate the circumference of the container circumscribing its own contents while circling out to capture the combinatorics of the contraptions which one might concede to place within it. There is a utility to the language which must be maintained: the cup is a cup in general but also this cup specifically, it is this cup here but not necessarily not that cup there, it is a cup on a table and not a cup-table although perhaps from another perspective it could be. Our words must hold themselves and carry us along with them. They must stack together if we are to construct a shelter worthy of its name, but they must defy their own naming so as not to be confused with the architectonics of the metonymic edifice. We must remember to remember always to maintain an awareness of verbal conduct without being swept out to sea by the rising swells of semiotic tides; we are visionaries in hot pursuit of a seeing eye splaying out all rods and cones as further focal points, not mathematicians calculating the algorithms of a singular truth. Draw it from many sides, describe the myriad features of the material, hum the sound contorting syllogisms from the testies through the throat through the theta. Sit and observe the stream whisking underneath its own slippery silvered shimmers mirroring the clouds whirling overhead, each the same substance containing itself with only a difference in degree:: the lake has sacrificed its airwards mobility to be formed by its container while gaining the reflective potentials of illusory depth while the clouds occupy the seat of godly observers as they dance throughout the noosphere only to suffer the perpetual creation and destruction of a body without delineations.

The conference is a meeting of minds, but not unlike taste or aesthetic maneuvers. In this play we are not actors nor directors nor grips nor gaffers but more akin to protozoan jousters participating in a celebratory war game of aesthetics and territories. The conference table can be any place, or rather is not confined to a particular locus but follows the dialectic monk in a halcyon must of seething potential. Here we sit and here we speak so here is the table and here is my cup which I now give to you to fill and call by whatever name you see fit. Here we stand and here we hear so here is the conference and here is my proposal which I offer to you with an expectation of revolving reciprocation and pulchritudinous profundity. Here is an object surrounded by fuzzy fluff which is so delicate to the touch and so pleasurable to handle but I tell you (!!!) this floating fur frenzies up a friction that will charge the holder of the woolen orb and this kinetic energy will shock us both if delicately handled for too long so let us remember to remember (!!!) to tear away the sensuous morsels and hone in on the smooth reflective weight hiding at the core. Here and now as we pass the floating linty mass back and forth between our grips we can describe the contents with oh-so-many multi-syllabic songs but the only way to know it to unlearn the polemics the un/known, to peer past the fibers of the dusty condensation and not just glimpse or gaze but look -- actively look! -- at the silken mirror orb held within. This shimmering pool reveals us both, two sets of eyes that can see themselves looking and see each other seeing each other looking and see the contents of the room within the cosmological eye looking back while also seeing the edge which defines the delineations of the pulsing pupil from the container within which we've place it, that is to say, we can see the thing in the place where we have placed it which is the same place we have placed ourselves even as we see it occupying a place always-already-other-than that where we are. The possibilities of inhabiting this foldable stackable watery depth contains the feasibility of embodying the ethereal other: a doubling of the self, a division of the parameters composing the tripartite model of the universe sprouting from the navel into singular white-hot spots of clarity. Not a purity but a purposiveness reveling in the poetics of its own purposelessness while determining to push pins further into the portal of possibility, of the unknown and unknowable as the most dynamic non-knowledge, as a truth which permeates the fallaciousness of any such declaration, and a material also! A mercurial non-Newtonian flow condensed into a scale which is admittedly unruly but manageable enough to negotiate through the acrobatics of our conversational aikido conducted here, now, on this table, in this cup, with this voice, for this purpose and no other save that which sews the thread back through the eye of the quivering needle.

A SCHEMATIC GRAPHIC LAYOUT THAT EMPHASIZES THE PROCESS OF THE WORKS AND DEEMPHASIZES THE PRODUCT = WHAT ALL THE WORKS HAVE IN COMMON

TURN THIS INTO A WEBSITE THAT IS A STRUCTURE REFLECTING ITSELF: A NEW WAY TO ORGANIZE THE COLLAGE MATERIALS (RECONTEXTUALIZE THEM AS A SYSTEM OF RELATIONS RATHER THAN PURE IMAGES)

THE WEBSITE = AN ACTIVE PROCESS WITH THE SCHEMATIC = A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF AN ACTIVATION PROCESS JUST LIKE THE ARTWORKS IT CONTAINS = A CONTAINER FOR VARIOUS CONTAINERS

ORGONE SCULPTURES

COMES IN SERIES, EACH OF A TIME AND A PLACE.

LAYOUT THE STRATIFICATIONS AS ANOTHER SCHEMATIZED LAYOUT OF INFORMATION: DATA DISPLAY + ENERGY CONDUITS.

NOT "ORGONE" BUT "ENERGY" -- LOOSENED FROM THE REICHIAN ASSOCIATIONS -- COSMOLOGICAL MAP OF A STRATIFIED UNIVERSE.

POETIC USE OF MATERIALS -- ALLEGORY OF THE FLOWER, THE SHELL, THE STONE; ALCHEMICAL TRANSMUTATION OF MATERIALS -- MATTER AS AN ALLEGORY FOR CONCEPTS

DO SOME REAL RESEARCH ON THE INTERCHANGE OF THESE IDEAS AND WRITE SOME REAL WORDS TO BE PRINTED WITH THE IMAGES. THE IMAGES THEMSELVES WILL BE PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLAGES MADE IN THE SAME MANNER (SAME PROCESS) AS THE SCULPTURES, SO WILL THEREFORE BE ORIGINAL ARTWORKS CONDENSING PORTRAITS OF THE LANDSCAPE OF VARIOUS TERRITORIES OF THE INTERNET.

MAKE A RUBRIC OF MATERIALS WITH A LEXICON OF TRANSLATION. MAKE A TAXONOMY OF FORMS WITH A CODEX OF THEIR SIGNIFICATIONS.

PAINTINGS

ARTWORKS CANNOT BE MADE WITH STOREBOUGHT MATERIALS!!!

ANY PAINTING (MADE BY ME) MUST REVEAL A CONSIDERATION OF THE ONTOLOGICAL AND THE MATERIAL SIMULTANEOUSLY: A MEDITATION UPON VARIOUS STATES OF BEING UTILIZING A PROFOUND POETICS OF MATERIALS WITH NO THESIS AND NO CONCLUSION. THE "SKETCH" FOR SUCH A WORK COULD BE MADE AS A SCHEMATIC -- A PROCESS OUTLINING A SERIES OF ACTIONS CULMINATING IN AN EXPERIENCE OF UNKNOWN VARIABLES. THE PROCESS IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT NOT THE PRODUCT, BUT THE PRODUCT WILL ALWAYS RESULT IN A CONCRETELY MATERIAL INSTANTIATION OF A CONCEPTUAL PROPULSION IN ORDER TO BE READ (LANGUAGE OF MATERIALS) AND CULMINATED IN VOLUMES (BOOKS ON A SHELF) AND HYPERTEXTED IN REFERENCE TO EVERY WORK THAT CAME BEFORE OR WILL COME AFTER. THE PROCESS ENACTED SHOULD FOCUS ON THE PRIMARY ATTRIBUTES OF PAINTINGS - PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION AND THE POTENTIAL POETICS INHERENT WITHIN THE LANGUAGE OF MATERIALS -- BUT MORE SO SHOULD DEFINE A RADICAL INCLUSIVE IDEOLOGY

MUSIC - VIDEOS

THE VIDEO FORM SHOULD REFLECT THE MUSICAL FORM.

PERPETEIA MUSICAL FORM: THE "FABRICATION" OF ONTOLOGICAL OBJECTS BY VIEWING A SINGLE SUBJECT THROUGH MULTIPLE LENSED-PERSPECTIVES, CONTAINING EACH PERSPECTIVE WITHIN A RELATIVE DIMENSION WHICH CAN THEN BE FOLDED AND STACKED IN RELATION TO THE OTHERS, AND CONTEXTUALIZING THE MEANS OF RECOGNIZING THIS OMNIDIMENSIONAL SPATIO-TEMPORAL FLICKER BY RELATING IT TO OTHER SYMPATHETIC SYSTEMS IN ORDER TO NATURALLY REVEAL AN ONTOLOGICAL PREMISE BUILDING UP INTO AN ARCHITECTONICS OF SENSATION. THE VIDEO MAKING PROCESS SHOULD THEREFORE BEGIN WITH THE REPRODUCTION OF THIS SONIC MECHANICS INTO THE ARENA OF THE MOVING IMAGE WHILE MAINTAINING A FLUIDITY TO FLEX AND ADAPT TO THE MEDIA-SPECIFIC ABILITIES, POTENTIALS, AND CONCERNS INHERENT WITHIN. THE MUSIC WAS MADE AS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE AS WELL AS WITH THE FORM ITSELF, THE VIDEO SHOULD BE CRAFTED WITH A SIMILAR PATHOS.

Ö MUSICAL FORM: AN ATTEMPT TO ISOLATE AND DISTILL IMPRESSIONS OF THE ENVIRONMENT INTO SPECIFIC MUSICAL VOICES WITHOUT PERSONIFICATION OR FALLING PREY TO CLICHÉ. THE MUSIC ATTEMPTS TO DESCRIBE ELEMENTAL CRITERIA OF A SPECIFIC SWEDISH LANDSCAPE AS IT FORMS A SPECIALIZED AFFECTIVE RESPONSE -- STOCKHOLM MELANCHOLIA. THE VIDEO SHOULD BE ORIGINAL FOOTAGE (NOT FOUND COLLAGE), SHOULD INCLUDE THE SELF (VERY FUCKING TRICKY TO DO THIS!!!), AND SHOULD CREATE A GRAYNESS OF THE LANDSCAPE WITHOUT REVEALING ANY SPECIFICS OF PLACE. THE REAL DILEMMA IS HOW TO MAKE SOMETHING WATCHABLE FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THE EPICALLY PROPORTIONED SONGS WITHOUT INSTIGATING A NARRATIVE PROJECTION BY THE VIEWER.

I awoke to a pulsating beam of golden sunlight pouring in through the skylight window and filling the small whitewashed wooden chamber in the utmost rearmost cranial cranny of what must be the largest wildest house of what must be the smallest quietest fishing village of the Eastern fjords of Iceland. I feel the pulsating energy beams of the so-distant-while-so-near slowly dying star screaming silently through the solar system. The solar system: a universe ecology named after its own being, a kind of cosmic tautology, for there would be no system without the solar, there would be no observer of the system without the infinite martyrdom of this soul-sipping life-dispensing fire-naveled nestled nettle rooted in the void. With neutrino laser beam eyes this giant pulsating quasar, which cannot be perceived directly with our own juicy vision orbs, pours an immaterial ocean of pure ecstatic flux over the earth like a saccharine sting citrine honey over a charred black walnut husk suspended in the aetheric stillness. The faucet that never closes, flowing flux from a conduit with no comprehendible origin: we call it THE SUN when we are in fact the sons and daughters distilled from its vapors. Waves of all frequencies smash into the outer onion rings of the atmosphere, soaking through the porous sieve like omnichromatic cheese, spinning threads from pulsation to particle and slowing down into the relatively icy stratified gradients of our pathetic electromagnetic spectrum. Oh white hot dot of free flowing cognizance! What hubris we command in believing that this spinning orb of eternal now in any way requires our presence for its articulation. How dipshit thick we all are for perpetuating these morbid fascinations of human gods, of human philosophies, of human crafts and wares, this desperate displaced bog of navel gazers whose most immanent moments describe their bodies as vocal chords through which this bright burning brahma might speak. The vitamin light drips down from the human heavens to turn somersaults into a billions colors that we will never perceive, violently vibrating every gelatinous layer within our limited sights into a million new shades of purple, tearing through the peripheries of proprioception, effortlessly wiping away the loftiest temples of mortal madness, to sit cool and clean on the giant sleeping mineral-faced voyeurs whose huddle comprises this valley where the house with my room and its window are nestled.

I roll over and up. My feet land lightly on a cool flat floor. The toes tumble down the stairs and then again some more, leading the way to the kitchen hearth: the living giving core of this terrestrial system. Charred black grounds are stirred in to boiled glacial runoffs and left to seep in the cistern while I take a minute to soak up some fleeting moments. Then I pour the volcanic tea into an enameled cup and skip out the croaking portal to bask in the interstice between dreams. I have a desire to describe my condition of the moment -- this moment - while also living it, living in it, being here still like one of those blood-clot rocks up in the waterfall letting the perpetual streams flow over me, but also to be the glacier itself, a condensation of potential time frozen upon that high vantage, a gargantuan mass with ever changing shape soaking up the sun most directly, perpetually frozen from within, looking out over the fjord, grinding away the tooth of the mountain to the imperceptible symphonies of ancient erosion magic, far removed from the incessant hiss of the clocks and watches clicking down below. Of course I can't be here and there at the same time, not in this form, so I change those shapes instead and splinter out the self into myriad cogito shards and throw them out into the morning clarity.

This is not a poem and this is not an essay and this is not a theatricality. This is not a meditation and this is not a photograph and this is not a website of a mountain hyper-texted to every other mountain to compile a molten mountainness which eradicates the idiosyncrasies

of any mountain specifically. This is not a love poem to any Björk or any birch, nor to any other woman or rune which may be hallucinated. Alas, on a morning like this I should not be speaking in negations but affirmations! This is not a diatribe but its parallax: I sit here in the yard as a midnight knight attempting to shed my own dark shrouds, a swollen solar cell seeking to celebrate the scrim which has suddenly evaporated away from this terrestrial protrusion out at the end of the known and knowable. I will make a thing out of nothing in order draw a tap to the celestial root of self-recognition, to paint a portrait of the pulchritudinous vacuum of thought-on-nonthought pulled out to a taut tensile, a semiotic sculpture of sweet solar semaphores cracking eggs of immediate nostalgia upon the molten iron pan of time, to fry up some sun salutation onomatopoeia with a side of Aztecan alliterations and dish it up quick for a snacking which is always filling but never full. I am drawing a circle around that no place that we all convince ourselves doesn't actually exist but I see us in fact being bound to eternally, that here and now which is always a was will be, the endless return which always already atrophies as an a priori, the timelessness of the moment which stretches out infinitely in all directions but seems to fit comfortably on a canvas one can hang on the wall or even a little scrap of pressed wood pulp when slides into the pocket and is forgotten about completely, dissolving quietly in the wash. The Roman numeral zero, the periphery of peripheral logic, that null-point line of minute girth drawn around a fog which we cannot designate with any other glyph.

This may or may not be published but it certainly will never again be lived, by myself or any other. There is no truth there -- ok ok except the obvious that there lies a grain of truth in the fallaciousness of the statement -- but this is no theater! We are not actors and there is no soundtrack to coordinate the dancing particulates of the solar chronos, no stage that can be built to hold the movements that my mind is currently contorting, no orchestra that could decipher the notations of the theta tone tickling my spine through this radiant stillness, no actor powerful enough to command the voice whispering the roar of the volcano upon which I sit. It is theater that is the greatest farce. It is performance that tells the greatest lie. Art isn't life nor should it claim to be, it is rather a rarified experience removed from it, it must be or is for naught. We got it all wrong, all we artists whose tradition I am swept up in, we war torn expats whose romance was ripped away from us by the terrorizing hand of ideology, we weary wanderlust warriors searching for a justification for a terror which cannot be justified. We got it backwards! Inverted! It is Life which needed to become Art, and it still needs to be, and still should, and always-already must, and this is the primary experience we should be garnering from all these pathetic objects and scenarios. Art is research: fuck that! Put down the spectrometer and the algorithmic lexicons and get the fuck back into the studios, onto the mountain, back to the ancient ruins and reverberant tombs! Remember the fading words of the ancestors and the ancient knowledge of ourselves-in-relation which has never been written and cannot be studied save for song and smoke signals stares. Remember Henry Miller and his food and his wine and his motto to remember to remember! Remember to recognize the companion animals and empathetic botanicals and the mythology moulding mycelium which bestowed us with this propensity to ponder, and remember the fucking sun! Remember the warmth that you're feeling directly through an invisible ocean which doesn't mean it's any less real because it's not visible but should prove that being can only be embodied through this sticky ecology of interwoven relations. If you want to be an artist and do something that makes sense then draw a very articulate diagram describing the autopoieticism of reason, draw a line around the void and name it null, put a cap on the bottle and stick it on the shelf and get the fuck on with what it really important: pursuing our propensity for wisdom, illumination, platitudes and plentitudes. This has gone on for quite long enough -- this tendency and this soliloquy -- and now I must also get back to work, which is not work at all, no labor not even of

love and never an obsession, but just a song for and about the sun. The sun is a song that sings itself soliloquy, and I am an artist singing my song of stewing stupidity for so carefully sewing this sinuous syntax while sitting here in the sun instead of just sitting here in the sun. I should stop, to sit still, to listen to this humming mountain and the crisping static of its ethereal flow, and to stop laying down anchors for others to follow and relive it through unfocused pupils. Wisdom is what I'm after, but the greatest lesson of the monk is of stillness, of quiet, of nothingness, of the cave of contemplation, of the holy mountain of Rosicrucian immolation, the meditation of cooking and the consideration of even the most mundane reticulations. To be an artist is not to draw the circle around the void but to leap into it and become engulfed in the vision, to bathe unencumbered in the solar pool, to shut the fuck up and listen to the harmonies of the elliptical orbits of a meta-mind just beyond view. So that's what I'll do...

PERSONAL COSMOGONY

ETHICAL-MORAL PRINCIPLES

AESTHETIC BIASES

THEOLOGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES

COMPOSITIONAL STRUCTURE OF SUBJECTIVE EXISTENCE

MAPPED RELATION OF REFLEXIVE COMPREHENSION

PERPETEIA -- SOCIALITY

MOSTLY OUTLINED ALREADY IN NOTEBOOK: AN ECOLOGICAL NODAL FRAMEWORK GRAPHICALLY DEPICTED THROUGH THE SCROLL META-FORM

CONFERENCE>MUSIC>TEXT>VIDEO>ETC

MAPPED RELATION TO A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL AS AN INCLUSIVE FEEDBACK LOOP

Ö --SELF IN RELATION TO ABSTRACT AFFECT / ENVIRONMENT

RESEARCH AFFECT THEORY

AESTHETIC SUBLIMATION OF PHYSICAL SPACE -- GEOGRAPHICALLY SPECIFIC

DESCRIPTIVE OF THE PSYCHIC/PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF AN ENVIRONMENT

VARIOUS GENRE-DIALECTS AND PALLETTIZED TEXTURES

EXPERIENCE>SKETCH>RUMINATION>SOLIDIFICATION>CONDENSATION

VISUAL MUSIC = NOT SYNAESTHETIC EXPERIENTIAL BUT CONCEPTUALLY

MAPPED RELATION TO PLACE, THE PHYSICAL, THE RESONANCE OF LANDSCAPE

COLLAGES -- STATIC VISUAL SYSTEM OF UNIFIED KNOWLEDGE

CHART THE DETAILS OF THE PROCESS:

IDEA>RESEARCH>ARTICULATION>BOOK>DIGESTION>SORTING (MANY SCALES OF COMPLEXITY)>COMPOSITION ON TABLE>COMPOSITION ON PAGE> SOLIDIFICATION>CONTEXTUALIZATION IN SERIES>CONTEXTUALIZATION IN ENTIRETY

SHOULD INCORPORATE NODES OF THE PROCESS AS WELL AS IMAGE-CONTENT AS ONE REFERENCES THE OTHER IN REPRESENTATION AND FORM

WEBSITE -- DYNAMIC VISUAL SYSTEM OF DISPARATE NONKNOWLEDGE

SIMILAR PROCESS TO BOOK COLLAGES BUT SPECIFIC TO THE INTERNET-AS-MEDIUM

DATA-MINING SCHEMATIC

WEBSITE CONSTRUCTION SCHEMATIC

INSERTION OF PERSONAL COSMOGONY AND POETIC WORD VARIABLE

MEDITATIONS ON THE DANGERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

DELINEATE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INNOVATION AND CREATION, AUTOMATION AND INTENTION, MONO-OPTICAL-CENTRISM, THE UNACKNOWLEDGED PROTRUDING TACTILITY OF VISION THAT IS SEVERED BY THE MECHANICAL EYE

PROBLEMATIC IDEAS OF FUTILITY/WORTH, PRESENCE/DISTANCE, DOCUMENTARY (DOCUMENTATION VS REALITY), ONTOLOGY (TRUTH) AND BEAUTY

BEAUTY AS AESTHETIC VS IDEOLOGY?

IF IT'S NOT ART THEN WHAT DO YOU CALL IT? SHIT, DEFECATION, FAT ON THE BODY OF WHICH I AM A PART, EXCESS, WASTE, CANCER TO THE CORPUS

****

Every night I go to bed and struggle to find the restful indentation in the seat of the mind from which I may remove myself from the activities of the day and fall back into the carbon padding of non-thought, which is only a crack in the interstice between various conscious and semiconscious states within which my mind is always clicking, tapping, metronomically counting the striations of seconds or else smoothing over the rougher clay edges of cacophonous concepts suggested by whim, whimsy, or wonder. Everyday I wake up and punch the clock with my deterministic ticket, force myself up -- because sleep is always below and night is always falling and mornings always lift us back up -- up and back into the painful cracks and creaks of my aching body moaning under the leaden pressures of atmosphere, the sluggish sludgy gravy of gravity, and the cold graphite edges of my fiercely forged gravitas. Everyday I open my eyes and look out through them as though through a window out of myself into an unfamiliar world, a self deep within another self, which as I contemplate it now, that is to say contemplate him, or her, that being, my self down in there or up in here, appears not as the images which reflect back from the mirror through my window portal pupils but as some more primordial figure: a subatomic particle of pure pressurized personality. If one were to somehow extract this being from his/her cozy little laboratory in the neuron labyrinth splaying out through all corners of my cranium I believe he/she would appear as a fossilized raisin, small wrinkled black nugget of energy forced into the mold of organic form, or else a pea-sized meteorite of some interstellar geology which has no place in the soft tissue substrate of this otherwise mundane corpus, or perhaps a single spore feathered with minute mycelial hairs stabilizing him/her in the center of a head full of moist soil writhing with nutrients and parasites, you little rhizome diffusing morphogenic clouds of influence and osmosisizing pneumatic hormonal signals to the mainframe psyche, sit still!

"What a lovely thought," but it's all bologna of course for I know damn well that there's no microbial hermaphrodite of the mind, no transmitter beaming in signals from the celestial desk of Metatron, no algorithmic codex feeding influence through a mechanistic meat puppet keeping its secrets separate from the rest of the capillaries. There's just me, in there and around it and through it and out of it. All of it is me. My eyes can hallucinate visions of objects which appear through a foggy veil of distance but my "I" is an entirety and always-already will be: a wholeness which encapsulates a cognizance and a corpus coalescing them succinctly into an entity which sees itself through the mirrored vantages of a reflexive universe. There is no inside and there is no outside. The mouth opens to take in the nutrients of the earth which pass through the gaseous acids and metabolic fluids, flaking off minerals for the bones and vitamins for tones, crawling along through the mile-long-gut running through a hermetically sealed center which should never be seen, only to drop out a thoroughly processed compost back into the soil from which it came, to be digested in turn by the ancestral amoebas swirling their cauldrons of anaerobic antimony in an endless alchemy of life and death which feeds through all things, connects all beings, negates all division, fills all theories with a padded insulation of particulated articulations of activation. My mind does not have a body nor can it rightly said to be centered at all or even be mine, to be me, except through the provisional delineations of anthropomorphic utility: to say I am here in order for you to know that you are there. This separation I will call the primary absurdity, but I will not get lost in what could be named a secondary order of human ridiculousness by purporting to give it another name. I'll leave that to the specialists, to the monks and the gurus sitting on a rock and trying to split it with their eternally honed asses, to the psychics and occultists serenading through séance a sing-song soliloquy of a shimmering etheric double, to the psychologists with their diagrams of tripartite division of this goddamn ego that everyone is obsessed with killing and which no one seems to want to understand, to the false philosophers pouting their postmodern humdrum drones and those true philosophes declaring their dialectics with amorous chants teased out of the woody pulps of human imagination with thunder tongues talking always around the rings and through the wormholes.

While I sit here staring at the vapors of my cogito flow by, sniffing the scents of the morning seasons gently with the evening breeze, touching grasping holding and releasing again the shape-shifting geometric reflections of my being, masturbating the yoni-phallus of the collective unconscious, or whatever the fuck you want to call it... I have so many questions I could ask. Am I meditating? Am I making? Am I ARTing? Am I reflecting, refracting, refining, rarifying? Am I being, or being on being, or being a being, or representing a state of being? Should I do something with it, or am I already doing something with it, or is there no something that might be done with it, and what is this something and what is it and how could we agree that whatever it is that it is done, which is to say enacted or active or completed? The answer is really quite easy: the answer is yes, the answer is in the asking, the answer is an illusion that must not be abandoned but should be maintained as a reminder that the pursuit is what is important, in fact is the only importance. It is this dynamism of flow, the passing of energy through a system, which defines all of these focal points of consideration: the life-ness of life, the art-ness of art, the meditation of the monk and the initiate alike striving to become one with the ancient stone or the grain of rice or the tip of each other's noses, the ontological orations of Heidegger while he surfs the wave of proprioception singing "being being being", the smooth gentle horizontals of graphite pulled over an infinite pastel desert chroma by the hand of Agnes Martin, a piano dropped from a building so that it can really be heard, the be and the here and the now of the "be here now," the axis mundi mind's I minding its own center.

But don't get me wrong, please don't misunderstand me, for I do not aim to delimit all these experiences to various rooms of the same catacomb, to deflate the lofty ideals of the sages to mere rocks kicked along the road leading to death, to call futile all the exercises of mindful meditations or prophetic painters. It's not all the same thing, it's a myriad of different things, it's an infinite number of things or some might say precisely 10,000 things, or π number of things. The tertiary absurdity is to confuse the one for the all, to compare the multiple to the singular, to insist on polemical opinions and imagine balance as being the equating of just two weights when there could be many, could be any, could be every. This tragi-comic absurdity which I now describe is not about our internal divisions that we name natural, or the inadequacies of our linguistic technologies in managing the leger of possible titles, but concerns the broader strokes we scribble around patches of sediment, the terrorizing tendency to territorialize the terrain. I suffer from this cancer of the mind most of all -- of course I suffer from the whole lot because I am human oh-so-human and can therefore only glimpse a glimmer of ephemeral clarity when I sit down long enough to notice the ecstatic movements of the Heraclitian river and contemplate its meandering shorelines before the damns of civilization sweep me back through the turrets and generators and cogs and goddamn clocks and calculators, back on to the tattered map engulfing the land which it aims to notate. Let me sit upon these shores just a little longer, please. Let me dip in my toes and saturate the spongy matter between "dreams and reality" (oh what a fucking ridiculous sound bite that is! What's the difference except delicately dialed degrees?). Let me sit here and meditate with my eyes wide open and my I splayed wide. Let me sit here and sing a song of eternal return, paint a memento mori for ol' father time that fucking prick whom we all love to hate but are forever indebted to for allowing us this taste of dimensional dementia. Let me meditate on the cause and effects and clauses and affects of meditation as a practice, of art as a meditation, of the art of meditation, of art and life, of life and non-life, of the singularity of the harmonious cosmos and the duality of mind and body and the tripartite self which we impose over it and the further divisions of truncated partitions that flourish us with ever more knowledge while always also signaling a deficiency in wisdom. Let me sit here to launch long form Wordsworthian sentiments out into the sediment, to speak boldly of morsels I have tasted many times but whose flavor I still struggle to describe, to tie my tongue in knots while praying for thunder or the last flood. I will sit here long enough to remember how I fit in to it all, how it all comes together, to witness the brittle epidermis shed off into the wash to reveal a more supple skin, to cleanse away the sleep in order to wake up and go outside and have conversations with other lost souls having their own dreams within dreams inside of my dream.

"What's the difference," I ask of myself, "one way or another?" Well there is no matter as long as one remembers to remember, to every day rekindle the flame and keep burning holes in the tarp in the sky, to recount that meditation is a stillness one shiver away from death, to demand that art should always be a portal to other unknown corners of the labyrinth but also a mirror allowing the eye to see itself I'ing itself, to bend down and taste to the water and its flow and recite a haiku that it will never go there again or be there twice (let alone thrice) and will never in fact even be here even as you're seeing it , at least as long as we insist of differentiating the capillaries of the body from those veiny conduits of the terrestrial flows flooding up to bring closure. I will sit here just a little longer to listen and remember and let the light come in and show me all the dust of skin and dirt dancing an eternal enchantment with the invisible pressures of the etheric ocean, and I will smile at the image of it and the knowledge of its real-ness and the wisdom of its perpetuity and of the absurdity of my own reverie and let out a loud fart and get on with it.

1. MAKE LISTS FOR VARIOUS SUBJECTS (AS YOU LOVE TO DO ALREADY)

   a. THE SELF

   b. Ö PROJECT

   c. PERPETEIA METASCROLL

   d. COLLAGE PRACTICE

   i.  AND LATER.....
   
       1.  ENERGY CONDUIT SCULPTURES
   
       2.  PHOTOGRAPHY ALA INSTAGRAM
   
       3.  WRITINGS
   
       4.  ALL PREVIOUS PROJECTS IN THE ARCHIVE
   

2. COMPILE A FOLDER OF VISUAL KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

   a. MODERN INFORMATION

   b. ARCHAIC WISDOM

   c. TECHNICAL SCHEMATICS

   d. BIOLOGICAL BODIES

   e. BOTANICAL ECOLOGIES

   f. LINGUISTIC ARCHITECTURES

   g. PHILOSOPHICAL COSMOGONIES

3. IMPORT SYSTEM IMAGES INTO ILLUSTRATOR TO TRACE THE FLOW OF DATA/ENERGY THROUGH THE SYSTEM

   a. ADAPT DIFFERENT MEANS OF DISPLAY INTO VARIOUS FORMAL SYSTEMS

   b. CONSIDER DIMENSIONAL REPRESENTATION THROUGH SKEWING, CONTORTING AND LAYERING c. APPLY APPROPRIATE DATA FROM (1) INTO THE SYSTEM

   d. INTERCONNECT SEPARATE SUBJECTS INTO A META-SYSTEM OF UNIFIED KNOWLEDGE

4. COPY+PASTE GRAPHICAL LAYOUTS INTO HTML WITH MUSE

   a. EACH NODAL POINT OF THE NETWORK BECOMES AN IFRAME OR OTHER LINK TO MULTIMEDIA CONTENT b. SUMMARIZE EACH POINT WITH BRIEF "SEARCH CRITERIA POETRY"

   c. DESIGN WEB-SPECIFIC ALGORITHMS FOR EACH/VARIOUS NODES TO DRAW TOPICAL CONTENT FOR EACH SUBJECT FROM AUTOMATED SEARCHES VIA RSS FEEDS, GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCHES, ETC. d. UTILIZE THE HYPERTEXT AND DIMENSIONAL LAYERING ELEMENTS OF THE INTERNET TO MODEL AN INFORMATION ECOLOGY OF MY SELF IN RELATION TO ALL OF MY PROJECTS, THEN CONTEXTUALIZE THAT ARTISTIC SYSTEM TO AN EXPANDED KNOWLEDGE-BASED DIALOGUE, WHICH RELATES TO AN EXPANDED CONSIDERATION OF KNOWLEDGE IN GENERAL

THE SELF IS AN INFINITELY HOT WHITE DOT WITH NO OTHER NAME

There is an infinitely white hot dot swimming in a sea of sadness swirling in saccharine sensations, yet drowning nonetheless for lack of anchor. The sediment of the shoreline is stacked into a neatly frosted cake, an eternally eroding wall of chocolate reverie and butterscotch imagination goo-ing through the blindly feeling claws and cementing the topologies enlaid in the fingertips. Time becomes sand in more than a metaphor but less than a shot glass full of itself -- or is it half full or was it half empty? There is a body out there - and in here too - and they are different, which is to say differentiated but not distinct, which is to say delineated by boundaries but fused at the pupils, which is to say that declaring a separation at all is only to point towards the abysmal schism cutting ever deeper downwards into the infinitely regressive musculature of the calcified consonants upon which we both stand without appreciating its warmth let alone recognize the elegant proportions of the hairy toed feetsies levitating just micrometers above the atomic structure of hydraulic psychic energies pulsating through flimsy lattice holding all the materials together. Here is a single reductive unit with no map to chart it, an isolated pixel liberated from the screen, a frequency drawing a sinusoidal wellspring just out of earshot, an existential unit of concentration with so many names that the chanting of them in sequence would destroy the universe if not for already birthing it; but hummed through which throat, toned through which hole, making or breaking what scrim if not of the diffuse membrane delineating an inside that somehow smells different from the vessel which contains it? Where are all the edges?

AND THE TIRES ROLL OVER ITS NAME

Then

We are driving down a road. Or maybe up. We are driving on a road made perfectly straight, in a process of straightening by our involvement with it, through a landscape imperfectly curved, becoming increasingly curvaceous as we observe it. We are driving on a road composed of an infinitesimal quantity of perfectly spherical white hot dots which have become dented, fractured, blackened and tarred through time or tires or tired talks about tyrannies. We are driving as a unit with a front and a back that is all middle. We are moving as a single animal with multiple independent heads always eating while being eaten, numerous flailing feet stumbling through their stepping, eyes fixated only on seeing themselves seeing each other seeing fixated eyes, a body with no organs because they were shat out and buried back there beside that last waterfall in a flagrant attempt to displace the ravenous hungers of corporeal desire into the solid stone stovepipes of the belching earth. We are driving on this road -- here and now -- made of the same black rock as the land surrounding it -- there and over there -- and it's a miracle that the eye of the driver can differentiate between the stable surfaces of evenly laid impediments and the silty salted soils washing up on either side whispering their slow volcanic hymnals of beginnings and endings beyond human comprehension. We are driving so the wheels are revolving a guttural whurl, up through the polyester foam seats, up through our quivering primate tails padded with fatty polysaccharides, up into the insulated cranial dome to shake the granulated thought-forms into a slow simmer just steamy enough to make us forget our names and directions. We are driving and the wheels are turning and pulling the road underneath gripping the hot black rock perspiring molten amniotic fluids spinning faster and then slower the entire planet through the dense dark mass of the universe like the salted licorice morsel rolling over the tongue of the Icelandic nymph staring back from one car over. We are driving while looking out from within our heads loosely tied to outer bodies, out through eyes gazing eternally an eternity just outside the window, out onto a charred molasses blanket drinking up the light out of the sky, out into an encroaching wall of pure neutral gray moisture quickly approaching and then we are in it and all the color is digested in the gunmetal atmosphere and all the sounds absorb into the cotton swabs of the cloud outside which is now permeating in and for a minute there was no color and no sound and no time and the line delineating life from death was dissolved into a continuum no less clear though no more muddled as it had ever been, just more gray. We were driving through a mass of fog and could no longer see the midnight road or blood-ore dirt-scape or the salty licorice tongue licking itself, or the images of foam rubber ass forms hurdling through space or precision manufactured components reticulating a trajectory by way of the satellite kino-eye-in-the-sky, but for a minute could only feel the weight of the minute and see the fog and hear ourselves hearing.

You there!

Looking out into the sea onto the salted seize I see I see an iceberg which seems to carry my name with it. I address it directly: "You, there, frozen gargantua, melting gently in the arctic sun, cracking violent pores into your own face in order to speak the sounds of ancient glacial spirits being liberated from their tombs, a tome of being for being erosion, how do I pronounce your name?" It stares blankly, holding still in the sapphire waters as I wade closer, radiating out elliptical orbits of moiré ripples out from some unclear center, and I continue: "You or we, which is it? You, there, imposter of the river, deceiver of the sliding slopes, are you friend or foe? You, there, gliding along nonchalant chanting that churning song, carver of terrestrial cadavers with no remorse, cypher of colloidal cryptologies, show me your essence and give it a name!" At that moment -- or perhaps at some other -- a sunbeam fell from the heavens to ricochet off the crystalline peaks of icy blue water rolling out over the glacial lake to burn molten ultraviolet embers into my iris and it was at that precise moment that I became aware of it - of the moment and my awareness of it - and decided to immediately forget it again. And then it spoke: "You, there, I eye-ing this body with no mind which is me but not mine, from where do you speak and from what are you asking? You, there, on the shore sculpted from slithering dance, how is it that you are so sure of standing straight and where do you perceive of these differences? Here, these cellular units of liquid made brittle, they are active in their own dismantling in order to flow down towards the center, calmly and collectively, which is always the path of least resistance, and will someday achieve such a levity of transparency as to transpire into breath and rise up in being, being-becoming active, becoming not like but of those clouds there, here, to spin freely in an atmosphere with no poetry and no choreography, rising to the zenith of the universe to hold council with the sun singing itself soliloquy, ultimately and eternally then falling back to the cooler peaks up there on the mountain of hot liquid core pushing up and out in a hydraulic piston of unfurling exchange. You, there, purporting to stand in deathly defiance, how do you see your having an out or a within, how is it drawn or scripted? You, there, why not stop drawing up the well and drop into wellspring, refrain from filling vessels in order to conduct a conference of clarity without constricting consonants? You, there, you are not the you you lead yourself to you-ing, and your you is not so much there as here, which is not everywhere but where-ever." I took a few steps back out of the water and back up onto the shoreline. I removed my clothes and laid them out on the rocks to dissipate. I repeated my own name over and over in my mind until it became only sound and was forced to speak it, but it came out only as ripples. I looked down to confirm that my feet were still on the shore but saw only a thousand eyes of river-smoothed-stone staring back up through my iris sun and became a revelation and was here.

****

Here

I have a name and it is zero that this is how your pronounce it in this language: "____." There are also many other names - which you may or may not be able to pronounce -- for all of the many voices which I have, which I am, which are the I's within me, which I use and which use me, which are me but other, a being and a becoming and a becoming-other and a being-other. I have only one name and it is zero, which is an exercise in precision, an articulate periphery around the void, a Roman numeral but I am no Roman of unconscious collective oracular living, living to regret it, knowing all about straight roads where every straight road leads home to property and power owned by brothers and fathers and our shared deceits poured back into the oracle. No, just zero, an algorithmic zero of celestial calculus, a mathematical negation appropriated from the cabbala, the navel of the universe from which the Yggdrasil is sprung, a degree-zero of language which is more of absence than negation though inherently and inextricably always-already both, a temperature at which flux becomes stillness, the locus of interlocution, not an imaginary center but the probability cloud where such a point might be located. I inherited this name from those that came before and I live in relation to their lives, and of course I could reject it in order to take up another, but I use it with intention as a reference point so that we can keep talking about something and avoid lingering too long on nothing, so let's not stay here. It's my real name in every sense of the word real, and name, and sense, and word.

I read the second chapter of your book first, then I read the first chapter second, and then I read the second chapter again, third, but the third has yet to be read, yet as in not yet, but it will be forth. The first chapter was actually read to me, to the extent that we might refer to the text-to-speech feature of my computer as "reading," and I think you will appreciate the irony of the synthesized voice being named ___. Yes so ___ -- the synthetic ___ -- read me the first chapter last night while I prepared food and everything was going just peachy keen until ___ reached the part of the text that is spelled out phonetically, or rather written to read the way it would have been spoken, with all the lingering residues of apostrophes and other half-incised punctuations sweetening the tea. When ___ reached this point in the text there was a collective wide-eyed pause instilled within all of the human beings present, which quickly transitioned into a mild hysteria and increasing throb of horror dispersed through the room, manifested in the shrill antagonisms (or were they agonisms?) of ___ most notably.

Interlude.

Just interrupted by ___ rolling up on a dilapidated bicycle. We discussed the dissociative experience of being nestled in mountains, signifying a ripping away from the body of civilization reminiscent of the dissociation experienced through psychedelic drugs. Or is is disassociation? Dis-association as in a reorientation of personal associations to self or things, or dis-sociation or even dis-socialization which perhaps refers more to the self being removed from a collectivized body? Perhaps both. Seydisfjurdur as a psychoactive state that one can dose. Then we stumbled upon -- quite by chance -- our mutual appreciation for dextromethorphan hydrobromide, or DXM, the primary dissociative drug found in over-the-counter cough suppressant syrup known commonly as Robitussin. Apparently we both have taken this poor-mans-ketamine countless times and find it to be a defining presence in forming our positions on privilege, which adds intrigue to the fact that we have such different articulations of such a position. We also swapped stories, almost in the same breath but in different meters, of how we had recently -- independently of the other -- taken walks up into the mountain, up onto a crest which neither of us had transcended to previously, different crests on different journeys to the same mountain, and had found ourselves trapped as we were unable to figure out a way back down again. Of course there was always the option of going back the way we came, but I for one couldn't help but think of your prerogative to never go back that way, the way you had come, and I in my own quest felt determined to only go forward and not backwards, which, up there on the ridge, led me to contemplate what and how and why this might be, or at least what it might amount to. If you walk up a mountain, by visible path or blind intuition, perhaps you would agree that there is an experience of ascension to ever great platitudes of physical endurance and mental clarity associated to the geographic stacking of mineral striations, of the Y axis, the vertical conveyor, climbing ever closer to the zenith of the physical world which somehow connects although perhaps only psychically to the cerebral zenith point of clairvoyant apperception. Through the breathing, the pausing, the small achievements of this plane or this rock, there are likewise earned small shifts in perception, creating a felt correlation between the muscles pushing the body up the sheer rock wall and the immaterial musculature of thought as it expands and contracts its faculties in its own silently exasperating struggle to achieve clarity. I have my best epiphanies at the crest of ascendant bodies. Even the smallest hills are ripe with intimate nuances of reverie -- have you ever read Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space wherein the author describes the psycho-somatic affects of corners, of columns, of staircases in relation to the crevices of memory? Anyways, up there on the mountain today -- and I must say it was a particularly warm and bright and in every way goddamn gooey syrupy saccharine pleasant day -- I was struck with the thought that I couldn't go back, wouldn't allow myself to retract my own path, and must indeed set a course directly ahead, over the precipice, over the edge of reason, over that limit beyond which I could not walk comfortably or even like the human being that I believed myself to be but more as a crab, a sheep with bilateral cloven hooves, a spider with maybe eight or more legs spreading out in every direction, some physical and some mental, crawling over the purple rock on my back looking up into certain doom. I slipped and spilt all the beans and paused for a minute to watch small boulders weighing at least as much of my own meat puppet loosen from the hillside and roll down, roll all the fucking way down, and in my mind projection could clearly see myself doing the same with one small twitch of foul judgement. Well, I made it of course, with only a few scratches and bruises and none the wiser to be sure, but even now it seems to have been an important decision to have gone ahead. ___ on the other hand had discovered an artificial wall up near the SEYDISFJURDUR sign that appears to have been built to prevent avalanches, the idea of which sent us both into an uncontrollable laughter as we contemplated the futility of such an embarrassingly human gesture.

End of Interlude.

Yes hmmm conversations yes. I want to conduct conversations with you and transcribe them into ruinous diatribes that shake the terra firma of the masses, and also weave them into delicate tapestries that hang loosely over the decaying flesh of the smoldering corpse of postmodern apathy, or at least call attention to the smell, and also perhaps mold some into cement blocks to which we can tie the delirious hopes of ignorant privileged upper-middle castes - and for our own amusements also, as voyeurs and interlocutors - watch them sink all the way to the bottom, that theoretical bottom which both of us knows doesn't really exist. And the audio books, don't forget, I really want to make those happen. And the cover for your book, I want to help with that. I really like your writing by the way, the style and the content, a hard combination to find satisfaction in these days. How many more chapters are there? And your tape loops, I think we should make a polished cassette tape release for my tape label and plan on printing covers for that when we all return to SayThisFührer this winter. And perhaps some kind of tripartite collaboration is called for as well, between you+___+myself? ___ and I are currently preparing a collaboration performance for an "exhibition" (oh the horror) we are having at the HEIMA house on Friday. He will effect/affect my voice through his pedal chain while I read some of the more -- ahem -- "aggressive" texts I have been producing (for this particular scenario the aggression will be leveraged against the seeming-apathy of the Swiss nincompoops down the way, whom despite my attempts to prevent such a thing from happening have left a rather sour taste in my mouth. Perhaps I am just ripe for the marauding and need any excuse for a target and they are the only fitting fodder at hand. Anyways, not a one-off, but an edition, but yeah let's do the one-offs too. I love the handmade paper from Kathmandu but I think I love the story more than the material, and the cement. We need to research some artist book/ephemera collections that we can send our non-editions too whom will hold them gently and turn them over quietly in a time capsule and lend an air of silent sophistication to our otherwise delinquent dialectic. I think they need to be seen and heard and handled, but not owned or kept, a kind of secret in plain view that you will only ever see if you are looking but could also very well stumble over.

My own book is coming along nicely. I'm figuring it out and ironing out the creases even as I'm making new ones, creases that is. As it currently stands I've distilled a system of language based on cuneiform -- the triangles and lines that almost-ancient (presumably) men pushed into wet clay that comprises the earliest form of known type -- and have compiled a taxonomy of every known figure, abstracted into a vector graphic with some subtle unperceivable alterations to make them more archetypal. Alongside this I am developing a new color theory, a theory of tactile color, based upon the notion that vision is not purely passive but palpable, a sense which reaches out of the body and interacts with the object in a dance of mutual exchange rather than just a spongey mass of rods and cones condensed into a pupil. The proto-linguistic glyphs are being joined at their intersections to model the self-making (autopoietic) structures of cellular automata, with the end product looking like some kind of post-LSD Mondrian broadway boogie woogie mixed with the schematic circuits of an alien technology... very satisfying. Then I've collected a series of symbols derived from some alchemical occult text, each pattern representing a person and a sound and material and a poetic tangent, as alchemy is prone to do. These symbols, encapsulated into circles, are then composed into "meta-forms" of bifold symmetry, akin to the Metatron cube made up of Platonic solids (like those adorning my digits) which we were looking at one night. Circles of symbols building up a lattice of larger circular symbolism which represent two-dimensions of information coagulating on a three-dimensional axiometric perspectivalism of the universe, spun through the velocity of time. Finally, this multi-tiered system of abstraction will be presented as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with content, which I will eventually (probably tomorrow) top off to the brim with textures pulled from the internet hyper-consciousness at our disposal. Images of wildflowers, mineralogical specimens, and colonial snail shells (imported from Spain to combat the other invasive species of aptly named "murder slugs") will be inserted into this model architecture of archetypal forms to function as maquette for the sculptures which I am already making, emphasis on the already making as I see this whole goddamn book to be a kind of reverse engineering of my thought process in the same way that designs for top-of-the-line VCRs are made economically viable through utilizing shit components and slave labor. Ok, not exactly the same thing, but in the same vein.

Like I said earlier, today was a most magnificent day out here at the edge of the world. I spent all day at the table outside, and in fact I'm still sitting here now as I write this to you. While basking in the sun I wrote a text, which I will attach along with this one, concerning the same theme that I have been building upon -- the self as an infinitely white hot dot -- but this time oriented towards the context, namely that of a proverbial table setting.

Second Interlude.

While writing this letter to you it was demanded of me that I attempt to read the aforementioned text outloud, so I will attach this recording instead. Immediately following this reading we commenced to drink copious quantities of beer while rehearsing the above mentioned collaborative reading/noise project, then ___ mysteriously appeared and drank the rest of the beers, then I got far too drunk and giddy like a fucking sloppy teenager and giggle fucked myself while trying to tell idiot anecdotes of my worthless autobiographic escapades and for a minute felt bad then let it all slide and felt better then ate some chili peanuts and felt worse then work up still drunk which feels pretty fucking O-K since the sun is out again and I feel like I have somehow gone full circle, straight ahead, in spite of the clocks and calculators to end up back where I started but changed and so much for the better for not having turned back.

End of Interlude.

End it as abruptly as it began.

1. TABLE OF CONTENTS

   a. COMPOSED OF APPROPRIATED CONTENTS FROM OTHER BOOKS: REICH, MILLER, DOSTOEVSKY, DERRIDA, DE CHARDIN, STEINER, CALVINO, BORGES b. FOOTNOTES TO THE BACK OF THE BOOK

2. FOOT NOTES

   a. SYMBOLS USED INSTEAD OF NUMBERS OR LETTERS

   b. QUOTATIONS PUT THROUGH THE BLENDER

   c. POETIC FRAGMENTS AND REDIRECTIONS INSERTED

   d. SYMBOLS SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE BOOK -- ASSOCIATED TO IMAGES

   e. REPEATED SYMBOLS

3. CRYPTOGRAPHY OF THE MIND

   a. LETTERS/GLYPHS COLLECTED INTO A TABLE TAXONOMY

   b. MOLECULAR UNITS OF EXISTENTIAL CONCENTRATION

   c. LETTER>SOUND>FREQUENCY

   d. LETTER>WORD>LANGUAGE

   e. GLYPH>PICTOGRAM>VISION

   f. FORM>PROPORTION>SYMMETRY>MIND DRAWING ITSELF = TULPA, STUPA, TABULA RASA, ARCHETYPES, COSMIC GEOMETRY g. WRITING>CALLIGRAPHY>STYLE

   h. WRITING>CUNEIFORM>HAND>BODY FEELING ITSELF = BRAILLE, FINGERPRINTS, HIEROGLYPHS i. WORD>NAME>TAXONOMY

   j. NAME > MEANING > BEING

   k. SYMBOL > SYSTEM > MAP > TERRITORY > MODEL

4. A THEORY OF PALPABLE COLOR FIELDS

   a. HARMONIES > MIXING > GRADIENTS

   b. COLOR -- FREQUENCY + FORMAL SYSTEM OF RADIATION (PARTICLE/WAVE OSCILLATION) = PHYSICAL THEORY OF COLOR TACTILITY c. NON-VISUAL SENSE OF CHROMA = HEAT, TELEKINESIS (FEELING BEING SEEN, SENSE IN THE EXPANDED FIELD), PSYCHIC RESIDUES (ORGONE CONDENSATION, BACHELARD'S POETIC OF PHYSICAL OBJECTS AFFECTING MEMORY), PSYCHOSOMATIC (NOT SYNESTHIC) ASSOCIATION = INSTERSTITIAL SENSES BETWEEN THE PRIMARIES (EXTRA-, OMNI-, META-, ALT-,) d. THE PROBLEM OF EVERYTHING/NOTHING IN PHENOMENOLOGY: LIMITATIONS OF THE SENSUAL FIELD

5. GRADE A DIAGRAMMATIC EXISTENTIAL UNITS OF CONCENTRATION

   a. RUDIMENTARY DIAGRAMS MADE FROM COMBINATIONS OF GLYPHS -- WORD COLLAGE AKA POETRY FRAGMENTS -- AGGLOMERATION OF CONSONANTS b. MICRO-MACRO OSCILLATION OF FOCUS -- FOCAL POINT = CURSOR-Y PROPRIOCEPTION c. 2D FRAMEWORK = WINDOW/PORTAL/FRAME = SCREEN SENSE

   d. GRID LAYOUT = PERCEPTION THROUGH DESIGN LANGUAGE = PRIMORDIAL FORMALISM e. CARTOGRAPHICAL CORPUS > FEELING A COMPRESSION OF MULTISENSORIAL EXPERIENCE INTO A FLATLAND OF MENTAL PROJECTION > CONTAINER FOR GEOGRAPHIC SENSE = WE DRAW THE MAP WHILE IT DRAWS OUR SENSE OF GEOGRAPHY f. SELF AS A UNIT -- MOLECULAR SUBJECTIVITY -- ALGORITHMS OF SELF-MAKING (AUTOPOIESIS) -- CELLULAR AUTOMATA OF THE CELLULATED SELF g. DIFFUSION OF REFLEXIVE CENTER (IMBEDDING, IMPREGNATING) INTO THE SURROUNDING/IMMERSED ECOLOGY = THE SELF AS A MORPHOGENIC PROBABILITY CLOUD h. EPICENTER OF TRANSMUTATION: ALCHEMICAL LIQUIDS OF THE BODY (MUCUS, SALIVA, PHLEGM, SHIT, BREATH/ETHER), TRANSMUTATION OF PHYSICAL STATES (CALIFICATION/MINERALIZATION OF THE BONES, BOILING IRON JUICES OF THE ARTERIES, MYCELLIAL STRANDS OF THE "CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM," THE PRODUCTION OF TISSUES AS THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF LIFE? i. MANDALAS, TULPAS, SPIRITUAL FORMALISM, TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETICS, TREE OF LIFE, AXIS MUNDI, "PEOPLING"

6. GRADE B EUOC : DIMENSIONAL PROJECTION OFF THE FLATLANDS ONTO A 3D PRIMARY FORM

   a. STRATIFICATION : UNIVERSE AS A BODY

   b. RITUALIZED OBJECTS, PHALLIC/YONIC FORMS, COSMIC NAVEL

   c. VESSELS, VASES, URNS, CAPSULES = RELATION TO MEMORY, TRADITION, RITUAL d. HYBRIDIZED MODELS OF HIERCHICAL STRATIFICATION: ATOMIC, CELLULAR, COSMIC (TREE), ONTOLOGICAL PLATEAUS, MILLE PLATEAUX e. INTERACTION OF INTERNAL PROCESSES DETERMINE THE EXTERNAL FORM: CREATION OF THE BODY, THE CODEX OF ALL POSSIBLE FORMS FOUND IN THE METATRON CUBE = LANGUAGE DESCRIBING ITSELF f. ECOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK: TECTONIC SHIFTING (CONTINENTS), OCEAN OF SEPARATION, ATMOSPHERE WHICH COMPARTMENTALIZES/ENCAPSULATES STATIFICATION SUBTERRANEAN AND BIOSPHERIC (NOOSPHERIC) g. UTILIZE TACTILE THEORY OF COLOR: MULTIDIMENSIONAL FOCUS THROUGH FREQUENCY SPACES COMPILING AND COMPACTING INTO

7. GRADE C EUOC: FORMS PUT INTO SYSTEMATIC RELATION TO EACH OTHER

   a. ORGANIZATION IN SPACE -- "INTERIOR/EXTERIOR DESIGN"

   b. ARCHITECTURAL RENDERINGS: THE OBJECT AS A TEMPLE, HOME, BUILDING, CAVE, DOMICILE, WOMB c. MODEL OF THE OTHER: USEFUL TOOL FOR MENTAL AND PHYSICAL FOCUS : USEFUL ANTI-COMMODITY : PSYCHIC FUNCTIONALISM d. UNIFICATION/CONDENSATION INTO A SINGULARITY: TRANSCENDENTAL WORLDS, LILLIPUTIAN WORLDS-WITHIN-WORLDS

8. DIGITAL COLLAGES OF EXISTENTIAL UNIT OF CONCENTRATION

   a. ARTWORK MADE FROM INTERNET TEXTURES : BIOLOGICAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL b. INSERTION OF CONTENT INTO THE PRE-DESCRIBED SYSTEM

9. SCULPTURES OF ENERGY CONDUITS AS FUNCTIONAL OBJECTS: ORGONE GENERATORS

10. RUBRIC/LEGEND TO ACCOMPANY EACH SYSTEM

    a. MUST BE DESIGNED WITHOUT TEXT (OR USED ONLY POETICALLY)

    i.  ASSOCIATED TO FOOTNOTES WITH SYMBOLS
    

    b. EXPLAINS INTERRELATIONS OF EACH LEVEL OF FOCUS MAGNIFICATION -- TIES TO TABLE OF CONTENTS c. ASSOCIATES INTERNET IMAGES TO MEANING: LIBERATION!

11. TAXONOMIES OF FORMS: EXISTENTIAL UNITS OF CONCENTRATION OBSERVED FROM VARIOUS SCALES

    a. KNOLLED PAGES OF ALL POSSIBLE FORMS: GLYPHS, COLORS, BIO/BOT/GEO ARRANGEMENTS, MOLDS, RESINS AND CATALYSTS, PRIMARY FORMS, PIECES OF OTHER ORGONE GENERATORS b. GRADIENTS AS HARMONIES AS FREQUENCIES AS WAVES/LENGTHS AS LANGUAGE AS MATERIALS AS MODELS OF THE BODY AS VESSELS OF PSYCHIC FLUIDS DRAWING THEMSELVES THROUGH MATERIALS AS REFLECTIONS OF THE SELF = ETHERIC DOUBLING

PRODUCTION ORDER:

TITLE PAGE

FALSIFIED TABLE OF CONTENTS

THEORY OF TACTILE COLOR -- RUBRIC/LEGEND

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS?

GLYPH TAXONOMY

GLYPH COLLAGES

METAGLYPH TAXONOMY

METAGLYPH COLLAGES

DIAGRAMS (SYMBOLS) TAXONOMY

DIAGRAM COLLAGES 2D -- MANDALA FOCAL POINTS

DIAGRAM COLLAGES 3D/4D -- AXIS MUNDI TREES

PRIMARY FORM TAXONOMY

VESSEL FORM TAXONOMY

VESSEL FORM COLLAGES -- RADIANT STRIATIONS

DIGITAL TEXTURE COLLAGES

SCANNED PHYSICAL COLLAGES

SCULPTURE DOCUMENTATION

FOOTNOTES

There is this thing which is not a thing as it is me so is not outside of my self but is my self, is the self of a particular designation which delineates the me-ness from the otherness of the universe unfolding like cloth, being sewn and tattered, fringed and creased incessantly by its own nimble irons, with edges ordained with a delicate filigree of doily lattice depicting the epigenetic mythology of primary tones and primary bones, yellowed on the edges but racing towards infinity like its going out of style, stacked neatly into piles and knolled onto the shelves of the cosmic cabinet painted in that absorptive carbon black which neither absorbs nor repells any radiant energy but just stands motionless upon its own impediment, sits upon itself, ass to forehead glued through a magnetic inversion beyond our comprehension but not really because its kinda like the doughnut hole of the magnum equinox, and its out there somewhere but also just right here, exactly where I'm sitting while I explain it to you. And there you are. You're sitting there receiving these smoke signals, across the plate, on the other side of the table -- the first and the last table, just imagine it standing on the idealized axis of (capital) X and (capital) Y and (capital) Z and (capital) N, but no that should be (lowercase) n because that particular glyph of the algorithm doesn't designate a specific variable but allows for the allocation of uncertainty, it is the principality of pure uncertainty distilled into a single unit and added to our algorithm representing space and time and that expanding space between zenith and nadir so that we can remember that this ground is granulated, that the bedrock is surfing the magma lakes from which it spawned, that this house too will come down one day, we spend our whole lives walking across X/Y axis of forest corpses laid neatly into rows and mollusk graveyards cementing prehistoric life into the dormant sidewalk asphalt brutalist grid that holds all the sneaker soles and chewing gum discharges of the world. And there you are, sitting or standing on the other side of our carbon black slate table-cabinet, our tabula rasa chess board, so to speak, but then speak because I seem to be doing all the talking! No conversation can be had with one voice resonating in its own skull. This page, this vessel of ink and dead trees, of cuniform cum and pressed papyrus, of that same carbon black infinite nothingness - of the table which is getting all over the hands and smudging the forehead as the writing finger searches in the darkness for the stray hairs falling into the starry skied jelly pupils seeing nothing yet -- this black carbon drawn upon the whiteness of imagination, or whatever other color you want to describe that goo permeating out from the mind but no it must be white because we haven't seen anything yet not even each other and color comes rushing in from reflections and refractions and from the dying song of the sun committing its martyrdom of doom at the center, an eternal suicidal ballet throwing out beginnings like seeds into the desert of the real, shoots that will dart up to differentiate into every chroma even those beyond our own eyes - which we have yet to utilize -and making seeds of their own to disperse in the aetheric winds riding a little song of life conquering the lands through blatant siege, yes a war song of the living, the labor chant of cells lined up along the assembly line manufacturing metabolic juices, nucleotides of the apocalypse, stretching and flexing and holding on to each other in the formation of mitochondria, that primary animal living from whence our instinctive drive to hunt and bite and eat and shit is sourced. But we can't give these microscopic stomachs the credit of murder, of war, of morals or of madness, no those are all distinctly human characteristics, but we're not quite there yet. Ok, so there you are sitting over there across the way, across the table, this very black table, this table of infinite blackness that we are holding fast to not fall into, do you see it? No of course you don't because its a fucking impossibly black infinitely expansive metaphor for all that which exists beyond our comprehension, so stop looking at the fucking table and look at me. Here we are, sitting here, oh yes so we are sitting didn't I say? But not on chairs, there's no room for chairs, because if we put some chairs in here then I have to describe the rest of the room, assuming we are in a room, and then I have to keep telling this story about how the table is in the middle and the chairs are on either side and they are positioned this way so we can observe each other while conversing, to visually validate through corporeal twitches, facial contortions mimicking primordial masks, digits counting ticks and tocks on immaterial clocks, hands waving about through the atmosphere like rulers and levels and compasses and barometers and geiger counters measuring a falsified topology, and all these other little quiverings of our meat puppets as they look at each other through these pathetic compound eyes that can only differentiate a million or so colors but really if we are honest only a couple hundred and to be even more honest there's only like 10 fucking colors that we can identify before the whole goddamn system of chromatic radiation breaks down into an agonizing abstraction of tints and shades, dyes and pigments, mineralogy and geomancy, acetone distillates and acrylic derivatives, basically into the constraining materialism that science likes to shackle itself to like the Marque de Sade lashing the other inmates of the asylum in pure writhing ecstasy but also secretly hoping that they respond with at least equal if not greater tortures in order to derive twice pleasures and then thrice pleasures through the writing down of the experience knowing full well that the books will be banned and burned and the song of his legend will be memorized and his fecundated body will dissolve into the etheric eternal historical ghost rendering him eternal life through literature and labyrinthine libel. Old miser Marque isn't a sick fuck pervert he's just the antichrist, the black hole to your sun which you insist of burning eternal you goddamn fool, the self-lacerating sage of the present of which we are all in denial, just being himself, pure and simple, which is what we should all be striving to attain, for it's not the individual which must be normalized (What terror! What horror!) but the social body which must decentralize, de-homogenize, de-evolve all sense of biological standards, self-medicate through a healthy dose of ecstatic eccentricity to nutrify the numbness of nullifying tedium, to push in a suppository supplement of Bataille's nonknowledge through the solar anus. Fuck, fuck it, what the fuck was I talking about? Who am I? Who are you? Where are we? Ah but it doesn't fucking matter because we are sharing a meal -- ya gotta eat! -- but first we have to finish setting the table. Put down the cloth, that plain white plane of consistency, then place a single candle in the middle. It's a fucking metaphor, roll with it. Then we can lay out the china and cutlery... what, no porcelain? The forks or knives? Of course not we're starting from scratch so everything must be made. I'll stay here and craft some plates. Don't worry about what they will look like or how they will be glazed, this is the first plate we are talking about so it can only take one form, that of plate-ness defined by its not being cup-ness or bowl-ness or serving-tray-ness or table-ness or me-ness or you-ness. I'll reach down and grab some clay, that earthen musculature existing somewhere between solid and liquid, and try to feel out this form locked within its own material limits. When it has found its shape, when it has discovered itself and solidified into its form, again, a kind of primary form of essential plate-y-ness, well then we can throw it in the fire to char out its being, to incinerate all those algaes and worms and mollusks and anthropodal memories squirming around in the slimy silt, to singe out the life of the thing in a ritualistic cleansing that purges the life force energy fields permeating through all that exists -- which at this moment is me and you and this carbon black slate table with no legs -- and instigate a becoming-of-thing-ness which is so essential for the pleasant dinner conversation we are about to engage in. We burn the clay to fire the ceramic and define the first plate: we kill the matter to reconsider it material for the crafting of objects which are deserving of their names, desiring for participation in our inaction of naming, differentiating from self -- mine and yours, if there's a difference -- and from the other clay and soils and firmas and firmaments, from the blackness of the table into a prism of colors which only the luminous fire can cast upon the mineralogical miasma. Ok ok, you get it, it's an object and we made it and we named it and we use it and that right there, right here, in this plate, embodied in this fucking first plate which is not a body but a thing, not a mirror reflecting back our image but a cerebral vessel that holds nothing except the epitome of difference, whispering always-already that there is a difference, even if only between its plate-ness and the you-ness calling out its name (with a tongue we have yet to describe. So now your turn... hmmm? What's that? You say you don't believe in originality, in creation mythologies, in novelty theory? Well this isn't going to be much of a dinner party if you can't comprehend the idea that all of this shit in the world -- I mean the world out there, beyond the scope of these pages, that real fucking table that's sitting on that real fucking floor held up by the real fucking world and all the shit-dome humans that built it all up -- that all of that was made and is still being made through our use of it, by our objectifying and object-I-fying it, through the naming and the referencing and the printing of encylopedias and the servers being protected in their earthquake-proof temperature-controlled high-security bunkers (yeah ya know even the internet has a material body). So get your head out of your ass and place it gently back on the forehead so we can get on with it, yah, because I know I'm just sitting here talking to my self but that gets really fucking boring if I can't at least imagine some other across the table to direct these words which may or may not be heard, not to mention resuscitated in response or repose. Get on with it then, that you which is not you but me but not me either more of just some other and not I: why don't you make us some forks then? Ah yes but there's no metal only the prima materia of carbon and the whiteness of the immaterial cloth (which we didn't make remember but merely unfolded) and the violent violet radiations permeating out from the candle in the center, sooooooo I guess you will have to make some, make some metal that is. Find some iron, here ya go, yeah it smells like blood and that's what it is, it's the same stuff but now they both have been named so there's a difference so it's not, not the same I mean, anyways we have that iron which smells like blood and it's solid, check, yup, so throw it on the fire and see what happens. Bubble bubble boil boil and now look and see all that shit foaming and frothing at the surface and rising up and making us light headed! That's right, metal is a material state achieved through the precision of human distillation, which is not to say that its unnatural, and all those impurities which we call impurities because they can be separated from the purity of the iron, which is in fact an illusion of scale and refracted phenomenology, well they aren't really impurities but just other materials, other ores, other potential metals to the extent that we can dream up new metal names for them and continue our oh-so-human taxonomy of states. Let's put that impurity up on the shelf... oh, wait, yeah, we didn't make a shelf yet, we haven't even mentioned one before, ok well fuck it then just throw it over there for now, out of sight out of mind what? Ok so next we scrape off a little bit of carbon from the ol' infinitely black slab sitting here -- it's carbon remember? -- and we toss that into the bubbling mass and voila there's a spark and there's some new colors and there's a material which didn't exist before or at least we don't recognize it so let's give it a new name. We can call it steal since we just fucking stole it from the universe with our human ingenuity, and I dedicate it to you in support of your theory of un-originality, which is not to say that I believe it or even entertain it for a second, but what would a dinner party be without a little intoxicated rivalry eh eh eh? Ok so we have this new material and we made it or we stole it -- whatever -- and we are gonna make a fork out of it and we know just how to do that already because there's an essential fork-ness in everything but it wasn't until we made this new stolen steal that we were able to realize the becoming-being of the forking fork-ness, so go ahead and make it, pull it out of there, reach in and grab it and hold on and keep rubbing it and turning it over and wiping away the fuzz until that fork is there in your hand. "Realize" it, so to speak. What is that which we spoke? What is that saying you are saying, what are we saying, that we realize a form? Comprehend a material, a material system of relations? That can't be right, but it is of course, that the mind and material are not really and/or but is, that is to say was/will be (can't we just use them synonymously?), that mind is material and matter makes mind so these thoughts could be said to be realizing themselves in an infinite jest, the same as the plate coming cuming came from plate-ness came from clay came from primary solids, the same as the steal stolen from the iron which is and is not blood which is certainly an ore which is to say a tincture a mixture a condensation of impurities which can never really become pure but always-already diluted and mixed with other substances which may or may not be primary in form or content. Everyone is talking about alchemy, alchemy as a metaphor or an allegory or a syllogism or just something that sounds like fucking wizards and magic which is to say a power which has been sucked out of the world by some terrorizing rationality or astronomical mechanism, and that's exactly what it is, but not in the way they mean it, not the way they use it is, not as something which is less-than-real or proto-science or outside of our senses or forgotten by the amnesia of the human psyche immemorial. Alchemy is a word designating a process of transmutation -- an inherently hyperbolic contradiction of object-process - not just of and between materials (though it is that too, just very insignificantly), but of the transmogrification and reification of matter into mind and back again, of the physical object-ness which we project onto the undifferentiated amniotic fluids of the cosmos in order to describe an internal flux of mucilage, phlegm, bile, and blood, which is to say calcium, carbon, sulphur, and iron which is not like blood but is, being-becoming was/will be, always-already, apriori apperception of material proprioception, which is to say that speaking the difference between them, the iron and the blood, the ore and the other, is only useful in delineating the you-ness from the me-ness, which is to say not useful at all and so we should consider it more impediment than firmament. This table, this plate, this ore-refined fork, fuck even the candle and the cloth, holy shit even me and you, all these things which are things and not things and certainly not all she wrote, they are fingers reaching out to touch themselves, cycles cycles cycles spirals trials in denial reticulations of repeating lines, a system of autopoiesis -- self-making-mechanisms, whether as cellular automata or nuclear fission of the astral bodies or the alchemical transmutation of diffuse material states. The table is here but I didn't place it, we found it and stole it as model of our mind so that we can place things upon it -- to make it useful, to give it a place and a purposive purposelessness and a name with a sound and a signifier resonating out through the diaphanous chromos. What I'm describing to you is a tactile theory of color, of palpable proprioception, of the eyes as feelers of the material, of an attention to the line which is drawn between the object being observed and the observer doing the object-ing, the rock which is peopling, the tone which is bone which is smelted cone of carbon flattening out into a perceptible space upon which we might place this consilient conference without conclusions. I love to make models, to see them and handle them, but more than the making I love the loving, the application of the semiotic and the magic of observing its instantaneous transmutation, the love of pure love compartmentalized into a series of forms which I can only describe through flicker and flux, by reaching out into the morphogenic probability cloud to isolate a single electron rotating around an uncertain nucleus and give it a name, me, or you, or any other moniker which let's us keep loving the flow passing between, like swapping spit with the slobbering mandibles of the fucking universe that's so eager to fuck you back. That's the solar anus, remember? The point is... well the point is me, the point is the self, the self is an infinitely white hot dot on this finite carbon table, to the extent that we can continue to conduct this conference which never actually took place because I've been sitting here talking to diffuse and diffusing self this whole fucking time, and its only here for the duration of your attention, which as I look at you now I can see is quickly fading so I'll stop as abruptly as I began to let you do define it for yourself, as you must, as we will. When you're done give it a name, call it table, test it out, put something on it and see if it holds, but you have to make something because we all need something to hold on to and what fun would this dinner party be if we all agreed to just let it all go?

I finally found some time to sit down and respond to your letter, my apologies for the delay. I'm sitting in the store here in Stockholm, the day after my 32nd birthday, looking out the window at a crispy golden day percolating outside. It smells like sticky leaves and wet trees, and looks like the clouds are a little bit higher and a little bit slower and the leaves are all singing away their colors, and feels chilly like the time for mandatory sweaters is here: every indication that autumn has arrived. To celebrate I'm wearing the same colors on my body today as I see out in the world - yellows and oranges and reds and browns with a little green - which makes me wonder if I'm totally invisible as I ride my bike around the city, perhaps mistaken for a gush of wind rather than recognized as a flying man. While looking in the mirror this morning I noticed many more white hairs in my beard, many more lines under the eyes and up on the forehead, and some new stray hairs cropping up in some weird places.

I've been here for almost a week and even though I recognize the sway of the buildings and the lean of the people it doesn't feel any more like home, any more than it ever did. I love Sweden but it still seems like I don't belong here, which again makes me wonder if I am invisible somehow. (Being invisible can be a powerful experience, liberating, enabling, comforting at times, and is hardly ever as lonely or isolating at it might sound). But on a day like today - when the sun is out and there's the scent of mushrooms and berries on the breeze and I have a date to take a walk with a beautiful woman and I realize that I can sit on my ass all day making my very absurd artworks and eat whatever I want and go wherever I want without worrying too much about money - well today is not a day to wonder about darkness. There will be plenty of time for that in the winter.

I feel rejuvenated by my time in Iceland, which makes me realize just how depleted I had become before leaving. This depletion has to do with not making enough art, or the right kind of art to satisfy my lofty desires, and also not having a community of people to share my ideas with, and all of this is due to a kind of scattered focus which I have been struggling to shake off ever since breaking up with ___ and moving to Stockholm I suppose. Being in Iceland, feeling like I was out there on the edge of the world, being hugged by mountains and cooed by waterfalls frothing up from the magnetic vibrations of the purple black earth and pulled up by a sun which seemed to be spinning faster than physics can describe... well it did something to me which is indescribable but undeniable. I regained some vision while being out there at the end of the world, and remembered a lot of things I guess I suppressed about how I get along with others and what I expect and seek in my human relationships. Now I feel strong and clear and completely refreshed, but this confidence also has a price because I now realize that another change is quickly approaching on the horizon.

I had a realization. I now realize that I just don't give a flying fuck about how most people think the world should work. In fact I think most are just wrong, dead wrong, dying in wrongness, and I believe I have a potent vision that might be able to redirect the path by which things are flowing, or at least be able to cleanly remove myself from it so that I don't get swept away with the tide. I've realized that I don't want anything to do with this material culture: I don't want to buy anything except for what I absolutely need and I need so very little these days. I don't want to sell anything unless it's a well-designed, well-made, worth-while thing and there is sadly so very few of these things in the world and in fact most things don't need to exist, shouldn't exist, and their existence is a huge part of the problems that I observe, the social problems in people and the environmental problems of the earth. I don't want to participate in a culture of excess and waste, of materialism and fetishized desire, of corporate aesthetics and social hierarchies and technological networking and all that other bullshit that seems to make the world spin these days. Not only do I not want to be in the middle of it, not want to participate in it, but I want to dedicate my life energy towards breaking it down. This is a big realization because it means that my days working here at the store are decidedly numbered, but not necessarily my days in Sweden... but probably that too since there seems to be so little room for my breed in this outcropping of civilization. I've had a lot of time to ruminate over what's most important in my life while living out there on the fjord, out there at the edge of the world, and what I've been doing the last two years kinda seems like a big fat waste of time if it wasn't for the fact that I was analyzing this time very closely in order to reach this conclusion I'm describing to you now. Yes, of course, this time was important and worthwhile, but only in terms of affording the opportunity for this epiphany which I am having right now, and then comes the essential and urgent next step to act upon this impulse and redirect my life in a way that will accomplish my new goals.

Don't get me wrong, I've had a really great time here and I'm still very much here, still very much involved with living this life, and even though I'm wheeling and dealing with material clutter I am managing to do it with some wonderful resourcefulness which is a bit removed from how all the rest seem to be living here. I have everything I need to make what I want to make, except for a context in which to justify its making... but that's something that I am no longer convinced exists anywhere in the world, or rather, it will be wherever I am so why not go back to where there are people I can actually relate to. Of course I will never stop making art, or music, or writing down these weird poetic thoughts, but I'm beginning to think longer and harder and more seriously about dedicating my continued education towards skills that really fucking matter, in terms of survival. I want to learn to tend the land, build my own house, install a solar power system and recycle my gray water, raise animals and develop co-dependent relationships with them, and start weighing my human relationships in terms of a similar kind of co-dependency. The more open I become to this reality and the more I try to discuss it with others the more feasible it seems to be.

Your name is a statement of death and affirmation in a single breath, dig? I think this is somehow related to your total disregard for punctuation in writing, a desire for continuous breath, an inhale which is an exhale, a living and dying simultaneously - at the same time or outside of time. When performed, when read, this style becomes obviously unsustainable for there is no way that a human being can read continuously forever without pause. The mind can't keep up - the mind of the reader nor the mind of the listener - and the meanings begin to break down and melt into a continuous flow of associations that are not so much like the perpetual phlegm and bile of life-juices so much as the flavor of linguistic digestive enzymes: the articulations break down into primary babbles, protozoan poems, primary signifiers singing meanings that have lost all color and soul. The psychology of your reading is manic, the affect one of hysteria, but perhaps this is only due to the speed of your delivery... at a slower pace the unfolding of words ad infinitum may become an undulatory bath of mother tongue coaxing, a gentle larynx cooing of the archetypal cocoon within us all, a slow swirling syllogism for the interstice separating all these concrete things which drag us down to the murky depths. Punctuation has a function of creating time and articulating space, so when you remove them - remove the marks that is - you are declaring war on memory and demanding anarchy of semiotic architectures, and this is very confrontational, although not necessarily aggressive. My personal opinion on the matter - the matter of punctuation - the matter which is to say material which is to say the insertion of the physical marks of full stops and half breaths which are in fact no material at all - is that most people are not assertive enough in their speech in general, with the result being that so much more is said than needs to be uttered with far too little meaning permeating the manifold than could be proliferated, and all this is just a real fucking shame wo/man. So I encourage you to throw out the marks and keep the words flowing, but I also wonder what your intent is, if you are trying to articulate a new clarity or scramble some old eggs, to take up the reins or lay down the whip, or some other action or perhaps non action. No judgment, just a question of engagement.

I read this article about the principle that learned hypnosis on the internet and tried in his mind to help his struggling young pupils by brainwashing them into a cleaner fragrance of being and I have many opinions on the manner... about my excitement at the prospects of hypnosis to actually influence minds, the acceptance of the institution and government and mainstream media in recognizing its potential to do so and even applying a legality to its conduct, my appreciation of the guerilla tactics of the principle in taking the responsibility of direct human influence into his own hands... and also other opinions about how fucking absurd it is to learn a powerful trance-inducing procedure through a dislocated screen, how dim and ignorant the writer of the article and all the parents interviewed therein sound in allotting so much credit to the principle as the wrongdoer without recognizing the haptic potentials of the youth themselves fucking goddamn ageist fucks that think adolescents need to be protected and ruled by some centralized state authority fuck you dad and fuck that shit, how there was no clear description of what exactly "hypnosis" consists of or how it is defined by the students or the legal ruling body or by anyone in fact, so there is this assumption that we all know what it is without any kind of description and this just fucking broods ignorance.... and here's the part you really don't want to hear: how this article is directed towards creating a mood and mode of fear and paranoia in the reader, creates a negative bias against a potential powerful psychological method, spectacularizes the plight of these small-town-hard- working-blue-collar-true-grit-mcdonalds-guzzling-footballing-dateraping-supposedlyinnocenteverydaypeople because a couple of teenagers died oh me oh my they had such great potential little Jimmy was gonna grow up and go to Juliard and play his guitar in front of thousands of privileged white people and impress the world with his youtube videos combining stairwaytoheaven with j.s.bach to further instigate the stagnation of western civilization oh me oh my little Suzie loved kittens and was so good at mathematics and she was gonna grow up and design an app that turns your profile picture into a kitten face and makes the world's water supply smell like kittens and just procreate so many greatnesses and wonders and oh let's not forget the wonderful athlete who was so good at fucking football and riding his bicycle and was sponsored by some company to sell more products to more naive people starving for the next hero representing the next wonder toy to consume, and forget about the hundreds of thousands of refugees hiding in the backs of fruit trucks and jumping on the back of cargo trains as they flee war and oppression running towards the Scandinavian countries and forget about all the fucking terrors of war that Jimmy's dad is building every day in the little factory down the street but it's so good for the economy and forget about the fact that we have already cured cancer back in the 1930's with clean water and clean food but all these goddamn mathematicians are inventing so many new goddamn agricultural war machines and plant poisons that all the brown rice is tainted with arsenic and all the iodine-containing seaweeds are full of petroleum distillates and all the water has fluoride added for your dental health and all these goddamn apps running on all these goddamn screens that are keeping us informed of the war machines and the arsenic rice and the evil rogue hypnotherapist principles murdering teenagers in bumfucknowhere are the things that are really giving us cancer and feeding us garbage and we are all always doing it willingly and it's up to us to stop, to turn it off, to look away, to look towards a way of living and talking and dealing with the wondrous unknowns of the universe that procreates positivity - and I don't mean some fucking new age sham positivity about lycra fetishes and green smoothies, but some authentic cool dry collected realistic perspective concerning how fucked up the world is and some calm realizations about how we may be passively contributing to the mass hysterias and some surgically precise cosmically powerful carefully considered and thoroughly worked out methodologies for how to get our asses into action to do something about it.

Rants rants rants. I'm not trying to preach to you, just to remind myself about the reality we are dealing with here, to point out the layers and the options. Although you didn't say so, I have a feeling that you were getting yourself worked up about the terrors of the deaths and the tragedy of the world and I'm trying to encourage you not to do that, not to get swept away with the spectacle, but to use that empathy and that attention towards getting yourself (or all of us if you have a savior complex) to some greener pastures, of the earth or of the mind, and if you don't believe they exist then get your hands dirty and try to build something here - right here - with what we have left.

Before I left the fjord I went for a drive with ___, way out as far as the road could go out there on the Northern side of the fjord, out towards that abandoned house that ___ was so enamored with. We drove out there past the edge of the world out to some other edge of some other world and as we stood there on a pile of bloody sheep skins that were washed up on shore next to the house full of ghosts looking out onto the ocean towards Europe listening to the sounds of the crystalline water splash against the smooth granite eyeball boulders I thought oh how picturesque and perfect it all was, just like the pictures, just like a picture but better than a picture because this was filling all my senses not just the visual. On the drive home we talked about how there was no going back, and I don't mean the house - either the house that was rotting out there on the tip of the fjord or the HEIMA house which was given a new life through hard work and clear vision - but I mean that there's no going back to the way the world was before. Shit is fucked up and will only get more fucked up and we both agreed that there is very little either of us can do about it: we laughed about how absurd it is to claim to be an environmentalist, to fight corporations or political parties, and all the rest... not from a state of cynicism or depression, but just a clear calm sharing in an understanding of what is really important, which is to build something for ourselves now, here, while we can, because there's no going back and there's nothing else to do. This was a profound conversation for me, although subtle, and I shit you not it changed something in me which was teetering on the edge for a long time, and now I'm really convinced that I don't give a shit about living my life according to this corrupt manual that leads towards fame or fortune or even modern prosperity or even sustainability now with eco friendly color schemes and designer compost bins, but I only care about building something real and powerful and doing it as soon as fucking possible. It's a desperate time, but not because people are hysterical or the environment is fucked or the apocalypse is upon us - all of which may also be true, from a certain point of view - but because my life is continuing and I have to wake up everyday to make decisions as to how to conduct myself and I don't want to be a martyr, to lay down or give up, or be a part of anything that I don't believe in completely, and if that means that I need to walk out there to the edge of the world where no one will find me or ever see me again then fine.

So... about Stockholm. Fuck it. I'm quitting my job and moving to the fjord to help ___ and ___ build their new house and make a shit load of crazy music and radical art and visionary ideas manifest and then I'm going to not go back but only go forward and continue building things that have meaning and trying my best to keep my head out of the shit and stay sane in this otherwise insane world. I recommend you do the same. Stay in Iceland longer if you can so we can hang out more and have more conversations about photography and politics and all the other really important shit that we should be involving ourselves with and for fucks sake stop reading the goddamn news and filling your mind with all the senseless tragedies and idiocies of the world because your mind is capable of greater things than misplaced empathy for bodies without organs.

I'm really into your photography and want to see more of it. I'm going to design a website for myself inspired by your go-getter can-do attitude. What was that book again? That book of photography? I want to read it. I want to write a manifesto against photography for all the photographers of the world because I think it's a form of mind control, like hypnosis, very much like that in fact, and working in a very similar way, to put us all into a trance while we're driving with a strange look on our faces until boom fuck we're dead.

Sorry it has been so long since I have written but when I was leaving the little fishing village out there at the edge of the world on that little bus driven by the little old man that never looks you in the eye but always keeps to his schedule of crossing the real boundary of the glacial lake pressed up against the sky by those reindeer lichen-covered black mountains holding up the waters like a mirror to Narcissus whom may be a metaphor for humans but sure as hell acts more like the sun revolving around the earth every day just so it can see itself illuminating all those little people and sheep running around bleating for their young ones to come shake their tales for more milk and climb ever higher towards unknown crests so yeah up there on that very same crest as I was crossing the threshold of that real boundary and also the imaginary boundary that separates the whiskey and whimsy and wonder and also the fish smells and rhubarb smells and that peculiar swollen sour milk smell of the iron-filled earth being churned up endlessly by 10,000 tickling waterfalls that always remind me of the 10,000 things that the Buddhist monk or was he Taoist described as a number which could be any number but also precisely that number which is the number of everything that exists in order to understand that all these things can still be counted of course if you want to but really isn't it just a big waste of time and I think this conversation also took place on a mountain top or maybe at the base of the mountain kinda like when we tried to have a conversation about postmodernism while smoking cigarettes and counting the icy peaks and suddenly laughed about how stupid the whole thing was so let's just go back to magic yes so anyways I was on this bus cresting the mountain with the little old man with no eyes for me and I was thinking about how I wanted to leave something in the house so that there would be a part of me there but I really didn't have anything to leave because I only brought what I needed and everything I made was bound up into a tight little digital package so I left some shoes sitting there on the shelf like others had done before me and that somehow seemed quite fitting because it represented not an absolute departure but a dedication to return, a kind of eternal return, like a song called a soliloquy, like a sun. Sorry it has been so long since I have written but when I was returning to the mainland of Europe I realized that it wasn't home that I was returning to but some other place that was very familiar but lacked all those smells which dictate to my brain that brain which is me and no other that it is returned to a kind of numinous space that instills calm and comfort and allows the lungs to decompress in that manner which can only occur when a journey is truly completed as in the sewing of a final stitch or the closing of a circle around a void which cannot be located again kinda like this conversation we were having while smoking cigarettes I think it had something to do with magic and skepticism and by magic I think we were both nodding in a calm understanding that what we were really talking about was the possibility of real change in matter and materials and also in ideas and ideologies and therefore also the world at large that we were living in like a kind of spell that casts a net of hope and brings in all the shimmering iridescent fish that would bloom into ever more fish which are not fish of course but again this kind of magic which is not spells of course but again this kind of effervescent efflorescent incandescent percolation of whiskey and whimsy and wonder maybe we could call it enchantment or reenchantment or simply magic and we could oppose it to that other thing we were talking about which is skepticism and the necessity of maintaining it - not cynicism mind you! - but skepticism which is to question and probe and I guess at its most extreme terror takes on the form of a scientific scalpel destroying the fleshy bodies as it slices into ignorance and sheds light upon rational understanding but in a softer tone of voice with softer moist eyes and softer rounded mouth and softer unwrinkled forehead we could call it just another kind of desire a particular and necessary desire to know which is not so different from that thing we were calling magic but perhaps one is based on a proliferation of knowledge and the other a nurturing of wisdom though which is which I am none the wiser. Sorry it has been so long since I have written but I have been quite preoccupied with finishing this book about energy and finishing these sculptures about energy and finishing this music which may or may not be art but is definitely about energy and trying to remember that thing I said to someone one time about how artists love to describe what they are doing as some kind of flow or flux or investigation into a resonation a pulse a frequency a color fetish or sometimes just as energy when they can't make up any other names for it unless they are some kind of amateur scientists also which everyone seems to be these days so they have all kinds of other words for the energy which may be a wave or may be a particle but anyways I wanted to make all this art about how silly the whole thing is but maybe I'm just turning into one of those artists that just talks about energy and I think the reason is because I've become drunk which is to say intoxicated inebriated ecstatic not on the ego but on the prospect of attenuating such attention on this flow coursing through all things that I remembered to remember to forget about the making-fun-of and instead allowed myself to be swept away by the thing itself which is in fact no thing at all but just this movement which we could call energy or perhaps you would prefer magic or linguistic aikido or poststructuralism. Sorry it has been so long since I have written but you are always on my mind and I think about your polar bear all the time and look at your other projects and try to imagine the stories and complexities informing them and think that it would be nice if we could do some kind of project together and what it would be like to come to Idaho or Alabama or Arkansas or wherever the fuck you are to sit on a porch and shoot beer cans and listen to that almost imperceptible hum that the fireflies make as they illuminate the bioluminescent bacterial cultures bubbling up in their translucent torsos and yes while I'm riding my bike around through these busy streets filled with busy people all shuffling around with their businesses I sniff the sweet smell of cold decaying leaves and crack a smile when I think about how good it was that none of our conversations ever reached any kind of definite conclusion because if they did they would not have felt nearly so authentic and I think that's what a conversation about magic or enchantment or postmodern diasporic installation art is really about anyways.

If you're coming to the fjörd we should have another cookie bake-off because it was an excellent tradition that can only become a tradition if its repeated, along with this conversation. See you there.

It's 8 o'clock in the morning: I overslept. I'm sitting in my tiny studio in a gigantic house in the middle of a park (which in America we would call a forest) drinking coffee and looking out the window at a buttery syrup sky, unseasonably clear due to the constant warm winds we have been receiving for the last few days. It's warm here, surreally warm, sickeningly warm even, not because it's uncomfortable but rather because it's unnatural. Nature is no longer natural because we have changed it, irreversibly and permanently, and I have often wondered how it is I should feel about this. Some days it's disgusting for all the obvious reasons, yet other days - today I think - it serves as a positive reminder that we are among a generation of humans that is experiencing a velocity and intensity of change that is unprecedented in all of our morbid human history, we are in fact on the cusp of it, and this is a radical freedom which has been uniquely offered to us.

Yes I understand your concerns and I share them. It's good that you are thinking about them and in this manner. I say it's good, in my opinion according to my biases, not objectively that is. I have three different ideas on how to respond to these issues and I will try to give them as succinctly as I can so that a seed can be planted that we can attend to later. A lot bubbled to the surface while reading your thoughts and I just want to respond with a few small morsels with the hope that we can take some care and attention to unfold the origami of these concepts together in real-time, "in-person", wherever and whenever and whatever that is.

One

The most pertinent idea you agitated surrounds the question of whether "body" and "being" are worth pursuing. Well of course the answer is yes, but it's more important and interesting (in my opinion, as an artist on the grandeur scale and for the sake of conversation) to consider how and why. One easy (vague) answer is to admit the realm of being to the territory of philosophy on the subjective scale and science on the objective, so that perhaps the reconciliation of the two can be attributed to the floating island of art and art making. I like this idea because it is a kind of auto-validation, like what your colleague told you: "It's what you do." This seems akin to a Zen method, in the way that it's practiced mindfully without purpose, which is what I think art is best at. However, if we want to sort out the mess in a more intelligible manner we must resort to the mechanics of language, which is a sloppy mechanism indeed. For meditations on the essence of being we could talk about Heidegger, the fucking Nazi, whose attempt to articulate a philosophical clarity just left us in a deeper hole than before. His focus is upon what "is", in locking down our being or being-ness or being-in-ness as some kind of definite article, and I fundamentally disagree with this. To go a few steps further down this path, I have pretty much decided that the entire trajectory of Western/European philosophical "truth" is flawed, neurotic, exclusionary, and simply fucked, which is why all the schizo-post-philosophical stuff is so interesting to me: it's still neurotic and exclusionary and fucked up but at least it knows it is. On the other hand, I do believe there is a real possibility to achieve a clarity in our thinking, a useful revision of our process, and a renewed articulation in our communication, and this is where I think psychedelics come in. DRUGS YES but no not just that, I mean rather a way of thinking that makes connections rather than severs them, a way of being that is not exclusive but inclusive, and a way of speaking that opens doors instead of shutting them. This explains my love for the radical thinkers, for the avant-garde in general, for the psyco-cosmonauts and the outcasts and the degenerates and all the others which are so difficult to fit in to the clean cut white washed history of power, propaganda, and death that most people seem so concerned with. Check out Robert Anton Wilson's use of the language of E-Prime, which is like English 2.0 and excludes the use of words like "is" and "being" for the sake of clarity. I'm also still a big fan of Baudrillard and Bataille for their fearless attention to the taboo, seduction, and desire. I think Brian Massumi is one of the most important ontological philosophers I have read in the last 10 years... he translated Deleuze&Guattari's [Anti-Oedipus]{.underline} and some of his books that I would highly recommend include [Parables for the Virtual]{.underline}, [The Affect Theory Reader]{.underline} (or something like that), and my most recent read [What Animals Can Teach Us About Politics]{.underline}. Very important stuff I think. Donna Haraway and N. Kathrine Hayles are also very useful in this vein.

Two

Concerning the world and the political, I offer you this excerpt for a conversation I was having with a young American photographer who was in residence with me in Iceland this summer. I still find it to be very relevant to my position:

ay ay! yes i felt a bit weird with how i left the conversation last night. i went upstairs and stood there in the dark for a minute suspended in hesitation because i felt like i needed to run back downstairs and justify my blatant disregard for human life in this very specific context and also explain a great many other things but ultimately i forced myself to bed because i remembered that yes indeed the conversation could go on for quite some time since we were all already drawing such distinct lines in the sand so in order for each of us to be heard in our own voices with our own space we would have to build a democratic conference of united cooperative nation-selves and that means quitting our jobs and writing grant proposals and swearing oaths that our faculties are adept and our intentions are sincere and that we believe in something greater than ourselves even if we all call the god by a different name and in the end i have to stick to my guns and admit that i still believe and will probably always believe that this entire task is a complete waste of all of our fucking time. politics is tricky - that is to say it's all tricks, deceptions, illusions, confabulations, images flickering with no signified authenticity - and i don't believe in it for a goddamn new york minute, and i can tell you why but honestly i would rather live it and be it and put my philosophy into action to see how it holds up as a group, and sometimes that means removing myself from it because it's no longer worth the effort. don't get me wrong! i think YOU are worth the effort, and ___ and ___ and ___ and ___ and anyone else that wants to talk about the dynamics of the self in relation to the social - which is the point of concentration that i am personally extremely invested in because it is the root of the whole thing. yes, i think that there are certain things that need to be said in order to orient ourselves to each other, to define ourselves to each other, even if that means declaring a refusal to be outlined. we must invest in each other first before any conversation about the horrors of the world might take place.

i am an american in the "truest" sense of the word. i am defiant towards the colonial mechanisms and i strive for autonomy, independence, freedom of all peoples, under god even if he's dead then all the better because we should stop anthropomorphizing our spiritual lives anyways, and not indivisible either because it's all infinitely divisible down to the molecular which is why the name of the conversation should be maintained as a continuous negotiation, and DEFINITELY NOT for liberty and justice for all because that is a politics of EVIL - there can only be liberty and justice through relation which means for one group and not another. fuck the government, i believe in anarchy not anarchism. i know for a fact that all the troubles of the world - ALL OF THEM - can be easily solved over night, right now, today, if we would prioritize them, if we would choose to save ourselves from ourselves rather than maintain business as usual, but we won't because the freedom that is being described by the talking heads on the screen is not true freedom, not independence from the tyrannical mechanism, but a concoction of illusory serfdom that keeps people buying and dying and defying and denying, throwing their bodies blindly over the mechanism of war, so it's really no surprise to me at all that all of them are being killed by the heaps every day. fuck em.

these people, all these people, on both sides and in all places, these people made a choice to believe in a construct which i know is beyond-flawed, a death machine lubricating itself with their bodies, a sacrifice of their humanity for lower cost petroleum and discount mega-stores. they made the choice and they fuel their own propaganda and they all do it WILLINGLY, CONSCIOUSLY, INTENTIONALLY, and you have to remember that! you cannot declare that people don't think for themselves! that they are zombies walking around unconscious! there is no greater dehumanizing tendency than that tyrannical ideology, don't fall prey to it. no, you have to remember that all these people are free to do as they will and so they spend their lives trying to figure it all out just like we are - we are the same, made of the same stuff, we are them - and so when a teenager goes in to the parents bedroom and goes to that place under the bed where they know the walmart special is hidden and lubricates it ever so gently and slides in just the right number of bullets to take out the whole family and all the teachers and all the peers reveling in their own stupidity and then of course making sure to leave one extra in there to finish the job at the end.... this is a choice, a choice made for righteousness at the brink of oblivion, a desperate choice which i relate to because i also feel fucking desperate - NOW IS THE TIME FOR DESPERATION - and it's the fucking war machine that takes this story and spins it back at you as a disaster against progress, as a mournful event that needs to be recorded and rebroadcast every hour to remind ourselves of how precious our lives are so go out there and buy as much as you can because tomorrow someone might blow it all up. it's all a fucking scam, and we are contributing to it by thinking about it, and i believe the best way and maybe the only way to surpass the stagnation is to remove yourself from it, not to respond with quivers before the terror and fall prey to the nightmarish fabrications but to REMEMBER TO REMEMBER THE EARTH IS A GRAPE TURNED RAISIN and let out a loud fart and get on with it. you are an artist, and so am i, which means we are working from a place of privilege - that's not in question - which means that you have a fucking responsibility to be there, be present, be active, but also to be invisible, to work covertly on the important issues, which i believe is the self-as-the-fulcrum-point-of-the-all and for you could be anything you want it to be but it better be fucking good if it's gonna be anything at all. you have a great responsibility and i hope that you find the voice to articulate it and the courage to describe it to those that need to hear it and the wisdom to live by it even if it means saying really fucked up things late at night around the kitchen table while intoxicated on your own privilege to people that may not understand it at the time but will rhyme and chime over and over again to remind them to remember to recognize the world as it really is, which is to say how you see it, because you have the vision and most of us are blind. if you want to do something, do anything at all, then find eyes for those that don't see for themselves.

i could keep going but i won't, or maybe we will in person, when we see each other back in the kitchen - back at the conference table - over our colonially conquered coffee and third world bananas and partially hydrogenated palm oil butter-flavor spreads. i am willing and able to have this conversation and yes i believe it's a very important one to have, but i refuse to be a martyr to anything or anyone or any ideology, i refuse to participate in a dialogue of morality - the immanence of evil, and i refuse to mourn the lives of those instigating the terror in the world. in fact i refuse to mourn anyone at all, because mourning signifies an end, an ending, a perpetual and totally uncathartic slowing but never stopping, and i would rather invest my energy in motion and action and presence and ponderance. maybe i'll see you there....

Three

I think the last part is about responsibility then: concerning what we could do, what we should do, and what we are doing. I've told you before and I will tell you again that I think that artists are very important, they are essential, because they live both in the world and apart from it. We could and should talk about privilege here, but I'm more concerned at the moment with the responsibility of our positions. My belief is that artists have a responsibility which is very clear for me and I can state it simply as thus: artists must be visionaries. We are the people that float through every plateau of the social hierarchy. We can sit rather comfortably at a table of rich or poor or philosophes or physicists. We can be legitimate or self-imposed outcasts, popular or unpopular, famous or nameless, but for me it's always the same. I hold artists to a golden standard that is beyond the limitations of morality, ethics, politics, and economics. We must dedicate ourselves to the task of having the most radical ideas, the most transcendental visions, the most psychedelic epiphanies, the greatest leaps in faith, the most intentional use of words and of every movement for that matter. We must be so in touch with ourselves that we can shift the perspective of ourselves-in-relation, and it is through these currents of relation that we will effect change in the world. Forget about political art, it's just more propaganda. Focus on yourself and focus on the cosmos and focus on the difference between the two: focus on focus. Remember to remember! is what Henry Miller always says. Designers and architects and philosophers and political radicals also have a responsibility of course, but it's not to be visionaries, rather it's to listen to the visionaries and manifest the ideas in their own medium. A shoe designer must make shoes that support the foot or else they have failed. An architect must construct a building that supports life, not attempts to transcend its function for an aesthetic principle. Philosophers must attend to the asking of "why" on each of those topics which we disregard in our daily routines, in order to recall our attention to them, with a clarity of semiotics that only they are attuned to wielding. Let the politicians deal with the failures of politics, a system which had never seemed so efficient nor essential to me and therefore has never seemed very important for me to pay any attention to. We live in a society.... or do we? What is this civilization that we have inherited and why do we feel a greater responsibility towards maintaining a tower of terror rather than letting it fall and concentrating on the revitalization of the human spirit? Let it fall I say, but don't get too caught up in tearing it down. Utility is about economics, it's about globalized consumerism, and this is the epitome of all our current terror. The world must stop buying all these things and all these ideas. It must become much more simple. I am convinced of this, and therefore I have a conviction of what I must make even if it is not always clear about how it must be made or how I will achieve it. It is your responsibility as an artist to find your own conviction and to live by it. In my humble opinion of course....

Ok ok well I just got really sidetracked with all these ideas, but this was not a waste of time. I think it's very important to continue to challenge and be challenged by each other, as friends and lovers and colleagues and artists and citizens of the world. I hope this returned rant helps you sort it out a bit, and I very much look forward to discussing all this more with you in a few weeks.

****

THE FIRST ITERATION OF AN

OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

As you know, I have been occupying myself with numerous and varied creative pursuits over the years which I believe have recently ascended to a pinnacle of focus and motivation steering towards the articulation of a total work of art. I am contacting you now - along with a select few other individuals - because we have collaborated with wild success in the past or have shared in conversation recently that has led me to believe that we will in the future. My current ideological current is a tributary of a longer, wider, dispersed dialogue taking place over a grand dislocation of time and space by numerous people, some whom are already intimately connected and other whom have yet to be introduced.

I have been offered the opportunity to return to the small fishing town of Seyðisfjörður Iceland from January-April of this year to participate in the radical art school known as LUNGA, founded and operated by two amazingly tender hearted Danish men. I will have private accommodations, a 100sq meter art studio inside of an old fish factory, a small amount of money to work with, and access to a small but powerful international community of young aspiring-artists. I have spent the last few weeks meditating on how I would like to spend this time and have decided that the moment is ripe - in the world, in my life, and in my art - to attempt to coalesce all of these experiences into a unified collaborative work on a scale I have never before attempted. I'm tired of making work in isolation and I'm hungry to reconnect with the artists that have been most important to me - you! I want to work with you. I want to build an ark with you. Whatever happens in the end, I want to dedicate some significant time and energy towards our potential as I firmly believe that we are capable of manifesting a vision much more powerful working together rather than alone. Now is the time.

****

I will begin composing an opera.

This opera will be very much like other operas that have been performed and will also be very much unlike anything that has ever been conceived of. Let me offer you a very brief outline of my plan...

Theme of the Work

I will describe a system of relations between vibratory bodies: planets in elliptical orbit around a dying star, the interplay of resonances transducing between the in/organic materials of our perceivable world, the molecular shivers of wave-particles locked in tele-kinetic embrace. The scale will be concerned with a macro-micro oscillation between these states. This is an opera of transmutation, communication, and dissolution. In short, this is a play about ENERGY - whatever that is. There will be specific representations of beginnings (birth), endings (death), and a spectra of processes playing out in between. The context consists of the interstice between the rational and spiritual world, between science and magic, between what can be perceived and what we currently only suspect to exist. As in the BOOK OF ENERGY, this work will focus on the movement between states rather than articulations of illusory static frames. For this work I will attempt to pour in all of my divergent interests in order to pluck the string that binds them. Part sci-fi space opera surrealist birthday party, part post-Nietzschean tragedy spectacle in a laser tag arena, part transhumanist conference of sub-geniuses in the sauna, part free jazz orchestra on a sinking ship... all of those things but nothing absolutely.

Composition

There will be written-visual scores produced for each member of the group, each representing a material with specific properties as well as a force with specific limitations. Each will therefore receive specific instructions (written collaboratively, between you and me) on how to interact with the other members in order to model a system of energy exchange, as well as specific content according to their role. The foundation of the performance will be a semi-improvised dialogue between the different strata of the universe-group. Each member will have a name, a sound, a visual expression, a taxonomy of movements, and an essential role in the construction of a meta-chord. At the core of this modeled system will be a single percussionist, surrounded by a trio (or more) of harmonic instruments, all of whom will be situated within a multi-channel audio environment. The central percussionist will be triggered by visual and audible cues, which will in turn cue the surrounding instrumentalists. The three signal from the instrumentalists will be fed to two or more computers which will process the sound into specific "sound-glyph-objects" which will fed back to one or all of the central performers. A lead vocalist will sing/read a narrative text in multiple languages (Icelandic, Swedish, E-prime, and a newly invented language I am currently working on). A choir of 2-10 people will move throughout the system. Yes, there will be a narrative both written and sung, enacted through symbolic choreographies of all members, and abstracted through a multi-channel video array representing a collective neural-celestial atmosphere.

Staging, Instruments, Context

The central percussionist will perform on a custom built, amplified, midi-triggered, and highly aestheticized sound sculpture. The surrounding performers will play prepared guitar, saxophone, bass, organ/synthesizer, flutes, custom stringed contraptions, or similar melodic instruments (to be decided). One computer will be processing the signals from the central percussionist while another computer will be effecting and distributing the signals from the performers. The main vocalist/reader and the choir will be fed to a master mixer controlled by a conductor along with various lighting displays, video projections, stage elements, and custom made "cue-objects" or props. All members will be outfitted in custom costumes specific to their role and many costume/role changes will take place. The stage or backdrop will be designed to be adaptable to many different performance locations and will be completely collapsible for ease of transport.

Practicalities and Timeline

If you are willing to participate we will conduct scheduled individual and group meetings (via video stream) to collect sound and visual material. During these meetings we will discuss the specifics of your role and work together to build an outline for a personal performance strategy based on your skills and interests as well as the needs of the composition. The score, instruments, and stage for the piece will be written and constructed by myself and the students of the LUNGA school between January-March of 2016 in Iceland. You will arrive in Seyðisfjörður Iceland in early April, where I will procure a nice group living arrangement, access to a kitchen, and a rehearsal space. We will begin with rigorous group rehearsals for 3-5 days, followed by dress rehearsals/experimental performances for 1-3 days at various venues around Seyðisfjörður (in the amphitheater, in the workshop of the art collective, in the local bar, possibly outside around the fjörd, etc). The second week we will leave the town to take our performance on tour around Iceland, playing at a variety of small strange galleries and venues along the north coast, two nights at a well known performance theater and art gallery in Reykjavik, then a few more spontaneous happenings on the return journey. I expect that different individuals will be living on various schedules so the composition will be constructed to expand and contract according to who is present - if no one shows up I will perform it alone with the students of Lunga, but that's the worst case scenario. I have other obligations beginning in May so the performance/tour must take place sometime in April, however the dates are very flexible according to your availability. *Unfortunately I cannot offer you any help with flights to/from Iceland, but I will try my damndest to get us some free housing, possibly food, and as much of the equipment as we need (although your ability to bring some of your own gear would be greatly appreciated!).

This will absolutely be the most ambitious and important work I will have attempted to date, but I must stress that my motivation in this project is to work with you (!!!) and other friends/collaborators that have been essential in my life. I have been looking for an opportunity to bring us together in a focused creative environment and I believe this is it. I hope you feel the same way and are willing and able to make the journey and spend the time in making this thing happen. This is a very rough proposal, just to plant the seed, and much more detailed descriptions will be provided if you come on board. Please respond to me when you can, as soon as possible, so I can try to convince you further. If you want to participate I would ask that you prepare a small sample of your work so that I can compile it into a kind of portfolio for the other members to experience.

One more thing.... I really believe this project could evolve into something much greater than an absurdist opera performed for a society of elves at the edge of a dying world. If we come together to make this happen I believe the result will have lasting repercussions throughout our lives and percolate deep into the public spheres. We should take the documentation and apply to group residency programs, grant opportunities, festivals, etc. We should continue the tour through the USA, through Europe, through India, or anywhere else you think might be relevant. If you have specific desires or demands from this collaboration then we must make sure to incorporate them. Let's come together and eat our own tail!

****

AN OUTLINE OF FORCES, PROCESSES, AND DYNAMICS

MOTIVATION FORMS STRUCTURE

Will is the transformation of energy into intention. The beginning of the process is through the recognition that we are already moving, have already been singing, have always already been here while also are already always leaving. The first glance makes the first impression and makes the most lasting imprint; everything else is perpetual forgetting, a unfurling of awareness back onto itself, a life of amnesia by material abundance.

ENERGY STRUCTURES OF THE UNIVERSE

NOTATION / TESTIMONY OF PROCESS / DOCUMENT

MUSIC FORMS

MUSIC STRUCTURES

BODY DYNAMICS

Contraction & expansion of the body on different scales: the body as a model for a universe of micro-macro concerns. "the skeleton is smart, it finds ways of moving that are not harmful". Movement forms: lengthening, cactus (juicy/firm/elastic quality with accents), contraction, rolling, inversion :: orientation to the grid: laterality, horizontality, verticality: dimensional propulsion & push/pull of gravitational forces.

embodiment of images or mimicry of forms: animal/plant/mineral: characteristic movements - opening & closing - heightening & shortening - fast jitters & slow buttery - floor & air - forwards & backwards

Translation

name = characteristic = mimicry = memorization through repetition :: sound form = "personality" form = movement form = memory form :: projection of self-as-name = projection of self-as-movement = projection of self-as-meme :: word = body = mind ::: the body as an instrument/device to absorbing memory from material.

HUMOR

The novelty/freshness/uncommon expression. Laughter of fear & laughter of joy. Will this wear away over time, through familiarity (is this the same as comfort)? COMFORT in the body vs COMFORT in the mind. The guide/mediator/observer/watcher: protection from danger: dangerous vs nondangerous situations. Transference of sensors, from eyes to hands to extension of the etheric double.

GROUND

Grounding with the eyes closed as a corporeal location: coordination is with the floor/ground. The gaze (even with eyes closed): the symbolism of upwards/downwards glances: variations on vulnerability - head up in ecstasy/release or head down in remorse/seclusion: the power pose of the natal/fetal position vs the power pose of the warrior stance: knees to chest for safety or knees extended for transparency. The power of touch :: the resonance of distance :: drawing with the eyes :: drawing from the body

****THE EXTENSION OF VISION INTO THE TACTILE :: BODY-INSTRUMENT OR BODY-SENSOR :: how it "feels" to be embodied :: how it feels to be observed being in the body

COSTUMING

FORM: Inspired by the traditional Japanese kimono, radiation protective clothing, foiled and pressurized space suits imagined as a continuation of everyday lifestyle garments (like yoga leggings, performance synthetics, day-glow safety colors and reflectors). The form should both hide the movements of the body while accentuating the functional aspects of the garment while also highlighting particular gestures as beacons, signals, "beams of focus"... the garment is activated with particular movements (specific poses, power positions, defense mechanisms, elementary non-verbal communication motions).

MATERIAL: No synthetics, no chemicals, only plant and mineral-based dyes and pigments. Numerous layers of alternating organic and metallic sheets. Some sheer layers, some perforated. Metals in brass and copper (warm metals) woven on a loom to make a kind of body stocking chain mail, very thin and lightweight, and also woven into other breathable materials that wick away moisture, regulate temperature, and conserve the energy resources of the body: this layer is knit from smooth and very thin copper/brass wire. Patina applied to the metals, with clean geometric shapes being maintained clean and high polish to make direct contact with the body and allow the suit to function as a biodynamic sensor circuit (ala Alvin Lucier, Lucky Dragons contact music, etc). Organic materials woven in a variety of coarseness: very thin lightweight material close to the body, thicker and more porous materials (like netting) on the outside. Loose or felted wool at certain fricative points in the body to build up static charges.

SCENE / CONTEXT / SET / ECOLOGY

VIDEO ENVIRONMENT

Animations: video mosaics as an immersive ecology of time-vision. Where does the gaze fall::: upon the self-as-body, upon the screen-as-body, upon the camera-as-eye, upon the I-as-eye:: eyes upon the screen make the body inactive: un-embodied / dissociated :: a group oriented towards a single focal point (the screen, the camera eye, the mesmerizing mirror (narcissistic fetishization), the self refracted through the myriad mirrored miasma :::: communicating via movement with self - mediated - is so much different than communicating via movement with an other (the other or others): how is it different?

SET ORGANIZATION

• cosmogonic symmetry of the transcendental gamelan orchestra

• the formal arrangements of a death procession marching band (the final scene in Kirosawa's Dreams)

• steps/plateaus/layers of transcendence that can be ascended/descended: temple, altar, funeral mound, axis mundi

• a central void & a surrounding galaxy: situated between everything&nothing

• geometric shapes of resonant forms: representation of the ideal-as-material/ecology

• the landscape of the body as the central scene: the universe birthed from

Setting:

As the stage lights come up we see some characters standing in a room with two doorways on opposing ends. The portals have no doors so that characters can pass freely between various rooms, one expanding upon the next, each identical to the one before, each occupied by one or more characters involved in a reflexive exercise of the self. Most of the stage is black, though some of the facets are painted in interference or day-glow colors. Cameras are placed at various points around the stage and upon one of the characters - the character camera is passed to others at moments of black out. The video is fed back into the physical environment, as mirror, as doubling, as parallax.

Props:

Each room contains some furniture, some specimens (animal, vegetable, and mineral), and an Existential Unit of Concentration (EUOC) sculpture consisting of an object cast into a clear resin form.

• The [furniture]{.underline} is designed and constructed to be as simple as possible (Enzo Mari), as an idealized form (Platonic/Jungian "seat" of consciousness), almost invisible but very present as a focal point of character affect (Bachelard), and painted a neutral middle gray.

• The [specimens]{.underline} will serve as symbolic parapsychic forces activating the space of the set, never acknowledged or interacted with. Each may be physically present or incorporated into the video projections as live feeds or textural collages (ie: "animalness").

• [Minerals]{.underline} may consist of an actual specimen sitting on the chair, under the table, blocking a threshold to/from another room, or weighing down a characters movements (ala Sysiphus).

• At least one [plant]{.underline} should always be present, sometimes more, but never more than the number of characters on stage - characters may be bring/take plants with them to adjust for this balance.

• [Animals]{.underline} should be present, always free to roam in their respective ecologies (never restrained or caged beyond reason) - smaller animals are magnified to expand their presence (ie: snails under a microscope camera or brine shrimp being projected onto walls of the set). Larger animals may roam the stage and audience freely, being present for the duration of the scene without territorial restrictions until the scene is over, at which time they are silently called back and taken off stage.

Lighting:

Each room has a projection which lights the characters and casts their shadow as a phantasmagoria upon the opposing wall, upon which one can also see fainter shadows apparently being produced from creatures in the adjacent room, although they are too abstract to describe in detail (shadow puppets or inverted animations). There are geometric lights which follow each character as they move throughout the space - a linear circle and a solid circle (spot light) - each of which are subtly shifting their amount of facets & colors. These lights follow the characters automatically according to a grid projected upon the stage which sometimes becomes visible for brief moments. The characters movements are traced across the stage by these lights, sometimes ahead of the movements (anticipating or leading their path), sometimes remaining directly above them in a oscillating field, and sometimes lagging or trailing behind them (haunting past). The lighting/shape movements follow the characters by their movements, catching them as the initiate a direction, but after a few moments of inactivity the shapes slowly recede back to the tracing of a larger "global" geometric form which itself is constantly subtly shifting.

Language:

Each character has a name which is used to reference themselves and another name which they use to reference the other - an ambiguous and androgynous designation in the language and also a proper name = "s'he" or "h'en" or just simply "you" but also "We'sis'ss" or "Us'sis'ss" = any mention of an "I" instills great confusion and suspicion in all characters on stage. There is also continuous reference being made to an other which is not the other but rather any other. Each character has certain words, grammars, and/or reference structures that are consciously avoided - not as a rule, but as a matter of social etiquette akin to refraining from swearing while in the presence of distinguished elders.

Characters:

There are many roles throughout the production that define distinct delineations of affect and articulation, but the performance is conducted by only 3 actors (3 voices = 3 speaking actors). There are other performers that enter and leave the scene continuously according to another tangential score of behavioral instructions seemingly unrelated to the "primary" events although occasional interfering with or otherwise influencing those events (ie: the relocation of shared props, redirecting lighting situations, de/constructing stage walls and elements, etc). The 3 voices are extremely distinct from each other, so the implication is that the 3 actors representing the 3 voices should be very distinct from each other, although this could be compensated for with highly theatrical acting styles or digitally processing the voices with microphones routing through various software or analog effects.

There are characters speaking

with space in between

to differentiate their words but not themselves.

They are speaking as themselves to each other, but the difference is uncertain.

The distance between oneself and the other: a matter of essences, a method of illuminating facets of the same form.

The dialogues with each other is an attempt to describe; it is a process of description.

It makes an object, a perspectival object with major and minor facets, considered to the extent that the opera is an object of art, a working out of an artistic process, a "work" which is to say a material instantiation of a perspective lived through experience.

The dialogue is a drama: a theatrical spectacularization. It makes a spectacle of life. It is not life itself, but removed from it. It is artificial, synthetic, a construction of determinism removed from the course of nature. A constructed reality that mimics through a parallax dance that which we embody in and of ourselves.

It functions, as a tool, to allow us as viewers and makers and participants in the theatrics - of life and of this opera of known and unknowable universes - to dislodge our understanding, to break away from the known in order to inch closer-ever-closer though never quite touching the resonant morphic field of the unknowable just beyond our senses but influencing them concretely nonetheless.

The dialogue of the actors - of the characters - singing and speaking in this opera is one of description, each speaking from their own disparate voices while accumulating a unified vocalization, distinct voices being spoken simultaneously to intone a chord. The elements and forces of the chord are tuned in and out of focus, modulating attention with intention, mixing up and down accordingly, respectively, to the articulation of focus for each individual scene, if there can be seen to exist more than one (scene). The singular movement of the opera form encapsulates within its folds the distinguished micro systems of the material parts, orienting them to each other in auspicious display in order to demonstrate through the mixing and repetitive cycling of their spontaneous scenarios that the focal point of attention is precisely where all content emerges: to call attention to the autopoietic processes rather than the structures which contain them. It is through the enacting of this dynamic process that we will shine some light upon the various facets of so-called reality, which is to say clarify through intention-induced attention the unknowable aspects of our performed existences at the periphery of the known.

In the beginning was the word: the first scene must address its own beginning. Through speaking we locate ourselves, the self, the I of the mind and the eye of the body: the location is the utterance of the first words. The first scene is what was already there, where it has always already been: a priori descriptions by an a priori subject with no memory. From this artificial beginning a process unfolds which loses itself temporally, so that after having begun the recollection of its initiation is no longer relevant. In the end, the end becomes just that, a practical ceasing to an otherwise arbitrary process of temporal undulations, or at best a sign of infinite return or infinite regress, one or the other or both.

We start with the beginning, with each character stating their own perspective of awareness. The delineation between the character roles is made by distinguishing what they are capable of perceiving, upon their focus, more and less, to create a hierarchical order of attention akin to the teleological cosmogonies, scientific taxonomies, ontological semiotics, and phenomenological physiologies which inform our known reality. Each character represents a different caste within a universal order: a cosmological caste system of attention with degrees of embodiment. Each caste communicates through a unique language. Two distinct caste systems are described with two distinct casts of characters, which can be conceived of as two complimentary frequencies of the same energy current or two bodies of the same organism (the physical and the etheric double): a system of interrelated plateaus whose structure determines the key elements of the opera, ie: the sound, lighting, video elements, etc. The caste hierarchy determines the rules of how characters may or may not interact with each other and/or the other elements of the production; a cosmogony of rules so that every caste is aware of what they may or may not do or may or may not be aware of in relation to the other caste, forming a social hierarchy mirroring the spiritual hierarchy structuring our understanding of the known and unknown. This opera is a reenactment of an actual spiritual-cosmological ordering.

Each caste system has 3 primary voices or narrators whom communicate in an "intelligible" language which functions as a kind of hybridized, semi-fictionalized, reimagined English. Other narrators speak in a range of languages demonstrating a great amount of semiotic slippage: "Neu-Nordic" (a distillation of Icelandic/Danish/Norwegian/Swedish), "Caligrapheme" (combination of various Asian symbol-glyph-based languages), "Romanik" (French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese), etc. Other members will be less or non- intelligible, whom may still be understood but only through far leaps of imaginatively activated intuition, an altered state of attention not so much intellectual as it is wholly embodied.

Caste Descriptions:

1. The Human Animal:

The lower caste consists of primordial creatures verging upon pure animality and difficult to distinguish from it as such. Conscious of all performers, anticipating the movements of the entire operatic ecology and demonstrating an awareness of all aspects of the spectacle including the audience but without any ability of communicating verbally. Animal sounds, but also non-linguistic forms of communication: gestures, ultrasonic, etc.

2. The Rational Objectivist

3. The Mystical Objectivist

4. The Anthropologist and Ethnomusicological hobbyist

5. The Breather

6. The Glossolalic Whisperer (Baptist trance, Hebrew mysticism, Ayahuasca songs)

7. The Affected Voice: embodied emotional vocabulary, the feel of the body

8. The Parapsychic Voice: mental senses, extending outside of the body

9. The Physiological Voice: tactile senses, the body meat itself

10. The Disembodied Narrator

Music/Sound Ecology:

• Each character has a musical association to their physical presence. The behaviors of the character are determined by the playing/manipulation of their personal score.

• The written dialogue has its own musical score distinct from the movement of the characters. Each scene has its own tuning and chordal logic, related to the affective content of the text.

• The various locations and interaction variables of the physical set aspects are associated to certain ascension/dissension chords: the table, chair, plants, animals, the X/Y axis of the floor grid (stage orientation).

• Each prop determines and manipulates the audio ecology in some way, in different ways, based on the object and the scene. The sonic variable couple be axis-based (higher or lower, front or rear of the stage, etc), interaction based (touch or lighting), or merely binary (simple on/off - on/off the table, on/off the stage itself).

WHAT MAKES THE SELF

WHAT FORMS THE PAST

I've known the name of it ever since I can remember, though the pronunciation has evaded me from time to time, and with sounds being so succinctly tied to the weave of the past these days I may not ever have spoken the moniker at all, aloud, to the extent that the speaking is the naming itself and also the remembering, so for that matter who can say how far back the memory can be said to extend, if it can at all be spoken, or known. What can be said for sure is that I've always been unsure, unsettled in the definitive qualities of secured foundation, blurred in scope by any perspectival instrument, somewhat deafened to the inner tones zoning through the very bones which sustain me, or at least some aspect of a self which has risen more or less vertically along a horizontal axis of self-seeing-ness, which is all of my selves and none other, at least so far as I may make such an assertion in-definitely though without precise definition. Who is this voice which is asking incessantly, simmering up from the boiling toil of the banal canals of everyday breathing schemes, every so often rising above the hissing whisper of subliminal murmur to clang a clear cold chord through mind and over body to calm the chatter of pragmatic consciousness and focus the senses upon a point of excruciating clarity - a pain due in part to its sur-reality in relation to the callous cauldrons of the resting states - yes a point with all the precision of an edge and the aerobatics of starlight and just as much distance, infinitesimal in physics and poetics alike in allegory, from every being throated or thwarted? This voice must be my own, arising from a within which is not wholly mine, rather a mining hole of switches, twitches, tricks and traps tapping in rapture the senses of my feelings feeling themselves as self, kneeling before an altar of a holed self, a holy shelf of lenses and other potential clarities, rumbling resonators of recoiling accentuations of a location somehow completely here and consuming how's of practice and completion and hearing, absorbed and ventilated.

My self is a breath, ventilating, a process of laying out and unloading the accumulating gleanings of a life of inhalations exhumed in relation to a softly laid air. Putting it down upon the page in neatly carved lines, scrimshaw of the fingers own prints making marks upon a body of pressed porous pulp, filling with ponderous flowing nibs inky guffaws and quivering tines, as a page of a book with no middle and perpetual prologue pummeling towards grand release with no end, or at least no credits. To write is to ventilate, to breath, to carry on a rigorous physical exercise with no mind and scarcely a body, to make vulnerable a voice which cares not to be spoken but must finds words through a material language even as it evades direct stares, distilling the tactile colors of the otherwise luminous scrim of reality down to a charcoal contrast of cheap dry communicative compote which only sweetens the tragedy of the eternal drama. Oh-so-human, oh-so-dramatic, why speak of any other, and how could we not? Text is the mirror guide which shimmers hints of the unspeakable names gurgling over the watery vocaled chords, falling over the quartz of the self as radiant beams of densely felted fractures, shattered from the ancient icebergs by Viennese mountain herders and left out to dry, flipping eternal folds of acrobatic reverie without glee in a midnight ocean of metonyms, metaphors, meteorites, Roman mollusks hiding purples in their genitals, rich running amethysts, ameliorated adamantium, and other archetypal archipelagos of awareness. This mind stretches out over the page to soak up the rays of the solar plexus, warming in dark sponges and lighter velvets, humming a gentle characteristic coo across the watery abyss like syrup over fresh pinecones. But still - in this stillness - of this moment outside of time and far within the compartments of space - how am I to know my own name?

Friendships are made spontaneously, an improvisation of mortal musics with solos streaming out of the greater symphonies in curiously crafted crescendos of delightful absurdity, when they are right, which is to say tuned in harmony not dissonance, though sometimes even the mal-tuned chords create an enchanting comedic chorus. Friends are made to be lost, again and again in eternal return, back to the beginning always already starting up in a finale, small morsels of joy and insanity dripping upon the tonsils and filling the voids of our lives or at least one life, for awhile, until they fade through silence or distance, by attention or abandonment, to the mausoleum of memory whose chilled marble contents gather dusty decorations and decayed enamels, frozen in the tanks of amnesiatic corpses and auspicious urns, rotting under layers of the flooding present ravenously consuming attention without heed to the vaporous emissions of excrement. We live many lives. Some relationships are abandoned for idealism and others murdered for pocket change, some we sew to the torso so as to never become unattached while others slip and curl instantly over the grasp before we have the chance to savor the flavors of the would-be reorientation, some filling our souls with previously unimaginable satiation and others amounting mountains of starvation. Loneliness is a bittersweet digestif best served cold after a long hot meal of sweaty sex, soiled secrets, and soulful soliloquy with saints or snakes.

Objects also come and pass, go through and on top of, providing programs and burdens and portals and barriers, but somehow always seem to become more than their material properties as we live along with them, as though the physical resonation of the thing plays a role as performer or conductor in our singing systems, or perhaps our song elates some supra-sensual shimmer in the properties, so that perhaps the mind and the matter may be said to be mustered of particles that can be differentiated but are not altogether different. I am myself to my own mind but also in body, solving and self-ing through making manifest my mental perturbations in mental meat, cerebral corpus, and there is no difference I would say, at least so far as I can speak of difference in things from their being not of my being but only becomings in relation to that which my self is said to be, namely a becoming in and of itself always and already in relation to that which defines it: the other. All these things piling up around me are not me but are also, they are me and me also, me +, greater than just, they are not my body but give it feeling by being felt and making my touch tactile, giving to me or some sense of me as much as I give unto them my attention or sense them as something in their own, so how can I say so assuredly that this sense is decidedly mine and not a shared reciprocal oscillation of sensation passing between what is me or mine and what is other or just another me or perhaps a me also? If that which is outside cannot be without a projection from my own within then I must declare that all my declarations are demarcating no delineations between any imagined or imprinted peripheries of ins or outs, that these others are also myself and are active in my own becoming as much as I am activating their ontological unfolding: we are making each other through being other, we are activating ourselves through a process of selving, we are processing difference as a process of dance, a primary movement of sensation and expression alike. So here are these objects waiting to be used and here is the me waiting to be objectified, some matter of memories and mind and a memory of materials and other matters, so let us take them up mindfully.

All these plants all around us, are they me or mine or matter or memory then? Sentient beings anticipating our moves before attention can intend the rudiments of mobility, sensing through qualities unquantifiable by our own rational mechanisms or machinated organs that which is and will be, with roots tasting down through gravity, seeing with mineral optics the rotations of the terrestrial capillaries, stretching up a tireless yoga of solar nourishment upon rich chocolaty firmament, forming without nerves an awareness to wind and water and even more obscure waves coasting our terrestrial beaches and corporeal breaches, these gentle bodies without organs, reeds and pipes and drums of every variety, harboring secrets of dark orchestrations and luminous consternations that make our feeble human mythologies seem like cheap gossip or cramped constipation. These chloroform nymphs offer a crystalline clarification that has yet to be incorporated into our choirs, a concentration upon being not compartmentalized in mortality but performed through the perpetual motions of the prairie, at the jugular of the jungle, active in the making of landscape-as-body, essential to the ecology rather than attempting mastery over some thing outside, a display of potent exteriorization of interiority that may offer us a refreshing vocabulary for an understanding in situ perpetuum mobile. Such an understanding is only found through acceptance, via compassion, vis-a-vis love attained not through purity but putrefaction, by turning dirt into earth, rejecting debilitating descriptions of what [is]{.underline} in favor of revitalized incantations of what the sensuous and sensible could be, to reorient towards activating attention upon the myriad minutiae, and of course upon love itself.

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH an exclamation an exultation an exoneration an evocation, of the amorous! AAAAAHHHHH a scream of torn tendons, of tenuous clouds, vapors of transcendence and tragedy. Love is not experienced through possession, in maintenance of a perpetual moment as it is always fleeting, always leaving, already gone, a requiem release of what is known or knowable: it is not itself concretely understood but only ever indirectly fondled through reflected and/or refracted and/or's, non-verbal streams which inject turbulence in sentimental sediments, only alluded to in form, color, shape, and simmer through poetry, philosophy, and other pedantic panhandling. It is through loss that we come to feel the swells of the hearts seize, by way of lack that we understand that which we once held to be so potent, by observing the effects of amorous magics that we may glimpse the residues of attachment itself. Love is tragic, defined by tragedy, known through a hallucination no less real than every other, is the other, the many lines that linger at the end of the poem, the dim pitch that encroaches and consumes after the lights have been blown out, and so it is through the circumstances of the separation that we should locate it. To know it is to have lost it, to feel it is to have it drop out of reach, to taste it is to feel ones own tongue tasting, a self selving its own through differentiation without difference. Screaming out into the vacuum formed after unclenching from the loving embrace is the clearest, most amplified declaration of the self-as-relation, as the locus of relations, even when oriented towards a nil languishing in pure liquid lack: the universe is a black love.

The universe was not born from any linty Vishnu navel or cosmic concubine womb, not from dusky walnuts or dewed forest tips, of ovarian pools or cool cooing song of hyperallergic tricksters finger fluting the soft clay soils of the moon, not of cheese or bees or plush flowered wings melting their wax upon the iron boulders of amber caked deserts, and not even from the mirrored emerald intestines of the great ocean before the time of terrestrial fates when it hugged and moistened the soils like an early morning blanket still humming the mourning song of that first quaking bounce that initiated the motion of the parallax midnight shoal, oh sea of coal, trolling the astral umbilical like a bastard orphan creature with no name for not having ever yet been made. No, the universe is no stardust marmalade spread over our toasty morass like steamy thick butter-balmed breaking fast waves of solar complexion, as though there were a face up there fading the flames of godly altars out across a lesser atmosphere of measly human riddles and Olympian games. No, the universe was not begun by the plucking of an affirmative string tuned to Pythagorean chords or Schoenbergian sores or greater or lesser intervals, idealized parables, thunder drums bursting skies with life frothing rain grains or lightning tongues talking the hymns of etheric doubles springing somersaults over amoebic jello jiggling in some protozoan dawn before the bell tolls for god only knows. No, the universe is no verse of nonesuch sanctimonious chorus, no terse thread sewn stich pulled from toes holding taut a tenuous linear torch, no head strong itch twitching curses at incessant boulders churning down abominable mountains formed of demiurges piled upon dialogues incanting excesses of pleasure, pain, or pulchritudinous plentitude. The universe was no negative, nor was it a purely purled positive, but more than likely and almost possibly maybe some less than whole and very much quasi quandary of yesses, dried figs, and sundry. Namely, it is yes, by which we may claim it to be an eye, or any yes spelled another way: an I which is eyeing itself I'ing its eyes in awe of the void receding not to blackness but self-same likenesses, in all likelihood seen as a hole of a fine sliced wholeness, or bread, dished hot pie of saccharine somnambulists awakened by the mirror-portal seeking its own tailing hiss of beginning. The universe is an eye through which we see ourselves salivating, a shelf which holds our I's and keeps id's from slipping, a multisyllabic multi-tendriled super-organism that touches all peripheries of electrical cross fires through composite peepers and morphogenetic clouds of sweet ripe vision. The universe is an eye, but not mine, an I but not time, perhaps shy but not blind, a simple rhyming structure humming its own tune so that folks can understand. The earth is a grape turned raisin, the universe is a black pupil: its a hole with the world inside of it and the "it" is just a single side of one possible "us" so forget about insides and outsides and remember to remember that the world is in me and I am in the world, the teeth are the visible bone in a head-holding-mind of verbal songs, and even the color is but a name for the null which defines explaining save for articulating the periphery of our dim knowing.

Sit and meditate on the sound at the end of the thread, and try harder to feel that which cannot be bent through bones or sanded by brittle intonation. It has already been falsely tagged as a ticket rather than ride: its not being ridden but archived. Scientists seem to specialize in death; even the monk on the mountain with his two stones which will never be mirrors continues to create friction for the frustrated followers swimming in sand, and also to write haikus to twilight psyche, and bake buns for holy bovine while neglecting that primary meat of the body. The humble people in the village of rivers and waterwheels lay down flowers upon the sun bathed stones marking the beginnings and endings of all possible trails to remind passersby of the inevitability of death so as not to run out of living while there is still rice to be steamed and reeds to tie up notes to the trees in sets of three as thin tinseled talismans to incessant seconds, calcifying minutes, the inertia of the hours, and the amnesia of years, but also wake up to instruments and parade around for a death already arrived as an eternal return, a rejoicing for a life spent in work not worry, winding a delicately crafted rope from attentive soups, poetic colloquialisms, and water clocks. What do we fear in the unweaving of our own garments, how we have so easily forgotten our slicked skin nudity of soft gummed organelles vibrating in the morning mists thickening the jungles of our ancestral biomes, what terror strikes down to the heart with clichéd cleavers and bumbling ballistics whenever that safe little chocolaty center is encroached upon, as though it were our own to protect, as though it were our selves we disconnect, as though the hand retracting back from the fire didn't learn the flavor of searing kisses from billboard circuses and televised revolutions. Let the hand burn, I say, "let's get gooey" so that we may all stop holding it and be free to pick up new curiosa, clamber together a loose goose neck tchotchke carbuncle, or even build a carbon table that might support the weight and girth of more pertinent conferences on the subject of mind and body, sight and universe, yours or mine, or tables.

Suddenly, appearing out of nothing, or at least seeming to do so, a voice speaks, as though swirling up from the inside: "Ok here you are - or something is - or at least was - that can be said for certain - or at least might be - so you are - not certain but listening - not here but hearing - not have been but being in - a form of you which may or may not be but most certainly was or will be - so... how can I help you?"

And in reply this being which is me but cannot be - since I am the narrator of this story and you the ears in the chairs over theres receiving the lesions and lessons with those unrelenting imbricating attentions - hear me when I say that this voice is not mine but probably yours, as mine is in yours, and we are all really just acting-other for each other in any and every exchange anyways. So it says, which is to say that I say, which as we said is just you saying, to this voice which once spoke, which may also have been ourselves squelching, or at least yours, and to whom or towards what we are now teething this clear calm address teeming over the rim like a tidal wave of emoticons flickering soapy slippage in a kitchen sink bathtub:

Well yes, ahem, I see or thought I saw a way or path by which or through I might cross this boundary which seems to have seamed the sides of what once might have been two separate-though-serrated slices, one of meat or muscle or might which my sights sought to fill with feeling like a sock in search for a foot to step with, and the other of something lighter and decidedly more airy which could have been just rhyme or rhythm overheard from some jingle jangle jungle jam-a-long but I suspect was in fact dissected from a close analysis of that supposed space in between these sun-cured sheets of skin and song where I was able to distill a great white something which - once it was oogled - quickly boggled my noodle for laying limp all my Heideggerian strudel, as well as a batch of other phenomenological confectionaries. So, uh, hmm, er, aaah, asso, typ, leksam, like these likeness, the items of like that linger with like kind, the like-to-like licorice lasso laying languid linguistic lasagna lashing limp-dick tarot on the yawning tantric yoni - this thing which is no thing, an event that happens to us and by us and emanates from us to this other which is becoming, in a process of becoming, increasingly difficult to differentiate, this non-thing pointing me out of the crowd of stimulations constantly consuming and threatening to drown us in simulations, or whatever it is, what is it? When we sit and stare at each other, either through mountain pose or mirror microphones, and exchange this juicy stuff in between that makes us fall into love or fall into the other or fall into or out of ourselves, this jelly slithering from the eyes or projected like beams from my I to yours, is it a detection of touch or a deflection of your visual will, a power or a force or a tactile hallucination which is no less real for being impossible to quantify? Let's qualify it! And then let's distill the essences down, down deep, seep it into a sponge and soak up the flavors to still this more whimsical sacrosanct nature a little longer, oh please please just a little longer, and to save it to share as more than just a whisper, and recall it on call, on days sunny or gray, to allow us to remember an experience worthy of the efforts of doing, so that we may know it all better and end our search here and now, please!

Call a name, or naming. Let's say its communication, say it go ahead, but keep walking next to me for even the lonely shackled and blind need to keep on keeping company. We can pick it up at a passing, swish it back and forth like carbohydrates, at a site active in its taking of a place, in the mouth perhaps, but less sweet and in fact often bitter and with more bite, the more so when less understood, but oh so caramelized delightful when synchronicities collide. There are many languages living in the world and even more coughing draught or churning curds from neglected syntax, so they say, and even more subtle little nuances that pass through pores or across pupils or stewed in subterfuge evading our attempts to elaborate them, and it is all these nameless shivers and slivers that connect the one to their own, and one to each other one also. Its an additive process defying all numerical constraints: this is not algebra but allegory! Listen to the sheepherders whistling over the mountains! Its not to their flock that they speak but the bowing boughs of basalt basilica stretching over the golden fleece, hugging the mythological wet woolen lunchsacks tight with fresh greens's for the cheeses, the epistemological tomb keepers of nature's own gnarled semiotic stacks pushing up from the magnetic streams aligning all of our senses: without these monstrous iron stupas we would have no rubric for intelligibility as all would be of unsounding mineral. The mountain is the first friend, the closest body to mind not our own, the primary primordial immortal provider whose copper clad conduits flow with the same iron vitamins stinging our own over-televised flesh jackets. The mountain is a friend, and in these times we could all use one, in time we will all need one, yet time and time again they will pass away to that musty clay cairn marking the center so that one can always find their way back to the source, the true navel of the only earthen pot worth spinning, that axis mundi which aligns our spines to the stars with stripes of magnetic comet tail mercury dew trickling down over the forehead more abundant and eternal than Icelandic waterfalls in springtime. Its towards these mile high mole hills that we should all address our concerns, against their brickhouse walls that we might strap up our loose tangents and hang the last sad hat to dust unneeded for no other party to promenade or banquet to banter. Tap in the hook and be done with sour airs.

The road to purgatory is paved with good attention; be wary of the tricks and trips carelessly laid upon your inquisition of halfwits, plebs, and secretaries of the burning republics. A good rule of thumbed nose is scrawled on the urns of a baroque penumbra that can never be broken; so what's the difference between riddle and Ritalin in the hands of a remunerated post-pubescent with a cashed in sugar cache and perfectly pitched retinal coordination but no pineal gland phosphors to phone home with? Its no matter, but everything matters, so let's pick it back up again. Let's say being lost in mind beats the hearts wandering bard better than a sea sick sailor in love with a tumultuous sea, called somber sober or Cincinnati: both just delay the inevitable decay of mental enamels rooted in convictions of fallacious wheat paste scrims erected by gray-suited orators of ashen pasts, more good intentions percolating salty lime dust to fill all cracks of a future generation deemed dirty under the nails before exiting the womb through the giftshop - as all those ol' sick daddies liked to call it in those days. Sweep it under the rug during communion so the pale physical compositions of our proudly impersonal conversations may satiated our dead leg gallivanting, while the philosophical house wives sewing circle circulates faux crossword pictographs covering up the clandestine stratagems for inheriting the world and getting to some real tidying up, with earthen spices, respiratory oracles, faint vestibules, and a sensitive zest for divination. Forget this beat, its been beaten bloody already and I've never even really seen any real spill. Let the philanthropists attend to the body count so we can return our attention back upon intention itself, get dirty with fundamental delusions away from grandeur and back upon that primitive flesh tube sponge, nails and all. Orate this oracle of an opera for no future but that which we shall be active in making, we true romantics reconstituting the sweaty terrestrial salts of poetic plethora, masticators of the myriad minutiae, torch wavers of the phantasmagoric miasma, writers of true love poetry and breakers of false heart vases venting profane kitsch and carcinogenic cliché.

I stand before you, esteemed members of the party, as one of the same body, also with my own ((body)) teeming with dendritic strains, buckled up leather slapped constraining braces, bearing the same weight, baring the flaming foam viruses always threatening encroachment upon the colloquial larynx and stopping the jaws from rattling. I stand here now with an erect head and drooping shoulders to show you my singular humility teetering humdrum pride, though my coat is checked at the door, which we all helped build, and me knees are still quivering with the anticipation of asphyxiation like finely tuned motor skills, spilling nails, cat tails, and other esoterica over the garage floor in search for a light. I stand before the forerunners of an apocalypse which needs no introduction, flying low under an ominous horizon of purple paralogical prisms, golden haloed infusorial hays, waxed wings breaking brittle in the cold, and boy are my arms tired. Head hung low, sea swelling ever weaker undertow, a scintillation of the toes swollen up from a deep bow, bowing the chords of the spine in pentatonic sequence programmed by fired Reiki fingers molesting the cartilage, filing down digit acrylics, stirring aromatic ambergris into the socialist neti pots to serigraph the networks net worth - cash in or be cached. The head now hangs even lower as I slump to catch the nasal drip, bent awkward petrified stalagmite neck, "break off" and let me swivel back around circular with no compass, heading by nose towards olfactoral memories, reveries, primrose pastries, dabbed lightly with rosehip oil and geranium mist, blotted with silk, muddled myrrh milkshake elixir grinding granulations of nutmeg into more practical analgesics. My sore shoulders reflect the burden of the empire, of reading old books in poor postures, of ergonomics published for an idealized gallery rather than the disheveled living room we all wake up in and will all return to for the afternoon nap, rapping fingers on unforgiving tabletops, overstuffed knapsacks mottled with soiled handkerchiefs and mucus membrane memory wrinkles, bound at the wrists to untied a knotted tongue, no song left to lisp or lip-synch but "release" or a low fidelity remix of "catatonia" by an anonymous maestro.

In the morning I raise up, first from sleep, then with lids, thrown over quilts to the dawning down, flipping up window scrolls and mental shutters, levitating over the body floating tributaries of an oceanic bedroll, balancing between some quickly clearing cavalcade of awareness and this other space of dreams which I struggle to make any less clear thought its decidedly more cacophonous. I clamor up and over the edge to make contact on with the floor, feeling through my neurotransmitters the sedimentary sentiments of years of human touch saturating the pulpy rings rippling through the floor boards, hands laying mortar upon handshake contracts, conversations encapsulated in tiered layer cakes of linoleum, linseed oil, imported concrete, Columbian coffee and Peruvian rubber, Honduran hemp burlap still ripe with the domestic golden Inca potatoes they were entrusted to wrap up, trapped in the knots of the bastard pine boards, pulsating through Pergo and perforated plastic sheathing, percolating through the cork to the palm of my feet, electrical shocks shimmying up the knees and thighs, sparks to the genitals :: voltage to the kundalini, foaming the head to that perfect sensitive simmer, aligned for thought, open flood gate of words and images and alien dance moves laying out the trajectories of mental geometry. In the morning I have no memory of death for being far too occupied with the beginning of living, a rebirth, still birthed, active in giving birth to the words evaporating over a smooth glassy waterfall of sensations, neglectful of shadows and sour grapes. As I rise to meet the sun I stop to single out those most savory scintillating strings from the molecular morass and cast out a meditation to the scene of day, stirring my own marmalade mind into a thickening of the halcyon buttresses pouring in through the warbled window panes, imprinting an infinite expanse into a memorable meme or palm-sized haiku to take with me through the course of the coming currents so that I might not forget to remember to remember when things are lighter, and to always be attentive to welcoming the eternal return.

Far after lunch, in the evening I die. I die slowly and many times over, minutes ripping themselves out of time with a deafening crunch like devilish knäckebröd chompers through a Tibetan horn. As the black approaches all the quartz architectures collapse upon the sand collecting itself into iced purple irradiated slabs, squeezing ghostly moans from some distant ionic trumpet, skipping diamond tipped edges over all my gold leafed iconography with greasy latex hands bearing an excess of fingers, caked in soot, powdered in noxious potash, poisoning the wellspring of what was once sweet clear pools, left to simmer away upon the iron heat of boiling night. In the evening I revert to the state of a deaf dumb animal - not absolute animality mind you, nothing so pure or innocent - a bastardized hydra-headed homunculus hissing acidic sprays from brimstone vortices on the forehead, skin melting to an internal blue flame, no taste save for that which festers and fancies inebriated fecundity. At day's breaking I become an animal-brute, drunk on anxiety and made numb to all but the hum of neurological tapeworms chewing through my withering prune cup cogito, a berserker with no strength and a taste for blood, a sexual vampire and perverted pariah, self-exiled to a desert of deleterious gases with snarl for smile, and no metronome. In the night I lose sight of what I once was as the accumulated presences of the day concentrate into an impermeable igneous glacial slab smeared over my little self, the minute self stripped quivering stark and mad in the labyrinthine recesses of the dank cerebral catacombs. At night, as I wander, I may sometimes be found without seeking, if I can muster the motivation to remember another amalgamation of a self wherein I may pour my perplexity back into the mold, to remember remembrances too hastily passed over without grasping, remember the song of the hours tempered to the celestial clavier, and if I am rigorous in my own unraveling may even be able to squeak out a melody of memory potent enough to instigate a release from the stupor and set back into place, at harmonic intervals, the fretted frameworks from which the quaking ochre-dyed cognizance may again circulate clarity, crystalline conviction, resume a pose of authority over the waning awareness, and set the feet back upon the base.

As I write the words they inscribe upon the brand of the brain a discrete bio-electrolysis; I work upon syntax, structure slippery syllogisms into straight line structures which seem to need a bending in any other direction while also being held to a form whittled into their own logic, much as my own double helix weaves an alphabetic rubric-riddle into the Mandelbrot digits pumping out the keyed type of the QWERTY board into predictable syncopations while also betraying a knowledge of turning beyond the scope of mathematical computation. The words jump off the page into my mind, spinning sticky woven webs of associations dipped in the sounds and smells of so many lives that distinguishing between those which I have lived, those which I've read, and those that I am currently performing seems not only impossible but negligent to the potential poetic profundity of living at all. Life is not language but informs it, the words jumping like wormy beans in the ontological cantina tapping tempos into the semiotic edifice, gentle indentations tick-tocking clicking clacking calculators circulating meaning from a voice made present inside the murky marshes of the mind, beamed out through the kino back upon the book active in broadcasting: reading is an exchange, a potent magic that steals from the eye while offering sweet wine plums ripened by the morning sun and dried through the long roaring night stoves. Words, consonants pushing back upon the vowels howling multi-timbred octaves above the sense they distract, a eternal sparring between light and dark meats of the same animal, an aikido of articulation, accentuation, or ascension, though one can never be too sure. It all began with a word: in the beginning was the word and the word was god but not literally, not by that name, nor Yahweh or Jehovah or any other, but almost certainly (one can never be so certain) the word itself, the primary form of the note, the primordial bread of the baking, a map scrawled over the stars to give them direction as though there were no north before pointing to it, a halo crown around the solar corona sliced by the honed iris stoned in erratic ecstasy at the sight of its own seeing, an eye which delineates the yes and pronounces the tongue to continue on in the speaking, a muscular twitch scratching lines upon the cave which was just minutes before only still stone of some other body not owned. The word is a force, a willpower, that which turns thought into energy, a magnification of electrified gnosis, a recourse to the known from the gooey gray matter between the ears whining so melancholic in its neglect. The word is an element, a mineral more malleable than metals but capable of so much more mechanical applications, whipped into a paste and mixed with the oily residues of sentience to congeal a pigment of chromatic consciousness - only the color chord but not the instrument, and don't forget the maker - a hardened mercurial orb or maybe dodecahedron that spins with such velocity as to still crystal clocks to loosened seconds, a brick red molten furnace of tinned tempers and adamantium affect, oh sinusoidal silica spreading my soliloquy to the sun and all the sibling selves, including my own, how do we work upon each other in perpetual purling hisses kissing the brows of reason with no decadence of sense or sensibilities. These words are not prose so much as autopoietic, a cosmos of self-making, a system of regeneration with no beginning, tangents of tactility excavated by the surveyors of sight itself the particle swarming sea of eyes active in the reading of difference by declaring the spaces between letters with breath, interval, desire, and apophenia: these specific experiences of abnormal significance which fill out the characters and make the mythology buoyant. I've known the name of it ever since I can remember, I've just only now remembered to remember it as an act of writing, of/for the self, of the known drawn lines demarcating the unknowable without difference, as an aria through which I may come to know that which may be unknowable through sight and location, and speak as an opera for any audience which may make time to allow for it, even if only ever in and from my own ears.

CASTES OF THE SUPRA-ID-CORPUS

1. [The Animal]{.underline}:

The lower caste consists of primordial creatures verging upon pure animality and difficult to distinguish from it as such. Conscious of all performers, anticipating the movements of the entire operatic ecology and demonstrating an awareness of all aspects of the spectacle including the audience but without any ability to communicate verbally. The Animal's expressions are composed of collaged animal sounds, but also non-linguistic forms of communication: gestures, ultrasonic, etc.

REF: Owl screetch, insect chatter, sub- and super- sonic animal languages like dolphins, whales, bats, etc, grunts and growls of mammals, aleatoric bird sounds, etc.

2. [The Breather]{.underline}:

A human character mocking the form of a devout and thoroughly ascetic monk extremist, whom attempts no harm to any other living thing and orients every action towards a supreme compassion for the other. To this extent the breather is almost invisible and usually disregarded by most other members of the caste cosmology. If The Breather ever speaks it is in metaphysical reversals, Zen sex jokes, or nihilistic proverbs. The Breather's "voice" is more amplified than most, maintaining an audible presence in ever scene of the opera even when not visible on stage, as a constant breath which rises and falls according to its own score, written to compliment or antagonize the mise-en-scene.

3. [The Glossolalic Whisperer:]{.underline}

Inspired as a hybrid of certain "tongued" stereotypes such as the Southern Baptist preacher, a Hebrew mystic incanting the scriptures of the Kabbalah, and the Peruvian shaman singing a group through an Ayahuasca ceremony, the Glossolalic Whisperer speaks in a non-sensical language that is understood by no other character, though a few may attempt to intuit its meaning through their own lens. The language notation is based on deconstructive algorithms and chance operations, sometimes numerical (removing every 7th word), sometimes astrological or transcendental (removing all "harmful" omens from a text), sometimes quite pataphysical (no words with the letter E) or synthetically pataphysical (just removing all the E's from a text with a "find & replace" function), etc. The Glossolalic Whisperer - as implied by the name - only speaks at the level of a whisper, though sometimes there are radical exclamatory moments akin to observed spiritual ecstasy in various cultures.

4. [The Rational Objectionist/Objectivist]{.underline}:

A true Renaissance man, very masculine and egoistic indeed. The Rational Ob/Ob uses the scientifically calculated, philosophically considered, psychologically scrutinized, thoroughly theoretical and decidedly dissembodied perspective to describe the surroundings and themselves in rigorous mechanical detail. All questions are formed as hypothesis to test various effects, all answers are reasoned to be infallible truths (until logically proven otherwise), and all other characters are regarded as (mostly) inferior intellects wavering between degrees of sentience from completely dumb and numb life not worth considering to certifiably schizophrenic. The Rationalist often address himself in the third person, pursuing exercises in passionless reflexivity and clinical objectivity which result in a perpetual existential crisis of his own making. Very receptive to the animal movements, though usually misinterpreting their meaning, and seeming to take great inspiration from the musings of the Physiological Voice, The Rationalist is constantly making war with almost every character including himself.

5. [The Mystical Objectivist:]{.underline}

Perhaps a true initiate of the occult arts, a wizard capable of unspeakable magic, or just a lonely nut-job that took too many mythological tall tales to heart, The Mystical Objectivist defines his knowns based on what he feels. Constantly fumbling with strange esoteric devices of divination, assorted healing stones, and heavy books with indecipherable hieroglyphics, this character somehow seems to turn every question or statement back into a demonstration of the infallibility of his own premonition. The Mystic occasionally takes notice of the plants and animals, incorporating them into the allure of his colorful language which quite often takes on the characteristics of The Breather, The Glossolalic Whisperer, and the Parapsychic Voice, though - like the Rationalist - this mystic seems tormented by his inability to conjure a semblance of the supreme reality in the worldly materials surrounding him and quickly regresses to a state of darkness.

6. [The Anthropologist and Amateur Ethnomusicologist:]{.underline}

A casual intellectual from a non-prestigious university that experimented with some psychedelic drugs at a rock concert in his youth, traveled through South America while preparing post-graduate work, and now holds a comfortable tenured position at the local community college. While often speaking in an annoyingly theatrical ironic stoner voice (and other post-internet dialects sourced from youtube videos) in a vain attempt to fit in with his peers, the Anthropologist usual has very clearly articulated and sensitive insights on most situations, though always failing to pursue the propositions far enough to generate any new knowledge or wisdom. A decidedly educated though obviously negligent, mentally unkempt, and overly privileged outspoken male feminist, this character seems to get along with everyone else well enough to not cause any friction, but slowly begins to reveal a neurotically obsessional voyeurism for all others that steers his focus away from postmodern scientific or cultural-contextualized politically-correct mystical ideas towards a kind of fetishistic material-based intellectualism that paints him as a universal enemy to the other characters due to his uncompromising neutrality.

7. The Affected Voice: embodied emotional vocabulary, the feel of the body: voice of the intuitive quiver personified

8. The Parapsychic Voice: mental senses, extending outside of the body: voice of the landscape-personified

9. The Physiological Voice: tactile senses, the body meat itself: voice of the mitochondria personified

10. The Narrator:

Perhaps the voice of God or Nothing at all, this character is never seen as a body but is often insinuated in various forms throughout the production as a general "responsive dispersed agency" (according to a general description of life), as color, sound, abstract form, movement of seemingly inanimate objects, natural and supernatural phenomena, etc. The other characters all take turns narrating, but The Narrator is one not playing a role directly in the dialogue, but commenting upon it from outside, as it occurs, directly to the audience without being able to interact with the characters themselves - omnipotent and invisible to all save for the spectators, representing the voice of the audience.

TOWARDS AN OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

MUSIC

AMPLIFIED PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE

FISH FACTORY GAMELAN WITH CONTACT/DRUM MICS RUNNING THROUGH ABLETON

PREPARE ABLETON PATCHES & TRIGGERS

BEGIN DRAWINGS OF COSMOCCOCIC DRUMSET

MULTI-HAND "DRUM FORMS" (NOT CIRCLE BUT OTHER GEOMETRIES)

NOTATED

DESIGN "ZITHER FOR THE ELLIPSES" - AMPLIFIED DONE INSTRUMENT

WOOD SHOP CONSTRUCTION UTILIZING BANJO ADJUSTABLE BRIDGE

*REQUIRES GUITAR TUNING GEARS - ORDER ONLINE

FOCUS UPON CHANGE OPERATIONS OF PREPARED PIANO

REVERSE-ENGINEERED NOTATION SCHEMES ALSO UNIQUE VISUAL SCORES

MULTI-HAND PIANO WITH EQ-BROAD-BANDING RECORDING TECHNIQUE

FISH FACTORY FIELD RECORDINGS

CREATION OF SOUND OBJECTS WITH VARIOUS TEXTURES

AMPLIFICATION OF TONAL SOUNDS INTO VARIOUS MATERIALS:

*NEEDS AMPLIFIER: FROM PROJECTOR ROOM?

***TRANSLATE LIVE RECORDINGS INTO MIDI TRACKS TO ADD TONAL ELEMENTS

SPECIFIC MUSICAL QUOTATIONS FOR VARIOUS INSTRUMENTS

SHORT RECORDED FRAGMENTS OR SAMPLES

ASSEMBLE AN ARCHIVE OF SOUND BYTES

USE FOR LIVE PERFORMANCE, CONTENT TO BE TRIGGERED

AMPLIFICATION

OF BREATHING

OF FEET ON THE FLOOR

OF TOUCH: BODY-BODY: SIMULACRA OF SENSATION

OF TONAL RANGE VIA EQ SCULPTURAL BROADBANDING =

SPLIT TRACK INTO 3: HIGH/MID/LOW + ORIGINAL: PAN SOFT + HARD

MOVEMENT

­­­INTERPRETATION OF RHYTHMIC MOVEMENTS INTO STATIC POSES

BODY AS TRANSITION TO LANGUAGE - SEMIOTIC GESTALT - ETHERIC ADHESIVE

REVERSE-ENGINEERED NOTATION

CORPOREAL CALLIGRAPHY : WRITING THE BODY

CONDUCTION/CONDUXION: PHYSICAL PRESENCE OF OUTSIDER TO INTERPRET SCORES

REQUIRES ITS OWN SCORE: NECESSARILY ABSTRACT FORMALISM

****

NOTATION

MUSIC: REVERSE-ENGINEERED NOTATION: INVERTED EVENT-SCORES: TRACE-SCORE

RECORDS PROCESSION OF ATTENTION

*MIDI>IMAGE + IMAGE>MIDI TRANSLATION

TONE + RHYTHM + VOICE : TERTIARY HIERARCHY

TEMPO: FROM BODY

PITCH: FROM TEXT READING : MIDI>IMAGE

AS A PROCESS OF AMPLIFICATION THROUGH MEDIA

MOVEMENT: BODY > VIDEO > STILL FRAME > GLYPH TRACING

DIRECTIONS FOR IMPROVISATION: TEXT > PLAY

CREATE SCHEMATIC-DIAGRAMS OF RECORDING SCENARIOS (ALA SOUND-OBJECTS)

NESTED HIERARCHIES OF NOTATION

VOICE CONTENT > MUSIC CUES > MOVEMENT CUES > CONDUCTION > MINUTIAE

META-SCORE FOR COSMOLOGICAL CONTEXT (TIME)

PHYSICAL TIME IS CORRELATED TO AN ABSTRACTLY TUNED CLOCK TO CREATE AN OPERA-SPECIFIC TIME SCHEME (IN-GAME TIME)

CORRELATED TO META-TUNING OF THE OMNI-CHORD: CONSTANT TONE

WEBSITE COMPOSITION

CONTINUATION OF NOTACHOREOGRAM FOR RESEARCH

NEW WEBSITE FOR MANIFESTATION OF OOFK&UU. PROJECT

VIDEO

SPECIFIC VIDEO QUOTATIONS FOR SPECIFIC TEXTS, CHARACTERS, MODES

COMPILED INTO AN ARCHIVE = WORK IN SMALL FRAGMENTS

DIRECT TEXT > VIDEO TRANSLATION = "THE WORD MADE FLESH"

SUBTITLE EXPERIMENTS: RETINAL BURN

TEXT > INDIRECT TRANSLATION = ETERNAL GOLDEN DIALOGUE

ORDER + VELOCITY SET BY TEXT COMPOSITION

ORGANIZED INTO SUITES/SCENES : USED TO ADVANCE NARRATIVE

VIDEO TEMPLE: ARCHITEXTURE

LINEAR VS CYCLICAL VIDEO :: WINDOW/MIRROR/PORTAL/VORTEX

SUPERIMPOSED VIDEO CUES (CIGARETTE BURNS)

ETHERIC VIDEO DOUBLE OF AURATIC CONTENT: COLOR + THOUGHT-FORMS

SEPARATE CHANNEL OR SUPERIMPOSED

RELATED TO ASTRO-CHARTS OF VARIOUS VOICES

UNIQUE COLOR FIELDS + TEXTURE FREQUENCIES

VIDEO CARTOGRAPHY OF THE BODY-SCAPE

PORTRAITURE IN THE EXPANDED FIELD: MORE THAN TIME :: MORE THAN SELF

APPROPRIATED PORNOGRAPHY VIDEO DATABASE - SLOW MO + GLITCH CAPTURE

TEXT

LINGUISTIC ACROBATICS / POST-STRUCTURALIST AEROBICS / PSYCHIC AIKIDO

FURTHER DEFINE THE META-NARRATOR

ALL-SEEING EYE + HAND SETTING TRICKS + TRAPS FOR ALL INVOLVED

IN A STATE OF PERPETUAL INEBRIATION

NARRATION IS PASSED BETWEEN VARIOUS CHARACTERS

COMPLETE DESCRIPTIONS/RULES FOR EACH CASTE

EACH VOICE SPEAKS ASPECTS OF A UNIFIED DIALOGUE

APPROPRIATED FROM SPIRITUAL/SOCIOLOGICAL/ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOURCES

VISUAL DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTER CASTE SYSTEM

FURTHER ARTICULATE EACH VOICE

BASED EACH CHARACTER ON SPECIFIC KNOWN VARIABLES : ELUCIDATE THE UNKNOWN

CREATE FLOW DIAGRAM OF CHARACTER RELATIONS

ARTICULATE UNIQUE SINGING STYLE FOR EACH CHARACTER

DESIGNATE COLORS + TUNINGS FOR EACH VOICE

CORRELATE A TEXT SCORE + MOVEMENT SCORE

CUES FOR POSTURE + GAZE + GENERAL VELOCITY

AUTODICTATION EXERCISES TO GENERATE CONTENT

INTERVIEWING SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES

META-FORM

TEXT>IMPROVISED MUSIC>BODY MOVEMENT>NOTATION>CONDUCTION

TEXT : WRITTEN POETICS OF THE SUBJECT : MENTAL IMAGERY

IMPROVISED MUSIC : INTUITED AFFECT OF THE GROUP : BODY IMAGERY

BODY MOVEMENT : TRANSLATED AFFECT (CEREBRA/INTUITED) FOR ONE OR MANY: FORMAL GLYPH

NOTATION : ABSTRACT GLYPH COMPOSITION FROM MANY TO ONE : DIRECTIONS FOR SPEAKING

CONDUCTION : READING OF ONE OF THE MANY : RETURN TO SUBJECTIVE POETICISM

CONTENT :: :: CONTEXT

VENTILATION

PHYSICAL (BREATH)

EMOTIONAL (CONFESSION, COMPLAINING)

PSYCHIC (AURATIC EVAPORATION/CONDENSATION)

THEORY OF TACTILE VISION (MORPHOGENETIC FIELDS)

MIRROR GUIDES (RULER + ORACLE)

WINDOW/MIRROR/PORTAL/VORTEX

ORACLES/DIVINATION/MAGIC

ARCHITECTURE AS A METAPHOR : THRESHOLD

PAINTING AS A METAPHOR

MATERIALITY OF MEMORY

FRIEND-OBJECTS : PRIVATE LANGUAGE

LOVE-OBJECTS : SEDUCTION NOT DESIRE

FEELING OF/WITH THINGS : MATERIAL SELVES : THEORY OF OBJECT MEMORY

TRICKS + TRAPS : LEADEN IDEAS

SELF-COMPOSITIONING

COMMUNING WITH PLANTS :: BOTANICAL SOCIOLOGY

NATURE AS A RITUAL OF ANTHROPOCENTRIC PURIFICATION

TRAGEDY (IN GENERAL) AS ART-AS-LIFE ITSELF

TRAGIC LOVE

TRAGIC VISION

TRAGIC SCULPTURE

TRAGIC PROCESSES

TRAGIC COSMOS

SEPARATE PATHS + IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

PERPETUAL DISSATISFACTION

TIME (IN GENERAL)

SUBJECTIVE ORIENTATION WITHIN OBJECTIVE FRAMEWORKS

****

RECEPTION :: input into system (cognizant / corporeal : sensory definition)

How does the receiver to take the incoming information?

*Attention technique

mind/body split

INTERPRETATION / INTERFERENCE :: comprehension / disruption (of organism)

How does the receiver understand the incoming information?

*Intuition technique

computation

RECIPROCATION :: (appropriate response : thought/feeling)

How does the receiver respond to the incoming information (make outgoing information)?

*Intention technique

will/reflex

DIRECTIONS (PREEMPTIVE RULES)

[FOR MUSICIAN PERFORMERS (LIVE) OR MUSIC PRODUCTION (RECORDED)]{.underline} :

Articulate the useful considerations of the sonic range & musical technique for the purpose of the conversation-conversion between musician & dancer.

• instrument-specific limitations to technique: semiotic pulsations, affective tonal construction, textural miasma immersion (complex compilations)

• audio-spectrum limitations to effect: towards an audio spectrum dialect

• psychological/affective limitations to expression

  • redefine freedom in the music: differentiate from jazz & other improvisation genres. These sounds are based on rules not expression...??? What's the difference?

* How can content be translated from text (based on direct experience of life) into a form intuitive comprehensible without intimidation?

[FOR DANCERS ON STAGE]{.underline} :

Articulate the parameters for physical interaction, mental interception, corporeal play.

• body-specific limitations to movement: what is safe & what is dangerous

  • what is communication & what is feeling

• dancer-specific limitations: amplify or decrease tropes to form/break consistency

  • in relation to what can be derived from audio content

• "compression" for incoming data (audio or visual)

  • complex input into simplified output

• image relation: the mind & the bodily effect/affect

  • image maintain/aroused through movement

  • image produced/synthesized through interpretation of sound

  • image-combine shift of movement + sound presented together

* How can translation occur through the body without recourse to other senses?

[FOR RECORDING (CAMERA)]{.underline} :

FOR WHAT IS/NOT MUSIC, MOVEMENT, DIRECTION

Determine what should or should not be recorded. Oscillate the frame to isolate the subject or expand the field of visual inquiry into a broader context.

Invisible Camera:

• isolate musician/dancer in front of backdrop: prepare for macro context

• isolate elements of musician/dancer: prepare for micro context

• focus relationship upon specific forms of making

  • music/movement in relation with various objects

Activated Camera:

• camera given to dancer to incorporate into movement

  • movements seen through dancers limbs: to be in the dynamic flow

• camera-as-sensor, controlled by process of music/dance

* How can the capturing of a dance-event be articulated in relation to the sound-event, text-event, and life-event which precedes it? How can the video be captured to serve the conduxion/contextualization-event which follows it?

NOTATION (POST-EVENT SCORE)

[MUSIC]{.underline}: Not to be able to recreate the music, rather to capture some facet of its spontaneous production & amplify this state into other realms of consideration. Not just to translate sonic events into visual events (no synesthesia), but to offer additive/subtractive impressions of the music-event: to expand potential relationships to previously under utilized aspects or to hone focus upon specific elements within the production that would otherwise be lost. Specific focus on the audible qualities of sound processes (not the movements of music making).

• Input sourced from text: text>sound score for musicians

• Output oriented towards psychic/psychological movements: sound>movement score produced for dancers

[DANCE]{.underline}: Not to literally translate the movements of the body into specific sounds, words, images, or feelings, but to focus upon the body as a conduit to other processes, as a site of process activation & transferal.

• Input sourced from psychic/psychology of sound: sound>movement score for dancer

• Output oriented towards an ecology of experience: node of reception. Translated into two second-order texts: video score for stage & conduxion score for meta-opera

[VIDEO]{.underline}: Moving-image acting as second level text, critical voice which correlates music to movement, also image to ecology, subject body to object mind.

• Input sourced from distillation of corporeal movement: dance>cinema score for video editing technique

• Output oriented towards theory of tactile vision: eye-mind node amplification

CONDUXION (PROTO-EVENT CYCLICAL QUEING)

DIRECTIONS FOR ALCHEMICAL TRANSMUTATION: The conductor-as-body participates in a live spontaneous dance with clear directions to interpret & broadcast meta-level information back down to the lower rungs of the cosmological caste system, ie: the voices.

• follows a dynamic video-score composed of reductive color/form compositions

• score has its own static notational method which must be understood, rehearsed, & performed by the human conductor in response to the dynamic processes

FOR TEXT DIRECTIONS

FOR MUSIC DIRECTIONS

FOR MOVEMENT DIRECTIONS

FOR VIDEO DIRECTIONS

FOR CONDUCTION DIRECTIONS

DIRECTIONS FOR DIRECTIONS

GIVE DIRECTIONS INTENTIONALLY.

NO STOCHASTIC RESTRICTIONS, NO INDETERMINISM, NO CHANCE, NO NONCOMMUNICATIVE IMPROVISATIONS.

GIVE ORIGINAL DIRECTIONS.

NO CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, NO CELLULAR AUTOMATISM, NO NATURAL SELECTION, NO COMPOSITIONAL QUOTATION.

GIVE CLEAR DIRECTIONS.

ALL DIRECTIONS MUST BE ORIENTED TOWARDS CLARIFYING THE PERIPHERIES OF THE KNOWN & ELUCIDATING THE ENCAPSULATED VOID OF THE UNKNOWABLE.

TEXT DIRECTIONS

WRITE WITH FLEXIBILITY.

ALL WRITING IS TENTATIVE, PROVISIONAL, & EXPENDABLE.

EDITING IS ACTIVE & PART OF THE PROCESS.

WRITE WITH SPECIFICITY TO THE VOICE.

GRAMMARS ARE SUBJECTIVE: CASTE SPECIFIC (OPERA) OR PERFORMER SPECIFIC (LIVE IMPROV SCENARIOS).

LANGUAGE IS A MEDIUM BOWED TO THE SPEAKER.

WRITE WHAT IS KNOWN TOWARDS THE UNKNOWABLE.

GRAMMAR MUST BE EXTENDED TOWARDS THE ARTICULATION OF A KNOWLEDGE-SYSTEM & STRIVE TO CLARIFY ITS PERIPHERY IN ORDER TO DELINEATE BETWEEN WHAT IS OR CAN BE KNOWN & THAT WHICH IS UNKNOWABLE.

MUSIC

PLAY MUSIC WHICH IS NOT MUSIC.

AVOID EXPLICIT LINGERING ON HARMONY, MELODY, RHYTHM, & OTHER ASPECTS OF RECOGNIZABLE MUSIC.

SEARCH FOR THE BEAUTIFUL & MOVE TOWARDS THE SUBLIME.

PLAY MUSIC WHICH IS NOT NON-MUSIC.

AVOID EXPLICITLY LINGERING ON DISSONANCE, ABSTRACTION, & OTHER ASPECTS OF NOISE COMPOSITION OR ALEATORIC QUOTATION.

SEARCH FOR THE UNBEARABLE & MOVE TOWARDS THE UNRECOGNIZABLE.

PLAY MUSIC WHICH IS NOT ANYTHING OTHER THAN MUSIC.

AVOID SYNESTHETIC TECHNIQUES EVOKING THE SONIFICATION OF IMAGE, FORM, TEXT, OR MOVEMENT.

SEARCH FOR THE PUREST MANIFESTATION OF SOUND CREATION & AVOID INNOVATION.

MOVEMENT

MOVE TOWARDS THE PERIPHERY OF ONES BEING.

AVOID ENACTING STYLISTIC TROPES IN PREFERENCE FOR HIGHLY IDIOSYNCRATIC EXPRESSIONS OF SUBJECTIVE CONTENT.

MOVE FROM THE CEREBRAL TOWARDS THE CORPOREAL.

MOVE TOWARDS THE PERIPHERY OF ONES BODY.

AVOID MINDLESSNESS & CRITICALITY IN PREFERENCE FOR ATTUNED ATTENTION TO THE SCRIM DELINEATING ONES SELF FROM ONES MEAT.

MOVE FROM THE SKIN THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE.

MOVE TOWARDS THE PERIPHERY OF ONES ECOLOGY.

AVOID ARTIFICIALLY DIFFERENTIATING ONES ATTENTION OF THEIR OWN DYNAMISM FROM THE MORPHOGENETIC FIELD WITHIN WHICH THEY ACT.

MOVE FROM SUBJECTIVE CONTRACTION TOWARDS AN EXTENDED EXPANSION OF THE SENSES.

VIDEO

FRAME MICRO-MOVEMENTS INTO META-TEXTUAL NARRATIVES.

AVOID THE ALLURE OF CONTENT IN PREFERENCE FOR COHESION OF PARTICULATES.

WEAVE VIDEO MATERIAL THROUGH A LOOM OF PROPRIOCEPTION.

FRAME ACTIONS AS POTENTIAL-BECOMINGS.

AVOID REACTIONS TO PRIORITIZE TRANSFORMATIONS.

FOCUS THE POSSIBLE TOWARDS THE IMPOSSIBLE.

FRAME AUDIO-VISUAL-DYNAMIC CONTENT INTO A FORMAL RUBRIC.

AVOID REGURGITATING STYLE IN FAVOR OF EXPLORATIVE COMBINING.

BIRTH A SYSTEM OF ALCHEMICAL DISCOVERY.

CONDUCTION

CONDUCT ACTIVELY, AS AN OPAQUE A PROCESS OF READING.

AVOID CREATIVE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE TEXT.

ATTEMPT A LITERAL INTERPRETATION OF THE SCORE, AS A CONDUIT.

CONDUCT PASSIVELY, AS A TRANSPARENT PROCESS OF SPEAKING.

AVOID A REFLEXIVE FOCUS ON THE OUTPUT OF SIGNALS TO PERFORMERS.

COMMUNICATE CONTENT WITHOUT COMMUNICATING COMMUNICATION.

CONDUCT SUBVERSIVELY, AS AN OBSCURE PROCESS OF SEDUCTION.

AVOID ONES OWN DESIRE, FETISH, OR WILL WHILE TRANSMITTING THE TEXT.

MAINTAIN AN ACTIVATED STATE OF SEDUCTION WITH THE PERFORMER FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.

You have been on my mind - or in my mind - since we first met, for the second time, or actually I think it was the third. The first time there was too much distance to see you or be seen by you, the second time may or may not really have happened because I was so little aware of it that I can hardly remember where or when it happened or if it happened, but the third meeting seared holes into my solar plexus sending shivers down to the core of my being. I think it's strange how these collisions happen with so much intention and so much chaos that may or may not be factored and all these varying degrees of awareness. I choose not to think too much about the details because I'm not a specialist, only a foolish philosopher-artist obsessed with his own gray navel, but I also can't help myself from thinking rigorously about such things in general, as I am generally predisposed to think rigorously about everything I encounter, in general, for I cannot find any reason not to. So... I've been thinking about you - a lot - and trying to decide how to feel about it, how to feel about you, how to feel about thinking about you so much, and how to feel about thinking so much about feeling in general.

I know that probably sounds confusing, or obfuse, or obtuse, but this is honestly how I think and feel my way through the world. So, besides trying to tell you that I've been thinking about you a lot, which I have, I'm also trying to show you a bit more about how I have been thinking about you, and thinking in general. What I can tell you is that it's tedious, that I'm tedious, which is to say that I can make very simple things seem very complicated and make complicated things even more complicated than they need to be and in general feel like making my whole universe to be as complicated as possible because it makes me feel like I am linked to a long complex human history of trials by fire and fireside mythologies and fire baked vessels and fire fueled creation from steaming mud pool minds and white hot inspiration. I rely on this fire to keep me burning, I rely on the power of destruction to open up new avenues of thinking and feeling, and I try to keep the embers as hot as fucking possible because my only real fear is stillness, coldness, slowness, making the world so simple that we lose track of all of the details that make it work, and becoming a cold static object in the process.

I once told you that I keep people at a distance, and later you repeated to me that I seem to keep you at a distance, so I have been thinking about what this means to me and what I think it means to others and what kind of distance that we are talking about exactly... I'm tempted to write something about how I think other people might deal with their loneliness, but honestly I can't really pretend to know and all of my attempts to describe what I see happening in other lives seems instantly false. I can only speak for myself, and what I can tell you is that I have chosen to live in (relative) isolation because I don't agree with how people seem to be relating, and I have chosen to be more complicated because the simplicity seems to cause more harm than good, and I have crafted the person that I have become (and that I'm still active in becoming) with a lot of intention and concentration. What I mean to say is that I agree that I maintain distance, and it's an intentional distance, and a necessary distance, and a useful creative distance to the extent that I believe I am seeking a new way of living that will grow out of a new way of relating which is based in a new way of thinking which might only be possible by removing myself from the current conditions of the world. To most people this probably sounds like an extremely stupid proposition, or at least an unnatural idea, or at the very least a kind of hypocritical notion - because how can one pretend to be inventing a new kind of relation through not relating, hmm? Well, it's a long story... but what I can tell you is that it's bound to an idea that art should be a tool for us to expand our consciousness, and that life is a dynamic process which become more beautiful when we live it with all of our intention and awareness, and also that each of us has a unique role to play in this existential theater and it seems like my role is currently behind the scenes, hidden from plain view, building the settings for the next aria which may never come.

One of my favorite writers is George Bataille, a French librarian of archaic mythologies and a powerful surrealist poet and a destroyer of taboos. Bataille started a secret society of radical intellectuals to create new kinds of rituals and invent new forms of art - among other things - and based his ideas on a kind of anti-logic or "non-knowledge" leveraged against the commonly accepted ideas of his day. One idea that was very important for him - and now for me - is the notion of a potlach society opposed to the traditional gifting society that we live in... The idea is like this:

I want to do something nice for you so I give you a small gift. The nature of the gift or of gift-giving is for the receiver to acknowledge that the gift has been given which returns some satisfaction back to the giver, as in "giving thanks." Maybe a small gift only implies a small thank you, but certainly a larger gift would require a proportionately larger gratitude, such as another gift. If the returned gift is too small the receiver might seem unappreciative, and likewise if the gift is too big the response might seem excessive or be rejected or require yet another gift being exchanged to compensate, so there is a pressure put on the receiver to understand exactly what the gift means and exactly how it should be responded too. All of this is a very real economy of material things passing through various hands, but of course there is also a symbolic exchange occurring, with the emotional investment in the giver and the psychological awareness of the receiver, etc. It's an economy that's based on being in debt, on being obliged to give and receive gifts that are not necessarily desired but are exchanged out of social obligation, and ties our emotional awareness to a world of things rather than letting them flow freely between sensitive persons.

Potlach is another system of exchange, a much more ancient system found in tribal societies, and is rooted in sacrifice. I want to do something nice for you without you feeling like you need to give me anything in return, so I can't give you anything material. Instead I choose something that is very important to me, something that couldn't be given or exchanged because it's so meaningful, something very precious, and I sacrifice it. This is not a gift, not an additive activity, but rather a negation, a taking away from my world of precious things as a symbolic proof of how I feel for you. The sacrifice leaves me with less, but also fills me with a powerful sensation of satisfaction (depending on the thing being sacrificed and the reason for doing so) that could never be given to me because it is based on my own private awareness of the importance of the sacrifice. Also, you cannot return this act like a gift because you were not given anything, only witness to my own willingness to give up something in order to strengthen our relationship and (hopefully) also filled with a powerful sensation in knowing that someone was willing to sacrifice themselves in your honor. The potlach should be received delicately and humbly, received with sensitive attention, and not as merely a gift. The only way to respond would be to make an even greater sacrifice in return, of something even more precious to you. As you can see, if we continue in this way we would both eventually sacrifice everything until we had nothing except ourselves, but since this is so obvious from the beginning there is not point in destroying everything, only in making the first potlach and reminding each other that it can and will be made forever, so long as we are willing. The real sacrifice is everything for everything without anything passing between us except "ourselves themselves."

This is the kind of relationship that I am looking for in other people, all or nothing. It's not black and white, but it is extremely subtle and delicate: to be able to lay down everything held as precious and become completely vulnerable as a symbolic sacrifice that will create a space to be able to recognize and receive the symbolic sacrifice of others. I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but to me it's completely natural - not easy and effortless, but totally sensible, sensuous, and realistic. Everyday I ask myself what is truly important, and everyday I realize that there is so much that I can so easily do without. I am always realizing how I want to live with even less, that I need so very little, and that the most precious resources are space, time, silence, and solitude.... until I encounter someone that is able to recognize my own sacrifices and acknowledge them through even greater sacrifices in themselves. It's all very abstract perhaps, but so is anything and everything, from a certain point of view.

I offer you this letter as a small sacrifice, a tiny potlach, an attempt to sacrifice some small part of my own mystery and become vulnerable for no reason other than to see what can happen if I make myself vulnerable. I hope these words find you well and resonate softly in your world.

My beginning is a propulsion - of an image, of an intuitive potential, but also something like the particles sent on a collision course through some massive copper shielded subterranean donut. I can never predict the ending nor do I have any interest in doing so. What I do know is that the beginning already occurred and already evaporated into a memory which I can't trust, so what I'm apparently shuffling around are muddled middles expanding upon themselves. I'm interested in the center of things and the focal points of my looking so I choose to stay there and revel in them.

I'm writing in the afternoon, after lunch, which is not when I would normally choose to write. The mornings are a time of rising, picking up speed, initiating new sketches from a tabula rasa - of both the room and my mind - and I love the feeling of freshness that such times bring. After the midday meal my metabolism takes over and the body become more anchored to the world, more leaden and less agile. This is definitely reflected in the words that are produced in the golden saturation. Somehow I have never developed a taste for producing during these times, at least not this kind of production, choosing instead to sit with the food sitting within my gut and let it all just sit, brewing and percolating in the atmosphere as it pours over the centers I labored over earlier, marinating in my own thick stew. The evening is completely out of the question, decidedly not a time to write, save for the occasional interest in mulling over much darker spices, which I admit still tempts me on certain days. In general I'm motivated by levity, so part of the process of writing is an active search and alert awareness for when these moments might reveal themselves. I'm protective of those moments. They are my most valuable resource.

I remember to remember the importance of the comma: a breath.

What sounds good is what forces a new kind of attention with as little effort as possible, which usually means a kind of slippery slick language soaked in aromatic oils, undercooked. The truth doesn't seem to rest, in things or on tables, but dances between the images of the world and those imagined in mind, skipping with nimble toes, bobbing buoyant like calm sea buoys. I think of boxers and butterflies also. The truth is a figment of an imagination which I sometimes choose to engage with, but only through an understanding that I never have to, that there is no obligation to mull over the sour wines of previous peoples or peer through the peep holes of dusty archives. I also embrace the responsibility of making sense, even when I'm leveraged towards stirring up absurdity, but I only have so many limbs and can only pretend to be able to touch both sides of an iceberg at the same time. Who knows where the bottom is bobbing. There is a freedom to be found in charting the course of migrating fish, ancient frozen water released from their glaciers, and the larger islands we call dry land which also emerged from somewhere, at least to the extent that the earth has its own memory which tells us such a story. What voice is that, doing the telling of mineral folklore?

Everything is an image and they are all flickering. Everything has structure and they are all swaying in the breeze. Everything is real and there are many of them - many reals, many realities - so which one we live in seems more a matter of levity than desperation. There is also always "me." Not always like "always already" or "always forever" but always to the extent that without that sense of self - of self sensing the world and sensing itself - there would be no writing. The writing I can see, the writing is real, so must I be also, and that's enough truth for me to keep going. It doesn't lead me because there is no "it" separate from any me-ness. There is no inside and there is no out. There's also nothing to lose unless you really believe that there is something to gain, and if you can believe that shit then you can believe in anything, which is exactly what is required to write.

I look at a rock and wonder what it is, what it's called, where it comes from. I look at the rock and think about it being seen, if it can feel my sight, if I am feeling myself seeing it, and where all the feeling of the world can be located. I look at the rock and think these thoughts and wonder if they are in fact my own, or belong to the rock, or something other perhaps. I look at the rock and realize that it is me - me and not me - that it might as well be me or anything else for that matter, for it is matter and so am I, we are of the same stuff while also different. As I look at the rock I think about how poetic that is, that thought, and also how philosophical and artistic and literary, then think about how that's all just stuff too, like me and the rock. The difference seems to be a matter of degree, subtle nuances of qualities and quantities. The difference seems to be a matter of degrees, of temperatures and temperaments and tensile strength and talc, how much or how little and how many syllables in the name, whether its Latin or Danish or otherwise. I look at the rock and consider giving it a name, but decide instead to let it name me, then immediately choose to forget all names, decide they are a burden keeping me from continuing my walk through the hills. All I want to do is keep walking and wondering how many rocks are under foot.

Freedom is useful. Freedom is a responsibility.

Books are useful. Books are a responsibility.

Fear is useful. Fear is a responsibility.

Freedom and fear doesn't live in books. They don't live at all.

Writing feels like little black plastic keys doing their own telekinetic dance underneath my fingertips. It feels closer to baking and idle tapping than anything resembling work. It's located at points - in my mind and at my fingers - immerged in an ocean of forgotten considerations. I would like to formulate a writing process that comes from the gut and all the fluids churning in there, burning on all the things that I put into it, and always threatening foul smells and unthinkable murky textures, rather than keeping it at arms length.

I wouldn't normally say this, so it needs to be said. Questions are white hot dots and answers are a bucket of cold water. Throw them together and the steam will rise. Sometimes it is time for questions, time for opening new portals. Sometimes it is time for answers, to decide a firmament to stand on. At all times it could be a good time to act: to go through them or stand upon them. There's plenty of time for everything so there's no excuse to not try everything. What's the difference between thinking and cognizance? What does feeling feel like? I know the difference, at least right now, and I'm willing to forget when now has passed.

Reading might look like words and feel like things but it's not writing, it's something else...

You can only do one thing at a time. That's not my rule, it's the rule of the world that we live in. It's physics. Don't try to destroy the fabric of reality, roll around in it. Don't try to answer absurd questions with rational answers. Let them answer themselves in their own languages. The "universal" might seem like a bright glowing prospect, but it also harbors tyranny. Trying to recreate the past is a failure before it has even begun, it is a methodology of failure. Sometimes failure can be important too, if it's a question that needs asking, or an answer that requires affirmation.

You could fill a whole library with books about beauty. You could also find a whole library, not yours but written by other people. Does reading or writing about beauty get you any closer to understanding it, being filled with it, feeling it? Beauty is experienced, it is experience. Remember to remember that the world came first.

I've been writing with a lot of commas these days and the sentences seem to keep on expanding with every breath. Please forgive my long winded statements and long form expressions.

I started this letter a few times now, in different ways, but decided to delete those attempts and start over because they were too formal, not direct or honest enough, somehow seemed to follow an obligation of etiquette which perhaps I was confusing for respect since after all it is my father that I am writing too. I am trying to remember that etiquette could even be quite important for you, as it is for me, sometimes, for as much as you strive to be an open minded and relaxed person you also concern yourself with the foundation of meaning, from which grows a fascination with responsibility, and ultimately a formal conduct that you live by. I would call this a kind of etiquette, a self-written rubric of social prescriptions, a series of subjective laws that you have invented and put into action in order to feel like you have worth in the world, that you are a good person, and that your life has meaning. I definitely relate to this impulse, and I definitely have my own set of rules being continuously reevaluated and revised which allow me to feel legitimate, not by some governing social or political body perhaps but certainly according to my own standards. I think that everything is wrapped up in this: faith, belief, and the constant excavation of truth; cultural importance, social hierarchies, and political follies to manipulate power dynamics; how we relate to ourselves, how we relate to each other, and how we articulate the importance of family; and even little things like how we make decisions about the food we eat or the clothes we wear or how we spend our time. As I tried to explain to you in a letter last year, I believe that we have much more in common in this arena than you sometimes admit, and I also believe that I came to these understandings by my own path not because it was inherited or forced upon me by you, so it is all the more significant that we have found ourselves asking similar questions.

Yes, for all our similarities on the philosophical level of morals and ethics I also can observe a great many differences in the specific interpretations. That is to say it is quite obvious to both of us that we are carrying on different lives with different sets of concerns and systems of action, but I for one am quite ok with this. Have we ever argued? Well of course we have, and I can remember a few instances distinctly as they have proven to be turning points in my life at least concerning my own conduct if not having lasting perturbations coursing through our relationship. I don't think this is negative. On the contrary, I believe that change can only occur through dissonance so I even take responsibility for instigating these conflicts, more or less consciously, working from the feeling that it is always better to deal with our differences in the light of day rather than suppress them for another time that will never come. Easier said than done sometimes... Anyways, yes we have argued, sometimes on cerebral dissonance (philosophical, psychological, political stuff) and other times on a purely emotional level that gets confused for other topics, like the resentment you were describing. I admit that it is sometimes difficult for me to deal with the way you choose to live - not your exterior involvements of course, but how you compose your inner ecology - but my frustration stems from my realization that I should not try to change you, only to give you as much as I can about who I am and where I stand in relation to your decisions. I think of this as a kind of gift, or a repayment, or a potlach: a kind of sacrifice of myself for the betterment of the larger situation. The arguments that I remember us having concerned a clashing of our ideologies and idealisms, of me trying to tell you that I think there is something wrong with the world or the people within it only to have it backfire into offending you on a personal level, or perhaps the other way around. Our disagreements have never become cataclysmic to our relationship because we are both more sensible than that, too wise to let such a thing happen, but the threat has certainly been there.

I want to tell you that I think you have always been a good father and that you continue to be one. You have never been abusive, always loving, you have always given me everything I needed and more even when I've made some really stupid decisions and even when I refuse to make some decisions that I know you feel should be made. You've never forced me to do anything I didn't want to do and always encouraged me to live how I think is right, which is how I'm living now, and even now, while you are telling me that you can't always understand the decisions that I make, you are telling me in the same breath that you will help me keep going. For this I will forever be grateful. More than that, I feel indebted to you, not so much a burden which weighs over my life but more as a foundation to the responsibility that I am active in articulating. You should realize that you - and mom also - are the fundament to my existence, not some unstable ground that I am trying to shake loose from but a well-tempered instrument with its own precision in its existential calculations. I don't have much to give back to you, not yet at least, a matter which is exacerbated further by our differing definitions of value. Neither of us are material people of course so that's not what I'm referring to. What I try to give you is "everything I have" or "all of myself," which is to say a kind of symbolic declaration of my desire to be completely transparent with you. I do my best to tell you exactly how I feel, even the negative shit, because I wouldn't want to ever do you the disservice of giving you my partial perspective. Over the years I have come to understand that even this requires a certain acknowledgement of the potential ramifications - a kind of responsibility - for when you say exactly what's on your mind you will inevitably encounter some friction. We have felt this friction before, and you have helped me understand that for all you have given me the least I could do in return is respect the life you have built for yourself and the person you are, so I have tried to do that ever since. If that is the least I can do, I am now trying to figure out what the most I can do is.

I'm on a strange path. It's an uncertain path full of risk, threatening total destruction, promising a slow initiation towards ultimate transcendence, with many adventures in-between. I don't know exactly where it will lead me, but that's also the point - to not know, to unlearn what I have learned. I have been thinking more and more about coming to New Mexico for awhile, maybe investing some time in Taos learning how to build sustainable architecture while being able to participate in some of your adventures around the US. There are some other opportunities on the horizon as well, some prospects that are not employment or at all resemble a traditional domestic lifestyle but I believe will allow me to continue being immersed in my art practice. Right now I am trying to maintain faith in that, faith in art and in myself, to nurture a belief that my ideas and expressions are potentially potent enough to arouse their own attention and that all efforts aimed at self promotion and long term sustainability are detractions from living in this dynamic present and all that it has to offer if I can only hone my focus upon it. What I can tell you is that I have everything that I need, for now, because I have taught myself to need so very little, after your influence no doubt. I don't know if I am a good son... I guess it's a matter of perspective, of which moral lens or ethical code I am considered through, but know that I'm completed invested in the asking of such a question for myself - and for you - and completely unconcerned with how it is perceived by the rest of society.

I worry about your health, both of you. I also worry about your relationship, your dialogue, your conflicting perspectives, and if you are creating a space for this kind of dissonance to play itself out. Even though we had some uncomfortable moments when I was home I also think we had some fresh experiences, as if my presence in the house begins to shake things up in a way that you both are not always pursuing, and I wonder how you feel about it. We can have any kind of relationship you want to have, you just need to say it, act it, and it will be. That takes practice, constant attention, attuned awareness, intention and focus. This goes for me, and for mom, and for everyone else as well. Personally, I am actively pursuing my "research" on the potential of human relationships and changing my mind about it everyday... it's why I'm here in Iceland, teaching at this school, opening myself to younger and older minds from many other worlds that I am unfamiliar with. I hope you also continue to open yourself to new experiences, to new ways of relating to yourself and to your wife and to your family and to your world, and try to embrace the dissonance as a harbinger of change. Well, that's my way and it doesn't have to be yours, but the theory is sound.

I want to show you gratitude, a private exchange of promises.

I will give you something that is no thing, to the extent that I can, to the extent that its possible to do so. I will begin a process of giving to you that has no end and only a hazy beginning. I will give you all of myself - my self - selfishly, to dissolve myself in your starry-eyed aether because I believe it will form and reform my self into a better version of myself, as well as selflessly, with all that I have for all that you are. I am a skeptic but not a cynic; I do believe in something greater than a world of things and I believe there is nothing that I can give you that you cannot make for yourself. I cannot give you a gift without instilling a debt, an obligation of returning it, which takes away from my intention in this giving. I will give you a sacrifice instead. I will sacrifice my being for you, for yours, so that we both might benefit and nothing will be depleted. This gratitude which I offer to you has a purpose which is greater than both of us, which is us and also greater than just our selves added together. It exists through our meeting and being met, a process that is happening in the present repeatedly, again and again echoing through our lives to nutrify and fortify. I hope these words meet you warmly and continue to keep you warm, as you have warmed me and continue to do so. All that I have to give is my insights, my uncompromising honesty, my dignity, and my mysticism. I'll put it all on the table for you, the table that we built together, not as a gift of mere thanks but rather a sacrifice of my inner platitudes in honor of your continued levity. I trust that you will do the right thing with it and keep rising.

___

You are a harbinger of devastating beauty, spicy saccharine attitude, and sizzling sass. I have many things that I want to tell you which cannot be written - as they will weigh too heavy and cold - and can only be spoken through struggle - which is too easily confused for war. I have advice that I want to give you which I hold back for fear of ageism, condescension, and my desire to remain a fool that accumulates wisdom from observing my own mistakes, which means knowing when to repeat them and when to lay them to rest. I can tell you many things about what I have learned but I know the only way I have acquired them is through direct hardships and brutal experience. You must do the same. I encourage you to soften and to keep on softening, to become consciously supple, to keep breaking down the metaphorical walls and illusory impediments that are continually rising up to hold our great human potential at bay. There is a power inside of you which you are only just beginning to realize and I urge you to humble yourself before its vastness, to remember that our greatest strengths come through recognizing the beauty in others more than fighting to make it ourselves. It can be a struggle, but it doesn't have to be. Only so much can be captured on screen, but the beauty of our existence has no limits and will expand to contain all of the love that we put into it. You will not burst and you will not be weighed down, but on the contrary will become more buoyant the more love you fill yourself with, and lavish upon others, and allow yourself to receive from them. It cannot be asked for and cannot be taken, can only be offered and sincerely received. You appear to me a warrior, strong in technique and fierce in vision. I want to tell you that I trust you regardless of what you choose to keep from me, that I respect your distance while encouraging you to shorten it, and for what it's worth I'll be in the world with you waging a similar war, fighting on the same front, squirming in the same struggle to keep moving, making, and proliferating a love which sometimes seems very far from view. Keep moving and don't give up the good fight.

___

I am softened by your generosity and compassion. I have felt like callous pumice, a dry and brittle fossil compared to your supple being, and then I saw you melt even further which reminded me that we could always become more liquid. You have served me in more ways than you know, as a potent reminder of another kind of physics in the world and calculus of the mind, of the importance of slow food and careful words and controlled breathing. If we were colors I would be grayed in comparison to your luster, but being in your presence these past weeks has helped me to remember that all is spectra, chroma has its own dynamism, nuance cannot be calculated, and the mind is a wellspring pouring through fleshy hues. Suddenly typography seems more like meditation than mediation of language, and all these words fall off the page like so many over-thought pixels. I encourage you to keep exploring all the possible moments, to keep expanding the spaces of experience and the potentials of feeling, and to trust in the magnetism of a magnified existence. Performance is a strange beast; sometimes it seems closer to theater than lived existence but always secretly promises a beautiful violence of our daily conventions. You live life powerfully, authentically, and sincerely. You are also a potent performer wielding a mesmerizing magnetism over us. Whereas this power to perform would normally be worrisome to me, in your warm and steady hands I know it will yield cataclysmic shifts in the consciousness of the audience. Remember to remember the fictitious nature of truth and the factious potentials of a life lived vividly, boldly, and without apologies. Thank you for your descriptions of the world, the real and the possible.

___

I don't know what to offer you, or how to locate a part of my being that I can serve up to you, that will serve you. My attempts to give feel like they have perhaps taken away, which makes me wonder if that is in fact what you might benefit from most - depleting a reservoir of uncertainty rather than filling a vacuum with more hot air. I want you to know that your perspective has been challenging for me, in the best possible way, which is to say that you have challenged my very certainty of being, shivered the voice in its asking, percolated a stew which I mistook for being already over simmered. I suspect that you may be unaware of your true project as of now, or at least do not fully grasp its importance for others, but I have glimpsed it with clarity and am testament to its potentials, so what I want to tell you is how crucial it has been for me even if - and perhaps more so because - it is not fully articulated. There are few that are willing to take on the most pertinent questions of the world, few that are able to recognize them let alone make them audible, give them form, call attention to the absurdity of the asking. There are few that can and even fewer that will, but you have proven capable in the burden and proficient in the pondering. The existential absurdity of your project - your art and your life - will forever endear you to me, and if you ever want anyone to join you in the probing you know I am carrying around a head full of blunt instruments at your disposal. Your song is a cacophony but harmony is the opiate of the masses so please keep making your noise and upsetting our temperaments. I would like to be more clear in what you have given me but so much illumination through language and intention would diffuse the dim spaces where it dwells, upset the subtlety of the nuances, wash out the shadows and leave a world without contrast, plus I share in your distaste for the definitive, so let's let the evening dwellers stay dark and keep warming the rocks that are within reach.

___

Commas are the breath and I must remember to keep breathing.

We met each other in strange opposition, in my mind, which is to say that it was discomfortingly familiar to me, a disembodied diatribe which I now can recognize as a profoundly personal dialectic percolating within each of us separately yet manifesting upon a common surface, not my mind or yours but more communal mental furniture, a working surface being worked out, working on itself. I thought I recognized something in you that I was against, some way of living in the world which was over polished with sterilized surfactants, the incessant clicking of so many clocks and calculators which I perceived as originating from some distant satellite to beam out through your being and disrupt the signals from my carefully incubated world, an algebra of antagonisms masquerading as anthropology, but I was wrong. The thing which disturbed me in you was not you at all, has nothing to do with your being, but was completely my own fabrication and condensation of social terrors and mechanical nightmares, of the institutional mine fields and carefully calibrated text mills. You have served me - not so much as a window into the fabricated terrors of civilization but much more importantly as a mirror to my own seeing, to my own ticking calculations, to my own abilities and inabilities in computing the phantasmagoric economies of the world that I thought were so neatly folded into the wardrobes of my past. Forgive the cliché, but you are my mirror. Clichés are useful to the extent that we can recognize them and put them to use, they relieve us of the burden of excessive explanation, blunt disclaimers, and perpetual reevaluations. We should both be so brave as to employ them for our own ends, in service of ourselves and to the world, which we are immersed in. I want to thank you for challenging me and being up for the challenge in return, for striving for change and being active in changing, for being radically open and letting the world rush in even at the threat of total annihilation. Words can only be spread so thin, but I hope you aware of how much your heat helped in the baking of my own loaves. Bread is one of my favorite allegories.

___

I could tell you many things but my fingers can only spread so wide and I'm stuck to the chair which supports me, a burden which you seem free of, an advantage which you have over the world, and which I believe you should recognize if you don't already. From you I am never sure if I should give or take, ask or demand or give over to, not for lack of trust in your nimble fingers picking up and putting down but certainly more for my own naiveté in attempting to honor your touch, excavate your determinism, fortify your desires. What I mean to say is, I would like to do so much for you, or so little if it's what you want, but I am generally unsure of which you would prefer, or if I should apply the preference, and what the difference is. I am jealous of you, for I often wish that I could express more through my meat than my mental muddling, through the toes more than the tongue. I am cursed by the spell of speech and it has been such a pleasure to observe your freedom orbiting through the various dimensions. I would put myself in your service if you only asked, when you ask perhaps, and I hope you keep me in mind when you go searching for supports to stand upon. I respect the distance that you have maintained here, but I'm also still very interested in having a radically honest relationship with you, through conversation and gesture and projects and general lived-in experience that is not so easily qualified, whatever you choose. I like letting you choose - even though you profess to remain a sandbag - and I appreciate the decisions you make, in words and forms and otherwise. I don't think you have yet developed that appreciation for yourself, that trust in your own actions that others are so eager to invest in you, but I know that you will, that it will happen through a reaching out rather than a holding onto, and that when you do you will become an unstoppable force in the universe. You are your own physics. I do not know what to give you, or how, except my openness to your movements and my eagerness in understanding them and a space to let you advance when you feel for it and retreat when that's what you choose, if you choose. I give you my trust, in your decisions or your refusal to make them, and of course everything else I have as well, if you only ask for it.

___

I suspect that any words I might offer you with sincerity will be taken as corny, with cob, or at least a dab of smelted butter, so I figure I might as well salt them up as best as possible. I respect the distance you have kept while being here as much I do the openness you have been exploring and I encourage you to pursue both to their fullest ends, like a well-stewed chili sin carne, sweet and spicy and full of chunks in a bottomless vat of mystery. Disregard these oily food analogies, but don't forget the depths, and the toothaches which make us more aware of the teeth, those calcium deposits protruding out into the shared awareness, our visible bones, our insides displayed without splaying for the world to deal with. I have little advice to give you which you can't find hidden away in the barn, or in the roots, or in the snap and suture of a few more split ends woven into a pasty whip and plastered over the surface you are active in forming, and I believe we both know that they need to be found out for ourselves, for yourself, if they are to make a lasting impression. I know you are seeking them, which means they will certainly be found. Suspension is a powerful force in our bodies and the rest of the universe, a thing that is no thing, which speaks without a voice, and you're already dialoging with it with your own tidlewave of emoticons. Keep the words muted and the tensions flowing. Remember to remember that time doesn't exist outside of our own dim light which is always fading and no vacuumed chamber can keep out the anaerobic bacterias taking their sweet fucking time to munch away the supposedly stainless steels which seal our objects, in bursting silos of the world or musty catacombs of the mind. There are old ships and there are new ships and all will eventually dissolve back into the rust that is a living thing itself. All the photographs are always already full of ghost babies, but with our knives by our sides not stuck in the ribs we can keep rubbing out the minutes until the laughter can rise back up to the surface. If we were in Iowa I would find you a guava to remember the jungle, but since we're in Iceland you will have to settle for some imported avocados which never ripen and a bag full of raisin which are active in their own forgetting of grapeness. I hope we can build a barn full of antiques someday, just so we can burn it down to the ground again and have a good reason for making popcorn: it's about the combustion not the construction. We will meet again under a different sun with various smells of yellow and different kinds of oil on our grits, maybe on a bus, or under a Balinese gong shaped like an octopus, but wherever it is I'm sure it will make for a good song and a couple more bruises that look like Rhode Island, or Iceland, or some kind of space manatee.

___

A man of few words and excessive consonants, shivering

In the vacuum of etheric doubles

Crumbling under a thousand suns

Mumbling over myriad mounds

Of pure white vapors

Made solid

Words

Words

Distilling constellation consciousness

Consternation nations sprawled out along the borders

Demarcating a man with no boundaries, language

With vowels swelling

Over a mountain mind

Eyes with four I's

Seeing

Seas seized in wanton seizures

Reminiscing of memories half formed, dough

Double baked in floral halos, white islands ringing

Across gentle singed parchment

A portrait of a self, you almost

Didn't see

Ocean

There can be no more sentimental poetry

After the great fall of cement corollary

Colloquial syllogisms sewing sinuous

Threads of bare boned lines

Sands without time or names, calling out

Commas to breath

A slow winding

Wind

Your mountain tone is a moan mounting clay

Loam loomed from nimble knees

Cracking in the morning

Cackling mourning of non-deadly sins

Sans morals

Sin carne

More on the shore

Than harbors

I will tell you "no more"

And you might not hear it

Save for the declaration of another

Voice from the waves rolling

Hisses sizzling sycophant shimmers on the glass

Paned by your own hands

Until you can see that

I will tell you no, "more"

For when you might be

Before the time of ontology

A primal stalemate with no other than

Holograms of what once might have been

You will begin in seeing, what

Can only be glimpsed through

Closed eyes turned in

Towards the mitosis cells

Already hatched

Not eggs

Boiled egos

You oh letters here which calls them a name

You have none, but lick

The envelopes sealed rim shut

I say "open it up" for the reading

Of scribbled onomatopoeia

With no animals

To reference

In the world

Full stop

With no commas

Is not a breath, a gasp

In or out is a just clasp

Boxed with no darkness

Make a hole for levity

And get off the ground

Sea, you

In the sun

___

You are not a mountain, or maybe, but definitely have a name, or so you think, but it has been given not anointed, so even this can be put down again. I have much more to tell you but not in this space, it can't hold it, and I can't hold onto it, so we should both let it go to roam over the airs and fall in another sea which we can sail across, when the time comes, when we get there. You know what you're doing, which is not knowing, so do it. I want to tell you that I could lay down on the tracks for you if you would only ask, which you never would, which makes me wonder if that's the reason I'm so eager to offer it up, and there's something there for me, that you've given without knowing, which is part of your charm. I wonder sometimes if you charm yourself so quixotically. Find more words my friend, and other mountains to pitch flags upon without laying claim, and remember to remember that every stone has been moved so you're not to blame, but are made, same as them, always becoming more powerful in the awareness of what you choose not to do as much as what you do. My advice is to condense: be like dew, forming and reforming to mingle with all the plants from tip to tip above and below leavened soils without ever getting dirty, and somehow always remaining water. Sometimes waterfalls go up hill, and eventually even mountains forget, and both will still remain what they are. Act! Keep pushing it out, not for mess but for measure, taking account of all the units compiling their own algorithms. Be active in the writing of your own footnotes, maintain activation in the asking, incessant scribbling, but also up above the book where the world is unfolding blankly, waiting to be written in. You are no rock but a non-thing, involved in your own defining, which is more than any sand or grit can proclaim, on seashore or in deserted forests. Make more canvases, and also consider their weaving, and if they should not also be left alone, and the pencils and pulped paper as well, and see what you can do then. Nimble toes can skip the lighter stones and always we are walking.

___

There is something very specific which I would like to give you, but I'm not exactly sure how, or if I should now. I believe myself to be a rather amoral person, which is to say that I'm not "good" according to the ascribed laws descended from the holy books, and that I am also an unethical person, to the extent that I do not abide by most of the social codes that have been instilled in us by the older generations. However, I am a believer in something greater, something, which I hold to be more important than any of these made up laws of conduct and etiquette, and that is myself, and the people that surround me. We have the power within our grasp to take hold of our existence, to shape it and form it into what we want to be, and in this there is a great power and a great responsibility. This power comes from knowing what to do and when to do, from understanding the circumstances that we find ourselves in, from taking responsibility for our selves in the world. Sometimes it means saying yes! With confidence, even when others do not agree, and sometimes it means saying no! when something doesn't feel right, and to know the difference between what you feel is right and what others tell you the world is made of. What I want to give you is permission, permission to say yes and no even when it results in conflict, or upsets the world around you, or even upsets yourself. Most importantly is no! Not enough people are saying no - in my opinion of course - and we need to remember how to say it, and mean it, and understand when is the right time for declaring it. The reason I am telling you this is because I believe - and know from experience - that the most profound changes in our lives and in the world are only possible through these kinds of discomfort, which is not an easy truth or even the whole truth, but one possible reality among many others of course. I hope that I have been a difficult person in a positive way these past weeks because that means that you have had to confront the reality of these changes, and that's a precious thing to experience. I also hope that you encounter many more difficult people in your travels, and are open to meeting them and being upset by them, and that they can teach you to become an ever-more difficult person also, so that we can all have that much more of a fun and exciting time together. I would have any kind of conversation you asked for, if you would only ask for it, and what I want to tell to you now is to ask for as much as you can from everyone, to take it and try to use it even if it fails, knowing that the more difficult it is the more everyone will benefit from it. Failure has its own importance and instills its own kind of powerful change, so don't fear it. It has been a pleasure to get to know you here and I wish for you a very difficult time in the future! You know what I mean: with lots of love, and lots of growth, and lots of fun and interesting conversations with weird difficult people.

___

I have tried to steer you on a direction while being continually surprised by your own propulsion, my waves being overtaken by the swells you have already set into motion, a tectonic shiver which trembles the earth beneath me as a perpetual trembling of self-awareness. You are a wild one and I trust will become even more wild as time rolls on, at least I hope so, at least you should strive for the wilds, to be wild out there on the wild fields sewing wild seeds migrating with the wild winds without care for inflated words or leaden buoys. As I write this to you I know that there will be words that you don't understand, but I trust that you will find their meaning one way or another, without fear or intimidation, and that kind of fiercely determined pure syrupy curiosity which you have cannot be taught in any school. I'm telling you, to the extent that I can know, that you have a great advantage over the others in this world because you can already see the nuanced shimmers sparkling over the surface that most people spend their entire lives convincing each other don't exist. I'm talking about an intuition of beauty beyond aesthetics, nurturing an intention for righteousness not distilled from an obsolete ethical code, your sparkling eyes percolating up from a sage-like wisdom somehow ancient and so fresh. I know you're worried about a great many things right now, but I want you to know that I don't have any fears for you, except in forgetting what you already know. You must concentrate in remembering! Don't let yourself forget: all of these crevices of secret ideas hidden in the mountains of knowledge, all of the little squeaks and giggles that the piano can make it you tickle it in just the right way, that there is no project worth doing except for the one that feeds your soul, that there is no wealth except for that which fortifies your spirit. I hope that you keep in contact with me so I can follow your unfolding, gain some wisdom from you as you roam this spinning space rock in search of its soft underbelly, can glean a taste of beauty as you consume it so ravenously. There will be many people in the world that will try to temper you, but please try to remember to remember what you already know, that there is no school (!), we are all responsible for our own learning, and you already know so much.

___

I never told you what I thought about your exhibition, perhaps because I didn't feel like it was appropriate to do so, that my words would somehow destroy something that was so delicately arranged and liminally considered, a manifested consciousness prodding through the flimsy membranes of abstract theorizations into a more poetic silt sliding over and through the fingers as soon as it's lifted. Barthes, one of my favorite minds who somehow manages to maintain a sharply honed wit whilst proliferating a powerfully sincere softness, writes about "the neutral" with countless allegories, poetic tangents, historical anecdotes, and mythological incantations. The neutral is certainly not black or white or any other such ridiculous extreme, but is also not merely gray, or something other-than, or not-, or non-. The neutral is that which evades explanation, defies comprehension, moves so smoothly as to appear motionless from the peripherals and ineffably acrobatic when gazed upon directly, perhaps cannot ever be truly seen except through its trace, through the residues which trail behind and the aporia anticipating its arrival. Barthes describes this dynamic of the neutral as a kind of shimmer, a bit like the non-surface of a body of water reflecting the sky and object around it, both of those things and something else, imperceptible except for that which fills it, not a void but an overflowing vessel of potentials defying complete comprehension. Your work strikes me in this way, somehow hard without density, delicate in its razor-edged clarity, an illusion that is always coming-going but certainly not ever there nor here, a movement between blurry definitions of seeing, feeling, and being. To the extent that its appropriate (or at all interesting) to consider an artist's mind through her work, I also have this impression of you as a person, to an extent, the extent of which is difficult to qualify let alone quantify. I want to tell you that I have sincerely enjoyed our conversations over these weeks, even when I have found them difficult to engage with directly as I am used to, or even on the periphery as I am learning to appreciate more and more. Your mind, your work, your methods, and your presence is an enigma to me, not so much a question without answer or object without matter, more of an absence which is always filling and fulfilling, a tangent decidedly worth pursuing, a challenge to all that I thought I knew which is sometimes exhausting and always edifying in its complexities. I have no advice to give you. On the contrary, I look forward to learning much more from you and about you in the future, on and in the shimmer.

___

I know what it is to be lost in the world, and also to be found, also to be active in a process of finding. I think you also know these things now and I trust that you will maintain diligence in pursuing them in the future. You seem to have ingested my questions in a powerful way, to take them in with warmth and to be warmed by them, and I want to reassure you that this is something worth holding on to and allowing yourself to be led by even when the metaphors seem empty and the clichés roll over like storm winds. Awake again, returning to this, here we are and will continue to be, always treading a fine line between the known and unknowable universes of the world combing through the imagination. There are a lot of rocks to turn over but none so sedimentary as the self, a wellspring of unearthing and uprooting only to be dug back in again. There is a poetics to existence, at least a potential inherent within all the experience to reference back to the searcher, and I urge you to remember to remember, to stay in the process of unfolding out before the steps are taken, not to hesitate but to rest assured even though in constant motion that the ground will still be there and there are only ever more steps to be taken after, leading to more unknows and nowheres, sometimes back but never to the beginning. Civilization is a great machine with gears churning incessantly - or so goes the allegory of the mechanism - but our bodies are more supple and our minds more malleable than is sometimes admitted. Peace cannot be found or made, only realized, and you already have everything you need for this task. I trust in your foraging hands and find comfort that you will keep some dirt under the fingernails. Stay dirty, and drop lots of crumbs along the way, not to find your way back but so that others might recognize the path and make their own attempts to follow. Isolation doesn't have to mean loneliness, getting away from the world doesn't have to dissolve the self. All is a process in motion, a tributary flowing into larger streams eating away at some shoreline, somewhere, anywhere, even here. Lay down some crumbs for me and maybe we can meet again someday, somewhere along the path, if you can forgive the cliché.

___

You have some secrets which I will never know and it gives me great relief in realizing this, in not knowing them, in knowing you while also not ever knowing it all completely. There is a powerful force inside of you that I have only begun to glimpse, and perhaps the world also has only seen a faint shimmer of your vast potential. People with a narrow vision of the world like to tell stories about the dangers of curiosity, the terrors of stepping outside of the known, of the violence that awaits those that choose to go their own way, but I think that you can already see for yourself that the potential for great illumination can drown out the shadows of all that absurd fear. Somehow I feel like I still know very little about your unique vision of the universe, but I know enough to trust that you are active in seeing it, in being immersed in it, and it makes me feel so exhilarated to imagine where it will lead you. I wish I could offer you some kind of advice, some small notion that you could carry with you, some tiny object which you could keep in your pocket to reach in and feel every once in awhile as you lose yourself in the fields and find yourself again on the road, but it occurs to me that whatever I could offer you would be just some still lifeless thing that means so very little in comparison to the scintillating tools you have already gathered or crafted. You are a person of profound intuition and wise silence, the things of magic. I trust that your witchcraft will lead you to the sun without melting, and I hope you will remember to remember to trust in those intuitions even when the sun is obscured behind iron mountains, that there will always be more incantations to learn and enchantments to discover, and that you also remember to ruminate some vibrations in my direction so I might learn from your example. I have gained more than you know from being with you and observing you, observing you observe others, and there seems to be a great lesson for all of us in this. You are very generous in your silence and someday I hope to be as quiet and generous as you are.

___

Oh wild fire beacon burning on the mountain, singing through the valleys, dusting the leaves in molten magics as you float over the world, from where did you come from and where are you going? Don't say Norway, say no way. I am jealous of your eyes and your being and want to jump into your body to become that which I cannot imagine save in dreams, or through the eyes of an icecream dripping down the fingers to dance free in luminous beams, milky rouge coursing through the lava fields of a universe most have trouble seeing. Your mind is a poem spilt over porcelain vessels, a cup overflowing with sweet churning and no toothaches, a living saccharine soliloquy for all us other lost souls whom forget to feel as we hurry to speak. You teach without knowing, feel without touching, walk on your soft hands through a crowd of all feet, tickling the fabric of reality with giggles too sincere to imitate. I am also a cup though much more simple and now filled to have met you and overflowing to be knowing you and actively spilling over to mop up more of the coursing motion whirling through your hair and over the furniture that you are always rearranging into new purposes. I would give you everything I had if I thought you could make use of it, and still would if you only ask, knowing that what would be made could only be the unimaginable innovations of a savant on a beautiful rampage, clearing out the devastating weights of the world in a wake of illumination, laughter, and levity. I feel blessed by an invisible magnitude to have met you, indebted to some unknown creative force for your existence, and filled with a new hope in humanity for knowing that you inhabit the world. Cut off my toe and take it with you as a reminder to not get stuck, as perhaps I have, and remember to remember, to value your own twitches and let them lead you to new colors of velvet reverie. Thank you for everything that you have shown me and all of the time that you have evaporated from my leaden pan.

___

You are a man on a rampage and I hope you never stop unleashing your devastating creative fury. I know you think you have a lot to learn, and you do, but the most important lesson is that which you already have, not from this school which is no school but from the self, your self, which is not so easily put into a box even if it has spinning walls. There is a poetics to existence that you are active in licking, with taste buds shimmering, and now that you've acquired a flavor for it I have complete trust that you will spread it thicker and thicker, a sweet sour marmalade of cognizance, a béarnaise extravaganza of possibility and violent beauty. I don't know what I can give you except my trust that you already have everything that you need to figure out what you will do next, my belief that you are no longer lost but active in finding without so much care of being found. You have conviction and are on a mission my friend: to unleash upon the world without shame or regret or holding back, because the world is sick and you have the cure. But remember! Remember to remember than not everyone is so eager to wake up, so don't waste your time on the sleepers just keep focused on the active minds. I'm not saying you have any responsibility for doing this, not for me or for anyone else, except maybe yourself perhaps, but that you have a power welling up from the inner spring to let it rain tears from double rainbow sunsets, to shower down from your private Idaho floating island an excruciating onslaught of terrorizing beauty, uncontainable charm, and profoundly wise foolishness. Take heed of your virtues and don't let anyone tell you to stop, or to temper, or to subdue. Rebel against all of it and tear the world a new asshole because if you don't it's all gonna be a shit storm anyways. Of course I would give you everything I have if you felt like you needed it, but we both know that you are on a trajectory of discovery, of defining those things for yourself, of pulling up some molten ore from the folds of the earth and breathing new life into them, which is something that I cannot give you but only encourage you to seek out. It has been an overwhelming pleasure to know and continue to know you and I look forward to many more adventures in the future.

****

Articulation / Friction

There are various interests that need to be articulated, so that they may be represented. The situation cannot be about conflict as this breaks down communication, but should definitely emphasize a certain friction between elements.

Operatic Dialectics:

Intention / Intuition

Linguisticification / Action - Order of the Ontological Procession

Process / Product - Platonic Forehand/backhand (Scale)

Chaotic Combustion / Controlled Distillation

How many projects: 1. the opera, 2. a music improvisation scenario, 3. articulation of a new cohesion, 4. the possibility of exploring all simultaneously

[The issue of power when everyone is equal]{.underline}

The OOFKAUU is an attempt to articulate a relinquishment of centralized control through active models. Its voice is a decentralized voice speaking all of the concerns while refraining from becoming universal. It functions as a experimental agreement between any number of possible participants - there is no content or object to the opera beyond the process of actualization of communication between willing would-be performers.

Improvised music is also concerned with the distribution, accumulation, and release of power, intention, intuition, and influence through a group of musicians (willing participants, defined more by awareness than instrumentation). Even bands based on improvisation have a leader and enter into an agreement for the participation scenario.

[Multiple voices speaking simultaneously subdues the potential potency] = but a singular voice becomes dictatorial. There must be a leader, agreed upon ideology, or shared structure in order to begin acting, and also to MAKE MEANING of the results after the act = rubric.

There is no band, only us. How do we decide how to distribute the power?

[Articulation of my position]{.underline}

I would prefer to remain an equal member rather than the leader of an ensemble. However, considering the necessity of the leader-presence I would take up its position when needed. My interest lies in the innovation of novel instrumentation oriented on modeling communicative flow, in orchestrating and documenting scenarios of distributed awarenesses, and in documenting the results of a process active in its unfurling. Basically in transference passing through various levels of concentration.

The music that we produce seems dependent on the scenario that we agree upon. I have no specific kind of music in mind - so I'm open to anything - but I do feel that the only way I can currently evaluate the importance/necessity/value of any possible product is in relation to the efficacy of the scenario in relation to the known towards the unknowable.

The universe was not born from any linty Vishnu navel or cosmic concubine womb, not from dusky walnuts or dewed forest tips, of ovarian pools or cool cooing song of hyperallergic tricksters finger fluting the soft clay soils of the moon, not of cheese or bees or plush flowered wings melting their wax upon the iron boulders of amber caked deserts, and not even from the mirrored emerald intestines of the great ocean before the time of terrestrial fates when it hugged and moistened the soils like an early morning blanket still humming the mourning song of that first quaking bounce that initiated the motion of the parallax midnight shoal, oh sea of coal, trolling the astral umbilical like a bastard orphan creature with no name for not having ever yet been made. No, the universe is no stardust marmalade spread over our toasty morass like steamy thick butter-balmed breaking fast waves of solar complexion, as though there were a face up there fading the flames of godly altars out across a lesser atmosphere of measly human riddles and Olympian games. No, the universe was not begun by the plucking of an affirmative string tuned to Pythagorean chords or Schoenbergian sores or greater or lesser intervals, idealized parables, thunder drums bursting skies with life frothing rain grains or lightning tongues talking the hymns of etheric doubles springing somersaults over amoebic jello jiggling in some protozoan dawn before the bell tolls for god only knows. No, the universe is no verse of nonesuch sanctimonious chorus, no terse thread sewn stich pulled from toes holding taut a tenuous linear torch, no head strong itch twitching curses at incessant boulders churning down abominable mountains formed of demiurges piled upon dialogues incanting excesses of pleasure, pain, or pulchritudinous plentitude. The universe was no negative, nor was it a purely purled positive, but more than likely and almost possibly maybe some less than whole and very much quasi quandary of yesses, dried figs, and sundry. Namely, it is yes, by which we may claim it to be an eye, or any yes spelled another way: an I which is eyeing itself I'ing its eyes in awe of the void receding not to blackness but self-same likenesses, in all likelihood seen as a hole of a fine sliced wholeness, or bread, dished hot pie of saccharine somnambulists awakened by the mirror-portal seeking its own tailing hiss of beginning. The universe is an eye through which we see ourselves salivating, a shelf which holds our I's and keeps id's from slipping, a multisyllabic multi-tendriled super-organism that touches all peripheries of electrical cross fires through composite peepers and morphogenetic clouds of sweet ripe vision. The universe is an eye, but not mine, an I but not time, perhaps shy but not blind, a simple rhyming structure humming its own tune so that folks can understand. The earth is a grape turned raisin, the universe is a black pupil: its a hole with the world inside of it and the "it" is just a single side of one possible "us" so forget about insides and outsides and remember to remember that the world is in me and I am in the world, the teeth are the visible bone in a head-holding-mind of verbal songs, and even the color is but a name for the null which defines explaining save for articulating the periphery of our dim knowing.

Who is this voice which is asking incessantly,

simmering up from the boiling toil of the banal canals of everyday breathing schemes,

every so often rising above the hissing whisper of subliminal murmur to clang a

clear cold chord

through mind and over body to calm the chatter of pragmatic consciousness

and focus the senses upon a point of excruciating clarity

a pain due in part to its sur-reality in relation to the callous cauldrons of the resting states - yes a point with all the precision of an edge and the aerobatics of starlight

and just as much distance,

infinitesimal in physics and poetics alike,

from every being throated or thwarted? This voice must be my own,

arising from a within which is not wholly mine,

rather a mining hole of switches, twitches, tricks and traps

tapping in rapture the senses of my feelings feeling themselves as self,

kneeling before an altar of a holed self,

a holy shelf of lenses and other potential clarities,

rumbling resonators of recoiling accentuators of a location somehow completely here

and consuming how's of practice

and completion

and hearing,

absorbed and ventilated.

This text is the mirror guide which shimmers hints of the unspeakable names gurgling over the watery vocaled chords,

falling over the quartz of the self as radiant beams of densely felted fractures,

shattered from the ancient icebergs by Viennese mountain herders

and left out to dry,

flipping eternal folds of acrobatic reverie without glee in a midnight ocean

of metonyms,

metaphors,

meteorites,

Roman mollusks hiding purples in their genitals,

rich running amethysts,

ameliorated adamantium,

and other archetypal archipelagos of awareness.

This mind stretches out over the page to soak up the rays of the solar plexus,

warming in dark sponges and lighter velvets,

humming a gentle characteristic coo across the watery abyss

like syrup over fresh pinecones.

This is an improvisation of mortal musics

with solos streaming out of the greater symphonies

in curiously crafted crescendos of delightful absurdity... when they are right,

which is to say tuned in harmony not dissonance,

though sometimes even the mal-tuned chords create an enchanting comedic chorus.

Again and again in eternal return,

back to the beginning always already starting up in a finale,

small morsels of joy and insanity

dripping upon the tonsils and filling the voids of our lives

or at least this life, for awhile,

until they fade through silence or distance,

by attention or abandonment,

into the mausoleum of memory

whose chilled marble contents gather dusty decorations and decayed enamels,

frozen in the tanks of amnesiatic corpses and auspicious urns,

rotting under layers of the flooding present

ravenously consuming attention without heed to the vaporous emissions of excrement.

Some are abandoned for idealism

and others murdered for pocket change,

some we sew to the torso so as to never become unattached

while others slip and curl instantly over the grasp

before we have the chance to savor the flavors of the would-be reorientation,

some filling our souls with previously unimaginable satiation

and others amounting mountains of starvation.

A bittersweet digestif best served cold after a long hot meal

of soiled secrets,

and soulful soliloquy

with saints

or snakes.

OKOK so I am myself to my own mind but also in body,

solving and self-ing through making manifest my mental perturbations in mental meat,

a cerebral corpus,

and there is no difference I would say,

at least so far as I can speak of difference in things

from their being not of my being but only becomings

in relation to that which my self is said to be,

namely a becoming in and of itself always and already in relation to that which defines it:

All these people peopling here

piling up around me

they are not me but are also,

they are me and me also,

me AND,

greater than just just,

they are not my body but give it feeling by being felt and making my touch tactile,

giving to me or some sense of me

as much as I can give unto them my attention

or sense them as something in their own,

so how can I say so assuredly that this sense is decidedly mine

and not a shared reciprocal oscillation of sensation passing between what is me or mine

and what is other,

or just another me

or perhaps a me also?

SO if that which is outside cannot be without a projection from my own within

then I must declare that all my declarations are demarcating no delineations

between any imagined or imprinted peripheries of ins or outs,

that these others are also myself and are active in my own becoming

as much as I am activating their ontological unfolding:

we are making each other through being other,

we are activating ourselves through a process of selving,

we are processing difference as a process of dance,

a primary movement of sensation and expression alike.

So are they me or mine or matter or memory then?

We sentient beings anticipating your moves

before attention can intend the rudiments of mobility,

sensing through qualities unquantifiable by rational mechanisms

or machinated organs

that which is and will be,

with roots tasting down through gravity,

seeing with mineral optics the rotations of the terrestrial capillaries,

stretching up a tireless yoga of solar nourishment

upon rich chocolaty firmament,

forming without nerves an awareness

to wind

and water

and even more obscure waves

coasting our terrestrial beaches and corporeal breaches,

mmmm these gentle bodies without organs,

with their reeds and pipes and drums of every variety,

they are harboring secrets of dark orchestrations

and luminous consternations

that make our feeble human mythologies seem like cheap gossip

or cramped constipation.

This is being being performed through the perpetual motions of the prairie,

we are at the jugular of the jungle,

we are active in the making of landscape-as-body essential to the ecology

rather than attempting mastery over some thing outside,

we are a display displaying potent exteriorization of interiority

offering a revitalized vocabulary

for an understanding*.*

Such an understanding can only be found through acceptance,

via compassion,

vis-a-vis love

attained not through purity but putrefaction,

by turning dirt into earth,

by rejecting debilitating descriptions of what [is]{.underline}

in favor of revitalized incantations of what the sensuous and sensible could be,

to reorient towards activating attention upon the myriad minutiae,

and of course upon love itself.

To know it is to have lost it, to feel it is to have it drop out of reach, to taste it is to feel ones own tongue tasting, a self selving its own through differentiation without difference.

Screaming out into the vacuum formed after unclenching from the loving embrace

its the clearest, most amplified declaration of the self-as-relation,

as the locus of relations, even when oriented towards a nil languishing in pure liquid lack:

the universe is a black love.

****

I could tell you all about how it went but I'm not convinced it would be worth hearing. What is significant to understand is that I attempted to orchestrate a scenario of known variables oriented towards an unknowable destination which resulted in so many unforeseeable human factors aggregating an experience which could have easily been predicted if I had allowed myself to function without faith in the transformative powers of music. The results were rather much more unpredictable, but the experience was worthwhile. My faith in humanity was affirmed on many levels and all the negative was not nearly as much of a shock as I thought it would be. Some great performances were had and great friendships reinforced. Now there is an opera with a prologue which continues to unfurl in my mind as well as the lives of others. ___ said something powerful to me after the show in Reykjavik, something along the lines of not knowing why it was so important for him to come before coming but after witnessing it he realized that it was more important than he ever could have guessed. Such a nice compliment.

When you left everything erupted. Not on account of you, but I don't believe in coincidences and rather choose to acknowledge a general dispersion of energies flowing through the ecologies of material and awareness, some of which are human and others more akin to the flippant magnetisms of the aurora skimming sickly pale greens lingering somewhere between pulchritudinous visions and imminent doom. So, maybe it had everything to do with you, or not at all, who knows. I have been swirling through the minds of others at a consistent pace for months now. I feel like an iceberg thawing into a river of myself but no longer able or willing to recognize the me in the solids-becoming liquid agency. It's not confusion that I'm feeling, rather something more like the inertia of ancient stones having come dislodged from the cliff, a vertigo from spinning through space and suddenly coming to rest on a fundament still shifting under my curves. Mostly I'm just tired, an exhaustion felt through velocity, weariness from organs burning through calories or eyes glassing over from all the sparkling flint rays simmering over the rods and cones. It feels like sitting down after a long day of work with all the bruises and inflammations and non-thoughts piling upon themselves in half cooked loaves waiting to be broiled through the heat of future minutes lingering just off the horizon. I'm still cooking and still hooking.

I'm still hooking: to the strands of the last letter you sent, something about understanding selves in relation and lingering upon introductions stretched out into wavelengths that can now be partially measured through some subjective metric. You should know that I never purported to have you figured out before hearing it from your own lips (the lips are always more satisfying in their trembles than the words they shape) although it took great effort not to leap into my own anticipations about what I was able to recognize as whole or whole-ing. That being said, I was also conducting an experiment upon my own churning tributaries and part of that process required a certain transparency of my interiors-made-visible and my exteriorizations-made-audible. I waited to solidify a conception of your being until you revealed it to me, as I do now and still, but I was and am also active in dismantling the mechanisms of the grand reveal, maintaining an almost fetishistic infatuation with the acoustics of the curtains and what they block out or usher in through windows real or metaphorical. We were both actually much more involved in illustrious descriptions and illusory innuendos than perhaps either of us can currently recollect. Time billows still.

I am approaching a feeling for leaving this place, slowly and tentatively, or rather provisionally, as one possible approach to the apex, one of the many sun drenched nadirs of sense or sensibility. It makes me a bit uneasy thinking about leaving the island with the boat, as though the psychic bridge made with other land masses would sever the magic with the imagination through recourse with the conduits of the "really real". However, Iceland is no simulation and LungA was no mere cerebral whisper. It continues to unfurl itself in real time, embedded in the meat of the mind as much as the static discharges of memory. Nevertheless, I look forward to flying off this volcano and keeping its exact coordinates that much more uncertain in hindsight. I think about you promenading the streets of Berlin and I'm not jealous while also feeling the thirst rising for cobblestones, coffee shops, conversation confectionaries in parks and on piers, and wonder how I will take to the taste of the city terrain when I land back within it. Send me some images with signs or symbols to help me remember the exuberance of civilization!

Here are some words for now with more to follow. Keep the lines clear and keep fighting against the anaerobic rusts that are always eating away at the communication streams. I hope this finds you well.

Its difficult to decide how to write about this, as it is difficult to decide definitively how it was felt and is still being felt: a tension in the mind manifesting through the body without conceding a difference between the two but certainly a process of regulating a transference between sensation felt and ruminated over, from above, dislocating from the presence in order to float through a sea of ideas populated by all these 'archetypal archipelagos of awareness', our bodies made physical making metaphysical through a morphogenetic field composed of ourselves as well as something (or un-thing) decidedly other. You know me - or at least you think you do, or at least you are rigorously engaged in a tangential process of knowing and unknowing and reknowing and remembering 'me' in various phases as well as in the present, and perhaps also willing to admit that the knowing of 'me' or 'me-ness' is contingent upon many processes of my own and yours actively worlding, intermingling and coagulating in and through various materials, constantly in flux, shifting with shades of energy or exhaustion, determined with statements and sounds, shifting with invisible tides - so you must know that I entertain a desire to unpack this experience of words, actions, relationships, possible musics of the mind and the actual sonic forms we molded, and all the minutiae that revealed itself (as well as other particles that remain hidden) over the last few weeks of living and working together out here at the edge of the world. This unpacking is motivated, which is to say oriented, towards a specific goal that (referencing Baud-man) should be considered more of a procession of seduction than desire, perhaps. Seductive, because the enchantment of the mind and enticement of the body is what we are sustaining, not a desire to outline a specific program or achieve a concretized object-experience. At least this is how I imagine it, and I imagine that my "it" will instill various shimmers, shivers, tremors, and terrors in your own imagined visions of the events. As well they should, or we are not working to our highest potential, perhaps (always a maybe with me these days, not of uncertainty but in sidestep of a definite which seems so stifling). So let's just say this conversation is motivated by keeping the conversation going, by learning what our mistakes were and collaborating on a rubric so that we may not repeat them in the future, or repeat them more consciously and productively, to appease all of our individual aspirations, however it is we choose to define them.

I feel like its appropriate to write about this freely, that this medium of writing is conducive to clear linguistic articulation while also maintains a slower deliberate pacing compared to in-person conversations which sometimes make me feel rushed or stunted.

First, the general lack of preparation: very little contact from individual members of the group with me, not to mention each other, regarding the potential parameters of interaction. A huge missed opportunity to initiate a dialogue of immanence, exchange of inspirations or techniques, familiarization with individual dialects of expression as well as (more importantly) the articulation of the grand project. Dialogue should have commenced in January, with months of conversation & planning under the belt when everyone arrived so we could jump right into solidifying visions rather than beginning from scratch. Major cause of disorientation, confusion, frustration, & distraction.

First conversation: how to we maintain a freedom of the dynamic without tyranny. Outlining various motivations and linguistic/expressive capabilities. Delineation of internal hierarchy excluding the others. Complication of bringing in outside projections with their residual ontologies.

First improvisations in music school: mitigating away from musicality towards abstract ideas localized in a central voice, an emotional struggle for freedom in action alongside an intellectual struggle to dominate ideologically? Conflicting preferences & aversions to particular sounds, a rigid subjective armoring.

Concerning the theater space (and other spaces): spatial amplification of sounds and egos. Some division of labor technically that reinforces mental controls. Delineations of conflict through aggression: breakdown of tact & poise - the ability to avoid embarrassing situations & ability to resolve embarrassing situations - noncompatible with radical transparency. Difficulty of articulating self in relation to the group: islands with too much distance between them. The space was originally conceived as a participant with presence, along with the video and potentially the instruments themselves, but in the end all focus was put upon one spatialization in one space (rigid!). Other conceptions of space are necessary: the intimate space, public space, body space, interpersonal space, various spatializations of mediums in relation to each other, mental vs physical spaces.

Power dynamic: no conciliation of perspectives between members, general struggle in playing and communicating, therefore soundscapes that feel "right" are impossible to qualify and repeat. The role within the group is confounded with the individual autonomy: not following a personal idea amounts to silencing that performers voice in the whole. Lack of cooperative model produces chaos. The difference between actions & words: an inversion: ___ aggressive in speach while generous in playing, ___ generous in speech & aggressive in playing, ___ a silver tongued subtle body, ___+___ as alternating in rigidity.

Attentions: in terms of spans (time/energy) & focus upon competing aspects. A qualitative difference between anticipation & performance attentions, what is said before & what is conducted during & what is appreciated afterwards. Shifting of attention upon technical aspects (navigating a personal archive of sound abilities) & how these elements interact with others. War: presence in group dynamic fluctuating between consiliation & disruption, reconciliation & prodding into the unfamiliar. Breakdowns of attention due to critical mass of information in the system & the collective struggle to isolate elements that are useful/productive/interesting from those that are detrimental/counterproductive/masturbation(!).

Meta-considerations: dialogues about dialogue, structures about structures, orientations about orientations, music about music or non-music, sounds which represent specific affects or those which designate styles/genres, awarenesses which facilitate playing or presence that isolates forceful focus. Neuroplasticity vs neuroelasticity. Location, articulation, & projection of the etheric double. ((All of these terms required increased fidelity, reconciliation with the myriad focus, but remained relatively underutilized in the group psyche. A philosophy of/for stones, ontology of the invisible, fluctuating definitions of energy, language in general (significance vs signification, symbols, thought-forms manifest in impressions vs ideas, thought-forms manifest in mind or through performance). Ecological models, cellular models, organ/corporeal models: animism, anthropocentric senses or articulations of the anthropocene, shifting of temporal scales from bacterial, botanical, biological, anthropological, sociological, cosmological, ontological, mystical.

Quantization of information: how much a single individual can take on: in a day, in a session, in a conversation, in a musical scenario, in a project. The problem of [downtime]{.underline} interfering with articulations of an ongoing process; necessary for productivity or distracting from heightened potentials?? How do we evaluate the good/bad (morally) or the useful/obsolete (productivity) or expressive/cliché (affect) or that which instill desire/aversion (physical or mental attraction) without a solidified rubric for such delineations?

(Unclear) Metaphors: of the universe, of an opera, of music or expressions through sound, of group order & influence. General confusion due to language impediments (Norwegian, Swedish, English) & semiotic shimmer (metaphors, allegories, definitions, instructions internalizing/externalizing visions). Ambiguity of content producing disorientation in articulation of participation. The carbon table: an unstable piece of furniture, designating what? (consciousness, collaboration, potential or practical projects, dimensions of physical space, bodily orchestration, conversation). Academic vocabularies citing (un)specific sources vs colloquialisms & slang taking for granted 'common sense' understandings of action & response. The [matter]{.underline} of scaling: micro/macro or molecular/molar:: linkages in the individual networks compiling perspectives of a larger discourse.

The Matter of the Audience: orientation remained unclear from beginning to end. First question: Who is this of/for? Somewhere somehow came the implication that our activities required an audience in order to be justified, but this should have remained a conversation or even a question not addressed. Audience is not a problem in itself but did dramatically deter focus upon the present by inserting dire anticipation (for an imminent event rather than an immanent process). The proposition that we are both performers & audience simultaneously: how does this imply a shift in attention?

Un/Familiarity: pertaining to social hierarchy (the triangulated psy-minds over the two initiates). Became a continual syphon of energy from centralizing focus, demoralizing tendencies amounting to myriad individual frustrations or distractions. Again, this should have been overcome before the physical meeting occurred through emails, video conferences, music exchanges, & other "immaterial" conduits. Lack of preparation.

Preoccupation with content: jazz, minerals, ontology, love, etc. Premature articulations without being able to digest. Would have been alleviated by more preparations. The goal seemed to become a paradigm shift in the expectations of the audience through orchestrating a product of reproducible components, rather than exploring the potential of an internal dialectic to shift the externalization of the affect toward elucidating their own becoming. Actions were general felt as avoidance of recognizable forms which devolved to a pale facsimile of an exchange. Content of text, video, & exchange between instruments became rudimentary & cliche: of course there is a power in this but nothing seemed to have been learned.

The most interesting questions came at the end: considerations of professionalism as musicians, articulations of leadership & unity of vision & solidarity of voices, being represented or suppressed within the group dynamic, how changes in space would facilitate different performances/experiences (as performers & audience), how content could be oriented towards pure becoming rather than speaking about (love for example) specifically, issues regarding leadership & direction (role formation in general).

When I imagine a house I do not necessarily consider walls. I can see something emerging out of clay, a malleable architecture suited to mind and body in all its flickering forms, but not necessarily conducive to entertaining any other personages not suiting themselves towards adaptive thinking and shaking. The image of a house is unclear, but the associations of home are becoming increasingly clarified the articulations of its character evolve through conversations, expanded skill sets, and a desire to keep making through purpose without being tied to any media. The house is a building and the home is a place which could be anywhere and would always be a "here" worth returning to. I like your ideas about designated spaces and would cheerfully help you carve out the catacombs of a person-portal labyrinth, especially if I could also inhabit it, but I suppose I'm of the mind that I really only need one room. One room for living, one room for eating, one room for loving, one room for working, one room that is sacred and profane in the same breath, one room for exhalation and plenty of storage inhaling necessary things. This room would not be my space, just a space where all of my mining would take place and that you of all people would certainly be welcomed into. I always think about building this room, which might be a house in itself or perhaps just a room in a house, which is why I'm building L+J's house now. I want to feel it out with my hands and body, get a sense of what is in a building, what makes it up and what it is made of and how it makes or is made by who inhabits it and also who has built it.

Before we met I fantasized about moving to the desert and building a small yet powerful self-sustaining structure with minimal power needs and maximum living potential. It has earthen walls and lots of wood, but also a glass room that is positioned towards the arch of the sun's travels to warm in the winter and cool in the summer and sustain a veritable jungle of edible companion plants, and definitely a really fucking comfortable bathroom that one could inhabit for hours without needing to leave. Somewhere over the hill would be a small separate structure, perhaps a carefully modified shipping container, with skylights and large windows in every direction and a very inviting floor that could support a large reclining painting or a few gentle lazy humans, and of course a wood burning stove. In the fractal mind gaze mud hut I would sleep and eat salads and write on an old but well cared for Italian typewriter, and in the sunbeam studio I would make maps of the unknowable universe and spin my own ceramics and design impossible sculptures and experiment with designs to broadcast my orgone out into space. There would be enough space for two and the design would be such that they would always be present of each other without always being seen or heard, and of course could inhabit two divided structures without interrupting the ongoing exchange of ocean-scale metaphors and celestial love thumps. The structure would be hand made with the greatest amount of intention, the most delicate attention, the most succinct precision without needing to be perfect, and when we sat in the small but highly functional kitchen we would be able to close our eyes and feel the precise location of numerous artifacts we embedded in the walls - objects that no one else would ever see or sense but we would always know where there. Some days we would never get dressed, some days we would never leave the bed we built together, some nights we would never need to go inside for having such a beautiful fire and arrangement of stars, and other times we would wear suits that we designed for each other to attend to the business of making for public display so that others could taste from the wellspring fountain of calmness we erected around us. Of course, its not far from the city, from some collaborators, from some elder wisdom, from the soft curling purr of nature, from some friends with copious books to borrow and stories to trade. Maybe there's even another place, a modest apartment next to the university that could serve as our library, material archive, cabinet of curiosities, and study. A place to interact with things and outsider theories and civilization on our own scale, with aged whiskey and hand woven rugs whispering generations of love making in their folds and a gigantic shelf serving as a pillar to the world, making our world the center of a larger universe slowly revolving around our stratosphere. And walking distance to the train.

I've been looking for someone to collaborate with on a life scale. Projects will come and go but I have my gaze set on the entire package. I'm writing an opera, but only to have a reason to tie together everything I've ever done with what I am currently doing and in anticipation for everything that has yet to come: its a theory of everything and nothing unfolding slowly with pleasure over an entire lifetime. I'm looking for an opportunity to remove from the world, not to die but become even more alive by disentangling from the sinuous threads of civilized tragedy. I see this life producing many things without necessarily an audience in mind, though there certainly will become one, maybe even fabricated. What I have in mind for us - for a collaborative project conducted between us - is a matter of scale, of oscillation, of dynamics, transmitted through seduction, oriented towards living. I know this is vague, but it occurs to me that writing down specific ideas on this computer screen for you to read will flatten too many dimensions and not allow some others to perspire as sweetly as might be possible if it was my tongue doing the clicking and tapping. We need to meet and discuss the possibility of how we are and what we do, as individuals, in relation to each other, and what would be possible if we were to combine our efforts to manifest something greater than just additive existence. I would describe it as a friction of two woolen planes foaming up a fierce kinetic energy that radiates out into the atmosphere, shocking and being shocked by two selves rubbing just to feel themselves feeling.

I am trying to melt into work and books but you keep floating over my thoughts like phosphenes loosened inside my salinated sight sacks. Today I spent hours attacking an ancient fundament of moss covered cement with a thunderbolt jack hammer and as the layers of history and heritage melted down into the earth, vibrating the rocks and shivering the sands like the back of a giant beast covered with flies, I thought about how long these stones had been sitting there covered by their own weight only to be disturbed (or liberated) by my tectonic hands and how we - the rock and I - were really not so different: damp, glassy, cooled molten forms coursing iron and soot rumbling to the terrors of vibration come to free them from sleep. I felt I had every right to be them and every responsibility to feel for them, and all the while I was thinking of you and wishing you would be there at the dinner table when I returned, waiting to float across the room and kiss me on all the meridians, to skip dinner and go straight to bed to spend a few more precious sleepless hours memorizing each other's details. I'm the rock, you're the lightning field.

These days my inclination is to fragment, slice apart and splice ad hoc, disintegrate the mortar between dialectical bricks, to cut and stab at the smooth fleshy membrane of existence to make a mark at all costs, even at the risk of appearing violent, although I'm always quite calm, or appear to be, or feel as such, and therefore what's the difference then between being calm, saturated in calmness, and just appearing to be as such (?). All these articulations reticulated into material memories, they are drawings, they appear to me as outlined etches already carved by ancient hands that I am merely tracing back in to legibility as my fingers slide over the weathered rocks to feel out the crevices left by wind or elbows or some collaborative dramaturgical chisel chant conducted over millennia with only the ocean as witness. The ocean is always shifting without changing states, always still the ocean while never being still, turbulent and relentless and seemingly eternal in that it is greater in scale than we can imagine while always being close by, stirring the air above our heads as well as between the ears, filling our sight and literally composing our vision. The ocean is the grandest of clichés and is therefor the most universal, most familiar, and most unfit in articulating details about any thing other than its own thing-ness which is very much more concerned with movement than material.

As Leibniz wrote, "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?" A very succinct articulation of the 'why' which drives philosophy. To delve into its labyrinthine recesses is to immerse oneself into a sea of asking, to become consumed in an inferno of questions; always an analogy of darkness. To seek truth is to look for light, enlightenment, levity, transcendence to a luminous realm or consilience with the ethereal pulsations of a dim within, to light fires while knowing some will get burned, to reach out into an idealized darkness grasping for an idealized lantern admittedly birthed from our own center, to shake hands with the void, to peer into the cosmic navel oscillating states of chaos and stillness. So the story goes, and the story is full of contradictions. One can align themselves with the mystics (mystagogues) or the rationalists (Aufklärer), but always already there is an orientation towards a potential wholeness, total illumination bathing in lumens protruding from in or out, a dialectical divide of opposites. It seems to me that to engage with this process one can either be filled with rage or with love, or some combination, but that some cooler calmer temperate states seem somehow grossly inappropriate in conduct and demeanor, disrespectful to the fullness of a life lived for beauty and passion, for the sake of experience not at the expense of the life that fills it but in respect for the integrity composing the whole of which we are inextricably immersed in. I choose love.

Of course, reality - however we subjectively define such a facet of truth - is never so pure. The real violence is in the distillation, of all the colors and sounds into so clean a concept as to render it tactile, to make it visible, to craft it into an object: to make the sacred into an idol that fits so comfortably into the pocket. Not a bloody violence but a silent slippery death drive of a more subtle nature, a process of erasure, not a blackout but a graying, fading, bleaching and belching, the burning-through of lived ecstasy into an infinitely expanding chasm that defies defining while seeming to stimulate infinite conversation describing the curvatures and contours of the outline. I question this process and recognize a desire brewing up within me to articulate a new direction - not new in the sense of a culturally radical paradigm shift in art making or philosophical declaration of idealized ontology, but a much more subtle and significant (re-)orientation in my own being-in-relation to my being-becoming, as well as others, as well as the procession of becomings (it)self, as one that feels themselves feeling and knows its worth feeling, which is to say being thoroughly invested in this unfolding of becoming with both love for philosophy and antagonism for materialism whilst still nurturing a desire to make manifest the manifold of my/our material being itself. I can imagine no other project; for better or for worse, I can only maintain focus on scale itself. All the minutiae gets lost in the monstrous mouth of the ocean humming motion into all the earth's magnetic polarities. My aim is to articulate a project which meditates upon this oscillation of scale by manifesting in as many materials and methods as possible, to de-emphasized the media in order to amplify the content-less message flowing through all things. The sound is love.

Nothing can be discovered about the thingly aspect of the work until the pure standing-in-itself of the work has clearly shown itself. But is the work ever accessible? In order for this to happen it would be necessary to remove the work from all relation to anything other than itself in order to let it stand on its own and for itself alone. - Heidegger in [The Origin of the Work of Art]{.underline}

Yes, I think philosophy emanates from angst, or darkness, or division with the world, or from tension or friction, fracturation or refraction, condescension or condensation. At least mine seems to do so. Not to say it's so definite, but it appears this way, to the extent that I can observe it. My happiest moments in life are those of total transcendence, of actual levity, not just the mental recounting of a moment already passed but an embodiment which dissolves my faculties of proprioception. These moments are not a theory of love or a poetics of love or an art of practicing love or a discourse concerning love or a meditation upon love, they are simply love, which is to say they are an immersion into the vacuum of color and non-color that these words - even these that I write now - will always pale in comparison to. Philosophy always seems dim in comparison to the hot embers of life itself.

This is how I will try to love you, and how I am determined to love myself, and how I am trying to articulate a project which bridges these <two (we + too = more than 2) shimmering islands. Of course, like the ocean, the concept of love is far too aseptic to be useful in describing anything but a colloquial misunderstanding reinforcing the very illusion it seems we are leveraged towards dissolving. So a new word must be crafted, perhaps an entire language erected in support of the magnitudes of these implications, possibly even an entire culture to express the complexity of this amorous cosmos, this aporiphic miasma, the pulchritudinous phantasmagoria of potential-proprioception. I would say that our project is to denounce responsibility for anything that is in favor of taking up the task of articulating a revitalized, reaffirming, reticent ontology. What I love about this project (of love), aside from the fact that it focuses upon love itself called by any other name, is it's scale, which seems to be precisely correlated to the magnitude of existence itself observed at any and every magnitude of magnification. What I love about the potentials of this mental-meat exercise is that it exists (provisionally at least) outside of the known world while simultaneously being absolutely rooted in the knowns we have planted it in, so that as long as we continue to mulch our granulated knowledge back into the fundaments we are sewing our sights can continue to be set upon something not so definitively here but decidedly always-already unknowable. It is towards this unknown that is greater than nothing and more full than the void that I would like to set my sights, upon a light-filled infinite black, that white room at the top of the house with our heads out the half open window staring starry-eyed stares into bottomless blue and brown vision caverns, locked in eternal gaze of one-self reflected through the optical mirror of the other's instrument. So "love" will no longer do. We need a new container to hold all these molecular collisions.

It has already begun, in my own mind as well as upon the page, in the pixelated possibilities of writing-as-probe, and also in collaboration and conversation with others, but still there is a lack. Something is missing which instills a sense of dissatisfaction which is not a disruption but rather an instigation to keep working, and that's what worries me: the work is oriented towards filling rather than being-filled, putting into a place rather than inhabiting placement, putting relationships in relation to the world that contains them rather than wording the wisdom of the world itself, rather than worlding itself into the possible world. I can say this now, so I'm already in transition out of this state and into another, not another ideal but ideally not wholly other either, and for this movement I must thank you. You have sent a quiver through my central nervous neurons that quakes my cartilage still, yes both a grounding to the earth and grinding into dust to float about the solar winds, stretching my considerations more taut in lines from core through cones to ionosphere swirling a new ocean of ions. I want more of that, and I want much more of you in my life.

I wonder if I will ever get my fill of metaphors, thick gravy language, tongue clicking against the pallet of my mouth tapping wet warm tones into the gray matter of my mind meridians. Sometimes I even exhaust myself, but always back to the reverie, to the thick hallucinatory reality of the language bubbling up molten mud pot rot upon the rusty armature of banal chores and task lists. I keep thinking about this powerful statement you made concerning how we fit together, that we have certain things to exchange, that you will learn to recognize some aspects of the quantum quartz from me and in exchange you will offer the potential to be healed, of what we do not know. This healing is what strikes me as so curious... Healed of what? What is my affliction? The holding on to friction or the letting go of the world? If I were to lose it (or find it), to be cured, to be comforted of my psychic ailments, what effect would it have upon my affectation? The question is, if I am alleviated, would I be better off without the struggle, is that is in fact which ails me? I find this all to be quite humorous in it's absurdity of course, that I can be aware of my own debilitations as well as confronted by an uncanny opportunity to reconcile myself with them with your presence in my life and yet still sit here and question it all. The conflict I hold regards the handling of knowledge, the balancing of wisdom, the proper conduct before both the sacred and the profane, and ultimately in my own relationship to materials themselves, whether anything is worth holding onto and how to concretize a position that can defend that perspective. This doubt used to consume me and now somehow it fuels me, but always the question remains as to whether to make anything from it or not. During the recent opera prologue rehearsals I became enraptured in conversation with my friend/collaborator as to whether the text I had written was merely an egotistical diatribe about myself (as he asserted) or about something larger that I was merely standing in for as a metaphor (as I had defended). I suppose both are correct, but I realize I am so revolted to hear my work reduced to mere navel gazing. In my darkest moments I feel that's all I can do, but in relation to you I understand that there's so much more to do. There are new words to be worded and new worlds to be worlded.

****

DISTILLATION OF CURRENT PROPULSIONS

IDEA FRAGMENTS TO DEVELOP:

• [HOUSE BUILDING]{.underline}

- Walls, rooms, insulation, general architecture, embodied thinking through the act of building

- Scenography for the opera: scale models for possible scenarios, diagrams of model-interiors (model-homes, model-civilizations, city planning models, RPG terrain maps, natural history museum topographic layouts, aerial photography & googlemap satellites.

- sound-proof sound chambers for actual sonic experimentation or theoretical sonic event scenarios (really soundproofed vs. simulated soundproof)

- walls as representative components of architectural metaphors: revealed cross sections of barriers, the scrim of private/public space, containers of domesticity (home) or the sacred space of art (gallery), the evocation of ruins & fragmented planes lodged into natural spaces as a metaphor for ideological phenomena

- rumination on the architectural metaphor in general, architectonics of designed structures vs tectonic of natural/chaotic (un)structures

• [ONTOLOGICAL WEBSITE]{.underline}

- Diagrams sewn into hypertext vortices, nodal framework tapestry of data.

- Begins with a diagram of itself, mapping its own terrain, which becomes a coded structure unfurling a continuity of movement.

- Focus upon the mediation of media, of technology upon the faculties of thought, of the interface of the computer screen upon the lens of the eye

- compilation of entire ouvre, updated and digitized. The website serves as a portfolio which utilizes the aesthetic of the diagrams to collate the implicit cosmology of the meta-OOFKAUU-structure with the explicit content articulated through its resultant contents (music, writing, images, etc).

• [CERAMICS]{.underline}

- To be used as props for the opera: built and destroyed, highly aesthetic semi-functional pragmatic objects, metaphor of ideological materialism. An opportunity to make highly "lyrical" & evocative poetic forms - not of bodies or genital sexuality, but of cerebral/thought-forms & sensuality.

- Also, purely functional objects: I want to make my own coffee cup, tea cup, water vessel, soup bowl, salad bowl, grain bowl, hummus bowl, coarse vegetable bowl, etc etc. A beautiful handmade ceramic utensil for every purpose, to be put to use but also to aestheticize the process-ing of living.

*related to the interest in textiles & handmade clothing - not as art but to beautify life & increase happiness during the day-to-day

• [MUSIC PROCESSION]{.underline}

- Chart the MACAMAMMAMATRIX Prologue structure = reverse engineered notational diagrams

- Begin planning/brainstorming the post-prologue procession: instrumentation, awareness scenarios, aesthetic, collaborators

- Delve deeper into the software components of live sound performance: Ableton+MAX with triggers and electric guitar for solo performance setup

• [OOFKAUU MANIFESTO]{.underline}

- Creative/conceptual plagiarism applied towards articulating a new ontological direction, folded back upon itself as an artist statement.

It has been a few days since I've sat down to focus on your being with applied intention. I have given myself over to other considerations, to be present in feeling out all the smooth and coarse contours of the house we are building, to fill the gaps between pragmatic construction with more ethereal architextures bending towards the articulation of a new subjective ontology, and soaking up the saccharine foam of these books I have surrounded myself with. Some days, like today, I feel a slight pang of guilt streaking out from the inherent contradictions of my applied awareness; I want to keep your image fresh and our conversations electric and I also want to avoid becoming obsessed with an image of you, of a simulation fabricated in my mind rather than our shared external reality, some idealized fragmented persona compiled of sound bytes and clean font faces. As we have been discussing - and I reiterate - we have found ourselves surprisingly immersed within a chimeric ocean: sometimes a shimmering reflective surface casting back our true-er selves refracted through the prismatic gaze of the other, sometimes a turbulent whirlpool threatening to cast overboard the semblance of sentience we have both individually invested so much energies towards making buoyant, sometimes a (seemingly) infinitely deep sapphire wellspring of pure unadulterated jouissance serving as a welcomed and refreshing contradiction to the gray scale monotony instigated by prattling overly-civilized voices of our peers. It's bliss to be torn apart by this. It's a welcomed violence to be in love with you. I will not and cannot stop swimming in my own pools but I will warmly welcome you in, just as I expect you to keep flushing over/through your own watery caverns with the hopes that I might join you in the psychic spelunking, as deep as the trails will take us. Nevertheless, while time may be subjective and exist only in our perception/proprioception of space passing through us - nothing to fear - it also has a way of instigating terror, a primordial fear of forgetting, of being lost, an incessant cosmic erosion of the mind through abrasive objects and a calcifying of the body from seeping habitual deposits from outside the auratic waterfalls of the self.

I will keep remembering, remember to remember, that which I have made and continue making of myself - my self as an Object of consideration as such - and also you. I will remember to remember you as I patiently sit here and wait for the next opportunity to form new mental-material memories. It makes me realize how conversation spanning such great distance, as we are currently separated by, does not coalesce into memories as mineralogical or metaphysical as those coalesced from direct, corporeal, sensual, intimate "first-hand" experiences. So, I will not try so hard to force an image of you where there is none to be seen, or to allow myself to confuse the vibrating pixel grid for the self which is you, the one I love. I will not love the screen. I will not love these slipping words or flickering signifiers. I will love you, the body and mind applying the resonant orchestrations, rooted in the physical place of your person. I will love you and not the image of you, even if it means I have to wait six more weeks to be re-immersed in your sea.

This morning I was struck by a new inspiration, a few actually. The first was a subtle though powerful shift in the orientation of my opera meta-project, stirred up from my recent attempts to fashion its murky contents into a coherent presentation for others to understand. I have been focusing upon an ontogenesis, the creation of a beginning, and the purely ontological relation of the Self to the Other, of myself in the Void, but now suddenly I realize that this articulation must serve a purpose - for myself, for the philosophical conundrum it evokes, and the artistic practice upholds. This sense of purpose, or purpose of sense, seems to be the next phase of the opera, the "post-prologue" so to speak. This is exciting (in a completely nerdy way), as this agency of purpose will allow me to dialogue with a larger sense of ethical and moral responsibility, the primary relation of my self to the world. The second inspiration is related to a second project, a form of writing that both is and is not a part of the opera, a more general and grand poetic style that I can only enter into when I feel particularly elated in the sublime environment and sublimated in my own neural-elasticity. For this writing revelation I will attempt to focus upon the house that we are building, to wrap up all these poetic impressions I have been hatching into a more tightly wound bundle, to give it as a gift to my construction commrades, and to ___ and ___, and to Sterling itself.

Today was lived in a schism torn through the fabric of time. Somehow inexplicably all of the torments of yesterday were digested overnight and excreted into compact little fragments of total comprehension. The strange feeling of dread which I had been unconsciously harboring suddenly dislodged itself and bubbled up to the surface of my consideration. My body was strong, functioning smoothly and without cravings. There were voices all around me today; my own self grinding against the stone of its own calcification to shear off the musty dusts of years of callous negligence, the mischievous dialects of my soothsayer friends resounding through memory and interfacing across the etheric divide to whisper various messages of psychedelic prognostication into my inner catacombs, and all the while the toasty warm words spread over a thick British accent slicing anecdotes about Zen into my soft gray folds. I had some powerful visions today, and some realizations, some elations, some much needed elasticity stretched into my bands.

Today I was painting. There is this chemical that carries a name so comical that one can't help but chuckle at the linguistic toxicity. This seemingly innocuous brown liquor is a chemical designed for wood, for the boards to suck up into their dermal recesses, to rush in and intoxicate the pulpy fibers effectively cleansing them of all the microcosmic spores and minute mycelium lurking in the pores. It is a thoroughly unnatural cleansing process, a real act of hygiene which reveals how unsanitary human cleanliness can be. It's made from turpentine and turpenoids and other distilled solvents produced from acidic tree excretions, different trees from those that need to be treated, that I am treating to a medicinal dose of distillates. One kind of tree is immune from parasites, is infallible to mushrooms and molds attempting to infiltrate its sinuous skins, but other trees are highly susceptible to the incessant encroachment of the dark decomposers floating through the atmosphere. We kill both trees and combine them together, with the meat of one and the "spirits" of the other, to form a board which is more than wood and less than tree, a timber which is not grown but is made, a combination of natural materials which compose a thoroughly synthetic component of our quintessentially human architectures. After this alchemical sap was applied we moved on to the stain, a delicious cocktail of pure color concocted from plant oils, insect casings, and a combination of exotic mineral dusts collected from around the world. My skin darken under the sun as the sticks darkened under my bristles which made a profoundly intimate impression on me. Such a product is mind blowing - at least on this day, to this mind - in how it can contain representation from all of the "stuffs" of this world and yet remain completely apart from it, absolutely harmful to the person and toxic to the environment, non-water soluble, ozone depleting, cancer causing, unbiodegradable, all for a color. A brilliant color, an unbelievable color due to its purity, something that is found in nature, comes from nature, is natural, is made of nature, yet also completely synthetic to the extent that its materiality amplifies its components through sheer accumulation. We can observe this color in the world but it is always lost amongst the diversity of the landscape, amongst countless other ingredients spicing the nutrients of life. Only here, out of this can, dripping off my brush, impregnating this more-than-wooden board, does it exist in such a high (visual) volume.

Today I listened to a very articulate English gentleman read a very fascinating book about Zen written by the endlessly charming Alan Watts. I've listen to this book before, while driving across Europe in a big white van, definitely while driving through Denmark and Germany, and as I listened to it again today some images of those long lonely journeys came back to me. Mr. Watts cracks open the Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist histories contributing to the unique cerebral-spiritual practice of Zen in a most reaffirming way, always calling attention to the contradiction inherent in any "study" of such a philosophy - even calling out the fallaciousness of referencing it as a philosophy as such - rather than a way of life. Zen must be lived and experienced, cannot be strived for, defies analytical scrutiny, is completely and irreconcilably illogical. I realize that (to a certain extent) I am this Western subject being defined: academic, rational, in search for answers through empirical comparison to what is known, driven by an elucidation of what is unknown, keeping a special compartment down in the basement for the mystical "unknowable" experiences always at a distance from my own distinct lived reality of tentative truths. I have certainly been practicing a process-ing of creating problems to perpetuate more projects, of applying a mechanism of optically oriented, logically lopsided, ontologically omnivorous inquiry towards the transcendental potentials of life. Today I was reminded of this fact and was more so surprised at my realization - because of course I am aware of this and practice it consciously - that perhaps I am no longer interested or invested in pursuing this methodology. I can easily imagine myself living and process-ing another way, so if I am going to continue in my philosophical rambling then I must become wiser as to their potential dangers and initiate the more subversive project of contorting the parallax paradoxes back upon themselves and avoid becoming subject to them, or perhaps I could even drop the empirical project altogether and be all the more satisfied for doing so. Not that I'm about to move to Japan and become a Zen monk. That would be like going to Italy in search for the authentic Italian pizza, which everyone knows was invented in New York. No, the realization I had pertains more to the angle of my trajectory and the application of the accumulated research to my daily life, and of course to my art practice. Everything I read, listen to, think about, and am affected by in general tends to become fodder for some idea about Art, being an artist, making art, or something along those lines. Zen is not about making, it's about growing. The Tao cannot be seen, cannot be described, but can certainly be felt, is already inside me, is the me that I refer to when I say me. There is a reality beyond language that I have tapped into before and that I am continuously interfacing with, so the realization has more to do with my orientation to the language and the experience of the words themselves than a change in life path. It was a subtle shift, but a significant one. I wish to reconcile these two conflicting motivations to my being - of an abstract philosophy of the mind and the concrete reality that I am immersed in - and I believe art is the arena in which to enact it.

Today I thought about my friends that were here recently. I thought about how great they are, how much it pleases me to know them and to know that they live in this world with me, and how important it is that they challenge me so. Mostly I thought about this challenge itself, some inner conflict manifesting out into all of my relationships, a very much welcome friction which has spurred profound creativity and paradigm shifting conversations as well as heart break and headache. These friends whom were part of the group that came to Iceland recently to manifest the opera project, they are truly amazing people that challenge me in the most amazing ways. After the opera project was over I was exhausted and disheartened, as you know from me telling you and also by being a sensitive instrument that can feel it for yourself. It doesn't really matter why. It's not important to recount all of the events that transpired. Today I realized precisely what it is that I am feeling from this event. Today I realized that I no longer wish to be challenged in that way, that I feel more confident and capable in my abilities and interests than I ever have before in my life, and that the thing that I have been looking for these past 3 years has been found. I have begun growing something which sustains me and it makes me feel liberated, a powerful freedom made all the more potent from being sourced from my self, from my own being. During our rehearsals I was very frustrated that my friends were not more flexible with their participation, more receptive to the needs of others, more sensitive to the potentials of the project I was outlining, more willing to explore the idea of the "unknowable" with me. They were critical and unaccepting of the others, acted selfishly with unbelievable hubris, rejected my project which was the reason for us to be assembled in the first place, and seemed generally ungrateful for what I had provided them with, complaining that the situation was always less than ideal. All this is to say that the behavior they demonstrated was much less self-aware and interpersonally tuned than I was expecting, which made me feel outright fucking insane for expecting this of them, as though I didn't really know my friends or my self. In the end they held me accountable for the failure of the situation, and revealed some aspects of how they view me as a person which I found to be deeply disturbing. That also made me feel insane, to hear a description of my self through their trusted vantage points that was so divergent from how I see myself; this was mostly what upset me. Today I realized that perhaps they had a point with this perspective, but that I was no longer that person as I had changed so much over the last 3 years and exponentially in the recent months. I suddenly feel incredibly confident to reconcile the relationships and not hold a grudge, but also to release my grip upon the understanding of the dynamic as such by continuing to pursue that which has brought me here, allowed me to feel so thoroughly enriched, and to leave the darker aspects of my history in the past.

Today I had some powerful ideas about future projects. I could hear the music I want to make next and see clearly what I need to craft it with, which is allowing me to feel completely at ease with selling my equipment now in order to be able to afford these resources when I return to the states. When I'm in New Mexico I will write, and I will build a website, and I will make a prolific bundle of new art works, and also look into acquiring some new skills like carpentry and ceramics! I realized that I am very much looking forward to spending some time in the desert at the height of summer with my parents and making very good use of the time I will have there to concentrate on realizing all of the nuanced percolations of experience I have sprouted during my time in Iceland.

Today I acknowledge that I am completely in love with you while also feeling absolutely grounded in my own sense of self, even if its a dissolving self by which I mean a self which is far less rigid than any self I have previously been. I am active in my own becoming and I know you will be essential in my becoming-able to articulate this person to myself and the world. I am in love with you for what we have and what I believe it can become while also feeling radically open and wonderfully unsure as to how we will continue knowing each other, unraveling and interweaving in and through each other. I am in love with you in a way that I have not been able to be in a long time, because of a tormented relationship to love itself, because I was questioning my love of myself, because I was not available to be loved. I am so surprisingly excited to know you and be communicating with you, and amazingly inspired at the thought of knowing you on a deeper level, and completely ready to encounter you upon a plane of existence that we are equals in constructing. I don't believe in destiny but I do recognize the enchantment of serendipity: we met at exactly the right place at exactly the right time and I intend to pursue you as far as I can until experience proves to me that I should do otherwise, which I don't think it will, in fact will prove quite the contrary, that we have something profound to offer to each other. I am confidently prepared to meet you there and ecstatic at what will and may become of it.

I'm out for a walk today, out below the base of the first waterfall. The lupins are blooming, that invasive species from Alaska, conquering the landscape with their new purples, removing the flux of volcanic soil to introduce foreign nitrates and colonial agricultural consciousness into the earth, spreading more and more every year out of control, a beautiful cancer on the mountain sprinkling its iron dermis with bobbing cartoonish swollen floral penises. I'm out for a walk early because I feel restless, so many thoughts coursing through my mind that I find it difficult to keep track. I know what the ideas are - they are clear - while the ideas themselves seem to cause conflict with one another. Specifically I am reading The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek, an incredibly intoxicating Lacanian philosophical text pertaining to the essential inversion of any given perspective, not merely opposites - positive/negative - but the either/or simultaneity of non/dualist competing perspectivalism intertwined into a unified discourse of articulating one in relation to the all. It is abstract. I have been telling myself for years that I have an exceptional propensity for abstraction and that reading such texts fortifies this potency, satiates my will to being, nutrifies (nitrifies) my ongoing project striving for continuous expanding abstraction, and I do indeed derive a great pleasure from such ruminations even while recognizing the absolute absurdity of the labors involved. It is the work that I want to be enslaved by. While reading this book I become aware of this tendency, of ever increasing abstraction and the resulting symptomatic language being stirred within me. Here in Iceland, individuals have been making me aware of how my language ostracizes, functions in the making-of-pariah, excludes myself sometimes, or in the isolating and dissociating of the listener in relation to me as speaker of alien tongues. My desire to hone and focus, to strive towards a clarity of vocabulary, creates distance rather than closing the gaps of relation. The Parallax View describes the subjectivity of the unbridgeable space between subjects, giving me strength in remembering to remember that this existential gap cannot be sutured except through delusion, for we all live with a lie at the core of our being. I feel fortified while also even more anti-social, feeling the visceral expanse between me and others, always already very much removed from it, as I always do, as I always have, and seemingly will be. Am I ok with this? Yes, I have come to terms with this being that I am, the becoming I am playing out, but I am also aware of how it pulmulgates through the social body and must take account of the ethics of these repercussions, reverberations. It feels selfish, overly preoccupied, but I can work to make it not be so.

Something else that is happening: a parallax study of my self, of sorts. I am remembering my deep seated interest in Zen. I'm thinking more these days of life as a practice, less Art according to the western canons of history, of the colonial mind consuming and excreting the earth as an object, an empirical mind defining the abstractions of the self and the void... but to again entertain the possibility of another way of embodied reality, the dissolution of abstract idealism, a loosening of the grip upon language to be enchanted, suspended, in a state of disbelief, of wonder beyond words, to exercise my abilities of performing release, to let all the minutiae flow freely, "to let it all go" and "just be" beyond the ontological analytical descriptions of life as a mechanized process. Zen is not a philosophy so much as a practice, a praxis, a life put into motion. I am a novice on a spiritual journey striving for increased clarity only achievable through release. Zen reminds me that the harder I try the more my grip will tighten and the farther away the process - of life - will appear. It cannot be viewed directly, logic is useless, but can only be glimpsed through metaphors and aphorisms, through poetry, parallax jokes. How do we move beyond the mundane concerns of the everyday? By integrating them into the transcendental program. How do we stop the process of torment and horror that is human existence? Through exercising profound altruistic attention towards all details of the room, and with tea. How do we avoid the banalities of waking up, eating, putting on clothes everyday? With meditation, concentration, intention, recognizing the beauty in all of these activities. The Zen masters response: wake up, eat breakfast, put on your clothes, pay attention. The student comes to the master and says: I've been here for years and you've never given me any instruction. The masters reply: have you eaten breakfast today? Yes. Then wash your bowl. I sense that I am already living this reality without being fully immersed within it, as though levitating above the earth, failing to make contact due to a disbelief of the importance of doing so - that was is missing is the mind not the routine. The problem: I am making the problem while knowing I am its source and so cannot relinquish myself from the problem - I am the only one that can - to melt into the pure jouissance of living, the unadulterated pleasure of existence, yet I refuse to, obstinately, stubbornly, foolishly and tragically, in favor for a perceived need to describe it. I can't merely stand upon the road without using it as an opportunity to pontificate a greater poetic relation to the road, or of myself standing upon it. The need to describe manifests as the need to make. The conflict: knowledge of what could be gained (through the release) compared to what I know I will lose, namely that artistic practice which has sustained me, become the fundament of existence, up until (and including) the present. I am conflicted by the idea of holding on to a materialist perspective, to a hallucination I might have willingly situated myself within, for a general enduring confusion over what is more real while always living on the brink of this way, the way of the maker and the identity of the artist in favor of one more ambiguous, ambivalent, autonomous, and anonymous - a life merely being lived. No longer Art, but now just art. This idea haunts me, a terror of choice, looking upon the voidinal precipice and recognizing myself in its craggy borders and depths of the abyss. The terror is not in either choice, but in the choice itself, in my equal skepticism and admiration for either side, of not seeing the schisms in conflict but of the bubbling choice within myself, the quivering in my self in facing the potentials of one path over another. I am wobbling, and I have convinced myself that it is somehow more noble to occupy this (non-)space or (lack of) place, to be straddling the fence, passively noncommittal to either camp. It is precisely this precision of articulated choice which is tearing me apart. "Never wobble!"

The white portal void of the mountain emerging out of the density of the frame of sky and earth surrounding it. The void can only be defined in relation to which there is everything else. There is no difference except in our minds, yet no inside or outside between mind and world. My parallax is simultaneous, a rational and logical effect of language-optics articulating relations, clarifying positions of calculability, even if through course of the negative, by incessant questioning of what may or may not be observable - I am hysterical. Here in this Icelandic landscape of primordial mountains I am continuously reminded of the absurdity of the disciplines and of the transcendental importance of letting them melt into an undifferentiated state, of making borders fade through the recognition and exaltation of such absurdities. The OOFKAUU is the middle - not just a wobble or impotent dithering between two absolutes - between the possibility of varying perspectives in general. The OOFKAUU is a net for ensnaring a general semantics of thinking about thinking, of the possibility of articulating a novel abstract thought in relation to a shimmering excretion (not so much a concretion) of experience. The OOFKAUU is the testing ground upon which these modes of living, making, growing, being and becoming, may be put in relation to each other. It is a modality matrix of relations.

REMEMBER! The importance of failure! Has this project begun yet, has it always already? When will it end, is it possible to be completed? What is it to begin? What is it concerned with? The questioning itself should be given the dominant voice, never the answers. The language of questioning is the content of the OOFKAUU - filled with a contentless materiality, transluecent vessel, cosmic container, a black love midnight altruism. Tthe questioning is the process is the medium: no message. Its ontological mechanism is to instill confusion, oscillate upon the parallax, to enframe contradiction, the tragic dramaturgy of the curious mind confined to its own vision-cells: a tragedy of the visionary! Remember the Zen allegories! The haiku: more than just a title of a larger poem, it is a succinct elegant curl of natural form. The OOFKAUU is a haiku for this - my own - existence. ___ is partially correct but incomplete in stating it is all about me: the opera is about me dissolving my own sense of sensing self, taking on the impossible project of doing so while remaining within empirical logical structures, of ontological language: the structures that have been erected to elucidate and give definition to the self compartmentalize and entrap that which they sought to bring about, and working within them (for the time being although not forever) I can only call/direct attention towards the cracks, fissures, crevices of the cave wall, of the screen, the phantasmagoria of experience, to make others aware of its qualities of projection and let in the light leaks of the outer sun, to provide a taste for other senses, articulations of beings-in-relation, of my own and others and any other. Returning to the cave to orate the soliloquy of the sun and risk being stoned to death in the name of authenticity.

The OOFKAUU is not just about language, but also about feeling/affect/sense/the body, not just abstraction but an attempt to concretize the referent of meaning, even within an invisible container or frame. It is a real art practice instantiated in materials and processes, of craft and labor, laid upon and under a life being lived. It is a process of attending to materiality which is not purely material, not product oriented, but leaves no trace, not completely here or there, not concerned with defining the "is-ness" of being but in participating within processes of unfurling becoming (on the cusp, the curl of the wave slowly falling upon the shore, fizzing foamy fundament upon an amphibian body). Goal-oriented-ontology is the laying out of tricks (for acceleration not deception) and trips (not traps) which I must be wise and knowledgeable enough to avoid stepping into.

The OOFKAUU is many languages. The thinking through of music: should not be spoken about, demands being experienced in other ways, perhaps does not need to be made (Cage), or can hardly be referred to - is hardly there, pertaining to senses beyond hearing. There is also a sensual music, a feeling through sound through the body, beyond the snapping of the thunder tongue talking, a sense toxic and electric, giving and taking away life, of primordial creation before human language, which cannot be spoken of and evades all analysis. The OOFKAUU, to the extent that it delineates the interstitial territory of the neutral gradient between existential praxis and ontological semiotics, attempts to attend to both of these experiences and fuse them into a "unified work of art."

Clarity of the absurd, to make visible the invisible, to make comprehendible the incomprehensible qualities of existence: the crafting of a new poetic form beyond the caverns of the mouth-mind. I should make a list of words designating orientation of movement, of bodies or perspectives, standing upon one position while being oriented towards another, emphasizing the transitional state between two or more points...

SUCCESS & FAILURE: no project can be completed to the extent that it seeks to unify into a totality - setting up for failure, admitting it from the beginning. The goal of the OOFKAUU is not to complete it but to begin, to enact, to perform wildly, flailing, in agony, in any way possible, through affect! The prologue is a grand entry way, an arch, a portal, a door, a threshold through which we might enter into the spatial-temporal coordination of the questions, into the existential think tank (reverb chamber). A consideration of space: every medium of the OOFKAUU is a resonant chamber for amplifying these absurd conversations, a portal into the unfurling. The success/failure of the LungA workshop: an experience of pure horror! When I proclaimed/admitted that I did not know, it was then structure dissolved! An excess of truth which became debilitating to action! If the experiment were to be repeated again while maintaining my awareness of how the situation would unfold without being swept up in it directly the horror may be able to remain contained but would it have appeared as significant!? Same with the prologue experiment: the process cannot be explained, can only be enacted and to this extent it served its purpose for my own transition which bares the question: would the experiment be worth repeating? Should any experiment be repeated? For who, for what? The experiment was for the change, the transformation to another state, and this was certainly achieved. For these two (connected) experiences, I embodied the horror in an authentic immediate way, but only through this catharsis was I able to articulate the importance of such a trial by fire, emerging with the scars and the imprinted archetypes of the flamed kisses, white hot memories alive. REMEMBER! Only through destruction can creation be instigated, can true paradigm shifts occur. Only by turning up the soil to comingle with the air can the seed begin to germinate. The LungA Existential Units of Concentration workshop was the prelude to the prologue, the first think tank generating the language for articulating the diaphanous relations that would be performed later through the prologue ensemble. I wanted nothing more than to become invisible, avoid being instantiated at the center of this ecology. What failed was the ethics of this encounter. I realized my role, which is that I cannot relinquish my role, that I must lead with wisdom and sensitivity to the state of others, to help them become incorporated into the folds. Working with others is always a matter of ethics. What are the ethics of the OOFKAUU?

The next phase: reverse-engineer the prologue event, to concretize its results and present its form to a wider audience. The opera takes place in the valley, through the conversations with myself. The backdrop of the real: don't confuse it for an abstraction. The opera is the reconciliation of my concrete reality with the abstraction of the document that represents it. This parallax must be embodied with all its forms: a music existing only in notation and another only through performance, a text which cannot be orated and another which cannot be transcribed, etc. This inherent tension is the fulcrum point of the entire project. The prologue is the portal, leading in to the space of meditation upon this point, the interior of the point itself, a flickering portal breech the boundary between world-concepts of boundaries. This process is essentially a redefinition of nature itself, as a process beyond essences.

****

The opera is about a dialogue I am having that must be externalized from my self (from my senses or conceptions?) In order to be heard, to comprehend the voice that is speaking. The process of living in the procession of the opera, the space in between. I must remember to continue documenting! Its the documentation that will comprise the content, all the myriad minutiae that I keep fumbling over. Everything else is just an abstraction... All this writing, all these images, the sculpture or stage settings. The content of this work is me and my sense of self and the permutations of that unstable form through some subjective speculations of a novel space-time. Take all the vocabulary and put it to a list, I still must remember to speak. Daily exercises in speaking, starting immediately! The walking and the talking will produce energy so that I am no longer confined to a specific working environment or creative time of day! Break through. Wherever I can speak into a recorder is where I can begin accumulating content for the opera, and it will accumulate! The only limitation will be my own bodily energy and I certainly know how to attend to that. Put an end to sedentary lifestyle for the sake of an activated psyche.

This should be the proposal for the Organ Mountains residency: walks, looking, finding, accumulating, presenting. A revisionist natural history towards a new ontology of/for known & unknowable un-i-verses.

Everything else is research. Accumulate it and put it all together! Stop watching movies and start looking into all the lost crevices of time. It's experience that is being accumulated, so wasted time is wasted experience. Stop making preparations for a life to be lived and begin living this one, now.

I'm reluctant to use video because it brings the attention deeper into the self. Tthe media permeates the senses, synesthetic experience, but its artificial: cybernetic, based in control. I'm interested in a dynamic expression of freedom, not the control and manipulation.

Assemble more orchestras, dance troops, temporary stages. Put out a call for untrained participants in every city I inhabit, begin making relationships with real perspectives and be forced out of the subjective abstraction. Write real scores that can be played by real musicians (or at least would-be performers with instruments) and write real choreographies for real movements that are filmed. Design stage settings and make digital models of how they would be. Design sculptures, either with found objects of collage techniques. Design posters with diagrams, intriguing words, images, etc, that will attract would-be performers. Put them up at universities, music stores, art galleries, book stores. Infiltrate the communities. Publish the writings as zines and distribute the printed matter. Get the fucking website underway so that people can see what I'm up to. Keep recording the music and put it online. Make images, photograph sculptures, be prolific! Write copious content! All this writing is preamble, preparatory research towards an opera but not the opera itself. Stage 1 is the prologue, the preparatory work: required being at the edge of the known universe in order to observe and articulate it. Stage 2 will begin with the first scene which must be enacted and thoroughly documented, and this is what will begin in NM signaling a return back to the known-as-unknowable or the defamiliarization of civilization.

TOWARDS AN ARTICULATION OF AN ONTOLOGICAL OBJECT CALLED:

OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

The opera is being conducted in phases. The first consisted of an incubation period of heavy research, to ground and orient the activities in the specific concerns of various disciplines.

STAGE ONE: RESEARCH of ONTOGENESIS= what an opera could be

• [Philosophical [abstraction]]{.underline}: cosmology, ontology, language as the terminal abstraction. Combination of the accumulated researches of western empirical existential pursuits to articulate the context upon which the other activities will transpire, namely the ontological fundament serving as an arena for the larger conversation. Teleology (usefulness). *utilize the empirical voice, formal writing methodology, rational logic algorithms, and cerebral cartographies of philosophy towards increased clarity. PHILO-SOPHIA: the love of wisdom

• [Theological/Mystical/Transcendental [allegorical]]{.underline}: this project focuses upon a universal human trait, to find or make meaning in the universe we inhabit. The goal is not to combine all the world's spiritual belief into a new age neo-paganism, but to address the source from which all theological articulation permeate. Includes mythology. *utilize the archetypal structures, symbols, aesthetics, architectures, etc., of these "sacred spaces" to infuse occult aporia into the greater dialectic. MYTHOPOIESIS.

• [Scientific [algorithmic]]{.underline}: the structural edifice of technology as a material mechanism supplemental to the body, consciousness, and spirit. Science provides rational description of a concrete world, but that makes it no more real than allegory or abstraction. Science carries its own bias in the senses - phenomenological anthropocentric bias. Provides the myriad minutiae: all the descriptions of all the details of all the things in all the worlds. The youngest and most naive of the epistemological pursuits.

These major areas of information are syphoned through various working methods, each harboring various strengths and weaknesses:

• Conversation: The primary operating mode for the composing and performing of the opera is through dialogue: Speaking to myself to discover internal focus, speaking to others to elucidate common relation(ships, set to sail across the sea), the combination of singular voices into the multiplicity of a dialogue oriented towards a subject of consideration. Dialogue happens in the present, with a sense of immediacy, involves practicing the art of negotiation (as the listener can speak back and influence the direction of the content) so is therefore based in reciprocation. *ideas of friction, jouissance (pleasure) of human relationships, the misery of disagreement: the most dynamic mode of communication in that it directly involves the subjectivity of the speakers, has clearly "felt" parameters of inside/outside, and pertains to and incorporates the sublimated psychology of emotions

• Writing: a bit more removed from the direct exchange of ideas with the tongue, writing occurs at a different speed, in slower time. *modes of writing: lists, charts, transcribing the content of dialogue, direct writing, editing, collage or cut-up methods. Language instantiated as material.

• Music/Movement Composition: application of a specific form of writing towards an intended affect/effect (sound, movement, aesthetic display, etc). The parameters for this form are very loose and to a certain degree any image, text, or material can be utilize as a notation: therefore this mode consists more as a process of translation, decipherment. A notation is not a new formal language, but a meta-language or mode of "reading" that can be applied towards other pre-existing languages.

• Information Aesthetics: a mode of reduction towards visualizing experiential data in an intuitively assimilated form. Can vary greatly in complexity, in style, and in usefulness. Can represent the content of conversation, or writing, of various compositions, or likewise serve as the beginning of new conversation scenarios, chart the trajectories of possible writing excursions, or serve as a notation directly.

• Visual Abstractions: consisting of "images" more than visual architectures, these visual artifacts can serve a variety of roles. In relation to writing: illustrates the content (reflection, supplement) or expands the content into a psychic/affective space by venturing into cerebral realms that cannot be concretized through words spoken or written (aporia, the ineffable). Visual abstractions can exist in any material, at any scale, and can be both intentional/deterministic or chance operations: consists more of a "way of seeing" or interpreting visual information (as opposed to pure data) than a methodology. Related to antiquated Platonic idealism of the (Kantian) sublime, sacred abstraction, alchemical symbolism, interference/dissipative patterns observed in physical materials, etc. The pure material embodiment of information that other forms of documentation attempt to describe. Can be made or found.

• Video: a unique media in that it is related/connected to all others (potentially though not inextricably): can serve as a medium of writing, composition, information display, pure abstraction, etc., as well as incorporate subject matter both numinous or profane. A distinct form in its synesthetic affect, combining moving image and sound: evocative, capable of trance induction, pertaining to the memory centers of the biological organism. *still pertains primarily to the eye, but serves as a bridge between media.

The Prologue: Ontogenesis

• The origins of creation out of nothing-ness. The swelling up of emotional turmoil to set the mood for a scene. The beginning of a conversation about how to begin a conversation, the product of a process not motivated by production. The visual elements occur after the event itself. Setting the groundwork for a communication between performers (roles) and their respective ontologies, methodologies, techniques, histories, but also between media (sound, video, text, visual data) in representing the interchange of ideas among the participants. Successes and failures: how are the events evaluated?

• The focus was upon the event itself, a beginning which allowed the conversation to unfold. Now there is content to discuss, problems to solve, a procession to participate in. The next step is to organize the content into a context, reticulate the peripheries and articulate the minutiae, construct the cast of characters through which the entirety of the enterprise will be discussed.

Conclusion to the Ontogenesis TO BE DONE

• Compile all documents into a single text

• Compile solo audio experiments into a single album

• Compile visual diagrams into a single composition

• Compile all data into a single container: the website, a mode of transmission/dissemination for others to interact with the unfurling process

• Begin collecting videos to represent the initial research process, foundational content, and occurrence of the ontogenesis prologue.

STAGE TWO: INTERLUDE POST-PROLOGUE PRE-MISE-EN-SCEN: setting the first scene. These ideas should be pursued, condensed, charted in various forms. Learn the lesson of the prologue by putting various media in conversation with each other, then delve deeper into the content (the minutiae).

New direction of research:

• Sociology: correlating the power dynamic of any particular group. The role of the individual performer in relation to the whole, the composer, the audience.

• New Philosophy of Society, Philosophy and Simulation, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History: Delanda

• Architecture: the physicality of the scene. Delineate the difference between the stage, the orchestral pit, the audience, the inside/outside of the theater itself: the frame of the place.

• The body, the anthropocene, physical mechanisms of movement. The seat of consciousness.

• Parables for the Virtual, What Animals Teach Us About Politics, Thought in the Act: Massumi

• Writing as a method, as a process processing its own processes. The slippage of language.

• The Parallax View: Zizek

• The Neutral: Barthes

• Of Grammatology + The Truth in Painting: Derrida

• The interstice, the middle, the neutral

• Existential Nothingness in eastern and western philosophy, how the conception/definition articulates subjectivity, the Void, the Other, Zen.

• In/compatibility of various forms of writing: scientific/rational with poetic/visual, surrealist methods of streaming consciousness with deterministic pragmatic clarity, the legibility or decipherability of a text (its coherence).

• Reconciliation of the archaic with contemporary civilization: Mircea Eliade, Terrence McKenna

• Scale: nature realizing itself on every level of consideration, the plateaus of the concrete, the measuring parameters of any specific instrument, the potential to clarify or obscure through language, scientific delineations of scale.

TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED VELOCITY

Mcluan: hot+cold media applied to quaternary of alchemy = for each media involvement in the opera (text, sound, etc).

Joyce: applied language for how to write the content of the opera

Remember ___'s technique: record the conversation and transcribe the book! = a nice variation on the cut-up.

Write more letters to people, to dig out the content through virtual conversation. Have more actual conversations, to dig out the virtual contents!

Living in Iceland = the edge of the known

Returning to NM = the center of the known

Where is the unknowable? Where is the orientation? Observe the shifting of the (my) perspective through the migration of physical space / time.

Maybe I am the one with the Oedipus complex = relationship to father/mother/self

-apply other psychological theories of self for mapping techniques

-look at the visualization tactics for writers outlining their works: Henry Miller, James Joyce, etc.

Daily iphone recordings: in the face, in the mirror, in the private and public spaces. Record the voice while driving, record the body while moving, "frame" the mind in various degrees of thinking-itself-into-being. Get a more robust portable camera rig? Body mount for first person perspective? (How does the camera presence change the potentials/possibilities of conversation?)

Let the dialogue write itself through the process of living and "reverse-engineer" the script of the would-be opera. Let the music play itself through the process of improvisation and reverse-engineer the notation. Let the movements perform themselves naturally through daily movements, the embodiment of various affects and sensations (use Massumi to further define this terminology) and reverse-engineer the notation that charts the paths. Let the video document its own becoming and reverse-engineer the documentation to form the video scroll. *All of this amounts to a common assertion: let the action lead and the rational rumination pick up the pieces. Lead with the body and work it out afterwards. Act first and apologize later!

****

My mind feels itself frothing like a cup containing some unknown quantity of semi-solids, more dense than liquid and decidedly more than empty, but seeming-to (or teeming fro) vaporous emissions that make the molecular branches impossible to identify, as though the neuronal components of my spongy gray matter are rooting through the gelatinous membrane of my semi-permeable self out into the aether of the world with no fundament to latch on to. So many thoughts and images pass over my awareness these days - often consisting of ruminations, reveries, allegories, and anecdotes of attention itself - so that it has become difficult to keep track of the suns that spawned them or the moons that hold them, even now as I recall them, as they fade more and more in their "they-ness" to entangle less and less with any other-ness, becoming less object on a background array of experience and increasingly undifferentiated from the sensuous manifold itself, the screen that is both my self and the environment that I am immersed in, the thing-itself no different from the eye that perceives it. Actually, its more like we are perceiving each other, virtually more than actually. So I could say that I have been lingering on questions of the real, but also trying to hone the focus of this meditation and avoid the slippery traps that I see being set all around me by others, sticky soliloquys of hyper-mediated selves in the age of transparent social networking and slow syrupy molasses funeral hymns pouring out of the dusty cold mausoleum of memory built by the German Belle Époque. These days I'm more interested in jouissance, in understanding how to take up the reins and ride the skies of ripe pleasure without becoming tinged by hedonism. I want pure pleasure without the purity, without purifying, just pleasure, not for objects or subjects but living itself, whatever that is - I know it's a contradiction, but perhaps it must be expressed that way, as it is, unbuffed.

I keep remembering, so much remembering. I occasionally have realizations of new ideas, speckled epiphanies, fresh insights, maybe a handful every year at most, but mostly it is remembering insights that I have already hatched, as usual. Part of the reason for this occurrence, repeated infinitely, is that I feel strongly that I have already tasted most of the possible aspects of my life - my art, and my world view - sometime years ago - I can't say exactly when but I suppose that isn't so important either (I don't want to get lost in the temporal folds, its more important just to realize that those past moments were real and can continue to be real to the extent that I can continue to manifest them into my ever-ready-now). Yes, I have already realized so many things, yet I have not completely become the person I believe I can and should be due to a very concise and clear reason, namely that I have been attempting to reconcile these desires which I can feel to be so intuitively correct with the larger social universe that I have been born into and others repeatedly insist I must grapple with. As I age I wish to become increasingly immersed in stillness, to inhabit a pose of grace, to be wise (not merely) beyond my years but outside of time itself - not physically but abstractly (melting into) the concrete, which is to say to disregard the concept of time as an "inaffectual" object that binds us rather than empowers us to fold back upon ourselves however we wish. Meditating on this leads me to writing, scribbling down what it is and what it is capable of and how to use it. I do not write to remember, I do not send myself notes to the future, as I refuse to be oriented towards a time which is other-than-now. I write to condense, to concentrate this present moment, to push it down into my being and have it become part of me: to use writing as a tool to articulate and refine my lived experience. To this extent I can no longer write as quickly or clearly as I need to keep up with my flowing-flowering-floundering thoughts, so other strategies of action must be put into place...

I remembered a conversation I had over the course of hours, over a course of the Northern road of Iceland, through due course over treacherous topics and controversial perspectives, conducted between myself and two trusted comrades with veins coursing with wine and noise, in a car, outside of a punk festival, on this very day exactly one year ago. What the conversation was about is not important, not right now at least, but what is important is that it was transcribed into a text which became a chapter which was compiled into a book which has been published and is now something which is more-than what I originally would have thought was possible from such a simple conversation. Recently, as you know, I have been walking and talking with myself, recording these conversations with no "one" and transcribing the words as either concise methodological notes and/or content for the operatic work itself. This simple tool, this simple process, was realized and forgotten and remembered and enacted and forgotten again and again and again. It seems to have different degrees, flickering degrees, of importance to me at various times for various reasons, but right now it is essential to my thinking.

Something else, related to writing and to memory, as well as to the incomprehensibility of my voice to the larger world-ing, is my current re-fascination with James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. This book which is more than literature and less than pure experience seems to serve some hypnogogic intermediary between the two and in many ways subsists as the quintessential modern work of art. I suppose what reinvigorated this interest was a beautiful original pressing of Ezra Pound's Cantos being dropped into my lap by a local sage (his qualities presented as disorientingly wise and idiotic at the same time). This book has also been haunting me, coming in and out of my life at various times, too heavy to handle and too dense to penetrate due to a conviction that there are never enough hours of the day or spans to my attention to penetrate its piney depths - as with Joyce's Ulysses and the Wake. Now is different, now I have nothing but time, now seems like a portal that is opening up into an infinite now, so what better time (non-time?) to delve into the deepest of modern chasms of the self-in-relation(?). I will read them both in NM.

I'm making maps in my mind that will soon manifest into images, perhaps, if I act upon the impulses and not just release the ambition to my own private islands of reverberation. The maps are cosmologies, topologies of the universe, celestial charts of gods lying upon stars observed by sailors below being swept along by chaos swirling meteorological forces upon a flimsy piece of rotting wood, but they are also technical manuals for operating alien technologies, astrological calculators for penetrating the mysteries of the future, very real technological schematics for actual architectures that both mind and body can inhabit in order to diffuse the difference between the two (or more). In my mind's-I (eye?) they are blueprints that outline the bridge between my imagination, my concrete reality, and the abstraction holograms of the language that sews them together, like the light and cloud bridges between the 9 worlds of the Yggdrasil or the golden spires that conjoin the heavens and the earth or the alchemical philosophers stone serving as both material substance and philosophical allegory to the ontogenesis of consciousness infusing the murky swamps of the terra firma. I want to combine all this knowledge I am accumulating with the purpose of proving (to the extent that anyone cares to calculate the algorithms of absurdity) how fruitless is the pursuit of static truth but also to reveal the cracks in-between, and more so to inhabit them. This is where wisdom lies (double entendre?), and I would much rather be silent and wise than outspoken in mortal intelligence. I believe we are evolving one "way" or another, up or down, in or out. We will all soon become closer to incorporeal data viruses or transcendental godheads. I wonder which would be preferably, and if we will live to see it become more than conjecture. Which bring me to the source...

Oh my parents... yesterday was father's day and also my own father's birthday, so we had a conversation. I must admit that it was pretty fucking depressing. He lingers on the negative, on his waning health and aging body and the weight of time itself. He proclaimed (almost with pride and certainly drenched in hubris) that he no longer has any "motivation" to change, that he is rooted in his stubbornness, that he has spent his whole life living one particular way which seems to be working for him and at some point he became tired. I believe what he was trying to explain to me was a feeling of comfort, but to my senses it just stank of death and desolation. I took a deep breath and told him that no matter how or who he wants to be that I will love and respect him and that I am eternally grateful for his giving me the life that I have, but also that I firmly believe that we make ourselves into the people we are, that these ontological statements of being ("I am... This is...") are the only shackles that bind us to living any particular way, and that there are infinite potentials of how one might express themselves and articulate themselves, thereby an infinite number of selves to be and lives to live and realities to inhabit. He always listens to me patiently, respectfully, but I can see that he doesn't really hear me. The justification was made and he insists that I hear him, that I respect his desire to be left alone with his being (no longer becoming), and I sense that any peace I will make with him will be a result of my own learning to leave him unruffled in his own nest. This is my test, this is why I'm moving home for awhile, to attend to this dilemma in myself. The worst part is the look on my mother's face when he makes these outrageous statements. Its visible how hurt she is because the words are so divergent from her own aspirations (or at least articulations of her world view) and how oblivious he is to the unintentional pain inflicted by his position. She's not helpless, but fuck he is such a powerful force of stubbornness, but when we (my mother and I) look at each other we can secretly share in the awe of ourselves being willing and able to put up with it. On previous occasions I have tried to empower them, one or the other, to seek some outside dialogue, to attend to this schism in their paradigms, to attempt a process of reconciliation, and when I do I can feel how this will tear them apart, that my instigations will result in separation, and who am I to involve myself in their lives in that way anyways? If my parents split up I would be fine. It's them that I worry about. My mother would be devastated emotionally and my father would be marooned domestically. Of course they can both fend for themselves, but what would they do? How would they live if not with/for each other? I think they both realize this and its the fear that keeps them together. I have decided that I will not become too involved in their relationship, that it is in fact theirs to attend to and does not require my interference, is not my responsibility or business to attend to. I will dedicate myself to having the best possible relationship with both of them as individuals and in making our group dynamic cohesive, as a practice, as a meditation, and a test of myself-in-relation to this source from which I am spawned. I had the (semi-)absurd idea that perhaps I have an Oedipus complex... of course I don't want to kill my father and fuck my mother, but that on a Freudian level (to the extent that such a psychoanalytic theory holds any weight, which is highly questionable) that I have certainly oriented myself to the world of others with a certain deep seated agonism inherited from (or in relation to) my assertive father and passive mother, that I indeed want to suppress his disturbingly controlling voice which I fear might become my own and I hear echoed in other men while amplifying the affective concerns of sympathetic wisdoms being dampened in my mother. There's certainly much more to be uncovered and boiled over here, but in general I have begun considering my decision to move back with my parents as a kind of "pilgrimage to my source" to the extent that I have one... from the edge of the world where I was able to confront the bare stripped nude self in the infinite void where the land meets the sea at the navel of the universe, back to the biological womb and the domestic nest from whence I sprouted to attend to the nurturing (or terrorizing) psychological mycelial network of "home" (whatever the fuck that is!).

Yes and there's some other idea brewing within me, something that I have been trying to not think about very much but it keeps coming back, so insistently that I must acknowledge it to decide if it should be acted upon. The idea has to do with all of the above, with the conversations with myself that are recorded as grist for the mill, of the memory and remembering and the mind maps of all that I know sewn together to make an ontological quilt that focuses on the subtle stiches that bind it, of the peripheries of the world and the source of my own creation as the relation of myself-in-relation to the always-other and how the geography is connected to the psychology, the salinated seas flowing into the salted seize of my own archetypal archipelagos of awareness... but with mirrors and reflections and refractions, and a camera, and myself playing a role which is both real and other-than. This idea has to do with video, with recorded images, but of what I'm not completely sure. Some days I think it must be found images, things pulled from the world that are not (directly) connected to the content of my own being, yet on other days all of this editorial rigmarole seems so excessive for the process (is in fact more about the process than the content) which leads me closer to turning the camera back around to my self, to my face, to put my body on the screen. Mirror sculptures, prism huts, steady-cams mounted to my back or chest following me around as I mumble barely audible words through an infinite voidinal landscape of anywhere but nowhere. I keep thinking that I will buy a small but powerful audio recorder and a small but powerful video recorder and I will dedicate myself to documenting this process of conversation for awhile, at least for some months, to see where it gets me. Of course the fear is that I will rack up infinite harddrives of content that will become so burdensome that I will never be able to sift through it all - crushed under the making-material of time - or that I will never want to look at it again, that it's somehow more about the process than the recording, but if I am always recording then I believe it could open up a new methodological awareness for editing that will shift the way I think about thinking itself. This part seems powerful and worth pursuing. This idea is half baked, semi-solid, premature, but I will keep incubating it and I hope you can help me work out the details when we meet in person.

I long to be somewhere with you, anywhere with you, everywhere with you. I'm so curious what this experience will be like and so thankful [to some great unknowable force which is not an entity and not greater than I but certainly a force nonetheless] that we will be able to spend at least a small amount of time together in two dramatically different climates. The apartment in Reykjavik will be a refuge, seems to be a secret bunker beyond the awareness of others, and I am compelled to keep it a secret for no reason other than being able to keep it between us, just for us. I want to hole up in that that light filled void, eat rich foods and drink wine that's a bit heavier than I would normally let myself sip, cover all the words in chocolate, and never stop touching each other either with eyes or fingers. I imagine meandering walks that flow into continuous rivers of conversation, evaporating time, perpetual daylight, complete surreality more real than real should normally be. Then I will go to the desert to prepare my familial climate and make ready for your arrival, and you will come meet me there, and it will be another dimension. It will be unbelievably hot and dry and bright, but there will also be darkness and cars and infinite vantage space. This void will be red, glowing from within, baking in its own oven, humming a deep earthen hymn of mortar and pestle, an axis grinding its own revolutions as we transverse a different flavor of infinity. We will be going from cold purple-grey-green moon stones to the searing surface of the sun! I look forward to your being-becoming more than virtual, to be formed as actual before me once again, and how our psycho-physical encounter will play out. Until then...

The subject matter is the self, my self, selving. I am the writer, character, content, and context. My self is always in relation, always relating, and it is the networked web of relations which comprises the theatrics of the display. There is a space between which I am striving to articulate. Between the two absolutes [Jungian oppositions, the archetypal male female, the father/mother, north/south, etc] lies an intermediate path. The power of this position/perspective is to embody both absolutes simultaneously as a non-absolute, a grisaille gradient. The fear is that this intermediary status will inhibit any idea from manifesting completely, purely, as "far" as it may hold the potential to be.

Conversations needs to be recorded and documented. There is so much subject matter in the world: the opera should be conducted through conversations. The problem: how to conduct natural exchange without the perceived presence of the recorder, to make the speakers forget that it is present or to obscure its presence. Is this stealing? What could it give back?

Comb over a thorough re-reading of massumi. Cross-correlate to Zizek, Barthes, Derrida, Jung, Delanda, Baudrillard. Find new books to read. Remember to remember: Miller, McKenna, R.A.Wilson, Joyce, Pound! Chart it out visually: create a meta-diagram of intellectual influences in order to identify the gaps that need to be explored further. This is where the notebooks come in. Take all the current knowledge (all the "knowns") and lay them out visually upon the conference table. Create another conversational cosmos with those that are known: real conversations with real people. This was once a failed experiment that could be reinvigorated, but remember transparency: doesn't need to be contextualized as a project, should occur first as "casual" conversation that is thoroughly documented. ***the opera will write itself as long as I am paying attention*** These daily practices must be recorded, not for longevity (for anyone else's eyes or ears) but for my own sake! This is the work, this daily writing and conversing. The exchange, either with myself or others, is the goal in itself.

*Remember the ideas and notes from Seydisfjördur: The ruminations of the opera ontogenesis. The experience of forming the prologue in all its successes and failures.

The difference between thinking all these ideas and speaking about them. The dynamic of the Danes while building the house: politics and food, breakdown of personal spaces, sports and roleplaying, the unspoken agreement towards a collective construction. The importance of working through ideas with ___, with the mountain, to the waterfall. The impossibility of explaining the severity of the contained ideas to those that are overly enraptured within their own worlds, ie: artists. Artists are not the intended audience (!), but then who is? No intention, just ventilation (for now).

Write up residency applications for US National Park locations to explore a sense of place, cultural heritage, indigenous architectures. Write choreographies and conduct conversations with relevant friends to enact them. Write music with electric guitar via Ableton for multi instrumentalist performers.

Gloss and matte black and various reflections of the modern self. The meaninglessness of well-worn jeans in reflecting individuality in the subject with no belief in cultural origins. The resurgence of spirit in the artist: a reflection of widespread naivety. What does it mean to evoke essences? Superstitions aroused by a lack of knowledge in a world of over saturation. Technology of convenience serving continuous distractions, dislocating any understanding of truth and driving people back into their intuition for having nothing else to trust in... It's not intuition that is bad, but uninformed intuition! It is a kind of knowing in itself that requires its own unique supplements.

divisions - between

philosophy / science

morals / ethics

self / other

*chart them to visualize internal references. See massumi's last chapter.

A day of death. A long conversation with ___ concerning my own amorality: a life lived in service of chance, spontaneity, improvisation, or rather living defined as a series of processes without function. A cemetery contrasted with a shopping mall: the affluent mercantile "heart" center of the city which has become transformed into a pseudo-futuristic mirrored reflective Jacque Tatti-esque glass walled labyrinth serving up virtual reality goggles and gold/silver too-casual pants, vs the cemetery representing the holy ground of the old world, a terrestrial sponge soaking up tradition and history to sprout life to new trees, a bed of death harboring reminders of life which have become forgotten, turned into a garden, a recreational area for the living, a topiary removed from contemporary time. Both are filled with dates and numbers, clocks and calculators.

How do I want to die? How do I want my body to be handled? A question of style or fashion: what do we adorn ourselves with now and what does it represent? How will we immortalize ourselves later and how will we be remembered? Death as fashion, living-death, zombies: "beautiful grotesque." The relation (or in-relation) of time: goddamn clocks and calculators, what does it mean? Our life units distilled into materialist quanta to be sold back to us in bits/bytes, stored in the cloud:: a relationship to digital photography! *my own personal desire to be removed from this system of perpetual useless exchange, the paradox: to make enough money to remove myself from the system of having to make money. Leads to dreams of paradisical existence, the articulation of the ideal home and studio, privacy in space/time/silence/solitude, and also human relationships. How much human interaction do we need to be fulfilled and how do we expect to change/participate in those that we currently have accumulated (haphazardly)?

The question of nature: what is nature, what is unnatural? Back to language, the divisions between philosophy & science, meaning/truth/real(ity)... Baudrillard's invisible hegemony, Massumi describing nuances of Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin's arcades project... Always this looming threat of photography (in relation to other media of expression): remember Mcluhan's media theory applied to shamanistic-artistic practice, applied to various psychoanalytical theories, even personal idiosyncratic relationships.

The question of the body: the language evoked to refer to the meat, to the mind, to the self. Where is it located? Can it be found? The bodies relation to presence, immersed in a sea of information, swimming in stimulation. A conversation with ___ about "too much" stimulation, sensory data in excess that "drains energy": back to differentiating between energies as such, from food, breath, environment, sacred idealism (chi flow), or scientific quanta of calories and heat expenditure or even quantum molecular interactions. (What is the difference) between the thinking-through and feeling-through of these experience, with these bodies? Is it the question that changes, the potential of the answer, or perhaps the experience itself is definitively unique (subjective)? The affect of the environment on our ability to express it: color's relation to our feeling of openness or inhibition to use language, or how the scale of walls creates an affect correlated to a mental architecture, how ___ describes a change in "mental weight" as the light changes seeming to shift the entire contents of the universe or have some effect upon gravity itself = affect being correlated to effect, back to the divisions between body and environment. Being a woman vs having a female body: being a subject or being subject-to a corpus beyond our influence, control, working autonomously regardless of our will.

The question of language: not to question the utility of language itself, but rather how can a language be used to articulate a more useful line of questions. Philosophy is littered with tricks and traps, don't fall in! Be nimble and quick to leap over the distracting candlesticks in order to only address those concerns that require due attention. Language's relation to attention: conservation of energy = conservation of attention = conservation of words: relationship to magic? Einsteinian physics? [that old theory of conscious restraint, which I can now understand as being an intuited movement towards a practice of Zen, of the Tao, on non-participation, of the world as a vortex which strips the person of the powers]. Language as symbols full of content and empty of meaning = exhausting!

___'s attention: the long phase-gap of intense consideration that occurs between being-asked and becoming-reply. Based in hesitance, a kind of paralysis: a primal fear that the statement will come to define the person, a belief in the poisonous potential of language to infect and contaminate the symbolic world we inhabit. Another aspect concerns control: an internal fight against speaking/acting impulsively, confrontationally, out of anger (by which she means pure emotion or specifically negative emotions? Would it still be undesirable to speak spontaneously out of love?). This behavior is partly due to conscious changes in herself to behave/function in the world differently, a movement towards active awareness of all nuanced details, but also amplified further in relation to me and my line of questions (as well as our intimate relationship I'm sure).

A walk with ___ along the water discussing our own private pavlovian responses, seen as decidedly negative feedback loops: addiction to food or addiction to sickness. Brings up the question of (locating the epicenter) of control and if we are able to reprogram our neural passageways. Is this related to re-imprinting our psychic circuits (as described by Tim Leary and R.A.W.?). We explored Harpa - the performing arts center designed by Olifur Eliason. On approaching we were more impressed with the wooden crates outside, trying to decide what was in them, windows or art. I don't remember wondering what was inside the building itself for I knew only too well that it could only be more of the same, it is just a facade hiding more of the status quo. Walking through the threshold, ___ becomes upset by the "deception", the discrepancy between the open airy colorful geometry "promised" by the exterior faced with the reality of the low ceilinged dark gray hallway that we entered into. She was emotionally invested in the entry hall while I could only focus on the people, or rather lost my focus due to the people: a common feeling of anxiety in public place, to stop looking and move through as quickly as possible to get to a place more calm, less active, less polluted. Moving upstairs, ___ notices the neglected/unconsidered tables scattered around the brutalist architecture - the white table cloths resembling Grecco-Roman statues - and she is disappointed that so much consideration was (obviously) applied towards the windows with so little invested in the human use of this place. We agree it is an unhuman/dehumanizing building but for different reasons: ___ is disturbed by the imperfect execution of the idea, perhaps if it were more thoroughly considered it could be appreciated as a beautifully complete idea in itself, whereas I am disgusted by the transmission of the ideology through the aesthetics of the building so as cannot delve into such considerations. I'm left on the surface, disturbed by the idea structure, the architecture of propaganda and what it represents to my own mind, body, presence as a human, presence in the city. I choose not to acknowledge those details so as to not engage in the contract of interpretation leading towards succumbing to the ideology, perhaps a socially irresponsible position? Back to the idea of a cultural conservation of energy: does everything need to exist? Does all art need to be supported? Is "art" itself, in itself, for itself, always already justified? - A better question: does it all need to be considered? I would say no, definitely not. Expression is neutral, not necessarily always-already righteous. Stupid people will produce dim expressions, poor ideas will perpetuate a poor culture (deprived of nutrients, not in the economic sense). Of course the obvious problem: who decides, or rather how is the distinction made, and how to dispense with the excesses? To a certain extent this is already happening, of course, necessarily **so I must write my residency statements describing my work as necessary.

Some ideas are important to record and other are not? A discussion about our parents failing health and if we feel a responsibility to care for them. Can we help others, or help them help themselves, and what is the responsibility in that? Can we speak for others, or help them speak for themselves, or manipulate them to say what we want them to say? *the problem of sympathy, empathy, pity. What is the responsibility towards someone (like my parents) whom choose to stubbornly maintain their unhealthy ways - although they are wiser than many to be sure? Don't I also do the same (smoking, drinking, etc)? How can health be measured, certainly not by an ideal, not by perfection, not through the gross equalization of scientific nutrition standards..?

Returning home, mid afternoon, fatigue sets in. Every day is the same weariness at this hour. Should it be combated or embraced? Energy pill or a nap? "really?" "seriously?" These words that ___ proclaims from habit and have become a kind of joke... Are they simply innocuous, innocent, or perhaps represent something about her relationship to "the real" or to behaving in a serious manner? Related to humor and illusion? Gravitas! No, hilaritas and amore!

What do you think about marriage? A simple question that unraveled into a complex emotional friction that threatened to negatively impact us both. ___ associates marriage with the ceremony representing it - the wedding - and the aesthetics that comprise it, cannot understand "what marriage means" and refuses to give an answer as to her possible participation. I try to outline the difference between the objective/ontological statements of what it "is" vs. the subjective/opinion statements of what an individual thinks about it - recalling the more accurate e-prime as a way of sorting out such disastrous pitfalls. The conversation escalates to near disaster, feeling threatened, attacked and "interrogated". I begin reading Barthes, sections on weariness and silence: perfectly fitting as I feel both. I'm understanding my own exhaustion with the tedium of the conversation itself: not language or content but the inefficient use of it stemming from inhibitions and fears coursing through the sublimated currents, the "elephant in the room" as ___ has remarked, her intimidation that she will not be considered as smart as me, as equal, as accepted. The dialogue breaks and ends - doesn't feel good, but was cut short before any real disaster only mild bruising. What is the lesson to be learned from this experience? To temper my own line of questioning (no it can't be!) or to be more sensitive to our dwindling energy levels at that time of day and choose to perform some other kind of activity? To keep vocal or to keep silent? The merits of silence, of restraint, of tact and letting the subject fall to the floor without killing it: requires a more mature sensitivity that I should hold myself accountable to.

Low energy in the evenings. I'm always restless at night. "afraid of the darkness" of the dying day. Some other activity should be cultivated during this time, perhaps a creative pursuit which can be more mindless and not require language: video editing, audio recording, visual practice! Physically stimulating activity. The morning is a time for writing, for ruminating, for words. A precious space opening up following sleep and anticipating the energy of the coming day, a moment of potential, of awakening, anticipation. Both of these times should be considered and cultivated for their own strengths.

And what about all these other ideas that I've had, over the past months, all the thoughts that haven't been written down? *this writing exercise seems significant as it recounts the immediate activities of the day before, but if too many days pass then the experience fades in memory. I must develop a way or regularly recording, either by carving out a space for regular writing or by non-invasive digital means (or both!).

-the house, its history, its materials. The stripping away of the old to loosen it in the atmosphere. The sawdust invading the perimeters of the body, through the biological membranes. Zoning out (or in?) to repetitive activities.

-Zizek and The Parallax View: the void, the other, a certain procession of highly rational thought. Delanda and a new theory of history: escalation of scale = scaling. Baurdrillard: desire/seduction, the invisible hegemony, simulation.

-"processing" the ontogenesis experience, related to the lunga experience: the social dynamics at play. Still requires further ruminations, a project in itself. Discuss today?

A conversation in bed with ___ after sex: "I want you inside me again." I hear it but pretend not to and she knows it. She calls me out on it, about the unfairness of one of us "getting off" without attending to the other, which leads to a conversation about the greater goals of our sexual encounters: yes goals, something to strive for beyond merely getting off, rather considering the orgasm to be an impediment to a process of continuous unfurling of the self outside of the limitations of time and space: time travel through our own bodies. That "place that I go" when I cum, how do we go there at will? The conversation triggers something in me for the good, about a better way to touch and be touched, concerning the initiation of such a process of time travel that necessarily disrupts the being-in/of the present moment: requires commitment! No half-way touching!

On the bus on the way to the airport we have a conversation about cultural relativity which is a bit shocking. ___ describes an experience in Japan entering into public pools without covering her tattoos in foil - a taboo which she is aware of and consciously ignores without guilt. Going to peru and being ashamed of one's own vegetarian diet as a clashing of cultures: vegetarianism is not a culture. To whom are the cultural laws and customs of a place applicable to? Only to those that believe in them? Do they require belief? A question of personal ideology, of "principles" as ___ refers to them: "am i a person of weak principles then?" Maybe so, but according to who and in relation to what greater rubric? The issue of cultural relativism, cultural appropriation, PRIVILEGE of the first world: back to the discussions with ___+___+___ driving around Iceland summer 2015. Later in the airport terminal, ___ is disgusted to be associated with her own peers (at University), cannot identify with them and their attempts to establish identity through design branding: "___ is my favorite brand because it gives me a sense of identity" (lends, or forms, or steals)? Is it giving on loan, transplanting, supplanting, supplementing? Additive or subtractive to the being of ones self?). ___ is horrified to consider her own project of cultural exploration in relation to this other... Very important and sensitive topic to explore here. She won't like what I have to say about it.

___ gets on a plane. I try not to think about it too much, not to suppress or deny but because it seems senseless to do so, like a waste of senses. I want to focus on the mood she has created in me, to linger in that, to carry it forward and have it continue to be my present. This seems a more fitting tribute to her ever-lasting memory in this perpetual presence, so that she never "goes away."

Reading Roland Barthes The Neutral on the plane. Fuck this is such an incredible book by such an incredible mind with so much to glean from: deserves a thorough combing over page by page, to chart the analysis, to soak up the references and continue down all the various rabbit holes. This is a project in itself (which has been brewing for far too long): a charting-course of active reading (activated reading) as a process of digesting, of pro-cessing the content. Must attempt with one book first and then apply this structure towards others: vector files that can be expanded and contracted in relation to each other, cut and paste.

*the cut-up method applied to software: Max patches interfacing with Ableton, vector graphics compiled into larger databases, both applied towards the circuitry of a webpage itself applied towards transcendental circuitry (R.A.W.) and divine architectures.

*remember the desire to record the notebooks in order to purge them for good and start over from scratch. This should be a primary goal of pro-cessing while living in NM (passive, in the evenings?)

Other inspirations trickling in from podcasts:

- Recording everything with a hidden body wire. Accumulation of thousands of hours of tape, what to do with it? A process of discovering what's important, or an additional tedium that can be avoided? Remember conservation of energy as there's only so much to go around, or is it about something else? Pure material archive? Then can't it just be faked?

- Communication with dolphins, or other creatures. The dispersion of intelligence in species besides our own, in pure biological substrate, in the dna/rna sequencing of our genes. Technology as the mediator - a computer for dolphin-human communication, why not to other species also then? How is this related to CJT's mineralogical inquires?

- Seeing with the tongue. Apparatus for expanded senses. Sensors and circuits of the posthuman subjectivity. Where are the limits for my own practice? Perhaps it's worthless to attempt to describe them (the limits).

- [In the Dust of This World]{.underline}: should find and read this book "that no one will read" but they obviously have. Proves that i need to start publishing, get these ideas out there in public, that they will come back to find me in other forms. Also, the merits of working in isolation for the sake of my own creative process/purity.

- Douglas Hofstadter discussing the infinite complexity of translating a single 28 line poem: the complexity is in the form not the content! Remember to incorporate such a translation process in my own work. It's not tedium, it's expanding the confines of understanding. *"alien languages" create alien understanding..?

- THINGS. Remember the theory being hashed out in LA circa 2012: theory of material memory. Can be applied towards any object: is the resonance real or imagined? Real or fabricated? A theory of resonance (energy), a theory of memory as residue (ether, invisible matter), a theory of affect of objects. *things in the expanded field: must define this expanded field, the expansion! The powerful resonation occurring in a place, a sacred space, a "sense of space". Very much related to what ___ is always going on about: the collision of the sacred and the profane. Not a place but a site. The seed jar hidden under a stone by some ancient person (Anasazi) discovered by some civilized hikers, left untouched (the importance of touch to these feelings of resonation: a tactile relationship to memory), then lost forever not because the object was destroyed but the place itself. The site shifted, thereby destroyed never to be recovered: the experience in the present will never be relived, but also the experience in the past will be remembered differently for not having any grounding in this ongoing present.

- 60 words: the importance of the political vocabulary: still completely about language.

*** I should strive for such precision in my statements, not excess but succinct accountability. I need a lawyer to comb over my language, to make it "real" which is to say to hold myself (and others) accountable to it.

Suddenly this strange desire to have my own podcast, A PLATFORM FOR BROADCASTING.

Landing in Boston, everything is discarded, flies away like a plastic bag into the ocean: careless and wasteful. The mind is wiped but not clean. Saturation of smells and images. Everyone is obese and greasy from the humidity. This country feels diseased and I am an outsider here: live up to it! Stay healthy and keep speaking! I'm not trying to cure these people but I am trying to avoid upsetting them: blend in by pretending I am one of them, I know better of course but perhaps they don't. The trick = don't actually fall prey to the allure! Does this require more strength than I am able to conjure? Concessions without sacrifices... Must be able to carve out this space for myself, to continue working, to keep the energy flowing. So far so good. Magic, enchantment (or re-enchantment). Listen to the bird song, listen to the stones, listen to the earth at various times of day. Continue to live and exist at various times of day. Don't sink in to the oily pools of civilization.

****

This will probably be the last day that I write in this format. The transition that I have been waiting to occur is now upon me: signals the shift from rumination to action! There's a lot to do, to compile, to sort out and organize. Now is the time for lists of tasks, items to be crossed off, projects to put under way. A few last remarks about recent history, recount it for processing: timeline ::

December.

Sweden. Strange feelings closing out this period of radical hermeticism. Ate mushrooms with ___ and was filled with overwhelming sadness, deep wellspring of affect, felt bad at the time but now I see that perhaps it was because I had grown numb and this was the beginning of an awakening. "I love you but I'm not in love with you": final words that resonate terror in relation to ___. All of my possessions left at her house: what a site! Magical house in the Swedish forest with an incredible/beautiful human! Contrasted by the schism with ___: breaking with the superficiality of Stockholm.

*___ and ___ as archetypes, characters in the OOFKAUU.

___ = wild in society calm in the forest, powerful loner lost in her own maze and all the happier for it. Wielding natural magic and speaking to cats.

___ = another kind of wild in society, more mindless, drunk on masculinity (and beer). Powerful because of resources not psychic energy. Prioritizes family values to keep life whole, really a man of dim values, modern nihilist believing in nothing.

Las cruces. Another schism with my parents, or dad specifically. Argument about how he doesn't feel appreciated, rather neglected, or somehow taken advantage of. He is perhaps? Witness a confrontation between my parents which puts their inner workings on the surface: affects me more than I thought it would I suppose as it eventually brought me back here. I'm hesitating to begin the next project, choosing to finish up what is in the past instead and take a break to conserve energy = good strategy!

January-march.

Seydisfjördur. Powerful reconciliation with humanity. Slowly at first, learning to reintegrate with the beauty of the world. All of the questions are laid out in public view = workshops (remember to revisit and chart their contents!). Realization about how much information there is and how difficult it is for others to access it: my work cut out for me. I give in to the process and heal my severed links to humanity, let love back in, turning point. The OOFKAUU articulates itself. Remember these documents = access and organize. Not just images but text works also. Should be represented as a website. Remember also the process-ing of music information = write down the schematics for this process and put its mechanisms into action for themselves! Relation to video, poetics, stage design, etc = all the aspects of a grander production. *the work is beginning at this stage: ontogenesis: must wrap up the contents now so that the next phase can begin.

Beginning of april.

Humans all show up to produce the prologue for the opera, which becomes something else entirely. This was a powerful process which demands its own space for thinking/feeling through. Put simply: what I felt to be a failure became a radical achievement: putting the dissonance into action. This process needs to be charted, graphed visually, to be understood: the music is a map of a territory which we were actually treading through. The real human relationships "suffered" as a result: do not neglect them! I owe everyone a proper apology, or explanation, or at least a symbolic attempt to keep the conversation open. *this conversation should be documented and brought back in to the fold. *remember the tension about the other group performing: we are the professionals and they are the amateurs, but in the end everything was flipped upside down. All a mess, but a beautiful one! Vacuum noise.

End of april.

Everyone leaves. Tour is over. Awkward ride back to Seydis with ___: I owe her a letter too. Emotional exhaustion, feeling disoriented. Attempt to recalibrate in books: Delanda's new theory of society x3, Baudrillard's invisible hegemony. Meet ___ and begin a wild series of conversations, a new way to converse, based in love. This is what I was searching for with the opera prologue: radical openness. I fall in love without wanting it, without knowing it, but then giving in to it completely! What a powerful emotional realization... "the universe is a black love"

May/june.

Sterling. Back to a private emotional life in a way, focused on the project at hand. Witnessing first hand that an intense work mode does not allow a space for quiet emotional meditation: physical exhaustion of body but also a time for mental relaxation due to lack of rigor, numbness. Long days of quiet, feeling the transformation of a space into something completely other: power invested in the physical materials.

Somewhere along the way...

A realization of what I am doing with the OOFKAUU: ontogenesis = the origins/creation of an ontology, statement of being/becoming. The prologue sets the emotional scene, the coordination of various aspects of the conversation = the conference table (even if it's missing a few legs, or is only hazily in view, it is felt!). Now the second phase: articulating the prologue into something concrete: begins as a process of condensation = "reverse-engineering of experience" into various notational forms to serve as a fulcrum point balancing the past with the future anticipation: the present is a fulcrum.

And now, lots of work to do. Make the first list:

• Organize all the notes from the recent readings into a network of researches: books, notes, ideas, notebooks. A chart of anticipated trajectories, of the known.

• Organize all OOFKAUU materials into a nodal neural network: website

• Visually map a system of musical production based on the creative conceptual plagiarism developed in iceland and the desire to improvise-as-communication. Orient this flow chart towards specific algorithms in max and ableton. Begin making more music!

• Continue drawing vector graphics for aspects of the opera: most easy to communicate with others! Working towards a book + website of these collected works

• Architecture

• Clothing on the body

• "things" = power objects correlated to memory

• Scaling: from microbiological forms to metatextual narratives

• Begin video production = towards a revitalized video scroll as a medium to disseminate the content of the opera = even better for applications: focus on one short and potent video work.

Black boxes: knowns are what goes in and out, but what happens on the inside is unknown/unknowable = metaphor for my own practice. Need to start making charts/graphs/organizational layouts like dad's (weird thing in itself). *research info-graphic layouts: does it need to communicate to others or only to myself? A structure for thinking-through thinking through, for processing processes! Various specialized categories: a system for research to collect all the ideas I discover, another system for calendric layouts (to-do lists), in fact one for every aspects of existence. Just start now and figure it out as i go along.

*lesson plan, syllabus

Begin compiling the archive: separate containers for various media.

Visual taxonomy inspiration:

1. Internal emergent structure

2. Scientific/philosophical empiricism

3. Spiritual/transcendental hierarchies

4. Others (related to first? Original structures)

Text content > illustrator diagrams > website taxonomy > max patches

Prologue is still underway: needs to be chart via reverse engineering of experience = apply method towards the music that we created + the human experience through memory.

The problematic: the black box = inside or outside the box?

The impossibility of describing what's inside or what's outside? Is this a tautology that can be broken out of through action? > we inhabit the reality we describe through the language we choose to describe it. Am i suffering according to my own principles? Am i subject to my self or am i actively becoming subject? The other way: slippery fluid play. *OOFKAUU = description of the tension between an empirical and (this other) perspectivalism/perspectivism, an attempt to embody another form of knowledge. Articulating a position which is/is not my own (comes from within or without?) = a fundament which can be upheld or abandoned: the tension between the absolutes, black and white, the existential "reality" of choice/will + the description of the vacuum gray area gradient expanding inbetween. What are the repercussions or advantages of embodying one or the other absolute, or of the potential power/impotence of inhabiting the gray area? Which is "ideal" or more desirable and how is that to be defined, to myself, in relation? *Is this philosophy? What are the questions I am asking: why / how / what if ? = no it's art, not looking for answers just ruminating upon the questions (is this a suitable definition)

[TO DO LIST]{.underline}

Find taxonomy inspiration images

Convert into illustrator models

Begin template for website construction

Organize text documents into a meta-taxonomy folder

Organize photo material into reference archive - what software? Turn into collages.

Organize ideas into visual structures for video/audio editing

Go through old hard drives: organize archive and prepare for data backup

Go through notebooks: convert to text? Destroy hard copies

Make list of future correspondences? No = should be more improvised.

Record correspondences? Yes = archive letters/emails + record audio conversations

Research text-to-speech software: transcribing notes + voice memos

Begin list of words = "interesting" "problematic" = increase fidelity of language

A general feeling of restlessness while trying to figure out what comes next - right back where I started in NM. Dad has a way of exploding, continuously exploding, bubbling over his own brim, and I am put into the position of having to temper my feelings, to refrain from rising to his ecstatic level. I see this reflected in my mother as well. Sometimes she is pulled in, later she reacts with an aggressive passivity...

OOFKAUU: the task at hand is to organize the content visually to know what I have and determine where I will venture next: a flow chart for the raw content, a sorting mechanism, a spatial organization of the documents > website. I need to accumulate source material + inspiration for the visual layout structure: images which describe a hierarchy/taxonomy of information, to be translated into vectorized models, to be used as a template for website construction. Remember ___'s website = image nested within image = akin to the visual cosmological website I envisioned at Joshua Tree. The audio components should be integrated into the diagram, video/moving image activated in response to viewer inter-actions, Mandelbrot nested complexity of internal/external oscillatory architecture.

A desire to clean house, return to a blank slate, to reduce down to the most bare of elements and expunge the excesses and redundancies of this entropic process. Word documents compiled into meta-documents. Letters compiled into series of content-organized groups: how to document? How to archive conversations as they are unfolding? The notebook archive: how to unpack the past to make it accessible in the present oriented towards articulating speculative action into the future? Walking + Talking + Thinking is definitely integral to the project but I need to decide what is useful, what needs to be saved. Is automated transcription possible, or desirable?

The immediate goal is to build a platform which captures all of the actions, ruminations, and miscellaneous creations of life itself: the OOFKAUU as a web-based architectural container for existence. Continuous uploading and broadcasting to a personal subjectivity cloud. The early articulations of the OOFKAUU - oriented towards primary being/self - is progressing towards the material instantiation of that self, the materialof the data defining that self, the medium transmitting the message, the orientation and movements through the stack.

It doesn't always have to happen at the same time, in the same way. Thinking that it must, or it should, is inhibiting growth of the entire form. I must focus upon the expansion of detail, "fidelity," of the language used to describe the structure. The OOFKAUU is a frame I have put myself inside of, but there is also an orientation from the outside - is this a different language or the same? Is the orientation a matter of belief, a tautology that can be broken by choice? What is the determinism of consistency, of a self in stasis, staying the same according to principles invented or inherited? I meet humans whom self-describe as more fluid, flexible, limber with a great distrust: how can I trust a person who is unstable, undefined, indefinite, always in motion? How can the self be seen or interacted with if it is always vibrating? The fulcrum of the OOFKAUU is the tension between the grounded definitive being and the arial perspective, effluvial flow, atmospheric pressure coursing through the upper stratospheres. To get beyond essences another form of knowledge must be articulated, both is and is not my own, will not come from within but must come without. In articulating the fundament I have the option to uphold it or abandon it. A later stage of the OOFKAUU will come when I/we will confront the tumultuous reality of choice, of determinism, of the responsibility of defending this internalized conflict, of the humanist project as it is externalized into the world, as it worlds the world we inhabit - the responsibility of crafting the world we wish to inhabit.

The question of philosophy: Why? Or, what if? The prologue is the how(?). Where is the gray area, the spectrum gradient, the neutral, the interstitial territory, the opening up of profuse potentiality in-between these hard and fast empirical buoys? Can it be located, inhabited, and what would be the positive/negative repercussions of maintaining such a state for more than the moment of recognition - to not take a side, or to side against the humanist agenda? What is the power (supposedly) achieved in relation to the other, what is it capable of? What is the potentials of inhabiting a firm empirical perspective as opposed to the fluid noncommittal flux form mind? Certainly neither is superior but can be recognized as having strengths and weaknesses... The articulation of a new ontology... is this confined to empirical terms? How to expand definition then, to increase definition, break apart and open up vocabulary, to make visible that which is currently ineffable? REMEMBER! : the word list, the need for new words, the necessity of new expressions through a long process of discovery = the long meandering journey of my self through the self-same-likenesses of the OOFKAUU.

It's now my turn to apologize for the long span of time that has transpired since your last letter. Of course so much has happened, to be expected, including things that were unexpected, as expected. Expectations are a fascinating conundrum in the (my) human experience, steering my consciousness through portals both real and imaginary, blurring the distinctions between my fluid will and the concrete conduits through which I am coursing. The opera has transformed countless times as it stretches and contracts to compliment and contain all of the expectations I smear over it, both luminous and horrifying. The creative experience I vaguely remember describing in my last letter has all but vanished - and I am eager to actively bury it in memory - leaving behind a pungent residue of powerful, potent, pulchritudinous potentials. (You'll have to forgive the alliteration, my mind deals in clicks and chants these days). Glad to hear about your decompression in Berlin. Seems to be a transformative experience in itself perhaps, post-transformative reticulation, putting on a few layers of skin as you emerge back into the social arena. I had a similar experience: I was building a genuine fear of the big jump from Seyðisfjörður to the gargantuan US-o-A, so I booked an apartment in Reykjavik for the better part of a week so that I could have a private light-filled incubator to hash out some impressions and calcify some of the physical into my body. I spent 5 days reading and writing, eating simple clean foods, going for long walks in the city to observe the cultural architectures, went to the museums to contemplate the flavors of various Icelandic visionaries, and began to strengthen my patience for a world that revolves to the incessant ticking of clocks and calculators which I had so easily forgotten. Have you ever read Roland Barthes? I feel like we may have had a conversation about him, or was it Gaston Bachelard? Yes. Well I highly recommend Barthes to you, having recently reminded myself how much I am personally enchanted by his rigorous intellect and genuinely gentle methodology. He makes me feel more sane. Go find a copy of [The Neutral]{.underline} or [A Lover's Discourse]{.underline}, you won't be sorry. Now I'm back at my parent's house in New Mexico, so far away from the wet ripe atmosphere of Berlin or even Copenhagen. The differences are palpable, tactile: my life here is conducted completely indoors, as is most of the activities of this country. It makes me nauseous to think about it (cf: Henry Miller's [The Air-Conditioned Nightmare]{.underline}) and also realize that what I really enjoy about life in a cultural epicenter is that so much of it consists of exterior orchestrations, for better and for worse. I'm going a little stir crazy honestly; shit, what I wouldn't give to be living in a closet-sized apartment over some bustling city street in the middle of some European city where I could step outside at any hour of the day and go on long cobblestone-gilded walks fueled by poetic liquids and mechanical symphonies! Of course, I am here for a reason, to sacrifice some elements of my own will in order to explore some coarser aspects of my own subjective history and to reacquaint myself with my familial origins, but I am also realizing that the purpose of this "little examination" is to remind myself (remember to remember) why I cannot live this way, why I must force myself to find a community out there in the world, why I hate air conditioning and discount super-stores and suburban consciousness in general, and what I love about the city. Books are my savior. Ever get into any Alfred Jarry? A young anarchist intellectual that was known for his impeccable wool suits, hand built bicycle, ravenous thirst for wine, and as the inventor of pataphysics - a quasi-surrealist proto-dada post-intellectual discipline exploring the nuanced absurdities of existence, recounted mostly as walks through the city. Makes me think of Guy Debord and the Situationists also... an excessively educated group of energetic young radicals that roamed the streets following their own psychic compasses (in revolt against the agenda of the city planners) to appropriate the propagandistic slogans of the billboards and turn the language of the city against itself, just to flex the will, just expand the possibilities, just to make a space for unfiltered human exuberance to stretch out, anything but "just" anything. Yes, I agree with you that the powerful resonance of a 'home' cannot be underestimated, although I am in a very different place in this regard. I have had a home. I have nurtured a relationship to things, not as a detrimental materialist accumulation (when is it not!?) but rather in homage to the potency of possessions to contain aspects of ourselves within them, to contain particulates of memory and foster a continual embodiment of aspects of our past, radiating out our minds back out to our senses, allowing one to grapple with their own historical lineage as they accumulate on the shelf in the present. As we discussed, as I have explained before, I began to feel burdened by these things and these places as it requires so much of my living energy to care for them even as I realize they are caring for me in turn. I think it is justified - don't get me wrong - it requires no defending, but I personally see it as laying down an anchor in a tumultuous sea that I cannot imagine not being adrift in: it seems that trying to stay still amidst perpetual dynamism is what causes violence. Everything is moving, gently vibrating, more a wave length (time-space) than a particulate point on a grid. On the other hand (!), I completely relate to this desire you have expressed, to have a sun bathed room with that one good chair in the corner, a cup of tea sitting on a pile of carefully curated reading, and a few gentle plant companions to keep company. Sounds like bliss, if you can afford it, and I encourage you to make it for yourself, as long as you remember to go outside as much as possible for those other airs. I wonder what you have decided for yourself, have you gone to Rwanda? This concept of the in-between space (not a place but an opening up of awareness): I think it's essential while also impossible, a paradox or perhaps a parallax. It's certainly something I've been ruminating over a lot myself as of late. It seems we must strive to inhabit a middle, to compromise, to strive for an equilibrium by inventing some counterbalance to all of the turmoil which fills the world, to be actively dissolving in the marrow of possibility itself, the lattice through which all signals pass, aloof so as to be unafflicted (though never unaffected!). On the other hand (and this question keep arising), how can we accomplish anything without integrity, without total uncompromising commitment to our carefully calculated ideals, without absolute immersion within a reality we are rigorously orchestrating with the entirety of accumulated experience? Well, of course the falsity is in the dialectic, in opposing these two choices which are equally absurd. We cannot completely inhabit either dimension as our delicate human ontologies balance upon precarious proprioceptions articulated via flimsy semiotics that cannot truly manifest in perfect abstractions - it's the attempt to do so which has caused so much pain and suffering in the modern world! Let's do away with abstractions and tip toe towards the concrete - what's the difference? I believe (yes believe!) that we each must decide our own trajectories, that each of us are capable, regardless of privilege or circumstance, to articulate our own ontologies. We must be active in becoming and avoid statements of being, so always be active, in situ, and never remain too long within any particular static structure or else risk the calcification, of being locked into place, of mind and body and potential. Perhaps this is the middle continuously unfolding, between more than merely two absolutes, or rather an archetypal archipelago of awareness that we can swim through and navigate according to our own pleasures. Where does pleasure come in? How can one live for pleasure without ever becoming satisfied, to avoid the pitfalls of hedonism while remaining active in sensuous fulfillment? I believe in seduction over desire: to desire is to transform the focal point into an object, into a thing, and to try to obtain it, to own it, whereas seduction is participating in a ritual of delicate negotiation, of reciprocal magic focused upon the dancing toes and the electricity extending out from the finger tips, like a tactile vision where the viewer extends out from the limits of their body to brush up against the frequencies of the world itself. I don't proclaim this to be the way, but perhaps it is a way. It's certainly complicated and should remain as such. The world is not simple nor should we strive for it to be so, let's not escape from the real but actively seduce it without being seduced by it! Yes, well anyways, I'm in New Mexico for now. I spend my days exercising my mind and body into fresh routines. I feel the onset of age developing in my musculature so I have dedicated myself to reinforcing my corpus before it abandons me altogether. I'm also obsessing over the last 6 months of attempting to articulate the opera and have decided that it shall be contained in a website that other can engage with, so I am currently involved with designing the intricacies of this patchwork quilt. It should be finished soon so I'll send you a link. My parents are driving me crazy, as I knew they would, and I can see in them where I have derived my own insanity from, although I have not yet figured out how I should process this observation. I suppose that's what my opera is for, to serve as a platform for processing those experiences which would normally remain shrouded in complex subjectivity, to push the clandestine algorithms out into the light of day so that other's can see themselves reflected in their shimmers. I strive to be a better chimera, not a mirror but a portal to the parallax of our collective being-becoming, which requires numerous (numinous) layers of contradiction and hypocrisy. At least it still gives me pleasure, for now. Next week I will leave this place to spend 7 days driving through The Great American Nowhere, through the deserts and natural monuments, camping under the stars to hear the stories of the scorpions and sage crackling in the hot dry wind. You think it's summer there... you haven't seen summer until you've been in this desert in July. It's incredible, how unreal this reality can be, how fierce and uncompromising to our bodies. Yet it's strangely soothing to be straddling such a tenuous line between comfort and immanent doom. We have not conquered everything, even with all this air conditioning and miles of ethernet cables, so there is still much to do. Of course I will not be here for long - I can't be! - so I'm beginning to contemplate my next move, hopefully outside of the US. I would love to live in Copenhagen, or just south of the city in a farmhouse perhaps, or possibly Berlin - it's just about how. I'm applying for phD programs soon, in a few different locations, but the one I really have my sights set upon is the Royal Academy of Art in Den Hague which offers a trajectory in art-as-research that speaks to me directly. There seem to be lots of cracks and crevices there to inhabit. Stay in the cracks! Open them up and stay open to them!

The purpose of this website is ORDER: to put everything I have into a cohesive system of sense relations, isolate the gaps, decide where to continue probing. Lay down the structure and let it be incomplete! My life is currently on hold while the structure is being erected. This is not sustainable! = there is a desperation to the time, to finish as soon as possible so I may return to living directly. Hence the current malaise... In the meantime, divide up the day. The physical body has been attended to, let it sit in routine and thrive! Now the mental body must be addressed = initiate a working schedule and try to stick to it!

07:00 wake up, coffee, reading

08:30 long walk

10:00 strength training / yoga (every other day)

smoothie

shower

11:00 daily writing exercise : new inspirations, creative directions, outlining

12:00 quick lunch

begin working

17:00 stop working

begin organizing research

18:00 dinner break

short sunset walk

19:00 study norwegian

study guitar chords

other projects

21:00 internet research on daily topics

mind maps

method notes for the following day to follow

22:00 decompression (if needed)

23:00 sleep

It's fucking impossible to see a painting through digital pictures. I mean see it. Of course one can look - Satan knows we all love to look - directing the optic nerves towards pixels with no place, a non-spatial direction without orientation. The screen is a vacuum that sucks out the marrow of our experience. All these megapixels and RGB quilts are no less real but so much less really here, have no presence, so smell or touch. We are living in a culture of lookers who do not see because everyone is trying to get outside of themselves, an absurd notion, so as not to face their own faces, to see their selves selving I's eyeing their own sights. And now I am sitting here looking at this shimmering pixel grid relaying a facsimile of what appears to be a painting, so what am I to do with that? Do I talk about what I'm seeing or what I think I'm seeing or what I think you are seeing or what I think you want me to see compared to what can actually be seen or what I suspect others would see if they were seeing the thing itself rather than the flickering binaries or how I am seeing this thing-that-is-no-thing on the particular screen I happen to be viewing it on/in/though now, at this moment, at this place (which is to say, should I attempt to ground this groundless experience within a ground of my own fundament)?

That needed to be said in order for me to say anything. I haven't seen these paintings so I can only look at them. Having said that, let me say a little something about 'saying', concerning speaking, speaking to the capacities of painting's concerns. Being a painter myself, or at least having gone through the gauntlet to be trained as one, I think that talking about painting is fucking shitty. No, it's not stupid - on the contrary it can be morbidly intellectual - and it's not absurd - part of the problem - and it's not useless - which is the crux of the issue. Let me unpack this a little more and contextualize it within my own persona: [in my opinion] a critical language focused upon the medium of painting is disastrously inappropriate, negligent to the inherent potentials of the medium (and its conductor) to transcend reasonable language into higher platitudes of holistic considerations. Its painfully rigorous mechanisms apply a scaffolding to the organic sensual movements, to encapsulate them into an architecture of emotions, devastating the very affect the words attempt to defend, much as the looming American skyscrapers stand as pillars of our own cosmic idiocy within a disapproving natural ecology of sentience. Thirdly, applying a language to painting renders it pragmatic, makes it serve a function, injects it with usefulness, and I assert that painting should be anything but useful. Whatever it is, painting must be definitively useless, "purposelessly purposive" as that old moldy-tongued Mr. Kant would squeal, which is to say that our relationship to its nuanced contours should not be compacted into a logical algorithm that calculates any definitive sense. As a window or a portal or a mirror or a parallax labyrinth of sensuous slippage (or whatever allegory the painter chooses to apply to their own creations in order to continue grasping for their own aspirations), the painting is a thing actively transcending its own materiality, a thing which points away from itself, a concrete excretion of pure immanence, an allegory for the 'which for which there is no whicher.'

At least ideally, to the extent that you are interested in idealism. Perhaps you consider yourself more of a realist, and to that extent apply a firm semiotics to your works, and if so I have this to say to you: you're doing it all wrong. So, you've made some paintings. What do you want from me? Some words, some directions, some advice, some feedback, some poetry? Here's what I've got:

What I can see is that there's not much to see. I can't see anything, any things, or at least any thing that I can recognize. There are no images in your marks, only marks, only paint, so I look closer to see into them. These are definitely paintings because I can see that they are made of paint, they do not hide from that, there is no illusion, it seems to be a fact I can take for granted. What are the qualities of these marks? In fact they appear less and less as marks, more as patches, pools, swatches of uniform color distinguishing one from the other, concentrations of chroma comparing their shades and tints. There is texture - there is always texture - which appears exaggerated, amplified, building up peaks so high that I cannot see over them and must confront their edges directly. Even the support has texture, so what is the difference between the coarseness that you are painting upon and the impasto you are applying? I have many questions which you are not present to attend to: What are these colors and where do they come from? All I see is paint, so what is this paint of? These forms defy defining, so how are they derived? What's the difference between applying mineral pigments to the meat of a plant, or the hairs of an animal? How does the wall support your vision differently than the floor? Where are you in space-time? At what speed do you move? How do you look when you are painting, and how does this compare to how you look when you are not? How do you begin, and how do you end, and do you know it or feel it, and how do you reconcile the insolubility of these human mechanisms to such absurd notions as "abstraction" or "provisional action" or "tactile vision?"

It's a shame that we couldn't have a conversation "in the flesh" concerning your work as I would very much like to hear your response to these questions. Perhaps we will have an opportunity in the winter. I hope this text serves you somehow, at least as a distraction to your own ambitions and affects, for awhile. Of course, all of this is completely useless, as it should be, unless you decide to put it to use, which is another conversation.

****

What I remember of being a child consists of a few scattered images, impressions, scenes peppering a great void of boredom and idleness. Being a child felt like endless waiting for something to happen without any satisfactory answer for why I should be so patient in waiting for it or what I might expect if/when it finally arrives. I struggle to shake this feeling to this day, forcing myself out of bed and into the world to stir up a fantasy of possibilities which very well may only exist in my own head, but exists nonetheless as no less real, concrete aspirations which give me purpose to keep living. Being young was painful in many different ways and even the joys seemed to be shadowed by an incessant unknowing. I mean my mood was dark, my inner experience, the fundament of my psychology that formed how I was thinking and feeling about the world, which must be distinguished from the external reality of being a very privileged person born into a supportive family. I harbored my own terrors, but they were inflicted by the world not due to negligence from you or mom as I acknowledge that you have always done everything you can for me. I feel much better now as an adult, ready to negotiate this world on my own terms.

My reaction to your writing was immediate: I felt overwhelmingly melancholic for how you described my own strange trajectory of a life and horribly guilty for not having it meet your expectations, in a way, while also knowing full well that it was never my intention to live the life that you described as ideal. I will try my best to recount my own experiences honestly, even though I think it's a bit foolish to do so, to admit to one's father such a morose perspective. It seems disrespectful, cruel somehow, and I don't wish to behave this way towards you. However, I believe that we are capable of attaining a powerful transparency in our conversation, a radical honesty if you will, and so perhaps this description may be received as a sacrifice of my self in tribute to what our relationship is and will be rather than a stale recounting of a past we are both helpless in shifting. I would like to give you something, a gift that is immaterial, some honor or sign of my sensitivity, or at least a tribute to our family as a delicate trinity that we are all equal in participating in. So, I will follow your lead by responding to your memories.

I don't remember being very young. I don't recognize that person as "me" when I look at old photos. I think of children as sponges that are passively absorbing the world around them, being completely immersed in it without differentiating themselves, as I certainly was. I've heard the stories you tell, but I cannot account for them physically, can't say it was me. My first memories are of toys, plastic, video games and screens. I was immersed in a world which seems incompatible with others, as a kind of narrator to my own imagination, obsessed with taking on character roles of individuals with lives more interesting than mine. I never really liked the puzzles or simulated fighting so much as merely exploring the worlds of the game, being invincible and invisible so that I could navigate without distraction, not playing to win so much as just playing for no purpose. I wanted to travel to other places, collect powerful objects, become wise and powerful while avoiding the main objectives just so that I could keep playing. Later, when the games were being played on the computer, I became interested in the back end architecture and began intentionally scrambling the code to see how I could manipulate the parameters and delve even deeper into an exercise of creative freedom that had nothing to do with winning or losing, or with interacting with others at all.

I was lonely, always lonely, as far back as I can remember. Loneliness feels like a ground state for me, a starting point. I remember having a few friends like ___ in Anaheim and ___ in Corona, and others of course, but it is difficult for me to really consider this people more than play partners as we were never really that close emotionally. From the first traumatic experience of going to daycare and continuing all up through Jr. High I was always a loner, although it's difficult to say if it was by choice or not. I couldn't understand to how the other children were relating to each other, so casually and mindlessly, and I couldn't bring myself to behave in such a manner. It simply didn't make sense to me, which made me feel like I didn't make sense in such a world. Always the feeling of awkwardness, physically and psychically, of being out of place or excessive to the situation. Around 7th grade the boys became incredibly vulgar, especially towards the girls, which became an even more confusing and disgusting situation that I seemed stuck in the middle of as I suddenly had a whole new set of reasons to feel ostracized from both sexes. I remember girlfriends and forming a strange relationship to the female body through unhealthy sexual initiations, but there were some good times too. It wasn't until meeting Michael and Sarang in high school that I began to find my place as they introduced me to a whole new dimension of human experience through radical music, literature, films, and human creativity.

School was a tedious, painful, inhuman, institutionalized experience for me. I remember how boring the architecture was - everything painted in neutral beige and brown, everything rigid and cement - and how boring the classrooms were with their uncomfortable desks and laminated posters. It felt like prison, with mind numbingly simple exercises put into place just to keep us from fighting each other, and I remember staring at the clock everyday counting the seconds until recess, until lunch, until the day was over, until the week was over, until I would be set free and not have to return to this place. I can't really understand why I received good marks while being so unmotivated. I don't know what this says about me or about the school system. Music and then photography became outlets for me as the most sane forms of activities I could be involved in, but then again I felt completely constricted by the predictable scores and repetitive mechanisms of how these mediums were handled by those around me.

Home was an escape, a fortress disconnected from the chaos unfurling outside, and I wanted nothing more than to stay indoors for as long as possible. I remember never wanting to leave and never wanting to have to pretend to get along with anyone else. I remember the fast food in front of the television, cereal and cartoons in the mornings before school, big boxes of donuts and more cartoons on sundays, pizza and movies in the evenings. All the fried morsels and fatty television that I consumed became psychologically bound to comfort which I've been struggling to free myself of ever since.

Leaving for college changed everything. Suddenly I encountered other human beings that were just as misanthropic (yet creative) as I was, providing much needed affirmation. I wanted to study science, but at the time I couldn't bring myself to focus upon the memorization of facts and figures while other questions concerning the nature of being loomed so large over my existence, hence the apartment disarray of my studies during those first years as I explored the potentials of comparative religion and philosophy to provide me with answers. Although music and art has always been presented as "extracurricular activities" which only fools or geniuses may pursue, I found myself returning to them as the only satisfying option for (self-)manifesting meaning: I remember the epiphany quite distinctly, that there is no meaning to be found in the world that was anything more than just some simple human's best guess or forceful assertion, so I must take this as validation in asserting my own, in literally creating me own, the vision to become an artist in the truest sense of the word. I didn't really know what this meant at first but I knew that I owed it to myself to find out, and so began the journey for autopoietic truth that I am still carefully navigating. Once I discovered the need to become an artist it became absolutely clear that I needed to be the best, the most rigorous and outspoken, the most prolific and accomplished, the most technically diverse and conceptually difficult. It was perfectly clear that I needed to attend the best school and read the most difficult books and make the most challenging works that I could. I would say it was my responsibility to do so, to myself and to the world, and this was the first time I felt the draw of such a concept and a dedication to the community that would enable me. CCA was a disillusioning experience... [file corrupted]

I have this interesting technical problem that I've been trying to attend to for a long time. It's both the thesis for my art practice and the general outline for my entire existence. I've more recently come to acknowledge it as something essential in the understanding of consciousness and human knowledge and wisdom as something whose correlation, like a membrane that's interfacing a depository of intelligence and intuition - or knowledge and wisdom, which is the material instantiation of the this human data. The problem is this: I cannot think clearly when I think about thinking, I can only think tangentially while being involved in these other activities. For example: when I sit down to write, I can't write, but while I'm out walking I begin thinking about writing, writing in my head without physical writing, I just have a stream of consciousness that I wish could be recorded, dictated, or transcribed into text form. When I return to the computer, the typewriter, or the notebook, and I sit down to attend to the stroke of genius which occurred to me while out in the world and it never returns. Because of course, at that point I'm thinking about writing, the act of writing, not the intricacies and elegances of what was percolating in my direct experience while out for a walk in the world. Part of it this problem lies with a gradient of consciousness; when I sit in the chair, facing this writing technology, I think differently than when I am outside with the sun on me, listening to music or inspirational ideas or anything else besides my own internal processes. When I'm listening to music I have ideas about new exciting music that I can imagine but never have heard, yet when I pick up the guitar and go to play my muscle memory takes over and the same old tunes come pouring out of the instrument, leaving me helpless in effacing any kind of change in this mnemonic system. When I'm listening to a lecture, I remember all the awe inspiring tangents of thought that I wish I had mapped, a network of all of my previous thoughts and memories and experiences that circulate around the content of the speakers words so as to chart myself upon the territories they are bringing into view, and then a second map of all of the supplemental information from all of the books and researches out in the world that I have immediate access to but which cannot be recalled without destroying the intimacy of liberated thought held within that quivering moment, and I wish I could superimpose all of my personal thoughts into this global database commons - to sync myself seamlessly and entirely - with all sources sited, and with the snap of my fingers or a quick succession of key strokes send it off to the publisher to edition off the new book. In a way this is what I'm getting closer to accomplishing with the Book of Energy which has become the Opera Of/For Known & Unknowable Un-I-Verses. So when I'm having conversations I say the most intelligent things that I'm capable of saying, even surprising myself with the things that come out of my mouth upon occasion, and this is the third aspect - that we each (and I especially) have different relationships with different people and the way that I am with you is the only time I am ever this person, right now, with you. Ok, well one could say we maintain different relationships with different people, that each relationship is unique, but it seems in fact that we entrain different selves for the various people we engage with, that we configure our various selves in relation to various people, that we are carrying around all of these identities all of the time inside of us. This goes back to the complication of self in general of course... So I can only have certain ideas, certain moments of genius (subjectively brilliant, not according to anyone else) when I am speaking to certain people and you are never going to see some of these aspects of my personality because... well, nothing personal but also everything personal! You evoke a certain quality within me based on what I evoke in you, and this is our dynamic, and the point is that I'm always wondering if this is something we are modulating or directing or if this is happening to us, if we impose it upon each other, if it comes from within or without... So this is very fucking interesting, and my conclusion is that I cannot sit down and write "characters" because I don't know how to think inside of anyone else's head except my own, but I do have a potentially infinite number of me's, infinite variations of my self, which can only emerge - they are emergent properties which I am observing through distance even while I recognize that these others I am describing are me, all of them, always myself, to the extent that intelligence is not a "thing" but an emergent property coagulating in response to the environment it is immersed in. Our senses are not mechanisms, but emerge of and through the body, an organic substrate seamless entangled with its surrounding context. So I would have to say that something like "love" is much closer to an emergent property of like nature than what one would flippantly refer to as an absolute truth of human kind. So I have to have all of these conversations! And with lots of different people, not just one all the time, not just you... as much as I would like to I cannot just talk to you for the rest of my life, and listen to you every day, sharing our thoughts and emotions, however complex or interesting or novel they may be, because I would be confining myself to this singular version of myself! I have to learn to record actual conversations, in real time, if I'm going to become able to transcribe the velocity of the identity construction as it plays out in the dynamic moment of that relation, in the space in-between us, at a rate almost too fast to stay aware of for more than a fleeting instant. I need to write it down... and then there's this whole ethical aspect to this dilemma: if the people I'm speaking to and sharing experiences with know that their words and actions are being recorded will it influence their behavior? And let's say it doesn't, that we are both are able to forget the recording device or at least not allow it to influence us - perhaps impossible - then what are the ethical parameters for using the recorded document? Back to the problem of essences then: can the essential meaning, or intention, or association with a concept, or a feeling, or an artistic vision be stolen from the individual within which it originates? Can anyone claim ownership for who they are, what they think, what they say? Can anyone purport to know themselves so thoroughly, so securely, so concretely as to clearly delineate the parameters separating themselves from those whom they address, either human or not, friend or foe, subject or object, territory or cartography? Does a photograph steal the soul of the subject?

I think it's interesting that one could have a conversation and use certain words in the moment, words which can then be taken or "stolen" to be used for a purpose or end which they did not intend, or would not agree with. If we had a conversation and afterwards you went and used the inspiration to compose music or an image, you didn't use my words but reinterpreted the meaning that we shared into something else, would you still be stealing from me? I wouldn't have thought about it like that...

Your description is similar to how we consider intellectual property under common law. So if one were to appropriate the words verbatim it would be illegal - as academic plagiarism, or intellectual property rights over a design concept perhaps - but if it is interpreted beyond direct quotation, manipulated or incorporated with enough nuance to be seen as being made original again, or an act of collage, to contextualize the idea into a creative work this is seen as an acceptable use.

So the problem that you're having... you will take these words and reassemble them in any context you find necessary, so you're not taking from me you're taking from a conversation you are having with yourself, in relation to me, with me serving as a witness.

You are a dynamic human being. You are not me (are you?), not my imagination.

But it's 50/50, we are speaking to each other....

Who does this conversation belong to?

Are you stealing from me or are you stealing from yourself?

It's a question that I do not have a conclusive answer to, and I suppose it will remain a question to the extent that these ethics and morals remain a negotiation that cannot be decided upon so easily, or imposed to righteously, without becoming something horrific or fascist.

Some of the people you will have these conversations with will think it's natural and not a problem, but maybe others you need to be more weary of. Maybe there's no black and white answer to this, there's a lot of gray zones, because it depends on the sensitivity of the content of what is being discussed and who is dominating the conversation and what is emerging from the conversation and how you end up using that, for what end, and how it reflects back upon that person in relation to their own conception of self that emerges from the exchange... because like you said, we are all experiencing this formation of selves in relation to each other all of the time, right? Because all of the selves are different all of the conversations are different, not just in their subjects but in their subjectivities, so that the moral problem will always be unique to the specifics of the context.

Yes but again, how the material will be used shouldn't matter... you're right, although I don't know if I agree, but is that the point or is there another? The point that you have nailed is the eternal arising of a moral/ethical dilemma, and I'm not interested in debating the details of the dilemma so much as in recognizing that there is not escaping it, except with you perhaps because of our unique conversational contract based on love and honesty, but not in the public or publicized social arenas where moral and ethical fibers become justifications for violence, revolutions, and political imperatives.

No, that makes sense.

So moving on, I'm now in a room speaking to myself, and after all of this shit about how to think and what am I thinking about and now I'm reading a book and now I can't focus because I'm thinking about thinking while I'm trying to absorb the thoughts off of the page... well, I receive some of my best ideas while reading books but not from the books themselves, they are not from the authors voice but from my own-in-relation to the content spread out before me, yet another unique self - one of my selves - which forms in relation to complex relations. Here I am talking to myself, and it's the first time in recent memory when I just let myself lay down on a sofa to record myself talking - usually I go for a walk, and it's outside, and there's movement involved, which means there is a general tempo or velocity between two points, and I usually come at the experience with a question (like an oracle) which works itself out through the movements, not to the point of solution but unravels the emotional tapestry with a fine tooth comb of reason, to outline a trajectory of how to act. It is very common that the alleviation to my mental constipation is found through pure movement, to get outside and move around! Not to exercise physically per say, but to coordinate thinking with the body. When I speak to myself, especially when it's concerning something personal, something that I wouldn't normally speak to someone else about - truly exteriorizing something that perhaps would have forever been kept interior - like laying on a psychoanalysts sofa, in their office, with the monocled analyst behind you taking notes, with me as the classic Freudian neurotic staring up into space letting the words flow out. Better to be a schizophrenic out for a walk than a neurotic on the sofa. And that's what it feels like! I feel like a neurotic on my own sofa analyzing myself, which is very hard, not because of the process of analysis so much as the forum it transpires within. I have an aversion to it, I think that I don't want to do it, that I don't trust it perhaps, that I don't want to transmit my inner contents out into the void regardless of what it is...

I'm just curious now... so when you have conversations with different people different selves emerge, so who is the self that emerges when you are speaking out loud to yourself?

A self that is based in narrative...

Are you... do you think that you or someone would become more aware of themself, of your self, of your true self I suppose, if they talked to themself out loud rather than just thinking because the language makes it real time, lays it bare, makes it present where it has to be dealt with, can't be concealed, made conscious by moving it out of the body and creating it to exist within the space that you're in, making the word present...

It's not moving out of the body, it's not moving. Whatever that sense is that we're calling self, it's not moving but is always in the same place wherever that place is and having different conversations with different people in different times in different environments, the self is always there, just there, wherever that there is said to be. The voice projects beyond the body, but not the self. I don't think it's about the body.

Ok, not the body... I'm just thinking that the persona that we are in relation to others, the projection of how others see us or how we see ourselves while we are having a conversation is having an effect upon the conversation - as you said - so how is it effecting or affecting the conversation when you're not talking to anyone else, just yourself? You're only talking to yourself, so maybe it's not related to the body but you're not mirroring to another person so you have to pull everything out of your own mind, to verbalize it, and how is that affecting the thoughts? You don't have a sounding board, there's no one there to bounce back, so where is your persona in this situation?

Well remember the problem, the problem of consciousness and the content of the opera. I'm trying to think clearly, so speaking to myself is an attempt to speak clearly, to articulate legibly, but not oriented to another, not a conversation maybe and certainly not a dialogue, but an externalization of the inner monologue. When I just sit here and think to myself "ok I'm going to think now, I'm going to think about the opera, I'm going to think about doing something, I'm going to think about making something," it gets all scrambled. I don't need a conversational partner to externalize these thoughts and make them easier to handle, and this is admittedly a much different process than if I were to create an other out of myself, to divide my unified conception of self into multiple selves that I could alienate myself from in order to conduct a schizophrenic dialogue. I would prefer to avoid distinctions like "in" and "out" because it's all in, it's all in there, the idea and the consciousness and the language, it's all infused within all the bodies and all the atmospheres, it resonates across thresholds and skins and framing mechanisms... I don't know where it's located, I can say that - and that's besides the point I think - because whatever is happening when I'm alone, silent, in a room, trying to have a clear thought with myself, to externalize it onto the page, it doesn't work so well. When I start speaking... maybe you think it has to do with the body, or just with the mouth, or specifically with the tongue and the teeth and the throat, or an emanation of a deeply seated soul resting down on the gut or throbbing out of the central nervous system twitching and aching with a sensual desire to amplify an internalized natural body-language, with moisture in watery vocaled chords of music or the dew accumulating in the air of the room, a voice echoing off against the other reflective walls, or maybe of an obsession with the image of the body, an evocation of Narcissus staring into the infinite mirror pool of self only to fall in to the silvery mercurial abyss to drown within a self-same idealism confined to the frame of the rippling pool.... whatever the fuck it happens to be, I know that it's different, and I'm not saying that it's better or more clear. I'm telling you it's not more clear, I know that it's not, not as clear as it seems when I speak to you which is part of why I love speaking with you, because of this feeling of clarity, even if it is only a feeling. And that in itself becomes intriguing, when we begin to recognize and isolate the people that we like - our friends and lovers selectively chosen because of the selves the evoke within or without of us - are those that we recognize an idealized self forming in relation to, which puts a kind of disorienting parallax spin upon sociology.

Yeah, so you love... ok, you're not saying that you're not in love with me but you admit that you are in love with the self that you are when you're with me.

It's definitely a part of it.

Completely. That seems factual, a truth. It's how we orient ourselves to everything and everyone around us. It's how I read you through my self.

I don't really know. I don't think that I can just lay down on the sofa, hit record, and have conversations with myself for hours a day and pretend to make any kind of progress. I think these process needs to happen sometimes, if only as a necessary failure (as all of my activities seem destined to be), and that has merits in its own right in order to slowly unfold this understanding of it being but one aspect of a much larger self-image that I need to remember, an image compiled of all of these voices singing in harmony, a chorus of my self attuned in relation to this problem of isolating a single voice from the ensemble. There's a page in the opera which outlines these 9 or 10 voices, the caste of characters, delineating a hierarchy... so when you were implying a minute ago about the possibility of a more authentic self, that when one is speaking to their self is a unified self addressing a doubling or mirror image of its self, or is it one self divided into two or multiple, reflected or refracted, is it one positive and one false, a series of others... all of these possibilities of character types can be contained within a single subjectivity, not people but entities, parts, voices, subjects, or selves that one or "the one" can address, to speak to or orient in relation to... so if you can follow me there, now when we refer to the self it's not so much as a truth, a source or origin or genesis from which all aspects of identity emanates. If we can identify 5 different ways that you can address yourself: there's writing in your journal, there's texting on a phone which is such a different form of writing that we could say it's a unique form of address, there's your way of speaking in person, the way of conducting your voice through an international video chat meeting without the presence of the body... all of these different ways of exteriorizing yourself, interiorizing other selves, and storing modulated nuances of self transpiring or oscillating in between, forming a kind of relational matrix: an operatic scale of engagement. It's disorienting.

Is it? Any more than... you're just pinpointing stuff which is part of normal human existence, highly relatable if not completely obvious. It just sounds disorienting because you're pointing at it. Does it make it more confusing or chaotic because you're pointing at it than what it is?

TW: Well what is it? I think it's a realm of ideas that everyone will be able to interface with, even if or because of the fact that it is so essential to the human experience of subjectification and communication, of conceptualizing relationships, modeling them into diagrams, stirring up moral and ethical dilemmas - but I'm not interesting in answering them, only in proposing them, in understanding the territory from which they arise, understanding the fundament which supports them, which supports us for the duration of our contemplation of existence. I want to understand the conceptual dilemmas at work here, and if they have been attended to then alleviate my confusion, and if they are untenable then to draw a frame around their void and give it a name - even if it's akin to zero - in order to nullify its negative reverberations into an aesthetic (or anesthetic) container of art. There's so many problems, and it's those that I'm after.

You're using your "self" as the... it's like it would be rude of you to provide answers to these problems you are uncovering if you want your project to speak to a wider audience, or if you want to encourage them to recognize themselves in the work, to be drawn into it, to relate. If you answered the questions you would be answering your own questions, that you posed, and perhaps barring others from comprehending the significance, making it seems like it's just an intricate system for you to relate to your self or your own "selves."

The answers are dangerous, falling into the realm of ideology, define modernity and all of its death drive repetitious horror shows. Look at how fucked up that was.

Having an answer is so defined by the time, space, and context that the answer appeared in - through the conversation or the book or the experience as you were discussing - and so for myself, I was trained through my education to treat an answer like a mathematical solution, to believe that the answer is factual, but now I'm thinking that the answer is becoming secondary to the question, or perhaps only maintains its sense by serving as a platform for the asking of more questions.

Answers must be provisional, flexing and folding depending on that context. That truth is temporary, subjective, and malleable seems to be the only truth, yeah? Answers are always rooted in situational contexts organized between two or more individuals. The only real truths are social truths, which is not to say objective. If I can make a statement that you wouldn't refute, we can utilize it as a truth for the extent of our conversation, or at least until you choose to focus upon it and refute it again.

Truths are containers, useful for the time of the exchange so that the conversation can continue without overflowing. It's difficult if truth is applied towards a manifestation of reality that isn't flexible, can't be unraveled, an illusion of being fixed, as if it is the only possible truth, which feels like a lie.

Lies are based in deception.

Presenting something as a truth seems like deception, like a lie.

If it's presented as truth maybe, but lying implies this moral agenda, of right and wrong, so who is at fault in the instance of this spoken lie, of the deception of truth, the speaker of the truth that believes it to be true or the listener who accepts it to be true without questioning its fundament in return? The responsibility must be shared it seems. It may be deceptive to present an absolute truth, but you can't blame the naive for they know not what they do. This precisely seems to be the importance of this operatic questioning of the fundament of knowledge, of self, and the meta-discourse of choral voice thinking about thinking: to make obvious that any proponent of truth is deceiving themselves so that our self - even our collective or social self - can no longer be deceived. We can blindly trust in transcendental truths, but we also can't blame those spreading transcendentalism for they know not what they do and we would all be hard pressed to pass blame within the culture of ideological propagation. I'm not interested in truth personally, but in philosophy, of the love of the search for the wisdom underlying the asking of question unfurling into better questions. This is not the fostering of intelligence, not of articulating or clarifying any particular truth, but in cultivating thought through a process of love for wisdom. I'm totally uninterested in science because science is totally invested in truth.

I've decided to change my work schedule, deciding this morning after a series of minor epiphanies that what I should be doing while living in Las Cruces is reorienting my self to the schedule of my parents. Since my father has been quite clear that he doesn't want his life to be disrupted - which is completely fair - I can accommodate his desire by choosing to adapt my life to his (which seems to be his insistence anyways, or else the horrible alternative that he wishes for no integration at all). I woke up this morning feeling groggy yet strangely mental refreshed, so I wrote some things down. The content of my focus should be my parents - recognize that they are the reason I am here so I should dissociate from this environment to convince myself that something else is more important. Rooted in my own psychology is a desire to escape, dissociate, get away from the horrible present, and I've been doing this my entire life. The OOFKAUU needs to be a practice of staying present in the accumulation of experience piling up before me, now. While I'm in LC I will focus on my parents, my specific, real, and lived relationship with my father and my mother, and I will trust in my determinism to turn this focus into something significant for my greater artistic practice even though it is not immediately clear. I must not allow myself to become too swept up in defining the specifics of use for this material.

Every day my parents wake up and sit at the kitchen table to eat salad and smoothies - respectively - and drink coffee and water plants. Father attends to his planner, his system of structure he erected for his life. I will do the same. I will wake up early, when they wake up, and sit down at the same table and engage with them. I must design my own planner in such a functional manner to continue thinking through the stages of the opera. Everyday over the next 2 months I will be able to meditate upon how the design and content of the planner interface and make fluid changes accordingly - of form representing the content of its flow - according to the needs and uses of the day, an archive of this present charting its own changes. I must make lists like my father, to-do lists, of what is happening today and next week and upcoming - the making of tasks to accomplish where they may not always be apparent, to invent the future - so that I can create a common ground to share with dad, to discuss our lists, to allow myself to be inspired by his work even if he doesn't consider it to be creative. The kitchen of their house might serve as the context for the first scene, although the danger is in the relation to "the domestic" in syndicated television, but perhaps it's not so terrible to associate to the theatrical comedy of Seinfeld, Louie, etc. (The interview with Louie CK discussing his aspirations for tragedy in his new work was surprisingly inspiring).

The morning breakfast table as the first table of the opera: the convening point of the parents as the first humans. The first table, the carbon table, the meta-tale: the primordial meeting place, a sculptural object designating a spot of significant in the landscape, permeating an attention of the invisible, a utility defined by drawing people towards the center to conduct a collision of attention and exchange across it, the table as the medium of interaction, and therefore inherent "social" (and would-be political) "value."

My parents sit there, watching the news as it bombards our attention with psychic tremors, and I feel helpless. Perhaps I could research and offer alternative news sources? Is it possible in a way which is not disruptive? Is the "disruption" described by my father in relation to this continuous inflow of propaganda? What is news worthy, how can we recognize it, why must we fortify against ideologies which modulate our ethics and steal our attention towards ends which do not serve our own aspirations? How to discuss such an idea with my parents with tact and poise, without causing disruption - does this imply a clandestine project, of covert infiltration or coercion? There is a profoundly important potential for a conversation here which must be negotiated.

The day unfolds after breakfast. They both fall into their daily routines - of cleaning and errands and all the other minutiae that fills their day - ricocheting off into their own personal projects against boredom. If the morning is focused upon the system of my father, then the middle of the day could be reorienting to my mother who has spent the morning being reserved - being quiet, passively absorbing, attending to the beauties proliferating upon the back porch. Simply, an opportunity to hang out together: going for walks, engaging with her interests in plants, animals, nature, asking her questions of her history - doesn't have to be ontological definitions of what and why she is. She, like my father, should be maintained as an unknown variable out of which an engagement will emerge, which is to say I must be careful not to impose my idealism upon them. The focus is on getting to understand her, perhaps with emphasis on the body and the outdoors as a way of observing her unique orientation to them, as a mother both literally and symbolically. How can we engage with each other more attentively, interesting for both of us?

Later in the day I will try to accompany dad to the gym. I will sacrifice my morning walk routine which is based in isolating myself, reclaiming some autonomy through communing with the elements and absorbing new information via podcasts, more than exercise. Perhaps in receding into my room I can force myself to be social, which means social on his terms, on route and return from the gym, if this is the only opportunity currently being presented.

I had a profound experience thinking about my relationship with my parents, rooted in attention and attending to each other, remembering to remember the focus upon a possible beginning, of origins, not of a autobiographical historical timeline so much as describing the psychic-philosophical space - not the house or NM or being born - founded in the relationships with the people crafting the fundament to my current being. Asking myself questions: how can this be conceptualize and how should it be handled? Is it me or something less than or more than or other than a self I identify with?

Remember the prologue: what is its content? Its not the beginning, it's what comes before the beginning, a prelude to the text to come, a overture introducing the musical themes as though a memory anticipating the thoughts not yet thought, an image of a thematic landscape not yet populated by characters, the a priori of an opera of attention. It amounts to an attempt to orchestrate the great nothingness, to make something out of a void without knowing how to conceive of the process - without history, about frustration and anxiety and fear and desperation endured while occupying the void, a soundtrack of the abyss representing the essential non-place. It was also about these specific people, from different background and histories and levels of familiarity with me as I attempt to articulate a specific-nonspecific and floundering in the process, having in turn their own unique articulations of being comingling in this interstitial zone of being. These 4 may become characters themselves, or at least be represented in their dynamics, perhaps visual/abstract. The prologue requires a more detail diagram - more fidelity towards the ontogenesis concept, which was left behind because I was so unprepared for how impactful the direct experience of the void would be felt in my being. Yet again in my life I was almost destroyed and have now recovered. I need to solidify this fundament so that I may proceed with articulating the first scene. I must be able to conduct these regular freakouts, paradigm shift, ontological gauntlets, and continue to maintain focus upon the work. How to act without being able to delve into action itself, how to write through theories of writing, how to compose music without being caught up in the performance of the work? Now I'm in my own void and I must continue playing, with whatever I have at my disposal.

Video component: ___'s video describes the immersion of the self into a primordial ecology, presenting an emergent being arising between the content of the lyric and the representations of "natural" life presented on screen. It was perfect for the prologue compositional experience, being based on the collective observation of this emergent potential, but is grossly inappropriate as a fundament for the first scene. The prologue was without space, without place, a nomadic stage. Iceland was not accounted for, served as a void, a zone of nothingness: a failure. There were no stage elements, no props, no costumes, just a void which was appropriate perhaps for the prior-to-beginning but now is no longer. The first scene requires a stage, a context, visual considerations for actors to be presented towards camera-audience. It can't be too specific because I don't know how or why: it's ambiguous: a mode of dress, in a place, at a table, without delineating too specifically any particular aesthetic.

My parents aren't characters, but facets of my self - my first others - which will become others as characters. They have voices which are not mine but mine is embedded within theirs, or rather theirs is embedded within mine. I can hear my father speak through me, feel the sensibilities of my mother through my actions, but how much of myself is in theirs? How are they influenced by me? This is the beginning perhaps: about me, my origins, and the entangled concept of family, moving away from the alienation of the prologue towards the confrontation of the original voices emerging (seemingly) out of nothing.

The map on the wall: a structure shifting alongside all this content I'm charting. My identity if being formed and reformed constantly - a character of the opera, the only (constant) character? The lyric is thinking about thinking, the details of my life turned into a project to produce meaning. It's literally me, myself made literal and literary. Alongside this are ruminations upon the structure of the opera itself, an outside of my being, a process of externalization. The OOFKAUU is the externalized container which expands to maintain all the content I pour into it, to a limit: where is the threshold of its containment and what will happen when that threshold is reached? Will it break, burst, spill, leak? By not containing, will it breach my own shorelines, become fused or confused with the self (my own self) composing its boundaries? What is the difference between considering it a vessel, or architecture, or pure instrument of scale? Its structure is blurry but not due to lack of fidelity, rather as a result of perpetual dynamism, the necessity of considering it through flux, the trace of charting the procession of time with static mechanisms always appearing as an elongated spectra of quasi-form. It evolves while revolving, a media focus upon focus itself. The media comprise the containers, yet they are contained with larger visual diagrammatic abstractions, nested within these linguistic articulations.

The OOFKAUU will be or is being performed, as theater and life, as spectral dramatic and comedic - if it's not a drama then it's a tragedy, but which is it? Life is too much drama, far too human-all-too-human, and must be made more comedic through distance, and ultimately suffer tragically from that distance. The one voice which splits into multiple: some may be humorous while others will remind (us) of the tragedy of this self-separation. ___'s love for total theater: dance and conduction of movements of awareness into the space of life itself, into the blurred realms of lack (of clarity) obscuring what is being performed and what is merely the continuing ever-through life being lived out with no end, and now no boundary. This is the future research of space/place/stage and movement/dance/choreography of attention. Is my parents house a real or theatrical place? Is it a set, or potentially so? The presence of a camera creates this separation, turns all places into theatrical representations of themselves, a flattening for the consideration of an audience, alienating the procession of being. The mere act of shooting video will distance me from the living-through of the life-space-sequence, and perhaps this will serve as a distinguished enough beginning in itself. The bedroom could serve as another possibility for a stage: an empty room, a bed, a desk, a closet archive. The emphasis isn't upon the result or the video document so much as the change which is caused within the present, during the moment of shifting attention of the lived-act-as-performance, the making-theatrical of existence.

The OOFKAUU is art, not life. I am the one doing all the living and I am not an opera. The OOFKAUU is not me, it is other, and hence always already disconnecting from that thing which it documents, myself. The OOFKAUU is an ontology of aesthetics, a definition in situ of artistic identity, that others may encounter as the transcendental or sublime experience of the artist aloof from the concerns of the world. Each aspect of articulating this structure is a profound opportunity for rigorous research. The content concerns appropriation, collage, taking that which already exists rather than attempting to create anything new - to this extent the internal mythopoietic concepts must be treated with skepticism rather than wonder, carefully and without indignation. The visual map is a drawing, a notation, a stage direction for the movements of the performance tracing them through the event-space of life-lived.

The music: chord progressions as affective time, feelings charted. This research is a collision of the philosophical and the technical: how chord modalities play upon human perspective. New tunings and novel chord structure will expand the sonic language for affective expressivity. Technical conversations - the music experiments in Iceland - for mutilating the natural tones into exciting new frequency spaces. Video = pure eye, kino-eye, a tension with the language-being being-written. Remember the procession of the VIDEOSCROLL: language to music to visual ID. Video serves as the imposition of the timeline upon the effluvial flow of the other media. Personal research vs objective research: different directions of observation, each with their own archives. Personal: the formation of my lived subjectivity in relation to my parents, the epicenter of the strange. Voice memos: the beginnings of mapping out the procession of the content moving from conception to action: how to write, how to research, how to work on the video, how to draw the diagrams: instigating a movement towards action out of pure thought, the primary externalization, the making-work of praxis.

It has been a frustrating week and this letter is perhaps an opportunity to sort out why that is. The feeling is of forgetfulness, almost a mundane amnesia, like an everyday fog that slowly settles back down upon the firmament of my mind to obscure all of the clarity of vision and reticulated thought I have labored to achieve on previous days. Sometimes it appears as though all of my human energy is nil and for naught if its not encased within a material container of some kind, a thought rooted in a very old epiphany that led me to become an artist in the first place. On other occasions it seems essential to let life "be," to leave it alone in all of its frailty. Like pure salty water from a glassy sapphire ocean splashed upon the sizzling slate plate of the mind, it bubbles and hisses in mesmerizing aleatoric symphonies, through dreams and wakeful contemplation, speaking only of heat and liquidity. liquidity. Its the feeling of the consonance and dissonance produced my the mixing elements that fills the air with meaning and it shouldn't matter if its documented in a recording, or even further, it detracts from the experience of the steam bath to try to capture its essence. Isn't this the nature of distraction, and isn't art therefore the greatest distraction from a life being lived, a life coming into realization of its own becoming? When this feeling settles into my lap it becomes impossible to make anything as I cannot remove myself from the present moment. The problem is one of satisfaction, relating to a sense of accomplishment in producing something, and also of satiation of my appetite for sensual pleasure and cerebral expansiveness, but mostly its a problem of memory. If I remain in this moment I am always already forgetting everything which came before, yet if I dedicate myself to the task of unraveling a nostalgic tangent or drawing a trajectory though a particular historical architecture I begin to become dislodged from the present-being driving the mechanisms of inquiry. I often wonder if there isn't enough of my self to go around, to be dispersed in all of the competing attentions that I would like to apply myself to, and if the secret to a satisfied existence isn't giving up on the juggling of variables in order to bury one's head in the sand of a single temporal dimension.

Of course that's ridiculous, to live such a flat life, to settle for anything less than the full range of human experience even if it means perpetual terror, suffering, angst, or ennui. Or (to spare the dramaturgical flavor) at least of forgetfulness, which you must admit is its own breed of psychological horror. So I keep working, however I can, experimenting with different methods of thinking and thinking about thinking and also sometimes not thinking in favor of pure unadulterated experience, although it is often difficult to decipher the work from the life regardless of the method. Every morning is a fresh start and every evening is a new opportunity to evaluate my efforts towards devising a strategy to relentlessly attack the encroaching unknown. I'm so fascinated by the idea of liberating myself from this system of temporal cycles - through the ingestion of psychotropic substances, or rigorous self-liquidation such as can be observed in the arts of Zen, or any other paradigm, be it pragmatic indoctrination or mystical hypnosis, which promises liberation - although I must admit that the prospect of being removed from the procession of linear time often seems as terrifying as remaining compartmentalized within it. So what is the ideal that I strive for then? Well, it lies at the interstice (as I always say and as we've discussed). It's the gradient what we construct together, through difference, lying somewhere mostly "outside of ourselves" (what a silly idea) though not completely whole contained within any singular self, and just where is that precisely? This, I believe, is the utopia dreamed of by ancient civilizations. Not a practical utopia of militaristic music, ascetic pedagogy, and strict moral discipline as described by Plato, or its hedonistic-anarchic inversion, but of the place which is no-place expanding in the cracks, that which cannot be pointed to directly. "The which for which there is no whicher."

Right. We have already discussed all this, nothing new except the perpetual struggle of new-ness reconciled with our never-same-old selves. You and I can skip down many merry roads ruminating upon all the intricacies of the golden mnemonic cobblestones flinting sparks of inspiration from our copper clad idiosyncrasies - no problem there, just pure joy. But what about everyone else in the world? What about all the other realities all of these other humans are inhabiting, deeply dug in trenches war-worn with conflict painted in various shades of gray...? Why do I even bother considering them? "Human-all-too-human."

As you know, I am currently here at "the source" (ie: my parents house) to confront the ontologies that created me, to address the perspectives that spawn my own, to attempt once again to tread upon this unstable ground with legs that have ventured out to the far reaches of sanity and back again. I feel pretty well prepared to absorb the tremors, but that doesn't mean that I'm not taking a beating in the process. What I'm witnessing here is a primordial fear buried beneath a vengeful hubris and a vitriolic denial of rigorous thought obscured by the plush blindfold of denial and insecurity. Its painful to see and terrifying to empathize with. I have lived my life in the wake of this dark wave with no epicenter, dispersed throughout the hegemonies of the world, amplified by the most sacred familial bonds, and as such I have struggled my whole life to sever myself from the influences of evil without destroying my very real human relationships. I never said it would be easy, or even possible, but I must try for I cannot perpetuate these terrors, cannot allow myself to repeat the mistakes that are so clearly displayed before me, and in some demented way even believe it to be my responsibility to do so. Yes, I admit that I act selfishly, that I wish to be liberated from this reign of terror and nausea and very much believe that it is possible without resorting to a theoretical escapist utopia, but I am also determined to craft a course of action fueled by compassion for those that I love, not to act as a weak savior or false prophet but to challenge the structures imposed upon us - composing in turn the infrastructures that we can build upon - to prove that there are other ways to live.

Perhaps this all sounds so dramatic, or comedic, and perhaps it is both. This is the stuff that sitcoms are made of. This is the fodder for numerous distractions, at least potentially, and I realize this dangerous potential now, at the cusp of venturing in, before I have truly begun. However, I am confident that I am not interested in dramatizing existence, or in making light of these leaden situations, but am in fact motivated by questions of truth and meaning, driven to depict the functioning fulcrum of reality, and willing to admit that such an endeavor is quintessentially tragic by nature. I'm willing to take on this weight, believing that I can somehow carry the load without my existence becoming irreversibly scarred by the burden. To survive this trial of tribulations I must have confidence in my self and maintain a diligent work ethic so as not to become lost in the morass of perpetually shifting grounds. There is also something else that I sense is needed, something based in intuition, in pure feeling - which is to say not a sensual experience of the body as much as a disembodied propulsion towards truth, an exercise of the will - that seems to approach the taboo of faith. But faith in what, or whom? We have discussed this topic a bit, and will much more I'm sure. Such a concept is inextricably bound to the perceived "weight" of being, as a kind of instrument, a barometer of existential diligence, and I for one am certainly interested in flaying open this etheric body to examine the phosphorescent entrails and see what new stains might be made upon my flickering soul, if there can be said to be one at all over which we will never be sure.

This touches upon yet another topic of grand importance: risk, specifically as it relates to the propulsion to create. There seems a great danger here in impulsive and reckless maneuvers, actions less of science or poetics than sheer idiocy mistaken as bravery, and I must be careful not to be a fool rushing in to an oven too hot to bear. On the other hand, I can see no point in proceeding - through any lived experience or artistic production - without gambling, throwing it all to fate or chance, so long as I can maintain faith in the oracle and not suffer the superstitions. Again, a curvaceous ouroborous biting back to the nadir of faith before the unknowable, which in itself seems to be the greatest risk I can imagine taking and so must proceed, even as (and of course because) it causes such distress. I'm risking everything coming here, in a way, or at least I intend to.

There was an incident with my father this morning. It's difficult to accurately depict the tumultuous psychic states, but I would define the scenario as a tension exacerbated by timbre and amplitude, of internal anxieties manifesting externally through psychically dissonant communication, and a complete lack of tact or poise. It began with a desire to go to a local hiking trail with my mother - her idea in fact - and I decided to extend the invitation to my father. Last night, when I first asked him, his immediate response was that we couldn't use the vehicle on the dirt road leading to the trailhead followed by a discussion concerning our safety, which is absolutely preposterous considering it is a state park area that attracts numerous visitors each day. It isn't the content of the discussion that was problematic - although it betrays some disconcerting anxieties related to his trust in our judgment and abilities - so much as it was the conduct of how it was excitedly exclaimed. My father speaks with high stress, at high volume, at high intensity, and its all fueled by defensiveness. It seems there is no topic too small or banal that will not instigate his fiery tongued furnace of frustration. He says it's "just the way [he] speaks" as though it were an innate sensibility to yell about what we're having for dinner. To witness it is rather perplexing for me, oscillating between empathetic fear, tragi-comic humor, and sheer depression that such a seemingly strong willed individual could be suffering from his own devices in such a manner. Anyways, I held my own ground and defended my mother's integrity by maintaining that safety was certainly not a concern and if he wished to join us his presence would be welcomed. End of discussion, retreat into the silent ambivalence of the poorly made film we were watching (as an aside, it is difficult to find an opportunity to engage with my father when there isn't some propaganda flickering across the screen). This morning, while casually discussing if the weather was appropriate for a brief hike, the subject is immediately attacked for being a terrible idea in consideration of my mother's poor physical state - completely absurd. It is vehemently argued by my father that the car will be damaged through our negligence, my mother will suffer due to her failing health combined with my refusal to stay by her side, and in the end I will merely succeed in achieving much unneeded frustration in attempting to go at all. You must remember that this was not articulated calmly, but tore through the calm gray morning silence like a flash flood in the desert, devastating all the landscape in its wake, completely negligent to any other will save its own momentum, and before I could have my first sip of coffee!

Well, to say the least I snapped and began echoing the tones and temperaments I was hearing in his voice as I responded that if all he aimed to contribute was fear and anxiety then I believe we would all be better off not hearing it. He response was to back pedal into defensiveness, implying that I was not being receptive to his perspective and was to blame for the heightened states, leaving me astonished and speechless. I cannot decide if this emotional manipulation is intentionally applied or merely a naive extension of his own inner turmoil: the prior is certainly a radical accusation - though not completely unfounded - while the later runs counter to my own firm principles that every person must be met upon the grounds that they place themselves. I must meet others as allies until they prove their deceitfulness through actions. This "principle" dictates that I live by example, to hold myself accountable to my own actions and even though I cannot predict how they will be received by others I must share in the responsibility of the affect to the extent that I can claim to be a self-reflexive person living a willful life of meaning and intention in a society of equal peers. This theory can be more clearly articulated through future meditations, but that's the gist of it.

So I left the conversation, abruptly and on a sour note, and I now feel this conflict of responsibility. On one hand I recognize that I play a role in the conversation and that I am solely accountable to directing the exchange towards more fruitful territories, which is to say that I can't defer the responsibility to anyone else. On the other hand, I cannot take responsibility for the negligent behaviors of my father, according to social etiquette as well as my refusal to internalize his fear, so therefore I cannot proceed as though he is at fault or requires changing. On the contrary, I must allow him to act as he will and respond to what is given - I am no psychoanalyst nor other professional of the mind with the authority to say otherwise. I continue to fortify myself from the terrors of the world out of necessity, for sake of survival, in the interest of risk and creation and my own philosophical imperatives. I will not rebuke my own principles and I will not be treated with disrespect: quite a "pickle" as we say here in the states. Truly between a bedrock of my own firmament and the hard place of defiance before my father's follies.

[On a side note, I cannot help but feel this is all a manifestation of some deep-seated male violence to the Other, which really pisses me off. I completely despise intimidation tactics and it truly sickens me to even consider that I may have to endure them at the hands of my own father, whether he is conscious of his effects upon me or not. My own romantic ideal of love is certainly grounded in a longing for a strong minded female counterpart living a life not so dissimilar from my own whom I trust enough to firmly disqualify certain beliefs as pure male foolishness so that perhaps I could be free of them once and for all and move along to more pertinent matters, as unimaginable as they may be as of now.]

My mother is obviously an entirely different psychological situation, as is expected in dealing with an entirely different cogito-personae. We have our differences in perspective and she is haunted by her own equally devastating insecurities, but we at least share in a common recognition of the importance of communicating our inner cosmos for the sake of our relationship health. I have gone through a few stages of experimenting with radical honesty with my parents, revealing deep secrets or admitting certain subjective weaknesses to them with a severe transparency that would make other members of our anxiety-riddled generation crumble at the seams. My motivation was partially selfish, to get this sticky gelatinous psychic residue out of my head so as to unburden my maneuvers through life, but I also firmly believe that I have offered my whole life up as a gift. I struggle with this, fearing that this is perhaps a delusion which makes me out to appear pompous, pretentious, or otherwise absurd. I know we have spoken of this before and I probably speak of it often - this concept of Bataille's potlach that I have inherited and its importance in my human relationships - but the reason I again cite its importance is to illuminate another essential difference between my parental relationships. As much as my mother seems to relish in these divulgences of my self, comforting my perturbations and cooing over my bruises, my father appears to resent them, again and again recoiling into a defensive stance of brutish retaliation that I cannot refrain from considering a fundamental confusion between his self and the ideologies which he has collected. To put it simply, he responds to my own deconstruction as though it's a judgment upon his life. My mother also deals in self-sacrifice - perhaps this is where I inherited this trait, now that I think about it - and has even begun to take on a reputation as a martyr (at worst) or intervention mediator (at best), much to the chagrin of my father for some reason. In all of this, I cannot help but recall the drama-comedy of syndicated American television in all of its banality as well as the infinite barrage of trivial spectacles pouring into the breakfast nook from the omnipresent chattering news channels. Must family dynamics really be so cliché?

No conclusion, not yet at least. After all isn't this supposed to be the first scene of an opera with no end? For now I'm left alone to contemplate choice: the choices I have made serving as a rubric by which to evaluate the choices of others, not to judge so much as to make sense of how others are choosing to live. I maintain that this choice continues to present itself so long as we are sentient persons actively becoming and to this extend we may be infinite beings with limits defined only by our imagination. Even so, I continue to witness an obstinate refusal in others to maintain accountability, all too often succumbing to the horrific delusion that they cannot redirect their lives by action of will or mental determinism, that they are in fact subject to mechanisms beyond their perception, understanding, or control. The tension between these perspectives on choice pervades all my thoughts and creative activities these days. The difficulty of making critical choices, the risk factoring in to making unconscious choices, the petrified nausea of not being able to choose, and the remorse resulting from regret in past choices; all of this speaks to something essential to privileged mundane (and profane) existence stripped of all ritual, mysticism, and humility before an invisible physics greater than ourselves. I think it has much to do with defining certain characteristic of our generation as well and I am looking forward to hearing your perspective on how Norwegians may differ from Americans in this regard. A choice cannot be singular, is rather a tension sustained between multiple factors of potential vibrating in frictive embrace. I wonder how long such a tension may be maintained before all the windows are blown out of this delicate glass house we keep ourselves in. Relationships are their own physics, exploding with momentums all their own. Choice isn't so much about fate than the fragility of our identities and the vulnerability of our comforts, about choosing what is worth considering and what we may choose to disregard, and of course it's never so simple a reduction as just two. Choice is always multiple, perhaps infinite, perhaps indefinite altogether, perhaps a reflexive parallax perpetuating itself in our consciousness. What would life be like without choice? What would our world be like without physics?

My own origins include a description of my own musicality. My relationship to music does not pertain to the body, but to the mind. I will think through - not feel through - the compositional possibilities of music as knowledge. I have a proficiency with guitar and drums, but have little interest in composing for specific instruments perhaps. A taxonomy of instrumentation, a hierarchy (or heteroarchy) of textures, timbres, tones, rhythms. An OMNICHORD or metachord, narrating through the tonal narrativity, to give characterizations to frequency frames. Remember: organum and plainchant: choir forms from the Middle Ages, a form of heterophony. A single voice supported by others, and the socio-political implications of this form. The audience and the architecture house the music - in the wild, it is let loose. Music must be contained, is given definition by its container, it is the frame which allows it to be distinguished from the world, to be heard.

There's an element of the opera which attempts to reconcile the literary component - the writing through a libretto form, evoking fiction and nonfiction and poetics of every variety - the oration of the text that is spoken = with my musical aspiration concerning emotions, abstraction (of the aether, of atmosphere) = with the fine art background related to the optical phenomenon and its articulations of the body. I've always prioritized scientific ideas, even though they carry with them an inherent violence towards the natural world, in the reduction of the complexity of the world through viewing it through this ontologically abstracting lens, irreparably cracking open the substance of the world to reassemble it another way - the artistic method is the epitome of synthetic discourse and artificial engagement with the world. This in fact seems what it may offer to knowledge: aesthetic order.

There is a bias towards the present, but it is the ultimate hallucination. The present is the shoreline, where the land meets the sea, but the line separating them cannot be located, is constantly dissolving and moving. The present is defined by the re-membering of a past experience or anticipation of an experience still yet to be had. Advocating for staying in the present - to "be here now" - is the prolonging of a culturally shared, collectively embodied, phenomenological hallucination.

Once I awoke I could not walk, talk, read, write. I could not recall any of the details of my life. I died that day. I'm riding in an ambulance and curl up into a fetal ball, like a balloon with the last bit of air wheezing out, I felt my energy lift and my spirit surrender. In that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. The doctors might rescue my body and give me another chance at life, or else this was my moment of transition.

I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye, a caustic pain like the kind you get when you bite into icecream, and it gripped me and released me and gripped me and released me. It was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain so I just thought "ok well I'll just start my normal routine." So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio-glider which is a full body full exercise machine. I'm jamming away and realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar and thought "well that's very peculiar" and I look down at my body and I thought "whoa I am a weird lookin' thing" and it was as thought my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality where I am the person on the machine having the experience to some esoteric space where I am witnessing myself having this experience. It was all very peculiar and my headache was just getting worse so I get off the machine and I'm walking along my living room floor and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down and every step is very rigid, there's no fluidity to my pace and there's construction in my area of perception so I'm just focused on internal systems. I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower and I can actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying " ok you muscle you gotta contract and you muscle relax" and then I lost my balance and was propped up against the wall and I looked down at my arm and I realized that I could no longer define the boundaries of my body because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. All I could detect was this energy, energy, and I'm asking myself what is wrong with me? What is going on?

On that morning it was a pure mapping experience. As soon as I was having a problem with the volume of the water as it hit the enamel face of the tub and there's an incredible amplification of the sound, well I immediately have a visualization of the circuit of the sound system through my understanding of amplification, understanding that I'm passing information through my brain stem and I'm having problems at that level and brain stem is the potential for death. This is now a do or die situation. So yes I'm mapping as I'm losing circuit by circuit. At the same time I'm going "what is wrong with me" because of course I've never had an experience like this before. It was remarkable, not completely horrible.

I didn't know how severe it really was. People always ask me "was it to your advantage to be a researcher of the mind or not" and I think on that morning it may not have been an advantage because I was fascinated instead of panicking. So I was like "ok ok I've got a problem" and then I immediately drifted right back out into that peculiar state of consciousness which I affectionately refer to as lalaland, but it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space and my job and any stress related to my job was gone and I felt lighter in my body and just imagine what it would feel like to lose 33 years of emotional baggage. I felt euphoria and in that moment my right arm fell totally paralyzed by my side and I realized "you're having a stroke." Then the next thing my brain says to me is "wow this is so cool." How many _____ have the opportunity to study their brains from the inside out? And then it crosses my mind, "well I'm a very busy person and I don't have time for this."

My mother would ask me what I wanted for lunch and it was file opening time. She would say "do you want to have a peanut butter sandwich" and I would go hunting ya know, "where is peanut butter," is there a file in my brain that understands peanut butter and if there was then I would say "ok," and then she would say "how about tuna fish" and I'd go hunting for the file in my brain that understood what tuna fish was and as soon as I hit a file that I could not go in and hunt for and find some kind of association to then we would relive that, so then she would give me tuna fish so that I would have that experience and I had to learn everything. We didn't know if I would have language again because of the pressure put upon the fibers running between my ability to create sound-language and those creating meaning through language. I had to learn vocabulary from the beginning. I had to learn what emotions were. I had to be able to describe to my mother what I was feeling inside of my body which required constant care and boy it took a lot of sleep and that was key to my rehabilitation.

The way I look at this is a new character has come online. My color scheme that I like to dress in is different. Before you would look in my closet and all you would see is black and white and red, stripes, polka dots, any version but it would be red, white, and black because every day I would get up and I would want to wear red, white or black so why would I keep the other stuff in the closet. Uh, today I'm sitting here, I'm in blue jeans which I never wore before, I always wore corduroys, and I'm in fluorescent green. I love fluorescent colors. So this never would have happened with that other character. So, no I see myself as a very different person with a very different value structure than I had before. And, um, there was a lot of pain in my past that got relieved and wasn't that a lovely thing to be able to hit the reset button on my emotional circuitry so that I'm then capable of functioning fresh and new without any antagonism towards anybody. I didn't know if there was anybody I was supposed to be mad at because it was all gone.

Ya know there are hundreds of thousands of artists who can do the work I was doing in the studio but for me to be able to have this internal experience of watching my own brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process its own information and then to go through the experience of surgery and recovery has given me such an insight into my own workings of my brain and fortunately an insight into... what does it take in order for a person to actually recover from brain trauma? Now we understand that there is neurogenesis, we do grow some new neurons, we know that there is neuroplasticity. People are capable of recovering from brain trauma and that's a completely different perspective than 15 years ago.

Dark, silent.

The time is 4 am. The setting is a black void with no distinguishing characteristics. Nothing can be seen or heard. In the beginning was a feeling, a hallucination of sensation, as though one were staring into a black velvet curtain, a billion impossibly small follicles of excruciating softness obscuring the seams of definition. Of the course of time - a quantity of minutes which very could be millennia - a light begins to seep into the space from no definite vantage, emitting just enough luminous beams to render the scrim of shadows as definitely something though uncertainly anything specific. One can think to reach out into space to grasp for an object to ground the perceptions but there is no one and nothing around in any direction and even the self cannot be touched upon, the body not yet formed, viscerally obscured through a thick soft cool membrane of silky skin velour poured between the fingertips - no part able to contact any other part, absolute separation.

A sound which may be one or many begins to murmur through the space, a low rumble shaking the gelatinous fluids of a body tingling with sensations as the sounds enter into the toes, vibrating up the legs to tickle the spinal column and ripple the salineated water of the ears, providing just enough direction to distinguish a forward from behind. The sound is warm, familiar, a voice which has never been heard but seems somehow to have always been cooing. The sound has no characteristics, is utterly unfamiliar, cannot be said to be of any specific tone or timbre. As the sonic texture approaches the frequency threshold to stimulate the follicles of hearing all of its abrasive dissonant textures seem to melt away into pure harmonic clarity, as though filtered through a prism and projected upon the scrim of the meat mind. The sound is now gaseous, now liquid, now some ethereal plasma flowing without friction through inner recesses, softly illuminating a difference between it-as-source and some other hearing or being-heard, a voice speaking through its own warbling consonance, often indistinguishable from the medium which conducts it. The voice/s emanates from within, swirling up from a deep watery pool of the self, but at other moments appears as an echo bouncing off of a distant cave wall, through its reverberations slowly revealing the a large interior space with deceptive acoustic properties sensed primarily through the musculature of the listener now taking shape, vibrating the marrow of bones fusing fuselage, cartilages of the calcium infrastructure grinding into position, gently massaging the muscles to cause the hairs of anticipation to trail up the neck, slowly creeping, rising and again, fading from the far left to the back right, though never certainly of one place or not of any other, just movement. The air is heavy and wet, palpable, carrying a smell of morning jasmine and faint bile, a mildly foul sweet-sour such as that emitted by carnivorous plants attempting to lure insects into their juicy acid bath internals.

The sound ceases to become sound by becoming a voice, definitely a voice, though it is still unclear who or what could produce such an emission. [Animal calls, clearly recorded human consonants, woodwinds playing in low register, breathing, etc. Slowed down to take on similar acoustic properties and woven into a sonic texture - the black velvet curtain.]

>>> recount the transmogrification from sound to voice from the prologue::

maca-mamma-matrix > tension > linguistic soup > sizzle/boil of negative theological narrator > dispersion and settling of elemental particles > prologue of the black void universe <<<

ON THE ORIGINS OF THE TABLE

(((SKETCH FOR A CONTEXT FOR CONVERSATION)))

The first scene is about building a table. The table is a place for meeting but at first there is only one voice, not yet any visible person. The components are described through language, through conversation with oneself, pulled out of the ether through a series of questions concerning the structure of one's self. The questions are associated to images, some being tied to particular sound-affects and others binding to words, concepts, or series of associations: building up a semiotic structure of associations as the words are being formed, articulating the visual > words describing a corporeal experience while images project the visual object. The first spoken words are of many languages, many voices, collaged from a variety of sources, playing back with many conflicting fidelities, with the voice of the narrator (my own) playing over them simultaneously as an ethereal double. On "screen" begins visual transcription of the spoken words: subtitles that at first appear scrambled, many colors and fonts and orientations, slowly distilling into a legible form dictating everything spoken by the narrator. [text-sound works, ref: mid-century audio collage experiments, sound-poems, dada poetry, fylkingen experiments, etc] the voice eventually more or less stable in tonal and linguistic qualia, though continues to subtly shift through speaking.

The words consist of collaged descriptions of parts: legs of animals, stems of plants, descriptions of beauty and general visually-desirable attributes, explanation of desirable qualia in buildings, artworks, furniture, sex appeal in humans, survival adaptations in the natural world. The words are constructed into sequences, through repetition and order, coming to describe an object(table). The images similarly become increasingly recognizable as they reoccur - not just the same image but categories of qualia becoming more consistent and meticulously timed with the temp of the speaking. >the image sequence and vocal oration appear to form each other, never clear if the voice is describing the image or the image illustrates what is being said, always-already both simultaneously< sonically, only the voice is present, though there are many subtly nuanced effects applied to double, triangulate, disperse, reverberate, and otherwise affect the speaker - focused on placement (panning and dispersion) through the space. The speaker becomes clearly audible - mixing down the unruly semiotic fragments and leaving a clearly audible narrator. The images become more consistent - it is clear that a table is being made although it is never referenced as such. A 2d (axiometric) rendering of the table is animated and drawn into a 2 point perspective space while the voice becomes monophonic. The table is drawn in 3d, 3 point perspective, as the voice pans to l-c-r. An image of the now clearly articulated table is projected onto a physical sculptural form of the table - projection mapping of the image onto the physical structure - while the voice enters into the headphones of the listener or pans into all speakers. A monologue begins concerning the importance of building the table so that a conversation may be conducted. The lights slowly fade up to reveal a neutral gray stage with a neutral gray table evenly illuminated from all sides so as to appear floating in its surroundings, slightly surrealistically separated from its physical environment. The narrator finishes the monologue and everything is silent.

THE ORIGIN OF TABLE MANNERS

(((SKETCH FOR A SCENARIO OF CONVERSATION IN CONTEXT)))

The first character (c1) opens a door (stage l), steps through, closes it behind, and walks across the stage to sit at the table. The movements are calm and deliberate, automatic, as one moving in the early morning just out of bed - a programmed awareness of the surroundings with little self-awareness. C1 sits on the floor at the table facing forward and brings up a small highly reflective coffee pot and matching cup, pours a cup of hot black liquid, and sips it silently making occasional slurping and swallowing noises. This first character begins speaking with the same voice of the narrator, beginning a monologue concerning the impossibility of conversation without an other (flow, change, rhythm/music/meter, exchange of information etc). As c1 speaks the table is slowly turned (on a platform?) To show c1 in profile, now speaking to the side. The voice is clear and unaffected. Another character (c2) enters (stage r), appearing identical to c1, and sits at what is now the head of the table. The characters visually acknowledge one another while c1 continues speaking. C2 sits at the table, pulls up a cup and pours from the same liquid, and also begins speaking - also in the same voice - an emotional description of the impossibility of describing a psychological self without an other in relation (or something of this nature). C1+c2's voices are speaking simultaneously, over each other not directed to each other, looking past each other straight ahead across the table. The voices create a monotony where very little is understood at first, but then slowly, through interspersing spaces in the two divergent monologues, a dialogue begins to emerge. At first it is not directed towards the other, consisting merely in 2 voices describing the (supposedly same) subject from different vantages: not agreeing, nor even acknowledging the content of the other. The table is oriented so that c1+c2 are oriented at 45° angles to front, creating an "x" across the stage, slowly revolving 180° so that both characters maintain the same x but are now facing backstage. A third character (c3) enters (center stage door), sits, pours, sips. The table rotates so the 3 characters are centered and symmetrical. After some time of sipping, c3 takes a breath, interrupting and diverting attention from c1+c2: silence. C3 begins a monologue composed of collage elements of the first 2, spoken louder. C1+c2 begin speaking again, 3 voices weaving a collaged narration of the self and other, the table as place, the instability of dialogue/communication, and various attempts to differentiate voices and perspectives from each other.

The vocal situation continues monotonously.

Each of the 3 voices begin to have effects applied to them which the characters seems to slowly become aware of, be affected by, and respond to through both implicit and explicit gesturing. A music composition is woven from the interplay of elements: cups of liquid on an amplified table, the 3 voices becoming increasingly differentiated (beginning as the same voice and becoming decidedly other in relation to each other), and the effect/affect being applied to color the voices. The voices transition from speaking to singing, exploring various vocal arrangements of polyphony, organum, colloquial folk chorus, etc. In addition to each voices becoming increasingly distinct in tone, timbre, and expressed philosophical perspective, a structural differentiation becomes apparent wherein each voice is speaking in different literary modalities.

>> each text will have a core monologue embedded with a larger rant. This core comprises the fodder for a series of structural experiments in the arrangement, ref: aba structure of arias, the reoccurring recitatives and intermezzos breaking the monotony of song, various poetic and literary devices, and even musical structures. <<

The vocal scenario becomes the context for a musical experiment in the distribution of meaning, modulation through affect intonation, and choreography or attention and orientation. The text itself takes on an increasingly reflexive quality until all characters are speaking about their selves-as-relation: each character is an axis of communication while maintaining distinct qualities. All statements become questions, directed to themselves and each other. The characters never come into agreement with each other, rather solidify their own idiosyncrasies even while continuing to ask similar questions.

(future notes)

Each of the 3 characters differentiates into 3 internal conversations to compose the 9 castes of the character hierarchy. Each of the 3 occupies a certain tessitura - high, medium, low - each of which is divided again into 3 to create 9 distinct voices. For the process of writing, work structurally: 1 monologue splits to 2, then 3, then 9. Write out full monologues for each character based on techniques appropriate/representative of their qualia (cut up, rhyming prose, hard analytical verbiage, etc.). Begin by associating specific writers or text sources to each. Each character will embody a particular archetype on all fronts of performativity: movement/choreography of body, posturing and aesthetics of the body, wardrobe/prosthetics in color and materials, tone and timbre of voice, speaking style, and content. Narrator becomes distinct 10th voice.

*cutup method of old and new text

*organize hierarchy based on iceland content

*research: literary, poetic, musical composition structures, lists of vowels and consonants

*diagram of familial relations: father/mother/son = continuity of life

I must create more hierarchies for cross reference with characters: matric of associations across platforms of consideration: plant and animal species (botanical/biological taxonomies or both physical and spiritual orders), symbols and glyphs (arcane magic, oracles, jungian symbolism), musical styles (performing techniques, instrumentation, sonic qualities, amplification or distribution methods, degrees of abstraction in composition techniques), a taxonomy of attention (who is aware or becomes aware of which others, concerning to whom they speak and from where they gain inspiration), and objects (references to the history of expression in art, imbued poetics of color and form, artworks vs useful objects, energy conductors/orgone accumulators/psychic incubators).

*new series of diagrams illustrating matrix relations of elements

*hierarchy of animal voices and animal transmogrification rituals

I'm sitting in a room at 4:45am on a Saturday morning staring into a screen, trying to look through a screen, beyond the whiter-than-white void of the pixel page in hot pursuit of this libretto I'm supposedly in the process of writing. All of these factors seem significant to me - the time, the day, the process - leading me to wonder if I am truly dedicated creative mind or merely obsessed with my own lack of meaning in life. The two can't be so different from each other perhaps. As I sit here I think about sitting here, think about thinking about sitting here, trying to feel the feeling of sitting here for better or for worse. It's not just about sitting or this particular place that I'm sitting, but concerns more the reason that I am sitting here, that I have been driven to wake up at this mysterious hour before the sun has risen to compose this document which I am quite confident few will ever read and very well may amount to nothing. I am thinking about sitting here and thinking about thinking about sitting here and the whole thing seems somehow so satisfying to me, tastes like the universal, like a utopia that I didn't discover but has already been articulated by generations of thinkers, armchair philosophers poking fires deep into the midnight shoals, poets traversing the sea of coal, all those minds we call genius which carve out a place for themselves somewhere just beyond the cusp of normal human routines, a place untouchable by other mortals, just the other side of reasonable time, to sit and think and write about it. There seems no need to articulate any other purpose, that is, when I'm feeling particularly optimistic. This whole exercise could certainly be conceived as an attempt to self-modulate, to fine tune the shivering granulations of my internal frequencies to align to those of the ether, a continuous seeking out of harmonious relation with my surroundings, just a few minutes of peace and quite to hear myself hearing. It also occurs to me - again and again - how this sort of activity might be interpreted as some sort of new age meditation, you know, with all the unknowing-of-mundane-knowledges-in-search-of-true-wisdom and being-becoming-in-relation talk. Perhaps I wouldn't blame someone for thinking so (since it occurs to me) and I should in fact re-internalize this anticipatory self-criticism as a kind of challenge to define what it is then, if not that. Well I know for goddamn sure that my goal is not synthesis and this text will fail if the only message it is able to relay amounts to "be here now oh wandering romantic." On the contrary, I'm detuning my scales for dissonance. This present is merely, hardly, a shimmering surface reflecting the expansive arid tundra of the past as it is overtaken by the molten bile of the future made manifest by decisions made manifest through delusion, hallucination, incantation, incineration. So what am I doing exactly?

I'm sitting in a room writing a libretto for an opera, of course. This task was decided before I was even able to articulate its method; I knew I had to write a libretto before I knew what a libretto was, before I really knew what opera was, and I can hardly say that I do now. It's a metaphor, yes, but it is also literal, necessarily so, with dire consequences on both fronts. I found myself in a dangerous position: trained as a kind of journeyman "jack of all trades" artist, obsessed with the history of painting as the history of art (an opticocentric bias to be sure), well versed in the concerns of the modern philosophical subject, all tributaries mounting a venerable tidal wave of emotions, that is, emotions manifest in objects and symbols, a specialization in material fetishes for the manufacture of static objects for consumer consumption. I should be making things. I should be in a studio somewhere wearing coveralls and boots getting sawdust in my hair and paint on my thighs, or, you know, collecting and shuffling stuff or orchestrating things in a space or at very least, out of utter desperation as a starving-yet-resourceful postmodern nomad sitting in my post-studio non-studio working diligently on something I can sell. Maybe I am, maybe this is, but it doesn't feel like it, doesn't seem like there's anything here at all, seems in fact like I'm avoiding such an encounter, avoiding making something that can be held, avoiding making anything at all. Yet I continue to write - call it anything but work - for what or for whom or for which why I do not know, and this is what has become essential to my practice (if one may call it that). If I know what I'm doing the process is already dead. I am in pursuit of the unknown, the unknowable as I like to say. Sometimes is feels so exciting, so important, and other moments it feel like a gun with a bullet flying a Mobius strip trajectory through my foot and back into the chamber. It also seems like I repeat myself a lot by trying to explain what I'm doing, like this writing now, which is at once absurd in the best and worst way, repulsively frustrating with an aftertaste of transcendental enlightenment. Maybe that other voice in my head wasn't so far off with the new age post-Fordist y generation guilt thing, eh?

Anyways, back to this writing about writing about thinking about thinking thing. The process certainly isn't without its share of epiphanies and at the moment I am remembering to remember - must have something to do with the time of day - to let someone else figure out what to do with them. I remember beginning this clusterfuck cavalcade back in December of last year. I was here in New Mexico visiting my parents for the holidays working on a brilliant book (if you don't mind me saying so) which hasn't been published (because I haven't spend a single minute seeking out an appropriate publisher - I know I know).

Ok wait - skip all that, not important. What I'm getting at is the fact that I've spent the last 6 months amounting a large file of preparatory research for my current endeavor. I spent 6 months thinking about thinking, organizing scenarios for extended awareness, casting large abstractions into transparent containers to feel out what I'm motivated by in conceiving of this half-baked opera idea and I'm pretty sure I fished it out. That's what happened in Iceland, could only happen there. It's very much tied to that place, those people and those experiences, and it's miraculous that I've been able to take it with me. While I was there I knew that I had to maintain focus on focusing, that the best use of my time and energy would be in dwelling on dwelling-on (so to speak), to not rush too far ahead of myself in anticipating what may or may not come ahead but rather stay rooted in the place, people, and pontifications surrounding me there, and I did. However, I was also very much aware of the fact that I knew what would come next. I remember being out on a walk talking to myself, as I was fond of doing at that time, articulating a focus upon focusing which required a deconstruction of the focal point, which had to be attended to first. I realized that the prologue conceived collectively was just a warm up, not a creation of being (as the namesake implied) but a facsimile of such a process. I believe this accounts for my feeling philosophically dissatisfied with the performance even though I can recognize it as an righteous achievement in itself for its own sake. Out there on the fjörd, walking and talking to myself, I dedicated myself to an analysis of my own origins as no one else seemed to be able to penetrate the gargantuan weight of what I was crafting - to no fault of their own, for why should they be invested in such an all-encompassing dilemma when they have their own existences to attend to? I committed myself, there and then, to turning the focus upon myself, my self-in-relation, which meant necessarily waiting until I left that place which made me (and everyone it seems) feel so free until I was injected back into the womb of my own creation. So here I am.

I'm supposed to be focusing on "family" right now, or something like that. Maybe that's wrong, missing the point, an unuseful abstraction. It's based on a false premise: that I can be defined by where I come from. I don't believe this, not really, yet I do realize that many other do which is perhaps why I am attracted to the idea. Do I really believe that writing about/through my parents will elucidate previously unrecognized aspects of my being? No way. I shouldn't let myself become distracted by this idea. It's not about them as individuals, their identities and personalities, but of parents generally, of generational influence and how neurosis, obsessions, cosmologies, and ontologies are passed down through time. This seems to be about history; I've always harbored such antagonism towards history, not feeling a part of it while knowing that I can participate in it if I choose to. This opera is about all that messy shit, the feeling and knowing and choosing bits and how they produce a modulated historical protrusion. History seems a demented concept full of hubris, narcissism, not just ego but the most shadowed toxic plasmas of human cognizance, and to that extent I want nothing to do with it. Yet (and yet) here I am, living without having chosen to, being forced to choose what I will do with it, to consider it meaningless fodder to be incinerated as I see fit or perhaps a responsibility, a call to arms which will lead me to the far reaches of the earth in order to reach some other conclusion which I cannot see from where I currently stand. All of human history is a farce of ideologies even while serving as the very fundament of all definitions of truth and reality - to some history is the proof, the only content that can be truly known, is the only thing that can be described, encompasses all of reality. For better or for worse, I refuse to live in relation to this definition of history, choosing (to the extent that anyone can) to be free of it, choosing instead to articulate a different albeit conflicting relationship of the self-in-relation. I'm currently the only character of this opera, so I supposed I must be the narrator...? So be it.

This voice is my own but it is informed by many others. These directions that I hint at will be made clear by referencing my fellow cartographers. This opera is about perspective, at least for now, and about my singular vision being comprised of an oscillatory multitude. As I have tried to remind myself again and again, I have always-already known the methodology of this madness so there's no more need to articulate it further. It's time to act, to write through this multitude of voices, to embody the research and transcribe it upon the page of my own existence. Ah so dramatic (or tragic maybe?). All that is to say that the best artists are thieves of the best artists whom are themselves thieves. In following my intuition through its reasonable intentions, I will continue to collect and collate voraciously. Yes, make the lists and craft them into charts. Fill files with found images and transform them into diagrams that articulate the ineffable aporias of the multiverse. My march through history is with the deviant, the subversives, the antagonizes of good taste, never forget! Remember to remember! I am the sieve through which the entirety of the cosmos must pass if it is to be sensed at all, reach out and grab as much as possible to divert it away from the influences of evil. The more I steal, the more languages I speak and voices I allow to speak through me, the more provocative I will become, and perhaps more understood as well. Of course I must also remember that I am no librettist, not a composer or a playwright or even a philosopher more than merits mere hobby. I am an artist with a honed understanding of my responsibilities in the world, a human of reasoned contemplation perhaps but no less effectual in acting through my own clandestine means of subtle subterfuge. A simple twist to keep moving: the action is through the meditation. My current focus is upon an origin, an ontogenesis - the creation of being. I'm a fool to have thought that I could sit down and write out a soliloquy of realized characters; this process is dynamic, always moving, perpetually changing, and so let it!

[Speaking to myself now]

At least today and as far as I can see, keep researching and work (act) to put that information into a format that can be subsumed into the corpus. Focus on the techniques, the details, all the minutiae, shove it through the hole and let the world figure out what to do with it.

The whole history of my being, the entire collected past of experiences and influences, leading up to and including the moments just now shed away, are all equally fodder for the articulation of what I need to do, what I am in the process of seeing through, what I am moving towards. Where the ocean meets the beach: this line is not perceived but imagined, projected, hallucinated upon the landscape. We are all imaginary lines solidifying our flickering present through leaden evidence of past experience, a narrative which ties us to the earth and keeps us from levitating, self-forged shackles, the burden of memory. There is no escape for those that expect to take everything with them. Buoyancy can only be achieved by cutting away weight, and perhaps even then it's foolish to visualize a surface of light that can be penetrated, a membrane beyond which is purer air and softer gravity. This ocean is paradoxical, always shifting through currents of invisible forces and impossible magnitudes, propelling floating algae through whirlpools and vortexes of inexplicable profundity, yet constant in its mass, predictable in evaporating, only to rain down again, the streams forever carving new paths while never failing to return to the one great source, the singular unifying void of immeasurable depth and darkness. The largest mountains are under the sea. There are more stars beyond our flimsy scrim of atmosphere than granules of sand on all the beaches. Every finger tip is a unique labyrinth. If every body is different how can we standardize any measurement? Can any eye ever share in the sight of another? Relative to what?

Fear is a parallax. Fear is a primordial biological effluvial engine that propels the fate of the known universe. The known universe is the human universe, for only humans could be so dim as to describe all that is as a singularity. Surely this verse must be multiple, if we are to satisfy our burning desire for authentic reality, if we ever hope to taste any semblance of truth beyond the provisional algorithms of civilization. Fear is the spark igniting the protein mechanisms of muscular motion, the light that shoots through the neural lattice of the proto-protein mind to fill the lamps of the first fiery nuclei, an a priori motivation to retract the appendage, flex the flagella, reflex the nerve endings into their discursive positions. Fear isn't a human emotion, it's the syntax of the multiverse, less hominoidinal affect than gravitational effect, the feeling-feeling of senses-sensing, the eternal fall back into the unified void lying at the center of the midnight ocean.

Our culture requires a reconfiguration. Our needs have shifted as a result of a change in position, a subtle side step of perspective which totally obliterated the old image. With this new view we will never see it the same way again, so let's stop calling it by those tired taglines. Life, that is. The world and all that it entails. Our culture was spawned from the womb of nature which cradled us, incubated our first epiphanies, and nurtured millennia of revolutionary enlightenments. It can be said that human culture is an extension of the natural, a progression of pure understanding, a materializing will coming into awareness of itself. This view is horrifically negligent, exercising irreparable violence against the creative propulsion of life. Humans are the epitome of the synthetic, the first antagonism to all that is innate to our world. It has nothing to do with technology, material resources, or the violence waged against all the pure beings caught in this bubble of atmosphere, or the boiling hubris that articulated these modern advances. Our unnatural division began much earlier during the first division of sentience from sentiment, at the origin of mind through differentiating the one from the many, in the jungle, before the void, by the plasticization of the landscape through the sieve of the autonomous gaze. We see a line on the horizon, there, and now there, that high water mark perpetually receding just beyond grasp which propels the tendons, disturbs temperament to shiver schisms through the calcium corpus, to revolt against the hallucinated boundaries in search for the idyllic ether nadir apexing the crown of consciousness.

The line is fear and it is real, don't let anyone tell you differently. There's much to be achieved out there, so much to learn and discover. The adventure is in the journey and all roads lead to death. We require a new culture, a different architecture built upon completely reevaluated sensibilities. Not to avoid death of course, but to stop destroying life. We will never become one with nature - for many reasons, but most succinctly because nature is not one. It is no less than multiple, a multiverse of predominantly imperceptible forces and magnitudes, a parallax midnight ocean of "energy" defying all attempts at more acute articulation. Our cultures are multiple, but they are founded upon universals, stacked up and toppling over false pretenses and misguided intuitions, mythologies pointing towards a nebulous inferno of eternity. We don't need new stories, new languages, new art forms, or new audiences. All that has been forgotten is conducted in the name of process or no memory however mechanical will allow us to remember a truth that has never yet been realized. Discovery is a cancer plaguing the biological drive, a self-glorifying mythology of war gods and rapists. We don't need a revolution we need a revulsion, a new relationship to fear, a reoriented reflex for the muscles as they retract to our self-imposed anxieties. How do we learn to say no, to not participate, to disengage from all etiquette, all society, all cultural debate? How do we learn to not speak, not participate, not proclaim meaning or exercise power? How do we articulate a life without material, quit understanding in order to learn only how to be still, believe in fear so deeply as to incinerate all the violent hope of righteous war machines? There's no going back, but we might refuse to go forward if it's leading nowhere. How can one simple idea transform an entire existence and what is required to overcome the fear to act upon it?

opening

a scene

characters: me, myself, and I (I, eye, other)

are sitting in a void

all black only voices are heard. no other sound.

a black screen. subtitles.

me: I'm sitting here writing a beginning which cannot be located. Is it a fools quest or inevitability of collective emersion in the aether... But how can I even begin without sculpting out definition from the morass of indiscernible postulates? How can I write without first knowing the language being spoken, how to invent a technology of multiversal translation, the dream of being understood by all. I suppose I will write a self into being without distraction, to attempt to separate one particular floating in a sea of undifferentiated energy currents, and so I speak while never knowing the speaker directly. Where does this voice emerge from? How can I peer into the wellspring of subjective depths without being implicated in disturbing the experiment, just another clumsy scientist sending negligent shockwaves through the phenomenological dimensions.

voice: Just begin already then. Why don't you begin with describing a scene you know well, use some music you've already written. Go ahead, put it on. Set the scene with a mood, lay the foundation and raise high the roof beams, perhaps a sky light. Remember to remember the path is already discovered and continuously refined, so simply lay bare those elements and observe their natural interactions.

me: Ok, well then I guess we begin with music.

[Södermalm Suite begins... me's voice takes on a strange effected intonation]

me: Begin with walking around Stockholm. It's as good ov'a beginning as any. There was a feeling to that place which inspired technical movements, visual observations of the commonly overlooked minutiae of our multisensory experience. This music evokes a primordial posturing, let us all take it up! Yes let's let the music serve as our medium for distilling the liquid sensations of our selves, a sounding board so that we may hear ourselves hearing, or perhaps oracle of invisible influences?

voice: But on the other hand - let's not get hung up on hands at the moment - this music has already been made, predates this production although admittedly anticipating its arrival. It is the beginning, in its own way, of the being you are currently active in reflecting upon. You already depicted that scene, let that recording serve as document to a process and stay focused upon the active components: creation! Remember to remember, a processing of unfurling understanding and forgetting. The music is highly structured, temporally aware, depicting a flickering array of cerebral spaces. It does not need to be replicated or recontextualized, but improved upon. Observe the functioning components and improve upon the remainder.

me: No it has to be an original composition. [walks over and stops the music abruptly]. Of course one project will inherit the potentials and processes of the previous, but they are more than mere simulacra of each other. The new project will be an addition, a greater-than of before. Remember to remember how it went: activity. Play music and record it, write songs and let the narratives emerge. To constantly be working is be stay within the morphogenetic cloud, to keep writing! The environment is key, so set up the scenario for composition. Remember to let the songs write themselves, just as this which I am speaking will serve as the libretto. It's not a question of which came first so much as how to modulate both sound and language simultaneously.

begin montage of words to images with corresponding sound:

work schedule:

daily autobiographical libretto

daily recordings of readings of the libretto

-currently only sound but later video

daily music production - *see music processing below

daily drawing session - short sessions, fast drawings, carefully archived

weekly video screenings of work in progress

weekly metanarrative organization - the large wall

weekly editing of libretto into linear-additive script

weekly audio editing

*weekly tasks occur over 1-2 editing intensives - requires own itinerary

Lots of ideas: making the music > free improvisations broken apart into units, time and tone mapped to a base structure. Base structure is a single sonic idea, conceptually related to a musical-technical idea = impressions of present/place. The daily writings will also be a capturing of the present line (from another angle) so can be applied over the music. Realistically speaking, with diligent work ethic one song (= music+libretto+video container) may be completed per week. Current goal is 10 videos to make an opera. First renditions should happen now, as soon as possible. The beginning has already begun. Take existing text to collage libretto. Record daily music improvisations and speak libretto sections in relation to the sound > let the exchange take place dynamically. Other sessions may be dedicated towards improvising new music over existing voice recordings > simultaneous process. Every media should be susceptible to collage technique. Remember to remember: the work has already been done. The new project is to chart that which exists and illustrate its origin. Recontextualize everything so that people may access it. Paul demarinis. Sound-text pioneers. Fluxus and lettrism. Robert ashley. Numinous marginalia. Grisaille. Ö.

Here is the schedule.

The "worlds" in the many worlds theory is then just the complete measurement history up until and during the measurement in question, where splitting happens. These "worlds" each describe a different state of the universal wave function and cannot communicate. There is no collapse of the wavefunction into one state or another, but rather you just find yourself in the world leading up to what measurement you have made and are unaware of the other possibilities that are equally real.

The purpose of this interpretation is to overcome the fundamentally strange concept of observers being in a superposition with themselves.

When an observer measures a quantum system and becomes entangled with it, it now constitutes a larger quantum system. In regards to each possibility within the wave function, a mental state of the brain corresponds. And ultimately, only one mind is experienced, leading the others to branch off and become inaccessible, albeit real.^[7]^ In this way, every sentient being is attributed with an infinity of minds, whose prevalence correspond to the amplitude of the wavefunction. As an observer checks a measurement, the probability of realizing a specific measurement directly correlates to the number of minds they have where they see that measurement. 

When two people look at two different detectors that scan entangled particles, both observers will enter an indefinite state, as with one observer. These results need not agree -- the second observer's mind does not have to have results that correlate with the first's. When one observer tells the results to the second observer, their two minds cannot communicate and thus will only interact with the other's body, which is still indefinite. When the second observer responds, its body will respond with whatever result agrees with the first observer's mind. This means that both observer's minds will be in a state of the wavefunction that always get the expected results, but individually their results could be different.

Since conscious awareness has to be coupled with local physical systems, the observer's physical environment has to interact and can influence the brain. The brain itself must have some physico-chemical processes that affect the states of awareness. If these neural processes can be described and analyzed then some experiments could potentially be created to test whether affecting neural processes can have an effect on a quantum system. Speculation about the details of this awareness-local physical system coupling on a purely theoretical basis could occur, however experimentally searching for them through neurological and psychological studies would be ideal.

****

Nothing can be made in isolation. The libretto must be written in combination with the music, or rather, it all must be composed simultaneously and in relation, if the content is to be a focus upon relation. How to perform simultaneity? How to labor on multiple fronts at once? What's the best use of time? How is time to be used? A solution by way of a schedule: a single day broken up (fractured) into differing (dithering) degrees of focus. A rigid structure to contain a chaotic form. The libretto is condensed, should be concise, and only the most essential information should be maintained. I don't want it to be explicitly autobiographical - only implicitly perhaps - but to use myself somewhat arbitrarily as a point of convergence of relations to others. Reading is as important as the process of writing, and so I shall incorporate and appropriate the text of others to the extent that I can see something of myself in them, in style or reference or allusion or allegory - an emotional satisfying appropriation to compose through reading. I am alleviated from being creative and put into the role of explorer, curator, researcher, media archeologist, anthropologist of my own humanity through the humans I've inherited culture from.

The Ö album transports me back to a place, whereas the PROLOGUE is not rooted to Iceland.

The text may be written forever without implying a structure - a necessary frame to allow production to be possible. The text must maintain focus upon the line: lines of the text, line of time - present between past and future, the lines of structure imposed upon the meditations. The text content is of agency, but the composing structure is concerned with relinquishing that agency: to erect a structure to allow the text (and the music and the whole opera) write itself > related to the old collage practice = observing a metaphenomenon with its own emergent intelligence, concerned with autopoiesis and meta-discourse. I am in the role of an observer to these system which are not mine by way of ownership but by being implied within them. The multi-mind model in physics: the observer is always implicated within the system they are observing. My work is contentless to the extent of its preoccupation with its own parameters, which also liberates anything to become content: a series of observational scenarios to put "things" in relation, ambivalently discerning between them. I'm ambivalent (to an extent) about the things themselves. There's no end to the potential source material = the necessity of a frame/structure.

The internet is a pre-made all-human archive of content > draw from it actively and attentively, towards a nonlinear discursive narration of all things. The "internet of all Things" put in relation to the infinite cut-up libretto text: both reflect the archive-ability of the other infinitely radiating out in both directions, the compositional structure determined by clouds of meta-commands, keywords, tag lines, hash tags, search phrases, like linguistic algorithms for ontological spatio-temporal coordination, existential GPS, or even writing the libretto in a kindof computer language invented for evoking such computational outcomes. The website as meta-discourse: conceived as a series of frames/containers which I can continuously upload into - text, images, video, all as it is captured in real time wherever I am as transparently as possible, to allow life to take precedence within the proscenium of experience over the documenting methods: to make a life based on reading, observing, collecting and archiving experience.

I'm focusing too much on the abstract infrastructural framework which is leading me nowhere, pure motion without destination, infinite discursive thinking about thinking confined to the limitations of my own POV. These thoughts must be re-oriented towards design labor, to erect the structure visually and virtually, in order to allow my inquiries to read and absorb more complex concept while providing a fundament to pile up and sort upon. Once the categorical system is erected, the rest will fall into place naturally as life will consist of reading and writing, collecting and processing information, watching and storing video footage, imagining and auto-composing musical ideas, at a velocity on scale with the speed of life. The orchestration is concerned with the attention proliferating in the various scenario-frames of life itself. The first act of the opera is articulating this structure, building the room so that I can live within it, the articulation of the organizational structure that will liberate the living of life over art. The containers represent the current logical models for describing reality, relation, being and becoming within the real.

Video is in the movement category. The first screen/scene of the first act must be blackness, nothingness, from which all else will emerge. The splitting of a single voice into multiple voices, me addressing the facets of my own me. The text will be represented with subtitles: the text comes first, accompanied by silence. Other section may be only music - perhaps it's displayed as multi-channel video installation where all these elements can be mixed and dispersed throughout a space independent of a frontal-orientation pressure upon the media = a dispersion of the audience for a modulation of attention. SO can read lines of the libretto, perhaps lines written especially for her, or for a woman, or as my own voice. Other voices may be collected to begin recording aspects of the various characters, just to begin putting them into relation with each other - this method can take place over the internet, remotely, randomly, with whomever may be willing.

All the images will emerge - cannot be predicted - as they flow from a process of watching, not directing. The music will emerge from listening: perhaps direct musical appropriation, capturing or recording in the room at various levels of degradation, distorting or filtering digitally or organically to add layers of affect. While listening to the Ö album: the process of writing began organically, out of nothing, out of chance and spontaneity, then turning them over and over through a long period of time the rough stone was polished into a more concrete form. It just needs to begin, to generate something, to initiate a beginning by sheer determinism, then the secondary at more important process can be initiated of cutting, mixing, layer, and composing can run its course. There's an outline for a methodology for emerging out of a sedentary state of nothingness and begin composing something, rather than entertaining pure fantasy.

I just returned from a camping trip with my mother and we had some intense discussions about our relationship to each other, our individual relationship (mostly my own) to my father, and my realization of a profound dissatisfaction with that relationship and many percolating sensations in not believing I can do anything about it. A description of my origins, my inability to change them - my own mythopoiesis - but also my distaste for wading through the nostalgic murk of the past when my father often wishes to venture there, not wanting to be defined by that narrative, not believing in that self I once was while being able to maintain the sense of the person I have become, or am actively becoming, so opposed to that flickering other. He (father) maintains a determined focus upon the mainstream news sources, a voice omni-present yet not his own, so that he is serving as a syphon to amplify these externally programmed voices which I am trying to actively avoid - not him, but the popular news media. He believes it's his responsibility "to stay informed about what's going on" while I feel that it's important and of my (and our) responsibility to be critical in this media, to actively disengage from it, and to seek out other forms of articulation of world events, of life and what it can be, and more so to enact the praxis of our philosophies, even while recognizing the inherent struggle of doing so in relation to the overwhelming reign of stupidity foaming up all around us. My own frustration stems from having to confront these popular idiocies which I would otherwise avoid - a tension with having to confront them directly without the relief of arousing the meta-concerns of the media transmitting the corrupted messages: an extreme challenge to my patience and upon the relationship with my father relaying these signals. My mother is active in her engagements with me, trying to understand where I come from by accepting the difference and emphasize the importance of a close relationship. We still experience friction of course, through this difference, yet it productively dissipates through conversation and leads towards an undeniable proliferation of understanding in relation to each other. I want to differentiate my father from the subject matter he communicates, which seems easy enough for me but seemingly impossible for him, which brings about the question: can we be separated from the ideological memes we transmit through our conversations, relationships, private or public interactions? Are we to be judged by what we say, what we do, how we think? Where can an authentic self be located beyond our choice of what to watch on TV? I feel/sense/observe "the wall" (as described by my mother) growing within my father - a general defensiveness, obstinance, impatience, anxiety, suspicion, and fear, with extremely negative consequences to his person and those in his environment. Can it be decided that this is who he is as a person, whether this attributes are expressed willingly, with determinism, or sublimated unconsciously, merely expressed through an otherwise innocent well-meaning "good person?"

This autobiographical content could populate the void of the first scene, presented as a conversation with my mother about my father, or vice versa, or myself in relation to another facets of my own being concerning the nature of my parents as an origin, etc. Where can the singular nature of the self be located when observing those from which one came? Other content: NM, the family house, summer roadtrips, ___ (or other GF's) and their family, their articulation of origins, their traditions and parents, cultural inheritance, etc. Recorded conversations can be collected and transcribed to generate authentic content - this is possible but is it desirable? A natural language of normal people? Maybe later, in the second act, other voice will need to be generate from captured content, but for now confine the focus to merely my own voice because there's more than enough there. Who cares about this hyper personal content anyways, perhaps it lacks all relevance to others..?

Remember: the places visited during the camping trips as inspiration for stage craft, various landscape voids and the "headspaces" they proliferate: the skies of NM, Chaco canyon and the ancient civilization of the pueblo indians, the cliffs as primordial schism rising up out of the undifferentiated mass of a dry earth carrying all of its history on its pockmarked face, the geological scale of time before time, the poetics of dust and colored dirt. Should these accounts be written at the place? As a token of that location, a form of collection of experience made material? In these instances the self would serve as a container, a cypher for funneling impressions down into a mythopoietic text, the telling of a story, the narration of a geo-history, the oration of the voice of others and objects and things as beings or entities or gods or shimmering facets of the eye-I observing and imagining them. To step outside into that early morning light, to feel the space (remember Iceland), with steaming coffee and churning bowels, to account for the sensation of that specific location. I need to wake up and not stay confined in my room, but sneak outside and pay homage to the mountain (br)other as keeper of my context. The strength of the music also: all of my solo albums are bound to travels across country, to the effects of specific patches of earth upon territories of the psyche, California to Chicago, Sweden to Iceland, redwoods to desert desolation. Even CTASSAULTS is bound to the atmosphere of LA and Joshua Tree, mixed and mastered in the cold dark Swedish winter. The music = a medium amplifying emotional resonance, a machine for physical materializing the waveform logic of the body = and then a reversal, creating a cymatic machine to project influence of (idealized/ideated) affect back upon the body. Music as a mechanism of translation of memory of relations, of the body to a place, the affect of a specific time-space captured within a sonic ocean, to be poured back in and be waded into upon call, inspired by a geological-scale vibration to be processed through vibratory instrumentation and transmitted back to the resonant body receiver. The libretto is written through the fingers upon the mind in relation to a poetic description of place, moving towards the ineffable affect of language - a musical text, to be differentiated from the alienating philosophical turn of the more analytical voices. Multi-mind model: I want to produce and observe, or produce in order to re-observe that which might be forgotten. The video serves to interpret/translate yet again the emergent critical effect of these affect-laden processes, to make them comprehensible to the analytic mind, to process them through reasonable linguistic association as visual container of the ineffable poetic qualities, emphasizing the velocity/fidelity/complexity of the concepts through image montage, layering, and rhythmic texturing of visual experience.

And that's the end of my walk... I have my work cut out for me.

Listening to the Ö album in the car...

The jousting of individual guitars, compiled through a kind of homophonic call and response, composed layer by layer, akin to how the Voices albums were made - laying down a base improvisation and hearing the chords emerge through play back attentiveness. This is a model for a monochord monotone monologue chorus - I am the voice, all the voices, singing with myself. The tracks are associated to specific places, each embodying unique characteristics, playing styles and aesthetic textures. Follow this path with the composition to particular "spaces" of the OOFKAUU, inspired by spaces visited in the world - ie: the family home, the deserts of NM, etc. The soundtrack for the first act must be recorded now, to lay a foundation, to be edited and composed later.

There is no true center.

How do i describe all the deranged details that have come to characterize my experience of this place? What would such descriptions serve? Myself, a self-understanding, or for others to comprehend some one other, irretrievably other than the being they know themself to be, and so why to expect that a verbal description will allow more intimate contact with the untouchable. No, the writing serves another purpose, functions as a tool allowing for the observation of resonant frequencies through the body instrument. The body is immersed in a place and time, this is inescapable, but writing can be observed functioning beyond the constraints of temporal parameters.

****

IF ANYTHING IS TO BE DONE AT ALL

1. RESIDENCY APPLICATIONS

-REVIEW CURRENT DEADLINES, ADD TO LIST

-ANTICIPATE LATER DEADLINES

-WRITE TEXT

2. ORGANIZE DAILY TASKS INTO AN EXECUTABLE PLAN

-TIME DEDICATED TO READING/WRITING, LISTENING/COMPOSING

WATCHING/CAPTURING = BUILDING THE ARCHIVE

-TIME DEDICATED TO UNRAVELING THE MYSTERIES OF THE NOTEBOOKS, COMPILING OLD RESEARCH, WORKING ON THE META-NARRATIVE WALL

-TIME DEDICATED TO NEW RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

*REQUIRES A VISUAL PLANNING CHART TO TRACK ACTIVITIES

3. LISTS

-BOOKS TO READ, MAPPED IN RELATION

-MUSIC TO HEAR, DIAGRAMMATIC BREAKDOWN OF APPROPRIATED ELEMENTS

-VIDEOS TO WATCH, ORGANIZED BY KEY WORDS

-METACONCEPTUAL DATA = KEY CONCEPTS

-CHARACTERS AND THEIR VOICES = TOWARDS A NEW ASTROLOGY

-DAILY IDEAS = SKETCH PAD FOR TRANSCRIBING SELF-MONOLOGUE

4. ARCHIVE OF PROCESSES: FOR SPECIFIC TASKS

-ARCHIVE = CATEGORICAL SYSTEM OF RELATIONS: META-TEXTUAL NARRATIVE

-MAPPED HIERARCHICALLY: WHAT DEFINES THE DIRECTIONS IS VARIABLE

-PROCESSES = THE CEREBRAL AND TECHNICAL MEANS OF WORKING WITH THE CONTENT OF THE ARCHIVE: PROCESSING MATERIALS OR OTHER PROCESSES

*EMPHASIS ON ORGANIZATION: TAGS, AESTHETICS, HIERARCHIES, DISPLAY

4A. WRITING

-PASTICHE LIBRETTO - CHARACTER - SPAWNED FROM READING ANYTHING

-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MONOLOGUES - NARRATOR, CHARACTER, META - ORIGINAL WRITING, USUALLY IN RESPONSE TO AN ISOLATED IDEA OR PLACE, DESCRIPTIONS OF CONTEXT

-LETTERS ADDRESSED TO OTHERS - CHARACTER - ACTUAL LETTERS COMPOSED OF PERSONAL ANECDOTES, TAILORED FOR THE CURATED SELECTION OF RECEIVERS

-PRAGMATICS: LISTS, STRUCTURAL NOTES - NARRATOR, META - TEXTS LIKE THIS ONE CREATING STRUCTURE FOR MATRIX OF RELATIONS

4B. MUSIC

-OMNICHORDS - USE UNKNOWN, PROBABLY SIGNIFIES ARCHETYPAL META- EVENTS - DAILY RECORDINGS OF NOVEL CHORD ARCHITECTURES, PURELY EXPERIMENTAL

-PASTICHE OVERTURES - NARRATIVE, SCENIC - APPROPRIATED/COLLAGED ELEMENTS FROM LISTENING LIST, QUOTED DIRECTLY OR REDUCED THROUGH MIDI

-SONIC INTERPRETATIONS OF AFFECT - CHARACTER COMPLEXITY - SONIFICATION OF VISUAL INTERFERENCE PATTERNS, TRANSLATING THE OCEAN OF ENERGY INTO SOUND

-ONE AND MANY VOICES - CHARACTER TIMBRE DISTINCTIONS - EFFECTS APPLIED TO CHARACTER/NARRATOR READING TEXT, SPATIALIZATION AND MULTIPLICATION OF THE SINGULAR VOICE.

****

4C. VIDEO

-ANIMATED DIAGRAM SCORES - ILLUSTRATION OF OPERA ARCHITECTURES ON EVERY LEVEL - REFLEXIVE, DISCURSIVE, SUPERIMPOSED

-FOUND FOOTAGE - SEMIOTIC ASSOCIATIONS, EVOCATIONS OF ARCHETYPES, LINGUISTIFICATION OF THE MIND-PROCESS BEING PROJECTED OUT, REPRESENTING CONCRETE REALITY

-ACTED SCENES - FILMED MONOLOGUES IN DIFFERENT SPACES, OF MYSELF AND OTHERS - USED TO DEPICT KEY DRAMATIC/COMEDIC/TRAGIC MOMENTS OF ACTION REQUIRING DEPICTIONS OF THE BODY

-CHOREOGRAPHED MOVEMENTS - PURE MOVEMENT WITHOUT LIBRETTO - ABSTRACTION OF THE BODY INTO DYNAMIC FORCE

SATURDAY/SUNDAY

REVISE RESIDENCY LIST / PREPARE APPLICATIONS / SEND

CREATE READING / LISTENING / WATCHING LISTS - FIRST DRAFT

FINISH SORTING NOTEBOOKS ON WALL

MONDAY-FRIDAY

BEGIN EXPERIMENTAL WORK REGIME:

04:00 WAKE

04:00-08:00 READING / WRITING PROCESS

08:00-09:00 BREAKFAST WITH PARENTS

09:00-10:00 DAILY CHORD COMPOSITION

10:00-11:00 5 MILE WALK WITH PODCAST

11:00-12:00 SHOWER, ERRANDS

12:00-12:30 LUNCH

12:30-13:00 NAP

13:00-16:00 RESEARCH :: VIDEO TUTORIALS

16:00-18:00 HANG WITH PARENTS, DINNER

18:00-19:00 5 MILE BIKE RIDE, SHOWER

19:00-22:00 RESEARCH :: WEB GLEANING : KEY CONCEPTS, MUSIC, VIDEO

22:00 SLEEP

WEEKENDS OFF = DAY TRIPS, MAKE DINNER, LONG TALKS WITH ___

[SCHEDULE TIME FOR NOT WORKING]{.underline}

VARIABLES OF POTENTIAL

TOWARDS THE ONTOGENESIS

OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

30 DAYS IN OCTOBER

EACH DAY DIVIDED INTO 3 MAJOR SECTIONS - HARMONIC TRIAD

EACH SECTION OF DAY DEDICATED TO SPECIFIC FREQUENCY - CHORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

MORNING = ECSTATIC ENERGY / CHAOTIC CREATIVE FOCUS

AFTERNOON = GROUNDED ENERGY / CONCENTRATED FOCUS

EVENING = LOW+DARK ENERGY / MEDITATIVE FOCUS

DAY STRUCTURED ACCORDINGLY:

04:00-10:00 = WRITING/READING

10:00-12:00 = MOVEMENT WITH NEW INFORMATION - WALK, LUNCH

12:00-13:00 = NAP

13:00-18:00 = MUSIC/VIDEO CAPTURING - ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT

18:00-20:00 = DINNER, MOVEMENT WITHOUT INFORMATION - BIKING MEDITATION

20:00-22:00 = REVIEW/EDITING OR MINDLESS RESEARCH

22:00-04:00 = SLEEP

[VARIABLES]{.underline}

WRITING/READING

• CREATIVE FLOW - CURRENT OF CURRENT THOUGHTS

• LETTERS TO SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

• PREPARING APPLICATIONS

MUSIC/VIDEO

• DAILY GUITAR IMPROVISATIONS

• RECORD CONVERSATIONS WITH PARENTS, ___, (((SELF))), OTHERS

• RECORD READING OF LIBRETTO

• VIDEO VIGNETTES OF "SCENES" AROUND HOUSE

  • BACKYARD, KITCHEN TABLE, LIVING ROOM, BEDROOM, CLOSET, GARAGE

  • VIDEO + SOUND = IPHONE + ZOOM SYNCED :: NEED CLAPPER

REVIEW/EDITING

• TRANSCRIBING/FORMATTING LIBRETTO - CASTE OF CHARACTERS

• WEB RESEARCH = NOTATION STRUCTURES FOR DRAWING SERIES

• WATCH VIDEO TUTORIALS :: AFTER EFFECTS, ABLETON, VUE, ISADORA

• STUDY SWEDISH

• ARCHIVE HOUSEKEEPING

  • DAILY AUDIO + VIDEO DATA

  • VISUAL RESEARCH FOR DRAWINGS

  • OLD ARCHIVE

  • NOTEBOOK PURGING + METANARRATIVE WALL

[PROJECT CALENDAR]{.underline}

• ONTOGENESIS = PERSONAL HISTORY - PARENTAL SYNTHESIS + TENSION - NEW MEXICO DESERT - AUTUMN

• SCENE 2 = INTERRELATIONAL DYNAMICS - LOVER SYNTHESIS + TENSION - NORWEGIAN FJÖRDS - WINTER

• SCENE 3 = SOCIAL ECONOMY - FRIEND CORROBORATION + TENSION - BAY AREA CALIFORNIA - SPRING

• SCENE 4 = TOWARDS A NEW ONTOLOGY - ? VOID RECONCILIATION, WORLD INTEGRATION, OR OTHER POTENTIAL ? - UNKNOWN LOCATION - SUMMER

[SPECIFIC PROJECT FOCUS - ONTOGENESIS]{.underline}

• SELF ARCHEOLOGY :: SORT THROUGH ALL PERSONAL ITEMS IN HOUSE, ONE ROOM AT A TIME = PERSONAL INVENTORY OF MATERIAL ASSETS. MAKE ARRANGEMENTS OF ITEMS INTO KEEP + PURGE

  • GARAGE

  • BEDROOM

• DOCUMENTATION OF "FOUND SETS" :: VIDEO + AUDIO OF MOST FREQUENTED/SIGNIFICANT LOCATIONS

  • BEDROOM - MORNING - VIDEO STILL OF SUNRISE, LIVING ROOM, ETC

  • NEIGHBORHOOD - LATE MORNING - PHOTOGRAPHS OF SITES OF INTEREST, ROCK COLLECTION, NOTES FROM PODCAST, CONVERSATIONS WITH SELF

  • BACKYARD - AFTERNOON - VIDEO + AUDIO OF LANDSCAPE, BIRDS, LAWN, PLAYING GUITAR

  • RESEARCH RECORDINGS - EVENINGS - SCREEN CAPTURE OF CPU ACTIVITY

• EXPERIENTIAL NUTRITION LISTS

  • MUSIC PLAYLISTS = CAPTURED FROM YOUTUBE

  • READING LISTS

DAY TWO

QUESTIONS CONCERNING METHODOLOGY

• WHAT IS BEING CAPTURED?

  • AM I THE SUBJECT? NO - THE LANDSCAPE IS SUBJECT

  • HOW MUCH SHOULD I BE REPRESENTED ON SCREEN?

  • A SERIES OF TROPES, CINEMATIC ARCHETYPES: MIRRORS AND WINDOWS, SHADOWS, SHIFTING LIGHT OF DAY, STILL LIFES OF PLANTS AND FURNITURE

• AREN'T THESE JUST SO MANY BORING SCENES OF MUNDANE EXISTENCE?

  • NO ACTION - YES, THIS IS THE POINT. THE FIRST SCENE IS A BEGINNING, COMES BEFORE ANY ACTION HAS TAKEN PLACE. REMEMBER: NOW IS A TIME FOR COLLECTING NOT CRITICALITY

PROVISIONAL SOLUTION: WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT IS IMPORTANT (YET) EVERYTHING SHOULD BE EXPERIMENTED WITH. THE BEGINNING IS A STATE OF NOT KNOWING. EVERYTHING IS FAIR GAME.

THE GOAL IS NOT TO DOCUMENT ME (AS SUBJECT) OR ENVIRONMENT (AS SCENE) BUT TO FOCUS UPON THE STREAM (CASCADE) OF THOUGHT BUBBLING UP IN THE PRESENT. THE HERE AND NOW SERVES AS THAT INVISIBLE LINE SEPARATING PAST FROM FUTURE. ALL OF THIS DOCUMENTATION IS MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE, WITH TOTAL DISREGARD FOR THE RAMIFICATION OF SUCH ACTIONS.

[DAILY WRITING TASKS]{.underline}

• A LETTER WRITTEN EACH DAY, TO SOMEONE SOMEWHERE. SHOULD BE COMPLETED IN A SINGLE DAY. FIRST: PLANS FOR CA IN FEBRUARY-APRIL. CAR?

• SOME WEB-BASED CORRESPONDENCE: DIRECT MESSAGES, EMAILS, ETC. KEEP THE CONTACTS ALIVE. FIRST: JEBBE, OTHER COPENHAGEN FRIENDS, START FROM MOST RECENT AND WORK BACK.

• BY THE END OF THE DAY: SHORT PIECE OF EDITED TEXT TO BE READ/RECORDED FOR LIBRETTO. FROM ANY SOURCE.

[DAILY VIDEO TASKS]{.underline}

• UNSUPERVISED TIME-LAPSE FOOTAGE OF A NEW SUBJECT. SCENE OBSERVATION, FURNITURE PORTRAITS, MAPPING ROTATION OF THE EARTH, ETC.

• FOUND MANUFACTURED NATURE ARRANGEMENTS: COLLECTED WHILE OUT FOR A WALK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. CONSISTS OF HAND-HELD VIDEO STILL. ANT HILLS, SHRUBBERY, GEOLOGICAL COMPOSITIONS.

• CONCENTRATED TIME-LAPSE OF A SPECIFIC OBJECT-SUBJECT, IE: STACK OF BOOKS ON NIGHTSTAND, ASSORTMENT OF ROCKS ON VANITY/BATHROOM, CLOTHES IN CLOSET, FLIPPING THOUGH PAGES OF NOTEBOOKS.

• SCREEN CAPTURE OF ALL CPU TIME!

[DAILY MUSIC TASKS]{.underline}

• RECORD IMPROVISED GUITAR: ZOOM (OUTSIDE, DISTANCE), TAPE (ROOM), IPHONE (CLOSE, PUT INTO OTHER OBJECTS), OR FOCUSRITE (IDEALLY!)

• RECORD OTHER MUSIC:

  • YOUTUBE>OFFLIBERATE>MIDI CONVERSION>ORACULAR MUSIC

  • YOUTUBE>OFFLIBERATE>CUT-UP METHOD>SPONTANEOUS TONAL POETRY

  • TAPE RECORDING OF WEB/RADIO/ANYTHING>PLAYED BACK AT SLOW/FAST SPEED (WITH ANALOG EFFECTS?)>"PLAY" WITH PHYSICALITY OF MEDIA

[DAILY READING GOAL]{.underline}

• CREATIVE CONCEPTUAL PLAGIARISM: FIND SMALL SECTIONS TO LIFT, TRANSCRIBE TO CPU, ORGANIZE INTO FOLDERS OF THE CASTE OF CHARACTERS

[DAILY ARCHIVE GOAL]{.underline}

• KEEP ARCHIVE CLEAN: AUDIO/VIDEO FOLDERS BY DATE, TEXT BY TOPIC, EVERYTHING AS NEATLY TAGGED AS POSSIBLE. DEDICATE SPACE ON AN EXTERNAL HD. CONSOLIDATE EXISTING MATERIALS TO CLEAR AS MUCH SPACE AS POSSIBLE.

• PURGE NOTEBOOKS, AT LEAST A LITTLE EACH DAY. < INSPIRES NEW DIRECTION FOR CONTINUED RESEARCH. ALSO, I WILL NEED THE CULMINATED DOCUMENTS FOR RESEARCH IN NORWAY.

[]{.underline}

[PLANNING TASK]{.underline}

• DECIDE A GOOD DATE TO ORGANIZE GARAGE, BEDROOM, COMPILE PERSONAL ARCHIVE. THIS WEEK WHEN PARENTS ARE GONE??

• DEDICATE WHOLE DAYS TO SINGLE ACTIVITIES? MAYBE/MAYBE NOT.

  • DAY OF GUITAR PLAYING

  • DAY OF READING

  • DAY OF SELF-NARRATION

• ACT OUT A SCENE. SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW, SOMETIME. THIS MONTH. GARAGE? CLOSET? BATHROOM, WHILE TAKING A SHOWER? SITTING IN A CHAIR GETTING HIGH DESCRIBING THE ONSET OF INEBRIATION (INTOXICATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS).

• INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FOR EXTENDED FAMILY. NOT FORMAL OF COURSE, BUT HOW TO INJECT INTERESTING TOPICS AND PRODUCE STIMULATING CONVERSATION?

WHEN CAN THE BEGINNING BE SAID TO HAVE BEGUN?

SUNRISE / SUNSET = LANDMARKS OF THE DAY. IDENTIFIABLE LIKE FINGERPRINTS ON A PERSON. RISING + SETTING = ANGLES OF TRAJECTORIES OF SEEMINGLY INFINITESIMAL LIGHT PARTICLES CASCADING THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE TO MINGLE WITH THE DUSTY DANDER OF THE HUMAN CLIMATE.

ANTHROPOCENE = HUMAN-ORIENTED ECOLOGY

NOOSPHERE = ATMOSPHERE OF PSYCHIC SENTIENCE

[NOTES ON THE DAY BEFORE]{.underline}

Yesterday, ___ and ___ arrived from Florida after a long drive across the southern USA. My mother spent all day in the kitchen preparing "simple appetizers" for them, definitely "not dinner," but laboring longer than she normally would in the kitchen nonetheless. My father on the other hand had been preparing for their arrival for weeks, perhaps months. In fact there seemed to be little else on his mind in the days leading up the their arrival. ___+___ arrived at 15:00, entering through the front door. We each received hugs and exchanged light humors as we found our positions around the kitchen table that had already been arranged with a variety of orange-red foods of a variety of textures. My father poured glasses of white wine for himself and his brother, two glasses of simple red table wine for myself and my mother, and a tall glass of sparkling water "with a splash of cranberry and a twist of lime" for my aunt ___, whom has always carried a carefree attitude towards alcohol. Earlier, I had placed a camera in the upper corner of the dining area, perched above the kitchen table directly over the screen door leading to the backyard, out of view but seemingly conspicuous nonetheless. As we sipped our glasses and crossed arms over the table reaching for the sweet potato bruschetta I wondered if anyone would spot the phone perched over the door and think it strange, but no one seemed to notice. The conversation began as soon as the door opened, about the length of the drive and the exhaustion of the journey, the annoyance or necessity of needing to stop and stretch, how long one would think such a distance would take compared to the "record time" it took them to arrive, gas mileage, gas prices, how boring it is to drive through Texas, how beautiful Texas is, how ugly Texans are, how many "Trump" signs were spotted all along the way and what that might represent about the declining average intelligence of our great country. There was more than mere mention of traffic conditions, what cities took the longest to drive through, what shoes are best suited for traveling such long distances, and surprisingly vivid descriptions of various hotel room interiors and their associated economies for locations across the country. What followed was a discussion, spoken with nauseating passion and chilled ego.

I wonder now if I should have prepared to record the audio of the conversation, to have it on record to review or transcribe as I like, and how tedious it would be to have to relive it. I believe I will attempt this on future occasions if I can rig the recorder in a place that will not interfere with the dynamics of the room - camouflage. That being said I cannot transcribe the details here, not verbatim, and again I wonder how useful or interesting it would be if I could. I think probably not very much, if at all. Am I to function here as the golden sieve, the writer of history, one in the position of ultimate power, to take the initiative to write my memories saturated in my perspective to render a definable color to the conversation? History is written by those that remember it. Writers manufacture facts. Would it be more honest, more transparent, more fair or compassionate to have recorded the words from the person that spoke them, in order for the thoughts to be most accurately preserved? Or on the contrary, is it better to let the utterances fall to the floor, mere residue of the fleeting moments to be wiped away just as quickly, thereby liberating each subject from the incriminating statements shared through familial trust and within supposed domestic privacy? [The windows were wide open during our meeting and I was very aware of how far our voices traveled, certainly far beyond the perimeter of the small property]. Where should these opinions begin or end? How should we hold ourselves and each other responsible for what is said? How does it change when it become written?

I keep remembering the work of ___, as observed through the time we shared in Iceland. Nordpaunk festival, overpriced red wine out of a box, finding a bag of weed from god, having a conversation with ___ in the front seat of the car while ___ set the recorder down on the central console. He later transcribed the text into a very fine chapter to this book. While reading over it later after it had been edited, I was struck by how potent the dialogue was. Even though I was re-presented it was adapted with sensitive creative agency. I was one of the voices participating and I could still recognize myself in the syncopated syntax, yet I also felt like the treatment wiped away the biographical details of my personage leaving behind all of the idiosyncrasies of my character without excessive artifacts. This would be a good strategy for my own work I think. What do I need to record about this conversation then? What is significant or useful for the project at hand? Five people around a table. Five would-be characters around a table. The table served as the site for an impassioned conversation, the likes of which I'm sure happen everyday. This incident marks a beginning, and perhaps also an end.

I'm not going to recount the details. Today I will be prepared to record these conversations so I can make sense of them the following day. What was significant about the foundation laid down yesterday was my fundamentally divergent position in defending the importance of change. I was out on a limb, in defense of free will and the personal responsibility to do more than rationally understand the other view but to empathize with those to whom one is speaking. Remember: agonism over antagonism. Tomorrow I will be better prepared to speak and to capture.

I must prepare to capture these scenes.

• Use a lower bit rate to make smaller files and increase recording time. Should be able to capture 6-8 hours per day without issue. Test today to make sure.

• Experiment with placing recorder out of sight in the next room. Prepare the room before people occupy it.

• Again, what is the purpose of the video in these instances? What needs to be captured? Remember: the passing on time on another scale. Still-lives of plants, furniture, unnoticed "invisible" attributes of the environment which may influence or absorb the temperance of the dialogue.

• For now, exercise a strategy of continuous recording of both audio and video = be prepared with power and storage. Cellphones are invisible these days. Use this as a strength: put the phone on a table with the camera up to record video of the room from this "bottom-up" perspective.

• Take notes in the moment = Allows for a breath, a pause, a moment of critical apperception.

• Speak clearly, deliberately, as concisely as possible. Use the magic of words to steer the conversation towards more productive places. Exit the territories towards the neutral zones...?

• MUST PREPARE TO RECORD FACETIME CONVERSATIONS: technical trouble shooting

****

Yesterday felt a bit like a waste. The filming in the morning went well: sitting in the backyard writing in the sun while capturing my screen movements and time lapsing the sunrise at the same time. The multitasking produces satisfaction - arises from both "getting a lot done" but also the nature of the images: sunrise on the mountains = space + time // context & screen capture = documentation of work, existence, proof that something is happening. I need more proofs in my project. Then everything stopped as I transitioned to my daily walk. I felt like a missed opportunity. What about these spaces in between actions? Certainly there's always action, always something happening, and how can I determine what is important to capture or not?

The footage from the shower seems promising. Time lapse of sitting on the sofa, not interesting. > How useful is boredom? Remember: This is not cinema. (???) Which is to say, the mise en scene is more important than any other consideration. I couldn't capture the conversation, but they were worthless anyways. < How can I know? Perhaps some gems will emerge from the evening footage.Today I will attempt to film everything, constantly, with as little interruption as possible. Some technical issues seem to be arising. Now is the time to prepare for them.

[PROBLEMS / POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS]{.underline}

• Sound of conversations are not being recorded: video is time-lapse and audio recorder is visually conspicuous.

  • Can audio + video be recorded simultaneously on the phone, with different apps?

  • If so, I will need a better microphone.

  • If not, I will need a visually hidden microphone for zoom. Placed on my body. Remember: Binaural in-ear mics that Julia had in Iceland.

• Video shots are not wide or close enough - limited focal point lens

  • Need new lenses. Expensive and conspicuous.

• Struggle to capture POV

  • Really only possible in private spaces right? Certainly I could wear my phone on my head all day long while I'm at home but I'm not going to go out in the world with it, or am I? What kind of situation will this create and is it interesting? Privacy laws?

  • Will POV be time-lapse? > Chaotic footage. If not, super large files.

[SHOPPING LIST]{.underline}

• iPhone lens kit

• iPhone microphone?

• Zoom stereo clip microphone

• light reflection fabrics?

• Personal insignia embosser - certifying sold artworks.

I don't want to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes anymore. They make me feel like death and colors everything with an unnecessary malaise. I think I should refrain from inebriation while the family is here in order to remain sharp, lucid, conscious. I shall try to focus on instigating fresh ideologies into the minds of my family members.

I finally quit my involvements with social media, but now I'm considering reactivating my profile. It's only been a week or so and I admit that it feels liberating, but all such freedoms come at a price. Part of the emancipation was discovered by thinking through the act of writing individual letters to all of the people I would like to keep in contact with, an impossibly daunting and nauseatingly romantic idea. I started a list of names, of those humans that it is most essential that I write to, that I keep the lines open with, and BELIEVE IT OR NOT your name was at the top of this list. You are currently my primary letter writing priority.

I've been thinking about you quite a bit these past weeks, mostly because I've been meaning to write you this letter much sooner and the thought has been itching me like an insect bite, a small red throbbing target of my awareness. I also miss Iceland, which currently feels like worlds and lifetimes apart from where and how I am currently living. Looking back, I can see that I was in a very strange headspace for the 6 months I lived in Seyðisfjörður and I chuckle to myself in imagining how I appeared to others. Nevertheless, it was an incredible experience to have this time out there at the edge of the world, sharing in the task of building Sterling on the precipice of the unknown void with you gentlemen, and all the moments in between.

If the circumstances would have been otherwise - which is to say if we were not perpetually exhausted and focused on the task at hand - I'm sure we would have had the opportunity to observe many more interesting points of convergence between our minds. Perhaps we will still have the opportunity one day. When I wake up in the morning and sneak out into the kitchen to pour some coffee and read to the rising of the sun I often remember those mornings at HEIMA which seemed to glow from the inside, the silent conferences we would conduct around the breakfast table with books and porridge and post-sleep breathing. I wonder what you're reading these days, whether you are loving to hate it or hating to love it, because of style or content, or what other potentials you are deriving from those books. Do you consider reading to be an escape or a deeper immersion into the world? I can see it both ways, but not simultaneously. Such it is to be human.

I've been living in Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA since mid July. At my parents house. It's driving me fucking bat shit crazy, I have to admit, but I'm making the most of the situation by trying to engage my elders with calm empathetic respect as I try to persuade them to act more deliberately, desperately, dynamically. I have some other family visiting at the moment - aunts and uncles - so I am surrounding by old age that is not necessarily so wise. I console myself by documenting everything, video and audio, always on, always present. I'm recording myself writing this letter right now. It all has to do with this opera I'm writing, somehow. Perhaps it is the opera, this is what it will be or will become, but it feels more like this constant documenting is a process leading to other processes. Yes, I enjoy this idea of "process-ing," of processes of processes, of processing the process of processing. Maybe that's just a personal inside joke that carries little meaning when I try to share it, but it smells like something potent to me.

US elections are coming up. I need to get out of this crazy fucking country as soon as possible. I have a ticket to Oslo at the end of this month, yes to go spend time with ___. Three months actually. We are renting an apartment there for November and December, just to live for a little while. No pressure, no pain. She has her school to attend to and I have... well, this documenting bullshit which may or may not become an incredible artwork and a long list of names to write letters to. Anyways, if you happen to find yourself heading to Norway in the middle of godforsaken winter then we should try to cross paths. I am considering making an excursion to Copenhagen for at least a few days in January, so perhaps then would be a more reasonable time to slap palms, if you're up for it of course.

I hope this letter finds you well ___. I hope your summer was full of hot sweaty love in the salty sands of Denmark and you successfully resisted drinking shit beers and smoking shit cigarettes, and more importantly that you have made some headway on your own writing and some satisfaction in city life and some small morsels of transcendence in your daily rituals. When will the english translation be ready? How does the new issue of ___ look? Don't hesitate to let me know if there's anything I can ever do for you.

It's mornings like this one that really make me miss you. I'm always actively processing my desire for you, and I realize again and again that I am sick for not having you near me, but a morning like this locates the sensation of loss - of your loss - in very specific areas of my awareness. The temperature has cooled a lot since you were here and I imagine you would need a proper sweater to join me on the back porch for coffee. Mine is still iced of course - my coffee that it - and I'm still wearing the shorts and tshirt which has become my uniform for this scene. The light is crisp, spilling over with blues and purples. I'm still so amazed by the clarity and distance of vision of this place.

I feel uninspired today, inarticulate. There is a mood to this place that I am struggling to capture as it feels hardly there, flickering, some desert mirage that my eye cannot focus upon. It feels like a hallucination, less than real, which make me struggle to believe in it. Perhaps it's choice to: I choose to not believe in this reality. In this place everything is manufactured, including this view, and every moment passing in this sterilized container makes my own life feel all the more manufactured, mechanize, metallic. The place I'm describing is my parents house specifically, but its also this neighborhood that they have placed themselves in, and the sprawling manila stucco city scape, and the divided territories extending out to fill my view. It all seems so toxic, poisonous, harmful to my health, to my mental meat and physical corpus alike.

Yesterday I spent some time organizing my possessions being stored in my parents garage. My humble pile of goods consists mostly of memories, small mementos that I have removed from the world to be hermetically sealed, secret prizes for my psyche, trinkets that only make sense to my own sensibilities. There's lots of old artwork, countless prints and drawings that betray so many moments of past reverie, photographs of old sculptures and installations, and just photographs. I used to take a lot of pictures, not that they are any good. In fact they are horrible, completely uninspired. I learned how to use a camera before I understood how to see, but I never really understood photography anyways... seems like a marketing ploy to sell cameras, produce documentaries, concretize a civilization of nostalgia, or just to sell things. I know that sounds harsh, but I can't help but think that photography flattens experience and compresses the world while its proponents ramble on about the poetics of light, the subjectivity of faces, and the politics of the image. Photography feels like betrayal, like theft. Yet photography is coming back into my life in a new profound way, right now, all of a sudden. I'm trying to turn it back upon itself, to invert the situation, the instance of the moment being captured and the vision of the observer. I'm trying to photograph nothing, or nothingness, or the process of being immersed in this suspended state of awareness. That's what it feels like to be here: suspension, off the ground but not into the atmosphere, not completely of this place. All these screens feel similarly, not altogether something different but decidedly not the same. All I know is that I cannot make here, cannot be creative, and that's about the most interesting realization I've had so I should try to document it. I need to document all of this nothingness.

I've been thinking that this opera is going to start with my own narrative, completely me as subject, but with the explicit purpose of unraveling/deconstructing that self through a study of the materials that compose the life and working on from there. Right now it feels really satisfying to document this strange fractured space with myself in it, thinking about where this place ends and where I begin, as a beginning, a beginning to the opera. Even just documenting long periods of nothingness, seeming sedentariness becomes activity, and it feels stupidly profound.

ONTOGENESIS - SOME DAY

I skipped a day - or a few? I can't recall how many. I'm losing track of time, that much is certain. Something switches off in my mind, in my brain. Perhaps it's purely chemical, or a decision, an application of will. I believe it is me but it feels outside of my self, a will not my own or an environmental influence which I succumb to. I am helpless to resist it.

I'm losing track of this information I'm collecting, of the purpose of these exercises. I question their truth, the sincerity of the project. I forgot the goal of this activity. I forgot what it is I am supposed to be showing. Already!? How can I forget so soon? Is my memory really so corrupted that I cannot maintain motivation for more than a few days without losing it again?

Of course it's always changing, my motivation that is, along with everything else. I'm filming my life here while attempting to stay present. All I want at the moment is to stay still it seems. This place, the location but also the close proximity of my parents, is completely debilitating to my practice, if I can even say that I'm making anything at all right now. And it seems like now is the time to explore this! I want to do nothing, so how do I make work about nothing? Is it about doing nothing or being nothing or the impossibility of nothing or some abstract voidinal nothingness, and really what's the difference? The real problem: how do I stay in the process when the process has become passive? Where does the activity take place, how does it occur? If I cannot locate it then how can I stay attentive to it?

Try to remember to remember!

Consider the primary elements:

• Video

  • Phone time-lapse: larger context, the environment/landscape, the bigger picture that all the subject and objects swirl around within

  • CPU time-lapse: tighter focus, lower fidelity, consistent distance from subject. Always capturing my face, necessarily. So far I've been oriented to no one: I'm not speaking or looking at any other, or even my self = image is passive. Begin applying this image with more intention = orient-in-relation.

  • Screen capture time-lapse: not sure but seems to be about attempting to document all the imperceptibly small movements of composing these ideas into a work. The movement on other screens (depicting bodies in scenes) is pedantic, mundane. All of the work is happening in the fingers, wrists, small localized movements of the arms serving as primary tools for the mind. I am dislocated from my body.

  • New Idea: bricolage other webcams into the screen capture vid. The screen-as-image-of-itself = an opportunity for streaming composition.

• Text

  • These daily notes to self: the material of memory. Continuous realignment of the project trajectory. Every morning I put it together to watch it unravel over the course of the day.

  • Letters to others: personal, anecdotal, subjective content. I'm not sure how useful/interesting this process is, but it certainly seems to fulfill the mandate of "processing processes" = a meta-process of sorts, of sorting. Makes me vulnerable: reveals everything. My concern = reveals too much!? Where is the limit set?

  • Bricolage: the not-yet apparent third mind, fabricated collaborations. Writing as a process of reading. How does this process work? How do I apply it? Is it working on me or do I work within it? How do I transfer/translate the impressions and content of reading into a written work? = the big question: how do I maintain focus on the [activity of reading]{.underline} while also dedicating attention to the [activity of gleaning]{.underline} useful libretto from the reading? Potential solution: software for photographing text and translating it as pdf file. I've used something like this before. Will this help? Requires the phone? Another kind of text scanner?

• Audio

  • Original music: still have this idea stuck in my head. Playing improvised music is fun and decidedly active = seems important for mind, if not for resulting product.

  • Sonic portraits: of objects and/or subjects. Translate video into sound? Frequency analysis? Synesthesia of vision and hearing: towards a cybernetic subjectivity...?

  • Remember! Colors pulled from environment to be translated to sonic frequency. Like sonic portraits but of the landscape/environment/context.

  • Voice design: modulated my speaking voice = towards an aesthetic of dissimulation. Also, downloadable voices for CPU, apps that add naturalized speaking, voice donation website or archive of other voices that can be put to use. I still really like this idea of every voice being my voice, perhaps with nuanced manipulation to amplify affect through tone and timbre.

FURTHER ARTICULATING THE ILLUSORY PRESENT

CATEGORIES OF ONTO-THEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION >A QUESTION OF BELIEF AS THE FUNDAMENT OF SUBJECTIVE TRUTH

[THEMES - META-NARRATIVE]{.underline}

• ORIGINS: BEGINNINGS.

  • COULD BE ORIENTED TOWARDS WORLD CREATION OR PERSONAL NARRATIVE. A DESCRIPTION OF THE PAST THAT COMES TO INFORM/FOUND/ROOT THE FLICKERING PRESENT. ORIENTATION, TO THE FUTURE AND TO OTHERS.

• MEANING

  • JUST THE WORD "MEANING" HAS A VARIETY OF ASSOCIATIONS TO EVERY INDIVIDUAL.

  • CONVERSATION WITH DAD = A WORLD OF MEANINGLESS OBJECT VS EVERYTHING FILLED WITH CONTENT. SUBJECT: THE BACKYARD

  • CONVO WITH MOM = HOW SPIRIT FILLS ALL THINGS. ALSO, SYMBOLS AND GRAPHICS OF PERSONAL AESTHETIC.

  • SOMETHING-NESS OR NOTHING-NESS

• DYNAMISM

  • THE POSSIBILITY OF SUBJECTIVE CHANGE IN ONE'S OWN THOUGHTS/PATTERNS

  • OBJECTIVE UNDERSTANDING OF TIME IN GENERAL COMPARED TO THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF TIME. "WHERE DID THE DAY GO?"

  • GENERATIONS/AGE. ISSUES OF TECHNOLOGY AS PRO OR CON TO THE SOCIALIZATION OF SOCIETY. HOW MY GENERATION DIFFERS FROM OTHERS. STUBBORNNESS.

[QUESTIONS - INTERVIEWS?]{.underline}

• ORIGINS: WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?

• MEANING: WHERE DO YOU FIND MEANING?

• DYNAMISM: WHAT DOES TIME FEEL LIKE?

[METHODS]{.underline}

• HOW TO USE THESE TECHNIQUES TO SUPPORT THE ABOVE INTENTIONS...

• NOT RECORDING EVERYTHING BUT SPECIFIC THINGS

• HOW TO APPROACH OTHERS WITH INTENTION, TO ASK QUESTIONS AND DIG FOR CONTENT WITHOUT IT FEELING CONTRIVED OR UNNATURAL

• IDEAS:

  • VISUAL FOCUS ON THE TABLE AS THE INTERSTICE BETWEEN THE SCENE AND THE WORLD OF OBJECTS. TABLE = CONTEXT FOR CONVERSATION

  • WAIT FOR THE THEMES TO ARISE NATURALLY IN THE CONVERSATION THEN INTERJECT SPECIFIC QUESTIONS TO SUBTLY LEAD THE FOCUS

[MUSIC]{.underline}

• SIMPLY NEED TO ACCUMULATE MATERIAL. THE MOST INTERESTING FORM IS THAT WHICH CHALLENGES EXPECTATIONS. TECHNIQUE SEEMS TO BEGIN WITH THE KNOWN AND WORKS TOWARDS THE UNKNOWN WITH IMPROVISATION.

TAKE OUT THE KNOWN

AND BEGIN WITH THE UNKNOWN.

STAY AWAY FROM THE FAMILIAR.

Out for a walk and it all becomes clear. The video serves as a document of the space and the movements within it. Its not the piece itself, so don't get confused. Documenting the objects being spatially composed within a space is fodder for a score: score it, the movements of the objects or of the camera in documenting them, the transversal of the space physical or through diffusion of attention or POV. Extreme close up detail of the knee - taking out time to focus upon small details. The music can become ambivalent lubrication to the video editing as the primary process: the visual technique can grind and homogenize the text/sound content according to its own logic. Editing is a process of removal = put it in relation to an additive compositional method. Remember: negative theology - describing by lack, silence, absence: a method of inverse/parallax collage. The libretto should be autonomous: remember ___'s book, consisting of conversations transcribed and collated by topic into chapter headings between characters not completely present. Conversations triggered by what he wants to discuss, manipulated by influence. Will Bent! The writing happens through violence, destruction, the taking away from life which is constantly accumulating itself, suffocating. The oration comes from me, or others. From this text as instructions, fill out the other contents: spatialize the directions, illustrate diagrams of faces and places, schematics of orientations and relations, applications for installation as a quasi-performance or installation upon or within various spatial contexts, speaker positions, object fabrication for use as props, arrangement techniques, descriptions of various performer characteristics (physical and psychical), a production of scores for musical and theatrical performers to follow, notations for multiple composers charged with overseeing overlapping territories of attention - composed conduction = conduxion. Outside individuals are needed to serve as speakers, actors, performers, etc., but everything will be embodied and enacted by me from the beginning until a budget can be procured. SUBTITLES of all text, to begin with, to serve as an immediate doubling of the text.

Ultimately I want to exhibit this work: instrument specific notations, but not aligned to each other: a test of individual players functioning autonomously, in an ensemble but without a unified piece of music. The shift is towards the radicality of presence more than execution of perfection. The same idea can be applied towards the recitative, camera work, construction of a stage, etc. The opera consists of a series of strict reference to spaces, time, and embodiments of self evoked through the documenting of existence-in-writing, but is not dependent upon such spatio-temporal coordinations for the presentation of the performance - either live or through streaming video, it will bend into the frame of the viewer seamlessly with their own consumption of reality.

This morning I'm thinking about how to film portraits of my parents. I don't think that the filming will be nearly as important as the audio - the emphasis being on the conversation, to have the encounter be real and sincere, not staged, an actual conversation between me and my parents. There are specific questions I want to ask concerning perspectives, articulations of being or becoming themselves, their description of their own worldview and their understanding of my own - as a beginning of a conversation, to have my own being articulated through their voices. Video should be captured discretely, if at all. The questions need to be written, not explicitly about me only implicitly - this is not a documentary about myself - to ask questions relevant to the person I am speaking to and our shared relationship first and foremost. Key points for the colloquial exchange: a working definition of philosophy and art, as to whether they are in service of or a distraction to what we refer to as life, categories or territories in which to place objects in relation to philosophy/art/life purely for the sake of common reference - intelligibility and understanding - and a working definition of self, as a category to refer to. The OOFKAUU is a system isolating/framing the dynamism of life through course of conversion via conversations, a process both validating and estranging, the horror of memory becoming solidified through history. There are moments from my own past which I would rather have erased: where are these experiences? Merely in my mind? The experiences (to which the memories refer) were shared with others who certainly formed unique autonomous memories, comprising a time distinct from my own, so what are the implications of trying to escape from re-membering these experiences? Am I the only one maintaining them, by remembering them, by maintaining them within the present? Are my memories relevant or relatable to anyone save for my own self? What is lost (or gained) in their forgetting, consciously or unconsciously letting them go, and then where do they go? Through these conversation I expect a discourse to arise, but the video needs to be treated separately: a document of the person, of the space, of the physical and material qualities of the interaction = requires great sensitivity and attention.

I want to collect footage of white sands - the luminous void - and the house representing the circle within which I have been pacing for the last 3 months. These places are not magic, rather the antithesis: not an enjoyable experience, not allowing any escape from my past selves, there was no purpose discovered even in remembering my previous pursuits. Heima in Iceland - attracting artists that are lost and LH looking forward to a time when more accomplished artists, more affirmed in their projects, will arrive to see their work through to completion. What I found in Iceland is an interest in origins - of myself and 'in general/gene-real' - the study of the medium of conversation, video as capturing time, audio as capturing presence, and an affirmation of my personal search as having consequences beyond my own boundaries as an ontological investigation.

Concerning virtual performers of the ensemble: I know I am real (through the procession of the OOFKAUU) but this does not affirm the reality of relations of others - regarding their existence I am less sure. The OOFKAUU as a process of questioning, touching upon and highlighting where I end and an other begins, through course of bodies and linguistic definitions, of being and identity, and methods of understanding in relation/opposition/choice of craft in forming a sense of purpose to their own projects, of themselves and the world they world actively, is it sustainable or in conflict, a productive tension or a destructive one, met with horror or terror or ecstasy - the nature of passion! The body (represented through video) is not as important as the isolated EYE - turning vision into the void immediately filled with everything, creating contrast between things, drawing contrast between beginnings and endings and other scales of periphery. The methodology of shooting video needs to be refined, to increase sensitivity to the spectral gradients and the illusory lines of seeing. How is the method of audio capture define in relation to video?

IN FOUR ACTS

First act: "macamammamatrix" as it's referred to. Black screen with subtitled stage direction for implied movements in a black space and/or some linear diagrammatic schematic illustrations animated on screen, either following the direction of the subtitles or serving as conceptual instruction in lieu of them. Tension begins building.

Second act: the bubbling up of aleatoric sounds becoming language. Visual collage, youtube VIDEOSCROLL-esque compilation of bubbling lip orifice sounds from myriad sources, showing the opening and closings of corporeal inside and outside. Tension released through orifices as language.

Third act: "the sizzle." Similar VS-esque collage but now compiled in relation to the orated text itself, the libretto serving as an outline for the visual signifiers. The tension accumulates violently through thresholds from one unstable state to another in continuous flux, an abrupt drop out to a void...

Fourth act: "magic flute." The release of tension: steady cam shots of white sands or other voidinal representations, a void now filled with decidedly something. The motion of circulating material descends down to a stillness - distillation of matter.

Fifth act: spoken prologue libretto. An escalating crescendo to a transcendent potential which pierces the membrane scrim of the first expansion, defining the threshold without passing through it, articulating what is known: "the universe is a black love" serving as an introduction to a state of orientation towards the ineffable. The original music from the live performance should be deleted, to be replaced by the WARPSPELL - looping miasmic manipulation of Wagner's introduction of the Ring cycle - with a re-recorded monologue of my own voice. SUBTITLES of the text. Begin introducing a multiplicity of the voices through audio manipulation, filtering, affecting through effects.

****

I wanted to start by asking you: what do you think I'm doing?

What I think you're doing with your life? Or with this project? Or during this time that you've been here? In what context?

What am I doing here?

Well, I believe you explained that you are here to try to strengthen the family bond and have some down time in between your major projects, taking advantage of that time to build upon the family unit. Is that fairly accurate?

It's not about accuracy....

You're the only one that can know what you're doing.

What does it seem like I'm doing from your perspective? How do you interpret this project?

This one today?

What I've been up to since I've been here.

I think it's a kind of regrouping, and you've been on some major escapades over the last few years and you decided you needed to figure out what you want your next move to be.

So it seems like down time?

Yeah, it seems that way. I mean I know that you're working. I don't see what you're working on, but I don't have to. I don't know what you're like when you're working on your own. I know you've been preoccupied in your room and on your computer and being alone and you don't always share it and I think that's because you are still figuring it out yourself. You have shared a lot over the last couple of months, you have shared a lot of insight about where you see yourself going, so that's all been very enlightening and comforting.

Do you feel like I'm concealing something?

No... it seems like sometimes you might be frustrated thinking that maybe I don't understand what you're saying - and that's true to some degree that I don't always understand what your mission is - but I still want to hear about it and know about it, even if I don't completely understand or respond, I still want to know what's important to you and what you're working on.

Why?

Because I care about you and I'm interested in your growth and your development and how you are affected by the world and how you effect the world.

If you don't understand it - maybe this is a bit rhetorical if we're not referring to anything specifically - but if you don't understand how do you perceive or receive what I show you or discuss with you?

I think that I do understand. I think that you don't think I understand, or maybe I don't respond the way your friends respond to things, maybe I have a different response, and you take that as a lack of understanding.

What about my reaction make you think that?

What about your reaction makes me think that you think that way?

What do you perceive in me, in my response to your response, that communicate dissatisfaction? What do you see in me that reveals my belief that you don't understand what I'm offering you?

I get it. I think that - not every time but occasionally - I've seen you cut the conversation off and pick up and leave. I think "ok I think he has told me all he wants to tell me." But that's not a criticism... it's not an issue, just an observation. I realize that you see things differently and live a little differently and have a need or a desire to have a plan for the future, and at this point in your life that's probably a good idea, once you're out of school, to know where you're going to live and how you're going to live. That doesn't seem to dominate your thought process though...

The planning? What do you think is dominating my thoughts then, if anything?

Creativity, expression, and how to get it out in the world.

What do you think creativity is?

For you or in general?

Is there a difference?

Yeah, it changes for the individual. Everyone may have a different perception of what it is.

I'm asking about your perception as an individual.

Well, I think it's taking things and making them through an expressive way, or having an appreciation for things as they are, an appreciation for nature, but wanting to express that appreciation for it in some way. For me, my appreciation for nature is to bring it indoors and arrange it in some way so that I can appreciate it on a more intimate level. For someone like you, it's taking it into your head and expressing it in a different way, through music or sculpture or some other container. That's how you express your appreciation for it.

So creativity is an expression of one's appreciation for nature?

That's just one aspect of it. I use nature as an example, but you could have an appreciation for women and want to do portraits of women and different aspects of their lives, in song or painting or sculpture.

Your medium is plants? You see that as being creative?

I like to think so. Yes I do, I think that everyone has the potential for artistic ability. Mine is much more - not mundane, but common perhaps. My expression comes out through my home and what I make of my home, the color I use and the representations I use to live with, and cooking. I like to be expressive with cooking. That's still more of a challenge for me because I don't have that gift of being able to use spices other than the way a recipe tells me to. I haven't developed that part of my creativity yet, it's still a work in progress.

How do you see cooking as being creative?

What can you do with a dish of beans to make it appetizing, to make it delicious, to make it look good? With spices and ways of serving, beans or potatoes - one of my favorites, cooking with potatoes, they have a lots of potential for expressing my creativity.

Why do you like beans so much?

I think I just have a savory craving to them - they're my craving now, more than when I was younger. Earlier in my life it was a sugar craving and somehow that turned around so that I don't really care for sweet anymore, I like the savory. I like to eat - you know that.

Doesn't everyone like to eat?

There's a difference between liking something and needing something to exist. You can just eat a bologna sandwich because you need some food, or you can create a fabulous casserole and eat it with pleasure.

Do you eat for pleasure?

Sometimes I eat because I need nourishment, but I also like to eat for pleasure.

Are the creative expressions of cooking and arranging your home also based in pleasure, or would you say that's a need?

A lot of it is pleasure. The need is having a roof over my head. I like to have four walls and a roof. I need shelter, but the pleasure comes from making it my personal space, having people come in and see who I am.

How did you develop this appreciation?

Well I think I've always had it, always had a nurturing side. I think it came from whatever spirit is within me. I can remember as a child - we used to make blanket tents and play house, and I always had to have the blanket tent set up a certain way. I've always had a desire to arrange things, making the best of whatever I have available at the time.

You inherited these traits from a spirit which resides within you?

It's in me, it's part of me, it's not all of me. You have several different spirits, and mine are those of nurturing and place - my place is important to me.

Can you tell me more about your understanding of these spirits? Does this have something to do with nature?

You get to know yourself. You are getting to know your self aren't you? You question and analyze your actions and behaviors, question why you are driven to do certain things... don't you feel that's how you get to know yourself? You analyze your behaviors and reactions and wonder "why am I doing that, why did this upset me so much, why is this so important to me?" Then you realize that it's an ongoing pattern, and that pattern is who you are. It comes from within, within my heart, within my being. Anyways, it's not a revelation of any kind that everyone is trying to get to know themselves, and that some people like themselves better than others, and others do not like who they are, but yet don't seem to be able to change who they are, to make themselves better.

What is this thing that resides inside you that describes your being?

It's not a thing. When you meditate don't you feel yourself? I feel... (tears) Just give me a minute... I feel goodness and peace and I like who I am. I like the person I am. I've told you before that there is a dark side, but it is experienced less and less as the years go on, and that's because I don't put myself in situations where that defense mechanism has to kick in as much. I think that's when it comes out, when I feel threatened in some way, as a reaction to the threat of others, but now I'm much more at peace and contented with who I am and my place in the world. Do you feel that? Do you feel an introspection when you meditate?

I feel that way constantly, obsessively. What I'm trying to figure out is where that comes from, those feelings and questions and how we articulate those questions and how we feel in relation to them, how we decide and make decisions about the self they are asking about. I'm interested in the process of the thinking through those states.

Don't you feel that when you're born you have a basic concept of being and that your experiences, your environment - some of it is nature of nurture, an old argument, but some of that comes into play. If one was raised in an abusive household, physically harmed on a regular basis, they would have a different perspective. It depends on the person, but some might take that internally and believe that they must have done something to deserve it. Others might think that they don't deserve it and refuse to take it anymore. It's interesting to see how those individual natures emerge, and depending on how you're nurtured that develops as time goes on, and the more time passes and the more experiences accumulated and the more influences encountered that help you to grow one way or another... you're constantly in a mode of "I'm going to accept this" or "I'm going to go with that" or "I'm going to reject that" or "I'm not going to subscribe to that way of thinking" or whatever. That's life, and we're all constantly doing that.

How do you decide which thoughts to subscribe to and which to reject?

I think we all have things that are important to us, so we follow the paths that align to that course.

How do they become important?

Well there is the core of your nature. Everybody has a core, and I like to think that everybody has a good core, but then when I'm out in public and I go to public places and witness how people behave I wonder how they can be so mean... I think it's good though, like a little universe inside of you, your own little universe in there, and it has all your things bouncing around and you are either positive or less... the degree of positivity in your universe influences a lot of the decisions that you make and I think that's why some people go bad and become evil or psychopathic killers and others become compassionate, giving, generous people, and I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm not ever going to be a psychopathic killer, but you know what I mean. I'm more good than evil. I don't want to hurt anybody and I don't want to be mean to anybody.

How can you tell the good from the evil?

If it's hurting anyone or anything then that's more evil than good. I think there's a lot in the world that doesn't harm. If we go walking out in these hills, that would all be good, unless you fell into a cactus patch... but there's nothing evil about any of this.

How do you know?

Because it's nature and nature can never be evil. People make things evil.

Aren't people a part of nature? Is humanity separate from nature?

Yes I think so. People can be unnatural sometimes...

Can we go back to your description of the universe? You were telling me about another universe once, one that is outside of us, a system that connects people to each other, where they come from...

I remember you took issue with my use of 'physics,' as far as us all breathing the same air and returning to the same dust, and returning back to the earth when we die, returning to the all and becoming a part of all that again. I think it's a combination of physics and biology and nature and spirit. The spirit comes from the combination of everything that's out here circulating, and it comes to you when you're born and goes into the physical, and that's your core when you start, your little universe core when you start out as a person, and through your experiences and influences it all makes you into the person you become. I don't think it's a physical thing, but it exists, just not like we see things... the trees, the grass, the rocks... it doesn't exist like that, but simultaneously with the physical world. It's another world and it's here with us now. Do you ever feel that? Do you feel that spirit, or do you take it all on a physical level, letting your brain decide if you are unhappy or not? Is it all neurons firing?

I think that we don't know, and that there's a certain truth in that not knowing, which is perhaps the only truth, and we might speak the truth by admitting that we don't know. I wouldn't say that I discount the possibility of other worlds or universes or fields of reality existing or being present alongside this one... it seems more plausible that there is than there is not, but I do not believe that - for a variety of reasons - we are able to access it or interact with it or really understand or feel it at all, and this is a kind of truth, and this is the human experience. I cannot say so confidently that "it is," but I don't have a working understanding of spirit any more than what I've glimpsed through human mythology. It seems to be a very human way of telling a quintessentially human story of who we are and where we come from and where we may go or what will happen to us beyond our physical bodies, a way of explain to each other and to ourselves our birth and life and purpose and death, locally and ultimately. In terms of my own belief, or if I believe it is something greater than my own being, I think that all of the world is made of these human stories, that physics is another kind of story, a mythological narrative in its own way, which becomes real to the extent that we keep telling it, that it informs us as we are informing it.

But I think physics has been proven, isn't that why it's called physics? Because it's been proven as a physical phenomenon that will always occur when A + B = C, that it defines physical laws, that define our biology?

Well, it's a scientific understanding of the physical universe. Now, as far as what the 'physical' is, I would offer that it changes according to what language we are using to describe it...

Physical is anything you can touch or see or feel, right?

Well... "see, touch, feel"... maybe this is more of a phenomenological description that one of physics, which is to say that what is "real" is what can be interacted with through our senses, but physics tells us that one never really touches anything, that on an atomic level all matter - which is to say both our bodies and the object we are supposedly touching - is defined by repulsion, atoms pulling away from other atoms, never actually making contact but sustaining a distance, even between all the matriculated matter of your own body. If one looks at anything close enough it would appear as mostly empty space and so we could say that we're never really touching anything, never really physically interacting or sensing with anything, except through absence, continuous repulsion. Maybe our senses are a form of self-deception, an illusion or a delusion, a hallucination that prioritizes a biological 'reliability' in the world so we can get on with the business of living. Whether we agree that physics is a reliable truth, or phenomenology is a better explanation, or some better form of understanding is debatable... there is a wide-spread belief in spirits inhabiting our world alongside of us that are able to jump into people and possess their bodies and determine their behaviors, occupy their agency, and people have killed each other because they believed they were acting in service of a greater being, or that perhaps that entity was acting through them, or that they were responsible for abolishing a demon in human form back to some other plane of reality, or that argued that they should not be held accountable to their actions because they were being willed by some other being, or force, or spirit... To get back to physics, to the extent that we understand the motion of physical matter, it's based on small snap shots, brief pictures we have taken with highly invasive instruments, requiring a biased observer. There's an understanding in science that one cannot observe any system without influencing that system, interrupting the nature we are trying to witness. So we could say that physics is real to the extent that we have made it real, allow it to explain what is real, that this is a decision and a construction. Is it creative? Is it truth? I don't know, but I believe the only truth is that we don't know, and that inspires me to ask so many questions.

You're right, we don't know for sure, and what becomes challenging is that people insist that they do know, but they don't really know either, but when they become so adamant that they do know it becomes unbearable, I can't even talk to them anymore.

You strike me as being a very intuitive person...

I have a lot of empathy. I can feel what others are possibly feeling, but I've been wrong, because some people are a lot more hardcore.

You mean their core is hard?

Exactly. So I can feel when people feel badly and I try to offer them some comfort, and they can retaliate and say "I don't care, I don't care about that, that doesn't mean anything to me." Then I'm shocked that they felt that way about it, whatever the situation. And I think "oh ok that didn't bother you? I should have."

Is that a physical feeling?

My empathy? I don't think that it's a physical thing - maybe - maybe that's what influences me when I perceive someone to be in pain or happiness, in feeling it with them.

When you're picking up a feeling from someone and feeling it yourself, how do you know that you're feeling it from that person and not yourself? How do you recognize that as a feeling in yourself? Is feeling for others or through others the same as feeling in yourself or through yourself?

It just comes up from the inside, up from the core - I'll see someone dealing with someone and all of a sudden it's consuming me. It comes up. I have my core and I'm observing something... it can be in a book or in a movie, it can be a real lived experience interacting with someone, talking one to one, and the feeling comes up. Do you get that? It's me interacting or interpreting a situation. It depends on the situation. Sometimes I can definitely put myself into another persons place, but other times I can't really but I can see that they're in pain even though it's not really affecting me.

Do you think that there's a separation between your mind and your body?

I think they are connected, because you can see when people are constantly sick also have an emotional issue occurring that they can't let go of that prevents them from healing physically. They're separate but connected, as mind-body-spirit. The spirit can definitely affect the mind, but it's not the mind. They all work together and we need to pay attention to all three to stay healthy. You can't ignore your body, can't ignore a cut because it become infected and cause serious issues. You mind is the same way, if you're constantly reading the wrong things or being with the wrong influences that can definitely effect your head and have negative consequences, so you have to eliminate that from your life. Spiritually as well, if you don't pay attention to your spirit and honor the things that are important to you then your spirit will suffer, which will make your mind and body suffer. All three need attention and none can be ignored or all will suffer. I know you believe that because I can see it, because you take care of your physical and your spiritual and your mental.

What if I told you that I don't differentiate between mind and body, that I don't have a spirit, that I in fact don't have a mind or a body but I am a unified being, that my mind is me but I can't differentiate between my self and my understanding of my self? My body is also me and I cannot differentiate between "me" and this thing that it's supposedly contained in. I don't perceive an inner state, but just a state. I don't feel my body as a mechanism that I have, but that I am this meat and I am mental. The spirit is something else altogether - in my opinion - closer to the stories we tell each other about the universe than it is something in or about me.

Your meat is your vessel right now for everything else that is going on.

"Vessel" is implying a container, filled with something...

And it is! It's definitely what gives you the ability to communicate, to create, to move around and do things. Your body is your vessel and if you don't take care of it you're not going to be able to do anything.

How did you come to this understanding?

Over time and experience, gaining knowledge, reading, talking, listening, observing.

Would you say that your perspective is informed by being a woman?

No, I don't think so. It's unique to me, but I don't feel feminine. For instance, I have a good friend and in our relationship I am more of a male and she is more of a female... I don't feel feminine or girly, but I recognize I am a woman through my biological functions, ability to give birth, but other than that I'm still just a human and the only thing unique between men and women are in these biological differences. I've known a lot of men who are compassionate, intuitive, sensitive, but were still men. I've also known women who were much less compassionate, more hardcore, even violent... so I don't think it matters what gender you are, you could have those characteristics regardless of your genitalia. We have a difference in biology and the hormonal differences are all individual, they can be controlled and balanced - if one wants that. I feel like this isn't really the answer you were hoping for...

Why? What kind of answer do you think I wanted?

I feel like you weren't satisfied with that. I get that feeling from you.

What does it feel like?

Like that's not what you wanted to hear, but what you wanted I'm not sure. I'm curious what you might have thought I was going to answer because you didn't seem pleased. I want this to be a two-way conversation, but sometimes it seems like you're disappointed with my responses or maybe you don't really like them.

Well, I can tell you that I don't feel that way and it seems like from my perspective that feeling may be coming from you.

That's very possible.

I'm a separate person from you and you are reading something in me with your physical senses, or maybe some extra-sensorial manner, but you are perceiving something and I'm telling you that I'm not generating that, at least not consciously, not with intention, not in my immediate awareness. You're telling me I seem disappointed but I don't feel disappointment, I don't think that's happening, but you picked up on something, so what do you think is more reliable? The thing that you felt or are feeling from me, or what I'm telling you about how I feel?

I think that the thing I felt was relevant, but the fact that you are telling me that it wasn't what you were feeling allows me to let that go. I still have a thought that you had expected a different answer from me. It doesn't change the fact of what I felt.

There's a reality which you are active in making, through this intuition, through this empathy, and then there's this other reality that I'm perceiving through my own perspective, and we are relating and interacting, something is passing between us, so what I'm asking is which or where would you call it "reality?" Is it in what you feel, an inner state...

That's my reality, and your reality was different. We don't necessarily have to share the same reality, obviously not.

How do we understand each other while inhabiting these different realities? If I'm in one dimension of existence and you are in another and we are screaming across this void...

We just talk to each other and I say "I thought this" and you say "well mine wasn't that" and I say "ok that's fine."

Do you think reality is based in language, or in our ability to communicate?

Some of it, just a part of it. Some is absolutely intuitive.

Can we talk about intuition and your feelings? Through this language can we articulate ourselves, articulate our realities, and come to understand them? If it's based in language it would seem to be that becoming more articulate, more response-able to express, would allow for a higher fidelity of speaking and understanding in each other, like a sharper image on a screen. Maybe there's another part of it that is based in feelings or intuitions that are difficult to describe, but do you think that those more invisible, foggy realms of emotion or intuition or whatever you may call it, is it useful or necessary or even interesting to apply language to it? Should we be trying to articulate that more clearly? Or is that an impossible project?

I don't think it's impossible. I think it's something people do on an ongoing basis, when they have the time, when they spend time together. That's why they spend time together, so they can communicate what they're feeling and what they're feeling. We don't always have that luxury because we live apart from each other - you and I - the luxury of communication.

Communication is a luxury? It's not necessary?

For certain things, to get to know each other it's necessary, but in our case it's a luxury because we don't often get to do it, yet I still feel that we know each other.

How do you understand this understanding, this process of making meaning for ourselves or through each other? As people, as humans, as individuals, personally and generally... how do we dispense meaning to the things in our life? What is your understanding of that, how do you do it? Where does it come from? Does everything have meaning or is there a void that is meaningless?

Not everything has meaning. Some things are meaningless... I can't think of what they are right now, but a lot of things, most things, have some kind of a meaning, and when we prioritize that it all comes into play, physically and spiritually and the way the collide and make you feel, it gives the meaning... (tears) It makes me emotional... because I question myself sometimes, why things that seem to have meaning for so many other people don't have meaning for me, or as much meaning for me, and over the past couple of years I've been thinking about that a lot. Why am I not affected by these things? Births and deaths and acquisitions and separations, just different things that people seem to react so vehemently towards, I don't, and I wonder if that's a character flaw, but it seems like something that has developed recently because I can remember feeling very much meaning for various things. It's funny how things can affect you. For instance, when David Bowie died I cried for three days. Why? I didn't even know the man, but other people that I have known, I didn't cry when they died. Why is that? Why does that happen?

What happens when you're crying? Does crying have meaning?

That's a good question. It has different meanings. There are cries of sadness and cries of happiness, cries of mourning, mourning the loss of something or someone, cries of frustration... This is a frightening cry. Sometimes you find out things about yourself that you didn't really want to know, I mean, that you want to know but also wish that you didn't know, and I don't want to think of myself as a cold hearted person, but I know that there is that side of me, that I can turn off and become stoic, untouched, when I make a concerted effort to say "I am not going to be affected by that." I hope I don't choose that behavior incorrectly - that's the wrong word - I mean without compassion. I hope I am not doing that in a spiteful or mean way.

Do you have control of your emotions, of what you will be affected by, or what you will not?

That sounds cold hearted. I don't want to be without heart. I've been doing some self analysis on this very topic recently and I haven't quite figured out what it's all about, but it's a kind of revelation for me to realize that I can be a little bit hard-hearted.

How do you conduct your self analysis?

When I meditate, and introspect, and talk to myself. I'm curious about what comes up so I'll read articles written by someone who has studied those states in people.

Is the meditation and speaking to yourself two separate things?

Yes.

So it's a rational introspection, more than emotional?

Yes.

You're analyzing your emotions with reason?

Yes definitely.

Would you say that you could analyze your body with your mind? That your feelings or emotions are rooted in your senses, in your physical meat, or that your reasonable or rational mind consists of some learned knowledge that's not so physical? Maybe that there's a difference between the directly felt knowledge of the body and the learned knowledge of the mind? When you're choosing to be more aware of your emotion or feeling, could you say you are choosing your body instrument, and when you are prioritizing ideas of your self or a rational introspection, at these moments you are choosing your mental or cerebral instrument? Is it a rational process of deciding what you are feeling or not feeling, letting yourself feel or not, a kind of cerebral control or observation over the flow of feeling?

Yeah... I think the body is the last thing to come into play. The mind and the spirit are the first interactions in any given situation, then depending on what is decided or deciphered on that level will determine how the body reacts. The body only reacts to what the mind or spirit allows it to, and that's the same with just about everything, I think.

Is meaning an emotional state or a rational state?

I think it depends on what it is we are giving meaning to. If the house burned down tomorrow I would feel bad but I wouldn't be devastated. If something to happen to you or Jeff, that would definitely devastate me... (tears) So physical things, material things, don't have nearly as much meaning to me as relationships. Although I do like my things, I do like my books and I do like my plants, and I have some stupid little things in my drawers that mean something to me, but mostly because they remind me of something that I enjoyed, and again, if they disappeared tomorrow I wouldn't feel bad. "That thing is gone, that's too bad, that was fun." Relationships have the most meaning.

These things seems to supplement your memory.

They supplement my memory, but my memories will always be with me, and these things just spark it.

Do you think you put something into these things, that they contain some aspect of you, some feeling maybe, like the way they spark the memories that are always in you?

Only as far as the memory they invoke, for instance if there was a spoon of mine and every time you used it you thought "oh this is my moms spoon" (tears)...

Does that make you cry?

Yeah.

It's a rhetorical spoon right? What about thinking about that spoon - which isn't physical, isn't here - sparked a powerful feeling in you now?

I don't know, just thinking about you having something that would give you a fond memory of me... Ok that's enough of this, enough crying. I didn't intend for that to happen. Anyways, this was a good talk and I wish we could do this more often. Next time I'm gonna ask you questions.

TRANSCRIPTION OF AN INTERVIEW WITH MY FATHER

(car starts)

So I thought we would take a drive up to dripping springs, same as yesterday. Ok. So, this doesn't have to be very formal by any means.

Is this going to be combined with the video footage and pictures that you've been taking?

Right now I don't completely know, but as of know it seems like I might use the information from these audio recordings - maybe not directly - with lots of video in landscapes with me narrating over it, but I'm not really sure what that text will be, so this is more like research for writing what I will later speak, gathering ideas. I guess I wanted to start by asking what you make of all that, what do you think I have been doing?

I haven't thought a whole lot about it. It's a new form of art or something that you haven't tried before that you think would be interesting to try, to take advantage of the environment and being with us, and maybe something will come together. That's about as much as I've thought about it.

Well what about here, more in general not so much concerning this project. Why do you think I came here for these three months?

I take you for your word, when you said you wanted to come, based on the multiple times that we had said it would be nice if we were closer together that if it had worked out somehow for you to find a place you really wanted to be, that you found something that really excited you to do, and that place where you were happy being was a place where we could be closer to you. So based on those conversations you decided that you had some time and that it would be good to come for three months just to kinda reunite and for us to be closer together again, not under the circumstances that we had been thinking or talking about though! I mean right under our roof, in our house, is way different than being involved in a job or a project and living there and we coming to see you and you visiting us - that's a whole different environment. But I believe that's why you said you wanted to come, to get closer, to reunite, to connect again at this stage in our lives.

And do you think that we've been doing that?

Yeah I think we have.

Do you feel good about the last three months?

I felt better about the last three months as time went on, ya know? We've been apart a long time, a long time, so it was less comfortable only seeing you a couple times a year and not being able to fully explore the difference in our life philosophies, where you are compared to where I am in life, so I think over the last three months we've talked alot about that. We didn't move the bench mark very far one way or another, you are still who you are and I am still the same as who I was, we just talked about it a little bit more and talking usually creates a better understanding.

Well naturally we're still ourselves... were you anticipating some kind of change?

No. Nope.

Before I came here - or when I first arrived - you had stated that you were apprehensive about your personal space being infringed upon, of your own territory being encroached upon, and felt like you needed to iterate that you were to be protective of your routine and your state of mind... maybe you could put it in your own words?

Is there a question in there somewhere?

I'm wondering if you still feel that way or if you think I have invaded your comfort by being here?

I still feel the same way, and I feel that you did encroach, because of exactly what you noted. It's not a big space and it was intended for mom and I only. It is our retirement home, just our home, and when we have guests it's for short periods of time and we can accommodate them very well, but anyone being there, even our son whom we are madly in love with, anyone being there - don't take it personally - would make me feel that way, especially for three and a half months. When Larry and Debby came out here from New York and they stayed from September to January, that was tough, way tougher of course than having you, but yeah... I don't see it as a negative thing. I view it as being simply that mom and I love our home, we love being in it together, it is intended for us, and any time that an warm bodies are in there for an extended period of time I feel like it's not the same, not how it should be.

Not the same as when it's just the two of you?

Yes, and unless you're a person that doesn't have any consideration for other people of course you're going to modify your routine a little bit, of course you're going to adapt, of course you're going to accept things that are not typically present and deal with them. It causes you to have to deal with another persons life, so therefore you have to make considerations and change how you would normally live, so yeah... I still feel the same way.

Do you think that change that you experience when someone is in your space, is that a mental change or is it something you feel some other way? Does your house feel differently, or do you feel differently when others are present, compared to this more ideal state when it's just the two of you? How would you describe that feeling?

Not as relaxed, because of the considerations you make for other people, ya know. Our grocery list is different, our cleaning habits are different, our shopping habits are different, we've spent way more money while you have been living with us than we normally would, as a consideration of your being there. It takes us out of our normal routines and patterns and we don't want those patterns and routines to change. Well... I can't speak for Rose 100%. I don't want them to change - I can say that definitively. It's been a positive thing, I'm happy it happened, I'm happy we had the time together, but I wouldn't want you living in the house all year long, I just wouldn't want it! If we had a big house with separate living quarters, where you could come and go and you felt free and pleased to do, and we could come and go and our morning habits could stay the same, and nothing would change, if you had your own space and we had ours, that would be a whole lot different. That's what I was talking about when we were talking about going up to Albuquerque, when we were thinking about moving. The idea was that we would have a main house and there would be other buildings on the property, another living space, a garage, outdoor space, and we could all come and go as we pleased and life wouldn't change. But all under one roof is a problem for me.

I think that what I've been doing here is trying to articulate a project which seems to be more and more about origins. I use this word and it makes intuitive sense to me, but I would explain it as a meditation on the beginning of patterns which we are occupied in the present, say of these patterns that you have in your life, that you have spent time building up and getting situated and comfortable with... I'm interested in where those patterns come from, and if recognizing them says something about where you come from. Who are you and how do you define yourself... are these patterns you, or are they attached to you? Are they something that you keep that are somehow separate from you, but important nonethless? Do you think of them - these patterned ways of thinking - as things? Or are they more subconscious perhaps? How do you think of them, and where do you think they come from?

The routines and patterns of my life? Is that what you're asking me? Where do they come from?

Well, yes. You are describing this way that you have, that you like to live, and I'm wondering where that preference comes from.

I think it comes from my entire life, starting as a really small boy living with my parents in that house with so many people. We established policies and practices in the house - rotation through the bathroom and who would cut the wood and who would start the fireplace - everybody had little chores so it was - right from the very beginning of my life - a necessity to organize myself and to have a plan to make this household work with all these people, with very little money, and we have to make do and stretch every dime that we have and everybody has to do their part. That stuck with me, so when I went into highschool I had the mentality - and I'm not sure if I'm relating it to that childhood experience very well, but suddenly this independent way of thinking came on me. "I don't want to live around all those people. I don't want to live in a house with all those people. I don't really want to join clubs - sports is one thing but after that's over I'm not going to hang out with the same people I play sports with." I became very solemn and independent. I took business classes all through high school. I didn't take the college prep courses, I took all business math and business law and business studies, that was my interest, so when I got into the business world all that independence developed into really good organizational skills and financial ways of thinking and I became this very private, organized individual that not only embraced privacy - socializing with the few rather than the many - but that positioning became a way of life, of habit. I'm not a social person, I'm a private person. I like that independence of being private and self-sustaining. A lot of people talk about how if they are good people the world will take care of them, god will take care of them, but I never thought that way. I always thought that you go out there and you earn it, you go out and get it, you do whatever it takes to provide for yourself, and that makes one less individual that anyone else has to worry about taking care of. So I've always taken care of myself very well and have been very fortunate not to have any disasters or any health issues or accidents or anything to interrupt my constant focus on taking care of ourselves, so when we got married - Rose and I - we took care of each other. She has gradually over the years has come to join me in her independence and her solitude, and she has to get out every once in awhile to convene with a person or two, but she doesn't deal with those crowds anymore, doesn't crave that social atmosphere anymore, and I'm sure I've influenced her in that way - rightly, wrongly, or ambivalently. So I think it's been developing from the time I was very small, starting out with all those people somehow influenced me to feel I wanted to be more private, on my own, and I developed that independence. I couldn't wait to get out of that small town I grew up in and when I got that offer to go to Northland College on a football scholarship, that they were gonna help pay for most of it, that was "wow, this is what I need, I need to get away from here no matter where it is." I never would have chosen Wisconsin, but it was somewhere away from there, and I knew that I needed that in order to develop independently in my life practices.

Would you say that you are an anti-social person?

I wouldn't go that far because... I mean yes, as far as "do I seek out social involvement and gatherings?" Well, no, however when I'm in those environments I socialize - I feel - well and people have a tendency to like me and want to reach out to me and pull me in so that we can socialize more. I have a tendency to resist that. I'm not rude about it, but generally over a short period of time they get the idea that I'm not gonna be hanging around all the time. But no, when I'm in those social environments I feel comfortable, I enjoy it, I'm received well, and people seem to want me to be around them more. I resist it. So, sorta anti-social but not fanatical about it.

Do you perceive any negative consequences or repercussions from your independence, your privacy?

Early on I would say no. In school and in my business life I had ample social involvement. I had to. I was in class, in business meetings, talking to customers, training employees, so I was constantly dealing with people, so I had to give and take, throw around ideas all the time so there was a lot more learning from others, learning from the system, staying up on educational issues so I could deal with professional intelligent people on a regular basis. I would say it has been more detrimental to me since I retired because now I'm not around as many people kicking ideas around and sharing experiences and offering challenge to thoughts and beliefs, so I would think as time goes by it will be even more detrimental because I will only be learning from my past experiences and anything I read, which is not as broad as having many people sharing their perspectives and understanding that they have good things to say and combining that with what I have to say, getting all those opportunities to learn more. So no... throughout my life I would say it has not been detrimental preferring and seeking solitude, but when I retired and it became just mom and I kicking ideas around, whatever we read or whatever we pick up in the media, it became different.

Ok, I wanted to go back to this other word you used to describe yourself - besides being private you mentioned being organized. I've always known this has been a big part of your life and we have discussed on a few occasions how I read into those characteristics, for better or for worse. I think that these attributes have importance on numerous levels - depending on how you want to think about - but I see it as a ritual, a careful attention and consideration of your environment, a very deliberate arrangement of a space, and is related to your desire for privacy in that way. I have tried to suggest that this could be seen as a creative outlet for you, or... I had never heard of this concept until mom told me about it recently, but the Japanese concept of Ikigai...

What is it?

Ikigai is the Japanese word for one's purpose or meaning in life. She read a book about longevity and prosperity in aging persons, about these "blue zone" communities where individuals live to extraordinary old age, over 100 years old, and long story short some scientists tried to uncover how this is possible - is it the food, is it the water, is it something in the environment? The answer is yes, all those elements factor is, but the most important thing is this Ikigai, their reason for getting up in the morning, as she says. Well... you surprised me on one occasion, stating that some things simply do not have meaning, which is fine and you're entitled to that - I don't think that's necessarily a negative statement in itself - but it strikes me as interesting in trying to uncover how you think about these things, these patterns and routines that make up your life, the rituals you conduct, do you thin of them as having meaning?

The thought that came to mind when you said that I - and I don't remember saying it but it sounds like something I would say for sure - that some things don't have meaning, I think.... that some things don't warrant enough consideration to worry about if it has meaning. Let's talk about my habit of being organized then. I like everything in its place. I don't like things to be moved around. I mean at the time you're using it then fine it's not in its place but you always put it back, always where you can find it. I'm too lazy to be looking for stuff. I want to know exactly where it is when I need it and I like it to be clean, I like it to be organized, I like it to be replenished when it needs replenishing, I like to know when it needs to be replenished, it's just the way my mind works. It's like accounting. I would be a very good accountant. I would make a very good financial advisor. My organizational skills and the way my mind works when it comes to dollars and cents would lend itself to being very accurate with calculations, and I also feel that I would be excellent at analytical skills involving those numbers to project and advise a direction that someone could take to better utilize their resources. I don't see.... "what is the meaning of that?" I don't feel that creates a meaning for my life, I just have always accepted that I like being organized and I'm good with numbers. I have just accepted that and I don't know that there's a meaning there except that it has served me well, because in the business world both of those characteristics are necessary to be successful, along with many others, but those two are very important and they just came naturally to me. Not a whole lot of talent does come naturally to me. About the only thing that does is that tendency to be organized, to not only understand the organization but to be able to read into it, project future action that makes sense based on the foundation it sits upon, and seeing where it will move. I never much read into "what is the meaning" of my having these skills.

What about your relationship to the things or the spaces? You put a lot of energy into your considerations, it take a lot of energy to maintain your focus of attention, and - you haven't said this exactly but I imagine that if something is out of place it affects you emotionally or psychologically, that there's a connection there between the placement of the thing or perhaps in a wider scope between that thing and its environment, in the context of the space. If it's disheveled, unorganized, if you go looking for something and you can't find it, or it's not clean or replenished, it negatively affects you, but when it is in its place and clean and well stocked perhaps it serves as a source of comfort, or satisfaction, or even pleasure.

My opinion is very low peaks and valleys. If this is the center line (puts out hand flat in the air) and frustration is higher and satisfaction is lower on that scale, the peak might go up to frustration temporarily - ah a cuss word and "I thought I had it but where is it" - and then it goes back down to fairly flat and you know... "ok, well that means I have to take a few extra minutes to go get it" rather than just putting my hand on it and using it, but it's nothing that... or if I see pillows that are out of place or on the floor that are supposed to be on the sofa, sure I look at it and think that "those pillows should be on the sofa" but I'm not such a fanatic about it that it causes me to have stress or I'm in the other room thinking "man I gotta go in the other room and pick up the pillows." No I'm not so concerned. I know that eventually the pillows will be back where they're supposed to be, someone else will put them there, and I'm fine with that. I think the organizational skills and me wanting everything in it's place is this flat line (emphasizing with hand) and it does agitate me a little bit so it peaks up in frustration and when we clean the house and everything is perfect and I know it's going to be like that for 3 or 4 days, sure I feel a little bit of satisfaction about everything being in its place all clean and presentable. I don't think they're high peaks or low valleys. I stay pretty flat when it comes to that, it's just who I am, it's just how I live, it's just the way I've always lived, it just comes naturally to me, it just makes me feel comfortable when things are in place, but I don't get bent out of shape when it's way out and I... well, like you saying that I do a good job on the landscaping... I haven't - like someone like yourself - sat back and looked at it for an hour and thought about how "I want to do this to that plant and make this one look that way." I call it a 'once around,' it's a once around the house, starting from the right side I do a circle around the house, as I go by it I see it and shape it up, trim it, clean it if it needs cleaning, I don't think about a shape I previously had in mind I just clean it up and I move around the house until everything is pretty much in order and looking good and come out the other end and throw all the dirt away and that's the whole extent that I think about it. As far as my attention goes, I think "oh I should do a 'once around' the house today and clean everything up and throw out the debris until the next time," and then maybe the next time comes and there's not thought in advance, I just go do it.

You don't think you have any emotional or psychological attachment to these things or these places that you prepare, that you organize?

Emotional is such a way that if I lost it I would be affected somehow?

Maybe.

No, I'm not big on things, objects... If I have things I want them to be in the best possible shape that I can keep them within my abilities, but again, if it gets to a point where it's not in that kind of shape or I can't maintain it anymore I just get rid of it and get another one. I don't hold on, I don't have a lot of things I've had since... I don't save things from back when I was a kid... I have one box of stuff that I had from college, sports and stuff, but I don't keep a lot of stuff. I'm not sentimental with stuff. Things are just things, I don't put any emphasis on owning them, just caring for them.

You said you have always been this way. Is that to say for as long as you can remember? As long as you have been self-conscious you feel as you have been the same person, with the same kind of temperament, exercising the same patterns?

I have been more of a wild man that I am now, it's hard to believe I know, but yeah but pretty much. Maybe a little more dramatic as a young man, more testosterone, adrenaline running through my body from time to time, but basically the same person. I remember one time - this might be related to your question but not exactly - I was maybe a sophomore or junior in high school and Dad had a thunderbird with suicide doors and I wanted to ask him if I could take the car to prom and I wasn't sure how he was going to respond to that but you build up the nerve, you ask, and he said "absolutely son go enjoy yourself" and I opened up the car and it was a disaster. I mean it was dirt, and food, and stains, and "wow I can't have my girlfriend in this car." So it took me hours of work on the day of the prom to go through that vehicle to get it to my standards, which was absolutely clean, no stains, washed and waxed, wheels all cleaned up, even cleaned out the engine ya know, and when I gave it back to him it was like a brand new car. It was one of the best decisions he ever made to give me that car because when he got it back he didn't recognize it. I've always had a necessity to be in a clean organized environment, and that's a pride thing too because I want other people to get in and be impressed, get into the car or come into the house and view anything that we have and it's not about the thing or the beauty of the thing or the design of the thing, it's about how well I take care of it and how presentable it is, the pride it demonstrates to get into that car and have them know immediately that their environment is so clean. That gives me gratification. I would never say "isn't this a nice Thunderbird," I would never say that, but when you get in, this Thunderbird represents a big part of who I am, this is how I want you to see the Thunderbird because this is how I feel, that things need to be prideful.

Not so much the Thunderbird as a choice in a car, but the presentation, the quality of attention that you have applied to that car...

That's just as much - if not more so - a reflection of me than the automobile is. People might be impressed if you have a Mercedes, but if the car is not taken care of, no pride in it, it's not as meaningful than if you had a lesser vehicle that is presented in such a way that makes me feel good just to be in it.

I'm remembering when you brought out your father's handkerchief, the box of silk cloths from your closet. We talked a little about it that night and I don't necessarily have an epiphanies to add, but their status as objects in your life seems interesting here. They are handkerchiefs, but not to be used. Originally intended as decoration, for you they seem to represent more of an experience with your father, a memory of his own attention to detail, to his manner of dressing with a detailed eye for color and pattern coordination, a personal memory of yours of going through his drawer, disrupting the organization but then carefully putting everything back in place so that he wouldn't know you where there, so your presence wouldn't be discovered. It makes sense not to use them, not to blow your nose in them, because they're not really handkerchiefs anymore, but placeholders of this memory of your father, right?

Yes.

So I wonder, do you think that there is a piece of you in your things? That you have embedded or infused yourself in your surroundings somehow, your memories or your presence? Would you say there's some aspect of your own father in the handkerchiefs? Can object contain something, hold some kind of meaning?

I guess I come off as a pretty basic simple individual. I'm not very sentimental and I don't keep objects, my own or from others. Of my mother and father I have a few pictures - not nearly as many as my brothers and sisters - I have a few pictures, my moms treasure chest, and a few handkerchiefs from dad... They are objects remind me to remember them. It's easy to forget someone you love after so many years because you get so caught up in your daily routines, moving from year to year through your life, that you don't always reflect on the people whom have had a big impact on you as much as you should. So the reason I wanted the chest and the reason I kept the handkerchiefs was to remember, to help me remember two people that were hugely influential in my life, treated me extremely well, took great care of me, and remembering how precious the chest was to my mom, that look she had when she opened it up - we were never affluent or she never had any money or valuable objects, so it was filled with nice little things which she acquired over the years which were associated with her life and her kids, and she would have them in there like treasures, probably not worth a pile of sand, but she treasured them and I can picture her opening it up and fondling the objects inside and showing them to people. I remember my dad and all his ties hanging in his closet and all those handkerchiefs laid out perfectly and how articulate he was when he dressed and the smell of the room and the smell the handkerchiefs contributed to the room, and so they're small sentimental objects which remind me, are used by me to remember. Those are the first memories I have - those that come from the objects - which then allows my mind to expand into more and greater memories of them, which generates more memories of being with them upon different occasions, so they are just the trigger, just the starting point to the recollection, and I want to maintain that recollection. But do I feel or sense my dad in the handkerchief? I'm not sure if that was the question, but no, not other than knowing they were definitely his. I definitely remember seeing them as a kid. He wore them in his jackets, and when he passed my mother asked if I wanted them because she saw how I was dressing, very similarly with ties and matching suits and thought I would use them. I never really did use them - maybe one or two for awhile as a younger man - but I just held on to them really as a trigger for memory.

Do you have other things that you keep that remind you of specific times or events, not of your parents or your family necessarily, but did you keep anything from our house in Corona, or Lakewood, or Anaheim, or other places you have lived?

Not really. Nothing of sentimental value or emotional value or triggers of memories... yes we brought stuff from Corona but only because it was functional and we already had it.

Do you think you're a sentimental person?

Not overly, but yes I am sentimental, not overly sentimental. I do think back on things that have happened in my life and as I get older those things might make my eyes fill up with a little water while I'm thinking about them but no I'm not overly sentimental, nor would I say that I'm not sentimental at all.

Ok, a little off topic. I don't know how to say this without sounding blunt, so at the risk of sounding tactless I will just be blunt. As a man, do you think that your perspective is male? By which I mean, is your worldview attached somehow to your masculinity? Informed by being a man?

No I don't. I think that when it comes to issues of equality - I think this is applicable - for example, should a woman earn as much as a man, is one person of one color more important than one of another color - I think I'm very broad minded concerning factors of equality, so I... there's that old image of a macho man, trying to be a dominant of the two sexes, but I don't feel any of that.

I'm asking less about the sociological aspects and want to emphasize your personal inner state, if we can, your memory and feeling and behavior, your patterns.

Is that driven by the fact that I am a man? I don't know if it is. If I was female I believe I would want to be organized and be good with figures and believe that all human beings are equal and that there's no dominant race. I don't believe that the things I believe really have anything to do with me being a man. They're not complicated, they're not unique. These are characteristics and patterns that any human being could develop and live their lives by, so no I don't think I am defined by my masculinity.

The last thing I wanted to talk to you about a little bit more is, well... I'm curious about your perspective on coincidence, or luck, or fortune, as you conceive of it. You have said before that you don't believe in luck or coincidence necessarily, that they don't have a meaningful impact upon your life, but you believe in fortune. How I interpreted what you said is that fortune implies the application of will, that it can be made through determinism, whereas luck is something more haphazard, a force that we are subject to or victims of somehow. Specifically I am interested in how these concepts might be related to who you are and these patterns that you express and how much of that you would consider to be willed, to be applied or determinate acts, consciously made, as opposed to being subject to devices outside of yourself? For example, some cosmic coincidence or godly predetermination of some kind, of some expression. You could interpret my question as being about control, your own control over yourself perhaps, but maybe you could interpret it as pertaining to creativity, or how active you are in the making of yourself, in recognizing your self as a creative gesture even if you don't consider the arrangement of your environment or the objects which populate it to be creative or expressive compositions. Are we subject to ourselves? Is it all application of will, conscious or not? Do you think or believe we are subject to some force outside of ourselves?

When I was a younger man I used to be very confused about many things, but I always felt like there was someone up there looking down on me. I don't know why, but that was really the feeling I had, that there was something in this universe that decided it was not going to mess with my life other than allowing the better possibilities to occur. I'll give you an example, of luck and good fortune. I was really lucky, the day after my birthday one year I won $5,000 on a scratch off and what I did with that money is buy our first home, a condo in Anaheim hills. $4,500 of it was the down payment and $500 was used towards furnishing the place. Now the luck came out of nowhere. I went to the store to buy a $1 scratch-off and won $5,000 - that's luck! The good fortune comes in when I decided I wasn't going to blow the five grand on a trip to Vegas or something, but I was going to make a substantial investment towards something which becomes one of the greatest investments you ever make in your life which is the home. The good fortune is that we were able to maintain our jobs and make the payment and eventually sell the home for way more than it was worth, selling in one of the best real estate periods that has existed in California, at least during our time there. It could have been bad fortune if I had invested in the condo and the housing market crashed and values plummeted and I was upside down somehow by thousands of dollars - that would be some bad fortune. Our good fortune was that we had to continue doing our part in the arrangement, had to maintain our status at work and maintain our responsibilities and tend to our savings and make the payments and maintain the house in such a way that anyone that would want to own it in the future would love it as soon as they walked in and wouldn't be turned off by anything we were doing. So we had to do all that to reap the benefits of good fortune by selling at a good market and getting more for it than we thought we ever would. That was good fortune, which rolled over into the next home and the next home, where we continued to do our part, working hard at our jobs to make our payments and pay our taxes and kept our purchases in good standing, and fortunately when we went to turn it over it was at a time when we were able to reap the benefits of our years of hard work. I don't find that to be luck. Years before it was bad times and years after it became bad times but we decided upon the right time to make our move so that our fortune resulted from our decision and effort. I say good fortune and luck and two different things. Luck just happens to ya, outta nowhere, holy- wow now I have five grand. Now, what one does with that and how one utilizes that unexpected resource to put oneself in a position.... (distraction) anyway, I had some luck, no much but a little bit, but mostly I've been very fortunate that all the efforts your mom and I put forth together, we were able to benefit from it and not endure a failure or a disaster that wiped out any of our plans, which were able to keep moving forward, and we were very fortunate that we never experience those hardships.

Do you believe there is any force of will outside of ourselves?

Well I was saying to Larry and Debby the other night that I do believe in God. Now, my definition of god is... I absolutely feel that there is a force - like mom would say - in the world, in the universe, however big it is out there, I can feel it. I feel like I can feel it. More so when I'm in nature than anywhere else, I can just feel that there's this energy that influences our lives, and because I don't have any other better description of what it is, this energy force or God, and so many people want to call it God, I say "ok call it God," call it whatever you want. I do believe it exists. Now, that's pretty much where I draw the line. I don't then do what I observe many other people doing, which is a judgment I suppose... they impose what they want it to be back on to it, so that they can feel comfortable thinking about it. "I want it to reflect who I am. I want it to be like me." However they choose to impose upon it or project it into being, so that they can feel comfortable with it... I don't have such a need or feel that it's right to do that. I've always believed that it exists, I think - like I said when I was younger I felt like "wow, something or somebody is looking out for me. How can I be this fortunate?" The most fortunate I have ever been in my entire life is when I had my back surgery. That's the first time I ever had surgery or had anything physically wrong or financially wrong... I mean that was the worst thing that ever happened to me and that's nothing really. I don't see it as a "woe is me," I thought of it as "it's about time some of this stuff caught up to me." I looked at it like, if something had to happen, I'd take it this way over a lot of things. So, I've been really fortunate. Something must be looking out for me. I don't know how to define that, and I don't feel like I necessarily want to try to define it anymore. I will say that I feel it exists and I just accept it.

Can I ask you, where or how do you feel it? Would you say that it's in for body, or that it's something you experience with your senses, or is it mental perhaps, something that's an idea that you think about like a concept but is not so physical?

I don't dwell on it. I think that it is physical, I think that it is mental, I think that it is in your senses, I think that it is all of that. It's just almost like it's raining on ya... you just... you sense it, and because you sense it it's almost like it sweeps this warm feeling over you, an inspired feeling, it's spiritual. It feels almost relief, like you can take a deep breath, I'm so gratified that I can sense this. Now I sense something and I seem to feel it physically, a relieving... stress relieving, spiritual feeling... and then it starts to play on your mind. "What is this that I'm feeling? What is this that I'm sensing?" You sense it, you feel it, it's like a spiritual relief, and then you think about it, so it's all three, but the thinking about it part is the most complex, trying to determine what the hell it is... who's right and who's wrong, all these different philosophies, all these different gods, and I just don't want to think about that anymore. I just feel good that I feel it, I feel that it's a positive thing, I don't want to over think it or analyze it, it's been good to me, and now I just want to leave it alone.

That's fine. I'm not trying to force you to describe deities or God... but I'm very interested in how you describe it as relief.

Yeah, like a stress relief ya know, like a "whew" (exhales) like you can take this deep exhaled breath and it just seems to relieve stress in your body.

So do you feel a lot of stress on a regular basis?

Not from life. Self-induced pettiness is what I feel most and that I blow off really well. I mean I don't take it from day to day and usually not even from hour to hour. Most of the stress is trivial stuff which doesn't matter to a hill of beans and I realize it quickly and it has no lasting effect on my life, but I don't feel stress from life, no. I really feel that nothing is causing me stress, except myself, and that is not deep or really that important to the next hour or the next day of my life or any future plans. It will never get me to a point where I feel like I need mental or medical attention for anxiety or depression or anything like that. I don't feel like stress is detrimental to my health in any way.

Do you call it stress or do you call it anxiety?

Eh, maybe just a bad habit.

Do you feel this way consciously? Is this bad habit a conscious behavior? Are you aware of it while you are doing it?

Now I am.

Do you exercise it consciously, or do it intentionally?

No I never do it intentionally. It's a part of me that just comes out. I used to do it unconsciously and would be more belligerent about it, but now I actually sense and recognize it while I'm doing it and try - not always successfully - to tone it down and lower it and get it out of the way as fast as possible so it doesn't have any lingering effect on either me or Rose, or anybody else. It mostly only comes out with Rose because we've been together so long and we've been discussing similar things with each other for so long, so sometimes some frustration comes out for her too sometimes, but I don't believe that it's detrimental. It's one of those things that you recognize, get rid of it, and that helps it from reoccurring anytime soon, but sure enough it crops up again and you go through it again and the more your do that the more you understand that it's not intentional and won't cause any lasting harm.

So I take it based on your description that you would not call this suffering, this is not an ailment, but would describe this as something rather mundane...

It's not suffering it's a bad habit.

Have you always had this habit, for as long as you can remember? Or is this something which developed?

I developed it but I was young. I think it was probably before we got married... yeah, I had some frustrating times. Yeah, sometime after high school, maybe after college.

Would you say that it's related to your desire for privacy? I don't want to put words in your mouth... it seems like it creates difficulty with others and you are protective of your space, or is there no relationship there?

I have never viewed it that way. My first reaction is no... I don't know why... it's a trait in our family and I don't think we have taught each other how to do it I think we just kinda do it, but (you and your mother) talk about how "you're loud" and "you're opinionated" and "you're easily frustrated," meaning the Wyche family. That's what I'm talking about as the self-induced stress, that triggers me to not think as clearly as I should and then I say things that maybe I shouldn't say and there's frustration when people try to respond and they don't understand ya... but we're not talking about life or death situations. Usually it's about stuff that doesn't matter. It's about a thing, or a situation that will come and go quickly and we won't even remember it in a day or two.

And this other state of mind, this spiritual understanding you described... that serves as a relief to that self-induced stress?

I haven't really ever though of it that way either...

I thought that was how you described it, this spiritual feeling washing over you like a warm rain, a relief from the stress, and the stress isn't from like or from the world and it certainly is not suffering, but it's a self-imposed state...

They're separate things. This sensation I tried to explain is not regular, it's not daily, it's not even monthly, it's maybe several times a year, usually experienced outside, never inside or based on a ceremony or someone giving a speech or something. It's always just an individual thing where I'm at a spot outside somewhere or traveling and I can sense and feel it and feel good about it and then forget about it really. Maybe it only happens three times a year, but those three times are powerful enough and memorable enough and you've experienced it enough through your life to say that I have to believe it exists. I personally have to believe that this force exists and is influencing my life.

Do you ever consider trying to replicate that experience, or strive to experience it more often? It seems like a powerful experience worth having. I can appreciate that you can feel it through a ceremony, but if it's about being outside...

Go outside more?

If it's about communing with nature or communing with yourself or with a greater power or whatever it is, in your mind or in your body or up above, maybe it's in the place or in the journey to a place, it seems to be undeniably beneficial.

Yeah, to reiterate that I am a basic and simple individual, and I use that to proceed my thought that "no I don't," I really don't seek to have that experience more often or try to evoke it in any way. I just appreciate it when it happens, as a reminder that I feel that way, a reminder that I'm not here alone doing it all by myself, then it passes and I move on. I'm pleased that I experienced it, feel replenished by it, and then I don't think about it anymore. I don't feel the need to... pursue it in any other way.

Ok... if you were to experience that feeling more often, do you think it would change you? Or could? Change your patterns? Would it make you a different person?

Based on the 3 or 4 times a year that I feel it, I would have to say no, because it doesn't change me when I feel it those times, so I can't imagine feeling it 2 or 3 or 4 times more would really... it's enough of a sample size to say "hey, I'm grateful that I've felt that, if in fact it's something that has granted me good fortune then thank you - I don't know why I deserve it but thank you very much."

Does that experience have value?

To whom?

To you only? Or to anyone or anything?

I don't know about value or important. I feel gratified that I sense it. I am happy that I relate to good fortune, maybe it's the power of positive thinking I don't know, but certainly it has been nothing but a good positive feeling and certainly everyone needs more of those in their life, but I don't over-think it at all, and I don't seek it. It happens when it happen and I try to appreciate it when it does.

OK. Thank you for this.

Sure.

****

My apologies for the delay, I assure you it's digital. I just made a phase shift transition to the Norwegian paradigm. I'm writing to you from a candle-lit gray cloud interior seamlessly melding with the neutral atmosphere ebbing outside the window. It feels strange and familiar to be back on Nordic soil, more like home than home was, but with a whole influx of memories and associations that I had neatly left behind for sake of overstuffed baggage. I'm here to be with my girlfriend, a Norwegian that I became entangled with on a chance encounter in Seyðisfjörður, in the very "living" room where you and I met in fact. She's working on a practice-based thesis concerned with reconciling a highly intuitive and idiosyncratic experience of memory with a handicraft textile manufacturing practice and that combination has proved to be quite stimulating to my own flickering cogito. We met the week following my 6 months as artist/teacher-in-residence at LungA which felt like a warm bath of on my mind, coagulating the nerve endings of my mind into a brine of effluvial questions and buoyant affectations. The school conversations cracked me open, partially against my will but all the better in the wider scope, and this beautiful woman swooped in to impregnate my psyche with the uniquely feminine inquisition that I had been longing for, so I was all game for the adventure and still seem to be, much to my own surprise. Then I built a house with a gang of sensitive artsy Danish guys, some of whom you know well. Exploring the intimate inside of a decomposing Icelandic barn built from an old English cargo ship and then touching ever centimeter of its corpus - and even having it penetrate my own, shards of ancient trees becoming lodged in my eye and filling the cracks of my wounds - for a short time I was bonded to a place and a purpose that I could not have anticipated. The house is fucking beautiful, perhaps you've seen pictures. Ah yes, and before that, and before meeting the woman, but after the school carnival, I was able to enact my private project in public view. I have been working on an "opera" since January... a catch-all term, certainly a metaphor but perhaps more-than, which encapsulates all my various activities of writing and composing and diagramming and processing of conceptualizings and musings on various singularizings of subjectivies, or something like that. Yeah, we put on a performance in the theater in Seydis and it was wild, this crazy eyed fire tongued Swedish serpent on a haphazard child-sized drumset cooing animal sounds to his Norwegian counterpart liking the reeds of his saxophone as he incants proto-syllabic consonants through the brass bellows, and some American friends there too, being all disgruntled and arrogant in their own genius in their own way, with me at the center spitting into a microphone some of those indecipherable alliterations that I like to write. When it was happening it felt strangely professional. When it was over it felt unbelievably fresh. When I was mixing the recordings and listening back to them while walking weeks later it seemed as though we were evoking many important nodes of the network of history. Then I hated it, and everyone involved. Then I came around full circle to realize (or remember perhaps) that it was only a false start, a test which must be appreciated through its useful failures more so than any delusion of successfully completing a project with no articulable genesis. After Iceland, months later, when I return to the desert of the real a.k.a. Umerica and began the next stage of the research, the entire project shifted in energetico-temporal-spatio dynamic territory, transmogrifying into a strange object of consideration, which I am currently ruminating over and deciding out to handle. I think I'm still writing an opera, of sorts, or of sorting, but not how I thought I was. Since then I read Zizek's Parallax View, Barthe's The Neutral, and three books by Manuel DeLanda, yeah then I got back into Derrida's Of Grammatology for a minute before moving on to Levi-Stauss's The Raw and the Cooked. Needless to say all that done cluster fucked me real good, massaging some boundaries and dissolving others about who I am and how I articulate my own ontology and what pragmatic purpose one might purport to wield. I'm about to finish Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies which might be the most important book that I can remember reading since Anti-Oedipus and in some ways even more important than that... it's a diagram, a schematic, outlining in excruciating technical detail how to construct a cerebral technology to transverse the chasms expanding between the islands of disciplinary categories that prevent philosopher-physicists from realizing the multiplicity/modalities of oscillating, scaling, reverberating mind. Shit be fucked uuuuuuuup and I love it. Highly recommended. I never read What is Philosophy but have been meaning to for some time so I went and picked it up from the library yesterday. All those books make me want to go back to school, do some phDing maybe, that European Graduate School keeps haunting me alongside the living nightmarish possibility of pursuing a doctorate in "art practice" instead. I know I don't want to go to school in the states, that's for goddamn sure, mostly. Applications are due at the end of the month and I'm sitting curious to see if I'll go through with it or not. When I was in New Mexico - spent the last 3 months there sucking off the parental teat while staring blankly at the ceiling wondering "am I living, am I working, am I making art?" - I collected hours of footage reminiscent of those quiet slow landscape scans of Terrence Mallick complete with whispered monologue narration. I recorded a bunch of music too, mostly heavy drone and algorithmic gymnastics on the solo electric guitar, and I think they go together somehow. Oh yeah, and I've been recording conversations. It started with me going on long walks up in the mountains of the fjord, speaking out loud simply as a way of externalizing the voices in my head and realizing that they needed to be recorded so that I could decipher their apparent brilliance. Then, yes, of course, I need to activate that supposed insight in relation to others or else it's just schizo babble... better to be a schizophrenic out for a walk than a neurotic on the psychologists sofa right right? I remembered some things about Aleister Crowley's magic of psychic intention, Alfred Jarry's autodictation of public conversations as a kind of signal-to-noise mechanical writing technology hybrid of the mind and the pen like a proto-cyborgian telegraph transcribing the spherics of the noosphere, oh yeah and that little ditty about Jacob Boheme hearing voices in the soap bubbles and seeing alien glyphs in the slime of the human goo that collected on the rocks and how he wrote it all down as a transcendent vision of sublime knowledge far surpassing the humdrum banter of the plebes of his day, and I thought "hmmm am I having a vision or am I a visionary or do I only see the two feet in front of me and so who is leading who?" Yeah so I started engaging, in conversation and in clandestine subterfuge, small careful movements of distraction, leading my mother's gaze across the table as I ash my cigarettes with the right hand and activate the tape recorder with the left, invisibly placing it down in the mists of plain view before asking some pertinent question to see if she would answer honestly. The good side is that I became much closer to my mother and articulated the insurmountable distance between my father's obstinate stance on things. The bad thing is that I have all these goddamn hours of goddamn recordings that I have to goddamn deal with now, but I suppose that's the point. I'm gonna spend the month reviewing, editing, attempting to form a third mind between the self that once was and the self that is currently, supposedly. Editing is violent, rigorous, destructive, and shit it is satisfying. It feels pretty good to switch gears to often and so drastically. I think that's part of why the girlfriend dialogues are working out too: it's a real pleasure to hear her speak so matter-of-factly about her hyper-dimensional affect, how she feels her way through the world emphasizing the tactile sense in a sea of echoes, memory without so much nostalgia, as a kind of baseline to my own demented rationalizing wormhole. Oh yeah ­­­­___ is here too, just arrived today to smash faces with his Norwegian counterpart, a very fine human that was my student at Lunga. I'm gonna make contact to absorb a little bit of Solveig's savant-genius and try to record some of ___'s progressive destruction as grist for my mill, for this opera thing, or is it just life? Or labor? I can never tell anymore. I'm glad to hear about your status. What are you studying by the way? Philosophy? Linguistics? What kind of degree? What about your book, was it published? I let the ball drop with my art book, just never really pursued options and didn't want to pay for self-publishing, but I often think about publishing-as-practice. I want to make more books too. I need to find a publisher, and a record label, and gallery representation, and a benefactor. Anyways, tally ho and keep in touch. I'll be here for some months with no job, just focusing on my own crazy spice mix. After that I dunno. Cheers, and remember to remember!

I'm now in Norway, sitting in a high wing of an old house built circa 1900 overlooking a white landscape populated with quaint A-frame houses and brick chimneys. Certainly an idyllic picturesque scene I can hardly believe. I'm staying here with my girlfriend for awhile, whose parents have painstakingly restored this house based on their extensive experience with historical painting techniques and wood beam construction. I've only been here a few days but we've already had some extremely tantalizing conversations about the sources and varieties of indigenous wood resins and minerals for painting the traditional Norwegian cabins, how to prepare handmade paints on open fires, and some of the clandestine associations of carpenters that sounds very similar to the American Masonic lodges. The forest is mysterious and full of magic. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the mythologies and methodologies to make connections - at least in my own mind - between these expanded stratifications of reality.

I'm here waiting out the American political turmoil to make some decisions about what comes next. Not to get all controversial or anything, but if Trump wins the election then I will have to try to find a way to stay abroad on a more permanent basis I think. Otherwise I'm considering where I might like to relocate in the states in order to initiate a teaching "career"... I have it in my head to jump in to the community college level and start building some experience, wherever the opportunity might arise. I'm also considering applying to some phD programs, which I've been on the fence about for the last couple of years. I re-read James Elkins book on the subject and found some interesting programs in Sweden, The Netherlands, and Austria, but I find it increasingly difficult to compartmentalize my thoughts and theories into a fine art dialogue. Don't get me wrong, I know that artists have an essential role to play in the revolutions of consciousness, one that no other disciplinary perspective may be capable of fulfilling, but I am less sure that my pursuit of increasingly specialized interests will be best sustained within the art institutional dialogue as opposed to perhaps say to a more rigorous philosophical program.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING CAN COMMENCE

ONTOGENESIS

• COMPILE VIDEO FOOTAGE INTO TIMELINE

• REVIEW GUITAR COMPOSITIONS + ISOLATE RIPE FRAGMENTS FOR ABLETON MANIPULATIONS

• ORGANIZE CONVERSATION RECORDINGS FOR TRANSCRIPTION INTO LIBRETTO

  • AUTO-TRANSCRIPTION SOFTWARE PROCESS? maybe that defeats the purpose... should be an active process of listening + re-recording the spoken content into an interpretation, second order writing

• SKETCH DIAGRAMS FOR MUSIC COMPOSITION METHODOLOGY, RELATION OF MEDIA, NEW MODEL OF SUBJECTIVITY

SKETCHES FOR ACT II

FLOATING HEADS AMIDST AFFECT ATMOSPHERES

CONCERNING THE EMERGENCE AND RECONCILIATION OF THE PRIMARY DUALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, THE RATIONAL MIND AND THE AFFECTIVE SENSE

• A NEW ENSEMBLE IN THE WORKS:

  • ___: DRONE ELECTRONICS, VOCAL INCANTATIONS

  • ___: VIOLIN, VOCAL HUMMING

  • ___: CONTRABASS

FUTURE TRAJECTORIES

• APPLYING TO SCHOOLS? GRAD PHILOSOPHY OR PHD? EGS?

• WOOFING, ANTHROPOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOLUNTEERING, SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE

• AMERICAN/WORLD HUMANITARIAN WORK

• COMMUNITY COLLEGE TEACHING POSITIONS - UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

LETTERS TO HUMANS

• ___

• ___

• ___

A blizzard swooped in and now the world is wrapped in a white whirling void. I find so much comfort in this level of isolation, such supreme focus, especially concerning my interests in essences and subjectivity. I just finished Schizoanalytic Cartographies by Felix Guattari, a work of technical brilliance by a true luminary of his own time. The text serves as a kind of schematic for consciousness constructed from the remnants of a salvaged modern linguistic system and oriented towards articulating a more useful understanding of the quantum scaling of the mind, in a nutshell. It's literally strewn with diagrams and algorithms, demarcating territories of incorporeal bodies that would make any Surrealist shudder in their boots, drawing out the miniscule modalities of subjectivity in an excruciating detail that boggles the mind and quivers the corpus. In short, I believe Guattari has articulated a system that leads "out" of our contemporary malaise - the so called 'postmodern condition' debilitating the creative milieu - a text that serves up a description of a threshold. It's up to the reader to pass through to the other dimension. The book was rigorous on my cerebral framework as well as my mental meat, which is to say that I felt its content viscerally, felt it working on me and through me with a palpable affect, like a virus I could not help myself from assimilating into my own cellular architecture. All contents of the text aside, I believe there is something in the mode of transmission, I don't know what exactly, an elegant combinatorics of syntax and vocabulary and scientific metaphor that propelled the conversation through my apprehensive barriers like neutrinos passing through the earth. There's something significant to this, again not so much in the content as in the context, the form, that is so very much related to the plight of the artist and so irreconcilable with the musings of so many weak willed contemporary philosophers, serving as validation and provocation for the work we have cut out for us. The world is in dire need for visionaries emphasizing wisdom over knowledge - I believe - machines dismantling their own components, architectures built upon a foundation of pure sensual desire for space, an infectious art free of the humdrum doldrums of the mundane, beyond the banal, more than mere progress without the delusions of prophecy. I have often been caught up in my own reverie of what such an art form might be like but more recently I have been tempering my awareness towards developing a methodology of achieving such a state, testing the tools in social arenas, even flexing my more-real-than-real relationships (such as with my parents) by attempting to 'practice what I preach' minus the soapbox. As you can guess, it's been a process of varying successes and failures, but what's interesting is that I can scarcely delineate between the two, as each successive action seems to strive for increasing autonomy in response, and sometimes what is needed is a powerful failure to recalibrate the horrors of stifling successes.

I recently spent three months in the deserts of New Mexico - just before coming to Norway - to live with my parents and initiate a new project, a kind of meditation on 'origins,' my own as well as in a more anthropological sense. As part of this process I dedicated myself to the task of combing through my notebooks, all of them, dating back to circa 2000. Once I got beyond the early diaristic embarrassments and entered into the chapters of college life I began to remember so many universe-expanding tributaries feeding into my current cerebral current, and of course your influence became palpable again. I remembered that cosmological timeline you wrapped around the walls of the Julius Caesar gallery, how succinctly is summarized a stream of transcendental mindflight while remaining irreconcilably incomplete due to the sheer scope of the endeavor. I wish that I had a print of it for my wall. I've begun my own cosmological outline, which I refer to as my 'opera' as I am attempting to carryout my discourse through an orchestration of numerous mediums put into relation to each other even as they are oriented towards elucidating the bedrock of relations themselves, of the self to the self and other selves, and I suppose of alterity in general. It began as a series of drawings, or diagrams I suppose, which attempted to outline a methodology for thinking-through the process of thinking, which then became a kind of notation for acting in other media, which in turn then needed to be mapped in relation to the primary process to form a kind of meta-order "process of processing" or just "process-ing" and is now expanding into a cosmology all its own. I'm currently composing music, editing video, writing a libretto, and delineating new subjects for the diagrams by articulating, enacting, and cross-correlating a methodology of applied awareness. Perhaps that seems vague or abstract, but I suppose the detail can be found in the mechanics of the method and the concreteness observed in the presence of the works... the art must speak for itself, eh? I'll send you a teaser once I have one prepared.

Speaking of which, I must now return to my composing. It has been a bit of a struggle to articulate my post-studio practice since emerging from grad school. There have been years where it felt as though I produced very little since my activity was not evident in images or objects, but now looking back, especially with the revitalized perspective gleaned from my notebooks, I can see that it was all accumulating towards articulating this trajectory. I've become more interested in experiences than ephemera, the proposition that philosophy is an articulation of a life being lived rather than a theoretical proposition of how we might become anything other than ourselves, and my practice has been forced to accommodate for this need. It stills seems very precarious at times, so delicate that it could easily be blown away with a careless breath, so nuanced as so be rendered utterly invisible unless observed through a calibrated gaze. I suppose that's why I find it so alluring.

I think of you and your researches often. I wonder if you are working and how it is progressing, and if you are still enjoying teaching, and what you would say about the attitudes and orientations of the younger generation of artists you observe filing through your institution. I wonder if you have joined an occult order or are conducting clandestine ceremonies by either moonlight or the illumination of public gaze, or how you would feel about the influx of shamanistic practices in the contemporary art world, all these whispers (and sometimes shoutings) about Ayahuasca and vision quests and ego dissolution and magic.

There are some layers there, some that you're laying down and others that were already present when you entered the scene, which is to say, some that you should claim responsibility for and others that have nothing to do with you unless you choose to engage with them. First of all, you are different and you should think of that as an asset, anything except a weakness. I'm different too. We don't gel with the rest of the goo, stand out like stains on an overly ironed social fabric. Please forgive the cliché, but that's why we are capable of greatness. I truly believe that, which means I've assimilated it into my perspective, rooted it down into the core of my being and derive energy from that understanding, use it as grist for my mill, and I encourage you to do the same. That point aside, it's fine to be uninterested in the conversation, but perhaps you should consider being engaged enough in it to be able to articulate what you are not interested in if only to be able to better articulate what you would rather be doing? Communication is a powerful tool full of potential and also an impossible burden that stifles the expansive potential of the mind, and as with any other tool it's all about how you choose to use it. It's about choice: of attention, of intention, of contention, of reception. Ha! You should also remember that most people don't know what they're talking about, just like you (and me for that matter), so all the buzzing words and sinuous syntax is more of an illusion - or a delusion - than some puzzle that needs to be worked out. Go ahead, play ping-pong and listen to europop, but also relate it back to what we are all doing here, as an exercise more than a test, as a way of flexing another muscle which is not the body but very much related to it, not to show off or put yourself above others but to close the gap between persons and soften the lines between these things which appear so separate. Or come up with another reason... that's creation! That's what creativity really is, coming up with a good reason to continue the conversation so we don't sit around in silence, living our silent separate lives and dying our slow silent deaths. Remember that theory is also silly, even more so for proclaiming that it is the epitome of "being-serious," but there are things that are much more silly than ping-pong and europop. There's a whole cosmos of art and artists and savants and geniuses that came before us that proved in so many ways in all their different styles of speaking how utterly absurd life can be. Sometimes it's about tragedy, sometimes about comedy, and sometimes about showing how there's really very little difference between the two. Is it silly to play ping-pong? It strikes me as an extraordinarily common activity even though I can be right there with you in observing how fucking ridiculous - which is to say pointless, infinite, contentless, and metaphorical - it can be from a certain point of view. It's the point of view, your point of view, that you should be talking about and only you can describe it and only you can decide what words or theories are appropriate for describing it. Just please don't stop trying. Another thing... confusion is the spark that keeps us moving. You don't really want to understand it all do you? How fucking boring that would be, to get it all the time, to know it so well that you can anticipate what the person will say next, see the conclusions before the story is told. That sounds like being dead already. Life is about the story, the process, the method, all the actors on stage twirling around in their absurdly overstuffed costumes waving their hands in the air and wailing their vocal chords like it means something, and then all the people in the audience wearing just as many layers of costume and spouting just as many variations of pompous affect pretending to understand what they're seeing, writing books about it, getting in arguments over it, standing up and shouting when they see something they don't recognize, tearing the seats out of the floor and throwing them at the musicians when they play dissonant notes, riding the composer out of town on a rail for proclaiming to have an original idea that needs to be expressed in a new language. All the best things in the world were made by outsiders - in my humble opinion - and fuck do we really need more of them these days with how the world is turning and the oppressive violence in all the eyes of the seemingly calm and collected militant citizens sipping their imperialist coffees and whispering in controlled voices about bodywork for personal improvement and object arrangements for their new photography series and ayahuasca rituals informing their post-studio practices. My advice to you is to learn their words, learn them real good, understand them in your own way if only to know why you don't want to use them or how to use them as a weapon against those that wield them to oppress and silence others. You're a powerful being and a radical outsider, but don't be silent because that's serving their interests. Remember that they are there for you, not the other way around. That whole school and all the faculty and all the students, they're all there for you, to inform your universe and expand your vocabulary and challenge the way you feel and act so that you can become more aware and more intentional and more powerful, not the other way around. Find your language, or make it up on the spot, and let them figure it out. You make the mess and they clean it up.

WHAT ARE THE STORIES I TELL MYSELF TO CONTINUE WORKING IN THE SAME WAY? HOW CAN I CHANGE THE STORIES SO THAT I MANIFEST DIFFERENT RESULTS?

ORIENT THE OOFKAUU TOWARDS A POTENTIAL PUBLIC

• DEFINE THAT PUBLIC

• ADDRESS THAT PUBLIC - DIALOGUE

• CONTEXTUALIZE THAT PUBLIC

• SIMULATE THAT PUBLIC

  • BUILD THE STAGE THROUGH DIAGRAMS: PUT THE PUBLIC IN ITS PLACE

  • AUDIENCE ARRANGEMENTS

  • FACE LECTURE SERIES IDEA: AN AUDIENCE INHABITED BY MYSELF

• A MUSIC MADE FOR PERFORMANCE

  • THE COMPOSITION FOLLOWS THE ACT OF PLAYING

• AN UNTRAINED DANCE OF SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE

  • FIND + APPROPRIATE THE MOVES

  • RECREATE MYSELF OUT IN THE WORLD = WITNESSES

• IF ART = LIFE THEN LIFE = SCENE

  • DAILY MONOLOGUES PERFORMED FOR THE INTERNET

IS THE INTERNET THE AUDIENCE?

AM I MY OWN AUDIENCE?

IS THE CONVERSATION FOR THE WORLD OR FOR MYSELF?

WHO + WHAT DO I HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS?

WHO + WHAT IS BEING CRITIQUED?

• WRITE MY OWN CRITIQUE

• DESIGN MY OWN CONTEXT

FAKE THEATER : THEATER OF THE UNREAL = NO THEATER AT ALL

FAKE ACTING = JUST LIVING

FAKE RECITATIVE = JUST SPEAKING

FAKE MUSIC = NO RESPONSE JUST PURE AWARENESS

IN STAGES

STAGE 1: PUBLISH PROLOGUE

• ASSEMBLE FOUND FOOTAGE VIDEO + MOTION GRAPHICS OF DIAGRAMS WITH THE PROLOGUE PERFORMANCE RECORDING. PUBLISH TO WEBSITE WITH DEDICATE VIEWING SPACE.

STAGE 2: ARTICULATE TRAJECTORIES FOR ONTOGENESIS

• NEW DIAGRAM-DRAWING SERIES OUTLINING THE BEGINNINGS OF THE OPERATIC SUBJECTIVITY

• DESIGN THE REVERSE NOTATION STRUCTURE OF MUSIC + VIDEO: BREAK DOWN COMPOSITIONS FOR RATIONAL UNDERSTANDING + PERFORMANCE SCENARIOS

• NEW THEORETICAL TEXTS OUTLINING THE CEREBRAL FRAMEWORK OF THE LIBRETTO, MONTAGE TECHNIQUES, MEDIA AESTHETICS, ETC.

NOTATE MUSIC FOR PERFORMERS: ___, ___, ___

MAKE DRAWINGS FOR CONTEXT: NO THEATER

META = ONTOLOGY

ORGANIZE ALL THE CONTENT THAT CURRENTLY EXISTS.

OPTIONS:

• LINEAR SCRIPT

• SPATIAL, VISUAL, RHIZOMATIC

• FLUID WEBSITE FOR IMMEDIATE PERUSAL

CATEGORIZE ELEMENTS ACCORDING TO MEDIA: RECITATIVE, SCORE, ECOLOGY

NOT PHILOSOPHY! IT'S ART = BASED IN AFFECTS AND PERCEPTS

LIBRETTO = PERSONAE // MUSIC = CONCEPTS // VIDEO = PLANE OF IMMANENCE

*REMEMBER* TO REFER BACK TO THE SCHEDULE SO THAT THESE PHASES CAN BE COMPLETED BEFORE LEAVING NORWAY. MUST BE CONCRETIZED FOR PRESENTATION TO PEERS + APPLICATIONS SO THE PROCESS CAN GAIN SUPPORT!

VIDEO = ECOLOGY

CONTEXT WITHOUT CONTENT

SERVES IN PLACE OF THE STAGE FORMS > NEED TO BUILD THEM INTO AN ARCHITECTURE, GEOMETRIC FORM, FACETS OF A SHAPE. DESIGN RESEARCH WORK = GOOGLE SKETCH UP OR STAGE DESIGN SOFTWARE? DESIGN A DIMENSIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR VIDEO TYPES: SPATIO-TEMPORAL COORDINATES AS CATEGORICAL SYSTEM FOR SHOOTING NEW FOOTAGE + ORGANIZATIONAL CONTAINERS FOR COLLECTING FOUND FOOTAGE

DESIGN NOMADIC TEMPORARY TEXTILE- BASED STAGES FOR VIDEO PROJECTION

*REMEMBER* THE EARLY VIDEO NOTATION STRUCTURE FOR 'THE VIDEO SCROLL' = NOTATION FROM TEXT, IMAGE, AFFECT DESCRIPTION, SYMBOL-CONTAINERS. ECOLOGIES OF EMOTION, PROVIDING CONTEXT FOR CHARACTERS, IE: PLANE OF IMMANENCE.

*REMEMBER* INTERIOR DESIGN WORK = HOW DOES ONE CLASSIFY THE IMMANENT AFFECT OF INTERIOR ARRANGEMENTS/SPACES, THE FEELING OF ARCHITECTURE, THE AURA OF MATERIALS, THE MEMORY WITHIN THINGS?

NEW MEXICO FOOTAGE: DITCH EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE VOID > FOCUS ON "SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING." ANYTHING THAT DISTRACTS FROM THIS SHOULD BE DELETED. EDITING WORK

LIBRETTO = RECITATIVE

CANNOT BE WRITTEN FROM REAL RELATIONSHIPS > TOO FLAT, "TOO REAL"

MUST BE MYSELF IN CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF > MORE REAL THAN REALITY

CONCEPTUAL PERSONAE = ELUCIDATION OF THE CASTE OF CHARACTERS. USE THIS AS THE GUIDING SYSTEM FOR PROCEEDING WITH A WRITING PROCESS. PROVIDES A CHOICE OF METHOD: WRITE FREELY THEN SUPERIMPOSE OVER CASTE, OR WRITE OF/FOR SPECIFIC CHARACTERS

THE CASTE SYSTEM MUST BE GIVEN MORE DETAIL. WRITING WORK = BIOGRAPHIES FOR EACH CHARACTER, "CHARACTERISTICS," SYMMETRY OF DIVISIONS OF SUBJECTIVITY.

*REMEMBER* TINGULEY'S MECHANICAL PORTRAITS OF PHILOSOPHERS, MY OWN PORTRAITS OF BS, RD, CT, EX GIRLFRIENDS, OTHER SYMBOLIC PORTRAITS SOURCED FROM ART HISTORY, MASKS FROM NUMEROUS CULTURES, LEVI-STRAUSS'S MYTHOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES

*REMEMBER* WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN. RETURN TO THE ORIGINAL LONG-FORM TEXT. AMEND, REVISE, ADD TO, PUT IT INTO A TIMELINE.

MUSIC = SCORE

ENERGETIC QUALIA SERVING TO INFORM THE CHARACTERS + CONGEAL THE ECOLOGY.

MUSIC = CONCEPTS PLOTTED ALONG A PLANE OF IMMANENCE POPULATED BY CHARACTERS.

*REMEMBER* TREATMENT OF SWEDISH MUSIC: STAGES OF PERFORMATIVITY

1. PERFORM WITHIN IMPROVISED STRUCTURE. DONE.

2. EDITING LONG FORM CONTENT INTO FRAGMENT-CONCEPTS. EDITING WORK

3. PERFORM EDITED MATERIAL WITH ABLETON = LIVE COMPOSITION. PLAY WORK

4. MIX FOR USE WITH OTHER PROCESSES.

5. REVERSE-ENGINEER PROCESS AS A DIAGRAMMATIC NOTATION FOR WOULD-BE PERFORMERS. DRAWING WORK

1. REVIEW/COMPILE EVERYTHING TO REVEAL THE OOFKAUU COSMOS THUS FAR

TO PRODUCE:

• SKELETAL STRUCTURE FOR DIAGRAMS - WHAT TO ILLUSTRATE NEXT

• META-THOUGHT HIERARCHY (IE: SCROLL) - WHAT TO FOCUS ON NEXT

• FORMATTED IN-PROGRESS LIBRETTO - WHAT TO SPEAK NEXT

2. MAKE FOUND FOOTAGE VIDEO TO CONTEXTUALIZE PROLOGUE CONTENT

• SO THERE CAN BE WEB PRESENCE - INCLUSIVE DIALOGUE!

• COMPLETE WITH SUBTITLES OF MONOLOGUE - FIDELITY OF COMMUNICATION

• REVITALIZED EXPERIMENT WITH VIDEO NOTATION

3. EDIT NM VIDEO FOOTAGE TO CONTEXTUALIZE SPATIO-TEMPORAL-COORDINATES OF ACT 1 SCENE 1: WILL PROVIDE STRUCTURE FOR PERFORMING RECITATIVE + MUSIC

3. DESIGN MUSIC NOTATION FOR SCORING COMPOSITION - EXPERIMENT WITH PERFORMING LIVE WITH OTHER MUSICIANS

4. DESIGN PSYCHOLOGICAL DIAGRAM-PORTRAITS FOR INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERS - WILL PROVIDE DIRECTIONS FOR HOW LIBRETTO CAN BE PERFORMED

5. DESIGN PROJECTION SCREEN THEATERS FOR VIDEO WORKS - VARIOUS METHODS ARE POSSIBLE: DRAWING, COLLAGE, 3D MODEL, PHYSICAL MAQUETTE. REQUIRES INSPIRATION RESEARCH

6. LATER = FIND LOCAL ACTORS, MUSICIANS, VENUES/GALLERIES. OPTIONAL.

INITIATE DAILY WRITING PRACTICE - MORNINGS

• FURTHER ARTICULATING THE CASTE OF CHARACTERS

• COMPILING + APPROPRIATING IDEAS FROM BOOK SOURCES: "QUOTES"

• CASCADING CONSCIOUSNESS OBSERVATIONS: SPOKEN OR WRITTEN

INITIATE DAILY COMPOSING PRACTICE - AFTERNOONS

• ISOLATE FRAGMENT-CONCEPTS FROM AUDIO RECORDINGS

• DISPENSE EFFECTS + PREPARE FOR ABLETON PERFORMANCE

• MIX VARIATIONS

INITIATE DAILY CONTEXTUALIZING PRACTICE - EVENINGS

• REVIEW VIDEO TIMELINES + EDIT

• COLLECT FOUND FOOTAGE + ARCHIVE

• PERFORM MUSIC + MONOLOGUE WITH VIDEO: PERFORM FOR AN AUDIENCE OF 1

****

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Que the gray... Hold the black. No lights! Ok, now tip toe in, center stage. Look straight ahead. Still now! Ok... go ahead.

The lights come up, an evenly diffused glow of LED upon creamy linen screens silhouetting a single figure standing center stage. The pale digital lumens seem to irradiate the back and sides of the figure, leaving the front shrouded in shadow.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Gray! And... Go!

Fog is injected into the atmosphere from stage left and right. The hiss of the fog machines is the only sound in the room, until suddenly the shuffling of the figures' garments becomes audible.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Go ahead!

A muffled voice clears its throat. Dampened, as though emitting through a cotton gag, slowly and deliberately, the voice begins to speak.

[FIGURE]: Space... Time... Concepts.... Where..? When..? What..? It's already finished, which is to say forgotten, but who is saying, and why of ends already at the beginning, and is it always just so or more, and will there always be more ands than justs? How just is that? Who's to judge? Erewhon; no-where, and now-when. Grissaille; the gray gradient grouting the sediments of sentiment, the in-between and outer-insides separating the uninhabitable islands of image, firmaments of feeling, fundaments of elements resonating within the vacuum of mass accumulations and matter convolutions, out there and here also. Begin again, back to the beginning that can't be located, so then again towards the other direction, ahead into the mists with no insides, no sides at all, following a beacon without roots, diffuse scrim of wave lengthening their particulated follicles of energetic momentum, electricity liberated from the copper veins, uncivilized sewers, subterranean rivers, Ganges of immanence, Styx tributary Lethe sinewing mind to mineral, meat to plague, flowing upwards through novel paradigms of physics beyond the apprehension of any mortal literature like a prehensile tale stitched along the black hole of Being.

FIGURE's voice becomes enveloped in a mild reverberation which escalates into a palpable, even violent, delay effect.

[FIGURE]: One cannot describe the place upon which one stands if it is devoid of all referents, without context, without the cold calm concrescence of moonlight or absorptive grounds. What is a tool if not a handle, the primary prosthesis, holstered to the hip or protruding out from the mandibles, probing and penetrating the orifices of dark velvet voids, always in relation to some Other or Othering that cannot be exfoliated directly, an extension of sense beyond the sensible, which is to say the reasonable limits of absurd utensils, but who is it that would proclaim such profanity? Profane or sacred, a curse nonetheless to rename anthropoidal creation as mere gleaning. All technology has been found, existed before the pragmatic could be articulated, before time keepers or utility closets, indeed before the priors and latters of taxonomy could be hoisted into place. If we are to start at any beginning surely it must be manufactured, if only through concepts, laid upon context, carved out of clotted waxes or congealed effluvial ether, but who is the we one might refer to? Is it this one who is speaking or that which is being addressed? Does the earth have substance or any straight lines for that matter, or matter for that lined up straight of like or downed minds might drown in sees of time, like great eyes swishing to the momentum of their own salienated fluids swathing the irises with limed tar pine for buoyancy, a compass standing at its own center for lack of poles or celestial fires, another river coursing through ontological capillaries, Pyriphlegethon of proprioception probing this homunculus incubating in a cocoon of hermeneutical honey or aphasiac antimony.

[ANOTHER OFF STAGE VOICE]: Wait! Stop. No, you can't be saying all that. These people aren't going to understand what's happening at all. You can't be riffing on the script that much, make it flow but mostly just read what's written. This isn't some fucking soap box for your own personal poetic promenade, this is art goddamnit and it's based in reality. I don't know what planet you think you're on but you have to use common words. Simple words for simple minds! Simple rhyming structures so that folks can understand! C'mon, I don't want to have to keep reminding you of this.

The video projections pause upon a still frame. A second figure engulfed in darkness steps on stage to give direction to the actor. During the lull some audience members begin whispering to one another.

[AUDIENCE 1]: (phew) I thought I was the only one.

[AUDIENCE 2]: What, you mean you don't understand the monologue? I thought you were an art student, aren't you used to this kind of stuff?

[AUDIENCE 1]: NO, I'm studying art HISTORY not studio art or postmodern art or avant-garde performance art or whatever you wanna call this. I mean, I'm all for poetry but this kind of absurdity is simply destructive. Art needs to mean something or it might as well not exist.

[AUDIENCE 2]: So this doesn't mean anything? Is it even possible for something, or any thing, to not carry some kind of meaning, even symbolically or psychologically or archetypally?

[AUDIENCE 1]: History will be the judge. There can be no poetry after Auschwitz, but everyone seems to have forgotten that and got all caught up in their own pulchritudinous ostentation again, and look at where it's gotten us, right back at the beginning, full circle, on the brink of total destruction. The end could be tomorrow, hell it could be today! And this is what I have to deal with in the face of total annihilation? Symbolic horror before the actual descends upon me? Some will to live...

[AUDIENCE 2]: Well that seems a bit contradictory to what you were saying in the car earlier... Maybe you should try to receive the experience before moving so quickly to a judgment of its contents, or even refrain from criticism all together until it has a chance to sink in..? Isn't there something to be said for the performance itself? Isn't life a series of performances that we confuse for reality? What is so real about the horrors of yesterday anyways, compared to the terror of this moment, or what is found in anticipation, of the next moment, or any other? How can you judge it if you don't give it a name? And what was your name again?

One figure begins to walk off stage. As the figure resumes speaking the video wall also resumes motion.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Quiet please! Go ahead.

[FIGURE]: So it begins again. So we begin again. At the beginning which is also ended, an always-already ceasing, false starts in the turbines of becoming potential exchange. A process, a conversation, a processing of conversation, a conversion of prophylactics, a pharmacognosis filtering pharmakon from pharmakos. A process of processing perhaps, perchance an encounter, a dialogue or dialectic, or a duel of dualities, pluralities promulgating between two points. "If I can have your attention, please," but is it yours to give? An incommunicable riddle, an aporia of atrophying apoplectic aphasia, phantasmagoria of pulchritude, philistinism, platitudes, or plateaus of consistency? Phrased as a question the labyrinth has no walls, ceases to be catacomb in its continually becoming untethered, but otherwise, in guise of solution, for dissolving or disfiguring or merely a device of dis-ing, of the negative - theological or otherwise - wisdom itself or a process of disentangling the Latin names from Lucifer or his cities. Down here then we can be located, at the bottom with more footing than floor, at the base serving as column, colander, centerpiece to a cavalcade of alliterative neural typical enunciations, let's set the table down there. Yes, a table, as an affirmation, a primary designation, imagined however you like as long as it serves the purely pragmatic purpose of placing things on it, in order to keep track of their positions. The cartographers can now tend to their archives, putting into production an entire cosmos of industrial processes - to be differentiated from our privatized pontifications - a phonetic autopoiesis perpetuating a procession of taxonomical technologies and noospheric ecologies for designing aesthetics, ethics, and affects of our exchange. So be it, but where? Yes at the bottom, at the first proclamation that what is said must be repeated, at the navel of the tautological wheel we are currently articulating. Not the word, but the ogling of orifices of oration. Not the pen, but the onomatopoeia that keeps its cuneiform circles gyrating. Here, between what is known and that seemingly great unknowable fog saturating ever utterance, within the gradient spectralizing the observed from the observer, at the twitch of the dance as it quivers from reflexion to reflection, at the shared earth we might both agree - with some well-tempered efforts - that we are both straddling. Put it down.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Bring in the table.

Two black figures bring in a matte black table, equal in all proportions, and place it silently before the Figure, leaving without a sound. The stage remains dark save for the peripheral illumination of the screen outlining the contours of the solitary Figure and table.

[FIGURE]: (pause) Go ahead. (pause) Process it. (pause) Yes, remember. The beginning is the space, the context, the positioning in relation, the enunciation of a reference, a place to put one's head, but not for sleeping! (An almost painfully loud Pathagorian chord chimes through the hidden speakers) One must be awake if they are to speak freely, minus the incapacitating encumbrances of ontological paradoxes, outside of identity, mouths leveraging minds balancing upon trajectories not transcendental territories, thunder tongues talking the tinny tinned tones of their own dental fortifications, beyond the pearlescent enamel barriers of the visible bone, towards the cooing swami song of the terrestrial gong, the cantos of the earth spelling out its own consonant incantation, the rhyme and rhythm of Promethean provocation, the spells predating anthropoidal enchantment, the orchestrations of ore boring down deeper into their own ulcers, fueled by friction, no longer by fictions fastidiously fastening our appendages of meat and prosthesis down upon the substrate of plastic. Pull back the sheathing to expel the insulating intonation. Now is the time to be retuned, listen! With your ears formed from eons of earthquakes, attuned to archetypal archipelagos of awareness, modulating modalities of the meat-mind humming sympathetic vibrations in a sea of morphic resonance. At this point, at the locus of our interlocution, upon the scrim of a sensuous manifold projecting out from a clandestine curvilinear center, let us agree that we have a surface, more or less solid, which might support the addition of other elemental postulates, not so that we might move on, but rather indeed linger here a little longer, immerse ourselves in it, to observe its characteristics, which is to say define our own definite distinctions, thereby beginning the bifurcated dialogue of immanence that must be uttered less we fade away irresolutely, irrevocably, irrationally, into the rearing void of silence.

Silence...

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Give it a minute... let it get kinda Cage-ian...

Silence...

[FIGURE]: Attention is not yours to give. (pause) The universe is a black love.

The Figure slowly walks backwards through the projection screen scrim, out of sight. The first stage light slowly rises, center stage, directly above the table, projecting a symmetrical shadow underneath its simple black mass. The projection screen scrim is raised to reveal a simple black stage wall.

Silence...

[AUDIENCE 1]: So what's that supposed to mean then?

[AUDIENCE 2]: You mean you still don't get it? It's just an introduction serving as an antithesis of itself, like a false start that acts like an illusion to something we only think we can see. Like life or something.

[AUDIENCE 1]: But wasn't there already a beginning? Is the whole thing gonna be a beginning with nothing happening?

[AUDIENCE 2]: I dunno, maybe. Isn't it always? I think it's more interesting than some of the other shit I've seen in galleries lately.

[AUDIENCE 1]: You think that boredom and linguistic masturbation is interesting? I think that says more about you than this performance.

[AUDIENCE 2]: Well, yeah. It's like breathing in a yoga class or something. You have to hang up your ego at the door and get mentally prepared to melt into the blackness of your own mind, or to observe your thoughts passing without trying to control them. I like how Zen it is.

[AUDIENCE 1]: So you want your art to be like a yoga class...

[AUDIENCE 2]: Well, no... I don't even want yoga to be like a yoga class. I'm just saying I think I get it and maybe it's more simple than you're letting it be.

[AUDIENCE 1]: Actually, I think it's more simple than I care for it to be, so simple it's dumb which makes me feel dumb for watching it.

[AUDIENCE 2]: But you're also participating in it, so does that mean you're dumb?

[AUDIENCE 1]: I prefer the term "idiot..." There, ask that director guy what he thinks.

[AUDIENCE 2]: Fine. (speaking at full volume) Excuse me sir! My friend here is having a hard time with the content and was hoping for a little explanation. Would that be possible?

The Anthropologist/Amateur Ethnomusicologist walks on stage, leaving a trail of white footprints along the otherwise black floor, and sits on the table with the posture of an academic. He lights a cigarette. As he speaks it becomes obvious that he is the off stage voice heard earlier. He speaks with a mixture of accents sometimes resembling Texas Honkytonk and at other moments performing a poor imitation of a British pronunciation.

[A&AE]: Questions already? Well I'll see what I can do. It's really quite clear I think. There's this dark fella on the stage and he's trying to tell you all about the mysteries of the universe and all that but it's rather difficult to give a simple description of a rather complex system of interrelated occurrences so he has to go on and on with all this poetic jargon in a kind of absurdist manner until we enter into a trance state and begin to visualize the whole thing through the semiotic activation of the pineal gland. So it's kind of like psychoactive literature, right? Put the key in the lock, all very predictable. But this darky ain't too sharp so he's getting some of the concepts mixed up, trying to use chaos to describe something extraordinarily ordered, so it all gets kinda blabbered up, incoherent, like the Mayan calendric system described by a noobie academic field lab assistant during his first tour of field work out in the middle of the jungle having just accidentally ingested a small dose of psilocybin. You're supposed to feel this kinda placebo effect, like that study that was performed on a group of evangelical southern Baptists in church... some of them were really feelin' it and others were just percolating to the other cooker, steam evaporating on the window, the god illusion (or delusion as I've always said). Anyways, just calm down there and lean back and get cozy over with yer buddy and get yourselves a little entertainment. I mean c'mon, it's only theater or performance art or whatever... I can never remember because they keep calling it different things. You should be glad that they're not wearing tights and twirling around like fairies up here, because that would be evoking some seriously deep seated Nordic hallucinations which we can really only understand in relation to Santa Clause and all that jazz about the cultural appropriation of pagan totemism (or is it Tokenism?) by the pillaging colonial terror, rewriting sacred Zoroastrian texts to be superimposed over all that hedonistic hogwash, like it was any more authentic or original or natural than anything else. Hmph. It's all primitivism you know? Have you read my dissertation? I'll spell it all out for you another time, but for now just understand that you should be entertained like any ol' art, checks and balances, bought the ticket so take the ride kinda thing. You paid to get in here didn'tcha? Want your monies worth don'tcha? Have a good time, have the best time, and by that I mean to say that you should try to get into it, try it out, feel the pulse of the cosmic drum and all that, be a participant and don't interrupt the flow of the performers, like really get into what they're saying up here, cause theater is really no different from magic and that's all about belief and presence and the inculcation of the influence through ritualistic ceremony. It's theater or art or whatever, yah? You gotta try to believe in what you're hearing for it to work, for the magic to take effect, otherwise why even bother? Might as well stay at home with some spam steak and fast forward through it on TEVO, would be cheaper and way less hassle. But you're cultured folk that's interested in the truth of things and that means experiencing it for yourself and having all kinds of opinions about it so just go ahead and do that and try not to spoil things for the others, yah?

Before the audience members have a chance to speak the lights suddenly go out. The theater is in complete darkness. A low even monotonous tone fades up through the sound system and a new voice begins to speak, in a slow steady and almost monotone voice, pitched at a third interval up from the tone.

[OFF STAGE VOICE]: Yes, but this production is also concerned with numerous other elements which you are not attending to. We are concerned here with affect and percept, not only the rational temperaments. It's about feeling, feeling feelings, and feeling through the feels of being felt, feeling Being being felt, more than merely empty pseudo-philosophizing, of being here, seeing this, yes, but also being and seeing, of this place and this voice and the interactions ensuing between various elements. At the enunciation of any beginning lies a problem. There are myriad nested questions pertaining to how to begin alongside where to begin, or if it has already begun, and if so how and why it came to be initiated. Is there reference to thinking or speaking, of thoughts or speech, of transcriptions of utterances through technologies of writing, from recitative to libretto, thought to text, or otherwise? Is theater concerned with the state of the actors, of the authors, of the audience, or otherwise? Is art to be concerned with the questions of philosophy in any sense, or merely of sense itself, and how might we distinguish between them if not by speaking out through another process which does not sit so comfortably in either compartment? How does one communicate with or through their own affect and percepts, avoid becoming an amateur philosopher or inattentive creator, avoid becoming an idiot, autodidact, or egotistical orator of idiocy? Must certain questions come before others, or are there multiple process being conducted simultaneously, necessarily or willingly, consciously or subliminally, attentively or through sheer negligence? Must they remain simultaneous? Must we consider their multiplicity, or exercise a propensity to singularize, over any other potential course? How might one maintain their attention upon the whole without becoming lost, losing their own singularity or multiplicity or simultaneity, among the constituent parts of that which is being observed, and for that matter can there even be said to be any difference, in matter, or by manner of one postulate to another? Where does the illusion of the "I" give way to the clarity of the eye? Is one speaking, to oneself, to each other, or more generally, can one ever be truly heard? Must thought have an object upon which to focus it's inquiries, attention, senses, or any other hermeneutical instruments? Is life filled with meaning, vast emptiness, or perhaps something, or some non-thing, altogether, or otherwise? This opera, which may or may not be an opera strictly speaking - if we can speak of such strictures - does have a title, does propose a direction, a trajectory from a place which must first be described, agreed upon, or recognized. From the known variables of consciousness towards the unknowable mysteries of this particular human imagination, these questions seem to imply that all of history is fair game, to the extent that it can be recalled into objects. All of creation, the artworks and the minds which created them, the philosophers inquiring into the truth of reality, and scientists and mystics in like manner, how is one to comprehend the totality of their accomplishments, if any are said to have been made? If we might deem any such inquiry to be useful in our search for purpose, meaning, legitimate answers to the follies of our existence, shared or disparate... what may be evoked? How does one judge their legitimacy? Is this beginning, which seems to have always-already begun, merely a false start? Must one begin at all, is it a question worth asking? This narrator proclaims that it is necessary to ask, to act through asking, to contextualize the parameters within which a conversation may unfold, and to allow for an awareness of the peripheries that we must work around, to move towards that territory, which may or may not exist, beyond the thresholds of our comprehension, the impossible, if it is deemed to be possible to do so. This introduction follows itself through discursive momentum. It has a purpose: to create a list, many lists, a vocabulary of words denoting concepts represented through symbols embodying affects and percepts of the human organism. We or one, I or other, must define some variables so as to make visible a material to be worked with, worked upon, worked through, worked within, to be worked. What is this work, this labor? Is there a better word or a better concept? These actions, this energy, this momentum; it begins here as this seems to be the most sensible beginning, according to the capacities or capabilities of the senses. Perhaps it's not being created, only discovered, found ready-made, and if so then therein lies an inherent legitimacy, that it came before any "us" which may be defined, hence the circles carved out through this perpetual prologue. From this place which feels so incomplete, continuously interrupted, riddled with holes and paradoxes, always implying its own parallax view even as it struggles to enunciate a clarity of singular perspective, we will begin. Of course this is where we will begin, as it has already and already begun. What is less certain is where it will lead if anywhere, what it will amount to if anything, what can be made of it or out out of it, as a process, as a destination, as a territory to be inhabited if only for awhile, at least in some way, so as to ruminate upon the least of variables that are necessary for thoughtful action to occur. This procession is propelled by a will to action, towards understanding its own willfulness and comprehending its own peripheries of comprehension, of itself and its constituents and its relations, if any. Perhaps it sounds vague, excessively abstract, absurd or cruel, overly philosophical or foolishly archetypal, perhaps merely a tactless aesthetic, taboo style, or poor decision, but certainly it must be recognized as a viable attempt to enunciate a proposition, a language of materials, and ecology of processes accountable to the community of organisms attempting to reflect upon the circumstances of their own irrational existence. From here the possibilities may seem infinite, limitless, but on the contrary we have now, through the practice of intention, by heeding the influence of intuition, demarcated what might be said to be initially and provisionally known. What will follow may be more of the same - equally incomprehensible - while maintaining the potential of becoming something radically other, that which defies naming but not understanding. Now that time is palpable and space seems to be inhabitable we may begin the pertinent exploration of those voids waiting to be filled by feeling through the container slipping over the invisible contents, to will them beyond the compartments of the imagination, to make tactile the ether engulfing proprioception, an illumination of the unseen, a flavor for that which defies all fidelity of the familiar. This table is a metaphor, a symbol, an archetype, an image. It is. We have made it. We continue to be active in its making. We will put it to use and define ourselves in relation to its potential uses. From here we can take a position, articulate our own orations, locate our selves by distinguishing what is from what still might become. We will begin to process our own process-ing as one is to many, one entry into a cosmos of potential awarenesses. This table, this beginning, this universe, this propulsion. The universe is a black love.

PROLOGUE > ACT1 SCENE1

The libretto is working, introducing characters, incorporating self-criticism, perpetual nagging, infinite regress of discursive negativity = negative theology is how the prologue begins!

NEW COURSE OF ACTION:

1. Re-record the vocal monologues of the prologue. "The universe was not born..."

2. Use new music (solo guitar drones) as background chord shimmers to new monologue, replacing the original improvised sections: the sizzle following MMM tension and the final emotional ascension monologue. New monologue will set the time span of this new musical section.

Structure:

>>MacaMammaMatrix :: cut up & transfered to Ableton for new performance, fill out the low end with new software instruments, general mixing fidelity improvements

>>MMM tension :: made more tense + more sparse(?)

>>Sizzle = Negative Theology Monologue of the Afflicted Self :: solo guitar drone.

>>Magic Flute (the Parallax of the MMM) :: treated same as MMM, remix + enhance

>>Affective Ascension = Cosmological Scaling Monologue of the Parapsychic Self :: slow building guitar drone pitched to Wagner-appropriated Warp Spell, crescendo to "The Universe is a Black Love," sharp cut to black

>>Act1Scene1 begins...

3. MMM + MF OVERTURES require new found footage video accompaniments based on conceptual, theoretical, symbollic signifiers, such as:

>>Monologues are black screen with aesthetically modulated subtitles (colors, movement, placement, etc).

#1: Inner layers of the mind

#2: Stratified layers of atmosphere, from the person to the universe, as a cosmological representation of love.

Evoke the content of the words, negation or positive charging respectively.

*Excellent opportunity for incorporating animated diagrams = requires learning AfterEffects (or other software) skills, but could be conducive to incorporating the drawings into the experience of the world in a more immersive manner.

>>MMM = a great convergence, crystalline structure, Gaia feminine ovarian vestibules of the jungle, warm, sweaty, activating, melodic, harmonious scales, nurturing.... *conduct an inspirational conversation with ___ concerning the potentials of this music as a material for representing a feminine force in the universe, incubating the mind, whispering like Ayahuasca.

>>MF = ascension, the Andes mountains rising out of the Amazon jungle, a holy mountain with impossible altitude, scraping upon the heavens, intruding upon the plane of immortals, rough, dry, sharp, inhospitable, masculine, brutish, violent to the body and negligent of the mind, screaming like a schizophrenic monk.

***Could possibly use footage from NM... White Sands for MMM and mountain cresting line at sunrise/sunset for the MF... must try before committing, otherwise could be made from found footage ala video scroll.

4. Choral experimentation with new monologues: layering of voices, harmonies, satanic triad and other dark/negative dissonances. *Use the compositional method of/through the voice to reinforce the philosophical content of the words. First performance is read to a tone for tuning reference so that following performances can be harmonized/modulated.

>>Negative Theology Monologue of the Afflicted Self (NTMAS) starts a with some velocity, power, a punch in the face of the senses, rising through the tension membrane of the post-MMM to punch a hole/threshold to another space, its inverse/parallax, first along the contours and then through the stratified layers of the Mobius strip rigmarole. Violence! Moloch! >>release into Magic Flute, which takes the form of a (holy) mountain.

>>Cosmological Scaling Monologue of the Parapsychic Self (CSMPPS) starts from an extended flute drone (or nothing) rising along a slow ascension as though along a valley floor back up another mountain of a different temperament, a tonal ascension through pitched guitar drones ending with the Warp Spell clip. Must learn how to speak this text: broken up into segments for harmonic convergence, isolate lines for call+response echos (archetypal archipelagos of awareness, etc).

Record the first monologues, do it well, then start layering.

5. Act1 Scene1 video representation: representations of nature that are really blown out, over saturated and over exposed so that they are predominantly white, projected onto a 3-walled scrim "room" backdrop = ___'s textile dream theater. Brion Gysin's dream machine, the purple and pink neon lights in LaMonte Young's NYC dream center, ___'s recently posted video capturing the light of the sun through the material of his back pocket while walking in nature, a visual representation of Rupert Sheldrake's morephic resonance effect as observed through the morphogenetic field, like a riff off of Kant's sensuous manifold updated for the psychotropic subject, or like Jung's cosmological archetypal symbols projected into the Ancient Greek cosmos - Astrological wisdom of oracle and divine manipulations coming before the Astronomical knowledge gain from the optical instruments of telescopes.

The viewer's perception is the 4th wall. Figure on stage (representing the Psychological Self, like the shadow described by Jung!) can make reference to the various facets of our perception so that the set becomes an architectural metaphor for the spatio-temporal compartment of our multivalence energy-based awareness (perception, apperception, proprioception = !!! is it our phenomenological senses, the focusing of mental awareness, or is it in relation to the body as coordination, eye-hand, moving through space and time, as in animal awareness?).

*The table = should be constructed as an optical illusion. When its first brought on to the stage it is only seen from one angle, but as the figure redirects our attention the table distorts, losing legs or contorting into impossible shapes, becomes fragmentary, illusionary. Like mirrors used on stage by a magician to make an elephant disappear or saw a woman in half, a foreshortening illusion or optical compression.

*The "Dream Theater" room = like conducting a google chat with 3 other individuals! Perhaps the best way to make the digital maquette is to enlist the service of 3 friends and screen grab the results, or to borrow some devices in order to conduct a 3-way conversation with myself, or just to record video of myself in 3 different locations and map/project the video images on a 3D digital model to simulate the same effects. Video material could consist of: faces (my own or others), landscapes, video scroll-esque montage collages of found footage put into mythopoietic sequence, or perhaps images of audiences!

*Actor for the Anthropologist/Amateur Ethnomusicologist = ME donning the aesthetics of the 'New Skin Colors' project, ie: naked and covered in spirulina acting upon an even monochrome ground. In post production the ground will be chroma-keyed into a matte-black stage (either a still or video image) and my body will be chroma-keyed into ambiguous world cultural pattern references appropriated from tribal patterns, esoteric motifs, transcendental imagery, etc., like "cultural camouflage" obscuring the definition of the figure. ***Same technique can be used for chroma-keying the Rational Objectivist figure from the Dream Theater backdrop.

*Black stage = can it be made as a physical scale model? Use ___'s black textiles with iphone video? Could also make a small maquette of table and lazy susan stage?

*QUESTION: do the audience spoken dialogue get subtitles or not?

*Last monologue conducted by the Psychological Self is paired with a black screen, but not completely black = video of matte black stage without the spot light with modulation of the video footage in post production to induced an inverted morphogenetic field, shadows on shadows, like retinal burn gazed through closed eyes after staring at a strobe light on robitussin, referencing "New Shades of Purple" from THE BOOK OF ENERGY.

6. Act1 Scene1 music production: METACHORDS coming into effect = improvisation instructions for specific musicians (Nick, Solveig, Erlend). Notes of chord are presented as a splayed lattice that can be navigated by the performer however they wish, although completely chance-based operations are encouraged. Chord is accompanied by affect instructions, consisting of 2 section: the still chord + the dynamic chord (a parallax of each other, differentiated by dynamism.

Still chord = choose any note and play all long and evenly as possible, separated by a space the length of a complete inhalation, followed by another note of the chord of the performers choosing, for a set number of repetitions (provided by the score) = see Cornelius Cardew's notation. REFERENCE: Pythagorean chord, Fibonacci separation of notes, see John Chowning's Stria.

Dynamic chord = choose any note and play as frenetically as possible without resorting to a steady pulsation or rhythm, lasting as long as such action can be sustained, then switching to another note with no space. Different variations could be experimented with, playing with the precise instructions of the affect of the playing style, attending to possible transitions between notes, or determining the length of time such actions should take place. REFERENCE: Heraclitus chord, Tony Conrad glissando technique, see: Morton Subotnik's Touch and The Dream Syndicate live improvisations.

*The second (dynamic) chord is recorded at full intensity/volume, but during re-performance scoring it should be slowly faded in, a swirling phantasmagoric miasma of ascension mirroring the Wagner Warp Spell ascension from the prologue.

*Both playing methods should involve a sensitive attention (most importantly!) and may incorporate various extended techniques in order to emphasize the affect of the performance over the fidelity of the recording. The goal is for the performers to innovate, to ascend to a state of mind ("awareness") wherein the performer is able to surprise themselves through their own performance, seeking out perpetually novel experiences with the chord provided.

*These instructions might serve as an early form of pre-emptive notation for the performers, to be differentiated from the reverse-engineered notation following the recorded performance.

>> In the meantime I can recreate these still+dynamic chords with midi instruments to fill the space of the video and continue working until proper recordings can be injected.

*Remember: the music is scored to the libretto, so the midi instruments are a chance to experiment with the performance of this technique. When the acoustic instruments are recorded they will then be edited into clips and re-performed ("scored") to the monologue. The voice always determines the spatio-temporal coordinates of the composition.

ACT1 SCENE2

The montone drone of the last monologue resonates through the room, almost imperceptibly panning to various corners as though a caged animal surveying its domain, carefully testing its parameters, silently plotting escape, until it finally fades from perception. The front stage lights fade up and a giant projection screen, spanning the length of the stage, steadily descends from the ceiling to the floor. A clear, calm, even, dry, natural voice begins speaking as though emanating from the room itself.

[NARRATOR]: Hello. Allow me to introduce myself. Hmm, you see it's a little bit tricky as I lack a proper name, at least in any form that you might recognize as properly naming my person or personality in any personal - which is to say idiosyncratic - manner, but we've decided that it's pretty important for us to become acquainted - you and I that is - if any rational sense is to be made of this spectacle we all seem to be implicated in. (pause) Yeah, but speaking of which, you know it's not always necessary to rationalize our experiences in order for them to be valid, and in some instances it may even be deemed invalid to do so, or inappropriate in consideration of the inherent potential of other qualia of feeling-through or sensing-around what is happening. We like to call those myriad affects and percepts that continuously unfurl themselves before us the "feeling feels," kinda a play on the signified of sensation altogether, yah? I mean, what is it to feel at all? If we can come to understand, either through intuition or determined focus or any other means, that the quasi-mythological schism separating mind and body is really just that - quasi and mythopoietic, a relic of a bygone cogito long since evaporated into the fragrance of phenomenological infusorial hay bundles - then how should we continue to understand the epicenter of sensation from which all of our empirical experience is said to emanate? (smiling) Well... let's put that aside for now. First things first, as the colloquialism goes. I love that turn of phrase because it really means very little etymologically, while connoting so much to our socio-linguistic sensibilities. Sensibilities! How about that for a nutshell, eh? What are first things anyways, as though any material element or ontological object or aesthetic propulsion, either through scientific function or philosophic agitation or artistic consternation, upon an edifice conceived through naturalization or socialization or heterogenation or glossolalic incantation, could be observed to contain a number, to be put into ordered sequence, within a hierarchy of any taxonomical imagination? Smells like the essence of the anthropocene to me, the first cut into the flesh that ultimately carved out our elegant cerebral vicissitudes from the juicy pulp of the orgone sponge, a fleshy node wedged between our plump little pontification portholes. We are going to take for granted that any talk of bodies or minds or coherency or reverie, or any other corporeal or conceptual resonation, is describing a whole, a unity, even if not always a singularity, for every child knows that no stone is uniform through to the core and even the wondrous white washing of the sun can be spectralized into a radiant prism of death if unleashed upon the innocent proletariat mitochondria of the superorganism attending to the seed strewn all over the earth.

Whispering is heard from offstage, drawing the attention of the Narrator and reminding him of the time.

[VOICE]: (whispering) Four minutes twenty seven seconds!

[NARRATOR]: Hmm? Ah, ok. Well anyways, you'll hear plenty about all that from everyone else, this night bleeding into the morning, one day superimposed upon every other, one big dinner party of amateur aesthetes debating the nuances of cheese and port pairings, silk liners or cork insoles, pensive toppers or power bottoms, like the Parthenon inverted upon its axis to become a theater for moles imitating the bulbs they feed upon. Right, well like I said let's dispense with the introductions then so we can inch our way forward through the seemingly infinite morass of teeming calcified doxaologies. What's that saying? Opinions are like assholes? I think of them more like asses, you know, those wild equestrian ancestors that serve as draught or pack animals to those living below subsistence levels. Hmm, yes, but even though we've been domesticating asses and opinions alike for thousands of years, we kindly ask that you keep your beasts of burden to yourselves. We're more interested in solipsism that sophism here this evening. So where was I... oh yes, so like I was saying, names don't really seem to cling to me, or rather my life is too brief to be living shackled to a pedigree, so you can just think of me as the nameless narrator, and as the narrator is now present I suppose some sort of narrativity must be prescribed, and I suppose I should be the one to attend to it then. I'll give it a whurl, but no promises as to its intrigue. This is supposed to be a serious production after all, dedicated to a rigorous rumination upon the methodologies of hermenutics, epistemologies of the will to live, ontologies of the human organism, revisionist physics of the terrestrial enclosure, and at the same time is to be some succinctly symbolic spectacle superimposed upon existential sociological architectures pumped full of profound anthropological specimens and some provisional yet necessary proclamation on the contemporary considerations of art in the age of accelerated apocalypse, in a nutshell! One night only! Sounds like quite a show, indeed, but I don't promise anything. I'll do my best to string you along for the more complicated bits but I'm only one voice ya know, only capable of so much blabbing before this production becomes just about me, the one that's not even supposed to be here or there but somewhere inbetween, so I can't be blathering on all evening about all the neurological nitrate esters and the paradoxes of the Copenhagen perspective of applied phsyics, you gotta do the work yourselves! Keep on your toes, try to read between the lines, sort out the elephants from the illusions and all that. Think of it as your job, yes your responsibility. (pause, looking around) What, you don't think you have a responsibility even as a spectator? That you can just sit pretty behind a two way mirror (or is it one way mirror...), upon a throne of Kantian judgement, docents of doxology dispensing with dissonances however you see fit? No no, you have a role to play as well, just like any other purchase you made today or throughout your entire existence. It all goes back to somewhere, a source, an origin, like the ass you rode in on, a petroleum fueled nightmare of innate responsibility, the terrors of capitalism! (faster) What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose name is the Mind! (pause) Damn that's a great poem, Ginsberg yah? The Beats yah? Those tweed clad cats could really get down, because civilization began pulsating bloody beat pulp penumbra poisons from its own pharmacies, Plato's republic, the evils of utopia and all that, and the kids were lost and needed a voice so those Harvard chaps strapped on some pants and dropped some black beauties and hit the street in a frenzy to start stirring the pot in the other direction. There's many instances of this throughout history of course, re-written or forgotten by those in control of the iron curtains. Man is the fucking bastard... powerviolence for a fallen species....

[VOICE]: (whispering) Alright alright, we gotta move on.

Everyday I wake up surprised that I'm still here, still comfortable, still breathing. I don't know if I would call it enduring, seems more a de facto existence, a base line abscissa by which other points are plotted while quietly refusing implication in any specific equation. The feeling is of restlessness, listlessness, an ennui without borders more humanitarian than any doctor, not so much a malaise, more reminiscent of something from my youth, experienced during those moments of seeing through the scrim, hearing the clear cold chord of concrescient consciousness ring out through the mundane fog of daily war, like a reminder of the stark reality and flat inaccessibility of a reality more authentically real than that which has been served up before my senses. It has nothing to do with the recent election, or maybe it does, but not in the way you might think, no shock of spectacle or awe of mass idiocy - I'm always sitting clean in such observations as you know - more like a turning point, a smoke signal on the horizon, for the first time in my 'adult life' being able to observe directly the encroaching onslaught of psychological chaos emanating from a gullible public 100 years in training. Yeah, not a big reveal, just validation of the worst that was already expected. Plus I'm writing this goddamn opera, a total work of art yah, a singularizing interweaving of all those potent aspects unique to each medium within a unified vantage (hopefully without becoming utterly monocular). Trying to read about what it means, where it comes from, what it's capable of, what it amounts to - opera that is - why I have had this stupid vision that the only thing that can give purpose to my purposelessly autopoietic existence is to attempt something somehow greater than the sum of its parts. You would think that equating to zero would signify having to do so very little to equate a greater-than-null void, but alas I am consumed with concerns for every detail at every stage of every discipline, the whole universe sung by a choir of every transcendental subject whom has ever existed played back through some circuit bent Kurzweil posthuman sampler amplified through the core of the earth to quiver and shake all remaining mortals "in to" or "out of" some sort of awareness. I'll be the first to say it's too big, but fuck it, the rest of the world is too small. I need a new universe to keep my attention affixed upon and damn anyone that tries to take it away from me. It's probably because I'm reading so much - you know, that I'm suffering, or that I'm refraining from suffering, whichever it happens to be at the moment. This weekend I binge watched a mountain of documentaries by Mr. Adam Curtis - HyperNormalization, Bitter Lake, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, and Century of the Self - all stuff I've heard and known, some deeply, some not deeply enough, but to take on such a barrage of information, of televised media that reads as dense as any text... well fuck man yesterday I was quivering on the sofa for hours trying to sweat out the heat emanating from the spectacularized anthropocene. I listened to a video lecture of Žižek espousing some Hegelian comforts wrapped up in Lacanian linens and felt a little better. He doesn't make me all creamy in the pants but do find his neo-Marxist enthusiasm in calling out the terrorizing mediocrity of neoliberalism rather charming. Yeah yeah and in your last letter you reminded me that I've been wanting to read What Is Philosophy for something like 10 years so I went and read that and was smoothed over real gentle and calm, all those clean delineations of planes and forces, D's giant corpuscular retina looming large and oscillating over the minutiae of the glossy sensuous manifold, G's propensity for dispensing schematics and technical calculations of psychic physics, all folded up so neatly into the locus of my daily concerns for knowledge and language and aesthetics undulating in its own center like a gently kneaded bread dough baking inward/outwards from the exploding star held in its gut. Yeah it's guttural, and it got me all worked up, intellectual indigestion for a week, couldn't stomach any more fluids, in the best way that is. And then that book reminded me to finally read Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double which I just finished before sitting down to write this letter and holy shit now the sky is falling, my girlfriend's face is contorting into a Dubuffet, and the MD40 street lamps are turning the gray grazing Oslo world outside the window into 10,000 new shades of purple like all the things that the Buddhists described while sitting in their caves calling each other Buddhas so they could slap themselves on the wrist for believing it. Plato's allegory holds up, but its more like an ecology of prehistorically-sized cockroaches rolling around in a literal mountain of bat shit, like that hole down in Mexico yonder, turning around in a tireless Blattodean yoga predating the carbon record, sipping the nectar falling from the sky without questions and without any phantasmagoric torch and most certainly without the proper olfactoral receptors to have any lasting or meaningful memories. Right, that's another thing I've been watching, trying to zone out on these David Attenborough docs about animals and ecosystems thinking they could serve up some late night moments of Zen only to realize days later that my consciousness has become riddled with reveries of absurd birds of paradise and those bowers that cut leaves from trees and flip them over so that they're all the same color thereby accenting their psychedelic trance-induction plumage and other stupid thoughts like if one were to record their shepard tone-esque squeals and play them back through amplified underwater speakers to those artic seals that live under the ice in that Werner Herzog film about the edge of the world would the animals recognize the patterns of the other and could some kind of interspecies communication be initiated that would turn the tides of global non-human consciousness like creating a sphere of radiation that would positively influence and increase animal intelligence and offset the universal stupidity being beamed through every being with radioactive cellular technologies, or could we take the 1% of surviving coral reef and put it inside of a geodesic-type dome space ship module modeled after the molecular structure of psilocybin mushrooms thereby combining the visionary theories of Paul Stammets and Bucky Fuller with the most sensitive and endangered symbiotic animal-mineral and botanical-neural hybrid organisms on the planet and shoot those fuckers up into space in a salienated self-oxygenating bubble, and would their combined pure liminality and pseudo-corporeality be able to transmogrify through the absence of gravity and human stupidity into some new super-organism which could then break the codes of our naive quantum physics to travel beyond the scrim of our galaxy and perpetuate life? Right, so Artaud is kinda cracked but you can't really blame the guy because he suffered from a fucked up spine since birth which resulted in a life long opioid addiction and he was writing his manifesto for a theater of cruelty in May of 1933 right as Hitler came into power so it kinda makes sense that he wants to design a new theater that puts the audience in the center of a huge warehouse bunker painted all black with giant spot lamps burning hot and red like a technological sun while all the actors giggle around on the cosmococcic stage organized according to the cardinal directions of a mandala with larger-than-human-sized instruments trying to invent unheard of tones with others screaming in their ceremonial robes and all of them writhing about like some apocalyptic ritual of communcal transcendence, of language primarily, but also all the other stupid terrestrial illusions that humans manufacture to keep the cogs of war turning. His descriptions are all really quite beautiful and I think you would enjoy the 100pg read if for no other reason that to shed a different glow upon D+G's Anti-Oedipus which I guess was inspired by this cruelty, which by the way is not cruel like torture but more like existence, like Sartre's nausea or Kafka's terrors but coming on like a hallucination of the reality to come, before the war. Have you ever read anything by Blaise Cendrars? I picked up his trail from my avid consumption of all things Henry Miller, who can't speak highly enough of this guy, and shit was he right. Hmm yeah I'm always thinking a lot about Miller too, his beautiful little pocket of unashamed autobiographical scrutiny coagulating with a robust philosophical fresh air, living so unapologetically beyond all moral imposition or social consternation. Shit he was a genius, my kind of genius, mostly I think so because of his courage to say 'fuck you' to the world and go his own way without getting involved, at least in any kind of pointless martyrdom kinda way but just hiding out with friends in poverty and in love and in wine to write these books which he knew would be so important for the minds all shaken up flooding back into the cities after all the terrors went back into hiding. How he was anticipating the after, considering all that came before, while somehow managing to stay so firmly rooted in the present without quivering himself out of conviction, shit man I want to be that. The world is coming down all around us as I always knew it would and it should be making me thrilled but instead I feel the terror that everyone else is describing and I think it's because of empathy or some mythology of the virtues of altruism, and I convince myself that I don't want to throw out that baby with the bathwater while also feeling like it's holding me back from realizing a potential that I've already tasted and will always be engaged in remembering and re-embodying. If I were to die in my struggles I think my dad would think it was because I didn't try hard enough because our generation "is good at generating ideas and alternatives to how things are but horrible at acting upon them to make some change in the world" but I would say it's because the world wasn't really that good at anything except producing palm oil and petroleum and canned lard and other industrially distilled essences with infinite shelf life. Don't worry, I don't plan on dying anytime soon, not until I make some headway on this goddamn opera. I just downloaded some pirated software of sampled orchestral instruments that I can compose with. Some Viennese clarinet herder took all these tux-clad lungs into a Baroque concert hall, three microphones to each performer, and had them all play long and short notes in every key from the highest to lowest register, transcribing the whole thing onto your standard chromatic keyboard, so I can sit in my whitewashed box and tickle my noodle with one hand while modulating the harmony of the spheres with the other. I guess it's not all bad eh? Thanks for the letter, glad you are well, keep fighting the good fight.

I want to write you back right away because these days I never know what thoughts will come upon me at such and such an opportune or inaccessible time and I must make sure not to let thoughts of you slip away. So you can be content of my condition, I assure you I am very much alive and well, living out my days in Oslo for the time being, sharing an apartment with my partner while we both hone our energies upon the task of proliferating the lists of tasks which must be done before the end descends upon us. Yes, I feel these are trying times, more so than ever in some ways while also perpetuating more of the same mediocrity I have always been aware of, which is to say the world is a disaster that we are and must continue shuffling around, trying our best not to be swept up into the vacuum of violent affairs or destructive ideologies, but I also admit that it has been very difficult for me to focus on my art amidst all this idiocy and turmoil. Living in Sweden was a tower of self-imposed exile - as I fondly refer to it - and then spending six months in Iceland felt like entering into another quality of dome far exceeding my architectural comprehensions - to run with the metaphor a bit longer - so that upon returning to our home land I was sent whirling into a labyrinthine vertigo, of body and senses and solar plexis, the likes of which I am only now beginning to recover from while also beginning a new infusion of nausea. All that is to say that I had a hard time enduring the USA for 3 months, even in the relatively incubated bunker of my parents house which is more a fallout shelter than a sanctuary. I tried my best to stay on track, building a new website for myself and getting thoroughly involved with an autobiographical video experiment as a method for articulating this ontogenesis idea we had been hatching in Iceland, but with the combination of my parents neurosis, the paranoiac talking heads broadcast across the perpetually illuminated boob tube, the general late-capitalist malaise inflicted upon my psyche by the suburban sprawl and compartmentalized ecosystem, and the added hallucinatory reverie of my adolescence sweeping back in from swollen chests of nostalgia and affective artifacts, I spent most of the time enduring some kind of haze, a fog of gray gauze obscuring my vision even amidst the white beams of the blinding New Mexico sun. I got some work done, took many notes, plowed through a few books and filled a few hard drives with footage so as to avoid a total calcification of my cerebral joints, but now that I have left I can see the beast for what it is. I did spend some time in Colorado and I feel it suits me wonderfully. Norway is nice, gray and damp and cold and all very nice, an excellent place to be working for the time being since I only go outdoors on a voluntary basis. I have also been thinking about our last encounter and have been reworking the documents towards various experimental ends, adding new voices and instrumentation to the recordings and making plans for some new visual orchestrations. Yes, while in New Mexico it seems I had to confront some demons I had been trailing along with me, as well as my relationship to my parents, all of which I thought was part of my project but has turned out to be simply life, raw and ravaged, purposelessly purposive in its own form. Now that I have reclaimed my serenity I'm back at work. Yes I've been writing a libretto for the opera, a "narrative" you might call it, from the prologue which we have already begun and onwards through the first act which is now filling up with a caste of characters and conceptual personas. I am glad you are still invested in a collaboration and of course I want to actively pursue this, but I think we must share in some rigorous dialogues on the matter as I'm sure you will agree that our last meeting, despite (or in spite) of its brilliance, was also riddled with clandestine tensions of the mind and musculature that have yet to be massaged out. I'm not harboring any ill will, but I also think we are both wise enough to learn from our shortcomings and take every new encounter as a revitalized opportunity to manifest a new reality. Let's talk immediately, whenever you can, I'm ready and willing and have much to share with you. Hmm yes, the future looms large even as I struggle to bring it into focus. I will be in Norway until January 27th and then will fly back to Los Angeles with no destination. I have a loose plan to spend some time in LA before making my way up to the Bay Area to reacquaint with the friends that reside there, possible for a few months, but it's really hard to say for certain until some more firm soils are sighted. Camaron mentioned you and MR are headed that way? Perhaps we should consider sharing a domicile? What are your plans? I'm also applying to PhD programs: EGS in Switzerland/Malta, PhD Arts at the Royal Academy in Den Hague, and maybe some schools in Ghent and Sweden. At the same time I'm continuing to pursue residency/funding options and have recently decided that I must attempt to format my enterprise towards gaining some viable employment as a community college professor, leading to more rigorous assignments later in life. This last option seems realistic and would keep me rooted in the states for awhile, as well as provide some much needed income for enacting our shared dream of setting up shop in the form of some kind of alt-civilization compound conducive towards the pontification of posthuman proprioception. If I can get a decent teaching job, say in CO or NM or TX, then I'm gonna buy a fucking house and start living in it and building it up immediately and I certainly will always have a standing invitation to you and MR and OZ to come lay your heads or lift a hammer to start singing the song of our own sovereignty. Of course yes yes yes I want to keep having a conversation regarding a communal effort in this regard also, and I certainly don't feel like the energy has been dissipated by time or distance or tempers or dissonance. On the contrary, I feel like I have been silently preparing for that time to come which is not too far now. Let's also talk about this, as soon as possible, and in the same breath I want to hear about what you are reading and what you are watching and what you are making and how you are articulating your "new ontology" of the meta mineral mind you mentioned on the fjörd. Let's compare notes, compile them into a new lexicon, articulate a novel method of interference interlocution, fold it into a book and write out the score and bring it on tour. It's not just words, I'm serious and I'm studious and there's nothing else I would rather do and no one else I would rather do it with. We must keep the conversation flowing and chart all its trajectories and tributaries, like the consilient scroll that was once mounted to our shared wall! Expanding out in the nth dimension beyond the scope of the page or any other human scale! Beyond mechanism and artifice! Towards the zenith of zero point energy pulmulgating out of the fleshy nodal sponge wedged between our oily orifices! Keep the tension without becoming unwound, old friend. Let's talk soon.

****

TO OOFKAUU PROLOGUE

PART I - 10 MINUTES

THE MIND BEFORE IMAGES, A CESSPOOL OF PROTO-FORMS.

VOID MATRIX. EXPLORE FOOTAGE OF WHITE SANDS WITH FAST/SLOW RAMPING.

SHOULD SERVE AS A SKETCH FOR A MORPHOGENETIC FIELD SENSUOUS MANIFOLD.

OUT OF NOTHINGNESS COMES THE FIRST SOMETHING WHICH REMAINS INDISTINCT, RECOGNIZABLE THROUGH ITS RADIANCE + REVERBERATION = INTERFERENCE PATTERNS IN WATER, GIGGLING OF FLUID BODIES, PROBIOTIC SOUP.

[SUPERIMPOSITION OF FIRST DIAGRAMS ALIGNING TO FORM A SYMBIOTIC UNIT GLYPH.]

TENSION - 3 MINUTES

MELTING, BOILING WITHOUT CASCADING OVER, ACCUMULATION OF KINETIC ENERGY, VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF TENSION JUST BEFORE THE RELEASE, RESONANCE BECOMING DISSONANCE THROUGH AMPLITUDE, CREATION OF A PARADIGM SHIFT ONLY POSSIBLE THROUGH DESTRUCTION = CREATION THROUGH NEGATION.

[FIRST DIAGRAM TRANSFORMING INTO A SCHISM, BREAKING APART BUT NOT TO NOTHING, RATHER TO A NEW BEGINNING, SETTING UP THE NEXT CONFIGURATION.]

PART II - 10 MINUTES

STEAM. EVAPORATION. VENTILATION = TEMPORARY RELAXATION BEFORE BOILING OVER.

BUBBLING OF GEOTHERMAL POOLS, DEEP UNDERWATER CAVERNS, "POPPING" OF ELEMENTS INTO DIFFERENT STATES LIKE POPCORN.

SWARMS OF ANIMALS = COCKROACHES ON A PILE OF GUANO, BIRDS SELF ORGANIZING IN THE AIR.

5 MINUTES IN: BREAKING UP OF TENSION THROUGH PRIMORDIAL VIOLENCE. REPRESENTATIONS OF DESTRUCTION = LANDSLIDES + OTHER FORCES OF GRAVITY, DISSAPPEARING MOLECULES, SINGLE CELLED ORGANISMS CONSUMING EACH OTHER, THUNDER DESCENDING FROM ABOVE.

NATURAL VIOLENCE CONTRASTED WITH HUMAN VIOLENCE? = THIS SECTION REPRESENTS THE FORMATION OF THE VOICE, A SINGULARITY ARISING OUT OF THE MYRIAD MIASMA OF MATERIALS, FUSION OF ATOMS TO FORM THE TABLE OF ELEMENTS, BIOLOGICAL COMPETITION, PLANTS KILLING EACH OTHER.

PART III

WORD FOR WORD FLICKER COLLAGE ALIGNED WITH THE TEXT ALONG WITH DETAILED SUBTITLES (IN VARIOUS COLORS?).

EVERYTHING = NOTHING.

FEELS A BIT LIKE THE MACAMAMMAMATRIX MORPHOGENETIC FIELD, BUT FILLED UP WITH THE WORLD, THE PARALLAX CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE MIND FILLED WITH THE HORRORS OF WAR + CIVILIZATION.

ADAM CURTIS ON HIGH GRADE PHARMACEUTICALS.

SPEED STARTS FAST, CHANGES TEMP, THEN GRADUALLY SPEEDS BACK UP INTO EVEN FASTER THAN BEFORE THROUGH SHEER ACCUMULATION OF IMAGES.

*WILL REQUIRE A LOT OF TIME TO GATHER CONTENT.

PART IV

THE APOCALYPSE. A SONG FOR THE END WHICH HAS ALREADY PASSED, SIGNALING THE ETERNAL RETURN.

PURE DEATH (NOT THE PROCESS OF DYING, BUT SOMETHING WHICH HAS ALREADY PASSED). THE HORROR OF MEMORY, HISTORY, CONSUMPTION/DIGESTION = THE COLD HARD TRUTH OF CIVILIZATION.

SLOW MOTION + REVERSED FOOTAGE.

FIRES, DECAY (*DECASIA = B+W), ABSTRACT DISSOLUTION OF THE MEDIA ITSELF = CIGARETTES BURNS IN CELLULOID, MELTING MATERIAL REALITY, TIME LAPSE OF RUST + MYCELLIUM.

HUMAN BEINGS (MAYBE) WEARING MASKS TO TAKE ON SUPERNATURAL FORMS, EMBODYING + REENACTING THE LOST SPIRITUAL WORLD NOW CONTAINED WITHIN HUMAN ARTIFACTS.

VIOLENT SCIENCE = DEAD LABORATORY SPECIMENS.

PART V

THE BEGINNING BEGINNING AGAIN.

THE FIRST DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CRYSTALS + PHILOSOPHICAL METEORITES OF THE OOFKAUU.

COULD BE WORD FOR WORD REPRESENTATION OF TEXT, SLOWER THAN BEFORE.

SHOULD BE REPRESENTATIONS OF MIND, MIND MODELS, EYE MODELS, HOMUNCULUS FIGURES, MIRROR DISTORTIONS, DISTORTIONS OF THE FACE, VIDEO SCANS OF HUMANS, VISUALLY DESCRIBING THE BODY (EVERY - BODY), SLOW MOTION STOLEN CHOREOGRAPHY, EXTREME CLOSE UPS OF BODIES HURTLING THROUGH SPACE, BLIND PEOPLE FEELING OBJECTS, DISEASES THAT DISTORT SELF BODY IMAGE, HUMANS BORN WITH PHYSICAL DEFECTS.

MEDICAL FOOTAGE THAT GOES INSIDE THE BODY. DISSECTIONS. HANDS EXPLORING BIOLOGY.

CRESCENDO = FASTER EDITING BUILDING UP A MONTAGE OF FACES, GAZES, BODIES + THEIR PARTS. *FOOTAGE STOLEN FROM PORN VIDEOS = EXTREME GRAPHIC CLOSE-UPS OF BODY PARTS. THE LAST NOTE OF THE CRESCENDO THAT DEPICT A MONTAGE OF ORGASM/CUM SHOTS.

Writing an application to EGS. The fourth question concerns an extrapolation of my submitted work samples, an analysis of a painting by Clifford Still. This is an attempt to write through a method I have devise. We think of painting as a predominantly visual experience with analytical thought coming secondarily, if at all, and likewise consider writing about art to be a critical experience conceptualizing the experience of seeing rather than a process of vision itself. I write as an artist - I am interested in philosophy but do not hold allegiance to the discipline. I prioritize the intelligence of the senses, but I still need to make sense of them, to reconcile them my vision with the knowledge inherited from other disciplinary observations. We are more than constellations of feeling and it is of profound importance to attempt to transmit the profundity of our subjective experiences, even if only as symbolic attempt, for sake of poetic enrichment. I maintain that artworks perform a potential beyond the scope of philosophy of complicating and amplifying our experiences through the senses, not merely confined to linguistic models and abstract concepts: art is more than an enactment of philosophical theories, not literally performed texts, and related primarily to the body, the haptic. This is why I have devised a way of working across media and disciplines, attempting to engage all of the senses to explore the possibilities of new modes of sense, to thoroughly activate the mind and body as a unified system. In this particular essay I am having a visual experience while attempting to expand my encounter with a painting into a more holisitic understanding of vision: to see the painting and see the painting seeing me, both immersed in a field of vision even while recognizing the painting consumes/fills my entire field of vision, becoming the entirety of my current cosmos, or is it I or my eye that becomes the center of the cosmos for the painting, becoming activated as I remain entranced in seeing it? My work - the opera - is a direct continuation of such a scenario. I would like to treat every media employed as an opportunity to break open - even destructively - and then piece back together - in acknowledgement of their fluiditiy - each sense and the objects of those senses, the artistic practices which attend to the reflexive experience of sensing, and the philosophical capacity to comprehend the proprioception and communicate our experience across the abyss separating the entities, beings, and perspectives of populating the field. I ask questions which inform my artistic process, but hope to also enact these questions as praxis, deferring back to philosophy the response-ability to make sense of my senses, not to legitimate so much as enunciate the ineffable threshold defined by the painting on hanging on the wall: a portal to another dimension. It was soon after writing this essay that I realized the need to depart from the 2D picture plane in order to explore the "expanded field" of considerations. I could no longer merely consider the painting on the wall as an inert object but an active and activating point of reference, always already a locus of relation to the wall, to the eye, to the museum architecture and corporeal infrastructure, of the maker and the viewer, all as support of its hanging on the wall and as a dynamic node of oscillatory experience. My own field then came into question: just as I considered the painting on the wall in necessary relation to my own being, my being in turn became the object to be scrutinized, the self as a model needing to be unpacked into the diaphanous atmosphere my I and eyes are swimming around in. My trajectory of continued research is located there, here, in, the time-space coordination of my self differentiating from the field. It has taken me this long to articulate a project which has been able to align my artistic and philosophical trajectories in such a manner where form and content collide into a convergence of meanings: not empty speculations or strictly superficial aesthetic enjoyment but existential questions concerning the relation between these attributes, not merely illustrating concepts or performing texts. Post-destruction, with all the pieces laid out, trying to figure out how to put the puzzle of awareness back together, a unified understanding of how they work, of how work works.

I'm taking a break from my application writing to send you a letter. I'm going to be honest with you in saying that I have not spent my time brewing over the details of our relationship. I try to bring what I have to offer with me when we meet, but as you can clearly see I've been losing patience and gaining in aggression the last few days and for that I'm sorry.

You asked me to write you today with an update on how I'm feeling. I imagine that you intended a brief message - not a letter - but besides that I'm not sure what you expect or hope for the content of this message to be. I'm feeling depressed because I'm lonely in general and our emotional breakdowns only make this worse. Because of my inability to reach you and effect any change in our condition I feel profound frustration which brews into anger when you ask me "how I'm feeling" or "what we are supposed to do" about our shared dynamic and eventually melts into despondency when I am alone in the gray silence of this apartment for too long. I also feel disappointed, not for you but for this season, because it feels like christmas has been cancelled and after this difficult summer with my parents I was really looking forward to some holiday cheer, not with confronting your existential doubt.

This application is making me tense. I feel like my education did little to prepare me for either the objective world or my subjective specializations and its becoming clear as I attempt to write about them. I want to improve myself, become sharper and faster, articulate a better project and cultivate a mental temple of wisdom and clarity. I've spent a lot of effort exploring the concepts which interest me and it now feels like a ripe time to make something more concrete with these ideas, to make use of them, to stop wasting. I'm determined to make this my priority. I want this for you too, so it's difficult for me to not be able to access your creative mind. There's a lot of reasons for this, as we've discussed, and it continues to weigh heavy on me.

I've spent a lot of my life navigating my own selfishness alongside my desire to live a completely selfless existence and have negotiated a conscious position in the gradient in between. Perhaps I am more untethered from the world than most but I remain firmly rooted in my sense of self. On this point, we are not in the same territory. I acknowledge that I need a certain quality and quantity of recognition and reciprocation to feel loved and loving and this has been unbelievably difficult for me to gather since I've been here in Norway. It's different now than it was this summer, or at least I am seeing things differently. I still want to meet you half way but it now feels like I've passed the half way point, that for my position it requires taking a few steps back and encouraging you to come forward, even though I suspect that your "experience" will interpret this as neglect. I hope you can come to understand that this is for my own protection and well being, for the sake of timing and the particularities of these circumstances (application deadlines, stress about where I'm going next, wondering what will happen when we part, etc).

I don't have the answers but I do have many strategies that I'm trying to remember and put to use. Everyday I wake up and try to remember the person I want to be and it feels empowering. I believe that discipline keeps us in balance, stops us from spinning out of control, facilitates the focusing of our individual strengths towards overcoming the perception of weakness. I hope you can develop your own strategies and take a few steps forward, in your own way, at your own rate. In the meantime I will try to stay focused on my own actions and redirect the energy which could be wasted in argument back into creative processes.

CLIP CATAGORIES:

DESTRUCTION/ETERNAL RETURN

LANDSCAPE

TEMPLES, SACRED ROCKS, SACRIFICIAL ALTARS, OFFERING MOUND, STULPA(?)

NATURAL DISASTERS, BUT ALSO HUMAN DISASTERS > MORE WAYS OF CRAFTING DESTRUCTION AS A RECOURSE TOWARDS NEW GROWTH

FALLING= ASHES, EMBERS, RAIN, "SKY", BOMBS

FLOWING, SWIRLING, CHURNING, DIGESTING, MELTING, CASCADING

RITUALISTIC MOVEMENT/CHOREOGRAPHY

SACRIFICE/IMMOLATION=FREEDOM THROUGH DEATH

FIRE, FLAMES, BURNING, EXPLOSIONS

SUICIDE: JUMPING OFF BUILDINGS, SETTING SELF ON FIRE, MUTILATION, SCARIFICATION > MUCH MORE OF THIS

IMITATION OF NATURE

OBJECTS BLOWING IN THE WIND

SACRED OBJECTS REPRESENTING THE ELEMENTS

DOUBLES, DOUBLING, PAIRS, TWINS, SHADOW SELF, ANIMA/ANIMUS

OPTICAL ORIENTATION TO THE SCREEN = VIDEO MANDALA

-FOR DETERMINING PLACEMENT OF WINDOWS

METAPHOR FOR COMPUTER "DESKTOP" AS THE MIRROR-WINDOW OF E.R.

SKETCH FOR ACT II

OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

Complete blackness. The sounds of pouring water into a kettle, placing it upon a stove, lighting the flame and the flow of natural gas singing caked oil on the steel vessel. The hiss of steam, the slow rise of heat percolating through liquid, then the chaotic chant of rolling boil. The sound of the kettle being taken off the stove, poured into a decanter, the sizzle of melting coffee granules being gently stirred, a wooden utensil thudding the side of a glass vessel. Silence, with a slow awareness of a sound of heat, a contact mic on the side or in the soup of the hot liquid. The audience is simmering, steeping, waiting. The smell of coffee fills the air.

[Narrator 1]{.underline}: Before the beginning there was already a having-had begun, a living motion preceding the actions of death, an apriori violence stirring the celestial churn of black butter-baked biscuit-models of atomic forehand/backhand - Platonic table tennis frothing foamy head lagers of liminal proto-sentience. Before the conversation began there was always-already a collaboration, a symbiotic sympathy transpiring between transmogrifying transmissions, terminal in their timed meters and well-tempered tinsel strengths, already plural and implying through an absence (often mistaken for void) the interminable presence of the other, always-never being completely anterior to the self-same-likenesses of the only-one speaking itself through various bodies and disembodied allegories of tongues, instruments, resonance chambers, and alchemical pelicans. Before the first words were uttered there were already sounds weaving aetheric tapestries upon the loom of distance, minute poems of unbridgeable breaths aligned across invisible polygons of concrete physics and fluid dynamics, salienating the water droplets condensing collisions in a vacuum soon to realize its own elasticity through imagination, that most primitive art sans form. Before the first characters appeared, before the first actors were enlisted, before the theaters premiered in the prisms of morning dew and the first poems were inscribed in the shadows of leaves, there was the heat in the center, burning a hole through the wholeness of presence, blowing warm airs over the cratered particulated dusts of non-named elements, a breath without lungs, a voice beyond chords, the sigh eternal for no use of timed constraint, an inhalation of the void immersed in its own empathetic ocean, quivering the geltaninous gradient bleeding out in the no-thing which can never be spoken, within which we will never dream, beyond which there is no pontificating, that most succinctly profound alien otherness outlying this uni-verse, which must tell its own story through its own mimetic bodies, when it is ready, if ever. Before there was one, there was none, and only by way of its own infinite facets splintering off into quasi-quandries of requisite somethings could a singular side be sewn, and it is here that we meet our first impediment, the first whisper, not a beginning so much as a remembering of that song of eternal return always-already cooing itself into hearing, by rites over range.

[ Narrator 2 enters and sits down at the table. ]

[Narrator 2:]{.underline} I'm trying to remember that conversation we had this morning. It started with coffee but never really ended, went somewhere else. I remember something about drugs, capitalism, teenage punk rock, video games.... it felt like we were talking about anarchy, but it also wasn't about that at all. How did it start?

[Narrator 1:]{.underline} It started with coffee. You wanted to drink coffee but didn't have any to make, which is funny because you work at a cafe, so I made you some. Then we started talking about coffee. It's one of those things that everyone needs, most essential, greater than food but lesser than narcotic, impossible to imagine living without once one is hooked.

[Narrator 2:]{.underline} Yeah we were talking about the experience of coffee, in the body, but also in the mind, how it comes on in waves, like an ocean. It's usually a hot liquid but feels more like stepping into a cold stream, shivering and moving over rocks in a way which is kinda violent. It rises and falls, breaks stones, chisels away at the shoreline eroding away the substrate, moving around the soils and redistributing the matter in new ways. Factories always have coffee, all businesses really. They say it's the capitalists drug, the real fuel of industry, but it's also its own industry. It's a product of energy and money, making energy to make money to make energy to make more money. It's kinda sick in a way, or is indicative of a sickness. I don't mean the plant makes us sick or that it is physical, but maybe it is that a bit too, a pharmakon which activates in small doses and poisons the body and the mind when consumed in excess, no but I mean that we're sick because we're out of balance. It makes us go too fast, too far, like it's unnatural even though it's a natural product, from a plant. It's too concentrated and too readily available and we just drink too much of it, like as a society ya know? Our society is sick and coffee is one of those things that can measure that illness, like a social barometer, like alcohol or tobacco or marijuana, or other substances which could have beneficial properties that are consumed beyond reasonable limits.

[Narrator 1:]{.underline} Hmm... I couldn't imagine writing without coffee. I need it to make decisions. Like if I'm in the studio trying to record some music I could just get lost in it, if it's too free or casual. Drinking coffee makes it a little faster, more serious, like I can decide that something is worth keeping so I can move on to the next thing, but maybe I also produce a lot of excess that way. I dunno, sometimes maybe it's all excess, but even that can be important too, shitting it all out to purge the palette and be able to go to more exciting unexpected places, right? Coffee does that to the body too, makes me shit a lot, gets all that stuff out that I'm consuming all the time. I like to wake up and drink coffee on an empty stomach and feel it rumble around in there, like there's some wrestlers choking on each other's saliva as they strangle each other, no but it's not so violent, more like a little dance, a jig, a twitch that tunes my clock to the right time, ticking ticking ticking click click clikc and then BOOM it's time! And it's time to go! Gotta go now! And I just shit it all out and everything is light again, a big reset button, starting over from scratch and clean like a baby, and then I just sit down and beat it all out while riding that energy. I can't do that by myself. Yeah it's like coffee is this other thing, like it's my friend and it helps me get my ass into gear, makes me get going. It makes me sad to think about living without it, physically depressed and also like I would be losing this friend that is always giving me these little presents, songs and notes, and whispering new inspirations in my ears. Sometimes it makes me sick, just like spending too much with anyone though. Sometimes people make me sick. At least with coffee I get to choose how much I take in. People aren't always so easy like that.

[ Narrator 3 enters and sits down at the table. }

[Narrator 2]{.underline}: It's like a person, and it also is a kind of person, or what's the difference I guess..? Sure yeah... there's all these stories wrapped up in coffee. You're describing it like a muse, like a presence or a person, and some of that is you dialoguing with yourself, and some of that is the coffee, it's influence and it's wants and desires, what it is willing through you. The pharmacognosis of the coffee plant... we could say its spirit or its essence, and also its psychology - or at least how it influences our own psychology, our pharmacology - and the flavors of its philosophy, or the flavors of our philosophy while drinking coffee, the conversations and frequencies that it instigates and encourages, from the cultivation and colonialisation of the plant and the daily rituals infusing our routines and the psychotropic effects it has upon the brain and the body. We care for it, help it colonize the planet, destroy the integrity of natural ecosystems to proliferate this botanical species, but its also the fuel for our own colonial expansion, right? Coffee and chocolate, sugar and spices and all the exotic luxuries of the world determining our human industries as consumable products. Who is serving who? There's all kinds of other stories too, beyond just economic or political or territorial concerns, of poetry and paranoia and delirium tremens, that parallax mirror swirl of the cosmos briefly glimpsed as milk is stirred into a strong brew, the associations of home comforts swimming in the smells, the nuances of flavor running the gamut of the tongue's sensitivities, from sweet to bitter and back again, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the student and the idle dreamer, and all the others too, conspiring and agonizing and incantating and amourizing in these places where coffee is served. The rise of the urban intellectual! Maybe the death of the old world too. Do we tell ourselves these stories or is coffee telling its tales through us?

[Narrator 3:]{.underline} I'm so conflicted about all this.

[Narrator 2:]{.underline} You're always conflicted about everything!

[ Laughter. ]

[Narrator 3:]{.underline} You're right, that's true I can't deny it, but don't say it like it reveals something about my character rather than recognizing that everything is a potential point of conflict, more agonism than antagonism. I mean, on one hand I think you're right about all that, how it's a capitalist drug, the fuel for industrialism and industrialization and industrial ideology and industrial iconography, and how it perpetuates these infinite cycles of commodification, directly and indirectly and probably in all kinds of psychic ways you didn't even touch upon, but it works in other ways too. I mean, it's not just that, not only those things, but possibly other things too, at least potentially. You're always going on about how the stories we tell stories through story the narrative of our reality, right? Well isn't this a case of manifesting a manuscript of servitude, and couldn't it just as well be one of emancipation, or of some other kind of story with no masters, or at least some journey towards articulating such a world?

I've worked at coffee shops my whole life. They have sustained me, and gotten me at least this far, and I don't feel like I'm a part of those systems that you are describing. Well, not directly at least, not consciously. Even though I'm slangin' those beans with my time I try to be conscious and intentional with how I present myself to the world. I want to be an empty vessel, a conduit, filling up with all the filth and the bullshit, all that propaganda, the stuff that's evil and the stuff that claims salvation too, all that shit. Drinking coffee is like preparing for battle, mentally but also physically, like gearing up for that constant warfare that is the world. I want to go out there and fill up with all that shit and then just BLAAAAAAAAH let it all out! And scream here it is! Here's the world! And give it all back again, put all that shit out there so everyone can see it AAAAH! Yeah, I wonder if I could do that without coffee.

[Narrator 1:]{.underline} It's like the farmers I met in Indonesia, sitting under the banana leaf huts, young people and old people, everyone all together, like families and locals but also anyone that is walking by, and they're all in there drinking coffee. There's coffee growing there, but they're not drinking this fancy stuff, it's all freeze dried crystals, like it's more about hot liquid and the smell, a simulation of coffee, more so than getting amped to go to work, but it's that too because everyone is poor and putting their backs into the fields. They're not drinking alcohol, it's always coffee and there's always a cloud of smoke lingering like a fog from all the hash the men smoke even though it's outside, and the conversations just flow. It's not primitive, it's very sophisticated, it felt like the quintessence of human sophistication, like witnessing the birth of culture, and I was there drinking the coffee and I couldn't speak the language but I was talking to these people with my eyes and through the tilt of our heads and with the coffee, sharing in that drink, and I kept thinking 'would these conversations even be happening if everyone wasn't full of coffee and hash?'

[Narrator 1:]{.underline} Would this conversation be happening if we weren't drinking coffee? Ok, so if we're talking about how coffee changes or influences the human mind, transforms the thoughts or adjusts the amplitudes of consciousness, modulates its frequencies, then is it the coffee that's doing it neurologically, physiologically, energetically? Is the frequency in the chemical or botanical elements, or in how it effects the biology, or affects the psychology, or is it something external in that genesis of culture, in the exchange between parts? Is the coffee transmogrifying our thought frequencies or are we amplifying the frequencies of the plant sentience, perhaps, and how are those frequencies transmitted? The conversation itself could be said to have a signature frequency, and maybe it's just an allegory, a loose application of some hard science upon the soft permeable substrates of the body, but I don't think so, it doesn't have to be. It's about energy, it is energy, this kinetic transferal between resonant bodies, the build up of cerebral potentials, the tensioning of muscles and ligaments as the waves of inspiration chase out the ennui from the corpus, and it's also about sensitivity right? About an empathy which extends beyond the physical limits, waves of liminality, of sentience beyond the brain, a snapping of connections beyond our human neuralplasticity, an exchange along the gradient only coarsely separating our selves.... coarse, as due to lack of fidelity, a story of poor resolution. So maybe we can tune it differently, to get a clearer signal or maybe pick up some information that's being lost.

[Narrator 2:]{.underline} Right, where does the conversation end and the inspiration begin? What is the difference between the idea and the speaker? It's like atoms, or you know, the atomic model, like from high school. We all studied these drawings, diagrams, models made of painted wood, with some red protons and yellow neutrons and a perfect circular orbit of the slightly smaller blue electron swirling around the nucleus, and were told that everything that exists, every thing is made up of some combination of this atoms, these clusters of little colored balls, and that it's all filled up, but really it's more like the opposite, that it's all empty, all colorless, that there's never really ever anything or any thing there at all, more like an infinite regression of forces and magnitudes constantly repelling us from touching, a vacuum collapsing upon its own vicissitudes, denying and defying our primitive primate mind from comprehending them at all. Ok, not to be dramatic, but the truth of matter is closer to an algorithmic probability than a physical model like that, a swirl of chaotic Brownian motion condensing into cloud form clusters of chance operations, not really so structured at all... the closer we look the less we see. I was reading this blurb the other day about the termination boundaries of galaxies, how everything is always falling into the center, all our planets falling into the dying star called Sun, and this cocktail of attraction becomes more diluted the farther out we go until the influence of gravity becomes negligible, but it doesn't stop abruptly, there's no clear line or barrier. It kind of tapers off, gradually, yeah like a gradient, a bad Photoshop gradient where you can see all the pixels - low fidelity, right? - but it's this transition from pink to green intended to be looked at from really far away. I dunno, maybe that's just human nature, or the human folly, or the blight of Empiricism, to always see two or a separation when things shouldn't be so clearly severed. Well, you see what I mean... so where does the idea end and the individual begin? Where do I end in this conversation, and where do you begin, and how do we describe the gradient, what is the signature of this frequency, and would any of this be contemplated if we weren't drinking coffee? Ok ok, but what would we be thinking instead? What would we be discussing if we were drinking green tea, or sarsaparilla, of shilajit, or sauerkraut juice? Is it about the intoxication or the influence or the intuition?

[Narrator 1:]{.underline} Yeah but there's always the social influence too. We can story a new story to story a new reality, but there's always gonna be the overarching influence of the social story looming overhead, and that has to be grappled with. When I was growing up, like when I was 15-25 or so, I was drinking lots of coffee and I was taking lots of other drugs to, as many different things as I could and as much of them I could get my hands on, but it wasn't abuse, more like research. I remember feeling like I didn't choose this world and I didn't want to live in it, not the way it was. I always thought that the world as it stood was absurd, violent and painful and excessive, and I didn't want any part of it, so taking drugs and listening to weird fucked up noise and causing chaos was an exploration into other ways of thinking and feeling and talking and living. I felt free and it was the closest to nature I maybe ever was, but it was also destructive to my body, I mean yeah the chemicals, but mostly because it was seen as anti-social behavior, and it was. I wanted my life to be a big fat FUCK YOU to everyone and everything, or at least a firm NO. Now that I'm older I'm a little more... buoyant. I've been using that word lately. Not quite grounded, but not floating off into space either, just floating, rising and falling with the currents, carving out a territory between land masses for now, but it also feels like biding my time for something to come, whatever is gonna be next. I think about safety and security, mostly because there's people that depend on me, are attached to me, yeah and that I'm attached to as well, and pure chaos breaks apart all those connections, totally dismantles the self, splinters identity and ego, erases names, relaxes associations.... being untethered is pure freedom but also totally anti-social! And it threatens people! I want to live in that chaos, mostly, but I also want to relate, and coffee has opened up a time and a place to allow for those meetings to happen, even if it does make me feel more paranoid about what I'm gonna do for work and where I'm gonna live... all that bullshit that keeps me thrashing around in this undersized pool instead of letting loose down the rapids, but I want that sometimes. Security is staying within the norm, the known, the neural-typical, where everyone else is hanging out, and that's what culture is, right? You can invent languages by yourself all day but without anyone to speak with you're just a schizophrenic out for a walk in the jungle.

[Narrator 3:]{.underline} I'm so jealous of you two, when I hear you speak and hear how free you are. I want to be like that, but I know that if I let go I could never be able to hold on again. I know time isn't real, or purely subjective, or just an algorithmic abstraction, but clocks are real and I don't get paid vacation! I have to work to stay alive and coffee gets me through the day, and I don't want to be a cog in the machine, but I can't just let everything go either.

[Narrator 1:]{.underline} That's it though, it's a risk, it's dangerous, it's putting everything on the line, at rock bottom, at wits end, because there's nothing else to do, because there's nothing else to lose, and nothing to gain either. Maybe it's not so much about getting to the end, but seeing through back to the beginning, or maybe dissolving all the limitations between things so it can just propel around infinitely, getting faster and more clear at every pass until there's no more up or down. But yeah, ya gotta eat! We gotta live! Can't just go untethered and pretend to find happiness, no one can live alone! Damn, this is where I get really fucked up. I mean, we're always living within these stories, building these mythologies, but it's not like poverty is just a myth, or that the oppression of people of color in America is a fiction that we are all guilty of perpetuating. The oppression is real! To deny it is to perpetuate the violence! But I'm not trying to stir up a conversation about privilege or politics, or identity or economy or authenticity, or all the residue of media spectacle and arbitrary truths that go along with it. Not that it's not worth discussing, or that we won't eventually, but for now it seems more important - as a matter of life over death! - to focus upon the scale itself, that micro-macro oscillation of perspective, of the story! Right? The story we tell sets the scale for the scene, sets the events in motion, sets limits upon the details that can be included and implies the biases and limitations of the storyteller. Everything is fair game, but one thing at a time, and where is it headed anyways? I love coffee, I fucking love coffee, but I don't love everything that it connotes and I don't want to bathe in all the psychic residues it carries along with it. This thick oily botanical tea is stirring the syrups of my mind like a delicate dance, an exchange, a symbiotic twirl of the proverbial hips, and I want to influence as much as be influenced by its magical effects. Yes, magic motherfuckers, it's just poetry in action, the theatrical made real, that thing that all afficianados of transcendence and consilience are describing through various dialects of incantation, the Rosicrucians and the Alchemists and Posthuman cyborgs alike. Call it by any other name, but never just just.

[Narrator 2:]{.underline} Ugh, I'm starting to twitch from all the caffeine. I'm gonna go on a run.

[Narrator 3:]{.underline} Yeah I gotta get ready for work at the cafe.

[Narrator 1:]{.underline} Goddamn clocks and calculators. Time does not exist. See you guys later.

I have a lot on my mind right now, so much so that it seems to finally be taking its toll on my body. Or maybe I'm just a masochist. I've been doing really long planks and going on exceptionally long walks, which I thought was healthy, but when I woke up this morning my body no longer seemed to cooperate with my will. This first instance in recent memory that I've spent almost the whole day in bed feeling nauseous and I'm fairly confident that it has more to do with my mental state than just some physical "inflammation." Anyways, like I said, I have a lot on my mind right now and the long walks haven't really been helping me to sort things out - and talking to myself has made me feel schizophrenic recently - so I decided to write a letter, and then thought twice about it, and now I'm thinking thrice about it. If I'm going to write a letter to hash out all of the intricacies of my current convoluted state I suppose it might as well be to you since we have become so intertwined and I have been so pent up and distant from you these last weeks. So here's a letter, one that I desperately need to write, originally for only my own consideration, that I am now extending to you.

By the way, I'm sorry for not responding to the lengthy and emotional letter you sent me during our time apart at christmas. I suppose I didn't think it garnered a reply, that my role was mostly to serve as witness to your own untangling of a rather complex personal knot. Perhaps that's what this exercise will be also, not an apology or a confession so much as an extension of trust for you to serve as witness to what I'm dealing with. Please don't thank me, I don't want any thanks.

During one of your last ventilations you said that being with me was beginning to make you feel lonely. I can really relate to that sentiment as being with you also made me feel lonely, due to the lack of attention more than affection. That is, I think you made yourself available to me physically and emotionally (which is inextricably bound up with your life experience, as we have already discussed on numerous occasions), but I encountered real difficulty receiving this affection as real and profound empathy. I have this thing I say about illusion and delusion, I'm sure you remember. My fear is twofold, different possibilities with the same horrific result: to live in an illusion of my own making or to play a role in the delusion of another. In a way, I think this is always the case and I could wax poetic for countless pages on the hallucinatory or holographic basis of "reality." We have also swirled around some psychological ideas concerning the construction of a durable self (as image, or soul, or physical vessel) and how our image flickers in relation to an other so that from a certain perspective our "self" changes according to who we are orienting towards. There's other ideas involved also, of course, but I don't know how clear I was with you concerning my intention to focus on the ideological foundations of this point when I bring it up. Individuals cultivating a relationship enter into a kind of unspoken contractual agreement to determine their roles-in-relation, but they also necessarily engage themselves - intentionally, consciously, or not - into a role of their own self-making (or autopoiesis as it's called). It's deceivingly simple to sketch out in a few vague sentences, but you can affirm for yourself how complex any relationship scenario can be (or necessarily is) as we negotiate our own sifting desires with the shifting territories of a dynamic relation unfolding under both our feet.

Anyways, the reason I bring it up is that now that I am alone (with my lonliness) I have been meditating on my own intentions and self-manifesting illusions, observing my own obstinance before the delusions you presented me with, and trying to sort out my own plethora of default and inherited selves from the future ideal I aim to become. I can see what they were, can remember what I was thinking going in to this, can observe how we transpired, and can see myself sitting here now wondering where it all went wrong. The trouble I'm having is that I don't think it was wrong - my intentions I mean - not a series of bad decisions or inattentiveness (at least speaking for myself) but love which has brought me here, and that's fucking me up even more. Our meeting was intense, totally based in irrational feeling and projections of profundity which we both brought with us - as you know - and that's why it was so magical. The ideal situation I was putting myself in was inspired by my past, by my activated presence, by my willingness to be transparent with my feelings and giving of my mind... in a word, it was based in pure love, rooted in real experience and oriented towards what I was willing myself to become. If you think about it, we always had misunderstandings. Every video conversation proved to be an exercise of my scathing observation to slice and scintillate your atmospheric cloud of impressions and epiphanies, getting close without pushing too far. I remember charting your limits and observing your discomfort with my probing. I think you know this also and it was sincerely fun, exciting, even fulfilling and motivating for both of us. I remember leaving those early conversations feeling refreshed and motivated to learn and do more. When you came to the US for our road trip I felt so completely relaxed in our dynamic, utterly trusting of your mind and presence. This was often against my better judgment as I could already identify some possible points of contention in how you acted in relation to my thoughts and actions, yet they seemed to be petty differences, even essential to the dynamic I wanted to nurture based on a productive tension, and most importantly I was able to receive each awkward discourse or behavior as an opportunity for me to observe myself, modify my behavior, and dismantle the inhibitions I had accumulated. This tension felt constructive. It served us. It was a useful tool, to use your phrase, which fit my own feeling of purpose and propelled me forward.

When you left the US I was devastated. It signaled the end of the first phase of the year, rooted in love and sharing and vulnerability, and ushered in the dark and ominous second half. Things did not go well in New Mexico - time will be the true test of course, but it certainly didn't feel beautiful and wonderful all butterflies and chocolate bars. I wasn't strong enough to overcome some of my adolescent demons forged in the blinding cauldrons of my parents dulled blades. I attempted to confront myself, to become vulnerable, to cultivate a culture of openness and reciprocation, but I fear that my attempts backfired and may have increased the distance between my father and I. It haunts me. The environment itself was also traumatizing. The architecture, the empty artifacts, the sterilized countertops, and the incessant clicking of all the goddamn clocks and calculators drove me mad. It broke my spirit and completely derailed my energy while also serving as a reminder of why I left and what I have been searching for. My project was a failure and I feel foolish, naive, presumptuous, and pretentious for having even attempted it. The whole summer (since you left) feels like a dark cold fog even though everyday was 38° and sunny. I wanted my experience there to be a gift for them, to make their happiness and well-being my focus, and to crack myself out of the brooding shell of resentment that had been built up over the years, but I can now see that they certainly view me to be completely self-centered, negligent, inconsiderate, focused only on my own emotions and desires with little sympathy for theirs. I wonder if that's their delusion, or my own... There's probably some new resentment sprinkled on top as well, being a 33 year old failure that has returned home to make some idiotic abstract video project on my iphone and clear out their refrigerator. Yes, I processed a lot of this before coming to Norway, but as I said it haunts me and I don't think I will soon be able to repair my own impressions of the encounter.

The whole time I was in New Mexico... while working on my "opera," staying physically and mentally centered on my creative tasks, and trying to process my experiences in Iceland... well, they feel like a delusion, like I was deluding myself. Much of this has to do with the delusion my parents choose to keep themselves comfortably contained within, to protect themselves from the evils of the outside world, but I can recognize that I have also been entertaining my own - about love and transparency and all my idealism for seeking out a better way to live in this corrupted world - so that my own refusal to back down on these key points caused an uncomfortable, unhealthy, and unwelcomed dissonance. My parents could see it coming.... and they accepted it with a surprising amount of patience and grace (at least my mother did) and I owe them credit for that. What I thought was going to be a time of healing and productivity turned out to be the most painful and destructive moments of the year.

I felt a wave of calmness and relief flood over me as soon as I stepped away from their car at the airport. I knew I was coming to you and I knew I was getting out of that boiling consumerist wasteland and suddenly all the strife seemed perfect, as though containing some glowing seed of a lesson that I could patiently attend to without fear. The whole trip I felt energized, focused, sharp... remembering our conversations and our dynamic and your beauty and tapping my foot with impatience to return to our loving cocoon. I had so much hope for our untarnished connection and felt completely prepared to be attentive to all my past mistakes - including the recent experience with my parents - in order to give in to our wellspring with my whole being. After that everything is a bit of a blur... I remember witnessing you becoming flushed with stress for the first time, and then again, and then again. I tried to observe myself to see how I might be responsible and grappled with the familiar discomfort of witnessing someone wrestling with their own fragmented history. I tried to stay present with you and serve your interests however I could. All of my own aspirations, concepts, and projects seemed completely safe, untouched by the interference we were experiencing, and for weeks I continued to feel confident that the emotional vapors would dissipate and we could return to the idyllic loving state I fondly remember in Iceland. You know the rest....

It wasn't until I had to begin focusing on these tasks that I really began to feel a separation taking place between us. I felt like I wasted a lot of time in New Mexico... yes yes, I processed some things, but I really achieved very little in my work. Once I honed in upon the quick succession of epiphanies that led me to start making the found footage videos in preparation for school and job applications, I suddenly felt a new surge of inspiration to make up for lost time and push this information out into the world. I could also see you struggling to figure out the direction of your project, so feeling that we were in similar situations I made the push to complete my goals. Looking back now, I feel like I chose to prioritize my own interests over yours, and even though I feel I remained focused on our shared dynamic, this resulted in the eventual destruction of our bond... although I don't really understand the depth of your need to be recognized. Of course I can't blame you for anything because honestly - all metaphors of "tables" and haunted "boxes" and "rooms" aside - I don't really know what you went through or are still going through. I only see the unpleasant results and hear the stories you tell yourself to stay calm. What I do know is that I wasn't able to handle the intensity of my own projects while immersed in your turmoil. I feel responsible for it, but what's worse is that I'm sitting here now doubting the decisions I have made. My phD application, the jobs, even the videos for the opera... all of it seems so insignificant in hindsight. Being with you felt like the most important thing and in a way I regret not choosing to sacrifice myself completely for your benefit. This is what I believe I am looking for in life, from a certain point of view: total self annihilation in service to another. In the end, my pride and my will couldn't overcome the neglect I felt, the loneliness of not being able to discuss what I was making or writing - of not being understood by my love - or the absurdity of the existential reality I was continuously facing.

Now I have nothing. I want to be here, to be with you, to build a life with you. I haven't been able to think about anything else for months and now, just as suddenly as you came in, it all seems to have vanished. I'm going back to a country that doesn't want me, to no job and few prospects and a jumbled pile of broken relationships that have been festering in neglect and uncertainty for years. For weeks now I have been meditating on what I want my life to look like so how I can manifest myself into that image, but all I keep coming up with is negatives. I know I don't want to live in Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco, even if that's where all my friends are. I've been heavily researching various freelance and remote employment opportunities so that I could earn money for myself while living wherever I want, but I must admit that the idea of spending all those hours of my life in front of a computer just to insert more meaningless information garbage into the world depresses the shit out of me. Maybe that's what I'm doing with my art also - sometimes I think so - and this is also depressing, or at least demotivating. It's just my low self-esteem right now, but I feel completely unprepared for any teaching jobs and unmotivated to put in the work to make myself appear desirable to the hiring committees. I keep ruminating over what I'm going to do... I can't live with my parents - although I might have to out of desperation and this nightmare constantly. The only thing that feels right is to pursue a position volunteering at an organic farm in rural America, which is probably what I'm going to do, but of course this is temporary, based in a barter system with little hope for making money... but then isn't my whole fantasy of owning a sustainable house out in the middle of nowhere just another diluted fantasy if I don't have someone I love and trust to share it with me, or the "career" that will fund it.... not to mention the horrors of the US political climate and my sincere belief that the world will change dramatically in our lifetime.

I hate that I found myself in the position of articulating the way out all the time in our relationship, because I honestly don't know anything. I don't have a job, sometimes it feels like I hardly have an art practice, and I certainly have only an amateur understanding of philosophical and psychological concepts. I told you once that I want to be the one in the relationship that can say "I don't know," that rolls around kicking and flailing, that can lash out irrationally and then be forgiven when I calm down. This is a sardonic joke of course, the blackest humor, because I know that I'm way too strapped in to be this kind of person. Honestly, I wish I could receive the existential angst of others with open arms and an open heart, to help others recognize their own deficiencies and empower them to overcome. What I lack is purpose. I thought I had found it in you, and in us, but I bowed under the pressure.

I don't know if I would have done anything differently. I don't like to think that way since it doesn't make any difference on where we are now. I think I could have stayed calm, empathetic, full of forgiveness, and saved our relationship at the price of sacrificing my own aspirations, but then again what kind of person would I be if I didn't stand for something and fight for it? I think you also could have acted differently on numerous occasions, adjusted your behavior so simply in order to attend to the needs I was calling attention to.... it's not that I ever wished for you to be a different person, just that I cannot stop wishing for you to be the best possible version of yourself. I desire it for myself as well. It's my lot in life, my own self-defined invisible vessel of autopoiesis. I am Sisyphus. I am the broken pelican of the drunken alchemist. I am the swollen clay becoming dry and brittle to my own internal heat combustion, desperately needing to stay wet and limber.

I don't know if I did everything I could... in the end I sealed off and escaped into my own recesses, as I knew I would, as I tried to warn you about. I became hot and brittle, like my father at his worst, like what I most feared becoming. Maybe I have become this due to fear, most certainly. We all have fear and we all need others to help us heal. I tried to be this for you but seem to have failed. I wanted you to serve me in this way, but for whatever reason - perhaps due to my own faults - you were not able to. In one way, I feel like I've come full circle and I'm back where I started this wild experiment, just before leaving for Iceland in the winter of 2015. I honestly don't know if my dreams of love and nurtured complexity are possible, or desirable, or respectable, as they seem to be continuously failing, and flailing, when I try to put them to use. That's why I'm a fool, so stubborn that I can't let go of my dream. It's also why I may become wise one day, so determined that I refuse to let go of what I know to be right. It's impossible to tell, now or ever, and again it really doesn't matter.

I don't know what to do with myself right now. This state of mourning and self-deprecation is not helping me to find reasons to return to the world and I'm at a loss to do anything about it. I'm stuck in limbo and loneliness and I don't even have a fucking guitar to write songs about it. I have no one and no way to express my frustration, as desperate as I am for a release.

I will try not to blame you. I will also try not to blame myself, even as I continue to hold myself accountable for all of my actions, right or wrong, as I believe we all must if we are not to succumb to the festering deception of the world. Perhaps all this seems dramatic and pointless, and perhaps it is. Time is running out and I don't really have a lot to waste on self-pity because I need to get back to looking for more pointless jobs in more depressing parts of the US, planning more days of a pointless existence with only a pointless end in sight.

Sorry. I don't mean to be so dark about it. I don't know how to talk to you right now and the thought of us hanging out so casually without discussing how we feel makes me nauseous. I want to see you and I also don't want to see you. I want to hate you but can't help but love you, as pathetic as that makes me feel. I want to be in the world and I also don't. I'm sure it will all work itself out with time. I mean, I'm sure I won't die, not anytime soon, and I don't really have much else to lose. I keep telling myself a story about how the greatest epiphanies spawn from the darkest moments of existence... genius sprouts from rock bottom. I don't know why I write this stuff to you now except that maybe I think darkness is better than no contact at all, but maybe that's also foolish. Time will tell all more clearly than I can.

****

ROUTINE MANTRAS FOR MENTAL CLARITY

• DAILY WRITING: MORNING OR EVENING? - TO COLLATE THOUGHTS

• DAILY READING: INSIDE AND/OR OUTSIDE? - TO COLLECT NEW IDEAS

• DAILY DRAWING: MULTIPLE MEDIA INSTANTIATIONS - NOTEBOOKS & VECTORS

• DAILY MUSIC: GUITAR/KEYBOARD - TOWARDS A HARMONIC CONVERGENCE

CURRENT MAIN IDEA TANGENTS

• MEDITATION: VIPASSANA. SILENT FOCUS, MENTAL ACUITY.

• DAILY ANARCHY

• PHENOMENOLOGY OF MYSTICISM..?

• DAVID TOOP: OCEAN OF SOUND

• EGS LECTURE VIDEOS

• #DELETEUBER PARADOXICAL ACTIVISM

• MUSIC: PUNK/NOISE BAND WITH AN AUDIENCE, OR NEW MENTAL IMAGERY THROUGH THE HEADPHONE ARENA

• AMERICA: BUT WHY? HISTORICAL TRAJECTORIES, POETICS, IDENTITY, SOCIO-ECONOMIC MALAISE OF THE CURRENT CONDITION. ESSENTIALLY, HOW I IDENTIFY.

• WOMYN: RELATION TO THE SELF, THE NATURE OF ROMANCE/DESIRE/SEDUCTION/ATTRACTION, INCORPORATING RADICAL HONESTY INTO THE FLUX OF INTERSEX CONVERSATION

• REMINISCENCE OF SPACE, TIME, PLACE: TRY TO ACCOUNT FOR THE LAST 3 YEARS IN A TIMELINE THAT CAN BE DIGESTED. THE VARIABLES ARE UNKNOWN, BUT THERE MUST BE A RUBRIC TO BE ARTICULATED TO FURTHER PROCESS THESE EXPERIENCES. = FIRST PERSON NARRATION

ITEMIZED LIMITATIONS OF ENERGY & AWARENESS

PREPARATIONS & REPARATIONS FOR THE OPERA - PROJECTS

• Beginning articulations of forthcoming mental tides

• [Cymatic textile printing machine]{.underline}: copper resonant plate to vibrate particulated dye into dispersed sound wave patterns which can be "printed" onto large canvas, linen, silk, or other textiles. Multiple tones printed over each other in various colors to create a synesthetic modulations of senses through harmonic color layers. Material can be used for theatrical backdrops, sculptural objects, wardrobe for musicians & dancers, "paintings" for sale, etc.

• [Music-movement transmogs]{.underline}

• Music-movement machine for sym-poietic notational drawing: (perhaps the foundation for a series of vector graphics) charting the interchange/exchange/transmogrification of intuitive improvisational inspiration between performers, "producing" a reverse-engineered notational image serving as document to a live-action sequence conversational flow. Examples: drumming signal (paradigm) shift sequences correlated to labanotation-esque body movements +/- body movements being recorded and deciphered into rhythmic constellations which can be actively sight-read by a percussionist [full body = full body]

• The tingle tapping of fingers on a guitarists fretboard (rising & falling, haptic sensibilities, resonate contact with the linear resonance of strings) mapped to expressive qualities of the hand/face/toes/stomach/other body parts == the creation of a gestalt formal system of touch-tickle into 4th dimensional shapes of distilled expression (how much of this concerns coding/decoding? How can the errors/lag/subjectivity of interpretation be removed from such a system?) +/- the grid of a dancer or the mind of a choreographer's 4d notepad being correlated to the fret board, ie: transferal of information between movement forms while still allowing/amplifying/emphasizing the creative potentials of both mover & player

• Theremin modulated libretto : correlation of tonal glissando & voice = sound information describing spatio-temporal-energetico coordination more than the rise & fall of theatrical affect in the actor. Relation between theremin player & actor should not be visual, vocal, linguistic, or expressive, rather emphasizing an allegory for the time worn schism between mind & body.

• Cymbal shimmers & video shivers

• Simultaneity of scale between model & reality: small model being projected via mirror system (or like demonstrations in science classrooms) to an on-screen stage screen serving as stage directions to the technicians.

2016

BORIS GROYS - ANTIPHILOSOPHY

GEORGES BATAILLE - THE UNFINISHED SYSTEM OF NONKNOWLEDGE

SLAVOJ ZIZEK - THE PARALLAX VIEW

GEORGES BATAILLE - VISIONS OF EXCESS

BRIAN MASSUMI - PARABLES FOR THE VIRTUAL

MANUEL DELANDA - A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIETY

MANUEL DELANDA - PHILOSOPHY AND SIMULATION: THE EMERGENCE OF SYNTHETIC REASON

MANUEL DELANDA - A THOUSAND YEARS OF NONLINEAR HISTORY

ROLAND BARTHES - THE NEUTRAL

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS - THE RAW AND THE COOKED

FELIX GUATTARI - SCHIZOANALYTIC CARTOGRAPHIES

DELEUZE & GUATTARI - WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

ANTONIN ARTAUD - THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE

2017

FRANCO "BIFO" BERARDI - THE SOUL AT WORK

KNUT HAMSUN - HUNGER

FRANCO "BIFO" BERARDI - AND: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE END

DAVID GRAEBER - FRAGMENTS OF AN ANARCHIST ANTHROPOLOGY

IVAN ILLICH - DESCHOOLING SOCIETY

DONNA J HARAWAY - STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE: MAKING KIN IN THE CHTHULUCENE

On Wednesday, I feel compelled to write you a letter, not for lack of communication or ulterior motive to elucidate any particular thing any more clearly, but for the love of it. For the love of writing, that is, but also to give you some love. So call it a love letter. I want to write something for you that is also nothing, or a non-thing, or might serve as a kind of vessel that isn't intended to be filled, just to be.

I don't have anything specific I want to tell you, but I suppose I have an infinite amount of general and nonspecific articles to share. I want to try to give them to you without it creating a burden, without weighing you down with all the minutiae constantly percolating through my head, and certainly careful to avoid creating any debt that you might believe needs to be repaid. I realize that I have never written you a letter, certainly due in part to the fact that we haven't spent any significant time apart since we became conjoined, either for need or desire or circumstances. As I'm sure you already know, I love to write. I could even say that I'm in love with writing, or I would say that perhaps I maintain that love which lies within writing itself as a kind of process always being performed through its own acting, played out through its own movements, articulating itself through its own embodiment. So maybe writing isn't love, not literally, but they certainly share much in common, in form and texture and multifarious expressions, and also in their potential lack thereof, in their potential. So I wanted to write something to you as a gift of a different order, one that isn't to make me feel better or that requires being gifted in return, and one that doesn't necessarily contain anything except the symbolic resonance of its own giving.

On Thursday, I am thinking about what I can give you, how I can give it to you, what is required in my being able to give anything, and why I feel such a need to give. I think I have a lot to give, I know I do, but I also realize that there is a profound difference in giving according to need and imposing "will" upon another, any other, but you especially. I don't want to impose anything upon you, or pretend to know what you may or may not need, while maintaining that I wish to give you everything I can, without purpose, I suppose, which is to say without expecting anything in return, so not a gift as much as a potlach, a sacrifice beyond payment.

I like using all these commas while I write like they are so many breathes, punctuation marks for breathing pauses, little stumbling blocks that break up my stream of thoughts into small little chunks that let them season and sizzle upon the black iron pan of memory, imagined as new lines only implied, not forced upon the linearity of the page.

I know, but what do I know? It seems inarticulable in words, at least these, at least any more than the hundred or so simple sounds I am evoking through straightforward language, so maybe a poetic sequence is more appropriate, but how do I tell the difference between plain speech and complex poetics, and what would be to gain in doing so? I would like to give generously of my wellspring of impressions, to share not a thing so much as an atmosphere of song, soliloquy for pure vibration, a poem about the tingle tangle of vocal chords jiggling in the throat chamber, but silent, wrapped in silence, unsung through any literal tonsils and left instead to resound through the chatter of thoughts ricocheting off the frequencies transpiring from my mind to yours, clicks of another tongue less muscular and all the more tantalizing. Poetry needs to be written everyday, not according to any rule but in praise of general health, and it needs a form to fill (or be filled), a target of focus (or a trajectory of velocity), to be interesting, which is to say "have meaning." I'm not so interested in sonnets as I am the concrete, rooting poems into the ground of existence - it's not a botanical metaphor, more of a making-real, of a way of speaking prone to continuous evaporation - condensation on the windows. Paintings can be seen as windows or as mirrors. They are dumb in that way. Poetry is infinitely more complex of course. Poetry is about existence, and about breathing, the mind and the body and all the invisible minutiae dancing in the cracks: breathing thoughts, exhausting moist ideas, collecting hot sweaty moisture off the surface of the page, or of life. I wanted to write you a poem about knowledge, or about knowing myself, which really would be about not knowing anything, or any self thing, without saying so explicitly, and so it seems that by saying what I was trying to avoid stating, likening it to a process of respiration and weather, I have presented both the futility and fecundity of such an inversion - wet silence.

On Friday, I witnessed some individuals lose their individuality, lose themselves in their selves. I stood stabile as others stumbled over becoming-other. It happened at work of course, a chaotic environment of continuous influx and outflux, pure flow at the end of the tributary with human fingers sifting through the sediments carried by the tides. Before and after work I have been practicing honing my mind, tempering my temperaments to stay tight without becoming excessively constricted. You see, something about that place and the people it attracts and the objects being handled seems to pull out the awareness from ones self, or at least mine from my own, but yes others have testified to these sensations as well, almost as though we are compelled to extend our sentience farther than equilibrium can contain, like elastic fibers which have built up a kinetic energy suspended in tension constantly threatening to snap back with violent force. Today I witnessed a snapping in or of another, a few in fact, a series of minor snapping which would have typically become lost in the general mayhem of fleeting moments if I were not so attentive to the gurgling indigestion rippling by, or at least that's what I tell myself. I feel my own being becoming uncomfortably extended, a certain loss of control over what I am saying, how my body is being held erect, a high-energy disorientation flavored like an apocalyptic celebration, an exuberant party at the end of the world, and as I become aware of it I attempt to back pedal in the current, to reel myself up and in towards a shallow pool of calmer buoyancy, to try to stay afloat and be carried along with the momentum and be directed by its coursing currents without being smashed on the rocks or eroded along the edges. Often it seems I am commended for my steady focus and collected demeanor and I try not to let this go to my head, but I am simultaneously specifically and especially trying to let this go to me head, to keep my head above water, to head in the right direction, to heed the right calls to arms and head off the pack-mentality at the pass, to hallow names and harken back to quieter times, thereby catapulting boulders of stillness into the muddy floodwaters of the present. When someone hits the wall, in mind or in body, suffering from ideological confusion or emotional fatigue, silently in their own shadowed corner or publically in a theatrical heap of steaming agony, I try to observe while remaining aloof, extend a hand of sympathy without being pulled under the waves, try to remain calm and recognize that there is no real disaster, not really, not in my trajectory, and that although we are all immersed in the same ocean each tributary maintains its name and decides its own course over the silty beaches. I hope to extend my attention as a gift to others without exuding any airs of pretension, to completely submerge in the collective waters without drowning in their perpetual swells. There seems to be a lesson contained there, something more related to the eternal mixing of fluids - that all is a mixture, tincture, impure solution - than pertains to the etiquette of swimming in riptides.

On Saturday I drowned, in visions of excess and poverty, mostly. My mental focus retracted into itself - all day I entertained a mental projection of my psychic body as an ouroborous, a curling serpent consuming its own entrails. I am constantly reminding myself that I am poor and it is difficult because I feel so rich, so fortunate, not privileged so much as empowered. My mind does not sit still in this devastated landscape as I am always floating away upon an ethereal breeze; it is easy for me to project another reality over the one which is continuously presented before me. The merits of this seem obvious - I do not suffer from the same perturbations that inflict those around me - yet the negative consequences are more subtle, leading me to second guess this aloof demeanor. I begin to wonder if I am really here, if I embody a whole self or merely a fraction of an otherwise entire being, if I am creating new worlds through a dynamic incantatory project driven by intention and dancing with chaos or if I am inflicted by a schizophrenic impulse to multiply realities in order to escape the undesirable qualities of the social atmosphere. Everywhere there is confusion, everyone around me appears disoriented, lost in their own vortex of self-referential continuously shifting tectonic momentum, so why must I perpetuate the guilt, fear, anxiety, and other psychic scars of those whom choose to suffer incessantly, needlessly, naively? Always the balance between maintaining buoyancy within the tumultuous ocean, to remain empathetic to all others as an open conduit of mindful consideration without being consumed by the toxins proliferating in the ether. Occasionally, when I am tired or over worked, I forget to remember the difference, internalizing the feelings beyond choice, and this manifests in my body as a bottomless chasm, a gnawing hunger which cannot be appeased by fats or sugars, a boredom which is overlaid upon existence like a shadowy filter, an overwhelming weight which cannot be sensed directly, like a vice upon the expansiveness of expression. In those moments, like I experienced on Saturday, I forfeit efforts of fortification, choosing to give in to the depths of the darkness, to be consumed by it, knowing that it is also real and necessary yet will never consume me completely, so as to feel the depths of these dark holes and gain new perspective on the heights of luminous awareness, if and when it should ever return.

On Sunday, I felt my self unraveling, the threads of truth untying themselves from the fixtures of existence, an eternal tapestry unweaving from the loom of flowing materials, back to a primordial line, what I would imagine Lao Tzu to name a "pure motion." This motion appeared to me as a gray abyss, a grisaille of old age, an under-painting upon which the colors of the world are layered. All the absurd commentary of peers and strangers melted into a general glossolalia of biology, along with the cacophony of all the other sounds as well, an amplified symphony of aleatoric friction through the atmosphere harmonizing with the tinnitus of my inner ear damage so that I was no longer able to differentiate the inside from that which was beyond the parameters of my own being. Standing in the sunshine observing the shadows of my figure while I mindlessly unfolded cardboard boxes and set them into rows, I could sense the collapse of the human ontological system into another dimension, one inhabited by objects and dominated by physics, directed by the language of electrons, more than the flimsy archetypes of the limited primate sentience. Riding my bicycle through the black tar streets, I felt how unnatural it is to fly. Seeing you after many days of being apart made me feel satiated, not full but filling, and I was able to regain my focus upon the text I had been absorbed in, realizing that I had lost whole sections to my own reverie projecting out upon the page as I lost track of what was written, what was being read, and what was reading me, or myself through the process of reading. I went to sleep early, somehow already refreshed by the barometric shift in my own humid ecology.

On Monday, I witnessed a return, back to an earlier state which I recognized through its familiarity but still seemed new, or at least different. I realized the importance of sleep in shedding off the layers of the day, as well as adding new layers in dreams, and how these layers comingle into the self that I am, which is to say how I am presenting myself to the world, and also to myself. Perception emanates from within and without, neither are more true. I received a letter from a friend whom I spent time with in Iceland - we built the house together and he had recently traveled back to the site to observe the wood we meticulously detailed, a labor of love conducted over months of immersion and seclusion - and he told me that in that far off isolated place, out at "the end of the world" as we call it, and it really does feel that way, and is that way, way out there he feels like even more of himself, not his ideal self so much as the root of his being, that more real than real being that supports all the social edifice that we are so desperately trying to balance in our daily routines while living in a city. I can relate to his sentiment to a certain extent, and with this in mind I would like to cultivate this flavor of being even while living in the city, but I recognize the profound vulnerability that it requires, and achieving such a state is impossible, or at least undesirable, while surrounded by so many egos and so many layers of concrete, so we must wake up and eat a fortified breakfast and put on all this symbolic clothing to protect ourselves from the world, and from each other, and from ourselves, and over time our ontological garments become heavy as our movements become calcified and the psychic armor becomes rusted in its limited range of motion. Still, there is a certain peace in these thoughts, at some moments feeling like a leaden hopelessness, but others, like this one, seems more of an opportunity to observe from the relative safety of one's own shell. We are all mollusks, we are all muscular feet rooted to the soil laboring our shells over the slime trails of others in search of the path, and all the complexity of human poetry and liberated consciousness attempts to shatter the nautilus - so to speak - which is both violent and heroic and stupid. My question - the most eternal - is whether such an action should be performed, even as it is being articulated. If one is to make life into a poem, poetry in action, how then to curb this violence, to not threaten others, to not obliterate the self in the process, or indeed is that the point, and if so how to reconcile these tectonic shifts with the need to keep on living and working, that is, to maintain a presence in relation to others which is not threatening, non-violent, supple in mind and soft in body, receptive to the feelings of others and ready to dispense concentrated wisdom in return?

On Tuesday, everything became louder, and I meditated upon rhythms, of life and work and the mechanical desires of others. The world felt heavier, slower, compressing like a spring in vice grips, while I was walking lighter, a retuned clock set to a different time, and I remembered the alienation that tolls when one becomes synchronized in labor, mindless in routine, while remaining full of insight and persevering in creative visions. All week I had been attempting to balance my various facets, to cultivate a rich inner experience of ideas, treated as a material process, requiring labor to shape and refine into rarified morsels, and also time to condense in elegance, with the external demands of social engagement, to maintain a powerful assertive presence before others, friend or foe, to speak candidly about existence as it arises without recourse to puns, clichés, colloquialisms, and other dangerous traps of muted mental meats. The issue is not just about work and leisure, economic labor conflicting with the poetic actions of the artist, but concerns more the variances of engagement with the world, with reality and in determining what is more real, what will proliferate into ever more life worth living and not detract from the continued pursuit of infinitely expanding inspiration. There is a secret embedded in this worldly material, what I believe to be "the grand mystery" lying at the core of every mystical journey as well as the obscure object of desire for empirical knowledge seekers, a slippery artifact of the dream world whispering into waking existence a deceivingly simple lesson so basic it is almost impossible for the fully formed adult mind to fully comprehend. This blurry principle cannot be summarized in an algorithm or abbreviated in a linguistic turn, but can be felt coursing through the body, and outside of it, in the patterns of our processes manifest through our patterned actions and the communicative abstractions we lean upon to describe them to each other, however callous and sloppy. The secret is change, and the etiquette for its handling is through release. I must remember to remember, keep in mind and out of mind this tonal tonic ringing through the calcified rock swimming within the salienated sacks of my ears, remember the sound of sound itself serving as a reminder that one cannot lose themself if they no longer differentiate from the environment they are bathing in, but also to remember the practical nature of such an unpronounceable rule, to serve continuously through thought and labor that perpetual parallax flux which rushes us all along, to move with the currents without holding on, so as not to be swept away, so as not to be folded under, but to remain buoyant and witness the sublime beauty of the destruction and creation occurring all around, always simultaneously, always changing, without logic or virtue or human sensibility, and to find themselves already there, arrived.

****

OPERA OF/FOR KNOWN & UNKNOWABLE UN-I-VERSES

[DISCRETE ELEMENTS:]{.underline} objects in the expanded field, each demonstrating idiosyncratic characteristics of sound, movement, interaction, etc.

• THE TABLE: must be assembled, materializing out of nothing to become the most basic (elemental) of forms. On stage, its represented by a silhouetted negative space, that place where a table would be place if one could imagine it becoming physical, defined by its absence. Then a 2D "image" of the table is placed, low fidelity representation, a flat rendering of an otherwise complex form. This 2D gestalt is used as a screen upon which is projected a 4D/animated/morphing cinema of "table-ness" transmogrifying continually through various stages of creation, development, dynamic states, momentum without matter. The table communicates its shifting of values through sound, amplifying the transitions between states with blocky rhythmic organic & mechanical pulses (gamelan) and calling awareness to condensed static states through chords, at first dissonant and then increasingly harmonic/pythagorian as the shape of the table become more harmonious/elegant/idealized. The table itself serves as a kind of [control panel]{.underline}, [game board]{.underline}, [communal territory]{.underline}, [collective body]{.underline}, and [collaborative instrument,]{.underline} each being explored at various points of the opera. In the beginning the musical abilities/sensibilities will be most obvious as the characters struggle to describe the shadow-form emerging out of the fog of imagination. As the sounds become more clear/recognizable the variations of forms (both visual and musical) can become consistent/predictable leading to continuous semi-improvised transitions to other states. The music draws awareness to the subtle changes in form of the territory as the descriptions of that territory fluctuate.

• THE COSMOCOCCIC DRUM-SET / CONDUCTIVE GAMELAN: "the first instrument," that which seems to have come before anything else. We hear the sound of its whirling pulsations before seeing anything emerge on screen, implying that the creation of all that exists emerges from these primordial rhythms. The instrument serves as a [metaphor for non-verbal communication]{.underline} through the sounds it produces, as [a schematic for semiotic machinery]{.underline} through how it is constructed/technically functions, serves as [a [metaphorical "tool" for both physics and pataphysics]{.underline} like a sonic mortar and pestle or resonate alchemical pelican in its ability to distill affect and transmogrify material through cymatic effect or a computer modulating the algorithms of physics. At various moments [it represents the voice of nature, the hand of god/s, and the creative-destructive potentials of the human will]{.underline}. On a technical level, drawings/schematics of the CCDS/CG is a way of spatializing the musicians of an ensemble, dividing their attention through adjusting their proximity to particular rhythms and allowing the conductor or lead percussionist to become de-centered. Such displacement allows for the reopening of the central void, which can then become filled yet again with the audience, actors, or other subjects/objects of consideration.

• PROBABILITY CLOUD OF ATTENTION: a spatialized representation of attention, associated to every "being-becoming" currently within view, visualized as a colored gradient of diffuse light field. Color is associated to qualities of awareness, size of the field expands/contracts/locates according to the b-b's acute/remote sense, texture defines the fidelity/resolution/depth. On stage this could take the form of [a roaming spotlight]{.underline} of simple shapes and unified colors, [physical scrim or inflatable form or metaphyical object]{.underline}, or more [allegorical symbolism]{.underline} like a character color-coded dress or LED light path, as well as larger video projection mapping of the entire stage or territorial sections within. On screen the attention-field may be any of the above, or occupy the 'negative space' of chroma-keyed backdrops or foreground objects, taking on more complex textures and movements.

Examples: roaming spotlight with different colored gels, digital projects of scintillation patterns or other forms of textural interference of the architecture, objects being present in the space which glow internally or reflect aspects of the environment around them (mirror acetate rocks, focal point diffusion windows/frames fabricated from concentric magnification lens of an old overhead projector, etc), LED garmets/suits/objects which throb and pulsate various colors in sequenced rhythms, sound controlled lighting effects in the physical stage environment or through various objects (plexiglass panels with color-shifting LEDs embedded behind, slowly modulating overhead theater lights, afterglow effects from various actual or simulated environmental or personal hand-held screens [like phones glowing on faces, through thin fabric of pants, or onto nearby walls/surfaces when they are placed around the set]).

• PLANTS/ANIMALS/CHILDREN=KIN COMPANIONS: unpack one at a time.

  • PLANTS: a simulation of a natural ecosystem, representation of life as an alien intelligence, an algorithmic composition of static living beings facilitating a collapse of spatial parameters (foreground/background). Evoke feng shui aesthetic philosophy instilling balance/harmonics to the architectural interiors/exteriors, serving as both object, subjects, and ground simultaneously, alternating roles according to various attentions of the primary-speaking-characters (PSCs). Some plants can be moved by PSCs, others move autonomously through the space on their own (flying overhead suspended by motorized pulley system or slowly crawling along the ground on radio-controlled platforms operated by stage hands), some always remain constant. Each plant carries particular symbolic/poetic/allegorical meanings, like ingredients to an alchemical recipe or "potion" being mixed in the stage-pelican/room-mortar. Plants have names and properties that some characters are sensitive to and all audience members may potentially become aware of if they decide to study and decode their particulars. On stage, the specimens may be real plants, hybridized graphs of real plants, crafted models in various materials (ranging in realism from botanical acurate to absurdly alien abstraction), or mere flickering images of real/imaginary beings.

Examples: "fake" silk/polyester plants painted various colors, mirror acetate or color foil crafted plants, abstract textiles made from natural plant-dyes, brutish carved wood relics, intricately cast metal forms, specimens larger/smaller than actual scale.

• ANIMALS: a simulation of pack-play dynamics, a continuous presence of symbiotic companion/kin whether characters or audience recognize them or not, and also various allegorical components of the primal human psyche = the anthropocentric embodiment of ancestral voices, the unified ego of the blood-biome, violence of programmed cell death becoming aware of itself. If plants represent the world-as-alien, a deterritorialization of the world we are immersed in, then animals serve as an extension of the interior, the alien ecosystem emanating from within our own muscular substrates, lymphatic winds carrying the voices of infinitesimal microorganism screaming out in unison. Each animal presence alludes to a facet of the internal world, either of the physical substrate (organs, elemental effluvials, the digestive soup balloon maintaining our probiotic ocean) or psychological protuberances (facets of the self: shadow self, etheric self, various "true" selves, subconscious, "big" and "small" Other, Void, perhaps various states of animalistic anxiety or auto-reflex actions, etc). As with the plant taxonomy, each animal will serve a specific poetic/symbolic/allegorical function, although unlike plants these roles will be inconsistent as they continuously shift from both internal "uncontrollably" forces of the animal will beyond the grasp of human sentience as well as via the human tendency to project their psychological/psychic states upon others. Some PSCs will be more aware of these transferrals than others, some PSCs will call audience attention to the movements, some PSCs will fall victim to confusion of animal roles and contribute to the general confusion of other characters and the audience.

Animal presence will be made visible through a variety of means: actual living animals on stage or roaming through the audience, stuffed animals in the form of taxidermy and child toys, crafted totems reminiscent of various world cultures combined/hybridized with strange new exaggerations, and through the allegorical use of PSC costumes to present the skins, colors, and textures of various animals upon the human body. Masks may also be used, although carefully avoiding literal evocations of specific animals, rather staying within ambiguous zones of "cat-ness" or "dogged" features, etc.

• CHILDREN: young anthropomorphic beings (not completely human though not definitively non-human) are presented as quasi-states, more becoming than being, not wholly characters nor utterly objects, yet embodying qualities of both. The child's attention is the inverse of the plant's: rather than the smooth steady botanical pulsations of empathic resonance, the child's attention is scattered, tattered, fragmented, dispersed, chaotic, agonistic, and flickering. The child's temperament is the inverse of the animal's: rather than the wise, calm, articulate, patient, sympathetic voice of the animal kingdom, the child is anarchistic, antagonistic, laying tricks and traps to attention and trust, always testing and probing the parameters of the interaction in search of points of weakness, fundamentally narcissistic and nepotistic in serving their own material interests, easily distracted by the allure of commodities, absorbed in the minutae of human culture and negligent to the subtle unspoken complexities of the natural world. As parallax of these other beings the child maintains a unique position in relation to them, more sensitive to the influence of plants and easily seduced by the vexations of animals than other PSCs, and in turn these beings exercise a unique consideration towards the child. The child behaves as caretaker of plants while easily succumbing to their intoxication, treats the animals as equals and can fluidly communicate with them directly but cannot translate these conversations to PSCs. On stage, children may be acted by actual child actors or adult actors cynically performing with diminished empathy. Each child character speaks in riddles, often fails/neglects to complete sentences, often rambles on about selfish materialistic desires or personal fetishes, and is prone to frequent schizophrenic emotional/psychic outbursts seemingly without relation to the actions of others.

• THE SCRIM-ROOM/DREAM-THEATER/SHIMMER-SCREEN: a metaphor-made-physical of the physical stage, staged upon itself, a regression of the place-as-thing, a reflection of the surroundings projected upon their own substrate, an allegory for character formation itself. It will be constructed of (essentially) walls which fold, stack, change is size and position, and serve as backdrop for a series of events. The materials and designs of these modular walls will change according to need, ranging from opaque to transparent, matte to reflective, human-scale to larger than the field of vision, moveable object within a voidinal space or immersed in the field of another scrim to semi-visible "shimmering frames" of overlaid patterns, textures, interference, materializations of sounds, modulations of light, or adjustments of an expressionistic/illusionistic space (ala expressionist film sets or a magicians trapdoor stage). At its most basic the "room" will consist of a single wall, akin to those used for photo backdrops, or even a single piece of paper pulled down from the ceiling reminiscent of long Chinese scroll paintings for kabuki theater. A slightly more complicated version may consists of a basic room divider stretched with one or more layers of fabrics or other materials which can have auxiliary sections added or removed, layers peeled back or applied, and can serve as allegorical architectural divisions for different PSC actions to take place.

The beginning of a process, of writing, among other things. Most important is to develop a practice, a ritual, to dwell in the various moments of the day and explore what might be done with them. I'm taking care of mind and body. I'm taking care with all aspects of creation. I'm taking care not to take care for granted.

This writing should be an instrument of voices, perspectives, characters writing themselves into being as an elucidation of my own ever-becoming. I must practice all aspects of existence, hone all the facets of this life, as I have been and as I continue to be, but now with rigor applied through method. This shall be my method.

How to write haiku while on the clock? How to navigate sublime consciousness among the proletariat? Za Zen: an internal focus among the swirling tumultuous chaos. Honing in on ones work to be as efficient as possible. The Four Agreements: Father's Way. Unpacking the ancestral histories of work, through ethic = work ethics, a fine tuning of the mental instrument, cerebral productivity.

All these workers are characters in and of themselves. They are individuals coming together to form an archetype, but of what? Not just Americans, not just lazy, not just overworked drones milking the clock. There is a silent ethic of separation and mutual support, every human for themselves, forced into collaboration, belittling the other over petty differences, dreaming always dreaming of another life outside of the job, an ideal put on hold for the grind of the work day, struggling to stay afloat within the abyss of constant motion - of capital forces - always threatening total annihilation, of the individual identity within the communal whole, of the physical body, but mostly of the spirit. The spirit suffers for different reasons, for lack of recognition, but mostly as a result of unnecessary (nonessential, ungratifying) toil in service of others with no immediate relevance. To labor for nothing, for the void, is to allow oneself to be filled with the void, to build the self into a container of nothingness. Yet there is separation possible, potential transcendence, above the hum drum drones of the machinery and schematics, a labor of transcendence which can be practiced in all things. It is this that I wish to achieve in this life.

Always it seems there are two characters, but the worker is one, and so perhaps is defined by this internal strife, or of the inner tension with the outer dimensions. Angry, hot headed, perpetually hungover, always verging on sickness, a somnambulant slave to their own materialism, or status, or hubris.

displacement of meaning from spoken to written forms. Every language evokes unique affect, has a usage it is best suited for, rooted in the histories of its speakers. How does language reveal an identity unfolding, becoming, as a process of articulation more than materializations of purpose? D and I will write in Arabic and consider translations on every level.

The content will be of darkness, of a Buddhist nature, the center always being filled never depleted. How to depict this core of being while evading direct description? Zen arts of mindfulness, ephemerality, process, growth. D on a loom, textiles and weaving as a metaphor? The language is a transpirational mechanism, the power of spells = mystical transformations, transmutation of matter, transmigration of souls. Darkness = increasing blackness (color), less substance with increasing density. Arabic language is of fire, breath, hot dry air, arid deserts and swirling tongues, Sufi twirls, curled robes over bodies, hidden, obscured, undefined.

How to build an instrument that produces textures (not just clear tones, but diffuse surfaces) upon which this curvilinear language can be written, spoken, supported? Musical instrument as the clock of time, metronome of the soul, springboard of the mind: bells in a monastery, brooks sweeping up the ashram, reverberant spaces for collective meditation or very dry tight constructed spaces incubating the domestic meditator cutting off from the world. A tension between inside and outside. Small instruments of objects amplified to image cosmic models, like tiles on the walls of the temple, each a schematic for a corner of the universe. Instruments of breath, air, heat = horns, reeds (throat), friction on stone, aeolian harps playing the breeze through windows, fans of stiff textiles (no motorized sounds!), the amplified rustling of heavy desert robes muffling voices underneath lost in a sand storm, sand blasting ancient stone architectures, sand spilling in tubes = Alison Knowles bean shakers.

What of identity? Where does our innate authenticity sprout from? Always already an eternal return to nowhere, or perhaps always a becoming of what we are (or are meant to be)? There is a void inside and outside that we each must be careful not to fall into. Can we appropriate our own culture? Is it possible to imagine (let alone craft) a new culture? How many people does it take to articulate a new identity? Taking care with words: a mantra: "Thinking and speaking are powerfully predictive actions." Darkness of the self-other, Phoenix rising from the ashes. Life of the fire in the embers glowing from within. The self is evasive and requires a poetic language to access.

an Oakland iteration of the OOFKAUU ensemble. ___ on strings, prepared violins, homemade dulcimers, aeolian harp, prepared table top guitars and basses= extended technique & unique amplification scenarios. ___ on vox, poetics, textiles, crafted objects, female ritual mind. ___ as choreographer, chasm of the mind/body divide, linearity of script, body textures unfurled through era-Area-arias. Produces a drawing to be loomed and woven.

and the ability to rectify them. Transcendence of mind over mundane routine, to hit to the source of inspiration, to spread infectious inspiration in others, to arouse creativity rather than contempt, to cultivate higher ideals and avoid reveling in the shit of existence. Every art has its principles of craft, method, attention and awareness, sensitivity to the "materials" at hand: handmind; the corporeal sense outside of and alongside the rational/intellectual sense. There is a theory of communication and then there is the heat of the moment.

___'s plight for happiness. The delicate balance between capitalized labor and hedonistic pleasure spawned from freedom = limits are concerned with applied attention, area of the will, self-determined freedom, i.e. Spiritual values. Juxtaposed to the monetary labors producing material wealth and imagined "comforts". Different definitions of "thriving" in each form of labor, divergent priorities for what is considered essential.

ACH: new perspectives in narrative storytelling, serves as a model for ambiguous character development, song structure, outline for archetypal stage design. Stage: 1. This world 2. That world 3. The "hinge", transitional space in between. Moveable platforms that can be rearranged or else floor drawings delineating projections of space-time-action::era-area-aria.

The meditation found in work: painting the bathroom, sweeping the floor (of the temple, ashram, home), carefully painting, scrubbing the sink. The qualitative difference between adding or subtracting material. The ritual of domestic housekeeping: sundays are a day of worship, no longer to a sky deity, now to the earthen beings or the earth itself, or perhaps the Self directly of the home is considered an extension of the physical body under capitalism (materialism) or psychic territory (affect of inhabitable space). Cleaning the home is cleaning the mind: to free oneself of clutter and learn to focus upon the hearth, the seat of consciousness, the root of sentience: a practice of mindfulness of oneself-in-relation. Respect for ones own environment, ritual cleansing to "make space" for extra-ordinary activities beyond the filth of daily existence: a sacred space (defined not by holy beings but by the removal, the void, the "other place" beyond reach of public view). Home is closed, sealed, safe and "comfortable": thriving space. It can also be opened, a space for opening, others invited in to make, to converse, to incubate relations: a gift of shared environmental consideration, the opportunity should be used mindfully.

Designs for textural synthesizers, spectrograph modulation units, amplified weather chambers, aleatoric simulators. Also in reverse: room sized microphones made from giant sheets of piezo copper or aluminum to capture the orgone resonance of a dancer, their displacement of atmosphere in the era-area, or the imperceptible movements of the space itself. Like a ribbon microphone, picking up extremely low architectural-scale frequencies. Research: capturing neutrinos with a super collider/partial accelerator, capturing space radiation with the very large array in NM, visualizing materials with cymatics - granulated earth vibrating on metallic plates. String tensioning through the room: Ellen Fullman: using the body to dictate the sonic-texture-space = ___ able to compose to the instruments I install & ___ about to recite Arabic poetry into microphones I build and modulate & ___ bowing the room with suspension lattice.

Remembering the conversation with ___: blue collar sensibilities. Classism of the mind.

The chorus of voices.

The dance, the dancer individual as representative of the species.

The chamber ensemble, both on & off the stage, sound of the world & soundtrack of the persons. Beginning & ending tones, designating temporal sequences or special movements: music as time-space: era-area-aria.

Letters written to individuals, reflection of the qualities of that unique relationship trajectory: real? Or just of the minds orientation? Orchestration of everyday life, but not to represent the mundane/banal aspects of existence, rather to raise them into the realm of spiritual satiation: work worship.

Write a letter to ___ in Seyðisfjörður. Keeper of the torch: flame of mind fueled by ember body, torch of reason, light of the philosoph, anarchist librarian, archivist of communal knowledge heard through the aural tradition. Tell ___ about the books read over the last year: Donna Haraway, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ursula K LeGuin, Claude Levi-Strauss The Raw and The Cooked, Felix Guattari Chaosography, GD&FG What Is Philosophy... juxtaposed with stories collected from people, the plight of the blue collar worker in America compared to the heroic Scandinavian trade worker, the story of class and classism in the first world, stories storming stories of a different order. Zen and the art of bonsai, the art of conversation, the art of house building, the art of noise, the art of doing nothing or the practice of nothingness: we are all so busy with the void that perhaps we forget the stillness of true chaos. Juxtaposition of mental and physical forces. ___, I have a new job, I build photosets for junk mail catalogs yet I am more of an anarchist than ever. Perhaps you can understand my position more than anyone, a question of purpose - to oneself, to the world of persons, to the world of things - but also of money. The house we built stands as a cerebral landmark, the axis mundi of conjoined worlds, of the absurd and the practical, a pillar of consideration, hinge of the universe separating two or multiple worlds. Remembering something ___ once said, about returning to Seydis after a summer in Copenhagen, describing a collapse of the boundaries of time-space. ___ had also hinted at slippages of the temporal continuum, shimmers of memory, the blurry state of mind while reading books on the sofa early in the morning, how a daily routine such as having breakfast at the same table with the same quiet company can lead to a condensation &/or collapse of the real into the imaginary abyss. How much of our time together was real, actually happened? How much was a figment of our individual or collective imagination? The first time I left Seydis, after the summer residency, ___ paid for my bus ticket and my response was that perhaps that I only exist in his memory - before our conversations of memory. Later while building the house, so many accumulated thoughts about physical history, human-scale time set against the stage of the geological pancake mountains - described as a layer cake of dough and jam, sweet to the mind, landscape made visceral through the memory of our haptic sense of eating sweet cakes, the textures and colors. The house was stripped and resurrected, returned from death, given a new body and filled with revitalized pneuma= our breath, our labor, the songs we sang out into the valley while applying the skin, the hum of the sanders vibrating the soul and skull while revealing the stratifications of history hiding beneath gray molten ash, the crisp breeze flowing down from the valley, more water than atmosphere typically allows, filled the space with the outside: breakdown of inside/outside during the construction, always open to that landscape while still sheltering our dreams and aspirations, like a 9-pole house or dreamers wigwam of indigenous peoples. Sterling and the sweat lodge as mirror portals of each other, constructed by the same visionaries for different purposes, both for cultivating mindfulness at the brink/periphery, one of civilization and the other of the earth/sea, platforms for communing with greater and lesser intervals of major and minor parables of the creation and destruction of mind/body relations. To return to Seydis will be a pilgrimage, a circling back to the source, embodiment of eternal return, a communion as well as a reunion: to nature and to humanity. That place - the house and the topology of memory upon which it is build - is a site of amplification, beyond holy it is profoundly secular, of and for the earth, prepared to be swept away by rising tides but forever buoyant in the salienated seas of our collective experience. I want to continue speaking with ___ about freedom, anarchy, liberation, beyond equality towards the modulation of individuality. What is the purpose of school, or perhaps purpose is the wrong question: how do can we practice school? How can we practice? What is in a practice? Towards what are we practicing: an end, a goal, wisdom, mastery, or merely old age, pure time, life as a grand speciation, a derive through the psychic continents, we all as flaneur out for a Sunday stroll, or monks on our own mountains humming the song emanating from below to above, or the sky-ward seeking dancer losing their body in the arms of the breeze, or simple pupils humbled by the infinite task of sweeping up after the ashram. The technique of cleaning, of cooking, of staying mindful in all the daily tasks, including talking. Every moment is a target which can be hit or missed, but not to win or lose: a question of potential attentiveness, proliferating awareness, or not: the lack thereof. ___, how have you changed? ___, how will you keep on changing? What does your landscape look like, what does it resemble, how do you make decisions to keep it in or out of order?

I want to send you a book: Ursula K LeGuin's Always Coming Home. LungA isn't an anarchist art school, it is a hinge between two worlds. The place is a transformation but it is up to the initiate to be transformed. As a last thought I remember Osho, and want to discuss influence and responsibility in the same breath. It always seems a matter of time, time as matter, as a material which can be manipulated, but time cannot be owned or kept: the primary delusion. We are aligned as much as we wish to escape individual and collective delusion, but will still entertain certain illusions for sake of fun, radical play, politics of honesty and joyfulness. How do we practice and temper our influence upon others? Upon ourself? We know it will take time.

Later... thoughts of Iceland keep returning, eternal return of the twisting golden braid, call of the center, back to the nude transparency of the ices over void. Remembering the conversation with the mountain, as well as with the humans. I should research the possibilities of a reunion, return voyage, even if just for a short span, to revisit these landscapes and reacquaint with these peopling peoples.

mind. I require sound resting places: toilet seat, armchair, studio chair. Towards a theory of chairs.

On the weekends, print out and read the week-long notes. Highlight major ideas & begin working towards their completion. Planning happens on weekdays to allow for the weeks end to be dedicated towards another quality of work.

Design & build a HVAC system, fan, ventilation... a good idea or not? One on each window, ideally reversible.

Start a list of musical instruments that can be composed on singularly, for rough sketch compositions. Research potential for an Oakland ensemble composed of strangers - outside the current social network.

Meditation while working: to stay grounded, focused, not spin out into the social praxis. The radicality of not speaking.

Remember ___: his power electronic gear setup, relationship with stewardship, a model ranch hand man. His pedal rig is a nice model for a vocal modulation center: enlist his services as such, digital recordings through his analog array.

How much work is enough? How much money is enough? Sit down to write out a budget: how much coming in vs. what is needed going out. Consider rent, summer travel expenses, projections until the end of the year. No sense having gear shipped from NM now, focus on saving money & dialing in living situation for intended uses.

Make a google sketch up schematic (or vector drawing) to scale of the living space, populated with objects. Use this floor plan to imagine possible ensemble physical arrangements, stage elements, etc. Source colorful tape to mark out delineations, directing action in space.

Line up podcasts for Saturday workshop sessions. Yes, [workshop sessions = weekends.]{.underline} Saturday's are my studio day, Sunday is a day of rest and socialization. If a weekday is taken off it should be used for essential errands, more thorough planning. Try to pull 8hrs of studio work per week - logged time. Can I setup a TSheets system for studio practice? Sunday morning hikes, then food shopping, big meal prep, hangout. Never sleeping in.

OOFKAUU: the narrator defines themself. The first act is a series of narrations, each attempting to identify & articulate a specialized quails of the production. The instruments & musical styles for each act change, so that what is being planned now will be the orchestra/ensemble for only the first act. (Later will be black metal, etc.) Compile writings from the red notebook & other personal sources into the narration, juxtaposed with the voices from books recently assimilated, conversations with friends, inner dialogue at work & concerning domestic equilibrium, & other personal voices. Perhaps some characters can begin to be developed, but the first act is just a gestation period for this content to be hashed out while remaining transparently(?) reflexive. The current goal is to articulate, illustrate, demonstrate, & present these ideas into a new branch of the portfolio before the end of May: Headlands res app & for conversational purposes at EGS. Specific outline of goals:

-draw studio floor plan for beginnings of choreography

-design & build remedial instruments for ___ to perform

-write narration dialogue & record myself or others reading

-draw meta plans for interrelated parts

-audition/record amateur performers acting out small sections of this content: body studies, video vignettes in front of neutral backgrounds.

-photographic collage plans for theoretical theater set builds: iPhone photographs from work, cut together seamlessly into impossible architectural models. Also, capture lighting arrays, behind the scenes found compositions of lights & gear, daily arrangements of ladders, etc.

-develop extended technique ideas, "in the expanded field" concepts for music, opera, & art in general. Related to era-area-aria concept: relies upon theoretical articulations to open up new potentials spaces for physical/creative work.

Talk to ___ about metal sourcing: sheet metal, copper plates, scrap. Continue returning to Urban Ore for materials but be specific! No hoarding! Also be careful with expenditures of time & energy: this opera is an exercise in efficiency.

___ should have presence in the production somehow, either by providing electronic sounds or as an archetype in the character development. Interview?

Revisit interviews with parents from the summer, & the footage perhaps. See if there's anything there worth holding onto.

Research a new/second HD screen for the laptop: expanded digital desktop.

distractions of civilization, anxiety caused by thinking, forgetting as an act of comfort= succumbing to vices. The opposite of mindfulness: mind numbness. I hope she will read Donna Haraway, UKLG, Levi-Strauss... but more than reading, there is a powerful discussion between us here on this point waiting to be hatched. Why is the city & all of its materials & processes & persons perceived as a negative force, put into opposition with an "idea of nature," thereby articulating the unnatural? Urbanity is an outcropping of nature in an anthropological sense, but destructive to the integrity of the equilibrium of a self-regulating spaceship earth... but this consideration is not in defining the parameters of what constitutes nature so much as how we as humans/persons are affected by our environment. ___: considering all the problems of the world produces anxiety which is not sustainable, increases distance between the holistic self & the whole sieve of existence, removes the mind from the flow. Now, while thinking less, motions are more natural, even while the personal environment has becomes more toxic. For me it's different: being immersed in nature "off the grid" swells up a wellspring of corporeal affect, feelings of profound integration, taste of holistic medicine, but also prevents me from making anything at all. Human enterprise "feels like" the antithesis of natural flow, yet is the source of inspiration: a paradox. As an artist/visionary, I have charged myself with the task of remembering (self) & reminding (others) of this dichotomy: the deal I have struck with the universe, living on the periphery, a foot on either side of the threshold. Is this a question of conviction, intuition, active/passive awareness? Or of personal preference? Certainly this also concerns ethics, social awareness (beyond the personal), and political tapestries woven on the loom of collective living: in a word, responsibility - as citizen of the world. If we all shut down our senses, all stop thinking & stop caring (or reduce this empathy), the neglected world will disintegrate. A question of negligence, self-preservation, globalism & care of the other in relation to self-care, self preservation. I have chosen the path of sacrifice, trying not to be a martyr for a cause but to dampen my own comforts to test the limits of urban utility: I can't expect this from anyone else, & also will not hold on to anyone else's anxieties. Self-responsibility, self-accountability, but as an empathic being living-in-relation to the whole tribe.

The "technology of meditation" in consciously pursuing the content stirred up in dreams. How might I develop a personal/biographical technology to account for my inner states? The opera as technology of the psyche, not just a cultural edifice, beyond the arabesque, towards a soft machine / bio-mechanism of the perpetual visionary.

Thinking & speaking are powerfully predictive actions.

Reveals the power to instill deep affect in others. The visionary maintains the vision & dispenses with visions to others, helps them to see: my biography? Listening & speaking: I want both to receive the universe & to let it pass through me, filtered, distilled, condensed, translated, "made" manageable.

processing, without goal while full of purpose - purposively purposeful (opposed to Kantian philosophy). To the mountain, to the apex, into the void.

Revisit the notebooks.

experiment with an object to be observed or as a mode of poetic inquiry into the gran mystery: one name or many truths. Fleas, ticks, scabies, worms: all these parasites living in & on the body. Filth: voices from within. Parasitic not sympathetic relationships. Interruption of domestic peace, of mind & body: the need to wash everything. Cleaning in general as a fine line between acute focus & physical duress. Washing the mind while breaking the back, sore hands from laundry, raw feet from running, legs aching from continuous bends. The difference between housework & yoga. A walk outside to clear the mind from all the clearing. What are the factors involved in this mental state? A destination, a continuous choice of trajectory= freedom, weather conditions & sunshine & wind, the heightened awareness of being in the world with all the risks involved.

Height: perception, boundaries, how it feels to sleep high in the air in a loft or 2nd story building, sleeping on the ground "in the earth" vs "in the sky."

What needs to be said:

This letter is written in the morning, on my way to work, on a small portable electronic device. Even though all that seems highly alienating & impersonal, I nonetheless consider these words to be a highly idiosyncratic extension of my accumulated thoughts since our last meeting, so that perhaps this form could be considered a media of heightened awareness & increased consideration, rather than not.

We all spend too much time in-doors. Doors: thresholds, passages to others rooms. Continuous movements deters detailed descriptions, of our surroundings, & especially how our own forms shift in relation to the compartments we place ourselves within. I'm always trying to slow down, speak less, look & listen to the neglected details & accents of the room - here taken literally & metaphorically - which causes dissonance, tension, "friction" with others sharing the space, seemingly an impediment to their continued full throttle acceleration into an oblivion of uncertainty. I no longer believe there is anywhere else to go, not from existential angst or despair, but indeed from optimism, that I have everything I need, & so perhaps others do also. I can calmly put all the pieces down & leave them behind, though I still do carry a few along with me, to keep turning over in the hand, to feel through the contours, to "see" where "feeling" might "guide" me. Put all the words in quotes I suppose: not to lift from reality but bury them deeper in associative transparency.

We spend too much time indoors, inside, literally & metaphorically. Too far inside ourselves, a self imagined as a building, a container of some essence in addition to the thoughts thinking themselves thinking or body feeling itself touching, & so we are sick. It seems to me like we require a new model, not a new idea or ideology or body or way of moving, but a new way of conceptualizing & embodying the whole thing, the whole non-thing. It seems like it requires a language to describe all the states of being & becoming, a useful language so that we can share our experiences with each other, a technical language that strives for increasing the fidelity of our experience, an embodied language that allows the speaker to maintain awareness of how what is said is said as much as what is being said through the saying. It seems to me that this language cannot be imagined in a void, by a man or a woman or any other, even a they/them, but always through them also, in relation, a series of relations relating to each other, an emergent relation unfolded like a series of nodes along a lattice, with a model to image it & a language to populate it & a body to enact it, all unfurling through motion along a path which always circles but never flows backwards. It seems like we should share in a focus upon the seams, conduct a dialogue at the periphery of being, to get outdoors & go for a stroll to continue the telling of a becoming-other than what we currently are without forgetting that we can never be anything other than what we describe our being as, or how we choose to describe it, to ourselves & others also.

It seems we all spend too much time indoors. We are spending, some "thing" called time, the quintessential non-thing if there ever was one. All those economics aside - far too boring for this early hour of the day, it's incredible how much changes just in stepping outside - literally, to walk outdoors, out of the architectures of the home, of business, of the city, of humanity. When is the last time you stepped foot in such a place? When I go for a short drive to access a greener zone, to tree a path carved out among the oaks & eucalyptus, on the hills or in the valleys, I am thankful for the opportunity to commune with the rich diversity of botanical beings & try to heed their lessons, believing they might have something to teach me, or at least remind me of, some non-thing that is slowly slipping away the more I walk along cement cinderblocks & metallic alloys & all the other molded or protruded materials of civilization. While I walk & gaze & remember & daydream, I also become aware of the artificiality of that environment; although plants abound & all appears wild, I witness the nonnative species, just as much strangers & invaders as I am, & I wonder about nature. Is it - nature - only an idea, a collective remembering of a place or time that no longer exists, or perhaps a state of mind, a way of seeing, a way of walking? Is it a place or a time or a state of being? Is it something inside or outside? Surely it must be the outside itself, yet it is discussed as being within all things, or perhaps all beings is more accurate, synonymous with life itself, yet also greater than, antagonistic to, or should I say agonistic with - sharing in the joys & deaths of infinite myriad beings living & unliving themselves alongside every other. I enjoy returning to these places, even if I struggle to consider it nature. I enjoy the conversations that take place out there, like the one I had with you, even if "out there" is not completely out side, just a side of a shimmering facet Rolodex of sides.

I wonder about the forest you are currently immersed in, how it feels, what it looks like, the smells & the varietals of ferns & the war of ants & fungus & the abundance of life-death lingering in the air & dew. I wonder how you would describe its feels, how you would say it feels to feel there, how you could relate it to me from abroad, through distance, of spaces & language & shared - though displaced - relating. I'll make you a pact: I'll keep describing here if you maintain observation from your vantage, for no reason other than the joy of comparing notes, & maybe articulating a little further what is ill with this world, & identify what it is exactly that "needs healing" as you were so adamant in proposing that day in the forest. I hope this letter finds you well, & full, & natural. Be well.

biology - certainly not, eugenics - or of the psyche - not an innate quality so much as a skill, craft to be practiced & honed, an application of technique upon a material: the self. This concept of mindfulness, perhaps I could invent a better word to encapsulate the meaning of heightened sentience upon all plateaus of existence. I strive for ever greater evolution, sophistication, emotional maturity & stability, physical endurance & agility, creative rigor, freedom in expression & assertion. It does not seem that all share in this desire: the seat of alienation. I must maintain contact with those that strive to touch higher platitudes & limit exposure to the "bottom feeders": already in this language a hierarchy is formed, a dichotomy between two opposing factions, which I can sense is foolish & grossly inappropriate for a harmonious conception of existence, against equilibrium. Mindfulness must be extended across the thresholds - 'sewing up the sutures' is my task, the role of the visionary, the responsibility of the capable, & I choose to consider myself capable.

Each are on their own path, singularly walking, setting their own course or following lines laid on the ground. Tricks & traps everywhere, the threat of others more capable but lacking a sense of ethics. Meditate upon these essential ideas: choice, guilt, repression, psychic terror, time/age/death.

manifestation of our inner tumultuous climate. War embodied through song & dance: what's the difference between an enactment & the real thing? What animals can teach us about politics= the limits & liminality of play. The art of war, war through conversation, the materiality of war. A ritual oriented towards a higher purpose, harbinger of death & destruction under the auspices of peace keeping, peace making.

Drums: an instrument of war due to the regular rhythmic rotation, like a rotary machine, clocks & calculators. Also a portal to other dimensions, of love & feasting & mystical ritualistic incantation. Percussion always lays out a structure, implies an architecture, coalesces into cells of disparate time-space. Coordinated with the body, these unit pile & compile into sections, compartments of sense, rigidity grinding against each other, or the material of the drum, or time-space itself.

Thinking through these collaborations... generally, what do I need to provide to get started? How do I participate directly through concepts? Ideas about dancing & movement without moving myself: I am not the dancer, the musician, the performer, the actor, but a choreographer, composer, writer, director: always behind the scenes, never seen/scene. I can provide structure, but why/how should/could it be followed? Scenarios for awareness: setting limitations to observe how events unfold within certain time-spaces, each with unique expressive characteristics. I'm not interested in making the music, only hearing it: staying aloof from the world, but I feel slightly guilty about this...(?) I need to act just enough to be "felt" to be an active participant, to communicate & exchange, to provide content & redirect attention as an equal peer, but not so much as to incite war/competition, blurring of information/content. This is key, & the most interesting aspect of this project: to act without acting, know without knowing, play through playing: radicality of play.

How to write with another? Dance through another? Play without instruments? How much of the expressive content comes from the manipulation of the instrument/body, or stems from concept, motivation, awareness? A delicate balance between the two. I am a 10,000 year old floating head, skill-less, de-skilled. Through what medium to I make my propositions?

Scales & timings on guitar. Contemplate prepared strings, audio spatiality, artificial (cerebral) modes of playing - artificial? Poses of the body, symbolism of its forms, movement-language dictating concepts not expressing pure affect: avoid the "interpretation" of typical interpretive dance.

What is the innate strength/weakness of Arabic, of poetry, of the calligraphic tradition of the Middle East? More than representing that regional mysticism, how to leverage the unknown & unknowable attributes of a totally foreign way of speaking/thinking-through/writing-in to reach previously inconceivable plateaus of awareness.

Same considerations in terms of space, instrument, affect, content, each form put in relation to each other but not literally, not simultaneously, one at a time each in their own way. Other aspects must also be considered singularly: the video recording of movement, audio capture of the sonic event, writing technology of the text (hand, machine, screen).

forms that can be used to fabricate real objects. Schematics & maps of objectivity. These may serve as simple hand outs to give others, as conversation starters & containers for shared brainstorming.

Instruments: drums, dulcimers, simple bowed forms, singing bowls, bells & reeds bound in a bushel, large glockenspiels or chimes. Instruments as furniture, architecture, place-attention/space-time generators, maybe permanently installed in a place or at least uniquely adapted to it.

Maps: for choreography, movements & locations - physical & also charting the meandering attention through various psychic obstacles= maps to compile & illustrate the various planes of awareness, attention, intention, intuition, function. Overlays, layers, superimpositions: esthetic double, exploded informatics with text descriptions, or maybe physical conduits of energy meridians (tai chi, feng ship, acupuncture) of how to pass through a space, as a direction of what could be (an ideal) or a document of what was (reverse engineering objects from direct/spontaneous/improvised experience; a drawing made from a dance or a notation made by an instrumentalist, etc).

Notations: a map of an instrument, a path through the process of playing, marks upon the landscape left by the coursing river, track marks of motion. Chelsea speaks of needing to be in a space, sonic space & architectural space, a corporeal response to physicality - but then musicans describe their music as responsive to space/time/place & architects design buildings in response to a specific landscape, spatio-temporal coordination, so who/what is at the source of this influence? The source is not the beginning so much as a focal point of attention, a moment of determination, a decision to balance upon a particular focal point. Why are creative experiences - as conceived by the makers - always conceived as a response to an era-area rather than attempting to infuse/influence/determine/redirect the information in the data stream. Nature is a factor: that mythological pre-existing essence of a place, but does this exist beyond an idea? Chelsea's point must be considered as a necessary corporeal validation of affect, the truth of experience, but this way of working as always in response opens questions (in me, my perspective, my process) of this always-other source. The purpose of the opera should be to meditate upon this source - again, not an origin/beginning so much as the locus of focus - to spin a new series of events, instigate a new way of feeling-through action/response, move towards articulating another way of "being in a space" as an era-area-aria, with ramifications bleeding out of the periphery of the purely creative act, with real consequences & repercussions in daily lives existence = a determination of the future path of art, towards the radicalization of mundane existence, reconsideration of how & why we act, in relation to others/each other/all others. If Chelsea (or a dancer, choreographer, performer, actor) requires a space to feel through, this should be what I focus upon crafting, considering, modulating, "meditating upon" (meditation bench/pillow, the seat of consciousness.)

These are the drawings, schematics for new forms of awareness, derived from activated conversations with performers concerning their needs of a space & reverse-engineered experimental notations documenting the trials of the experiences playing-through the scenarios. The drawings are intertwined with the play, determining & also documenting. Collaboration with others should emphasize & amplify their strengths while also deterring the traditional ways of working, to destabilize/loosen the impediments, introducing chaos in the system to dislodge awareness & offer other possibilities for conversation & action.

ATTEMPTS TO ARTICULATE A BEGINNING: A CODE OF ETHICS OR ETIQUETTE?

Everything spoken is provisional, an offering to be considered but not a rule. Not everything needs to be considered & perhaps the strength of collaboration is in helping each other sort out the excess that gets in the way of creation. = Everything is fair game & also everything is vulnerable to veto.

A reference to the carbon table: before we sit down for a discussion we must describe where we are sitting, what we are sitting upon: to feel the presence of the room in how it influences/inflects our attention, & also to craft a conversation which is truly unique to us - two individuals colliding in an intentional way.

Imagined variables: intentionality & rules / improvisation & freedom / technique (of the instrument) & composition (with notation) = we both can & will consider all possible variables, but to begin perhaps we should lay claim to a territory: ___ with technique, TW with notation forms // action & intention.

On this point: it seems imperative that we avoid dualisms, binary oppositions, simple & dumb dichotomies. Rather we should pursue the possibilities of multiplicity, of the (and) / (+) more so than the (or) / (-) (|), etc.

Should we play together? Is it just a conversation? It's both, always. How do we continue the conversation to craft an intentional cerebral music that also allows for exploratory freedom? How do we communicate with instruments, technique, & sound to expand our awareness of what is possible, thereby expanding the peripheries of the conversation? Where do we do it? How often?

For now, we come together to talk & hash out ideas solo: ___ concentrating upon technique, TW focusing upon visual notation/communication structure. Next meeting will be an exchange of these individual pursuits & we will go from there, depending upon what is produced.

PROGRESSION OF FIRST IDEAS:

A notation structure of "blocks" allowing for choice of the performer, consisting of note variables & differing pathways all leading to the same place, empowering players to insert a measure of their own will in the composition = still determined by the composer. Doesn't need to be written, but is based upon a pre-determined agreement: a series of rules decided before playing. Modular modalities, a system with variables, a small fraction of choice but still a "follow the leader arrangement."

Reverse engineered notation: must avoid taking something complex & merely making it accessible! Instead striving for understanding & clarity - to have the improvisation determine the notation. Improv (chaos of expression, intensity of feeling, spontaneity in time, etc) to coagulate into a communicable form that can be shared with other musicians so that the potency of the experience can be recreated = a document of the cerebral intensity, of the mind of improvisation, more than a document of the sound effects/affects >> implies that there's a different between an audio document recording the effects of a session & a visual-notational document recording the affects of a session. = maybe impossible.

Free Jazz: a genre of deconstructing the modes/rules of melody to amplify feeling & spirit. Offers a rich history, but also must be avoided = offers an awareness that we can reference without repeating (not to quote but to learn from the mistakes). How to compose music "after free jazz"? This is just one point among many: none should be fallen into completely.

Skill & technique in building/writing: idea & practice, skill & technique, action & action upon different planes of consideration (must be careful not to succumb to simple binary oppositions!).

Goal: to build a relationship between the playing & the writing that is exploring the relations of meaning with depth & sensitivity. To avoid loose improvisations with weak visual supplements which break down into abstractions, & also resist the urge to write the music first, to be interpreted by performers later, so as to maintain & strengthen the reciprocal exchange between writing/performing music & conceptualizing/actualizing sound.

Cornelius Cardew: Scratch Orchestra, Conlan Nancarrow's player pianos, Morton Feldman (less than there & more than not there) :: different compositional/improvisation techniques/scenarios.

Numbers & colors, lines & shapes, circles & bars, images & movement. Gradients: a spectra in-between black & white. Symbols, archetypes, alphabets. The problem: to devise the system of translation to give it meaning, to avoid a free interpretation of colors, esoteric forms, etc., but instead use the notation system as a tool for expanding awareness of technique & vice-versa. To coordinate & correlate the system with the technique. Also an issue of fidelity: what variables are important, what can be left out? Too high fidelity can never be realistically played, too low fidelity leaves too much to the performer's interpretation. What is to be played, how is it to be played, without either the instruction or improvisation taking priority?

The system should be devised by us (not collage or pastiche). The music should be performed by us (not other performers). Let's use what we have, at least for now, for sake of focus & (relative) simplicity in this complex conversation.

The possibility of a third element: another person, another instrument? Are they brought in to the conversation? As we compose, making room for another instrument. Before they are brought in, we should be sure (between ourselves at least) what their role, or responsibility, or limitations, may be. Bands/collaborations form a kind of hierarchy, & we must define that before we bring in other players or would-be collaborators. How can we learn from our own histories, learn from our past mistakes - in past bands & musical scenarios, to avoid drama & turmoil while maximizing creative freedom.

We should meet regularly - once a week? Let's keep playing & talking equal - don't let playing take predominance: no pure jamming. Also, we have work we can attend to individually during the week: ___ focusing on playing (technique) while TW focuses on visual research/reference to complicate the conversation more. The weekly meeting should be limited - an hour or two? - in order to concentrate our attention & energy while we are physically together.

Images & words as necessary supplements to the writing process: organic words with roots in nature & time.

Is playing the guitar an organic experience? Wood vs aluminum, natural vs industrial feel of various guitars. Different materials change the approach = the instrument influences/inflects the possibilities of playing. *When do we attend to the materiality of the guitar? Make or modify our own? ___ could explore the varying qualities of feeling, evocations of time, "naturalness," etc., of different instrument materials. The relation of effect & affect: music as a series of physical effects that evoke biological affects. It's never just one or the other, always both, always an atmosphere of sympathetic vibrations, otherwise it's merely robotic (which we agree we should avoid).

Nature + Time: big vague eggs waiting to be cracked.

IMMEDIATE GOALS:

Something recorded (audio) for our own reference by the end of May.

Something documented (visual) that we can think about by the end of May.

To be able to discuss the relationship between these documents/recordings to brew upon while we are separated for the month of June.

ATTEMPTING TO ARTICULATE SOME GUIDELINES FOR SAND DUNE SINE WAVES

THE LANGUAGE:

• The cuneiform script of Arabic languages: linear flow, curvaceous like supple bodies or sinuous/sensuous sand dunes: earth + wind dancing, sharp pointed tips & accents: hot & fast like fire.

• Discrepancy between the spoken & the written: oral vs material traditions, different qualities of memory - to know how to speak but not how to write, different [voices]{.underline} reading-in to the meaning of words: ___'s voice enunciating the language with accent vs the "inner voice" of one's own reading mind - not the same as the material-meat voice based in sound but understood through a similar system.

• To the extent that every language is capable of (& even necessarily succumbs to) a specific articulation of reality, what is the inherent meaning evoked with spoken Arabic? Donna Haraway: "It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories." *What speaks-through Arabic more than what is spoken-in Arabic: the content of the langauge articulating itself more than using Arabaic to speak what could be said in any other language.

THE SOUND:

• How to construct an instrument of textures, of the landscape, of the body? A playing process akin to writing, to write sound - more than a metaphor?

• Specific Ideas:

  • Ceremonial Hand Forms: Contact mics at the core of constructed objects, part sculpture part instrument: crafted pieces built around the piezo disc, embedded within different materials like handmade hand-oriented hand-played shakers, and aestheticized = disc coated in rubber put into a thick membrane of oil, a balloon of tea, a bag of sand, another disc sewn into a soft pliable membrane filled with rice, lentils, herbs. Instrument is played by shaking, swirling, massaging, rubbing: a sensuous technique. Another variation is in the form of an enclosed feedback circuit, so that manipulating the instrument with one's hands modulates the signal continuously passing through, either clearly tonal (in flux) or dissonant distorted.

  • Shifting Sand Oud: Piezo transducers vibrating through suspended flat materials (thin metal, pliable wood, stretched fabric treated with waxes and/or other natural materials), with granulated materials spread on top. The instrument is played with a hotly amplified electric guitar running through a modified speaker, prepared with cork and glued to the suspended plane of metal. No natural guitar sound is heard, only the resonance through the metal. The guitar is tuned to modalities of traditional Arabic makam.

  • Secret Weather Cabinets: medium to large sized sound proof boxes filled with beans, sand, goat hair, and small but powerful condenser microphones to capture the events occurring inside, creating the impression of a small private space even when amplified in large rooms. The instrument is played by inserting one's hands into holes just big enough to seal around the arms, so they are played "blind" without the visual engagement of either the performer or the audience involved.

  • Melodic & Dissonant Weather Walls: large sheets of suspended metal "gongs" with numerous contact mics attached at harmonic intervals. The instrument is played with a large heavily padded ceremonial club, either rubbed or struck, akin to a human-scaled Tibetian singing bowl, and a specially designed clamp that cuts a sharp line across the sheet of metal allowing it to be tuned (or detuned). Two gongs of different sizes are suspended together so that the vibration of one creates harmonic dissonance with the frequencies of the other, evoking the sound of distant thunder storms in large open spaces.

  • Auto-sympathetic Pseudo-Santur: an architectural scaled interpretation of the traditional Arabic hammered dulcimer, consisting of long wires suspended taut across the room, positioned in such a way that the sympathetic vibration of one instigates dissonance in a nearby string. A master string is connected to the cone of a speaker through which the vocalist is speaking/singing so that the voice vibrates the string, becoming more or less audible at certain predetermined frequencies and causing a shimmering chain reaction through a chordal nest of notes when the primary notes are lingered upon. The longer the strings, the more nuanced and sensitive the instrument will become.

  • Breathing Cup: a small face cup resembling a dust mask (but only covering the nose) fitted with a small contact mic, subtly amplifying the breathing sounds of the performers. Perhaps connected to variously sized aeolian harps, played automatically through the air of breath, either directly or via sensors or vibratory amplification.

CONTENT / TECHNIQUE:

• Texture is more of a plane than a line or a point, which seems in contradiction to the defining characteristic of Arabic musical sensibilities: defined by melodies and percussive accentuation. Texture evokes the landscape, the feeling, and the spirit, more content-less than content-filled. How does one sing in an unfamiliar language? How does one play upon alien instruments?

• Towards a technique of non-form, of formlessness, of the void, of the becoming Other. To evoke a spell is to allow for the possibility of what is not altogether present, to make the invisible visible. To speak and play like fire: hot & dry, leaving room for creation in the wake of destruction. An emphasis on movement, endlessly shifting, large concentric spirals of walking in the desert without a sense of direction - although never lost, always obscure.

• What is the difference (in sound, affect, pronunciation) between a statement and a question when speaking Arabic? Inflection, rising or falling, tonal qualities of the language.... could help determine the tonal limitations of the instruments? Speaking in questions, more questions than answers, the true void is never finished and knows no boundaries through endless inquiry, eternal return.

cosmological eye, I am thinking about the body, how to embody the eye, & time, & enact scenarios of mind. 3 scenarios imagining the eye-as-portal/point between the inside & outside worlds:

A modeled eye: a simple cubic room of clear glass walls, slightly bigger than the body, like a model eye that a body is encapsulated within. Each wall of the room is a reverberant surface, either an input or output of an integrated cross feedback system oriented by the poles of the room - up/down, left/right, front/back. The body serves as interference to the feedback flow & sound is modulated by both subtle & exaggerated movements.

A moving eye: a straightforward scenario for visual interaction consisting of a "dancer" with a live-feed camera held in hands & another live-feed camera mounted to the head at eye level. Both feeds are superimposed on to each other to create a single complex image.

A multi-eye self: multiple camera mounted upon "observers" - people moving through the space oriented around a central "subject" with no camera standing in the middle. Each camera feed is superimposed on the other to create a complex composite of a single subject from multiple angles.

****

Coming Home while preparing to delve back into the world of Zizek. ___ describing her dream as very strange while to my ears it seems completely mundane, a series of events which "did not happen" but seems like they easily could have, with the exception of the Great Danes insets the floor boards. Could be fascinating to delve into some dream interpretation with ___, to unfurl her subconscious on a page or through a hand-mind crafting process - ultimately that's up to her, in time & concentration.

The correlation between dreams & RPGs: prior is immersion into the ocean of the self, the later amounts to dissociation from "reality" in preference for a fantasy world. The comparison implies dreams are a fantasy - more or less than real, but not real strictly speaking - or else that fantasy games are a way of playing out subconscious desires in mundane existence - games as greater than the reality platform which hosts them. I'm dissatisfied with the comparison perhaps, or just my dialectical contrast to weigh them against reality: both are real & both are alternative realities existing simultaneously within the multiplicity of experience, each a choice of focus/awareness - lucid dreamers, gamers, augmented reality platforms, ontological modulation, words like "immersion".

My dreams are not abstract - my ideas are not abstract - I am interested in focusing on the [concrete nature]{.underline} of reality: remember concrete poetry, musique concret, other theories of concrete art from mid-century. Abstraction moves away from representation, a non-objective non-representational modality of working through life & materials. I'm interested in creating scenarios to observe what is "actually there" - deconstructing the language of phenomenology as much as the experience of material arrangements. I need to meditate upon these differences, & return to my past notebooks to recount the many years-long personal struggle between this polemics. What I propose might feel abstract because of its removal from daily banal concerns, but I propose that being intoxicated/inebriated/inundated in the late-capitalist world of ideology is a more accurate description of abstraction.

Discussing the parameters of a dog kennel that accommodates both the human & canine comforts: to treat the fabrication of any new object as a series of design problems, puzzles to be solved, a delicate balance between pragmatic function & parsimony/elegance (of both function & aesthetics). The pleasure derived from our earthly possessions lies in the recognition & sophistication of these variables: dog kennel, new sofa, loft, work wear, in fact anything & everything around us. Sound byte: we say we live in a materialist culture but in fact the opposite is true - we succumb to the desire of the images (Baudrillard on seduction) without considering enough the material means of production. We need to focus more on the material, the concrete: the materials of the world, rather than the sensuous production of ideology >> begin Zizek monologue here.

*watch Zizek film "Perverts Guide to Cinema" with ___. Let's crack open a conversation about our animal nature & human perversions, the inner & outer reality ebbing & flowing in relation to the other, concepts of the self & other & void & soul, etc.

*also watch Adam Curtis' "Century of the Self" for personal review & to inspire new conversation directions with ___.

conceptualization, concerning ontological difference. Woman & the void comprise the universe, the presence of man throws it out of balance. Every 'being' is a facet of a larger wholeness, supplement to one another or to an Other, the larger looming completeness of which alludes to a Master Signifier - god, or in the case of the OOFKAUU the 1st narrator.

Zizek (& all of EGS) is going to be processed through the written libretto of the opera, text folded upon text, which requires its own visual structure to compose & orchestrate. Research methods of writers to visually layout their ideas, character development, etc. Possibly set up walls to track flows of information through the system. Nodes of interaction & action - nexus points - serve as sites for musical encounters, providing a semblance of ideological structure for the sonic experiments. Concepts in the reading will condense/coalesce into objects (objet petit a, objet a, etc.), as sculptural props & physical instantiations for interactions in the libretto & musical scenarios. *This process of translation shouldn't become too literal: some more meditating is required to decide/decipher the materializations of the concepts - dialectical materialization as a sort of secular alchemy, turning shit into gold - enter Jodorowsky as reference, transmogrifying the discontent reductions of Zizek into positive constructs sending shivers through the ontological mechanisms - the two voices in conversation, as parallax (not opposite) to each other.

sympathetic understanding with children. I can see it for myself, also get her to admit it. (Makes me wonder about the line of reflection I serve for her, how much to be her mirror before becoming a neurotic voice perpetuating anxiety - my worst fear). Children are described as pure, "unadulterated," innocent, powerful in their innocence: what ___ sees as positive attributes I interpret as ontological weaknesses: lack of experience, dim flickering consciousness prone to the vices of the adults around them, selfish egos seeking continuous self-pleasure without a concept of desire/seduction/satisfaction/restraint = all the virtues of a mature reasonable intellect. I want to see & appreciate her side though, observe & internalize the power/potential of naïveté, to develop a more sophisticated "tolerance" of children while also becoming more determined in my presence with them... opens up a strange territory of considerations around the parents protectiveness, social responsibilities & collective child rearing, education as an institution, my role as (would-be) educator (only for willing & attentive minds), etc. I observe myself being too hard on Dex, not accepting enough, not loving enough of her difference from me: divides the intellectual repulsion from the emotional/physical attraction, but really it should be a continuous cycle, not letting the acceleration on one pole influence the slowing/friction on another. Would I really want a relationship with an intellectual anyways? Dex's strength is in the hand-mind, she is still developing the complexity of her articulations of that knowledge, & I must remember to continuously support her creative growth.

Zizek 'Disparities': Object Oriented Ontology as a model for (aspects of) the OOKFAUU, specifically the treatment of sculpture-props, ontological objects, plants, instrumentation of the ensemble, but also "child" subjects rearticulated as autonomous non-subject objects, the social hierarchy of animals (domestic, feral, wild, etc). "$" as a non-subject, presence of absence, a wholeness defined by incorporation of its lack. The "unknown unknowns" of (Hegel? Heidegger?) & the legacy of dialectical materialism in the wake of 19th century German thought. So many variations of absence, lack, other-ing, non-, inverse, parallax: "disparities" between things/materials = between, in, of, through: everything "riddled with holes". Zizek choices quantum physics as an empirical-scientific foundation over biology, ecology, epigenetics: accounts for the void as a presence, a theory of materialism across the dynamics of scale, free of the social hierarchical flux of competitive species...? (Some review of these concepts will be necessary).

New definitions, provisional & radical, of subjectivity, selves in relation or as autonomous objects, through material & abstract definitions of their composition rooted in the history of dialectical materialism & phenomenology. Grist for the mill: writing the libretto. Take notes of this reading of the text to funnel into scenarios of character interaction, narrator monologue, etc. The concept of "renormalization" to make Hegel coherent to a wider audience strips away his madness, loses content of his speculative philosophy by stripping away the important excess, presence denoting absence. The OOFKAUU libretto will oscillate these motivations, to make clear & to remain "mad".

****

as they flow in & modulate the daily substrate of life: music projects, readings, films, conversations, subjective speculative philosophies, all combined into a meta-archive: chaosography.

Remember to keep talking. It's Sunday and I'm in the bathtub. It reminds me of ___ - sounds strange when I say it outloud - but he always made note of how his greatest ideas emerged during the moments lounging in the bathtub.

Perhaps large swaths of these recordings should be silence....

I have to start talking, that's the point of this recording. I must begin externalizing these ideas which are amounting within my psyche. There's a collision of many different aspirations currently underway: there's the current reading list which I began amounting since returning to the states, attempting to accumulate artillery to offset the anticipated foundations I will soon be assimilating from the official EGS reading list. My weapons include:

And: Phenomenology of the End - Franco 'Bifo'Berardi

Staying with the Trouble: Finding Kin in the Chthulucene - Donna Haraway

Always Coming Home - Ursula K Le Guin

Where the Bird Sings Best - Alejandro Jodorowsky

Psychomagic - Alejandro Jodorowsky

Disparaties - Slavoj Zizek

Philip Beeseley assignments

Heidegger assignments

There is a list that came before also, all the texts that I read through in Norway which laid an important foundation, as well as the list plowed through during my extended residency in Iceland. These books should be reviewed, put into sequence, quoted and infused within the current tendrils of thought. All these books proliferate new ideas and methods, vocabularies, methodologies, stacked up ontologies, forms and vessels, structures and portals for passing/thinking-through, by way of myself and the other, of context as place and self also, thinking through thinking, thinking through reading. Ultimately this is what the opera is concerned with: reading, ravenously, the role of the reader, the method of reading, as a strategy of active listening and hearing the voiced experience of others. All these experiences must be remembered, kept close to home, available for active recall, until the day will come when I will transform my role to that of the writer, relying upon this thickly layered sediment to serve as a firm foundation for the catapulting of my own voice out into the aether, an instantiation of a philosophical and poetic voice. How to write an opera of experience? By not writing, choosing to read instead, to allow it to write itself.

There's no explicit method of writing: it changes for it is change, it adapt for it is adaptation, I practice through it as a method of practicing all methods simultaneously. I am attempting to practice a responsiveness to the flux flow of the method I am developing as it develops dynamically in relation to the world's own dynamism. All of my experiments in music and composition, in writing composition, in reading organization, in choreographed movement-in-relation to the stimuli of intellectual sources - the corporealization of proliferating ideas - are in relation to the meta-proposition of reflection/reflexion of attention through a form serving as both container and substrate, to sit without being restrained, to serve as a ground or a stage, a medium of forms always remaining open to all possible means, a text definitively to be read while serving as its own referent, if it is to live. I am foremost interesting in continuing the project of the living - let death speak for itself.

So how to write the OOFKAUU? There are voices arising from a void which I am becoming increasingly aware of as they make their presence known - not voices within me, voice that I hear directly, addressing my being, I am not becoming schizophrenic, but rather an awareness of the necessity of risk taking into an authentic access to the potential of writing through multiple conduits, an exuberant feeling of freedom to wield various angles and tones, even the becoming-obvious of the absurdity of failing to recognize such a potential. The voices are my own, speak through me as a medium, are voicing the real and imagined orientation of others I have assimilated and continue to encounter. What's important is not to articulate on the behalf of others, but to imply their presence while staying rooted in the singularity of the conversation, to maintain the wholeness of my singular voice resonating within a pluriverse, a plural reverberant spatial expanse of re/action, re/in/flexion, re/dis/cursivity. The OOFKAUU is the articulation of the space of potential within which these dialogues may transpire. It is the stage, and the composition, not merely the libretto or the orchestration, not just the theater or the actors performance, but the entirity oscillating through all the parts - a holon apeiron, or holarchy within a great chain of being. According to Le Guin: an ERA/AREA/ARIA - a time/space/song of continuity.

my body-mind-soul-subject in/of the world, objects, territories, temporalities as possible.

Plateaus : Personal, relationships, friendships, family genealogy, co-workers, people who have received letters, emails, text messages = direct witnesses to my existence through interaction. Gradient of intensity from more>less familiar.

Philosophical, conceptual, theoretical: ideas that are currently ruminating/distilling which reflect aspects of my being, cerebral paradigm, intellectual lattice. Place myself within an intellectual historical trajectory = cannon.

Music/Art-Historical: also cannon= attempt to define current dealings by proximity to other makers, composers, creative movements. Combinatorics of "southern CA subculture" & pseudo art historical genealogy: outside of the contemporary status quo. *fake CV: this information based on subjective orientation more than "factual" historicism (writing history myself).

Poetic language, creative paradigm, linguistic lasagna, malleability of the expressive body: superimposition of creative ontic structures serving as adhesive glue binding the clumsy joinery of the otherwise burdensome histories of fact/fiction. This is not strictly true or un-true, nor even definitively content, so much as colors/shades/filters laid over the other information= the necessary supplement, more true than true.

Everything, all the minutae, accounted for.

but I often find that the influence flows just as freely the other way. His rigor is inspiring, the depth to which he has articulated his own project - even though or perhaps because of the very fact that I disagree with the premise upon which they are founded - continuously taking great risk to achieve an authentic relation to the world on his own terms. His decisions have amounted some great resources for himself - socially and now finally financially as well - providing an opening of more opportunities and allowing him to keep working, something I have always struggled with. In receiving an email from him today, I am aware of pangs of anxiety coursing through my own subjective system, I can't understand why. It's not founded in a spirit of competition, but perhaps a guilt of falling behind, metaphysically, upon the path of truth-seeker and vision-makers, a strange bastardization of an internalized capitalistic angst - so to this extent perhaps it could precisely be conceived as a competitive spirit-demon which must be exorcised! We artists cannot be opposed to each other without swimming in the same stench of death we aim to cleanse ourselves from.

All collaborations must be put on hold until I return from Switzerland, to allow myself to gain some new insights, solidify the foundation upon which I stand and strengthen my position in relation to others. I'm anticipating many conversations with SEA transpring during EGS so I will refrain from getting ahead of myself in anticipating them now - trust in the organcism. The self-portrait is related to the notebooks compiled upon the bedroom wall in NM, a collation of my personal autobiography into an epistemological diagram that can be put on display. The secret is in the aesthetic model of ecology - AWOBMOLG was a welcome research reminder on this front. The ecological framework is the lattice architecture of relational dynamics which can be mapped without explicating content - even stronger for doing so - which will feedback into the OOFKAUU ontological flow.

I just need to get to work. Clear the work space, clear the desktop, clear the mind, begin the outline of the territory.

Now will be printed, 50x50, mounted in standard frame with possible wood shop upgrades. *find a local fine art printer and get a quote

Structure:

No center - I am without center

All is suffering, intentional, mindful, aware: not needless, sitting with the suffering

More Heidegger than Buddhism (for now)

Structured through dialogue - explain it to ___, record in, then map the frequencies of exchange with the highest possible fidelities: sort out with is important from the excessive but include as much of both as possible.

Reference OOFKAUU diagrams but invent a new variation

Simulated multi-dimensional scaling through varying line thicknesses

Remember to remember! Memories & inspirations constantly flowing in: the structure serves as a quasi-functional net ala "dream catcher", collecting & collating personal aspirations circulating through my ecosystem like morning condensation on a leaf.

Purposively purposive qualities: some goals for the effect of the piece=

Distinguish my ontology from a strictly Kantian/Hegelian/German set of concerns: chart a different intellectual trajectory

Account for the recent multi-media method of thinking & working: explain the necessity of the OOFKAUU .

Fashion the first Era/Area/Aria: the time bedding unfurling within the cosmic breeze nestling my current colored moods & shimmering attentions (multiple) + the locale of my immediate & extended territory (physical & psychic planes of existence) + the [poetic imagination-based combinatorics of colliding libretto, orchestration, & general forms of HISTORY]{.underline} (ref: Heidegger on Hölderlin)

concerned with labor, deconstructing the mechanical metaphors of the biological substrate and all of its inherent nested psycho-somatic layers. My history is of work, while trying to work as little as possible. I've been asking myself "who am I" forever, with scarcely a decent answer after 33 yeas - no! Not true! I have many answers that seam reasonable but incompatible. I've invested in history, in the continuation of ideas and their manifestation in materials, the institutions which house them, the dialogue which supports them. I'm not outside frolicking in nature, gathering from direct experience, but rather comparmentalized within a labyrinth - who is the designer? I aim to become the designer, to understand the intricacies of the phenomenological catacombs, to feel the tongue snapping against the upper palettes of my jaw.

passed between us arising again to splinter the grain of my dense cerebral ply, against my will it seems. I can't say it's a shame in how things turned out, for I choose to see the good in it - the good in you and the good that was us. I'll let the bad fall away so as not to be poisoned by it. I am not writing you to reopen old wounds, or to recount the events that transpired, or to ask forgiveness or design reconciliation. We were both present, to the extent that we could be, and too many moments have passed since. I would, however, like to extend to you a gesture, of empathy and understanding and friendship, or at least camaraderie, to acknowledge the passing of time and the significance of that which we shared with each other, and perhaps out of sheer curiosity to witness how you will receive me. I wonder how our conversations have inflected and influenced you, in these past months and in life in general, and I wonder if we will ever share any more, in the coming months, in this life or any other. For what it's worth, our time together was very powerful and significant for me, so that perhaps more than any other reason I am writing you this letter to tell you that, to tell you this: I am glad to know you, or to have known you (if we shall never meet again), and for the brief yet powerful experiences we shared together.

I think of you often because our conversation wasn't finished and I have more that I want to add, but due to the circumstances of how we were severed it seems inappropriate and presumptuous to say anything at all. I would like to continue sharing with you, exchanging conversations and experiences, forms of relating and thinking and feeling through this world. I am confident that I loved you deeply, although I am less sure that I was so aware of its depth while we were face to face. I was hard on you, hard with my affections and my language, and I wonder if you resent me for it, or if you are appreciative, or if you think of it at all.

There are many other things I would like to mention: books and films and ideas and inspirations, travels and adventures and incantations of worlds, and other things and non-things also. Perhaps I will wait to see how this letter affects you and go from there, as I am prepared to receive no response, or even a request to cease and desist all future attempts to dialogue, but ultimately the choice is yours. I hope that this finds you well and happy, warm and comfortable, satiated in all the right ways and also hungry for all the right reasons.

spiritual / personal / transformative / existential significance! But I suppose I am a person that bares witness to the spiritual / personal / transformative / existential / absurd significance and insignificance of everything, while also loving to talk about it more than anything, to bring all that invisible goo that holds together ligaments and molecules out into the open in order to laugh at it, and perhaps that is the secret and not-so-secret language you refer to, that you see in me, that is also in you and everyone and everything else. When I speak I wonder if it is me or the not-me performing the speaking: is it my self, my "will," some propulsion embedded deep in the purple gray void of my brain that beams out electronic signals for my tongue to flip and curl and click against the top of the mouth? Is it really me that pretends to hear and understand the sounds coming out of that orifice, or to make meaning of how the vibrations are received by the orifices of others, or how they are echoed back, or to think that any of that could make up a coherent system? Surely it must be the wind, or just the still air, or the dust floating in it, or the aether floating between that, or the electron probability cloud flowing between that, that serves as a point of resistance for the gummy muscles of my mouth hole, that is clicking against my gums and making them jiggle into the vowels and consonants. Language must be an illusion, certainly not mine to make or give. On the other hand, the universe (multiverse) would make much more sense if we considered it a long form poem, an act of poetry writing itself into existence, so perhaps all is language and all the stillness and nothingness is just a swirling ocean of commas and full-stops lingering on the precipice of articulation.

None of us are as flexible as we used to be. All the more reason to keep waking up earlier and earlier and keep stretching deeper and deeper. You are wise to keep your tent. Thank you for the letter. It caught me at a beautifully serendipitous moment and filled my existential container with hot pink inspiration.

I've been living in Oakland, CA since February. It horrible and grotesque and sunny and indescribably beautiful here, all at once, in everything that I see and do. In two days I will get on a plane and fly to Venice Italy to meet a group of people for the first time, the students and faculty of my phD program, convening on the occasion of the biennial. After a few days of strong standing coffee and canal breeze I will board a train destined for a little village in the Swiss alps where I will spend the rest of June listening to an extremely interesting curation of personages outlining their theses on the current complexities of the world. I will take notes, and I will think some new thoughts, and I will entertain old thoughts, and all of that is well and good, but between you and me I am mostly looking forward to walking. Like you, I love to walk and think and be alone - which is never really possible of course since we are always already everywhere surrounded by people that just happen to be people we don't know, or have yet to get to know, but the thought is still enchanting. I will walk to a train and walk through the airport and then walk through another airport and then walk into a new city, and then another, and then another, until I land in this small village surrounded by mountains, and then walk all around it and through it until I come to know it completely. Funny how walking leads to knowledge, even if one lacks a destination. Already in my mind I am forming an association to Seydisfjordur, a parallax view: the opposite altitude, more earth than ocean, yet somehow connected, as thought through the umbilical of an alternative dimension.

Speaking of parallax views, you will soon meet ___. I am bound to that woman somehow, some way that I don't care to describe in too much detail for fear of destroying its magic. She carries pieces of me inside her being and getting to know her will also be getting to know new facets of me: perhaps it's more than a joke that I like to think of us being two halves of a single person. You will see, or maybe you will disagree, but either way it makes me giggle to think of her spending time there with you all. I would like to be there myself and have been thinking about paying a visit somewhat soon. You will be the first to know if and when those plans are formed.

I've been reading so many interesting books and listening to so many amazingly strange albums of music and making many awkward and exciting manifestations of would-be future days. I hope we can spend many hours with many fires and many gradients of light discussing all this new content and much more, sometime, somewhere, in the coming present. When we get there I will remind you of all that time we spent apart, and how endless it felt, just for a laugh, just to make the present that much more surreal.

Yes I have an address and you can send me things! Like I said, I am leaving for Europe for 1 month and will return in early July, but there will be someone here to receive it so send any time! I am so pleased to hear word of your silence, and your exuberance, and to catch a glimpse of your visions. I hope this finds you well, satisfied in all the right ways and hungry for all the right reasons.

****

I will take a deep breath and try to not dismiss the potentials of this situation before I give them a proper chance to flourish into their own majesty. That being said, my initial introduction into the group of EGS scholars has not been overwhelmingly positive. There is the consideration of the groups composition - mostly young white males - but what is more disturbing is the relative lack of artistic representation.

My personal afflictions aside, how can I objectively entrain the motivations of the first session? There was a discussion concerning the overarching thematics of the biennales curation, the collection of these artists under a theme of 'by and for artists,' a general banner which seems to avoid a theme more than elucidate one. In light of this situation there was voiced a general dissatisfaction with the lack of clarity while simultaneously a complaint of too much clarity in the descriptions of the wall text. Some of the work was seen as trivial - works concerning color or overtly formal considerations - while others were deemed bad for their apparent idealogical premise being rooted upon a false fundament - universal humanism deemed no longer applicable to our existential plight. Some voiced the begginings of a hierarchicial opposition of themselves to the masses, other declared a preference for the sublime nature of being before a work of art. ___, one artist among the group, was good about asking questions in relation to these perspectives and I should observe the power in taking such a position. At the end of the discussion I was left feeling alienated, as though I was once again faced with the territorializing schema of having to demarcated and defend the primary ontology of the maker, of technique, of art as emanicaipation of a unique vision, from the throngs of all-too-eager criticism. I became frustrated and contemptuous, so now I must force myself to write through this scenario in order to arrive at a relative peace (or agony) before returning to the group.

I must be clear to myself in recognizing the necessity of outlining a position amidst such a group, as a model for the world at large and my functioning within it, for sake of sanity and posterity. I must be diligent in recording these scenarios in order to relive them again and again, to work through them as trials and tests of endurance and agility, as well as to glean from them tidbits of tension for future writing scenarios - I have my work cut out for me in this task. I must remember that I am an artist first, a philosopher second, that this is the path I have chosen to orient all of my actions and perceptions through, and from this rememberance will emerge my strength. Above all I must position myself appropriately (according to my own ideals, not those outlined by the group): listen, receive, remain calm, consider and analyse what is being said, and finally retort with the full force of my whole being - combing my physical, psychic, and philosophical prowess.

When we first entered into discussions the table was not big enough to hold all the participants. I failed at this first test: here precisely was the metaphor I had been working with for the past year and I did not seize upon the opportunity to modulate the situation! At one point Chelsea needed to stand up, another failure on my part in not joining her! Following her lead! These physical orientations must not be under estimated, indeed must be kept at the fore of awareness. What was lacking on my part in yesterdays conversation was such an awareness, the lack of my own voice (as well as other voices amplified through my being without my necessarily claiming ownership of them), a dislocation from my body at the bodies of others = where can expression sit at such a table? Remember what is at stake here: abolsutely nothing! All is grist for my mill, all of this world has been laid out before me to be taken up or dismissed as I see fit. There is no objective ruling order any greater than that which I might articulate out into the ether. Trust in the truth of my own conviction.

Must I require such a self-pep talk everyday? Perhaps, to regain confidence of course, but also to remember to remember! The project is already under way and I know what I must do.

****

In the mornings I have been waking up early, sneaking out of the room as quietly as possible so as not to wake ___, tip toeing out the door and down the stairs and out into the courtyard of the converted 17th century monastery that we have been inhabiting. My impulse is to walk towards the sun, to bathe in it, and I am repeatedly drawn to the giant marble tables flanking the sides of a seemingly ancient marble effigy, but as soon as my face senses the warmth I begin to anticipate its omnipresence throughout the day and quickly decide to retreat into the shade of the trees at the center of the courtyard. With my little plastic cup of steaming espresso - dispensed from a machine in the lobby of my dormitory - I walk a few circles around the rough marble pedestal standing at the center of a small alocade of oversized cobble stones and ruinous looking marble benches. Everything here appears ancient, and that which has been added more recently is visually obvious, a clean layer smeared over the top and failing to adhere to the temporally concentrated mass underneath, peeling off in layers, colors flaking off to the touch to reveal the cold calm gray of bygone epochs of sturdier human memory. It's here, in the shaded middle, surrounded by the sounds of foraging morning birds and a sea of wild strawberries, that I sit to think and breath and listen and write an account of my time upon the floating city.

I realize now that I have yet to take into account the massive quantity and myriad qualities of artwork I have been observing, focusing instead on the social element and my own affective resonance to the place rather than its contents: a failure in perspective in itself. Where to begin - always the beginning? No total account is necessary, but there are certainly some themes who elucidation may help me think through my current orientation towards the contemporary art milieau. I will not be able to recount it as a narrative, for sake of time and concentration, but also because this may prove less useful than a more fragmented form of note taking. I should try instead to mentally walk through while taking account of the most pertinent aspects of what I have experienced, as there are moments everywhere which I can assimilate into my own plane of considerations.

FRAGMENTS

A circle of television repeating images of Amazonian people in such a way that they can be easily dismissed: a horror of neglect and forgetfulness to the delicate jungle peoples.

Anna Halprin and The Farm: remember the Bay area traditions of radicalized (failed) utopias. Halprins diagrams for world dances are relevant to the OOFKAUU.

The underwhelming presence of drawing and painting throughout the exhibition, and to some extent of static sculpture and material concerns in general. It seems as though the velocity of novelty is speeding up to such an extent that I can no longer stomach those still frames without their being supplemented by a strong dose of lived existence. Static art is dead experience.

Artistic focus which becomes overly myopic, upon a single medium or process or sense of identity, becomes easily dismissable. I am eager to dismiss excessive expressions, and just as hungry to seek out relevant, pertinent, even essential modes of inquiry. This is not purely a desire for ever increasing novelty, nor necessarily reduced to mere personal bias, but perhaps rooted in the acknowledgement of artistic responsibility and questions of relevance for the present moment. Art should be involved in the dialogue of immanence, seeking to feel the peripheries of its disciplinary compartment, not prodding towards its non-existent center or attempting to recatagorized a delusional sense of wholeness. Where does "universal humanism" fit in to this schema?

Positive standouts:

• The ontological techno-sci-fi opera of Mariechen Danz: Ore Oral Orientation

• Chladni-cymatic vocal formations of Kader Attia's Narrative Vibrations

• Cosmic world-animal paper-cast primordial stone sculpture - Erika Verzutti's Turtle

• Edith Dekyndt One Thousand and One Nights + Slow Object 008: dust carpet and silver curtain

• Alicja Kwade's WeltenLinie: linear mirror frame stage with archetypal geological sculpture prop-forms designed for a performance for twins

• Geoffery Farmer's poetic destruction at the Canadian pavilion

• Simple brutal political stage at the Uruguay pavillion - Mario Sagradini: Law of the Funnel

• Jordi Colomer's anti-aesthetic political organization for Spain

• Philippe Parreno's Cloud Oktas = quasi-objects, AC/DC snakes, transparent walls

• Lee Mingwei's zen chair of contemplation in the garden: When Beauty Visits

• The sense of humor in cinematic narrative in the Greek and Finish pavillions, funny and entertaining and decidedly relevant, although also incredibly dumb and better suited to another venue.

Negative reactions:

• French pavillion: what a failure! I really wanted to like it but it's riddled with conflicts

• Swiss pavillion: regressive and horribly unproductively boring

• Ernesto Neto's ayahuasca ceremony hut

• The terror that comprises the Russian pavilion

• German pavillion's faust

• Austria's instagram self-making machine: Erwin Wurm and neon lights in infinity mirror boxes

• Olifur Eliason's weird fucked up light workshop utilizing immigrant labor

• Almost without exception (can I recall an exception!?), all of the paintings and drawings throughout the international pavillion and comprising the rest of the exhibition.... this certainly is indicative of my own bias but for good reason, concerning the necessity in arousing certain sentiments of our contemporary condition through the material mode of transmission joined with high-fidelity conceptual paradigms

An incredible (surprising) emphasis on narrative forms, conveyed through theatrical and cinematic techniques.

A series of important questions with ___ and ___ this morning concerning the potential radicality of art to efface change in the world: articulation of the danger which is as follows: we as artists wish to make something relevant, something important, something which contributes to the world for the better een if admittedly only according to our own ideology - perhaps especially so, to make the world in/as our own image - yet the most radical decision is to not make art, admitting that what is currently accepted as viable artistic expression contributes towards the same detriment that we/I (speaking for myself) aim to oppose, dismantle, destroy. Another problem: assuming that the artistic expression is based on inherent failure (I'm not necessarily admitting this yet!) then how can this "artistic research" itself be validated, beyond the perview of empirical quantization or academic qualification or any pre-existing disciplinary justification catagories, but in its own right, on what terms, to what degree, for what intended purpose if the purpose is to defy the purpose itself? Purposelessly purposive - a Kantian trap/trope.

The exhibition of the Taiwanese pavillion: Tehching "Sam" Hsieh's Doing Time one year performances, punching a time clock everyday and living outside in New York. This work draws a fine line between the performativity of life and art on many levels. The material produced is document of his actions: life bowing to the performativity of the artistic gesture > I am personally willing to go to these lengths - amounting to a sublimation of life to the artistic process - if the results could prove radically justified, yet as ___ was quick to point out the artworld murmur surrounding such a piece is general, muted, confined to certain endurance-work performative circles, and short lived, ie: does not resonate with a wider audience? Of course not, for it is still art and seen to be subservient or less important that the life it is critiquing. The result of the performance is documented in photographic material, physical forms (in conversation with a tradition of found objects and performance props) which allow the process to be cannonized, archived, preserved in plexiglass boxes, auctioned upon the economic market > in other words brought back in to the very system which the piece attempted to break out of. It seems that art at best may serve to transform the artists life into pure experience while reducing her to an artifact to be subsumed/consumed: perhaps an obvious inevitability, but the question as an artist is why? Why would we choose to take on such a path, towards what end or purpose, if the resultant conversation and exhibition and academic research cannot ever hope to efface change in the world? The life of the artist can be transformed, but why would the artist choose such a role and not remain an autonymous individual willing their being into the forms they see fit without the additive/excessive layers of cultural production making a farce of their existence? What quality of life can one hope for under the cloud of perpetual failure? Why not dedicate oneself to more practical ends, of effacing direct (not a question of reality, but of efficacy) change in the world through invovlement with programs, organizations, or institutions directly dedicated to the issues at hand - labor rights, homelessness, identity articulation, classism, or whatever the issue may be? The artist never smiles > just one of numerous aesthetic considerations which were of course carefully chosen to direct the appropriate attention/awareness of the work and sculpt a motivation through the process, but isn't this farce of expression also indicative of the "real" joylessness (suffering) of an artistic existence if it is not motivated by the standards of fortunate and glory (materialism, philistinism) directed by the institutions currently in place?

Alenka Zupančič Seminar: The End

Repetition:

If one wants to efface a change they should act as though the change has already taken place. The question then becomes how does one behave this way, as though the change has already taken place, to embody the potentiality: regarding escaping the repetition of possibility that one does not wish to repeat.

Freedom is the realization - action - of the possibilities of the situation.

The limit (end) we are endlessly approaching, but always already structuring the repetition we are functioning within. The unattainability is the precondition of the economy of repetition.

The end (of smoking) is redoubled alongside the end of something else (the month, the year). This will be my last cigarette, the ultimate cigarette. Why can't every cigarette be the last, and hence the best? One must believe it - becoming a neurotic, delusional. An infinite repetition of the end, enjoyed against ones will. But isn't every activity the last time, until it occurs again? Implies a linear conception of time > a real end would imply a shift of the formal constraints of beginnings and endings, of origins altogether, of linearity and inherent additive progression of activity = circular time is definitively without end.

Yet infinite repetition implies no end: structural paradox of this argument. = end implies closure, repetition concerns return back to a beginning. The apocalypse itself spawns from a distorted linear progressive temporal structure. A true end of the eternal return demands a different temporality.

Hegel's death of art describes an infinite repetition of its own end, so that it cannot really die.

The ultimate depression stems from ultimate freedom of choice: contemporary ennui. Can this be called suffering? Certainly is bound in privilege. Abolishing freedom (of choice) frees us from the debilitation/depression of excessive freedom.

We must say no to the abstraction conception, to move towards a concrete freedom: to reject the false choice between smoking and not smoking. The imperative to smoke and the imperative to quote comes from the same source, the source must be dismantled, the real place of difficulty. The problem of abstract freedom must be tackled at the level of imperative.

The past only ever becomes the real when it is acted out (articulated) in the present: the temporal bias of psychoanalysis. Matters of authenticity are the wrong perspective, only through repetition may we access the contents of the neurosis. The role of the psychoanalyst introduces a new sickness, transplanting/replacing the original repetitive sickness: the enactment of the obsession of wanting to stop smoking.

Acting out: behaving under duress of obsession/sickness without realizing themselves.

The articulation of the most radical end serves to structure an understanding of our present reality, to analyze ourselves, what must end in order to allow this end to come about: to instill this potential catastrophe. It's easier for most people to imagine catastrophic apocalypse than it is to articulate a transformative scenario of our contemporary predicament. The result: an ambivalence toward the end, catastrophe, extinction, or any emancipation.

What if even total apocalyptic scenario is not radical enough to articulate a "way out"?

Our impotence is real, more than laziness. It is structural. We cannot remove the structure for fear of losing perspective over "what is going on." Going too far, not because it's too radical but for lose of perspective.

Paul & Patricia Churchland: eliminative materialism

Sensory Motors Psychotherapy: 12 character archetypes

The teacher as the analyst: asking a question and remaining silent until there is a response. Contemporary education lacks patience.

The teacher as maintaining parental responsibility.

End of day recounting, walking through the forest, remember to remember!

Soft subtle malleable ambassador conductor . Perpetual movement, flux, but not always dissonance and disruption. Pause, restraint, absorption. Gathering and collating without yet critically editing > no removal. Later, a process of filtering, cutting down towards essential elements while refraining from essence or elementalism. For now, a state of and/or, either/or, aether/ore : ore oral orientation. The inspiration is there, now always and already, and merely needs to be followed. Stay moving and keep collecting. Listen to the botanical, conduct and choreograph, release control over systems. Above all else, stay affirmed in the prowess of my individual will: freedom must be lived, not just ruminated upon! Change must be effaced as though it has already taken place! A practice of restraint: I'm not here for others I'm working for myself above all else. Stay true to my own process.

A solution to the temporal dilemma: either quantum physics or subjective proprioception. Fiercely defend the integrity of ones own experience... no psychoanalytic voice can lay claim to my own existential territory.

Who is it that I choose to acknowledge, as real or truth or otherwise? What is important is how I formulate the question, more than how I can reiterate the answers spawning from others.

Articulation of the Era-Area-Aria: enunciation of temporal-spatial context continuity. Under this rubric, a series of projects that may serve as studies for the larger operatic ecology. Daily exercises, or at least correlated to modulating states of awareness (time), physical flux (area), and compositional techné (aria).

Begin ruminating upon the prospect of a becoming-thesis, thesis of becoming, an orchestration of the text.

Post traumatic slave syndrome: genetic memory.

****

Out for a walk in the woods, trying to remember something, trying to remember nothing, remembering to just remember, the void, the other, the keywords, the focus now is to absorb, to take in, to refrain from measuring, to exercise patience, humility, restraint, to take it in and not hold on to it, it's not mine, there are no territories, I own nothing, no ownership. I'm trying to remember always who I am, what I am doing, what my purpose is, what the meaning of "it" is, [ forest bird song in the background ] and there are no viable answers that I can entertain of course but it is the questions which demand to be asked, even incessantly, over and through process, from which the identity emerges. What I do know for sure is that this change will be embodied, that the performance becomes real as it is enacted, all the documents serving to extended the experience to others, but this is not the primary motivation, which lies rather in the experience itself, in this life - namely my own, to the extent that I may locate it - transpiring here, upon the focus of the process itself. Justified only in itself, through the reflexive sensing of self, but is also not, and/or, an inverse of itself. Remember to remember! It's the model that I'm crafting not articulations of the limits of language. Language is already an end, a trap, that which cannot contain the full limits of my being, only its own. My senses and me eyes are emancipated from the strict compartments of concrete cells, the cellular architecture - completely deathly to biological - the mere abstraction. I am no mere abstract, no mere mode of seeing, but an embodied vision, an actively looking I, seeing as a way, sights laid gently upon the path, a poeticism lying at the interstice, of it but not just there, not bound to any spot, owing more to flux and flow, of the making through crafting, poiesis of poetic praxis. I can gather terminology in order to make clear that which I need to remember, to increase its fidelity, but it is not through conversation, not through language, that this meeting will be converyed to other, it is in the work, in the operatic performativity, of the gesture of a life lived performatively, of a life lived by ennui and melancholy, suthentic suffering, always articulating its parameters, perhaps needlessly but perhaps with purpose. These poetic holes, these fragments of being, the sap oozing and coursing through the fibers of this botanical life, the fluid the flow - all these provisional metaphors may become powerful in pointing, circling, delineating, forming, but not for too long. Keep moving. Stay alive, stay alive, keep living. Clicks and cuts: I'm a collagist of the world at heart, it's how I world. Get out doors everyday and stop reading so many goddamn books! (If the environment is inviting). The world is not a text to be read, but it can be also - is this not precisely the concept of ecology? Of structural anthropology? There is a structure emerging here but that doesn't mean that the landscape exhibits an agency beyond my own articulation of it, or does it, and what is at stake? Keep walking, keep talking, keep writing, to other and the earth also, sure, but remember that this is not the work - or is it? The dialogue transpiring between being, entities, others or other whole selves, this is no project but is life itself. I'm trying to capture it as much as may be possible, now, while the opportunity is ripe, to collect specimens, grist for the mill, allegories for my poems, that much more material to work with later, but not so much to become burdensome - there's something to be said for restraint, limitations, not simplification or reductive abstraction but of the necessity of the limits, frames, rules or strictures, for sake of focus, because I am human, because I work within the confines of space and time.

A pervert is one that keeps it in the open, opts to attend directly to their own miseries.

A melancholic mourns the loss of the object even when it is still present.

Lacanian objet a = a blind spot in a painting : exclusion is characteristic of our vision of reality. By utilizing a Lacanian description of reality based on inherent exclusion, doesn't it make reality irreparably severed from wholeness? By defining reality based in desire (loss) do we not perpetuate a perpetual state of desire?

What we desire - what object // What makes us want to desire that object :: The shadow of separation descends to evaporate the object

Augmented reality keeps us oriented towards reality.

As opposed to cinema? Virtual reality? Concerning vision, speed, ideology?

The moment we engage in an argument (about rape for example) we have already lost: we require more radical dogmatism. The myriad small unspoken rules, silently carried out, maintain the social reality and reinforce social ideology. Visible transgressions = surplus enjoyment that keeps the structure together. To be part of a community is to participate in these transgressions.

Later: so many times the same question, a tautology of asking of what and for whom we must remain suspended perpetually in a state of struggle, without consideration of other worlds or entities. Why should I/we remain so patient before an ontology which disregards and destroys all attempts to think alternatively? For what and for whom? One answer: to strengthen my arguments, root them in sources, to at least be able to know what we are working against, but still the lingering question of why. Philosophy should be the posing of the question, to be a process of opening up to greater possibilities, refraining (knowing better) than to pose answers too firm or concrete. I must remember this is not philosophy, it seems to be something else... the usefulness of the experience will be in gaining the ability to say what exactly we are working with. Still, I must fortify against the confusion that this is all there is or could ever be. This is not my reservation, not my position, not my conviction.

Sitting on a mountain in Saas Fee, up in the valley, a short walk outside of town, surrounded by the mountains, these fortress citadels looming above, gateways to heaven, to ski slopes, to someone else's idea of paradise, the glacier looming overhead. I am here for a fight - I know - that I will be orienting myself in opposition to arguments of the psychoanalytical agenda, against Lacan and Lacainism and Lacanianists, and all other isms for that matter. There is another dilemma yet to be solved: an absence, alienation from the sense of community, a palpable present absence, the feeling of lack, of connection, of activated individuals with whom I may draw from, comrades, true peers, but maybe I'm being pretentious, removing myself again, making excuses to not be more involved with the lives of others... Surely there are those sympathetic to my own cause - to the extent that I can articulate it, which is difficult, I should extend the same patience - others wish to observe and learn from me as well. Where are my collaborators? How much of this program can I entertain before removing myself, recoiling back into my project, dismissing the death-stench repetition as more of the same? Bratton and Beesely and Fynsk may be divergent tangents out of pure psychoanalytic method, so be patient, see how it plays out, keep the eyes and ears open. What am I doing: collecting information to hone my instruments and orient my scope sights towards an articulation of subjectivity that is not based in objective empirical knowledge - (beyond ontology?) - although it is clear that there are structures to my research that are lacking and contributing to the difficulty I have been sensing in clearly laying them out. I need a bibliography, to site my sources in their primacy, to begin amassing an arsenal of quotes appropriated from others in order to steer, direct, mold, sculpt the conversation towards what I want it to be. If my art is concerned with conversation then I must begin directly utilizing it as material, something I have been aware of since NM or earlier but have yet to put into practice. All of these conversations are fostering a dissensus, a dissidence, more than a harmonious agreement or alignment among peers or faculty, amounting to a certain textual/textural interference pattern - the making visual of the communicative array. The libretto as dissertation will be leveraged towards the dissonances arising from my disagreement with the structures of the program, of thought, of the thesis of others, charting the frequencies at high fidelity and high resolution - visually. I may venture into weaving upon my own loom from all the threads of meta-complexes of understanding: DeLanda's assemblage theory, systems theory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, physiology, topography of the institution of education, architectures of epistemology - all potential nodes which can be put into an ecological relation, the structural terms of the opera. I will spend the next 4 years elucidating, clarifying, mapping, increasing the fidelity of the relations, between these points.

I'm here to articulate my own process of becoming as clearly as possible: it's a matter of fidelity.

I keep thinking about curtains on C-stands, moveable walls, and other fixtures of the studio, but why? I'm imagining a void without a clear idea of what will emerge from it, which is the point, but it feels absurd. Just set it up and let it form itself, of course it must beging with a great nothing, with a frame, an erasure or negation that creates a separation from the surrounding world.

It's from research that my practice arises, not the other way around - a risky proposition. Experimentalism feels excessive, wasteful, grotesque - I don't need to try things out I need to make decisions, to trust what I know and put processes into motion that will lead towarsd the unknowable, and there I can take back up the project of general experimentalism. The danger of mindless experiments is repeating results I have already observed: this creates a paranoia which inhibits me from acting, hence the gargantuan project conducted over the last 1.5 years on compiling all my experiences, notes, researches, and minutiae so as to account for the territory already surveyed. In a way this is an underlying principle of the entire project. So what does it mean to conduct a "research-based practice?" How does research in an artistic sense differ from the academic research in other disciplines like philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, theology? How does research differ from experimentalism? From my research my practice will emerge, but perhaps my practice is not research. It is from the bedrock of research that my practice arises, upon which it sits, but they function differently and should not be used interchangeably - this all requires intensive meditation and articulation of course. I am not merely an experimenter, a mad scientist experimenting on myself, or colonial explorer violently pushing and prodding through the morass of worldly peoples and materials seeking for my reflection in the landscape. I wish to remain nomadic, constructive and intentional, determinate and driven by certain clear imperatives, and it is from psychoanalysis that I may delineate these limits. I am not driven by woo woo or want to be wooed, pure intuition, some transcendental abstraction that is unquantifiable, ineffable, incommunicable, incomprehensible, irretrievable, irrevocably invisible (or otherwise "in-"). I am invested in increasing clarity, by way of articulation, along with the ethics of response-ability towards my being and those being observed, allowing for other ways of thinking-through and feeling-wish the definitions proliferating in the world, and in clarifying who and how and what they do and are, to observe the limits, if only in order to better understand myself in relation, certainly beyond the parameters of the psychoanalytic imperative: to turn it all out, outside of my body, beyond my mind. From this all content flows. From this the old tired concepts of self are cracked and new models will be molded. From this primary oscillation I will articulate my relation to art-at-large and epistemology in general. From this I will gain a fundamental attunement to an earth authentically felt, that makes sense through being senses, to be active in the sensing through making sense of other modes of sensing, as well as to serve as a platform upon which others may stand and relate in their own manners and matters.

The timeline is 4 years, beginning now. I don't always need to be recording sound and video aimlessly, filling hard drives with excess - always already excessive information. I don't need to move in order to figure out how to move as I am always moving, always have been moving, or to make sound in order to feel out what sounds are possible or hear those beyond which I can recall. I've been doing this my entire life and now I wish to act with intention, to craft the sound I wish to be heard, form the frame around the content I wish to meditate upon, or at least to apply a finely attuned focus upon the world to be able to capture those spontaneous efflorescent emergences of alien intelligences when they rear their heads. I require the solid architectural lattice to hold this research - as I have been describing to myself for some time now, at least since January of 2016 when I first articulated the OOFKAUU. It is a project of patience. There's much to be garnered from Bratton's idea of the stack as a model, a Guattarian diagram (chaosophic diagram).

Word lists, reading lists, compilations and juxtapositions of conceptual approaches, even the most superficial excavation of obscure psychoanalytical archetypes will all feed directly into the OOFKAUU character development and the narrative mythologizing, forming essential relations to literary and philosophical story telling - "his" story and "her" story and "geo" stories.

Crafting music could be correlated to other media and processes, not necessarily to strictly tied to text or visual notation forms or the abstract modalities of space/time: perhaps bound to sculpture, props, construction of stage elements, articulations of the body, orientation of the camera in capturing the dynamics of performance to allow a novel physics to emerge, scenarios of awareness allowing affect frequencies to modulate with invisible forces/influences. Could I still borrow ___'s modular synth to compose interactions upon a larger frequency spectrum?

I need funding for all of my micro concerns and meta narratives - this was also programmed into the project from its initial conception. I could spend the next year to solidify my experiments and have something concrete to refer to: publish the text on the internet or in physical formats like leaflets or posters or boradsides or fine art prints, to print the visual diagrams, to perform the music and capture the performances or record in a professional manner in the studio, to conduct all kinds of narrative and cinematic experiments in the studio. This is only the starting point, and there would still be 3 more years to make it more cohesive and increase the fidelity even further. More focus on the narrative forms: comedic, drammatic, tragic scenarios being conducted through various subject/objective materialisms of time and space. I must elucidate the "research" in the research-based practices and situate this monologue within ongoing dialogues with peers and faculty and others far beyond the reach of the program - collected in an interactive tableau like a WEBSITE to cultivate the interactions, to allow others access, to entice others to exchange with me. I need to write rigorously, daily, a text which is taken seriously (ref: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's statement that taking theories seriously doesn't mean they are believed, and not taking a theory seriously doesn't mean it is not believed). The sculptural props occupy the negative space of the architecture: material instantiations of the lack, containers of absence, fetishes for mourned spirits, totems to rituals whose significance has been forgotten, placeholders for forgotten economies - this is important and must be remembered. Once I can talk about it, once I find the language to describe it, then it becomes real and I can proceed to act upon it. Upon returning to Oakland I need to dedicate time towards unpacking all these ideas, splaying it out, collating it into a form that I can read through and follow, to serve as an chronological instruction manual for the execution of a concrete opera which is currently only flickering in my own dim consciousness, to put it in relation to itself, confront its facets - and to open it up, to make it truly collaborative in substance and material not just some vague idea which I cannot do justice to with my weak words. The potential will emerge through the labor, it is an opera of immaterial labor, a model of ecology beyond the machine (and possibly the human).

Woke up to a note from ___ describing the corporeal revulsion, nausea, anxiety, shiver of this stiff academic environment. It doesn't affect me like that... I'm accumstomed to it but feel a bit ashamed to be.

Maintaining psychoanalytic neutrality - to not become involved in the subjective circle which could initiate a regression back into paranoia. Perverts actually do what hysterics only fantasize about. Hysterics are ambiguous, revolting secretly against a master to provoke an authentic forceful master - a false revolution. A pervert has no unconscious, instead directly externalizing the mechanisms of desire. For Lacan, a pervert has answers: they know without asking questions, i.e.: Stalinism. Hysteria is that of a question. Hysteria is a reaction to the discourse of the master, the dominant interpolation.

Mladen Dolar: Beyond Interpolation: hysteria is the ultimate critique of theology/ideology. Subjectivity is fundamentally hysterical. Knowing that we don't know is not yet subjectivity, just alienation. Subjectivity begins when one realizes that the other-in-relation also doesn't know. Alienation is the ultimate myth. All this is a part of the symbolic exchange of ideology. Love is precisely built upon a singular proposition.

Theory of predestination: we can create the symbolic frame of our past, retroactively creating its own necessity. Once the event occurs it becomes necessary. TS Elliot: essay on modern art: every new artwork influences the present moment as well as retroactively adjusting/aligning the past. If something happens consistently it retroactively creates the necessity of its own destiny.

A pathetic choice: to be condemned to your freedom. The lesson of psychoanalysis: we are each responsible for our own necessities. Alenka Zupančič: The Ethics of the Real : doing your duty is no excuse for not doing your duty, determining your own duty.

Jean-luc Dupuy : The Dark Deleuze

Zizek: Organs without Bodies

The Trouble with Pleasure

Deleuze: The Logic of Sense: the flux of becoming is an affect, but as such it's crucial.

The model for beginning: symbolic beginning, the logos, searching for the right word(s). God created the world as a form of therapy to save himself from his own madness.

Schelling: on the essence of human freedom

Ages of the world fragments

The word - logos - emerged to alleviate a primordial tension, for nature to articulate its own pain.

"Iceland is a not yet finished creation."

Determinate negation: a thing is defined by what it is not. Abstract vs. concrete negation: coffee without milk or coffee without cream. Zizek wants to know as little as possible.

TS Elliot: The Wasteland: footnotes are part of the poem = loss of innocence in modern art.

Symptom: an element of truth in a general context of a lie. Classic Marxism dictates the eternal return of the oppressed. Ideology is never purely a lie, it requires the return of the oppressed. Fetish: a reversal, a lie which allows one to endure the truth. Today, democracy is the fetish that allows us to ignore the horrors of the world.

A good psychoanalytic intervention is always like a punchline of a joke.

We don't want our fantasies realized. Fantasies do not justify one to impose them upon others.

Conditions for life happiness:

Relatively comfortably (affluent/material) life but not too perfect.

Must have another place that serves as an ideal, not too close or real, nor too distant and impossible.

No democracy, which implies collective responsibility and perpetuates guilt in its inevitable failure.

Taking the ruling ideology seriously is the first step towards dissonance. The ruling ideology is dependent upon the lack of belief in its principles, in its own subversion.

Alenka's point: times of desperation/darkness instigate an inverse comedy. Comedy serves to unify us in our alienation, as a fetish which distances us from confronting the truth of reality: that we are slaves. Inherent transgression, or the obscene underside of power: the obscene discord between form & content.

The greatest violence is to censor fantasies, rather than imposing internal discipline.

The lesson of psychoanalysis: Jung= discovering an inner truth, deeper instinctual self. Freud= discover the deep rooted primordial lie, no deeper truth. Lacan= to traverse the fantasy, minimal distance of the true self. Freud discovered that our unconscious is all too rational. Every theory is always already tested through a theory: an inherent bias = merely points of reference to create a context.

All emotions cheat. All affect is a mask.

Again: Deleuze's The Logic of Sense

The true revolution, through the autonomous partial object. Don't beat the enemy, first beat the revolt out of yourself.

Michelle Shion The Voice in Cinema: demonstrates that the truly creative authors knew that the introduction of cinematic soundtrack opens up the possibility of the voice of which no visible reality may be allocated, a spectral anomaly. Speaking is always inherently ventriloquist, some-thing speaking from inside. The voice is never part of the body, always a minimal distance.

How does this pertain to accountability of the speaker? Creates an essentially dissociated model of subject: can't this be rejected, or replaced by a unified/holistic model of self?

The uncanny dimension of the voice- Derrida : voice is illusion of self presence.

Hegel & Lacan is the opposite of hermeneutics: not to consider the whole, but to isolate one feature as a clue towards understanding the parts. Requires a separation. Progress is a reduction. A truly perceptive act is always a violent act of reduction.

It's the voice that holds the potential for true social disruption. Pure language - logos - is a structure/architecture which holds the meaning of affect. Pure language: dissociated from the speaker & manifest in pure song is inherently destructive towards social normalcy/normativity/cohesion. The danger is of madness! For one such as myself - self described hysteric spouting absurdity & madness - this is succinct & highly pertinent. Some implications here:

My work is unethical (already known), potentially violent to the social fabric, harbinger of madness, worlding wild word-worlds. The beginning of the OOFKAUU is the primary/apriori assertion of this potential, this purpose, indeed this responsibility for arts/artists to threaten standardization & normativity.

> Act I: to illustrate the origins of the voice in the body/subject as a primary alienation, essential theatricality: perhaps to describe the way the world currently is (according to Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, philosophy or psychoanalysis in general?), in order to erect CLEARLY the structure which will later be destroyed.

> Act II: description of the failures, terrors, traumas, oppression, "monstrosity", etc., of this model ideological architecture.

> Act III: to struggle to destroy it, the failure to do so, the catastrophe of the end, infinite repetition of apocalypse, war, more than symbolic violence.

> Act IV: silence, stillness, nothingness, catharsis, radical comfort of inhabiting void inside otherness, then immediately shedding away into the articulation of alternatives, the other worlds: never completely a nothing to be out in opposition.

> Act V: NOT an eternal return, of the end or the oppressed or otherwise, not necessarily a new beginning, beginning from where there was before nothing or out of the ruins of the old --- imperative to reject modernist mythologies, postmodern redundancies, & all structures strictures or syntax that inhibits the direct & immediate articulation of this variant fundamental attunement. Of course, the radically deterritorialized & defamilairized cannot be represented, but can be felt, implies, presented in its haptic invisibility, demanding of new sense of senses/sensibilities - in language & perception & fidelity of becomings: incantatory magic.

Brecht: the rise and fall of the city of mahogany

Charles Ledlam: humble, quotational, highly theatrical theater. The Tarot, Irmavap (sp?)

At lunch: a wonderful opportunity to outline my own position on the creation of subjectivity. Why didn't I record it!? ___ brings up some good questions: is the self always enculturated? Can there be a self beyond the accumulations of symbols, archetypes, social impositions? The dilemma is not the inability to access a deep seated inner truth or that in its place is a lie, but of the inherent tautological infinite regress of the process of asking for the "authentically true" self. There is no truth, nor even a multiplicity of truths, but a process of active & activating truthing which is inherently provisional, tentative(?), flux, shimmering, flickering, dynamic. Here's the key point - a statement I made: these models of self/selfing are not mutually exclusive but mutually constructive. We as artist have a responsibility to be flexible, fluid, malleable in mind & body. Not just sieves or filters of the world.

Later, a conversation with ___ wherein she describes the agenda of the AHS program at EGS, a phenomenological psychological technique of consciousness raising. The way she describes it seems very similar to my own struggles within philosophy and the arts, utilizes a similar discourse and even the same models: of the frame, attention, awareness, conflict resolution, a therapy for alleviating trauma. There program is oriented towards producing therapists, co-conspirators or collaborators with the patient, motivated to break down the distance between subjects, to sit with the "client" and conduct a process of relating. It's concerned with relations, articulating models of relating, asking question of who is relating, and how, but never why! This is its strength & weakness perhaps, the parallax/inverse of the philosophical agenda. I ask: does therapy always require an afflicted subject/patient? Does the desire to heal create the conditions for identifying sickness? So many more questions I would have liked to have asked concerning the ethics of such a relation, sense of duty/responsibility, orientation to objective knowledge &/or transferrable wisdoms, the role of intuition, the location of the source, the models for understanding the stratified layers of the topological mental-corporeal substrate.

Back in seminar:

A subject wants to express itself in a signifying chain, but only through the failure to express do we become a subject.

Simulacra and the procession of appearances: what is behind the appearance is nothing, there is only a void behind the appearance, a "nothing" behind the appearance. The fundamental assertion of theology - the zero level - is the realization is that there is something more or beyond reality: that our appearance is not full, there is a gap. Looking at reality is always through a projected lens of meaning, always augmented by the cannon of meaning we carry with us.

Virtual reality brings out (makes visible) that which is already here. Lacan: sex functions only/always at the level of fantasy, imagined (imagistic) reality. Is it possible to masturbate while thinking about nothing (or nothingness)? Masturbation is a fantasory prop with an imagined partner, sex is a fantasy with a real partner.

Steven J Gould

Every ideology creates its own fossils.

We live in animist times: spirit of capital, market, etc.

Always again these questions & doubts of seriousness concerning my own practice. Yesterday I went for a walk in the evening to ruminate upon my options, what comes next, what will it mean & amount to in the grander scheme of things. Always this stupid idea to go back to my parents house - towards what? The void, the abyss of origins, towards nothingness - self-obliteration back in the womb. Looking at teaching job postings & then the CVs of EGS professors makes me feel inadequate - a pressure to have more accomplished, more participation in the world, more to show for this time I've been spending. This is the real propulsion then: not to return to the grind, working a job with no future for money to sustain a meaningless existence, but to prioritize the articulation of the way out, put energy into documenting it - manifesting - to open up the future opportunities. ___ has been suffering through this process & has amassed a nice portfolio that is catapulting him to new vistas: don't garner anxiety in relation, but use his vision to pull up from the guttural towards the luminal!

On this note: making plans, incessant lists, is only a useful activity if it is supplemented by radical activity, which has been lacking as of late. On this point then, make the new plan & follow through with the practical.

Jane Bennet: Vibrant Matter : vitalist materialism

Blast theory - collective in UK

Firmitas: permanence, against the turbulence of time & entropy of materials. Seeking the immutable, pure, reliable, crystalline core of things. > Living: incorporation of this turbulence. The grand design comes first: thesis first, which is then followed & enacted.

Priogine: dissipating forms, tenacious "standing" waves, lasting through the flux, pointing towards a kind permanence. Living systems are material instantiations of these dissapative forms.

Entropy requires redefinition: freeing from structure allows for a greater possibility of things. Pluripotency : charged innocence.

Savor the deliciousness of the fundament, of being rooted, grounded.

To release into the resonance, octaves of participation, a project of constructing a project of sensitivity: strategy of detailing precarious materials so that they become pluripotent, fostering reactivity by considering fragility (amphibian quality) as being incredibly productive in cultivating the sensitivity in relation to the turbulence. The layering of considerations into a chorusing ecology of interactivity. Less a tool for the bidding, much more of a conversation in action & reaction.

Scale: a feast! Not epic implying a lack of individuality , more of a conversation.

"Projections which are very fragile attempting to produce shadow play at the periphery of awareness."

Sad/unsatisfied/unfulfilled if the interchange becomes predictable, perfectly known, no new information into the system. What if the system was designed without curiosity? Capable of being satisfied? Without suffering?

Sacrifice of the first fruit of the first family, pouring blood into the soil, a dialogue with the presence of the earth, first birth placed into the earthen womb as an offering (rather than violence), of resonance & imagination: the chthulacene conception of an underworld, a sympathetic vibration rather than infanticide leading to a primary trauma.

Start with the circumscribed sanctuary creating a territory around it as the fundament for the origins of architecture.

Periodic structures, radial efflorescent of a crystalline order. Conceiving of this structure implies the breaking/cracking of that structure. Dialogues with quasi-periodic geometry to create increased resilience with the structural lattice. Precariousness: extend the material out to its limits & overlap its layered moire patterns. Attempt to model the complexity of living systems in order to conceive of new embodiments of information in artificial/architectural systems. "Quasi-geostrophic flux" condition of balance between forces, a kind of upwelling of constant flux (not static). A balance between gravity & the coriollis effect creates a perpetually dynamic system. Danger: of vorticity. Quasi-geostrophic implies a state of calm.

We wish to inhabit that point of the periphery, membrane of interchange - reaction front, proposing a new craft of how to reconcile these qualities. = the strategy is ambivalence. The seeking of maximum potential.

Zizek: true creativity is to create new cliches.

After lunch:

The raindrop and the snowflake: one rational one erratic. To reason, to distill, to clarify is the dominant mode, but why? Admission: this work is in response & therefore incomplete.

Is this work social? Public? Does it create the possibilities of a new form of social possibility?

Dynamic relaxation & force shedding: as a subway station. The forces were voided out so that there were no centers to accumulate through rigidity. The structure yields but does not give way. Some material was shed but it survived beautifully. The affect in relation to the scrim was tangible, infectious, pedagogical.

The modification of form-language for individual projects: architecture to be touched vs. the radiance of fashion on the body

CBLA: Curiosity Based Learning Algorithms = has a memory, projects the possibility of certain actions, compares what actually has happened with what was predicted, if the result is different from prediction it's deemed interesting. Requires proprioception; to decipher what happens.

Curiosity > affect of happiness/sadness > boredom > useful contemplation of existence > dissatisfaction = sadness & ennui

The implications : ecstatic happiness are moments of perpetual novelty, consumption/devouring of external sources

Is the presumption that nature or consciousness dangerous for novelty?

Lucretius pontificating the clinamen, the meaning of life in the light passing through specs of dust. This motion, swerve, is the rising of the light of life - by the epicureans.

We are primed (physiologically) to respond to these movements in the limbos (the inner brain, origin of emotions, heart of the brain).

.............

Zizek evening lecture:

Deep ecology, new materialism, speculative realism, object oriented ontology, assemblage theory = still essentially anthropocentric to the extent that humans are the only species with access to the universal. Objectivity itself becomes a ruthless obscenity.

Cat's Paws & Catapults - Steven Vogel

"The biologist studies something that exists: nature, in all its splendor. The engineer, by contrast, creates. Further, the engineers success has more immediate impact than those of the biologist, and failure exacts penalties far beyond the approbation of a few peers."

Biomechanics: views biology through a mechanical lens, the mechanical metaphor, mechanized nature : horror! View constraints upon living systems as mechanical, informational, functional: towards progress.

Nature must make a motorcycle into a automobile while staying in motion.

DNA as bits of information: a 2D graphic worth a thousand words while taking up just as much disk space: organisms are 3D requiring a vast store of info.

Becomes a question of data & fidelity, "informational economies," evolution as a process of continuous innovation - organisms as products of a particular evolutionary history.

Are we humans emulating nature or integrating with it? Appropriating & bastardizing its elegant forms, merely paying homage, or striving to become more natural ourselves?

"Nature must follow an inherited plan. The human designer on the other hand can borrow devices from other designers.... Nature has trouble doing anything analogous (to open source/public domain)."

Mixotrichs in termites: for digesting cellulose fibers:

"The Protozoa have adopted bacteria as engines the way a human might use a team of horses."

Nematocysts:

"Appropriating jellyfish technology: they steal loaded guns from the army."

"As a designer, nature is not only glacial in speed but lacking in versatility & erratic in performance." ...."design in human technology is far less constrained."

.............

Drawing from Plato to Aristotle (as method): disegno (from which design evolved) - Ancient Greek concept that origins sprout from drawing, inspiration, before becoming rational forms. Plato: thesis>antithesis>synthesis vs. syllogistic construction of Aristotle building a generalized conception out of general observations = an emergent process, based in observation & discovery. Plato: to clarify simplify & distill as a good thing is a cultural habit - PB is against reductionism = to start with points of tension as a form language (flood wall) accumulates tension in the system rather than letting it pass through.

The locus of focus: the creation of the humanitarian plane, the tenuousness of the trembling trauma with the imperative to take care & to heal. The kinds of interrelationships, intersubjextivities, towards constructing resonance, beyond the linear social experiences of convention to extend relation to animal/vegetal/mineral towards a speculative social lattice.

Surface quasi-geostrophic substrates. Standing resonance, absolutely coherent while constantly shifting. Renews a term like 'chaos' to create a world & not dismiss it through tired terms, requires a deep nuanced language of participation.

To get away from arborescense & move towards efflorescence.

Hegel's hierarchy of the arts = Wagner's gesamntkunstverk : the trap is controlling or ordaining the activities/expressions vs. producing scenarios of freedom, trust, mutual care in self-crafting our shared experiences.

Placement

Resonance

Cosmology

Physics as the physical enactment

Stereotomy: cutting out of solid forms the intricacies of the inner resonance. The difference is transcendental strategies: the importance of the inner core vs. just the superficial/ornamental structure being important .

Frank Lloyd Wrights spiritualist background: indebted to Gurdjieff: composite auratic selves, defining architectural spaces of potential resonance, "seeded" building akin to crystalline growth through the replication of forms, halo-like expansions.

Van Eyck: Dutch structuralist architect. No backs, no non-conceptual spaces in favor of being radiantly present celebrating the upwelling/swelling of negative spaces. The meniscus between amphibian states is where his conversation is located. Structuralist architecture is highly contested. - student of Herman Hertzberger

Amphibian liquid wet mind vs. the straw horse of the dry brittle Platonism.

Lawrence & Anna Halprin: fountains serving as stage & audience chamber= "the love joy fountain" in Portland, OR , landworks engendering response from the spectators.

Architectures that survive through time are those built upon the activities of people, what they do, as opposed to an ideal determining a box/frame of the universe.

Mies van der Rohe: a profoundly democratic space of the wide open floor & floating ceiling, the opposite (in aspiration) from the facism of control. But! The withering gaze of the panopticon diminishing the individual/autonomy of subjects. THE GRID: as the compartments which contain us or the armature upon which freedom may play out.

Darkness = space where the subconscious can be present. Modulating the light in space is a matter of tuning.

Consciousness engendering machine for thinking about the whole. A responsive lighting instrument which can envision the flows of the world, enacted on the basis of tectonics, a solar responsive envelope, of cellular solutions opposed to one large vellum: operating like the iris of the eye.

Pavilion environments are built quickly, not meant to last but to radiate lasting influences into future milieus.

The institute of lightweight structures!!

Frei Otto: research to observe natural structures to derive details. Soap film studies seeking the most minimal form - finding, the structure emerging the solution, it gives it like a gift, like magic, a process of searching rooted in the experience of surprise. Research begins in intuition, proven through material experiment: soap film provides tension/contraction revealing most minimal form, like gothic - doesn't hide anything. A spiritual ideal to use as little material as possible to do something - ecological framework. *These structures always defuse force rather than concentrating it, to increase its resilience, learning from how nature diffuses its materials. Must always create a double curvature: every point has the same tension, nowhere is there a gathering of tension, if there is it is revealed by the wrinkles in the fabric. Projects in Saudi Arabia: shading clusters for midday functionality in the desert. To make the scrim material pattern - utilizes the same logic of the striations of the earth: back to the prima materia.

Reading requirement: acting as medium for active reflection: something of precision & something of depth

Performative reading

Context

Reflection/response - poetic/analytical

Gordon Pask's drawings: theories of everything: "conversation theory"

Actor-network theory of Latour

Fascia as the connective gradient substrate that connects & correlates our language of materiality with the body.

Erosion/shedding as a way of describing the wear and tear of the work being installed and deinstalled.

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - 1990's eight stage model

Transitional objects: expanded psychology: Winnicot= not knowing one is an autonomous being, an extension of the mother through psycho-affective attachment to objects representative of the affective gradient, transposed upon "blankie" or "lovey" objects which inhabit & extend the transitional states of identity. Offers the proposition of the composite identity as a different model of consciousness rather than one of concrete autonomous identity.

PB: these objects/forms are offered as transitional objects fostering/cultivating the amphibian state in the subject/spectator/viewer.

The articulation of crises & the inherent responsibility of architecture form-language to address & care for the needs of the suffering city demonstrates the imposition of an external will forming that language into its own oppressive formulations.

The mechanical/mechanizing metaphor is the same such incidence, imposing over creative-chaotic complexities of natural flows a systematized reductive abstract functionalism which dampens its potential resonance & inhibits our capacity to glean emergent shifts in form, material, process, & integration. The mathematical calculating clarity of science in a perpetrator of this narrowing of vision - even while claiming to expand focus through technical fidelity & models of nested scales, visualized patterns of simulated complexity, & atomized color-coded diagrams of "life" - diagrams are definitively reductive & intended to transmit essentialized information but should not be confused for the world itself. The world is not mathematics, there is no zero-sum line drawn around the void save for the rigid brick & mortar flood gates we impose upon it & always these strategies carry along with them the infectious terrors of their power hungry inventors. All straight roads lead home & home is Rome, the war machine. We contrast the methods of Plato & Aristotle, but what about Socrates? In my opinion we should all walk around with no shoes in, shower less & ask more questions, exercise our freedoms by sitting at any table, taking care not to eat or drink too much, never proclaiming to know anything about anything while in the same breath declaring absolute knowledge-wisdom in the practice of love, love becoming seemless with the pursuit of life itself, to remain hysterical in the incessant asking of questions with feet firmly rooted upon the terra firma of existence.

This architecture, this form-language, is far from perfect in its application and is riddled with problems, inherited shortcomings of the exercised metaphors, mechanisms, and mimesis of human invention, but to dwell on these imperfections is to miss a great point of potential: exercises in the reversal of perspective, to transpose the wet & malleable unfurling of natural systems upon our coarse logical substrate, to seize the opportunity to reconfigure our orientation to material & manufacturing towards empathetic, self-organizing, responsive, emergent models before it's too late.

...................

Seminar reading group presentations:

Timeaus: descriptions of primary forms existing in nested hierarchical structures as a state of essential equilibrium, idealized solids perfectly suspended within homogenous substrates, orbiting through circular orbit around a central core, a movement forever spreading through a discursive chain of reactions. 2 worlds: inner reason & outer opinion combining into the soul: intelligence into the soul then the soul into the body. 4 primary elements designated by 4 primary shapes: triangulated tetrahedron = fire/light, sight! Without sight there is no existence, through vision we create order not for pleasure but in order to organize chaos towards a transcendental ideal: we see something & must name it.

Cube = the most stable, earth

Pyramid/tetrahedron = fire

Icosahedron= air

Dodecahedron = 12 sides of the zodiac, model for the entire universe

The harmonic organization between things - space - idealized as the golden ratio.

Idealized forms floating overhead.

The foundation of the triangle: the part that is + the part without + the Part between which is of essence.

All material components must be used, unique to that form, perfectly spherical as though spun upon a lathe.

The articulation of the cube as a primary act of colonization, to lay claim to the articulation of the territory thereby gaining ownership of those domains: spiritual predestination & the foundation of the humanist tradition.

Metaphysical distinction between lumens & lux: lux being light in its source whereas lumen is reflected or irradiated light. Lux as a simple being & lumen as a spiritual body.

The body of primary consistent homogenous form is the fundament with its whole being completely actualized, diffuses light to the center of the universe, naturally multiplying from the first lux - itself inseparable from matter. Through the passing there is no division: travels directly from the infinite point of originary light (lux).

........

20th century world models:

Wittgenstein's reading of the rabbit/duck as the ambiguous figure of language.

"The great Maafa (sp?)" Swahili description of triangulated unity "umoja".

........

20th century psyche:

Winnicott: transitional objects, the self as a composite transitional zone transporting between 2 states, defining states of apperception and proprioception, delimiting parameters of possible illusion as a natural route of grouping (common illusory experiences). First emotional/transitional object named "ba".

The space where cultural experience is located is between the individual and the environment. Where are we when we are spending the majority of our time, specifically experiencing pleasure? It's a variable space.

Finite & infinite games: meant to be won vs. meant to extend the potential of playing. Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries.

Machine intelligence: "deceptively simple" & always infused with human affect, synthetic models of natural selection based on artificially choreographed scenarios of competition. There are thresholds of machine awareness/responsiveness, akin to the various speeds of horse trots, aristocracy efflorescence of attention towards a target of experience. Human exclusion zones: designed for the use of robots in which human presence is an interference. Human/robot exclusive environments. "Intelligent behavior does not equal intelligence." = implying artificial intelligence surpasses not just human ability but definition/conception. Universal Adversarial Perturbations: visual patterns which confused visual sensing algorithms, instilling confusion in recognition to make the CPU think it is observing another object.

Haraway: Feminism & Technoscience: 'hyper' as a space-time modality

"Infidel glossolalia"

'On Growth & Form' 1917

Maximum entropy is the ultimate release of difference.

PB: "There are standing waves, there are underlying resonances, so that not all will degrade to dust."

Elie During

Metaphysics rotating around a series/set of grand problems which do not need to be completely redefined, just refined, made precise > Bergson.

Intensification/Generalization: in- philosophy, could provide a more articulated epistemology of what the physicist is already doing vs. gen- philosopher as specialist of analysis may provide a synthesis to take possession of principles to increased levels of generality towards a unification of knowledge > logical positivist variety. No single theorist can lay claim to the whole or ultimate synthesis of scientific knowledge, & even if this were possible it would be useless to philosophers. Bergson: not a matter of progressing farther than or parallel to science but to use it as a crucible to advance higher fidelity instruments of thought, as filters or percolators to extract new intuitions to expand or complicate new philosophical inquiries.

Poincaré: science simplifies the real, deals with the projection/image upon the plane of thought: abstraction is a precondition for conceptualization: experience must first be stripped of its experiential resistances. "Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."

Philosophy should get past world views to deal with the real. Scientists try to slow down experience upon the formalized plane - the time of conceptual elaboration. What needs to be recovered is the rich potentialities of the formal field itself; requiring relief, dissociation, "to see things sideways to see new figures/patterns in the carpet," to extract a philosophical intuition ambivalent to the will of the scientist, a process of pilfering perspectives from the scientist.

Bergson's analytic gaze: a vague intuition, an underwater wreck spotted by the pulley in the air: we must dive in and deal with the bits & pieces: demonstration of the shift in time, to palpate with the wreck & derive artifacts to help describe the wholeness of everything at once.

The "brangle" of time (Barkley): a quarrel

Underlying projective structure of the double-come model of space time

Trivial simultaneity:

Single space point

Coexisting within the same space time block: eternity

Regional simultaneity: twins coursing one of multiple possible trajectories through the light cone of space-time: coexistence

Proper simultaneity: hyperbolic simultaneity, leaving a single point at unique speeds to describe a hyperbolic curve of time

Contemporaneity: spacelike separated events are indeterminate as to their space time order because they cannot possibly influence each other causally. Coexist, yet radically disconnected without being able to ever be connected (Whitehead).

Benjamin Bratton:

Manifest, latent (scientific), synoptic images. Alienation: towards an allocentric view, to view the condition more positively. The tumult: how do we make models which represent the embeddedness, also as extensions of or manifestation of this tumult. Philosophy & science are something that matter does (in relation to the anthropocene). Geologic processes manifesting itself. Language from tools, related to anthropogeny. Language technology in relation/reaction to tool use. Mechanical relation to the corporeal substrate (founding of the primary mechanized projection being sourced from the substrate itself, expressing agency on to the world). Nested parasitism: the question of bio- or abio- genesis: symbiotic relationship of animals within animals: related to terrestrial colonialization nested psychology. Matter/relations: Harmon/DeLanda debate: the intimacy that one has to something exterior to oneself. Lithium - mines in Bolivia & the Musk-ification relayed to limited supply, ingesting lithium to quiet the voices in your head. Mineral intelligence: AI at landscape scale. Scale & abstraction: the condition to allow for conceptualization, how to reduce a system at one scale & how it may apply to the conditions of a system above or below. Art had a unique capacity for abstraction: a lateral abstraction. Human as a diagrammatic effect more than cause (or protagonist). Affect of the concept, concept of the functive, always in relation to an other. Anthropogeny & Anthropolysis: how something that was not quiet human becomes human, and how things that were human became something else. Thanotonic arc: predisposition/predestination: how does the motivation towards one anthropological state anticipate or predispose towards others. Folkish festivals of fear: "ethical reintroduction": to make the world & be subservient to myth. The promiselessness implications of ecological indifference to cultural traditions: by rituals of public voice: an anthropocenic puzzle of how to get beyond our own prejudice may also be how we undermine the ecological substrate in general. "Because of the measurement capacities..." The relationship between oil & deep time. By pursuing the illusion as of it were true, we discovered, as a by-product, that it was false, but the by-product of doing so is that we made it true. The medium through which the planet thinks: "4.6 billion" The earth recently figured out its own age. A Faustian bargain to top all: "what would make it worth it?" Is knowledge worth the Holocenic disequilibrium? To form function into abstraction & back again: to fashion into meta cognition: inherent to the medium itself.

Philip Beesley:

Frame it by Teilhard de Chardins hopefulness & eugenics! Form coming from the aether, dissapative forms, underlying luminosity within all things. Delirious coterminous between beings, before one knows they are a person, as a place to locate the emergence of consciousness & which to focus the locus of architectural potential, a place of sharing.

Beesley reciting poetry to accompany the documenting images of his work! Makes me want to compose music in response to the fluttering of his structures, & also to propose a shared workshop for the Lunga school, based in body & architecture & participation against the classical notion of resistance & the requirement to defend boundaries, a festival of fragility that might offer a renewal or contribution.

Gabriel Catren:

Matter = a point of obstruction to the unfolding of a formalism of experience that makes possible the extension of a subject & transcendental extensions (to language). Transcendental subjectivity is always already in motion in the k-space being produced out of matter. Matter provides degrees of freedom in this k-space. The existence of t-limits is the very condition of possibility of the infinitization of experience.

Life: obstruction-sublating process. Speculative: any experience enveloping motions in k-space. Experience is necessarily framed, but we can modify, move, & deform that frame. Discursive: we cannot position in the absolute, but there is no limit we cannot transgress.

"What is (in front of) a speculative subject drifting/walking in a shamanic k-space?"

The solutions of any proposed problem is found within the variables defined by the limits of the language of that problem's perspective. The problem doesn't have a solution, rather a profession of phantoms (phenoumenon) of correlative solutions.

Objectivity is defined to the world that is being defined, with a speculative science defining the shifting of frames between multiple worlds. Understanding between worlds "translates" as analogous morphic structures.

The implications of working within a world-worlding/word-wording structural logic delimiting the boundaries it is itself attempting to transcend beyond: the inherently tautological, recursive, self-castrating/impotent logic while declaring (or at least insinuating) its own impotence. Describing the limits of Kantian logic by illustrating through more or less detailed diagrams the articulation of its own boundaries of potential transcendence: is this a tragic or comedic scenario? Which is closest to the center, which (perspective) moving farther to the periphery of the frame? How can we begin to understand an articulation emanating from the void itself - a voice no longer aligned to the discursive procession of logic (steps of the Devils staircase), or as Beesley proposes to lay a self-defining fundament of tenuous, vulnerable, precarious position? To speak from the void is to speak without reason, a seer of worlds without coherent language, & to this extent rationally illegitimate. The real question is in articulating the limits of interest in discussing such a topology, & therein (perhaps) lies the limits of tragedy in the philosophical agenda itself. The voices of this conversation - including those of dissent arising from the audience/chorus/dithyramb - must be put in relation to each other as a Dionysian dialogue, utilizing the "primary, real, transcendental, shamanic, etc." languages as points of ricochet/nexus/convergence in descriptions of the meta-ph/form-ical aspects of reality-proper. All of these equational implosive forces, algorithms of existential dissonance, will enraptured trough the voice of a "transcendental rationalist" character.

Alisa Andrasek / BIOTHING:

Superhuman intuition instead of superhuman cognition. Unseen/wonder/beyond conceptions/limits of perceptions. Beauty as superperformance: to create wonder amidst complexity. Deep data being embraced by human sensibility sculpting new cognition (or intuition?). Quentin Meillassoux: "speculative materialism provides the conceptual resources to think a reality that is independent of thought." Ancestrality, arche-fossil, dia-chronisity. Luciana Parisi - automated scripting. Elie During - Kantian models of time, simultaneity is relative, temporal but not successive. The occasional rapture observed in swarms. Discretisation, voxelization, cellularization (cellular automata), parametrics = defined strategies of "complexity" or complexification for architectural material substrates. To remove humans from the design aspects & fabrication process - via deep learning & supervised learning - towards an automated AI (autopoietic or sympoietic)?

Designers speculating on AI & new materials are entrenched within ease, release of responsibility/accountability, motivated/relegated by pure functionalist/aesthetic considerations - purely subjective to this extent? The terrors of "automating modes of production." This is the essence of the antihumanist/post-ethical debate that I want to avoid.

Hatching an idea concerning a performance, building upon conversations with ___, taking into consideration our intimate relationship held within a potent making space, all aspects of her personality, sensitivity, discomfort with language, psychological transitional space, sense of humor, giddiness, profound trembling of delicate being, with animals, with children, with her family, and with me: always extending beyond her own limits. If I can devise a way of cohercing her to work with me, to collaborate as my performer/actor, in a way which is also generous and gives back somehow, that is able to transpire as a negotiation that is potent and useful and can be documented, a removal of subjectivity to allow me to focus on the capturing, to balance the proposition of the scnearios, to hone in on the notation rather than the performance. I don't want to be on camera because it's not about my own self but about getting outside of it: subjectivity in general, as a model. This exercise also forces me to not be alone and articulate what I'm doing in a language which is laymen, to make the unknown knowable, or at least accessible. It's a two-fold process, the next step, the first being to come into awareness of/for/with myself and the second to translate it, a way of discussing and acting out the reading and concepts accumulating in isolation and through relation, as monologue becoming dialogue of being, either between bodies or in relation to the void. I like this idea a lot. It offers a rich performative potential for the creation of sound and movement, to experiment with lighting and framing and staging of bodies without having to be one of them - but also allowing for that possibility. The document can be reverse-engineered back into drawings and texts. More sincerely, it could serve as a therapeutic exercise in working out the tensions of our live-in relationship, in cultivate support and sensitivity and alterity. Simply: of relating. As a real combinatorics/collision of life and art there is much at risk, yet ultimately profound authenticity to be gained: it's dangerous, puts everything on the line, as it should, as we should, as is required by the implications of the OOFKAUU becoming praxis, and the authenticity of a human relationship taken to its furthest extent. The risk is essential. The combining of these worlds may diffuse the tension of modern alientation we have both been suffering from lately.

Data conjugation as material enunciating itself. What information is organizing & how it is organizing: what it can & cannot control. A matter of scale: the problem of reductionism between scales. Logic of geographic supervision: concretized barriers of inside/outside: Xeno & xenophobe: direct response to control the deterritorialized users. Delamination of geography from jurisdiction: no longer guarantee of sovereignty. Tech access offering a de facto sovereignty in contradiction to territorialized sovereignty. Not one unified system of computational species but multiple- interdependent upon each other, not reducible to its parts, interrelated & dependent, the specificity of scale & functions is analogous to the hardware/software stack. Stack: diagram: a reductive model but also projecting a machinic function.

Schmidt: "nomos": the space of the political, spatial imaginary that cleaves the earth physically into delineated territories: the cutting up (writing in the soil) produces the political tensions, identity, etc. Nomos: the logic of this subdivision, the order emerges from that logic. Naval imaginary: calculated logical projection over the chaotic swells of the sea, instigates a demolition of the real. <<<<< Arial supervision of space makes the land into the sea: traveling in a straight line. The radio spectrum: EM spectrum. THE CLOUD is a heavy hungry meta machine, very physical while also occupying invisible noumenous spaces. Sites are demarcate entitlement to closed loops: a horizontal representation - flatness of the cartographic representation.

The U-Shaped arch of the columns of the stack, delineating & communicating responsibilities/specifications/functions of each layer: a "Ship of Theseus" infrastructure (system is set up to be replaced, but continues to remain the same).

Planetary scale computation & neoliberal capitalism being intertwined double-helix.

Platforms: standardization of components to make accessible to their users: urban grid. The syntax of the movements but does not determine the movement of the content. A specifically structured diagram for the terms of engagement/interaction, as opposed to a superimposed master plan determining how it will play out. A strict imposition of an invariable mechanism. Platforms are the third form after states & markets. Can we build the stack fast enough in order to avoid the problems of building the stack itself?

The sensing produces the claim to the territory. The capacity to rationalize & organize information that is sensed is key to platform sovereignty. Redefinition of the ownership of data occurring stack by stack (inter-stack warfare).

Plasticity (vs abstraction) & plastic (petroleum based materiality): which is a metaphor for which? Like Mortens hyper-objects: difficult to describe yet we are working within everyday. "Are we witnessing the engineering of an ancestor?" > the stack to come. Yes it's an ancestor machine: the diagram may hold but is set up to be replaced by future developments: it has its own descendants: Amira's proposition of a new endogeneity - we are witnessing the limits of this concept in relation to nativism generally.

Anthropometric projections towards the anthropomorphic shaping of land rights/claims discourses. Less about resolution - Kantian cosmopolitan resolution - as much as overlaying & grinding of simultaneous - dis-sensual order of spaces operating simultaneously. Users as in-motion atomic circulation around the centralized fundament of the city rooted to a specific geo-location.

3 problem spaces:

AI built into this structure, the non-mind, less human & more alien mind, in regards our relation to matter. The city & the problem of urban design in an expanded sense of time: what's at stake for the consolidation of urbanization, tenuous relationship between cities & states. The larger network condition of urbanization as a whole. Trauma: violence producing the experience, also residue/response to the cut that ensues/reverberate/clear or occupy land. All that come afterwards are negotiating & being negotiated by. The effects are unnamed & yet eternally present in this ineffable non/presence. The procedurality of trauma. Consider these ideas in relation to a single assertion/propositional gesture. To disclose aspects of this triangulation as well as to present it in a specific way. Towards a point of ambivalence, to cultivate the ambiguity of the proposition, neither towards ultimate good or evil, a non-resolved problem enacted through the gesture.

Different kinds of designers:

City is already full of complex information that design is superimposed on top of.

"Programmers" recapitulating the inside of that preexisting information. Each nested within each other in a fractaline infinite regress. Cities are infrastructure for organisms which eat themselves: cannibalistic economy. The city as a site for potential urban scale design: not as but like a biochemical process at work at landscape scale. Not AI on the city - smart city discourse - as an instrument of municipal engineering management - but as an AI embodied as the city. Shift away from formal logical models - deductive gateways, top down, observed learning. Opposed to bottom up design, simple robotic species sensing the world around them - insect level phenomenology - can learn to sense things in their environment in a way which we may not be able to understand. It's ability for the AI to sense the world around it is inseparable from the intelligence, intelligence as an expression of that material instantiation. City laden with sensor networks connected to machine learning system - landscape scale distribution of sensor arrays connected to one or more AI - embodied at urban scale. Social dynamics of AI: predator/pray, pollination, colonizing, more or less indifferent to human circulation. Human: we are both sensors & sensed. Abstraction as a basic function of intelligence, not just signal & index of abstract forms, but to deploy - set in motion own feats of abstraction & to calibrate how they abstract us in turn. More synthetic biology than setting master plans in motion. Lamarcian transmission of capabilities: a change of behavior that changes the underlying code, implying a much broader view of speciation. Definition of city as gradient flow of density: decentered model: no exclusion.

Address: to be a person place or thing it must be nominated/designated/identified - functionally addressed in relation. Avogadro's number - assigning agency. It doesn't matter what it being addressed - a standard ambivalent addressing system, allowing something to be an entity to which things can be sent or from which things can be sent. Abstract syntax, assigning spatio-temporal coordination. Not an ontology: an artificial system: the whole table can be given an address or each of its components: whole or composite object. Aspects may appear which may have been previously unidentifiable. Deep addressibility: we've run out of IP addresses.

Ubiquitous computation: 10^23^ addresses per person: quantum addressing. Functionally complete if not ontologically complete = addressed & deferrable in one system without being visible to another. How to physically assign the address at a cellular/molecular scale? OOO: infinite sub-division of individual objects. The use of the software produces traces in the software itself.

Interface: boundary point which governs the relations between those systems. The interfaciality of the thing does not govern the relations between those things. "The mother of all demos." Diagrams: represent objects as well as the relations between those objects: one way chain of mimesis. GUI (Graphic User Interfaces) are two way mimesis: the chain of representation works back upon the thing itself. Images don't do/act back upon the thing - a fundamental shift on the history of the image itself. As interfaces multiple they form regimes, inevitably reduce all possibilities to a necessarily small/narrow array. GUI produces a diagram from infinite possibilities. Partially functional: a map that is the territory is non navigatable. The reduction of complexity is what makes them more useful. Metcafs law: the more nodes in the network the more valuable an individual node in the network becomes. AR: loss of interpretive distance. Anamnesis: the work of belief. Danger: political theology - we fear the militarization of perception itself. Ultimate individuation & ultimate plurisation.

Anthropocene is a certain kind of humanism which we must move beyond - the Copernican trauma, heliocentrism, etc. Today's surveillance culture: supervision in bad faith: reverse panopticon. The geophysiological profile of the big hull. Anthrocidal trauma: switch to focus to support of the post-human stack. Worse than being seen as threat is not being seen at all. Drawn by an inhuman & inhumanist form of finding. Computation itself turned into whatever meta-machine comes next.

Concerning artificial intelligence, the city, and trauma...

AI may be a two-fold nightmare. One: a transfer of the intelligent into an artificial substrate - but what is artificial in the body, in a machine, or in the process of mechanization = a threat to the biological in humanity, a manufactured substrate for the container for the proliferation of intelligence consisting of creativity (not pure curiosity) and sensitivity in relation to other (as humility, peity, alterity, and other acts of virtue = a transcendent function), but this is precisely what we humans struggle with most as all are dependent on a definition of self-through-relations to others. The threshold of our subject models must be surpassed towards a more intelligent complexity in some aspects and determinately maintained in others. It is a computational problem for non computable variables, as where we locate these perimeters/parameters is not a universal value. AI represents a certain computational capacity, measured in relation to the fidelity of the human, and a coming-into intelligence of the object as other, a kind of alien intelligence, or mineral intelligence according to Bratton, potentially rendering us obsolete. I lean towards abandoning the body while preserving the ethical codes of conduct - as the essence of humanity if there is to be one at all - yet it occurs to me how the opposite is more realistic, that there is nothing beyond our organismic senses yet the processes of ideation may be modulated to differing ends. This meta-mind, super/supra-mind (beyond, not just greater than): is this a becoming human of the artificial, or the becoming non-human of intelligence, of the earth coming into its own articulation, of cellular becoming synthetic as an extension of the natural, compared to the implications of an intelligence which is uniquely human. What is truly artificial? A truly (concerning truth or authenticity or fidelity) artificial (material) model (abstract diagram) of intelligence (computational humanity) would surpass the current model of supervised learning of preprogrammed semi-automated processes or curiosity-based learning algorithms and move towards the actualization of life itself through a bio-mechanical enunciation. If the intelligence is bound to material - and it seems there is no way out of this materialist bias - then how is the material manufactured as conduit or carrier of this sentience which is more than mere data? Is it to be grown or assembled, protruded as sheet material extended or folded or forged into other dimension through tempering force or is there a way to imagine (through our admittedly limited biological intelligence) a greater-than or other-than "artificial" materiality? Are we able to articulate the periphery of the biological as a gradient which never fully becomes other, absolutely synthetic, animate non-life, a collaborative exchange between the cell and the mineral - new metaphors are required. What is the motivation? To automate processes of human ingenuity, to increase comfort and the project of modernity, or to disrupt and shift civilization towards a state of being currently unrecognizable as life, that terms like "organic" and "synthetic" fail to describe - lack of fidelity combined with a false object of scrutiny - to push beyond the peripheries of our imagination and capacities for sense, to supplement our humanity beyond the limits of recognizable human qualia.

The city, to the extent that it comprises the elemental space-time-territory, can be conceived as a compartment - the house as an extension of the body, or as an extension of intelligence? If we conceived of architecture as a purely material formalism then this is an extension of that artificiality of the design problem of material limitations in facilitating the integrative coexistence with the earth which we already experience first hand everyday. If we could begin to consider the city substrate as a bio-psychic extension radiating out through efflorescent complexity from an intelligence not necessarily bound to the material substrate, the city would begin to take on a form which could prioritize, cultivate, and nurture the circulation of information beyond the material confines of our own bodies - architecture as transcendence of human form. These are not practical concerns if we restrict the pragmatic use of architecture to facilitating our current human routines, but may become practical if we entertain the (fictive) possibilities of another way of life. Bratton's stack describes a data architecture serving to restrict and constrain access as much as it allows for any possible access - can we not move beyond this model now that we have envisioned it? The structures which contain/reveal their own limitations - the problems and the solutions are confined to the natural language which articulate them. Gabriel Catren describes the paradox of transcendence in his colloquium lecture, an attempt to describe and propose and transcend the very conceptual architectures of transcendence articulated by Kant: the limitation lies in our inability to describe the state beyond the threshold. In relation to the stack, if we could articulate a city-system a material instantiation which prioritizes the flow of information over its own materiality, what would be the consequences for architecture, urban planning, integration of ecological landscapes or theories interfacing with our humanity? Landscape-scale considerations of language and intelligence have become essential.

Trauma implies a psychic and physical impediments upon being, inherited genetically, historically from previous generations. How do we cope with the responsibilities or inabilities resulting from our generational or situational awarenesses? How do we escape the constructed nature of our individual subjectivities, according to the model locating trauma within a self (as opposed to outside of or anywhere else)? If each of these terms are necessarily nested concepts: artificiality and materiality, of intelligence as supra-medial flow/stream of meaningful immaterial components through a system of relations, we can begin to orient towards a cellular automata model of genetic information bound to data-materiality but incorporating the very fragility, vulnerability, tenuousness of the biological substrate, a delicate embrace, sympathetic vibration, entropic equilibrium with the "natural" environment container. My proposition, in relation to these physical constrictors of the city-architectures within which our bio-organic existence (as its own philosophical container) is said to be compartmentalized by: adopting an integral nonmaterial instantiation of intelligence (the root of a new idea, far from worked out, requiring more meditation but pushing in the direction of the necessary unknown) would redistribute tension through capillary flows, lymphatic meridians, distributing information through the system to break down the delineations between inside/outside, organic/synthetic, of both body and concepts, to make moot the physical and psychic separation of mechanical metaphors and movement forms projecting abstractions over the real substrate, to dissect and subdivide its parts through intrusive and violently invasive ideations seeking a center which cannot be located, as it is continuously dislocating. The trauma stems not from failure or lack, but by the presence of the natural language: the language serves as its own problem, articulating them through its modalities of form, confining their inquiries to a search too limited to offer any plausible transcendent solution - a myth of no exit. Multimodal multiverse model as the ultimate panoptic prison of the mind-body. A hope for an intelligence liberated from the human, or of its material substrates: a continuation of the humanist project of cerebral freedom and bodily emancipation. Trauma is the impediment, describing a loss of the thing, an a priori mourning stemming from an intuited (yet incomprehensible) eventual destruction and dissolution of the human back into the landscape itself, as an ultimate realization of our transcendent ethics in the wake of the murder deities of our own creation, elucidating the primary suffering and alienation which has come to define life and we (moderns) all struggle to reorient and redefine ourselves in relation to - that which is a lack of relation. The alienation and lack defines the model for subjectivity and the possibility of any beyond - the primary trauma of existence, which is not bound to life but to the defined separation between inner and outer worlds, the empirical separation of intelligence and form, extended trough the naturalized language of the diagram. The material is not making in its own image - not a mineral intelligence - but the human projecting its devastating intelligence upon the cave wall and mistaking the phantasmagoric forms for reality and confining transcendence as an impossible myth. Trauma extends from the accumulation of points of tension, issue of the interchange of the "concrete" in ideas and materiality, straight lines, high walls, Roman roads, articulations and projections of logic from primordial man, allowing the trauma to become a self perpetuating mythology - the root of human mythology. Certainly there must be a way to separate the horrors of abstraction itself from the content of the world, to remember to observe or account for a presence which cannot be represented without causing irrevocable harm, a world which must not be contained within our insufficient containers, elements which cannot be isolated. Trauma is the model, the separation of the intelligence from the material. What kind of social milieu could be articulated which would suture, integrate, unify these components, and what would this post human society be like? Could such a post-model be modeled? How would the shift in relation to the substrate shift the substrate itself? How do human abstractions impose frames upon the world and how do the dissolution of these models allow for the possibility of another world beyond human conception? To approach trauma as originating always already within a center of a being which has no center - save for a lie - will imply a loss which that being will endure through to the tips of existence, perpetually in search of a dislocated center, never whole, but to articulate an alternative to trauma as a being always already cunified, effacing the change as though it had already occurred, would in effect (put-into-effect) a predestination, dominos clicking back into high velocity sequences back to the original articulations of the material models and the opposed intelligence itself. That's a mess, but there are some internal reflexive structures presenting themselves - the question: what is being observed in order to allow for a recognition of the language used to observe and articulate the problem, as this recognition will allow for the realization of the limits of articulation and liberate/uninhibite the use of an/other languages (still bound to problems, but with differing sets of limitations).

Vision: to reorient towards other models, draw the diagram differently in relation to how we choose to see differently would allow one to "escape" or originate from the void beyond the confines of the framed thresholds of a mineral intelligence, materially instantiated, with the city infrastructure serving as fundament, barrier, protection, scrim, bodily extension, of a rigid compartmentalized cellular (prison) restrained, repressed, melancholic suffering of urbanity... instead of trauma and the search for alleviation, we might begin to articulate a method of __________ (choose this risk carefully!) = of love, energy, satiation, happiness/joy/pleasure, of simply being in and of the world >>> an action which moves beyond the speculative, to lay words upon the abyss and render its frames.

****

Turing; a "sufficient" threshold of intelligence: based on speed/immediacy: the imitation game. This condition has now shifted from a sufficient condition to a necessary condition of artificial intelligence. Nick Bostrom: super intelligence & super catastrophic risks - center for the future of humanity at Oxford. = theory of runaway superintelligence: application of information from one system (playing go) to another domain (perfecting a culinary dish), leading to AI that are good at building AI then incrementally improving through exponential growth & very soon humanity ends - cataclysm. What fail safes must be put into place to keep this intelligence within the Petri dish? The problem is a human one, to formulate a heutristic question in order to program an AI to think at the network level abstractions approximating the human.

Artificial Stupidity: throttling of the capacities of the AI to be better for the human user: computer chess = CPU is made stupid so we can engage with it.

Vs

Artificial Idiocy: not a dumb machine but refers to when the AI performs its programmed task to such an idiotic extreme that it's efficiency becomes idiotic: paper clip maximizer machine= the entire atomic substrate of planet earth is rendered paper clip. No bug/glitch, performed function perfectly to a catastrophic degree > ethics machines expanding to an idiotic degree.

Victor Tausk: "The Influencing Machines"

.....

On Automation in the Stack

Schi-morphism: one thing standing in for another, understanding the affordances of the previous thing: "throwing away" "documents" in the "trash can" in the GUI. The trash model does not reflect - is discontiguous - from how the info is read/stored/etc on the CPU hard drive. The problem with automated schimorphism on various layers of the stack: great & horrible that we don't have to deal with them all the time. AI at landscape scale: problem of automation: who what how is being automated & what it is being automated against: when does it solve a problem & when/how does it cause more problems or by increasingly complex without significant results - automated refrigerator.

Evolutionary robotics: "Intelligence without Representation" 1991 - models of AI inherited from anthropomorphic robotic design.

What is incredible about machine/AI utilizing Natural language is the implications for English itself - google translate AI making its own language to translate between languages.

Economic automation, or how automation shifts the relative risk patterns within the economy being automated. Things that used to be owned privately get pushed back into a service model : pushed to the periphery of the platform : the cascading effects of the democratization of mobility: takes the risk back from the center towards the edge. If we can see these benefits, what are the end points of this virtualization? City by city basis depending on the infrastructure. With automation we do away with the possibility of demand-side crash. Distortion of the pricing schemes of capitalist labor: "Inventing the Future".

Voice as an interface - specifically from human to AI. Not that it doesn't have a voice, but perhaps we are limiting it to merely a voice instead of all the possible ways it could express. The capacities may be less dependent on the capacities of the AI to articulate & more so on the limitations on the range of sounds that are available to articulate. Sounds that can be interpreted as intentions, a microphone personified. Conversational UI: not a composite users but appears like a discrete user.

Paro & sex dolls: emotional infill: more difficult to engineer an AI that humans feel emotionally connected to than it is for an AI to be connected to the human user. Through these interactions we come to train each other. Vocalizing in this way will train is to learn to speak to the AI. Because of the humanization of the AI creature, we may come to suspect it of motives which are not present. The design of personalities: the voice of various AI personalities representing various companies or serving different purposes. Chatbot therapist: named Ellie - wired magazine. The question of affordances with AI: James Gibson - there certain things a tech appears able to do so that when we encounter it those functions determine how we negotiate it. The affordances are built into the form: a hammer, a paintbrush. The interface condenses/reduces the potentially infinite functions to make it more manageable for the human user. The design of the personality helps solve the problem Of affordances: certain personalities present themselves as being capable of certain kinds/qualities of tasks.

Always a blurry distinction between programming & interaction: photoshop. Siri is a discontiguous operation, that is: learning to understand your voice, is optimized by the responses that are returned by the user in relation to the info pulled from the internet, & from other users interacting simultaneously - Siri learning to understand what we (humans, hominids) mean when we ask/respond which constitutes an act of programming through interaction. Joseph Weisenbaum: chat bot therapist 1966 - Eriksonian ego, asking in a Socratic dialogue of incessant questions.

Synthetic voice simulator software!! The Markov model: stochastic model, trying to predict what you will say next.

Simulation theory: we live in a simulation.

O'reilly's weekly podcast on bots.

Text/Voice/Image: Derrida reading Platos dialogues: "the metaphysics of presence": text-image-voice sequence. BOT APOPHENIA: a kind of false pattern recognition, a breakdown in correlation-causality: the assumption that one thing causes another = true correlations.

Tay + planet 4Chan = Nazi teen porno

Documentary about Kasparov losing his shit playing chess with IBM deep blue AI: who am I playing? Am I bugged? Have I been duped?

........

Remarks on the w/hole of representation in computer vision.

Diagram <> Interface

Encode cultural bias through the reduction of fidelity in the interface: for function. How do these systems see wrong to allow us to see ourselves differently. What we see as realism it sees as abstraction & vice versa. The equivalent of green face paint architecture. Photosynthesis as a vision without representation. Subjectivity tied to the discourse of the ocular, so that the displacement reorientation the articulations of inside/outside: how are we seen by the machine? It's not without aesthetic judgements: humans as an ambivalent surface vision is projected onto: the clearing away of a closely guarded illusion. We are creeped out by how we ourselves look through the machinists gaze. Productive alienation: Trevor Paglin : photography of machine vision. Cosmists: the communist history was determined by the sun

We four were pleasantly conducting a conversation around a table concerning the nature of our own existence and the existence of a possible nature in relation to one another as an abstract model, the threshold of which our existence seems bent upon defining, the beyond which rises and from which emerges an intermodal description of facets of a singular object - of existence itself - alluding to a morphism of language, of languages, which can only be described through analogy to an artificial intelligence unencumbered by our own human corporeality and cerebrality. We were unpleasantly pulled from this state by the demands of the exterior world, that which lies beyond the edges of the table, to articulate a pragmatic and concretely founded design strategy through which to construct or manifest a scenario for an AI we were charged to contemplate. The four of us were able to reach a consensus that this AI must be left to articulate its own being beyond the reaches of our own cancerous human trauma, including the confining body which limits its finite potentials, a utopic non-place beyond space itself, beyond earth and its gravitational limitations on matter and form, yet when charged with articulating the concrete propositions of such a project to an audience of our peers - due to our own human short-sighted perspectivalism and the necessity of justifying such a project to self-invested human investors. It seems all we can comprehend is ourselves engaged within the confines of a rigorous - not tireless - project of attempting to understand our selves understanding, admitting that the way we think we think is not really how we think, at least we think so. Our proposal then: let us unify the global computerized industrial complex and reorient it towards the task of fabricating perfect replicas of we four individuals sitting here at this table conducting this debate. The cybernetic replicants will be perfectly accurate re-presentations of our minds and bodies, in resemblance and function, containing all of our virtues, ambivalences, and flaws which define our idiosyncratic divisions (between the four assembled and to all those others excluded). These four mimetic replicas will be placed at the same table - not a replica itself, but precisely the table at which we are currently sitting - and encouraged to continue the pontification of a corporeally liberated artificial intelligence, unencumbered by the mortal impediments of which we four currently suffer. The conversation will be allowed to play out - potentially infinitely - as long as it is possible to do so, without being restricted by the easily exhaustible human debilitations of attention span, caloric consumption, and obscure depletion of vitality and determinism, beyond the scope of human-scaled time, which has created such absurd and arbitrary restrictions upon our own conversation. Our hope is that eventually these chimeric creatures, the splitting images of authentic selves serving as representatives for all humanity, will be able to sift out the nuances of the situation, compose a risk-benefit analysis of an ideal interstellar post-terrestrial AI, to such a degree of fidelity beyond the scope of human endeavor. We must trust (have faith) that if such an AI were deemed impossible or undesirable for the human, these four AI representatives will then be charged with turning reflexive, investigating their own being in order to perfect the anthropomorphic AI - towards the creation of a being which may eventually begin to articulate beyond our current limitations of knowing. They must be programmed with the capacity of transcending their own limitations of presence. If such an ordeal were to transpire, far beyond our own mortal limits of speculation, they would certainly extend beyond our comprehension of the data resulting from the research: these four cyborg-being-composites of the combined entirety of present human ingenuity, continuously improving upon each other through the incessant free flow of information at this table, beyond the spatial-temporal constructs of our own humanity - they would eventually be enabled to articulate that which beyond we cannot currently imagine, or perhaps ever will, for fear or lack of clarity. We put our faith in this humanist AI, knowing full well that if such a project were to fail that at least we would have these perfect replicas last beyond the biological, serving as a monument to our own optimistic idealism - the beauty of our own imperfection - and from this vantage we may still hope to engage with an ethical inhumanism of higher fidelity than that which we can currently imagine.

Up on the mountain, walking down with a stick, singing songs which seem to be emerging from the face of the rock, some kind of interchange / exchange, between grasshoppers and spiders, between flowers and various grasses, between colors of blue and red in the iron blood coursing mineral. Speed, pacing, time at high altitudes: the time, what time is it? How to write an opera: why write an opera: what is an opera: a theory of opera: what theory am I reciting or positioning myself against? Which theory is for me and can it be found or must it be written from scratch? Is it a hybrid, something which already exists which I might co-op? Could I trust someone else to articulate it for me? How could I, how should I, what would be the benefit in doing so, the risk? What would I gain or lose in refusing to do so, to articulate my ability, through a text, the opera as text, through the various aspects of a holistic work, describing beings capable of their own specialized speculations, speculating upon a text-image, orating a langue openly? But must it be necessarily - a language? Which is to say: must it say anything at all? Perhaps, and why not, why wouldn't it? Yes it may say many things. As to what or who is the speaker, there is a lot to consider: the literary and theatrical aspects of the projection of voice: where does the voice come from? Who is speaking? What being is this emanating the cool cooing song seemingly out of nothing? For who or for what do they speak? What is this being and how do they articulate themselves? Is it singular, or plural, or potent, or more than can be articulated by my own being-in-relation? Already necessarily an other, or always-already my own, my self, some self? This being is articulating through multifarious forms and dimensions, through the music, through the poetry, through a libretto, an image of orientation. The music is that which is resonating, the resonant vibratory sinusoidal heterodyne tones emerging through movement, friction, materials rubbing, coursing, flowing, tone-ing. A watery intelligence, an air chord, the words they speak - this natural language - is arbitrary and ambivalent, and should be proven through an example - to be made an example of - by using more than one at a time, by inventing some others possibly, for this specific task, if its possible, a new language of possibility. Is it within my capabilities? What is it for, how does it work, what would it say? Is it translation, it is enunciation, is it incantation? Do I need help? Do I need to be speaking to someone, some being, some thing, to hear it, to know it? Must it be real, must it be someone other than myself, must it be at all, what must it be, who must they be? How about this goat here, on this mountain, looking back at me, "will you speak?" No reply, and it runs down the hill away from view. But what would it look like anyways, how would it be pictured, what comes first? Does the rock begin speaking, is it a yell or a whisper? Does it take on form immediately or remain formless, some incanted will with no body to contain it? Or is there an underlying flow of forms, a form-language, a language taking form within the corporeality of the earth, the corporealization of its plants, where is the life within, the planet, is it firm or fluid, does it speak for itself, or does it also co-opt voices? Is it grinding or murmuring or whispering? Does it draw lines in the sand, in itself, over its own skin, or within the bones? Where do these things begin and end, where is the beyond, where is the frame, where is the text, how does it speak, and what does it look like? It's an opera because it's a production, a composite user, an interchange between would-be-users, natural artificial synthetic and otherwise. It's an opera because it's a conversation which is sung not recited, a poem and also more than just, a song but also greater than mere melody, a sound primordial prior to modal primitive to models, a way of thinking and a way of dictating, of notating thinking, because the way that we think is not the way that we think we think, I think, but I'm not sure because it's not stable, this ground, it slips and slides under me. I can get my mind around an idea to craft, make, shape a shelter which slides underneath me, the forming of a new firmament, not completely new out of nothing, based in pure novelty, but with a specific purpose, not just to satisfy curiosity, although not necessarily not that either, but with an explicit task: to support itself in its own making. The opera is tis firmament, attuned tone to the fundamental, a fundamental attunement that is not static, anything but: slipping, sliding, coursing, buzzing, grinding, as I step over it like land unfolding ever before me, never sure that it will be there as I take the next step, as I make contact never completely knowing if it will hold, if it won't break loose and tumble away into a void, of myself or belonging to gravity, a corrialis effect spinning revolving undulating motions of the oceans ever churning sometimes violent but mostly calm, steady, deceptively clear, clean, cooing. An allusion or an illusion or mere delusion: is this me (snapping two objects together) or is it the ground grounding itself? This process I'm describing: is it my own, am I determining, willing a sense of being, a being-becoming, is it necessary? If I don't, who will? Maybe they have already, can I see it, should I look, is it visible, can I hear it, is it within range, within reach, is it real if I never encounter it, if my eye never comes in from the outside, if my I - me - never gets out of its own articulations of being, is it real, is it reality, does it matter? Is this funny, or tragic, or otherwise, who cares and do I, should I, the meaning, the questioning, the incantatory axis of praxis: it's not just rhyme and meter but of course always necessarily so, like spell casting, cursing upon the earth, for sake of meaning and beauty, and it's echoing reply always incomprehensible, fruitless, trite, cliche, the same old story told again and again but what else is possible? I'm trying to think outside this frame: what is thinking if it's not framing? What is thought if it's not the positioning with a space through time, a relation to spatial times, an era of areas sung through arias: era/area/aria: a time unfolding as an epoch of its own making through a room, spatializing the making of space through craft-time, a continuum, a progression, a procession of discursive, reflexive, subjective, songs. It's sung, written but meant to be read out loud, an oration, a singing hymn for the people, for all people, for personhood, for the making of persons, for the making apart of possible persons, singing to that space between person, that forming space from which persons person actively building upon personages in their wake. Various colors, various tones, various frequencies: do I have a community? Do I have commraderie? Am I in a society? Is this project political, political, political, does it police borders, does it reinforce hold up or break down, is it relatable, is it for whites or grays or blacks or some other spectrum perhaps, some other color, some other age group, some other economic bracket, some other spatio-temporal coordination? Who is excluded? Who and how are they excluded? Am I included? Can anyone else be included? How to bring one in, how to bring them in, where is in, where is the in, the going in, is in a place, a space, when will we get there, how is it articulated, is in a frame, a spatial-temporal frame, how can we sing its thresholds, how might we transgress its foothold, how can we walk around in its T-space, go for a shamanic stroll in a greater-than-abstract K-space, as transcendental flaneurs? How is privilege enacted within this frame, can privilege be expanded, its frame expanded, to be inclusive, to be exclusive, is it limited in its framing, are there restrictions to its constrictions, how can everyone, or anyone, becoming involved, become dissolved, would they want to, if they could, is it up to them, is it up to me, and who are they, and who am I, anyways? This text: this image: this oration: is it a monologue, is it a dialogue, am I in conversation, am I speaking, is there someone listening, does it exist? This text: all these texts: through sound, through oration, through writing, through structure, through architecture, through archi-text-ure, through embodying the mineral intelligence of the landscape, recognizing the delineation of walls, ceilings, the floor, the grid, the space we are inhabiting for the duration of this monologue, this table we are sitting at for the duration of our conversation, the space, the place, the time it takes to describe this image clear enough for you to see it, how much more time for you to feel it, how much more time for you to know that its yours, for your to feel ownership of it, for you to feel indebted, invested, for you to know that it is you that has articulated this? What is your image, can we compared images? How do you speak, what do you say, how are your thoughts embodied through text forms, form-languages, images unfurling within sequences in time, on what space, through which model? Is this monologue monotonous, is it boring? Am I driven by curiosity, novelty, do I need to be stimulated, am I able to be stimulated, is it my mind, my body, my intrigue, my curiosity which needs this, is it my own, did I inherit it, can I lay claim to my manner of speaking, to my capacity to learn new ways of speaking, to my ability to incorporate new concepts into my articulations, may I conceed ownership over any of it, over any aspect, over any perspective, perspectivism, perspectivalism, observing facets of what object, are we seeing the same thing, are we understanding each other, are we asking the right questions, are we foolish in seeking answers, where does wisdom emerge from intelligence, and how will we know how to recognize it when it reveals itself? Is it something within or without, where should we be looking, is it manner or matter of seeing or not seeing, making visible or keeping hidden, is this search clandestine, fraught with error or terror or horror, is it tragic, is this funny? If I laugh, is it from happiness or sadness and how would I know if you weren't here to explain it to me, if you weren't here to bare witness to my oration? Is this interesting, should we keep talking, are we talking, are you responding, or are you choosing to keep quiet, to keep silent, are you protesting your response, exercising your right to not respond, by not responding, relinquishing your determinism, your will, your voice, your actions in speaking and being present before me as your other, or are you merely an extension of my own hallucination? Are you in my delusion or am I in yours, is this real, is it illusory, does it matter, is it matter, is one more beautiful than the other, can it ever be seen, can it ever be spoken, when will it be understood, when will we see the other? What are the marks of intelligence and how quickly can we recite them, is it a process of memorization, depth, complexity, fidelity, velocity? Is it instantiated in material matters, mannered bodies, minding organs, in the transmission between substances, the passing of signals between atoms, molecules, cell structures, are they self-organizing, are they aware of their own organizations, is it the earth realizing itself, are trees really speaking, feeling in relation to each other, as a unified forest, does nature contemplate its own existence, does mathematics lie at the root of the trees, do mathematics lie, is understanding a process coming into its own awareness of itself, is this process economical, is it viable, is it justifiable, is it legitimate, should we continue, would it be better to not, to refrain, to constrain, to keep quiet, to stay silent? Who would lose out, what would be missed, does the attempt cause more harm than the good it is capable of achieving, is it all meaningless, is it all nothing, down there, at the bottom, and then how to we therefore make decisions as to what to lay on top, how to layer it, for what and for whom? For what and for whom does beauty recognize itself, or must it be name first, do aesthetic sensibilities form themselves, or are they acquired, accumulated, designed? Is any of this built, am I building, am I in a building, when I am outside or in what, and when do I say that project is finished, how do we recognize the completeness of articulation, when will I be finished speaking, how much time has passed, how much more time will pass, where is it going, how is it passing, how is it flowing, when does it become boring, and when it does what will we do next? Make it more interesting or sit there and be bored, wherever that is, to be still, to feel it, does it feel good, to be nothing, to be quiet, does it feel better to articulate or to not, are we making each other feel better by articulating or would we rather not? Is this repetitive, is it incessant, will it never end, is this a game, are we playing it, are we the players working within rules or are we playing with the rules, is the game malleable, can it be bent, can it be readjusted, is it defined through signals or the act of playing, how much is predetermined, how much must be explained before playing, how much is learned through playing, what are the consequences of not playing, how much are we able to foresee? Am I writing this opera or is it writing itself, does it come from me or am I a conduit through which these streams are coursing, are any of these ideas my own, can I lay claim to anything, should I, should I try, does it matter, is it matter or memory then? This little bee buzzing in my hair, is it friend or foe, this conversation I had with the iceberg, and now with this glacier, do they hear me? You here mountain, you hear me mountain, do you have a name, do you care to have one, am I the one to give it to you, or has another already, and do you accept it, you who they call mirror, is that because you would rather not lay claim to any identity or territory, but would you hold mine for me as I trod upon you, am I projecting myself upon you, do you have an inside I might inhabit, even for a moment to rest, are you teaching me a lesson, are you helping me to understand, are you doing anything I can understand, are you doing anything at all, or is this all a form of animism, organicism, illusion, anthropomorphic fallacy, lying in language, lying through language, in the form, in my abstraction, within the frame, or in my inability to think beyond it, to diagram beneath the abstractions, to speak outside of the vocabulary I have acquired, to feel greater than the senses of my body. You mountain, do you feel me, do you care for me, can we speak privately, are you public, are you present, are you here, can you hear, are you locatable or do you infact define your own space, you who certainly must be a they, a them, a composite user of multiple languages, multiple momentums, flowing, hissing, gurgling over each other through gravity, some kind of built up destruction or tearing down through chaos or entropy or motion called by any other name, you mountain, are you singular or plural, won't you ask back, won't you ask me, won't you express your curiosity for my existence? Are you a sight or am I just siting your site, do you have limits, a threshold, or am I the one only one delineating the borders, are you a territory are you waiting to be territorialized, can you teach me something about deterritorialization, of myself in relation, can it happen now while I'm upon you, am I still here, am I still upon you, can I ever be completely, can I ever be whole without you, and how about this glacier, melting away up on your top, swollen moist crown cutting away, keeping you moving, is it violent or beautiful, is it sweet to your ears, can you ever hear it, can you hear yourself speaking, do you feel yourself moving, through all the dendritic flows, fractaline cuts, forming and training your jagged epidermis into various tools for my own contemplation, thought-forms taking shape in response to my citing their relations, are they for me, should I receive you as a gift, or are you more ambivalent, more indifferent, are you just a mirror, reflecting, echoing back incessantly, or perhaps able to speak and choosing not to, refraining, restraining, reserving quietly, remaining silent in your stability, beyond my measly frame of time and space. This song: it's an aria of an opera: I'll dedicate it to you, at least for a moment, this moment upon which I was standing upon you, singing it to you, when there was no one else around to listen but you and me, refusing to believe that I was ever really that alone, are we ever, could we ever be?

Lacan took the Heideggerian project the farthest: language as the house of being. Letting being vs willing: human being is inherently powerless so truth can occur: needs human being because it is powerless: the grounds of truth, a dis-position of human being. I'm the disposition of the human that language emerges - language is not the ground, the human itself suffers the signifier not a function of the signifier. Lacans symbolic/real/imaginary triangulation of the human.

When a text emerges as an instance of thought it has its own characteristics, not a finite set of neutral articulations that can be assembled into theses, instead a set of textural events whereas thought is engaged to develop & inhibit our approach/experience. The tool is useful & limited to its use: philosophy has its own finitude, its own event character, which we must attend to very closely what is before us & how it is laid out. To come to an understanding one must enter into the grain of a text. Writing as a performance of thought, to stage the idea in phases of the development, a crafting of method unfolding in sequence. Those that take more time are more dramatic: H insists we read the unfolding, a performative instruction, with language at the heart of the method. A transformative process upon language: a perverse twisted German, must be read with an etymological dictionary to explore the roots of the words, in relation, as it is being worked out in process: to read the work as language rather than concepts. He doesn't want it to make conceptual sense! To follow him we must follow the language! To read H means reading language, to enter into the work of language - suspending the concept. An attempt to undo representation, undo conceptual thinking. We are not reading a philosophy so much as particular engagements of thinking taking place within a particular language through which ontological differences emerge from their site: thought is fundamentally historical, material, finite, tied to the mortality of those undertaking it - thought is all about death! The bastardization / horror of theories being applied over the engagement of thought, experiencing the questions through the unfurling of thought through language.

Fundamental ontology: the human being is the first question, before the nature of being itself. An attempt to lay a new foundation for the metaphysics of subjectivity: unfolding historically from Descartes>Kant>Nietzsche>Husseral = modern philosophy as thought of the modern subject: a problem of language!! Must change the approach.

Give voice to the National Socialist movement: spiritual fundament for the Nazi's. "Inner truth & greatness of national science/socialism."

A failure to consider/account for the problem of the human: humanist fallacy: post/trans-humanism goes to fast & loses the consideration of the speaker, a weird abstraction of where the consideration is coming from in OOO - the human is doing the thinking, immersed in socio-cultural context/conditions.

Art as an access point to truth, as a formal construct, the gestalt (form/figure) instantiated in the crafting of the work of art.

Attack on the matter/form distinction: the primary binary opposition informing all aesthetics. H is destructing/deconstructing - a different orientation of subject/object , on the structure of representation of the object constituted in its formal character, the figurality/gestalt of the form: the poets river gives the form of the gestalt for a people. How does it take form, how does it form us, the process of forming, imprint is or upon us? The river is a figure/form/gestalt of destiny: a mythopoiesis, a writing of the predestination of the flowing figure. Only when the tool relation breaks down do we begin to consider the materiality of the thing- a becoming object or process of objectification.

Hölderlin's poetry is disruptive, addressing questions of how one can enter into the space of reading poetry, an issue of being & of time - time of the poem, of the process of reading, of reading being through poetry. Its the overarching resonance, the articulation, the swaying, of the poem, of its telling - not just the arrangement of words - then the over arching resonance of the telling is the initial creative move which prompts the choice of words, the origin whose resonance predestines the use of words. A rhythm that the poet experiences which is prior to the choice of language, determines by the fundamental attunement of the poetry which takes form within the inner outline of the poem, grows out of the particular metaphysical local of the poetry.

Schwingungsgefüge: "a swinging framework": Jointure, composition, articulation

Grundstimmung: "pravailing mood" : Fundamental/ground - tonality. The governing stimmung (time) is of the absence of the gods, of mourning!!!

Metaphysical Locale : "the fatherland"

Syntactical & Semantic juxtaposition of terms. The entire movement through these phases must be considered through the reading of the poem - in the inner outline of the form, the taking of definition of an inner outline, forms the poem. The inner outline of the whole emerges & determines the language.

Rhythm > Time > Form

Autriss: "outline/sketch": the structure of difference - ontological - which gives us the event of truth : a tearing, cleft, a drawing out of a cleft, the articulation of difference in a form of the grundstimmung.

Being defined through the rhythmic movement of the schwingungsgefüge.

Making up the experience of the poem, as an exposure to being emanating from the metaphysical locale of mourning. Its not a subjective experience of the poet! Its not expression, communication of subjectivity (erlebnis: personally experience, or erfahrung: subjectivity) but of an exposure of difference, a movement through a process of differencing.

DESTRUKTION? To rethink the image of language itself as more than a mere tool, having & using. Rather language has us.

An exposure at the limits of what the human can bare.

The structure is drawn as a bow. "Let the holy be my arrow" projects into the unknown. A structure of forces, tensions, the potential of transcendence of the suffering of being or mourning of lost gods/time/limits of human abstraction. An articulation of the structure of history, an historical event by which history begins to be thinkable, a sequence of events which open epochs (Foucault) which define the history of specific peoples.

A calling to act! To create! Or else the continuing devastation of history. The essence of the west needs to be rescued - a historical moment through which we must act, an intervention.

Poetry is not a production, not a part of culture. Distinction between production & poetry.

"Full of merit, human beings dwell in poetry."

Dasein produces a world before itself, a process of production, brings forward a world - as opposed to poetry which resounds upon the fundament/earth.

Poiesis: to make

Praxis: realizing it/oneself

The world is an image, humans produce a world image - the work.

Brauhen: to use, to need. The gods/truth need human beings to Become realized. For art, the earth is used but not used up/depleted: to bring forth the earth.

The necessary repeatability of the linguistic sign, which creates a rhythmic undulation.

The becoming-other of the poetic dasein, the becoming of the poetic Hölderlin: from an I, absorbed into a we, the man looking to the east, the arial view of the eagle. How to understand the place of the dasein in the work.

Double articulation: mourning of the gods & relation to the earth. We are we that we can say that we are unconcerned with the engagement - domain of power - of the poem. According to what historical sequence is this statement made? What is the age of a people & where is the poet situated in relation to the modern image? Through feeling the absence of gods we are feeling-with the earth: the earth as a yearning for a relation to the past & a sense of something coming, an opening to the future from out of the past. Assuming/withstanding mourning is a waiting through the absence while anticipating the coming of sense to come: Bring towards death, of non-being, opens us to our finitude, our thrown being which has always-already occurred. We have no power over our being, we are thrown in, find ourselves in the world in relation/suspension between death & birth: an experience of vertigo.

Is the mourning projected into the natural landscape & read its signs as a symbol for his feeling? The I doing the telling is complaining with the homeland as part of it, the power of the earth upon which the being dwells poetically. The land lies full of expectation beneath the stormy heavens, the I belongs to the earth, from out of the earth the I comes into differentiation the uniqueness of his own being. The poet is mourning with the rivers of the homeland.

Temporality is the originary condition for the consideration of being. God/gods=time.

The poet transmits the totality of being, myth, the stories of a people, the river as a drawing of all of being to become language for human use. The telling is biased towards a rooted being, the voice emerging from the place, with no room for a nomadic people : i.e., Jews.

Ways Dasein knows its truth:

Attunement: finding oneself, a mood, a tonality. The most primordial form of the feeling of being-thrown. Angst is privileged as the confrontation: anxiety, anguish: we feel the world slipping from us & the world slips from us & in that moment we lose our relation to language: a drifting in the nothingness without language. We are emerging from anguish. The way one finds oneself is through affect: by our attunement we are in the midst of being, while also separating. Attunements are collectively experienced.

Understanding: worked out in process

Language: being as a question which it addresses. Language is dangerous in its ambiguity, in its error. Had a shielding function to protect the poet from the raw resonance of being.

Originary Temporality is the free oscillation of the whole of temporality. Time reaches & contracts itself, & only because of momentum is there a throw, & only because of oscillation is there a projection. This can be seen as rhythmic when it is brought to form.

Hölderlin sees the formal characteristics of tragedy as profoundly rhythmic. Correlation to Aristotle: the poetics, schemata: to have force in the poetic language, one should write numerically - to imitate - the actor. Schemata as a gesture of speech or physicality.

Rhythm not as flowing but as a movement that occurs by virtue of articulation through the oscillatory motion of time, the over-arching resonance upon the ground of poetic saying. A rhythmic schematism of the poetic outline.

Marcus Gabriel: subjectivity as a totality of illusions.

Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: MG + Zizek

UNDER THE AFFECT OF HIGH ALTITUDE

Writing music as a language - not so much a process of pulling out something from nothing, a turn towards doing-away-with, of destruction, deposited. I know that these melodies I'm humming are not coming out of the landscape, they are coming out of a center real or imagined, yet only to the extent that the landscape has me, that I am held within it, undifferentiatable from it, functioning together as a compound user, using each other, me and the mountain, me in the mountain, me on the mountain. Meaning emerges out of the center, a rhythmic undulation emanating from a metaphysical point somewhere beyond my own frame of comprehension, rooted in a proprioception - my body - so why not put my body or being into any other frame besides this limited form, in order to feel myself unfold there, to sense the unfolding on that place, sense the space, tell the time as a demarcation of my own being? This is less a tool-process, of feeling through the process of feeling, of processing feeling, tooling my self as though these cuts sliced out of the face of the rock to craft a better arrow head. The singing, the writing, the music composing, must happen in a place/space, not nowhere but here. This is the importance of continuous documentation: it must be measured continuously along with the writing. To use memory as an undulation alongside the resonation of the funament, as a tool for tuning to the attuned fundament. The text forms out of the image of dissapative forms, gestalt flow of the river carving out the stone stage, as I sit beside it to thit. It is more of a source than I am, I just sit close to feel its power because I have such a difficult time feeling without an object to orient myself-in-relation-to- (hyphens left open to the space of what might come forth), without another flow to immerse myself in. This river is creating the time allowing me to sense myself as a relation, insinuating always a hissing wholeness so that I can keep singing. The music comes first, the lyric out of the poetry always flowing underneath - subterranean river. All those other forms, ways of speaking, will follow in suit - they are also necessary but must not be confused for a beginning, a source, an ontogenesis.

I received your last message while sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in the small Swiss village of Saas Fee, high in the mountains. The structure is modern but its exterior emulates the quaint aged wood cabin façades of the traditional architecture of the region, a simulation of itself in plainview. This is a ski town - apparently - and all of the local commerce is glowing with brightly colored technical backpacks, ultra lightweight rock climbing ropes, or else laminated posters of majestic goat spirits standing precariously on the glacial peaks, small jars of mountain berry jam, chocolates pressed into the form of bearded hermits and the traditional long Swiss horn-thing, and other oddities to fill the bags of tourists - mostly Germans & Australians for some reason. I've been living here since the beginning of June, attending my first session of what will be a four year phD program in "Literary, Musical, and Visual Thought," but so far the students seem more interested in debating the neuroses of Hegel and the French post-structuralist transmutations of Heideggerian mythopoiesis, much to my chagrin. I slowly felt out a space for myself, on the edge of course, claiming a territory of body and attention to retain a high degree of mystery and autonomy without coming across as arrogantly superior or merely contrarian - hopefully. Of course I'm inhabiting the periphery, some delicate triangulated dialogue of negative theology, infinite philosophical regress, and rigorous artistic hallucinations made real by sheer sweat and tears.

I think of the LungA school often, and Seydisfjordur, and you good ol' boys (and powerful women) out there fortifying the brink of human civilization against the rising tides of indifference, toxic abstraction, neoliberal nausea - and it always makes me smile. I truly appreciate what you have built for yourselves and continue to reference your projects as a base model of what is possible - to myself, for my own sanity - as well as maintain a rumination in the present of the dialogues I was fortunate enough to participate in out on the fjord. I continue to fantasize about project proposals or grant applications that could afford me to live out there in the wilds of the earth for an extended period again, but for the time being I suppose I will have to live vicariously through your oral ricochets and flickering screen images.

I've been chiseling at this form, gently handling a material deserving of great care and patience, but also insinuating a violence, a force seemingly inherited, genetically derived, or else emerging from within the clay, a language articulating an ancient tool syntax, like slicing meat off of the rock in order to train it into a better arrowhead. This opera - of and for, beginning from the known while moving towards the unknowable, as a making (poiesis) through effacing (praxis) the change as though it has already occurred, towards the articulation of multiple overlaid universes or a greater enframing multiverse quivering against our human squirming over its description - it's coming together. This unfurling process of resonant awareness is laying out a beautiful tapestry of considerations, and it always already makes me remember you and the conversations we had, and anticipate those that are still to come, concerning being and determinism emerging amidst the swirling chaos of a world in crises. Again and again a concept or idea will arise out of the miasma and present itself before my vision and I will hold on to it and think to myself smiling that "this is exactly the kind of strange paradoxical form-language that I should write to ___, as a potlach, and to trick him into keeping the conversation going." But then another arises, and then another, and before long all of the slippery amphibian concepts slip and slide back into the quivering inspirational aether so that when I finally sit down to write you a letter all I can recall is generalities. Yes, but isn't this the real joke of life, that the more we work towards unraveling its complexity the deeper we are subsumed within its swirling morass and at the end of the day its only ever up to us to decide if we will drown in colorless matmos or golden syrup.

I'm supposed to be articulating a thesis, building a bibliography, collecting primary and secondary and tertiary sources to build a critically-theoretical house for my project to inhabit. The proposition to sit still and write 100,000 words concerning the paradoxical labyrinth of existential logic-forms seems a nightmarish predicament - I refuse to attempt it, not because I don't believe it possible, but certainly because I don't believe the process of writing in this way will serve anyone - myself or my kin. Instead I will try to write through letters, by exchange and correspondence, with sharpened arrowheads within and beyond the threshold of this school, a way of writing always in relation to another, a grounding of the voice in a body which is my own at least to the extent that I can recognize it. I would like to direct some of these letters to you because I know you will receive them kindly, entertain their weight without taking it on as your own burden, revel in the ecstasy of the existential angst without losing that soft smirk which gently reminds me that the situation is perhaps more a matter of strategy in distribution of tensions through an empathetic ecology that a taking-on of the invisible spirits of the infernally suffering past - without diminishing the seriousness of the project. I would also like to come visit you, to work out some form-languages through dance, around the fire, under the earth roof of the sweat lodge, on the shoreline where the earth becomes indistinguishable from the sea consuming it, with testicals in the ice flows and eyes turned towards the cardinal directions swirling down through coriolis perturbations feeling out the equilibrium inherent within entropy sung by gravity brought down from the hills on the back of the river grinding its own meridians through the continuous negotiations with the gray-purple earth. Believe me, I'm keeping you in mind and directing my path towards your front door, and when the time comes we will drink to the savoring of its curvatures and laugh at our own limited perceptions in being able to consider it anything other than always-already past or pure anticipation for the overflowing into the next sip, relax in its flicker, and tell stories through the phantasmagoric miasma projected onto the walls of the ol' ship house.

But for now it's Heidegger! He describes the poet as the center of the universe (a coarse reading, but not inaccurate). The poet sings the song of the river emerging through the fundamental attunement of a quivering earth, always-already yearning for the loss of the gods emanating from the poets' own mourning of the lack of meaning instigated by an eternal flux, locked in a state of ecstasy and sadness, "full of merit, yet poetically man dwells on the earth," always striving to work towards meaningful productions while always the head rears upwards to launch our ontological arrows into the heavens upon the eternal gold bow built from the oscillatory tension of time and the rhythmic structure of language. Mythopoieses! Speaking as a worlding, an activated process of speaking poetry through the coursing river flows of a deeply nested within. What beauty and what nonsense! I hope to become just as ridiculous and well received in my old age, although I will certainly avoid joining the National Socialist party in attempting to become spiritual advisor to the masses.

Dear ___, I wish I could write you something more concrete, but I take comfort in our mutual understanding that gift-giving creates an economy of debt that perhaps could be side-stepped by choosing ritualized sacrifice instead. So here is my potlach. Trust that I don't expect anything in return, and desire only to lay down as much of myself as might be possible while always-already wondering if such a project should be ever attempted - Heidegger on the biography of the philosopher: "he lives, he thinks, he dies" - to feel closer to that vibratory fundamental attunement (the working model for now) and continue to pluck the melodic strings of friendship heterodyning over the ocean, through the mountain, into the calcium flows of bone frame and salt water senses. May these words find you living well and contented. Keep the fire lit.

Temporality.

Relation to gods: already attuned, found attunement.

Relation to the earth.

Poet is torn from everyday relation to exposition, transition, being outside in a temporal opening.

Bringing back into the opening of the earth.

An analytical exposition of a rhythmic outline of the fundamental attunement.

When the gods are absent there are no paths on the earth: becomes a simple unholy site of use. It is the poets task to attend to this opening for the coming of the gods.

History is the monumental play the gods conduct with and for humans.

Earth as abyss: pure potentiality & chaos (lack of potentiality), from this that the poet draws out definition. The gods need humans to feel/attune - which they lack due to their immortality

The soldier: exposed with the others to a nothingness which is the ground of their community.

Antigone declares her right against Creon to claim another usage, of the dead: der Brauch. Creon informed the duty of philia: the law of family & the state. Antigone disclaims it, rupturing the bond of philia with her sister, "my philia is for the dead". Aouoegic: evoking the power of the dead, the realm of chaos, of which Antigone is serving & being served through. Leads us towards the death drive, the theological beyond our comprehension/articulation, the unknown.

Ereignis: the event of appropriation, an occurance.

Eignen: when time is the proper time, comes into its own, being owning, definition occurs, destiny is made clear

>>>>BEYNG is doubly articulated: der Brauch

Through language: the self comes to itself through language. Using the human to articulate being as human being. The bodily dimension of the human in relation to the earth - body/hand/doing the writing.

The poet is summoned to attend to the origin, the emergence from this coupling - the demigod, the river - streaming out of the mountain, the event of a birth springing forth: a calling of poetic duty to give voice to the origin. The river seems to stream by its own will until it turns, turning away from what the river would want - to regain the origin of origins - but is obliged to turn-about towards the homeland. :: the centaurs set themselves up on the turn of the river, as natural scientists, as the vantage by which best to understand nature & the will of the river.

Hölderlin on the Greeks:

Foreign

Proper

National

>clarity of presentation: Apollonian, through their sculpture, etc. exceed themselves

>native enthusiasm: Dionysian, ecstatic passion, lose something essential to their being

For Moderns:

Foreign: enthusiasm: speculation for a new religion, Kantian injunction of human finitude & reason, what we can understand & know & do

Native: clarity of presentation: German clean display

= we can't imitate the Greeks without losing our relation to our own being. We require a different form > Hölderlin is looking for another form of representation: correcting the Greek. As we rethink our modern position we must change our mode of representation accordingly, not just inherit the Greek static embrace of eternity: "they go out in flames, we go out in little boxes." How do we articulate our destiny? The Rhein is an allegory for this turn.

The conflict between gods/earth implies in itself the tension between need/discipline: need= internal constraint exercised outwardly, discipline= external will applied inwardly. The will arises through this turn as a counter-will. ::: the river as a structure of reflection. "The rivers have an eye to its origin." A reflexive turn of the river thinking back to its origin, finding a form for itself , taking on form.

The nature of lack is a point of conflict, of the gods using the poet.

Tragedy: based in separation, the self-conconception which unified/coupling & separation/incision which is conceiving itself - a cathartic separation.

Hölderlin's "alternation of tones"= a dramatic shift.

(wind sounds)

It's June. Your letter arrived in March. The way that we correspond is closer to the spatio-temporal dislocation of scrawling ink on pressed wood pulp, folded up into little vulnerable compartments with symbolic currencies glued on for a sense of safety and security, sent through the air over oceans and impossible distances, to be carried by hand and shoved in a dark little slot with your name on it. Whenever I'm on an airplane, sitting there in the seat, hearing the mechanical sounds groaning underneath the floor and creaking through the plastic walls, I think to myself "what the fuck how did humans build a flying bus we're fucking hurling through the air and this shithead is looking at pictures of food on a glowing screen what has become of life" and perhaps it's a similar kind of amazement I have with mail, and now even with email, that such a thing could exist at all and more so that we use it so often and so casually without having to attend to all the minutiae that make it work fluidly, seamlessly, quietly in the background.

I'm sitting in a yellow room with yellow table cloths and yellow curtains. I'm drinking mechanically protruded coffee and crunching on sunflower seeds and raisins and bananas swirled in a bowl because that's what I've been eating everyday for breakfast since I arrived at this hotel in the Swiss alps at the beginning of the month, and now the month is almost over, so I've been doing this for a month, and this month seems more real than real, more real than airplanes. Yes I've been living in this small town called Saas Fee in a German speaking part of Switzerland up in the mountains because I'm in school again - more real than real - my first term of a very unique school working towards a phD in "Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Critical Theory" emphasizing in "Literary, Musical, and Visual Thought." Seems perfect for me eh? When I was living in Norway, with ___, in the cold dark frozen forest, having empty sex and drinking empty coffee and feeling empty, I decided that the purpose of my life was being stolen from me by all the silent machines of the world gnawing and suckling from my lymphatic nodes, drawing the aether out of my eyeballs on all these goddamn screens and calculators, and so I had to make a stand of some kind, set up a fortress - especially if I am to retain any solitude - and reclaim some territory for myself.... so I applied to this program and got in. I felt pretty fucking prestigious for a minute there, thinking I was getting wrapped up in an exclusive world of advanced minds crafting visionary models of existence out of abstract postulates, but now that I'm here I realize that even philosophers can be shit heads. Just kidding - not really - everything's fine now that I've created some distance around myself and let my peers know that I don't want to engage with the typical bullshit, which is to say the laughing about absurdity and giggling about saying stupid things and joking about how much they love to drink themselves to death and all the whining and complaining about all the things which we must engage while knowing that we never really ever have to at all.

I always make this distance, and of course I feel conflicted by it, but it's a matter of self-preservation, dig? It's necessary to maintain the state of mind that I've decided I need in order to get up every morning, to stay playing this game of life - I wonder if I am a finite or infinite player, someone that plays by the rules or someone that plays with the rules - but I console myself that everyone is entitled to be a freak if they want to, that bars and cigarettes aren't mandatory, and at the end of the day fuck em all because I'm doing what I want to be doing. With love of course. Hmm, yes so I was telling you (6 months ago) about how I felt weird while living in Seydisfjördur, working on the house with you guys, and I think it has something to do with this tendency I have, which is more than a mere unconscious propulsion, to remove myself from the group - any group - in order to pursue my own grandiose idealism. I had a hard time sometimes, just moments, speckled here and there, certainly not always but absolutely recognizably frequently, when I wanted to be so profoundly alone that it felt like yearning for death, oblivion, what Heidegger calls "the abyss." Henne and David gave me some anxiety - just between you and me - because of their youthful buoyancy, cultural integration... maybe because of their joy, flippant joyfulness, eagerness to laugh.... I don't know. It wasn't really about them, of course they were sweet and made the experience wonderful, but it was about me and the profound situation I just emerged from, being so deeply engaged with some of my very close friends in such an exhausting and emotional manner right before you fellas showed up, and then before that living in Seydis for 4 months carefully instigating an existential crisis (crises?) in the students of the LungA school, which kinda backfired and sent empathetic shivers through my own being that perhaps I had not yet recovered from. I don't know if I ever told you about that experience, during LungA. I don't know if I could have talked about it yet. There was a woman who was attending the program under a false name, what she thought was a performance of identity but I perceived as a deception of my invitation to be transparent and radically honest, and of course there were many other interesting humans assembled as well, all in very close quarters, and resonating with the tunings of the other as one giant jiggling vulnerable Other-ing. My presence in this group was in leading a workshop called Existential Units of Concentration, which was based on the proposition of simulating an existential crisis caused by philosophical reflexivity: basically I would inundate the students with a carefully crafted trajectory of rigorous stimulation, bombarded with questions opening up considerations to the outer stratospheres of consciousness, and then bring it down into a quiet comfy dark corner to be profoundly bored - boredom is useful in opening up a space to ruminate upon life - and it fucking worked, in a way I couldn't have anticipated. The student with the false identity had a nervous breakdown - I don't think I should take credit for it, not completely, but it happened nonetheless - and other students began projecting their inner fears and terrors upon me as the target. The trust was splintered and my motivations were questioned and I became extremely unsure of myself and what I was doing and what it was for, and it was from this place of bleak midnight being-in-the-void that we began building it back up again, when I started articulating the possibilities of an "opera of/for known & unknowable un-i-verses." Shit got crazy. I didn't anticipate losing my head along with the students, I thought I was gonna keep it cool, but I embraced it and followed it through and ended up experiencing a profound transformation myself, and now that I look back on the whole experience I don't think it could have (or should have) happened any other way.

When I met you I was immediately attracted and repulsed, by your depth and words and darkness and seclusion, recognizing in it something of myself, and always a silent nod of knowing exchanged between us, a recognition of the necessity of some distance out of mutual respect, never of competition or spite or bitter flavors. A recognition and understanding of the profundity of personhood, and a laughter that resonates through the absurdity of being alive.

So that's how I was when we met. Shivering in the shadows on my own quivering being, a pure trembling, profoundly vulnerable, a delicate situation, strapping on boots and ready to wrestle with a screaming motor writhing in a cloud of ancient wood dust, to peel away walls and make weather patterns out of destruction, to get lost again in new thought forms and lay a new foundation I could stand upon. While building the house I was trying to lay down this fundament, and because of that I felt unstable, like I didn't have firm ground to stand upon and just wanted to be alone, so that's why I didn't really feel like myself and wonder what impressions you formed from our time together. Now things are different. I went to the deserts of New Mexico and chewed on the rocks, melted and boiled under the relentless sun, and died numerous times over. Then I went to Oslo and had a very weird and strangely cathartic winter negotiating the blurry territories of affect flowing under and around ___ as she processed her own mechanisms and confronted her own specters. Then I moved back to Oakland, to the fucking hood, to the cuts, to a war zone of poverty and garbage and perversity which made me quiver anew as I no longer had a skin and my eyes could hardly take the sights which confronted me everyday, so I again retreated into books, reading a book a week, prolific in words, weaver of worlds, sucking the amniotic fluids out of the poetic meat, gorging myself on botanical and bio-mechanic psyches. Then I met an amazing Greek woman with a boxer puppy and immediately decided to move in with her and build a studio and eat her pies and listen to her fears and help her clean the house, all the while continuing to read a book a week and working a job building fake rooms for photoshoots and saving money and feeling more and more like a real human again, until one day I woke up in Switzerland with the summer sun scorching a hole through the curtains and thought "I should tell Jeppe about this to make him laugh."

What else? I've been reading a ton of philosophical texts, still, of course, as usual. I'm slowly uncovering the porthole I've been anticipating - a schism that lies buried deep at the seat of western articulations of consciousness, the origin of our suffering, the wellspring of poetry, the mythological beginnings of our subjectivity and the obsession with death which drives us towards our lonely oblivions. I need to understand it so I can subvert, you see, because I'm sick of building compartments of tension and anxiety around me and yearn to live out in the open, with profound poetry and radical feeling, without it being stolen by concepts of capital or phenomenological pragmatism. I think you understand this: the search for freedom is the voyage to one's own inner depths, but it also oscillates back out into the universe, because we're never really so alone as we convince ourselves to be. So this bullshit has become my project, my obsession, and I'm following it where it will take me. Even though I still hate everybody I meet I'm pretty happy because I'm swimming in an ocean of concepts that are coagulating into new definitions of life, so I feel pretty fucking light and optimistic these days. The sun helps, for sure.

I wonder how you're getting along in Copenhagen. I would like to live there. You Danes have fashioned a beautiful balance of Scandinavian pretentiousness and good ol' fashioned Germanic ingenuity that I find oh-so-charming whenever I encounter it. Maybe I'll start conjuring a way to get myself there, or to southern Sweden, or into a little cabin built out of sticks next to the river behind ___ and ___'s house on the fjörd at the edge of the world. For now I'm in Oakland, with the beautiful silly Greek and the beautiful silly boxer puppy in a big open gray room where she dances and I read and we bake pies and make videos of each other reading Heidegger on the toilet. We can pitch a tent in the living room for you if you ever decide you want to come experience the horrors of the California wasteland first hand.

Ok my friend, you have endured my rantings long enough. There's much more that I would care to share with you, but I supposed you will have to respond to this garbage first and then wait another 6 months before I can be bothered to reply, as is the way of the world we have made for ourselves. Or perhaps we will meet each other in person first, out on the frozen island or in your own neighborhood, or mine, or somewhere in between. Let me know how and where you are, what it's like to be doing those things in those places, and if you want to get married to I can get the fuck out of America. Hope all is well and heavy and warm without burns.

Up here on the mountain it all seems clear. It's clear up here, from this vantage, physicaly, but of course I'm referring to the opera, to the project of making sense of space, of telling time and giving it names as it passes, of speculating what might come next, the making (into) sense this sensing thing sensing itself, named myself, the sensorial object in question, or at least the meat lying/dying at the center. I just listen to the prologue again for the nth time and it resonates more powerfully than ever. First things first: finish the 5th section of the video documentation to accompany the recording of the live prologue, to cinch up that hole. Draw out the cosmological diagram so that others might be able to access the cosmology visually, as a static image corresponding to how I think - and continue to think - of/through it. Namely, the opening up of a world of name in the first section, becoming a tension (second section) from which the poetic voice emerges as a relation to the voice not her own, the third being a monologue of differentiating through tension, the fourth a depiction of absence/lack of gods through the ongoing mythopoiesis, and the fifth comprising the reflexive turn, subjective turning back upon the fatherland, the I glimpsing its own I through spherical eyes, infinitely regressive eternal return, repetitious differentiation of voices, Dionysius standing apart from the chorus, both present without bodies - the end of the prologue, insinuating a continuation into a beginning (yet to begin) of the ontogenesis praxis. The prologue is an illustration of a Heideggerian ontogenesis, a coming into being in relation to the mythopoiesis of the past, a true articulation of truth, being becoming Dasein in relation to a truth always already acting itself out through the work, as an arbitrary beginning, the only truth beginning being that which attempts to offer its own truth as truth, as the root of all beginnings - seems fitting even though admittedly failure. From here I can branch out to an infinite variety of strategies and tensions, voices and logics, schisms of thought and form, schemata of concepts, schematics of trajectories. I am becoming increasingly sure of this fundamental attunment upon which I stand following the oscillatory rhythms of praxis, poiesis over thesis: moving forward, I will not articulate a rigid ideological paradigm to be projected over the world, making a universe upon an ideal model, but would rather choose to allow the structure/language/form to emerge, an efflorescent interference pattern of form-language of which I am an observer to, not a determinate of. Up here on the mountain it all seems so clear. I cannot do this alone. It seems in fact that I don't want anything to do with it at all, which is to say that I am invested in articulating, observing, thinking through, being the poet on the earth, exploring the schism, inhabiting the rift between the lack of the heavens and the mournful earth. This project is rooted in dialogue even when its a monologue. I need kin to be more specific, need to offer them a mode of engagement with this material which should be made relevant/intrinsic to all those involved, all those involved with me personally. To offer a proposal, not as a gift implying a debt requiring reimbursement, but as a sacrifice - reread Bataille's reading of Maus inverting the Marxist gifting economy and offering another model of exchange economy based in sacrifice: potlach. How do I give up myself, give of myself, give up my being towards the active making, articulating, working-through of this project, but how could I possibly ask that of someone else? I wouldn't, I shouldn't, I couldn't, on existential grounds, while purporting to stand so firmly. Instead of asking other to give up themselves I would like to design a method of giving over of myself towards their enrichment, benefit, in whatever way I might be able to - physically, emotioanlly, psychically, psychologically - although I suspect it will be philosophically: voice, language, form-language, giving shape to that which is so difficult to define, differentiating that which may not yet be recognizable, towards an end which I will aid in helping them define without taking on the task of doing it for them. How can I direct my actions, through focused awareness, towards benefitting my kin? How can the benefit be described and determined? How much of myself must be maintained in order to be a stronger empath? And who is going to be receiving?

The universe is a black love: the singular verse that is not I, not mine, the space/place oscillating between an I articulating it as a singularity and the possibility of its lack, an un-I'd verse, it is - ontologically - the dasein of being-there, and where is it? A singular, an objet, that other always differentiating itself from itself, from the I. It is black, dark, shadowed, voidinal, abyssmal nothingness, no-thing, that which is not present, an inverse of the verse, a parallax of perspective, the consumption of color, murky cloud looming over the earth. It is love: the "ma" of negative space surrounding all things, the filling in of the void, presence, wholeness, Socrates knew nothing of anything choosing to walk the world shoeless and full of questions, yet he was an expert of love, the dissolution of himself in service of Human Being, an ultimate love not transcendental but terrestrial, corporeal, the spirit of (not beyond) matter and the manner of engaging with it, not pure linguistic acrobatics. The universe is a black love.

From this beginning I will articulate the first act, always already having begun beyond the parameters of my own being-beginnig. As I write, I find the voice differentiating from myself. Is it me that is speaking, is it I, is it my I, my own, can I own it, what is me, who is speaking, how do they choose to speak, who are they addressing? I need an actor, someone who embodies through identity this role of the speaker who is not me, cannot be me, but perhaps the voices must be my own, must be spoken through me though acted by an/other: performing my existential conundrum. Although performative, I maintain the truth of my asking, the authenticity of the gesture and the truth of the action, as it is indeed my own anguish through which this rumbling boiling toil of the opera is unfolding. I need a body to represent my alientation, and how could it possibly be mind, possibly be male, with my skin, my corpus, masculinity? No, it must be another that is addressing, me, and through, and I sense it must be a woman, a lover, my lover, the real lover, "a true lover," she who stands in opposition, giving and receiving love, what other could it possibly be speaking at the onset of origins, a time/space literally now being now? To the extent that I can articulate this clearly as a notational structure, stage direction, movement instruction, lyric, libretto, clearly scribed text, this is what I will give to ___ for our collaboration. This will also serve as the beginning for a musical ensemble for the first act - the chorus - which may be infused in the collaboration with ___, or executed in relation to those activities. ___ suffers through isolation and comes from a similar place, endured rites of passage, struggles and shares in experience, and so these pursuits may prove to be important for him personally. If I'm going to learn from the strengths and weakness of the prologue ensemble gathered in Iceland I must learn to instantiate a hierarchy of influence, always maintaining the democratization of the group, to each hold voice while subjugating towards a greater unified voice - a chorus of voices. ___ (and all other collaborators) is/are not below me, but is/are differentiated in responsibilities so that they may define their own. This dynamic will arise through focused conversation at the beginning, laying the groundwork for the relational dynamics.

This being said, I don't want to be in this ensemble. I don't want to play or perform, but to conduct, to inform not perform, to provide the cerebral psychic emotional spaces, the images in relation to the text being orated through the performance, to facilitate, to assemble the essential components to allow others to play out and play through these ideas so that I may in turn focus upon their articulation so that the two of us - engaged in dialogue - may come to better understand the individual parts. I want to remain a voyeur.

Diagrams/images: always already a relation to the unfolding history of nested relationships ricocheting through these proceedings. I am always interfacing with the past, writing a history through a process of reverse-engineering predestination to speculate in the possibility of arriving somewhere unexpected, unpredictable, ineffable. I am evoking the voice of Oedipus, Antigone, the Greeks, the Germans, the French, and other voices also. From here I will interface with an intelligence not artificial but completely human while also not my own, not myself. Through these images and diagrams, the visualization of the unfurling of history, I will interface with past generations of thinkers to inform an orientation towards the coming-in of other potentials. I am reading, absorbing, writing, speaking: a subjective existential cycle modeling the oscillatory motions of the universe, the world worlding, of the heavens and the earth and that rift-schism we inhabit, equally occupied by both orientations simultaneously. There are objects within this space, forms which must come off the page, instruments evoking a certain intonation of chords (I wonder if I will be able to fabricate them), movements and bodies which are not my own writhing and wiggling in the cracks, other faces and other visions and other eyes/I's although their roles are still shrouded in fog and require articulation. I need others to be both on and off screen, speaking and/or moving in ways unfolding through the primacy of dialogue. I need some instruments built, and its not important that they come from hands, only that they function how I design them to. I need some sculptures made, containing concepts and emanating cosmologies and resonating mythic speech physically informing a relation to the body, a symbolic architecture interfacing directly with the bodies sensors, bypassing the floodgates of the mind. Multiple structures need to be built, literal territories requiring simulation in the studio void which I am preparing and also on site, in order to dialogue with the residents/resonance of particular places, like this mountain for example.

The project is about going and meeting these individuals, spending time with them, working with them, in a fashion not necessarily predetermined, not an overlaid ideological frame but a rapport worked out through the course of our interactions beginning from the anticipation of era/area/aria : time/space/song, the singing-through process embodying the inherent oscillatory structure of the un-i-verse as a black love, at least for now, until the metaphor changes. This is not a documentary, but a refrain of the self, a restraint, a caesura, a pause, a space, a breath, of getting caught up with my own process of making and choosing instead to teeter upon the brink of potential, executing as I go along the way but not getting swept up in the flow thereby distracting me from focusing upon the meta-constructs which I am determining to fill my field of view - meta-objects are prioritized over the minutiae. These projects must be budgeted, grants must be applied to, for I require money to endure so much research, conduct so many conversations, to pull into my elliptical orbits the resources necessary to build the connections between so many seemingly disparate parts. Some things need to be made: the imperfection of the form will be as essential as its informing of its content. My ideal world is not so clean and polished, Here is the outline, a kinda of schematic to proceed, to maintain the most minimal of means, to avoid maintaining a multimodal studio but be free to keep it clean and open for thinking, feeling, intuited, writing, ariculating, researching, building upon the enunciation of the black un-iversal flow, to proliferate black love, to put into motion these processes beyond my own threshold of understanding, acknowledging my own thresholds while pushing their frame, the process of enframing, towards that which I do not know, towards the unknown and the unknowable.

The darkness of the theater is an invitation to go to sleep: crafting of cinema is a series of devices that will keep the viewer connected - awake - to the intrigue of the narrative.

Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark

A lesson from Morricone: never change key = a shift in psychology. Used tone colors more than melodic structures.

DOOM STING! Meta chord to replace the silence. "Colorful air conditioning."

The absence of family in grounding the contemporary narrative.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is a film directed, written and produced by Henri-Georges Clouzot, cinematography by Andréas Winding and Armand Thirard, which remained unfinished in 1964.

The power/danger/potential of cinema to cause harm - responsibility to recognize & attend to this danger. The question of taboo? Waters, Makavajev, Jodorowsky, Korine? Responsibility to transcend thresholds of social, cultural, personal frames/limits/standards.

Living in Oblivion: a film about making a low budget film where everything goes wrong.

Ringo Levio: book by the SF Digger

Politics of Experience: RD Lang

REMORSE! (In 36 situations...)

Musicbox

Festin

27. Discovery of the dishonesty of a loved one

3. Revenge following a crime

2. Deliverance

LAST SEMINAR WITH MIKE FIGGIS

There seems to be some need to write something down concerning the experience of our penultimate seminar, maybe just the experience of working through peer work or possibily an indication of something larger.

Even though the screening of the PROLOGUE was a technical mess, it received glowing reviews from peers/Figgis - validating.

• Attend to PART V of the prologue. Begin with vox, re-recorded from scratch, with new imagery sewing it together. Get it up on the web.

• Make sure that the prologue video files are playing properly and make them readily accessible on the tw website - infrastructural reorganization

Some elements of actors acting in more/less natural/synthetic environments:

• Huge schism between natural language (ref: worldings of natural language, as method and philosophical implications) and the artificially constructed oral presence of pure monologue. A matter of believability, relation to daily lived existence, and the subtle nuanced modes of discomfort that can emerge from a performance.

• I certainly need to put in more work into character development: directions for behaviors, limitations imposed upon way of speaking, and an architecture for casting the roles: aesthetic decisions, formal possibilities. Once the structure is more clearly defined it can be fucked with - the interesting project of reduction, taking elements away, stripped of their context, to see what possibilities emerge.

• Potential to develop characters in musical ensemble: caste of characters / heirarchy. How to articulate the potential inter-modal relations between participants without directing/inhibiting their range of potential expressions within the structure: create frames within which they may function autonomously.

The importance of essential sound.

The importance of focused use of camera perspective.

****

Where and when was I?

JANUARY - APRIL 2016 - SEYÐISFJÖRÐUR ICELAND

OOFKAUU Prologue is first articulated [insert the notes / images from this time]

MAY - JUNE 2015 - SEYÐISFJÖRÐUR ICELAND

Meta reading list initiated [insert book list]

JULY 2016 - REYKJAVIK ICELAND

Experiences of empathy with ___ [insert notes]

AUGUST - OCTOBER 2016 - NM & THE SOUTHWEST U.S.A.

Roadtrip with ___, national/unnatural monuments. Extreme isolation with parents. The failed attempts to locate the ontogenesis with the concept of family. [insert notebook compilation, daily writings, & other ephemera]

NOVEMBER 2016 - JANUARY 2017 - OSLO NORWAY

Struggles with emotional/rational compatibility with ___ leading to the realization that the PROLOGUE is not complete until it can be seen/heard by an audience, leading to the composing of accompaniment parts and the supplemental video. The first articulations of the OOFKAUU narrativity are attempted. [insert writings/notes]

FEBRUARY - MARCH 2017 - WEST OAKLAND CA

The violent re-emersion into the post-industrial wasteland and the need for viable employment put the project on hold. Like the Iceland house build, it is a time of ravenous reading. [insert book list here]

APRIL - MAY 2017 - ADELINE ST WEST OAKLAND CA

Initiated a process of daily writings on phone while continuing to work long strenuous hours. Began reading in preparation for first EGS session. [insert MOBILE META TEXT & EGS Notes]

JUNE 2017 - VENICE ITALY & SAAS-FEE SWITZERLAND

First EGS session. [insert notes & intellectual procession]

JULY 2017 - WEST OAKLAND CA

A time of compilation of all previous materials, focusing on organizational structures. Lattice of triangulated awarenesses articulated, providing a (macamamma)matrix to be populated with the content generated over the last 1.5 years of meditative research.

I turn into a monster in the evenings.

There's so much to get out, to write about, it seems I need to practice my WPM - typing skills as an progression of consciousness dictation. For now my thoughts will have to be contained within these fragments, small windows, passing image frames that I struggle to tie down as they float by. Someday technology will provide me with a documentarian prosthesis: the wonders and the horrors of being able to capture pure thought as it is being produced, filling up hard drives with my own rattling, to be reviewed at some infinitely receding impossible to achieve later date. Maybe it's better that I don't get what I wish for. On this note: research the progression of AI voice, notation/transcription software, and other technological prosthetics in writing or dictating thoughts = INTERFACE.

Quickly! Get down the rest of it before it's gone!

A way of writing the libretto in relation to others - the formation of the self-through-relations. Like the impromptu system begun in Sweden with the letter writing project: put the recipients into catagories to orient the content of the writing content. Now there's a professional catagory: Bratton for technological dialogue, Dolar for issues concerning the voice, Zizek receiving unsolicited psychobabble concerning hope, Fynsk on existential poetics, Figgis on fucked up narrative.... how far would I be willing to go? Conversations with ex girlfriends, picking up where we left off, lost threads treated as though they are still weaving upon this old rusty loom. Remember the Chris Kraus book [I Love Dick]{.underline}, read in the airport and on the plane all in one sitting while traveling from Reykjavik to San Francisco - fitting in its own way - how its composed on letters to a fictitious lover drawn into a fanasiful web of relations that really wasn't a fantasy at all.

My body is consumed by eczema. My body suffers from general health. Make continuous reference to the body and its functions. The body is full of intrigue and disgusting annecdotes waiting to write themselves. The horrors of the body.

When will I have time to read through all that has been written? Who am I writing for, yes, but when am I writing for?

Write about work as a literal and metaphorical placard of boredom, futility, tautology.

Write about the walks in the woods for the same reasons, oriented towards the relationship rather than the economy. Dig up questions of purpose, of nature, of self-in-relation to other beings, and the continuous confrontation of "the public" while walking amongst the botanical giants swimming in their void.

Write about being bound to objects, bound to the process of purchasing and acquiring them. How can buying a car tie me to a place, to a person, to a relationship, to a way of living? How can some jeans, some shoes, some seemingly small inconsequential purchase do the same, while seeming to offer liberation? What does purchasing power have to do with real power? Certainly there's much to be said about money - how to do so without slipping into endless cliché, that's the real trick. I need to talk about work without it feeling too much like work.

I should reflect on the past, the immediately passing series of events, while they are still fresh, but this writing feels so anticipatory, leaning forward with a head into the future while the foundation is being left behind. Yes, what time am I writing for, but also what time am I writing in? Am I living in the past, or time traveling into a not-yet-come-into-being, or are there other options that could be articulated, and does it matter to keep track of them? Some of this is my responsibility to sort out for the sole purpose of writing it down, but the general orientation will be left up to the reader - to the actor, the narrator, the listener, the viewer, occupying both sides of the camera.

Yes there are many ideas to unpack from the previous month living abroad, and the ideas will just keep rolling it, so I better get the fuck to work. What does this mean exactly? What does it look like? Is this the work, or a planning stage, or a reminder to recount the work which has already taken place - perhaps in the form of an experience or conversation already fleeting from memory?

Notes to self: find a better job, storyboard (?) and shoot the last scene of the prologue, search for residencies and opportunities for funding that can be applied to.

At some point I will need to confront life itself: how is this current stasis of existence compatible with my work schedule? How is this relationship conducive for working? What are my priorities and how am I balancing them? How much attention should I dedicate towards figuring it out, how much will figure itself out through life itself?

How important are these questions and what do they do? Orientation or disorientation.

Everyone is complaining all the time, if they have to work. This mode of talking fosters a certain mind - we grow into our habits as much as habits grow from our actions - so does it begin with a determination, a will or drive, or from passivity? It seams like those that are the most determined are doing the most complaining.

Writing is a form of work, but what form is yet to be determined, or rather is always ready to be redetermined, depending on determination, focus, calm or ecstatic articulation. How I work will determine what will be produced - the work makes the work. (These series of short, parable-esque notes-to-self are particularly conducive to pre-war morning thoughts).

Work is war, velocity, immersion in a machine language of violent revolution. Bratton repeatedly referenced Virilio in his seminars and text, orienting his speech/text towards a war-like trajectory. The set shop feels like war: violent, competitive, desperately rushed, while also boringly monotonous, painfully simple, full of dead bodies and dead space without any hope of being filled. If my own work (text/image/speech) will be of war or peace, of one or towards another, is yet to be determined. I must keep in touch with Bratton because he's working so close to the front and perhaps he might save me from having to fight so hard myself, while also running the risk of becoming fully enlisted.

Capitalist labor is physical, incompatible to this immaterial creative force of writing and creating. I must fortify myself to this imposed routine... make the schedule! Physical days of labor should be accompanied by physical creative pursuits. Labor days should be accompanied by physical music making sessions in the evening. Make some specific goals for this time: not cerebral music sessions, but purely physical exertions. Work it out on the drum kit, on the fretboard, or any other outlets which may arise that are physical, aerobics, embodied, and directly sensorial. Collect more outlets for this category to have on call for future days.

Dreams, day dreams, the filling of voidinal space with the workings of the sub/un/conscious... How is this space prioritized, privileged, or suppressed in relation to the activities of the caffinated cogito? The variances of embodied and disembodied dream states, in relation to other people or only resonating with ideas, the pure affective shiver of sensation, the trembling of existence before the unknown and unknowable abyss beyond our individual being. Is this work? Can it be put to work? Should it be?

OOFKAUU as a form of work, material or immaterual labor, of great importance or ultimate absurdity. The time and space that the ruminations of the OOFKAUU requires is not the antithesis of the capitalist labor system, but it being put in competition with it. Is it possible to salvage the voidinal spaces of material labor to reorient back upon the OOFKAUU? I'm merely human (all too human) and hence require down time, but to what limits can I allow myself these expanses of nothingness?

One thing is certain: I need to work with my whole/holistic being. Write with it all, sleep in it all, work with profound focus and attention to detail without straying into the primordial subconscious fray. Stay alert! Except for those moments when drowsiness are an asset.

Note on the material resources of the OOFKAUU: although it may seem more "professional" or "legitimate" to work with virgin materials - the idea that art must be cleanly severed from the world around it - due to economic/psychic/circumstantial resources this may not be possible. The creation of these materials is in fact the work of the opera: not just to have them as a finalized product but to experience-through the process of conceiving of them, sourcing them, building them, and putting them in relation to the event-world as a whole.

A TENTATIVE WORK SCHEDULE FOR LIFE AND LIVING

MONDAY: MORNING - READING

DAY - LABOR

EVENING - EMBODIED PRACTICES

TUESDAY: MORNING - WRITING (FINISHED BY 11)

DAY - OOFKAUU ATTENTION

EVENING - EMBODIED PRACTICES

WEDNESDAY: MORNING - READING

DAY - HANG WITH ___ / DAY TRIP / ERRANDS / MATERIAL GATHERING

EVENING - READING / EMBODIED PRACTICES

THURSDAY: MORNING - WRITING

DAY - OOFKAUU ATTENTION

EVENING - EMBODIED PRACTICES

FRIDAY: MORNING - READING

DAY - LABOR

EVENING - EMBODIED PRACTICES

SATURDAY: MORNING - READING/WRITING

DAY - OOFKAUU ACTIVITES

EVENING - OPEN / RUMINATION / DECOMPRESSION

SUNDAY: MORNING - HANG WITH ___ / DAY TRIP

DAY - RUMINATION SESSION / RECORDING

EVENING - OPEN / RUMINATION / DECOMPRESSION

****

Work as theft, of mental and physical life span, of liminal & subliminal territories. Work anxiety, work-related-anxiety, rooted in a lie to unfold in a perpetual reliving of the trauma of loss. Work is destruction.

Attempting to recount a conversation which began naturally, concerning the natural, unfurled progressively in attending to the unfurling of progression itself, etc etc, oriented towards the primary orifices of orientation, conversation concerning the meta-discourse of speaking, of speaker, of being-able to speak, of the response-able-ity to speak, the possibility of speaking and being heard. Impossible to recount in its entirety, I should attempt to note some key moments...

ANIMISM / VITALISM / ORGANICISM :: communing with the rocks, communication with river, interference patterns upon the surface of nature, direct relating to the potency of the elements, a sublime definition of nature, the effable - beyond language & empirical perspectivalism (the question "why is it necessary to use reason/logic/language?")

TECHNOLOGICAL-ECOLOGICAL CRISES

NIHILISM / EXISTENTIAL DREAD / NOTHINGNESS AS NECESSITY

OTHER / OTHER-ING / OBJET PETITE A / THE BIG OTHER

BODY-EAR : PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERCEPTION THROUGH THE BODY ITSELF

THE ORIGINS OF THE VOICE : ORIENTATIONS TO ALIENATIONS

RADICAL LISTENING / RADICAL PRESENCE : GIFT GIVING AS SOCIAL CONTRIBUTION

THE PURPOSE OF DEFINING PURPOSIVENESS / THE PURPOSELESSNESS OF CONTEMPLATING PURPOSELESSNESS

I just watched your video twice, whilst gorging on broccoli and hummus and chips which mostly missed my mouth and fell into my beard. I mention this for context for consumption, of consumption, while consuming your image. Now that I've seen it twice it seems like it could bare yet another repetition, as though it has been implying repetition from the beginning. I should also mention that I was viewing on a phone, sitting in the sun of my kitchen in full beams, high glare, all the reflections of myself and the chip beard and the room I'm sitting in sharing the space of your Germanic-forest Ice(land)-face, blending between frames, my hand hold shakes of viewing quivering along with yours as camera operator on the other end of the kino-eye, perhaps just centimeters beyond the black mirror or infinitely far away. What do you want to hear from me about this? Some annoying questions? Ok, go: Is this art? Is this the ideal viewing experience? Does this viewing add or subtract from your original intention? What was your original intention and am I subject to your determinism or am I in charge of determining it myself, or my own path, or my own "I", or anything at all? If adding and subtracting isn't relevant for your consideration then perhaps multiplication or division would better suit your needs? Less questions now, more statements of my own inclination maybe.... It seems like being in the sun was appropriate, like I should have been even more outside, with a higher contrast screen (definitely never a digital projector) and maybe huddled in a group of teenage ravers all watching your video simultaneously on their own screens, pointing to the parts which they liked most, showing each other (and me) their flicker frames, so many screens and so many speed nails and so many green eyebrows. But more than all that, more than just more things happening, it would have been more looking, and that seems like the really important part: looking. You are always looking at the screen - not directly into the camera - and it's obvious that you are looking at a screen and it's obvious that I'm looking at you on my screen looking at your screen and as I look at mine I see myself more and more which makes me realize that you are there/then looking at yourself more and more, not at me, or someone else, only yourself. I'm sitting here now after the fact (of looking) thinking about all the looking that just happened wondering who the looking was for, if it was all for you or for someone else, and how that works... am I looking at you look at yourself, a voyeur looking in on your memory/fantasy, or am I observing a more focused looking, a gaze you are crafting, a weapon you are smelting, bullets of vision ricocheting in every direction, bouncing off tits and ass masks, scrambled egg forests, pixel smeared makeup manifolds, feigned sensuous embraces, authentic auteurs, killing time to waste time to spend time to make time, for boredom and intrigue and skinny dipping all blending into one vision. Seems like the screen is doing all the framing. Other questions then begin to rise about what is not seen, what is off screen, how the bodies move underwater, under mirror, whether I'm being directed explicitly or implicitly... how do the black frames function? How much time is needed to fully ingest what is taking place, the long shots compared to the short ones? How much of the body needs to be seen to know what is happening on camera, through movement, as a form, as an image, as a gaze? Who is this third person, being implied and also created, that exists behind the camera when you two girls are both in front? Is this mysterious "other" me, or some other, or any other, or just "another" that doesn't deserve a representation as gazer? Am I a voyeur by choice or did you make me into one? The highest compliment I think I can give you is that your little video was not so little but carries profound resonations into larger cinematics - it makes me think about films, and just FILM, films I want to make and that perhaps I could only make after seeing your video, your video which is definitely not a film but could become one if you decided for it to be, which leads back to the question of what I am to do with it, where does it sit, how do I watch it, and what do I make of it now that I've seen what it has made of me? I would be very curious to hear what you think you have made, if only to compare it to what I have observed you making, and for us both to compare all that which was believed to be seen and remains unseen, perhaps ever unseen, beyond the scrim of the eye, outside the framing of vision, past the feels of the body and the flies of the donkeys, out there on the surface of the skinny dip lake at the end, shimmering against the sun like my hand held mirror murmurs in my grasp, blinds me through inner and outer lights, jiggling the floating plasma in my retinal ocean and allowing me to safely conclude that I would be fine never hearing that song for the rest of my life.

Thanks for sharing. Please give me some answers.

TO ___ : TO KEEP THE RESPONSES FLOWING FROM HER VIDEO

- NARRATIVE OF LIFE // ART

- GETTING LOST ON PURPOSE // FOR ART

- OLD SCREENS // NEW SCREENS

- FOND MEMORIES OF A DAY OF BEING HUMAN = WHEN ARE WE NOT? WHAT HAPPENS DURING THE OTHER TIMES, THROUGH TIME?

- BEAUTY IN BERLIN // BEAUTY IN OAKLAND // BEAUTY IN TERRITORY

- REPRESENTATIONS OF ONE'S BODY INTO MERELY A BODY = FLATTENING

- TECHNOLOGY OF THE CAMERA, INTERNET VIDEO HOSTING, VISION, THE FEMALE FORM = "TECHNO CULTURE" / "TEEN CULTURE" / "FEMALE CULTURE" / "COOKING CHANNEL CULTURE" / " IPHONE CULTURE" / "CULTURE-ISH CULTURE"

- I LOVE DICK BY CHRIS KRAUS

TO ___ : REPRESENTATIVE OF THE ANIMIST-VITALISM - ORGANICISM

MYSTICAL-EMPATH POV.

- GIFT ECONOMIES IN RELATION TO THE OTHER

- RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE SOCIAL CORPUS

WHILE OUT FOR A WALK WITH THE DOG

Going on regular walks with ___ as part of the new studio routine - an opportunity to commune with the creature under my/our care and the creatures of the neighborhood. Seems essential to respond to this space / place / territory / demarcations / people / objects / environment.

DEFINITION = frame of being (user/self) + time + space >>

To draw a frame around the object of consideration to determine what it is not. Who is observing, when and where they are observing, then comes the how and various what's, with the 'why' reserved to a later order of analytical experience. Philosophical analysis is removed from the thing itself.

It takes so much time to recount the previously elucidated territories, hence these self-addressing exercises. The goal is to reach the threshold of definition more immediately, to pick up where the last thought left off without having to recount all that has already happened, to keep the project moving.

Now, the work is sifting through the previous history to make sense of where I come from and how I have gotten here, to provide context for what is happening in the present, working backwards from now.

Continuous recording + text transcription risks redundancy. What is the goal? Translation into what? Another idea or form more simplified, easier to refer to, more abstract or specific? Into an image, a project, a performance? Why all this reiteration? At some point decisions must be made concerning the differences between iteration and reiteration, towards the putting to use of these ideas.

Voice messaging = a purging process, externalization, exegis, to take account of what is possible to articulate/expressed.

>> Turning into text - a process of transcription - to make legible, readable, a state of materiality

>> How to make the ideas accessible to others? Libretto, philosophical dissertation, organization and display of the files themselves (website).... etc etc. The work of the OOFKAUU address the problem of presentation, what to display and what to allow to remain hidden (or to actively obscure), to define the known and orient attention towards the unknown/unknowable.

>> To turn the text into a fundament upon which other interactions or conversations may be conducted.

1. Exegsis: expression: intitial articualtion: externalizing the internal ruminations

2. Stasis, solidification, not quite concretization.

Modes of generation of the material (primary order), then considerations of use (secondary order), then process of editing which solidifies into a certain form (tertiary order) = the tripartite structure of method/treatment of experience = can be applied towarsd any material of the OOFKAUU.

Example:

Text: 1. generate ideas through free form writing 2. coagulate ideas into propositions for experimental conversations with others (to try them out) to generate more content in relation 3. to utilize/treat the text to solidify/distill into a more concrete form like a section of the libretto (an aria) or dissertation (formal chapter or paragraph), or direction for stage/actors/musicians/performers.

A methodology of treatment, a strategy towards the use of these materials, over arching structure happening invisibly in the background but requires being made visible.

THE PROCESSION

1. having an idea while walking, being documented as a voice memo to be relived later.

2. doesn't require transcription but does need to be applied later, not repetition but put to use

3. will become solidifyied into a visual abstraction diagram which visualizes, presents, brings forth the hierarchies of potentials, strengths, and weaknesses of articulating such a system.

THE PROCESSION fills out from the middle, working back towards the origins of the voice (conversation with ___, Mladen Dolar, Maurice Blanchot, psychoanalytic structure of Freud/Jung/Lacan = locating the core at the center of a body).

The user, the time of their inquiry, the space they are accessing =

working back towards the crossing of knowledge territories = philosophical, psychological, psychoanalytical modelings of the self, divisions of body into a component/organ mechanistic model, actor-network theory of Latour.

Time = t-space, k-space, architectonics of the ego

Space = the technology of the voice, the territory of the body, the page filled up by writing.

The technology of writing (Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida), working back towards the origin of its own creation, utilizing different models of knowledge, various FIDELITIES/VELOCITIES/COMPLEXITIES of abstraction towards AN INCREASE OF CLARITY IN ARTICULATION OF THE MODELS. Ideal forms projected upon the experience of the world, prioritizing the rationalizing of experience over the direct immersion in their stream.

I can begin working forwards. Up to now I have been working backwards towards the source of ontogenesis- perhaps necessarily for the sake of framing, placing limitations upon the current focus to make it manageable, to confine the inquiry for the sake of framing, to make this point clear merely as a beginning, a fundament through which to contextualize the later work... the working backwards is an attempt to offer context. It is upon this foundation/fundament that all the research will sit, although it will remain in flux.

VOICE / BODY / TEXT / PROCESSES OF TRANSLATION / LANGUAGE / ORIGINS / MYTHOPOIESIS / ONTOGENESIS >> what follows?

* The vocalizations of the voice memos may enter into a mode of use by which it may become apparent that the speaking must no longer necessarily be confined to pure reflexivity, the continuous reiteration of the self from which the voice is emanating, articulating the fundament, the voice coming into awareness of itself, to speak itself as voice, through voice, relating to the physical body and the philosophical subjectivity determining its questioning. At some point this project will become exhausted, essentially, necessarily. What will follow will be an improvised form of speaking, located upon the threshold of lived experience and accounting for the living-through-experiences, which becomes pure performativity, becomes theatrical. Not through a distanced rehearsal of a text which has already been generated - a secondary performativity - but a performativity which is synonymous with life/living, unable to be distanced in either user, time, or space from the living of life itself, what Mladen Dolar refers to as the theatricality of philosophy (not a philosophy of theater). This voice will be capable of dictating a libretto of experience in real time. The text will cease to be preable, instruction, bullet-form, note taking and become the bringing-into awareness, clarity, and articulation of these other media becoming transparent as such.

What will follow will be generations of other text forms, architectural and notational descriptions, the articulation of a physical space which can be inhabited - the poetics of architecture, the poetics of space, will become increasingly relevant.

I'm currently working to give vision to voice. As this process increases in FIDELITY/COMPLEXITY/VELOCITY, as the methodology of speaking/transcribing becomes faster and the visualization/abstracting/diagramming more clear, the visual language will need to become more complex. How to map beyond 2D space - nth dimensional space? At this point enter cinema. The prologue anticipates this, but right now it's premature. The diagram serves as a pragmatic, tool-form purpose, to make an image out of all that is visible and draw a line around the void of the ineffable, a visual articulation of the threshold of comprehension. Eventually the image will take on a state of performativity, opening up the opportunity for new spaces (beyond the known) to be experienced through novel forms of user/time/space that cannot be merely pontificated/illustrated after the fact - documented in real time, performatively. The immediate access of iphone, small cameras, and other technologies will be essential in this regard.

The performativity will collide with the present. This language, process of thinking/seeing/feeling/enacting through the space of art/life/practice that happen in the immediate dynamics of direct human interaction, through conversation, is the goal.

TWO DIAGRAMS HAVE BEEN ARTICULATED HERE: one concerning the methodology of media handlings, the other a more meta-visualization of form/content, implying a third space (an orientation that is unknowable in method/content).

CURRENT PRAGMATIC TASKS:

- All the files accumulated in the archive need to be sorted through, transcribed, made use of. This information will populate the structure of the DIAGRAMS mentioned above and begin to structure a more formal textual outline working towards the articulation of the phD dissertation (the technique from Bratton via Zizek: trick oneself into writing by placing bullet place-holders and filling them out later).

- Applying this visual mapping/writing "tricks" technique towards musical notation - not so dissimilar from out the prologue video (and the VIDEOSCROLL before that) was created, with text markers defining a structure which was then filled in with content to craft into a seamless experience.

- Letters which will be written to others, building upon an idea of gift economy, Bataille's description of potlach in relation to Mauss, moving beyond Marxism >> poetic ruminations upon the act of labor, to be laboring without it being just about labor. To craft labor into a poetic act of beauty. The labor is the current performative aspect of this work, the movement that is not purely performative movement. THE CHOREOHRAPHIES OF WORK.

- Copious amounts of text which need to be sifted through, cut apart and reassembled into more useful catagories.

- Foundational diagrams of the OOFKAUU which will inform how/what images will be made going forward.

- Articulate choreographies of all possible movements: musicians, camera operators, stage hands, collaborators, walks for self-talking, studio space, etc. Other choreographies will emerge naturally through the interrelations of participants.

MAJOR CATEGORIES:

VOICE

TEXT

IMAGE

MOVEMENT

STAGE :: to be differentiated from space :: less time and less user or non-user depended, but some amalgamation of space and place = The stage is a making of context, the collection of physical elements which orient to the territory or come to define it as such. Movements are through the space but not bound by it. STAGE is the fifth category which most explicit deals with materiality. The other categories lack material specificity, it is defined by this fifth category. STAGE is the sounding board of the voice, the book of the text, the instrument of the ensemble, the speaker system, the cosmococcic drumset, the stage upon which the events are taking place - the scrim which frames, the platform which presents, the materiality of the frame. At the beginning it is the most basic frame: the white boards of the studio, the carbon table, the white panels placed on the floor to be stood upon, the movement around Lake Merritt for talking, the page as the container for writing = a problem: revisit concrete poetry as method for writing. It is the positioning of instruments, speakers, bodies in the frame, as frames. The primordial stage is the EYE, the physical EYE, the frame of the [eye], the scrim of the outside/inside of subjectivity. It is also a real space: of the studio, of my home, the carbon table which can be built and serve as a site for other activities to take place, of the speaking, writing, playing, movements. Another frame is the curtains: a spatial peripheral frame as a container to hold the activities held within.

THE RESEARCH FOR MOVEMENT/STAGE IS CURRENTLY LACKING AND NEEDS TO BE FOCUSED UPON MORE ATTENTIVELY.

The defining of these spatial orientations is through MULTI TRAJECTORIES: beginning from the middle and working towards the beginning - orgins/ontogenesis - and towards the END - towards the unknown and unknowable beyond the current capacities of articulation - but also upon other axis as may be defined through the visual-abstract-diagramming of method + category: striations, topology of axis defined by the interrelations of divergent media.

This is no longer the prologue, but is an articulation of the first act which is THE MIDDLE. A website is needed to display and incorporate all of these elements: generative model of the voice, textual schematics as it solidifies into libretto/dissertation/notational structures, the schematization of diagrams and cartographies of the meta-structural outlines, depictions of movements as a choreography of labor which may or may not be specifically located in the body (currently consists of Heideggerian oscillation, a movement towards the place of lack, path of least resistance, filling of an empty vessel). The website as a model for a WORLD STAGE.

PB describing architectures serving as flood gates vs. the effluvial / vulnerable / AMPHIBIAN state >> work towards a fluid dynamics.

Jumping into video is premature.

Music performance is premature.

Now is a process of relating, of the self, to the models, through relational dynamics.

The letters will serve as offerings/gifts, going outside the parameters of the OOFKAUU, lines which are thrown out to be pulled back in, bringing in new/fresh information from outside individuals to strengthen/complexify/challenge the OOFKAUU system.

It seems like all life experiences are turning into inspirations for character development.

Examples:

___ as the Vital Materialist.

___ as the Vital Spiritualist.

___ as the augmented reality designer.

___ as the musician.

___ as the feeler of feelings.

Other characters could be written from anyone/everyone in my life, but especially:

___ as the feminine shadow or whoa-man parallax.

___ as the empathic Scandinavian pseudo-shaman: charlatan selling snake oil cliché.

A choir of ex-girlfriends screaming!

A choir of me(s) screaming!

A choir of children and trees screaming!

___ as the void/abyss/blackness of goodness.

___ as the betrayer.

___ as the painter (!!!).

___ as the Anti-Object Oriented Ontologist.

___ as the Lacanian Psychotic.

___ as Thor's Ear (!!!).

___ as the feminine sex of the primordial mountain.

___ as the jazz drummer - pure feeling, brutal masculinity.

___, ___ as the stoics.

___ as Heidegger's poet.

___ as the Kind Earth.

___ as the void/abyss/ of death and destruction.

___ (___'s GF) as the weathermaker.

___ as the voice of God incarnate as the Word.

___ as the obsessional neurotic amateur ethnomusicologist.

A breaking point with ___: I can no longer bare her low fidelity descriptions of experience. Will this realization lead towards a solution, or is it a problem in itself, or perhaps the beginning of the end? We shall conduct an experiment to create distance between our personal projects and each other - for me this might be impossible unless I begin working through clandestine subterfuge, for which there is an excellent opportunity. On this note, we discussed a scenario for a documented conversation imposing framing mechanisms as limitations: a concept to ground what is discussed, certain vocabulary limitations to direct attention towards other conduits of communication... seems worthwhile for conversations with myself as well. This proposition makes me aware of how all human relationships - beyond the OOFKAUU into the "real" - are based on such compromises, yet not stated so explicitly. Is there harm in the statement of them as such? Perhaps, yes. Here there is concern for the intelligibility of the relationship, of what can be said and what is better left unsaid, of what is seen to be visible for each party in the ensemble in determining what they are able to be aware of and therefore how to act in relation. For the OOFKAUU this consists of a charting of the relational bonds connecting points of definition within strata of the experiential matrix. For LIG (Life In General) these rules appear as arbitrary, oppressive (facist), obsessional, neurotic, perverted, etc, depending on their degree of public/private performativity.

Concerning the VOICE: I remembered the possibilities of musical treatment with the vocal range: "we always sing in microtones" and speak in infinitely nuanced spectragrams also. Each voice has particular socialized frequency modulation supplementing its natural projection, a sonic range which corresponds to attributes of identity: gender, social class, general affect (sickly person), etc. More research is needed on this matter: this arena is the sociological and becoming-political territory of the opera.

Musically, there is are some very important considerations at this level: recall Mike Figgis' "doom sting" triadic chord structure for filling the silent moments in his films with an ominous feeling. Likewise, various "empty" spaces of the opera may be filled with various qualities of this colored/textured/affected sonic representation of emptiness. Here is the research corresponding the ineffable emotional capacitance of music and its ability to transmit such information to an audience of viewers, requiring a rigid notational lattice to structure the musicians beyond their potencies to express as autonomous individuals.

Variations on the Figgis Doom Sting:

Confusion Sting

Ennui Sting

Malaise Sting

Anxiety Sting

Recoil Sting

Alienation Sting

Comfort-ability Sting

Good-ability Sting

I outlined for ___ a 10 point system for producing meaningful statements from her own being, through her own expressions, consisting of 3 nested triangles.

"Definition" at the center, surrounded by:

User / Time / Space

Velocity / Fidelity / Complexity

Self / Other / Big Other

The 3rd section requires revision, replacing the terms to be less Freudian/Lacanian.

This nested diagram is working towards a ontological model of self-definition, self-articulation, orienting a logical structure upon the ineffable emotional wellspring of existence. Another similar diagram could/should be created to reverse the process, to apply an affective/intuitive wisdom upon the rational mind to translate its artifacts into corporeally/emotionally accessible information. To the same extent that this ontological matrix is currently being used to definite concepts within LIG relationships, the affective model should be carefully crafted and put into use experientially.

LIG is the petri dish for the OOFKAUU, while the OOFKAUU is the abstract diagram of LIG. A lattice of relations designating the prioritizations and interrelations between life and the opera.

The meta methodological diagrams articulated on the recent walk needs to be drawn out, illustrated, brought into visual clarity. It is the macamammamatrix which will be populated by the research accumulated over a life-long endeavor to articulate the self.

I need to roughly sort through all relevant texts, being them to a copy shop, and print out the entire lexicon in chronological order for them to be digested thoroughly. * I'm still suffering from the same problem of disorientation/confusion endured through sustained distraction by the continuous investment in the desires of the external world. How to fortify against this without losing touch with humanity - or is that an inevitability?

Articulations of the humanist project of civilization and deciding what side of the fence I'm going to pitch my tent.

The possibility of developing some choreography through conversations with ___, ___, ___. How can a conversation about feeling, the body, movement through space, and interpersonal orientation be conducted through technological mediation? VIDEO of course: remember ___'s video, self-capture prioritizing the gaze, intersubjective/relational POVs, low fidelity to emphasize camera movements. Also ___'s video: dislocating the eye away from the head and onto the peripherals of the body = "peripheral vision!"

*There seems to be emerging an elemental orientation here: ___ as water, ___ as fire, ___ as air, who will be earth? ___ as the aether, defying all categories: pure ineffability.

Collaborating with ___: dancing out our own private choreography - how to record/document it without becoming intrusive? How to communicate the idea without turning our relationship into a model for the OOFKAUU? How to "conduct" a conversation concerning the creation of sculptures of feeling - a product of the conversation experiment perhaps? How much of this needs to remain hidden?

THE FRAME / THE STAGE / THE PLATFORM

Within and upon this mock void will be conducted the initial actions of the first act of the opera: the carbon table, the emergence of the narrator, the introduction of the framing mechanism, the introduction of the macamammamatrix ontological supercollider, a general orientation of audience to the lattice of the stage itself.

NEED TO BUY:

- 4 sets of 10'x10' tripod curtain hangers with curtains (preferably in both white and black).

- Piano hinge for remaining plywood walls

- black roll-out flooring

ARTICULATING MUSIC + STAGE CRAFT-MIND METHODOLOGIES

Remember that if focus can't be regained with determinism, go for a walk. What was it that D+G wrote in Anti-Oedipus? Better to be a schizo out for a walk than a neurotic on the analysts' sofa..?

By putting all of the notes and voice memos in chronological order I hope to observe an emergent structure within the material, as opposed to projecting an ideal structure over the material. This META TEXT could serve into categories of the libretto, structural engineering, or research fundament for individual activities. By combining it all into a single source - a book - I can dismiss it more easily and keep moving on to other projects.

Emerging from the text structure will be a visual form which represents it. A personal art-historical timeline, representing the aesthetic and philosophical parallel evolution in relation to a nested modeling of the self. X/Y/Z axis on a grid of sensuous experience.

Nested tripartite model for reflexive fidelity:

DEFINITION

USER / TIME / SPACE

VELOCITY / FIDELITY / COMPLEXITY

SELF / OTHER / CONTEXT

The visual structures model the narrative sequences coursing through the text: arborial/rhizomatic architectures of thought illustrated diagrammatically in a >1:<1 relation between the perception of complexity and the comprehension of meaning.

*These ratios of fluctuating qualia can be made of/for any attributes being compared.

Various visual languages are evoked to increase the fidelity of the abstract representations, feeding back into the complexity of the oral-textual articulations, so that:

THOUGHT > ORATION > TEXT > DIAGRAM

as also } (((oscillating)))

DIAGRAM > TEXT > ORATION > THOUGHT

From this "narrative of thought" emerges the potential of a musical sequence of notation.

Tree of Knowledge: classical diagram for illustrating the flow of information through generations of humans, across the threshold of USER/TIME/SPACE, accumulating into categories of disciplines and archived for posterity to be accessible to future generations.

Maca Mamma Matrix (as defined my ___): an effluvial, efflorescent, etheric/atmospheric mass emerging from the collective experience - at the intersections of relationality - of/for a sublime/ineffable sensing of nature. It represents the mother/source/origin of meaning and the actor/user-network (or matrix) of relationships between coagulating in response to the primordial rootedness (what Heidegger would call the "fundamental attunement") of human meaning in the material substrate of the earth. The language emerges as a process of naming the aleatoric sound of creation, an alliterrative echo of consonant and vowel sounds carving out a clearing in the dense hot jungle of proto-thought.

To the extent that music is composed of/from/with/for concepts it is oriented towards a non-linguistic non-visual embodied praxis of the narrativity of thought. Improvisational strategies of music making evoke knowledge structures already in place, calling upon knowledges already known (recalling scales, evoking sounds previously heard, sonically illustrating behaviors already learned through other means). Improv is not creation - does not form novel forms from a void - rather, it demonstrates a preference and primacy of praxis by embodying and enacting a conscious choice of knowledge and particular method of expression, put to the test through the dynamics of lived experience to observe what kinds of reaction-based (ie: linguistic) attention driven (ie: conscious/conceptual) scenarios might emerge.

Music is performed in the moment, but it is not time or life itself. It is as theatrical as philosophy, serving as a model of experience and an abstraction of affect as much as any discipline whose sense (reason) and sensibility (embodiment) are dependent upon the space between actors/performers in a matrix of relations. Music creates a context, a substratum, a supplement in our striving to hear ourselves hear, and to this extent is an extension of the project of thinking about thinking, and of thinking well ("thinking soundly"). At least for the audience! For the musician herself, directly interfacing with the world of sound-sense, music is the corporeal praxis of thought served up hot and direct - like any craftsperson shaping their raw material into forms that will later become functional, aesthetic, or conceptual objects, it is the craft-mind which defines its own purpose.

What is the goal of our music? To directly engage, with the instrument, with sound, with an audience, with a space, with a concept? This would imply a strategy of reducing alientation, separation, time lag, and/or spatial disorientation between (subject) + (object) - to craft a certain relational engagement between elements. Or, is the goal to create a conceptual paradigm which allows for the corporeal experience of a concept, idea, image, language, or meaning which arises through relation, beyond the pure expressivity of the medium? What strategy is most capable, bares the greatest potential, to advance our knowledge of ourselves and our modes of expression, of music and language in general, and all of the "technologies" of sound we employ through our music-crafting forms?

Is this a humanist project, or is it founded upon some other ideological proposition? If so, what?

Music seems to be on a fulcrum point, flanked on one side by the procession:

MUSIC > DIAGRAM / IMAGE-NOTATION > POETIC / TEXT-NOTATION > ORATED / ENTROPIC-EXPRESSION > THOUGHT } process of increasing stasis

and on the other side to:

STAGE / FRAME < MOVEMENT-FORM < MUSIC } process of increasing flux

How might we articulate a strategy of musical awareness maintaining focus upon both fronts?

How to move beyond purely conceptual frameworks and "begin playing"?

Does it matter what it sounds like? Are there any aesthetic considerations, how can they be articulated, why do we defend them?

It doesn't matter what it sounds like. The techne is ___'s territory.

Examples of concepts projected upon playing scenarios:

• Separation of tones which correspond to the distance between points on a philosophical diagram, architectural model, or other spatial array. >> Time/Space can be used as reference points on an open matrix of experience displaying parameters which we can define and redefine continuously. There is also always already a user, either 1 + 2 or 1/2 + (another performer we must direct) or (ensemble) + (audience).

• A combination of tones for a specific affective response: doom sting for an ominous affect, just intonation for evocations of mathmatical perfection, specific detunings for discordant/dissonance.

• Applied framing for performers: a set of rules/limitations in what notes/chords can be played, how they can be played, in relation to what conceptual modality of playing or evocation of a sound/image/form. Akin to language games: talking about Love without using words like sex or romance... the necessity of finding other words trains the attention upon other parallel routes for achieving the intended goal - essentially a process of controlled improvisation. For guitar, this could be a restriction of certain territories of the fretboard, certain picking styles, certain spacing between notes, or particular expressive attributes in style of play (like in traditional notation). Can be given as visual direction (finger positions or abstract movement meridians) or text descriptions (like a narration of how to hold a yoga pose or swing a baseball bat).

• Shifting the attention of the performers off of themselves, or the internal relations of the ensemble, and onto external factors of the space (like folly work for soundtracks) or a an aspect of another unfolding narrative.

• A shifting orientation to the Stage/Space - to the room, the dynamics of performance, to the infrastructure of amplification or projection, of the architectural acoustic properties, or of the aspects of a crafted space like walls, corners, curtains, or other impediments of sound or vision. Or perhaps it's factors such as: who is in the ensemble and how is outside of it - where is the threshold of the band? Where is the audience in relation to this perimeter? Where is the individual frame of any given performer in relation to the framing mechanism of their peer, or of the collective ensemble, or of frames they may not be able to perceive directly but feel or sense indirectly? What is the spatial-temporal relation of an individuals body to the source of their sound emission (where is their amplifier located and how does it determine what/how they play)?

For the sake of the collaboration, it is essential that both 1 + 2 benefit from the arrangement, which is to say get out of it what they want and feel as though their contributions are building towards a worth while goal. If this is lost, the project is already over as the dynamic will shift towards a negative (unproductive) friction. It should be each individuals responsibility to articulate their own needs, limits, and aspirations so that no individual takes on the weight of the entire project, either in conceptualization, performance, documentation, or ongoing definition.

QUICK NOTES ON MOVEMENT + STAGE:

___ + ___ + ___ = self-documenting movements in response to a personalized discourse, to the extent that it can be justified as interesting or useful to their purposes. How could I serve as a presence within their already unfolding dynamic process? How does the OOFKAUU interact with them as autonomous artists?

Through me! = craft a letter which invites another mode of communication - not necessarily an involvement with the opera itself. Use the material towards preparing a more stable firmament for future articulations of OOFKAUU movement in relation to the other media forms.

These interactions exist in multiple spaces, multiple simultaneous stages, a combinatoric time scale transpiring across various data outlets, with multi-perspectivalist lenses and more microphone ears than a conventional observer could contain.

The roadtrip in August will instigate a return to parents house (both mine & ___'s), a return to the origins. The car will serve as a mobile stage through which we may conduct conversations (which must be recorded!!!) concerning our ongoing real relationship, as well as the possibility of interplay with OOFKAUU elements, a setting not confined to place or time. Also the presence of ___, as the non-speaking third creature-presence. To chart the shifting/changing conversations over/through these places as we continue to chart the VELOCITY/FIDELITY/COMPLEXITY of our very real relations to each other.

Definition = explanation of physical/chemical constituents (structure) or its (intended/perceived) effects.

Criticism = to tear down and reduce.

Pretention is the inherent risk of the humanities. Scientists may be arrogant, but the professional conditions do not allow for pretentions. Philosophy cannot have direct access to the real because if so it would replace a love for the real with the real itself. The method of philosophy is descriptive generalization.

German Idealism is being caught within the thought of thinking through thought. OOO is not negative theology, but indirect ontology.

The object is not definable by its qualities. The object is withheld from all direct access. Indirect knowledge is the basis of all of human cognition. IE: metaphor.

Marshall McLuhan = historical determinist (?): theorist of the backgrounds. The content of any technology is less important than the fact than its that specific technology = the way that media structures consciousness. "The content of any medium is no more important than graffiti on the atomic bomb." > Media changes through reversal (overheats and flips into its opposite) and retrieval (the domain of artists: they take dead clichés and brings it back to life in an aesthetic fashion).

Objects = anything not reducible in any direction, neither to its chemical properties or as mere function.

Forgetting is an important philosophical theme.

7.20.17

THREE LETTERS

THREE PERSONS

THREE POVS

I'm sitting in a room, sitting upon a fiberglass chair skinned with polyurethane foams and other mechanically protruded cellular dermises, feet upon the cinder brick floor, eyes upon the iron oxide-coated polyester tape twirling around the reels of an old Uher portable solid state recorder I pulled off of my shelf late last night. These units were rather unique, being some of the first models to be powered by batteries and so able to be brought outside, although having just returned from a walk with the awkward contraption I can hardly testify to the pleasures of doing so. While I was walking, dictating to myself, testing this simple electro-mechanical memory unit, I was contemplating all the minerals being put into service for this absurd exercise in capturing my own voice upon a medium with the hope of faithfully playing it back, mirroring my emanating ego back upon its watery pools, and all the repetition and redundancy of labors that go into these scenarios, and whose voice it was in fact that was being recorded. As I spoke, in relation to my viewing of the world rolling under my shoes, into the musky little diaphragm quivering the needle of the illuminated volume meter, I wondered at the theatricality of the situation, wondered with a sense of calm detached enchantment, concerning a theatricality of which I was both actor and audience within a network limited to myself and this bulky squawking mechanism, each with a voice vocalizing a relation to the other, each excessively over-designed for the purpose at hand while admittedly pathetically equipped for articulating any novel pronouncement of reason as to our purpose, poetic, ontic, or otherwise. While walking and talking and ruminating upon the reflection of my refractory reflexivity, I thought of you, and your stack, and your AI visionary vicissitudes.

I'm sitting in a room, writing you this letter because I believe you invited me to do so, by telling me that you wish to keep in touch and hear more about my own project, and so I aim to make this a reality if it is indeed possible. I would very much like to tell you more about what I'm up to as my opera is currently in such an abstract state that I recognize how few are able to interface with it. Being such an articulate thunder tongue talking as you are, wielding such throttled terminal velocity with impressive speculative fidelity and ontological complexity, I know that you could help me in this way - the way of articulation - concerning my own capacity for speed, resolution, and depth of field. I also wonder if I might somehow be of service to you, with my meandering mothertongue mantra mind archiving spectral arrays of allegorical alliterations and alien altruisms, or merely as a willing subject splaying open the unchartable innards upon the ineffable apeiron of the anthropolytic holodeck, in my willingness to dissolve the perimeters of being into the sentient ocean miasma of pure media, into the ambivalent matmos of post-mind matter. As I told you when we occupied the same room together, your seminar truly comprised some of the most stimulating times I have had in relation to material meditation, ontological speculation, and epistemological disorientation in a very long time, in recent memory, and in some ways remains unparalleled. It is an experience which I would not soon tire of, yet I am also aware that for a being-becoming-buoyant bot such as yourself that perhaps I must be extraordinarily creative in enticing your attention, if I am to gift anything back - or perhaps some kind of cyborgian potlach or silicon spiritualist sacrifice might be a more fitting image of our would-be exchange economy. I'm interested in finding a way to articulate it, in seeing what more I can extract from our conversational convergences, and how I might reciprocate the ecstatic oscillations.

I'm sitting in a room sitting in an image of a room sitting in the nested diagrammatic schematization of a room sitting in a fundamental attunement of semiotic slippage of a room sitting sweetly in a subterranean software reverberation chamber singing succinctly the room song of soft rooms passing through hard rooms to come to sit upon the room of your laptop in the room you are sitting within. I'm sitting in a room drinking coffee glancing at Francis Ponge's text The Voice of Things, the poem which is not a poem concerning a pebble differentiating from the fundament of the earth by being able to be picked up, to fit in the hand, the become more visible than the giant stone platform of the continent filling the entire field of view but larger than the effluvial minutiae of dust particles dancing in the dislocating pressure of breath as the face comes closer to the small stone. In another pseudo-poem, a tiny shell is made larger by letting sand fall through the fingers, to notice the individual grains left behind, to project scale upon the haptic. Your work seems less a matter of where to lay fingers upon stones as how the salienated sacks of human vision might erode upon the shores of the mineral corpus.

I'm sitting in a room in Oakland, imagining you sitting in a room in a Russia-California-airplane-black mirror hologram. These rooms appear to be adjacent to each other, not such a great expanse indeed. Stay within reach. I hope this finds you well.

--------

I'm writing to you immediately after rising from bed, directly from waking, the coffee still steaming. This is my favorite time of day, perhaps my favorite time of all times, rising at the cusp of darkness and light to linger in those gray striated gradients between the epoch of dreams and territories of business madness. I've been meaning to write you a letter for some days now, even weeks, ever since we departed in fact, out of a desire to have our dialogue venture towards unfettered depths without the structured impediment of the seminar architecture, in order to see where it would go or how we would accompany it, but mostly just to keep it percolating because I can sense that we have much to share with each other. The scale of our potential interaction dwarfs the comparatively miniscule cellular frame of this white page, but I had to make some kind of attempt to reach out from the ether, to drop some music into your ears, even if it's just the monotony of spaces in-between typefaces, with the hopes that we may still yet find a more suitable spatial-temporal territory to conduct that other conversation concerning conversion of models of consciousness, among other things.

I was taken in by your imagery of the interior, the language you evoked, presenting your relation to the looming physical form which compartmentalizes our world. The mention of swaddling, vital effluvial flows, amphibian bodies wading in warm primordial soups of determinate proteins, and the extensions of that body out - beyond its own scrim - into the etheric apeiron of the environment, reforming the corpus into landscape, renaming the objects forming the firmament of the fundamental attunement of the human foot laid rhythmically upon the earth: these are concepts which I hold close to my own articulations of being but perhaps have been uneasy with their usages. Your poetics are powerful, potent, and pulchritudinous - your style of speaking (of which I have been contemplating much these days, especially concerning theories of architecture and social design) emanates a hallucinatory or incantatory quality (referring to the subliminal flows beneath the bedrock of language) oriented towards the articulation and amplification of love (that most dangerously cliché and extraordinarily essential component which seems to be evaporating in contemporary society). I find your vitalist pronouncements to be often difficult to digest, but not to any fault of your own or in their own capacity to world worlds, rather through their facilitation of my own coming-into awareness of my own internal impediments, those flood gate walls I have erected to manipulated my ontological flows, to recognize the precarity of the scaffolds of reason and the tenuousness of the Humanist project. I am also tempering a poetics, casting cosmological forms in the sand, and practicing the promulgation of pulchritudinous plentitudes over platitudes - LOVE, as amorousness, as attraction/repulsion-oscillation, as that harmonic heterodyning frequency dance quivering the calcium lattice of the organism with ocean-filled gaze back upon the mineral substrates from which it arose, and that concept beyond conceptualization which harbors hopes of suturing the discrepancies between knowledge and wisdom, love as determinism itself.

I am working on a project which I feel is of the utmost importance for the existential progression of my own being, although I am struggling to communicate it across the threshold of subjectivity, over to the other, to lay it gently upon the social tapestry and let it sit however it may. I believe you may be able to help me with this dilemma. Based on your history and our aligned research, perhaps you are one of the few that can. I also wish to somehow contribute to your work, more or less directly, as an organ in the holon body wiggling in the scenarios of gelatinous cultures to be observed, making visible that ineffable sublimity of liminal slime, or if you wish, more as a satellite hurling its own velocity around the momentums and dynamisms of your self-defined earth, beaming down ricocheted signals of supplemental resonance from the far side of the continent. I hope we can form some kind of exchange situated within an economy which could benefit us both - another concept which seems indispensible for both our beings and project articulations. In the Bataille book you brought to EGS - Visions of Excess - ol' George unpacks the premise of a potlach, that "archaic" exchange economy of mutual transcendental sacrifice opposed to the common gift exchange dynamics, always already implying and enforcing a debt to be repaid, making everyone more poor save for the one who hoards and steals from the community. This other potlach system seems exceedingly, beautifully, elegantly absurd in expounding the necessity for the individuals of a community to give up, give away, or even completely destroy their wealth in order to maintain their own power and pay homage to the relational matrix connecting them to other beings. Bataille is reading through Marcel Mauss' book The Gift: The Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1966) - which you are probably aware of but merits a refreshed critical gaze.

I want to share with you an account of the mirror pools I am currently wading within, and also ask to hear more about the triangulated velocity/fidelity/complexity of your own work, but to be respectful of your time I will keep this letter short, for now. Please keep in touch and let us figure out a way to keep the rivers flowing.

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I've been walking around Oakland for the last few weeks talking to myself, recording my voice on various apparatuses, shooting video of people shooting video, watching films about people making films without knowing it, listening to music which seems to serve more as soundtrack to fill the silence of my existence than it demands a confrontational presence, and all the while I keep coming back to you and your projects. I have this tendency to wrap up my thoughts into allegorical alliterative aesthetics, especially when I'm writing letters to people, which might have something to do with my belief that it is impossible to address a person directly and feel completely understood, and perhaps impossible to understand anything at all, especially complete-ness or understanding through language itself, so that it seems more fun for the experience of reader and writer alike to skip down more liquid paths of meandering shorelines and efflorescent impressions than to say anything so brutal as a static statement of time, or space, or self. I like to use commas also, and hyphens - for their intended purposes as caesura, symbols of space, designations of breath, more-or-less socially acceptable fissures within the continuity of thought, and also as a kind of mindful editing technique, to the extent that this is a narrative I'm telling you, an image I'm crafting for your eye or otherwise, a progressively unfolding basically linear time line that could flow on infinitely and oppressively - as beautiful and as deadly as a waterfall - if I don't take the time to pause upon certain moments, to meditate upon the timing, of time itself.

I've been driving around Oakland for the last few weeks listening to myself, playing back recordings of my voice and my music, hearing how the dispersion of sound is so different with a 4 speaker system, 2 of them shouting from behind, all that bass rumble emanating out of the doors and from under the seat to blend with the rumbling road roar pouring in through the crevice of the vehicles frame, the highs being lost to the hiss of the wind, the mids being amplified much too loud for comfort but perhaps strategically so in consideration of the unoccupied range of such a room. This is such a different listening experience than sitting in front of my studio monitors and reflecting on my own hearing in this space leads me to imagine the fabrication of a small studio model that recreates the acoustic properties of listening while driving in a car - in audible aesthetics, if not in its visual aesthetics. As I walk and talk and think while speaking I insert a comma (,) to take note of where I am placing the microphone - in this case the very powerful omnidirectional mic on my iPhone - its proximity to my mouth, or perhaps pointed outwards in the direction I am walking, and now held at arms length to my right so that I turn my head to face it as though I were addressing a friend strolling beside me. I think about the microphone more as a pure subjectivity than a pure ear, which is to say it is more of a self than most human selves purport to being as it (the microphone) is simply a point, a simple point, a pointillist penetration of the world, not some complex matrix of relations. When I put on the cavalier mic, clip it to my shirt, I can't stop thinking about how absurd it is that the voice is being captured from that location, from under the chin, from the perspective of the chest plate but not from within, like a contact mic through the bones simulating the sound of oneself hearing oneself from inside - like when you put pressure upon those little flaps of flesh to seal up your ears and listen to yourself speaking that deep and muffled yet profoundly audible voice which is more your own than any recording has ever captured.

I've been looking around Oakland through the lens of my phone, which seems somehow gross and appropriate, because of how limiting of a vision it is, but also how ubiquitous, as I look around and see others doing the same. I wonder about the effects such looking has upon the eye and I wonder about the affects such looking has upon the "I". Tiptoeing down the street to keep the camera steady, trying not to trip over myself as I look so clumsily through the screen, actively looking at the world while thinking about how I'm seeing so very little, I become increasingly incensed by the dissatisfying experience of both the filming and reviewing of this footage, of the grotesque limitations this tiny kino-eye frames my sense of a self sensing through a dynamic existence, of the profound artificiality of screen vision and digital vision and cinematic vision, not for its lack of technological sophistication as much as the lack of its technology of sophistication, if you catch my drift. All this makes me remember your rig - your riggis - its reorientation to the dynamism and momentum of the body, the implications of naturalizing the horrific contraption of cinema, the design sophistication and elegant execution in attending to the problem of living and seeing simultaneously without excessively diminishing its sensuality, and how such a contraption could be extended into the reception of the footage, that is to say, how such a rig could be designed to supplement the experience of the viewer just as your instrument facilitates the labors of the cinematographer. The body then becomes a kind of filter through which all this vision and sound is passing, and what happens to subjectivity then, to the "you" and the "me" and the "us" or the "we" in this schematic of cinematic experience? I dunno, let's discuss it.

I've been riding my bike around Oakland listening to free jazz feeling free and jazzy thinking about freedom as an ideology and jazz as an ontology and bicycling as a technology of philosophical transport. Some say that Albert Hoffman's innocently visionary bicycle ride through Basel Switzerland on April 19, 1943 did more to change the architecture of the self than Freud could scheme in a lifetime, not that I am necessarily proposing that, but the implication of freedom and mind-jazz and moving faster than our legs alone can carry us seems to carry profound cinematic implications.

I've been here in Oakland writing this letter thinking that maybe it's getting too long now, so out of consideration of your busy schedule and the vocal chords of your assistant who I might be so lucky as have placed into the awkward position of reading these words to you - so as to better amplify the voice I have been attempting to describe - I will cut off the flow. I hope we can keep talking, swap some records and slide some ideas across the table, perhaps work together in some fashion on one or the others projects, and have some more serious conversations about the seriousness of vision, as well as share in more humorous ruminations on the necessity of comedy in tragedy.

Real quick: go watch these films immediately!

Alejandro Jodorowsky The Holy Mountain

Dusan Makavejev Sweet Movie and WR: Mysteries of the Organism

Jon Moritsugu Mod Fuck Explosion

___: "I am asleep with my eyes open."

I can identify (yet another) inner tension: to fortify against the world while I am in the process of creation so as to not allow its influence to pass my threshold, to remain pure in my process of rumination and my practice of meditation, to not mingle my voice(s) with those of history, to find a silent room so that I may hear myself more clearly. On the other hand, while I am immersed in the process of reflexion I often have the experience of confronting my own cerebral threshold - or is it physical, psychical, philosophical, linguistic perhaps - of not being able to speak as radically as I feel. When I read books, especially in the morning, with coffee, in those dim early hours of light when time is suspended, bouyant with seemingly infinite potential for what the day-tide may sweep in, this is the true feeling of inspiration. When I'm outside swimming in nature - and this theory will be proven in short time yet again - a process of re-collection occurs, bounding of the loose frays of already worn ideas, or of re-membering, of assembling a body spewing up from a cesspool of knowledge I'm always carrying around with me if not always able to immediately access. There is another mode of transference with "nature," specifically with the botanical and mineral topologies of the landscape, which indeed seems to temper the logos, tickles the body, stirs the bubbling affective pots, seems to "radiate being" directly to the senses, and is what I suspect my dear friends are referring to when they describe the reality - experienced through touch and taste and tender tactile exchanges - of this animate world beyond the scrim of the self. I'm willing to entertain this vision, to grapple with its repercussion and not be too brash in wiping it off the table, even if it is only to come to understand it as a hallucinogenic filter, but I cannot entertain it as a semblance for god, or any other name for transcendence, or some life greater than the project currently underway, or even of some being other than my own - which seems precisely the point of departure, rupture, and potential re-solidification for these opposing views.

A conversation about love. A conversation about conversation, trying to get to the root of defining love. We came into an agreement, a consensus, that love is a kind of consensus itself existing between two individuals, or shall be for us, that we will agree to be self-interested and self-invested in our own growth as well as the growth of the other. This seems to be the contract of love if there is one, although love is more than a contractual engagement. We discussed its feelings, resonations and vibration in and out of the body, love as an idea, a word, a living entity through usage, as a concept explaining the space between entities, an activation of use-potential, of the potentials of growth of the individual. We reached a consensus in support of growth, agreeing that our partnership, our love arrangement, will be based on challenging the other to grow and articulate themselves more acutely. From this conversation there emerged some interesting aspects concerning the masculine and feminine - the need for ___ to take on a role, of herself, to take on the responsibility of her own being - as a woman, as representative of women, as a feminine self requiring care and definition in regards to a unique experience of time and space so that we can take equal part in defining it and sharing in it. The love territory in the middle, between us, underneath both of us, and we not occupying as opposing factions but mirrored walls, surfaces of the same room, a singular space we are coming together in defining. The definition of love requires a delineation of time - a process conducted - and a space sprawling out actively before us, in relation to we as individuals relating to each other. This conversation was useful as a tool which we can now continue to reference as we progress forward in our relationship and I am thankful that we were able to have it. AP was able to isolate an essential point, her own point, her POV, a point of emotional turn, a spin upon her own axis, propelled by internal centrifugal force, and we agreed that it's for both of our benefit that she take on accountability for the velocity of the spin of her momentum. We would together take responsibility of our own parts, always in relation, and that the love would be cultivated from a response-ability, a re-membering of a collective body. The masculine/feminine language evokes Donna Harraway, a wellspring we are both benefiting from surveying deeper. The mythopoiesis of the genders will soon take on a more pronounced role in the OOFKAUU. There is a reiteration of the logic defining a natural language, defining its own problems and offering the possibility of its own solutions, the incompatibility of the T-spaces, of we lover's conducting discourse across an infinite divide called 'love,' being always other to each other: it would be interesting to juxtapose Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, Alain Badiou's What is Love, and Gabriel Catren's T-space theory of Kantian space-time upon the lover-molecules dancing within the quantum affect atmospheres of hot wet space time transpiring between individuals. Within this space, the shamanic walking along the K-space trajectory between T-spaces, is where I believe love will be located.

From love, we turned towards a shared meditation upon nature as a context of relations. Natural theology: nature as a synonym for god, the imposition of a human idealism upon the landscape or the reception of the voice of the landscape. Is ___ speaking to an entity or only himself? Am I able to recognize and interact with any entities beyond myself, or am I always only interfacing with myself, even as a self as a multiplicity of entities? ___, through his strategic dissolution of self, strives to become pure ear, an absolute listener, an altruistic direct hearing ear which is always open, a receiver exercising unadulterated receptivity, receiving any that may need it. Is he interfacing with an other or only always already himself as other, or perhaps directly himself through others? What of the feminine position - ___, ___, ___, ___, etc - could I (should I) collect a feminine dialogue of immanence to juxtapose or observe or assimilate or gain wisdom from a feminine ontology? There's a dialogue happening amongst women that I need to be more aware of - somehow, by whatever means, and to bring the male out from the center, towards the periphery, to identify the threshold, to bump a nodule in the membrane separating the known from the unknown. How to coordinate such a dialogue? Where can I locate myself within such an ecology of human and non-human beings? I don't identify with any group, so can I identify with the forest? How to my self-imposed ethics or strategized conduct hold up in the wilderness, and where is it located?

After Diane Davis spoke at EGS in Saas-Fee, a questioner from the audience speaks: "I was already a vegetarian and now I can't eat anything, thank you for that." Will I die from altruism, from profound empathy, from ultimate piety?

When is an ontology escapist (how could it be) and when can it be observed to confront its own mechanisms head on? Can an ontology be defined beyond the metaphor of mechanism? Is it always already a metaphor for being? Are we applying the metaphoricity, the allegorical compromise of language upon the world of things? Mind is not a machine, but what is it? The problem is inherent within the asking of what it is: is one model better or worse than another: what are the thresholds being considered in attempting to articulate being? Here are the parameters for todays meditation:

The self is a frame, a process of enframing. To define the self is to articulate the thresholds of an individual, however it may be located. There are greater and lesser selves, although not by the positioning within a project idealistic hierarchy of names, but through their own definition. One can make themselves greater - Robert Bly's masculine mythopoiesis: recognizing the masculine potential and striving to embody a heroic role passed from father's to sons in procession. One can make oneself smaller, diminutive, passive, decreasing their presence in the world, diminish and dampen their capacity to world, to restrain in their right to manifest. How is ethics applied here? It is not a problem but a possibility. Does making oneself, or presence, or impact, smaller directly increase their righteousness? Make them more or less attuned to the fundament, constantly shifting beneath their feet regardless of the mode of walking? How does the scale of amplification shift one's potential for presence in the world? [These ideas are admittedly naive, intuited, based more in image than philosophy, inherently problematic]. How do we define nature? OOO, actor-network theory, assemblage theory, anti-metaphysics - my knowledge is currently limited. Nature as a threshold, the concept of nature combined with the image of threshold, reveals a potential key: nature as a diagram of the world, as a concept of context, as a theological landscape, as a territory occupied my a population of bodies: how we define it and how it comes (in turn) to define us, in relation, as relational beings: the population and the landscape, the being upon the plenum of becoming, the landscape becoming itself, the threshold of the fundament.

We world new worlds, pick up another model, it changes the world, now we are inhabiting this new place: does this imply an expansion of the T-space or the possibility of truly transcending into the pathways of the shamanic flaneur? Are we confined to out frames, is this the definition of being, or the limitations of being-defined? Is it possible, let alone desirable, to truly transcend the ontological mechanism - in order to adopt another, or leave it behind, with a new language, a new vision, a new body, or none at all? If we could wouldn't we have already? Perhaps some have, individually, never to be heard from again? How should we speak of our individuality in relation to the greater organismic milieau, of ourselves in relation to society, of the collective voice emerging from the greater landscape: what are the implications of these ontological questions, in service of what social or ideological project, of and for the self (what model, indebted to which designer) or for the others (of what place and time, what country or national identity)? How is an ontological pronouncement bound to a sense of responsibility? Related to righteousness, good and evil: God implies a morality. Is nature secular? Is natural theology accompanied by an ethical accountability of a human scale, or greater perhaps? Are these values invented, crafted, refined, or inherited, descended, inspired from some holy presence? God fearing, or nature fearing, or just full of fear... is there fear in piety? Latour asking how we may stop speaking about religion and begin speaking religiously... how can this retroactivity be condoned, how could I ever determine to speak in such a way? What could be gained, and what would be lost? I would venture to say that what would be gained would be meaning itself: to feel the direct presence and purpose of things, in things, to hear their voice, to witness their animation. If everything is living, coursing with determinism, certainly my behavior would change in relation to the world in accordance with this new conception of reality. Compare the behaviors of god fearing humans with those exercising the hubris of science: the hubris, a projection of an agenda, the entitlement to seek out truth and lay claim to its territory, to conquer through colonial spirit, the very thing that Latour and Harman (et al) seem to be able to over turn: the cartographic perspectivalism erasing its own contours, Cartesian POV turned parallax, Copernican revolution coming to an end. The merits of OOO/vitalism could decolonialism thought, the mind, the architectures of thinking of the self in relation. Of the body also? Of beings, or ontology? What would be lost then: the rigors of method, of detached observation, the structural logic, pragmatic architectures, fidelity of diagrams... all worth losing perhaps. To make it personal: what more could I lose if the bottom has truly fallen away? Why not entertain these possibilities? Should I attempt to gain the courage of hoplessness, accept the Lacanian lie underlying all being, the inherent theatricality of thought playing out the eternal alienation of existence? This does not sit well with me, nor does the alternative, hence a choice: to pick a side or define a new faction = not hope but out of desperation, no exit. The role of the shaman, the trickster, the weaver upon the universal loom, the bard/madrigal/singer of song, the poet/artist/hermit, the mythopoietic being: what territory do they occupy, the walkers of the K-space? How to describe someone transcended? I cannot abide by a transcendental conception of nature, or that there is anywhere else to transcend to: I am far too skeptical about such an idea. Nor can I abide by the infinite repetition, the monotony, the tautology, of the Lacanian lie, of the void, the lack, the continuous displacement that keep the logical mechanisms grinding their own gear. I desire liberation, freedom, lived now not later, and I have tasted it, and am continuously reminded (as of late) of how easy it is to achieve, merely by putting down and refusing to hold onto the leaden impediments of the previous generations: would this be called willful ignorance? Is ignorance, naiveté, truly bliss?

___ suggests the possibility of a third: a third mind, third voice, third space, third time, a tertiary structure undermining or overmining or simply mining the firmament being described (regardless of the language in use): this is my own articulation-in-relation, the power of the OOFKAUU procession, an actualization of transcendence not for any other than my own subsistence of being. [The image occupied by Gaylen Gerber in my own shimmering autobiographical-historical memory: leaving a letter before walking off into the desert never to be heard from again, truly alone yet surrounded by people]. The OOFKAUU is my letter, being written for humanity - out of lover for all those I have come to love - not to be confused as an operating manual for transcendence without becoming absolutely dangerous to human existence. The opera depict my path, describes the curvature of my arch, points towards where I went off too (once I arrive there, far out of reach), the bridge I am building over the chasm of the void.

The beginning is my foundation, my historical context of thought, although not merely a representation of a past. The second act will consist of a thesis concerning the futility of the continental philosophical logic structures, and OOO, and all the rest: a chance to thoroughly explore all of the weaknesses of my argument, a kind of last stand or final hope to gain sincere conviction in a materialist POV. The third act might be a depiction of the conflict turned into potential, providing an articulation of the whole/hole = a threshold portal identified or created accompanied by the conflict of whether to pass through it or not, if such a journey were even possible, described as a kind of reverse cosmology, a breaking up of the material of the universe, not to return to nothing but to allow space to proliferate, in the gaps and fissures between the smooth reticulations of existence, the letting in of potential, allowing the meaning of the landscape to articulate itself, satiating that desire for what needs to be known beyond the mystical confabulations of wonder, enchantment, magic, etc. Some final act might depict the achievement of passing over the threshold, viewed as a failure by others to the extent that no change is effaced, both being true according to the incompatible POV's, highlighting the limits of visibility and praxis from one POV and the inability of ever observing such a phenomenon without directly participating it from another POV, the real becoming performativity of the positivity of the praxis of potential. The end will return back to the beginning, with the shift being located in the model of the self - in myself and the viewer - a reconciliation with the inherent alienation of the self according to the logic which binds its definitions, and with the voice of the forest devastating the needs of human civilization once it becomes heard, illuminating the necessary disparity and distance between being defining their individuality, of nature and reality as oppressive frames of reference consuming the animism of all that lies within their frames: of nature, and reality, and the nature of reality, and then it will end. The rest of my life could be spent filling it out even farther, illustrating ever increasing detail, making it (in effect or affect) ever more real, populating this world with material and imaginary entities, until my own end will come, or that of the world itself, until the universe becomes a multiverse or some other UN-I'D-VERSE.

Notes to self upon waking - mine are always so pragmatic and boring. I dream of the toast and coffee waiting for me, my love of to-do lists and spreadsheets reminiscent of my father, yet I'm protective of the morning silence in a way which he doesn't seem to appreciate it - I get that from my mother. From both of them, father's quickness to rise, steadfastness of routine, keen eye for organization, and mother's poetic embrace of the mood, water plants and letting it all roll on slowly, not speaking until the second cup of coffee. There is mythology here waiting to be written.

I couldn't sleep. Tossing and turning, gently not violently, constantly checking the clock as though I would be late, from not knowing when I would be leaving and therefore not knowing how much time I would have in the morning, and the need to have this time, to write these words, to lay a proper fundament for the rest of the day. It's not anxiety, but felt like an inability to give in to the nothingness of sleep, a need to hold on to the conscious thoughts, a slightly stressed feeling of fleeting memory, of constantly forgetting something that would have been better to remember.

Among the philosophers and psychoanalysts I am a novice and it feels great. There is so much I do not understand, so much more to assimilate, and I am so thrilled to swim in that shimmering ocean of possibility. I must not become a cynic before the search has begun. In the meantime my work is clear. I have articulated the path as far ahead as I am able to see it and now I must begin walking it - of course I have already begun. Remember to continue re-member, re-minding and re-mending the upholstery upon the seat of consciousness.

Returned from a walk. Listened to the voice memos recorded in Las Cruces last year, finished transcribing the whole month of October, when I was surrounded by family, having conversations with parents and others, the recorded placed upon the table. The conversations are not interesting themselves but there are allegorical narratives which arise. I'm not yet convinced that I can sacrifice the time and attention to transcribe them all, but I want to keep them in mind as a possibility for use as some kind of supplemental scenario, an acting out of dialogue in some obscure section of the opera. Just because the conversations were had doesn't mean that I have to make any more of them than what they are, or were. There are some embarassing moments that I would rather not be revealed - and are not particularly revealing of anything in themselves - but there is also some meta-level commentary/analysis that emerges in my listening ear while sifting through them, for example, recognizing how poor of a listener I can be, how distracted or self-interested, even though I was in NM in order to concentrate and focus. I was often intoxicated and smoking cigarettes and not feeling well, not attending to my own well-being but sliding back into old habits, which made for a difficult summer - the psychological root of this difficulty is what seems significant, if anything. Another option could be to funnel the audio recordings into some auto-dictation software to see what is recognized, what is left behind, what is misinterpreted, and what beautiful monstrosities might emerge from the coarse AI scoring.

I also listened to the final lecture of a four part series presented by Bruno Latour. I have heard enough at this point to recognize that I must deeply consider his ideas sooner rather than later - I downloaded two of his texts and will begin purusing them. I'm especially interested in his correlation of Gaia to opera, leading me to believe that he is entertaining a similar practical methodology to the composition of his actor-network theories as I am to the OOFKAUU. Perhaps more to his technique than to his content then will BL becomes essential to my own endeavor.

The importance of compiling this text into a document, by a certain deadline: before leaving for the roadtrip in August. This will be an intensive time with ___ which I must be present for and focus upon. Today I watched a film based on Heidegger's tool-being and was reminded of a key element correlating philosophy with craft: the importance of PRAXIS, living taking precident over theorizing. Tool making and description connected to the articulation of a subjectivity defined by its relations to the world of objects, a relational emergence of meaning, through their use rather than detached contemplation. Authenticity: a movement towards a second phase (of concentration) in the opera, my life trajectory, and (presumably) my personal relationships - a movement towards collecting, tooling, making as an embodiment of praxis. This is related to my current meditations upon the necessity of erecting a system which can contain my own activities as I move forward into the speculative space of creation, a container for my experiences. Eventually I will be able to walk and talk and dictate and transcribe within a single day, to stay on top of the experience, awareness, and articulation of new ideas as they emerge as well as have them represented in a document which can be referred to later, but more so serves as the goal of the idea itself: the project as an act of thinking, or thinking-through-action. Reading as a process of exercising attention, note-taking becoming notation of active awareness, recording time (through audio/video) as a mode of marking back upon time itself, etc. I need to compile a bibliography and become more rigorously studious in my research methods. I need to remain strictly organized as I begin amassing the archives of music production - soon the piano and other instruments will arrive and music will begin proliferating quite organically, but as it accumulates I must be sure to apply a process of sifting and sorting in order to maintain an awareness of what I am striving for and what is most essential. The same for video: once the screens and lighting arrays are collected and I begin the process of seeing-through the camera on a daily basis time will very quickly fill harddrives and attention spans, so I must have a system to facilitate this process. The website as meta-container must be continuously reconsidered, a syncronization of these various media interests, to automatically collate the material into means of access and archive, as simply presented as possible. The website is currently a depository for what has already been made, but it must be modified to adapt to new materials in real time, as it is being produced, LIVE. I need my own server, my own cloud, my own private storage that can be uploaded to and accessed from anywhere/everywhere: a very worthwhile investment. Text could be uploaded to a blog, to be time/date-stamped and tagged and made to be navigatable through streamlined menus. Sounds could also easily be collected and organized: away from the restrictions of "user-friendly" services designed by others. I want my (web)site to be a convergence of these experiences, even imposing one form upon another: text being displayed in transparent containers with videos serving as background and automatically loaded song files playing over top: automatic web-based cinema constantly changing as I continuously upload various elements, so that the viewers access time determines the experience they will have. The site could be just videos: perhaps displayed as a "video wall" where invidual clips are made daily/regularly based on a preconceived formula, ie: music of that day is the soundtrack, text is the subtitles, videos are ongoing compilations of live edits and found footage gleaning or studies of movement and arrangements of stagecraft. The site will be an archive of this ongoing video work, like a dynamic essay, essential in the articulation of performing the text components through existential spotlight. All this should be attended to through the autumn and winter, so that when spring returns I can have this architecture fully erected and can turn my focus yet again towards new conceptual horizons to challenge and reinforce the conceptual fundament, culminating and solidifying during next years EGS session. During EGS I can continue to make videos, capture sound, text documents, etc., and have an appropriate receptical already in place to contain and distribute this content to my peers - and most importantly to have something to show faculty and other interested parties! To turn attention away from the fundamental an upon all the minutae of the flow - to allow the opera to begin writing itself. New experiments in media: fig rig and lighting installation possibilities for cinema, image manipulation through algorithmic software for AI recognition, incorporating alien POVs, computer programming languages becoming naturalized into human (character) speech), augmented and virtual reality OOO via experimental user headsets, archive-cinema-criticism mentality via Zizek, architectural modeling through 3D rendering software, CAD + Paramatricism + amphibean design, visual arrays of philosophical models via Fynsk via Heidegger. Don't forget, there's also a shit load of reading to do! I can't spend 100% of my time navel gazing: there's a bibliography to be compiled and (eventually) a PhD dissertation to write! Associations need to be indexed now as the project begins to unfold, and the website can be a place where I can tag and hypertext my research and footnotes, a dynamic bibliography linked to other sites, as dynamic as my focus/attention.

7.29.17

CONVERSATION WITH A MOUNTAIN GOAT

... Had a really intense, frightening experience, a grizzly bear, it was the strangest thing because two things happened quite instantly which seem notable, even in that moment: this phrase "black foot" came to mind and I realized that Glacier National Park is surrounded by the Black Foot Indian Reservation - that was interesting - and also how much it was, not quite like this, but it felt like encountering a person, the way that my body was responding, it was like walking into someone's room while they were naked and oooooh!

You were intruding upon someone else's personal territory...

Totally intruding, like walking into the bathroom on somebody, trying to leave but there's not door.

Did you see the bear?

We were hanging out. First I heard the two bare cubs running up the tree - literally running vertically on the tree, going up, which was a shocking experience!

Must be an instinctual fight-or-flight mechanism, to immediately move to the high ground...

To scope things out... the mom was telling them to get up there... but the way they moved up the tree was really shocking, like they were running while going up, the agility...

Grappling hooks for hands!

They were up 30-40 feet like that (snaps fingers) and those cubs are sizeable creatures. The agility of those creatures was very impressive, so I was like "oh my god, ok, I am clearly not as agile." And then I was brought into a song - my instinct was to just start singing - so I was like hey momma I'm here... I'm gonna give you all the time... you need... just doing this sing-song thing, because it felt like... I just sat there on my knees and was watching this momma bear breaking open huge logs with her paws.

Was she aware of you?

Clearly aware...We were all in the same space together.

Did you see the breaking of the logs as symbolic, as signs being sent to you by the bear? Intimidation?

At first I thought that, but then I saw that she was eating termites. Every few minutes she would raise up and look at me, and I would raise up my voice... ok momma... it's ok... and she would go back, stand up on her hind legs and go booofff shatter a log and get in there to eat ants and termites and things. We were just hanging out - I mean it wasn't hanging out, but she allowed me to observe her doing her thing, and after 20 minutes or so she sent a call to the babies who very reluctantly came down, always looking at me, got down on the ground and stood up on their hind legs to look at me, and then they all walked off. There was something about the personhood - not the personhood of an animal, but something so much more complex going on. My only reference for dealing with the situation was of intruding upon someone's private space and having to be there, that's what it was like. There was something more than her being a person, she had an equal presence for sure, but not as a person... something else was going on that was kin to a human being... it wasn't just her size, which was like me, more bulky and hunched over, and I kept thinking that if she was a grizzly bear she would be four times as big, and if it was a grizzly bear I would have been so incapacitated...

What about the sense of danger as it was? Did you feel that you were in danger?

For a few minutes, I had to acclimate, but there was something about the song that emerged through my talking that provided a handle - a loose grip but still a handle - on the scenario. If it were a grizzly I would have had no handle. The scale was important. I kept judging her size, considering the distance and other objects in sight, the scale of the animal was a major part of the experience, judging it constantly...

If the mother bear had attacked you, chosen to perceive you as a threat, perhaps due to her not being able to forgive your encroachment upon her territory or not recognizing your song to be a peaceful one, if she heard your song and misinterpreted it due to some colloquial misunderstanding or miscommunication - because you are front different worlds, civilization and the forest - or whatever it happened to have been based on how Momma conceived of the world, do you feel that you would have been prepared to take on that confrontation?

In the moment, not knowing how it would have panned out, because she's a formidable animal, but it didn't feel like that, wasn't necessarily part of the equation of being there. I don't know...

I can appreciate that you didn't feel it at the moment, but in terms of the vulnerability we were describing earlier, the importance of taking the initiative of making oneself vulnerable... to frame it as an inquiry, I wonder about one's capacities to remain confident while remaining vulnerable, the present of hubris while positioning oneself tentatively...

I always forget the definition of hubris, what is this?

Hubris is the predominance of will, a kind of excess of the self... to feel as though you have (gasp)... what is that!?

Hmm some interesting colors there.

Damn that's a big spider!

Ooooooh!

Did it jump?

No.

Did it move quickly?

It moved very quickly!

I bet she'll go right into that jar.

Yeah because I'm gonna put it right on top of her so she doesn't have any say in the manner... oooh! C'mon girl, get on there... You know I'm an arachnophobia right?

Are you? I can tell!

It's my only irrational fear.

It's gonna go right through that crack. Do you have a piece of paper?

Yes... Being an arachnophobia is totally irrational, the only phobia I experience, and I can't say that I would have a very clear understanding of what a phobia was - or felt like - if I didn't have to continuously deal with this one. I can say with confidence that this is a phobia because it makes no fucking sense for me to be unnerved by such a small being, such a tiny creature! OOOH! But I'm telling you that AH!... I'm telling you it's a formal fear, has to do with the movement and the shape of spiders specifically, the speed and gestalt of this creature, the geometry of the legs... I've thought about this a lot - I've been an arachnophobia my whole life, so I think about where it comes from and how to rationalize it - believing that by rationalizing it I might overcome its grip, surpass its influence, but it is a phobia because it is not rational, more archetypal, an image imprinted upon my psyche... maybe you could psychoanalyze it, I choose not to... maybe I endured a traumatic spider bite as a kid that I can't consciously recall but affects me this way, or maybe it was because there were a lot of spiders in my house in Corona. I have this memory of being there as a child, sleeping in my bed at night facing a bedside table with a glass on it full of water, and one evening I woke up to witness a spider which had fallen in to the glass of water, apparently crawled up the side and slipped in and was swimming circles in the glass, and the movement of the ripples, seeing the legs so clearly flailing in the clear liquid, the image disturbed me so much that I couldn't bare to do anything about it. I couldn't save the spider, I couldn't kill the spider, I couldn't touch the glass that it was drowning in, I chose to just watch it swim circles, and I woke up the next morning and it was still swimming, and I returned the next night and there it was still swimming... it took days for this creature to die a slow, probably horrible, certainly incredibly traumatic death...

Right there next to you while you were sleeping, who knows what that was doing...

I think I became intertwined with that drowning being.

Spiders have been so important for the mythologies of ancient peoples and there must be a reason for that.

The stories and the people are intertwined, the images and the creatures, and our beings...

I remember histories of the spider interacting with dreams... Ok I think we just pick this up now... and we will release it...

Thank you for your assistance.

Intriguing that this happened during this precise moment of our conversation...

Yeah, concerning fear in relation to animal beings, considering vulnerability and recognizing territorial limits...

I haven't thought this through yet, but to continue to what we were discussing... The bear brought out my own bear-ness, and what I thought was going to be a very traumatic experience became something else entirely when it happened. When you have a practice-based idea of something the unknowable aspects are the things that occur, that's the inevitability of ideas that come from direct experience - at least they should. If you have a new experience and it is as you thought it would be, something is going wrong there. Rationally it makes sense that a new experience would create a new way to think about that experience. In thinking about this phobia-oriented geometry of a thing which instigates an uncontrollable response, it makes me remember this EMDR practice, this bilateral unlocking traumatic memories through eye movement, reforming the symmetry of a thought as it's unfolding within you by amplifying parts of the body, and I've been studying mandalas, how they're made in regards to something as simple as focused eye movement and their potential to unlock new neural physiologies leading toward new concepts, new ways to get to a concept, the mandala is a maze for the eye that leads one towards enlightenment, to put it simply. I've also really been trying to focus upon the roots of words and was quite shocked to realize that the word astral is in disaster... something that helps me remember that optimism in a necessary muscle in being this thing that I am, that when you can connect the inevitable trauma of being a terrestrial thing to something like a natural disaster and realize that the word has come from a concept implying an ill-placed star, a bad star... This need to conclude everything with the apocalypse in a rational way seems like a recent occurrence, the inherent end of everything which seems like a way - in academic circles, or within the stronghold of this concept of the anthropocene - there's been some faulty wiring it seems like in associating concepts to words.

The concept of the anthropocene is not so strong though, but seems to me to be very tentatively placed, and highly debated, and misunderstood to the extent that it is articulated through multiple languages which are not in agreement, and really is not so important - by which I mean this problematic theory is not describing something so succinctly but merely indicating the possibility of moving beyond a certain arbitrarily framed epoch of knowing to enter into another, which is a mythology that seems to be perpetuated by all the disciplines... perpetuating the myth of the end of our current time to entertain the hope of gaining a new concept of time. There's a lot there, to what you just unpacked, regarding trauma and the location and description of trauma being rooted in a specific language - although I disagree that the contemplation, rumination, meditation upon, or integration back into a discourse of ends or "the end" is a new occurrence, and see it rather as a universal and eternally returning story. Any contemplation of beginning, or being as an indication of the present, necessitates a prior and posterior - at least concerning the beginning of time - what has happened defines what is happening which defines how we can conceive of what will come next, or in some cases what we imagine will happen will manifest how we unfold the story of the past, and regardless of the orientation both sides of the frame elucidate the present, a state of affairs which I take to be a kind of connective tissue between cosmological, teleological, theological, and philosophical ideas - it's the framing structure of concepts, or the natural language of time itself, depending on how far we want to take it. We could extend the frame to empirical science, physics or hard sciences of making-sense, or phenomenology, or psychology, or other "soft" sciences of sensation. "Disaster" perhaps evokes more or less specific qualia of catastrophe depending on what disciplinary context we pull up around it, "to what end" we contemplate an "ultimate end" - is it merely an abstract delineation of time, or is it a specific end, your end, as a person, as an entity? Our end, of humanity, of a particular or general civilization or culture, of an epoch or conceptualization of time, like the anthropocene? Is it the ending as a sign, mark, punctuation - like a period on a sentence, a caesura to our articulations, the ending of our conversation, bringing about the end... In terms of an ecological disaster, which certainly seems to be a hot debate searing holes through the tongues of contemporary philosophy, and anthropologists also...

Certainly, and even outside of academia... when I speak to people my age, I sense a certain requirement for accountability, or responsibility - and not in the more delicious compounding of response-ability, which I'm very interested in and how it connects to the conventional "responsibility" - but this other need for people to take account for some idea of "poor human behavior." There's so much energy put into politics and race, ecology, that's all about advocating for the need to acknowledge a trauma we have collectively inflicted. "You're white" and "you're overly privileged" and "that's why you are where you are and should admit that." I've gotten that and I continually have to come up against it, like if I try to talk about politics...

Do you disagree?

It's not that I disagree or agree, but there are other ways of talking about things that aren't in the form of a dialectic.

Perhaps not if you're white, male, privileged... some who cannot savor the flavors of that position might not see it that way.

That's why I've gotten from others...

You can be a white male privileged being in academia and write essays about the potential to decolonialize thought, or a disciplinary language, but in order to enact it as praxis, to state that we simply come together to convene with our already decolonialized minds, to act as though the change has already taken place in the world, seems irresponsible. The response-ability of considering the other seems neglected in this sense, there's not an accurate appraisal of the inability of others to take up such a position due to their continued suffering under the artifacts of the modern condition. To take for example Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's idea - not his, but which he quotes from one of his anthropological forbearers - this concept of perspectives I was reading about in Cannibal Metaphysics, a proposition that we define ourselves by attempting a reversal of perspective achieved through taking up the vantage of the other and that we should recognize that we are always defining ourselves in relation. Eduardo Kohn in that How Forests Think extends this to more extreme limits, what I would call a revitalization of panpsychic stories and animistic ideas of diffuse consciousness into plants and animals, infusing the landscape with agency and a voice which lends awareness to our own oration upon the ground of "the human." The human being's understanding of human-ness arises out of relation to the puma-being, roaming the forest as a greater-than-animal but not less-than-human, simply an Other with a voice of its own. These epistemologies are outlined as a multiplicity, so that every exposure to another culture of beings (used in this loosened manner) is an opportunity to redefine our own, as opposed to solidifying an idealized structure and projecting it out upon the landscape, the quintessential colonial imperative, so that "the sun never sets over the British Empire," or the Roman, or Nazi Germany... that there is a singular empire unifying our reasonable search for transcendent truth, that our civilization rests in the shade of an ideological banner, regardless of space and time and (non-)persons and territories and the nuances of cultural difference.

I get that sense, but the exact bridge that you used to go from perspectivism to colonialism is a bit unclear to me...

Well what does it sound like for a black woman whom does not nurture a particular interest in anthropological or philosophical radicalism to hear an academically notated white man - not even to mention the topology of privilege, concerning the complex social and economic structures which we have been born into and how our local dialects define social progress or cultural progressiveness... although I would state that by being a white male you should take stock for your relative ease of access to a black woman in this country.

I wouldn't even know how to respond to that to be honest. If you want o have a conversation where we would have to agree on what all these words mean, I doubt if it would even be possible, but if you want to have a conversation where I take what you say and generalize it for the sake of our conversational flow then we can, but that's the whole thing. When you have an ideological conversation you can take a single instance, even hypothetically, one that we both don't have any personal experience with, no direct imprinting of the world, to try to evoke more of the language of relational dynamics "no world to bring it out of us," you can take a single situation and use it... say things like "this company hired more men than women and so women are less privileged in this country than men..."

I hear you, but this is not a hypothetical situation, and the question is not rhetorical, but there are real stakes at play here, founded in the daily lived reality of how this society functions, articulated through the voices of numerous individuals whom share our territory, whom exist here and now alongside us and that we both encounter every day, but secondarily - the point I was trying to make in my correlation earlier - concerning perspectivism, which I consider to be a rich opportunity to extend our awareness to an abstract Other and attempt to embody that which is beyond our comprehension in order to better observe our own interests... to entertain the notion that the forest thinks or the puma is a human and thereby expand our concept of humanity beyond our own bodies - beings that do not resemble us that share in the same pool of personhood - this seems absolutely essential.

I'm also fascinated by this idea...

So you can and should extend your awareness towards the other, not a theoretical placard of deception perpetuating an ideological agenda, but the real people whom cannot partake in the luxury of this conversation.

I'm not denying that poverty exists, or that people endure really horrible situations, that there is every possible scenario on the spectrum. It's not that I lack sympathy, for anyone or anything, especially if it's in my world...

And I'm not accusing you of any of that either...

... but that's pertaining to the language, in questioning the forms that the language takes, how it seems like it's not changing. Part of the problem in "the debate" is that there's a space for the debate. A problem with the lecture is that there's a lectern. Often I go to a lecture and observe that the problems being discussed often seem to have more to do with the proposed gathering in the first place, the dynamics of the space for that talk, and how the talk seems like it's coming out of the space as much as the space forms around it. I think that the problem is in the presumption... that just because we use the same words we are speaking the same language, in recognizing that talking is... You can't just have a president on TV because it's still TV. I can't vote by watching a TV show.

I can appreciate that, and I think you're right... like a meeting of the Princeton Institute of Advanced study to direct the flow of universal human rights, or a gathering of the intelligencia to discuss the fate of third world peoples, of specialists (risking elitism) assembling to pontificate problems and seek solutions behind closed doors, is in itself a problem which denies its own limits by not allowing outside forms, and I also think it's a problem of language, but there's a difference between us using the same words and misunderstanding each other and a situation where we are already resigned to forever be bared from understanding as long as any form of natural language forms the basis of that conversation and advocating for the creation of a new language which cannot yet be uttered, or cannot be referred to from within our doomed condition within the confines of natural language, a very confusing and complex entangling of semiotics, and as much as I want to entertain the possibility of speaking-through new modes of speaking and thinking-through a more efficient or elegant thought-form, this seems a profoundly privileged - and possibly elitist - and certainly highly specialized intellectual pursuit which bars others from access.

What is the intellectual pursuit?

The ruminations upon thinking itself, advanced philosophical reflexivity, thinking about thinking and speaking about speaking, semiotic contemplation, anthropological discursivity of the human in order to propose a personhood beyond...

I think there's a type of person that is like that, but just because we think thoughts with other thoughts doesn't equate thinking to a luxury, that you have the space and the time to do so and everyone else that doesn't make as much money is too busy making bricks or something...

Oh but I would say you're precisely wrong in that!

Even the brick maker has to think! The brick maker...

... does not have the luxury of time to rethink issues of identity or semiotic utility precisely because they are too busy making bricks.

I think it depends on the person. There's brick makers that think all they are doing is making bricks, and there's others that see that act as more than just making bricks.

Show me such a brick maker! I would argue against that idealism, although I gain no pleasure in doing so. I would refer us to Heidegger's idea of "tool-being"... a barrel maker in the countryside in rural Germany so invested in making the best possible barrel, even to the point of philosophical perfection, and this comes to define an identity. Through his tool mind he crafts a tool-being through the barrel, that through crafting an object he comes to expand the richness of his own life, to fill it with purpose through the relation of function and action, just as the barrel enters into the relations of the community and is filled with meaning through its use. There is no need for philosophy with the barrel maker, as he is sutured directly to existence through the crafting experience, lives an unquestioned fullness of being and is... generally blissed out by being filled with such purpose, by being free to exercise the will to make of himself and his surroundings. The philosopher, in observing this process of production, a voyeur on the sidelines, endures an alienation in being removed from such a process and that removal is incompatible with the making of the barrel.

I feel like that's why I feel such a direct relational kinship with practice-based orientations. Philosophy was once held to be a surplus to reality, of the thinking person removed from a relation of things, but I don't believe that's the only way to think philosophically.

This is bound to the tradition of the bourgeoisie, of the fetishization of the working class and mythological heroicism of the poor, of the starving artist, ideal subjects who are not true subjects, of the slave with purpose having a more meaningful existence than the master swimming in wine and ennui all day...

But how often do you actually run into people like that?

I believe this is what is at stake in taking responsibility for our privilege. These are rigorous academic pursuits of which you are a specialist, upholding a position of exclusive access that will not be made universally understood, in order to advocate for an incredibly specific interlocution of potential, that exists at a particular axis...

I don't feel much of a kinship with that, from my own personal experience. I find myself in situations where that could have been a possibility, but it has never been my tether to any place or time... I've always been merely passing through... I feel as distanced to that form of thinking as I do living here while not identifying as an American, not in any immediate sense of the word and it's designation of identity.

Yeah, but this is precisely the problem, that you exercise your privilege... I mean I'm not trying to put the heat on you! But I am trying to help you locate why such a thing would be problematic because you are vocalizing, through your denial to internalize this dialogue or assemble in the manner that society has come to recognize as proper in maintaining a democratic and "free" procession of exchange... is to function as a silent oppressor.

I know... I take pleasure out of continuing to create playgrounds out of those obstacles. I feel a tremendous purpose in doing that, in behaving in such a manner, in remembering that there are no presumptions but only infinite possibilities in all of our roles as peoples, whomever I'm hanging out with... there's more mystery to the ways societies grow and merge and change. I can't allow myself to fully be subsumed by that conversation, but that I must create a little piece of grit that agitates the muscles to spin a pearl that I'm always more interested in making...

... as is your privilege to do so. I would encourage you to do so. I think your project, which is to say your life project, everything that you are attempting and have and will, could be strengthened and made more relevant and accessible to some if you were to take this head on and locate yourself within it. I might even venture to say that your project puts itself at risk of being subsumed by that very colonial mind that it attempts to differentiate from... I just fear doing yourself a disservice by not "getting dirty" in these other conversations.

It's not that I uphold a position of denial. I'm only 30 years old, I barely have a grip and I'm still figuring out how to orient my being in relation to other, but I do think that I must be careful about who I talk to. I've noticed I can only talk about certain things to certain people, that certain individuals have more of an inclination to unfurl and contribute to a situation if... that different people have different inclinations, so the type of conversation I'm having with you I might not be able to have wit everyone - or anyone - else. The thing that's still developing is my ability to attenuate these differences...

....................

... no concerns for the theories of the world it seems like, but in another way like a mother of them, a harsh mother of them, and where do they come from? I've been trying to think about the relationship language has to places like that, and finding rhetoric to dissolve in granite and glacial ice, finding another kind of language there that doesn't have... I feel like a lot of problems are reflections of the environments from which they come.

I tend to think that the problems are not so bound to the place as much to the language which articulates them, that the problems and their potential solutions are contained within and transmitted by the natural languages we speak them through. I'm curious to hear you say more about what you see emerging from the granite, how the languages might abrade or dissolve, what impediments...? What languages do you bring with you that succumb to this erosion? Could we discuss that other language which you are observing - the granite tongue or glacial syntax - could we speak it now or does it only exist there? It is a language confined to that place or can we bring it back with us, and can it be assimilated into or translated into this language being abraded, so that those that have not ventured to that place may come to understand it? To go one step farther, would you say that the language of the granite or the glacier - is it of the mountain or the territory, the latitude or longitudinal coordinates, of the atmosphere where the sky meets the earth, in the poetic sense or material sense or literal sense of these terms - in whatever sense, is it in turn eroded or abraded here, by this natural language we are using to speculate it's outside? How is this place where we are now referred to then, as Oakland, as a city, a civilization? We're talking about languages, but are we also discussing urbanity? These book languages?

All wonderful tangents... I believe there's a clue in observing that the root of "question" is "quest," something I really appreciate about that word. There's a type of questioning which you are very proficient in which is satisfied with the question itself - to begin and end with questions - that brings the quest back in to the act of questioning. The requirement of the quest, of asking questions, is very exciting to think about and I can't help but feel a linkage between the life of the city dweller and their use of technology in affording the modern demand of convenience, and I can't help but feel as though the histories and fields of inquiry that the people - dead and alive - through which they wander through reveals a certain repulsion, that the dwellers repel from that field of convenience because they recognize that there is no growth there, no new abilities in that easy experience. I don't want to create - something I've been wrestling with - I don't want to dichotomize "wilderness" and "city," but there's something about the convenience of cities and the disorientation of that other place - not-city - that I find a polarity there. There seems to be a surging desire to populate city space with things influenced by the other place - which seems a more sufficient reference than "wilderness." There's something there, concerning lack of convenience and disorientation, which seems so suitable for human experience, so nourishing for the thing that we are, for the act of pontification, for the moment of philosophy, towards idea making and feeling articulation. I was having a profound experience in the John Muir Wilderness recently, encountering a boulder and seeing my friends face in it, and thinking "how is this boulder facilitating the remembering of this person, someone who has never been here before and has nothing to do with this place, what is it about this environment - something in the shape or forms - which facilitates such effluvial relational capacities?" I do think all of those questions you bring up imply the necessity of specificity, that it depends which place one goes to and spends time in, it depends on what kind of city it is.

Two things that occur to me while listening to you: how our relations to places, to worlds and worlding, shift and shiver when you make the proposition that there is something inherent to the boulder which instigates this response, where I tend to think - and tend to my thinking - as always the boulder being a being only to the extent that we may project out own being upon it. Not to steal away from the boulder any possibility of its coming into its own agency - I mean I would steal that away, but for the sake of this conversation it's not the point I think - but what facilitates the formation of this face is a projection of an identity encountered in your past experience, a re-membering taking place at the location of the form of the boulder, the boulder serving as site of your own reflexive activity, your mind forming patterns upon its textured surface where there is no coherent formalism, an illusion - I believe it's called apophenia. It's difficult to call the boulder a being as it seems to be without body, mostly uniform, only arbitrarily distinguished from the firma upon which it sits - to expand the scale is to consider the whole mountain, or the small pebble in the shoe, and are they each to be endowed with the same agency? But again, I'm not trying to debate whether the landscape has agency, but in order to define the boulder as such, to render it an object, is to contain it's entirety, at least from one perspective, within the entire field of view, to frame it within our being-oriented scaled vision. The issue seems dependent on this scale orientation, a procession of your self extending out like a plenum of experience passing from body to body, so that the face you see projected upon the body of the boulder is a relation to your own member, and the member in your memory... remembering upon a boulder, not a boulder re-mamboing. I recall a concept from American Minimalist sculpture, that the form should be no larger than the width of the makers hands, or roughly the height of the body, so that the scale of the body creates the idealized scale of formal contemplation...

Idealized for this mapping procedure that takes place...

Yeah, because larger than that extend beyond the field of view and smaller becomes to object-like...

In the case of the boulder I can see the occurrence of this mapping of body to body, but I don't think that the mapping procedure is limited to scale. Having a similar type of experience simply being in the place, there's a couple things there that might be fun mentioning. There's a word that ___ has been using, involution, and one of the definitions of this word is "being brought back to one's proper size." This word kept coming up for us in this place. Even though there were some terrifying moments of being so vulnerable and fragile in this hard glacial place, so easily lost - a quick angle change of the sun and the entire landscape shifts - then "where'd the trail go?" The proper size was so incredible for the vantage, that one has at this scale, is so powerful, to see the entire landscape in stereo without compound eyes, the vista that one can behold is as massive as the landscape, like an extended physiology that brings one to doubt the rigid constraints of their body. What seems so productive to conversations like this, in the thought infrastructure that it seems we are exuding, one doesn't talk about a thing we talk about everything in a particular way, not that there is an idea about something but rather an idea about how to be with things. This is an aspect which makes me feel like we could come to laugh at these presumptions - of politics and race or whatever - and render them irrelevant in favor of another way of feeling through the world.

Another idea that comes to mind, to take it back to our earlier conversation, is a little sound bite from Viverios de Castro which I can try to paraphrase... in turning his focus back upon his own discipline of anthropology and it's "natural language," the ethnographic agenda of speaking a description of a people which are other, be it the forest (in the case of Kohn) or a human tribe which populates it, this is the anthropological voice which he is speaking, or speaking through, or is speaking through him... so concerning the formation of a natural language which can be deemed acceptable to anthropology should also be one which is accepted by the people whom it describes. Castro qualifies this acceptance further by stating that it should not be comedic or absurd, or project any gross injustices, so that when the people of the tribe (or whatever beings are being spoken) hear back the scientists description of them they don't immediately dismiss it as non-sense or beyond their sense, they entertain it as a possible image of their identity or reflection of some semblance of being, and they don't consider it laughable, don't endure distance from their existence or the world through comedic alienation and enter into the dramaturgy (and inevitable tragedy) aroused through self-objectivization... and so - in my own interpretation - this use of language may allow for a way out of sorts, as this renaturalized language exercised through a revised ethics of consideration through speaking does not purport to describe the people so thoroughly as to steal away the possibility of their coming to know themselves... that perhaps an ethics of anthropology is keeping open a back door for those it aims to describe... so in terms of the experience you described, in observing the emergent language of a landscape, there should be an ethics involved emanating from you, or between us, emerging through the journey penetrating the wilderness or this other place as you sense it as other than you and it senses you in return, sensing and being sensed, an ethics to sense the reciprocation of sense being exchanged, and I see that originating from you as the observer, playing a role as the anthropologist fascinated by emergent languages and hallucinating them wherever you find yourself... How could we account for our ethics, our response-ability, and allow this back door for nature to have the "last word" in describing itself? This seems to me to be a release of the ineffable, a loosening of the grip upon understanding to let it float upon the breeze of poetics, an acceptable recognition of the unspeakable as both horrifying, terrible and terror-full, as inherently intertwined with sublime beauty before nature's power to create and destroy - all of which are concepts firmly rooted within the Western gaze and concerning the empirical subject, not necessarily transferrable beyond that body... and we wouldn't want it to right? We want to avoid projecting our inherited cultural terrors upon other beings.

Definitely yes. Also, there's something about the consideration that one changes... next year we will have different ideas - that change is the only constant - so through our idea-ing and thinking we incorporate these ineffable spaces out of necessity, for any idea to have a trap door and allow for new perspectives to flow in. It's not about answering but questioning, to let the questions lead us through quests of possibility.

Yes, that seems essential in practice, but I am so skeptical of the implied essences flowing through matter. It's essential to remember, to member (concepts into bodies) and re-member (the limits of our own forms) actively, which seems to be what we are attending to through this conversation, but to remain fluid also in locating and describing this essence... which seems to oscillate between our positions and those that we describe. I admit my reluctance to locate this essence in things, to animate indeterminate objects...

I feel that too.

... but also refrain from completely explaining our world away through reason alone, through the terrorizing machine of logic, to impose this mechanical sensibility upon the world - the modern mechanical metaphor no longer suits my vision or my expressive needs. So yet another model must be discovered and adopted - we need a new ontology that can't be limited by strict ontological articulation, a new anthropology that is not limited to hominids, a new way of thinking and a new way of feeling in relation to the other, a new other... to remove the concepts from their pure idealistic pedestals and root them back in the body without conceiving of this change as a diminishment of function, rather to amplify their potentials, to follow their pulsations through nerves, not just some invisible auratic discharge in the ether, in the clouds, in an abstract mind, but in the molecular motions of those atmospheres, nested within bodies which voice their own descriptions... but where the limits of this survey are located I am less sure.

There's a sense that I get in the way that we discuss these things which seems relevant. There's an element of satiation, of perhaps not being fully satisfied, an indication that dynamics are suspended within a pleasant geometry when the distribution is not totally satisfied. That trap door thing... this weird space where we're not quite sure where to go or what its filtering, what is being removed. I do get the sense that when we're older there will be something so different, an unfathomable unpredictable difference of considerations... there seems to be a joy of in this unpredictability. Considering this notion of being beyond the world we have inherited, not identifying with the solidity of its description, of the crust and then the mantel and the magma, the solidity of the simplicity of the description of the world as a "beautiful project," and then the dismembering and disfiguration of that solidity into the void free of myth as another beautiful work... there's a worldview there, in the feeling of that beautiful progression of humanity through those movements, which is as strong as the things being described, that is so helpful and useful to remember. Yes, this process is a beautiful thing, that the flora and fauna of the theories being passed around are going through these different topological stages, that there are different growths observable at various moments, and then a forest fire will come and refigure the whole project, and its not a system programmable towards harmony...

.............

It seems like people spend so much time making their ideas strong and I wonder if it's ok for ideas to have weaknesses, weak spots, if a more sustainable idea might be one that is allowed to be fragile in certain parameters of its articulation.

Yes, fragile and tentative and vulnerable, tenacious - sounds like Philip Beeseley.

He was using this word "fertility," which is intriguing... how the sensory organs or just organs in general are the most fragile moist holes into our beings, epitomizing sense by being sensitive to the world, yet it seems like their carved and carpentered by a world which is so traumatic and unpredictable and sudden.

Beeseley uses this image of sacrifice, a young child buried at a pivotal axis, an epicenter at the base of a gate, the threshold orifice of the city body, the point regulating the inside and outside of the human world, and this baby laid delicately in the earth, under the fundament of the wall - a description of architecture as the membrane between two worlds - and this sacrifice is coddling itself, using this motion with his hands to insinuate wrapping around the layers of the body, a body embracing its own being... as an image essential to his project, an incubatory coddling of a concept, a cerebral coddling perhaps... and rather than a hominid intelligence or bipedal biological body, Beeseley is more keen on articulating an amphibian nature, not so much a terrestrial fate but a body emerging from the water while remaining wet.

The human being is formed through liquid, an amniotic water-born creature... a certain sense that we are water people, considering the ration of materiality, we are more water than anything else... I love the idea that the sensory organs need to be wet.

And considering your point about the strength of one's argument, or proposing that we allow for weakness in ideas... I might reframe it within a different language. Yes, a tentative, tenacious, provisional, and vulnerable proposition, but not necessarily weak, that a reorientation to the parameters of this strength could consists of not merely filling in holes for sake of argumentation but cultivating a different quality of attention towards these holes, as portal flowing in and out, orifices, permeable membranes engaged in maintaining a porosity with the environment we are immersed within, of the material strength focusing upon the diffusion of the member, to be more like dermis, skin which expands and diffuses tension, contracts and condensates according to the environmental changes...

I wonder where the word "weak" comes from, where it comes from and where its roots are... I certainly think of it in consideration of these spaces for the unfolding of the unfathomable, for the ineffable to inhabit, which incorporates a trap door allowing for future growth, but also a trap door to step out of when the shell is no longer useful, when the shape changes and reveals cracks in the rigidity so we can step out of the way of falling debris.

I tend to not consider our arguments - yours and mine and Beeseley's - as the weak perspectives. I think of them as being much stronger, at least potentially (although we are still young as you say), in embracing amphibian formalism and recognizing the tensegrity of another architecture not limited to the squares and circles of ancient Greek idealism, but perhaps more of a rhombic, triangulated, helical curvature, flexible and sensuous in its movements, less rigid in its roots... that seems stronger to me, better equipped to sway with the oceanic currents without being beaten upon the craggy shoreline...

A frothy foam, frothing concentration of bubbles...

... a porous bone filled with fluids which can bend and flex with the tensions of the environment. Yes, so I sense a willingness for vulnerability in Beeseley and others, but I can also locate holes in these projects, which we can and should elucidate - with care and attention. I think that we must help each other in this way, that this is a greater response-ability than any other. We can aid each other in thinking-through weakness and strength, to disperse the tensions through a greater system... I'm thinking about kin, caring for others, not merely sympathy but an active attending to others with great sensitivity... one must succeed the firmness of their position in order to allow the other to come in, to give them room to speak, to share beyond our own limits... this doesn't feel abstract but sounds in fact profoundly political to me.

It comes out of John Berger's idea of tenderness as being the first act of liberty, something that perhaps we can only really begin discussing if we make it to 95yo and are still able to be squirming around. He describes the mode about tenderness towards one another as being the first step towards freedom, as it is the only social behavior which stems from choice, tenderness as being the only true choice that one can make, as an individual exercising free will proven through exercising tenderness in a world which considers such an action to be defiant.

An intention that one extends to kin.

...............

... it makes one endure a certain struggle. It asks so much of you just to go, just to be there, that hope and success become so rooted in direct experience that just making it through the night becomes a success, being able to cross a treacherous moment in the hillside becomes as successful as a political revolution, it's weird! It brings one to their proper size, of being a terrestrial human being, which in all honesty, compared to the place that we live our proper size is tiny.

But you're not out there naked and shiver. You're well stocked, well provisioned.

Ideally.

It can be rough and extend your limits but they are still limits expanded by the conveniences of civilization. I wonder where this place is... referring back to what we were discussing before, is it a physical place that you are describing now? Is the language of the granite confined to a spot? I wonder if it's a particular landscape or something on a scale of geo-history (ala Latour) or geo-politics or geo-industry (ala DeLanda) or geo-temporality or -spatiality, not opposed but juxtaposed to the human. The way that you're speaking now reminds me of naturalists describing the periphery of civilization and the necessity of escaping, going out into nature in order to attune or retune, reacquaint to the spirit, to maintain a familiarity with a natural spiritual force beyond human comprehension in order to instill a humility, a piety to a force which keeps human hubris in check, a force greater than our misguided human powers, and ultimately an exoneration of the ultimate itself, be it named nature or god or any other name, implying a giving up or giving over to pure magnitude, pure scale. But I'm not trying to call that into question, but I do question "the limit," our ability to locate the membrane separating where we are now sitting from the other place where you have ventured. My experience is not being able to go far enough, never locating that threshold, not being able to identify the ends of the civilized world or the beginning of the great undifferentiated wild. I can't go far enough to find a nature which isn't already present, also and can't escape the imprint of civilization upon my psyche.

Really? Have you tried? I can't tell if you're speaking literally. Are you saying that you physically haven't gone into a place where you feel free from the politics of humanity?

Yeah, I am saying that, and I admit that I haven't traveled as far as you have - or really far at all - but perhaps because of that I feel like I can articulate this problem, not without a certain sense of awkwardness of course, but hopefully on behalf of would-be others whom may also have difficulty locating such a boundary. I have gone quite some distance... my journeys have taken me through many countries and diverse ecologies, but still I feel as though I have never been beyond the scope of humanity. I have been off the well-trod paths, but I can't say that I've ever been truly lost - metaphorically speaking. I have lost myself here at home, but never in any such manner as I could uniquely allocate to the other place, never so thoroughly disentangled myself from the world as to discover a new one that wasn't spawn from my own imagination, not any more than a taste, a fleeting flavor which feels like a hallucination of genetic memory perhaps. No place which has disrupted my ontology in a manner more jarring that what I inflict upon myself everyday, through these walks and talks for example... No escape that felt more real, that didn't imply the inevitable return to the self that I always in the process of describing, no voice orating from without... ok, but it's not about the limits of my imagination or my arbitrarily defined being so much as the possibility of even discussing such a limit, which seems as absurd and necessary as the end which we began with.

I hear you. This is an intriguing question. Is it right to try to distill this place into a language? I don't know if it's even possible, but I do know that one can have their linguistic faculties influenced by a place, as a way to seduce others to come and experience it for themselves. I remember this story about Theodor Roosevelt wanting to speak with John Muir, back when there were few natural reserves and when the idea of a National Park was percolating under the political thoughts of that time, and John Muir said "yes you can come, but you must come alone," and there's something to that. In order to have the conversation in granite-glacial-speak you must go there and become disoriented. You can't have the safety of the people that are here to look after you. In order to get the thing that I have to offer, like John Muir was saying, is for you to come here alone.

How do you reconcile that... is it reconcilable with the world that you return to? What is the responsibility of returning to this world - the one we currently inhabit, whatever this place is? Is this even a useful question?

I think it's a great question which I can't pretend to have the answer to but one that I think of often, and is one that I use to create more questions with. Certainly optimism has something to do with it, a reconfiguration of conventional ideology, of how we ideate through relation, become affected which only becomes obvious when you come back.

I think about the venturing-into - through questing questions and following the path to the other place - the images and languages, the symbolism and the marking of paths orienting our orientations to firmament, all of this built upon a certain knowledge garnered from books, from human history or her-story or geo-stories, accumulated and packed in to all the holes made less-than-whole. I can understand the proposition of emergent potentials and intelligences or wisdoms, intuited or unspoken or unspeakable, but I find it extremely difficult to hold on to them as knowledge comprehendible and communicable to others, to be shared and instilled with cultural meaning, to reconcile my subjective experience with the inter-subjective ecology or world that we are playing in.

Yes, and I question whether that is possible, and I think it is, and once we get into our 60s we may find we are having a very different level of articulations in regards to these points. What is happening now seems to be - what we were discussing earlier - is learning not to talk about the thing but learning to talk about everything else in a very particular way, to approach and engage things differently. We can't talk about this directly, but we can influence each other to approach everything else with a different strategy, so that perhaps from a certain perspective something will pop out of the middle, as a relief pattern of contrast that emerges when we avert the gaze.

This sounds like negative theology... a theo-philosophical tradition of defining god by his absence, and this is paradoxical to the presence you are describing, maybe a parallax.

Hmm I like that word.

Yes, not just a mirroring inversion, the same thing split or doubled through reversal or illusory reflection, but an inversion of the same into itself, multiple parts which cannot be seen by looking directly but which combine to form a more cohesive whole which can never be fully contained within the field of view.

And also... it's an astronomers axiom, to look to the side of the star that is being observed because the periphery is more sensitive. Concerning parallax in relation to our attempt to vocalize this working definition of nature or wilderness - the tricky thing with parallax is that if you don't see all the steps within the procession of revolving around a celestial object, it appears to jump cut, like a coarse edit, and it becomes very difficult to figure out the continuity of relations - potentially impossible to relate one side to the other - unless you have the smooth perspectival sweep from one state to another... something about that, whatever is happening with the parallax phenomena, considering this resolution of what is being observed, seems very useful.

Maybe that could serve as a description of the irreconcilable state of the incommunicability of our subjective experience of time...? Implicating the necessity of abstraction, of diagrammatic models, and reductive processes in general, with parallax serving as a kind of reductive description of a presence of creation, of a greater (than human) meaning, of the potential of forming things from a void or making entities animate, the transmutation from mere objects to vital entities... a description of presence of the ineffable, synonymous with or a kind of parallax to negative theology, defining god by an absence. So I wonder then if this granite language should be discussed as presence, or as an absence of this ineffable experience of/with/through the other place which must be encountered first hand through solo existential experience and cannot be transmuted through language, but can only be indirectly referred to.

What other option is there? For me this makes so much sense. In order to dance with the meaning of the world we cannot talk about it directly, but we can seduce through the influence that was felt through the spinning, seduce ourselves and each other, by talking about everything else. If the person is listening they will listen not to the words but the gesture from which the words emerge, the intuition and the love and the heart, the worldview and the patience in all of its efforts that have been put in to the thinking, the doing, the active being, and the believing.

I don't disagree, and perhaps you're right that our natural language should be reoriented towards this concession of direct address, but I tend to think more and more these days that this gesture doesn't go far enough. I wonder if we can go farther without it becoming violent, without intruding upon momma bear's territory, if we can articulate presence without perpetuating colonial terror.

I think you're right. I don't mean to say that it's enough, but that it's fair enough, at the moment it's working for me at an approach to others. This image of a sheath, of the transitional object, of a child's blanket, the "bankie" as a sentient veil or externalized consciousness... I keep thinking about this as an invisibility cloak. Something I've been wrestling with through all of these grant proposals concerns keeping something safe, keeping something hidden, which bring me back to our prior point about keeping a hole for mystery, leaving a space for the ineffable, the trap door for the universe to escape our terrible definitions, which might also be a practice of restraint - to not tell everybody where the ripening blackberry bushes are, because that's a source of energy, a kind of wellspring which feeds you.

Except those that are initiated perhaps? Back to the beginning, when you were stating that we must be careful who we speak to, in a certain careful attentive manner, perhaps the parallax of Robert Irwin's dialogue of immanence or the finger raised over the lips of the Gnostic knower, keeper of the mystery, symbolically and literally discouraging the secrets from being revealed. I think this is a strategy for weeding out friends from enemies, or to be able to locate those initiated and fluent enough to understand what is being spoken indirectly, and at some point there seems to require an ontological turn, not for the sake of a PhD dissertation or an art project or a grant proposal, not for public consumption, but I am very aware of the necessity of a dialogue of immanence conducted by those representatives working at the periphery of their disciplines in working towards an ontological articulation that is not always-already obsessed with its own end through infinite regressive repetition of the trauma which instigated the separation of disciplines in the first place. A new statement of being, articulating an is--presence not merely circumnavigating this place, not a continuation of the Roman project of drawing lines around all the voids and inventing it a name - all straight roads lead to Rome - building physical and metaphysical walls which maintain the inaccessible void and perpetuate the visceral trauma of our lack of departed spirit, depriving us of the substance of the middle, fueling the modern project of alienation and all of its horrifying semiotic mechanisms. The psychoanalytic description of the inner lie spawning all the ideological canopies whose shade we will never emerge from is not only profoundly unsatisfying, but an insufficient description of our directly experienced potential of existence.

I feel that also. Since I've been working on another PhD proposal I've been ruminating over the possibility of a vocalized cosmological perspective, and I feel like I can do it, and that we're involved with something which is already akin to that, but I certainly don't feel like it's ready for the world. I feel pretty firm in believing that it won't be ready until I'm older...

Not that much older! You've come much farther than many seem willing to risk.

Maybe...? But I won't feel comfortable espousing these ideas until I'm in my 60s - the number doesn't matter, but until I have some years, some experience...

I can get behind your scale and agree that all things worth doing take time, and perhaps there is more to risk in revealing too much too soon, but in terms of a collaborative bibliography with copious notes scribbled in the margins, the creation of a clandestine forum for our own mutual advancement, some place crafted and private... I wonder about the necessity of risking dialogue and presence among peers and extending it out tenaciously to entice and seduce other kin, to grow the familial relations slowly and deliberately. To attempt the creation of such a forum, even if it's acknowledged as an already failed project...?

That seems to be going on, something similar... something intriguing emerges when we begin to constellate the dithering perspectival pivots that have taken place between us and our kin, when considered as a constellate geometry of ideation - an ideological solar system. But maybe I'm not grasping exactly what you're saying at the moment...?

I hear myself striving to put some pressure on a point that can elongate to a meridian of a collective body, not to invent a new zero, but to delineate a place between identifiable places that we can inhabit as a collective body, to locate ourselves at a center of triangulated minds - or constellated multi-mind - which doesn't belong to any one but remains always-already a dispersal of tension, like the fascia of a collectively reticulated corpus. Pouring into the center of a void still circulating, a place that can only be defined peripherally, defined as much by its absence as its vulnerable presence. I wonder about our sharing in aligned, positive, affirmative propositions, of terminology and vision, without succumbing to the influence of public displays of strength. How do we bring forth a description of being while remaining cynical towards the ontological project as an imposition of colonial empiricism, within a public forum which can support our furthered research? When and where is the praxis of our would-be philosophies? When do they become enacted, beyond the mere rhetorical?

I feel like I must mention... there's an aspect to those last remarks about empiricism where I fray, the ideas are fraying. I am not totally sure if I can hang on to that conceptually - I lose the threads of the fabric.

Can I ask what you mean by "fraying?"

Well I would have to ask you what you mean by empiricism...

Empirical knowledge are those (supposed) truth allocated from direct observation and experience, trialed and proven evidence. It's true because it has been observed to be so... which seems problematic to me, just as much or more so than proposition based in pure intuited feeling or unexamined affect. So... I exist ontologically - I am - because I have a body and I feel my senses into being what they are and all that is self-evident. You are ontologically real because I can touch you... how such statements form the world we live in...

I see. Not colonial imperialism then, but scientific empiricism.

Yes. Well, interesting how they are related also, but I meant empirical knowledge and the lineage of epistemology, knowledge of knowledge. I think about how this is at odds with speculative philosophy and more dynamic modes of thinking, encroaching upon the speculative realms of animal intelligence from Donna Hardaway, of emergent mineral intelligence from Ben Bratton, of amphibian states of mind and architecture described by Philip Beeseley. This whole sub-genre of interdisciplinary philosophy sprouting up around speculative materialism and realisms...

Donna Haraway seems like a good example. In the 70s she and a small group of likeminded people had the foresight to recognize Santa Cruz as a hub of philosophical creative energy, a wellspring of communal potential, and they bought land together as a place to write. They took a risk, a small group of initiates that banded together to form a space for their collective ongoings, and for her it was a place to write and write quickly, to write books. There's a real practice-based necessity to all this. Once you get the roof over your head, and all the economic obstacles are overcome, the risk is settled with some foresight... for them Santa Cruz clearly had the right spatio-temporal orientation, the ecology, the weather, the biodiversity - those places exist in America still, but they may imply a difficult adjustment, but it's a risk worth taking.

That's a very provocative way of tying this ontological discourse into our larger personal rumination upon the possibilities of acquiring some land, aligning the life trajectory to better facilitate the life pursuits, and it's incredibly appealing to me. I think this group you mention - well both Haraway's and our own - implies a kind of contract of engagement, to perpetuate self-conviction, and also to amplify the response-ability to the other, specifically each other, to keep one another mutually engaged, constantly be evaluating and attenuating the path through direct influence, because four or six or eight eyes are better than two! A fact of biology right? It's about conviction, to convince each other as much as we convince ourselves.

Yes. In considering my personal cosmology I resonate with that sense of conviction, to convince people of the importance of these pursuits, especially those that are closest at hand.

So now, while we are young and immersed in this perpetually transitional period with no end in sight but certainly a difference which can be anticipated and speculated, it could be an opportunity to begin practicing convincing each other of the necessity of seeking out such a place, beyond the speculative, to make it real, to visualize or manifest it, and to inhabit it, to take the risk of exploring what might take place there, how it would look and how we might go about doing it, so as the day approaches when action will become increasingly necessary - economic and social actions, writing up contracts to maintain our autonomy and security - we will have a conversation already underway (which of course has been taking place over years now), but one specifically concerning this praxis of presence, place, and purpose... and poetry!

Part of the conviction, not just to convince each other but also myself, to approach myself as an other... specifics are very convincing. Considering various biomorphic places and what they have to offer - what kind of trees, or is it prairies or mountains, and what do they have to say? A specific place with its specific qualities, specific plants and formations, specific distances to specific cities and the life which could take place at those intersections, as well as possible relational energies through collaborative projects of whomever is involved, speculating on shared sources of income and sustenance... it seems like an inevitability, but the textures and details of how it will unfold it happening right now. The specifics are unfurling now, as we discuss it and get excited and try to convince others about it, build camaraderie around the eventual transition to another texture of living. There will be a continuation of this conversation in the material world in some way, not too long from now.

The possibility of pushing beyond ones own limits, of their body or awareness or of the civilization which they are immersed in or the conceptual framework they have inherited. Can we avoid taking on the burdens of the past? Why not, why must only academia attend to them? New problems need to be articulated, but at what cost, what risk, what authenticity?

How to learn from the sensitive handling of objects and our physical surrounding. How to actively attend to ourselves and our world of things as a practice of activating attention and working beyond things? What is learned or lost, which must we gain and what could we lose, for better or for worse?

Is the Japanese culture truly more concerned with questions or is it the answer I have been looking for, concerning integration of nature and natural elements and the praxis of philosophical focus.

It's incredibly difficult to be inspired before leaving for such a meaningless job, unsatisfying labor. My own practice is opposed to this excessive cultural force in every way.

I have something in mind, unclear and not completely formed, which is both an image of what to make and how to make it and the inspiration of maintaining its incomplete and imperfect qualities. Related to Japanese culture in this way: Reiku ceramics, Bonzai trees, Shinto temples, the darning of holes in textiles and clothing, but especially the hand formed crafting of small functional objects whose beauty arises through their use more than removed aesthetic contemplation. Objects for the hand to enjoy, objects for the body - as a whole not a dislocated eye, avoiding pure gaze, like the 15 stones of a rock garden with no designer, no maker, no definite age.

How to craft without practicing cultural appropriation? How to borrow the better attributes from a tradition without taking away from its own tradition, to use it as supplement towards filling in the cracks of my own existence and context with gold paste, to acknowledge the beauty in its imperfections?

Byōbu walls: wind walls. Made of paper yet designed to redirect the wind, to tremble against the aether without falling inward. Simple lightweight frames, lattice of bamboo, inspired by the mono-material of the forest, with no metal only bamboo nails so that the side can be shaved down and squared to the other edges. Layers of paper are built up over the frame with special paper hinges which allow flexibility in both direction. These walls are more book than architecture, more of a painting than structural support, for directing the mind as much as cloaking the body, protecting awareness and increasing the sensitivity of the senses - vision upon its surface, hearing within the room. They are ear drums, resonating with the vibrations of the rooms inherent frequencies, a sound trap collecting the aural auras of all those passing through the space. When painted with image, hanging calligraphic poems, or projections of shadows and light in the room the screen absorbs, bringing into itself, but when wrapped in thin foils of gold or silver or papered with patterns of the external world, of nature or civilization, straight lines or smooth curves, the thin membranes sing back out to the environment to reflect and refract the light upon other walls.

I want to build these walls for the studio in order to study how they might absorb and reflect my being, to form a space, as marker or monument or membraneous barrier, separating what flows and forces, reflecting what energies. I want to hand craft small object in order to better understand the sensitivity of their touch, to appreciate their scale and material and what they are able to pull out of me - or allow me to extract from myself - and to observe what the difference might be. I want to find stones and plants of such exquisite natural beauty that I don't want to attend to them beyond recognizing their own character, and give them a name, and build them a pedestal, and write them poetry that will allow me to see their own ancient relations even more clearly.

It's Thursday and I feel horrible. I'm home, just finished transcribing some conversation I have with my parents last summer, which were good. I remember recording them and at the time feeling like they might not amount to anything useful, and maybe because a year has past or due more to the state of mind that I am currently in these days they seem more useful, concerning both the questions I posed as well as the significance of the responses given by my parents. They will be useful to inform the fascination with origins of being, my own being, by providing context to who they are and how they have come to answer such ambiguous aspects of existence for themselves. This transcription is the culmination of a process which has consumed all of my studio time for the last 3 weeks, compiling and writing out the ideas I have been brewing in, sewing together a personal history, an autobiographical narrative which accounts for how I have come to be here and now. This story can be read; I am actively reading it even as it is being written. After graduate school I felt like I was submerged in a dark morass, a nothingness of fluttering confusion and amorphous malaise, totally depleted after these intense yet superficial relationships formed during that time, balancing the importance of art as commodity... and for many other reasons as well which I don't need to account for here. To say the least, it took me a long time to get rediscover my determinism and I can't say that I just yet feel so completely founded upon stable substrate, yet I wonder constantly how much of this could be merely the aftershocks reverberating from this trauma endured in Chicago, whether it was self-inflicted, needlessly or necessarily and even intentionally, and what was in fact the diseased root of that blackened tooth: locating that room feels like locating the root of "me", but that in turn feels selfish, conceited. I am thinking about so many things in addition to this project, but also related to it... I just need to vomit it out a bit.

I'm thinking about Japanese screens and their division of space, the craft of the studio, of my studio and others, how I can craft here, what it is I am making here within this space, what am I to do with it, how is it divided or should be for what purpose? I have these big plywood panels with piano hinges which create rather unsturdy and unsatisfying walls - perhaps this experiment will not serve my purposes - which may proove to be more useful as a floor. Resurfacing the plywood to be walked on, what then would better serve as a wall? Curtains, screen, or other ideas, decidedly hand made. The curtain could be sewn from degenerate materials, a quilt, a tapestry, evoking the history of high and low status wall adornment, functional and aesthetic. The screens are traditionally crafted from bamboo and paper, natural materials sourced from the local environment - but I don't live in a natural environment, in fact feel quite severed from nature, and would craft screens according to (representative of) this alienation or alien resourcefulness, in house, in mind, in life. I want to use the crafting process of these items to invert the alienation, to amplify it into a strength: giving focus to weakness instigates a transformation: wabi-sabi. Another idea: what will happen in this crafted space, on the boards, against the walls. I am mapping out a time line, a spatial topography spreading out my mushy ideas like a thick film on a glass slide, yet it remains hidden, I cannot access it. Is this because I cannot reach the content, or is it physical access, touching the wall? As I read through this text I have written I hope to reverse engineer it and map its directions upon the spatial lattice drawn out upon the walls, floors, curtains... to rewrite the text - manuscript of my performed live - and apply a reductive design/motif/diagram upon it to make sense of it, because there is too much to take in all at once. It needs to be schematized, like charting the narrative turns of a novel, towards a process of semi-automating the writing of libretto - this is not the libretto, but a necessary step towards conceiving of what one could be! Currently the focus is upon the writing, so perhaps anything not conducive to this acitivty should be removed... what does that mean? What does it look like? What is the scale of efficiency? I must remember this is a transitional time, as I process many years of accumulated data which is difficult as I am also trying to keep moving forward even while looking back for clues to the direction I am heading. The result is a fluctuating mild/wild dislocation of the immediate present, a difficulty in being here as I am so involved with all the other places and times I have been and would like to propell myself towards - a recipe for disaster in my experience. A life must be lived, not merely ruminated upon, and this realization is ripping me apart sometimes, like today. Coping through this process is as essential of a component as attending to the writing, production of content, or transference into other media.

It occurs to me on a day like today when everything seems to askew that it is probably not a good idea to write, not a good idea to read, as I feel distracted, displaced, pulled towards any number of things which seem more pressing - as my mother's voice was just saying, the physical and the emotional and the spiritual must all be attended to and currently I sense a lack in one or more of these area, a feeling which I hope to sit with for awhile, so as to dissapate the anxiety and fashion it into a creative vessel. The dark moments are as essential as those that are light. I hope this exercise of speaking to myself will allow me to sit in the feeling like a warm pool, without causing destruction to my constituent parts, without being consumed by excesses. No sheer force or determinism can bring me back to equilibrium, so what is the strategy? Is it a waiting game, or some other game? Is there a practice of meditation or physical dislocation that I could perform - a desire to instigate a transition rather than sitting still. I can recognize desire disconnecting me from the writing of the opera, even though the opera itself is concerned with just this desire - at least for the moment - and the importance of analyzing its acrobatic contortions. Back to reading and books: there's so much I want to absorb yet the feeling oscilates between ecstatic inspiration feeding into my work and a sense that I am taking away from time/attention better spent in more practical ways - the same situation I have always dealt with, of course. After a series of recent conversations, it seems as though my engagement with the world of ideas is precisely the source of my alienation, yet my conflict stems from ruminating upon whether they are right or wrong, if I should be attempting to shift my perspective or challenge theirs in turn by reinforcing my own intuitions or rationality, certainly it's a negotiation of both but it's hard to feel through that, to find the time to read and expand as much as I want to, to challenge my own ideas and project while maintaing the focus to keep working on them, to attend to the past and the future - historicizing myself while determining the future. So again, I recognize the transitional nature of this process, which would benefit form a goal: to finish this stage of the development by the time we leave for our upcoming roadtrip - if I can thoroughly process the past so that I no longer feel as if its looming over me, allowing myself to hone my attention towards other spaces and time which may not be recognizable without this necessaty liberation. I would like to have a rough draft in physical form to give to my parents - this seems significant for my need for a deadline, to best take advantage of the offerings of the journey, and as a sybollic gift to pass forward to them as an access point to my mind - as well as proof readers for the editing process! Others could also read it, especially those indicated within the work. Perhaps this is the text I extend to would-be collaborators, to serve as a rubric through which a conversation may be conducted, or to represent what I may be able to offer within such a situation. Relating back to the diagrams on the plywood walls in the studio - the mapping out of my own psyche - its about locating the wholes, so that I may keep my focus steadily upon remembering what is known, deciphering where the unknown may lay, and continuously evaluating the difference between the two, informing how I will act next. It is a worthwhile goal to focus upon this text until August 18th - is it too ambitious to think I could have a rough diagram sketched out as well, on the wall, a brutalist image of what the future may hold in order to imprint upon my imagination and deram about under the open skies? After the transcription of this oration - after today - I will end the process of writing the past and beginning reading through it, editing actively, imposing more meta-level commentary upon the moldy logics and distill the emergent images into a form-language for the wall, to externalize and visualize the concept in relation to each other. While on the roadtrip with AP I will meditate upon some goals: to listen, to see, to be present with my partner, to observe the world around me and be sensitive to how it may influence my perspective, to refrain from projecting myself upon the situations in order to receive the experiences as they spontaneously occur - to remember to remember continuously that life itself is no project! The opera is not life, but is the container which attempts to capture it as it unfolds. I want to prepare to capture audio and visual - to be prepared to film situations as they arise without too much thought or interference - to be prepared to collect specimens and think about the possibilities of their presence, not of making, either myself or things. When I return I will have a few days to myself before having to get back to my job and I must make use of this time to compile the collected experiences. September will be a shit show: I'm committing myself to working long hard days to feed my bank account. I will be tired from this compulsory labor, so perhaps this will be a good time to make footnotes, to supplement my narcissistic text with readings from the outside - to be quiet and still and focused upon subject matter that is not my own. I can digest the experience of the roadtrip, read through my own text, amend the diagram on the wall, read the works of others, and prepare for the next phase: MUSIC. I will have a piano and my guitars, the text will be formed and strongly implying some directions for a libretto, if not already supplying some elements to work with. As the summer wanes and the world becomes darker I will want to bring the light into the studio - October, November, December will be a time to combine these elements in the studio, by which I mean: the text becoming performative through conversation, the music becoming performative and cohesive to the text which informs it, the wall map will begin to take on a form of notational logic which will radiate out and make more coherent the text architecture, music physics, and begin to imply possible movement trajectories and the spaces which will contain them. The wall is the image of the interference patterns emerging from the text, evoking affect through sound, represented by movements of body and vision, re-presented upon the world stage theater of the studio floor and its malleable walls. Movements will be through the space, through conversation, out the door and into the world at large - I just ordered some shoes and I will walk through the forest, through the city, through the landscape, relating to other bodies, other entities, other tracks, invisible forces relating to my active visualizations, quivering relations of being-borders, of my self and beyond. This physical place, here and now, this place I am in, this studio I am pacing around in while talking to myself outloud: this is the stage, at least initially. The screens and walls and curtains will need to be functional, to spatially delineate interiors (and exteriors) where activity may or may not be possible, to generate potentials for events (physical and psychical) to occur, to frame what is "opera" from what "is not." This reminds me.... I've been thinking about the table again, the carbon table, philosophical table, meta-form quasi-concrete fundament for relations: I want to build it as soon as possible, here, in the studio, hands-on craft work. I want to build a kitchen table to replace this shit Ikea horror we currently have, and to build it with great care and attention even though it's bound to be imperfect. In addition to being our kitchen table it will also be an essential prop - indeed, the first prop - of the first scene of the opera, for a conversation to take place, for a narrator to emerge. I want to orient the table towards functional purpose - for eating at, and it will be used - but also for conversing, converging beyond the practical, not of this world but a site for worlding-beyond. I want to populate this table with hand crafted (hand-mined/hand-minded) object, some of which have been hinted at, others which might be found, still others not yet conceived of - still held within the unknown but not totally unknowable. I will disrupt the "living" potentials of the space with clay forms, metal forms - to be more explicit: the table will be black, carbon black. I must consider the material I will make it out of, the process I will use to make it, how it will become black, through what process of alchemy or allegory; the language of the materiality of the table are so essential. There must also be some chairs, or at least two, possibly more - for our daily use of course, but also because there must be two to tango. The chairs should come in pairs, but perhaps two sit permanently upon the ground while two more can be suspended by special hook mounted to the wall, to clear the space and use them for another kind of storage function when they are not being sat in - perhaps. His and Hers. The making of the vessels, of our plates, of the functionally beautiful objects which fill the space - I think about clay drying, fired in the over? Is this possible? Can I buy clay and form it here and make functional objects within the home? ___ will certainly be of infinite help in this regard - but do I need to sign up for a ceramics class at a local community college? What of CCA, alma matter? Can the creation of our shared living space be a collaborative conversation? Can the making of the things which populate our environment serve as an interpersonal conversation? (I was reading about how the person one lives with is so significant an influence upon the person that one will become, or is currently).

___ and I had a discussion this morning concerning the clarification of an old idea: our desire to collaborate on a thing, the making of an object. I was reluctant to this, quite opposed at first, struggling to see the value for myself if I could not articulate the meaning directly, but I have now completely change my mind: I'm remembering the importance of making, how it informs our speaking, the dynamics between them and the capacity to care for these objects, and how AP can teach me through this method - take the lead so I might become more passive. We have been watching some programs about Japanese handcraft - another mode of research which seems essential, writing through the body, the practice of restraint and negative space, putting the body in formal relation to the world around.

So I'm dedicating the next 6 months to some rigorous OOFKAUU focus - with some small breaks - but towards the spring I will have to return to the academic rigors. I'm hoping that by next summer, by the time I return to EGS, I will have a new website portfolio/project with this text represented, the image/diagram/wall presented (Illustrator drawing perhaps), music recorded/performed and well documented, video footage of movement or POV or cinematic elements which can stand autonomously yet bound in supplemental relation to the OOFKAUU (without requiring excessive explanation). [The text seems to represent the voice, the potential of oration and language itself; the image depicts the emergent patterns of the material world or materialist ontology, a form-language of emulation; the music pertains to emotions/affect not necessarily bound to body/thing but evokes an invisible diffraction/diffusion through space-time, as space-time; the movement category (currently occupied by movement) directly pertains to proproception, of the body, the embodied states, specifically (but not exclusively) of the eye, beginning with the eye (since the whole project begins with the "I"), of the inside looking out; the stage is the physical attribute of space/place/area, referring back to the website presenting virtually the activities being conducted within the modeled/maquette/manifold of the studio, the physicalization of the diagrammatic space-time lattice matrix, suturing it all together. I want to have all this prepared to show/present to people by next summer - should not be too difficult considering my progress from last summer.

I must begin preparing for battle; I need to be reading constantly. I must dedicate one day a week to ravenous consumption, and EVERY day I should try to squeeze in a few hours of reading. Most days should be in the morning, with coffee and silence, to determine the conceptual directions of the day. Every day will be a walk - I must attend to the body. Weekend has been resigned to errands, but I should make better use of this time and integrate it into the productive work schedule. Sundays should be reserved to walking in nature, eating indulgent food, finding inspiration and relaxation in films, and investing some quality time with ___.

Thinking through all of this helps, but I still feel bad. Although I feel better in laying all of the plans out, I still don't feel like working. I suppose I can spend some time transcribing what I just dictated out onto the page, but it also occurs to me that I want more time to be silent and alone - these moments are increasingly rare these days, ever since returning to the USA infact. I miss the long cold silent winters of Scandinavia. Americans talk far too much for my taste. I need to remember to remember to make time for silence, for nothingness, even if I justify it by pacing circles in the studio, talking to myself outloud into a microphone. This monologue couldn't have happened outside - there are far too many distractions. I should learn this lesson and seek out the appropriate time, space, silence, and solitude while I'm writing the future elements of the opera. I feel guilty about my moments of "vegetation," like I must sneak around with it, hide it from all others, hide it from the world - this is ridiculous. This is what Fjola calls "being human" and we should all be entitled to it, all be allowed to die a slow silent death if we wish, if only to make us work even faster and more diligently when the breath normalizes and the vigor returns. I don't need to justify this, but somehow so many of my notes become oriented towards this. All of this makes me consider my "personality traits," how they could be psychologically classified, what neurosis or afflictions I may suffer by my own devices, inherited from my environment, or more subliminally endured. I should allow myself the guiltless space-time to do nothing, to become nothingness... but maybe it's unhealthy because of the mindlessness, lack of awareness, which is painful, alienating, suffering, and creates an addictive desire for the want of that self-eradication. Certainly I am human, but I do not want to classify our natural disposition to be depressive and melancholic, to define the baseline of existence as ennui, and so I wake up early, keep working, towards something more than nothing.

I am envisioning fine art prints being made from the libretto text, and the notes-of-self, and the notational poetry, and other texts. Prints made of the diagrams also. Prints on fine paper positioned in frames hung on walls. Prints on banners stretched on poles or larger frames fashioned as walls or dividers or hung on the side of buildings or scaffolding. Prints on cheap paper, various medium to large scale, wheat pasted on walls around the city. Prints on cheap paper, various small sizes, distributed as leaflets at public or semi-public events. Prints on various papers sent through the mail, to people known and unknown, addresses I already have and addresses yet to be discovered. Prints on quality paper left in quality attention zones, especially while traveling: gas stations, lavatories, posts, rocks, special places, secret zones, collection sites, demarcations of sacred space. Prints on fabric left behind to designate territories - not to claim them but to contribute towards their coming-into-identity. Prints writ large and placed in plain view. Prints made small and distributed through secret conduits of intimate relations. Prints for specific individuals. Prints for specific publications.

I am envisioning a curtain, a cloth, a textile woven of time-space-continuums. A textile collaged from collections, pieced together from disparate parts, assembled into a whole, unified through attention and process. A symbolic textile, a room, a womb, an incubator for being, a representation of the cosmos, stars and all, everything and anything and nothing. I am imagining collecting orphaned pieces of cloth and sewing them together by hand, with a machine, with adhesives, with layers of batting, to be thick and heavy, uneven, variously textured, like the surface of the moon, or the surface of the earth, or the surface of skin having endured a life of experience. Perhaps I am conjuring a series of curtains, curtains of different hues and tones, textures and surfaces, mattes and sheens. Before these curtains all will be revealed. By these curtains all will remain hidden. Behind these curtains only I will see and be seen. Outside of these curtains are infinite representations of entropy.

I've been ruminating upon our conversation ever since you left. Your voice and POV are so essential in offsetting the violent velocity potentials of my own, I need you to help me in striving for an equilibrium. I'm currently charting a course to oscillate into new territories but first want to make sure I can understand what's at stake in cartographic cinema. I hope we can connect again soon and continue massaging the messages.

I appreciate your acknowledgment of the resonant affects emerging out of our shared space. I suppose it is wise to find a natural balance between dynamic equilibriums and lines of flight bursting beyond stabilities. And more than these inertial modalities as well. I can't say that I necessarily know much or that I essentially understand anything, but I do my best to help my friends feel development and belonging. Very excited to continue the conversation! Please keep emailing text! I truly appreciate it!

You know what's very difficult with this for me... pardon because my assessment is a bit emotionally belligerent and lacks granularity...

Eastern philosophies, such as Kundalini or Buddhism , and ayahuasca cults and gnostic traditions have all been speaking about subtle bodies, higher dimensional corporeal energetic projections, awareness of the superimposition of multifarious spatiotemporal beings in a single entity-location, astral projection ...these sorts of things for thousands of years. But by the evaluatory tools ( namely logic and reason and empirical "evidence" and "objective data") of the canonical western epistemological modalities, these other modalities have been thought of as superstition or at best robust but squarely limited in the psychological. That one is having a very sophisticated but ultimately personal experience that is a projection on the world and not necessarily A truth of the world as it is.

And now through an elaborate meta-mechanism of instrumentalities and ideological frameworks something very Akin to the subtle body is revealing itself within the data set. This is claimed to be a discovery and potentially heretofore unknown.

Which is absurd to me...

It is less about this particular epistemological mode creating higher fidelity models( and more truthful) than others, and more about the increase in granularity and fine scale detail within this particular model. That the western empirical mechanistic rational scientific model and its attendant instrumentalities is modifying-magnifying itself in relation to the world.

Every epoch has its necessary mythopoetics.

This is one is ours and guides us into New possibilities out of which to be and into which we may belong

But true wisdom comes in witnessing the topographical multiplicity of the mythopoetic

Hear and see with the thousand heads of shiva.

Not just the one head of western man.

There's no need to pardon your emotions of course, I hope they can become amplified. I do hope that the 'granularity' by which I take to be synonymous with the resolution or fidelity of our collaborative thought-model may continue to be honed, and this seems precisely what is at stake here!

Yes, others have been mentioning subtle bodies interfaced through various 'subjective' experiences since before the beginning of time, but what time are we working within? The civilization that we currently inhabit continues to redefine the parameters of inquiry - of space and time and self and being - rationalizing through increased velocity/fidelity/complexity of the observation and articulation. These rational mechanisms are not absurd - quite the contrary, they attempt to articulate in order to pull out of absurdity. There's always a bias of perspective involved and it is our response-ability to wield them with care and sensitivity for the whole world is at risk. It's not that these states are being discovered, but we are becoming able to recognize them, shifting the model in relation to the reality - and what is more real anyways? Every knowledge system is tied to its own model of abstracting the cosmos. Knowledge itself is reductive, regardless of the culture, language, or myth of the seeker.

What is this truth you speak of? How does the 'bare-ing witness' of this truth (which I would offer is always already only ever defined by the individual speaker) offer a possibility of being aligned with a greater knowledge of the structure of myths? How do we account for the multiple POVs of all the shiva heads simultaneously? What media, what language, what manner of speaking or representing or modeling might be appropriate for this?

I personally believe that the fidelity of the model expands the fidelity of existence, just as the expansion of potentials through experience - through psychedelic mind flight, or fresh concepts gleaned from books, or conversations with humans or other being-entities - expands our knowledge of the world around us. We are story tellers, history is his-story they say, so how do we tell the story of telling stories which story the narrative of our reality? Is there danger in seeking the story of stories? Am I damning myself through this hubris? What about the morals of these stories... to not seek beyond our means, to not fuck with the gods, to not disrupt the natural order, to not impose a man-scale vision upon the natural world.... or what story with what moral are we referring to?

Of course there are more questions than answers and I'm more concerned with the journey and the beings encountered along the way than I am in reaching the peak of the holy mountain - an uninhabitable and uninviting geography anyways. I believe you have a powerful story to tell, and it emerges differently with every person you tell it to, but the shards and shrapnel that I gather from your explosive visions have been beautiful and helpful for my own telling, so I believe we should continue to entice them out, to weave them together, to combine the heads. To embody/ennact the POV of Shiva is to become the creator and destroyer of worlds, and certainly worlds are always crafted in collaboration, in the space between being and becoming-other. Combine the heads, combine the languages, combine the instruments, yes, but not just mythopoiesis, not just poetry, not just absurd creation or observation, but a making of sense of all this, sensing of senses, articulating the artifacts, seeing through multiple eyes.

I wanted to say something else to, something about my own bias, which I still cannot completely understand. Something about who I am actively making myself to be and in relation to what civilization, culture, mass of stories and histories that I am formed out of. You know where I'm from: a vanilla bland cracked stucco mini mall terror wiping over the southern deserts, the city of Condor, a meaningless asphalt existence littered with shimmering distraction portals, with no stories to help me recognize the plant and animal being around me, no connection to the past generations, no song emerging from any authentic inside... just concrete and alienation. Maybe people have been talking about subtle bodies shimmering in the aether since circa 9 BC but what the fuck do I care because it's all absurd - the drugs and the myths and the science and the philosophy - the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Germans and the Posthumans - where is my fundament? Or I can ask you... where is yours? What culture do you ground your visions in? For me, I am starting with nothing, with nothingness, with no-thing-ness. It all has to be built up, even the ground itself, so what do I have to believe in? This is the real question of mythopoiesis, of ontogenesis, of origins and of making-worlds and of incanting beliefs and of speaking knowledges to each other. If anything is absurd in this world certainly it is me. The question is, how do I use this to my advantage, how does it liberate me to travel where others may not be willing to venture, not for hubris in defiance of the holy heavens (inside or outside) but as a gift, as a sacrifice, out of alterity or peity, to the extent that such a state can be articulate before the mournful lack of anything greater than my own being.

Hmmmm....The initial point of departure and arrival for me is to distinguish, for myself at least, the discrepancies between granularity and fidelity and resolution. Perhaps also to discuss perspective and complexity and velocity. Obviously, this will be rendered very coarsely but at least it will be expressed passionately.

Granularity, it seems to me, has much to do with a kind of lateral and oblique perspective upon the matter at hand. A kind of "going into" something to see what orders of magnitudes it may or may not have nested within itself and how various re-presentations can be conjured through the parsing and discernment of these bits and pieces. Granular synthesis comes to mind.

Fidelity to me seems affixed to a distinctly perpendicular perspective, a kind of bird's eye view. I find it very telling that fidelity also relates to accuracy of a copy or faithfulness of a partner. These seem very telling of the kind of position fidelity has to the thing being considered. It is above it in a way. Fidelity seems to seek a total image or vision out of which to compare and contrast. 

Resolution feels in a way a combination of Fidelity and Granularity. To the extent that it seeks to determine the details of the space being considered as it relates to degrees of navigation through said space. The resolution of a microscope or the resolution of an argument. There is a kind of understanding within Resolution that navigation renders the possibility of greater or lesser detail in relation to a point of origin and the desire for the navigator to resolve/ complete their journey.

All this is very rough and ramshackle but I'm just openly ruminating here... What I kind of see woven betwixt and through these ideas is the idea of Detail. And perhaps Detail in relation to Perspective. Which, when one thinks about it, perhaps Perspective is always already packed into detail. I suppose perspective is always already packed into all of this...One of the masks of subjectivity?

It would seem that Perspective is the pivot point for determining what one is more specifically invoking. Granularity or Fidelity or Resolution. Lateral or Oblique or Perpendicular views? Comparative or hyper-local con-textual? And in this regard, Velocity seems to specify the rates of change of various densities of information in relation to a perspectival point. 

 Velocity can render a perspective with more of less resolution. Velocity can turn the granular into a blur, or conversely slow the blur down until it emits countless particles. The career of the LHC is to have high fidelity frozen frames of spacetime allowing for the teasing apart of granularities. 

Complexity has something to do with coherent interrelatedness, specifically the coherency of the  transformations of force and form within a system. The more complex a system, the more accurately in can converse with itself about itself, losslessly. 

Just thinking aloud here...

It seems as if you are stating that knowledge is both reductive and expansive. That in its careening saunter towards fidelity-granularity-resolution it opens up k/new vistas for experience. Through discerning finer and finer detail, perhaps one is opening self up to larger and larger/ subtler and subtler magnitudes of experience. And here, I would argue, is where hubris and the "devil in the details" comes to rest. We may personally or globally come to a point(maybe we already have) in which the quest for detail and organization/ orchestration of epistemologies is in fact festering rather than expanding. That the process of world model making has turned in on itself one too many times and instead of rendering a nautilus shell in the shape of Shiva' cochlea, that this process has in fact turned into an ingrown toenail. Festering can have high fidelity as well. Borges writes about this sort of thing, The Library of Babylon is one such story that comes to mind. In the game of shells, we forgot the ocean.

And this touches upon the absurdity of it all. In the quest to banish the irrational, to make sensible the sensate senseless ineffable Mystery, we have perhaps created ever more complex Rube Goldberg Machines. Silicon and symbol, glass and gargantuan mountain scale gash, optics and options, data and detritus, coppers cables and genderless concubines helming silver starships, signal transmitting autonomous machines circumnavigating the globe to facilitate pornographic flights of fancy and international warfare. Instant coffee and instant karma. Rube Goldberg machines to try and assuage the paranoia-pain of a meaningless universe and to bolster the hubris of a god given right to conquer the seven spheres.

And here is where I find a weave into the more important matter...what do you, Travis Wyche, need to feel whole? To belong? To have points of origin from which to depart and about which to spiral? I don't know my friend...I really don't know.

The place that I, ___, have found, that I have found some trust/ truth within, is my body. This is the root of the ramifying subjective. I know that this sounds obscure and non-specific but it is where the ancient stories and contemporary psychedelic mind flights have brought me. This body is obviously a divine gift and the obscure but definite feeling toned landscapes it can guide one through must not be obliterated by the more caustic vagaries of contemporary model making. Sit and be and breathe and let the questions and perspective fly through. It is a decidedly Buddhist/ Naturalist perspective but I have found a place to inhabit in it. Cuddle with the dog, kiss your girlfriend, feel the wind on your face, and enjoy the taste of your morning coffee. 

I wouldn't purport to be presenting a total perspective and I get a sense that the world is far more heterogeneous than can be supposed. In fact, it maybe a breeding ground for totalities. A fecund field of totalities rubbing against one another rendering granular perspectives betwixt their fricative surfaces. 

But what do I know man...I haven't addressed Time or Truth at all...I'm just trying to be commensurate with the love and sophistication you have brought to my life.

Yes, I also believe that to conduct such a conversation we must set out from the beginning, but I for one do not locate the origin within language. I was under the impression (like into wet clay) that we were discussing something older, preceding oration, supposedly prior to reason, before the word. In the beginning there was the word and the word was ___, that unspeakable ineffable non-entity dispersed through the ether - oceanic metaphor for the cosmos spilling over the arbitrary human shores into that which we cannot fathom, infinite depth, not to be confused with our earthen waters, which although they remain as mysterious (or more so) than the black skies beyond the atmosphere, they remain firmly anchored by force and dirt. What is coarse is the fundament itself, that upon which it all stands, that granular substrate appearing as both horizon line separating heaven from earth at the outmost expanses of vision, differentiating into discrete mountain ranges and crevices which we are able to place names upon, crumbling and eroding into boulders sitting before us - almost our own scale - which we venture to imbibe with agency as an entity or body or prospect of more-than-inert dirt, grinding down still farther than our own form can follow to humble stones we put into lines to mark our own path as geological cartography, earth mapping earth for human vision, cracking in the unforgiving sun of Ra or Surya or Helios or Inti or Huitzilopochtli (the "hummingbird on the left") or Wi (we?), Beiwe, Hors, Malakbel, or whatever name you prefer to evoke - these pebbles now fitting neatly into our hands to be carried around, polished by human touch instead of the wind of time, carved into totems and fetishes of our own imagination, gazing portals for the extrapolation of myth, sounding boards for the invention of law, currencies for the exchange of value, ornament for the altars, eyes of the icons, jewel of the crown, keeper of dreams whispering fate into our children's ears, vessel of knowledge, symbol of the entire earth itself long before we sent mechanical eyes into space, deteriorating against our minds still further until becoming too small too handle, filling up the seas with beaches for leisure, swelling up deserts with evidence of our violence, sweeping into the cracks of our old shoes to cause blisters and callouses and other agitations, blinding the horizons by great storms of its own agony against human purpose, floating weightlessly in the morning and evening light to remind us of the pollution of beauty, ground down still further to be suspended in oily pastes and spread upon flax textiles to serve as crafted human symbols of our imagination vomited upon the illuminated page - the source of illumination itself - until finally being shoveled over our heads upon dying, larger cousins being charged with marking the final resting place of our measly flesh tubes, silently watching always the absurdity of our comedies and tragedies and negligence of knowledge knolled out upon a carbon table we are foolish enough to believe we erected, with purpose.

Knowledge seems to be both reductive and expansive, and is paradoxical in this way. At what point does the epistemological corpus become ineffectual then? When is it turned in upon itself, grown back into its own dermis to interrupt its flows, to cease to be a beautiful geometrical dynamisms re/presenting (or enacting) the cosmic architecture and become a grotesque appendage of the human mutation? I would venture that this is not merely a Western detriment, but one that all humanity succumbs to. I resolutely do not believe that we were ever more pure, more attuned, integrated, aware, receptive, empathic, wise, or otherwise; on the contrary, I believe we have always already been lost within ourselves, that the Borgesian myths speak of greater truths of consciousness not merely the project of Enlightenment or Humanism, that if we can be said to "be" anything we are organisms of separation, orators of the silence, seekers of ontogenesis through mythopoiesis, if not distinct from nature then certainly the vessel through which its timbres hear themselves quivering, most articulate muscular mouth and calibrated ear for the specific frequency frame of language and meaning. I'm not interested in dominating the world, in reigning over other beings, of conducting tyranny over life or ownership over stones, but I do believe that our purpose is to ruminate upon purpose, that our poetry should serve as a process of living rather than a clear portrait of that which carries on most beautifully without our interference, and that the mystery is best revered by dancing with it. As a game, there seems to emerge a distinction between those who play within the rules and those that play with the rules. The only absurdity is the notion of "thinking too much" or "going too far," as though consciousness itself were a vice, the mind manifesting a mythology of violence against other members of mind (as though we weren't all so intertwined). This is not to say that humans do not succumb to folly and foolishness fueled by fear and fetish, but I would encourage you to distinguish between various colors of majicks, differentiate technologies of mineral intelligence from war machines of abstract colonial terror-territories, to ween out the devil from the details so we may get on with the project of combining our efforts towards mutual support, radically expansive alterity, atomic bombs of love, global communities of mushroom growers and bacteria beneficiaries to reinvigorate the immune system of the terrestrial spirits, to be an advocate for the anti-power retributions of post-industrial revolution contriving to emancipate workers from their roles and reverse the assembly lines, to return the products to the factories to be disassembled, to return the re-sources to the source and get on with the poetic act of living cleanly. What must be given up? What must be done away with? Certainly it is not reason or knowledge or science, but perhaps the meaningless signifiers which perpetuate thoughtless action and social orientations, the vices of the mind which instigate divisions between peoples and hallucinating obsessions with trying to radicalize society from within the propaganda machine - its far too strong and far too keen on integrating the revolution into its production schedule. Colonialism is a spirit residing within us all: we are all participants within master/slave dynamics and what must absolutely cease is the tyranny of hubristic id's over lesser entities in all forms. I for one am interested in laying my whole being upon the fire if it makes the signal pyre burn a little bit brighter, because my body is just one of many and not any more full of meaning, but I refuse to be a martyr, and I refrain from merely baring witness, and choose instead to attempt activity and activation at great risk, for I believe that there is no authenticity without laying everything on the line.

Now... regarding your questions directly addressing myself, for my own part, of what would be required to "feel whole" or to acquire a sense of belonging - to a place or a time, or tribe or kin, or concept or canopy - I am equally in the dark. My initial response to this question is to undermine the presumption that we all - or I specifically - must belong to any whole at all, as though this is some essential aspect of being (or being human?), that any such whole may exist beyond or besides the human abstraction which idealizes it. The longer I live the less useful such a concept appears, and the more absurd the possibility of such a feeling resounds in my silly psyche silken personage, and the more distance I gain from the holistic stories which story this reality which has always sounded so exotic to me: because it is! It is exotic, definitively, because it was not the culture I was raised in and never has been that which I have inhabited, so how could I dare appropriate the cultural milestones of others, acquired and collected through the very colonial anthropologists which I argue with here at the threshold of temperance? My reality is woven into a different pattern; although obviously dependent upon the same fibers, I am becoming cognizant of other interference patterns overlaid upon my lattice. I am no cog to any machine - in fact I despise the mechanical metaphors of ecology, cognition, and corpus, desiring to instead articulate my own gooey amphibian membranes of sense and sensation, for better or for worse, but I do live here now and do perform visible behaviors and routines within this mechanized beast of a social body, and I must take responsibility for the history I have inherited and the modes of life I choose to perform daily, for subsistence and comfort, for labor and leisure, for my privilege and responsibility in wielding it. To this extent I am precisely that which I say I am not, a walking contradiction, a rabid hypochondriac hypocrite critic of hyperspace, but I'm trying to take account of what is, and open new accounts of what could be, and push not for the sake of pushing but because the membrane needs to pop and new fluids need to be allowed to intermingle in the soup. Don't envy me and I won't envy you - although the prospect is tempting - for I do not believe this serves either of our interests, and that in fact our interests may be more aligned that you let on, and in fact the articulation of this alignment is what instigated this conversation to begin with - I believe - and this superimposition of one wise skeptic over another, and the charting of their patterns - ours, that is - seems a better fit for a beginning than any salted semiotics or rusty rhetoric could muster. Where you have ended (in your last letter) is precisely where I think we are beginning: with ourselves, in relation, through relating, by a concern with the dynamic nature of relation more than the determinism of a myth of nature beyond the wet substratum we are swimming in. Don't describe me as being at odds with the world, at least not any more or less than you, and (I would venture to state) any and every other human contemplating their own humanity, and (I would dare to speculate) any and every being-becoming writing themselves through their own onto-mythology. As I said from the beginning (which has always already taken place, for we have known each other for many years now), I need you to help me work this out, perhaps you are the only one that can in this way, and I believe the process to be cathartic to both of our beings - although only you can decide how it may or may not serve your own - and may also evolve into a rigorous and righteous model for those "others," the seeking-subjectivities of the world, to project themselves into! So let us construct it carefully, with great care and attention, with full feeling and fine fidelity, through time and other complex allegories, tracing and retracing trajectories backwards and forwards and towards other orientations as well.

It has already begun. Let this document stand as proof.

If western opera serves to articulate the transcendence of reason, an embodied praxis of the project of the Enlightenment, humanist philosophy played out through subtle layers of clandestine Masonic mysteries, then the OOFKAUU should be oriented towards describing the (not new but thoroughly revised) mythology relevant to the present, outline a gender dynamic beyond dichotomy, usurp reason from the throne and then continue dismantling the city down below its fundament, to scratch upon the bare earth to rediscover what has been lost and integrate those fibers into/with those strands gleaned from the privileged position in the private command seat of informational history. It seems like a contradictory and hypocritical project to be writing an opera, but I must remember that my beginning is already the end of this other epoch, that I am charting a course already taken, oriented towards the threshold behind which I have already glimpsed even while hesitating to describe. All of this autobiographical autopoietic autopoetic scrawl is the preamble to the more important project still to come: an exhibition of impotence, sacrilege, blasphemies, dire tragedies tuned to absurdly comedic tensions, the acute frequency axis whose crossbeam interference sends shivers through the static spine of modern civilization. Remember that the articulations of this "first act" are a description of the old world, already passed and falling away. The next act will be an articulation of the future.

The burning question: how to reconcile with the other myths, the myths of the other, stories from outside the cannon? ___'s point, the asserted need to think with the multiple heads of Shiva, to acknowledge the other worlds already worlded, the form-languages already spoken. But the problem: how to understand across these T space divides, how to stroll through the shamanic K space, how to integrate these stories into my reality and be changed by them, not merely collect, not merely observe, and absolutely not to dissect upon the operating table! The sterile surgical tableau is opposed to the earthen carbon table: the difference is in the light focus, the tools and their uses, the "logic" of organization and the diagrammatic designs of the mapping, the ergonomics of the furniture towards the body, in the construction integrity of the joinery. MrM locates the wholeness in the body, by inhabiting profound presence, beyond the concerns of the swollen eyes and festering organs of modern man.

The stories extend beyond the words, imbibed in the music tones and textures, the diffusion of optical and haptic patterns, the geometries of the stage architecture, the composure of the orator, the references to being which may not be locatable to Enlightened beings. I must compose a scenario which juxtaposes and explores this variations on enlightenment: the western reason, eastern transcendence, indigenous infusion, anthropological meta-myth. Weave the stories upon my own loom, I am the loom and the weaver.

Karl Ove Knausgård - "My Struggle" - Norwegian writer of longform (3,500 pages in numerous volumes) autofiction : using ones own life details as the fundament upon which a narrative is written. Concerns the meaningfulness of small moments and the meaninglessness of all the spaces in between. > correlated to French autofiction, American identity deconstruction, but seems to relate strongly to Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." These literary references are gargantuan. Also, Alfred Jarry's plays come to mind. I don't mean to compare my own project to these but I might keep them close in order to remember the great license I can apply over my own autobiography. Henry Miller as well (but of course)! All these absurdities of existence - all the meanings and meaninglessnesses - can be wrapped up in a container, sewn upon the end of this protruding swollen worm of words and distorted experiences, mangled and scarred, it grows like a gall upon an Oak, providing distinction through disfiguration, a slow and sophisticated death. The European model of avant-garde processions is a musty corpse of culture, asphyxiating upon its own foul fumes, intoxicated on formaldehyde and ether, blinded by staring too long in the fire, frost bitten and plagued from exposure and negligence.

As I write characters into the future, revise rumination into the past, collect notes from lectures and readings, and pontificate to-do lists for all the small points and huge masses, I wonder how I might apply a system to further process layers of associations on top. Color coding, stylization beyond italics and bold characters, intermingling fonts, radical fluctuations of scale, remember concrete poetry! and the importance of negative space! I must keep speaking forward but the the text can continue to be manipulated as I proceed: perhaps sketch possibilities through new writings and apply the learned techniques upon the rest: auto-historical-revisionism.

TOWARDS AN ENSEMBLE FOR A MULTI-STORIED SUBJECTIVITY

...Considering past details, the what-ifs, the "ors," but it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is this, whatever is being done in the moment.

What doesn't matter? It doesn't matter what we do in the past?

It doesn't matter how you think about it, how you consider yourself in the past, or situations in the past.

I would like to hear you say a bit more about why you think that is, because I tend to think that who I am in the present is defined by the being I am now who is a person defined by their past experiences and accumulated instances, in terms of memory of the self I have been, remembering how I felt in certain situations to inform what I'm feeling during this situation, or perhaps remembering through notebooks or evocative pictures or other externalizations of my mind, but the present is also defined by how we orient ourselves towards the future: who we are now is how we speak now about who we will become. Who I am now is how a style of articulation in describing who I want to be, a story that I tell, and seeking out a being beyond my description feels like chasing a mirage that can't be perceived directly, a flickering illusion that can only be glimpsed from its sides. So it's quite provocative to hear you say that the past doesn't mean anything, or that you want to not address it or attend to it. I wonder how that's possible, but mostly why you think that the past is undesirable.

Ultimately it's not completely possible. We all carry our own ideas of what the past is and how we were involved in it, how something was and what shape it makes, and that's only our individual realities and memories, captured from our own vantage points, which are completely different from everyone else's perspective no matter what scenario - the dynamics of a relationship, a trip to the lake, a vacation to New York - these are remembered by a singular point of view, your own. I don't know...

I don't know either... not to say that what you are speaking about doesn't have merit, but that it doesn't seem like we can go anywhere with it, that we are here now reveling in this idea of what it could mean to forget the past, as an opportunity to restart our individual histories or redefine ourselves, to become a new person.

Then with this concept of present, can't we constantly become different people?

I would think so! But then people re-memeber you to be a certain way, are always putting you back together in the same way, the way that they think they know you to be. People say "___ is this way."

Yeah they do.

So there's two points then, there's the story that you tell yourself about yourself, and then there's the story that other people tell about who you are, maybe even conflicting stories about who you were or strange ideas of who they perceive you to be, even in relation to a projected future. Then these stories are combining like a chorus...

... People agreeing "yeah ___ is that way!" But I wasn't! I don't feel like that person.

Hey look at this ghost tree.

Why is it so white?

It looks like it was underwater and there was a bunch of algae in its branches that dried out and became bleached in the sun.

Eww it stinks.

Look at that loner crane out there in the puddle, next to an old tire, looking at his own reflected image.

Thinking about his past.

Thinking about death. "Look at this shimmering bird in the water that looks like me but is not me because I'm here now."

A dystopic tire stuck in the mud forever.

Yeah, so these stories that people tell, they follow us around, all of them, the stories we tell and the stories that others feel inclined to tell for us or about us or even against us, and all of those stories create dissonance and confusion and tension. I think of all history... take any person from history, like Napolean to pull a random example, and how one of the first things any random person might say will concern his "little man" complex perhaps, and even though it is based in his actual physical stature being below average it's also probably a story that followed him around his whole like like a looming ominous shadow over head... "No I'm not that way, I'm this way!" ... And it's the story which may have grown into a complex which spurred his warring nature. You hear similar things about Hitler being a failed painter then instigating the war, and we're all always going to war in this way, all talking about being in love and becoming attached to someone or something or some idea, or losing an attachment and going off to war over it...

(bird squawks and flies away)

I don't think one can completely stop thinking of themselves in relation to the past, but I think that people can and do live through their past too long, or too much, re-live it more than living from it. I see them dwelling in it, what they've done and who they were.

I've been thinking a lot about the possibility of rewriting those stories. Ok, so stories of ourselves to ourselves and then others telling our stories for us - whether we like it or not - right? So how could you rewrite your own history by choosing to tell it differently, and yes, become another person? Also, the implications of me approaching you and saying "___, you remember this thing about me, but that's not the truth, because actually it happened like this..." and then to go about living in such a manner as is this story is indeed true. Doesn't this render it true in a way, at least in a literary sense, to make it believable as a kind of truth through the telling? To go around changing other individuals perspectives of you.

Seems like that's trying to prove something...

Well, can you prove that you exist? Maybe it's trying to prove that. How do you exist? When do you exist? "No, it definitely wasn't like that, remember? It was like this!" And then everyone becomes disrupted, and begins asking themselves how it really happened, and the story becomes internalized to be told a different way, at least in terms of style if not content. "Oh well if that's what you did then I don't know who you are." Yeah, you're right, you don't know who I am, so let me tell you... to the extent that one would want to reinvent themself. Speaking of which, I looked up that author you mentioned to me, Klaus Ove Knausgård... his first books were given a lot of praise which laid the seed for him writing a 35,000 word 6 volume autofictive biography of his own measly existence, struggles with his father, boring stuff.

I read a chapter. He's just drinking coffee and talking about his days listening to New Order and how he remembers being punk and how much he hates his ex-wife, so personal and dull.

I read a review in the NY Times and the critic was associating him to Proust, a "Nordic Proust" or something... "It calls attention to the unavoidable meaningfullness of all the small details and how they are swimming in an ocean of meaninglessness filling up the silence in between." Something like that. Describing it as a project on the scale of life, filthy with all the minutiae. This critic said he was interested even when he was bored.

I read that too. All the reviews made me fascinated by the book, but I'm not going to read 6 books about this guy...

Of course, because that would be incredibly tedious. Proust wrote a huge work like that, In Search of Lost Time I think it's called. It goes on and on... my sense is that it's a description of the ennui of the modern subject, the melancholia swelling up from enduring a meaningless life that hardly seems worth living, and yet persisting to live...

Finding a reason to live amidst the meaninglessness of existence...

...Or maybe not. Maybe just living and feeling like nothing has any meaning.

Then why is he writing about it?

Well, maybe to tap into that feeling of listlessness, of ennui, to make that meaningful. Proust is heralded as the creator of some of the most important work of 20th century literature, so to compare Knausgård to Proust is essentially a declaration of his importance for our contemporary condition, even if we can't currently recognize it because we lack the distance of history... writing about coffee and waxing nostalgic about punk is mundane to us but will be rubbed into a high shine by those that write the glowing reviews, a predetermination of the boring history to come I guess. I mean he's Norwegian so how punk could he really be anyways?

(laughter)

Fucking richest country in the world, maybe not then, but certainly now. Your father molests you, puts an axe to your head everyday... brutal, but still some first world Scandinavian dramaturgy.

Scandinavia is dark and they brood in some fucked up relationships with each other, for a variety of reasons, regardless of the social support extended by the government. Their whole life is so comfortable that is inverts, becomes incredibly boring, constantly stricken by the melancholy of winter or the ennui of summer, psychologically internalizing all that comfort into a rebellion against nothing, anger towards the void, a whole culture based in self-repression and angsty retaliation against the father.

A culture of lack of communication... strange.

I've been trying to think about these things in terms of narrative, story telling, how things become more boring as the approach the space and time of life itself, so much more tedious. Yet when there is more imagination, more creativity, it's faster, full of electricity, so different from life, at least from the majority of our daily existence in these strange times. So how might this translate to music? If music is the medium which most directly evokes our affect, an immersion of experience that doesn't need to have words put on it to make sense, then what emotional space do we want to be in (when we collaborate on this project)? Do we want something long and boring, closer to life, like Morton Feldman perhaps, or something more eruptive, trying to smash the mirror, to break the monotony to pieces...?

Or both? Life is often both at the same time.

Yes! So what kind of story are we going to tell and how are we going to tell it?

What kind of story do you want to tell? What is the story that needs to be conveyed in music?

I'm not so interested in drama, in staying at the level of the human, but more drawn to the comedy and tragedy, the power of myth concerning the absurdity of existence, or stories that exercise imagination to describe where we came from or the place we will inhabit when we die, gods building and destroying as allegories of humanity, how tragic and fucking dark it all is. So I guess I'm saying I'm interested in a certain level of theatricality...

How do we convey that? Are you saying you want to push that through the sound, or in a text or a score?

I think it will come through the sound and doesn't need to be spelled out, through the feeling not the words. What I don't want to do is repeat life, because if art comes down to just that then I choose just to live - no art needed. I don't need to make music, don't need to write. If experience is the priority then I can go prioritize it without needing to contain it in something else, go on a hike instead of being in the studio, go have a conversation without recording it instead of always thinking about the ideas that are being drawn forth and attempting to pin things down into projects. I want music to be something more than... to create spaces for hearing, listening to sounds that don't mimic... (birds singing in the background) don't mimic bird sounds for example. Maybe we start from birds and then make more than birds, not end on birds, but do things that birds can't do, that nature can't do, or that we wouldn't be drawn into doing otherwise... otherwise what stops us from just making field recordings, to capture what is, of everything, then playing them back... and now we're changing the speeds, making more of the experience of listening again than there was in the first listen, adjusting and manipulating the world of sounds according to another sense of attention. That's where the music begins. The recording of birds is just a document, not yet music.

Ok, so our piece, this thing we are working on together, is a story that we want to tell, and it's something can concerns us directly but doesn't repeat our lives. Where do we start? How does the composition process begin? I know you have specific ideas about what you want out of this...

Kind of, but I'm mostly interested in being open to what might come forth. Rules are important to be able to recognize what we have made, to differentiate it from everything around it, and to make it better right? To learn from what we have made and keep refining it into something better, to sharpen it, to hone the edges of the frame... so we have to build these rules. There's many ways to tell a story - as many ways as there are stories - many ways to illustrate the scene. It can be representational, presenting an image that you can superimpose yourself onto or into. "Here's a picture of a tree," and you can observe its details, what kind of tree it is, how the leaves look. If I illustrate the place you can put yourself in it, go there, with an extension of your senses through the framing device of the medium. Or I could show you an abstract picture, an image that represents nothing but is still full of content. When you try to put yourself in that place you may find that it's a more of a non-place or no-place, defined more by how it is described that what it is describing. So I would propose that the more representational our music will be the more details we must be dedicated to providing the listener, the more resolution to the image, and if we are focused on telling a more abstract story then we must remember to attend to the open spaces, to meditate on the process of offering entrance into the piece so that the listener can describe it for themselves without our concrete definition. I'm certainly interested in both of these techniques, and also in pursuing other ways which can be told through other strategies, other stories of feeling and hearing altogether. In terms of your question concerning where we can begin, it seems we could begin exploring some spaces and take account of what they are telling us, or how they are telling, through music of course. What's the difference between abstract and literal music? Between really free music and rigid or constrained music? Between conventional forms and experimental forms while working under the strain that everyone thinks everything has been done before? What's a music of reduction, boiling sounds down to their elements, a music of abstraction of space and feeling, opposed to communicating an image-idea with more clarity? Or fidelity, as I like to say...

It seems like a difference in how it's approached, how to enter into the space, an understanding of the agenda in the exploration. Being in a band is about articulating the agenda that everyone is bringing to the table, which sometimes becomes clear and aligned and sometimes doesn't.

I agree. To be more specific with the question of how to begin, perhaps we need to decide what we can do. What can we play, or how do we play? A question of technique or styles, a form-language. I mean string tunings, chord patterns, and how these structures create different feelings, what they can describe. The speed of the notes - if we associate playing to speaking or music to language we could say the speed of articulation, our ability to recall certain vocabulary and to improvise upon what is being said. When speaking there inflection, intonation, enunciation... the form of the word, what its describing, and the feeling that propels it. I don't want to get too hung up on the idea of music as language because I really think it's something else, or capable of going places where words aren't, but maybe that's a place to start then. What can we say? To do two things: to make a space to let the feeling what is said take precedence over the form or content of the words, and then specifically focus upon a vocabulary to carry our content. Those are the decisions that happen, then the performance is working out how to put them together. What to do and how to do? For my own part, I'm obsessed with the "what to do" and perhaps as a seasoned musician you could be occupied with the "how to do" - how to move the fingers, how to manipulate the strings, how to play the instrument...

Based on your direction...?

It's all "us," because you have to get me to understand the "how" as much as I must articulate clearly our "what" so that we can work through an understanding together, and that process of exchange becomes the arena for our collaboration, whatever spews forth. Eventually we will bring in other people to play with us, so we both have to be clear about what is happening so we can communicate it to them, both "how" and "what" they are responsible for, and then encourage them to move around freely in the spaces that we designate... then something really weird and amazing will happen. To be even more specific I would say that today's conversation is a good place to begin. This feeling of melancholy, of ennui. We want to make something real, on the scale of life, but is not fucking boring or monotonous or tedious, unless we can use that tedium to put more meaning into the process. When it begins to feel dead or flat, either too close to life or too unbelievable to hold meaning, through the feelings of these spaces we are exploring, well then that creates a rule so that we don't do that again. The rules are the limits, the parameters, the language that we agree upon so we can continue speaking, and language is living right, living through us by being put to use. How we're gonna begin is to try to make some rules, even if it's what it shouldn't be or what we don't want. We don't have to say why...

I think it's OK to say why, and to write it down. I think the next step is to start writing down rules and parameters, what we do and don't like, do and don't want, or what is or isn't a good idea in support of our "what" and "how" to act. I don't think we should linger too much on how we want it to sound, to see how it will sound, how it may become. That's how it's improvisation, because it can't be predicted... but I'm not interested in making purely interpretive music, translating a feeling into a music form.

This conversation is improvised, but we also make sense. We're figuring out what we're talking about by talking about it, and hopefully when the conversation is over we will have gained an understanding of many things that we didn't (necessarily) have before we began. This continues to be interesting, so long as we continue trying to figure out what we are describing and agree that we aren't just babbling nonsense at each other, right?

Setting rules around the ideas, of tonality and chord structures, is a way for us to understand what the other is saying and keep it from being an onslaught of incomprehensible noise. I like your idea of using images as a tool or a guide to feel certain ways, to instigate exchange through the vehicle of a symbol or an image.

In opera there's a relationship between the libretto and the composer, and it's always in consideration of the intended audience....

Isn't that strange?

...What's that?

That classical music is made for such a specific audience. Is it still that way? It seems like things have changed now that everyone listens to weird sounds and has access to all of these semi-automatic instruments for music making.

Of course it's still that way, even in our world. Even your post-punk band caters to an audience. How can there be music without an audience, or culture without those that participate in it? I would say that every art is made for someone, always reveals a relation, and wouldn't have any purpose if it was ejected into a void without being seen or heard. It's the sensing that gives it purpose. Even an artist that is convinced that they only make things for themself - like we were discussing earlier, that's simply the story they tell themselves which may be different than the stories which circulate around them, and all those stories together with all the tension and theatrics that ensue, that's culture. It's always for someone...

The beginning of culture... yes that's what gives it meaning, through the conveyance, the broadcasting of meaning to whoever hears it and appreciates it, gives content back to the music.

I think the music you make with NL has a lot of detail in it. I get the sense that you're crafting representations of anxiety, distilled from your individual experiences of the world. The band has a feeling and a space that you create collectively, but then individual songs seem to differentiate unique perspectives that riff upon the main theme, modulating the ingredients of the affect based on the push-pull of you all making it. I think that's a way of telling a story which is very powerful too, the power of punk music. This collaboration that we're discussing now, I don't think it should be limited to a single formula or theme - just long-form abstract spaces or something - but could be a lot of different things in both its inspiration and technique. We're not going to be too literal, but not totally improvised either, but very intentional and applied in defining the parameters of a space, concerned with the specifics of the mechanism and its articulation as we chart an emotional-psychological space through different physical spaces, the space of performance. We are going to start making these sound objects and putting them up on a shelf, accumulating them, and the project includes that shelf as well as all the objects that we put on it and all the different arrangements we can imagine ourselves and challenge ourselves to taste, everything that we can pull from our collaborative library to be put together as a process of composition. Maybe that process happens in the live performance, or by attempting to bring that energy into a recording studio, or having the components separated by playing and editing techniques, like generating a bunch of material that we can compose later. I remember an interview with John (Luther) Adams where he explained how he would record literally days worth of music by himself, or with small ensembles, and then bring them into the digital studio to weave an intricate tapestry. I can see us functioning in a similar fashion, not worrying about beginnings and ends so much as finding a space to roam around in, and when we find it figuring out how to stay in it, rubbing up against the boundaries without falling back out into the void of mundane existence, to keep it up as long as we can. Later, once we recognize it, we can go in to cut it out of the larger whole, to frame it and teach ourselves how to recognize it, and then save that as an artifact for the shelf... a little piece of sonic memory. Once we have the moment captured and can listen to it for a certain duration without having to focus on evoking it, in the car or while out for a walk, we can figure out how to start and stop from those precise points and begin to hone a technique without all the other distractions, to make it more elegant.

I think that's a good place to start.

Perhaps the playing can start with you. I thought that maybe you could attempt a sonic beginning, just yourself, and then I could listen to it, just myself, and respond to your proposed technique with an idea somehow. Then we could listen to that combined recording and evaluate what happened, and have a conversation...?

Yeah. Ok.

It could also go the other way and I could begin, but I think that beginning with you allows you to set a certain intuitive tone through your playing style that I can follow, and I enjoy thinking of you as the technical leader of the playing style. Take all the good and bad elements of your being and funnel it into an affect of action, to play through the melancholia we were discussing earlier in a direct and authentic way. I would also ask in addition to the recording that you provide me with the tuning, and any modifications to the instrument itself.

I love the idea of two guitars in non-standard tuning. That's something I haven't really explored. I've been playing with these copper picks also. They give the guitar a really interesting surreal tone.

Great. I think we could address the entire instrument, its construction as well as how we can manipulate it or redesign it as an impediment. I'm thinking about the pickups and amplifiers, objects or forms added onto the basic design, things that limit the range of motion or expand the possibilities of sound... thinking of these elements in balance opens up a strange world of imaginative directions in striving for sounds matching our inner being, or beyond our comprehension. When I was in Iceland I was trying to have a conversation with the glaciers through a highly amplified guitar, using a glass slide on my right hand to glissando notes into crackling watery sparkles... but maybe that's going too far towards the mimicry you said you wanted to avoid. I'm interested in the slide as a tool to expand the possibilities of expression, to expand the realms of the conversation.

Extended techniques for extended expressions.

There's also the realm of recording techniques... I've been thinking about boxes that fit over the amplifiers, so that different frequency ranges or volumes would vibrate the material of the box to add a kind of auto-percussive effect like shimmering cymbal sounds or sizzle to the bass response... even playing through drums or taut heads, really primitive cymatic techniques. I remember you telling me about how cool it is, at work, when there are two people in the studio sanding at the same time, how it begins to oscillate into interesting interference patterns. Something like that, but sanding through amplification! Maybe it's a part that we compose for, a section that we provide directions to put wood boxes over the amps to color the sound.

Is the main goal to record this music? To package it and release it to the world?

I'm not so interested in producing products for consumption, but I'm very motivated by the excitement of performance, and in utilizing recording as a learning tool in the crafting of the composition that will later be performed. Recording is a mode of writing, like text or any other kind of language, and it serves as a document that helps us remember our actions, to gain some distance to sort out the gems from the shit, and like any book the words should be intentionally chosen and the grammar should have a certain polish. Mostly it's for learning, to learn how to repeat what we do, understanding where it is we want to go, just as important in learning to manipulate the guitars. I want to form an ensemble that performs, live and local, wherever it is that we might be, touring it around and bringing it to some exposure to see who it attracts and where it could take us. Perhaps we both eventually stop playing to become conductors of an ensemble of 10 guitarists, leading with mixing boards to fine tune a deep sound that must be attended to with great attention.

Maybe that's too far!

Ok, well I just encourage you to get out of it what you want to get out of it, and I will try to do the same, and that tension will emerge through the music quite naturally and make it better than we can currently put words on, I'm sure. Through the compromise, it will emerge.

I want it to be intentional, not just a wash of noise.

Same. Well, I'm writing this opera, which as of right now may or may not be swirling around the perimeter of our conversation, and I just keep thinking that whatever we do I want it to be free and be an autonomous creation but will undoubtedly influence my other pursuits, heavily if it's done well. I don't know any violinists, or cellists, or contrabass players, but I know you - an incredible guitarist - and we have some history playing improvised music together, so I guess part of my motivation is to work out some ideas for string ensembles with you and other serious players. I'm looking for something orchestral and epic...

You're trying to meet other players too? To bring other's into this to form a larger group?

I want to talk about what we are doing and something serious, very formal, and certainly serious, in order to see who it attracts and how we can challenge ourselves through the various conversations. I don't have a concrete vision, just an active imagination. What do you want it to be?

I like your ideas... It doesn't need to be anything, any specific sound or genre of music. I just don't want it to be interpreted as haphazard, sloppy.

Right. Rigorous, serious, highly attuned and intentional. Very well considered and rehearsed I mean.

I would like each sonic object that we craft to be highly considered, scored, remembered over time so we can go back to those musical moments. I like the shelf idea as a collection, but one that is arranged very deliberately.

Yes, well consider that there are numerous ways of going about that. One way could be to preconceive of an idea before we play, to write it out as a score, and then learn how to play the music from that procession. A bit unnatural to me, but not impossible, in fact quite a conventional tactic I believe, although I'm sure composers are usually sitting with their instruments and taking notes while playing through a assorted bag of ideas. Another method could be to feel it out, to find it, seek it out with the instrument, and through the improvisation discover new spaces that we cannot imagine or articulate, and then once we're there to put a flag on it, to mark the territory and trace our steps through the recording document serving as a kind of map so we can get back to that peak. Both seem appropriate for our ends, and other ways also that we can strain to imagine.

If the sound is overly considered, or if the influences of other music are too present, the process can go down hill pretty quickly. It seems more important to consider how something sounds and feels in the moment that it's being made, rather than trying to pin it down to what is familiar, what has already been heard.

I also don't want to become obsessed with pure novelty, to be so interested in finding new sounds that we can't repeat what we have learned from our research. Perpetual novelty becomes subsumed my another flavor of boredom.

Foucault: don't ask me who I am and don't ask me to stay the same.

-from ___ during our walk on Saturday.

The talk with ___ seemed productive, working towards a unified vision, articulating divisions of investment, becoming more real as it is made visible through our words. I have initiated the conversation but he will begin the action - a nice trade off, two beings acting as one mind.

On Sunday - back in the redwood forest stomping grounds - the conversation with ___ is brought to new heights as we articulate the presence of oscillating simplicity/complexity, the lack of her voice, the oppression of my monologue and the necessity for her insertion of will towards crafting a more reciprocal dialogue. She maintains a reoccurring fallacy describing the naturally divided states of intuition and reason - I'm quick to break it down to a shared ground. We discuss the necessity of rigor, in thoughts and in feelings, the implications of fidelity in both thought and relationships, the move towards "thinking" to move past stagnant "philosophy," and ultimately end upon the challenging and intriguing periphery of my own known conceptions - if we can return here at a later date without her (or I) forgetting everything that built up to it, we will have truly made some powerful strides forward in the mechanics of our exchange! I outline for her how I have refrained/restrained from recording our conversations up until now, but I can clearly sense the encroaching necessity of doing so soon, beginning on our roadtrip, as she will be essential in helping me to illuminate that boundary - between our beings, separating our concept formulas from the dynamic awareness of existence, of the artifice of art and the Art of Living, the opera from the orator.

Dolar's text on the voice is prophetic: so many of my own ideas articulated for me, we anticipate each other - of course this is just in my own mind, but real nonetheless. Remember a podcast story: Japanese families going to a phonebooth in the country to talk to their deceased relatives - to talk to the dead in their own mind. Perhaps Mr. Dolar will be the saving grace of Lacanian analysis for theater/cinema/etc.

Laying in bed this morning, gray pouring in from all sides coating the walls, observing new cracks in the ceiling, the sounds of the large open space of our shared room filling up the empty spaces of my half-formed dreams. This is why it annoys me so much - the dog slurping its own genitals, the street traffic, the loud fan of the bathroom vibrating through the walls like our own private airport right next door - these sounds infect, function like pollution, stealing away the sweeter auratic resonance of my own mind. She is always cooing "mmmmm," the same sound used for pleasure and discomfort so it's impossible to distinguish save for trying to piece together the context she is currently squirming in - the dog grunting "mmmmmm," the smell of the bakery down the street "mmmmmm," the first sound in the morning and the last sound at night "mmmmmmm." I'm sure I make my own sounds but they are so thoroughly integrated into my inner soundtrack that I no longer distinguish them from the general environment and they are seldom brought to my attention from others. I enjoy bringing such things to our attention, these sounds and many others, these aspects of life and many others: attention itself seems worthy of maintaining attention upon, a slippery game which I never tire of, yet I wonder about the endurance of others in maintaining such concentration. It often seems that the world is filled with so many little things to capture and contain our awareness, all these vessels of sense/sensation/sensibility to fill with out own being, externalized paraphernalia to put upon the shelves and coffee tables, to decorate with, to show off to others as markers of cultural sophistication or anthropological history - does the desire to live in an empty space equate to a want to eradicate these relations? Perhaps, to be free of them, free of the desire.

I've been reading texts by Dolar, an incredibly validating experience providing another firm fundament to place the opera upon. A Voice and Nothing More addresses issues of mechanics and automata, of voice captured to media - tape recorders and implication into digital playback, spatial distribution of bodies in relation, of mouth and ear, opening and closing orifices, inside/outside oscillatory dynamics... highly simplified diagram of dialectical oppositions (a hole which I believe I can complicate and fill with my own ruminations - Dolar purports that these processes cannot be schematized but I beg to differ!), algebraic equations from Lacan offering specific symbolic beacons I might put into circulation (even if just as opposition to my own positive creation of new symbols), and what I believe to be a very useful orientation to Lacan's (and by extension, Freud's) topology of desire - which I must come to terms with in order to "defend" my dissertation to the academic audience of EGS. Pathagoras, the philosopher behind the curtain, the voice emerging out of the void, speaking in relation to the void, the voice as an articulation of its own void, a resonant cavity of the subject whose quiver comes to define subjectivity. Yes, I believe that more texts in this vein may serve very well to articulate my proceedings in the voice of the Other, through pastiche and appropriation, creative-conceptual-plagiarism (of course), and help me map the diffused differences between the arguments to begin injecting my own becoming-natural language. After reading, Dolar's text should be combed through and distilled into an arboreal note lattice: one possible beginning, a root system to be woven into other mycelial networks as a proceed.

All of the texts and voice memos from the last 6 years have been compiled - here, in this document - and the conversations continue to unravel. I will make it my goal today to transcribe the remaining conversation, with ___ during his recent visit and ___ from a few days ago concerning our shared orientation towards defining some spaces for music production, and use this as an opportunity to begin thinking about how and what to continue recording during the roadtrip over the next two weeks. Ideas have been building up on all fronts, concerning all things, and I'm hoping that this trip will be an opportunity to expunge much of this content - to externalize it so that it may be attended to more directly. Of course the trick here is tact and poise, to maintain attention upon attention itself even while discussing the nuances of acting intentionally and attentively. I will utilize the phone as an audio recorder inside the car - the mic has proven more than sufficient for my needs. I will also prepare the recorder for outside capture, although I'm not sure what the purpose of this audio will be as of yet... my attempts to locate interesting acoustic spaces on previous journeys has proven entirely frustrating for the presence of other humans. Even when I have found myself in particularly obscure and isolate areas I have found that the noise of traffic and distant machinery is so prevalent as to consume the desired silence of the recording, but I will bring the recorder just in case as I believe having to extend my attention towards its preparation and safe keeping will make me more attentive to the sonic spaces we will be traversing. I am also going to prepare to shoot video: concerning this point I believe I can be especially conservative with my strokes. What am I hoping to achieve here? I suppose I have in mind a representation of the void, spaces of nothing: color, texture, rock, fundament, walls and shadows: not representations, not illustrations, but raw backgrounds to serve as material to be worked with later... I catch myself thinking about the 5th installment of the prologue, which should perhaps be composed of these still dry oceans, but also anticipating video imagery for the encroaching first act. The fact is, I must begin capturing to initiate the process, and I must force myself to attend to the material I accumulate in order to begin thinking through its material concerns. The images themselves are not so important. Audio and video recorders will be present, but no books. I can and should write, although even this seems like inappropriate behavior for the situation. I will choose instead to walk and talk and touch and be with ___ and ___, to be in my body and attend to what is around me.

Desert musics. Chords clanging clear cold consonants. Nature is a series of alliterative instances which humans confuse for transcendent poetry, revealing their inherent communication problem.

Dreaming about a house that's all threshold, a smooth gradient with the surrounding landscape, extended mud room leading towards the hearth at the center, a series of wash basins.

I refrain from writing or recording the communication breakdowns - there's enough suffering in the world already, I don't need to perpetuate its mindless condition by replicating the mindlessness of others. Attend to the beauty of more elegant form-languages, through hand and mind, and prune the excesses from the arboreal taxonomy.

****

Remember to remember the insights of the roadtrip - tomorrow. Today is a day of labor, tomorrow a celebration of time.

Ruminating upon synonyms for increasing fidelity of interpersonal communication, a music of wide open spaces to be performed in very intimate settings, and a potential method of reading my own hi-(fidelity)-story to be recorded and layered over the mortal musics. Theater, tragedy, the singular orator becoming distinct from the chorus. As I read through my past I must amend it with the present and speculate upon its future, to keep the words alive through my continuous breathing through them: a strategy of condensation, like stirring a stew to become thicker, different from the initial composition of the recipe.

The journey was a success, which I can judge from my current feeling of being at ease with my situation. A catharsis that results in no perceivable change, yet the feeling of shifted fundament cannot be denied.

Where does the prologue end and the first act begin? This is really asking: when does the armchair philosophy end and the praxis begin? Always both at the same time, but not always concerning the same expanse of time: this is true time travel!

Find Ursula K LeGuins book on Utopia. Begin a list of primary texts for the bibliography. Initiate the research-based practice (pick up the tread frayed off from EGS). Create the footnotes for the prologue operations manual! An interactive reference program? How to form this into a tool for contributing for the writing project.

Thomas Metzingers analysis of first person subjectivity models. Top priority should be to collate my recently accumulated research tangents into a semblance of a whole - remember the OOFKAUU model beginning from what is known (perpetually beginning again) and moving towards the unknowable (oriented towards what is emerging directly ahead).

Begin to visually model the current research CR into diagrammatic models. Likewise, chart the procession of the prologue content. All this will serve as the lattice support upon which I may hang and rearrange my ongoing pursuits. Evoke the sculptural-material metaphor.

Get the piano tuned. It will be the foundation of the compositional energies.

Sell off all the useless stuff around the house and apply those funds towards useful gear: trusses, studio monitors, circular lighting system.

This will mark the first occasion that I have written text directly into this document, inserted my thoughts at the tail end of what has becomes a 700+ page silky beast of deathly desires, and so marks a turning point in this project, which I may not have been completely convinced was in fact a work in itself, as well as in my orientation towards my future activities. I will give myself these next two days to read through this tome, to make edits, clean it up, imagine what it might be like for another human to lay their eyes upon the words, try to anticipate their empathy and sensitivities, how they might see their mind working through my units, either by projection or direct implication. What is it that we recognize in our own voice? It always sounds different in recordings, entering back in to consciousness through the ears and bypassing the direct reverberations of the jaw bones and skull rooms. I wonder who will see themselves in this work, if they might see themselves as I have seen them, or if it will be more sides of me in turn, and infinite regress of my own facets shimmering through a crystalline interference pattern of voices and analytical gaze.

A journey took place, one which I may still be recovering from. We got out of town, escaped into the wide open world of possibilities, but never found the wild place. Lots of open highways, savory sun light, giant tumbleweeds and juicy succulents, color drenched rock faces and cool silver dew cave walls, but always there were people, evidence of hands that came before, artifacts of the human branding all the surfaces, making the whole world feel manufactured, forming all of the scenery into photographic backdrops, rendering all the natural scenes into low resolution projections of a ghostly apparition of some long dead original beauty. I feel this way every time I go out there, out looking for nature, out to the wild, coming up to the threshold that might lead beyond that which I can see and can securely know only to realize that I'm not prepared to tread there, that there's nowhere to park and we didn't pack the right bag and we simply do not have the time to venture off in that direction for who knows how long just to see if we can catch a glimpse of something which feels unfamiliar, just to see if we can get lost. Not that I'm not up for that, but it requires planning, or so it seems, if I expect to return, to go and see it and also be able to come back without enduring unnecessary discomforts - this is why I plan, to avoid excessive displeasure. The question remains, what is to be done with that information, the experience of wilding, to venture and see - what exactly? - only to go back to the save brick cave and return to the same toxic employment. No, that's not really the question, so much as a larger looming issue: how do I stay out there? How do I not come back? Is it a matter of conviction, of determinism? What would allow me - within or without - to make such a decision, to go without turning back, and is it a metaphor or a physical path to be carved out of the undifferentiated ground?

So there's that issue of the wild, of the opening of wide open space, the recalculation of subjective scale, generally what people seem to refer to as "grounding" or "being grounded," but before that condensation there was a more radical evaporation, a burning off of some built up pressures, a release that didn't come clean and simple but felt like it was ripped off, forcefully removed, like reopening a room to douse it with alcohol to kill infection festering beneath the second skin. ___ had been struggling with herself, seemingly more with her words and expression towards me than the genesis of thoughts and feelings welling up inside her, building up pressure against an invisible impediment, cracking fissure in a glass dam of her own making, and we had been swimming in it for some time. In her defense, I was also swimming in some boiling pools, stewing in my own pots while also trying not to get scalded as I dip in and out of hers, and as expected a lot of that pressure was released in the car during our trip. I anticipated it, tried to address it, pointed to its future occurrence (weeks before departing) and tried to speculate upon the struggle, thinking we could get a head start on the unraveling while still at home with space to breath on our own, but it wasn't until we poured all of our ingredients into one pot and sealed on the lid, committed to spending many days and hundreds of miles stirring the sludge, that all of the aromas of discontent began to swell to the surface. I went out there, on the road, thinking I would be recording the whole thing - to contribute to this text, no doubt - that I would bare witness to a great unfurling above and beyond but including and rooted within my own being-in-relation to my intimately entwined other, but when the time was upon me, the words were being exchanged, the reality of the experience was far too messy, too cumbersome to account for while also being immersed in, dedicated to with the necessary sensitivity. Recording as that moment - during those long difficult moments - would have been grossly inappropriate to the present as well as produced a disgusting burden upon the future, which has now become present yet again, and could not be justified. Unfortunately this means I am without a document of the events that transpired during those two weeks of roaming the deserts, but I also realize that this fact - being without record - was significant in itself. This journey was not a project, but a relationship, a recalibration of self without so much pragmatic scrutiny, and so I will leave it out there, beyond where I care to step, a place better left to fade into the shadows of memory.

I've returned, to the urban cave and this alienated life, but I've brought some morsels with me and feel sustained, for now. I will attend to this text, two days to read through it, and I wonder how I will respond to this tumultuous past. I sense that I now know where this is all going so that I can calmly lay it down, begin work on other avenues of thought and feeling, even other forms of writing which may be amended on the end of this one but will certainly be of a different flavor or texture. What comes now is the music and the movement and the stagecraft. What comes first is the completion of the fifth section of the Prologue, and the binding of this text into a physical object, and the initiation of graphic diagrams which attempt to make sense of the relation between these two ways of working. Yes, of course I will keep writing, but perhaps I can now say that I know what that amounts to, where to put those words, can delineate between what I know and where I want to continue exploring. What comes now is the proper opera, a piece of theatrical philosophy (or philosophical theater) which is played out everyday, a practice of extreme attention, compassionate self-scrutiny, conscientious model building, and a rigorous research-based practice oriented towards articulating the thesis of my PhD. What happens next is radical speculation into the abyss, from the known, of and/or for (in tribute to and in service of) the great unknowable beyond, which really is just a matter of scale, a manner of scaling, a process of returning to ones proper scale while immersed in the impossible expanse of everything and nothing circulating all around the center which is here, which is me, at least for now... until I come across some new information which allows me to locate it somewhere else.

Start a blog, or some kind of remotely updateable archive viewable by an audience. Back post everything that has ever been written. Dedicate to the daily practice of writing. Finish the book, wrap up that frame, then continue moving forward into the more definite project. The first act of the opera, the first research compilation for the PhD, the laying down of a new foundation. This was about to be a time of completion but has become or will become yet another period of transition. This will be an essential practice as I begin the next phase of music production.

On that note: remember the stillness of the music, sound frames, aural deliberations of space. Static chord structures, slowly climbing scales to Borgesian rooms nested within the corners of other rooms: Shepard tones to infinite heights. Guitar, piano, flute, voice: any instrument. Tune the chords and record the sections: composition happens on the editing table. Accumulate more instruments! Order flutes, shakers, breathing instruments. Get the meditation organ back from Chelsea.

One* - profound thinking through of the processual fabrication of dynamically shifting subjectivity models and scales of Earth magnitude. There's a richness to this substrate, finally feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel I've been squirming around in. Good leads towards a more clearly delineated unknown set of variables - undetermined. As Morton says: a necessary upgrade of certain foundational concepts.

Met with ___ yesterday. He's full of praise for me, embarrassing, but the love and admiration is completely reciprocated, which amounts to an incredibly validating experience. "I need you in my life." Many ideas put on to the table concerning many ways of living and working. I hope to exchange skills and labors with him - offered to go help him build wherever he is at the moment. I believe I would do anything to help facilitate that mans ideas, not due to charisma or manipulation, but because I sincerely believe in his existential project. Many topics: jewelry and metal work, sustainable house building, land surveying, plant and animal tending, psychopharmaceuticals, music making - an Arp 2600 that I'm incredibly excited to lay eyes and ears on it.

Before that: good walks and talks with ___ in the forest. Discussed the scaling oscillations of her own Existential decisions, to have a business or go to art school?

Order the curtains

Create a space for mind to organize

Create a space for materializing the mental matters

Collate the terminology

Agrilogistics

Thinking at Earth Magnitude

Eu-daemon

Neuroplasticity

Etc

The reason I haven't done so already: takes as much time as the reading itself! Must setup a system which can facilitate all these processes while maintaining mindful awareness of why they function: a problem of scaling, small parts to big picture. The hard problem and the very hard problem of consciousness. The Mesopotamian fields that subjectivity was spawned in. To begin: compile the reading list from the last few months - much has been accumulated! Next: chart a speculative trajectory for where it will go, based on an anticipated thesis - tentative, to be sure. Third: comb over what I've already gathered, collect buzz words and scintillating concepts, splay them open upon the operating table, put the voices (of the various authors) in dialogue with each other - and in relation to my own, to differentiate myself within the miasma of sandy particulates.

Remember to get out of the city. Make a plan and execute it, to travel, to wonder, to sit still outdoors, doesn't take so much effort to instantiate a shift in mind. Can't always be staring at the same four walls, or one! During this time, reinstate the recording flow (vox).

Earthquakes, hurricanes, ecological crisis, global scale catastrophe. Put this work (my own, concerning models of the self) in context to these global concerns.

their business, tending to their business, not tending to themselves or each other.

Idle chit chat of the mindless workers. There's nothing to think about and the silence is unbeatable, so verbal miasma ensues.

Traffic circles. Routines. "The grind" abrasions against the fundament of existence. The opposite of purposive tool being. Comments on traffic, how to do it better, play by play commentary.

Constant building, rendering, overly aestheticized structurally weak storefronts. Business is expanding, making more jobs, more excess, more traffic, more business, more waste.

"These long days make me shoppy."

I need a new job. Maybe I can write a piece of theater about that...?

"Go to an Asian country, if for nothing else just to witness how 2/3 of the worlds population is getting on."

More than anything else - beyond all the material toxicity and bastardized creative processes - I observe myself being caught in the strange cycle of social obligation. To speak. I must speak, but why? For sale of others or my own comfort? It's part of the job: maintain a conducive working environment, friendly relations, to lubricate the grinding of the destructive machine. One can't maintain such awareness - the awareness I strive for through these writings - and maintain comfort in the labors. They are not compatible. My threats to the system put my own wellbeing at risk, as I am bound up with it. Do not self sabotage! Stay covert, stay safe, stay focused. My time will come later.

Spontaneous idea:

How to continue to reap inspiration from this job? I'm here to build sets while gathering inspiration for myself. Yes, learn to build and perhaps even play with renderings - only for myself, not for business. In the end: use the finished catalogs as the stage backdrop for scenes of the opera. Scan them, photoshop out the text - even if it's fast and obvious, shoot video in front of a green screen, impose the manipulated images into the background.

Research to buy:

Curtains for 3 sides

Tripod pole support for photo paper backdrop

Lighting system - iPhone or Dex's camera

Scanner

High res screen capture software

High res pocket camera - incognito shots while at work

*remember something ___ said about stealing back time from the employer - never stop making art

Remember Dad and the Four Agreements: not so interesting when contemplated singularly, it takes on a new significance in the work place. Very useful these days.

manifestation. Thinking-actively like a dancing sprite in the "heat of the moment" then compressing through the boiling pelican of solitary thought to ultimately be tempered, beaten, brazen upon the forge of the elemental archive. The potential of my project: to decrease the distance between these points, to synchronize time amongst these mediums of communication, to inscribe directly upon the ontological tablet.

Derrida: arche-writing, "difference" (correlates to ___'s use of the term), always-already

New/old idea: full body second skin suit - continuation of new skin tones work. A white or flesh -toned suit that can have different pigments or materials smeared on, adorned by various actors playing the role of reoccurring characters. Also: chroma key green experiments with disappearing limbs, faces, floating eyes, disfigured bodies, esthetic doubles. I need green screen positive and negative elements to superimpose all the layers upon/over/under each other: the next era of my collage practice!! Moving video stills of the expanded phenomenological field.

Researching sound studio variables: reference monitors, microphones appropriate for piano recording experiments, and sound dampening curtains. Curtains: how should they be constructed: purchase expensive items ready to install or fabricate from scratch - is it worth the time? I'm thinking about the backdrop, relations to painting emerge, issues of landscape and visual texture grounds, surface treatments, material concerns of the painter. A flat matte ground erases context, a colored surface would allow other worlds to be warped back in : visual issues. It must also be functional in other capacities: temperature and acoustic regulation of the space to make it functional for audio/video work in the winter - these aspects seem to take precedence. Putting money into the physical acoustics of the room will be more beneficial than any singular component- long term and justified.

Considering the roles of actor-friends for voice overs, movement instructions, video-based games and experiments in selfies, etc. Who would be willing to participate? What can I offer them in exchange? It must begin with myself, and ___, and dog - keep it all in house until there's a concrete product to show other would-be collaborators. The same goes for music-based experiments.

Music composition strategies: divided by instrumentation and formal usage. Review the notes and compose with intention, not sporadic improvisation: charting flows through frames - movement confined to particular scales, "doom sting" meta chords and action/event sounds to use for visual emphasis, other arrays of subtle affect contexts, melody-logics for individual characters - (what's the technical term for this?) Peter and the Wolf-esque.

Voice: reading monologues of text through Jupiter III & Max patches - analog and digital modulations of the narrative - not automatic, but sculpted, carved from the block of marble following the curvatures of its grain, attentively with great care.

Physical object collage experiments: autopietic amalgamate. Sketches for physical sculpture collab with ___.

Stop making plans - immediately - to begin folding the wrinkles back into themselves.