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

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.

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