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.

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