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...