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 or A Lover's Discourse, 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) 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!