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.