A blizzard swooped in and now the world is wrapped in a white whirling void. I find so much comfort in this level of isolation, such supreme focus, especially concerning my interests in essences and subjectivity. I just finished Schizoanalytic Cartographies by Felix Guattari, a work of technical brilliance by a true luminary of his own time. The text serves as a kind of schematic for consciousness constructed from the remnants of a salvaged modern linguistic system and oriented towards articulating a more useful understanding of the quantum scaling of the mind, in a nutshell. It's literally strewn with diagrams and algorithms, demarcating territories of incorporeal bodies that would make any Surrealist shudder in their boots, drawing out the miniscule modalities of subjectivity in an excruciating detail that boggles the mind and quivers the corpus. In short, I believe Guattari has articulated a system that leads "out" of our contemporary malaise - the so called 'postmodern condition' debilitating the creative milieu - a text that serves up a description of a threshold. It's up to the reader to pass through to the other dimension. The book was rigorous on my cerebral framework as well as my mental meat, which is to say that I felt its content viscerally, felt it working on me and through me with a palpable affect, like a virus I could not help myself from assimilating into my own cellular architecture. All contents of the text aside, I believe there is something in the mode of transmission, I don't know what exactly, an elegant combinatorics of syntax and vocabulary and scientific metaphor that propelled the conversation through my apprehensive barriers like neutrinos passing through the earth. There's something significant to this, again not so much in the content as in the context, the form, that is so very much related to the plight of the artist and so irreconcilable with the musings of so many weak willed contemporary philosophers, serving as validation and provocation for the work we have cut out for us. The world is in dire need for visionaries emphasizing wisdom over knowledge - I believe - machines dismantling their own components, architectures built upon a foundation of pure sensual desire for space, an infectious art free of the humdrum doldrums of the mundane, beyond the banal, more than mere progress without the delusions of prophecy. I have often been caught up in my own reverie of what such an art form might be like but more recently I have been tempering my awareness towards developing a methodology of achieving such a state, testing the tools in social arenas, even flexing my more-real-than-real relationships (such as with my parents) by attempting to 'practice what I preach' minus the soapbox. As you can guess, it's been a process of varying successes and failures, but what's interesting is that I can scarcely delineate between the two, as each successive action seems to strive for increasing autonomy in response, and sometimes what is needed is a powerful failure to recalibrate the horrors of stifling successes.

I recently spent three months in the deserts of New Mexico - just before coming to Norway - to live with my parents and initiate a new project, a kind of meditation on 'origins,' my own as well as in a more anthropological sense. As part of this process I dedicated myself to the task of combing through my notebooks, all of them, dating back to circa 2000. Once I got beyond the early diaristic embarrassments and entered into the chapters of college life I began to remember so many universe-expanding tributaries feeding into my current cerebral current, and of course your influence became palpable again. I remembered that cosmological timeline you wrapped around the walls of the Julius Caesar gallery, how succinctly is summarized a stream of transcendental mindflight while remaining irreconcilably incomplete due to the sheer scope of the endeavor. I wish that I had a print of it for my wall. I've begun my own cosmological outline, which I refer to as my 'opera' as I am attempting to carryout my discourse through an orchestration of numerous mediums put into relation to each other even as they are oriented towards elucidating the bedrock of relations themselves, of the self to the self and other selves, and I suppose of alterity in general. It began as a series of drawings, or diagrams I suppose, which attempted to outline a methodology for thinking-through the process of thinking, which then became a kind of notation for acting in other media, which in turn then needed to be mapped in relation to the primary process to form a kind of meta-order "process of processing" or just "process-ing" and is now expanding into a cosmology all its own. I'm currently composing music, editing video, writing a libretto, and delineating new subjects for the diagrams by articulating, enacting, and cross-correlating a methodology of applied awareness. Perhaps that seems vague or abstract, but I suppose the detail can be found in the mechanics of the method and the concreteness observed in the presence of the works... the art must speak for itself, eh? I'll send you a teaser once I have one prepared.

Speaking of which, I must now return to my composing. It has been a bit of a struggle to articulate my post-studio practice since emerging from grad school. There have been years where it felt as though I produced very little since my activity was not evident in images or objects, but now looking back, especially with the revitalized perspective gleaned from my notebooks, I can see that it was all accumulating towards articulating this trajectory. I've become more interested in experiences than ephemera, the proposition that philosophy is an articulation of a life being lived rather than a theoretical proposition of how we might become anything other than ourselves, and my practice has been forced to accommodate for this need. It stills seems very precarious at times, so delicate that it could easily be blown away with a careless breath, so nuanced as so be rendered utterly invisible unless observed through a calibrated gaze. I suppose that's why I find it so alluring.

I think of you and your researches often. I wonder if you are working and how it is progressing, and if you are still enjoying teaching, and what you would say about the attitudes and orientations of the younger generation of artists you observe filing through your institution. I wonder if you have joined an occult order or are conducting clandestine ceremonies by either moonlight or the illumination of public gaze, or how you would feel about the influx of shamanistic practices in the contemporary art world, all these whispers (and sometimes shoutings) about Ayahuasca and vision quests and ego dissolution and magic.