displacement of meaning from spoken to written forms. Every language evokes unique affect, has a usage it is best suited for, rooted in the histories of its speakers. How does language reveal an identity unfolding, becoming, as a process of articulation more than materializations of purpose? D and I will write in Arabic and consider translations on every level.

The content will be of darkness, of a Buddhist nature, the center always being filled never depleted. How to depict this core of being while evading direct description? Zen arts of mindfulness, ephemerality, process, growth. D on a loom, textiles and weaving as a metaphor? The language is a transpirational mechanism, the power of spells = mystical transformations, transmutation of matter, transmigration of souls. Darkness = increasing blackness (color), less substance with increasing density. Arabic language is of fire, breath, hot dry air, arid deserts and swirling tongues, Sufi twirls, curled robes over bodies, hidden, obscured, undefined.

How to build an instrument that produces textures (not just clear tones, but diffuse surfaces) upon which this curvilinear language can be written, spoken, supported? Musical instrument as the clock of time, metronome of the soul, springboard of the mind: bells in a monastery, brooks sweeping up the ashram, reverberant spaces for collective meditation or very dry tight constructed spaces incubating the domestic meditator cutting off from the world. A tension between inside and outside. Small instruments of objects amplified to image cosmic models, like tiles on the walls of the temple, each a schematic for a corner of the universe. Instruments of breath, air, heat = horns, reeds (throat), friction on stone, aeolian harps playing the breeze through windows, fans of stiff textiles (no motorized sounds!), the amplified rustling of heavy desert robes muffling voices underneath lost in a sand storm, sand blasting ancient stone architectures, sand spilling in tubes = Alison Knowles bean shakers.

What of identity? Where does our innate authenticity sprout from? Always already an eternal return to nowhere, or perhaps always a becoming of what we are (or are meant to be)? There is a void inside and outside that we each must be careful not to fall into. Can we appropriate our own culture? Is it possible to imagine (let alone craft) a new culture? How many people does it take to articulate a new identity? Taking care with words: a mantra: "Thinking and speaking are powerfully predictive actions." Darkness of the self-other, Phoenix rising from the ashes. Life of the fire in the embers glowing from within. The self is evasive and requires a poetic language to access.