sympathetic understanding with children. I can see it for myself, also get her to admit it. (Makes me wonder about the line of reflection I serve for her, how much to be her mirror before becoming a neurotic voice perpetuating anxiety - my worst fear). Children are described as pure, "unadulterated," innocent, powerful in their innocence: what ___ sees as positive attributes I interpret as ontological weaknesses: lack of experience, dim flickering consciousness prone to the vices of the adults around them, selfish egos seeking continuous self-pleasure without a concept of desire/seduction/satisfaction/restraint = all the virtues of a mature reasonable intellect. I want to see & appreciate her side though, observe & internalize the power/potential of naïveté, to develop a more sophisticated "tolerance" of children while also becoming more determined in my presence with them... opens up a strange territory of considerations around the parents protectiveness, social responsibilities & collective child rearing, education as an institution, my role as (would-be) educator (only for willing & attentive minds), etc. I observe myself being too hard on Dex, not accepting enough, not loving enough of her difference from me: divides the intellectual repulsion from the emotional/physical attraction, but really it should be a continuous cycle, not letting the acceleration on one pole influence the slowing/friction on another. Would I really want a relationship with an intellectual anyways? Dex's strength is in the hand-mind, she is still developing the complexity of her articulations of that knowledge, & I must remember to continuously support her creative growth.

Zizek 'Disparities': Object Oriented Ontology as a model for (aspects of) the OOKFAUU, specifically the treatment of sculpture-props, ontological objects, plants, instrumentation of the ensemble, but also "child" subjects rearticulated as autonomous non-subject objects, the social hierarchy of animals (domestic, feral, wild, etc). "$" as a non-subject, presence of absence, a wholeness defined by incorporation of its lack. The "unknown unknowns" of (Hegel? Heidegger?) & the legacy of dialectical materialism in the wake of 19th century German thought. So many variations of absence, lack, other-ing, non-, inverse, parallax: "disparities" between things/materials = between, in, of, through: everything "riddled with holes". Zizek choices quantum physics as an empirical-scientific foundation over biology, ecology, epigenetics: accounts for the void as a presence, a theory of materialism across the dynamics of scale, free of the social hierarchical flux of competitive species...? (Some review of these concepts will be necessary).

New definitions, provisional & radical, of subjectivity, selves in relation or as autonomous objects, through material & abstract definitions of their composition rooted in the history of dialectical materialism & phenomenology. Grist for the mill: writing the libretto. Take notes of this reading of the text to funnel into scenarios of character interaction, narrator monologue, etc. The concept of "renormalization" to make Hegel coherent to a wider audience strips away his madness, loses content of his speculative philosophy by stripping away the important excess, presence denoting absence. The OOFKAUU libretto will oscillate these motivations, to make clear & to remain "mad".

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