I received your last message while sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in the small Swiss village of Saas Fee, high in the mountains. The structure is modern but its exterior emulates the quaint aged wood cabin façades of the traditional architecture of the region, a simulation of itself in plainview. This is a ski town - apparently - and all of the local commerce is glowing with brightly colored technical backpacks, ultra lightweight rock climbing ropes, or else laminated posters of majestic goat spirits standing precariously on the glacial peaks, small jars of mountain berry jam, chocolates pressed into the form of bearded hermits and the traditional long Swiss horn-thing, and other oddities to fill the bags of tourists - mostly Germans & Australians for some reason. I've been living here since the beginning of June, attending my first session of what will be a four year phD program in "Literary, Musical, and Visual Thought," but so far the students seem more interested in debating the neuroses of Hegel and the French post-structuralist transmutations of Heideggerian mythopoiesis, much to my chagrin. I slowly felt out a space for myself, on the edge of course, claiming a territory of body and attention to retain a high degree of mystery and autonomy without coming across as arrogantly superior or merely contrarian - hopefully. Of course I'm inhabiting the periphery, some delicate triangulated dialogue of negative theology, infinite philosophical regress, and rigorous artistic hallucinations made real by sheer sweat and tears.

I think of the LungA school often, and Seydisfjordur, and you good ol' boys (and powerful women) out there fortifying the brink of human civilization against the rising tides of indifference, toxic abstraction, neoliberal nausea - and it always makes me smile. I truly appreciate what you have built for yourselves and continue to reference your projects as a base model of what is possible - to myself, for my own sanity - as well as maintain a rumination in the present of the dialogues I was fortunate enough to participate in out on the fjord. I continue to fantasize about project proposals or grant applications that could afford me to live out there in the wilds of the earth for an extended period again, but for the time being I suppose I will have to live vicariously through your oral ricochets and flickering screen images.

I've been chiseling at this form, gently handling a material deserving of great care and patience, but also insinuating a violence, a force seemingly inherited, genetically derived, or else emerging from within the clay, a language articulating an ancient tool syntax, like slicing meat off of the rock in order to train it into a better arrowhead. This opera - of and for, beginning from the known while moving towards the unknowable, as a making (poiesis) through effacing (praxis) the change as though it has already occurred, towards the articulation of multiple overlaid universes or a greater enframing multiverse quivering against our human squirming over its description - it's coming together. This unfurling process of resonant awareness is laying out a beautiful tapestry of considerations, and it always already makes me remember you and the conversations we had, and anticipate those that are still to come, concerning being and determinism emerging amidst the swirling chaos of a world in crises. Again and again a concept or idea will arise out of the miasma and present itself before my vision and I will hold on to it and think to myself smiling that "this is exactly the kind of strange paradoxical form-language that I should write to ___, as a potlach, and to trick him into keeping the conversation going." But then another arises, and then another, and before long all of the slippery amphibian concepts slip and slide back into the quivering inspirational aether so that when I finally sit down to write you a letter all I can recall is generalities. Yes, but isn't this the real joke of life, that the more we work towards unraveling its complexity the deeper we are subsumed within its swirling morass and at the end of the day its only ever up to us to decide if we will drown in colorless matmos or golden syrup.

I'm supposed to be articulating a thesis, building a bibliography, collecting primary and secondary and tertiary sources to build a critically-theoretical house for my project to inhabit. The proposition to sit still and write 100,000 words concerning the paradoxical labyrinth of existential logic-forms seems a nightmarish predicament - I refuse to attempt it, not because I don't believe it possible, but certainly because I don't believe the process of writing in this way will serve anyone - myself or my kin. Instead I will try to write through letters, by exchange and correspondence, with sharpened arrowheads within and beyond the threshold of this school, a way of writing always in relation to another, a grounding of the voice in a body which is my own at least to the extent that I can recognize it. I would like to direct some of these letters to you because I know you will receive them kindly, entertain their weight without taking it on as your own burden, revel in the ecstasy of the existential angst without losing that soft smirk which gently reminds me that the situation is perhaps more a matter of strategy in distribution of tensions through an empathetic ecology that a taking-on of the invisible spirits of the infernally suffering past - without diminishing the seriousness of the project. I would also like to come visit you, to work out some form-languages through dance, around the fire, under the earth roof of the sweat lodge, on the shoreline where the earth becomes indistinguishable from the sea consuming it, with testicals in the ice flows and eyes turned towards the cardinal directions swirling down through coriolis perturbations feeling out the equilibrium inherent within entropy sung by gravity brought down from the hills on the back of the river grinding its own meridians through the continuous negotiations with the gray-purple earth. Believe me, I'm keeping you in mind and directing my path towards your front door, and when the time comes we will drink to the savoring of its curvatures and laugh at our own limited perceptions in being able to consider it anything other than always-already past or pure anticipation for the overflowing into the next sip, relax in its flicker, and tell stories through the phantasmagoric miasma projected onto the walls of the ol' ship house.

But for now it's Heidegger! He describes the poet as the center of the universe (a coarse reading, but not inaccurate). The poet sings the song of the river emerging through the fundamental attunement of a quivering earth, always-already yearning for the loss of the gods emanating from the poets' own mourning of the lack of meaning instigated by an eternal flux, locked in a state of ecstasy and sadness, "full of merit, yet poetically man dwells on the earth," always striving to work towards meaningful productions while always the head rears upwards to launch our ontological arrows into the heavens upon the eternal gold bow built from the oscillatory tension of time and the rhythmic structure of language. Mythopoieses! Speaking as a worlding, an activated process of speaking poetry through the coursing river flows of a deeply nested within. What beauty and what nonsense! I hope to become just as ridiculous and well received in my old age, although I will certainly avoid joining the National Socialist party in attempting to become spiritual advisor to the masses.

Dear ___, I wish I could write you something more concrete, but I take comfort in our mutual understanding that gift-giving creates an economy of debt that perhaps could be side-stepped by choosing ritualized sacrifice instead. So here is my potlach. Trust that I don't expect anything in return, and desire only to lay down as much of myself as might be possible while always-already wondering if such a project should be ever attempted - Heidegger on the biography of the philosopher: "he lives, he thinks, he dies" - to feel closer to that vibratory fundamental attunement (the working model for now) and continue to pluck the melodic strings of friendship heterodyning over the ocean, through the mountain, into the calcium flows of bone frame and salt water senses. May these words find you living well and contented. Keep the fire lit.