A conversation about love. A conversation about conversation, trying to get to the root of defining love. We came into an agreement, a consensus, that love is a kind of consensus itself existing between two individuals, or shall be for us, that we will agree to be self-interested and self-invested in our own growth as well as the growth of the other. This seems to be the contract of love if there is one, although love is more than a contractual engagement. We discussed its feelings, resonations and vibration in and out of the body, love as an idea, a word, a living entity through usage, as a concept explaining the space between entities, an activation of use-potential, of the potentials of growth of the individual. We reached a consensus in support of growth, agreeing that our partnership, our love arrangement, will be based on challenging the other to grow and articulate themselves more acutely. From this conversation there emerged some interesting aspects concerning the masculine and feminine - the need for ___ to take on a role, of herself, to take on the responsibility of her own being - as a woman, as representative of women, as a feminine self requiring care and definition in regards to a unique experience of time and space so that we can take equal part in defining it and sharing in it. The love territory in the middle, between us, underneath both of us, and we not occupying as opposing factions but mirrored walls, surfaces of the same room, a singular space we are coming together in defining. The definition of love requires a delineation of time - a process conducted - and a space sprawling out actively before us, in relation to we as individuals relating to each other. This conversation was useful as a tool which we can now continue to reference as we progress forward in our relationship and I am thankful that we were able to have it. AP was able to isolate an essential point, her own point, her POV, a point of emotional turn, a spin upon her own axis, propelled by internal centrifugal force, and we agreed that it's for both of our benefit that she take on accountability for the velocity of the spin of her momentum. We would together take responsibility of our own parts, always in relation, and that the love would be cultivated from a response-ability, a re-membering of a collective body. The masculine/feminine language evokes Donna Harraway, a wellspring we are both benefiting from surveying deeper. The mythopoiesis of the genders will soon take on a more pronounced role in the OOFKAUU. There is a reiteration of the logic defining a natural language, defining its own problems and offering the possibility of its own solutions, the incompatibility of the T-spaces, of we lover's conducting discourse across an infinite divide called 'love,' being always other to each other: it would be interesting to juxtapose Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, Alain Badiou's What is Love, and Gabriel Catren's T-space theory of Kantian space-time upon the lover-molecules dancing within the quantum affect atmospheres of hot wet space time transpiring between individuals. Within this space, the shamanic walking along the K-space trajectory between T-spaces, is where I believe love will be located.

From love, we turned towards a shared meditation upon nature as a context of relations. Natural theology: nature as a synonym for god, the imposition of a human idealism upon the landscape or the reception of the voice of the landscape. Is ___ speaking to an entity or only himself? Am I able to recognize and interact with any entities beyond myself, or am I always only interfacing with myself, even as a self as a multiplicity of entities? ___, through his strategic dissolution of self, strives to become pure ear, an absolute listener, an altruistic direct hearing ear which is always open, a receiver exercising unadulterated receptivity, receiving any that may need it. Is he interfacing with an other or only always already himself as other, or perhaps directly himself through others? What of the feminine position - ___, ___, ___, ___, etc - could I (should I) collect a feminine dialogue of immanence to juxtapose or observe or assimilate or gain wisdom from a feminine ontology? There's a dialogue happening amongst women that I need to be more aware of - somehow, by whatever means, and to bring the male out from the center, towards the periphery, to identify the threshold, to bump a nodule in the membrane separating the known from the unknown. How to coordinate such a dialogue? Where can I locate myself within such an ecology of human and non-human beings? I don't identify with any group, so can I identify with the forest? How to my self-imposed ethics or strategized conduct hold up in the wilderness, and where is it located?

After Diane Davis spoke at EGS in Saas-Fee, a questioner from the audience speaks: "I was already a vegetarian and now I can't eat anything, thank you for that." Will I die from altruism, from profound empathy, from ultimate piety?

When is an ontology escapist (how could it be) and when can it be observed to confront its own mechanisms head on? Can an ontology be defined beyond the metaphor of mechanism? Is it always already a metaphor for being? Are we applying the metaphoricity, the allegorical compromise of language upon the world of things? Mind is not a machine, but what is it? The problem is inherent within the asking of what it is: is one model better or worse than another: what are the thresholds being considered in attempting to articulate being? Here are the parameters for todays meditation:

The self is a frame, a process of enframing. To define the self is to articulate the thresholds of an individual, however it may be located. There are greater and lesser selves, although not by the positioning within a project idealistic hierarchy of names, but through their own definition. One can make themselves greater - Robert Bly's masculine mythopoiesis: recognizing the masculine potential and striving to embody a heroic role passed from father's to sons in procession. One can make oneself smaller, diminutive, passive, decreasing their presence in the world, diminish and dampen their capacity to world, to restrain in their right to manifest. How is ethics applied here? It is not a problem but a possibility. Does making oneself, or presence, or impact, smaller directly increase their righteousness? Make them more or less attuned to the fundament, constantly shifting beneath their feet regardless of the mode of walking? How does the scale of amplification shift one's potential for presence in the world? [These ideas are admittedly naive, intuited, based more in image than philosophy, inherently problematic]. How do we define nature? OOO, actor-network theory, assemblage theory, anti-metaphysics - my knowledge is currently limited. Nature as a threshold, the concept of nature combined with the image of threshold, reveals a potential key: nature as a diagram of the world, as a concept of context, as a theological landscape, as a territory occupied my a population of bodies: how we define it and how it comes (in turn) to define us, in relation, as relational beings: the population and the landscape, the being upon the plenum of becoming, the landscape becoming itself, the threshold of the fundament.

We world new worlds, pick up another model, it changes the world, now we are inhabiting this new place: does this imply an expansion of the T-space or the possibility of truly transcending into the pathways of the shamanic flaneur? Are we confined to out frames, is this the definition of being, or the limitations of being-defined? Is it possible, let alone desirable, to truly transcend the ontological mechanism - in order to adopt another, or leave it behind, with a new language, a new vision, a new body, or none at all? If we could wouldn't we have already? Perhaps some have, individually, never to be heard from again? How should we speak of our individuality in relation to the greater organismic milieau, of ourselves in relation to society, of the collective voice emerging from the greater landscape: what are the implications of these ontological questions, in service of what social or ideological project, of and for the self (what model, indebted to which designer) or for the others (of what place and time, what country or national identity)? How is an ontological pronouncement bound to a sense of responsibility? Related to righteousness, good and evil: God implies a morality. Is nature secular? Is natural theology accompanied by an ethical accountability of a human scale, or greater perhaps? Are these values invented, crafted, refined, or inherited, descended, inspired from some holy presence? God fearing, or nature fearing, or just full of fear... is there fear in piety? Latour asking how we may stop speaking about religion and begin speaking religiously... how can this retroactivity be condoned, how could I ever determine to speak in such a way? What could be gained, and what would be lost? I would venture to say that what would be gained would be meaning itself: to feel the direct presence and purpose of things, in things, to hear their voice, to witness their animation. If everything is living, coursing with determinism, certainly my behavior would change in relation to the world in accordance with this new conception of reality. Compare the behaviors of god fearing humans with those exercising the hubris of science: the hubris, a projection of an agenda, the entitlement to seek out truth and lay claim to its territory, to conquer through colonial spirit, the very thing that Latour and Harman (et al) seem to be able to over turn: the cartographic perspectivalism erasing its own contours, Cartesian POV turned parallax, Copernican revolution coming to an end. The merits of OOO/vitalism could decolonialism thought, the mind, the architectures of thinking of the self in relation. Of the body also? Of beings, or ontology? What would be lost then: the rigors of method, of detached observation, the structural logic, pragmatic architectures, fidelity of diagrams... all worth losing perhaps. To make it personal: what more could I lose if the bottom has truly fallen away? Why not entertain these possibilities? Should I attempt to gain the courage of hoplessness, accept the Lacanian lie underlying all being, the inherent theatricality of thought playing out the eternal alienation of existence? This does not sit well with me, nor does the alternative, hence a choice: to pick a side or define a new faction = not hope but out of desperation, no exit. The role of the shaman, the trickster, the weaver upon the universal loom, the bard/madrigal/singer of song, the poet/artist/hermit, the mythopoietic being: what territory do they occupy, the walkers of the K-space? How to describe someone transcended? I cannot abide by a transcendental conception of nature, or that there is anywhere else to transcend to: I am far too skeptical about such an idea. Nor can I abide by the infinite repetition, the monotony, the tautology, of the Lacanian lie, of the void, the lack, the continuous displacement that keep the logical mechanisms grinding their own gear. I desire liberation, freedom, lived now not later, and I have tasted it, and am continuously reminded (as of late) of how easy it is to achieve, merely by putting down and refusing to hold onto the leaden impediments of the previous generations: would this be called willful ignorance? Is ignorance, naiveté, truly bliss?

___ suggests the possibility of a third: a third mind, third voice, third space, third time, a tertiary structure undermining or overmining or simply mining the firmament being described (regardless of the language in use): this is my own articulation-in-relation, the power of the OOFKAUU procession, an actualization of transcendence not for any other than my own subsistence of being. [The image occupied by Gaylen Gerber in my own shimmering autobiographical-historical memory: leaving a letter before walking off into the desert never to be heard from again, truly alone yet surrounded by people]. The OOFKAUU is my letter, being written for humanity - out of lover for all those I have come to love - not to be confused as an operating manual for transcendence without becoming absolutely dangerous to human existence. The opera depict my path, describes the curvature of my arch, points towards where I went off too (once I arrive there, far out of reach), the bridge I am building over the chasm of the void.

The beginning is my foundation, my historical context of thought, although not merely a representation of a past. The second act will consist of a thesis concerning the futility of the continental philosophical logic structures, and OOO, and all the rest: a chance to thoroughly explore all of the weaknesses of my argument, a kind of last stand or final hope to gain sincere conviction in a materialist POV. The third act might be a depiction of the conflict turned into potential, providing an articulation of the whole/hole = a threshold portal identified or created accompanied by the conflict of whether to pass through it or not, if such a journey were even possible, described as a kind of reverse cosmology, a breaking up of the material of the universe, not to return to nothing but to allow space to proliferate, in the gaps and fissures between the smooth reticulations of existence, the letting in of potential, allowing the meaning of the landscape to articulate itself, satiating that desire for what needs to be known beyond the mystical confabulations of wonder, enchantment, magic, etc. Some final act might depict the achievement of passing over the threshold, viewed as a failure by others to the extent that no change is effaced, both being true according to the incompatible POV's, highlighting the limits of visibility and praxis from one POV and the inability of ever observing such a phenomenon without directly participating it from another POV, the real becoming performativity of the positivity of the praxis of potential. The end will return back to the beginning, with the shift being located in the model of the self - in myself and the viewer - a reconciliation with the inherent alienation of the self according to the logic which binds its definitions, and with the voice of the forest devastating the needs of human civilization once it becomes heard, illuminating the necessary disparity and distance between being defining their individuality, of nature and reality as oppressive frames of reference consuming the animism of all that lies within their frames: of nature, and reality, and the nature of reality, and then it will end. The rest of my life could be spent filling it out even farther, illustrating ever increasing detail, making it (in effect or affect) ever more real, populating this world with material and imaginary entities, until my own end will come, or that of the world itself, until the universe becomes a multiverse or some other UN-I'D-VERSE.