Returned from a walk. Listened to the voice memos recorded in Las Cruces last year, finished transcribing the whole month of October, when I was surrounded by family, having conversations with parents and others, the recorded placed upon the table. The conversations are not interesting themselves but there are allegorical narratives which arise. I'm not yet convinced that I can sacrifice the time and attention to transcribe them all, but I want to keep them in mind as a possibility for use as some kind of supplemental scenario, an acting out of dialogue in some obscure section of the opera. Just because the conversations were had doesn't mean that I have to make any more of them than what they are, or were. There are some embarassing moments that I would rather not be revealed - and are not particularly revealing of anything in themselves - but there is also some meta-level commentary/analysis that emerges in my listening ear while sifting through them, for example, recognizing how poor of a listener I can be, how distracted or self-interested, even though I was in NM in order to concentrate and focus. I was often intoxicated and smoking cigarettes and not feeling well, not attending to my own well-being but sliding back into old habits, which made for a difficult summer - the psychological root of this difficulty is what seems significant, if anything. Another option could be to funnel the audio recordings into some auto-dictation software to see what is recognized, what is left behind, what is misinterpreted, and what beautiful monstrosities might emerge from the coarse AI scoring.

I also listened to the final lecture of a four part series presented by Bruno Latour. I have heard enough at this point to recognize that I must deeply consider his ideas sooner rather than later - I downloaded two of his texts and will begin purusing them. I'm especially interested in his correlation of Gaia to opera, leading me to believe that he is entertaining a similar practical methodology to the composition of his actor-network theories as I am to the OOFKAUU. Perhaps more to his technique than to his content then will BL becomes essential to my own endeavor.

The importance of compiling this text into a document, by a certain deadline: before leaving for the roadtrip in August. This will be an intensive time with ___ which I must be present for and focus upon. Today I watched a film based on Heidegger's tool-being and was reminded of a key element correlating philosophy with craft: the importance of PRAXIS, living taking precident over theorizing. Tool making and description connected to the articulation of a subjectivity defined by its relations to the world of objects, a relational emergence of meaning, through their use rather than detached contemplation. Authenticity: a movement towards a second phase (of concentration) in the opera, my life trajectory, and (presumably) my personal relationships - a movement towards collecting, tooling, making as an embodiment of praxis. This is related to my current meditations upon the necessity of erecting a system which can contain my own activities as I move forward into the speculative space of creation, a container for my experiences. Eventually I will be able to walk and talk and dictate and transcribe within a single day, to stay on top of the experience, awareness, and articulation of new ideas as they emerge as well as have them represented in a document which can be referred to later, but more so serves as the goal of the idea itself: the project as an act of thinking, or thinking-through-action. Reading as a process of exercising attention, note-taking becoming notation of active awareness, recording time (through audio/video) as a mode of marking back upon time itself, etc. I need to compile a bibliography and become more rigorously studious in my research methods. I need to remain strictly organized as I begin amassing the archives of music production - soon the piano and other instruments will arrive and music will begin proliferating quite organically, but as it accumulates I must be sure to apply a process of sifting and sorting in order to maintain an awareness of what I am striving for and what is most essential. The same for video: once the screens and lighting arrays are collected and I begin the process of seeing-through the camera on a daily basis time will very quickly fill harddrives and attention spans, so I must have a system to facilitate this process. The website as meta-container must be continuously reconsidered, a syncronization of these various media interests, to automatically collate the material into means of access and archive, as simply presented as possible. The website is currently a depository for what has already been made, but it must be modified to adapt to new materials in real time, as it is being produced, LIVE. I need my own server, my own cloud, my own private storage that can be uploaded to and accessed from anywhere/everywhere: a very worthwhile investment. Text could be uploaded to a blog, to be time/date-stamped and tagged and made to be navigatable through streamlined menus. Sounds could also easily be collected and organized: away from the restrictions of "user-friendly" services designed by others. I want my (web)site to be a convergence of these experiences, even imposing one form upon another: text being displayed in transparent containers with videos serving as background and automatically loaded song files playing over top: automatic web-based cinema constantly changing as I continuously upload various elements, so that the viewers access time determines the experience they will have. The site could be just videos: perhaps displayed as a "video wall" where invidual clips are made daily/regularly based on a preconceived formula, ie: music of that day is the soundtrack, text is the subtitles, videos are ongoing compilations of live edits and found footage gleaning or studies of movement and arrangements of stagecraft. The site will be an archive of this ongoing video work, like a dynamic essay, essential in the articulation of performing the text components through existential spotlight. All this should be attended to through the autumn and winter, so that when spring returns I can have this architecture fully erected and can turn my focus yet again towards new conceptual horizons to challenge and reinforce the conceptual fundament, culminating and solidifying during next years EGS session. During EGS I can continue to make videos, capture sound, text documents, etc., and have an appropriate receptical already in place to contain and distribute this content to my peers - and most importantly to have something to show faculty and other interested parties! To turn attention away from the fundamental an upon all the minutae of the flow - to allow the opera to begin writing itself. New experiments in media: fig rig and lighting installation possibilities for cinema, image manipulation through algorithmic software for AI recognition, incorporating alien POVs, computer programming languages becoming naturalized into human (character) speech), augmented and virtual reality OOO via experimental user headsets, archive-cinema-criticism mentality via Zizek, architectural modeling through 3D rendering software, CAD + Paramatricism + amphibean design, visual arrays of philosophical models via Fynsk via Heidegger. Don't forget, there's also a shit load of reading to do! I can't spend 100% of my time navel gazing: there's a bibliography to be compiled and (eventually) a PhD dissertation to write! Associations need to be indexed now as the project begins to unfold, and the website can be a place where I can tag and hypertext my research and footnotes, a dynamic bibliography linked to other sites, as dynamic as my focus/attention.

7.29.17

CONVERSATION WITH A MOUNTAIN GOAT

... Had a really intense, frightening experience, a grizzly bear, it was the strangest thing because two things happened quite instantly which seem notable, even in that moment: this phrase "black foot" came to mind and I realized that Glacier National Park is surrounded by the Black Foot Indian Reservation - that was interesting - and also how much it was, not quite like this, but it felt like encountering a person, the way that my body was responding, it was like walking into someone's room while they were naked and oooooh!

You were intruding upon someone else's personal territory...

Totally intruding, like walking into the bathroom on somebody, trying to leave but there's not door.

Did you see the bear?

We were hanging out. First I heard the two bare cubs running up the tree - literally running vertically on the tree, going up, which was a shocking experience!

Must be an instinctual fight-or-flight mechanism, to immediately move to the high ground...

To scope things out... the mom was telling them to get up there... but the way they moved up the tree was really shocking, like they were running while going up, the agility...

Grappling hooks for hands!

They were up 30-40 feet like that (snaps fingers) and those cubs are sizeable creatures. The agility of those creatures was very impressive, so I was like "oh my god, ok, I am clearly not as agile." And then I was brought into a song - my instinct was to just start singing - so I was like hey momma I'm here... I'm gonna give you all the time... you need... just doing this sing-song thing, because it felt like... I just sat there on my knees and was watching this momma bear breaking open huge logs with her paws.

Was she aware of you?

Clearly aware...We were all in the same space together.

Did you see the breaking of the logs as symbolic, as signs being sent to you by the bear? Intimidation?

At first I thought that, but then I saw that she was eating termites. Every few minutes she would raise up and look at me, and I would raise up my voice... ok momma... it's ok... and she would go back, stand up on her hind legs and go booofff shatter a log and get in there to eat ants and termites and things. We were just hanging out - I mean it wasn't hanging out, but she allowed me to observe her doing her thing, and after 20 minutes or so she sent a call to the babies who very reluctantly came down, always looking at me, got down on the ground and stood up on their hind legs to look at me, and then they all walked off. There was something about the personhood - not the personhood of an animal, but something so much more complex going on. My only reference for dealing with the situation was of intruding upon someone's private space and having to be there, that's what it was like. There was something more than her being a person, she had an equal presence for sure, but not as a person... something else was going on that was kin to a human being... it wasn't just her size, which was like me, more bulky and hunched over, and I kept thinking that if she was a grizzly bear she would be four times as big, and if it was a grizzly bear I would have been so incapacitated...

What about the sense of danger as it was? Did you feel that you were in danger?

For a few minutes, I had to acclimate, but there was something about the song that emerged through my talking that provided a handle - a loose grip but still a handle - on the scenario. If it were a grizzly I would have had no handle. The scale was important. I kept judging her size, considering the distance and other objects in sight, the scale of the animal was a major part of the experience, judging it constantly...

If the mother bear had attacked you, chosen to perceive you as a threat, perhaps due to her not being able to forgive your encroachment upon her territory or not recognizing your song to be a peaceful one, if she heard your song and misinterpreted it due to some colloquial misunderstanding or miscommunication - because you are front different worlds, civilization and the forest - or whatever it happened to have been based on how Momma conceived of the world, do you feel that you would have been prepared to take on that confrontation?

In the moment, not knowing how it would have panned out, because she's a formidable animal, but it didn't feel like that, wasn't necessarily part of the equation of being there. I don't know...

I can appreciate that you didn't feel it at the moment, but in terms of the vulnerability we were describing earlier, the importance of taking the initiative of making oneself vulnerable... to frame it as an inquiry, I wonder about one's capacities to remain confident while remaining vulnerable, the present of hubris while positioning oneself tentatively...

I always forget the definition of hubris, what is this?

Hubris is the predominance of will, a kind of excess of the self... to feel as though you have (gasp)... what is that!?

Hmm some interesting colors there.

Damn that's a big spider!

Ooooooh!

Did it jump?

No.

Did it move quickly?

It moved very quickly!

I bet she'll go right into that jar.

Yeah because I'm gonna put it right on top of her so she doesn't have any say in the manner... oooh! C'mon girl, get on there... You know I'm an arachnophobia right?

Are you? I can tell!

It's my only irrational fear.

It's gonna go right through that crack. Do you have a piece of paper?

Yes... Being an arachnophobia is totally irrational, the only phobia I experience, and I can't say that I would have a very clear understanding of what a phobia was - or felt like - if I didn't have to continuously deal with this one. I can say with confidence that this is a phobia because it makes no fucking sense for me to be unnerved by such a small being, such a tiny creature! OOOH! But I'm telling you that AH!... I'm telling you it's a formal fear, has to do with the movement and the shape of spiders specifically, the speed and gestalt of this creature, the geometry of the legs... I've thought about this a lot - I've been an arachnophobia my whole life, so I think about where it comes from and how to rationalize it - believing that by rationalizing it I might overcome its grip, surpass its influence, but it is a phobia because it is not rational, more archetypal, an image imprinted upon my psyche... maybe you could psychoanalyze it, I choose not to... maybe I endured a traumatic spider bite as a kid that I can't consciously recall but affects me this way, or maybe it was because there were a lot of spiders in my house in Corona. I have this memory of being there as a child, sleeping in my bed at night facing a bedside table with a glass on it full of water, and one evening I woke up to witness a spider which had fallen in to the glass of water, apparently crawled up the side and slipped in and was swimming circles in the glass, and the movement of the ripples, seeing the legs so clearly flailing in the clear liquid, the image disturbed me so much that I couldn't bare to do anything about it. I couldn't save the spider, I couldn't kill the spider, I couldn't touch the glass that it was drowning in, I chose to just watch it swim circles, and I woke up the next morning and it was still swimming, and I returned the next night and there it was still swimming... it took days for this creature to die a slow, probably horrible, certainly incredibly traumatic death...

Right there next to you while you were sleeping, who knows what that was doing...

I think I became intertwined with that drowning being.

Spiders have been so important for the mythologies of ancient peoples and there must be a reason for that.

The stories and the people are intertwined, the images and the creatures, and our beings...

I remember histories of the spider interacting with dreams... Ok I think we just pick this up now... and we will release it...

Thank you for your assistance.

Intriguing that this happened during this precise moment of our conversation...

Yeah, concerning fear in relation to animal beings, considering vulnerability and recognizing territorial limits...

I haven't thought this through yet, but to continue to what we were discussing... The bear brought out my own bear-ness, and what I thought was going to be a very traumatic experience became something else entirely when it happened. When you have a practice-based idea of something the unknowable aspects are the things that occur, that's the inevitability of ideas that come from direct experience - at least they should. If you have a new experience and it is as you thought it would be, something is going wrong there. Rationally it makes sense that a new experience would create a new way to think about that experience. In thinking about this phobia-oriented geometry of a thing which instigates an uncontrollable response, it makes me remember this EMDR practice, this bilateral unlocking traumatic memories through eye movement, reforming the symmetry of a thought as it's unfolding within you by amplifying parts of the body, and I've been studying mandalas, how they're made in regards to something as simple as focused eye movement and their potential to unlock new neural physiologies leading toward new concepts, new ways to get to a concept, the mandala is a maze for the eye that leads one towards enlightenment, to put it simply. I've also really been trying to focus upon the roots of words and was quite shocked to realize that the word astral is in disaster... something that helps me remember that optimism in a necessary muscle in being this thing that I am, that when you can connect the inevitable trauma of being a terrestrial thing to something like a natural disaster and realize that the word has come from a concept implying an ill-placed star, a bad star... This need to conclude everything with the apocalypse in a rational way seems like a recent occurrence, the inherent end of everything which seems like a way - in academic circles, or within the stronghold of this concept of the anthropocene - there's been some faulty wiring it seems like in associating concepts to words.

The concept of the anthropocene is not so strong though, but seems to me to be very tentatively placed, and highly debated, and misunderstood to the extent that it is articulated through multiple languages which are not in agreement, and really is not so important - by which I mean this problematic theory is not describing something so succinctly but merely indicating the possibility of moving beyond a certain arbitrarily framed epoch of knowing to enter into another, which is a mythology that seems to be perpetuated by all the disciplines... perpetuating the myth of the end of our current time to entertain the hope of gaining a new concept of time. There's a lot there, to what you just unpacked, regarding trauma and the location and description of trauma being rooted in a specific language - although I disagree that the contemplation, rumination, meditation upon, or integration back into a discourse of ends or "the end" is a new occurrence, and see it rather as a universal and eternally returning story. Any contemplation of beginning, or being as an indication of the present, necessitates a prior and posterior - at least concerning the beginning of time - what has happened defines what is happening which defines how we can conceive of what will come next, or in some cases what we imagine will happen will manifest how we unfold the story of the past, and regardless of the orientation both sides of the frame elucidate the present, a state of affairs which I take to be a kind of connective tissue between cosmological, teleological, theological, and philosophical ideas - it's the framing structure of concepts, or the natural language of time itself, depending on how far we want to take it. We could extend the frame to empirical science, physics or hard sciences of making-sense, or phenomenology, or psychology, or other "soft" sciences of sensation. "Disaster" perhaps evokes more or less specific qualia of catastrophe depending on what disciplinary context we pull up around it, "to what end" we contemplate an "ultimate end" - is it merely an abstract delineation of time, or is it a specific end, your end, as a person, as an entity? Our end, of humanity, of a particular or general civilization or culture, of an epoch or conceptualization of time, like the anthropocene? Is it the ending as a sign, mark, punctuation - like a period on a sentence, a caesura to our articulations, the ending of our conversation, bringing about the end... In terms of an ecological disaster, which certainly seems to be a hot debate searing holes through the tongues of contemporary philosophy, and anthropologists also...

Certainly, and even outside of academia... when I speak to people my age, I sense a certain requirement for accountability, or responsibility - and not in the more delicious compounding of response-ability, which I'm very interested in and how it connects to the conventional "responsibility" - but this other need for people to take account for some idea of "poor human behavior." There's so much energy put into politics and race, ecology, that's all about advocating for the need to acknowledge a trauma we have collectively inflicted. "You're white" and "you're overly privileged" and "that's why you are where you are and should admit that." I've gotten that and I continually have to come up against it, like if I try to talk about politics...

Do you disagree?

It's not that I disagree or agree, but there are other ways of talking about things that aren't in the form of a dialectic.

Perhaps not if you're white, male, privileged... some who cannot savor the flavors of that position might not see it that way.

That's why I've gotten from others...

You can be a white male privileged being in academia and write essays about the potential to decolonialize thought, or a disciplinary language, but in order to enact it as praxis, to state that we simply come together to convene with our already decolonialized minds, to act as though the change has already taken place in the world, seems irresponsible. The response-ability of considering the other seems neglected in this sense, there's not an accurate appraisal of the inability of others to take up such a position due to their continued suffering under the artifacts of the modern condition. To take for example Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's idea - not his, but which he quotes from one of his anthropological forbearers - this concept of perspectives I was reading about in Cannibal Metaphysics, a proposition that we define ourselves by attempting a reversal of perspective achieved through taking up the vantage of the other and that we should recognize that we are always defining ourselves in relation. Eduardo Kohn in that How Forests Think extends this to more extreme limits, what I would call a revitalization of panpsychic stories and animistic ideas of diffuse consciousness into plants and animals, infusing the landscape with agency and a voice which lends awareness to our own oration upon the ground of "the human." The human being's understanding of human-ness arises out of relation to the puma-being, roaming the forest as a greater-than-animal but not less-than-human, simply an Other with a voice of its own. These epistemologies are outlined as a multiplicity, so that every exposure to another culture of beings (used in this loosened manner) is an opportunity to redefine our own, as opposed to solidifying an idealized structure and projecting it out upon the landscape, the quintessential colonial imperative, so that "the sun never sets over the British Empire," or the Roman, or Nazi Germany... that there is a singular empire unifying our reasonable search for transcendent truth, that our civilization rests in the shade of an ideological banner, regardless of space and time and (non-)persons and territories and the nuances of cultural difference.

I get that sense, but the exact bridge that you used to go from perspectivism to colonialism is a bit unclear to me...

Well what does it sound like for a black woman whom does not nurture a particular interest in anthropological or philosophical radicalism to hear an academically notated white man - not even to mention the topology of privilege, concerning the complex social and economic structures which we have been born into and how our local dialects define social progress or cultural progressiveness... although I would state that by being a white male you should take stock for your relative ease of access to a black woman in this country.

I wouldn't even know how to respond to that to be honest. If you want o have a conversation where we would have to agree on what all these words mean, I doubt if it would even be possible, but if you want to have a conversation where I take what you say and generalize it for the sake of our conversational flow then we can, but that's the whole thing. When you have an ideological conversation you can take a single instance, even hypothetically, one that we both don't have any personal experience with, no direct imprinting of the world, to try to evoke more of the language of relational dynamics "no world to bring it out of us," you can take a single situation and use it... say things like "this company hired more men than women and so women are less privileged in this country than men..."

I hear you, but this is not a hypothetical situation, and the question is not rhetorical, but there are real stakes at play here, founded in the daily lived reality of how this society functions, articulated through the voices of numerous individuals whom share our territory, whom exist here and now alongside us and that we both encounter every day, but secondarily - the point I was trying to make in my correlation earlier - concerning perspectivism, which I consider to be a rich opportunity to extend our awareness to an abstract Other and attempt to embody that which is beyond our comprehension in order to better observe our own interests... to entertain the notion that the forest thinks or the puma is a human and thereby expand our concept of humanity beyond our own bodies - beings that do not resemble us that share in the same pool of personhood - this seems absolutely essential.

I'm also fascinated by this idea...

So you can and should extend your awareness towards the other, not a theoretical placard of deception perpetuating an ideological agenda, but the real people whom cannot partake in the luxury of this conversation.

I'm not denying that poverty exists, or that people endure really horrible situations, that there is every possible scenario on the spectrum. It's not that I lack sympathy, for anyone or anything, especially if it's in my world...

And I'm not accusing you of any of that either...

... but that's pertaining to the language, in questioning the forms that the language takes, how it seems like it's not changing. Part of the problem in "the debate" is that there's a space for the debate. A problem with the lecture is that there's a lectern. Often I go to a lecture and observe that the problems being discussed often seem to have more to do with the proposed gathering in the first place, the dynamics of the space for that talk, and how the talk seems like it's coming out of the space as much as the space forms around it. I think that the problem is in the presumption... that just because we use the same words we are speaking the same language, in recognizing that talking is... You can't just have a president on TV because it's still TV. I can't vote by watching a TV show.

I can appreciate that, and I think you're right... like a meeting of the Princeton Institute of Advanced study to direct the flow of universal human rights, or a gathering of the intelligencia to discuss the fate of third world peoples, of specialists (risking elitism) assembling to pontificate problems and seek solutions behind closed doors, is in itself a problem which denies its own limits by not allowing outside forms, and I also think it's a problem of language, but there's a difference between us using the same words and misunderstanding each other and a situation where we are already resigned to forever be bared from understanding as long as any form of natural language forms the basis of that conversation and advocating for the creation of a new language which cannot yet be uttered, or cannot be referred to from within our doomed condition within the confines of natural language, a very confusing and complex entangling of semiotics, and as much as I want to entertain the possibility of speaking-through new modes of speaking and thinking-through a more efficient or elegant thought-form, this seems a profoundly privileged - and possibly elitist - and certainly highly specialized intellectual pursuit which bars others from access.

What is the intellectual pursuit?

The ruminations upon thinking itself, advanced philosophical reflexivity, thinking about thinking and speaking about speaking, semiotic contemplation, anthropological discursivity of the human in order to propose a personhood beyond...

I think there's a type of person that is like that, but just because we think thoughts with other thoughts doesn't equate thinking to a luxury, that you have the space and the time to do so and everyone else that doesn't make as much money is too busy making bricks or something...

Oh but I would say you're precisely wrong in that!

Even the brick maker has to think! The brick maker...

... does not have the luxury of time to rethink issues of identity or semiotic utility precisely because they are too busy making bricks.

I think it depends on the person. There's brick makers that think all they are doing is making bricks, and there's others that see that act as more than just making bricks.

Show me such a brick maker! I would argue against that idealism, although I gain no pleasure in doing so. I would refer us to Heidegger's idea of "tool-being"... a barrel maker in the countryside in rural Germany so invested in making the best possible barrel, even to the point of philosophical perfection, and this comes to define an identity. Through his tool mind he crafts a tool-being through the barrel, that through crafting an object he comes to expand the richness of his own life, to fill it with purpose through the relation of function and action, just as the barrel enters into the relations of the community and is filled with meaning through its use. There is no need for philosophy with the barrel maker, as he is sutured directly to existence through the crafting experience, lives an unquestioned fullness of being and is... generally blissed out by being filled with such purpose, by being free to exercise the will to make of himself and his surroundings. The philosopher, in observing this process of production, a voyeur on the sidelines, endures an alienation in being removed from such a process and that removal is incompatible with the making of the barrel.

I feel like that's why I feel such a direct relational kinship with practice-based orientations. Philosophy was once held to be a surplus to reality, of the thinking person removed from a relation of things, but I don't believe that's the only way to think philosophically.

This is bound to the tradition of the bourgeoisie, of the fetishization of the working class and mythological heroicism of the poor, of the starving artist, ideal subjects who are not true subjects, of the slave with purpose having a more meaningful existence than the master swimming in wine and ennui all day...

But how often do you actually run into people like that?

I believe this is what is at stake in taking responsibility for our privilege. These are rigorous academic pursuits of which you are a specialist, upholding a position of exclusive access that will not be made universally understood, in order to advocate for an incredibly specific interlocution of potential, that exists at a particular axis...

I don't feel much of a kinship with that, from my own personal experience. I find myself in situations where that could have been a possibility, but it has never been my tether to any place or time... I've always been merely passing through... I feel as distanced to that form of thinking as I do living here while not identifying as an American, not in any immediate sense of the word and it's designation of identity.

Yeah, but this is precisely the problem, that you exercise your privilege... I mean I'm not trying to put the heat on you! But I am trying to help you locate why such a thing would be problematic because you are vocalizing, through your denial to internalize this dialogue or assemble in the manner that society has come to recognize as proper in maintaining a democratic and "free" procession of exchange... is to function as a silent oppressor.

I know... I take pleasure out of continuing to create playgrounds out of those obstacles. I feel a tremendous purpose in doing that, in behaving in such a manner, in remembering that there are no presumptions but only infinite possibilities in all of our roles as peoples, whomever I'm hanging out with... there's more mystery to the ways societies grow and merge and change. I can't allow myself to fully be subsumed by that conversation, but that I must create a little piece of grit that agitates the muscles to spin a pearl that I'm always more interested in making...

... as is your privilege to do so. I would encourage you to do so. I think your project, which is to say your life project, everything that you are attempting and have and will, could be strengthened and made more relevant and accessible to some if you were to take this head on and locate yourself within it. I might even venture to say that your project puts itself at risk of being subsumed by that very colonial mind that it attempts to differentiate from... I just fear doing yourself a disservice by not "getting dirty" in these other conversations.

It's not that I uphold a position of denial. I'm only 30 years old, I barely have a grip and I'm still figuring out how to orient my being in relation to other, but I do think that I must be careful about who I talk to. I've noticed I can only talk about certain things to certain people, that certain individuals have more of an inclination to unfurl and contribute to a situation if... that different people have different inclinations, so the type of conversation I'm having with you I might not be able to have wit everyone - or anyone - else. The thing that's still developing is my ability to attenuate these differences...

....................

... no concerns for the theories of the world it seems like, but in another way like a mother of them, a harsh mother of them, and where do they come from? I've been trying to think about the relationship language has to places like that, and finding rhetoric to dissolve in granite and glacial ice, finding another kind of language there that doesn't have... I feel like a lot of problems are reflections of the environments from which they come.

I tend to think that the problems are not so bound to the place as much to the language which articulates them, that the problems and their potential solutions are contained within and transmitted by the natural languages we speak them through. I'm curious to hear you say more about what you see emerging from the granite, how the languages might abrade or dissolve, what impediments...? What languages do you bring with you that succumb to this erosion? Could we discuss that other language which you are observing - the granite tongue or glacial syntax - could we speak it now or does it only exist there? It is a language confined to that place or can we bring it back with us, and can it be assimilated into or translated into this language being abraded, so that those that have not ventured to that place may come to understand it? To go one step farther, would you say that the language of the granite or the glacier - is it of the mountain or the territory, the latitude or longitudinal coordinates, of the atmosphere where the sky meets the earth, in the poetic sense or material sense or literal sense of these terms - in whatever sense, is it in turn eroded or abraded here, by this natural language we are using to speculate it's outside? How is this place where we are now referred to then, as Oakland, as a city, a civilization? We're talking about languages, but are we also discussing urbanity? These book languages?

All wonderful tangents... I believe there's a clue in observing that the root of "question" is "quest," something I really appreciate about that word. There's a type of questioning which you are very proficient in which is satisfied with the question itself - to begin and end with questions - that brings the quest back in to the act of questioning. The requirement of the quest, of asking questions, is very exciting to think about and I can't help but feel a linkage between the life of the city dweller and their use of technology in affording the modern demand of convenience, and I can't help but feel as though the histories and fields of inquiry that the people - dead and alive - through which they wander through reveals a certain repulsion, that the dwellers repel from that field of convenience because they recognize that there is no growth there, no new abilities in that easy experience. I don't want to create - something I've been wrestling with - I don't want to dichotomize "wilderness" and "city," but there's something about the convenience of cities and the disorientation of that other place - not-city - that I find a polarity there. There seems to be a surging desire to populate city space with things influenced by the other place - which seems a more sufficient reference than "wilderness." There's something there, concerning lack of convenience and disorientation, which seems so suitable for human experience, so nourishing for the thing that we are, for the act of pontification, for the moment of philosophy, towards idea making and feeling articulation. I was having a profound experience in the John Muir Wilderness recently, encountering a boulder and seeing my friends face in it, and thinking "how is this boulder facilitating the remembering of this person, someone who has never been here before and has nothing to do with this place, what is it about this environment - something in the shape or forms - which facilitates such effluvial relational capacities?" I do think all of those questions you bring up imply the necessity of specificity, that it depends which place one goes to and spends time in, it depends on what kind of city it is.

Two things that occur to me while listening to you: how our relations to places, to worlds and worlding, shift and shiver when you make the proposition that there is something inherent to the boulder which instigates this response, where I tend to think - and tend to my thinking - as always the boulder being a being only to the extent that we may project out own being upon it. Not to steal away from the boulder any possibility of its coming into its own agency - I mean I would steal that away, but for the sake of this conversation it's not the point I think - but what facilitates the formation of this face is a projection of an identity encountered in your past experience, a re-membering taking place at the location of the form of the boulder, the boulder serving as site of your own reflexive activity, your mind forming patterns upon its textured surface where there is no coherent formalism, an illusion - I believe it's called apophenia. It's difficult to call the boulder a being as it seems to be without body, mostly uniform, only arbitrarily distinguished from the firma upon which it sits - to expand the scale is to consider the whole mountain, or the small pebble in the shoe, and are they each to be endowed with the same agency? But again, I'm not trying to debate whether the landscape has agency, but in order to define the boulder as such, to render it an object, is to contain it's entirety, at least from one perspective, within the entire field of view, to frame it within our being-oriented scaled vision. The issue seems dependent on this scale orientation, a procession of your self extending out like a plenum of experience passing from body to body, so that the face you see projected upon the body of the boulder is a relation to your own member, and the member in your memory... remembering upon a boulder, not a boulder re-mamboing. I recall a concept from American Minimalist sculpture, that the form should be no larger than the width of the makers hands, or roughly the height of the body, so that the scale of the body creates the idealized scale of formal contemplation...

Idealized for this mapping procedure that takes place...

Yeah, because larger than that extend beyond the field of view and smaller becomes to object-like...

In the case of the boulder I can see the occurrence of this mapping of body to body, but I don't think that the mapping procedure is limited to scale. Having a similar type of experience simply being in the place, there's a couple things there that might be fun mentioning. There's a word that ___ has been using, involution, and one of the definitions of this word is "being brought back to one's proper size." This word kept coming up for us in this place. Even though there were some terrifying moments of being so vulnerable and fragile in this hard glacial place, so easily lost - a quick angle change of the sun and the entire landscape shifts - then "where'd the trail go?" The proper size was so incredible for the vantage, that one has at this scale, is so powerful, to see the entire landscape in stereo without compound eyes, the vista that one can behold is as massive as the landscape, like an extended physiology that brings one to doubt the rigid constraints of their body. What seems so productive to conversations like this, in the thought infrastructure that it seems we are exuding, one doesn't talk about a thing we talk about everything in a particular way, not that there is an idea about something but rather an idea about how to be with things. This is an aspect which makes me feel like we could come to laugh at these presumptions - of politics and race or whatever - and render them irrelevant in favor of another way of feeling through the world.

Another idea that comes to mind, to take it back to our earlier conversation, is a little sound bite from Viverios de Castro which I can try to paraphrase... in turning his focus back upon his own discipline of anthropology and it's "natural language," the ethnographic agenda of speaking a description of a people which are other, be it the forest (in the case of Kohn) or a human tribe which populates it, this is the anthropological voice which he is speaking, or speaking through, or is speaking through him... so concerning the formation of a natural language which can be deemed acceptable to anthropology should also be one which is accepted by the people whom it describes. Castro qualifies this acceptance further by stating that it should not be comedic or absurd, or project any gross injustices, so that when the people of the tribe (or whatever beings are being spoken) hear back the scientists description of them they don't immediately dismiss it as non-sense or beyond their sense, they entertain it as a possible image of their identity or reflection of some semblance of being, and they don't consider it laughable, don't endure distance from their existence or the world through comedic alienation and enter into the dramaturgy (and inevitable tragedy) aroused through self-objectivization... and so - in my own interpretation - this use of language may allow for a way out of sorts, as this renaturalized language exercised through a revised ethics of consideration through speaking does not purport to describe the people so thoroughly as to steal away the possibility of their coming to know themselves... that perhaps an ethics of anthropology is keeping open a back door for those it aims to describe... so in terms of the experience you described, in observing the emergent language of a landscape, there should be an ethics involved emanating from you, or between us, emerging through the journey penetrating the wilderness or this other place as you sense it as other than you and it senses you in return, sensing and being sensed, an ethics to sense the reciprocation of sense being exchanged, and I see that originating from you as the observer, playing a role as the anthropologist fascinated by emergent languages and hallucinating them wherever you find yourself... How could we account for our ethics, our response-ability, and allow this back door for nature to have the "last word" in describing itself? This seems to me to be a release of the ineffable, a loosening of the grip upon understanding to let it float upon the breeze of poetics, an acceptable recognition of the unspeakable as both horrifying, terrible and terror-full, as inherently intertwined with sublime beauty before nature's power to create and destroy - all of which are concepts firmly rooted within the Western gaze and concerning the empirical subject, not necessarily transferrable beyond that body... and we wouldn't want it to right? We want to avoid projecting our inherited cultural terrors upon other beings.

Definitely yes. Also, there's something about the consideration that one changes... next year we will have different ideas - that change is the only constant - so through our idea-ing and thinking we incorporate these ineffable spaces out of necessity, for any idea to have a trap door and allow for new perspectives to flow in. It's not about answering but questioning, to let the questions lead us through quests of possibility.

Yes, that seems essential in practice, but I am so skeptical of the implied essences flowing through matter. It's essential to remember, to member (concepts into bodies) and re-member (the limits of our own forms) actively, which seems to be what we are attending to through this conversation, but to remain fluid also in locating and describing this essence... which seems to oscillate between our positions and those that we describe. I admit my reluctance to locate this essence in things, to animate indeterminate objects...

I feel that too.

... but also refrain from completely explaining our world away through reason alone, through the terrorizing machine of logic, to impose this mechanical sensibility upon the world - the modern mechanical metaphor no longer suits my vision or my expressive needs. So yet another model must be discovered and adopted - we need a new ontology that can't be limited by strict ontological articulation, a new anthropology that is not limited to hominids, a new way of thinking and a new way of feeling in relation to the other, a new other... to remove the concepts from their pure idealistic pedestals and root them back in the body without conceiving of this change as a diminishment of function, rather to amplify their potentials, to follow their pulsations through nerves, not just some invisible auratic discharge in the ether, in the clouds, in an abstract mind, but in the molecular motions of those atmospheres, nested within bodies which voice their own descriptions... but where the limits of this survey are located I am less sure.

There's a sense that I get in the way that we discuss these things which seems relevant. There's an element of satiation, of perhaps not being fully satisfied, an indication that dynamics are suspended within a pleasant geometry when the distribution is not totally satisfied. That trap door thing... this weird space where we're not quite sure where to go or what its filtering, what is being removed. I do get the sense that when we're older there will be something so different, an unfathomable unpredictable difference of considerations... there seems to be a joy of in this unpredictability. Considering this notion of being beyond the world we have inherited, not identifying with the solidity of its description, of the crust and then the mantel and the magma, the solidity of the simplicity of the description of the world as a "beautiful project," and then the dismembering and disfiguration of that solidity into the void free of myth as another beautiful work... there's a worldview there, in the feeling of that beautiful progression of humanity through those movements, which is as strong as the things being described, that is so helpful and useful to remember. Yes, this process is a beautiful thing, that the flora and fauna of the theories being passed around are going through these different topological stages, that there are different growths observable at various moments, and then a forest fire will come and refigure the whole project, and its not a system programmable towards harmony...

.............

It seems like people spend so much time making their ideas strong and I wonder if it's ok for ideas to have weaknesses, weak spots, if a more sustainable idea might be one that is allowed to be fragile in certain parameters of its articulation.

Yes, fragile and tentative and vulnerable, tenacious - sounds like Philip Beeseley.

He was using this word "fertility," which is intriguing... how the sensory organs or just organs in general are the most fragile moist holes into our beings, epitomizing sense by being sensitive to the world, yet it seems like their carved and carpentered by a world which is so traumatic and unpredictable and sudden.

Beeseley uses this image of sacrifice, a young child buried at a pivotal axis, an epicenter at the base of a gate, the threshold orifice of the city body, the point regulating the inside and outside of the human world, and this baby laid delicately in the earth, under the fundament of the wall - a description of architecture as the membrane between two worlds - and this sacrifice is coddling itself, using this motion with his hands to insinuate wrapping around the layers of the body, a body embracing its own being... as an image essential to his project, an incubatory coddling of a concept, a cerebral coddling perhaps... and rather than a hominid intelligence or bipedal biological body, Beeseley is more keen on articulating an amphibian nature, not so much a terrestrial fate but a body emerging from the water while remaining wet.

The human being is formed through liquid, an amniotic water-born creature... a certain sense that we are water people, considering the ration of materiality, we are more water than anything else... I love the idea that the sensory organs need to be wet.

And considering your point about the strength of one's argument, or proposing that we allow for weakness in ideas... I might reframe it within a different language. Yes, a tentative, tenacious, provisional, and vulnerable proposition, but not necessarily weak, that a reorientation to the parameters of this strength could consists of not merely filling in holes for sake of argumentation but cultivating a different quality of attention towards these holes, as portal flowing in and out, orifices, permeable membranes engaged in maintaining a porosity with the environment we are immersed within, of the material strength focusing upon the diffusion of the member, to be more like dermis, skin which expands and diffuses tension, contracts and condensates according to the environmental changes...

I wonder where the word "weak" comes from, where it comes from and where its roots are... I certainly think of it in consideration of these spaces for the unfolding of the unfathomable, for the ineffable to inhabit, which incorporates a trap door allowing for future growth, but also a trap door to step out of when the shell is no longer useful, when the shape changes and reveals cracks in the rigidity so we can step out of the way of falling debris.

I tend to not consider our arguments - yours and mine and Beeseley's - as the weak perspectives. I think of them as being much stronger, at least potentially (although we are still young as you say), in embracing amphibian formalism and recognizing the tensegrity of another architecture not limited to the squares and circles of ancient Greek idealism, but perhaps more of a rhombic, triangulated, helical curvature, flexible and sensuous in its movements, less rigid in its roots... that seems stronger to me, better equipped to sway with the oceanic currents without being beaten upon the craggy shoreline...

A frothy foam, frothing concentration of bubbles...

... a porous bone filled with fluids which can bend and flex with the tensions of the environment. Yes, so I sense a willingness for vulnerability in Beeseley and others, but I can also locate holes in these projects, which we can and should elucidate - with care and attention. I think that we must help each other in this way, that this is a greater response-ability than any other. We can aid each other in thinking-through weakness and strength, to disperse the tensions through a greater system... I'm thinking about kin, caring for others, not merely sympathy but an active attending to others with great sensitivity... one must succeed the firmness of their position in order to allow the other to come in, to give them room to speak, to share beyond our own limits... this doesn't feel abstract but sounds in fact profoundly political to me.

It comes out of John Berger's idea of tenderness as being the first act of liberty, something that perhaps we can only really begin discussing if we make it to 95yo and are still able to be squirming around. He describes the mode about tenderness towards one another as being the first step towards freedom, as it is the only social behavior which stems from choice, tenderness as being the only true choice that one can make, as an individual exercising free will proven through exercising tenderness in a world which considers such an action to be defiant.

An intention that one extends to kin.

...............

... it makes one endure a certain struggle. It asks so much of you just to go, just to be there, that hope and success become so rooted in direct experience that just making it through the night becomes a success, being able to cross a treacherous moment in the hillside becomes as successful as a political revolution, it's weird! It brings one to their proper size, of being a terrestrial human being, which in all honesty, compared to the place that we live our proper size is tiny.

But you're not out there naked and shiver. You're well stocked, well provisioned.

Ideally.

It can be rough and extend your limits but they are still limits expanded by the conveniences of civilization. I wonder where this place is... referring back to what we were discussing before, is it a physical place that you are describing now? Is the language of the granite confined to a spot? I wonder if it's a particular landscape or something on a scale of geo-history (ala Latour) or geo-politics or geo-industry (ala DeLanda) or geo-temporality or -spatiality, not opposed but juxtaposed to the human. The way that you're speaking now reminds me of naturalists describing the periphery of civilization and the necessity of escaping, going out into nature in order to attune or retune, reacquaint to the spirit, to maintain a familiarity with a natural spiritual force beyond human comprehension in order to instill a humility, a piety to a force which keeps human hubris in check, a force greater than our misguided human powers, and ultimately an exoneration of the ultimate itself, be it named nature or god or any other name, implying a giving up or giving over to pure magnitude, pure scale. But I'm not trying to call that into question, but I do question "the limit," our ability to locate the membrane separating where we are now sitting from the other place where you have ventured. My experience is not being able to go far enough, never locating that threshold, not being able to identify the ends of the civilized world or the beginning of the great undifferentiated wild. I can't go far enough to find a nature which isn't already present, also and can't escape the imprint of civilization upon my psyche.

Really? Have you tried? I can't tell if you're speaking literally. Are you saying that you physically haven't gone into a place where you feel free from the politics of humanity?

Yeah, I am saying that, and I admit that I haven't traveled as far as you have - or really far at all - but perhaps because of that I feel like I can articulate this problem, not without a certain sense of awkwardness of course, but hopefully on behalf of would-be others whom may also have difficulty locating such a boundary. I have gone quite some distance... my journeys have taken me through many countries and diverse ecologies, but still I feel as though I have never been beyond the scope of humanity. I have been off the well-trod paths, but I can't say that I've ever been truly lost - metaphorically speaking. I have lost myself here at home, but never in any such manner as I could uniquely allocate to the other place, never so thoroughly disentangled myself from the world as to discover a new one that wasn't spawn from my own imagination, not any more than a taste, a fleeting flavor which feels like a hallucination of genetic memory perhaps. No place which has disrupted my ontology in a manner more jarring that what I inflict upon myself everyday, through these walks and talks for example... No escape that felt more real, that didn't imply the inevitable return to the self that I always in the process of describing, no voice orating from without... ok, but it's not about the limits of my imagination or my arbitrarily defined being so much as the possibility of even discussing such a limit, which seems as absurd and necessary as the end which we began with.

I hear you. This is an intriguing question. Is it right to try to distill this place into a language? I don't know if it's even possible, but I do know that one can have their linguistic faculties influenced by a place, as a way to seduce others to come and experience it for themselves. I remember this story about Theodor Roosevelt wanting to speak with John Muir, back when there were few natural reserves and when the idea of a National Park was percolating under the political thoughts of that time, and John Muir said "yes you can come, but you must come alone," and there's something to that. In order to have the conversation in granite-glacial-speak you must go there and become disoriented. You can't have the safety of the people that are here to look after you. In order to get the thing that I have to offer, like John Muir was saying, is for you to come here alone.

How do you reconcile that... is it reconcilable with the world that you return to? What is the responsibility of returning to this world - the one we currently inhabit, whatever this place is? Is this even a useful question?

I think it's a great question which I can't pretend to have the answer to but one that I think of often, and is one that I use to create more questions with. Certainly optimism has something to do with it, a reconfiguration of conventional ideology, of how we ideate through relation, become affected which only becomes obvious when you come back.

I think about the venturing-into - through questing questions and following the path to the other place - the images and languages, the symbolism and the marking of paths orienting our orientations to firmament, all of this built upon a certain knowledge garnered from books, from human history or her-story or geo-stories, accumulated and packed in to all the holes made less-than-whole. I can understand the proposition of emergent potentials and intelligences or wisdoms, intuited or unspoken or unspeakable, but I find it extremely difficult to hold on to them as knowledge comprehendible and communicable to others, to be shared and instilled with cultural meaning, to reconcile my subjective experience with the inter-subjective ecology or world that we are playing in.

Yes, and I question whether that is possible, and I think it is, and once we get into our 60s we may find we are having a very different level of articulations in regards to these points. What is happening now seems to be - what we were discussing earlier - is learning not to talk about the thing but learning to talk about everything else in a very particular way, to approach and engage things differently. We can't talk about this directly, but we can influence each other to approach everything else with a different strategy, so that perhaps from a certain perspective something will pop out of the middle, as a relief pattern of contrast that emerges when we avert the gaze.

This sounds like negative theology... a theo-philosophical tradition of defining god by his absence, and this is paradoxical to the presence you are describing, maybe a parallax.

Hmm I like that word.

Yes, not just a mirroring inversion, the same thing split or doubled through reversal or illusory reflection, but an inversion of the same into itself, multiple parts which cannot be seen by looking directly but which combine to form a more cohesive whole which can never be fully contained within the field of view.

And also... it's an astronomers axiom, to look to the side of the star that is being observed because the periphery is more sensitive. Concerning parallax in relation to our attempt to vocalize this working definition of nature or wilderness - the tricky thing with parallax is that if you don't see all the steps within the procession of revolving around a celestial object, it appears to jump cut, like a coarse edit, and it becomes very difficult to figure out the continuity of relations - potentially impossible to relate one side to the other - unless you have the smooth perspectival sweep from one state to another... something about that, whatever is happening with the parallax phenomena, considering this resolution of what is being observed, seems very useful.

Maybe that could serve as a description of the irreconcilable state of the incommunicability of our subjective experience of time...? Implicating the necessity of abstraction, of diagrammatic models, and reductive processes in general, with parallax serving as a kind of reductive description of a presence of creation, of a greater (than human) meaning, of the potential of forming things from a void or making entities animate, the transmutation from mere objects to vital entities... a description of presence of the ineffable, synonymous with or a kind of parallax to negative theology, defining god by an absence. So I wonder then if this granite language should be discussed as presence, or as an absence of this ineffable experience of/with/through the other place which must be encountered first hand through solo existential experience and cannot be transmuted through language, but can only be indirectly referred to.

What other option is there? For me this makes so much sense. In order to dance with the meaning of the world we cannot talk about it directly, but we can seduce through the influence that was felt through the spinning, seduce ourselves and each other, by talking about everything else. If the person is listening they will listen not to the words but the gesture from which the words emerge, the intuition and the love and the heart, the worldview and the patience in all of its efforts that have been put in to the thinking, the doing, the active being, and the believing.

I don't disagree, and perhaps you're right that our natural language should be reoriented towards this concession of direct address, but I tend to think more and more these days that this gesture doesn't go far enough. I wonder if we can go farther without it becoming violent, without intruding upon momma bear's territory, if we can articulate presence without perpetuating colonial terror.

I think you're right. I don't mean to say that it's enough, but that it's fair enough, at the moment it's working for me at an approach to others. This image of a sheath, of the transitional object, of a child's blanket, the "bankie" as a sentient veil or externalized consciousness... I keep thinking about this as an invisibility cloak. Something I've been wrestling with through all of these grant proposals concerns keeping something safe, keeping something hidden, which bring me back to our prior point about keeping a hole for mystery, leaving a space for the ineffable, the trap door for the universe to escape our terrible definitions, which might also be a practice of restraint - to not tell everybody where the ripening blackberry bushes are, because that's a source of energy, a kind of wellspring which feeds you.

Except those that are initiated perhaps? Back to the beginning, when you were stating that we must be careful who we speak to, in a certain careful attentive manner, perhaps the parallax of Robert Irwin's dialogue of immanence or the finger raised over the lips of the Gnostic knower, keeper of the mystery, symbolically and literally discouraging the secrets from being revealed. I think this is a strategy for weeding out friends from enemies, or to be able to locate those initiated and fluent enough to understand what is being spoken indirectly, and at some point there seems to require an ontological turn, not for the sake of a PhD dissertation or an art project or a grant proposal, not for public consumption, but I am very aware of the necessity of a dialogue of immanence conducted by those representatives working at the periphery of their disciplines in working towards an ontological articulation that is not always-already obsessed with its own end through infinite regressive repetition of the trauma which instigated the separation of disciplines in the first place. A new statement of being, articulating an is--presence not merely circumnavigating this place, not a continuation of the Roman project of drawing lines around all the voids and inventing it a name - all straight roads lead to Rome - building physical and metaphysical walls which maintain the inaccessible void and perpetuate the visceral trauma of our lack of departed spirit, depriving us of the substance of the middle, fueling the modern project of alienation and all of its horrifying semiotic mechanisms. The psychoanalytic description of the inner lie spawning all the ideological canopies whose shade we will never emerge from is not only profoundly unsatisfying, but an insufficient description of our directly experienced potential of existence.

I feel that also. Since I've been working on another PhD proposal I've been ruminating over the possibility of a vocalized cosmological perspective, and I feel like I can do it, and that we're involved with something which is already akin to that, but I certainly don't feel like it's ready for the world. I feel pretty firm in believing that it won't be ready until I'm older...

Not that much older! You've come much farther than many seem willing to risk.

Maybe...? But I won't feel comfortable espousing these ideas until I'm in my 60s - the number doesn't matter, but until I have some years, some experience...

I can get behind your scale and agree that all things worth doing take time, and perhaps there is more to risk in revealing too much too soon, but in terms of a collaborative bibliography with copious notes scribbled in the margins, the creation of a clandestine forum for our own mutual advancement, some place crafted and private... I wonder about the necessity of risking dialogue and presence among peers and extending it out tenaciously to entice and seduce other kin, to grow the familial relations slowly and deliberately. To attempt the creation of such a forum, even if it's acknowledged as an already failed project...?

That seems to be going on, something similar... something intriguing emerges when we begin to constellate the dithering perspectival pivots that have taken place between us and our kin, when considered as a constellate geometry of ideation - an ideological solar system. But maybe I'm not grasping exactly what you're saying at the moment...?

I hear myself striving to put some pressure on a point that can elongate to a meridian of a collective body, not to invent a new zero, but to delineate a place between identifiable places that we can inhabit as a collective body, to locate ourselves at a center of triangulated minds - or constellated multi-mind - which doesn't belong to any one but remains always-already a dispersal of tension, like the fascia of a collectively reticulated corpus. Pouring into the center of a void still circulating, a place that can only be defined peripherally, defined as much by its absence as its vulnerable presence. I wonder about our sharing in aligned, positive, affirmative propositions, of terminology and vision, without succumbing to the influence of public displays of strength. How do we bring forth a description of being while remaining cynical towards the ontological project as an imposition of colonial empiricism, within a public forum which can support our furthered research? When and where is the praxis of our would-be philosophies? When do they become enacted, beyond the mere rhetorical?

I feel like I must mention... there's an aspect to those last remarks about empiricism where I fray, the ideas are fraying. I am not totally sure if I can hang on to that conceptually - I lose the threads of the fabric.

Can I ask what you mean by "fraying?"

Well I would have to ask you what you mean by empiricism...

Empirical knowledge are those (supposed) truth allocated from direct observation and experience, trialed and proven evidence. It's true because it has been observed to be so... which seems problematic to me, just as much or more so than proposition based in pure intuited feeling or unexamined affect. So... I exist ontologically - I am - because I have a body and I feel my senses into being what they are and all that is self-evident. You are ontologically real because I can touch you... how such statements form the world we live in...

I see. Not colonial imperialism then, but scientific empiricism.

Yes. Well, interesting how they are related also, but I meant empirical knowledge and the lineage of epistemology, knowledge of knowledge. I think about how this is at odds with speculative philosophy and more dynamic modes of thinking, encroaching upon the speculative realms of animal intelligence from Donna Hardaway, of emergent mineral intelligence from Ben Bratton, of amphibian states of mind and architecture described by Philip Beeseley. This whole sub-genre of interdisciplinary philosophy sprouting up around speculative materialism and realisms...

Donna Haraway seems like a good example. In the 70s she and a small group of likeminded people had the foresight to recognize Santa Cruz as a hub of philosophical creative energy, a wellspring of communal potential, and they bought land together as a place to write. They took a risk, a small group of initiates that banded together to form a space for their collective ongoings, and for her it was a place to write and write quickly, to write books. There's a real practice-based necessity to all this. Once you get the roof over your head, and all the economic obstacles are overcome, the risk is settled with some foresight... for them Santa Cruz clearly had the right spatio-temporal orientation, the ecology, the weather, the biodiversity - those places exist in America still, but they may imply a difficult adjustment, but it's a risk worth taking.

That's a very provocative way of tying this ontological discourse into our larger personal rumination upon the possibilities of acquiring some land, aligning the life trajectory to better facilitate the life pursuits, and it's incredibly appealing to me. I think this group you mention - well both Haraway's and our own - implies a kind of contract of engagement, to perpetuate self-conviction, and also to amplify the response-ability to the other, specifically each other, to keep one another mutually engaged, constantly be evaluating and attenuating the path through direct influence, because four or six or eight eyes are better than two! A fact of biology right? It's about conviction, to convince each other as much as we convince ourselves.

Yes. In considering my personal cosmology I resonate with that sense of conviction, to convince people of the importance of these pursuits, especially those that are closest at hand.

So now, while we are young and immersed in this perpetually transitional period with no end in sight but certainly a difference which can be anticipated and speculated, it could be an opportunity to begin practicing convincing each other of the necessity of seeking out such a place, beyond the speculative, to make it real, to visualize or manifest it, and to inhabit it, to take the risk of exploring what might take place there, how it would look and how we might go about doing it, so as the day approaches when action will become increasingly necessary - economic and social actions, writing up contracts to maintain our autonomy and security - we will have a conversation already underway (which of course has been taking place over years now), but one specifically concerning this praxis of presence, place, and purpose... and poetry!

Part of the conviction, not just to convince each other but also myself, to approach myself as an other... specifics are very convincing. Considering various biomorphic places and what they have to offer - what kind of trees, or is it prairies or mountains, and what do they have to say? A specific place with its specific qualities, specific plants and formations, specific distances to specific cities and the life which could take place at those intersections, as well as possible relational energies through collaborative projects of whomever is involved, speculating on shared sources of income and sustenance... it seems like an inevitability, but the textures and details of how it will unfold it happening right now. The specifics are unfurling now, as we discuss it and get excited and try to convince others about it, build camaraderie around the eventual transition to another texture of living. There will be a continuation of this conversation in the material world in some way, not too long from now.