I've been ruminating upon our conversation ever since you left. Your voice and POV are so essential in offsetting the violent velocity potentials of my own, I need you to help me in striving for an equilibrium. I'm currently charting a course to oscillate into new territories but first want to make sure I can understand what's at stake in cartographic cinema. I hope we can connect again soon and continue massaging the messages.

I appreciate your acknowledgment of the resonant affects emerging out of our shared space. I suppose it is wise to find a natural balance between dynamic equilibriums and lines of flight bursting beyond stabilities. And more than these inertial modalities as well. I can't say that I necessarily know much or that I essentially understand anything, but I do my best to help my friends feel development and belonging. Very excited to continue the conversation! Please keep emailing text! I truly appreciate it!

You know what's very difficult with this for me... pardon because my assessment is a bit emotionally belligerent and lacks granularity...

Eastern philosophies, such as Kundalini or Buddhism , and ayahuasca cults and gnostic traditions have all been speaking about subtle bodies, higher dimensional corporeal energetic projections, awareness of the superimposition of multifarious spatiotemporal beings in a single entity-location, astral projection ...these sorts of things for thousands of years. But by the evaluatory tools ( namely logic and reason and empirical "evidence" and "objective data") of the canonical western epistemological modalities, these other modalities have been thought of as superstition or at best robust but squarely limited in the psychological. That one is having a very sophisticated but ultimately personal experience that is a projection on the world and not necessarily A truth of the world as it is.

And now through an elaborate meta-mechanism of instrumentalities and ideological frameworks something very Akin to the subtle body is revealing itself within the data set. This is claimed to be a discovery and potentially heretofore unknown.

Which is absurd to me...

It is less about this particular epistemological mode creating higher fidelity models( and more truthful) than others, and more about the increase in granularity and fine scale detail within this particular model. That the western empirical mechanistic rational scientific model and its attendant instrumentalities is modifying-magnifying itself in relation to the world.

Every epoch has its necessary mythopoetics.

This is one is ours and guides us into New possibilities out of which to be and into which we may belong

But true wisdom comes in witnessing the topographical multiplicity of the mythopoetic

Hear and see with the thousand heads of shiva.

Not just the one head of western man.

There's no need to pardon your emotions of course, I hope they can become amplified. I do hope that the 'granularity' by which I take to be synonymous with the resolution or fidelity of our collaborative thought-model may continue to be honed, and this seems precisely what is at stake here!

Yes, others have been mentioning subtle bodies interfaced through various 'subjective' experiences since before the beginning of time, but what time are we working within? The civilization that we currently inhabit continues to redefine the parameters of inquiry - of space and time and self and being - rationalizing through increased velocity/fidelity/complexity of the observation and articulation. These rational mechanisms are not absurd - quite the contrary, they attempt to articulate in order to pull out of absurdity. There's always a bias of perspective involved and it is our response-ability to wield them with care and sensitivity for the whole world is at risk. It's not that these states are being discovered, but we are becoming able to recognize them, shifting the model in relation to the reality - and what is more real anyways? Every knowledge system is tied to its own model of abstracting the cosmos. Knowledge itself is reductive, regardless of the culture, language, or myth of the seeker.

What is this truth you speak of? How does the 'bare-ing witness' of this truth (which I would offer is always already only ever defined by the individual speaker) offer a possibility of being aligned with a greater knowledge of the structure of myths? How do we account for the multiple POVs of all the shiva heads simultaneously? What media, what language, what manner of speaking or representing or modeling might be appropriate for this?

I personally believe that the fidelity of the model expands the fidelity of existence, just as the expansion of potentials through experience - through psychedelic mind flight, or fresh concepts gleaned from books, or conversations with humans or other being-entities - expands our knowledge of the world around us. We are story tellers, history is his-story they say, so how do we tell the story of telling stories which story the narrative of our reality? Is there danger in seeking the story of stories? Am I damning myself through this hubris? What about the morals of these stories... to not seek beyond our means, to not fuck with the gods, to not disrupt the natural order, to not impose a man-scale vision upon the natural world.... or what story with what moral are we referring to?

Of course there are more questions than answers and I'm more concerned with the journey and the beings encountered along the way than I am in reaching the peak of the holy mountain - an uninhabitable and uninviting geography anyways. I believe you have a powerful story to tell, and it emerges differently with every person you tell it to, but the shards and shrapnel that I gather from your explosive visions have been beautiful and helpful for my own telling, so I believe we should continue to entice them out, to weave them together, to combine the heads. To embody/ennact the POV of Shiva is to become the creator and destroyer of worlds, and certainly worlds are always crafted in collaboration, in the space between being and becoming-other. Combine the heads, combine the languages, combine the instruments, yes, but not just mythopoiesis, not just poetry, not just absurd creation or observation, but a making of sense of all this, sensing of senses, articulating the artifacts, seeing through multiple eyes.

I wanted to say something else to, something about my own bias, which I still cannot completely understand. Something about who I am actively making myself to be and in relation to what civilization, culture, mass of stories and histories that I am formed out of. You know where I'm from: a vanilla bland cracked stucco mini mall terror wiping over the southern deserts, the city of Condor, a meaningless asphalt existence littered with shimmering distraction portals, with no stories to help me recognize the plant and animal being around me, no connection to the past generations, no song emerging from any authentic inside... just concrete and alienation. Maybe people have been talking about subtle bodies shimmering in the aether since circa 9 BC but what the fuck do I care because it's all absurd - the drugs and the myths and the science and the philosophy - the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Germans and the Posthumans - where is my fundament? Or I can ask you... where is yours? What culture do you ground your visions in? For me, I am starting with nothing, with nothingness, with no-thing-ness. It all has to be built up, even the ground itself, so what do I have to believe in? This is the real question of mythopoiesis, of ontogenesis, of origins and of making-worlds and of incanting beliefs and of speaking knowledges to each other. If anything is absurd in this world certainly it is me. The question is, how do I use this to my advantage, how does it liberate me to travel where others may not be willing to venture, not for hubris in defiance of the holy heavens (inside or outside) but as a gift, as a sacrifice, out of alterity or peity, to the extent that such a state can be articulate before the mournful lack of anything greater than my own being.

Hmmmm....The initial point of departure and arrival for me is to distinguish, for myself at least, the discrepancies between granularity and fidelity and resolution. Perhaps also to discuss perspective and complexity and velocity. Obviously, this will be rendered very coarsely but at least it will be expressed passionately.

Granularity, it seems to me, has much to do with a kind of lateral and oblique perspective upon the matter at hand. A kind of "going into" something to see what orders of magnitudes it may or may not have nested within itself and how various re-presentations can be conjured through the parsing and discernment of these bits and pieces. Granular synthesis comes to mind.

Fidelity to me seems affixed to a distinctly perpendicular perspective, a kind of bird's eye view. I find it very telling that fidelity also relates to accuracy of a copy or faithfulness of a partner. These seem very telling of the kind of position fidelity has to the thing being considered. It is above it in a way. Fidelity seems to seek a total image or vision out of which to compare and contrast. 

Resolution feels in a way a combination of Fidelity and Granularity. To the extent that it seeks to determine the details of the space being considered as it relates to degrees of navigation through said space. The resolution of a microscope or the resolution of an argument. There is a kind of understanding within Resolution that navigation renders the possibility of greater or lesser detail in relation to a point of origin and the desire for the navigator to resolve/ complete their journey.

All this is very rough and ramshackle but I'm just openly ruminating here... What I kind of see woven betwixt and through these ideas is the idea of Detail. And perhaps Detail in relation to Perspective. Which, when one thinks about it, perhaps Perspective is always already packed into detail. I suppose perspective is always already packed into all of this...One of the masks of subjectivity?

It would seem that Perspective is the pivot point for determining what one is more specifically invoking. Granularity or Fidelity or Resolution. Lateral or Oblique or Perpendicular views? Comparative or hyper-local con-textual? And in this regard, Velocity seems to specify the rates of change of various densities of information in relation to a perspectival point. 

 Velocity can render a perspective with more of less resolution. Velocity can turn the granular into a blur, or conversely slow the blur down until it emits countless particles. The career of the LHC is to have high fidelity frozen frames of spacetime allowing for the teasing apart of granularities. 

Complexity has something to do with coherent interrelatedness, specifically the coherency of the  transformations of force and form within a system. The more complex a system, the more accurately in can converse with itself about itself, losslessly. 

Just thinking aloud here...

It seems as if you are stating that knowledge is both reductive and expansive. That in its careening saunter towards fidelity-granularity-resolution it opens up k/new vistas for experience. Through discerning finer and finer detail, perhaps one is opening self up to larger and larger/ subtler and subtler magnitudes of experience. And here, I would argue, is where hubris and the "devil in the details" comes to rest. We may personally or globally come to a point(maybe we already have) in which the quest for detail and organization/ orchestration of epistemologies is in fact festering rather than expanding. That the process of world model making has turned in on itself one too many times and instead of rendering a nautilus shell in the shape of Shiva' cochlea, that this process has in fact turned into an ingrown toenail. Festering can have high fidelity as well. Borges writes about this sort of thing, The Library of Babylon is one such story that comes to mind. In the game of shells, we forgot the ocean.

And this touches upon the absurdity of it all. In the quest to banish the irrational, to make sensible the sensate senseless ineffable Mystery, we have perhaps created ever more complex Rube Goldberg Machines. Silicon and symbol, glass and gargantuan mountain scale gash, optics and options, data and detritus, coppers cables and genderless concubines helming silver starships, signal transmitting autonomous machines circumnavigating the globe to facilitate pornographic flights of fancy and international warfare. Instant coffee and instant karma. Rube Goldberg machines to try and assuage the paranoia-pain of a meaningless universe and to bolster the hubris of a god given right to conquer the seven spheres.

And here is where I find a weave into the more important matter...what do you, Travis Wyche, need to feel whole? To belong? To have points of origin from which to depart and about which to spiral? I don't know my friend...I really don't know.

The place that I, ___, have found, that I have found some trust/ truth within, is my body. This is the root of the ramifying subjective. I know that this sounds obscure and non-specific but it is where the ancient stories and contemporary psychedelic mind flights have brought me. This body is obviously a divine gift and the obscure but definite feeling toned landscapes it can guide one through must not be obliterated by the more caustic vagaries of contemporary model making. Sit and be and breathe and let the questions and perspective fly through. It is a decidedly Buddhist/ Naturalist perspective but I have found a place to inhabit in it. Cuddle with the dog, kiss your girlfriend, feel the wind on your face, and enjoy the taste of your morning coffee. 

I wouldn't purport to be presenting a total perspective and I get a sense that the world is far more heterogeneous than can be supposed. In fact, it maybe a breeding ground for totalities. A fecund field of totalities rubbing against one another rendering granular perspectives betwixt their fricative surfaces. 

But what do I know man...I haven't addressed Time or Truth at all...I'm just trying to be commensurate with the love and sophistication you have brought to my life.

Yes, I also believe that to conduct such a conversation we must set out from the beginning, but I for one do not locate the origin within language. I was under the impression (like into wet clay) that we were discussing something older, preceding oration, supposedly prior to reason, before the word. In the beginning there was the word and the word was ___, that unspeakable ineffable non-entity dispersed through the ether - oceanic metaphor for the cosmos spilling over the arbitrary human shores into that which we cannot fathom, infinite depth, not to be confused with our earthen waters, which although they remain as mysterious (or more so) than the black skies beyond the atmosphere, they remain firmly anchored by force and dirt. What is coarse is the fundament itself, that upon which it all stands, that granular substrate appearing as both horizon line separating heaven from earth at the outmost expanses of vision, differentiating into discrete mountain ranges and crevices which we are able to place names upon, crumbling and eroding into boulders sitting before us - almost our own scale - which we venture to imbibe with agency as an entity or body or prospect of more-than-inert dirt, grinding down still farther than our own form can follow to humble stones we put into lines to mark our own path as geological cartography, earth mapping earth for human vision, cracking in the unforgiving sun of Ra or Surya or Helios or Inti or Huitzilopochtli (the "hummingbird on the left") or Wi (we?), Beiwe, Hors, Malakbel, or whatever name you prefer to evoke - these pebbles now fitting neatly into our hands to be carried around, polished by human touch instead of the wind of time, carved into totems and fetishes of our own imagination, gazing portals for the extrapolation of myth, sounding boards for the invention of law, currencies for the exchange of value, ornament for the altars, eyes of the icons, jewel of the crown, keeper of dreams whispering fate into our children's ears, vessel of knowledge, symbol of the entire earth itself long before we sent mechanical eyes into space, deteriorating against our minds still further until becoming too small too handle, filling up the seas with beaches for leisure, swelling up deserts with evidence of our violence, sweeping into the cracks of our old shoes to cause blisters and callouses and other agitations, blinding the horizons by great storms of its own agony against human purpose, floating weightlessly in the morning and evening light to remind us of the pollution of beauty, ground down still further to be suspended in oily pastes and spread upon flax textiles to serve as crafted human symbols of our imagination vomited upon the illuminated page - the source of illumination itself - until finally being shoveled over our heads upon dying, larger cousins being charged with marking the final resting place of our measly flesh tubes, silently watching always the absurdity of our comedies and tragedies and negligence of knowledge knolled out upon a carbon table we are foolish enough to believe we erected, with purpose.

Knowledge seems to be both reductive and expansive, and is paradoxical in this way. At what point does the epistemological corpus become ineffectual then? When is it turned in upon itself, grown back into its own dermis to interrupt its flows, to cease to be a beautiful geometrical dynamisms re/presenting (or enacting) the cosmic architecture and become a grotesque appendage of the human mutation? I would venture that this is not merely a Western detriment, but one that all humanity succumbs to. I resolutely do not believe that we were ever more pure, more attuned, integrated, aware, receptive, empathic, wise, or otherwise; on the contrary, I believe we have always already been lost within ourselves, that the Borgesian myths speak of greater truths of consciousness not merely the project of Enlightenment or Humanism, that if we can be said to "be" anything we are organisms of separation, orators of the silence, seekers of ontogenesis through mythopoiesis, if not distinct from nature then certainly the vessel through which its timbres hear themselves quivering, most articulate muscular mouth and calibrated ear for the specific frequency frame of language and meaning. I'm not interested in dominating the world, in reigning over other beings, of conducting tyranny over life or ownership over stones, but I do believe that our purpose is to ruminate upon purpose, that our poetry should serve as a process of living rather than a clear portrait of that which carries on most beautifully without our interference, and that the mystery is best revered by dancing with it. As a game, there seems to emerge a distinction between those who play within the rules and those that play with the rules. The only absurdity is the notion of "thinking too much" or "going too far," as though consciousness itself were a vice, the mind manifesting a mythology of violence against other members of mind (as though we weren't all so intertwined). This is not to say that humans do not succumb to folly and foolishness fueled by fear and fetish, but I would encourage you to distinguish between various colors of majicks, differentiate technologies of mineral intelligence from war machines of abstract colonial terror-territories, to ween out the devil from the details so we may get on with the project of combining our efforts towards mutual support, radically expansive alterity, atomic bombs of love, global communities of mushroom growers and bacteria beneficiaries to reinvigorate the immune system of the terrestrial spirits, to be an advocate for the anti-power retributions of post-industrial revolution contriving to emancipate workers from their roles and reverse the assembly lines, to return the products to the factories to be disassembled, to return the re-sources to the source and get on with the poetic act of living cleanly. What must be given up? What must be done away with? Certainly it is not reason or knowledge or science, but perhaps the meaningless signifiers which perpetuate thoughtless action and social orientations, the vices of the mind which instigate divisions between peoples and hallucinating obsessions with trying to radicalize society from within the propaganda machine - its far too strong and far too keen on integrating the revolution into its production schedule. Colonialism is a spirit residing within us all: we are all participants within master/slave dynamics and what must absolutely cease is the tyranny of hubristic id's over lesser entities in all forms. I for one am interested in laying my whole being upon the fire if it makes the signal pyre burn a little bit brighter, because my body is just one of many and not any more full of meaning, but I refuse to be a martyr, and I refrain from merely baring witness, and choose instead to attempt activity and activation at great risk, for I believe that there is no authenticity without laying everything on the line.

Now... regarding your questions directly addressing myself, for my own part, of what would be required to "feel whole" or to acquire a sense of belonging - to a place or a time, or tribe or kin, or concept or canopy - I am equally in the dark. My initial response to this question is to undermine the presumption that we all - or I specifically - must belong to any whole at all, as though this is some essential aspect of being (or being human?), that any such whole may exist beyond or besides the human abstraction which idealizes it. The longer I live the less useful such a concept appears, and the more absurd the possibility of such a feeling resounds in my silly psyche silken personage, and the more distance I gain from the holistic stories which story this reality which has always sounded so exotic to me: because it is! It is exotic, definitively, because it was not the culture I was raised in and never has been that which I have inhabited, so how could I dare appropriate the cultural milestones of others, acquired and collected through the very colonial anthropologists which I argue with here at the threshold of temperance? My reality is woven into a different pattern; although obviously dependent upon the same fibers, I am becoming cognizant of other interference patterns overlaid upon my lattice. I am no cog to any machine - in fact I despise the mechanical metaphors of ecology, cognition, and corpus, desiring to instead articulate my own gooey amphibian membranes of sense and sensation, for better or for worse, but I do live here now and do perform visible behaviors and routines within this mechanized beast of a social body, and I must take responsibility for the history I have inherited and the modes of life I choose to perform daily, for subsistence and comfort, for labor and leisure, for my privilege and responsibility in wielding it. To this extent I am precisely that which I say I am not, a walking contradiction, a rabid hypochondriac hypocrite critic of hyperspace, but I'm trying to take account of what is, and open new accounts of what could be, and push not for the sake of pushing but because the membrane needs to pop and new fluids need to be allowed to intermingle in the soup. Don't envy me and I won't envy you - although the prospect is tempting - for I do not believe this serves either of our interests, and that in fact our interests may be more aligned that you let on, and in fact the articulation of this alignment is what instigated this conversation to begin with - I believe - and this superimposition of one wise skeptic over another, and the charting of their patterns - ours, that is - seems a better fit for a beginning than any salted semiotics or rusty rhetoric could muster. Where you have ended (in your last letter) is precisely where I think we are beginning: with ourselves, in relation, through relating, by a concern with the dynamic nature of relation more than the determinism of a myth of nature beyond the wet substratum we are swimming in. Don't describe me as being at odds with the world, at least not any more or less than you, and (I would venture to state) any and every other human contemplating their own humanity, and (I would dare to speculate) any and every being-becoming writing themselves through their own onto-mythology. As I said from the beginning (which has always already taken place, for we have known each other for many years now), I need you to help me work this out, perhaps you are the only one that can in this way, and I believe the process to be cathartic to both of our beings - although only you can decide how it may or may not serve your own - and may also evolve into a rigorous and righteous model for those "others," the seeking-subjectivities of the world, to project themselves into! So let us construct it carefully, with great care and attention, with full feeling and fine fidelity, through time and other complex allegories, tracing and retracing trajectories backwards and forwards and towards other orientations as well.

It has already begun. Let this document stand as proof.