Laying in bed this morning, gray pouring in from all sides coating the walls, observing new cracks in the ceiling, the sounds of the large open space of our shared room filling up the empty spaces of my half-formed dreams. This is why it annoys me so much - the dog slurping its own genitals, the street traffic, the loud fan of the bathroom vibrating through the walls like our own private airport right next door - these sounds infect, function like pollution, stealing away the sweeter auratic resonance of my own mind. She is always cooing "mmmmm," the same sound used for pleasure and discomfort so it's impossible to distinguish save for trying to piece together the context she is currently squirming in - the dog grunting "mmmmmm," the smell of the bakery down the street "mmmmmm," the first sound in the morning and the last sound at night "mmmmmmm." I'm sure I make my own sounds but they are so thoroughly integrated into my inner soundtrack that I no longer distinguish them from the general environment and they are seldom brought to my attention from others. I enjoy bringing such things to our attention, these sounds and many others, these aspects of life and many others: attention itself seems worthy of maintaining attention upon, a slippery game which I never tire of, yet I wonder about the endurance of others in maintaining such concentration. It often seems that the world is filled with so many little things to capture and contain our awareness, all these vessels of sense/sensation/sensibility to fill with out own being, externalized paraphernalia to put upon the shelves and coffee tables, to decorate with, to show off to others as markers of cultural sophistication or anthropological history - does the desire to live in an empty space equate to a want to eradicate these relations? Perhaps, to be free of them, free of the desire.

I've been reading texts by Dolar, an incredibly validating experience providing another firm fundament to place the opera upon. A Voice and Nothing More addresses issues of mechanics and automata, of voice captured to media - tape recorders and implication into digital playback, spatial distribution of bodies in relation, of mouth and ear, opening and closing orifices, inside/outside oscillatory dynamics... highly simplified diagram of dialectical oppositions (a hole which I believe I can complicate and fill with my own ruminations - Dolar purports that these processes cannot be schematized but I beg to differ!), algebraic equations from Lacan offering specific symbolic beacons I might put into circulation (even if just as opposition to my own positive creation of new symbols), and what I believe to be a very useful orientation to Lacan's (and by extension, Freud's) topology of desire - which I must come to terms with in order to "defend" my dissertation to the academic audience of EGS. Pathagoras, the philosopher behind the curtain, the voice emerging out of the void, speaking in relation to the void, the voice as an articulation of its own void, a resonant cavity of the subject whose quiver comes to define subjectivity. Yes, I believe that more texts in this vein may serve very well to articulate my proceedings in the voice of the Other, through pastiche and appropriation, creative-conceptual-plagiarism (of course), and help me map the diffused differences between the arguments to begin injecting my own becoming-natural language. After reading, Dolar's text should be combed through and distilled into an arboreal note lattice: one possible beginning, a root system to be woven into other mycelial networks as a proceed.

All of the texts and voice memos from the last 6 years have been compiled - here, in this document - and the conversations continue to unravel. I will make it my goal today to transcribe the remaining conversation, with ___ during his recent visit and ___ from a few days ago concerning our shared orientation towards defining some spaces for music production, and use this as an opportunity to begin thinking about how and what to continue recording during the roadtrip over the next two weeks. Ideas have been building up on all fronts, concerning all things, and I'm hoping that this trip will be an opportunity to expunge much of this content - to externalize it so that it may be attended to more directly. Of course the trick here is tact and poise, to maintain attention upon attention itself even while discussing the nuances of acting intentionally and attentively. I will utilize the phone as an audio recorder inside the car - the mic has proven more than sufficient for my needs. I will also prepare the recorder for outside capture, although I'm not sure what the purpose of this audio will be as of yet... my attempts to locate interesting acoustic spaces on previous journeys has proven entirely frustrating for the presence of other humans. Even when I have found myself in particularly obscure and isolate areas I have found that the noise of traffic and distant machinery is so prevalent as to consume the desired silence of the recording, but I will bring the recorder just in case as I believe having to extend my attention towards its preparation and safe keeping will make me more attentive to the sonic spaces we will be traversing. I am also going to prepare to shoot video: concerning this point I believe I can be especially conservative with my strokes. What am I hoping to achieve here? I suppose I have in mind a representation of the void, spaces of nothing: color, texture, rock, fundament, walls and shadows: not representations, not illustrations, but raw backgrounds to serve as material to be worked with later... I catch myself thinking about the 5th installment of the prologue, which should perhaps be composed of these still dry oceans, but also anticipating video imagery for the encroaching first act. The fact is, I must begin capturing to initiate the process, and I must force myself to attend to the material I accumulate in order to begin thinking through its material concerns. The images themselves are not so important. Audio and video recorders will be present, but no books. I can and should write, although even this seems like inappropriate behavior for the situation. I will choose instead to walk and talk and touch and be with ___ and ___, to be in my body and attend to what is around me.