posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

the volume of memory

May we speak of fullness, and of amplitude?

Or,

mere intensity and lack?

Of certainty, not. Buried, yes. Suppressed, but not invisible.

What was: now only traces, tracks of energy in liminal mind, itself the inconsequential armature of be-ing.

Released to the future, tracing a trajectory not governed by arc, origin, or knowing; the unknown entering that mind, leaving Light and uncertain matter.

You impressed on me your broken self-love and absolute certainty in every moment and I remember it all, forever.

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

really?

If we go to the root of the matter, we find that human love is in its essence merely the rutting season in a reasoning being; it increases all the vital forces of the human being, just as rutting increases those of the lower animals. If love apparently differs enormously from rutting, this is merely due to the fact that the reproductive impulse, the most primitive of all impulses, becomes in developed nerve centres more diffuse in its sphere of operations, and thus in man awakens and excites a whole province of psychical life which is entirely unknown to the lower animals.

Bloch, Iwan. The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization. London, England: Redman Limited, 1909.
posted

‘bedeutungsblind’ of eco-thought

As long as we use technical models in biology without being fully aware that by applying these models we just imply that nature performs according to the projected human requirements and guidelines, we are “blind for the significance (bedeutungsblind)” as Jakob von Uexküll expressed it. We are incapable of putting up questions about the origin and legitimacy of our own needs nor are we capable of asking for the origin and legitimacy of the needs of other living beings. We cannot investigate either, in which ways the needs of the different living beings on this planet are dependent on each other.

Uexküll, Thure von, 1980. Kompositionslehre der Natur. Biologie als undogmatische Naturwissenschaft. Ausgewählte Schriften Jakob von Uexkülls, Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Thure von Uexküll. Frankfurt am Main – Berlin – Wien: Verlag Ullstein GmbH.
posted

War is an ugly thing

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Mill, J. S. (1862). The Contest in America. Fraser’s Magazine.

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The Field of Attention, The Field of Flows

Slipping through a day, from dawn to late evening, time is a field of flows. Attention calls flow from its progress, delineating it temporarily as distinct and heterogeneous. Pass through attentiveness, and one arrives at the granular curtain of awareness. Seeing both detail and the full over-flow of being.

Fighting to maintain constant attention to lived life. Back to breathing?

An attempt to address the title of this blog entry. Entries arise from these titles. Titles self-generate from the textures of living. Entries are attempts to address the titles, to address the textures of life, to form a text: a reduction of life. A tautology of be-ing — writing about be-ing — a pleonastic embolism destined to disrupt attention, flow, and life itself. And yet these become normative to the social. Normative to the day of lived-life, pried from living body, in service to social presence, social acceptance, and social ‘success’. If only all the world were ignorant of Plato!

posted

snippets

fleeting passages, mental imaginations slipping through a narrow slot canyon, rubbing gritty walls and feeling the cool stone on cheek, fleeting passages, mental imaginations of non-being. going beyond what is pressing into eyeballs from out there. some kind of inverse folding of the in here to the out there, becoming all from being Self. or watching the Other vanish from meat-space tangibility, entangled-ness, there-ness, then gone. with a rough sigh. expelling all that is lively, and no longer receiving the inspiration that was once dealt: there’s a finite supply. clocks winding down, complications, intrusions to safe, normal living. looking around, first at patterns of mud flow after a flash flood, then at shapes of crenelate cyanobacteria in cryptobiotic colonies, then at the faces of friends, aging. and finally at the archive full of photographs.

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

matters

Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property — variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass — can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity. — Frank Wilczek

Sometimes I get the feeling that I don’t recognize even my own life. Among the array of phenomena which present themselves for the sensual body-system every … second … recognition shouldn’t be necessary for any one of them, given that change is the governing principle, or so. All should be new every time, all the time(s), and thus recognizable whether or not there are any observable and (relatively) invariant* features. It could be that this lack of recognition is itself merely the reliance on external models or comprehensions of ‘what’s out there’ as opposed to a deeper reliance on what is experienced by the Self as being (relatively) invariant. more “matters”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

down on this

Einstein’s relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty have become our own. Even if we do not understand the science, we experience the reality.

Steve Dietz, Dreams of an (Un)Certain Future, in the “Sarai Reader 03,” p. 202

Part of the reminder that the map is not the territory, and the model is not the thing itself. We have the territory, we hold the thing itself, and it is a matter of finding our voice to describe both to those who are most immediately around us.

posted

sketching

There is missing, in the long paragraphs of text that has characterized this work, this labor, there is missing any tacit explication of Self.  That dimension of be-ing is always held behind various structures and impediments, calcifications and reifications. Without any potential for at least mirroring that which is out there, separated from the wet eye and dry skin, reflected constituents of anything true.

So, false or antithetical meanings constantly overtake the possibility of saying (something) profound(ly) that “I am.” Instead there is duplicitous blather. Not that this is rooted in anything internal, actually not at all. The internal as a direct expression of conscious and unconscious presence is always authentic. It is only when that internal state collides with the social, even in the mental articulations of language, where pre-tension arises.

What life can compare with this? –
Sitting alone quietly by the window,
I observe the leaves fall,
the flowers bloom as the seasons come and go.
Do you understand, or not?
— Seccho

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

cycles

I hear myself say “shit,” with a drawn out groan when waking up in the morning. Rebirth? Or merely recognizing that the night visions were not reaches into some omnipotent primal mind, but were instead merely what I saw yesterday, under the sun, with their false meaning correlated into the banality of teeth-grinding dreams.

The north-shore-bound train rattles across that one bad joint on the Harbor Bridge outside the window, dung-da-dung-dung-da-dung-dung-da-dung-dung-da-dung. Four cars, eight sets of wheels: a single axle, three doubles, and a single.

[After watching her long eyelashes, seated as she is, side-wise to me, profiled at the front of the bus, I cannot that night close my eyes and see her…]

Why does the potential in life seem to drain ever more quickly here, and there. After an mid-afternoon pause, outside to record sounds. Because other progresses are not made when confronted by the screen. Therefore.  Capitulation of any weak progression of thought, it comes to nowhere.

Thinking instead, flat, two dimensional, of the solitary and gape-mouthed death, settling that night into the room of living.

And in the evening, making for bed early with a tinge of migraine, I say, “my third eye has closed.” And seek another sleep in tangled comfort.

posted

Free empty hands

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands — no. Free empty hands. Back turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade. — Samuel Beckett

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

(How to Sit) Zazen

It’s a good example of the affect of mediation on socially-generated practices of any sort [this came into mind when I saw a poster advertising a IEEE conference here in Sydney. The posted contained all the recognized and standardized functions of conferences anywhere on any subject. The cocktail evening cruises on the ________ (fill in the blank) river/harbor/lake. The hospitality suites in the _________ (fill in the blank) hotel. The keynotes by famous personages. The plenaries, the break-outs, the posters, workshops, and seminars. yadda, yadda. Don’t people get tired of this endless repetition of heavily coded social protocols?]

The following was downloaded from the UM (University of Minnesota) original Gopher online text retrieval system sometime in the winter of 1991-92. I think it’s the first document (extant) that I downloaded via that new networked document system — the direct precursor of the WWW. Coming around in a very long, very wide circle, from the roots of the digital coming-to-being in the last millennium, breathe deeply:

1. Sit on the forward third of a chair or cushion.
more “(How to Sit) Zazen”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

holding space and antinodes

Non-doing defines doing. Sitting in stillness invites people to move. Getting out of the way allows people to fill space with their passion. Letting go of expectations leaves room for responsibility to come forth. All of this is integrity. Every piece of doing requires the strong presence of non-doing to anchor it.

Stifling every impulse to intervene, to give directions and orders leaves space for others to design their lives. You can create a container and then stand by and watch it fill and teem with life. You don’t resist the natural movements of groups of people co-creating their futures. Instead you work on your own inability to be still, to want to own the outcomes, to want to invest your ego.

This is not your show. You are holding space, embodying space and being empty and full at the same time. If they thank you in the closing circle, you have not done enough. — The Tao of Holding Space, Chris Corrigan

and a side note on one of the seven marvelous students in the Ways of Listening course I taught this term at UTS. Ash undertook a fine project Antinode, you can check out the process-documentation blog that she set up. nothing like be-ing in the analog world! her experiences definitely fed back into the overall success of the class. auspicious start to teaching in Oz!

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

here, there, etc

the play of reification. when mind stops, not confronted by any particular obstacles, but merely by an inertial lag. lacking the energy to proceed. while outside weather changes, un-noticed, unless it is rain. it has fallen below the threshold of modern awareness. inside people. like writing here. slipped by the side of lived be-ing.

wander over to to the Art Gallery of NSW to catch a screening of Gimme Shelter. flashing-back to Ancien Régime of mid-century Amurika, seeing the radical youth of that time — youth who are now retiring boomers fighting to keep a big slice of pie — what’s theirs by right, eh? bah!

a stroll out to Sculpture by the Sea, an uneven sprinkling of expressions placed along the Bondi-Bronte path. Shar says the water is 19.5C, gettin’ there. I’ll be in before long. inflammatory Thai dinner after that.

Willy and Andy unveiled a new blog, a collaborative effort covering “absolutely everything.” Welcome to the blogosphere folks!

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

many impressions, no time

where to start. what to write about (if there ever is time to write here). impressions, expressions, observations, actions. food shopping: Woolworths, Coles, and the thousand-and-one small Asian food shops, and Paddy’s Market, 7-11s for expensive junk food, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese fast-food. vomit stains smeared on black cut-basalt (rhyolite?) sidewalk paving. up-scale-chain consumer fashion depots line George Street, my commuter trajectory. old Ruger, Winchester signs over one empty shop-front, across the street from the Greek guy selling swords, Swat boots, and GI dog tags. the rest of the neighborhood Chinese-owned shops. restaurants with open fronts, tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, with one Lebanese place with hookahs. and the pubs, packed from Thursday through Saturday nights. late. girls with impossibly high-heels limp along tugging down impossibly short skirts that hike up and show pantied crotches at every tottering step. blokes, the NRL blokes, with bulging tee-shirts and vaguely Maori tattoos on biceps. and the suits. the business class. busy, very busy, very very busy. Japanese manga girls or so, adorned, liberally with things and things with accessories and feathered black hair and pale milky skin. Anglos, red patchy skin, (it’s the latitude), sometimes Tilley hats (I can’t bear to wear my new one at risk of appearing like one of these). baseball cap will have to do along with plenty of sunscreen on my UV-challenged nose. more “many impressions, no time”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Infinite Jest: Kinds Of Light

Kim proposes a new microsound project, making sound tracks for the experimental films of David F. Wallace’s fictional character James O. Incadenza in the book Infinite Jest. I pick Kinds of Light as it immediately strikes a resonance and subsequently patch together an obsessive piece in 24 hours (4,444 frame splices on a multi-track of a water performance in Pool Creek Canyon (changing the course of history)), shatter-welded with audio from video footage of standing at a confluence in the West Elk Wilderness entranced by the Pele’s hair of water coming from the sun). definite sonic hyper-retinality.

(stereo audio, 7.4 mb)

I missed Wallace during my North Amurikan vacancy of the last 20 years. surprised I hadn’t run across him randomly, though, given the households that I have ramble through on the nomadic way. George knew him and speaks highly of his character. sadly for all of us, another victim of the intensity of be-ing. I plow through Oblivion, and a couple other books that I managed to recall at the library. extremely dense. the first short story I read drove me, half-way through, into a delirious sleep from which I woke ten minutes later, not knowing where I was. jittery, caffeine-fueled, precise jewels. you see the faceting process, the cutting of the entire glittering crystal, a tedium of focus, the high-speed grind with diamond grit, a rocking, polishing movement across the charged wheel. spun tales. fiber glass. each brittle thread opening a bloodless wound which nano-gapes at the whole fuckin’ world, all at once. he would be Brakhage’s cinematographer if Brakhage was blind and able only to see the inside of his eyelids.

“Kinds Of Light” – B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. No cast; 16 mm; 3 minutes; color; silent. 4,444 individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate and rendered disorienting at normal projection speeds by the hyper-retinal speed at which they pass. CELLULOID, LIMITED METROPOLITAN BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL SPROCKET DRIVE

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

funeral, et al

just back from Helga’s funeral service at the Seltjarnarnes Church and the reception at Hotel Saga after wards. sad to see the ones who grew up with that old way of living pass away, that long-ago generation. Helga was born in a dirt-floored sod hut in Svarfaðardalur near Dalvík on Eyjafjörður just shy of one hundred years ago. she was the matriarch to four generations of descendants who follow her on the pathway.

(00:40:06, stereo audio, 77 mb)

while I will always be an outsider in this close-knit community deep in the North Atlantic, I will always be bound to the place through the people of this family. bound in the living and the dying, the movements, the step-wise step-fool wanderings along the rugged sphere’s surface, floating in a suffused crystal darkness. where replication and desertion become forces driving Light and spare living. messages arrive from all corners of life. direct in the face, through this and that face rarely seen, age-lines and sagging skin characterizing it all. eyes peering out from under graying crop. young ones dancing around, some so young that the dance has not yet begun in the newness of be-ing. but where eyes wide open take it all in to map pathways across pure soul. they take it all in. and the living move on, the ones who have left are there in memory as the ones who formed us.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

dabeisein ist alles!

it is finally the cold rain on the last lap home after a day of being in the cold wind of late winter Berlin, the cold rain gets my head cold, giving me a head cold. damn. waiting with M-H to get into the Reichstag to see the heart of the German government. for what it’s worth.

meanwhile workers are quickly replacing all the monumental (and mostly broken) Light posts that line Karl Marx Allee with new ones, though of the same form. at first I thought, oh, construction, been like this for years, but soon realized that things actually proceed at a good clip in this continual renewal of the city. who’s paying for it?

if only, with the greyness of possibly imminent spring times, sweeping through a head full of cold. unable to concentrate. unable to do that at all; with nothing to think about, and nothing to think about from lack of attention to the moment. out of it. and dreaming of the Golden Elixir that Taoism offers, though finding will not be in dreams, but in full be-ing.

Human beings receive this Golden Elixir from Heaven . . . . Golden Elixir is another name for one’s fundamental nature, formed out of primeval inchoateness. There is no other Golden Elixir outside one’s fundamental nature. Every human being has this Golden Elixir complete in himself: it is entirely realized in everybody. It is neither more in a sage, nor less in an ordinary person. It is the seed of Immortals and Buddhas, and the root of worthies and sages. — Liu Yiming

posted
  • place: Brooklyn, New York

tendencies

(00:09:14, stereo audio, 17.8 mb)

Tending to my own symbolic annihilation. Making agreements with distant others to be there then. When being here now remains contested and thin in execution, and, still, a warm hand-shake and I feel like crying; gracias, gracias por todos, gracias, gracias to the guitar-playing Latino guy (is he my age?), a tenor singing in the L station. His spirit-voice shakes the rusted iron foundations of the city. It quickens autonomous space and heart in the urban subterranean and pushes everyone to the electric forefront of be-ing. The sustained highs transform the state of all things until suddenly I am here now. The I-beams shudder as the train pulls in. My head hangs as I enter the car and slump onto the fiberglass bench. Peak experience, and the inevitable deflation.

posted
  • place: en route Chino Valley - Phoenix, Arizona - Denver, Colorado - Glen Ridge, New Jersey

en route

Finally, finally leaving this place with some finality. Except to retrieve a few boxes of things sometime later in life. Or so, depending on how life goes. Or does not. Europe looming yet again. How many times have I made this leap across the big pond? 15, 20, 40, or so? Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Luxembourg, Stockholm. And on. Airports. This time KLM to Schipol and on to Hamburg, taxi to DüppelStr. in Kiel. And friends. That’s the best part. But it doesn’t solve the over-arching issue that hides in movement. That is, what to make of life, as it surely enters the latter half if not later.

No images, no text.

Prescribed burns. Burning forests with control. Choking the air.

Waiting for the whole wheat pasta to cook. While the daily feelings-of-displeasure arise. Versus the feelings-of-pleasure. Which arise under other circumstances than those which stimulate the feelings-of-displeasure. That this is the dialectic of being.

I first met my future ex-wife at a party in the summer of 1988 in the German city of Cologne, or Köln as the locals spell it. It was in one of those neighborhoods in Köln that had a name, like Deutz or Uni-Zentrum, but I don’t remember the name. I was wearing a dark-maroon and black smoking jacket. In Germany a tuxedo is called a “smoking.” I wasn’t wearing a smoking, but people at the party were smoking. Mostly cigarettes, because at that time, all university students in Germany were required to smoke cigarettes, it was part of the social contract. Because so many were smoking cigarettes, you couldn’t say that lots of people were smoking hash as well. Although they could have been, as hash was often mixed with tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes that looked exactly like the regular hand-rolled cigarettes. Nobody called them joints. I don’t remember much of the party. People were speaking mostly German, and I didn’t understand much if any German at that time. Sometimes somebody would speak English, but mostly not. And as people got more and more altered, marginal English happened less and less. Sometime that week, or that night, or on that trip to Europe, I lost that smoking. I was not happy about that. Now I don’t ever buy such clothes, instead stay sheathed in the banal products of the banal culture of consumption. On sale. Thrifty.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

The Planet

two rather friendly, though dark granite bears flank the entrance to the building I’m staying in. granite everywhere. that’s always the first thing I notice in Finland. the density of building materials. granite. the window in the bedroom looks out over the entrance from the second floor. another bedroom in Helsinki. realized in conversation last night that I’ve been coming to Finland for 13 years already. wow.

Finnish flags are unfurled on every building. not sure what that’s about.

head down to the Andorra Theater to meet Andrew and Sophea to see the movie The Planet. part of the Lens Politica Film Festival. I see Steve Kurtz walk out of the previous film early. I don’t know him, and didn’t really feel like interacting. he walks away through the mostly empty lobby. the movie is darker than Al Gore’s tour-de-force on the same subject of global warming. and it covers a bit different territory including e-waste, and developing-world attitudes about the problem. experts paint dark pictures, and pictures paint darker pictures. dark. realizing I likely won’t last to 2050 seems auspicious, though there is a curiosity at the idea of catastrophic change, planet-wide. what terrible lessons that would hold for those who are alive. how they will revile the fools of this present age. but the planet has the potential to re-generate another species if (once!) we eradicate ourselves. give it another 250,000,000 years. why not? or is our presence here a unique expression of order not to be replicated ever. what is it about these imaginations of disaster projected by science that seem to fascinate so much? and in the end, it is still us in the developed world, sitting in theaters in our cities, receiving the images of film producers, telling us what is in the world, rather than us out in the world, be-ing there. fully.

posted
  • place: en route Grand Central - Bedford, New York

Beckett

en route from Grand Central to Bedford Hills. lunch with Anthony at the Empire Diner, we walk down there from meeting at Penn Station in the morning. an eatery where I used to go on occasion when working in Chelsea. long time passed. groups of tourists stop on the corner and take photos of the diner. it’s a land mark. marking the land which can’t actually be seen — it’s all paved over and dug up. so, the city as one big land mark, and nothing else. no land left to mark. we mark time with dialogue. conversations which are continuous registrations, trajectories from the past. launching into an immediate and present future. stopping at way-points to register the locus, then rocketing onward. upward. bouncing through some Beckett. ah, Beckett — when the privilege of having a conversation about Beckett? rare. to explore the textures of a literate vision of such elemental power, circumscribing the moment, being, and the perfect intertwining of both to create life. hmmmm, been in the country too long. though the sight of stars is nothing to feel inferior about. they leave different traces in the self than the traces of known and historied voicefull lives.

while the infrastructure labors along. trains slow and imprecise. although arriving in the same places from day to day, the time of arriving changes the place to another, given the slowness. barely able to stay on the track.

through Harlem with hardly a look into the structures of the past years, the rennaisance, onward, northward. up the Hudson, on the Hudson River Line. I’m inna New York state of mind-full-ness. greasy face from lunch of fried veggie lintelburger.

back to thinking about Kevin. what to say on Wednesday, the memorial. thinking how that maxim of avoiding any pre-tension. that is to be remarked. as well, the power of being to invoke collective presence.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

10th anniversary

into the second decade of this travelog. following through the long and winding road of countless kilometers of body movement and mind floating above the surface, suspended in the dark matter between two infinite half-spaces. leaving reduced fragments of primary technology — words — behind, scattered in frozen wake-full-ness. no thought that it would persist so long, accretion volume and visuals and sonic samples. until it becomes a primary manifestation of present being. no more no less.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

distributed empathy

living on the back. no longer an upright animal. except part-time. and no driving for another couple months. perspectives are limited. constant aching. phone calls with empathetic Others, emphasizes the distance of distributed being, how help is only visceral. hmmmm.

posted
  • place: Phoenix, Arizona

Chaz

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree… As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications. — Charles Darwin

posted
  • place: en route Catonsville, Maryland - Las Vegas, Nevada - Livermore, California

give thanks

back in Amurika. familiarity of being. and seeing what I want to see. or not. in the immediate surrounding there doesn’t seem to be a heightened sense of paranoia, but in the extended media surrounding, there is a sense of impending. bus ride from Newark shows the levels of social being. stratification, segregation. lower levels of infrastructure are eroded and the interstitial spaces of chaotic dispersion seem increased. obvious, and overlooked. that the overall depression evinced by the more open individuals, a tangible fear not of terror or violent intervention in the social order, but by the acceleration of intolerant and oppressive attitudes that are locking the society up into a polarity of ideologue and dogma. that the fundamentalism of one external social system is stimulating a reactionary rise in rigid (reactionary!) fundamentalism internally. with no good view in the horizon. no sense of optimism. (to such a degree I can’t even find a spark here in text, a fiction of easy life ahead.)

of course, there are elemental ways of going that do not slow down under a matrix of oppressive social conditions, ones that don’t acknowledge the dominion of legal, political, economic, or general social strictures. spirit. that which is removed from the relativist social sphere. the region where the Self moves as a flame, a fire, an entropic configuration.

yesterday’s stream and the conversations woven around with Steve are enLightening and stimulating. as is the rare case when the possibility to engage with an Other who shares not only the material basis for formal working, but when the aesthetic explorations, the attitudes, and the human interests are sympathetic. we are both net workers. it’s been a pleasure sharing contacts and possibilities over the decade since we met, remotely, during the Fax You project. I was at the Helsinki end, he and Genie at the New York end. contact. and sustained contact. what it’s all about.

posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

soap bubbles

soap bubbles drift past my window. waiting to catch a ferry into town to meet Sanna for lunch at the Atheneum. the summer ferry schedule is on now, so three-per-hour for much of each day. takes the timing aspect away. Maria and David drop in for a bit yesterday evening.

the impending travel to ram5 is on mind. presenting a short set of ideas “the human need for open source space” as a participant presentation in “the practice of open source architecture.” fragments include:

in joining this workshop, I faced the issue of bridging between a series of phrases which I have yet to completely understand as a lived praxis, and my own understanding and praxis. This process is an essential part of open source, where a distributed system facilitates a set of flows that are not always subjectively related. In order to find a pathway across those often uncomfortable spaces of representational difference, one must sometimes let go of the actual symbolic content:

terminologies (need to remain open!) need to be fuzzy concepts that can accept input, crossover, and disruption from other directions.

and rather than a critique-filled, Luddite, anti-technological call for caution or complete rejection of these technologies which the military developed years ago and are only now trickling down for the intelligentsia to play with, (observation of this effect prompted Timothy Leary to come up with the conspiracy theory that “the KGB and the CIA collaborated to develop LSD and personal computers to keep the middle class intelligentsia busy and out of trouble”)

I would like to invoke a remembering of what these social systems are built upon, and what the goals might be in using them.

for me it’s still a question whether it is possible to deconstruct (or pick the locks on) the Masters house using the Masters tools. picking the lock is possible, but who wants to live in the Masters house anyway, it’s got a bad vibe and a bad smell in it.

recalling the basis of Open Source: the human exchange platform.

linguistic-based exchange is only the socialized framework, it is necessary to go beyond that mediated social space into the space of real energy exchanges.

this includes the abstracted space of finance (global capitalism being a subset)

Language, which includes

does not cover

split between linguistic/abstracted systems of exchange (which include legal codices, symbolic (vs real) monetary value exchange systems) and the ‘real’ space of energized exchange

(why con-fluence and con-ference and dancing afterwards are the meat of con-nection and com-munity)

should not end with movements of abstracted symbolic re-presentations of reality, but should be rooted in the real exchange… the adoption of these abstractions as reality is a core cause of alienation that is giving a very desperate edge to contemporary social systems

we must regain the root. (there must be an embodied corollary to each abstracted notion adopted)

this root is post-materialist, energized exchange that transcends at least at some points the limitations of abstracted re-presentations of connection and dialogue

it is clear that many implementations, sailing high on the hype of the dot.com days, are now merely the tools of state command and control.

we need situations that re-energize human connection regardless of the particular representative symbolic content. this is the essence of open source, it is more than a bazaar, more than a market place, more than any socialized system. it is about embodied be-ing and full-tilt presence, nothing more nothing less.

let’s dance!

Andrew shows up, along with Alison and John, we watch the neighborhood cat prance in with a live rat or voll, play with it, and theorize on the range of possible outcomes.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

gates of paradise, oh yeah?

the inbox overfloweth and among the jetsam, the gates of paradise

M y end e a v o r
i n the shadow is to c r e a t e
a l i ght effect that goes d o w n p a s t
t h e walls of habitual prejudice, d o w n t o
t h e training broken buried Se l f, t hr o u g h t h e
s c a ttering of ideas, images, and wor d s, t o o q u i c k
o f s ad or happy for the mercilou s d o g t r a i n i n g
to r eject. My endeavor is to no u r i s h t h e b u r i e d
r e al human inside so t ha t i f t h e b u r i e d S e l f
e v er arises to take its plac e i n t h e co n s c i o u s
l i fe, the unb o u n d S e l f w i l l b e s t r o n g
e n ough to surv i ve t h e v i c i s s i t u d e s
For human beings breath and change are the same: And they are different: The same is the gate.
o f o ur daily life. Fi n d y o u r S e l f.
B e your Sel f. L i v e f r o m
y o u r S e l f.
-- David Daniels

then what can be commented on? in the face if it all?

hanging in the Kiasma Café, waiting to meet Aki again. just got word on funding for a short trip to Oslo if I want. to the Random System Workshop with Kim Cascone, but I’m also scheduled to do a streaming gig to Prague and The Kitchen in NYC on Thursday evening as well, what a problem to have. too many interesting things to do! incredible the difference to life in US academia. but the instability is taking some getting used to after the two relatively sedentary years in Boulder. especially the issue of buying plane tickets. feel like that is draining the up-sides.

posted
  • place: en route Bremen - Kiel, Germany

spins

leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.

Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:

Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!” more “spins”

posted
  • place: Baldwin, Colorado

Dante

below Carbon Peak, at night, sleeping in the pick-up, tearful in the cold to pee, knowing that the stellar core of the Milky Way is being obscured by Dark Matter, otherwise it would blind us with Light and keep us in wakeful madness. and make the sun only a dim reminder of local being. all life would radiate in Dante’s Paradise.

posted
  • place: en route Boulder, Colorado - Charlotte, North Carolina - Fort Myers, Florida

floridada

back on the skinned wings of alloy, fleeing with Loki, moving mach 0.6, east-south-east. to floridada. long time since being in these containers (but what is it to stay embedded in a language that is full of Cartesian frames, and mechanistic, materialistic frames of reference?) it may be that I have missed the precise point. but there was that moment, day-before-yesterday, sitting by the creek, several miles into the canyon, watching a stick that arched uplifted midway between my eye and the glittering, rushing clamor of water. keeping eye focused on the stick, exercising the physical mind’s eye not to travel or be disturbed by that energized background. and getting, as a direct infusion of this practice, the reminder that this is actually an embodied result of the theoretical point of view, the worldview that is emerging during the last months and years. that a way of looking does merge with a practice, the momentary be-ing, finally.

arriving. in the southern realms with a micro-burst welcoming us to the landing strip, rough thunderheadwind, and warm blustery flatness. Aunt Mary is there in the terminal waiting for us.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

The Spell of the Sensuous

No thing has changed. All conditions change. Tired of language. Stopping to consume from the archive. The database that, if I did not have, in its massively material form, would free me to live in the moment. Digitizing is no answer because that process does not remove the weight of that past. Only complete transformation (by fire) would accomplish that. Burnt offering to the present, to living presence. If a practice was subsequently developed.

Approaching the limb of the eighth year of this journal/travelog. Meanwhile reading, or rather adsorbing, David Abram’s book “The Spell of the Sensuous”—recommended by a mutual friend, Eric Fisher, a friend of the author—which confirms obliquely several crucial practices that I had not yet been able to firmly frame in my worldview. Pleasing and stimulating. But reasons for characterizing drift into stretches where only poetics are meaningless for navigation of the now. Discrete, concrete, miscreant. Mechanical words, stripped of any life leave traces that mar what is left behind the wave of hand, brush of hair, shadow of hand on the back of the head. What is the be-ing-ness of Light?

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 2017.
posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

solstice

it is midsummer. moon waxing, not full yet, but there is not so much that touches the eye with length of day, brightness, or even the memory of winter still etched in body. wintering in Colorado was easy. brilliant, and I repeat to many souls that “you will never hear me complain about the weather here.” how is it that I survived Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and especially, Lapland? it is all memory. now. some written here, some not.

shuffling through boxes of books and other things, I think: what’s all the energy focused on the reproduction of art? what is the obsession of getting all art configurations onto paper accompanied by words? paper is an easily preserved object, (the archival word), this is a related factor — to avoid the death of the material object, immortality of the material (the thousand year Reich). seems also related to democratic socialism. that the production of culture should be spread to all, equally. though it is, in the end, not egalitarian propagation by any means. the absolution of “you had to be there.” that an individual’s experience should not be singular, it should be reflected from the collective. rooted and growing only from the collective. not the individualized interpretation of unique seeing (as the reproduction applies a stasis to point-of-view (who’s point of view IS it?), it denies a multiplicity of points of view (portals into the realm of the spirit regarding see-ing and be-ing).

you can relive the voyages of the great explorers — advertisement

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Snorri

networking for survival. looking to rise to the surface. but when it is the Word that still is the over-arching superstructure of the matrix, and it is that very word that is anathema. antithesis. how can it come to be. axe-wielder. Snorri struck down at the thermal pool, from behind, a swift stroke leaving him bleeding into the warm waters, flushing life-water into earth water, mixing Odin’s tears with the sharp stinging excreta of the forge that made Thor’s hammer. all the words on paper did not predict this moment.

the vitality of the country is not linked to the government at all. those who govern do so only of themselves and for other vain matters. the people come and go their ways, and from random collision comes many things. is it different than Europe? there is one mistake that Amurikans make: assuming some kind of homogeneity rules the rest of the world. as there is the media feed. Europe is 350 million anglo white people. bad approximation. it’s slipping by. going it’s own way. as the rest of the world. goes, in circles, in spirals, in the ether between the stars. it’s still there.

but the measure of flows that move us through our be-ing here now cannot be made. if we try to document, we are lost from the moment, not reflecting the brilliance of that revealing of presence in the present.

but is all of this talk, this writing here, these lectures, these speakings, of no value. what-so-ever. oh gee. what then? and anyway, here I cannot write anymore as a travelog. because my motion is only between close-spaced points, and I move by the strength of my own body most of the time. maybe once a week in a car, but otherwise, on a bike. microscopic travels, or maybe mediated travels. there has been a massive increase in email volume. but dislocation has ceased for the time.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

sun-fire

snow again last night. cold, but not too cold. sunshine makes the cold much less penetrating. we bask our life in the Light of that sun. it does bind all things. how has it come that humans can be so easily turning away to stare into a derived and re-created fire. the essence is lost, first of all! essence is not even considered, only the readings of primary sense. readings of reproduction. readings of re-presentation.

felt like I was alive for a moment. that in the midst of folding a black tee-shirt from the dryer, that everything, that everything everywhere shimmered. shivered. nice.

but the relationship of that shimmer and the continuum of be-ing is bisected with. what?

friends offer this possibility of the expression of the self in a form that may be more closely aligned with the array of filters that one sets up internally to deal with what life delivers. laughing for a whole evening with Nick & Deb (above) and Dave.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

convocations

many dinners and convocations, keeping me charged. keeping me going. inspiring, humbling, the imperative of being here now. and doing, living as much as possible. telling stories, and listening as others seek to place themselves in the midst in their own lives; being aligned with the flight of birds. or speaking their mind, speaking their spirits. so it goes.

video conference with Loki. and I meet Wally the plumber, and Dancer, the hair stylist. local Colorado folks. the fabric of Amurika is never what it seems from the distance of the other continents…

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

grounding

what I hope will be the last visit to Iceland for a long time. bone-tired of the movement to get here. feel like being grounded. allowing the electricity of life pass through the body and on into the earth. grounded. in all its suggested meanings. flighty. with the wind blowing outside. and non-sense of the isolation of the interior. the protected sensual field of action. band-limited, spectrally-defined cut and pass. and all that. filtration. that the process of being tends in the direction of shutting down than opening up. but that is my own perception. realizing that possibly some others tend to open-ness as a base condition. open to life and living. what a concept. I have to fight to achieve that state of being. but maybe it is the fight that stands in the way.

posted
  • place: Joensuu. Finland

dragon teeth

off and on. the shift in being. has no measure. which feeling human beings have no word in. war-makers. I would rather die being called a love-maker than a war-maker. or a peace-maker (the ironic name of a Colt 44 six-shooter. the peace-maker. nothing could be more ironic.)

formations. constellations, sewing the dragon’s teeth. planting, harvesting. it has all come to pass.

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

forms of violation

there is no real drive behind being here, or anywhere else, in the transitory movement. food shopping. Juhani’s words about the problem of racism here in Joensuu. said it was in the Helsinki Sanomat again recently. I look with different eyes. in front of the Ramen noodles, a young guy in heavy metal garb is standing in front of his girlfriend playing a red key-ring laser pointer on her mouth while she is talking inaudibly to him. it gets in her mouth. rape.

posted
  • place: en route Kiel - Hamburg - Berlin, Germany - Zürich, Switzerland

lunch with Mark

okay, already the system is declining. complete chaos in Hamburg. the Regional Express that Christian takes me down to in Kiel is delayed, stopping in Hamburg-Altona, so I have to race to the S-bahn to take that to the Hauptbahnhof. at first I choose the what I think is the wrong line, with several extra stops, but the most direct line is apparently completely shut down. make it to the station, racing to make the ICE to Berlin, only to find that it, too, is delayed by about 40 minutes. call Mark at the hotel, then race to another track which they announce with three minutes notice. on board the ICE, first class, full of German business types, swirling around and in between. I take an unreserved seat that has a power plug, much to the dismay of some others. settle in for the ride. more “lunch with Mark”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

fractions

fractions of lives. shivering in the wide-ness of being. running into Timo, his wife is in a coma, it happened suddenly three weeks ago. and in the pool, swimming, I realize that my own being tends to be sucked into the energy fields of those who are not sensitive of their projection into the world. sounds convoluted. it is convoluted. but, upon sensing that someone is not acutely tuned to their surroundings (as if I ever was), it is my tendency to project myself into their projected space of insensitivity. blah. paradox, or just mind-filler.

posted
  • place: Brussels, Belgium

simply the best

cafe9.net, the final chapter. forum with the folks from around about. the city, Brussels, is moving into the next state, as that is going. European Development. mapping into the spaces of being. the view from the hotel is raucous. the day after the ending day of the networking and creativity workshop with a nice compact, concentrated group of participants. five cultures. and seven points-of-view. synthesizing. in both form and function. small successes, leading to interventions of energized sparkings. crossings, no genetic alterations. no need for that. (reading in the paper about the GM fish. (faugh!)) needing to counter these migrations and permutations of the matrix of living energy.

potato and chicken soup, a local specialty. chocolate mousse.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Sesshu

Art and culture. Before going to work, Sanna joins me in absorbing an exhibition of works from the Zen painter Sesshu, and his followers. How following shows the reverberations of being — the stone in the pool is probably the best metaphor to reflect upon. Disciples, followers. Not feeling well the entire day after a full-moon nightless sleepless standing up in the semi-dark walking around the three rooms empty of presence. Looking out old glass windows seeing a wrinkled night-world of halide orange and cold night-moon-shining-white.

Later in the evening there is Björn’s organ recital in the Berghall Church in Kallio. Meeting Icelanders. and others. And then a rendezvous at a club in Kaivopuisto for some long smokey close-clutch dancing with this partner that … fits … while wondering about men — partners of friends of this friend — who leave their partners at the dance floor to go gambling their money away alone. how it goes. I surely would never come to that, when there is that warm and very fine fit that persists all the way back home to a bed that also … fits.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

leaving

another month gone by, this time in Iceland. leaving looms. this long series of leavings. but at the other end, there is work that has to be done. not for doing, but for being.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

crossing paths

aspects. potentiations. formations, formulations. configurations. alignments. all is change. as we surface constantly at the interface of time and being. now that I was able to develop the meager 13 rolls of film from the period September 1998 – July 2000, and scanned in a fraction of the images, I face the question of whether or not to retrospectively add images to this work or just work again into the future. for the first time in at least 20 years, I am traveling without a silver-based image-making system. without a Nikon and 28mm lens, Tri-x film. that’s what I was reduced to carry in the last ten years. making mostly environmental portraits of the humans with whom I crossed paths.

crossing paths. this is a phrase often used in email. “when we next cross paths,” “when will our paths cross?,” “it was nice crossing paths with you.” and so on. but we are wanderers now in a way that makes this phrase plainly metaphoric. like so many other things in this time that have become only representations of representations of something that we once thought was in a way similar and brought us good feelings. we are living in a mist of shadows and silhouettes that deepens as the collective point of convergence nears (for me, and me, and me, all speak together, voices echoing from all nodes on the net). convergence.

movement is of the earth and is rooted in that presence. stillness is of heaven and that wholly absence.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

Green Hour

tipsy, riding home (a relative term) from Mari and Esko’s place, after a sauna and dinner and some wine (Chilean and Spanish), it is a white night. midnight, the sun only just below the horizon, no wind, the clouds and rain of the day gone, but it is cold, only 6C. piss behind the oil-fired power plant, must be a 10 megawatt station. overtake a body doing a drunken side-step on the bike path. and children standing in a playground, standing looking mute, expecting a parley with the drunk, but that is some minutes and eons off into a future that is made certain by the lack of wind and in the moment of the Green Hour. L’heure verte, Green Hour, it came and here it is, jumping into a loose narrative that leaves being and presence far behind and instead wobbles into an uncertain future in a nowhere locus. silent, except for the drunks, furtive night-day children who are learning to be drunken and hidden at the same time. running in packs, or desperate pairs, no, at least threesomes. the river as high as it has been in 30 years. at the one meter mark on the bridge pylon. I theorize what the construction standards are for those same structures. deep seated– all the way to the glacial bedrock?

La fée verte, at L’heure verte, from the times in France when the consumption of the brilliant green and bitter drink Absinthe made from wormwood (Artemisia absinthium). but also when the air stills, in the northlands, and the color of day wanes, sun dropping into the red of humid sunset. a state of being.

posted
  • place: Riga, Latvia

Xavier’s image

hanging at the bus station for a bit, pick up the return ticket to Tallinn for Friday, then going on to the Occupation Museum this afternoon. end up spending several hours there, trying to understand the history of the Nazi and Soviet presence. borders shuffling around, people treated like so many animals. herded around from place to place. with an absolute minimum of care for their survival. pogrom, gulag, concentration camp, resettlement, and the barbarity of the regimes. a little bitterness towards the West, also, with the understanding that the three Baltic Republics weren’t big or important enough for the West to confront the Soviets over. now the issue is how the large Russian minority is to be dealt with. there is a language law coming on the books which declares Latvian as the national language, but I think this will come into something of a conflict with EU directives on minority rights within (potential) member states. the Welsh people, the Sami, and other groups have benefited from the EU mandate to support minority cultures already, so the precedence is not in favor of the Latvians who, by only 4 percentage points, are a majority in their own land. presumably, this will be a major issue, and treated specially within the EU framework. I am staying with friends of Rasa and Raitis, Karl and Kristin, in their roommate, Xavier’s, room. he just left for an extended visit to Mexico, his homeland, Vera Cruz. Karl is Swedish, Kristin is Latvian. on the wall next to the bed is a detailed map of Latvia which I can study abstractly while lying in bed, and hanging over it, obscuring half of it at least, is a big black sombrero with white and silver piping. opposite on the other wall is a big black and white silver print of a woman wearing a swimsuit standing on the sea shore, on a rocky beach, child next to her on hands and feet looking at the ground. the woman is facing the sea. about 10 meters offshore from her, lopsided and partially submerged, is a war bunker with gaping windows and a broken staircase leading down into the water. a man is looking out of the second floor window casing. the woman has her hands on her hips, something of a bouffant hair style from the 50’s and, from a distance, the tone of the swimsuit top makes her look topless. there is no horizon. she is day-dreaming, and that day-dream is my reality. every sensual impression that I have ever experienced she created in the fleeting fraction of a second when that image was made. even when I say to myself (preparing fragments for my public lecture on Thursday): I am a be-ing of energy. it is only because she dreamed it, the energy of her dream has become me. I am that energy. passing through a series of scenarios as disjointed and mute as some dreams can be. giving nothing, taking only the form of the present vessel of place, for the moments of occupation, then immediate, complete dissolution, moving on to the next phase condition. altered state, alter ego. much beyond all that, to the next condition of be-ing. energy-in-motion IS creativity. but how to peg that to the social and cultural conditions of the time. that gap, I cannot bridge with my own abilities at language and the primarily visual tools available to me. which begs the question, what tools would be optimal, what would allow me that full expression of embodied energy? would massive capital of digital power do it? would big photographic prints do it (I have always thought so, thinking that better this or that physical solution would be sufficient to put the whole effort over the edge into electric saturation). joke. making images in silver seemed to be a way of going, but that process, one which I was immersed in for 20 years seems difficult to access lately. it is hidden within the inner topology that has evolved in the last years. hibernating, forgotten. senseless?

posted
  • place: en route Keflavik, Iceland - Copenhagen, Denmark - Kiel, Germany

(x, y, z)

airports and early mornings. not much sleep. a dream where Bill showed up. we were staying on some kind of boat. but meanings are hard to recover from the falling impressions of being at this early hour. no prognostications. called Nancy last night for the first time since I can remember. she put her back out last week also, the day before I did mine. strange. hereditary problem with the lower back structure. so it will be hard to take care of. back trouble. what about front trouble? or side trouble. top trouble, bottom trouble. so it goes. Cartesian problems. using the standard notation of (x,y,z) data sets. without the complications of matrix convolutions.

And though I have no telepathy with my visitors, after they have spoken, I have the power to recall their voices, to become the speakers. And I do this so that I might listen for the hidden music — a very difficult task, since the instrument of these voices is plucked only on the thin strings of words — but I listen very closely to the voices, straining to hear in them the song of the ethos, so I may know. — Desi speaking, quoted by Kit Reed

Christian picks me up at the airport, on the way home from helping Frank and his wife move in to a new flat in Hamburg.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

y2k

sporadic bottle-rockets, M-80’s, and strings of fire-crackers going off signals the approach of the New Years celebration in three short days. discussions do circulate on the condition of the world. and the possibilities of … but nobody knows anything for sure. so, speculation gets to be old and stale, and there is left only hollow waiting, which is, for me, a space of suspended living. there is no real breathless rushing towards doom. and portents are quite harmless, although they do pop into consciousness from time to time. waiting. letting fingernails grow, not calling folks. dinner last night with Val, Niels, Haukur, and Helmut, like the old times. Loki a few years older, eating, drinking, and talking. all of us older. me graying at the muzzle, look in the mirror, after pissing, behind amorphous silica eye covers, technology does not impact my being, only the body, or maybe it is vice-versa, maybe everything is changed with the advent of networked machines.