| Year |
World Population
|
Yearly Change |
Net Change |
Density (P/Km²) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 8,045,311,447 | 0.88 % | 70,206,291 | 54 |
| 2022 | 7,975,105,156 | 0.83 % | 65,810,005 | 54 |
| 2021 | 7,909,295,151 | 0.87 % | 68,342,271 | 53 |
| 2020 | 7,840,952,880 | 0.98 % | 76,001,848 | 53 |
| 2019 | 7,764,951,032 | 1.06 % | 81,161,204 | 52 |
| 2018 | 7,683,789,828 | 1.10 % | 83,967,424 | 52 |
| 2017 | 7,599,822,404 | 1.15 % | 86,348,166 | 51 |
| 2016 | 7,513,474,238 | 1.17 % | 86,876,701 | 50 |
| 2015 | 7,426,597,537 | 1.19 % | 87,584,118 | 50 |
| 2014 | 7,339,013,419 | 1.22 % | 88,420,049 | 49 |
| 2013 | 7,250,593,370 | 1.24 % | 88,895,449 | 49 |
| 2012 | 7,161,697,921 | 1.25 % | 88,572,496 | 48 |
| 2011 | 7,073,125,425 | 1.25 % | 87,522,320 | 47 |
| 2010 | 6,985,603,105 | 1.27 % | 87,297,197 | 47 |
| 2009 | 6,898,305,908 | 1.27 % | 86,708,636 | 46 |
| 2008 | 6,811,597,272 | 1.27 % | 85,648,728 | 46 |
| 2007 | 6,725,948,544 | 1.27 % | 84,532,326 | 45 |
| 2006 | 6,641,416,218 | 1.27 % | 83,240,099 | 45 |
| 2005 | 6,558,176,119 | 1.27 % | 82,424,641 | 44 |
| 2004 | 6,475,751,478 | 1.28 % | 81,853,113 | 43 |
| 2003 | 6,393,898,365 | 1.29 % | 81,491,005 | 43 |
| 2002 | 6,312,407,360 | 1.31 % | 81,660,378 | 42 |
| 2001 | 6,230,746,982 | 1.33 % | 81,848,007 | 42 |
Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realize the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of tele-presence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the re-invigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favor of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits – most prominently in the intense debate on global warming – citizens and organizations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced tele-presence technologies.
ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility
The ElectroSmog festival for sustainable immobility, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of tele-presence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organized in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters.
The festival was organized at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
more “Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog”
the American Dream is only to survive
David Brooks, columnist at the New York Times writes in this commentary on New Years Day:
Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.
I have always enjoyed his pragmatism and basic awareness of a wider historical context. It frames the American Way as (merely another) expression of a global continuum of human presence on the planet. And he seems largely to avoid the hybridized reli(geo)-political Destiny’s Child(ish) mentality that so pervades the fragmentary remnants of mediated public discourse in this declining nation-state. more “the American Dream is only to survive”
The Military
(extracted and edited from The Regime of Amplification)
The second example — though it is a much more complex combination of pathways in its geo-political and material deployments and in its interaction with the overall continuum of relation — is foundational to the TSS (techno-social system) and is also a prototypical expression of amplification. It is even more a prototype than radio. Radio is merely one sub-system of what is ultimately a military organization.
A military system incorporates all the requisite patterns of an amplification system: input signal (the human population and other concentrated energy sources available to the TSS); amplification process (provisioning and equipping of the select grouping of people through the collective life-energies of the greater population of the TSS); the feedback system (communications, command, and control systems); and the output signal (the expression of amplified (and directed) energy flow as a campaign to secure the viability of the TSS either by offense or defense).
more “The Military”
fragmentation
… this false reification of the self is basic to the planetary ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. We have imagined that we are a unit off survival and we have to see to our own survival, and we imagine that the unit of survival is the separate individual or a separate species, whereas in reality through the history of evolution, it is the individual plus the environment, the species plus the environment, for they are essentially symbiotic. — Gregory Bateson
This is exactly what Bohm is talking about when he frames the absolute disaster that a fragmented and materialist worldview has delivered us to (and to us!). And how a holistic and symbiotic view is the only way out of the crisis.
Ice Land
Wow, the lid is blowing off the formerly staid and sheep-like Icelandic society. Following the collapse of their entire economy from top to bottom, side to side, Icelanders are finally making a vocal and physically critical look at the excesses of the political and business leaders who they have supported without question over the last couple decades.
News from Iceland usually centers around glaciers, volcanoes, whaling, tourism, or in more recent years, music. But all that has been displaced by the spectacular fall from fifth highest on the world’s standard of living index to International Monetary Fund-ed pauper-hood, all in a couple months.
And of those same government officials, politicians, and business people, not one has paid any public price for their despotic (nepotistic!) greed (aside from some of their Empires collapsing, surely, though, after they have secreted away the cream). The Chairman of the Central Bank and former Prime Minister David Oddsson — nicknamed in the 1990s Little Hitler by the few who saw his rule as one based on enormous reserves of ego rather than economic expertise — has refused to resign or even admit any errors in judgment while the entire national economy has collapsed.
Not prone to display dirty national laundry in the international arena, Iceland has been ridiculed with an unprecedented vehemence in British and other international press outlets, often at the hands of expat Icelanders who are so fed up with the whole scandal that they are breaking the public self-critical taboo. Several leading international economists, familiar with the Icelandic situation are reminding the public of the warnings that were proffered months ago of the possibility of impending crisis, all which were ignored by a government who, in the run-up to the crisis, repeatedly claimed the economy was sound.
In private conversations, I frequently pointed out the deep nepotism in the architecture of power that suffused Icelandic society as well as the reciprocal sheep-like obedience of the general populace; especially among the government politicos but really everywhere in a system that sustains perhaps only three of the possible six degrees of separation. Everybody knows everybody.
At any rate, I had wanted to post some links to pertinent resources in this fast-developing situation if only that it might be an object lesson on the excesses of a system that Iceland was very talented in upholding — that of consumer capitalism in all its vain-glory.
There’s the Iceland Weather Report by native, Alda Sigmundsdóttir. She has taken some major strides over the history of her blog, most recently doing interviews with voices critical of the current regime including one with the Icelandic economist Thorvaldur Gylfason.
Another voice which I concur with strongly based on my long experience with Icelandic culture is voiced by New Zealand economist Robert Wade. Small dribbles of news in the more traditional style of Icelandic media (passive echoing of officials) may be found in English at the Morgunbladid (the main national newspaper). They have been absolute supporters of the Oddsson regime and the reactionary Independence Party that he represents.
I could relate many stories from Iceland, and, indeed, have done that here over the last 14 years, but these days, my attitude is that they deserve what has happened. The broader population accepted uncritically the fiscal direction of the Independence Party and the incredibly greedy business elite (very very large fish in a very very small pond). Some Icelandic voices have recently pointed out this very sheep-like behavior on behalf of the public — as something that hopefully is in the process of being purged through increasingly violent protest actions that are both long overdue and at the same time completely not disturbing the equilibrium of the ruling elite.
to be done
the last day of the year is spent with Zander and Bill going falconing with a serious professional falconer, Tom, who was hawk-sitting Zander’s Harris Hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus) for the time they were away in Costa Rica. flushed a few rabbits and squirrels, but the juvenile bird didn’t quite manage to catch any of them. later we head to the ski house with Simon and a friend of his along with Tom and his wife, Peggy, for a quiet evening. Andrea stays home. and the year is over. the snow piles up. and the agenda for the new year seems to be one of a lot of work needing to be done: the environment, the elections, the war, the economy, the housing crisis, not to mention creative action.
Uni-see
so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on…
questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:
Why are you looking for a unified theory?
What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it’s not just an accessory)?
How can the energy affect the technical model — for example, social networks in the internet?
Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?
How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously — wouldn’t there be a problem with time?
How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?
What if everyone shared John’s worldview, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?
If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?
Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?
Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger — without giving it back — in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?
Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?
Since we try to create a balance between “flow” and “block” in order to reach a good level, could we integrate “chaos” in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?
perambulations
clearly lost at words. in words, without words, for words, back words. energy ebbed under the circumstances. the demise of the workshop still a real bother. will be into the future. and not very auspicious first visit to Australia. perhaps the last visit.
missed Sophea today, she lagging from jets, coming the other way ’round the globe, via Delhi. worked on slow machines. after the walk to the College. jetfuel coffee and a nice muffin in one of the many cafs along the way, reading the newspaper, catching the local drift. the word ANZAC (Australia – New Zealand Army Corp) in the context of recent political scandals, historical honor and glory, contemporary resistance to the Iraq/Afghanistan crisis. nationalism? you bet!
walking back and forth trying different pathways, the row bungalows with the iron-railed porches and verandas, steel gratings on the doors, the more modern apartment blocks, slick, shiny, bright. life-style. many of the row houses are under remodeling, for sale and resale. there is a significant market, though nothing like the California frenzy. apparently people have also flocked to the huge tower blocks that fill the center of town, built in the last five or so years. where there used to be porn shops and big business districts.
lunar dreams
a nice network crossing late with Fernanda, in Berlin now, formerly from ISNM. in crisis mode, figuring out some steps to take next in life. she had written me a couple days back, after returning from a five-week holiday in Brazil visiting family, back to a deadening job in Berlin, in the angst of being alive, but having that vitality being drained by pointless and un-inspiring work. half the battle is not to fall asleep to the liveliness that surges up from life. not to allow the pressures of social production to compress dreams unless it is to press carbon into diamond. to make dreams fly with Lightness and certain brilliance. no matter what, though, is to not let life be weakened so much that each moment is lost to the dull and stultifying grind of labor. finding a labor that brings joy is a rare pleasure, but finding a life labor that brings some social recognition as well as that priceless joy is ever more unusual. surrounded and obscured in a matrix of dark matter, searching for a life that does not lack Light, what do we become?
so, we talk about these things, not quite strangers, but desiring to know the Other’s life and the path it takes, has taken, to bring us here. and then, there is the future.
Lunar Moon day 5
Year of the Red Overtone Moon
kin 141: Red Spectral Dragon
I Dissolve in order to Nurture
Releasing Being
I seal the Input of Birth
With the Spectral tone of Liberation
I am guided by my own power doubled
— from the Lunar Calendar site
the usual Light night’s sleep before travel. because of early rising and tight schedules. fog persists into the morning, the remains of the clouds that obscured the lunar eclipse last night.
now that’s news!
Chris mentioned that old CSM amigo George Saunders just had a MacArthur Fellowship bestowed on hissef. well, dang, George, congrats! I had to chuckle when I went to his fan site and saw it had been hacked by a Turkish Armenian freedom fighter — complete with a waving flag and anthem. it’s back up now…
George’s latest short story collection, In Persuasion Nation gets qualified critical acclaim as is likely with a collection of stories. I haven’t read it yet. I’m waiting for a 600+ page novel to wield baseball-bat-to-torso, outlining in bruised flesh the practice, not of resistance to the contemporary cultural brutality, but of a thoughtlessly new way-of-going. potential’s there, but somehow mundaneity clogs the sweat pores. put a hold at the local library on Nation, review forthcoming.
Following his superb story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
memories of fire
aren’t disco balls just enhanced simulators for dancing around a fire? what’s the dif? why not dance around a fire more often? gyrate under washes of starLight with limb warming fire to back and front as oscillations permit. in a crowd of like-smelling co-habitants, oscillating to rhythms of necessary presence.
what of having fun while living?
Modern man is insecure and repressed — isolated from his fellows yet desperately clinging to the collectivity which he trusts to protect him from the might of other collectivities. Divided within himself into instincts and spirit, repressions and sublimations, he finds himself incapable of direct relation with his fellows either as individuals in the body-politic or as fellow members of a community. The tremendous collective power with which he allies himself gives him neither relationship nor freedom from fear but makes his life a sterile alternation between universal war and armed peace. The modern crisis is thus a crisis both of the individual and of society at large. — Maurice Freidman (1976, p. 245)
CSM
Meet Rafael in the morning, speaking about the political economies of soft game authoring; lunch with Steve, we decided the last time we saw each other was 21 years ago when I walked out of the corporate headquarters of Union Oil Company of California, times past, and catching up on the intervening years. Then a wander around the CSM campus to see what’s new. Strange vibe. Being no stellar student, but Sara, the Geophysics Department senior secretary recognized me (surprise!), got Dr. Keller’s email address. Wander around the campus looking at the new buildings, and allow place to seep in, an overlay of history, into senses. Thomas Hall, second floor, the first dormitory experience, 30 years ago right now. Formative? De-formative? Time past, time passed. Never conscious of the eyes of a 30-year alumni scanning the place back then, did it ever happen?
One of those fall afternoons, brilliant sunshine, Colorado blue sky. Down to Clear Creek, once a gravel ditch, now a sculpted kayak, mountain bike, jogging, and strolling corridor. How things develop in the West. To this standard of tidiness.
Dinner with Rick, Sally, and Natalie.
Crisis of the now. Crisis of being in the past moving into the now, and on into the future past.
become republican
JC sends this to da40 — become republican
I respond,
sotto voce:
only too true, though personally I’m not so rabidly anti-Jesus. it’s the zealots who, as the cartoon points out, hide behind His words and are fundamentally hate-full and intolerant. not what I would expect from the pursuit of a Christ-like behavior emulation…
seems there are glimmers of hope that the society has woken up from a bad dream that was imposed by the 2000 pseudo-election. I frankly don’t have much hope though, that the systemic corruption in the political system is going to go away at all, demos or repubs are the same animal from that perspective.
in the Republic system of Rome, there were various contingencies (balances of power) to cover during different times of need (war being the primary one, though it was misused as a power-manipulation tool — nothing new about that! It is interesting that the concept (and specific form of civil rule) dictatorship was held for a temporary crisis.
more “become republican”
penthouse
The first day: the feng shui of the room is complicated by rafters, skyLights, and the orientation of the bed. will have to think about that. Meeting Milos who is terribly sick with this flu epidemic sweeping across central Europe. I am hoping it is the same bug that is in Bremen, so that there’s no further risk of infection.
sotto voce: The deep mediation of human presence by technology is a critical issue in the moment. A radical shift in awareness is necessary to decode the creative possibilities and complex problems of what is becoming a kind of global crisis. Establishing a lived artistic praxis that is beyond ego, product, and process, one that is expressed in momentary be-ing and is beyond the framework of consumerism is of the greatest importance. The dynamic of human networks suggest a powerful model for this praxis. By understanding the role of technological mediation in the larger picture, it is possible to re-establish a condition where humans lead technological development instead of the other way around.
hbr says
just as I had observed and inferred from bits of data that I have seen over the past few years. that the US is in serious crisis regarding the precipitous drop in the numbers of creative talent entering the country. graduate students are not turning up in droves as they used to, populating all the hard-core science, business, and technology programs at the best US universities. they are staying home or going to European, Asian, and other societies which are not so repressive and paranoid as the neoconservative fascists in power now in the US. so, reading the article “America’s Looming Creativity Crisis,” in the Harvard Business Review that enumerates the extremity of the situation only confirms my observations. empire continues its decline with the deluded self-knowledge of ascending to the millennial realms of power and righteous glory. ideological and religious dogmas constricting scientific research along with repressive and exclusionary visa and immigration practices lead the way to a rapid decline in creative capital that was once a primary mechanism in US global hegemony. in the metric introduced in the article, the Global Creative Class Index, the US already ranks behind 11 other countries, including Iceland — a statistic that somehow hasn’t reached Icelandic eyes yet, for it is sure to make front-page headlines “Icelanders More Creative Than Americans” when it does.
locative?
smartmoblogsociallocativefictiongpsteredmedia creatures feeding one on the other, in a frenzy of “what’s next that’s cool” and built for speed. (which ultimately will move ‘it’ on to the next “Next Big Thing.”) seems like another wave of meme-hype reverberating around the extraordinarily limited space of global telecom networks (in collaboration with military satellites). is the price to be paid so removed and hard to comprehend? seems so. I have run across exactly zero critical words about this phenom. instead a flood of vacuous phrases and spin terms that are kept afloat in a social sea by the flatulent buoyancy of affluence, global capital, and ex-military industry. STILL. “radical decentralization” for autonomous consumption of text, image, audio and video — the re-presented and ultimately consumable world. autonomy for re-presentation and re-production of reality — one that fills the belly with gas and the head with language peddled by those same tired techno-utopian spin-doctors. technology always looks its ubiquitous best in the eyes of the über-class. as I click through the verbiage at locative.net (no longer extant) it feels like RedHerring from 1999 or so — so much interlocking terminology leading in a head-rich circle of hype-logic. headmap drops phrases like “everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached,” “every place has emotional attachments you can open and save,” and “life flows into inanimate objects.” and behind these words (more and more of them) there is no awareness of or anticipation that there was/is an essence that is a substrate for knowledge and abstracted/systematized human apprehension. that something comes before knowing. and the vitality-draining construction of a Babylonish Tower is an ongoing exercise that society never quite purged from its mind. the path that re-creation bumbles along is not the same one as creation. not even in the same forest.
When people consider the dangers of the chaos of a free intensely networked spatially augmented world, they should also consider that like all technological advances it offers tools to both sides of any argument. ‘ends appropriate means’ may seem ominous but the ends can just as well be social advancement. Even in a critical situation, disaster response and recovery in a world of spontaneous peer to peer mesh networks, running evolved social software, seems like a sane option for coordination of local efforts to recover and help from outside. The homeland security initiative raised the point that a citizen owned spatially aware communications network could be invaluable in a crisis. — headmap.org [ed: dead link] ideolog
what kind of crisis? when shopping is compromised? what can be meant by the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘homeland security’ being used in the same context? and, invaluable to whom? a threat to the status quo? or is there a radical suggestion that the masters tools be used to displace the master? funny, though, the effect of wielding a tool is perhaps the same, regardless of the wielder. that is, on the wielder, not on the hapless victim!
and what if, just what if these technological deployments are subsequently used for command-and-control, will everyone be surprised and taken aback? gee, we never imagined…
and the other core issue — whether you believe that all things are connected by a relatively un-knowable (or un-circumscribable) substratum or whether you consider that phenomenal existence is populated by discrete and completely independent objects, actions, and beings. that driving an SUV in Chicago rush hour has absolutely no connection to the presence of an M1 Abrams tank parked on a bridge outside of Falluja. that typing these words on this keyboard into this device has no connection with degradation of ground water in the Kwale region of Kenya from titanium mining.
body on the edge of crisis
hustle into town yesterday evening for some dance performances, with Aki doing one on the steps of the Atheneum to a composition “Everything but the city” by a young Dutch composer, Rijndert van Woudenberg. two other performances, one accompanied by a Stockhausen composition, the other by Henze, were ‘normal’ modern dance, and although there are probably a multitude of subtleties about the genre that pass the un-tuned eye, this normal dance is about the body and it’s forms and the parameters that body training apply to the possibilities of movement. clearly a difference between that and butoh.
I work with dance as it involves the changing of the senses. If your senses do not change, the dance does not change. The consciousness of the body comes into the picture with the changing of the senses. Generally we believe that in dance no matter what happens in our senses the physicality does not change. But to me, when the senses change, consciousness changes, and the physical body itself changes. In a bigger sense is the larger question: What is matter? So with sense and consciousness working together, the physical body itself does change, matter changes. — Kasai Akira
later, lunch with Sanna at Carousel. time and times. drifts through comfortable, warm places, once occupied, absorbed, diffused, permeated embodied be-ing, present, past, divided.
herding cats
choosing pathways. a teachers way is a constant risk of sketching a path of collective character. Greg said something about herding cats in another context. seems appropriate, kinda. nah, teaching is much too serious to joke about. any human contact must be considered attentively.
but I am nervous internally about the execution of the learning situations here. they are socially much less robust than the previous teaching. a complex array of students. all coming on complex pathways. and the time does seem like simmering crisis perhaps.
tomorrow’s teaching will explore some terms, that the exchange of possibilities are not limited, and I express the meta position (explaining the phenomena of creating a protocol, a shared means for connecting). how that works. looking deeply at a practice of dialogue.
conflicted
crisis. hard constructed hierarchy hits distributed system…
New Years Day
start the New Year in Hualapai Mountain Park, near Kingman, Arizona. up at high altitude in the Douglas Fir. granite boulders. a campfire of pine cones and needles with a few branches. quiet and cold in the night. no other people camping in the campground. a Black Widow in the heated bathroom. driving on the “historic” Route 66 from Kingman to Seligman. not seeing much, except that the “historic” roadbed is not even being used — too many curves and grades compared to the straightened and leveled new “historic” Route 66. so it goes. into the Grand Canyon Caverns. seeing a mummified bobcat grimacing in pain after falling into the caverns 200 feet beneath the surface. designated fallout shelter stocked with k-rations during the Cuban Missile crisis. a mimeographed sign on a bulletin board in the cafe asks for anyone in the nuclear test areas nearby, or downwind of them who has developed cancers in the last 45 years should contact…
Campbell gives a call from Phoenix. will meet tomorrow in Prescott.
shopping?
the next day. shopping, late wake up, well, 0800, which is relatively late. shopping makes me feel terrible, or maybe it is being in Helsinki, looking at every face in the passing crowd to see: will I recognize it. and if I do, what will she do, what will I do? it’s a hollow way of going, a temporary one.
packing bags, reading old texts, finding that I could not be productive at all in the office, just putzing around, time dribbling along, no stopping the flow. and this evening a party at KuvaTaide Akademie. going to an art students’ party seems something retro. but Sólveig called and invited me, so, to see her I’ll definitely go. something about ports and storms, nah, she’s a very charming gal.
completely behind in email. a hundred more-or-less urgent messages stacked up, and I just don’t have the energy to deal with it. perhaps it’s only the time of year, but it seems that crisis dogs my steps too much of the time. the Lightness in my being drains parallel to time, cutting a groove in the rock of being. weathered. and leaving no thing in its wake, but the groove. danceable? perhaps, but maybe not. shuffle. all is still possible, but it seems so difficult. and I also realize that if I can’t crank up the intensity and tone of this work, it is destined to crash and fall silent very soon. it is bereft of images, no audio, and the texts are listless and flat. I don’t want them to be tawdry, too revealing. so, the form needs shifting as they are definitely too boring. like there needs to be a alter ego interface. the Other Self, the Real Self.
The unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of road) is a stupid illusion; we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. — Vladimir Nabokov
crux?
the day is a blur. truly a Monday morning. late evening phone calls, full of silent pauses, where each are trying to catch a psychic breath, letting heart gather stillness, let chest push open beyond closing constrictions. somehow, I have come to a different point in life these past months. not sure whether it is a crux, juncture, discontinuity, a crisis, turning point, simple chance, a result of earlier mis-calculations, whatever. curious how isolated I feel. again, in another foreign country (looking around, how’d I get HERE?), talking to stranger after stranger about esoteric and aesthetic things. or nothing at all. the explorations of energy transfer between humans becomes theoretical and somehow less than real. it is subtracted from what should be a reality, leaving only a dried husk of presence. ‘nuf said.
then again, that dried husk can be liberated, revivified, soaked, with body fluid. blood saves, semen shudders, spit washes lips and tongue, and fingers smell of sweat and native secretions, meanwhile,
As in any well-functioning totalitarian society, the inhabitants of this automated prison believe they live this way by choice, having long since developed an aversion both to the surface of the earth and to direct experiences, unmediated by the machine. — E. M. Forster
fallacious criteria
all things unravel. and I am in planes, buses, and taxis. south to north. plus or minus. no messages on the phone as I leave range for word to come. hauntings. futures compress, pasts well up, present reifies into words that fall like rocks to the floor, gouging everything living, and scratching everything dead. that’s it. ending so quickly, so pointlessly. absolutely no reason for ultimatums about hurt and pain and. so on. fictions churn out. where readers bring wholesale chunks of being into print, neither lost nor found. but set to float in a inner harbor glazed with rainbow oil slicks, half-empty coke cans, and spent condoms. left a pot of black-bean chili cooling on the stove: when it is cool, then there will be nothing more. bags of hot chili powder and basil, corn meal in the cupboard. birch-smoked salmon in the fridge, and everybody is starving for what they don’t want or can’t get. it’ll end up in the garbage. maybe there will be a general cleaning that will take into account the Indonesian Liberation tee-shirt that I threw on the floor in the rush to get out to the taxi to the rail station to store the two bags that I simply couldn’t carry all the way to Trondheim. rolling thoughts of what to do next time in Helsinki. flight back is in two weeks. fourteen days to arrange something. Imatra probably after that. re-arrange Eindhoven. fill out plans for Tornio. give in to the fear. icy fear. or keep going? head south? head west? US for the summer? what’s best for Loki? Iceland, maybe not. the initiative to be mobile to better keep contact with him seems to be receding in the need to get grounded again. the time in Iceland served to point out the serious crisis in the production curve. how things are made, why things are made. and the role of the powerful ego. how did it get so strong, and how does this compare to others’? don’t matter, comparison — that is actually a function of feeding for the ego — that consumptive looking-at-the-Other. that can’t be written out of this script. but most of time previous, I have identified the ego-center of other people’s work, and ignored the spiritual component — made easy and quick judgments based on a limited and possibly fallacious criteria. realizing that pursuit of material interaction (that is, using the material world to “make art,”) along with my developing sense of dematerialization, I must not reject physical manifestations. to do that would reject a certain class of communications that are attenuated by time, space, and possibility. in Oslo at the moment, hoping to get online this evening for a jolt of email to deal with. and to ponder what to begin tomorrow. Trondheim. the first road sign I see is to Hell. if I am correct, hell means bright? or…
Loki’s dreams
Leaving the flat in Lahti, after a relatively long stay of four weeks, I immediately experience the stress of movement-insecurity. And again, it plunges me into a state of ineffectiveness. Crisis point. Questions of how to proceed with this style of living. The vacillations I experience emphasize the fragility of building a presence of being on the ego. That is the source of the oscillations. These become the most uncomfortable and stressful times of life. Other times are filled with the in-your-face of teaching, where time flies by as I make the pronouncements of a teacher — or at least speak with the students. At the same moment, it seems that speaking introduces its own complex web of deception. That having to speak to the Other is a way of escape from the Self, as a rattling noise that supplants any need to look into the frightening swirl of internal energies. A diversion from the essential. Really looking for the way of Zen detachment from this. A stiff back is not the right way to be going. keep on keepin’ on is one way that the truculent San Franciscan flower child would put it, moving targets are safer. but stillness and silence are so difficult to bear. Although at times the floating body simply desires to come to a rest. Disturbances in mental functionality seems to no are different than of other ways can to forget filters of movements into the base of binary openings. Enough said? Who cares? Not me! Plow, Plow through Oxen! Little things. Undisclosed. Partial, fragmentary, immediate, extraordinary. transition. movement. for the moment, lost again. far from a home that is not mine, surrounded by homes and houses. cut loose. partners around, in various stages of being. Sun breaks through the high arched window over the tall buildings across the street. breaks through a multitude of meditations to give me Light. (Jah Rastafari!) but what tools are there in life and in the mind? move through this Light, no, remain stationary, Immobile. for a grasping thousand seconds. body locked in a known curl, legs crossed, and only the pen-hand in motion, mind following. But following at a distance, in low visibility where musings break few borders, and run aground often on size and placement. and time. following myself. sun heats up. and I am left feeling warm. sleepless. under lids that never close. with the storm of the ego, (it will pass) and I will go on. without remembering the real sensation of it all. only repetition will bring recall. lost in a storm. swimming pool, immersion, submersion, a small ache where cold water penetrates to the eardrum. decide not to flip-turn, but to stop for a moment. he is standing in the water. his nose is crooked and flattened. a fighter. long stringy hair. he turns to me and says something. (this dialogue to be finished)… I find a scrap of paper where I have scribbled, sometime last fall in Colorado when Loki was with me, a fragment of one of his dreams. In a previous life, before being born, he was a wolf with two names, one was Strong Jumper or Sterk Hoppur, the other Hungry Jumper or Svangur Hoppur. I make it through the day, not really very confident of anything, especially what I am doing. Incredulous that I can be so fragile. Wondering at what others do in this life. Each Other is focused on the way of going through the material jungle, looking for survival.
volume
Oh hell, what pretense to think that I could really get any sensible writing done here, when all other mediums seem to fail me as well. Concentration lags behind — a result of very poor physical condition that my body is in, and mentally I am really unfocused … Can’t really point to what is going on. Material stimulation and the stimulation of speaking to others seems to not hold my attention for long. I wonder at how others can focus and make massive and detailed material contributions to this monolithic world of Art. I am left babbling about spiritual transcendence, hypostasis, and being. Out of step with the environment that I have immersed myself in … This Art world. This world of commerce and culture and the intersection thereof. more “volume”