posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

grace of vision

Our death is our wedding with eternity.
What is the secret? “God is One.”
The sunlight splits when entering the windows of the house.
This multiplicity exists in the cluster of grapes;
It is not in the juice made from the grapes.
For he who is living in the Light of God,
The death of the carnal soul is a blessing.
Regarding him, say neither bad nor good,
For he is gone beyond the good and the bad.
Fix your eyes on God and do not talk about what is invisible,
So that he may place another look in your eyes.
It is in the vision of the physical eyes
That no invisible or secret thing exists.
But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?
Although all lights emanate from the Divine Light
Don’t call all these lights “the Light of God”;
It is the eternal light which is the Light of God,
The ephemeral light is an attribute of the body and the flesh.
…Oh God who gives the grace of vision!
The bird of vision is flying towards You with the wings of desire.

Vitray-Meyerovitch, Eva de. Rûmî and Sufism. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1987.
posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

The Revolution of Everyday Life

Following is an excerpt, Chapter One, from an old favorite, The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem—written back in the 60s under the umbrella of the Situationists. Be forewarned, it is not a particularly easy text. Arising out of the wide-spread social unrest fomented by the post-WWII generation of European intellectuals, it contains hundreds of gems reflecting on both the roots and current realities of life. You may find it stylistically dated, lacking intersectionality, and overly idealistic, even romantic, however, there are plenty of core messages and observations that are spot on. In the current cavalcade of faux information saturation it’s well worth studying!
more “The Revolution of Everyday Life”

posted

it may carry no name

equinox::self-portrait::self-deception
equinox::self-portrait::self-deception

That we are dancing around the perimeter of a Void is an allusive image invoked simply by being alive and considering—even incidentally—the fundamental questions of be-ing. The Void itself forms not a black hole but rather a shimmering, blinding nothingness whose edge is as well defined as our own sense of that be-ing. It is and it is not, and it takes no name.

All the while, all are dancing around it, pointing at it, exclaiming in adoration or apprehension, naming it in the varied languages of their own realities. Those names are Legion, at least one for every individual, though there is a deep suspicion among most that the naming can never be complete, can never adequately address the limitless impact that this no-thing imposes on our brief living. The act of naming is a salve to the implicit terror of falling in, as we watch others do just that. It takes no name.

The primary questions? How close might you get without falling in? What dances are appropriate? How settled does one feel with one’s personally-crafted name applied to it: the Void? Is it a name that is shared with others; a comfortable, comforting name that others recognize when one calls it out in the extremities of Life? Or is it a profane deviation, garbled, confused to those Others, at once looking on, then turning their backs to that demonstrated ignorance. It takes no name.

It would seem that some spend their entire—and perhaps brief—lifetimes on the brink, shaking in ecstatic union, breath resonant with the shimmering, balance is all, retreat sometimes necessary, unless capitulation and fall is part of the act. It certainly is the closing one. It takes no name.

The very inability to articulate a name drives some to accept what others invoke. This seems to keep it far away, a glow on one horizon, inserting presence on rare occasions, until it fills to an infinite half-space, and zenith shrinks to an event horizon of solitude, silence, and no-thing. It takes no name, and is gone.

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

They must change

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in one’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

Buber, quoted in Aubrey Hodes’ Martin Buber; an Intimate Portrait. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1971.
posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

waking to death

Solstice pre-dawn seeps in the windows, and I wake up to thoughts of death and the gaping maw that it is. How can it be? How is it? What is it? Why is it? Never any answers. Psychospiritual gymnastics, any sort of denial or questioning, nothing stands against it. Pointless to consider. But how to come to some relation with it? I’ll have to dig up my copy of the Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It brought some tiny modicum of thoughtful peace as I witnessed my mother dying. But that was the Other, not the Self, staring down the Void. All that is different now.

The difference in those two conditions is as stark a contrast as one can consider even though there is no ultimate difference, only (mortal) time frames. (cue: Dark Side of the Moon)

Faugh.

And the day closes with the horrible news that Nora, EJ’s youngest, passed today. Another victim of the fentanyl scourge. Only tears to offer in the moment. Unspeakable catastrophe. What has the world become?

Ever darker: the Solstice shift not sufficient, although Light is coming. Please.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

talking about changing the course of nature

I have not really textually explored the changing the course of nature process/performance series. At the Balance/UnBalance 2015 conference in Scottsdale, I presented it in a brief talk, and I have a power-point from that talk that I will upload here eventually. But a deeper contextualization is in order.

Change: Circumscribed by the traditional I Ching system that engages in a fundamental mapping/reduction of the widest possible set of phenomena indicative of change. Metrics of change. What’s that? Difference as calculated by repeated observation and memory-based feedback. Comparison. All this activity embedded in a flow of change itself.

Imposing change on life: is it imposition or is it simply willful flow along a trajectory that is laid out before us? Passive versus active — I recall being a bit insulted and confused when I was being introduced by Hans Werner Berretz at a gallery opening of my work in Aachen. He labelled me (in German) as a Pazifist, but I piped up, no, no, I’m an Activist!, folks in the gallery laughed a bit… I was clueless as to the German distinctions surrounding that dialectic.

While this performative project, ‘changing the course of nature’ is an intentional, almost self-conscious pathway, is there any substantive distinction to be made between that process and the constant, ongoing flow that is life/living?

“I feel I have been searching you a lot. … That may sound odd, but it is the phrase that comes to mind.” she said

“I read, consider your words. and try to hear your breath in the rhythm of the words, but I can’t because I’ve not heard, or felt your breath much.” he said

The course of Nature is changed.

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‘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
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

heart-ache

This hyphenated linguistic shortcut addresses a particular embodied response to life: it headlines the days and the human encounters that ensue on the ground for this brief visit to Boulder for Bridget’s ‘Celebration of Life’. Following the aching are the inspirations of conversation with the living, old and many seldom-seen friends, that help ease the heart. The oscillation between these two conditions shreds future and past into a pile of random memories sitting directly, forefront, in the lap of the present. Together we, the living, help each other reconstruct some meaning and bring an order to the shared memories, and prepare for the unknown future.

posted
  • place: Vilnius, Lithuania

RAM 6 interview: Kûrybingumas = energijos judëjimas

Vytautas [Michelkevičius] interviews me as we sit in Konstantino Sirvydo skveras not far from the university. He titles the article “Creativity = energy movement.” I write these words thirteen years later. Precisely when I need to be reminded that creativity *is* energy movement. Movement has ceased on the scale that I was used to then. 2004 was an incredibly busy year for my nomadic networking praxis — Arizona, New Jersey, Iceland, Copenhagen, Kiel, Lübeck, Bremen, Helsinki, Suomenlinna, Vilnius, Tallinn, Berlin, New York, Fort Myer, Phoenix, Prescott, Colorado, Durango, Boulder, Moab, Kayeenta, Copenhagen, Vilnius, Nida, Copenhagen, Reykjavík, Akureyri, Oslo, Trondheim, Hrísey, Århus, Glen Ridge, Baltimore, California, Livermore, Ukiah, Prescott, Kelso, Amboy, Livermore, and so on into the next year. The epitome of the nomad. The experiencing of life as a stream of abundance and not a plateau of static need. A nomad needs no future. How comes it that life has reified against all I said and did to keep that stasis, that dis-conscious, la petite mort, as far away as possible, or as close to the heart as its beating? To simply be in the many moments that track one after the other. The country, city, and state names belie the real nature of the process: it was all about the humans, the encounters, the face-offs, the arguments, the dialogues, the exchange of creative energies across the network and across the space that intervened between each life. The encounters were, are, what forms life and living, as my energy winds down. As my energy dies. There is *no* time. And I have made the conscious choice of leaving prematurely, stepping away from all the life that I had, to treat it as simply an artifact. Treating the trajectory, the vital path, as nothing more than happenstance of a past life, or a life lost in the complexities of itself, or a life that is only written about.

20040910-7md_article

posted
  • place: San Cristobal, Mexico

from Anthony

San Cristobal, MX
14 April 1988

So J.H. –>

I find myself in an amazing place; Last night we had a fire because it got a bit cool; today we eat lunch outside in the sun… but first, the weather … the dedication in Borges’ book, A Universal History of Infamy reads:

“I inscribe this book to S.D.: English, innumerable, and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.”

To those of us concerned with inscriptions (on rock, on paper) this comes as a blessing.

People here (as elsewhere) struggle to live, and no one can give name to that. Previously, Indians found in town after dark were jailed. The at-one-time Governor (Gobernador) of this state (Chiapas) was indicted for his Indian-killing policies. Rare to see an indictment because the Mexicans approve of this practice. This boy’s methods had become ‘unsound’ (Kurtz-style, Heart of Darkness). At some point the rule-makers changed their game, and now Indians walk the streets of this town at night. The man for whom the town was named Fra Bartolome de las Casas, First Bishop of Chiapas, was the first in his time to suggest that Indians were human beings and that enslaving them was wrong, early 1500s. Now the poor people in this area are deforesting the countryside, and Indians sell their land to lumber companies for a pick-up truck, lack of awareness in humanity at this time. Terrible corruption blotted up with human faces.

Strange scene –> a few days ago we went to the nearby Indian town, Chamula. There the Chamulans make offerings of Pepsi (poured in small glasses) to the Saints (who have combined with/replaced the Earth Gods) in the ancient Cathedral. The floor covered in pine needles, candles lit in homage set out in groups on the floor. Then we go to the ruin of another cathedral, graveyard packed: goats, lamps, burros grazing among crosses, and on certain graves bottle tops from Pepsi sprinkled, simply left, from offerings made by those still above. “An adaptable people,” my cousin says of the Chamulans and their Pepsi.

And we are accosted by a Chamulan woman and her child in that grave yard. She begging us to buy a belt from her and her daughter with a smile and full of play. Here it all was: the graves, the woman pleading, the bright child offering a bright doll in her hands. I imagined those below murmuring in darkness and soil; and we were above, the brown earth, the soft green of the grass, the bright blue of the woman’s shawl, her face: vivid. She not aware that she was pleading amongst graves. Other things that cannot be communicated. The faces of so many people I see now are beautiful, but they do not know. They are full of wonderful things but do not know. The loss of dignity, the loss of what is sacred. Well, I will say it: so many doomed. But this cannot take away my happiness nor theirs.

AZ