posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

cognitive decline: ipse dixit, ‘cognoscere’

cognitive task, somewhere in Delta County, Colorado, February ©2021 hopkins/neoscenes.
Engaged in a cognitive task, somewhere in Delta County, Colorado, February ©2021 hopkins/neoscenes.

What was I thinking? Dunno. What am I thinking? Gone, in the instant that the next version of the monkey-brain is implemented through a core-dump. Reality? Relative, transitory. To know? A defunct notion.

As work-for-cash becomes an ever more complex burden of coaxing information from data: brain seizes, falters, forgets, fails. Colleagues exhibit various states of disconnect and disinterest in what they do. Is this a post-Covid malaise, or what? This while almost everyone else I know—acquaintances, friends, family—are feverishly traveling, hither and yon, while, simultaneously, the conditions for climate change accelerate. Both young and old, there seems to be no room for adjustment from the status of what we were, what we had, what we consumed before the world seemed to falter, shudder, and succumb to a systemic fever dream.

I can no longer maintain remote communications and time passes ever more swiftly. I do not see a solution. I can’t manage. The alienation is complete. I cannot even keep track of the scope of those folks who I have lost contact with. Did they make it through Covid alive?

A decade ago I was actively engaged in Europe after finishing up the PhD in Melbourne and following a couple semesters teaching at CU. That was the last time I was a salaried educator (in the US), with the exception of the many invites I got to participate as learning facilitator during the three months I was in Finland, Estonia, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, and elsewhere. Good times gone. What a difference a decade makes.

Any “spare” time is spent (oh, how I despise market terminology!) in the maintenance of the house and yard. Easier to deal with the yard. Any task that I can chant away. A random four-bar sequence playing on infinite loop in braincase while engaged in a repetitive task: the meditative potential is high when the incipient material state is predictable and easily grasped on the surface: the psycho-spiritual potential to change the world, significant.

This mental laziness keeps more complex house tasks at bay: computational, multi-step planning, considerations of material use, configuration, and possible errors. Stasis: when time accelerates. Rictus: is it fun yet?

Overall, this is an unsustainable situation. Somethin’s gotta give! But what, precisely?

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Punitive Solstice

The punitive assignment of a couple of external ‘management communication’ workshops is the latest folly imposed by a hapless ‘management’ that has no clue I’ve been teaching and facilitating such things across 20 countries. Deeply cynical and utterly oblivious to its own gaping flaws regarding humane and engaged leadership, its days are self-numbered. Trump-like, this ‘manager’ is a fount of narcissistic tendencies that reflect on Others the most self-possessed of gaping flaws.

My days there are self-numbered as well. What to do to maximize? meh. That’s the wrong question. Simply occupying the transitory instance of Life provides a low-frequency drone that accompanies the blood-pulse in ear: always there until it is not. Easy to be so distracted by the vicissitudes of existence that the pulse falls away from consciousness, bringing it back to the fore even while fully immersed in any activity. Burning up days that are never to be retrieved is the original sin. But it’s not about maximizing, it’s about be-ing within every moment. Every second.

I’ve segued into a state of mind that sees its own limits, looming, in reflections that now, seen close-up, fill the eyes with impending blindness. These are limits that Life imposes. Spirit might forefend them temporarily, then transcend or perhaps succumb to another line of existence. Or not. The expansive intentions that drove earlier Life have transformed into mere survival, seeing daily cycles as hurdles to overcome, all the while, watching evidence of life flicker, inverted on scarlet retina. Listening for blood-pulse.

Complex tasks are avoided because that meditative listening falls too far away. And Life becomes mere mechanical functioning: fixing this, buying that, eating food prepared by machines, not watching the stars, silently, motionfull within cosmic chaos.

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

fish-like, lizard-like, guru-like realization

Scheduled to do a swimming challenge, as clued-in by Dr. Miller: 3K per day @ 0530 AM for 12 days at the Golden Community Center. I got on the mailing list and began mulling the concept. The first day was a Monday morning. The week before, I started to crank up workouts from 2K up to 3K. 2K workouts consisted of 500 freestyle w/ pull-buoys followed by 1K of the same gradually increasing speed until the last 5 laps are strenuous, followed by 500 kick with perhaps 100 fly w/ workout fins. I used to keep a pace of 14-15 min/1K. These days, it’s more like 18 min/1k what with the post-torn-rotator cuff handicap. The prior Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: 3K/50 min. First time I’ve swam that distance since 2014 and the shoulder injury. I dropped Sarah, the organizer, a note, just to see if my times and such would generally fit in with the group. No problem.

Sarah sent out a schedule for each day’s workout on Sunday. As I scanned it, I started to mull how it would work, or how I would integrate into the organized scenario. And why swimming ‘workouts’ take certain forms. The obvious answer relates to the goal of a workout. The traditional goal, for example, in Masters Swimming, is the maintenance of ‘swim team’-type fitness, refining and optimizing strokes, swimming for times, prepping for meets (for the really hard-core), and generally a continuance of a somewhat team-style social situation.

This got me thinking about what role swimming played for me. Since I wasn’t really a team swimmer to begin with — not really into team sports at all — there was/is clearly a different motivation to be in the water. Typically, when possible, I schedule my workouts when a pool is least busy, hoping always for a solo lane. Sharing a lane, depending on who it is shared with, may be tolerable, provided the other swimmer understands the protocols, where they are in the lane, and how to stay within their half. A collision — most often of wrists/hands — can be both painful and shocking when passing at relatively high speed. One also has to be vigilant on flip-turns. And of course in all those different countries, lap swimming has absolutely different protocols, or none whatsoever. Annoying!
more “fish-like, lizard-like, guru-like realization”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification

Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):

The Regime of Amplification

Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!

*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.

posted

From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

Empty Infinity

Without beginning, without end,
Without past, without future.
A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.
We forget one another, quiet and pure, altogether powerful and empty.
The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart and of heaven.
The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors the moon in its surface.
The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear.
Consciousness reverts to contemplation; the moon’s disk rests alone.

Wilhelm, R., 1962. The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, New York, NY: Harvest / HBJ Book.

Researching more of Wilhelm’s powerful translation work that continues to widen an opening door into an ultimately livable space. The dorsal/ventral (toku – nin or Circulation of Light) breathing technique elucidated here — even when practiced with flawed concentration — has an immediate and profound affect on the state of the system. I am even surprised with the intensity of change which ensues. The body is straighter, uplifted, and the balance of body heat has shifted drastically — the chronically over-heated head is cooler, the feet and hands warmer. This shift has not yet directly impacted rising gall (yang) in surprise (reactive) situations, but when the breathing becomes first nature, it appears to have the potential to do that. The base-line of calm has shifted for the better. Will have to consult Heiji about these affects. A daily practice of some minutes, with as many reminders shot through the many unconscious moments of non-breathing, seems to be an auspicious start. There is no going back on this discovered knowledge.

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: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

arrival and meditation

edge, Echo Park, Colorado, May 2010

Have an incredibly erotic dream with Jennifer D., back from the Culture Capitals 2000 project in Prague. Will have to email her. Otherwise watery squint-eyed perusal of the rotating stellar field in ma’ face.

This morning, a raptor circles a hundred meters away with its mate hidden in the trees along Pool Creek, making a creeeewing sound. It’s the same noise it made when I wandered over to the creek earlier in the morning. All the birds are noisy—it makes a multi-dimensional flow which lies on the ear with pleasing insistence. No need to move the head, as the sources are in motion and occasionally in sight.
more “arrival and meditation”

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CLUI: Day Thirteen

live-fire range, shattered .50 cal bullet, South Base, Utah, April 2010

A long cycle ride south from South Base, the (doh!) southern part of the airbase. Into the region down-range of the heavy machine-gun target range and where fragments of mock-up Little Boy bombs (prepped with high explosives, not nukes) may be found along with tens of thousands of rounds of oxidized-green-sheathed bullets scattered everywhere on the surface of the playa. The cycling is a bit surreal when surrounded by mountains floating on silver lakes. Lots of effort into the wind, but otherwise, it’s a flat out ride. Slight differences in the surface texture, and then the human altered areas — the dikes and drainage berms of the saline concentrating solar evaporation ponds.

Then there are the bunkers and V-1 test area. Matt said the casinos use a couple bunkers for records storage, as does the city of Wendover. The Simparch-designed CLUI South Base Clean Livin’ center is a cool space — completely self-contained with a PV electricity system, gray water recycling system, and a composting toilet. Along with the refurbished Quonset hut it makes for a homey post-nuclear space for quiet meditation.

posted

myopia and narrow vision

What is certain is that even a skill as abstract as literacy has an unexpectedly strong physical aspect. In the history of humanity, our attention has shifted from the horizon to the length of our own arms: the printed page or the electronic monitor, or at the farthest the television screen. (p. 237)
Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity, Tenner, E., Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003

 
This shifting of attention has deeply affected the eyes, with a documented rise in myopia in more literate societies. Nothing like a myopic population: with the simultaneous illusion of tele-vision being foisted on bodies everywhere!

Edward Tenner, in Our Own Devices examines a number of basic technologies and their affect on embodied cultural/social participation. Think athletic shoes, chairs, eyeglasses, typewriters/keyboards, baby nursing bottles, flip-flops, and helmets. Where did they come from, why did they develop, and ultimately, what is their affect on users.

There are so many examples of this, one need only select any particular technology and begin to meditate on its source, its uses and (mis)applications: the affects on human presence gradually become apparent. The deeper the meditation on these, and the wider the field of affect is likely to surface. Tenner’s detailed histories become a bit tedious if the reader’s curiosity wears away, as the tone of the writing doesn’t change throughout, but it is in the examination of the details that connections can be made and eventually some basic principles emerge. Tenner himself is a bit glib about the meaning of the deduced affectations, and remains neutral with a slightly optimistic outlook.

In the case of computer keyboards, though, for example, he does not go beyond the direct dialectic between inventor, device, and user. Doing this, he neglects the affectations that arise not from direct usage of a device, but the indirect affects which are present as the widest context in which the device arises in a complex techno-social system. Clearly, this is not his goal, rather it appears to be more of an entertaining and surficial cabinet-of-curiosity stroll through the obscure history of everyday objects. In my opinion he misses a potent opportunity to carry through to the deeper relations between technology, technique, fundamental social relation, and embodied be-ing.

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tool-making and control

Nadine's hand, Alsace, France, June 1988

If one constructs a tool, what is one doing, and why is one doing it? How will one do it?

How to control of flows around oneself? And what does this control mean? Where does the desire to control arise from? Is it simply about evolutionary (survival/procreative) pressures? Is there anything about control that is altruistic (or simply outside of the broadly evolutionary imperative)?

The divide between life-forms that make tools and ones that don’t is fundamental, but it may be ignored when regarding the smooth continuum framing life as a system(?) that alters the flows of energy around it generally to its advantage (or to its need to continue — life is about life needing to continue life). The divide then appears to arise only when one considers how (from a mechanistic p.o.v.) that control is exerted.

mine, Bitburg, Germany, July 1988

This divide seems especially arbitrary when the body itself may be seen as a tool. The mechanical relations between bone structures, for example, or the magnifying ability of the lens in the eye. And, extending the definition of tool beyond the purely mechanical to, say, chemical, the body is a clearly a refinery in the exact same sense as a petroleum refinery. It conducts a wide-ranging set of thermodynamically driven reactions to access and distribute concentrated energy sources that it has introduced to its system. While there is a material dividing plane, the skin, which historically looms largely absolute in determining many classifications of relation and order, that plane may also be seen as arbitrary. The surface tissues — including the entire gut and lungs — are highly permeable surfaces which are constantly interchanging matter and energy with the environment they are in. In an optimal sense, at a particular time, this interchange process does not degrade the general order of the biotic system, but it does precipitate localized and systemic change. Also to be considered are the millions of microscopic organisms which synergize with the larger human body system — without which that system would likely not survive.

Andrea, Jersey City, New Jersey, May 1988

Are there, then, distinctions to be made based on body-as-tool and the ‘external’ tool that the body/mind system synthesizes? Or are these distinctions merely artifacts of the entire mechanistic p.o.v.?

It would seem so. If one considers, again, the relations within the body between , say, limb or organ, where a part may be seen as having a particular function which benefits or affects another part. A particular part has a function (as any tool also has) which aids in the performance of the body-system and interacts with other specific mechanisms in the body. In a living body-system these inter-relations are both necessary and sufficient if one includes the those moving between the body and the external. The body is seen as an indivisible whole, but without the constant interactions with the external environment, it would, for practical purposes, dis-integrate immediately.

The point of this short meditation is to emphasize the process which a tool, by definition, precipitates. That process is the fundamental alteration of the energy flows to which the tool is applied. This process unites the purpose of both internal and external systems for energy flow change which may be seen as a tool. The body is a technology as much as anything external to it which causes an alteration of extant energy flows. (Uff, this suggests that life itself be defined as a technology as it always alters the flows around it — we are life, we alter the flows around us, we are a technology.)

The division between tool-makers and those organisms which do not make tools may then be seen as a somewhat arbitrary one. Both organisms are needful of altering the surrounding flows to survive, they actualize that need via evolved mechanisms as they relate with those particular flows. The ultimate point for both internal and external tool use is the optimized continuance of life.

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A start to meditations on The Road

The road-as-pathway is a channel for the flow of energy. It is defined by socially-constructed standards and protocols: a web of socially-applied energies follow the limitations and directedness of those protocols. Roads are a human construct in response to the existence of natural blockages that divert from desired trajectories, that expend communal life-energies and threaten the control of energy resources.

The road is perhaps a synthesized mirror for the human-navigable river, that directed natural space of flow, or the ocean which is the cumulative and spatial confluence-of-all-rivers.

Practically all natural landscapes have some form of blockage as to cause a deviation to even slow and deliberate human passage. So, when there is a lack of free and easy passage, first a foot-path evolves, or is established through troddden effort. This is a trajectory for the body, with the foot leading. Seeking a pathway on foot requires vigilance and concentrated attention in many environments, though this condition is necessarily eliminated from daily life in the developed world — almost completely through the efforts to flatten, level, grade, and pave large swaths of the Terran surface.
more “A start to meditations on The Road”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

silent selection

Buber’s story illustrating that Silence is communication opens a certain mediatory path. Especially that of listening, a critical reciprocal of expression: the act of open impression. A kind of inversion, equivalent with Simon Weil’s framing of human obligations versus the traditional (and often violent) struggle for human rights. This inversion also maps into the qualities of presence and absence implicit in the mediated technological space. Where scripted and centered Silence is necessary for balanced expression. (Both the silence of meditation and the silence of listening).

Kittler, in Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter: plowing through his expansive, eclectic interwoven threads examining the development of technology and the ensuing affectations on social systems, on people. I perhaps haven’t given him credit previously that he deserves, although I always found his presentations to be too dense to follow (simultaneous translation probably didn’t help — native speakers surely had to focus to follow his thinking). And this book didn’t come out in English until 1999, so wasn’t available when I was crossing his path. He makes clear points on the connection between technological development and war, the contingencies of warfare which don’t merely draw technological systems into a problem-solving process, but actually arise purely out of the need to more effectively, efficiently kill the Other. Optimization of defense, primacy of offense, protection of home-lands, via reducing the potential for the Other to accomplish the same. Natural selection. Is this what drives the techno-social system?

Kittler holds a fascination for these mechanisms, a boyish focus on the tool and on the technological ground of war without once making any moral approbation or moral critique of the way it goes. Has he given up? Does he care? Is he a techno-determinist? Does the intellectual fascination not accept moral argument? Or is the disinterested contemporary academic not allowed to take a moral stance?

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

to be mindful of modalities

exploring modalities of communication. of connection, of be-ing. Kittler shows up on the radar immediately (hmmm, recalling that extremely uncomfortable evening with him in that bar in Linz before the Intertwinedness happening. he needed the table to circulate around him. and it did because of the language (protocol) gap. I was not fluent in German enough to access the discussion that inevitably circulated, hovered, around him. strange situation. instead I talked with his assistant (and translator whose name I have now forgotten), a young American who came to worship Kittler in Berlin for a time. I left early as I had to catch a train to Copenhagen early the next morning.)

how to bind energy in to the text [as the particular creative output]. to be released in TIME. to the proper receiver.

that from an earlier travelogue entry. it clearly has been on mind for a long time. actually the transition from print-making to performance/happening was a mapping of that need. finding that the silver print was just too rigid a platform when compared to presence. although the print is, as with anything, in retrospect, a resonance of presence and be-ing as is any trace left in the wake of life.
more “to be mindful of modalities”

posted
  • place: Florissant, Colorado

behind Cripple Creek

so, what about now? the then, constructed from fragments of fleshy and amorphous silica memory remains. it stands in each accretionary flow of now as a splinter of … glass … that distracts with an acute and heart-shimmering intrusion deep into souls that only somewhere wish to be there, then. speaking to a screen, there is a deep form of silence that no intensity of dialogue might remove. it is not a meditative silence but rather a reverberatory one … in a glass house.

Karen is back home after her first trip to China, so she and Ron pick me up at Greg’s for an over-night at the cabin south of Florissant. beautiful place! a great dinner that Ron concocts. and fine company, neighbors. and the wet weather continues in one form or another. Pikes Peak gets plenty more snow above tree line.

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  • place: Sycamore Spring, Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, Arizona

the spring again

head out to Sycamore Spring earlier this morning to allow for a longer period to explore. four liters of water rather than two. forgot to take the pruning saw to take out some of the tamarisk trees growing in the wash. will do next time out. how the cattle wear ways through the bush: I followed many of those ways, but they are, in fact, infinite in number and go nowhere but elsewhere. leaving spaces where anything edible is gone. and the microbial soil is crushed and eroding. only splattered shit left behind in various stages of dessication. just as all other forms of life process energy and leave waste behind. eating on the move, because there isn’t enough nutrition in one place to really graze and shit one of those classic UFO-shaped pies, those are the product of pastoral abundance. the desert is not abundant in any way except in lack thereof. it takes at least 100-200 acres of this land per cow per year, possibly double, triple that. why even raise cattle here is the loud question I would ask the ranchers. how long does a cowpie last? here they are hard and indeed could be made good use of in a cow-pie-throwing contest. at the immediate moment of exit from the humid gut, the pies fester with flies, the hairy and loud kind with the technicolor backs and eyes. in a frenzied dance likely for the water content alone. fast dessication hardens a crust which keeps a core amply moist for some days. this attracts some kinds of burrowing creatures who build tunnel complexes that riddle the whole-ness. the pie eventually loses it’s bilious green color and grades into a bleached beige of a rag used to wash a car a few times. they seem to persist in this form — dried and digested grasses, cellulose — for a long time, years to be sure, possibly decades? probably a decent fuel source. how many acres used to gain one pound of meat on these beasts? more “the spring again”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

and heaven

Bodenlos and Heaven. and the ascent of be-ing as the ground turns to vapor and dissipates beneath the standing feet. how will these thoughts images intertwine? the German, rolling off tongue, with a dropping and slowing lilt. the English, heavy, gravitational in its religious orbit.

walking out of the building where people work at maintaining a certain form beyond hypostasis, Venus is low on the horizon in the irradiated semi-darkness. the semi- arising through the human re-concentration of energies. Licht. Light. Life. das Leben. I look upwards, taking care to stop walking. is this, what I see, is this heaven? it is called the collective signifier: the heavens. what is there to see but the anisotropy of matter revealing its presence? we are coalesced ejecta of novae. Ich fühle mich wie im siebten Himmel. or is it in us? the Empyrean, lifting us, vapors, to the brightness that fills the sky in the days, at the same time as burning in our chests, our eyes, blinded.

and that, though known, is not brought into the path, the way. in ascendant modes, the heart intuits direction.

The foreigner (and foreign) is the one who acknowledges his own being-in-the-world that surrounds him. Thus, he gives sense to the world, and in a certain way he dominates the world. But he dominates it tragically: he does not integrate into the world. The cedar tree is foreign in my park. I am foreign in France. Humankind is foreign in the world. — Vilém Flusser

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

https://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980’s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

https://neoscenes.net/blog/cv-resume

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT more “Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

mantis

preying, or is it a praying mantis hooks into window screen wires, on the outside, with the fluttering Others gathering to the seductive Lights. and, a feasting begins, first a snapping quivering snatch, and some bug is devoured from head to ass, wings and legs fluttering down when attaching flesh and tendon is consumed. imagining the mandibles, a multiplicity of angled jaws cracking, shredding carapace for juices and soft meat inside. a crab feast. a result of meditative posturing, carefully controlled breathing. and fast reflexes. a neck that can pivot the two 180-degree eye-spheres. serrated arm ridges clamp prey. deadly machine, and a shivering to watch.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

Titans

Sam Harris on c-span. talking about blind spots of consciousness. solitary confinement. meditation needs to be brought into the normal spectrum of human experience. and this along with recalling the Challenger incident.

20 years since heading up from Tower Records near Columbia Circle to dinner at Emily’s mother and step-father’s place on the Upper West Side — sitting in the living room afterward — as the television played the Challenger explosion over and over. her step-father was VP at Martin Marietta, the company that built the solid-fuel Titan IV rocket boosters which exploded because of the thermally cracked o-ring. he spent most of the evening with his head in his hands as the spectacle looped endlessly. a few months later, I visited with Emily in Paris, here with tulips to be set

right here on the cold steam radiator.

then heading south to Lyon to visit with Christine and then to Chalon-sur-Saone for a week at the youth hostel and hanging out soaking up the ambience of Niepce.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

the lost films

have the chance to catch The Lost Films that Stan Brakhage made in 1995. so in-spiring to receive these energies of his life. after he has passed away last spring. an honor to have been taught by him. even when he would sometimes leave the room when screening a film, and forget to turn off his wireless microphone on the way to the drinking fountain or the bathroom, or in an encounter with a colleague in the hallway. when I was doing my MFA back in the late 80’s and again when I was a visiting faculty in the fall of 1997, my office was next door to his 3×6-meter cubby-sized office with a sloping roof on the upstairs hallway where the photography grad students had their darkrooms. it was in that little office where many of his hand-painted films came together, on a glass-topped desk. with the pigments standing ready. how did he conceive, map, from working tediously frame-by-frame with a loupe, the projected brilliance of 24 fps? astonishing crystal clear will-to-see, and to apprehend the world as-it-is, and as we adsorb it through wide-spectrum eyes, corners of eyes, through eyelids, blurred tears, and squinted eyelashes. Light-receivers, life-receivers. and how he conjured humor to arise from chaotic abstraction, magmatic? no, more like a tremoring breeze through new aspen leaves. the coursing of wind mingled with the temporal deflections, resistances of leaf. and the leaf laughs. “it’s the same.” as Lightnin’ Hopkins says, “if you cain’t say it, then … SING boy!”

notes for The Lost Films:

1) A travelogue “nocturne” on the City of London as illuminated by “glaze” finally off the surfaces of Turner’s paintings.

2) A travelog to the north of Finland, shepherded by the midnight sun.

3) A hand-painted work, a “midsummer’s night dream,” still reflective of the previous summer in Finland.

4) A multiply pastel-toned balloon of optical fog triumphing over the barest hints of photographic representation in the lower right-hand corner.

5) A mountain meditation primarily in blue “mountains” of the mind shaped by amorphous dull yellows and faded violets.

6) A hand-painted film, some of the same colors of the previous films moving through sandbars and oceans of thoughtful recollection.

7) This is the eternally ephemeral process of attempts to remember imagery “giving-way”/ being-displaced-by the contemporaneously practical sighting of what confronts any given viewer at every shift of open eyes (or, as in the film, at every shift of camera, optical focus and montage of edit) — the skeins of the Atlantic, the particularities of Boston night Lights, and illuminated points West, ending on a garbage truck in a parking lot by the deserts of New Mexico.

8) A dark “sea chante” of absolute photography.

9) The color negative of “truth” — that is to say it is the whole truth (insofar as hand-painted film might aspire to achieve it) and a counterbalance epiphany to any such “truth” as might be put in quotes.

— Stan Brakhage

Once, I think it was in 1997, Stan and I were talking about his trip to Finland for the retrospective at a small film festival, he was telling me of a peak experience he had while in a rowboat coming from an island in a lake after a sauna. the Light. he broke down and cried from the seeing.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

doctoral meditations

weekend ending. reflecting in the office. swimming two days. more swimming pool commentary. wide 50-meter pool that is hardly ever open, and when it is, it is full of the breast-strokers. no pull-buoys to be had, at least the Russian attendant gives a good looking around, but the useful objects are locked away for the special-interest groups. so, some 50- and 100-meter sprints, just up to a kilometer is all I can force myself to do. no measure of relaxing and meditating. but at least some upper-body work-out.

conversations with Frieder are long and intense. and traverse new territories in mind. would it be possible to finish my doctorate here? hmmmm. it would seem to be an ideal place, though after the Media Lab experience in Helsinki, I am skeptical. there is the common phrase “ahead of his time” that does seem to apply to the general trend of my situations. where I attempt to do something that is against the flow of the situation. the digital media thing at the Icelandic Academy: where I had to struggle, on a salary scale that rivaled Eastern Europe, to get people to believe that the Internet was something to pay attention to, getting the school up on the web — the first Icelandic school to have a regular website. but then retreating (as I was leaving Iceland anyway), tired of trying to pull others into that vision. then the school eventually privatizes, salaries quadruple, the technical infrastructure blossoms, and a former student of mine is hired to do network-based teaching… or, applying for digital media jobs in the US, using a portfolio on a floppy disk back in 1995 or so. argh!

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

eye-rot

Monday evening. sitting in front of monitors for all of today, yesterday, the day before. eye-rot. and headaches. no meditation.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

sins

I should not be here, I should be elsewhere, by measure of PLANS. but plans shift and slide, along with the whim of the body presence. missed my flight this morning at 0700 to Prague via Helsinki and Stockholm. first time I have ever missed a flight. anywhere. cost me some bucks, and now I miss the whole cafe9.net meeting in Prague. along with a lecture at the Academy in Brno. and the ensuing reconstruction of schedules and flights makes my head ache. doing too many things, and not enough. nothing and everything. Loki is extremely happy that I am staying another week at least. but I see no solution. Iceland does not work for me. there is no way for me to live here, unless I was fluent with the language. unlike other places where there is enough room in the culture for a foreigner to exist in first language, here not. and I have too many things going on elsewhere anyway. cafe9.net. I hardly mention the internal mechanics of this project. no details, no revelations. though I have never been criticized about revealing anything in these pages, except by Sanna, but that is passé at this point. cafe9.net rumbles on. despite. but lately, since October or so, maybe even last summer, whenever the slip in communications began to happen, the dislocation of immediate being and remote presence, a gap, a slippage, opened up, a dissatisfaction has been growing with THE MEDIUM — the net, and the role, the effect it has had on my situation. in contact with so many people that I can hardly think. several days ago, before the rigidity of my lower back lead to this degraded condition, there was a subterranean urge to meditation, an urge that I did not quite fulfill. each time a discontinuity explodes on linear and insulated life, psyche measures itself against virtual standards. hints of higher being play across media-saturated energy configurations. untouchable. inaccessible. over there. other life-styles seem to creep further away. “what if?” becomes “because that’s the way it is.” damnation. peaceful damnation. mistakes. paying for past errors in judgment, SINS, whatever that means. if a sin is the transgression of the mind against the combined being of the soul and the body. the apokalyptic dream. reflects. what it is to be here and now. like speaking with a mouth full of small round pebbles, black basalt, worn smooth. easy to swallow. hard to talk. and then there is.

posted
  • place: en route Reykjavík - Akureyri, Iceland

floating silence

in the north, a mellow plane flight over a white-on-white landscape. sun rising. always conscious that clock-time is off from sun-time here. humans delegated that GMT rules, when, by global position, high noon comes at 1330. makes the mornings dark and thick in the winter, no doubt. arriving, Helgi meets me at the airport, and straight to school with a cup of coffee, and jump into the delayed workshop. rolling through several topics and introductions. working online afterward, then happen by dinner with Helgi and his family. on to the guest flat which is quite nice, like the one in Tornio. getting significant email done — critical business things crowd in. related to the movement that is about to break on me in 11 days or so. logistics. and in several conversations during the last couple weeks, I understand that I have reached a critical point in creativity. it’s not there! the ability to reflect, meditate, ponder, let the mind float in silence has crept away. not noticed, as I was busy doing other things.

posted
  • place: Imatra, Finland

dam meditations

Imatrankoski rapids (upstream) on the Vuoksi River, Imatra, Finland, December ©1999 hopkins/neoscenes.
Imatrankoski rapids (upstream) on the Vuoksi River, Imatra, Finland, December ©1999 hopkins/neoscenes.

back in the east. of Finland. on the western border of Russia. a border drawn partly by the movements of the Winter War that began sixty years ago last week. where Russian bombers hit Vypori at 0915 in the morning. they drove deep into Finland, but were later driven back, and the borderline was repeatedly re-drawn by the fortunes of war. first the Finns were supported and allied with the Nazis (the Whites), and then by the end of the war, they (the Reds) had turned against the Germans who subsequently withdrew through Lapland into Norway, leaving behind total devastation — the scorched-earth policy in action. the city of Rovaniemi in south-central Lapland was 99% destroyed. There was a brutal internal Civil War between the Reds and Whites prior to WWII, something that almost tore the country apart before the great General Mannerheim (White) won over the Reds. Independence Day, December 6, is still a day for old people, especially the soldiers to remember the suffering and be remembered in solemn ceremonies around the country. living memory is the word. different than in Amurika, where the Revolution and the fight for independence is only cause for over-eating barbecued food and watching fireworks while eating watermelon in the dead heat of summertime. dead memory. big difference. that life and living is so much more important than any material constructs or mental/social constructs like history and language and institutions and other imposed and largely abstract constellations of apparent energy. nothing real. snowing and very cold these days. it makes the town and the landscape look like a very idyllic picture postcard of White Christmas. heavy frosting on gently curved fir and birch trees, reposed for the chill. rocks and streets alike white, most form obscured. the river, split in to two narrow channels in the middle of town, both of which are dammed for a hydro station, one a bit further downstream than the other so that from a bridge over a narrow gorge, one can look upstream and see one small dam structure, with the dry gorge below full of fluffy white shapes. the same bridge passes over the river immediately upstream of the turbine intake, and there the water is flowing fast, strangely smooth, with harmonic anti-waves with an amplitude of half a meter and a wavelength of, say, five meters, migrating upstream against the current. today, in the thick falling snow and deep chill, the water there has a scummy skin of thin slush onto which is mixed swirls of fresh snow. last night I seemed to come down with a minor sinus cold that has lasted the day, though with no serious symptoms. generally I throw off these things in less than 24-hours, though more generally, I simply don’t get sick. back to the water thing. but this week I had two very bad nights of sleep, for some reason, and that, combined with long, badly-timed waits for the bus between the teachers’ house and the college, and early mornings, wore me down a bit. was thinking that the teaching here in Imatra stretches my toughness — and actually it is quite easy conditions, but I have gotten just too soft. ain’t no hungry barbarian.

Imatrankoski rapids (downstream) on the Vuoksi River, Imatra, Finland, December ©1999 hopkins/neoscenes.
Imatrankoski rapids (downstream) on the Vuoksi River, Imatra, Finland, December ©1999 hopkins/neoscenes.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

chutes & ladders

back in Tornio after another fast trip to Helsinki early in the week. rolling along, another country, another gradual settling in, climbing certain ladders and sliding down certain chutes. no time for consideration, little time for meditation. manufacture time. the Day of Ascension. and Finland plays Sweden into sudden-death overtime. winning in a match that always brings out an often-times acrimonious nationalist passion from both sides. Europe.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

silence

nature is silent. a massive complete silence broken only by the human incarnation. not the silence of manufactured meditation, but the great yawning nothing that swallows all the things we can make with our hands and even create in our dreams. Janet writes that Jazzie has just had puppies.

posted
  • place: en route Lahti - Suomenlinna, Finland

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.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

turning times

Turning times. Solstice passed. No time to meditate on the significance of it, a five-year-old doesn’t allow for meditation. Time begins to press into the impending departure from the country. I realized that our new passports have not yet arrived by express mail. Eight days until hitting the road in earnest. Never a moment that is not filled with the confusing rush of ego-centricity. To be free of this would alter life immensely. That pressure of comparative living, looking at others through a filter so distorted as to preclude apprehension with a fat dose of in-your-face.

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

visit Homare

Despite not quite being over a cold that kept me home from teaching on Monday, in a dull-witted fog of sinu-kalyptic mondo-cosm, I drove over to visit with Homare whom I had not seen for some years. He has a bigger studio now, near downtown Denver, filled with oil, water-color, and acrylic paintings, monoprints — exploding from each corner and surface. A prodigious amount of work, he produces artifact after artifact, and has a storage unit full of canvases. His work is calmly explosive, and at the same time, meditative and electric. somehow I run into Krishnamurti…

Memory is always in the past and is given life in the present by a challenge. Memory has no life in itself; it comes to life in the challenge. And all memory, whether dormant or active, is conditioned. — J. Krishnamurti

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

solstice-to-solstice

A short note about the installation that I just opened yesterday as part of the Akureyri ListaSumar 1997 (Summer Arts Festival). It is an extension of the performance series solstice-to-solstice: a naming of the Light of Being [it takes a few seconds for the java slide-show to cue up—there are a total of 225 images].

and the intro on the wall reads something like this:

This installation is a visual exploration of a life-path—a braided passage that is both material and spiritual. As Light forms, informs, and sustains Life, its influence on the large and small is whole and complete. The eye absorbs this energy and that inspiration becomes material essence for Being. These images are a meditation, a reviving of memory, a remembering, a potential source for the imagination and, most of all, a visual naming in the fundamental sense. Naming is a basic creative process that brings the material world into being, it forms a matrix, an armature, upon which this personal visual history and memory is built. These images span a Cartesian time from 21 June 1995 to 21 June 1996, they span a wide Cartesian space. Outside of the Cartesian, they span steps of eye and heart that leave the Cartesian behind, and are suspended in a new construct of community, network, and being.

Probably a measure of bullshit, but the 40-meter long strip of images that span the space impressed the hell out of my back, leaving me crippled and craving more of the pain-killers that the Doc prescribed. One step forward, two steps back. A photographer from the national paper came in to do a portrait for upcoming coverage of the town’s summer art festival, and during the opening, the most retro and pin-headed critic (no, I can’t honestly call him a critic—should simply say guy-who-fills-columns-with-pointless-drivel) employed by the newspaper ran through the installation. The poor old fellow knows little about art, and nothing about photography. I recall the review he wrote for an exhibition I did some years back which was of as much critical value as an equal quantity of paper pulp destined to clean a baby’s arse. Some people don’t know when to quit. The only positive point is that a bad review from him pretty much confirms that an exhibition is at least interesting.