posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

the volume of memory

May we speak of fullness, and of amplitude?

Or,

mere intensity and lack?

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

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

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

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

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

augury: I can’t remember

Damn if it didn’t start with

yarrow—stalks harvested under the towering Sangre de Christo mountains, cut for use casting the I Ching;

then it proceeded to

culvert—piping rainwater under the road upstream from the Prescott house, it’s clogged with debris and when a flood comes it washes down the road and through my yard. It’s definitely not a conduit although it does guide flows; then there are

tamales—they snuck in there somewhere between the known, tortillas, and the next mental blank:

box elder—the trees that shade campsite #12 in Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, and that host those weird black-and-red (western) boxelder bugs.

Let’s try this again, commit to Latinized memory:

Achillea millefolium

tandem tabernus

Ferculum Mesoamericanum ex masa, farinam ex segete nixtamalizato, quod vaporetur in folliculo grani vel fixa folium.

Acer negundo quod exercituum Boisea rubrolineata

recalling, naming what routinely … cannot be brought to mind.

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

from source to sink to source

Thermodynamic and electromagnetic (energy) models of reality use the terms ‘source’ and ‘sink’. Given that certain aspects of living organisms are accurately modeled by thermo, it follows, reasonably, that in a science-driven interpretation of reality, these terms may be applied to human life.

Eau de source: spring water, water that is safe to drink. Source, re-source. Life-source. Keeps life in motion and creating.

And then, sink: to submerge (in water?). Water that kills, hypothermia, a demonstration of inverse heat capacity, from source (body engine) to sink (cold water). Taking from, depth, gravitational pull of the Sun at night: into the earth. Drawing, winding down, running out.

From source to sink and vice versa. The movement of energies from energy-dense to energy-deficient regions.

Back to the anisotropic distribution of energy/matter in the cosmos. Life is predicated on this seeming imperfection. It is the ground condition of Life as a negentropic phenomena. Pure sameness was once disturbed and began to differentiate. Back to Weil’s “Two forces rule the universe: Light and Gravity.”

Mind has forgotten how to string words together. Mind knows no more names. A retreat from naming is the end’s beginning. I will stop naming what I cannot recall. Rather, turn naming into an action stripped of all symbolic content. No adjectival building of sense: mere non-sense. A good thing perhaps? Rules broken, expression by fiat, without the symbolic chatter, without symbolic precision.

An urgency to fall back into a frenzy of creative action emerges from a deep loathing of empty-headed criticism of pointless tasks that have no use in changing the social system: the dysfunctional working life. In service of the overwhelming human inertia directed into the search for (re)sources. Sources. Am I then guilty of helping sustain the unsustainable? Maybe, but worse, guilty of tolerating the intolerable idiocy of management: an energy sink.

To be a source is to allow a flux of energy to pass into and through the body with minimal disruption, minimal blockage. Channeling, not grasping, not riding the tiger, but simply be-ing the tiger, inspiration, be-ing the tiger’s roar, expiration. Nothing to do with the social, the fiscal, the political, the noumenal.

 

 

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

what’s new?

Weekends, weeks, months, even years speed by, entombing life in a retrospective silicon vitrine: a dim reflection of what it could be, or, even more passive, what it could have been. Life actually holds no interest for me except as it is. Five days on the road, three of those on foot in the bush, walking dry washes, wet canyons, fracture zones, sage forests, and several fault lines. Ancient barbed wire: almost garroted at one point. That would have been messy and, off trail, not discovered until late in the season, a scatter of catamount-stripped, bleached and cracked bones. Plenty of those stumbled on over the years. The only other impingement on body was a gashed shin whilst climbing high up on the flank of the Mitten Park fault scarp, will carry that scar for many moons, trace of a single misstep.

Some random conversations ensue in the campground, but mostly solitary bush-walking, ravens are curious when I initiate a dialogue, they circle closer (with sun at their backs in a clever move to keep me blinded, watching). The dry washes become the site of photographic essay, so empty and barren is the imagination. The in-sight of things draws mind to travel that thin line between madness and be-ing. It is impossible to re-present those things because they aren’t things at all. They are merely manifestations. They are fields of action, activated flow. No wonder that the representations are so pale and thin. Sagebrush, flower, rampart, water-washed stone, lizard, and, finally, days later, skin, activated and living skin.

Golden, Colorado, May ©2017 hopkins/neoscenes.
Golden, Colorado, May ©2017 hopkins/neoscenes.

more “what’s new?”

posted
  • place: Medano Pass, Great Sand Dunes National Preserve, Colorado

Medano Pass, the edge demarcates nothingness

Silver twiLight shades the aspen trunks, recording down by the creek, some big branches break nearby. Time to retreat.

Last night on the Divide (Medano Pass), after a short visit with Steve up at his off-grid homestead in the Wet Valley there. Did a nice portrait of him, and proceeded to erase it by accident this morning. Said goodbye to Holly in the morning at the Cottonwood Hot Springs after a pleasant evening and morning of hanging out and soaking.

The mind lets down, as the eyes, skin, body interfaces with the un-filtered ‘out there’. Especially the eyes, pulling in the energies of those ‘things’ that constellate the surrounds. Proximal flows. All sourced from the brilliance of sun. Heart carrumps the chest-wall as legs push away from earth, seeking to maintain aerial presence until earth absorbs the whole of Self — worms, bones, and roots.

Words propel nothing. They push silence away, as do radio waves, or as voices breaking into a void: “I’d like to kiss you.”

What does this mean? It is language. But maps are not the territory.

Walking across the earth. Looking at that surface, looking at the dividing line between earth and Heaven, looking at sky. I name a few things: aspen, prickly pear, conglomerate, ponderosa, sand, juniper, lenticular, but these are weak signifiers. They carry nothing of the thing itself. Science is weak for naming the world. Detailed, but weak when stood next to the raven crawing echoes against the canyon wall, far away, miles with the wind in dead aspen branches sighing higher than the same wind in the bristlecone needles. The frequency spectrum of turbulence. It is turbulence, motion incarnate of all the world, that speaks primal tongues — let the ear hear, if listening.

in the Sangre de Christos, Saguache County, Colorado, November 2016

So, there is this presence here, now. And there is the social system. Venn diagram: what overlays?

Silence sitting here in the cab of the truck. Near the mouth of Medano Canyon, no one else camping here, the last humans drove by a couple hours ago as I sat on a pinnacle maybe 500 feet above the canyon, watching the sun set over the dune field. Taking exceptional care moving around — between having a old and worn pair of boots on, ready to be retired, and being older by some months since last out in extreme places. Bears are out here, too, a dry fall makes them late to hibernate.

Listening to Indigenous Nation radio. Listening in the Light of the dimmed screen. In the darkness of 18:15 winter day at the end of November in the high country. Could be colder, could be snow; ’twas damn cold yesterday afternoon at Steve’s place when the sun went down behind the Crestones. Damn cold.

I was here with Loki four years ago on a five-day road trip from Boulder. And only saw him for a few days otherwise since then. Sometimes I have failed as partner, father, son, brother, friend, employee, teacher, artist, collaborator, cook, geophysicist, photographer, et dividerent aliter bene multis.

Occasionally I have succeeded in one or another of those ways-of-going.

I have an eleven-year-old digital camera. Advancing technology leaves my art production behind, constantly. If I can call it art. Artifice. Art. Artificial. Art. Reduction. Art. Ramification. Art. Expression of retroactive sadness that does not allow me to rise above the temporal. It’s 18:30. what’s the point of this stupid writing. As I sit, alone again, in the back-country. Never can manage to do things with others. Although the solitary movement seems best for allowing the chitta vritti to be stilled. Reflecting the complexity of what is out there, inverted, on the inside back of the skull. The mental wet-ware camera obscura scrapes clean the noise of the social. Just by looking at rocks, lichen, bark, plant, sky, and the edges of all these. Proximal flows. The edge demarcates nothingness.

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
  • place: Mint Wash, Prescott, Arizona

naming

Hyla arenicolor, Mint Wash, Williamson Valley, Arizona, April 2005

“What is it?” we ask, meaning what is its name? This odd quirk of the human mind: Unless we can name things, they remain for us only half-real. Or less than half-real: nonexistent. A person without a name is nobody. A human’s name can become more important than his person. A plant, an animal, a thing without a name is no thing — nothing. No wonder we humans like to think that in the beginning was — the Word. What word? Any word. Any word at all, anything rather than the silence and terror of the nameless.” —

Abbey, Edward. Abbey’s Road. New York, NY: Plume, 1991.

Plowing (ploughing) through Abbey this time, years since reading “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” his writing seems dated, depressing, even dark. So much of the landscape that he passed through is (de)evolved, so much of what he prognosticated about the Southwest, at the hands of corrupt politicians and developers has materialized like a cancer across the land. The forever-expansion, development-is-good, it-creates-jobs mantra that is chanted by deeply unholy men (and women). Bringing 4000+ square-foot pseudo-adobe MacMansions to dot the landscape along with scaled-up vehicular afterbirth: Hummers in every five-car garage. Although there are places one might go and on a middle-scale—meaning the easily visible—local scale, to the uninitiated eye, the natural system seems untouched. But with any consideration of scientific data—atmospheric systems, plant and animal ecosystems, and hydrological systems are being irretrievably altered. What of the domination of a species that will destroy most of the other macro-species only to live on briefly in an impoverished environment: soon to succumb to a viral celebration in the host of hosts. Definitely, catch it while you can. Take the last road trips around before gas costs what it should and the only way to get out of Dodge will be on foot. And the only way to survive the plague is through a slow and costly counter-evolution.

At any rate, this is a frog (possibly a Canyon Tree frog – Hyla arenicolor). But note the incredible coloration. The green exactly matches a particular lichen that grows on the granite in that area. The pinkish blush of the oxidized feldspar in the granite. There were four of them literally stuck to the side of a large smooth boulder on Mint Wash. I was sitting opposite from them, having lunch with Marianne, about 6 feet (2 meters) away, and at first I thought they were phenocrysts in the granite, but then saw they were frogs. This particular one was the only one I could get close enough to make an image of, it was crouched on a relatively reasonable ridge. The other three were glued to vertical (overhanging!) smooth surfaces, but there was a 2-meter deep hole in the creek bed, full of water immediately below them. So, this one had to do. The beautiful beast is about 1.5 inches (3 cm) long.

posted
  • place: en route Cornwall - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - New York, New York

en route – Keystone #666

Heading back into the NYC urbs after a week in Cornwall, PA. Philly ringed by collapsing tenements and the rail tracks littered with quantities of random detritus, all iron-work rusted, signage cryptic. How difficult would it be (how much energy would it take) to clean this stuff up, return some order to the system?

Free your mind, your ass will follow! The Kingdom of Heaven is within! — Funkadelic

posted

the essence of ego-centricity?

It is true that, while busied only in considering the manners of other men, I found here, too, scarce any ground for settled conviction, and remarked hardly less contradiction among them than in the opinions of the philosophers. So that the greatest advantage I derived from the study consisted in this, that, observing many things which, however extravagant and ridiculous to our apprehension, are yet by common consent received and approved by other great nations, I learned to entertain too decided a belief in regard to nothing of the truth of which I had been persuaded merely by example and custom: and thus I gradually extricated myself from many errors powerful enough to darken our Natural Intelligence, and incapacitate us in great measure from listening to Reason. But after I had been occupied several years in thus studying the book of the world, and in essaying to gather some experience, I at length resolved to make myself an object of study, and to employ all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths I ought to follow; an undertaking which was accompanied with greater success than it would have been had I never quitted my country or my books. — Descartes

Eliot, C. ed., 1910. French and English Philosophers, New York, NY: P. F. Collier & Son.
posted

other thoughts:

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. — Patañjali

Kevin reads that in yoga class — Sarah is still back east, so he’s subbing for her. Positive vibes, a little contrite (how to actually realize anything so … optimistic), but gotta stick to it, somehow.

posted

episodic memory

Our capacity to remember episodes in our lives provides a profound and highly valued aspect to our existence, allowing us the capacity to relive events in our lives. We value the ability to relive a proud moment such as a graduation or the birth of a child. We expect and in many cases require that we will remember a meeting with a coworker or a visit to a family member. We start to question our mental capacities if we forget an episode, and we question the capabilities of others if they forget an episode that we remember. Thus, the memory for episodes is an essential component of human behavior.

Hasselmo, M.E., 2012. How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wewsh, high density, clinical neuro-physiology/biology or so. But the typological divisions of memory among episodic, procedural, and semantic seem an approach that reveals how we are. And the neural construction of spatio-temporal trajectory (episodic trajectory) is fascinating. Overall, it feels like the science is still in the process of sub-dividing ever more the energetic processes of be-ing.

posted

recalling Varela

…[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it[‘s] roots [are] in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.

– Francisco Varela, Cosmos Web Forum letter 12e (1998?)

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

passing note

500 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile flying
250 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile driving

These are very approximate/average numbers and are affected by the type of plane/vehicle and its relative efficiency.

We are changing the course of nature. Or, more precisely, without life on this planet, nature would be different. We are life in this place. Or we are life, as life is a perturbation of basal flows. An always-inchoate flow, but never completely still. This is all we are, a way for the cosmos to increase entropy, perhaps, as some believe, the best way for the cosmos to increase entropy, to wind down, into a cold and silent nothing.

But it’s all in the language, isn’t it? And even the language needs to get shucked, ripped from its stalk, tossed away to reveal and remind of the truth that the word is not the phenomena that it de-scribes …

Back to:

All Roads Lead To Rome.

as principle.

The questions are, What is Rome, and What is a Road?

et cetera

Nine km. in three days, not bad — it’s actually getting easy — I need to do more sprinting and drills, but just moving faster is best, feeling the greater resistance of the water and consequent speed. That and watching the sky and listening to the birds on the walk from my office to the pool. The sky was exceptionally dark and clear last night, it got down to maybe 40F, pretty cool. Totally dreaming about being in the bush, as they say here, in the back-country, the wilds, the wilderness. To watch the stars sink right to the black edge of the world. Squatting, eyes tearing in the chill condensate of mid-night. The Southern Cross is practically at Zenith now which seems strange, but at a similar latitude as in the north in winter, Polaris also reaches quite close to Zenith. Pity no chance of catching a good sky on this tour. Now too many folks to visit with before possible departure, too many things to do, including whether not to leave again.

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

matters

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

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

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

the predatory life/death: lex talionis

With the growth of industry comes the possibility of a predatory life; and if the groups of savages crowd one another in the struggle for subsistence, there is a provocation to hostilities, and a predatory habit of life ensues. There is a consequent growth of a predatory culture, which may for the present purpose be treated as the beginning of the barbarian culture. This predatory culture shows itself in a growth of suitable institutions. The group divides itself conventionally into a fighting and a peace-keeping class, with a corresponding division of labor. Fighting, together with other work that involves a serious element of exploit, becomes the employment of the able-bodied men; the uneventful everyday work of the group falls to the women and the infirm. — Thorstein Veblen

A man gets shot once in the face, and a second time to the head to ensure his demise. Other men are shot. A woman is shot. Why celebrate except in the instance of savagery, with an up-turned face, contorted with suppressed rage, making a vengeful grimace, and declaring the nation-state’s supremacy. An eye for an eye, the context lost on those who do not even know the content of the holy book coming from their own god. Instead, kill and be killed and kill and be killed. more “the predatory life/death: lex talionis”

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

traveling beyond

Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret in terris oppressa gravi sub religione […] primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra […] ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque, unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, […] quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

(When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of superstition, […] ’twas a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her, and first to stand forth to meet her […]. And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole; whence in victory he brings us tidings what can come to be and what cannot […]. And so superstition in revenge is cast beneath men’s feet and trampled, and victory raises us to heaven.) — Lucretius

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

do, do not

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. — Ayn Rand

posted

Sonnet 116

a Garrison Keillor reading reminded me of this wonderful piece:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
— Bill Shakespeare

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

I left FaceBook last week …

Emile writes to the point:

I left facebook last week
by EZ

tired of the mirrors, noise and eyes.

tired of prickly, intimate and fleshy human relationships being flattened into ‘friend’-nodes, the erasure of myth by constant visibility and exhausting availability.

what kind of network society do i want to support? a closed compound of willingly data-mined crayons or an open net of chance and unpredictability? more…

I am of the same mind, and had decided a couple months ago to do the same — at the end of February. I have found it most instructive that since I put this status up:

Capped by the Goldman-Sacks pseudo-IPO for the wealthy, and in light of the massive data-harvesting of everything posted here, I am leaving FB as of 01 March 2011 — if you are interested in staying in touch, email me chazhop at gmail dot com with your contact info before that time…

I’ve gotten all of four five responses in the last month and only one at the suggested email address — of around 500 ‘friends.’ It appears that the concept of ‘friend’ in the FaceBook space is quite completely divergent from that of my own conception of friend-ship. There is a bloated vacuity in the expressed presence that the applied protocol of FB requires as a condition of participation. I hate to pop your bubble.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

prana

Prana is an auto-energizing force which creates a magnetic field in the form of the Universe and plays with it, both to maintain, and to destroy for further creation. It permeates each individual as well as the Universe at all levels. It acts as physical energy, mental energy, where the mind gathers information; and as intellectual energy, where information is examined and filtered. Prana also acts as sexual energy, spiritual energy, and cosmic energy. All that vibrates in this Universe is prana: heat, light, gravity, magnetism, vigor, power, vitality, electricity, life and spirit are all forms of prana. It is the cosmic personality, potent in all beings and non-beings. It is the prime mover of all activity. It is the wealth of life. — indigoworld

yet another model of the substrate of all. I find it fascinating that there are configurations of humans who struggle to assemble these models in the face of transitory living. the process relies on a clear insight combined with precise observation of the phenomenal world around. take a breath.

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

workshop – Day 9 – eNZed

prepping the waka, Whanganui, New Zealand, December 2010

Workshop day begins: first the waka time on the river. Morning cycle down the river to the Putiki boat ramp, get there a little early, and feel the nerves as to what is possible with the workshop. There have been numerous anticipatory conversations in the last days about what I will be doing. I take a small paper with thought-notes and put it in my life-jacket pocket.

I am fighting with the impression that there is a superfluity of input for the participants — some have not been on a river or so. My dilemma becomes a question of when to jump in and alter the flow of events and protocols which accompany the waka and the enveloping and powerful Maori cultural scenario. It makes no sense to do anything other than participate. Where full participation is a position, an approach to an eventuality of contingent life-flow. I am observing the processes and vibes that are coalescing, seeing if there is a auspicious moment to intervene, but I see none. Back to participating. Enjoying it all. The newness, but also the familiarity and comfort which the Maori protocol applies to that (community-facing) unknown, and The River. more “workshop – Day 9 – eNZed”

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

Energy, Creative Action, and Sustainable Systems Workshop – Day 8 – eNZed

The official blurb for the workshop:

This workshop will draw on Hopkins’ international experience in facilitating creative encounters in the context of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. With an open structure for engaged and focused dialogue, the workshop will explore a powerful energy-based worldview that can open up new awareness of social, cultural, and natural systems. The dynamics of collaborative human relations confined within an attentive space is guaranteed** to generate provocative and inspiring outcomes. Creativity is, by definition, about the formative flow of energy between living organisms. We will move through a variety of environments (including on the river by waka) as we share life-time in the workshop. The workshop will augment the processes of any creative practitioner with a profound, situated, and practice-oriented conceptual toolbox that address the following areas and more:

(Keywords in no particular order): energy, creativity, thermodynamics, technology and techno-social systems, art, attention, entropy, learning, media, networks, participation, process, virtuality, creative action, human presence, Light, human encounter, mediation, concentration, optimization, pathways, meals, sustainability, simplicity, synchronicity, auspiciousness, and serendipity.

**on the condition that you bring along your entire Self, not merely your body, mind, and spirit

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

The Green Bench – Day 2 – eNZed

opening, The Greenbench, Whanganui, New Zealand, December 2010

Today is completely packed and busy: cleaning, organizing, and installing the show at the Greenbench for the gallery opening this evening. The title of the show is BURN and the show is obliquely or directly about hydrocarbons — plastics, production, consumption, distribution. Julian had tracked down a collection of oil samples from an early and now spent New Zealand (oil) field nearby (name?). I am surprised, oil — with the tectonic regime here, the foreshore of a plate boundary subduction zone. Ah, maybe the heat flow is actually lower when considering that because the immediate crust is double thickness with the subducting plate, so there is a lower heat gradient from the mantle. Shallow oil, guess I’d never thought of the genesis of such plays.

I use embodied energy to organize and clean the gallery kitchen for the opening, along with having numerous conversations with folks introduced from Julian’s extensive local network. He asks me if I will talk at the opening sharing some anecdotes about working in the oil business. Completely impromptu, though I had a minute to sit with a piece of paper before and write a five- or six-point list of things to remember to talk about. I am not the best story-teller, especially in such a situation, but folks politely listen to a few minutes of my rambling.

Later in the evening, raucous preparations over wine precede delicious dinner back at the house. Definitely some good cooks around!

The question for me becomes — how to keep track of the dialogues, and the warm humans encountered? Julian mentions there is an artist-residency possibility in town. It would be great to hang here for a time. Somehow, it reminds me distantly of Tornio, in Lapland, half-way ’round the world, literally, in the sense of it being a littoral backwater along a river in a small country, but the community here seems quite activated, and the differences between Finns/Lapps and Kiwis/Maori are complex and significant. Similarities do exist — it would be good to have the time to explore. It looks like there will not be any spare time in these 11 days for much autonomous explorations, although this is okay, as the people immediately surrounding Julian and Sophie’s lives provide a rich environment for encounter. And a site for the exchange of inspiration.

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

down on this

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

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

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

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

work, labor, action

Arendt‘s tripartite approach to the sociopolitical — Work, Labor, Action — in “The Human Condition” suggests the expenditure or the flow of energy. All three are intertwined within the do-ing, the be-ing of life, and in the sense that they are all embodied expressions of life-energy, they are equal, divided only by the particularities of the pathways of expression of those energies. She begins, I believe correctly, with viva activa as her source: the active, activated life. However, she does not explicitly posit a connection between viva activa and the source of the possibility for an active lif, that is: ones life-energy (sourced in the energized thermodynamic flows of life itself). These impulses towards the social structures of collective life must have a source, an activated well-spring that drives the cumulative social (and life) dynamic. The question of the source is perhaps more important than the ultimate expression of the source.
more “work, labor, action”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

eat the rich

“Eat the rich,” Chris reminds me on the phone. Visiting my sister in NoCal, I was over at Berkeley for a day (could it have been the same trip to meet Marty and Robb for lunch all those many years ago?), and I came across a t-shirt with a skull on it (I think), eat the rich at the top and FMLN (Fronte Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional) across the bottom.

When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich. — Jacques Rousseau

The wealthy (as a concentration-point for resources) are a source of sustenance (energy) when the number of the poor and hungry reaches a tipping point. Government, in the form of a cadre of elites who effect a mechanism of control of (social) energy flows, taps into the population of energized bodies (the social), directing their collective energy towards the maintenance of the (sovereign) state. When the cost to the precariate becomes too great, or when they perceive that the rewards they receive from that State (whatever that State is), are not sufficient to counter the drain on their life-time and life-energy, they will cease their participation in that State. Or, slacking, they may blame the State for their state: when it is their State, and is one in which they participate willingly.

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

the fluidity of leaking

What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.

The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. more “the fluidity of leaking”

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

cycles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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”

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Migrating: Art: Academies: done

MigAA book cover (pdf download)

After eight weeks of intensive effort, sometimes re-writing almost from scratch a wide range of (English-second-language) articles, essays, and academic papers, the second and final book from the MigAA project is done and at the printers. Bravo to the Alfa60 designers, Joseph and Lina in Vilnius — perhaps this book will win awards like the last one did! And big kudos to El Jefe, miga, without whom, none of this would have come to pass, none of it!

This is the jacket blurb I wrote in ten minutes — the day Lina was sending the book to the printers! more “Migrating: Art: Academies: done”

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: enroute - Dinosaur National Monument - Grand Junction - Glade Park, Colorado

leaving and heading south

leaving Echo Park, Colorado, May 2010

Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.

Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…
more “leaving and heading south”

posted
  • place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

end of the road

Start to try making time-lapse sequences from the immediate surroundings. Lousy and/or old equipment, a quasi-functioning power system, and the results show it. Add a portable generator, a better tripod, longer cabling, a 3-CCD camera with chip memory (ah to be free of tape!), and a laptop with a battery that lasts longer than the start-up sequence. I’m ready to cash in some of my retirement piddle to cover it. Maybe $10K I could get away with all of it, including a decent audio recorder? That, along with a better 4WD truck and I’d be part of the pseudo-elite for once. hah. So, anyway, now, marooned in Echo Park by the intense weather, (I was warned, fair enough, but I told the ranger that I wasn’t planning to come out until Friday next at least, anyway, so things should dry up by then, and that I had enough supplies for at least two weeks if not more). Stormy already today, late morning, humidity pulled the clouds up, and while attempting some decent time-lapses, it gets worse. What else is new? Maybe I end up sitting in the car just writing. There are rain filaments across to the north.

Cutting tamarisk growth behind camping site (#7) to feed the fire. Keeps mind busy, with flinging sharp blade biting into hard wood. No help around in case of an accident. This sharpens the wits. more “end of the road”

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”

posted
  • place: Wendover, Utah

CLUI residency — Energy of Situation

Some final words on the residency period:

Energy of Situation

Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).

Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”

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CLUI: Day Twenty-Six – Caxcanes Musical

More fire-exercises from the platoons who have taken up residence across the street. They have set up two camouflaged observation/guard posts and are firing from these positions towards the rail-road tracks, their comrades playing insurgents, firing pretend mortars from 200 meters away. The mis-en-scene is completed with colored smoke screens and a sniper who sets up in the tumbleweed.

In the evening I end up at the Wendover Night Club, what could be called a seedy joint in the corner of The Plaza strip mall that includes, what else, a stripper club complete with an Italian-looking bouncer sitting on a stool at the door, cigarette hanging from his mouth; there’s a Chinese restaurant, a smoke shop, and a computer gaming store.

I end up going to the Night Club because last week, one evening, I could hear some loud what I would term proto-Mariachi music playing within earshot of the residency. I put off going to check it out, but finally out of curiosity I drove in the direction of the music. End up four blocks away in one of the old airbase buildings. I pull up to see a group of swarthy-looking Latino guys hanging out. The music has stopped. I don’t know what they were thinking when I came up, gringo in shorts with white Crocs on, at any rate, turns out they are a band, Caxcanes Musical, most of the members are from the Mexican state of Zacatecas (the Caxcan are an indigenous group: Los caxcanes, lidereados por Tenamaxtle, peleaban bajo el lema ¡Ashcanquema tehual nehual! ‘¡Hasta tu muerte o la mía!’. Y el lema se cumplió, tanto en el triunfo como en la derrota. Ante la desproporcionada respuesta de los invasores, los guerreros prefirieron morir lanzándose al vacío.) I chat with them for a bit and though I’m sure they are thinking el gringo loco, they seem pleased at my enthusiasm and invite me to catch them at the Club in the Plaza.

I’m clearly the only gringo at the Club — at least I can order in Spanish! And I get there on time, as I don’t want to miss the show. On time from the time the guy gave me when I get to the empty Club at nine pm. He says the music starts at ten pm. He didn’t tell me there are three warm-up bands — or groups, not to be confused with bands. I hang out nursing a Coors. At any rate, I survived the first group, Tambura los Primos — audio is extant, then my memory card filled up on the H4 and I couldn’t figure out how to properly erase files to clear up space for the other groups. The whole scene was quite cool — clearly a rural audience, the guys with their really pointy shit-kickers and Stetsons, dancing with their gals in a stilted waltz move with the arms and hands never quite intertwined. Reminded me of country-folk in Finnish Lapland doing the tango on Midsummer’s night parties. Anyway, a fun evening, and I think they will play again on Cinco de Mayo which actually be on the second of May before I split for nether regions.

posted
  • place: en route Prescott, Arizona - Paria, Utah

on the road again

sandstorm, Navaho Reservation, Arizona, March 2010
Heading out on a three-month road-trip. Tailwind across the reservation at least part of the time. Embarkation for slickrock and slot canyons, salt pans, playa, and rotated fault-blocks. Heavy tailwind expected, along with winter weather for the rest of the week across the entire west. Hope to appear, unscathed, at the other end in Wendover.

The road fills the head with eye-blink disorientation. Transient fragments of thoughts thrum along in no particular order, no rhythm, as unconnected as any sequence of fated events: reflecting fated events in minds-eyes. Too much seen outside the window, beyond the amorphous silica barrier. And too much not sensible because of that attenuated presence versus the full immersion. (Virtual) movement. Looking for roadside memorials this time. Something to lock the thoughts into the reality of mortal coils. Find a few. Stopping for them is always a bit tricky, especially with a 65- or 75-mph speed limit. I drive a bit slow with this old vehicle of mine, and slower still so that once I spy a cross of some sort, I can safely stop on the shoulder. To die on the same stretch of road somehow would not be auspicious; under the wide silent sky and red cliffs, stars, with the smell of spring sage in the air. Wind passing through shredded plastic bags caught on the barbed-wire fence. Someone told me those bags are called witches panties. A small golden bell tinkles vacantly, tied to a wreath of plastic flowers shivering in the wind.

What is the difference between that containable in the reduced tracing of recorded, reproduced, recreated image or sound and that which resists the reductive process with an impassive tenacity, no, a merely passive and eternal persistence. The difference lies in what the observer brings to the reductive process and what the hearer, viewer brings when consuming the reduced trace. It has little if anything to the originary energy of the thing, das Ding, das Ganze, itself. The emanations affect the reduction, there is a direct correlation, but in the technique, the process of reduction is deeply tied to the techno-social. No way to decouple that. (Or is there?)

All the way from telling stories to making movies to painting canvases to building houses.

What is the advantage of shunting the energy of a situation through more and more of the techno-social domain? Or does it matter at all? Compare (telling) stories in person about an experience (sono-linguistic reductions) with posting digital photographs online (visible radiation reductions). In principle a reduction is a reduction is a reduction. And when compared the the situated phenomena itself, any and all reductions are not the thing itself.

The dam at Lake Powell, as with the Hoover, a high-security zone, protected by hired guns. No bags allowed in the visitors center. Celebrations of all that the techno-social can bring to the merely social, along with a big-screen overview of the lake at 59-percent-capacity with a fat white bathtub ring contrasting the red rock cliffs. German tourists debate the advantages of the Best Western versus the Quality Inn motels.

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upheaval

Upheaving, upheaval. Testing dependence and independence. Just when the path looks stable, where the knowns gradually coagulate to staunch the in-and-out-pouring stresses of un-knowing; the flow is not turbulent, the road is straight and wide, with interesting terrains somewhere up ahead. Then one finds a dip, through a desert wash, unseen just a short distance away. In this dip is a mess of flash-flood debris, and a double-fork in the road: change comes along with deep choices to be made between diverging pathways. One is obscured by the morning fog of oracle’s lack, so that what lies ahead cannot be distinguished; the other way may be seen, but with curves that carry it quickly out of sight. The third apparently climbs out of the one dip, and is the road that one perceived from a distance to be the straight and wide, but turns out that there are many dips, as when crossing a wide alluvial fan spreading out from the base of a mountain canyon.

Saline Valley, California, May 1983

Then there is the idea of the bush-whack. A process that forgets the roads and launches out into the countryside, a self-determined goal in sight or hinted at by the terrain to cover. The bush-whack presumes a base, often, with measured forays out on a daily basis, rather than a continuous and wearing, un-remitting confrontation of the unknown. It is the frontiersman, one who stays at the edge of stable regions, the fraying or un-formed edges. One foot in, one foot out. Solitary. Progress not determined by forward motion, but rather by the growing determination to remain in motion at all. That is progress, in the Light of how life comes and goes, the determination to continue is a hard kernel around which to wrap the discoveries that occur along the way.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

Ah, my friends, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. — Hermann Hesse

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empathy (smoke and mirrors)

John Vallee, 54, lives near the trestle that spans the Crane Creek and was watching TV when he heard a loud screech. He went outside and first thought he saw a blanket tangled under a rail car. Then he realized it was a person.

“It’s going to be hard for me to get to sleep,” Mr. Vallee told Florida Today. “I can’t get it out of my mind.” — AP

The energized impression and apprehension of be-ing leaves us with resonant formations in embodied memory. And it is resonance that best circumscribes (models) the phenomena of the propagation of empathy from the Other to the Self. Although there is no hard evidence in humans, the concept of mirror neurons would seem to support the idea of resonance. Caught a lecture at UM with Deb on “Empathy in Normal Adult Development and Neurological Disease” with Bob Levenson from UCB which got me thinking of the actual mechanism that allows for the transmission of the energies of expression across Cartesian space from the Self to the Other. The obvious model would be the transmission of band-limited radiative (visual, auditory, touch, etc) energy which then is apprehended by the neural system, a system which is sensitive to ‘matched’ or similar experiences that have already impinged and impressed themselves on the body system. This impression process changes the body system from one energy configuration to another. And any life system will have fundamental resonant pathways — these would be necessary determinants of basic learned experience — whatever the particular and precise mechanism is (mirror neurons being perhaps a primary model), the idea of resonance seems to be key. Resonance would depend on some accounting of sameness and difference as per prior embodied experience and the persistence of impressions (which themselves are configurations of energized neuronal structures: memory) among other factors. There would have to be a means for rapid energy pattern-matching across a huge volume of semi-fixed memory structures in the brain — it would be impossible to check all possible prior impressions with all live incoming impressions, so there would have to be some kind of disgressionary or limiting function to the process in the form of step or directional filters…

I can’t get you out of my mind…

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structural point

There needs to be a repetition of certain concepts at numerous junctures — energy, thermodynamics, flows, order, flux, fields, reminders of the Newtonian language, control, image-based articulations of all key-worded concepts, and precise observations on the structure-of-relation of the (declining) Military-Industrial system. Choosing examples of technological deployment, tracing the affectations of it, across the full distance, simplifying (reducing) the connections. Connecting the altered flows and the ‘original’ flows, along the entire way (using thermodynamics as a foundational guide).

Dialogue, sound, and music are good examples.

Identifying between altered and originary flows is in itself is likely an impossible task. I would suspect that all comprehensible flows are already in a (corrupted!?) state?

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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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  • place: Primal Locus, Where Ever, Terra

temporary suspension

(this was the final posting to the travelog on the hybrid php/html platform p-machine pro before the tech-no-mad blog was initiated)

apologies for the lack. you have no-doubt noticed the dearth of entries here. no travel, no entries, no kangaroos. all energy goes into the tech-no-mad blog at this point in support of the doctoral research. you may tune in there for tidbits and fragments sampled from the wide range of inputs sliced through. here will remain dormant for a time, methinks. besides that, reflecting back on prior situations also dominated by remoteness. how there is no solution in distance. face-to-face has to ensue. sooner than later. (b)logging miles to return home where ever that place (of heart) might be. or not. e.e.cummings comes to mind, or so, while the Western Slope recedes from same. but without stretching abilities, formative pathways, expressive outputs, little will come. the ecology of words is not sustainable. whilst closing in on 2 million hits to this project (since 2004), gawd knows the total since inception in 1994!

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technology fails

20100116 The latch handles on both the driver- and passenger-side door are broken. There is a certain geometry on the plastic lever-arm which, over time of repeated lifting motions, fails. So I have to replace them. The truck is relatively old, compared to the average age of vehicles on the road. I call the Toyota dealer nearby, and they want almost USD100 for each replacement handle. This is called an OEM part — Original Equipment Manufactured — a part which carries some of the branded weight of the maker and its record of quality along with a premium price (including a substantial markup to underwrite the existence of the dealer distribution system). Too much! I knew this would be the case before I called, but I wanted to set a ceiling price before looking elsewhere, online. This particular vehicle model was globally a widely-distributed frame, body, and engine combination and so there turns out to be a substantial non-OEM parts market. The only question is one of quality. Non-OEM parts online appear to be both Mainland Chinese- and Taiwanese-made with what seems to be a substantial US distribution presence in the form of highly discounted warehouses designed for online mail-order sales (with Ebay, Amazon, and their own web sales presence). I find the parts, in several styles (chromed plastic and black) for a small fraction of the OEM cost, USD 20 with free shipping. more “technology fails”

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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”

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movement and encounter

Morning, mourning notes on encounter, in no particular order.

It is on a pathway, the pathway, in the mode of movement, in the shifting of unknown situations, where encounter occurs. These encounters are traced with the full presence of the body and all aspects where they occur.

There is the general rule on a hiking trail, uphill gets right-of-way: those struggling and straining to make it to the top of whatever heights that you’ve just been on should be given precedence. It’s always a question, though, what the precise character of the encounter will be. Whether you have seen (or heard) the approach of an Other, through dense forest, or whether you round a turn to be confronted by a gaggle of silent walkers. Encounter is a culturally specific regime overlying that of the embodied, the animal. On trails in the West the density of hikers is generally low, except in National Parks which can see crowds as dense any on Fifth Avenue in New York City at lunch-time. This is one criteria on which to judge a trail — not merely the views afforded, but the number of people encountered. Escaping from human presence is as prominent a thought as what other ‘natural’ phenomena might be encountered. more “movement and encounter”

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dipping into Ellul

Morning reading, sparking off Jacques Ellul’s classic, The Technological Society, where he attempts the first comprehensive definition and discussion of technology as something that pervades and underlies social formation(s). He also discusses a distinct relationship between the machine and technology, where the machine is the most important and obvious aspect of technology; where mechanization “transforms everything it touches into a machine;” but where technology is a cumulative way (perhaps expression?) of integration of the machinic into the social fabric, it is represented by a continuous re-formation of the (human) life-form(s) to the techno-social system. Without this impelling force, humans, as simply another evolutionary life-form expression, would not have arrived at where they are in this moment.
more “dipping into Ellul”