posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

Monday

late to bed, up early. to town, to swim. and anticipating a nap at some point later on.

nope, no time for that. already evening. too late. ferry ride becomes a trance-dance across thoughts of water, movement, and the Other. the art student, flipping through a tablet of sketches, large hands, he dozes for the transition. girl, thirty-something with a silver band around her second finger, like the one that Gary made for me, and traded me for a sepia print of aikikai-tiasa, Chalon-sur-Saone, France, April 1986, she closes her eyes, and is gone, somewhere, while I study the traces in the ether, traces that her body left, energized impressions of ear, cheek, neck, of hand with that silver ring. to myself and only a few others I call my ring a Ring of Power. then I close my eyes, I’m gone as well. nowhere.

the address book creeps over 1000 entries. laboriously going through all contacts, updating, purging, correcting.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

signal-process

already every evening filled this week. as the low thrumming outside signals the passing of one of the daily cruise ships through the narrow channel at the south-east end of the island. workshop underway. listening. meditative, but this is how I always am anyway. wandering through foreign streets, as the observer. listening. but along with that way, there was a flash, an indication, that all social interaction is a skin over … what? an intangible absence. and that the skin held little, maybe the absence was not hold-able. in the end, social connection or relation falls away. and does not carry into the next state of being. and while the proposition that the next Other offers the realization of transformation, of Buddha-hood, is powerful, that transformative process appears to be almost entirely internalized, only triggered by the con-frontal Other. (not even catalyzed.) having to present my ‘work’ in a limited time frame to a fresh audience is always a challenge (where part of me resists the social framework that generates such pre-tentious configurations.) of course, encounters with an Other are encounters, but it always feels like the anticipation and formality are far too rigid to de-power. I have done this on a more general scale by denying a relationship with PR. keeping documentation minimal, subjugating the value of presence over re-presentation. and paying the consequent social price. arbeit macht frei. but paramount in personal relations, that PR?

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

nazca

almost a full moon, Venus brilliant. walking around the island this afternoon, after realizing I could. no agenda. and already thinking ahead to tomorrow when I will head into town to catch what surely will be a sincere show — nazca with mika and mkk. three former students involved. fine to see. of course, how to measure anything like that. I only intersected with them for a few of life’s many hours. what does a teacher take credit for? some microscopic catalytic event which leads … nowhere? or simply the estimation that the teacher’s heart has been transformed. is it such that a change in One must be reciprocated in the Other for the change to be real and sustainable? if the change in One is not real, than the Other remains the same as well? is it possible to fake change? it is possible to simulate it for some perverse purpose of social engineering, but what’s the point aside from command-and-control??

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Leary

In planning a session, the first question to be decided is “what is the goal?” Classic Hinduism suggest four possibilities:

  • 1. For increased personal power, intellectual understanding, sharpened insight into self and culture, improvement of life situation, accelerated learning, professional growth.

  • 2. For duty, help of others, providing care, rehabilitation, rebirth for fellow men.

  • 3. For fun, sensuous enjoyment, aesthetic pleasure, interpersonal closeness, pure experience.

  • 4. For transcendence, liberation from ego and space-time limits; attainment of mystical union.

…snip…

Instructions for Vision 4: The Wave-Vibration Structure of External Forms (Eyes open, rapt involvement with the external visual stimuli, intellectual aspects)

O nobly born, listen carefully:
At this point you can become aware of the wave structure of the world around you.
Everything you see dissolves into energy vibrations.
Look closely and you will tune in on the electric dance of energy.
There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles.
Consciousness will now leave your body and flow into the stream of wave rhythm.
There is no need for talk or action.
Let your brain become a receiving set for the radiance.
All interpretations are the products of your own mind.
Dispel them. Have no fear.
Exult in the natural power of your own brain,
The wisdom of your own electricity.
Abide in the state of quietude.
As the three-dimensional world fragments, you may feel panic;
You may beget a fondness for the heavy dull world of objects you are leaving.
At this time, fear not the transparent, radiant, dazzling wave energy.
Allow your intellect to rest.
Fear not the hook-rays of the light of life,
The basic structure of matter,
The basic form of wave communication.
Watch quietly and receive the message.
You will now experience directly the revelation of primal forms.

— Timothy Leary, Ph.D., Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., & Richard Alpert, Ph.D. The Psychedelic Experience

Ah well, stumbled on that, following a thread from Aldous Huxley. As for the effort to shift awareness from a dominantly materialist point-of-view to one that has a central locus on an energized movement: I just had the realization that I probably will not ever produce a text-based representation circumscribing the territory of my own worldview. [ed: well, fast-forward to 2013 and my dissertation!] And unless in a situation where there can be an unfolding of the thoughts, in concert with an Other, there will be no revelation, no representation. Only action, doing, facilitating, and teaching. The 2126 class moves fast and with gusto. A deep difference with the spring class, where students seemed tight, fearful, and distracted. Just war? or, hmmmm, does it confirm or refute my theory that much education is about saturating individual, forming humans in a certain fear of non-conforming, while in-validating divergent behaviors and thoughts. How come I resist letting my child be wild?

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

womanifesto

my entry for the exhibition womanifesto Procreation/Postcreation in Bangkok that Varsha asked me to join — turns out that she uses the simple entry as a main element of the exhibition poster, invites, and publication (it’s the spiral line of text)!

____________________________________________

procreation:

creativity is energy-in-motion

the essence of motion, movement, is energy

the quickening of the spirit

a look around to apprehend the Other

a dialogue begins

small flows of energy between two

fundamental creation, life

one plus one equals three

primal phenomenon

__________________________________________________

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

en-souled life & long-lost lack

back again. this place. and what it measures in the bodily en-souled life-ness. trekking to new spaces within the grand scaled confluence. looking, remembering, finding new places, small places within large spaces. human nature. ground turning turning under stars of immediate motion and a vastly Lightful moon on a balanced equinox time scale. Green River now brown with rain-spawned silt, cold from venting from the Flaming Gorge dam upstream, that and winter-coming snows already falling at head-water regions above 9000 feet.

no mention of the Other events, too unworkable to go with. and keeping with a long-lost lack of presence. stress of, and such.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

heavy blanks

dinner with Chris and Sandy and the kids.

school, students, and teaching weighs heavy on mind, not to mention the situation with Loki.

mind draws a blank in the midst of the dramas of life. weariness from the pattern of channeling mis-directed bridging energies between Others. nothing left over to work with once it has passed and the impulse is gone.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

you cannot change the past

ponderings:

they sat in a room in a mud house dried by southern suns or so they thought. but it was one of those rooms where vision was restricted, atrophied, and seeing even the heat of mingled breath close to the face was not possible. she said that she couldn’t see much down the road either. instead of listening, he looked down upon his Self from above, like the moon, somewhere else in the room, or through the window, it was evening, and the Blood of Christ mountains moved under the fixed stars. she was there, he was somewhere else, or at least that what it seemed. to a third person, though there wasn’t an Other in the room, it seemed that they were both there. or maybe all three were alone, in separate rooms. wondering which door to open, hoping that they would find the Other. it was all too much. sensual presence limited to a 60 cycle drone in the ear. so he slept near the sea. sleeping was easier. his soul could drift. seaweed, underwater, storm breakers, a flush of bubbles, millions of small silver worlds. eyes closed. and still they saw. they saw the conditions of all things around and the entire rushing froth of the universe. (in every instant. de-cipher. out of the word, before the word. ex-officio.) and with that seeing, the force behind the eyes apprehended the future. and the past was there as well: not in need of apprehension, but of leaving in it’s momentary state of reified change. you cannot change the past. neither can I. they looked at each other, eyes as deep as the flat sky of a frozen noon somewhere in a nameless valley in the desert. and agreed. on everything that lived. it was only those things in the stasis of impacted death that caused a divergence. Saturn occulted by the moon, the Pleiades looking on.

but what about teaching and academia? only rare words for that here. but what if I had written about teaching all along this long road? would there be anything learned there? or would it all be the same repeated staleness. at least there are the strong reactions from the few, always, a trail of glittering wakes, criss-crossing. nothing to do with the structural position of education in the developed world. but it is clear that academia in the US is somewhat isolated from the main stream of cultural activity. it’s not clear what the mechanism causing this isolation is. could be that general aspect of isolation and alienation that seems to be always a part of the society. or whatever. no pontiff. only hip-hop on the raydeeoh.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

time again

long telephone conversations ensue, maxing out my 3000-minutes-a-month-nights-and-weekends limit. and be-ing in this house again. hmmmmmm. histories and futures converge, cross, fade, re-emerge, flicker behind passing tree branches, hung with prayer ribbons, over-arched by sky and sun. some of the colored strips, embodied prayers, are tangled in the branches.

particular depths of connection simply remain outside my normal thought patterns. (survival) stress is a key factor in limiting the pass of sensual energies. but that same stress raises the intensity of some flows. in or out. no clear. thing. but if the confident line goes. and the Others in suffering lift hands in supplication or praise. then the channeling must continue. so to speak. a description of contact with the Dalai Lama seems to confirm all this stuff. well, that was known, assumed, and those levels of electricity are ambient around us every moment. just switch on the juice! in the Sun, in the Sky, in the Ground, everywhere. not a naturalistic thing, simply in all things, blanket, in all dimensions, irrespective to the model system applied.

and seeing how the Other lives. watching that in a distant and rigid side-ward stare. no, just seeing the fragments float past eye from time to time. and time again.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

convocations

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

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

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

here

twists and turns. waking before the early dawn to see the cloudless sky painted in many colors. silence broken by the furnace, and the cat who, once she realizes anybody is awake, begins to yowl for food until she is fed. Sage, on the other hand, waits patiently in her kennel until liberated for a morning potty. go potty, Sage! and she races out into the back yard, bounding over the catclaw and prickly pear to find that right spot in the morning chill. dawn. getting up before dawn is special. it’s easier when dawn is at 1100, but here in the south lands, it means getting up at 0630. in the quiet.

chapter has changed. this text probably has to end in the form of a travelog. as I will not be traveling much in the next months. 12 years of European holiday behind me. now back to the reality of life in Amurika as I have often quipped. the media portrayals in Europe of the US situation are extreme and narrow. just like the views of the rest of the world here. the only difference is that re-presentative imaginations dominate people’s lives far more here — giving a distinctly shifted absence to every thing and every event. and every facing of the Other.

shopping defines much of being. I shop, therefore I am. walking by the bell ringing Salvation Army guy. I am already digging into my pocket before I get near. 27 cents. I catch his eye, smile, and as I turn away, he says, bless you. I go shopping. I missed yet another chance. the substitution of money for less mediated (and less socially structured) exchange is a loss.

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Frankfurt, Germany - Phoenix, Arizona

re-arriving

another brutal day of early arising, bus to plane to plane. and a migraine. faugh. but about to arrive in Phoenix, well, sort of. still 2.5 hours off, but after nine hours of flying, that seems like a short hop. no idea what will greet me there, with the recent events. was contemplating a relaxing holiday preparing for the re-location to Boulder in January.

reflections. Finland for the last time in a while. the silence of the pre-pre-dawn moments. waiting for the airport bus in the cold darkness. the blur of the movement. fighting a migraine the whole way. and again being a silent seat-partner to a young French woman. happy that the aircrew is offering water every hour or so. here on the trans-Atlantic plane. crossing Ice Land, Green Land, Arctic Canada, Hudsons Bay, Winnipeg, then south-west to elsewhere, and finally landing in Amurika. with the associated blast of that Amurikan-ness. how to deal with? green teen-age soldiers try to act with authority and disdain. in the face of the unknown of terror. while the echo of the Cold Warriors are everywhere, fearing every Other.

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki - Jyväskylä, Finland

raw suspicions

the raw suspicion that stability is a straw dog. (a term that Anthony first raised into my consciousness). in that conversation in a bar-restaurant somewhere on the Delaware River a long time ago. wondering what happened to him, no words from him in many, 18 moons ago. while now in the moment, the Leonids rain down from the sky. he was supposed to be going to Flagstaff, the wanderer that he is.

the last morning of the Media Lab workshop, I have something of a microscopic revelation in the number six tram. understanding that I am talking deeply about the power of presence as a creative strategy and practice, traveling around Europe preaching this, and all the while, at the same time, leaving my little boy behind. a little boy who is not so little anymore. everything seems impossible for this family. relationships are crushed and fragmented, distorted and removed, applied over distance and imbalanced. hmmmmmm.

another thread that came from the workshop this week were characterizations about the externalization of memory and the problem of re-presentation. with memory removed from the embodied self, there is an erosion of personal autonomy (the external localized memory is the technological network — which is not a network after all, but a lateral hierarchy). the act of placing memory externally reifies what would be an internally dynamic condition of evolutionary presence. and contributes to an ethical or even moral slide. (assuming that a static condition of memory is problematic — haven’t meditated on that one so much.)

here in Jyväskylä, dinner with Niina, finding out about the local situation (email never provides enough communications spectrum), in a hotel on campus by the lake. seminar tomorrow. a late call, like those many others, of the sadness I have caused to an Other. by not respecting innocence. and not providing the right dreams.

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

racism

Week off closes in. Some time off, after an intensive six weeks of movement, and before another six weeks of teaching in nine places or so. Take myself out for lunch, Sunday afternoon. Pizza. End up in a long conversation with the Moroccan cook at the Kebab & Pizza place about the world situation—and the pizza.

“Good?” he asks, looking out the window away from me as he speaks.
“Yeah.”
“Where you from?”
“Amurika.”
“I have always wanted to go to Amurika.”

The conversation goes on, quite deeply into the issues. He is Muslim, has lived in Finland for ten years. About the well-known racism in Joensuu, he shrugs. “They break my car, what can I do?”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Chimney Rock

at Chris and Scharmin’s place, house-sitting. long roads across Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and other lands. full summer moon at Chimney Rock. rising moons, count ’em, Richard says, how many of them do you have left?

so many longings and self-sufferings from the ego. life flickers through them all and the self is lost eventually, as it should be.

small things: a y-shaped log from the previous campers, there in the fire pit. Loki helps me re-dig and repair the pit, placing the stones in a ring with a slight opening up-slope so the down-slope breeze in the evening will feed oxygen to the fire. that log is special. special for the full moon night. it is juniper, but a perfect shape, curved branches, or a u-shape on a stick, to be more accurate. it is somehow a burl or from a diseased tree. it burns the entire evening, more than 15 hours in the end, with a rich resinous, fragrant, smoke. to be danced around. into the morning when it is still brown wood at the core and sticky with bubbling resin.

maintaining a house and land. having a house and land.

having good friends. what is this in the long run of living? maintaining. the energy of this maintaining is depleting me. (because I maintain with a deep streak of ego, not pure love, as it should be). to what can be done. what if I had all that energy back? to work with on my own psychic condition? I would have wasted it. being with the Other is a salve. but it is not salvation. god refuses to change the rules. elemental beings play until the dawn finishes.

heat of the Front Range day begins to vibrate. water pipes in the walls aspirate with flow to the laundry machine in the next room. raydeeoh is on. Loki plays in the other room. looking over telephone numbers of people to call and see.

watching clouds all day. watching life. day-pulse. dawn. daybreak. moonrise, sunset. fires, smoke, horizons, trees, animals.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

how to exhale?

Run out of words to express, to exhale what is in me head. Time passed into histories and time again, but no words form that reflect the interior dia/monologues. Only noise. The only measure over time has been to listen to the Other to see if there is something understandable. I have seen many messages expelled from inside Others, messages that I recognize [empathy?], and can find rooted presence in my own being. But where is MY voice? Not talking about effect, affect on the immediate environment, but more the reverberations, resonances. If I believe my own statements: that all things are inter-connected, then there is no doubt of affect, but what is the measure of it and in what way is it manifest in the Other. To look for it in the Other — via that whole pattern of how one looks at the Other — is built up from childhood, how one reflects on the being of the Other. Patterns of reaction, response, actual ways of seeing, viewpoints, impressed into psyche until they become the reified structure of the ego. Living life by the ego. Hmmmm.

Impinging signals are too quickly attenuated by these learned (imposed) filtering mechanisms. Filtering (as a model of the perceived limit for action) seems to be a direct function of what psychologists (and Buddhists) call the Ego. How to avoid, deactivate, or otherwise re-route sensual information around that system? Let it flow! (If systems analysis even offers a potential model for approaching the situation). But this is the primary problem. Finding the language, the system for attacking/dealing with incoming and outgoing energies in a way that follows the nature of the energies themselves.

posted
  • place: Brussels, Belgium

tech-no-madic meditations

On the road again / Going places I’ve never been / Seein’ things I may never see again / I can’t wait to get on the road again… — Willie Nelson

This unfinished sketch of text, expelled in November 2000, is a small surfacing of themes, presences, and fragments from a realm of hyper-presence and the author’s self-proclaimed tech-no-madic wanderings in the northern hemisphere at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. Performance art enters the field of words as an action to be redefined as following:

Beginning with art
Art is an accumulation of ways of going and ways of doing. Art is the configuring of energy flows in a lot more than ten thousand ways in order that they become part of a transmitting dance, a dialectic movement of energy between beings. Those configurations are mediations positioned between two beings: they are carriers of energy from one to an Other and back again. The movement of these mediated or packaged energies is the essence of creativity. Creativity is not a peak experience, it is continuous and powerfully cyclic. Blocking energies is anti-creative and ultimately a blocked state may not be maintained when confronting the natural movement and flow of energy. Blocks appear to be placed by a manifestation of consciousness which disregards (or has learned to disregard) ambient and raw chaotic energy movements.

Leaving Newton behind
There is no reason for us to slog through a life that is subjected to materialistic 17th century attitudes and mechanistic points-of-view. Mechanistic (Newtonian) physics is an observational model, complete and self-contained under very limited conditions. Its applied pinnacle is the Age of Industry. That age represents the peak of exploitative systemization and ideation of rational thought. more “tech-no-madic meditations”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Lev’s edifice

Lev was suggesting that the skyscraper was the ultimate (or crucial) symbolic and real social expression of the Industrial Age, and, in the course of his fascinating lecture, pondered what might be the crucial expression of the Information Age. immediately my thoughts went to the concept of LifeStyle as being that edifice — LifeStyle becomes the penultimate expression of the consumer society. this false edifice of success(-full) surrender to a socially mandated norm or behavior. the vapid Look of it all.

and what about creativity — too much attention paid to aspects or results of it — and no observations that is is a continuous, (NOT sporadic) and peak experience. and, at the same time, it is cyclic. and it involves both the creative and destructive principles. it is not a commodity. it is harmonic, balanced from all scalable viewpoints and sensual contacts.

some notes I wrote later:

In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle aLight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.
more “Lev’s edifice”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

notes on creativity

most of the texts that I have been absorbing in the last weeks deal with creativity as a discontinuous (non-cyclic) and anomalous event rising above the normal “level” of daily life. this view is an obvious artifact of materialist thinking that treats life as a linear (singular) trajectory and that the expressions of that living can be wholly reduced linguistically to various statements and formulations. accepting that this view IS true within its own limited framework (the history of rational thinking), a critique would have to deconstruct the whole facade of Western philosophy in order to make a substantive attack on the position. this writer is neither qualified nor interested in making such a frontal attack which would simply be tossed aside in the dumpster of academic discourse. instead, understanding that to even name a philosophy or a philosopher that stands supporting that edifice would only give power to a system that I believe is fundamentally flawed, I have chosen to proceed intuitively, and perhaps poetically, making enormous and possibly scandalous generalizations, leaving the normative conventions of the English language behind, and simply dive into thoughts that are reflecting through waters muddied by 42 years of thrashing around in a world that seems more intense and striking everyday. by this methodology, combined with a desire that these texts be only the opening for a dialogue with the Other who might come on it, here in the sea of hyperspace, I will begin. more “notes on creativity”

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

wet-ware

about to leap. about to jump into another world of pasts and futures and Otherness is general. native land and native lands, landscapes that have reflected, fish-eyed in wet-ware optical apparatus. from the extremity of one place or another.

Where falls this censure It o’erwhelms myself. How was my Heart encrusted by the world? O how self-fetter’d was my groveling soul How, like a worm, was I rapt round and round In silken thought, which reptile Fancy spins Till darken’d Reason lay quite clouded o’er — William Blake

posted
  • place: en route Reykjavík - Akureyri, Iceland

back sufferation

at the airport in Akureyri, after a long workshop. short in time, long on energy and things that transpired. learning how to teach, how to let go of the situation and let it develop on its own. injecting certain things, with-holding others. and just learning. it rolls on its own through humor, especially humor. despite my condition of the last two days. Soffia locates a physical therapist who cooks my lower back and then works it over with a heavy massage. I accept the most intense reworking of the tissues, despite the pain. it helps, mostly not by the physicality of the manipulations but by reminding me of the structures there, on location, structures that are reflecting the tensions of the mind. re-minds me to forget recollection and mind. period. just release it. like in the workshop. letting go. and not holding on. not fighting, but relinquishing territories, and the Other will advance to meet the Self. good night.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

passion?

encroaching. departures AGAIN. pictures of what I want to have and to be and how I want to live are converging, but in a ass-backwards way. looking out this eighth-floor window for one of the last mornings, becoming homeless, encore. a yellow tinge floating low over the chilled city, frosted nitrogen-laden air. the Ferris-wheel of the Tivoli has been lit for the season (of darkness). and I can’t stop thinking about her. sham, chamois morning meeting with Timo, covering some interesting possibilities about the graduate program. actually specifics of co-constructing a set of possibilities leading to the idea of the concept of publication of hypertext mappings of the intersection of logical/Western and fluxus/Eastern pathways. yowzah! I’m into it! while he waits for a phone call from his wife who is imminently expecting their child. whew. nothing like phone calls with that reality jolt. but I greatly enjoy these mappings, and see that I am in need of mental exercises that go beyond teaching young potential artists. need to sharpen and challenge my faculties. like at the ~/Connected meeting two weeks ago, I realized I was slacking. although it was not difficult to rise to the challenge of consequent intellectuality, it was a stretch to project those kinds of energies which contain an entire different set of constraints. (for example, my penchant for exaggeration — a good dramatic tool in the classroom, where I can project it and draw it back, and in the process, draw students along into the details of an argument — in a more challenging setting, it can be a serious handicap that drains creditability from an argument. my only excuse is passion. I am a passionate person. or a person of passions. for others, in all manifestations. hmmmm.

posted
  • place: Imatra, Etelä-Karjala, Finland

self-portrait & noise

self-portrait, teacher's flat, Imatra, Etelä-Karjala, Finland, October 1998

drone of trucks coming from and going to Russia on the highway near the house. combined with a very high-pitched almost-but-not-quite continuous whine of the hot water pipes makes for a very bizarre environment in the flat/room. I can work with the whine, although it is quite loud, sleeping I do not even try, just start with ear-plugs. sensitive hearing and loudness. noise. how is it that I can trace, identify, and enjoy the well-flowing energies/works of others, yet cannot make such works myself? I have an instinct for Others whose energies flow less turbulently (more laminar flows, cogent, read-able, absorb-able?) than mine (I think!?), meeting them, speaking with them, enjoying their presences and their products. and engaging in energizing dialogues.

posted

module-tasking

finishing touches to the research plan part of the application to the doctoral program at UIAH (University of Art and Design Helsinki) Media Lab. an applied program which I hope might allow me some breathing space to recenter my activities in education and networking. and do things like coagulate bleeding wounds of sensibility:

Me:
>> I mean, can we really afford to ignore the conceptual/spiritual
>> philosophies underpinning the (monolithic) Chinese culture? As well as
>> MANY other basic cultures (including many local manifestations of
>> Christianity in the past 2000 years)? Typical blind-sided-ness of Western
>> Thought patterns! The dematerialization of life is essential, followed by
>> the transformation to the paradigm that all is energy! I love throwing
>> E=mc2 on the board! Energy is the body/mass convolved by the velocity of
>> Light acting upon itself! Conversly, the Body is Light to itself
>> subdivided by its energy…

Mark:
>> write it up dood! hypertextualize it in bodily chunks of light and then
>> link it to other destinations — the writer as networked energy…

glad that somebody thinks this is important. but this has always been a real problem with my work — that each time I have gotten something into a formal, materialized presence, I see how imperfect it is, and indeed, I have never been satisfied with any form of working this stuff out EXCEPT with a smallish intimate and interactive set of participants. everywhere from the slide-show parties back in the late 70’s and 80’s to the camping trips and dinners. why should an artist’s context be something ELSE if one is really intent on opening a dialogue with the Other. otherwise, the chances of opening any kind of connection through the overtly formalized and sterile ploys of the Art World is close to zero. slept with yer gallerist lately? Sanna calls, mmmmm. and have a rolling talk with Loki while he is multi-tasking between me and Saturday morning Tom and Jerry cartoons in Iceland. “Pabby, he just threw a paper airplane out the window … and look now, he opened the front door and the airplane just flew back in, how did that happen?”

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

no endlessness

days are continuous. nights left awhile ago. a stolen night, one last weekend in another town, in a hotel: it’s about surreptitiousness, laughing, serious talk, and settling some things. time seems to be going so fast now. there is no endlessness anywhere, except in the challenges that humans apply to each other’s survival. trapezoidal .ram files drill cauterized holes in between neural target groups. and I get tired. teaching seems ended for the year, none too soon. ran out of steam (what about a sauna?). but the interaction seems to bear fruit. I look around at those who are collecting around me, and they are beings of Lightness, of energy, and of generosity.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

awake

Fitful sleep, the radiation from the vibrating Sun keeps me AWAKE, I think. What else could it be? The warmth of an Other? thinking about it.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

possib(ilities)/(ly)

the cafe9 project seems to be coming in to its own condition. there is an inherent flow moving me towards some kind of stability in Helsinki. if I can keep my energies in a state of alignment, this has become the absolute question. keeping surface explosions, well, holding onto the long enough that they dissipate and do not throw bad energy off at other people. heightening the awareness of others’ energy so that the flow and movement of the combined intersection is balanced and positive (when that is the needed condition). helping Harri on his thesis for an hour or so, I am rushed. cycling over to the pool, fast, the attendant is not in the cash cage to take my turquoise-blue 10 FIM coupon that I buy at the college cashier, the normal price is 25 FIM. good deal. but nobody is in the cage, and it is before eight. I wander around and one of the lifeguards comes over to help. I am a little surprised that his English is so good, as I have frequently had some trouble communicating with local people here. he takes care of things, and so I race in to the locker room, change and get into the water, thrashing a quick kilometer before the 2030 closing time. cycling home across the pedestrian bridge, I watch the ice on the river. it is disappearing rapidly. it will be all gone in two days.

the pointproject crew in Trondheim collab with Annie Abrahams to perform the I have only my name? irc event, I act as a facilitator (they have no background with IRC) and participant.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

meat-space incarnation

embarassed to admit I have nothing to say, nothing to offer. as I restate above the effulgence of Whitman: nothing to offer but the self. is this a monstrous fantasy of ego-stormed lameness, or is it an ultimate Truth? what more do we have. and offering the self, the complete risk and instability of change brings us to a flash-point of presence and being? or simply to the mundane facing of Other in their inscrutable meat-space incarnation. what more do we have, what more can we do?

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

skin of being

and I realize I have no place in the public, but only in the private. interfacing the internals to those who are reflections of all others on their more-or-less skinned surface. how does skin reflect the image of Light projected on it? is it in the thousand-colored fragments that make up the whole, those rainbow-grained glistenings that make up the smallest vision, looking close in bright sun, watch the Light touch, lick the softness, leave a wet vision behind to evaporate to nothing in the heat of day. fog rising from cold winter seas. earth brings the sun to land. pulling with gravity songs, lets us stand for awhile, then lays us down for sleep and re-creation. skin of earth, skin of being. and that is all that separates us. the fog continues to close in, obscuring first the radio tower, then the huge ship-yard cranes, and now, St. Nikolai’s church just a few hundred meters away. it is still very bright, but the Light has flattened and the visible retreats to the elemental.

The journeys the traveler had made had long surpassed the possibility of being counted. Most of them, moreover, were indistinguishable — not because the same events transpired during each or all, but because they were so unalike as to be similar. … Soon, as the black-garbed traveler counted soon-ness, all things would have but one nature. He would be unique no more, and time would have to stop. Whereupon…
Release. — John Brunner, Traveller in Black

the long weekend bled away. the public lecture I give next week will NOT be streamed online — I can’t risk it again! last year there was also a network problem.

posted
  • place: en route Tornio - Rovaniemi - Helsinki, Finland

strikes

in Rovaniemi. bus to bus to bus to plane to bus to taxi. underway for four hours already, and still have a plane, bus, taxi to deal with. just to get from Tornio to Helsinki during an Air Traffic Controllers strike. without reading Finnish, it is outside possibility to understand the detailed dynamics of the negotiations. how can anyone, experienced in cross-cultural and linguistic situations, have any real faith/trust/belief in this monolithic stance that journalism and the media somehow have a corner on the truth market. knowing the slippery interface between two persons speaking the same language and having similar backgrounds, and the zoomed-in intensity of crossing even the most basic cross-platform linguistic barrier. in all cases, meaning is stripped to its essential lowest-common-denominator packet-form. in the worst case, it is lost. and in between these two translation polarities, there is a massive area where few things can be pegged, many data-feeds mis-routed, and substantial interstitial gaps in the matrix of human expression. travel makes me stress — all the time. can it be? that a human will undertake to set a daily condition of being that MOST stresses the core neural network of the organism itself? being human. chomp down on some Ibuprophen and aspirin dragged along from the last visit to the US. never am able to get the right over-the-counter drugs outside the US for some reason — just don’t know which ones to get. though I hardly ever use any medicines stronger than Tiger Balm or so. faugh! so I try to rewire language. adding contemporary terms to replace the ancient. but it is all the same — using cross-platform instead of transformative. while language is being constantly fed by the media, by writers (script-writers, mostly, and technocrats and geeks), its core senses do always reflect ancient knowledge-bases. one of the greatest challenges is educating across a language barrier — at the same time, reducing ones own knowledge and experience base to packets that can be shunted across this formidable interface gap. especially useful is a reliance on pure energy, force-of-self to heave these things across. and a very quiet, sensitive ear for hearing where the receivers place these energies within their experience. and sensing what these energies engender in the Other. mapping both the generative and reflexive energies of the Other. I don’t push this hard enough in the Art-Context, though. or with the mediations I have used for so many years. relying instead on the ephemeral, the transient, the sole ambient experience. un-documented, face-to-face, momentary. back in Helsinki. again. and again. sitting in a hotel room. watching cable. media-child, show about fashion. reflecting on the few times at Studio 54 and the Palladium in the Big Apple. knowing the underside of THAT business. images of Manhattan, photography, art directors, designers, fashion houses, headliners, mainliners, winners and losers.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

resistance

long day, a short stop at NIFCA to check on a few things, then on to Media Lab to have lunch with Samu. bloody cold in the wind. walking to the ferry, I have to fumble with my hood for all of 20 seconds, and my fingers are burning cold by the time I get my gloves back on and into my coat pockets. two pairs of long underwear keep my legs from freezing. over lunch Samu and I speak on the contingencies of the body and measures of corporeal and intellectual linkage and disconnection. after lunch, things progress into mappings of cognitive energy-transmission, and measuring a stance on oppositional politics — against the apparent hegemony of pan-global capitalism. I propose that resistance — a direct oppositional energy is counter-productive — that the best resistance is to either create a new way of going at the personal level, or at least effect a passive side-stepping to allow the energy of the beast itself to roll, to orbit the self, imparting its energy of angular momentum to the centered chi of self. and rather, as a strategy, to deal humanely with the absolute least common denominator of the beast — individual humans. discussion of the characteristics and strategies of resistance and opposition need not occupy the same scale that the term pan-global capitalism implies. keeping the discussion at the level of formalized discourse reinforces a key aspect of the system — that part of it rooted in institutionalized relationships between people as controlled by the inherent hierarchy of linguistic operation. another positive strategy is the conscious praxis of maintaining a human scale on the resistance — this alone has a radical effect on the entity resisted! at the core of my belief is the essential nature of human-to-human interactions, and the absolute risk one takes when one leaves that sphere of action in the stead of language/cultural-based interventions.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

a Guinness

slow start to the day, but then things accelerate in such a positive way that I can hardly understand it, meeting Riita at NIFCA, speaking about many things, Sonja, Anders, making phone calls to Lily, Philip, Ari, Marjanna, and Samu, ending up at MUU to do some work, email has piled up, but all interesting communications that pull me back into my beliefs, things that I believe in con gusto, that when Sanna calls into the evening, I can hardly stop, but do for the sheer pleasantness of another enjoyable conversation and presence. a Guinness I reward myself with, at the same time, making movies in our heads. it is the next day — 0030 when I catch the ferry home. it is winter, beautiful winter. and the cold does not bother me. it is nice. and I can’t believe I am saying/thinking this.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

New Years Day

yet another special dinner at Simmi and Hildur’s. this time their traditional New Years Eve meal of wild (gray) goose, two of them with an incredible sage stuffing. fabulous! driving home, through the city, past the harbor, huge fishing trawlers, port windows reveal green house-plants inside. strung with Christmas Lights (Light tubes are the most popular item this year, aside from the traditional candelabras in windows). fireworks still going off regularly, although nothing like the madness of midnight when the entire area erupts in a madness of explosions and Lights. emergency signal flares (expended often before expiration, just for the hell of it) slowly drift seaward in the Light breeze, creating drifting constellations that are punctuated by thousands of greater or lesser explosions.

Loki finally retreats into the house, and when I go back in some minutes later, after the boys have spent their collections of pyrotechnics, I find him crouched in the living room by the couch, sobbing. ever since his first New Years, he has been terrified by the noise. later that same day, I find myself looking at this website again, wondering just what to do with it. I find the older sections like the portrait works, and other documentation work to be just too dry. yet I don’t have an idea of what to do — either just scrap them or somehow integrate them with other areas of the site. it is just that the writing is too glib and amateurish to have much soul. something akin to how it is when Loki asks me to tell him stories each night (or during the day when there is a chance) — I make long ones up (sometimes based on stories that I have read, like the C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books) that span several days and feature some of his best friends as partners in adventure. but in the end, I don’t think I am much of a storyteller. although it is something that he connects with in me — I think mostly because the combination of my absence in his life, and the long series of audio tapes I have made for him of either reading stories or occasionally telling ones. he listens to the tapes, and apparently gets a bit obsessed by them at certain points, listening over and over to a particular one until he has it memorized. so when I read him something when I am visiting, he can mouth the words and now is beginning to pick out the written words on the page. I try to peer into him, to understand what the conditions of our relationship have imposed on his spirit, but I cannot see clearly. he is an Other. and the only way I can cope with the whole thing is to show him what little I have come to understand is something called love.

posted
  • place: Unari, Finland

40th

40th year comes on slow through the thin white curtains with blue Light skin and Lightening dreams. and the heating musk of bodies intertwined and motionless or so. the placid river running under two bridges and over one dam. not frozen, with the tannin color of a bitter root drink. horizontal clouds differentiated into cool and flat warm tones. above the Arctic Circle. and the day ends, blue as the beginning in a silent place on a lake, a sauna sweat, two or more fires. burning. white birch with crackling oily skin flares dry and makes fast yellow flames. silence, within another cosmic movement. a bright red toadstool grows in the yard all the white night — I look at it once, through the kitchen window, in the dimming Light, inside I stand naked and skincool, drinking a glass of water. I look again and eyes blur into standing sleep with warm arms wrapped around me and moist breath on my back.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

dixon ticonderoga

Makeham’s Law: The mortality risk of a person at any age over 20 is equal to a constant plus a simple exponential function of the age.

Dixon Ticonderoga

sotto voce: Dixon Ticonderoga. Pencil wrote the Bill of Rights a million scrawling times. Dixon Ticonderoga Pencil: the standard was Number Two. the factory is two blocks away can’t remember when the first time was. notes taken (Dixon Ticonderoga fantasy). connections with. who average. what deviance of standard obedience. Dixon Ticonderoga Pencil (I chewed you to death, was told I died of lead poisoning along with the chipped ocher enamel, and the splinters and the power clinched, growling through fat-lined and pictured tests. like living. and realizing that it’s all over. over). — notebook excerpt, 1984

a spider crossing the floor aims its head at just the right angle so an eye-facet reflects a pin-point of green Light in to my eye. this is something that catches my eye. why is the eye not caught so often? like when drinking in the reflections from the skin of the body, eye racing around those shapes, but the Light carrying such energy that it is left with no thing to imagine, no need to imagine, with the power of presence, it is the eye that tells and shares the energy of the Other.

Food was no longer anything but shapes and colors. The eyes were devouring a choice of red, white, green, orange… — J-M. G. LeClezio

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Hamburg - Kiel, Germany

languages

alien nation. night train really isn’t. leaving the flat at 1745 by taxi. leaving Tornio by bus at 1810. leaving Kemi at 2000, trudging in Light to the South, but noticeable dimming within the roaring grinding cabin, high whine of air movers, both the two bunks too slim for two, but two forced to be in one because of need. needs of fate, needs of whatever. I do not know, needs of time, beautiful in sleep, beautiful upon waking, stretching away, and the shyness that for me is an inscrutable hidden in language and culture difference and herself. her silence given to searching for words, and that thing I know well of Babylon — the excretory hubris to attain God after the language leaves. maybe this can never become anything other than what it is. and for that I am thankful, for it to be what it is in the moment of when it is enough. the word romantic surfaces, but this is only a poor shake of letters not touching on the actuality. romantic movements are gritty-eyed, skin-burnishing events. hallucinogenic Light flashing through the trees when the shades are opened in the morning, well, at the 0500 hour because sleep is not possible for me. last car in the train. yeah, the language difference, something I am too familiar with, and the limits of expression. can we substitute one form of expression purely for another? the example being the susseration of skin-to-skin, a touch-language (this has been thought of for years: and acted upon more than once), instead of this ancient way of going that would never be now — constructs of letters making sound, making sense and dissonance. the shaping and imprinting, wanting to remember the feeling (do we ever have memories of feeling?) hand moves back and forth, pressing the body-wall of Other, never knowing what it is to be. the conflict of sensory feeding and sensory survival and sensory overload and sensory subjugation and sensory purpose. goodbye is goodbye when the first meeting is only days in the past. saying goodbye is unspeakable. the way one looks at the Other. the eye as receptor (not transmitter like history gazing on itself) nor ear as receptor, only a transmitter of attention. The body and the voice as transmitter (touch, the receiver and transmitter.) Light emissions. (voices move) through the containing ether. shaping the words to trace an outline of being on the vacated space of that body once known or thought to be known or thought to be anticipated (memory of loss. and loss of memory.) anticipating that I would. or just anticipating what it was. shoulder, arm, wrist, finger. ring.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

late night question

where are you? I ask her in the white night — lying intertwined on someone else’s bed in someone else’s flat at the north end of town — long after she and I stopped dancing at one of the beer-smelling clubs on the border between Finland and Sweden. Her profile softens the near-view, her breath smells of the chamomile tea with sugar we drank after the long walk home. The sap begins to run in the birch trees, the river ice almost broken, school is almost out. The night never ended, never began, stars long gone, weeks ago, years, eons, memory removed when they last faded into the summer sky so that there is only here, now, and the rising and falling of her breath, the heart-beat, felt through proximal warmth and mere layers of skin.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Labou

days have flashed by. at night on the kai (waterfront of the harbor), pause to look at the seal tank at the aquarium. the seal looks at me with bloated brown eyes, moving its head to the right and to the left on a sinuous neck with no shoulders below. public lecture last night, technical problems, an afternoon field trip to the Facist Death Memorial at Labou, class seems to be intense, Volker stops in for three days, conversations between he, Hubertus, and myself are of singular intensity, the school seems in a state of dis-awareness of itself, life is precious, I think of the David Bowie song Young American, all the way from Washington… and it all goes ’round. content, being, vessel, and void. a dance with music constructed from vibrating particles of self-and-Other. head north yet in two days, 36 hours, a stop in Copenhagen.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

Kiasma

Perttu, the curator of Media at the Museum of Contemporary Art (KIASMA) here graciously meets me today and I get a tour of the fabulous new facility that is about to open in the center of Helsinki, across from the Parliament building. The building, designed by the American architect Steven Holl, is, well, overwhelming. It is so wired one can feel the movement of energy through the walls and floors. constantly vibrating. Is my open-ness in meeting new Others merely a state of artifice, or is it a natural state of sincerity, where the Other is greeted in a spirit of synergistic sympathy? Meeting, there are always the instantaneous developments, the chemistry. I have been traveling and meeting people for years now, a trail passing out behind me scattered with the forgotten ones, the ones with whom is sustained the cryptic line of connection in the long-ness of our Cartesian moments. Swirling wet snow today made the city streets a mess. it is here now, that which is needed.

A change of mind? When Gladys Stourfelt, at 21, inherited her grandfather’s modest fortune, several suitors proposed. She got as far as the altar on three occasions, but always changed her mind at the last minute. Gladys postponed her decision year after year, until finally, flat broke at 40, she agreed to marry her last and most devoted admirer. He had waited almost twenty years to marry his impoverished heiress, and died soon thereafter. We suspect you’ll find a mere 3-minute wait for Caffrey’s far less frustrating and far more rewarding… –from a Caffrey’s Irish Ale ad

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

interventions

No idle moments to be spent dabbling in web-site improvement. I dream about making some significant art projects this year, but it looks to be a year spent in teaching others, working for others … The snow gets into my cuffs as I step down to the school this morning to take advantage of a decent Internet/ethernet connection. I am able to spend a couple hours getting some items updated. I think constantly about re-doing the entire web site from scratch. Starting from zero. What that would change. Ego is the primary intervening force against clarity of vision. The long string of self-portraits that I have done over the last two decades suddenly come into my face as interventions — either cease the making of them or make them to use them as a tool to knock the ego from its intervening position. Make them so transparent that they show nothing but vision! In the end, it would not be for the Other, these exercises, but purely to loosen the self from the constant grip of the ego. raking leaves was. shoveling snow now. snow transpiring negatively to hard ice under the pressure of daily life. blue ether air twiLight seen between the slats of the dirty beige plastic venetian blinds fluoresces and vibrates. You Vee. like the ozone hole lets in leaks of deep space that, after a singeing from solar radiation, bleeds high frequency blue-ness into our realm. the snow consumes it, the cold consumes it, and it is gone eventually after a slow lingering of one hand of hours. it all makes me lie. it is really subsumed by gravity. I putter through digital letters written only year-ages ago. The archive that I have with me goes back seven digital years.

People will speak, They will not speak in order to convince, or to drown the noise of silence. They will speak because it will be easy to do so, and because life will surge from their mouths together with the words. Everything will be filled with life. There will no longer be room for anything dead or unintelligible. — J.-M.G. LeClezio
 

But do words truly bring us to a higher state of awareness — aren’t they just tools of a technology so old that its origins are inseparable from the origins of human thought? That is, language is merely another one of humankind’s shields from the terror of life on this earth. We are occasionally brilliant enough to realize our own physical weaknesses and subsequently to create prostheses that magnify the energies of our puny bodies, but we are not brilliant enough to recognize that our spiritual strength does not lie in our clever forays against the world, but in the limitless possibilities of the interface of mind-body-spirit, and the choices we make, and the Others we face in spiritual dialogue.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

azurelian blue-ness

The day following Christmas. Brilliant azurelian blue-ness fires a sky that my eyes hardly may rest on for more than a moment in time. The day is packed full of human psyches impinging one onto the other in a pressing pushing way. I was up late writing last night, and up early in the morning; this combination leaves me short on patience all around.

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

word-lines

House-sitting. for Rick and Sally. They are in Costa Rica for awhile with the kids. Loki is with me now. Sleeping upstairs as I try to stay awake in pain, but needing to write and feel some progress with things that I need to work on. Snow comes down tonight. Hot-tub pump whines away. Hard-drive spins. Meet with Gene for lunch a couple days ago. MB is come and gone, on to my family’s place in Arizona, sorta. Life has taken such a hectic dimension that I catch myself anticipating free time on the road that is looming up ahead in January. Needing to work with Mark, Rebecca, Jim, and others, things to be done, people to be visited. Well, at least, when I am not teaching. But that is minimal worry. The worry is about the solidity of the spine (spine-less, broken back, lame) to endure the intensity of things. Construction of word-lines that sustain. I find life-line mixed into threads. the thoughts that I am completely wasting my life, compared to much of what I have been taught (conflict), so-called knowledge, the thoughts that I am blessed with friends, a beautiful boy, job offers, the thoughts that the world might very well continue on the way it has to the moment, or it might end at any moment, the thoughts that there is not a day to be wasted, it must always be full, full of life, and that life must grow, thoughts of divine internals that might operate outside the skin wall and bring energy to others, thoughts of transcen-dances, thoughts of quietness and being, thoughts of nothing.

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

traverse no zenith

Forty-degree temperature swings signal the approach of winter. sun draws into a southern zenith. recall a phrase that meant so much — traverse no zenith — imperative demand, plea from a heart moving through bands of circumpolar cloud, Light of Being. on the phone caught by the unexpected, radio clipping sounds cut into aural continuity. two instances of deja vu fire into the continuity of recent cyclic time. the screaming train, braking downhill across the street. hearing, I race downstairs grab the video camera and begin filming. leaning against the frame of the front door, one foot propping open the screen, seeing the contents of the viewfinder, I am there in dream again. before, like during the Self-to-Self event way back in 1990 immediately prior to flying to Iceland, staying at Bill and Andrea’s place in Layton, Peters Valley. that Knowing within the flow of sensory information. reeling screeching of steel wheels pulsing to a halt over many minutes. and the visual construction of things, impression on eye. being pushed into the race of perception. and the thoughts strung out in a progression of order, like it was before, like it was before. I was here now. I am here then. and the coming-to-be yet a pure formation of new-ness in pre-dreams that are no longer real but are fragments of movement movement movement. somehow things have changed. back is stable, not hurting all day, for the first time in months. this was the year of back-ness, backwardness, spinal deficiency, upright challenged, anti-bipedalian. crawling, lying on the back, succumbing totally to gravity, being absorbed by the floor-ness, being at the bottom, close to the earth or pressed to lower matter. any change in this is a revelation, somewhere near Patmos, and the end Times not too far off. formed conversations are call and response. pressing idea out, energy, in the form of Words. Light. Words. Light. Words. saying that ignites, seeing the Other come back from the hearing in another state, hearing difference, and praying that the hearing is not distorted by the filters of learned being. WHERE IS MY VOICE? hidden behind the anti-truth of language, squirming under the weight of separate and solitary understandings. experiences unfold and leave a taste in mind that is akin to a dry polluted wind, blowing across steppes of post-industrial carparks. stained ground, offal of automobiles and material sinners. case closed. nothing reported today. late anyway, and over and out. from a western front.

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

word-prayers

The week flashes by in a way that continues to defy my clear understanding. Bullshit. Who cares how fast it goes. Quality, not lagging moments. sliding through the words, words that frame each human encounter. momentary existence flashing to ear enjoyment hearing knowing. the pleasure of speaking with others spoken to over long times and long places. the recognition. understanding no less a challenge, but the recognition and open acceptance remains the core heart of the interaction. a string of beads, word-prayers to the Other, passing through fingering hands one-by-one, where walking propels to the spatial coming-to-be, speaking-hearing propels the soul to a visionate space of confluential coming-into-spirit.