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Let them believe

Let everything that’s been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

Tarkovsky, A., 1980. Stalker, Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/.

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conformity of protocol

The Press, too, in my opinion, is increasingly becoming a purveyor of orthodoxy than an expression of individual views. The State which in a variety of ways, ranging between subtle pressure and persuasion and unabashed handouts, feeds it with ‘news’, is able more and more to call its tune. The Press…is in process of succumbing to the collectivist zeitgeist. At its obsequies (burials) the mutes are public relations officers, and the service is read by an ordained Minister of Information, with massed choirs provided by the British Broadcasting Corporation…It is in the passion for thinking in terms of categories that I detect the clearest and most ominous symptom of subordination of the individual to the collectivity. A voluntary uniformity, no less than an imposed one, prepares the way for servitude. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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mobile focus

Some people walk with both eyes focused on their goal: the highest mountain peak in the range, the fifty-mile marker, the finish line. They stay motivated by anticipating the end of the journey. Since I tend to be easily distracted, I travel somewhat differently — one step at a time, with many pauses in between. Occasionally the pauses become full stops that can last anywhere from two minutes to ten hours. More often they’re less definite. … Trapped by our concepts and languages and the utter predictability of our five senses, we often forget to wonder what we’re missing as we hurry along toward goals we may not even have chosen. I became a tracker by default, not design, when my tendency to be distracted by life’s smallest signs grew into an unrelenting passion to trace those obscure, often puzzling patterns somewhere, anywhere — to their source or end or simply to some midpoint in between. But when I began tracking lost people, what had begun as an eccentric habit — following footsteps on the ground — quickly matured into an avocation. … I now commonly walk toward a single goal: to meet the person at the other end of the tracks. — Hannah Nyala (from Point Last Seen).

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Food, Energy, and Society

For most of the time that humans have inhabited the earth, their prime source of power has been their own muscle power. …

Early additional sources of power included human slaves and domesticated animals. The hunting/gathering societies were helped when an extra food gatherer or hunter could join in the task of securing food. Likewise, the labor intensiveness of primitive agriculture increased both the need for and the usefulness of slave and animal labor. …

A slave or extra hunter, of course, would have to be fed. However, two hunters could kill more than twice as much game as a single hunter could kill alone. In this way, additional labor provided a greater return in energy than the energy input required for its maintenance. (p. 68)

Food, Energy, and Society, Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., Third Edition, Taylor And Francis Group, Boca Raton, Florida, 2008. Food, Energy and Society, [Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., (revised edition), University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, 1996]

I haven’t gotten access to the most current (2008) edition of this major collation of numbers, but the 1996 version is recent enough for the extrapolation process to be framed and the principles to be clearly demonstrated. Unfortunately that extrapolation reveals a worsening situation than they originally laid out (or imagined!) in 1979. With a detailed quantitative analysis of the (energy) costs of all eras and types of food production, as well as an examination of pesticide use, water, biodiversity, and soil resource issues, the separate chapters are full of numbers and comparisons which are remarkable in extent and sobering in their basic message. It would be possible to verify the extensive research in detail by tracking down the fifty-pages of references, but the message is simple: the human species is exerting an ever-increasing energy drain on the global environment merely to subsist, and there are definitely better and worse ways to marginally affect the situation. Humans tend to be wasteful — but any life-form causes this process of entropic waste (energy) production merely by living — it is not an avoidable condition. It appears now that the problems are of such a wide-scale, and the solutions are presently so haphazard (as applied by nation-states rather than through some trans-national instrument), that the inevitable upward geometric curves (population, resource consumption, environmental degradation, etc) will reach their limit. Those curves as they exist in the mathematical domain have no real upward limit and may approach infinity asymptotically. This would represent the system with infinite energy reserves. The earth, taken as a sub-system of the cosmos, is finite, and so are the energy resources it makes available for human use. more “Food, Energy, and Society”

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

holding space and antinodes

Non-doing defines doing. Sitting in stillness invites people to move. Getting out of the way allows people to fill space with their passion. Letting go of expectations leaves room for responsibility to come forth. All of this is integrity. Every piece of doing requires the strong presence of non-doing to anchor it.

Stifling every impulse to intervene, to give directions and orders leaves space for others to design their lives. You can create a container and then stand by and watch it fill and teem with life. You don’t resist the natural movements of groups of people co-creating their futures. Instead you work on your own inability to be still, to want to own the outcomes, to want to invest your ego.

This is not your show. You are holding space, embodying space and being empty and full at the same time. If they thank you in the closing circle, you have not done enough. — The Tao of Holding Space, Chris Corrigan

and a side note on one of the seven marvelous students in the Ways of Listening course I taught this term at UTS. Ash undertook a fine project Antinode, you can check out the process-documentation blog that she set up. nothing like be-ing in the analog world! her experiences definitely fed back into the overall success of the class. auspicious start to teaching in Oz!

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

health care

got to weigh in on health care. so sick(!) of the toxic blather going on within the US, although it might just be that it is a spent nation-state, in the throes of becoming less relevant in the world. clearly it is becoming less functional internally which eventually (already) will have an effect on external relations. morally it is tearing itself apart by those who, strangely call themselves Christian but who seem to have zero compassion and limitless zeal for defending against the stranger and killing preemptively when that stranger seems strange. period. I have some understanding of the fear of governmental authority. the media in the US has certainly inculcated so many other nation-states with the blight of the dictator and illustrated that to the US citizens, a situation that reinforces some traditional/historical fear of the government. fine. more “health care”

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

hipbone

Cross paths with a fellow BS‘er, Charles, who is based in nearby Cottonwood. Nice to have some high-quality f-2-f time at the Raven for the afternoon. Many interesting stories and thoughts emerge in the convocation.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
— William Butler Yeats

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  • place: Denver, Colorado

dorkbot303

Jane also organizes a nice Denver dorkbot event along with the Denver Open Media crew live broadcast on community cable channel 57 and on KGNU. she invites me to do an hour talk/presentation on whatever—networking, projects, community activism—live. interesting dynamic, I’ll get a copy of it at some point. Mark Hosler from negativland does the hour after mine. later there is a small party upstairs.

A chaotic night, as it was also Dona’s photo exhibition opening at Sliding Door Gallery, only a block away. Very strange coincidence as I practically never had any engagements in Denver, ever. It was a First Friday street night, and the neighborhood was packed. Very nice to see such civil activities like that in the US, maybe there is a cultural renaissance about to fire up. Maybe in response to the collapse of consumer capitalism in the developed world. Folks had consumed enough of all that consumer crap on credit on loan on mortgage on plastic (now, is that hydrocarbon plastic we’re talking about?).

Dona had some photographic print work along with Camilla Briggs and her organic textile set-pieces. Dona’s images of the Dalai Lama which impressed themselves into works about Light were distracting, perhaps because of his iconic status, but more basically, to have a human form entering the field of radiative holy-ness of Light, well, either redundant or simply not necessary. Or maybe too obvious. Dunno, precise problem can’t be circumscribed without seeing all the images again. Were these stills from a movie? Why not. Fluid seeing. It seemed to miss the regularity of decisive format choices — sizing and positioning. A smaller panoramic cloud sequence, while not astonishing for those of us humans who fling ourselves about in metal tubes high in the air, was moving in its internal brilliance. Abstraction helps to refine expression of aesthetic. Unless the figuration is more personal — the opposite of iconic. Any body would do. Any body is holy enough for Light to play with.

Camilla’s wax-sealed rose petals needed intimacy, something played out right there in the middle of this civilian crowd. they needed to be touched, to be touching the participating humans in the room. the patio behind the gallery was funky.

And, otherwise, I especially enjoyed the DOM folks, lead by Directrice Ann Theis, and their real passion for what they were doing. Haven’t run across that too often—the last time, in Latvia, at the Cultural/Historical Museum dance party in 2001—and especially not among US cultural-industry sector folks. Usually there is a desperation and even irritated defiance in the air.

I was too distracted by observing the social scene and having rather intensive conversations and interactions with others. Very dynamic evening. Enjoyable.

Bravo!

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

medialogies

Month(s) end(s), hot Berlin. Pushing 90F/33C. Summer is here.

Annie points out that the incident team deploys monochrome, a project featuring a wide variety of electronic/network-based projects.

and then there is the blog/audio file from the RCA in London, a talk/discussion on Brazilian Medialogies – Systems of Learning with Carlos Villela, Felipe Fonseca, and Ricardo Ruiz.

fortune cookie:

All the passions make us commit faults — love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones. Lucky Numbers: 4, 6, 15, 19, 22, 46.

and on to meet Udo and head to a couple openings along with another session of dkfrf again to hear Ben, Michael and other’s perform. beforehand, on the way down, a slow cruise through Görlitzer Park, summer expression! afterward, sitting outside at a cafe talking until very late.

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  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

ascending

holiday in Netherlands, Ascension Day. internet goes out. just after figuring things out with the next day’s schedule. meeting tomorrow with Carmin, Rob, Geert and Linda, uff.

several times, friends in Europe have expressed the sentiment that they should be allowed to vote for the next US president. I don’t blame them.

in a cafe. pretending that I am a normal tourist. visiting this place on a week’s break from the job. shaky premise. Chinese tourists, comfortable in their own skins, progressing to world dominance. while Amurika founders in scarce 225 years. street musicians sing “if you’re going to San Francisco, make sure you have some flowers in your hair…” or so. he’s Amurikan, maybe 40 years old. maybe more, maybe less. who knows. age becomes less knowable or even contemplated. as day after day there is yet another blank page let lie, while pretty girls smile and rub their lover’s backs. tattooed arms intertwined. and what of life trajectory, how it goes? year overtaking year. while an older guy sits down at the next table with a baby-fist-sized spherical knob on the top left side of his head. bulbous. the tattooed gal shows the dimple in her lower back to her lover. they kiss. each second of eye contact they have, I age a year. slowly sinking into anonymous senility. nothing to do but stare down the far horizon, if it could be seen at all here in the City, to spot any sign of Death approaching. but there are too many brick buildings framing the space of Rembrandtsplein. more “ascending”

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

FearingS

Annie Abrahams sends out an open invitation to participate in her project FearingS which is a part of:

“Oppera Internettikka – Protection et Sécurité” explores the poetics of a contemporary sound form — live opera as a sound event for the audience in the form of a live internet audio broadcasting. In that way it combines the notion of the world wide web communication protocols and classical artspace — an opera house. Opera is a very strictly coded form of art with a lot of passion, and internet is a lonely place of solitude and intimate communication which is becoming more and more fragile, dangerous and suspicious.
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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

John Francis Wester 1958 – 2006

John Wester Learn sorrowfully from the network (from Karen (T.)) of another passing. John Wester was a great friend from junior and senior high days. we maintained contact after the college diaspora and when we were both living in Los Angeles after college (he doing his law degree, me finishing my tenure with corporate oil) and later through email, thinking that at one point we would cross paths. an obituary is a terse framework that little shows the life, only the social situation. I’ll add some words and, if I can find some, photos soon. Karen calls — the first time we have spoken in, what, maybe 30 years? nah, a few less than that. it is strange and nice to hear a voice that slowly stirs older memories — of those humid summer days down at the North Shore dock of what was a not very large lake in one of the first planned communities of the 1970’s, Montgomery Village. I would cycle down Brink Road from home to the Village on occasional summer days before a drivers license made more of the world available. At the dock, John, Richard, Taryn, Karen, Mark, Gary, Bruce, Sharon, and others would hang out — some of them working (boat rentals), some like myself, just hunting for summer friendship. more “John Francis Wester 1958 – 2006”

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

[microsound]

the [microsound] list is discussing what some judge to be a severe lack of quality among those who write reviews of electronic art endeavors (in this case, sonic/music things), following are some comments:

sotto voce: I think there are several ways to go with the concept of reviewing (speaking as someone who once had a music column AGES ago in my university paper — mostly to get back-stage concert passes with the local promoter in Denver)… :-\\

— reviewing is a process of reducing the energy of a performance into a linguistic re-presentation for others to read and presumably ‘get something’ of the original performance.

— the principle behind this is to take evolutionary advantage of the experience of an Other in order to optimize Self-survival. relying on Other’s eyes and ears so as not to become hopelessly obsolete or even lunch meat. to remain viable in a social system one is forced more-or-less to heed this second-hand info as a part of socialization.
more “[microsound]”

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  • place: Riga, Latvia

ram5 – day 4

The final day after some power-full sonic/visual performances last night including a nice visual-sonic collaboration between Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer of umatic. Discussion starts with a presentation from Armin Medosch who makes an eloquent outline for the future replete with lessons from the past.

But many here have a passionate and singular dedication to the ‘solutions’ offered by technology. This I can only subscribe to a lack of experience in seeing the mapping from hype to reality of other, previous techno-utopias. Am I a cynical oldster? There is an overt exhibiting of ‘critical intellectual discourse’ on the face of it, but the proceeding praxis is merely an over-heated implementation of a skewed representations of reality. hmmmm. A reference to the rhetoric of prior situations would be helpful.

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

reversal of perspective

goooood-mornin’ Lawd!

One day Monsieur Keuner was asked just what was meant by “reversal of perspective”; and he told the following story. Two brothers deeply attached to one another had a strange habit. They marked the nature of the day’s events with pebbles a white one for each happy moment and a black one for each moment of misfortune or displeasure. But when, at the end of the day, they compared the contents of the jars one found only white pebbles and the other only black.

Fascinated by the persistence with which they lived the same experience differently, they both agreed to ask the advice of an old man famed for his wisdom. “You don’t talk to one another enough” said the wise man, “Both of you must give the reasons for your choice, and discover its causes”. From then on they did so, and soon discovered that while the first remained faithful to his white pebbles and the second to his black ones, in neither jar were there as many pebbles as before. Where there had been about thirty there were hardly more than seven or eight. After a short while they went to see the wise man again. Both looked extremely miserable. “Not so long ago,” said one, “my jar was filled with pebbles the color of the night. My despair was unbroken; I continued to live, I admit, only through the force of habit. Now I hardly ever collect more than eight pebbles, but what these eight signs of misery represent has become so intolerable that I cannot go on like this.” And the other said: “Every day I piled up white pebbles.. Today there are only seven or eight, but these obsess me to the point that I cannot recall these moments of happiness without immediately wanting to relive them more intensely and, in a word, eternally. This desire torments me”. The wise man smiled as he listened to them. “Excellent. Things are shaping up well. Keep at it. And one thing: whenever you can, ask yourselves why the game with the jar and the pebbles arouses so much passion in you.” When the two brothers next saw the wise man it was to say “We asked ourselves the question but we could not find the answer. So we asked the whole village. You can see how much it has disturbed them. In the evening. squatting in front of their houses, whole families discuss the black and white pebbles. Only the elders and chieftains refuse to take part. They say a pebble is a pebble, and all are of equal value.” The old man didn’t conceal his pleasure. “Everything is developing as I foresaw. Don’t worry. Soon the question will no longer be asked: it has lost its importance, and perhaps one day you will no longer believe you ever asked it.” Shortly afterward the old man’s predictions were confirmed in the following way: a great joy overcame the members of the village; at the dawn of a troubled night, the rays of the sun fell upon the heads of the elders and chieftains, impaled upon the sharp-pointed stakes of the palisade. — Raoul Vaneigem

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  • place: en route Tribeca, New York - Fort Myers, Florida

David Glenn Marshall 1958 – 2000

scanning the network for old friends, I look for my oldest friend, David. from second through sixth grade in Clarksburg. a friend for exploring with: fields and woods, following creeks, playing soldier, fishing in the pond behind our house, slogging through swamps and bogs, long summer adventures with canteens and snacks, hiking sticks and knives, watching out for poison ivy, copperheads, and water moccasins, riding bikes into the dim of humid summer evenings, playing catch until eye could no longer see the ball. soft spoken and gentle, David stuttered a bit, but was a determined and stalwart friend. we ended up in different schools after elementary school, and we lost contact after that, but I knew he went on to be a commercial pilot. and now he’s gone. he shared the same birthday as Loki. August 18. he was 9 days older than I, now he’s forever younger, buried in the cemetery behind the little white clapboard church in the center of Clarksburg, a couple hundred yards from the home he grew up in. and the school we attended together. more “David Glenn Marshall 1958 – 2000”

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  • 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.

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  • place: en route Tornio - Helsinki, Finland

hip-hoppin’

Today Mikko proposes that we all write hip-hop ballads for his 45-minutes. It’s part of the course. Listening to Puff-Daddy, well, here goes:

here it comes here it comes public, pushin’, everybody’s down lookin’ up and lookin’ down this is what I found W-Tee-Oh, UNESCO, shoot ’em up Cee-eye-Ay Dee-Oh-Dee, formULA, eN-esS-Ay

Pop-techno-shit Pop-techno-shit Dreamin’ about it dreamin’, wet dreamin’ about it

Ee-yoU, eFf-Bee-Eye, M-Eye-Five gonna dive, gonna dive into the middle of fashion like a passion for facism strip it down, load it higher and fire, bay-bee, fire

Pop-techno-shit, Pop-techno-shit Dreamin’ about it dreamin’, wet dreamin’ about it

eM-Cee-eye, Ay-Tee-Tee, Sonera Nokia, talkin’ at ya talkin at ‘cha all day long fillin’ heads with techno-duppy-dread and stripped-down lead bullets that don’t fire in guns, but in wires kill yer sense just the same and you can’t blame anyone but yersef, consume muthafucka

Pop-techno-shit Pop-techno-shit Dreamin’ about it dreamin’, wet dreamin’ about it

shop ’til ya drop, shop ’til ya drop, yeah Until some muthafucka with a bigga wad drops ya’ lose ya’ dreams, immediately like they was nothin’, specifically like smoke driftin’ from that smokin’ barrel, where are ya then, Pop-techno-shit, gone, bay-bee, gone

Pop-techno-shit Pop-techno-shit Dreamin’ about it dreamin’, wet dreamin’ about it

Pop-techno-shit, Pop-techno-shit done dreamin’ now time to move in the groove time to move in the groove

Okay, so I ain’t no hip-hop dude, I did it in 20 minutes, having’ fun with the students. Mixed-up day. Moving through different scenarios as quick as you please. Students having to fill 45 minutes with something. Coordinated. Like I got no plan, when teaching, anymore. And that shows. Chaos. And lacking focused energy to tie a classroom into an electric place: means I need to quit teachin’ for awhile. Definitely. Or at least chill and not press so hard to teach so much. Balancing my own sources.

Late leaving night train for Helsinki.

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  • place: Helsinki, Finland

business

well, on the eve of heading to Dessau and Prague. after a full 24 hours in Helsinki, coming from a snowy Lapland yesterday evening with Juhani. saw everybody from the Baltic initiative at TempLab, pizza with the Balkan crew, Tapio hosted a party at Meteori last night, and then a good meeting today at MUU Media Base to map out some future plans. Kjell, Mindaugas, Minna, Riikka and many others … Rasa and Raitis head to Tornio on Sunday to take over the networking class. drama again in the field of relationship. passion and loss. what else is new?

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  • place: Tornio, Finland

chutes & ladders

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

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  • place: Tornio, Finland

on a walk

In a painted corner, words fail me, in the class — this space that I have voluntarily entered with these other humans, who also entered voluntarily also — adjusting our collective visions and expectations so that they are in an eternal alignment, or internal alignment, or infernal inferno. In that painted corner the suggestions range from rescue to BREAK THROUGH THE WALL behind the back, to a basic “Let’s get outta here!” And so we do. A stroll through town to the bus station to get ice cream soaking up the brilliant sunshine that is here now. Fragment: approaching the bus station, an old man sits on a bench in the sun. At the corner of his mouth, as we approach, I see a sparkling diamond (this is a sign, but I do not know it, it penetrates my head like the summer sun Light on North Atlantic water. more “on a walk”

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  • place: Linz, Austria

Snow White

Equinox here and gone. equality, balance. being. beans. a walk in spring snow and sunshine near Linz. with Thomas and Christa. speaking of many things, specific and distributed. systems, situations, attitudes, conditions, awarenesses, presences. exercise of this worldly head floating through (maybe they call it a crimson haze) and the discoveries! what is found in the interstices, between what are commonly recognized as samples of meaning, between the gaze and vision, between pleasure and passion, between Light and materiality. (oh, about singing the body electric and such). telling stories that I well know, like, back when I was living in eLAy, taking Snow White to a Keith Jarrett concert at the LA center of the Arts, downtown downtown, as they once said in eLAy. yeah, she played/danced Snow White at Disneyland in SoCal (Southern California), Anaheim, long legs, and she never flinched at the idea of commuting 60 miles one-way to get to work, I think she said that she put 150,000 miles on her car in two years. faugh! long legs, she didn’t really get into Keith Jarrett, but we went to a Neil Young concert, too, when he was in his wired electric phase. she had a perfect profile, and I can’t remember her name.

hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die…

so it goes. long legs. my cousin Pete introduced me to her, right when I had moved out there to work for UNOCAL back in 1982, that was when he was heading security at Disneyland. gees.

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  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

Dr. Bronner

Dr. Bronner, the mysterious Essene manufacturer of the Dr. Bronner’s line of soaps has this on the label of his Peppermint Oil Soap:

Who else but God gave humankind this sensuous passion! Love that can spark mere dust to life! Beauty in our eternal Father’s fashion! Ecstasy far above earthly greediness & strife! Poetry, uniting All-One, brave, all life! Like a beacon breaking thru dark clouds that pass, your deep embrace, your sensuous kiss! Who else but God can make Love last 1 trillion years of sweet eternities! For when conquered after years of toil, sweat, blood, Love can strike like greased lightning sent by God, to spark mere dust to intense blazing fire & create new Love-faith-hope-guts-strength, as only God inspire! Unite the whole Human race in All-One-God-Faith, as all mankind desire!

Dinner with Paulina and Joris last night. Their son Samuel and Loki are friends in playschool so they played all evening while us adults talked over food and drink into the encroaching twiLight. Joris is a Dutch painter who has been living up here for five years or so. He speaks Icelandic well enough to be teaching art in the local elementary school. They have a beautiful house rather nearby with a clear view of the harbor and mountains above.

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  • place: Tallahassee, Florida

ideological structures

Staying at Scott’s place for the last days here at Florida State University. He’s doing tech management for the Art Department, having just finished his MFA up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yesterday was heavily involved in discussions with students and faculty about my performance last Thursday. Passionate discussions to be sure. Because of a small glitch in communication between Paul and I, (and, the onerous ideological relationships that accompanied the performance space itself — the Art History lecture room) the dialogue which is the third component of the performance stopped after about ten minutes. The intensive hours of discussion that ensued in the days following amply illustrated to me a number of factors influencing the dialogue. The first was the power of the ideological structure enclosing the audience and space. (This would include the unfulfilled expectations, based in preconceptions and comfortable same-ness)… Anyway, the continuing discussion has been very stimulating and has opened up new areas of consideration for me. I have very mixed feelings about the performance, but the flux of energy that has enveloped it in the four times it has happened — once in Köln, once in Helsinki, once in Tampere, and now, in Tallahassee — has carried my thinking on a productive tour of my own pathway as well as providing deep insights into others’ attitudes, dreams, and beliefs.