On the afternoon of 27 August 2024, the area including Upper Sand Canyon, a relatively small drainage in Dinosaur National Monument, experienced a major precipitation event. The fifteen mile Echo Park access road, in part, runs the full length—about three miles—down that canyon, much of it in the fluvial hazard zone. Long stretches of the road were completely washed out, and it was only the heroic efforts of the guy re-grading it that re-opened access to Echo Park some days later. I recently made it back up to Dinosaur for a short sojourn after an interminable and blurry five-year absence.
Earlier bush-walks along the dry washes in the area, the curious effects of flash-flooding as well as other, slower, changes are noted. I’ve come across dried-mud-caked trees in Upper Pool Creek Canyon more than 20 feet higher than the dry creek bed, yikes! And in some areas of Hells Canyon, boulders the size of small cars are seen piled up and ground together in violent proximity.
With the 27 August incident in mind I did a long bush-walk along the east-west axis of the Ruple Point-Red Rock Anticline that forms the Weber Sandstone hogbacks running perpendicular to Upper Sand Canyon.
I’m no photographer. I take pictures, mostly rather banal pictures: re-creations, re-presentations, documentations of reality. When asked, I tell people that I photograph who I am with, what I am doing, and where I am. Suitably self-centric for the pseudo-artist.
Yes, I show up, with camera. And back when there was a physical craft involved, I excelled in the production of fine archival prints, and I was called a Master Printer. Over the years I taught many courses on the craft: master printing, photographic history, and photography. I have thousands of vintage silver, silver/sepia, and silver/selenium prints that have sat in boxes for the decades since I was last in a wet darkroom, plying that craft.
I still hold onto a selection of superb enlarger lenses, though the last enlarger I had access to—in the darkroom that I built for my father—I gave to the local college back in 2002. Their once-vibrant photography program collapsed a few years later. So much for craft, gotta sell those lenses.
Not only that, I still can’t get a true horizontal horizon line! Dammit! Simple composition, strictures I never liked, were not transcended to a level where they could intentionally be disposed of entirely.
After five years of not carrying an analog 35mm camera, shooting only miniDV video from 2000 through 2006, I picked up a DSLR with a lens that gradually reduced itself over more than a decade’s use to a piece of garbage. And forget a clean CCD sensor. It’s worse than in the ‘old times’ with spurts of Dust-Off and manually spotting (or ‘re-touching’) negatives and prints with Spotone and tiny paint brushes. CCDs manifest every dust speck as large dark circles on the screen (and in print). Got a clear sky? Guaranteed to be covered in more-or-less distinct circular blobs. I finally upgraded to a true professional-grade DSLR a few years back—as usual, behind the current mirror-less technology—always several steps behind any state-of-the-art. The only time I was near that was when I was shooting with the two Nikon F2a bodies and a selection of decent lenses that my father generously handed down to me back in the late 1970s.
The successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013 to acquire a high-end large-format printer ended during Covid when—after seven years of pointless printing—one nozzle got clogged and I didn’t immediately address the issue to fix it. The printer is now a 250-pound paperweight. I could perhaps revive it, but that would require buying a full set of inks, a $2500 investment that might not pay off in the end. I only sold a handful of prints total, and gave away many more than that, by far.
At this point, my images are hardly ‘collectible’ and so the only photographic medium I am using currently is this travelog. That will not change for the duration—despite this virtual world already jam-packed with trillions of images—until the energy winds down, and all archives become cold stardust fodder.
The punitive assignment of a couple of external ‘management communication’ workshops is the latest folly imposed by a hapless ‘management’ that has no clue I’ve been teaching and facilitating such things across 20 countries. Deeply cynical and utterly oblivious to its own gaping flaws regarding humane and engaged leadership, its days are self-numbered. Trump-like, this ‘manager’ is a fount of narcissistic tendencies that reflect on Others the most self-possessed of gaping flaws.
My days there are self-numbered as well. What to do to maximize? meh. That’s the wrong question. Simply occupying the transitory instance of Life provides a low-frequency drone that accompanies the blood-pulse in ear: always there until it is not. Easy to be so distracted by the vicissitudes of existence that the pulse falls away from consciousness, bringing it back to the fore even while fully immersed in any activity. Burning up days that are never to be retrieved is the original sin. But it’s not about maximizing, it’s about be-ing within every moment. Every second.
I’ve segued into a state of mind that sees its own limits, looming, in reflections that now, seen close-up, fill the eyes with impending blindness. These are limits that Life imposes. Spirit might forefend them temporarily, then transcend or perhaps succumb to another line of existence. Or not. The expansive intentions that drove earlier Life have transformed into mere survival, seeing daily cycles as hurdles to overcome, all the while, watching evidence of life flicker, inverted on scarlet retina. Listening for blood-pulse.
Complex tasks are avoided because that meditative listening falls too far away. And Life becomes mere mechanical functioning: fixing this, buying that, eating food prepared by machines, not watching the stars, silently, motionfull within cosmic chaos.
How to see, seeing, and changing a point-of-view: intractable questions, persistent challenges, fluid realities.
Last fall, after making yet another series of portraits on a trip with German friends to the Grand Canyon, I had the realization that the geometry of my portrait work had been locked-in for years, decades now. Changing subjects, changing situations, surroundings, but the fundamental geometry between camera, Self, and Other was/is essentially static: an unchanging point-of-view. Different Others in the relationship — the collaboration of portraiture — can it be that the essence of relation is also static? To implement a different geometry suggests the necessity of changing the nature of (the) relationship itself. The technical means, the protocol, does have an effect, of course: the choice of lens unequivocally determines a primary geometry of relation. But what is the intersection of that optical geometry and the sacred geometry sketched that is within the continuum of relation?
I use (almost exclusively) a medium-wide-angle (a 28mm with film SLRs, an 18mm with the digital SLR). These tools/technologies and their explicit protocols frame the relationship. The selection is not arbitrary. It’s not simply ‘environmental portraiture’ — that reductive term comes after the process that generates the images. It could similarly be called ‘distant portraiture’, and indeed, distance is a determining factor in the outcome. A wide-angle lens brings the photographer physically closer to the subject while allowing the intimacy to expand, encompassing the context of the situation. A telephoto lens often propagates a stealing-at-a-distance of visage. And it compresses the perspective of that visage in such a way that violates the normal perspective of the eye. The eye sees approximately as a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera.
But all this is merely the technology, the mediatory tool. Strip that away from the eye, and see. Through the wetware optics of the orb alone. Digging deep into the head. Transferring the energy of the world, and of that collaborating Other, inside: seeing, and be-ing in relation to.
It begins somewhere in the Self: what, an inclination? No, it’s much more complex than leaning towards (already language fails to offer any easy way out). There are the mirror neurons, so it is thought, that encounter the vibe, both the raw and formed energy of the Other. This reception (crucially formed in resonance) drives our actions, our expressions. This is not noise. The word sounds carry directed energy. An expression is directed (at) (the Other).
This expression is directed at No Other. This is the way we lose what we have.
From the inside, watching. It’s easier to watch the sky than to watch an Other. Or to be watched. While there is another Watcher, always, in the sky, the air. One that expects us to be present in every moment. It watches for this. And when, for a nano-second, we slip, slack, into the apathy of being elsewhere, there are irruptions that change the trajectory of living, without any recourse to mercy. This is the Watcher, Seeing us in the Light. Being watched shivers through our perceptions of ourselves and of what we are doing. Have done. And we are left with nothing but the essence of sight. As we stand in the Light.
Without going out of my door, I can know all things on earth
without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven.
The farther one travels the less one knows, the less one really knows.
Without going out of your door, You can know all things on earth
without looking out of your window, you can know the ways of heaven.
The farther one travels the less one knows, the less one really knows.
Arrive without traveling, See all without looking, Do all without doing.
Harrison, G., 1968. The Inner Light.
Watching the two-part George Harrison HBO bio-flick, it’s quite good; and what of those people, that man, among others. Life is so simple and so complex.
The faint but clear sounds were wafted through the night in a murmur of operatic music.
A voice near me said: “This is Sunday, and the band is playing in the public park of San Remo.”
I heard this with astonishment, thinking I must be dreaming. I listened a long time, and with growing delight, to the strains of music carried so far through space. But suddenly, in the middle of a well-known air, the sound swelled, increased in volume, and seemed to gallop toward us. It was so strange, so weird, that I rose to listen. Without doubt it was drawing nearer and louder every second. All was coming toward me, but how — on what phantom raft would it appear? It seemed so near that I peered into the darkness excitedly, and suddenly I was bathed in a hot breeze fragrant with aromatic plants, the strong perfume of the myrtle, the mint, and the citron, with lavender and thyme scorched on the mountain by the burning sun. more “au soleil: on sensing the world”
stepping outside, iris closed.
immediately the Milky Way is apparent, despite Light streaming
from windows in the house.
through glass. electric Light, a stream from the beginning.
through wires. and wires.
crossing huge spaces in the dark landscape. Strung
from towers that are giant beasts striding, frozen across those
spaces. leading to the dams. or to the power stations.
where the earth or water is forced to yield some of its
elemental strength.
give back that strength.
turn the Light out, watch the stars get brighter. watch
the stars enter the house. or even enter the head. filling
it directly.
imagine that — filling the eye, the head, the body with raw stellar energy.
After attending the Brakhage Symposium a few weeks ago, I run across this excerpt from Bruce Elder. It’s a little dense.
Brakhage has even argued that artistic forms relate to our embodied nature. The relation is most obvious in rhythmic forms, for all rhythm, he insists, derives from the throbbing of the heartbeat. Brakhage believes that physiology is what ultimately determines what we see. He believes, too, that physiology has a large role in determining what forms artists produce. The conception of cinema that he offered from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, that cinema can present what he calls “moving visual thinking,” he also bases on a notion of the body, for this idea of cinema proposes that film’s great strength is that it alone among art media can present the prime matter of thought before it passes through the filter of language. Adults are ordinarily unaware of the prime matter of thought but, he maintains, a fetus or infant is. This prime matter derives immediately from the synapses and reflects the nature of corporeal processes. At times Brakhage even identifies this thought matter with changes in the nervous system and so insists that his films actually present the “sparking of the synapses” or “the light in the brain.” He even avers that his films do not present pictures of moving visual thinking but convey the energies of moving visual thinking itself. One of the poets and poetic theorists Brakhage has read most avidly is Charles Olson. Olson’s poetics were fundamentally anti-mimetic, and his antimimeticism rested on his claim that a poem generally does not depict what it is about but, rather, by reawakening the energies of an experience in a reader’s body, actually recreates the experience. One suspects this fundamental proposition had a significant role in shaping Brakhage’s ideas on moving visua1 thinking. more “moving visual thinking”
looking out from. maybe not from the depths of soul, but looking out from this meaty incarnation, are eyes hungry by nature, are they only looking for, see-ing, food, reproductive potential, danger? can we see anything beyond this, beyond the carnal? do we have, at all, a spirit other than the spirit of any and all lives, Life on the planet?
Whatever the case, plans begin to form for a return to Europe in some few weeks. Starting off with the bricolabs/Pixelache project in Helsinki and then over to Tallinn and a small island off the Baltic coast of Estonia. Then back to Kiel via Vantaa. Hang there a bit, then on to Bremen, Frieder is looking into funding for a workshop in late June of early July. That would be nice to do one of those again — the German universities still seem to have that atmosphere of rigor that other places (the US!) seem to lack or have lost. Then to Köln, Berlin, and so on. Movement.
and then all the new encounters at CU. between students and faculty. but I cannot seem to further the idea of making this home.
lenticular eyelids hover over the Flatirons, nuclear red-orange.
I say “nice view” to the Salvation Army bell-ringer
standing outside a building full of food-stuffs.
Inside, I look for cheap things.
and leave without change in my pocket to give:
I take the other door out.
this after making a transfer across fiber-optic networks of value for calories.
a transfer of what? some numbers punched, and it is tending to make me sick.
sick in a way of driven feverishness to escape to elsewhere where values are true and not merely convertible currencies of social trust in … God.
sick in a way of realizing that the point-of-view taken, the approach is an illusion surfaced with centripetal impulse (impulse driven by rotating planetary system, and fed by the mesh of gravitational attraction to things). leave me go! release the mass of embodied … stuff and finally convert gravity to Lightness.
after the heavy washboards on the road ascending the rest of Rocky Creek, descending Trail Creek, and then along Taylor Park over to the Cottonwood Pass road, I am determined to get a newer truck with 4×4 drive and suspension. made it to the Divide at Cottonwood and finally get out of the truck. head out along the Continental Divide northeast towards Turner Peak, then turn west into South Texas Creek basin, above tree-line. have to work hard to avoid snow fields, cliffs, and bogs, and though this is an extremely dry year, it’s still early in the season at 12,000-plus feet. the weather is threatening with some corn snow and rain, it’s cold! meanwhile, the flowers that are already open early in the mountain spring attract the eye, as does the line dividing heaven and earth.
posted
place: Pat's Draw, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado
Going to the top of Pat’s Draw then around above Mitten Park, another perspective on Steamboat Rock, and back down via a small cave that caught my eye a few years ago. Overflowing bat guano seeps from some of the smaller cavities, etc.
posted
place: around Hawk Moon Ridge, Glade Park, Colorado
An afternoon walk with Luna across the canyon to the eastern ridge to look back at the yurt. It’s windy as hell and there is haze in the air, occasional whiffs of fire — dust from Utah and distant forest fire smoke. Not a good sign, but scanning info sources, there is no evidence that there is a fire anywhere close. With wind speeds gusting to 60 mph, though, given the dryness, good Lord, anything Lighting anywhere would likely be explosive.
fleeting passages, mental imaginations slipping through a narrow slot canyon, rubbing gritty walls and feeling the cool stone on cheek, fleeting passages, mental imaginations of non-being. going beyond what is pressing into eyeballs from out there. some kind of inverse folding of the in here to the out there, becoming all from being Self. or watching the Other vanish from meat-space tangibility, entangled-ness, there-ness, then gone. with a rough sigh. expelling all that is lively, and no longer receiving the inspiration that was once dealt: there’s a finite supply. clocks winding down, complications, intrusions to safe, normal living. looking around, first at patterns of mud flow after a flash flood, then at shapes of crenelate cyanobacteria in cryptobiotic colonies, then at the faces of friends, aging. and finally at the archive full of photographs.
posted
place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado
wanted to check if a round-about way to get to the top of the bench was possible via heading to Mitten Park, and ascending the end of the bench there. nope, not without some serious bouldering or even technical climbing. got up pretty far, but the as the rocks are severely distressed at the fault itself, everything gets unstable. I quit where the trees stopped growing! good day for just looking around at everything along with a little initial off-road cardio. the cryptobiotic soil is always something to visually decode along with the lichen and other symbiotic expressions.
posted
place: Pat's Draw, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado
a short circuit to recall the textures and to reacquaint the senses, the body, with the essences of place — sky, rock, earth, plants, former occupants, etc: the basics. starting with a quick overview of Echo Park from the southern wall, then following that complexly eroding wall along to Pool Creek, then across to the west to some nice petroglyphs.
Between instances of ‘seeing’ someone, it is easy to believe that perhaps we have no ‘contact’ or influence, or other expression of presence on that Other. But this seems not at all true, and is only a perverse influence of a close-to-pure material culture. In the moments, hours, days between the face-to face encounter, I am, first off, already at the effect of our prior encounter. This has changed me, fundamentally. I am elsewise already, as I depart from your immediate presence. It’s not merely a question of persistence of this change: it is far more profound than merely the ‘propagation’ of something with in my Self, being elsewise means that I am change(d). As I draw away, the change persists in the now-transformed Self. This new Self moves along, it is engaging the flow of life in a way that is different than if it had not encountered the Other: you are there. Maybe this is only another framing of memory, but what, indeed, is memory but the persistence of the effects of encounter: an effect of the change that comes from open encounter. Still seems that this could simply be labeled as ‘presence’ as it is a persistent effect of presence, and that (Cartesian) proximity is irrelevant.
This whole scenario reminds of the multi-verse theory of reality, but one question would definitely be, what is the granularity of the splitting off of a new universe? How ‘often’ would it occur — it would have to be an any juncture of change, or so… Which would seem to be asymptotically close to infinite, which I suppose is what string theory suggests, etc., etc.
Vision is a remarkable process by which we are able to interpret an image from light the eyes receive from the objects around us. Although this process depends on the interplay of many different factors (including the optics of the eye, the isomerization of retinal, nerve impulses, and the brain’s ability to reconstruct the image), vision is fundamentally based on the change in the molecular orbitals of retinal that occurs when the molecule absorbs energy in the form of light reflected off of the objects that we see. When visible light hits the chromophore (retinal), a p electron is promoted to a higher-energy orbital, allowing free rotation about the bond between carbon atom 11 and carbon atom 12 of the retinal molecule. About half the time, this rotation leads to the isomerization of retinal when the p electron returns to the lower-energy orbital. When retinal isomerizes, a conformational change in the protein opsin occurs. This conformational change initiates a cascade of biochemical reactions that result in the closing of Na+ channels in the cell membrane. When the Na+ channels are closed, a large potential difference builds up across the plasma membrane, and the potential difference is passed along to an adjoining nerve cell as an electrical impulse. The nerve cell carries this impulse to the brain, where the visual information is interpreted.
or
The retina is lined with many millions of photoreceptor cells that consist of two types: 7 million cones provide color information and sharpness of images, and 120 million rods are extremely sensitive detectors of white light to provide night vision. (The names of these cells come from their respective shapes.) The outer segments (tops) of the rods and cones contain a region filled with membrane-bound discs, which contain proteins bound to the chromophore 11-cis-retinal. (A chromophore is a molecule that can absorb light at a specific wavelength, and thus typically displays a characteristic color.) When visible light hits the chromophore, the chromophore undergoes an isomerization, or change in molecular arrangement, to all-trans-retinal. The new form of retinal does not fit as well into the protein, and so a series of conformational changes in the protein begins. As the protein changes its conformation, it initiates a cascade of biochemical reactions that result in the closing of Na+ channels in the cell membrane. Prior to this event, Na+ ions flow freely into the cell to compensate for the lower potential (more negative charge) which exists inside the cell. When the Na+ channels are closed, however, a large potential difference builds up across the plasma membrane (inside the cell becomes more negative and outside the cell becomes more positive). This potential difference is passed along to an adjoining nerve cell as an electrical impulse at the synaptic terminal, the place where these two cells meet. The nerve cell carries this impulse to the brain, where the visual information is interpreted.
at everything which overflows the outline, the contour, the category, the name of what it is.
All appearances are continually changing one another: visually everything is interdependent. Looking is submitting the sense of sight to the experience of that interdependence. To looker something (a pin that has dropped) is the opposite of this looking. Visibility is a quality of light. Colours are the faces of light. This is why looking is to recognize, enter a whole. Identity of an object or colour or form is what visibility reveals: it is a conclusion of visibility; but it has nothing to do with the process of visibility which is as uncontainable, which is as much a form of energy as light itself. Light which is the source of all life. The visible is a feature of that life; it cannot exist without it. In a dead universe nothing is visible. more “on visibility”
The greatest joy, and the greatest triumph, in art, comes at the moment when, realizing to the fullest your grip over the medium, you deliberately sacrifice it in the hope of discovering a vital hidden truth within you. It comes like a reward for patience — this freedom of mastery which is born of the hardest discipline. Then no matter what you do or say, you are absolutely right and nobody dare criticize you. I sense this very often in looking at Picasso’s work. The great freedom and spontaneity he reveals is born, one feels, because of the impact, the pressure, the support of the whole being which, for an endless period, has been subservient to the discipline of the spirit. The most careless gesture is as right, as true, as valid, as the most carefully planned strokes. This I know, and nobody could convince me to the contrary. Picasso here is only demonstrating a wisdom of life which the sage practices on another, higher level.
This morning, awake at five o’clock, the room almost dark still, I lay awake quietly meditating about the essay I would get up to write, and at the same time, as though playing a duet, watching the gradual change of colors in my paintings beside the bed, as the light slowly increased. I had the strange sensation then of imagining what might happen to those colors should the light continue to increase in strength beyond full daylight. And from thinking about the unknown color gamut to the forms themselves and then to their significance — what a world of conjecture I explored. In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller
I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now to the other system of lines; and that then this system remains visible alone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes. This happens, for example, whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of the other system. … But it is extremely hard to chain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless we associate with our looking some distinct purpose which keeps the activity of the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the lines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstances attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we most seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.
This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but one without training cannot so easily execute the intention of making them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of looking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily fixed on a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate control. — Hermann von Helmholtz, “Psychologische Optiks,” as quoted in William James, “The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1”
What bugs me is that stupid little black dot in the picture …
Chris Allen, one of my favorite students from way back in Master Black and White Printing at CU Boulder in the late 1980’s, passed today. Chris was a gentle, gracious, and humble soul, at the same time as being a fearless seer. His work at the time he was in my class was sourced in his tightly-knit family situation. He visually mapped the dynamic of his crew of young daughters and wife with an intensity and intimacy that I have not seen rivaled with such personal work. He was hard-working, focused, and completely un-self-conscious about his photography. We had many wonderful conversations about life and photography during that time. His wife, Sandy, was due with their fourth child, and they invited me to attend and photograph the birth which I did do. I remember saying yes to Chris, and then getting the phone call early one morning, “It’s time, come on over.” Uff! What have I done! I was terribly nervous about such an event, having never witnessed a birth before. But the vibe at the house, between the midwives and the kids, was incredibly calm and loving. I was blessed by their trust. more “Chris Norris Allen 1953 – 2011”
Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property — variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass — can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity. — Frank Wilczek
Sometimes I get the feeling that I don’t recognize even my own life. Among the array of phenomena which present themselves for the sensual body-system every … second … recognition shouldn’t be necessary for any one of them, given that change is the governing principle, or so. All should be new every time, all the time(s), and thus recognizable whether or not there are any observable and (relatively) invariant* features. It could be that this lack of recognition is itself merely the reliance on external models or comprehensions of ‘what’s out there’ as opposed to a deeper reliance on what is experienced by the Self as being (relatively) invariant. more “matters”
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know every object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” — Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision”
“It’s tragic that this all begins with the apparent mistaking of a camera for a weapon,” said David A. Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University. “But it’s perfectly understandable with what we know now about context and vision. Take the same image and put it in a bathroom, and you swear it’s a hair dryer; put it in a workshop, and you swear it’s a power drill.”
Workshop day begins: first the waka time on the river. Morning cycle down the river to the Putiki boat ramp, get there a little early, and feel the nerves as to what is possible with the workshop. There have been numerous anticipatory conversations in the last days about what I will be doing. I take a small paper with thought-notes and put it in my life-jacket pocket.
I am fighting with the impression that there is a superfluity of input for the participants — some have not been on a river or so. My dilemma becomes a question of when to jump in and alter the flow of events and protocols which accompany the waka and the enveloping and powerful Maori cultural scenario. It makes no sense to do anything other than participate. Where full participation is a position, an approach to an eventuality of contingent life-flow. I am observing the processes and vibes that are coalescing, seeing if there is a auspicious moment to intervene, but I see none. Back to participating. Enjoying it all. The newness, but also the familiarity and comfort which the Maori protocol applies to that (community-facing) unknown, and The River. more “workshop – Day 9 – eNZed”
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place: Blue Mountains National Park, Katoomba, NSW, Australia
brutal day, too late to change it: deciding to go out to the closest bush access — the Blue Mountains National Park up at Katoomba to check it out — bad weather, but this is the only opportunity to go before leaving for New Zealand on Friday. I suppose it is the rough equivalent of hitting Yosemite or so (not near the grandeur of Yosemite, but the proximity and intensity of being a tourist attraction, they get three million folks up here every year). a 90-minute train ride from Sydney Central up the hill to Katoomba Station. decide to fuel-up at a cafe in town first, do some writing, pick up on the vibe. then head south from town on foot to the edge of the main escarpment of resistant Triassic Hawkesbury sandstone that Katoomba sits on. pouring rain by the time I get an hour out. thankfully I have full Goretex on which is useless. so, drenched to the point that it makes no difference. more “drenched”
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place: en route Prescott, Arizona - Tehachapi, California
head towards Livermore via Amboy and Tehachapi. somehow over-conscious about this being a road-trip as I follow former pathways, familiar, horizons both distant and near are recognized at many various moments, rocketing down the defense inter-state. and the emblem of Route 66 stenciled on that pathway between Needles and Ludlow. the once-abandoned Roy’s gas station and motel in Amboy now a neo-post-modern stop-over, huh? and seeing a few monuments to the patriotic dead along the way. and finally, closing in on Tehachapi near sunset, a major fire happening in heavy wind immediately south of town in rugged hills not two miles from where I camp for the night in Tehachapi Mountain Park. hardly anyone around, surprisingly enough. the road in is steep as are the individual campsite slots. I set out a bed on a tarp on the powdered and dusty ground. nose is aware of fire all night, it Lights dreams, though the wind is carrying the force of the blaze to the north away, away, towards Death Valley. houses burn.
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place: Upper Pool Creek Canyon, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado
Two days here in Echo Park already. Three nights, one night alone, Friday and Saturday there were a couple of people in, then tonight, Sunday, no one around at all. A bit creepy, especially with the mountain lion kill I just discovered over in the middle of the walk-in camping site. Saw that on the way back from Mitten Park this afternoon. Been thinking of the cougars the whole time I’ve been here. Seeing evidences of kills scattered widely across the entire space. Wondering what the total range is for a single cat? I just don’t want to meet one. Having fantasy imaginations, and on the way back from Mitten Park had composed an Ode to the Puma, not able to memorize it sufficiently to record it, but recite it loudly on the way back.
The trail is choked with small purple flowers where it starts from Echo Park. Then there are the vague petroglyphs, then one set of rafters float by, small against Steamboat Rock. Looking at things great and small, it’s all relative to the eye, and the unfolding context.
Eight years ago, I leave a stone from Iceland in a cavity of the standing carcass of a burned piñon, the stone is now gone. Where?
posted
place: Pat's Draw, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado
hike up Pat’s Draw and around the fault area, up a steep talus slope below the high scarps of Harper’s Corner, as far possible, and even some slow trundling down some very unstable and steep terrains. Seeing more 12-16-point elk racks, more mountain lion kills, and the weather is warm.
How to transcend the rigidity of extant and defined protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is an emetic for it; or at least poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol. Or simply turning away to create a new protocol. But this threatens social viability. This is a critical issue as protocol underlies all techno-social deployments. All. And the affect of protocol, its genesis, its makers, its purview, all contribute to the formation of a (dominant) worldview that it imposes a(n arbitrary) frame of reference upon the participant in the particular techno-social system. On the other hand, life without protocols: an impossible situation for social animals (or any animal, for that matter — a protocol may be thought of as a way of going, whether self-directed or directed by innate sense and following the line of maximized entropy production).
This conundrum applies to all (socially) evolved protocols, no matter the genesis. It means that this pervades and saturates, all experiences of being (except perhaps for the pre-human, or over-human). On The Poetics of Protocol, a working title moving towards a core thematic. Using the metaphor of a sliding scale, at one end, chaotic ways of going, at the other, completely prescribed ways of going, life falls somewhere in between.
Having to jump between several points-of-view — the tremendous volume of applicable writing on the range of subjects; a strong, principled, and unifying overview tied to idiosyncratic personal experiences; and, finally, the mental focus required to tie all this jetsam together — the jump has to be transformed into a creatively complied micro-narrative. But looking around at the plethora of source materials is always discouraging — in form and content. The inability to structure my own content into a form consistent with the material that I consume is disturbing, though idiosyncratic expression is one of the goals for PhD research. (Inconsistency has potential to uncover innovative spaces and may be used as a strategic tool or approach.) So this can be viewed as a strategic advantage in the creative interpretation and packaging of the material. Content-wise, I am confident of the presence of something to say, as well as a subsequent pathway-of-action reflecting what is said. Daunting task none-the-less, from any vantage.
Seeing from more than one point-of-view requires motion or at least movement between points of stasis. Does the establishment of a point-of-view require a cessation of movement? (Motion of course is completely relative regarding point-of-view: life is never static so point-of-view never absolutely static.)
Do humans (life-forms) exert control over environments by modifying flows to help them re-member and stabilize their forms? To form them in a way that resonates within their energized neural storage regime (life-form)? Probably not, as from a bio-thermodynamic point of view, life exerts control (simply) in order to deplete energy gradients (according to the authors of Into the Cool, an exploration of NET (non-equilibrium thermodynamics) and its relation to life/living systems).
Or can this even be considered a control process, this interaction of modifying flows? Or is it merely part of the cumulative (dynamic) process of life as an engagement of the entropic/negentropic fundamentals of the universe?
I realized that in Regime of Amplification I got the terminology a bit wrong — focusing on the anisotropic concentration and rarefaction of energized matter as the fundamental condition (as driven by gravitational forces). When it is the gradient between the two situations which is of primary interest and importance. — a bit similar to seeing only the elemental yin and yang instead of the overarching dynamic unity, the taijitu. So, a rewrite is in order — to look at the transitional state rather than (theoretical and limited) end-states.
the play of reification. when mind stops, not confronted by any particular obstacles, but merely by an inertial lag. lacking the energy to proceed. while outside weather changes, un-noticed, unless it is rain. it has fallen below the threshold of modern awareness. inside people. like writing here. slipped by the side of lived be-ing.
wander over to to the Art Gallery of NSW to catch a screening of Gimme Shelter. flashing-back to Ancien Régime of mid-century Amurika, seeing the radical youth of that time — youth who are now retiring boomers fighting to keep a big slice of pie — what’s theirs by right, eh? bah!
a stroll out to Sculpture by the Sea, an uneven sprinkling of expressions placed along the Bondi-Bronte path. Shar says the water is 19.5C, gettin’ there. I’ll be in before long. inflammatory Thai dinner after that.
Willy and Andy unveiled a new blog, a collaborative effort covering “absolutely everything.” Welcome to the blogosphere folks!
more about nomadism in a book so dense with academic double-speak I decide to deal with it by simply riffing through pages and seeing what appears on random pages. this particular passage reasonable, very reasonable, but clearly not from lived experience, more a constructed philo-reality from textual reportage. I can say, been ‘dere, done dat.
With the nomad as the living embodiment of the rootless, the homeless, and the boundless comes a perpetual displacement — if not elimination — of a series of conceptual couples (such as inside/outside, central/peripheral) that traditionally demarcate and define our social space. Embodying the boundless, the nomad disregards lines that insist on separating space, that predefine and hence foreclose the original open. Within the boundless space, each point is as central (and for that matter, just as peripheral) as any other point.
But the boundlessness of the space in which the nomad roams also affects his experience of and relation to time. The boundlessness of space makes the nomad a perpetual traveler, and perpetual traveling can only mean the nonexistence of final destination, Without destination, the nomad can afford to be oblivious of time. The nomad does not have to be on time. This, in fact, is the nomad’s only luxury, which comes from rock-bottom poverty or, from a different point of view, from total freedom, of going-no-where. — Briankle G. Chang, “Deconstructing Communication”
decided not to acquire any new digital traces of movement and seeing until the new path opens fully. lunch with Norie yesterday begins a mapping of the process. meeting with a variety of Others. most completely unknown. stimulating but exhausting. housing still not 100% settled, at all. but a bed for the sleeping in the small studio space with the palm tree and the Cooks River out the window.
I stick around for Chris’ 50th as his folks, John and Barbara, also come into town on their way between Iowa and Tucson. nice to catch up with them. Barbara reminds me about her chocolate-chip cookies when she mentions she doesn’t have any with her. this references the care packages she would send to Chris when he and I were room-mates back at 148 Washington in Golden — she would usually include a tin of her fabulous cookies which Chris would share generously. got to snag the recipe someday. or, film her making them.
all this visiting. catching up. exploring territories. hearing stories. mapping out lives. recitations, prognostications on weather and politics and social systems. sampling lives. and seeing time pass forwards inexorably.
keeping up appearances (the cost of social participation), requires energy. energy paid into the system. (was this the lament of the Man?) versus what? appearing as The Self is and allowing for personal idiosyncrasy, proceed with no particular thought as to impact, just to channel what comes in life.
Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART … EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who — from his state of freedom — the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand — learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER. — Joseph Beuys
Prof. Fred Henderson III of Mount Princeton Geothermal, LLC, meets us in the late morning (thank goodness!) for a briefing on the geothermal development that he is overseeing in the area. the ultimate goal is a heat-exchange/re-injection power plant based on several high-flow wells into the hot spot that drives the hot springs. he then takes us on a two-hour tour of the area mapping out the geological regime and sharing some of the development info for the geothermal prospect. the major problem in the valley (of Chalk Creek) is the complexity of property ownership and the density of residential development. this entire area is carved up in relatively small lots with homes and is a very desirable location, so people will fight any drilling, piping, whatever is necessary for the plant, this, knowing it is an alternative energy source which will offset some of the coal-fired electricity production that the West is so dependent on. the coal plant that supplies them with electricity is out of sight, though, and there are sure to be a minority who will resist anything remotely industrial in appearance while the mountains fade into the growing coal haze.
the last stop is at a recently completed well that officially has the highest recorded heat gradient in the state of Colorado. I do a portrait of Frank and his wife there, it’s on her property.
(noting that the Chalk Cliffs for which the canyon is named are not actually chalk but rather hydrothermally altered Precambrian granite which in places will crumble in the hand, while those unaltered are hard as … rock!)
after the tour, a last slow soak with those rust-e folks still left, then reluctantly descending from the mountains, in conversation.
