Artificial Day
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd as to know only artificial day. ― Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928
Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification
Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):
The Regime of Amplification
Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!
*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.
die Mauer
Gah, it was twenty-five years ago (today) … seems I was busy, very busy in 1989. In August, Stefan, Debra, Magga and I headed for Kassel from Köln and then on to Berlin. Through the huge Charlottenburg checkpoint, past the Soviet tanks, after the surreal drive on the lousy autobahn where, if you stopped the car, you could be shot. We had a nice flat somewhere in the West, don’t recall where in the Western Sector, a friend-of-a-friends. We entered the East through Checkpoint Charlie for a long day which started out at the Soviet Culture Center, went on to a impromptu visit with a photographer, Micha Brendel, (who I learned of from my gallerist in Lyon, France, Raymond Viallon — and whose work resonates with the presence of the Stasi State) and finally ended up at a youth music festival somewhere up the Spree on an island. The high-point was trying to find food to eat and only locating one restaurant where, of the handful of items on the menu, they had only one. Much more could be said, but I just want to the get the images up (a couple days too late, but).
Earlier that summer I had noticed several things—the first was the not-insignificant fact that the super-sonic overflights by the US military along the Eifel region (and Köln) had ceased since the previous summer when one would hear them on a regular basis. Germany had reclaimed its airspace from the occupying power. And secondly—easily as profound as Reagan’s tear down this wall Mr. Gorbachev! stunt—I saw, but regretfully did not document, posters in the Vienna underground featuring Mr. Gorbachev in his fedora and heavy winter coat with a hand raised, palm facing outwards, and the simple text Lay Down Your Arms!. As far as I noticed, there was no other text or attribution, and I did not remark about it to my friends who I was visiting. I thought to myself—this is profound, and more profound things are on the way. My German friends would not accept the idea that a major paradigm shift was on the way. I was not surprised in November 1989 when it happened!
we take it…
We take as axiomatic that information is instantiated in matter through the particular arrangement of its components in space and time. This arrangement defines a unique relationship among the components, which can only instantiate information if it is stable and therefore persists as a configuration in space over a line in time. When two or more such configurations are brought into association, there is a combined arrangement, which if persistent, also instantiates information: that of both components plus that of their association. The Shannon information of the combined configuration is given by the product of probabilities of each component configuration (less any mutual information). Thus the ‘surprise’ is in finding this new whole, is in general greater than that for each of its component parts. Nested construction of increasingly complicated configurations of matter may proceed this way and thereby constitute an increase in information content in the Shannon sense. Most significantly, when configurations combine into stable forms, they do so by presenting context for one another: the information of each is functional information for the other, enabling greater function than that of the sum of parts.
Farnsworth, K.D., Nelson, J. & Gershenson, C., 2012. Living is information processing; from molecules to global systems. Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.5908.pdf.
This calls for broad-spectrum Dialogue in the sense of what I have defined (for example) as Dialogue. That it begins to bring a greater holistic knowledge (in)to persistent agency.
give me your time
Give me your time, give me your space, your eyes, your ears: this is the mantra of the Self. I give you my time, I give you my space: this is the mantra of the Self, the self released from the bonds of egoism. I give you my self.
Watching tears well up and begin to fall. Where do they come from? And what will become of them? Feeling tears well up and fall. It’s a bit of a puzzle, the neurons that resonate between two (or more) bodies. There are the shared events of social adhesion: nationalistic synergies, mass tragedies, and the spectacles of sensual attraction. These are not the true resonances of the soul. Souls play together in the strangest of circumstances.
And networks proceed at the speed of life. Something I’ve been saying for years.
Julian’s TWOi
Julian Priest (DK/NZ) (aka, “an excited geek”) launches (literally!) an “orbital artwork” as part of the kicksat project that the went into orbit yesterday piggy-backed on the CRS-3 Dragon ISS Resupply Mission. The Weight Of information is anchored (in space!) by a transmitting pico-satellite that will orbit for three weeks before burning up on re-entry. Around the active orbital period, several global Meet-to-Delete events will take place. Stay Tuned and track the satellite here!
yup
When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars – pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience.
. . .
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.
Beston, H., 1976. The outermost house: a year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, Harmondsworth, NY: Penguin.
MiT: privacy (and reflecting on presence)
Drop in on Diane’s MiT class this morning in the large ATLS100 lecture room — she’s covering privacy issues. Huge class — I think she’s got more than 100 students enrolled. Quite different than my section of 38.
Surveillance, privacy, monitoring, searching, tracing, 1984, algorithmic filtering and screening of dataspace (face recognition, etc), Mugshots; the students had an assignment to do a name-search on a partner to find out as much as possible. Sitting near the back of the room, a majority of students are paying almost no attention to Diane — instead doing the usual retinue of screen-based tasks — other homework, Facebooking, shopping, and so on. This is disappointing in that it highLights the contemporary situation where even a highly-rated (entertaining!) university teacher is not really engaging the students. In a class of one hundred, filled with mediating screens, what should one expect. Human engagement between teacher and student has been lost in the shuffle of money/power that has become US academia.
Presence is projected out from the Self in a variety of ways — mediated and unmediated, well, always mediated by something: body heat by air (as thermal energy arising from energized interactions, catalyses, and transformations within the body). Presence is more and more being pushed (expressed) into what may be called technological networks. Distributed into more and more finely atomized (digitized!) fragments, and more and more widely distributed in both space and time. Coded, derived, lost in the data-space. When presence is so diffused into that space, we lose what we have here, now. Gone. No chance for an energized encounter when Selves are all pointed away from each other and thoroughly atomized…
evolving spaces
An example of the sliding-scale metaphor I use often in teaching — that whatever dialectically opposed concepts (i.e., networks vs hierarchies) the actuality of the situation is that neither exist in a pure form, but instead exist always in hybrid collision of dynamic evolution — in this case, a net/archy. Another instance (see this):
Smooth space and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space — the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus — are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously.
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. & Massumi, B., 1988. A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press. p 475.
well, the next step
hmm, well, another election. or so. Boulder voting 71% for Barack, and legalized pot. Amendment 64.
having fun with my students, they are struggling and coming up with what they can, the bar is high, the class can be harsh on presentation crits…
anyway, researching some Virtual Reality papers to pass on:
The modern notion of space is a compound metaphor that embodies all our concepts and experiences of separation, distinction, articulation, isolation, delimitation, division, differentiation and identity. The laws of perspective and of geometry for us are a codified summary of our normal experience of alienation, unique identity, and un-relatedness. It has all been abstracted, externalized, and synthesized into the cold, empty void we call space. This metaphor of space is our modern mechanism for avoiding the experience of oneness, of the chaos, of the ultimate state of unity to which the mystic seers and philosophers of all ages have referred.
Jones, R.S., 1982. Physics as metaphor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
the meta-structures of creativity
if creativity cannot be taught, cannot be ‘made’ to happen, how best to approach the assumption that it can be fostered or stimulated within situations?
one answer to this is a consideration of the meta-structure of flows that characterize a particular situation. I have talked about meta-structures elsewhere. to begin with, each instance itself is only ‘separated’ from everything else through a process of abstracted defining. separation is an abstraction, a reduction of the actuality of holistic, immersed, and connected being and presence. so, best not to consider separation, distinction, and particularities. rather, retain a sensibility to all possible flows, or flow in general. easy to say, despite the (English) language being wholly insufficient to deal with such concepts. (Csikszentmihalyi is pretty good at making a natural language argument for flow, though he comes from a completely different direction than me, the conclusions are similar, will explore that when I shuffle through some of the references…)
last things
The last group photo:
The last launch:
matters
Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property — variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass — can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity. — Frank Wilczek
Sometimes I get the feeling that I don’t recognize even my own life. Among the array of phenomena which present themselves for the sensual body-system every … second … recognition shouldn’t be necessary for any one of them, given that change is the governing principle, or so. All should be new every time, all the time(s), and thus recognizable whether or not there are any observable and (relatively) invariant* features. It could be that this lack of recognition is itself merely the reliance on external models or comprehensions of ‘what’s out there’ as opposed to a deeper reliance on what is experienced by the Self as being (relatively) invariant. more “matters”
teaching, and prayers
jump into the Multi-Platform Story-Telling course to join Jan in the first day of audio work. the students seem quite activated as they continue on the projects that they started in video, moving to four-minute audio pieces, then on to some photographic work, and finally I’m supposed to tie it all together on the ABC Pool site. the intent of the course is to aim at social networking concepts, although I find that the Pool site is a rather generic top-down implementation of contemporary social media. it doesn’t look sustainable except by a back-end maintenance infrastructure (funding infusion), and activities imposed by related institutions (universities) (attention infusion). if there’s time, I’ll make some inquiries on stats, although I doubt that those will be publicly available. most organizations don’t understand that substituting grass-roots impulses with centrally planned deployments simply doesn’t work. we’ll see. I feel like the course is 15 years too late.
by happenstance, walking back from lunch with Jan, note that the Islamic prayer space (split into two sides, one for men and one for women), is open for visitors. the LTU Islamic Students group is holding an Islamic Awareness Week: Islam: The Solution. we go in, and I end up staying for a couple hours, first listening to the general discussion, then jumping in to talk with some of the students. hard to gauge the affect of being an Amurikan in such a situation. there is one other Anglo fellow there, and the rest are from all parts of the Islamic world. interesting field of dialogue follows.
de-Facebooking
This space accreting, while the gradual shutting-down of FaceBook proceeds. After the Lightning trip from Yuma through Calexico on northward to the Bay Area and back 48 hours later with my original road-tripping partner, Gary, sheesh: 36 years compresses into careers, children, life-trajectories, and gas prices. That and a running dialogue on the nature of the cosmos and human relation.
Regarding the FaceBook wastage, well, it seems quite right for the moment, no regrets. When only a minuscule fraction of hundreds of ‘friends’ notice the departure. Mostly the ones who do are also ones who find the whole thing tiresome and distinctly artificial. The ones with thousands of friends notice nothing in that sea of being known and wanted, busy as they pump their status (statii?) by the moment. After being an early adopter, and a participant for a time, it does seem to be only an accumulation of attention-sucking life-dross. A prime example of how media can absorb our attention without limit — making consumable, for consumption, the textually and visually reduced detritus of be-ing. And presenting that as a worthy object of a sizable chunk of our social life-time. Of the same dimension as the proliferation of bottom, side, and top overlay graphics on cable teevee screens.
I discover that I have suffered no irretrievable loss as I squeeze down the feeds (media consumables, eh?) to nothing. No you-tube fragments, no important NYT articles, no photos of vacation travel, no banal ego-feeding status updates. I suffer no gaping existential holes in my existence on the planet. Down to 200 friends, slowly deleting all content, connection, and demarcation in the account so it will end as a shriveled husk, a dried dust mote falling from the data cloud.
I left FaceBook last week …
Emile writes to the point:
I left facebook last week
by EZ
tired of the mirrors, noise and eyes.
tired of prickly, intimate and fleshy human relationships being flattened into ‘friend’-nodes, the erasure of myth by constant visibility and exhausting availability.
what kind of network society do i want to support? a closed compound of willingly data-mined crayons or an open net of chance and unpredictability? more…
I am of the same mind, and had decided a couple months ago to do the same — at the end of February. I have found it most instructive that since I put this status up:
Capped by the Goldman-Sacks pseudo-IPO for the wealthy, and in light of the massive data-harvesting of everything posted here, I am leaving FB as of 01 March 2011 — if you are interested in staying in touch, email me chazhop at gmail dot com with your contact info before that time…
I’ve gotten all of four five responses in the last month and only one at the suggested email address — of around 500 ‘friends.’ It appears that the concept of ‘friend’ in the FaceBook space is quite completely divergent from that of my own conception of friend-ship. There is a bloated vacuity in the expressed presence that the applied protocol of FB requires as a condition of participation. I hate to pop your bubble.
Fred Arthur Nettelbeck 1950 – 2011
F.A. produced numerous chapbooks and alternative press publications. Not on many radars, but definitely expelling severe electro-magnetic radiation for the time he was around.
Demonic seconds of my history must not stop now. I am sober and writing this alone. No voice touch or folded skin of beings. I cannot remember. My father is a vapor inside a black box buried hundreds of yards behind my house. I have drunk the last of his beer. I have heard the last of his hollow laughter many long nights ago as coyotes joined in erasing tears, excuses, lies. I am left with what I have created of years. My structured words contained in slim volumes as proof that my face will not last. That here are many ways to spell a life. I cannot blame my vocabulary. I cannot blame the alcoholic seizures. I cannot blame the wet and sticky hours I have spent inside a woman. I cannot blame the relentless black night or the sun again. Again. As I still don’t give thanks for the days nor care to court the clock. Because I am owed millions of dollars. Because they don’t make enough damn booze to drink. Because you’re too stupid to understand. I am living here. As the stars punctuate all the past and future lives. I am living here. Possessed. — F. A. Nettelbeck
at the edges of the envelope of power projection
When approaching the edge of a protocol-driven projection of power, the first thing noted is that the edge is in flux, constantly. Depending on the metric flow of the power, and the metric flow(s) of the countervailing chaos, the edge will shift at any temporal and spatial scale. The juxtaposition of controlled and un-controlled situations represents a more-or-less steep gradient from directed to random (or directed to countervailing directed) flows. A good example to consider is the two polarized and hegemonic forces of the Cold War compared to highly ordered (Imperial) military systems being projected into poorly organized social systems.
The edges of hegemonic Cold War projections of power were often located in social spaces of great chaos. But these points-of-contact generally did not impinge on the monumental and rigid structures (enabling ideological rigidity) at the core of Empire. Empire shielded itself with layers of decreasingly ordered spaces. The borders as projected closest to the two primary centers of power were defined by rigidly controlled edges across which there were few incursions or expressions of chaos. Natural borders represent a special case of intervening ‘natural’ chaotic systems which provide a temporary or long-term barrier to impingement. However, a power nexus has to deal with that chaotic border itself to maintain reasonable order there for its own population.
The space containing a vacuum of power is quickly filled whenever there is a localized energy source of a great enough magnitude to fill that space. It is more slowly filled when there is no localized concentrations of power. Again, the maintenance of an ‘edge’ is really about the maintenance of a gradient of order with a certain steepness.
An Imperial power will be more strongly be drawn into vacuums merely by the steep gradient between its highly organized (military) system and that vacuum.
The protocols of nation-statehood (currently) define geographic boundaries of power projections. However, it is clear that these boundaries and the protocols themselves are constantly in flux and themselves are finally defined by balances of power-projection on both sides. (Consider a con-federation versus a republic.) The border on chaos is a border that is under the greatest threat of alteration (because of that steep gradient mentioned previously).
voice
Again, back to voice. Given the process of coalescing and erosion. In order to bind the grains of disparate disciplines, different socio-cultural systems, and idiosyncratic paths, a voice which allows some transcendence of localized protocols of communication is necessary. That voice must needs to be poetic in a fundamental sense. It need not have a particular density or timbre, but it does need to be located somewhere within and without any and all those disciplinary spaces, pores.
Is a poetic voice immediate or is it cumulative? It is supposed that the smallest increment or grain of uttered language, the phoneme can hardly be a poetic vocalization. So, maybe language is generally cumulative, accretionary, in that geologic sense of layered erosional deposition, reification, burial, uplift, and consequent re-erosion. In this instance, it is then possible to find a shiny-smooth cobble of, say, cloudy quartz. Well-balanced, raising expectations of imminent knowledge of something when in the hand, pleasing to the eye. What are its origins since arising from the heart of stars: silicon, oxygen. At one point following the gravitational accretion of the planet, the silicon was oxidized by some environment rich in oxygen. Silicon dioxide. Under pressure, super-heated, igneous differentiation allowed masses of these molecules to collect and form crystalline agglomerations within a cooling batholith. Uplift and erosion brings that raw mass to the surface where it is shattered slowly, washed by waters, and dragged downwards by gravity. The cobble is smoothed with many others, and buried with all those, pressure cementing them all again into a single mass, a conglomerate. Another uplift and erosional cycle breaks the conglomerate cement and releases this smooth stone into a creek bed, into a river, where it is further polished. Holding it in the palm, what is its voice? What does it say? How does it speak to its temporary holder? What does it say other that the mute message of gravity to be let down, to be given back to the earth? If the holder knows, they might read signs in the surface, in the raw presence of the thing-ness of the cobble. The signs point to histories and pathways. The reader has to understand the basic elements of those signs in order to create their own understanding as to the origin of the object. But of its pure presence, nothing need be known, but only the immediate experience of the Self in juxtaposition with this thing. Naming all this is the root of language.
Plucked from the poetic talus, the transformed erosional product of language, the cobble might be heaved through the wall of the proverbial glass house of culture, period. Howl.
endings – Day 11 – eNZed
I join the panel Social Energy with Zita Joyce, Caro McCaw, and Sally McIntyre along with a Skype from Eric (Kluitenberg) from late nite NL, half-way around the globe. It’s funny to cross paths with him here, but appropriate in the sense of the networking practice.
There was one point in his presentation that I had a serious disagreement with — when he posited that the remote half of a connection (in this case, a tele-presence ‘wall’ in a working environment), was ‘fantasy’ in the sense that it wasn’t ‘real.’ If I understood this correctly, I would totally disagree. It is rather a situation of sensory attenuation — the ‘presence’ of the remote Other is real, but attenuated (by the communications protocols between here and there). And it is in this attenuation where the loss and alienation from remoteness (and ultimately the frequent dysfunction of online events like ElectroSmog) arises. We didn’t get into it too far as there were other issues to talk about in the panel, but this one really was problematic. When assigning a ‘fantastical’ label to a real techno-social deployment we remove any (human) agency from it and push it into a phenomenal realm where it does not rightly fit. What is implemented is an expression of a human techno-social system — manifestations of this system are never fantasy.
Many good presentations, especially the comments from Mike Poa, the founder of the One River project with the waka on the Whanganui River. It’s hard to hear of yet another river suffering from the typical exploitation/development which ends up wasting the life of the entire watershed and its people. But then the efforts to revive the river culture seem to be pretty successful. The Maori are by no means quitters, and their cultural strength is significant. A couple days ago I spent part of an afternoon talking with a group of Maori women who were reviving/continuing the tradition of weaving baskets, they said that there was a very positive engagement from the young people.
It’s over, so, cleaning up the space and trucking everything back to the Green Bench or the house at the end of the afternoon.
The day closes with another delicious barbie at Don and Ana’s place, with the slow and mild twiLight falling.
workshop – Day 9 – eNZed
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”
Energy, Creative Action, and Sustainable Systems Workshop – Day 8 – eNZed
The official blurb for the workshop:
This workshop will draw on Hopkins’ international experience in facilitating creative encounters in the context of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. With an open structure for engaged and focused dialogue, the workshop will explore a powerful energy-based worldview that can open up new awareness of social, cultural, and natural systems. The dynamics of collaborative human relations confined within an attentive space is guaranteed** to generate provocative and inspiring outcomes. Creativity is, by definition, about the formative flow of energy between living organisms. We will move through a variety of environments (including on the river by waka) as we share life-time in the workshop. The workshop will augment the processes of any creative practitioner with a profound, situated, and practice-oriented conceptual toolbox that address the following areas and more:
(Keywords in no particular order): energy, creativity, thermodynamics, technology and techno-social systems, art, attention, entropy, learning, media, networks, participation, process, virtuality, creative action, human presence, Light, human encounter, mediation, concentration, optimization, pathways, meals, sustainability, simplicity, synchronicity, auspiciousness, and serendipity.
**on the condition that you bring along your entire Self, not merely your body, mind, and spirit
landed – Day 1 – eNZed
Up at 0400 to make the hugely early flight to eNZed. Had to be totally packed for the US as well, as I’ll have only another 20 hours back in Sydney, in transit between Auckland – Sydney – San Francisco.
A new country, a new place to visit. The national memorial service is happening when we land, so I manage to record a minute’s silence in the baggage claim. Some people were oblivious. People are watching the ubiquitous flat-screen teevees rather intently. The cost of extractives, but only the most obvious one.
The jump flight from Auckland down to Whanganui reveals both sides of possible landscapes. Massive clear-cut forestry in the highlands, and intensive farming in the more level areas — both with the attendant geomorphology of erosion features marring the terrain. Much has changed since colonization, surely. Then there are the remaining highland forests which are not yet decodable, having not met them on the ground.
Finally get into Whanganui, Julian picks me up at the airport in their 1988(?) Honda named Buzzy Bee (?) — a vehicle with a history, too bad I’m writing this in far distant retrospect, or elsewise I could relate the story. It was funny. Great to finally meet Julian, and we immediately start up a substantial dialogue as I am dropped into the whirlwind of family life surrounding the community effort aimed at the Greenbench (Gallery space) and the ADA Symposium. I tell him that I am at his service, and that, officially, my workshop starts now. It’s all about energy, presence, be-ing, and raising these topics in whatever contexts that arise in the next ten days.
The evening starts with a rousing performance of Aladdin by the children of the Brunswick School located in the countryside near Whanganui. Julian and Sophie’s three daughters recently started attending the school. This was followed by some photo-ops — meeting more of Julian’s family and other folks in the community — in the playground, as the soft, mild summer twiLight closed in.
Statement of Multi-Cultural Experience and Practice
With 20 years of experience with students from more than 40 countries and with educational organizations in 25 countries, I have a deep appreciation of the issues involved in multi- or trans-cultural education. My own practice as an educator looks at multi-cultural learning from both a pragmatic and a positive point of view. Pragmatically, for example, all of my classes in the past years are composed of students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. This simple fact brings to the fore in every situation the difficulties of language, and the cultural expressions that are deeply formed by language. Most often working under second-language conditions, I have honed my sensitivities to the relative speeds of comprehension and expression that second-language imposes and to the contingencies of difference that surface. Because difference is such a core creative source, I make it a practice in my workshops that students engage each other so as to open the potential pathways for creative collaboration.
It is tremendously important that a learning/creative situation is relevant to each particular student and that they feel comfortable enough to evolve and take on an experience that reflects a personal, internal source. Teaching in up to 20 different linguistic and cultural situations each year I have developed an appreciation for what is possible, what each distinct viewpoint opens up in a collective learning experience, and how personally relevant work may be seen as an inspiring source for peers. This kind of movement through radically different domains requires me to have a flexibility to engage and facilitate under widely varying conditions. While this is a constant challenge, it is one that I seek out for its richness, liveliness, and the consequential open space that arises when learners, myself included, are faced with the unknown — both inside the Self and inside the Other that they face. Because a fundamental concept of my creative work as well as my seminars and workshops is the facilitation of distributed (that is, non-hierarchic) network systems, I specifically deal with this human-to-human dynamic both in the conceptual/theoretical content as well as the lived practices that I stimulate in the classroom.
Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realize the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of tele-presence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the re-invigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favor of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits – most prominently in the intense debate on global warming – citizens and organizations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced tele-presence technologies.
ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility
The ElectroSmog festival for sustainable immobility, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of tele-presence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organized in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters.
The festival was organized at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
more “Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog”
underground space
the fluidity of leaking
What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.
The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. more “the fluidity of leaking”
performance space
From The Regime of Amplification to The Road
[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]
Abstract
The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.
Introduction
The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.
The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”
Empty Infinity
Without beginning, without end,
Without past, without future.
A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.
We forget one another, quiet and pure, altogether powerful and empty.
The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart and of heaven.
The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors the moon in its surface.
The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear.
Consciousness reverts to contemplation; the moon’s disk rests alone.
Wilhelm, R., 1962. The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, New York, NY: Harvest / HBJ Book.
Researching more of Wilhelm’s powerful translation work that continues to widen an opening door into an ultimately livable space. The dorsal/ventral (toku – nin or Circulation of Light) breathing technique elucidated here — even when practiced with flawed concentration — has an immediate and profound affect on the state of the system. I am even surprised with the intensity of change which ensues. The body is straighter, uplifted, and the balance of body heat has shifted drastically — the chronically over-heated head is cooler, the feet and hands warmer. This shift has not yet directly impacted rising gall (yang) in surprise (reactive) situations, but when the breathing becomes first nature, it appears to have the potential to do that. The base-line of calm has shifted for the better. Will have to consult Heiji about these affects. A daily practice of some minutes, with as many reminders shot through the many unconscious moments of non-breathing, seems to be an auspicious start. There is no going back on this discovered knowledge.
gah,
Got that one hurdle out of the way, though there is still the matter of the accompanying paper. I saw very clearly the interface between the institution and the wider world, where the protocol of the (semi-)ordered system imposes its particular form on the flow.
But, in the end, I may not be able to over-come the imposition of a protocol so polariz(ing)(able). The one person who coordinates the checking of unsatisfactory/satisfactory at this juncture did not seem to engage with my presentation at all. Except to point out that I satisfied precisely none of the assessment criteria. Were it a response that was nuanced, I could understand missing the mark, but with a complete rejection of the presentation, I find it a little over the top, and, well, disingenuous if the term intellectual engagement is being bandied about at the same time. If I didn’t have 20+ years of teaching with fifteen of it moving through this exact space of inquiry across tens of universities with hundreds of graduate students, I might be open to the idea that what I am articulating is not graspable or open to engagement, but in this case, I suspect some other mechanism was operating, what else can I do?
pro-vocative
over to Serial Space to meet Ian and see a screening of early works of his — tape-to-tape media collage works which work remarkably well, especially given their age. very interesting conversation ensues afterward with folks. a good sign of pro-vocative work.
Serial Space ambience
ad infinitum
After a long hiatus, the need to get back to work on this space surfaces. A continent away. A fiscal quarter later. And feeling like the speed of days is such that a chin-strap is necessary on the Tilley hat, though it’s not worn here yet, the sun is still in winter distance, and there’s not been enough of it (indoors too much) to warrant head-coverings.
Doctoral assessment time, in a couple weeks, though it would seem that the hoop to leap through is spacious. Or maybe specious — where casuists squabble over the use of meaning to construct be-ing.
But at least have joined the food coop, inspired by Ann-Marie’s dedication.
More soon. eh?
yurt raising
up early, wrestling with the rather small pile of parts — the lattice wall, the door, the skirting, and main fabric roof, insulation panels, rafters — but surprisingly little ‘stuff’ to make a whole house. yurt raising, surprisingly easy (except for a few points) with a small crew of smart folks, a few tools, a couple dogs, and about 6 hours total: no glitches; friends make a heli over-flight, and we chill out for a barbecue in early evening.
the particular points that I can recall: the fabric roof is DAMN heavy; the installation jig (wood tower) is essential (remember to attach firmly to floor!); even-ing out both the roof and wall fabrics is tricky; that’s where a crew of 5-6 is good. two people doing the job would be very tough if not impossible; cabling around the door frame is non-intuitive; all-in-all, it’s pretty darn easy, it was completely done by 1400, so, about 6 hours work. and it is a spacious and comfortable space.
on the Ark
long cycle ride with Bill first down the Ark which was partly over the bike path at one point. that made for a challenge going back up against the current in a foot or more of fast moving water — the river is definitely at spring flood stage! Then all the way back upstream to the Pueblo Dam which was open and blasting snow-melt downstream. pretty damn hot, but along the river in the shade of the huge cottonwood trees, all is chill. at the end of the ride, I was tuckered, but also impressed with the urban green-space development that Pueblo is undertaking.
leaving and heading south
Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.
Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…
more “leaving and heading south”
Trail Draw and Upper Pool Creek Canyon
An Outward Bound group rafts in, and are lectured to in the Trex seating arranged for “camp fire talks” here in the campground. I find it really bizarre, when there a thousand ‘natural’ places to sit for a dialogue, they make a bee-line to the plastic composite seats. I guess they got lectured on the tamarisk mitigation work around Echo Park, I didn’t ask, as I was too busy prepping for the day. They later went into the woods between the campground and the river and were doing something. Wonder if they saw the carnage I wrought on the tamarisk behind site #7! more “Trail Draw and Upper Pool Creek Canyon”
end of the road
Start to try making time-lapse sequences from the immediate surroundings. Lousy and/or old equipment, a quasi-functioning power system, and the results show it. Add a portable generator, a better tripod, longer cabling, a 3-CCD camera with chip memory (ah to be free of tape!), and a laptop with a battery that lasts longer than the start-up sequence. I’m ready to cash in some of my retirement piddle to cover it. Maybe $10K I could get away with all of it, including a decent audio recorder? That, along with a better 4WD truck and I’d be part of the pseudo-elite for once. hah. So, anyway, now, marooned in Echo Park by the intense weather, (I was warned, fair enough, but I told the ranger that I wasn’t planning to come out until Friday next at least, anyway, so things should dry up by then, and that I had enough supplies for at least two weeks if not more). Stormy already today, late morning, humidity pulled the clouds up, and while attempting some decent time-lapses, it gets worse. What else is new? Maybe I end up sitting in the car just writing. There are rain filaments across to the north.
Cutting tamarisk growth behind camping site (#7) to feed the fire. Keeps mind busy, with flinging sharp blade biting into hard wood. No help around in case of an accident. This sharpens the wits. more “end of the road”
Mitten Park
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?
back on the road
Transit of Utah. From west to east, along a winding trajectory from desert to forest to desert, oil drilling, wind power, gas stations, Mormon farms, gold mines, high-security military bases, municipal alarm towers scattered across the landscape — for warning the population surrounding the bases where testing of bio- and chemical-warfare devices is ongoing — warning them of impending disaster. Continuing on the isolated Pony Express Trail, then descending into populated areas. Calling ahead to Dinosaur to see about road conditions. Plenty of snow on the Uintahs, plenty! At the last minute after checking out the Green River campground on the Utah side, I get word that the Echo Park road is open. So, gas up, including the extra tank, and head in from Jensen. Excellent weather, and finally arriving, no one else around, very good. Get the pick of the few camp spaces, #5, 7, and 9 are the best for shade, seclusion, and access to firewood — though shade is not the issue at this time of year, more important would be the access to morning sunshine to warm up — but since there’s no one else around, I can use the #6 picnic table in full sun in the morning for breakfast. So, I take #7 and offload/set-up quickly: already charged at being here once again…
CLUI residency — Energy of Situation
Some final words on the residency period:
Energy of Situation
Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).
Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”
CLUI: Day Twenty-Six – Caxcanes Musical
More fire-exercises from the platoons who have taken up residence across the street. They have set up two camouflaged observation/guard posts and are firing from these positions towards the rail-road tracks, their comrades playing insurgents, firing pretend mortars from 200 meters away. The mis-en-scene is completed with colored smoke screens and a sniper who sets up in the tumbleweed.
In the evening I end up at the Wendover Night Club, what could be called a seedy joint in the corner of The Plaza strip mall that includes, what else, a stripper club complete with an Italian-looking bouncer sitting on a stool at the door, cigarette hanging from his mouth; there’s a Chinese restaurant, a smoke shop, and a computer gaming store.
I end up going to the Night Club because last week, one evening, I could hear some loud what I would term proto-Mariachi music playing within earshot of the residency. I put off going to check it out, but finally out of curiosity I drove in the direction of the music. End up four blocks away in one of the old airbase buildings. I pull up to see a group of swarthy-looking Latino guys hanging out. The music has stopped. I don’t know what they were thinking when I came up, gringo in shorts with white Crocs on, at any rate, turns out they are a band, Caxcanes Musical, most of the members are from the Mexican state of Zacatecas (the Caxcan are an indigenous group: Los caxcanes, lidereados por Tenamaxtle, peleaban bajo el lema ¡Ashcanquema tehual nehual! ‘¡Hasta tu muerte o la mía!’. Y el lema se cumplió, tanto en el triunfo como en la derrota. Ante la desproporcionada respuesta de los invasores, los guerreros prefirieron morir lanzándose al vacío.) I chat with them for a bit and though I’m sure they are thinking el gringo loco, they seem pleased at my enthusiasm and invite me to catch them at the Club in the Plaza.
I’m clearly the only gringo at the Club — at least I can order in Spanish! And I get there on time, as I don’t want to miss the show. On time from the time the guy gave me when I get to the empty Club at nine pm. He says the music starts at ten pm. He didn’t tell me there are three warm-up bands — or groups, not to be confused with bands. I hang out nursing a Coors. At any rate, I survived the first group, Tambura los Primos — audio is extant, then my memory card filled up on the H4 and I couldn’t figure out how to properly erase files to clear up space for the other groups. The whole scene was quite cool — clearly a rural audience, the guys with their really pointy shit-kickers and Stetsons, dancing with their gals in a stilted waltz move with the arms and hands never quite intertwined. Reminded me of country-folk in Finnish Lapland doing the tango on Midsummer’s night parties. Anyway, a fun evening, and I think they will play again on Cinco de Mayo which actually be on the second of May before I split for nether regions.
CLUI: Day Thirteen
A long cycle ride south from South Base, the (doh!) southern part of the airbase. Into the region down-range of the heavy machine-gun target range and where fragments of mock-up Little Boy bombs (prepped with high explosives, not nukes) may be found along with tens of thousands of rounds of oxidized-green-sheathed bullets scattered everywhere on the surface of the playa. The cycling is a bit surreal when surrounded by mountains floating on silver lakes. Lots of effort into the wind, but otherwise, it’s a flat out ride. Slight differences in the surface texture, and then the human altered areas — the dikes and drainage berms of the saline concentrating solar evaporation ponds.
Then there are the bunkers and V-1 test area. Matt said the casinos use a couple bunkers for records storage, as does the city of Wendover. The Simparch-designed CLUI South Base Clean Livin’ center is a cool space — completely self-contained with a PV electricity system, gray water recycling system, and a composting toilet. Along with the refurbished Quonset hut it makes for a homey post-nuclear space for quiet meditation.
CLUI: Day Twelve — Silver Island Mountains
Neal makes it in from London after last weeks aborted attempt from having the flu.
A loop north around the Silver Island Mountains paralleling the Bonneville Salt Flats traces many textures of rock, sky, and the interface between. Numerous forays away from the truck into the landscape, looking at everything, smelling everything, hearing … nothing … or so. The space vehicle rumbles onward on the bad road. Bad road. All bad roads lead away from, further away from, Rome.
Leave the car, be here now. The desert commands that (or the fearful response, deny here now, and insulate the embodied self from any manifestation of here, get back to the car, now).
Turning to the west at the north end of the mountain fault-block, I am suddenly met by five huge white Maremma (or Great Pyrenees?) sheep dogs, each over 100 pounds, ready to shred whatever fleshly appendages might be protruding from the truck. They were guarding a sizable flock of sheep who were busy razing the already marginal winter foliage. gah, why they allow sheep farming up here, I’ll never know—the BLM’s “multi-use” philosophy destroying what land cover there is left in this place. The circuit continues across the playa from Pilot Peak and on to Leppy Pass and a human installation.
(Ed. note — have solved the image gallery as you can see. Seems to be relatively glitch-free and less work than my previous solutions. This is one image from a number — Pennsylvanian-Permian-aged lime/mud-stones, highly contorted. Do hope to get all of them up from this trip so far, sooner than later. But there is so much code to do for that — I still haven’t settled on a means to display images on this blog — there are several pre-packaged plug-ins for WordPress in this regard, but I haven’t decided. Not going to Flickr things nor use Facebook as the data management and control is passed off to those cloud services (not to mention the perverse End-User Licensing Agreement terms). The travelog blog means was good, but the file structure of WordPress does not lend itself to any automation if I use that older technique, and I desperately want to get out of the manual compilation work that I have been doing all along. It’s incredibly time consuming and easily bunged-up with (simple) code errors. Ach, as this site evolves into its 16th year, it remains something of a millstone, given the relative paucity of traffic (1 – 2,000 hits a day total).
CLUI: Day Two
Get out to the grocery store, the only one in town, and a slow drive through town. It does seem like a differential planet. The Latino population is about 80% — workers in the casinos, and the rest are the owners and operators. An obvious imbalance. A majority of housing is either single- or double-wides, or, on the (impoverished-for-lack-of-casinos) Utah side, shacks surrounded by the flotsam of personal disorder — a metric of the desirability of energy expenditure on arrangement. Some of the lots approach the structure of middens in this. Middens are primarily defensive in function, shielding the inhabitant from predatory intrusion. Matt showed me one example here on the airbase, of an old man whose place was beyond being a junkyard, it was an accretionary gravitational field for (all) matter. But since his recent death, an increasing level of disorder was applied. Clearly, there is the possibility to distinguish between an active and an abandoned midden.
Otherwise, listening to the space, and, through the now sparkling south windows, watching the heavy weather rip through. Snow, sleet, hail, wind.
Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Watch the (Hollywood) movie Above and Beyond about Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29, Enola Gay, that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “Gripping mellerdramer!” as my father would say, wandering through the teevee room on his way to his workshop or darkroom or outside to work on the car or the yard.
CLUI: Day One
Matt pushes off towards Salt Lake City for a flight back to LAX. I roll up sleeves, literally, and begin the task of altering yet another environment to conform to my needs and to optimize my time here. Cleaning is very necessary as I’m the first resident of the year — the center is normally closed from the end of November to the beginning of April. So, raising the level of order with the input of human life-energy and life-time. Scrubbing floors, wiping down shelves, polishing windows, moving furniture, vacuuming and wiping down everything (ceiling vents, floor, blinds, window sills, chairs, tables — everything has a coating of fine dust on it such that touching it leaves the hands dirty — opening all storage areas and inventorying everything, wiping down all devices, drawers, walls, surfaces). This will take days of sporadic effort, but today is completely used up, late into the night. Bringing things in from the truck, looking at the damage to the bike rim and roof rack, figuring out the food situation. Rearranging the kitchen and living spaces. Looking through the library to see what should be looked at more closely. And so on. Settling in for the duration.
en route
At Linda Leas cafe in Kanab, locals, non-Mormons pursue another religion—worship of java—across the street from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. After the first night out. Wishing for a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to give a greater degree of risk possible. Snow or rain threatening in forecasts, and bentonite clay roads are impassable when wet. The guy working the BLM desk, old, over-weight, tobacco stains his white mustache brown, makes the warnings. He has to talk to foreign tourists and downstreamers a lot, surely. Folks who haven’t a clue about how it works out here. The Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument is so large, and the country so unforgiving, surely they have to scrape up the dessicated or flash-flood saturated remains of folks every year. On the other hand, this is no monkey-wrench territory anymore, it’s just a place for cheap virtual entertainment via wheeled vehicles — SUV’s — with windows. Maybe some stars glimpsed, a whiff of juniper blossoms firing off tart pollen.
Typing like I can’t get over it. Wanting to find something to use, utilize, make happen, profit from, in this movement, this travel, across these space. Spaces that have so little to offer in transit, and less to offer when living, settled, in them. Nothing arrives. Nothing comes. Even with some caffeine enhancement via cappuccino. (Cappuccino here, wondering about the spread, propagation, of cappuccino across Amurika). In territories defined by the dominance of thin and watery drip-grind served by waitresses named Flo or Blanch, in stainless diners. Now, instead, cafes with multi-colored chalk menus on the walls, starting with espresso, then cappuccino, then lattes, and so on, with as many permutations as the local consumers demand to enhance their sensibilities. Retro interiors: Naugahyde, Formica, Vinyl, Linoleum, garage-sale vintage, cluttered.
Accident intrudes on the evening hunt for a place to camp. Again the bentonite clay plays a significant role. Up from Paragonah, into the National Forest a few miles along Red Creek Canyon, and the road starts to get wet, then snow-covered, no match for my vehicle, reach a zenith and decide to backtrack. With no turn-around except back a quarter-mile, I start backing, and a bit too fast, get caught in some old tracks in the mud and bingo! In the very muddy ditch up to the axle, with an overhanging branch almost completely ripping the bike rack off the roof. Shiite! Climb out the passenger side window, shaken, cursing, looking at the graying sky and approaching dusk, and knowing the forecast for bad weather.
upheaval
Upheaving, upheaval. Testing dependence and independence. Just when the path looks stable, where the knowns gradually coagulate to staunch the in-and-out-pouring stresses of un-knowing; the flow is not turbulent, the road is straight and wide, with interesting terrains somewhere up ahead. Then one finds a dip, through a desert wash, unseen just a short distance away. In this dip is a mess of flash-flood debris, and a double-fork in the road: change comes along with deep choices to be made between diverging pathways. One is obscured by the morning fog of oracle’s lack, so that what lies ahead cannot be distinguished; the other way may be seen, but with curves that carry it quickly out of sight. The third apparently climbs out of the one dip, and is the road that one perceived from a distance to be the straight and wide, but turns out that there are many dips, as when crossing a wide alluvial fan spreading out from the base of a mountain canyon.
Then there is the idea of the bush-whack. A process that forgets the roads and launches out into the countryside, a self-determined goal in sight or hinted at by the terrain to cover. The bush-whack presumes a base, often, with measured forays out on a daily basis, rather than a continuous and wearing, un-remitting confrontation of the unknown. It is the frontiersman, one who stays at the edge of stable regions, the fraying or un-formed edges. One foot in, one foot out. Solitary. Progress not determined by forward motion, but rather by the growing determination to remain in motion at all. That is progress, in the Light of how life comes and goes, the determination to continue is a hard kernel around which to wrap the discoveries that occur along the way.
My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.
From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.
Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.
Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.
Ah, my friends, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.
But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.
But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. — Hermann Hesse