portrait, urchin at the train station
group portrait, 4th graders
group portrait, dancers
politicians and the media
![Contemporary politicians and the media ... [Montgomery County Fair, Gaithersburg, Maryland, August ©1985 hopkins/neoscenes.]](https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/1985-27-29.jpg)
Research is …
Research … is the exploration of the unknown. It is speculative, uncertain. It cannot be standardized. It succeeds, moreover, in virtually direct proportion to its freedom from performance controls, production pressures and traditional approaches … To be effective, new devices must be the responsibility of a group of enthusiasts whose attentions are undiluted by other conflicting responsibilities.”
Dr. Vannevar Bush’s Congressional testimony quoted in New Developments Division, War Department Special Staff, History of New Developments Division, War Department Special Staff, c. Apr 46, pp. 4-5. Manuscript in OCMH.
Dialogue and Learning
My educational philosophy is built on the existence of a simple phenomena that I observe on a daily basis while moving through life. It is this — where two people can come together and have an encounter. If this encounter is at least somewhat free of conventional social strictures, and the two individuals are able to find an open path for the sharing of their life-times and energies, there arises a special situation. Following this encounter the two might step away from this encounter, both are inspired, both with an excess of energy circulating within themselves, both at a higher energy level than when they arrived an the instance of the encounter.
It is this excess of energy arising from the situation that becomes a source of creative action.
This is a fundamental in learning: To face the unknown Other, to find an open pathway for an exchange of energies, and experience the potential of energy exchange.
The degree of openness in the encounter is heavily influenced by the techno-social system that the two individuals are embedded within and the meta-conditions of their encounter.
Moving away to a wider perspective, a classroom is a multiplicity of these dialogues that have the potential to generate absolutely relevant knowledge and experience sets for/among all participants in the encounter process.
As an educator and facilitator, it is my role to change the characteristic of the space/conditions for the encounter such that there are more possibilities for it to find or create open pathways. One primary task is to be aware of and push back at least a subset of the imposed social relations/protocols that govern the encounter in order to uncover possible alternative pathways for creative collaboration.
for college students
A piece of advice: seek out the best profs. Once you land at your school, ask around, look over any “outstanding teaching award” lists, online for advice, look around to see what students are producing interesting work (find out their teachers). good teaching / great teaching will push you into the indeterminate space of being-here-now. it is at that moment you are open to the Unknown and that openness is a state to cultivate no matter how maddeningly intense it might feel.
granted, I know this is a boot-strapping situation. knowing a good prof when you encounter one: what’s that mean?
hmm. well. listen to small interior voices. I say small in that they are not the loudest, usually, except in a transitory way — you might wake up with a particularly boisterous one on a particular day, it’s probably good to give some passing attention to it. but what I call ‘voices’ here are not linguistically-defined, they are the resonances of intuition which are not reductive abstractions as language or protocol are, they are pre-linguistic. so, technically, they are not ‘voices’ at all. or even aural/sonic. they are merely ‘vibrashuns.’ got it? it’s where you find yer mojo. with yer mojo operating properly (as a transmission-reception mode), you will be able to suss out the best profs, eh?
stay tuned (who stay’s tuned anyway, these days?) for more. [noting, sadly, the redundancy of this mode of writing anyway]
more cutting room floor
I think of you often.
If fundamental presence is so ever-present, immersive, why would we want or need more than that? Indeed, is there anything more than gradations of changing presence through which the Self and the Other engage, given the limitations imposed by embodiment? Perhaps not. It may be that this is the ground-state that Buber posits as the source of reality: shared presence. We have this pervasive base condition of flowing presence, but we do seem to desire more. We sporadically, haltingly, seek to optimize the conditions of inspiring encounter through the focused direction of our creative energies: more and better, higher and deeper, electric be-ing expressed and re-expressed. We seek to have those expressions subsequently received, reciprocated, reflected, refined, absorbed, by the Other: this process measured by the evinced substantiation of embodied change within them. Does this desire for more arise from the experiential affirmation that deeper and more attentive presence somehow brings more Life into our lives? Or is it simply a reaction to deep-seated fears of the unknown and of loss that arise as we experience the changing flows that constitute our lives? Or is it that we merely need confirmation of the shared experience of being alive in all its joy, madness, ecstasy, beauty, and terror? Is it primal memory of the immersive, enveloping flux of womb?
more cutting room floor
I’ll help you meet the unknown. I rather enjoy the unknown. At least some of it. Not all of it. Maybe later I’ll tell you about what specific unknowns I cannot deal with. Every life-form has a threshold limit for dealing with the unknown. It is much easier to meet the unknown in the company of someone who finds a particular unknown not to be unknown. Overlapping knowledge-sets are very helpful in dealing with the unknown. It’s about standing back-to-back or side-by-side sometimes. No one knows everything about everything, everyone knows something about something. And anyone who professes to know more than half about everything will not make a good traveling companion. Likewise, someone who claims they know nothing will likely end up being tedious and disagreeable in the ensuing intimate run of a road-trip. Those who presume knowledge to be a fluid condition, changeable, and in need of constant refinement are the best traveling companions.
The capacity to tolerate indeterminate or unknown situations largely rests on prior experience. But somewhere, deep within the reptilian brain is a realization that to gain the requisite rewards that life offers (are they any more than simply the continuance of life?), one has to move outwards, somehow, outwards, through, across, into the world. Riding differential gradients from less to more or more to less, you never know. This movement presumes exposure to changing fields of external flows. It means sampling those flows, carefully or with great abandon. more “more cutting room floor”
living a lie
Reading and responding to a series of transcripts of talks given more than 100 years ago by the Zen Buddhist Abbott Soyen Shaku:
Deep into the night, as other things cannot unfold, the cause of the full-on blockage appears:
I wake up in the morning with the thought that I am living a lie. A big one. The portraits, the blog, the performances, the movement, the participation, the friendships, the art, the writing, the letters, the telephone calls, the thesis, the intelligence, the teaching, the mailing-list-postings, the lectures, the workshops, the recordings, the social awareness, the travel, the online presence, the relationships, the projects, the listening to the heart, the living and the dead, the exercising (the swimming, the yoga), the eating (picking and choosing healthy things), the parenting, the collaborations, the archiving (preserving an empty past), the saving of money (preserving an empty future), it’s all a lie, a big fuckin’ lie. This is not a text about it being a lie, this is a lie.
It’s all about preserving the Self. Self-preservation. Sure to bring sufferation, yet it is how Life maintains itSelf on the planet. The retreat from pain is about Self-preservation. The fear of the Unknown is about Self-preservation.
It appears such, in the Buddhist system/model, that the very motivational essence of Life ensuring its projection into the future (to be, vis viva) is the source of suffering.
Shaku, S., 1906. Zen For Americans
freedom from mastery
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
chilly morning words
Chilly morning words form. Brushing away the crust of ice formed by dreams of last night. And other morning words of resolution. Or just thoughts. Words. With cornbread heating in the oven. New warmth diffusing into the food-stuff. A morning. A morning. Words melt, spill, tremble. Waiting to drop into space. Formed from symbols that litter the mind. And then, the thoughts on resolution. the accuracy of the human animal sensibilities.
And all that.
I run, minded, mindful, of the past and what. is. not. yet. The recent spins into the places of spinning. Words traded with new Others. And Others becoming newer in closeness.
I write like this in the morning. And let mind wander. The discipline lies alone in the be-ing. Not much else at all. But. I find no pointedness here of objective. To explore in these words. At least, I see none yet. Retrospective. And this such that we create more than we may know at the point of creation. Why is this: some disconnection with the creative self to be unfolded at some later time? I know of all which I have created at some points. Some electric instances. but of this, life remains unknown.
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…)
Nordic Nazi recollections
Hitler’s worldview included copious referencing of Nordic creation mythologies (thus his love of Wagner!). One consequence of this obsession was the emergence of strong pro-Nazi movements leading up to, through, and most disturbingly, after WWII in all the Nordic/Scandic countries (Nordic countries comprise all the Scandinavian countries (Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark), plus Finland). Some Icelanders eagerly supported these Nazi ideologies — documented in black-and-white images of uniformed goose-stepping rubes on parade in downtown Reykjavík before the 1940 British occupation, and the refusal of Icelandic authorities to allow African-American soldiers into the country during the later US occupation. These warped sympathies have persisted right up to the present time: a fact that was brought to my attention by a sequence of articles published in Iceland’s main national newspaper, Morgunbladið, back in the early 1990’s when I had recently immigrated to Reykjavík to take up residence with my future ex-wife, an Icelandic psychologist who I had met in Germany a few years previous. The current events in Norway bring all this back to mind, again… more “Nordic Nazi recollections”
movement (again) and storms
Morning air is diffuse and golden, a Light fog, perhaps from this event some 200 km away or so. Nothing like the Great Sydney Sandstorm of 2009, but nothing to trivialize either. If only humans would realize that the butterfly that made the storm is the self-same one that they startled from rest when ripping by on their ATV last weekend, celebrating hydrocarbon (inter)dependence in the desert.
… snip …
Movement ends up being a critical combination of idiosyncratic prognostication (what unknown lies ahead of me?) along with the repeated familiarity of bland acculturation (MacDonalds). The known and the unknown form a powerful dialectic in all life-trajectories, all movements. It is these two characteristics dominating individual presence in concert that carries us forward. Preparing to engage both change and the unknown relies on the clarity of present awareness, breadth of past experience, and the level of tolerance for existence in interstitial and autonomous zones. The preparations for movement include gathering enough knowledge and gathering enough things to ensure survival. The existence of known factors bolsters the potential for survival: otherwise questions like “where do we get gas?” and “where are we having dinner?” become overwhelming contraventions to even cursory local voyages of discovery. Not to mention “When are we going to get there?” This ranks very high along with “Where are we?” as being among the most problematic questions, raising high levels of existential angst in the Cartesian order. In the post-Cartesian it simply doesn’t matter!
conversation
a long conversation with Anthony this evening. always stimulating coverage of the non-typical meta-structures of social and individual existence.
the thought comes up, in teaching — most recently the “Multi-platform Story-telling” course that I was involved with this past semester at La Trobe — how seldom the holistic social meta-structure of the grouping of students (and teachers!) is considered in the facilitation of a learning trajectory. this includes the cumulative totality of all relations (power and otherwise!) that occur within the grouping. I call this space the continuum-of-relation and define it as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. Based on the assumption that we are in a holistic and continuous universe, it is possible to extend the definition to include the set of energy relations that humans have with the detailed and greater cosmos around them, and indeed, this is an important aspect to consider, but it is easier to limit the scope to a specific subset comprising relations between all humans. There are infinite sub-sets of relation that may be delineated, one set being those which arise in the process of learning facilitation. much attention is paid to syllabi, curricula, classroom technologies, and wide-scaled social ‘relevance’ of education systems while very little is paid to the immediate and long-term embodied needs for a recognition of presence of all the humans involved in the actual learning process. and especially the needs for deep human encounter and connection. is it such that this university, as with most others, is merely reflecting a wider scale of civil social decay when those crucial relations and their attendant qualities are simply ignored in the stead of assessment protocols, schedules, cash-for-services, and the general corporatization of education. more “conversation”
group portrait, year 10 students
interview with Niina: art & technology
Niina has been researching art and technology for some years now. We met when I was teaching my old netculture class at the Media Lab in the University of Art and Design Helsinki back in 2000. I participated in her research for her PhD then, and … now
Ei Niina — this is all I could manage, it’s impromptu, but honest, with a bit of humor mixed in… a little complicated, as there’s no time to write an essay about what world-view lies behind the answers. You might want to reference https://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/pixel.html an article I wrote for Pixelache in Helsinki in 2007 — the same year I did a workshop there too https://www.neoscenes.net/projects/pixel/index.php
you could also check out:
https://neoscenes.net/blog/ and search on
https://neoscenes.net/blog/?s=network
or so…
even
https://neoscenes.net/blog/date/2001/11
> 1.What changes have happened in your work and practices as an artist during the
> last ten years? Do you think your relationship with technology / or the way you
> use technology /has changed during this time?
My practice has widened intensively to take on a tough challenge of the entire techno-social system we are embedded within, are part of. Yes, this includes my relationship AND my understanding of the relationship between all flows that are the substance of technology. This also includes all aspects of life governed by techno-social protocol. When I use (a) technology I understand what I will both lose and gain when using that particular protocol. Using a technology is in fact, a changing of flows of energy that we are embedded in, part of. We are not separate in any way from everything else!
diversions
The primary task to undertake in a learning situation: pushing back the deep im-pressions of attention-diverting noise: to the degree that the actual subject of inquiry is secondary. a practice of facing the unknown which is the core of learning. attentively facing the unknown. mediating technologies tend to wrap us in a cocoon of dis-awareness of our own senses and from the flows that we are immersed within, making it impossible to focus attentions on the flows to begin with… ach! it’s such a pervasive problem. It becomes a powerful motivation to engage (young) people and to push back these im-pressing forces and watch them begin to breath freely again and then, to watch them begin to wonder what it is that they would like to learn about, then participate with them as they approach the unknown and engage it…
Sonnet 116
a Garrison Keillor reading reminded me of this wonderful piece:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
— Bill Shakespeare
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”
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.
assessments
And so, encroaching on the last major procedural hurdle before the doctorate goes to the external examiners (next year sometime). The panel assessment seems to be routine and bureaucratic. Public speaking in compressed time frames is no fun. When there’s always too much to get across in the extremely limited time frame, and the highly institutionalized context allows for negligible true dialogue. In some ways, the process is a deeply laughable (chortle?) imitation of what it claims to be, or what it once perhaps was. That is, learning as a process of open and sustained dialogue between two or more humans. Facing the unknown that each other presents, or both facing the unknown of what is, or what is out there. Contemporary ‘education’ is a thin and watery drool coming from somewhere up above — meager remains of what’s left of a blasting monsoon of shared life that brings one to a deeply profound awareness of that-which-is. Instead we squelch around in evaporating puddles of shared encounter, wishing for more rain, and complaining about the weather.
Tomorrow, it happens. We shall see. No brolly, no Wellies…
So, over this hurdle, and maybe the final work commences, perhaps finishing earlier than scheduled, or at least that inspiring outcome is a concept on the radar.
Meanwhile, surviving week-to-week, in part through the acupuncture and massage treatments from Heiji Cho and some of the Chinese Traditional Medicine (CTM) students here at UTS. The gall bladder channel is the one being worked — to release rising yang from the liver. hmmm. The treatments work, they seems to diffuse the migraines that do show up and eventually, as is common, with any lock, the migraines will vanish. I am confident of this, and only wish I had come to this conclusion last year, or even earlier as these episodes interrupted life from time to time. The stress of movement came on such a regular basis, but there was no thought to find a source, find a working solution, a cure. It was only the process of gritting the teeth until a dark and quiet room could be found for the duration. Western meds never really worked, they only covered the symptoms at best, and in some cases a single pill cost as much as a full 90-minute acupuncture treatment session.
But choosing to undertake a treatment of what is known as ‘alternative’ medicine was always a difficult stretch. Despite input from trusted others who had benefited. There was the hardship of paying cash from the pocket to the practitioner when cash was never so abundant.
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”
CLUI: Day Nineteen — SWAT
Today, upon waking, there are two buses parked to the west of the hangar, a bit later, numerous SUV’s begin to pull up along with several official SWAT command vehicles and their teams from Winnemucca, Elko, and Wendover. It’s SWAT play. How to deal with a bus-load of terrorists/hostages or so. Several squads are lectured and engage in practice drills for the morning. I had originally been told by the airport management folks that there were going to be live-fire exercises at South Base, so we were surprised when this began to unfold in the back yard.
There is the fascination of playing Army, recalled from early days in the Maryland woods beyond the pond, beyond the corn fields, into unknown territories of abandoned farmhouses and hunting camps. Learning to make the sound of a gun and of explosions. And here, older boys, men, with very fancy toys, playing for their lives and the lives of their charges. Learning to stay alive, to save life. Learning to kill, or be killed. Learning to protect the innocent and kill the profane.
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
musings before a roadtrip
Leaving aside the refined mapping of experience-once-removed. And instead, gathering experience first hand, in the moment, where circumspection is wistful, wasteful, or even dangerous.
Music on the road. Traveling minstrels, buskers, harmonica-playing hobos. playing for people on the road, or playing whilst on the road. Meeting at the roadhouse. Beyond the city limits. What goes down when humans engage beyond the control of the proper social order. What goes on outside the ordered flows of town. Interstitial in the sense that between towns lie the open roads. bandits, women and men of loose moral fortitude, and wild animals. The space of chaotic flow.
We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” — pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.
As a matter of fact, we don’t just “suspect” it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism
What is the nature of what is feared outside the purview of human controlled flows? Is it merely nature? It is the presence of (or the risk of) death — that singular element that lies completely beyond human control, for ever? It cannot be erased from the wild kernel of being. Some seek the thrill of facing it, some hide in states of paranoid control to keep it as far away as possible, backing away only to fall over a precipice unseen behind. Religion is the construct that irrationally rationalizes the presence of the unknown, of death, and of corrupt social order.
… back to the road …
The body of speed. (hunt and/or be hunted). Movement is the first escape from death. Running to safety, to the nearest tree. Running to fetch the weapon that you left at home. Running for the crowd so that the odds of getting eaten are marginally lowered. Running fast. Running to change places. Running to make a moving target. Running for help! Running to the Library!
The Book as fuel for keeping warm and The Book as weapon: dictionaries and encyclopedias work best for both purposes. Book as pillow. Book as door-stop. Book as object sensed orbiting centers of cultural gravity. Textual asteroids and debris. Escape that field.
The Book as tool for enhancing procreative potential and staving off death. Rather, Books on how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading about how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading-while-driving. Speed. And then it comes. uuuuuhhh.
nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…
desire, complexity, simplicity, determinism (mix-up mash-up)
Today, mulling the difference between technological determinism (as a self-propagating system on its own immutable trajectory) and the reciprocal idea that human social systems selectively construct the systems of technology they ‘desire’ (subject to all the variability of the particular social system within which the technology is embedded). Then, within that selection process, thinking about the process of development and the general trend towards greater complexity. Do these processes ever trend generally to greater simplicity? Does desire ever, on a wide social scale, ever become directed to less material abundance? Is material security predicated with amassing more-than-sufficient material wealth? Or do society-wide technological systems collapse towards simplicity only in cases of ‘natural’ disaster.
[Complexity and simplicity are used here as general indicators of the depth and breadth of the techno-social system’s process of provision and production that leads to services, situations, or products deemed necessary for participants. Metrics of complexity would include geographic proximity, ease of access, energy density, and the number of substantive steps required to produce a product or create a desired energy flow. The relative necessity of a product is highly subjective and varies widely between different systems. Necessity is a cultural construct (complementing, say, Maslow’s needful ranking). Complexity may be indicated by the number of discrete steps that can be described that a process passes through — steps/degrees of flow alteration.] more “desire, complexity, simplicity, determinism (mix-up mash-up)”
the American Dream is only to survive
David Brooks, columnist at the New York Times writes in this commentary on New Years Day:
Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.
I have always enjoyed his pragmatism and basic awareness of a wider historical context. It frames the American Way as (merely another) expression of a global continuum of human presence on the planet. And he seems largely to avoid the hybridized reli(geo)-political Destiny’s Child(ish) mentality that so pervades the fragmentary remnants of mediated public discourse in this declining nation-state. more “the American Dream is only to survive”
movement and encounter
Morning, mourning notes on encounter, in no particular order.
It is on a pathway, the pathway, in the mode of movement, in the shifting of unknown situations, where encounter occurs. These encounters are traced with the full presence of the body and all aspects where they occur.
There is the general rule on a hiking trail, uphill gets right-of-way: those struggling and straining to make it to the top of whatever heights that you’ve just been on should be given precedence. It’s always a question, though, what the precise character of the encounter will be. Whether you have seen (or heard) the approach of an Other, through dense forest, or whether you round a turn to be confronted by a gaggle of silent walkers. Encounter is a culturally specific regime overlying that of the embodied, the animal. On trails in the West the density of hikers is generally low, except in National Parks which can see crowds as dense any on Fifth Avenue in New York City at lunch-time. This is one criteria on which to judge a trail — not merely the views afforded, but the number of people encountered. Escaping from human presence is as prominent a thought as what other ‘natural’ phenomena might be encountered. more “movement and encounter”
Kerouac, again?
The road novel: a tracing of the displacement of the embodies Self across the Greater (or Lesser) Unknown. The road journal. The road. What is it about the road. It’s not merely a metaphoric interpretation of life, it is life. blah-blah-blah.
(in clipped phraseology)
Writing the fluid movement, writing to map encounter, it’s a hopeless task except as is comes closer and closer to the asymptotic point of writing-while-be-ing. It’s not a wall to break through, it is a separate reality. Talk about parallel universes! Writing and be-ing. Writing-in-be-ing.
Writing is the pen/cursor traveling across the page/screen. A locked dialectic of eye-to-2D-surface. Smoldering neuronal fire slogging between.
Writing what is(was) is always the case.
Back to the idea of the performative expression. That of telling the stories from the road. I did this in an annotated form in the performance at the Ultimate Akademie in Köln, Al Hansen’s old haunt. But how to do that in a way that is meaning-full in the context of this thesis project?
Obviously, there are many domains where verbal language is not useful or sufficient for description, and the many alternate systems used by humans, like mathematics, music, chemical symbolisms, graphics, maps, etc., show that this has been addressed since a long time. But some aspects are not covered yet. The main missing factor is dynamics. All notation systems are static and don’t cover the essentially dynamic character of life. This is a possible problem for a civilization that commits by far the largest part of its cultural memory to a system of static representations. In many non-western cultures, there is (or was) a strong tradition of non-verbal, dynamic cultural transmissions and it needs to be noticed that western civilizations have lost “the science of ritual” to a large extent (Staal 1982). There is the large field of cultural movement patterns that are not amenable in principle to static representations, since movement, when frozen in a static form, simply vanishes. Dynamis is incontrovertible with Stasis. This essential lack of all the static CMM that are so widespread in western civilizations alerts us to the possibility that perhaps there may be some very essential factor that civilizations are losing when they commit the bulk of their cultural transmission to written, static representations. — Andreas Goppold, Criticism and defects of writing and language
The uncontrolled gesture: go to your edge
Starting with the immediate body as a field-of-action to release control (versus the control-at-a-distance regime we are immersed within now):
Bushwhacking is a method to relinquish control of the trajectory of the body. By exposing the body to the unknown, one has to respond in real time, in the present. This present invites the presence of be-here-now and within that state of be-ing, the embodied self yields to the edge that divides the controlled from un-controlled. Precisely at that edge is the locus of active transformation and change. Making the next step into the unknown is, literally, an act of trust in the body, in a belief that entering the unknown will present possibility. Whether or not this possibility is merely the chance of the continuance of the species (in a biological framework), the projection of life into the not-now, the future, or whether it is an operative pre-condition for a transcendent state I cannot at this moment comment on. Somehow, this is a question that each individuated being self-wise has to make in each of those moments.
more “The uncontrolled gesture: go to your edge”
the past
back at yet another airport — north, east, south, west? future or past?
The Past
Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past. Tonight here in suburbia as I sit
In easy chair before electric heater,
Warmed by the red glow, I fall into dream:
I am away
At the camp fire in the bush, among
My own people, sitting on the ground,
No walls around me,
The stars over me,
The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind
Making their own music,
Soft cries of the night coming to us, there
Where we are one with all old Nature’s lives
Known and unknown,
In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken.
Deep chair and electric radiator
Are but since yesterday,
But a thousand camp fires in the forest
Are in my blood.
Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
Of all the race years that have moulded me.
— Oodgeroo Noonuccal
on participation, part one
I was telling someone the other day that I am a good participant. I know how to jump into a situation and contribute in a way that is sensitive to the ambient flows that are happening at the same time as clearly manifesting a unique set of contributing flows. Perhaps a bit too conservative in respecting the paths of those ambient flows, but it’s probably better to be slightly more conservative than liberal. Uhh, such loaded terms. Useless words after they are so distorted by socio-politics of certain cultural configurations. Although it is ironic to note that here in Australia their political meaning is in (antipodal) opposition. Which simply emphasizes the idiocy of politics (as Peter Tosh observed once: Politics, “poli” means people, “ticks” are parasites, politics, parasites on the people). Words, language, always tends to go through this reification process. Followed by a morphing process when the reified language becomes overwhelmed when attempting to explicate new situations or when circumscribing known situations with a different point-of-view. The reified structures will be bolstered and protected until usage simply makes them redundant.
more “on participation, part one”
Weltanschauung
The construction of a worldview is a process of feedback, memory, and resonance with that memory arising out of an awareness of difference.
We know remarkably little about the ground functions of practically the entire system we are embedded within.
Writing an idiosyncratic worldview oscillates between the interior and exterior of being. It moves through all culture and social systems, the natural world, and every code encoded, every text ever written. To this passage is mixed lived impression, the accumulate energized traces that life leaves on the body — traces that, ultimately, are memory. And through memory, life compares these two strands: difference arises.
Traces of word and traces of where and when word arrived into the body-system: spoken, written, the two means to no end. Each in arrangement, in relation with an Other, Others. The relation to the Other defined by inarticulate resonance framed and directed into word, and left as traces both embodied and those dis-embodied, change left behind as bodies pass by. more “Weltanschauung”
technological affectation
If film can do this:
Film serves to train human beings in the practice of those apperceptions and reactions required by the frequentation of an apparatus whose role in their daily life ever increases. To make this whole enormous technological apparatus of our time into the object of human interiorization and appropriation [innervation] — that is the historic task in whose service film has its true meaning. — Walter Benjamin
Then is there any reason to doubt a connection between the declining power and influence of the (technocratic mediocracy of the) United States and the implementation of the Internet as-it-is today? Is there any connection between the tendencies of its population to spend their (limited) life-time in tele-communication (and tele-consumption!) and the demise of civil society? People seemingly now avoid confronting the (unknown) Other and rather cluster as mirrored-Selves, with a cumulative effect of breakdown of a (diverse) cultural fabric into a checker-board of self-interest groupings which spend time defending the borders of their squares from the surrounding Evil unknown.
this conclusion proposed in the sense that if film can have that profundity of affectation on human nervous systems (the primary interface with the world-as-mediated-by-body; or the primary EM antenna-structures), then what of all the wide press of technological development seeping into all parts and orifices of perception and reaction?
no pix
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.
pseudo-settled
grounded. arrive at Devleena’s flat in Marrickville, John is there to meet me. a bit of communication gap with them and it turns out I have the studio only for two weeks, after that it’s been promised to a Kiwi researcher. so, got to put the word back out to the network for another place to live. drat. this place, where Sophea also stayed, would have worked out well aside from the fact that the internet WPA connection isn’t functioning properly (yet), it won’t accept my login, sh… I’ll email her in Delhi to see what the score is.
got a bank account set up with Paul at the ANZ Marrickville branch, went grocery shopping, and hung out in a caf for an espresso and wifi.
palm and eucalyptus trees out the window that overlooks the Cook River (more like a tidal draw) above Botany Bay. it’s warm even for Sydney winter stats, +20C today. sweaty. chilly at night. very much like Santa Monica in the winter. as I thought it would be. air is clear, stars are unknown. winter sun is in the north, in Arizona among other places. clouds and breeze from indeterminate quarters. drifting through. the sounds of the city are not unfamiliar, but are … elusive.
more stories
the festival ends with a long eye-vibrating day — War Against the Weak, Crude, and Burma VJ. I babysit the kids (and watch Lord of the Rings with them way too late for a school night, but don’t tell anyone!) while Nick and Deb go out to the closing party. documentary film is a bit foreign to my mind, after years of work in non-narrative experimental moving images. intriguing to be presented with stories, those basic forms of human communication versus the chaotic release of non-linear stimulation. perhaps there is a dialectic in this — juxtaposing a need to have (socially) structured and chronological sensory input versus flows that are not really predictable (though safe in the sense that they are only optical/aural inputs and not full sensory inputs). different people have different capacities for absorbing change and facing the unknown. is it merely that we have been conditioned as media consumers to the form of the filmic story? or is there some core stimulus that compels us to remain attached to the trajectory traced by the story-teller?
iDC dregs
iDC list gets annoying and rewarding at the same time. but what of life spent on the keyboard? the topic is teaching… and the transition of the teacher into the link jockey.
sotto voce: While the offerings of IP_based networks seem unlimited, and in rhetoric, the superlative of unlimited is often applied, I think it is important to keep firmly in mind that it is not a space of unlimited knowledge nor is it a space of neutral knowledge. And, also, in this time, it is not a space of embodied experience aside from eyes absorbing statically-framed EM radiation, ears hearing sounds disconnected from their source, and fingers twitching across a very limited place. Not to mention underlying ideologies which accompany each form of mediated connection (largely invisible but very much real) — among others, that of consumption (extractive resources, electricity, and thus, the globe-spanning world that we exert irresponsible dominion over). In this regard, the (limited)vastness of that knowledge-space seems a bit tainted and out-of-touch perhaps. Expensive and consumptive. Exclusive, reductive, and reified. A teacher is a catalyst, and is one who, simply by being an Other we encounter in life, presents us with the unknown. If we trust that Other, a world opens up that was previously unknown, and (if) we (trust enough to) apprehend and engage it, it changes us, we learn. This unknown world is sourced in the entire comprehensible universe, and is available through that Other. These encounters may take place anywhere, anytime, and can be had ‘for free.’ We need only ‘pay’ the Other with our attention, our life-time, and life-energy. It seems that in our formal techno-social educational systems, these potential encounters with the Other are (being) replaced by more and more socially-standardized systems-of-relation (protocols, curricula, government mandates, abstracted monetary instruments) which seem ever more intrusive to and even suppressive of potential open encounters. This limits the creative potential of the outcome. The cumulative effect of this social hyper-formalization-of-encounter — because learning occurs precisely at the edge of knowing, not within the known — is that we look elsewhere for the dynamic of coming-to-be (learning) that keeps us alive and growing. To me this is the ultimate source of the loss of vitality that affects the Education World, a vitality that ultimately does not rest on technological mediation but on human encounter. Yes, human encounter is always mediated by the vast range of social protocols and tools, and learning encounters may happen within highly mediated (‘virtual’) spaces, but when we allow those encounters to slide continuously into more and more mediated spaces, the life-time available for less mediated human encounter shrinks. I think that this represents a wide loss to learning, education, community, and creative potential as it moves to extremes and forgets what it is predicated upon — the originary encounter between the Self and the Other.
precipice
This
intimate address
of newly floured
new-honed
snow
sends through us
its
unknown
step-
redemptive
emptive
brilliance
a’a’a’
z)
fixed memories
Memories. how to surface, how to frame, how to recreate. images, in the process of uncovering three decades of work primarily unseen. thousands of images of friends, places, strangers, objects, situations, events. a very small percentage are so far away in mind that what, who they are, is now unknown. so, looking through the external sources, the calendar, the email archive, other images, the travelog. to set a location. but some cannot be deduced. where was I? who are those people? what’s going on?
And then the questions, are the images interesting, compelling, usable?
and to the Wordsworth reference:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathe’d horn. — William Wordsworth
dkfrf review
Rinus makes some nice notes on the Amurikan evening at das kleine field recording festival last week in Kreuzberg.
Rinus is one of those intelligent and grounded souls who facilitate events that are the polar opposite of pretentious. informal, humane, and best, they include a collection of found artists. artists who are connected by their desire to connect with others in an open way. my impression of the evening of performances was largely the comfort with which it proceeded. for example, I had not intended doing a visual set, thinking conservatively it was about field recording. but when Brandon got the video-projector set up, I thought, yeah, why not. so I started the evening with a slowly-building barrage. guilty, sure, of a phat mix. Rinus noted that it divided the crowd — it’s that polarizing influence that I seem to have. hmmm. it’s partly the software, got to explore how to slow it down for a more meditative mix. density. (going back to the thoughts about levity and density a few weeks ago). Brandon’s set was a perfect counterpoint to mine with the levity and Light of his life.
more “dkfrf review”
khm
up at 0430, out the door at 0440, on the s-bahn by 0458, at the airport at 0550, on the plane at 0645, into Köln-Bonn at 0800, through Köln-Deutz at 0845, arrive at the Academy by 0900.
breakfast with Zil and a quick tour of the Academy — haven’t been here for years since visiting Nils Roeller back in 1997 to see what the progress was on the Flusser archive among other things.
Zil and I share ideas on teaching, art, creative active, facilitation, corporate be-ing, the desert, and so on. a very nice meeting with the unknown Other. as Miga and Hubertus are developing a collaborative project with Zil, I do hope to jump in with some seminars on collaborative creativity. we’ll see.
brainstorms
conversations with Volker and others range across vast spaces of cultural, spiritual, personal, and social thought and practice. as per usual. great!
I’ve been checking brainstorms more than usual lately, jumping into discussions with Howard, Bryan, Andee and many others on the topic of academia, education, learning, teaching, students, and what a struggle it is to be involved with this sector of the techno-social system.
sotto voce: In the 1:1 dialogs it’s usually a volunteer student, but, of course, a volunteer is never really a volunteer unless the power relation in the classroom is fully devolved into a truly distributed system. Which is never the case until the class is completely over and grades are posted — then the teacher can come into a more human-to-human relationship with the student in our traditional system. This is one reason I have maintained an autonomous nomadic status as educator. I can more easily set up a (more) balanced relationship with the students as I have no particular position in the local institutional hierarchy. Of course, there is the more difficult issue of my status as the teacher (which has to be devolved) … but I do devolve that as much as they and my own personality would allow … it is always a sliding scale, and I’d like to go further than I allow myself … in this, the fear of the unknown is a significant resistive force among the students and in myself.
Ideally, a class could consist of going around the group manifesting all possible dialog relationships between everyone, not just between the teacher and student — more accurately, there is no need of the teacher in this scenario anyway. In this situation, all are teachers and students both. In any case, this is a radical pathway which is a direct threat to business-as-normal educators/institutions because it makes them directly redundant, or, at most, facilitators.
These techniques are not specifically limited to f2f either — I will sometimes mandate a text-based 2-hour ‘dialog’ or phone call or other more heavily mediated type of connection to explore ‘virtuality’ and the attenuative affects of technological intervention.
Sometimes when I am lecturing, I do so with my back to the students.
high
attenuated transitions, on the same route taken two months previous almost to the day. across the Central Valley, and the ascent of the Sierras. not too crowded for a Saturday around peak season. so much drier than two months ago. most creeks in Yosemite are dry washes. fill the 10 gallon bladder with water from the high-pressure spigot at the east end of the Tioga grade. fill the water bottles and the 2.5 gallon tank as well. and drink a good fill. cold, damn good water. courtesy the Donner Electric Company. there are two spigots, another man is filling a large bladder in the back of his SUV. when I’m done, a pickup pulls up, the guy mouthing “get outta the way!” to me as I get into the cab of my truck. contorting my mouth into a variety of shapes, without using any particular language or vocabulary, I then smile and slowly pull away, waving. on down the road, south on 395 past Mono Lake, being passed by cars moving at excess of 80 mph most of the time. going backwards whilst going forward. one sedan passes. I vaguely notice the occupants. fifteen minutes later a tableau reveals itself. several cars parked on either side of the road, and that same sedan flipped over in the median, a group of people milling around. the D200 records several shots as I pass, transcendent. to Bishop. from Bishop one heads a bit south then east into the White Mountains on a very steep and twisted paved road which ends up in the Deep Springs Valley passing the mythological Deep Springs College. about half-way to the College is the turn-off into the Bristlecone Pine Wilderness area. a 40-mile trek on a bad dirt road. to the locked gate. tooling along, following the principle that wash-board surfaces are best negotiated as such a speed where the tires only have contact with the wave peaks, not the troughs, you get a smooth ride. while filed at the back of mind, another maxim taught/learned during the School of Mines summer field camp — “driving on a dirt road is like driving on ball bearings.” suddenly that mushy feeling with handling. hmmm. slow down. damn. a flat. the fourth this summer. good thing yesterday I had replaced the previous spare which had a 3-inch slash from an unknown source. the current flat tire has a similar gash. changing it as fast as possible, damnation, get covered with the fine pale beige dust. twiLight somewhere shortly off, and another 25 miles to go before getting to the locked-gate/trailhead. I had to think hard whether to continue without a spare or turn around and get back to paved life. with a uncertain heart, I went ahead, trundling along at no more than 5 mph. well, at least it gives a nice view of the passing scenery. consequently, I didn’t get to the gate until well after sunset. there were a couple other cars. there was a hard breeze blowing though with the air around 4% relative humidity, it didn’t feel as cold as it actually was, but it was plunging fast. the daily fluctuation can easily be 40 degrees F (30 C). ground cloth (a heavy black plastic sheet), three back-packing sleeping pads, the wool poncho from Colombia, bivouac sack, down sleeping bag, sheet sack, pillow, down vest, and fleece jacket. after a quick dinner of re-heated pasta from the night before, I crawl in, leaving a small slit to watch the stars through. only just warm enough. over-tired from the drive and the altitude, stunned awake by the stellar intensity, hardly sleep, catching a few scattered Perseids. I’ve not seen stars like this in years. this particular location, aside from the modest amount of air pollution from the rest of California to the west, is as dark as can be found in the lower 48 states. that and being up at high altitude. the stars were not positioned as in a dome of sky. rather, they appeared without perspective, nor were they simply pasted, flat on a black background. they appeared full and with depth and an obvious shading of dark matter obscuring the center of the Milky Way. enough overall Light to see easily. I had the feeling of plunging forward into them, clearly manifest as a space, a cosmos that I was floating into, chill wind flushing any illusions of being on a planet. flying despite the gravity of the chunk of rock pressing against my back.
revisitings
the second anniversary of the accident. while doing yoga, the body muses on the possibility that the technological solution to the shattered spine will fail, catastrophically, one day when in the Warrior One Pose. rendering the body in two halves. one which does not function, and one that might.
There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveler. Therefore wander! — Aitareya Brahman
so, movement beckons, re-reading Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, and recalling the little snippets of antipodal behavior that resonate. going walkabout, as the Aboriginals do, seems to be a highly developed form of psycho-geography with a substantial spiritual element fused into the embodied core.
but two years later, I am calmly ecstatic when I am able to do a six hour bush-whack in a landscape where I recognize most of the elemental features as well as the more universal vibe of the place. to do the same in an unknown place would cause a bit of stress, but with an equal dose of thrill. to see the unknown world, absorb the sounds, colors, the people, the life. what more can one ask in this incarnation?
Lewis Lake
Yellowstone. For the second day. Struggling with the teenager and such. Which distracts from and distorts the energy of place. Interaction of place and person. The series of images continues domination of landscape which traces the very tangible interactions between human and land. In this case, 21st-century Amurika and the accumulated legacy of a pioneering land which is filling up. To be sure, there is the tribal essence of camping in a tent where nearby there is a very large and possibly very aggressive bull buffalo chewing its cud. And the thermal activities which do remind of the possibility that the planet could simply throw off the species which has raped it in extremis and spend another few million years developing another species for potential evolution. But here we are now, the heart of the Western Frontier Spirit. Old Faithful. The semi-circle boardwalk with bench seats made from plastic 2×4 boards, those extruded from recycled polystyrene bottles courtesy of some corporation, surrounding the low and very trampled-looking tufa deposits. Where the faithful, in their hundreds and perhaps thousands come on a semi-hourly basis to watch an endlessly variable repetitive event, marking a psychic continuation from those pioneering days to the present where the frontier is an unknown and fearsome — with Them bent on prising from Us everything that we’ve built up and enjoyed on the backs of Them over the last 100-some years.
That evolutionary struggle along with another one — the elegant mosquito which will still be around after this country is down-graded to a mere tropical storm from Cat-5 Imperial hurricane of the post-war era. Though moot the question: exactly which war am I referring to? And is a typhoon from the far east next?
streaming streams
finally solved the tech problem of the real audio/video stream files from the archive playing properly in a pop-up window. have the space on the tech-no-mad server to load up all media archives, and now it’s just a matter of organizing the html files, and making sure the audio and video windows are sized properly. it’ll be nice to get all that stuff back up and running for posterity. the stream index page is full of those ancient-looking 320×240 streams that were pumped out during the time I was at Boulder, teaching at CU, with access to phat-pipe Real Helix server. a few others go back to true pre-historic times with 160×120 files from the initial neoscenes occupation project in Tornio in 1998. the accretionary process that is the core of this web space goes onwards to an unknown end. with a minuscule audience. and no prospects.
salvage
hmmm, combinations of local circumstances impede encounters. structural deficiencies route possible crossings into different spaces. turtle-like, looking out onto a complex and unknown landscape and socio-cultural milieu.
find any openings for contact, sussing-out, phishing, checking in, checking out. finding where there is a break in the construct, gaps. small TAZ’s crouched and ready. intervene, connect.
and on another note entirely. sadly, transcendentally. hearing on the underside of the planet. or the reverse top. as shadows point to Antarctica. another giant come to an end in this world. how to expect that another world is? or that there is some way of standing in both for more than a while.
So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
