posted
  • place: Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

field work: witness

field work: witness, female greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), Upper Pool Creek, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, October ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
field work: witness, female greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), Upper Pool Creek, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, October ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.

In the process of phonographic listening/recording along Upper Pool Creek west of the Chew Ranch property, I came across this scenario. No clues as to what led up to it. The body seemed to be fresh and whole, life gone that very day perhaps? I didn’t disturb the scene: doubtful that such a nutrient/energy source would remain unconsumed in this wild environment for long.

It did bring back the memory of traveling to Dinosaur back in 1988 with Pablo where we visited his friend Renzo and wife Lisa. Renzo had recently taken the position of wildlife manager for 40,000 sq mi of the Monument and northwest Colorado. One morning, pre-dawn, we set out in his work truck and after a long drive, parked in the low sagebrush steppe and from a distance watched, in the greying Light, a lek where the dramatic mating ritual between dominant male and female Greater sage-grouse unfolded.

posted

The Peace Of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— by Wendell Berry

posted
  • place: Mill Creek Valley, Colorado

cyber-break

group portrait, Mill Creek, Colorado, September 2011

a couple hours online between bouts of wild(er)ness solo and with old friends. have a long conversation with a solo hiker up in Mill Creek this morning. Steve lives out of his modest Toyota RV, a retired engineer, spends 5 months a year hiking in the Colorado high country.

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CLUI: Day Twenty — raptors?

east to the playa from the Toano Range, Nevada, April 2010

A nice hike with Neal, his last day before heading back to London (despite the volcano!) into the Toano Raptor Observation Area at the south end of the Toano Range. No big raptors except for a turkey vulture who didn’t fly away from a sheep carcass at the side of the track in until we were just 20 feet away (oi, pew!!). That’s as close as I’ve been from one of those huge birds. The hike in gets into snow pretty quickly, including corn snow coming down. But the sun is warm on the south-facing side of the canyon, and with the elevation gain, the view to the east over the playa and all the way to the Wasatch Range is fine. Apparently in the fall, during migration, more than 50,000 eagles, hawks, and falcons pass through the area.

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CLUI: Day Eighteen — storm

dust storm from the tower, Wendover Air Base, Wendover, Utah, April 2010

Brutal sand/wind storm (again, what else is new in “Wind-over”). I have been almost completely scuppered in doing sound work here by the incessant wind (and not having a decent wind-snout for the Zoom H4. I thought Iceland was windy, well, this place is a close competitor. No trees, and the contrast of the flat playas between the relatively high mountains makes for some adiabatic action combined with a series of major Pacific storm fronts pulsing through. Noting when in (sparsely) wooded mountain valleys of the Toano Range, there isn’t the intensity of blast — the opposite occurs on the air base which is on the edge of a playa that extends 200 km to the north, 200 km to the south, and 150 km to the east: flatness breeds velocity. Velocity and sustainability — it goes on and on with only occasional respite.

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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.

20100206-2007-0862

nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…

posted
  • place: Soquel, California

bog in brain

slow cool morning, a tour of the great studio that Mike & Isabelle have brought together. a walk to the creek, marveling at the trees, the rocks, the land.

It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e., than I import into it. — Henry David Thoreau

posted
  • place: en route Copenhagen, Denmark - Vilnius, Lithuania

departures and arrivals

arrival in Lithuania, right after the national basketball team beat the US team by five points at the Olympics. flying in over lush forests and fallow fields, a bit of wildness. Julija meets me at the airport with a smile, holding a RAM6 sign. drive into town to the Elektra Hotel on the river in the old town. and then walk up to the Contemporary Arts Center where the event is being held. Mindaugas, Derek, and Sara are already there, working away on the wireless connection. Nils comes in, and later Gediminas and Nomeda, so things begin, a look over the facility to map out spaces for the proceedings. good to be a day early, though, to clear head and focus on the workshop proceedings. dinner in a ultra-kitsch restaurant with menu items like “To Hear you Better,” “Nude Maids in Sweet Flags,” “A Sweet Sin,” “Grandpa’s Buttons,” “Men’s Joy,” and “Boyish Dreams.” bawdy gender gap or what? — hard to calculate what a different culture provides for linguistic cues.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

oscillations

time. Elizabeth queries me: “are you coming back from Europe, or is this “the move?” I tell her it’s an oscillation. between the red rock canyons, the sage, the roaming thunderheads, and, on the other side of the Big Pond, cultcha.

posted
  • place: en route Berlin - Hamburg - Kiel, Germany

ignoring things

back to Kiel via Hamburg, on the train once again. having also once again not done much there at all except meet intensively with a small group of other humans and speaking, exchanging energies with them. ideas like forms of deep-praxis, life-changing practices, and ways of communicating my ideas in more visceral ways come up. and logistics, and that flow, analog and continuous, of life, forward, and the sensual information that feeds into that.

the music that I encoded at Wolfgang’s is quite electric/eclectic. like listening to KCRW radio. in Santa Monica. where eyes opened to other forms of thinking and being. about as experimental as you can get.

like having the students choose an energy source, and give weekly reports on it to the others. or, as arose in Kiel as well, that image of the two cans with a string between them. communications-at-a-distance.

hearing last night the depth of living under the weight of manifest fears in Bogota. how that goes deeply into re-arranging the body’s energy state. we may stand, consciously apart from the body, but eventually it comes back to connect with that removed consciousness. with a vengeance if it has been ignored too long. saying, DOn’t IGNORE THE LIMITATIONS OF SENSUAL PRESENCE, yep.

passing a massive antenna installation a bit the the north of the rail line. military, and probably extreme long wavelength array for submarine or global communications. a relic of the past? like the landstrasse lined with the Linden trees. and the fallow, wild fields. a higher level of wildness and disorder. than in the former West, still. nice.

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Tallinn, Estonia - Riga, Latvia

arrival

reLab HQ, Riga, Latvia, March 2000

When the gaps in these notes are so large, there is a distinct lack of continuity between here and there. When the here’s have been so many, and the now’s are rapid and brimming with the negation of writing: life, empty space becomes the content. And the there’s are forgotten. Heading to new lands. New and old friends. Riga, after exactly twenty-four hours of travel. From Lapland to Riga. Flights, if you had good connections would take about five hours total. But connections never seem to be good here on the perimeter. Tornio was a short week of snowy brilliance, a couple hard workouts, running to the pool, not so far away, but enough to make me feel like I need to push body against the barriers that make it uncomfortable. Running to the pool, swimming hard for 30 – 40 minutes, running home. After taking the time for a sauna, of course. Yeah, in a train now, so time for a few reflections: No more short teaching gigs in the next year. Minimum of two weeks, with preference for four. The idea of doing six one-month workshops at different places seems very appealing. Then the balance of time in the southwest of the US? Can it really work? Time is passing so quickly that dreams run away. Only just now arrived. Twenty-four hours full on the road. Getting too old for this kind of action, but where will it cease? Movement was quite a bit easier than I had thought here at the border of the Evil Empire. But the atmosphere has that tinge, an edge of desolation somehow, a bit of wildness. Flatness. Arrested construction — the Soviet could not concentrate enough energy to bring the society to a point of self-sustained possibility for its members. So it goes. Riding the bus from Tallinn. The landscape is peaceful smooth, not so extreme as Finland, already enough south to get away from that edge feeling. Though Tornio seems always familiar despite the extremity. Mountains of snow lining all the streets. Impressions. The first moment in E-Lab here in Riga. I’m early, I caught an earlier bus leaving from the harbor in Tallinn. Rasa and Raitis are not here in the moment, so I wait and write instead. Overlooking the river. A dark gray-green monument to a struggle sits below on the bank of the river near the railroad bridge, two figures fighting something that is invisible, something over there, downstream.

posted
  • place: en route Stamford, Connecticut - Manhattan, New York

locust memory

Sitting by the window this morning, still in Stamford, I began watching the leaves falling through the crisp air outside. Nature is all around all the time, and I hardly see it. The impinging of the human desire for order is the most telling sign of our times. In the Christian creation story, humans were given dominion over nature, a kind of stewardship. Where has this gone? To mowed lawns and meticulously controlled gardens, raked yards, trimmed trees. I remember the experience of playing in the woods as a boy. How the wildness of it was compelling somehow. I remember the bramble thickets and how tough their stems and thorns were. I remember once, it was the Year of the 17-year locusts, giant reddish things that had grappling-hook legs and a horrible face mask and flew en masse around everywhere outside — once I found myself standing in the middle of a tall grass field (which is now the yard of a new house), I was locked in a terrified immobility. Each time I tried to move, hundreds of these thing would rise up from the grass and many would land on my skin, clinging, seeking to pull me down to feast on my body in Bacchanalian frenzy. I stood there for what must have been an hour, it seemed eternity. I don’t remember how I escaped, whether I simply ran screaming from the field, arms akimbo and windmilling the beasts away from me, or whether someone came for me. No memory of escape. Strange.

DayLight was going and the umber air Soothing every creature on the earth, Freeing them from their labors everywhere. I alone was girding myself to face The ordeal of my journey and my duty. — Dante

Later I gathered my things (I weighed them in at 56 pounds) and caught a bus to the train to Grand Central and took the subway to City Hall and walked to Stefan and Ellen’s place in Tribeca where I was going to meet Stefan. He was delayed at work, so I ended up cabbing it up to the opening with all my bags where I rather self-consciously, though very appropriately, entered the Sandra Gering Gallery for the opening of the blast5drama event.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

time and space

Spending the day preparing psychically for the first of two performances in the next week. Tonight will be at the Time and Space (tila aika) Department of the National Academy of Fine Art here in Helsinki. I am unsure of the content, and how that content will develop and manifest itself from my memory. Formally, the performance is rather similar to what I did in Köln last May, but there is the change of fluid memory, and I am also adding images which may either corrupt the spoken word or be a positive contribution to the piece. My rough mental references are documented on the Blast website as part of the blast 5 drama project.

The title of the performance is Solstice to Solstice: a naming. It exist as a cycle, a continuation, a movement in Time and Space, so it will be perfectly appropriate to the location. The moon is full tonight, I think. Life is too short to be apprehensive, so I enjoy the anticipation of it all. Moments ticking by. Approaching the moment when I walk out the door. That is the critical moment, the initial going, overcoming of the static inertia, the friction of immobility. And the going is an endless thing. It can be on a continuous journey that moves the body across the various incarnations of the physical world, that is what any leaving of home is. Each and every movement from the home is a journey, and one becomes a traveler once outside the door. The door that guards the hearth from danger and the excessive wildness of the world. I have had many homes in the last months. Safe havens. With friends new and old. But none of them are mine. Does one need a home? Is not this existence a wandering in many forms? Can the sense of home take other forms than the floor-walls-ceiling-and-door?

At the door of the house, who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The pulse of the world beats beyond my door.
— Pierre Birot

And on the theme of networking, Tapio asked me to write a brief article for ValoKUVA, the Finnish Photography magazine. I titled it Manifestations of Networking — it explores some personal roots in my usage of the internet. It will appear in Finnish, so I wanted to post it here in the original.