to watch the movements of any body, while in mind is the recollection of an other one dying, and while snow falls heavy on the greenhouse glass outside, and the pipes rush with water somewhere in the house. it’s all too much.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each others cup but drink not from one cup. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. ― Kahlil Gibran

Changing the course of nature, a series of actions, grew out of a fundamental principle that the embodied and living Self (as organism) alters the existing flows of the ambient natural system — the system which the Self is (merely) the energized extension of. If one envisions life itself as being a negentropic phenomena occurring as part of a field of energy without known limit, then it makes some recursive sense that a life-form would seek to extend the alteration of the flows that are moving around it, through it. Predation is a form of this, eating, consuming; sensing even could be construed to be an alteration (as Quantum) confirms — that the observer changes that which is observed. Alteration, fluctuation, change occurs at all scales.

One easily accessible phenomena that presents the idea of energy flow with a certain universal precision and intuitive simplicity is water. Fluid flow surrounds the body in water vapors, airs, sprays, and floods, while we also consume this flow directly, finding necessary sustenance for the body-system. Although the internal system is, topologically, simply an extension of the surface area of the external skin — both skin and gut are sensitive interfaces with submerging energized flows — with liquid energy flows everywhere.

Life speeding up entropy …

(the tool — axe, hand, mortar&pestle, hammer, rock, saw, shovel, rope (or use ‘natural tool))

“non-destructive” ?? (impossible not to change), but constructive/destructive don’t really apply

chopping down the dead birch tree in the Catskills (@ Bill’s place)
sawing a tree for fire wood
breaking off lower (dead) branches of all trees in an area
pushing down dead timberrrrrrrr(!)
adjusting the flow of water in a creek
trundling rocks (rolling with gravity)
throwing/skipping rocks into/across water bodies (skipper)

tying trees together (rock to tree)

watching anything

digging a hole

the body (hand on things, stepping on ground, in water, etc.)

Video — (finding a rock, digging it out, moving it, digging a hole to get dirt to fill the first, and replacing the rock in the second hole and covering it up.) (crushing a handful of leaves (mortar and pestle))

Changing the Course (of History/of Nature)

This series of performances takes place in isolated areas in the American West where the artist encounters moving water. Water in the West is a fundamental issue. Watch this space for evidences of change:

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or go here…

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.

Chris tells me that he went to a lecture by Wilczek at CU recently, so, on the basis of that recommendation I track down his book “The Lightness of Being,” which happens not to be at the LTU library, so I’ll have to wait to get it delivered. Suddenly doing a lot more reading again. Going through something of a reset in the thesis process, seeing in mind the order that has to be imposed on the writing, like the orders imposed on external situations. Back to the Confucian sorting into organic categories idea somehow. Reviewing a couple theses that Norie loaned me, both photographers, so that is a good start. Practicing sentences and paragraphs, in a process of stylistic imitation, to see where they go. This because 1) I can usually imitate styles pretty easily, and 2) my basic style is completely different than what would be considered a ‘normal’ academic style. This used to trouble me a lot, but I see that it goes back to the idea of ‘packaging’ of expressions being crucial. At least in terms of the social interfacing of work. I still don’t care much for altering the character of a work merely to fit some marketer’s dream, as this has deep connotations for the authenticity of the expression. However, by re-packaging an expression in a form that itself resonates of a certain integrity, perhaps on the advice of a trusted Other, there is a potential for expansive dissemination of those expressions.

More importantly to this issue now, I am looking more closely at the main internal and external sources. The internal sources are basically in place, and have been as a taut line drawn along my creative practice over the last couple decades-plus. The external sources are identified by a resonance with that tensioned line. Sketching along with ordering the patterns that the resonance takes is the primary task now

*a basic definition of invariance is ‘a function, quantity, or property that remains unchanged when a specified transformation is applied.’ It is an active term, arising through the action of transformation, and where transformation is framed as (a) limited and changeable situation. That’s the mathematical definition, but another could be the characteristic of the phenomena we experience which our minds see as repeating (at least a bit) out of the vast field of change that we are fully immersed within — and transformation is simply a ground condition in the full flux of being.

whatever.

Qi follows the will. (The will is an imposed pathway on the movement of Qi.) If the heart is centered and in balance, the clarity of eye is complete.

But otherwise, if the heart is misplaced, distortion of everything seen and sensed occurs.

cross my heart and hope to die. opening the heart. set someone’s heart at rest. heartless. cold hands warm heart. near someone’s heart. broken hearts. cry your heart out. heart-broken. he’s got a big heart. to one’s heart’s content. a man after my own heart. have one’s heart in the right place. absence makes the heart grow fonder. affair of the heart. heart and soul. bleeding heart liberal. after your own heart. be still my beating heart. by heart. beating heart. change of heart. steal someone’s heart. a man after my own heart. have one’s heart in one’s mouth. open your heart.

absence makes the heart grow fonder. take heart. after my own heart. at heart. break her heart. by heart. change of heart. cold hands, warm heart. cross my heart. cry her heart out. cut to the heart of the matter. do his heart good. eat your heart out. find it in their heart. from the bottom of my heart. get to the heart of. gave me heart failure. half a heart. harden mine heart. have a heart. have no heart for. heavy heart. in her heart of hearts. lose heart. lost her heart to. near to my heart. not have the heart to. poured out his heart. set her heart on. sick at heart. steal someone’s heart. steel my heart against. take heart. take to heart. to her heart’s content. warm heart. warm the cockles of his heart. wearing hiss heart on his sleeve. with all her heart. young at heart. with half a heart.

heart attack.

The view that technology may be represented as a human constructed/refined pathway for the limited sense of controllable ‘natural’ forces (energies, power, flows) seems to be productive, but it needs to be tested more against deterministic or Utopian views of technology. I’m pragmatic about the outcome being an overlooked pathway hidden among the trillion-plus unique URLs in the webiverse.  Oh well. Ultimately technology is a set of (often socially-proffered) choices that the individual makes as to where to channel his/her life-energies. The channels or pathways are multiplex and are influenced by collectives of Others (both dead and alive), but ultimately are there for the individual to engage or not. Of course, there are social systems which have set rigid command-and-control systems in place to radically limit the choice of pathways available. Other social systems have evolved elaborate methodologies for persuasion so that the participating population will feel compelled to utilize certain technological pathways rather than others — often not even being aware that their ‘choice’ is an illusion.

There is a precursor situation which influences the development of external shared social protocols and that situation is within the refined evolutionary structure of the body-system. The body, as with any life-form, is itself a powerful system for the (consumption and) directed expression of energies, both internally through various sub-systems, and externally as a unitary and singular body. It is the primary technological system (and then all life is a technology…!).

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

It’s a good example of the affect of mediation on socially-generated practices of any sort [this came into mind when I saw a poster advertising a IEEE conference here in Sydney. The posted contained all the recognized and standardized functions of conferences anywhere on any subject. The cocktail evening cruises on the ________ (fill in the blank) river/harbor/lake. The hospitality suites in the _________ (fill in the blank) hotel. The keynotes by famous personages. The plenaries, the break-outs, the posters, workshops, and seminars. yadda, yadda. Don't people get tired of this endless repetition of heavily coded social protocols?]

The following was downloaded from the UM (University of Minnesota) original Gopher online text retrieval system sometime in the winter of 1991-92. I think it’s the first document (extant) that I downloaded via that new networked document system — the direct precursor of the WWW. Coming around in a very long, very wide circle, from the roots of the digital coming-to-being in the last millennium, breathe deeply:

1. Sit on the forward third of a chair or cushion.

2. Arrange your legs in a position you can maintain comfortably. In the half-lotus position, place your left leg on your right thigh (or vice versa). In the full-lotus position , put your feet on opposite thighs. You may also sit simply with your legs tucked in close to your body, but be sure that your weight is distributed evenly on three points: Both of your knees on the ground and your buttocks on the round cushion. On a chair, keep your knees apart about the width of your shoulders, feet firmly planted on the floor.

3. Straighten and extend your spine, keeping it naturally upright, centering your balance in the lower abdomen. Push your lower back a little forward, open your chest, and tuck your chin in slightly, keeping the head upright, not leaning forward, or backward, or to the side. Sway your body gently from left to right, until you naturally come to a point of stillness on your cushion.

4. Keep your eyes cast on the floor about 3 to 4 feet in front of your body, eyes neither fully opened nor closed. If the eyes are closed, you might start to daydream or visualize things.

5. Keep your lips and teeth together with your tongue resting against the roof of your mouth.

6. Place your hands on your lap with the right palm up and your left hand (pal up) resting on your right hand, thumb-tips lightly touching, forming a horizontal oval. This is the mudra of zazen, in which all things are unified. Place the sides of the little fingers against your abdomen, a few inches below the navel, harmonizing your center of gravity with the mudra.

7. Take a few breaths, exhaling fully. Let your breath settle into its natural rhythm. With proper physical posture, your breathing will flow naturally into your lower abdomen.

8. Sit still and keep your attention on your breath. When your attention wanders, bring it back to the breath again and again — as many times as necessary!

9. Be fully, vitally present. Simply do your very best. At the end of your sitting period, gently sway your body from right to left. Stretch out your legs; be sure they have feeling before standing.

10. Practice every day for ten to fifteen minutes (or more) and you will discover the treasures of your life.

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 — meagre 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.

Understanding this from being aware of my own movements (and instances of compromised balance), and watching locals, I noticed several major differences between their gait and mine. The primary feature of the local walk was that both feet never really left the ground and contact was flat-footed and somewhat stiff-legged. There was a substantial time when the full sole of the shoe was flat on the ice, and it was during that time when forward acceleration was made.

If you try this yourself, you will immediately see that the glutes are not the site of any muscular effort for locomotion as opposed to when accelerating off the big toe and Achilles tendon. Could this be the source of the predominance of flat arses in Iceland?

Aside from the glare-ice technique, there was another endearing and embodied gait by farmers when walking their fields. A thousand years of overgrazing sheep has seriously compromised most of Iceland’s grasslands. As the land was overgrazed, this exposed the underlying volcanic soil directly to powerful aeolian erosion which could strip meters away down to a gravelly bedrock surface in no time. When life again attempts to establish itself on that surface, after sheep are removed from the picture, it first starts as miniscule moss colonies which grow in the shelter of a small cobble or so. The moss begins to capture wind-borne soil which gradually increases the colony size which increases the turbulent capture of airborne sediment. Over a period of decades these moss colonies form a hummocky surface with a relief of perhaps 50 cm (18 inches) and a horizontal frequency of a meter or so. To walk across such a surface is absolutely exhausting unless you conform your body in a particular way. The Icelandic farmers gait consists of the following: hands clasped behind the back, an exaggerated forward hunch of the upper body, and the knees bent dramatically. Leaning forward, and using the bend in the knees to essentially level out the distance between the upper body and the average ground height of the bottom of the hummocks, one takes long strides where the torso never goes up and down, but rather the level changes of the hummocks are compensated by different extensions of the knees. It’s humorous to watch, but is highly effective and a very rapid gait. If one tries ‘normal’ walking, climbing up and down the hummocks, it is slow and absolutely exhausting.

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…

What changes flow into the ongoing process of life during solo retreats to power-full places? I think a lot about all the others who I know, and do wish that there were folks who would be able to join me in these places. Some folks I would like to have join me and others, I know, wouldn’t appreciate it. Everything would be different, especially the bushwhacks and the rambles; the cooking and eating, sharing meals, and just hanging out together would recall so many prior times, and the deep and satisfying fun that was had by all.

The hikes: while most attention has to go to the movement itself, as there are considerable risks to walking solo in such places, mind may drift from immediate situation and the larger questions of what has become, what does become of life. It’s more of a noisy mess, but it is easier under these circumstances to do the yogic step away and allow the chitta vritti, the thought-noise, to simply happen, knowing that being in the moment is far more important and has deeper implications than any projections onto future (and very much theoretical) situations or into re-living historical situations. The pull of the un-fettered mind into both those spaces is strong, and the best tonic for that is the risk of solo bushwhacking where there is a steep penalty for not paying attention. I do catch myself every so often, verbally, aloud, slow-down slow-down slow-down, after I make a mis-step or blunder. The most common is when traversing some slick-rock face and stepping on a small pebble. That’s all it takes, send you 10 feet or 100 feet to the next ledge down, or to the canyon floor. Doesn’t make much difference how far, an injury would be immediate life-threatening even if it was a minor sprain — if immobilized, you would have to deal with at least one night out, maybe more, with hypothermia, then dehydration being the most problematic, then the problem of becoming predator food, the problem of attracting help could be very difficult, if in a slot canyon or off the normal known trails. I carry a loud whistle, and do leave small notes in my car which would direct search parties to general areas, but the terrain is vast, and there is much topography that would make searching difficult. I think they would wait a day at least before even checking the car anyway. Unless you told someone specifically that you would be in touch. There is no phone access, and so on, uff. Well, the point is, focus and caution have to be taken very seriously when soloing. I would do things rather differently if with one other or a small group. There is immediately a sizeable extra safety factor. Not that it would suddenly make risk disappear, but an innocuous stumble on the rocks wouldn’t immediately become a life-and-death situation.

What about these time-lapse movies? What are they about? I don’t know what to make of them, but have spent numerous hours making them — 2 minutes per hour is the rate that I’ve been using — a frame every 3 or 4 seconds to make a PAL 24 fps film. I guess I’ll make a dvd or maybe a single work, but have to think of the sound-track for them, that’s difficult.

Anyway, head out, south through Rangely, down the Book Cliffs, through Loma and meet Collin and Marisa at the airport office of their business, the Colorado Flight Center, get pizza and beer, and drive up the hill to Glade Park to have dinner with Bob, their next door neighbor.

Apocalyptic. Huge wind storm, driving wind upwards from the playa to the black clouds collected over the ranges. Wind. Then, much later in the evening, the air becomes heavy on the lungs, and a fine powdered dust hangs in the more still air, like a fog, but dust, powdered mountains, air-borne terrain. It is dark, lightning and thunder shuffles in the background, unseen, muffled behind the curtain of dislocated earth hanging in the air. Eyes sting, nose waters, pressure heavy on the lungs, body recalls the Great Sydney Dust Storm of ’09, sleep is disturbed so the reading of Augustus continues, more on that later.

Many other events and actions go un-commented-upon, so far. And there are more sounds to upload, along with numerous time-lapse sequences. These seem most apropos to the time here. Watching the weather — back to the “window weather’ concept.

John Vallee, 54, lives near the trestle that spans the Crane Creek and was watching TV when he heard a loud screech. He went outside and first thought he saw a blanket tangled under a rail car. Then he realized it was a person.

“It’s going to be hard for me to get to sleep,” Mr. Vallee told Florida Today. “I can’t get it out of my mind.” — AP

The energized impression and apprehension of be-ing leaves us with resonant formations in embodied memory. And it is resonance that best circumscribes (models) the phenomena of the propagation of empathy from the Other to the Self. Although there is no hard evidence in humans, the concept of mirror neurons would seem to support the idea of resonance. Caught a lecture at UM with Deb on “Empathy in Normal Adult Development and Neurological Disease” with Bob Levenson from UCB which got me thinking of the actual mechanism that allows for the transmission of the energies of expression across Cartesian space from the Self to the Other. The obvious model would be the transmission of band-limited radiative (visual, auditory, touch, etc) energy which then is apprehended by the neural system, a system which is sensitive to ‘matched’ or similar experiences that have already impinged and impressed themselves on the body system. This impression process changes the body system from one energy configuration to another. And any life system will have fundamental resonant pathways — these would be necessary determinants of basic learned experience — whatever the particular and precise mechanism is (mirror neurons being perhaps a primary model), the idea of resonance seems to be key. Resonance would depend on some accounting of sameness and difference as per prior embodied experience and the persistence of impressions (which themselves are configurations of energized neuronal structures: memory) among other factors. There would have to be a means for rapid energy pattern-matching across a huge volume of semi-fixed memory structures in the brain — it would be impossible to check all possible prior impressions with all live incoming impressions, so there would have to be some kind of disgressionary or limiting function to the process in the form of step or directional filters…

I can’t get you out of my mind…

The condition of virtuality arises when humans create a situation which attenuates the flows that are impinging on their sensual and embodied presence. When technology is defined as a way to alter the paths of energy flow: virtuality is a subset condition of the altered flows such that the flows that are obviously (or not!) entering the body system are attenuated. The obvious (materialist!) subset of the widest set is that grouping which attenuates the classical sensory-input spectra. These may be ‘scientifically’ framed based on typical wave-based mechanical and electro-magnetic physics: the EM frequency band of visible Light, the pressure-induced electricity of touch, and so on. In a holistic approach to presence, the affectations of flow are continuous, complete, and substantive.

Alluding to yet a further subset is the use of glass as a specific form of energized matter which is placed between the eye and the ‘world out there.’ This is a fundamental form of virtuality, where silicon dioxide is introduced as an attenuating filter of flows between embodied presence and the cosmos. (this is a short intro to a longer text on the history of glass that’s cooking on the back burner.)

If one constructs a tool, what is one doing, and why is one doing it? How will one do it?

How to control of flows around oneself? And what does this control mean? Where does the desire to control arise from? Is it simply about evolutionary (survival/procreative) pressures? Is there anything about control that is altruistic (or simply outside of the broadly evolutionary imperative)?

The divide between life-forms that make tools and ones that don’t is fundamental, but it may be ignored when regarding the smooth continuum framing life as a system(?) that alters the flows of energy around it generally to its advantage (or to its need to continue — life is about life needing to continue life). The divide then appears to arise only when one considers how (from a mechanistic p.o.v.) that control is exerted.

This divide seems especially arbitrary when the body itself may be seen as a tool. The mechanical relations between bone structures, for example, or the magnifying ability of the lens in the eye. And, extending the definition of tool beyond the purely mechanical to, say, chemical, the body is a clearly a refinery in the exact same sense as a petroleum refinery. It conducts a wide-ranging set of thermodynamically driven reactions to access and distribute concentrated energy sources that it has introduced to its system. While there is a material dividing plane, the skin, which historically looms largely absolute in determining many classifications of relation and order, that plane may also be seen as arbitrary. The surface tissues — including the entire gut and lungs — are highly permeable surfaces which are constantly interchanging matter and energy with the environment they are in. In an optimal sense, at a particular time, this interchange process does not degrade the general order of the biotic system, but it does precipitate localized and systemic change. Also to be considered are the millions of microscopic organisms which synergize with the larger human body system — without which that system would likely not survive.

Are there, then, distinctions to be made based on body-as-tool and the ‘external’ tool that the body/mind system synthesizes? Or are these distinctions merely artifacts of the entire mechanistic p.o.v.?

It would seem so. If one considers, again, the relations within the body between , say, limb or organ, where a part may be seen as having a particular function which benefits or affects another part. A particular part has a function (as any tool also has) which aids in the performance of the body-system and interacts with other specific mechanisms in the body. In a living body-system these inter-relations are both necessary and sufficient if one includes the those moving between the body and the external. The body is seen as an indivisible whole, but without the constant interactions with the external environment, it would, for practical purposes, dis-integrate immediately.

The point of this short meditation is to emphasize the process which a tool, by definition, precipitates. That process is the fundamental alteration of the energy flows to which the tool is applied. This process unites the purpose of both internal and external systems for energy flow change which may be seen as a tool. The body is a technology as much as anything external to it which causes an alteration of extant energy flows. (Uff, this suggests that life itself be defined as a technology as it always alters the flows around it — we are life, we alter the flows around us, we are a technology.)

The division between tool-makers and those organisms which do not make tools may then be seen as a somewhat arbitrary one. Both organisms are needful of altering the surrounding flows to survive, they actualize that need via evolved mechanisms as they relate with those particular flows. The ultimate point for both internal and external tool use is the optimized continuance of life.

The need for criticism to include the framework for a new, alternate pathway to travel upon shows up when I find myself focusing too much on circumscribing the problems. This is the same as opposition politics that gets too mired in opposition (doh!) and forgetting that an alternative vision is necessary as well. How to find autonomous spaces when on the road, moving along the lines of power drawn by the dominant social system? How to find or facilitate interstitial spaces that are not under the control of that system. Do these spaces have a set of characteristics that makes them immediately identifiable? Or are they only identified by the precise instances of (uncontrolled) energy flow that occur within them? (chicken-and-egg situation!) For every unit of human-controlled flow of energy, there are countless flows of energy of many orders greater magnitude that are not controlled. Humans are capable of controlling a certain, very limited range of flows. This range has increased in time from those expressions of embodied reach to those far beyond the direct impact of that body. By collecting the energy of many bodies, humans are able to express and project the reach of their control over vast regions. Ultimately, this reach is limited by the number of bodies at the disposal of the regime and the efficiency with which that granular energy is harnessed (through those controlled pathways).

Ran across a couple (excerpted) essays by Ivan Illich, a radical critic of techno-social consumerist systems.

The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed. — Ivan Illich, Silence is a Commons

The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly. This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. — Ivan illich, Tools for Conviviality

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics — that being the approach to social inquiry as an expression of how the dominant worldview is itself dominated by abstracted elements — rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, and largely govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-form of one. This energy arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body which allows for that expression, the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ between the two, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time) of the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation, when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

up at 0600, toss the last items in the truck, 0640 departure. head north-by-northeast. one of the five or six route options for traveling between Prescott and Boulder. gas relatively cheap. clear, dry roads. modest traffic. migraine ensues. why? still no answers. face frozen by the icy landscape shape-shifting outside glass cocoon. travel-day migraine.

Navajo voices in my head. a roadblock for a funeral cortege winding in to a ragged and desolate cemetery near Naschitti. a couple Navajo guys hit me up for change at the gas station in Farmington. tens of F350 Ford pickups streaming back in towards Farmington from the gas fields that have raped the region in the last six years since the Bush regime opened up the area to uncontrolled drilling.

migraine persists all day from noon. hard will staved off a gut explosion until going up the gunbarrel (Route 17) from Alamosa, in the dark, an 18-wheeler in front of me going way too slow, and another behind me going way too fast. suddenly, with head simulating internal combustion with Pallas Athena to be birthed out the forehead or so, I have to vomit. no place to pull off without wrecking, fortunately I have a camping wash-tub in the passenger seat that I had some munchies for the trip in. I dump out the food, swing it between me and the steering wheel and immediately heave my guts into it whilst cruising down the road at 50 mph. three times, gah dam. finally a turn-off. so eff-ing fortunate to have the tub, otherwise, it would have covered the entire interior of the cab, likely. get the car stopped on a side-road, without spilling the tub, open the door and dump it, get some water to rinse acid from mouth. nothing has spilled or splattered. gah. another 20 miles to the Dunes. where it is closing on zero degrees Fahrenheit. zombie-driving past the Center of the Universe and on into the empty campground, and then death-by-sleeping in the back of the truck at an empty camp ground at Great Sand Dunes. -20 C/ 0 F cold outside, but toasty warm in fleece and down. 680 miles. 12 hours. some stops. and all that land, passed by the eyes that are set stereoscopically in a head that wants to implode into the single dimension of a deep sleep.

Easter weekend drifts into Easter Monday, sunny, puffy clouds, changing Light. sunshine is still hot. non-native trees shedding leaves. others like overgrown houseplants are fat and green. nobody else seems worried that winter is coming. what winter? stay inside working while Brad and Amanda are out and about. don’t mind being inside, just needing some down time, and will be outside in the mix enough in the coming days. Bondi calls, soon enough. weather is inscrutable. different. exposed to difference. just the sun being in the north in winter-time is enough to throw brain and full body off.

lines of the hand, with the skin thinning, turning to trapezoidal textures that shimmer differently than they used to do. cool tonight, here at altitude, in the dry west, when the sun goes, warmth goes as well. remembering the nights in the desert, so many times. no matter the heat of the day, the night gives the heat back to the darkness of the sky. only in deep summer, is there more heat delivered than can be reflected away, so that only at the null hour, a time before dawn, does the air loosen itself of the burden of heat. but as soon as fall comes, with a couple days of cloud cover, the night air is an empty chill.

time: money: energy. what about this triad? the conversion between the first two concerns a number of roles and activities that one undertakes. probably the first thing to notice is that time as a phenomena exists outside the framework of the social system. at the same time as recognizing this, a primary task of an evolving social system is the construction of a regulated mechanism for quantifying time. this is a feature of even technologically ‘underdeveloped’ cultures — where the importance of the cyclic variations in the seasons was carefully framed and marked by religious holidays to remind citizens of their places in the (agriculturally) productive life of the society.

time as a raw phenomena is an intangible, of similar import to gravitation and Light. however, the development of devices which would demarcate apparently consistent segments of time has been and is important to any social system. one metric of the advancement of a society can be tied to the accuracy and extent of standardization of temporal measurement devices. framing of time is a key element to any set of basic standardization metrics. and, to the extent possible, these metrics are rigidly applied to all parts of the social system — you know, those kind of people who don’t wear a watch? a little revolt against the microscopic reach of hegemony in the social structure. try meeting someone without depending on some kind of shared standardization of time. at sunset? at high noon? at the first moon after the vernal equinox?

what is “spending time”? it is a commitment to share a portion of the lived expenditure of life-energy on some activity. life-time, and the co-committed life-energy that is ‘used’ in a unit of (standardized) time cannot be retrieved. time is a uni-directional flow that often appears to change speed, irrespective and independent of the standardization applied by the social system. cosmology suggests that perhaps there are regions of the universe where this flow is distorted significantly, though not reversed or stopped. it is a given that the existence of our local system of complexity that life-time flows in one direction. therefore, ‘spending time’ has a significance equal in importance to any other fundamental choice facing a sentient being. along the flow of time, biologic entities, at least considered as discrete material objects, display the uniform characteristic of increasing entropy according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. there is a clear relation between the limited amount of energy an entity can obtain, generate, use in an apparently materialistically limited existence and passing time.

then there is the issue of money. money is not the thing itself. money represents something, being only printed paper, it shares a parallel history to the development of the printed word, and before that, the abstraction of written language. but since the social system designates a set of equivalencies — sometimes of limited number, sometimes in near-infinite variety — to actual configurations of matter, or actions undertaken by other sentient beings. (to be continued) …

three months out from accident/surgery and all reports are positive from Dr. Papadopoulos. he was busier than last appointment, but he gave the essential prognosis that I can wean myself from the brace and swim, hike, and so on. good deal. it comes off as much as possible. which may be a slow process, it has grown to fit, muscles succumbing to laze and sprawl in the molded plastic casing.

retro-fitting the travelog — now back to December 2000. about half-way, though the first half is probably twice the volume of text than the latter half. doubt I will get the whole thing done. it is a legacy project.

pondering how it is that I have not brought more relevant experiences into this travelog. the last decade of my trajectory is relatively singular, and has crossed the paths of a great many of those who are greater in the eyes of the mass pay-per-view. nothing rubbed off. or only a little.

it could be that, as with the subject of my inquiry — the continuum of human relation — I tend to take a relationist rather than a reductionist approach. that is, allowing a text (better yet, speaking!) to generate from the complex and dynamic space of the human connection rather than making a series of overarching reductions of that Other, through the encounter. hmmm. it is this pathway which almost requires an abandonment of social relevance, except as a chance by-product. there will be unprecedented outcomes.

it is exactly this reductionist approach which brings massive social rewards: the compressing/re-stating/re-creation of lived presence as completely embedded in the social system. indeed, this IS the essence of fame. the generation of parallel (yet seemingly convergent) pathways which appear known, or previously experienced (social structure is predicated on shared experience). when there is an encounter with an Other who, on examination, does not share any of the abstracted pathways of life-experience, we feel uncomfortable, distanced, and afraid. through the “getting-to-know” process — a process of trying to locate within the Self and the Other common pathways and patterns of being — if we are not successful in finding any shared pathways, then the social dimension of the relation is doomed. we are forced to simply be in the moment, in a fearful and unknowable sequence of moments that have no predictable outcome. “breaking-the-ice” — looking for the flow of shared life by breaking through the stasis and reification of socialization (judging on looks, on possessions). looking at life passing on around through the (distorted) socialized eye. seeing only the known, blocking out any confrontation of the unknown.

a couple Latino guys come to deliver the firewood. my ears are wooden. hard to understand them. not able to dredge up some English, and not used to hearing the Spanish, though I can understand when one of them translates to the other.

here’s a side view of the titanium in my back — up to the right. the cylinder in the middle is located at the core of the L3 vertebra. and the HUGE wood screws are in the L2 and L4. sheesh.

sliding into fall. this is the first year that I have not been working, teaching somewhere in the world in the month of September since 1986. instead, nursing body to some state of health, slowly. bored with reading and other forms of mediated consumption. can’t sit long enough to really do concentrated work on new videos and such, but do want to at least get one new dvd done with the 3 or 4 new videos finished before summer started.

everything is in slow motion except for time passing rapidly. now more than two months from this cataclysmic accident. no meaning to interpret in the event and the subsequent process of recovery.

talking by phone to folks occasionally, hardly doing email, don’t understand the malaise.

Francis Bacon doesn’t seem to be so interesting — highly over-rated. though he did recognize that

Knowledge is power — Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est

but anyway, he doesn’t provide any liberate witticisms on recovery. recovery is a slow process. obviously. to regain a state of order after a chaotic intervention into the body-system assumes a significant input of energy back into the system. seeking order. recovery is seeking order. but the pathway never seems so clear. there are many possible ways. the ingestion of certain substances is necessary, but which ones in which order and what quantity when. rest mandatory, but when does rest and horizontality begin to hinder regaining the activity of life which is primarily vertical? exercise, the operation of the physical meat space is key, though it too can take legion permutations depending on life-philosophy. body-awareness is heightened, to the excruciating boredom of those folks who have to listen to mumbled ruminations about body processes and deviations that are often, as they say, “more information than I needed to know.” the grail of order, bringing perfect form back to the meat-space is always set to fail merely by the intervention of the same time factor that is necessary for recovery to begin with. time brings decay and aging. so, recovery will always be an accession to a lesser goal or state than one would care to accept. diminished capacity. the question becomes, what to let go of and what to fight for…

no energy. good days are fewer than bad days. bad days come when sleep is not found. a particular kind of diffuse pain or sensation keeps body from sinking into deepening slumber. no fast-racing head thoughts, just sensate disturbance. strings the days out in a fog of lack and pointlessness.

one month out on surgery. some things have improved, many have not. no stamina, little strength, watching muscle mass melt away. going to physical therapy — it adds some dimensions to movement and increasing strength, but existence is ever limited. memory is poor, desire to communicate limited. thankful for the continuing cool and cloudy monsoon weather. spectacular clouds, occasionally the massive thunder storms intersect the house here, though most often they do not, Chino protected by a dry bubble of upwelling air. sometimes there are storms on all sides yet none will migrate over the area.

I think Nick suggests that moniker, but maybe not. my memory of daily existence is very flat and lacking any cataloged depth or retrieval landmarks. this will persist into the future. with spinal cord damage. the entire neuro-system is off. so is the lap where the laptop resides. some skin surface below the suture line reacts with the definite sensation of burning when there is only a slight pressure contact. confused nerves. distorted signals. while the main body system slowly oscillates, out of equilibrium.

living on the back. no longer an upright animal. except part-time. and no driving for another couple months. perspectives are limited. constant aching. phone calls with empathetic Others, emphasizes the distance of distributed being, how help is only visceral. hmmmm.

now concerns have all shifted to simple things like how to manage post-surgical edema in my left leg, as it migrates slowly towards the figurative ground of foot-dwellers. this seems to be the most intensive source for problems (pain and discomfort). unless there is an underlying neurological pathology, which I hope not.

still have a yet-uncounted 12-inch string of surgical staples decorating my left abdomen. my surgeon is on summer vacation, so, won’t meet with him until next week to find out what is going on with the surgery, recovery, and probable causes of the bone density problem. almost two weeks out of surgery. should I feel better or worse. having no baseline makes life frustrating. although my base health was excellent going into the whole thing, it’s not clear where I would be or even how the original injury actually happened to begin.

still processing the whole paradigm-shift of plan-changes, and possible life-changes. hmmmm.

fighting for breath, heart bursting, the horizontal trauma that surgery imposes on the body is severe. can’t imagine being older or in worse shape. fighting to get enough air, but no diaphragm muscles left, and pushing against the suture wall, non space for air. heart compressed into smaller-than-average ribcage. pulmonary edema. can’t draw anything near a full breath. even with an oxygen feed. a horrible suffocating night.

details aside. woke up this morning in peak condition, ready for a lively 4th of July. hours later, stretched out in pain on the bedroom floor apparently suffering from a herniated lumbar disk or so.

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation (Nietzsche: beständige Schöpfung). The human body is an energy system … which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new. — Norman O. Brown (1990)

a flu sweeps the class, knocking many people out. I felt it come on late in the afternoon yesterday, and headed home to bed, but it still comes on all day today. despite that, the day was very productive and busy with a tentative meeting with Steve’s class in Baltimore. on the way home, Martin tells me about the prevalence and common knowledge about the psilocybin mushrooms that this neighborhood, Upper Borg, is known for — at least the fields around the area. seems the psychedelic culture was widespread in Germany pretty recently.

Neils, Valgerdur and I head to Selatangar for a short hike in heavy rain and thick misty airs. the sea roils against the smashed and solid black stone. lichen splash some rocks with colored and white spraying splotches of paint. a visit to the Blue Lagoon is … different … from when it was a rough dredged pond in the lava, and a small wooden shack for changing. now it is business.

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form–no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space–ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold–the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn. — Walt Whitman

readying things for another launch. over-busy, but enjoying seeing people. still have severe pain with the tooth item, ibuprophen keeping me going. that and exercise, good food, good conversation. dropped in on Kaisu’s opening, saw Perttu at Kiasma after swimming in the afternoon. then back to the burbs with Sanna, followed by a too meaty pizza at the ubiquitous middle-eastern-run pizza house and a psychedelic sunset on the ferry home late. time in this place shrivels like a lettuce leaf on Mojave asphalt in July. even life time seems to be doing the same. it’s going to be over soon.

hustle into town yesterday evening for some dance performances, with Aki doing one on the steps of the Atheneum to a composition “Everything but the city” by a young Dutch composer, Rijndert van Woudenberg. two other performances, one accompanied by a Stockhausen composition, the other by Henze, were ‘normal’ modern dance, and although there are probably a multitude of subtleties about the genre that pass the un-tuned eye, this normal dance is about the body and it’s forms and the parameters that body training apply to the possibilities of movement. clearly a difference between that and butoh.

I work with dance as it involves the changing of the senses. If your senses do not change, the dance does not change. The consciousness of the body comes into the picture with the changing of the senses. Generally we believe that in dance no matter what happens in our senses the physicality does not change. But to me, when the senses change, consciousness changes, and the physical body itself changes. In a bigger sense is the larger question: What is matter? So with sense and consciousness working together, the physical body itself does change, matter changes. — Kasai Akira

later, lunch with Sanna at Carousel. time and times. drifts through comfortable, warm places, once occupied, absorbed, diffused, permeated embodied be-ing, present, past, divided.

04 2004′, ’21 1809

what should I write about here? no blogging spew to be had, not that I really care about putting something down each day, hardly have done that in the history of this whole work.

spending time on the archive. looking through old 16mm family films. there are more than 4,000 feet of silent Kodachrome from the 1950′s. mostly Alaska. researching the telecine process going from film to digital video. want to get them all transferred so that folks in the family can actually see them. there used to be a 16mm editing console (manual splicing and viewing unit), but that has long since made its way to the Goodwill or so. so I manually spliced the remaining 100 foot reels together onto 400 foot reels, there are ten or twelve of those along with “The Alaska Movie,” as we call it. a 1600-foot behemoth 45-minute-or-so series of fragments of hunting polar bear by air, Inuit dancers, glacier break-ups, family parties, sledding, trailing moose in the car, panning gold, and on and on.

part of this increasing tendency to archive these days. bought archival storage cases for all Dad’s and Aunt Mary’s slides, amounting to about 7,000 or so. numbered boxes for much of my own small archive of negatives, prints, and other art stuff. seems spurious, out of all the things to do in the world.

so cycling 20 miles in the 100+F heat seems the other thing to do. winds make the difference. with the wind downhill, against uphill.

much time spent taking Dad in for his almost daily hospital visits to get his leg wound looked after. really shocking. shows how much more difficult it is for the body to heal as it ages. eventually there is not enough energy turn-around to bring order back to the system.

score. life goes the right direction, so it seems. university faculty housing comes through, a relatively inexpensive apartment for the academic year. car is now registered in Colorado, drivers license is next. maybe even re-registering to vote, after the long hiatus of cynical attitude and expatriate status. but voting only to stick it to the folks who engineered the coup d’etat in the previous presidential election. the results don’t really matter anyway, as the core of the empire, the ranks and ranks surrounding the centers of power “inside the Beltway” are rotten and corrupt.

I penetrate the earth and sustain creatures by my strength; becoming Soma, the liquid of moonLight, I nurture all healing herbs.

I am the universal fire within the body of living beings; I work with the flow of vital breath to digest the foods that men consume.

I dwell deep in the heart of everyone; memory, knowledge, and reasoning come from me I am the object to be known through all sacred lore; and I am its knower, the creator of its final truth.
– Lord Krishna

it is midsummer. moon waxing, not full yet, but there is not so much that touches the eye with length of day, brightness, or even the memory of winter still etched in body. wintering in Colorado was easy. brilliant, and I repeat to many souls that “you will never hear me complain about the weather here.” how is it that I survived Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and especially, Lapland? it is all memory. now. some written here, some not.

shuffling through boxes of books and other things, I think: what’s all the energy focused on the reproduction of art? what is the obsession of getting all art configurations onto paper accompanied by words? paper is an easily preserved object, (the archival word), this is a related factor — to avoid the death of the material object, immortality of the material (the thousand year Reich). seems also related to democratic socialism. that the production of culture should be spread to all, equally. though it is, in the end, not egalitarian propagation by any means. the absolution of “you had to be there.” that an individual’s experience should not be singular, it should be reflected from the collective. rooted and growing only from the collective. not the individualized interpretation of unique seeing (as the reproduction applies a stasis to point-of-view (who’s point of view IS it?), it denies a multiplicity of points of view (portals into the realm of the spirit regarding see-ing and be-ing).

you can relive the voyages of the great explorers — advertisement

Flatirons wreathed in ice-crystal clouds. resonant. the Bouger Anomaly calculation in the total gravitational field analysis of a particular point is made to consider the effects of large variations in the topography local to that point. the effect of a cliff or mountain nearby cannot be ignored. below the mountain, ones body is Lightened by its gravitational attraction, while on the top, one is drawn downwards by its mass beneath the feet. that is countered slightly by the greater distance from the center of terrestrial spin which, because of greater velocity, Lightens ones body centripetally.

no mapping

and then, lately, I have been trying to reconstruct the visualizations that Akeno taught one week when teaching butoh at Media Lab. she was teaching us how to walk.

walk as though there is a large carp in your belly, swimming forward with a deep swerving, slow, against the current;
walk as though you are 20 cm above the surface of the ground;
walk as though there is a large eye in the center of the forehead, there is a thread coming from the center of the eye, the thread is being pulled slowly forward;
walk as though there is a massive hand behind the back, pushing;
walk as though there is an expansive forest of mint behind the slightly open mouth;
walk as though there is a wide and shallow ceramic bowl on the top of the head, filled with a deadly poison;
walk as though each joint in the body has a thread going upwards to heaven;
walk as though you are on razor blades;
and the most intense of all:
walk as though you are seen, are being watched by all that is around you, by all the universe.
–Aki Suzuki, butoh teacher

end the day wondering if the society has eroded beyond my recognition. or has my recognition become crusted with mutated tissues and cauterized nerves. alienating fear has spalled the rich exterior, and left it scarred and hypersensitive. on a macro scale, paranoia deeper than Amiri Baraka could ever dredge, and on a micro scale, minds bent double by the stress of surviving. a form of darkness. while all the while all the while. life slips by. full of busy-ness.

pathways under the mountains, across fields of snow, by winter moon-lit pines.

what I hope will be the last visit to Iceland for a long time. bone-tired of the movement to get here. feel like being grounded. allowing the electricity of life pass through the body and on into the earth. grounded. in all its suggested meanings. flighty. with the wind blowing outside. and non-sense of the isolation of the interior. the protected sensual field of action. band-limited, spectrally-defined cut and pass. and all that. filtration. that the process of being tends in the direction of shutting down than opening up. but that is my own perception. realizing that possibly some others tend to open-ness as a base condition. open to life and living. what a concept. I have to fight to achieve that state of being. but maybe it is the fight that stands in the way.

forgot to write anything, lost in the hangover haze from one of those dinner parties. Sólveig and Artu invited me over with some other artists from Denmark, Iceland, and Finland for a loooong Russian dinner which turned out fabulous. even though all the onions that were diced were NOT eaten. everything else, including the vodka, was consumed, as per video evidence below.. a walk home at 0430 was nice, though, with the bright morning Light already in full tilt. I chant I’m on a’nother fuckin’ planet over and over as I pass by Töölönlahti, the Taidehalli and Eduskuntatalo (Parliament House) on the way home, also evidenced late in that video. only problem, I paid for the walk the next two days. I had forgotten to put the small foot-pad in my left boot. seems that for my spine to be in equilibrium, the left heel must ride a couple millimeters higher than the right. symmetries of nature do not apply to the left/right sliced-and-mirrored human body. the generated image of meat-half and reflected-half forms two subtle monsters. in my case, left side of body (right brain) is variously halt and lame. while the right side (left brain) dominates. eyesight also anti-symmetric where right eye is far-sighted, left eye, near. one optometrist tells me, hey, this is a good thing because you will always be able to see something without glasses. okay, I think it was the same optometrist who gave the wrong prescription and made the left eye get worse over a 6-month period way back in the 1980s. idiot. but eyes stay with the same strength for a decade now. no changes. same glasses. the frames bear the corroded temples from Pacific salt water, sunglasses worn after surfing.

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.

back goes. just like last January before the Prague meeting. related to suddenly having heavy things to carry and to the psychic stress of the destinations — arriving and re-arriving — crippling drain of energy. dribbles right out the tailbone.

stepping over the barriers. to thought, through thought. and back into the body, bodies. Saturday nite in Helsinki. getting only small doses of life, but enough to … stay alive. Sanna’s warm offer of a Bulgarian film on video and a bottle of wine is too good to turn down, especially with the rain and too-long a line at Saunabari. we catch the 14 bus to Töölö … dozing on the couch, crawl to the bed in the alcove, rumpled sheets, in the comfortable position of intertwined-ness out of habit, bodies calling, re-calling each other. since, what, a week ago, nah, more.

butoh in the morning. Akeno is leading short exercises for one of the classes in Media Lab, so she invites me to join in.

life shifts radically. my online presence expands, and my real self shrinks some. try to run up stairs, jog everywhere I go, to isometric exercises while on the tram, anything to keep the physical self happening. walking near water in the Light, looking at trees, sky whenever possible. the power of a fast connection is intense, though. draws me in, for hours a day…

we come to a moment of making history, or moving beyond history, or making a gesture at least, standing at the edge of something, anything, but it is an edge a precipice. and raising an arm to the height of the shoulder, we sweep the air, palm out. it’s done. over. gone. but never really forgotten if the state of being is like it should be. might be, one day. and it happens within every nano-second.

sparrows and crows are loudly meditating on the possibility that there will be a warm time coming soon. no conclusion. so it goes. caught between a rock and a hard place, caught in a play, caught in a spider’s web. acting, struggling, carefully extricating the body, centimeter by centimeter, to allow for a more full life. electric god dogs. and other titles flicker by in the analyzing mind, cars idle, accelerate, idle, looking for parking. warm air leaks out the top of the window, cold air flows in at the bottom. books, books, everywhere books. this is Europe. the land of Gutenberg. kingdom of the letter. domicile of literary expression. this is what Europe runs on. books, the word, the letter of the law, and religion. what is the obverse of the Word? the image? it is again the intersection of Ikon and Logos. but both are equally mediations. they are only carriers of energies.

at the airport in Akureyri, after a long workshop. short in time, long on energy and things that transpired. learning how to teach, how to let go of the situation and let it develop on its own. injecting certain things, with-holding others. and just learning. it rolls on its own through humor, especially humor. despite my condition of the last two days. Soffia locates a physical therapist who cooks my lower back and then works it over with a heavy massage. I accept the most intense reworking of the tissues, despite the pain. it helps, mostly not by the physicality of the manipulations but by reminding me of the structures there, on location, structures that are reflecting the tensions of the mind. re-minds me to forget recollection and mind. period. just release it. like in the workshop. letting go. and not holding on. not fighting, but relinquishing territories, and the Other will advance to meet the Self. good night.

things build up. stormy weather is over. then, with the slightest movement, a slight rotation, reaching to pick up a bag, not bending at all, a small spring is released, sending a needle into the spine. a buzzing that ricochets around the internal architecture, the Temple of the Soul. and instantly I am crippled! gasp. just like last spring in Amsterdam at the n5m conference. faugh! the ensuing conflagration is crazy. massive shifts in plan, constructing and reconstructing scenarios over and over, shit happens. and what to do about it? no clear solutions except that messages are flying through existence, some I choose to read, some I ignore, some surface through the ignorance and break the ice. in ma’ face.