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.”

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)?

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 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 approach to social inquiry being an expression of how the dominant world-view 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)