just incomprehensible. I, Robot, twice in a row. Asimov in Hollywood. dribs of humor, drabs of car chase, gobbets of fire, punching, swat teams, body armor, and guns. and imagine that, I get to see it a third time, four days into the future. on 21 November, en route across Amurika. another 6.5 hours in the air.

rok it is. whole gale in English, as opposed to strong gale, fresh gale, or moderate gale. grounded. no flights north today, most likely. so it goes. the rok brings restless sleep and no relaxation, the flux of energy is so intense. wind speeds between 40 and 50 meters/second in some places. flights north are canceled all day until 1800 when they mobilize a 757 to do the hop. luck out with a business-class seat, at the front, the first place to go in a downing. next to me sits Brad, I think his name is, a basketball recruit for the Akureyri team. all the way from Connecticut. his first time in Iceland. says it was the worst plane flight he’s ever had. I told him he was lucky we were landing in the dark, as the sight of the mountains that the plane threads through on the way into the fjord are hairy on a good day. in a rok, the whole machine is bucking, thumping, and revving like a Huey under fire over the Mekong. bless me, father, for I have sinned… whewsh. and a 30-minute wait for my bag, and a further 30-minute wait for a taxi. the entire local infrastructure groaning under the stress of a full 757′s load of bodies itching to get outta R’vík and back to winter-enshrouded northlands.

up early, eat the rest of the food in the fridge for breakfast. veggie omelet. and head out. back in Ice Land, where the landing was preceded by some minutes of rough buffeting, and at the gate it is hard to remain standing in the parked airplane from the wind shaking it. rok it is called. roaring wind from some direction, this time from the northwest, from Greenland. so, cold. bitter on exposed skin. so, stay inside and wonder if flights north will be delayed tomorrow, not too keen on doing the stol (short take-off-and-landing) Fokker hops to Akureyri in bad weather. not at all. will call in the morning to see what the status is.

en route already again, away from this land, moving ahead with relative purpose, dancing. gray day, low clouds, rain on the inward-slanting airport lounge windows, Scottish accents drift in tour’s end quiet across the coffee shop / boarding hall. got here too early as well, but as the moving inertia took over from that of comfortable stasis in a certain place, rang up the taxi place. as usual, for the pre-boarding chill-out time. a pick-up truck drives the landing strip. English Football, the Euro corollary of the American League, entertains with silent subtitles.

a single F-16 flies north at 400 meters above the fjord. and there are repeated afterburner blasts which say that there are more than one aircraft up there somewhere, and now, a few minutes later, two go over wing-to-wing. never seen that up here before, what’s this about? not a normal event — Icelanders do not like to be reminded that they are still an occupied country. the 85th Group, based in Keflavík, next to the international commercial airport, is a wing of the US Navy and has been based there since 1944.

after getting away from the Big City on takeoff, now moving over a landscape that is familiar at all distances possible, from the face pressed into the wet moss to stereoscopic squinting at satellite imagery of rifts, grabens, shield volcanoes, and glaciers. the fascination with geo-morphology never lessens. hanging out in the International Space Station would definitely be cool. but speaking of chill. on the way to the airport, the ex asks “why are you doing this residency in a land that you hate?” “hate? I never said that.” “yes you did, many times.” child in the back adsorbs this and the unmanageable dis-reality of being. I drag a suitcase into the domestic terminal, no check-in line for Akureyri, the guy behind me is already pushing at the counter in the moment I step over to heft my suitcase on the scale. excuuuuse me.

Hrefna meets me at the airport and takes me on a short tour of town to show some of the changes since the last time I was here onto 4 years ago or so. do some quick shopping, enough to get me through the next few days. no internet access.

Wow! free internet access at the Vilnius airport! should have arrived earlier, but the ordered taxi never arrived, so I had to walk to a nearby taxi-stand to catch another one. and had to barter with the guy.

hoboy, knew it would be a long one. up early to say goodbye to Stefan on his way into work, breakfast, Ellen away with Victor to the dentist. final packing. another breakfast with Kevin after the early boiled Irish oatmeal. lunch with Ellen and Kevin at a hippy joint in Montclair. Ellen graciously volunteers to do the 20 minutes drive to the airport instead of me making several transfers over almost two hours, slogging. nothing new at Newark since January. the 1750 flight with SAS to Copenhagen. hardly any sleep, and suddenly it’s 0730 and we are landing. Björn meets me at the cafe outside the baggage claim, and we’re off to the festival site — the Overgaden Art Center.

across the NYC metro area, from one side to another to get Loki to the plane back home. he takes his last pictures on the way, this from the Triboro Bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx. always curious how the infrastructure teeters along in NYC. I can recall Kennedy airport from the early 1970′s being under construction. it still is, torn up and pot-holed roads, construction sites that do look years old.

now en route with Loki to Houston, a call for doctors on board is made. the defibrillator is taken to first class and a passenger is laid out on the floor. clouds outside are rising like cosmic intrusions from one universe into another. flying immediately over the area where Marlin jack-up rig #3 was located 26 years ago, my home for week-on-week-off summer roughneck work. recalling those ages of time. the whole scene off the Mississippi delta, Cajun country. skirting thunderheads shimmering with early-morning lightning strokes, platinum edges blinding against gray bodies…

with the throbbing, aching jaw continuing for now two weeks, faugh, ibuprophen the only aid: nomadism seems ill-advised. security, stability, normality, insurance, and a steady income. retirement, pension, a house, a car. a zip code ’til death. head to Berlin tomorrow with Wolfgang. go directly into the workshop upon arrival, so.

a nice long walk last night to the harbor with Zorak und Steffi, full moon rising, wandering back by the old homes of Admirals of the Baltic Fleet.

today spent in organizing bags again, easier when not flying, so fragility and contents not such a factor. email from Janet, the roof collapse at de Gaulle in Paris is somehow affecting my connecting flight, have to check that out. warm sunshine outside.

at the airport, seems I missed Mari, but the security line got too long and the time to boarding got short. goodbyes stack up spent language, brief embraces, and what is felt? leave-taking, quiet hollow winds scoop up surface moisture and make prolapsed thunderheads that range to the east. offshore is clear. wet tarmack. aching jaw. writing of future is fiction, drawing on the past only sustains the images. no substance. don’t recall the first time of a view down a perspective convergence to see what comes, or at least understand that inside the drift is the tidal current which pulls on all bodies. keeps them orbiting. and crashing together at various speeds. escaping those instances leads to interstellar space. cold, dark, infinitely feeding on any warmth and life.

airport. Friday afternoon, flight to Brussels will be full of returning EU VIP’s. at least the middle-class roving managers.

while the news from the US becomes more and more grim. the Steve Kurtz case would be laughable except that it is only the beginning, and it is nothing to the FBI and CIA. it appears there has been a deep culture shift in the mentality of Amurikans. bunker-mode hardly explains it. smells like fear of living.

another airport. looking at things in that critical view.

back in the air again. with hope that the storm apparently bearing down on New England is not epic. or ever remarkable in any way except in the deep sense of disappointment that it brought to weekend skiers for it’s failure to live up to any expectations of precipitation.

looking forward to a visit with Stefan and Ellen and family in their new home. been a long time.

and in a week, will already be submersed in the first European workshop in 26 months. after the two-year retreat to Babylon.

verily on the road. in the sky, between earth and heavens. and with an inertia far above the normative baseline (of tethered being). perhaps pivotal in locative presence. with the strange old dilemma of Europe beckoning, offering cultural and intellectual stimulation, and jobs; the US only to be inhabited with a begging bowl or throat-cutting PR tactics. and this highly incidental and mercenary gibberish of law, politic, militarism, and market. but the spaciousness of the land, it’s enveloping and readable sky (sky slowly dying in down-wind Los Angeles and coal-fired über-powerplant and endless wide-fogging sky-worms). vegetation that is sensible, and sensuous, full of necessity.

so. anyway, officially this space again becomes a travelog. once I called it rotless jottings, tagging a label on the notebook entries that fit face-to-face in closed books in a locked trunk somewhere, sometime. because otherwise, these notes still dance around the voice of the void. not the voice inside, but an external expression that is stiff and formal with social conformity. not yet freed from the externally measured usage. the development of voice, so often spoken about by writers, must be a unique and very much internal coming-to-know process. nothing frugal or ascetic, but rich, debauched, and psychic. transient as any heightened state of being. sustainable only with tremendous self-discipline or complete abstention from reasoned living. so, what path is this, developing in the time of … war?

flows of strangers surround, carry, float the senses in a proto-typical field of mellow drama (“gripping meller drammer,” my father would say, transiting the teevee room) and bland media platitudes.

but, hallo, where am I? elsewhere. another airport again, a new-ish feeling, not fitting, but fossilized in mind. an homage to Bedouin. past flickering lives, partially transparent bodies that echo histories and occasionally abundant futures.

what did you say?

whiskers grow…

at the airport. on the way home. to the home that will continue for only a few more weeks, into the beginning of the mountain winter, snow coming, slower than it falls, but still coming down the slopes of the peaks, above tree-line. a long and intensive week here. now back to teaching. with a disrupted schedule. momentum a real factor.

back on the skinned wings of alloy, fleeing with Loki, moving mach 0.6, east-south-east. to floridada. long time since being in these containers (but what is it to stay embedded in a language that is full of Cartesian frames, and mechanistic, materialistic frames of reference?) it may be that I have missed the precise point. but there was that moment, day-before-yesterday, sitting by the creek, several miles into the canyon, watching a stick that arched uplifted midway between my eye and the glittering, rushing clamor of water. keeping eye focused on the stick, exercising the physical mind’s eye not to travel or be disturbed by that energized background. and getting, as a direct infusion of this practice, the reminder that this is actually an embodied result of the theoretical point of view, the worldview that is emerging during the last months and years. that a way of looking does merge with a practice, the momentary be-ing, finally.

arriving. in the southern realms with a micro-burst welcoming us to the landing strip, rough thunderheadwind, and warm blustery flatness. Aunt Mary is there in the terminal waiting for us.

up early, hot yesterday, snow this morning. so it goes. shuttle in, squeezed into a flesh sandwich, security loose, routine, sunshine on the apron, steam rising from the solar flux of heat. first flight since Helsinki-Frankfurt-Phoenix. more than three months ago. and so it goes. don’t feel like writing when here in the noisy terminal and in transit mode. on the way to Oakland and a drive to the Sierras. a rendezvous.

another brutal day of early arising, bus to plane to plane. and a migraine. faugh. but about to arrive in Phoenix, well, sort of. still 2.5 hours off, but after nine hours of flying, that seems like a short hop. no idea what will greet me there, with the recent events. was contemplating a relaxing holiday preparing for the re-location to Boulder in January.

reflections. Finland for the last time in a while. the silence of the pre-pre-dawn moments. waiting for the airport bus in the cold darkness. the blur of the movement. fighting a migraine the whole way. and again being a silent seat-partner to a young French woman. happy that the aircrew is offering water every hour or so. here on the trans-Atlantic plane. crossing Ice Land, Green Land, Arctic Canada, Hudsons Bay, Winnipeg, then south-west to elsewhere, and finally landing in Amurika. with the associated blast of that Amurikan-ness. how to deal with? green teen-age soldiers try to act with authority and disdain. in the face of the unknown of terror. while the echo of the Cold Warriors are everywhere, fearing every Other.

miserable day. ending with the usual travel migraine. was supposed to be using this whole day to finish off things in Helsinki, now it is all I can manage to buy a few Christmas presents and repack my massively heavy bags. bed at the hotel near the station brings no sleep. but at least the migraine leaves by the 0420 wake-up which I watch come around in 20 minute intervals all night.

supposed to be on a plane RIGHT NOW. something happened that has never happened before. a missed flight. damn alarm clock had the wrong time on it, the alarm was correct, but I didn’t double-check the clock time. faugh. costing me a thousand dollars. and the airlines is absolutely NO help whatsoever. I swear I will never fly Icelandair again. and on top of this, it is snowing heavily today, raising the stress of not being able to get out tomorrow which would cost an additional few thousand to get another ticket from Finland back to the US. grrrrrr…

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.

another hop. psychically have finished in Finland. a quiet departure, dinner with Mathias and Sylvia, emotions are mixed. frustrated on the part of the doctoral work. on to Iceland for a week, then back through Helsinki (cheap flights) to Frankfurt and then Phoenix. to another maelstrom of life.

meanwhile. Finland recedes in a rear-view mirror that I don’t have. no driving away, just the hermetic transfer by air. snowy chill and frozen streets. bank accounts, currencies, and all that lies behind. after losing 9% of my bank account because of a plunging euro — all in ten days. often seems I get screwed by currency exchanges. the little people always do. but now that Caesar is the EU in Brussels. well, I leave that newly unified place. on the eve of expression of their unified aim — monetary policy. money. to be able to face up to the US. monetarily. and I return to Amurika. in its confusion and ignorance.

one more month in Europe. juggling airlines reservations.

He felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think. … The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence. — Paul Auster

here, another different workshop. immersion with two students. allowing things to float, travel, reaching points of departure and arrival simultaneously. hours of exchange. and not on the road. too short a trip. on to Oslo. and on and on and on. concert for New York City. the spectacles of stardom. and the spin makes the world stop.

getting back on the planes. all the way to Joensuu, where tomorrow morning I have to get the visa process going for St. Petersburg next week. I can’t believe that is coming up so quickly. between that and other logistical arrangements. and the unknown of world events.

loop loop loop. the eye is taken in, the eye is taken in. the mind is numbed, the mind is numbed. replay.

I end up using the phrase “ancestral home” though I have little connection to such a reality. heading to Scotland for the first time ever. where on the Isle of Skye that generations of clan MacKenzie lived and died. I know next to nothing about them, except for the geographic proximity. and the name. and a few clouded memories of those old ones that I met as a child, ones who still could speak Gaelic, and who had been born in that land, only to come to the West of the Atlantic when life got too hard in the East. sailing west, south and west to find a new place to be. immigrants. like everybody, as though the change from immigrant to native would erase all. land without pasts.

and, now the travel has a new, sharper, edge. after TWA 800, and now with the World Trade center in smoldering ruin. reviewing some videotape from when Loki and I made a visit there earlier this year. the elevator ride, buying an expensive ice cream and seeing the free cheesy film promoting New York City. and seeing the diorama of the City from Wall Street to Mid-Town, with the north end of the island relegated to two dimensions of tempera on the wall. that diorama, a voodoo city, perished last week. what next?

all the while through the media rain, the trees outside change color. the birch lining some of the grid streets change with clusters of leaves going bright yellow, embedded in a matrix of green, and at the end of a week, the matrix is yellow, turning brown, with a scattering of green. often consider that I should document it, but beyond picking up one yellow and one green leaf a week ago, I have done nothing. video does not adequately record. so, I just look as I walk from point to point in the town. watching the change, understanding that as with the change since last week, that life is constantly in change. time slipping quicker. somehow I have come to something fundamentally different in my process, my awareness. that will affect both internal and external … blah blah blah. so on .

landed at Heathrow, flying over the English countryside. not since 1996 have I been here, or has it been more recent. no, 1996. in the opening salvos of this travelog. five-and-a-half years ago. already. this time only as a transfer passenger. transforming passenger, transformed passenger. passively carried for a fee. on the way to. and a workshop tomorrow and the next three days. each morning. another one of these confluences of humans. serendipity, surrender. being the passive activist. interfering. with certain systems (that I should better leave to their own progression and devolution. I can only be who I am. I like this fatalistic bent.

about to fly. Terminal one. not leaving baggage unattended except for the future. future baggage. slick, clean terminal, but I find a 120 volt jack. it’s been spray-painted black to blend in with the faux-basalt wall panels. the remains of the 2.5-inch masking tape around the edges, outlined in overspray. as usual, my torso length does not fit the chairs. JC Decaux is here, the advertising agency, owner of advertising space. in Helsinki, too. folded consumer spaces. Finland is pro-consumer, hyper-consumer. who have I been kidding? sure, socialized health-care and such, but that is only a veneer.

In his extended concept of art as social sculpture, he recognized a need to create conditions, a humus that would first make a lively form possible. I saw that in my area of work — that is, art — a concept (or no concept) prevailed that was no longer viable. This nonexistent concept has an affirmative character, and it claims it can do something it cannot — to do something that has to be learned and mastered is exactly what the traditional concept of art cannot achieve. — on a Joseph Bueys exhibition, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

exactly as I wish to do. setting up conditions for the lively growth and exchange of energies within an open framework full of possibility.

about to fly. clear and relatively temperate today in the City. sent Loki off home last night, out to the airport along with Stefan, who was sending Hildur, their au pair for the summer, back home on the same flight as Loki. departure was hurried and over in a few seconds. why am I regretting so many of the conditions I have imposed on my child’s life? guilt is destructive. Live Up!

a day after catching the Gladiators (or who was it?) in Kaisaneimipuisto, so it goes: not surprising, but hardly any Finns dancing, it’s not that warm even though it’s the end of May. heading west. half-way across the Atlantic. 747. simulator. wonder who the pilot is? chop is coming up. NYC tonight, actually it is night already, there in Helsinki where I used to be. stupid Hollywood on the boxes lined up from stem to stern. and several tens of thousand liters of jet fuel starboard and port, or so the first officer told us somewhere over Belgium.

Nueva York, make it, a blur, through customs, and meet Stefan out front. he happened to be coming to the airport anyway this evening to pick Hildur, a relative who will be an au pair for them during the summer. into the City, via a scenic tour on Conduit South, then Conduit North to Atlantic Blvd., the Brooklyn Bridge, and so on. so it goes. shifting spaces, shifting cultures. shape-shifting. mind-shifting. Scandinavia to Manhattan. so different. but I am complacent about the differences, as a part of both cultures now. or neither. that’s more correct. floating in a null space, convergent axis in a divergent cultural milieu.

still en route. but happen to be joined on this flight by Katrin, a networker from Iceland. we haven’t crossed paths since last January when I dropped in to do a lecture in one of her classes at the Icelandic Academy. we constantly are criss-crossing on similar pathways, but seldom actually SEE each other.

a brutal long day with nine hours of flying broken in two halves. on the road again for another intensive springtime. and then summer will come. and what next? big questions come up. as usual. cobbling together a pathway. and too much listening to other people, and not finding the heart is speaking loud enough (taught not to listen, I guess). intelligence is no great advantage in this world unless it is combined with fortitude and concentration and the ability to focus attention. going to see if Willa would be game to share her java scripting from her journal pages (www.willa.com) to restructure this site. having some talks with Janet about her massive genealogical work motivates me even more to be more inclusive and extensive with the web space. linking all content into a more cohesive whole. or at least creating a deep cross-referencing system.

now the incredibly obnoxious work of arranging flights for my up-coming movements around Iceland-Germany-Switzerland-Finland. always a problem making such arrangements.

flying around Amurika. in this other place, stayed with Stefan and Ellen for the weekend, a delicious holiday dinner last night. Kevin brings the dessert, Ellen makes the turkey. back slowly recovering, but still casting an energy sink on my presence. time comes time goes. the writing here is no longer essential. so many other targets.

scanning the network for old friends, I look for my oldest friend, David. from second through sixth grade in Clarksburg. a friend for exploring with: fields and woods, following creeks, playing soldier, fishing in the pond behind our house, slogging through swamps and bogs, long summer adventures with canteens and snacks, hiking sticks and knives, watching out for poison ivy, copperheads, and water moccasins, riding bikes into the dim of humid summer evenings, playing catch until eye could no longer see the ball. soft spoken and gentle, David stuttered a bit, but was a determined and stalwart friend. we ended up in different schools after elementary school, and we lost contact after that, but I knew he went on to be a commercial pilot. and now he’s gone. he shared the same birthday as Loki. August 18. he was 9 days older than I, now he’s forever younger, buried in the cemetery behind the little white clapboard church in the center of Clarksburg, a couple hundred yards from the home he grew up in. and the school we attended together. (more …)

flash fire, morose carving up of temporal remains. moving and moving. Helsinki for some hours on Saturday, enough to have breakfast at Fazer with Sanna, then drop by Tapio’s place to leave some material offal. then back to the airport to head to Copenhagen, landing a kilometer from the Oresund Bridge that threatens to bind Denmark and southern Sweden in (un)holy matrimony. faced the sad fact of the total sum of money that I have spent carting around about 3 cubic meters of belongings since 1989. first from Colorado to the East Coast, then by boat to Iceland, then, five years later, shipping it back to NYC with almost the same stuff, putting it in storage in Newton, New Jersey for five years (at U$D40/month), and now, finally (?!?) driving it all back to Prescott, Arizona to reposition it there to cook in the desert heat. basically don’t even know what is in the boxes, but with the sum total of the money invested in it, damn well ought to be valuable! but likely not. just stuff. weight, mass, to be acted upon by gravity and the entropic effects of time. the storage unit in Jersey is marginally exposed to rain water, and combined with the humid and hot summer climate, I have the feeling that everything is at least partly consumed with some form of microbial critter. decay, rotting stink.

but anyway, Loki and I take a visit to the cockpit of the B757-200 for some time. wow! the pilot is quite friendly for my moderately intelligent questions. the view is intense, a strange feeling of vertigo, but not vertigo, realizing that to be in the front of the plane has something to do with whether the thing will stay up in the air. feeling the power of the outsides, as we sail over Goose Bay. ain’t see no geese up here! Light snow on the ground, in patches, but nothing serious, it’s warm in Gander. 20C the pilot says. while NYC is only about 13C. stormy on the whole East Coast, I am hoping this doesn’t mean anything serious about the landing situation.

already some place different. two flights yesterday, one from Reykjavík to Oslo over lovely Hekla, who decided with moment’s notice to erupt on Saturday evening. the second flight ends in a heavy Vestfjordene cross-wind and the pilot almost sliding off the runway, just two or three meters from the edge with the leeward wheels. and a hard double bounce with a sharp list in between. not a nice feeling that time. but back in Bergen. rain, and another workshop. interesting situation. complex groupings of beings. needing to continue extending the research into the dynamics of group interactions. chafing at the cafe9.net morass. the conflict between whatever and whatever. in the invisible arena of remote presence. ah, f**ked-up.

so it goes. Rambo on teevee. oh boy. Loki gets home okay after a day at Paulina and Joris’ house while I am teaching. pick him up and race him to the airport in their car. and later in the evening we make our first hook-up with iVisit. audio and video. remote presence. and so it goes.

again, heavy weather causes changes in plans — one that keeps me around Loki longer than I expect. despite the slight stress that change makes, I am happy that this happens. no planes taking off yesterday or today, so Loki is stranded with me for at least an extra day. across at the pizza place, a man is vomiting loudly in the bathroom in the early evening while I call the airlines about the flight situation. swimming for a short time. the wind. like yesterday, is intense. this jewel arrives from Varsha by email from half-way around the globe, Bangkok:

A long drive into the hills beyond Kanchanaburi and we unexpectedly arrive as evening falls to a destination on the river Kwai, from where we complete the rest of our journey by long-tail boat deep into the jungle. We are to stay in a raft-house on the river surrounded by sounds of lush nature unbroken by electricity and all the noise created by it. As the sun drops behind the hills, darkness descends quickly and the few boats go silent, unable to ply dark waters in safety. By now the temperature has dropped considerably with an unusual cold spell that we are experiencing.
(more …)

in the north, a mellow plane flight over a white-on-white landscape. sun rising. always conscious that clock-time is off from sun-time here. humans delegated that GMT rules, when, by global position, high noon comes at 1330. makes the mornings dark and thick in the winter, no doubt. arriving, Helgi meets me at the airport, and straight to school with a cup of coffee, and jump into the delayed workshop. rolling through several topics and introductions. working online afterward, then happen by dinner with Helgi and his family. on to the guest flat which is quite nice, like the one in Tornio. getting significant email done — critical business things crowd in. related to the movement that is about to break on me in 11 days or so. logistics. and in several conversations during the last couple weeks, I understand that I have reached a critical point in creativity. it’s not there! the ability to reflect, meditate, ponder, let the mind float in silence has crept away. not noticed, as I was busy doing other things.

back in Helsinki already. offline for almost seven full days, barring a short peek at email on the 11th from the center for Contemporary Art there in Prague, sandwiched in between a hectic schedule of meetings and discussions with the cafe9.net crew there. so much going down that it is TOTALLY impossible to make flowing sense or documentation of anything! stumbling back to Helsinki, on the screaming wind of jet streams, to the top-floor rabbit hutch I am soon to bail out from. head out back on the road again. Dresden, Leipzig, Dessau, Bauhaus. Kurt Weill and Walter Gropius, Kandinsky and Brecht. and wet historical sex.

This is the life of man on earth but of darkness we come at birth
Into a lamplit room, and then
Go forward into dark again ….
Now a man don’t mind if the stars grow dim and the clouds blow over and darken him As long as the Lord God’s watching over them, keeping track how it all goes on. But I’ve been walking through the night and the day
Till my eyes get weary and my hair turns grey.
And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away
Forgetting the promise that we heard him say.
And we’re lost out here in the stars,
Big stars, little stars, blowing through the night.
And we’re lost out here in the stars,
Big stars, little stars, blowing through the night.
– Maxwell Anderson

massive flows of people in the brisk air, crossing stone-line spaces in complete human order. while I sit in a silent room, drifting through remote lives, remote life. so many points of presence in the matrix, the embedded volume of life, that calculation has to be estimated, by orders-of-magnitude, unspecific, prone to inaccuracy, messy guess-timation, and catastrophic over-runs and under-flows. slipsticks drove WWII efforts of calculation. slide rules. painted, demarcated bamboo slivers. then came the electronic calculator that I desperately needed after one semester at CSM, exams were constructed with a calculator speed in mind, so, the slipstick had to go, had to spend five hundred on a TeeEye-71 magnetic-card-programmable machine with advanced scientific equation features. playing land-the-lunar-module on it, same as on the main-frame over in the Green Building.

early flight, run into Juha in the airport with his daughter and her friend, they are going to Tornio, so Juha asks that I chaperone them to the school and the flat. some eyebrows rise to see me arrive in the school by taxi with these two young women, AND THEN I escort them to the guest teachers flat … hoboy. my reputation. well, not that serious. class starts, confusions with the room, which will be a problem.

up at 0600, but awoken at 0410 by somebody opening a door in the house, then, an hour later, the black cat — who I met yesterday first on the front steps, then, later, sprawled on the (heated) bathroom floor — jumps in the window. in bed at 0100. then, here at the airport, the plane in canceled, the next one also, and I have to transfer to an SAS flight an hour later. on the way over to Tone’s place for fish soup dinner, I stop to call Hilde, and at the same moment, Sanna calls, multi-tracking. and still the questions of what to do in the spring, after the holidays, causes me tight-chested breathing, and sleep deprivation. this is very unusual for me. so it is something to work with my breathing on, my concentration, my future. more offers to do workshops, this time back in Bergen in the spring. Cafe9 got another boost from this visit, very interesting intersections. for old times’ sake, I wander over to see Johan, who was teaching in the Institute of Photography at the Art and Design school when I was a guest lecturer back in 1992. or was it 1993?

Loki arrives from Iceland, a brave little boy who even made a change of planes in Stockholm. the airlines lost one bag and his bicycle, but we head north tomorrow, so they will have to deliver it there.

up early to pack, walk to the airport bus.

all things unravel. and I am in planes, buses, and taxis. south to north. plus or minus. no messages on the phone as I leave range for word to come. hauntings. futures compress, pasts well up, present reifies into words that fall like rocks to the floor, gouging everything living, and scratching everything dead. that’s it. ending so quickly, so pointlessly. absolutely no reason for ultimatums about hurt and pain and. so on. fictions churn out. where readers bring wholesale chunks of being into print, neither lost nor found. but set to float in a inner harbor glazed with rainbow oil slicks, half-empty coke cans, and spent condoms. left a pot of black-bean chili cooling on the stove: when it is cool, then there will be nothing more. bags of hot chili powder and basil, corn meal in the cupboard. birch-smoked salmon in the fridge, and everybody is starving for what they don’t want or can’t get. it’ll end up in the garbage. maybe there will be a general cleaning that will take into account the Indonesian Liberation tee-shirt that I threw on the floor in the rush to get out to the taxi to the rail station to store the two bags that I simply couldn’t carry all the way to Trondheim. rolling thoughts of what to do next time in Helsinki. flight back is in two weeks. fourteen days to arrange something. Imatra probably after that. re-arrange Eindhoven. fill out plans for Tornio. give in to the fear. icy fear. or keep going? head south? head west? US for the summer? what’s best for Loki? Iceland, maybe not. the initiative to be mobile to better keep contact with him seems to be receding in the need to get grounded again. the time in Iceland served to point out the serious crisis in the production curve. how things are made, why things are made. and the role of the powerful ego. how did it get so strong, and how does this compare to others’? don’t matter, comparison — that is actually a function of feeding for the ego — that consumptive looking-at-the-Other. that can’t be written out of this script. but most of time previous, I have identified the ego-center of other people’s work, and ignored the spiritual component — made easy and quick judgments based on a limited and possibly fallacious criteria. realizing that pursuit of material interaction (that is, using the material world to “make art,”) along with my developing sense of dematerialization, I must not reject physical manifestations. to do that would reject a certain class of communications that are attenuated by time, space, and possibility. in Oslo at the moment, hoping to get online this evening for a jolt of email to deal with. and to ponder what to begin tomorrow. Trondheim. the first road sign I see is to Hell. if I am correct, hell means bright? or…

parting ways, penetrating the clouds above, Finland to the eternal brightness of skies at 10,000 meters. thinking of crashes, seeing the results of a crash in Thailand on the front page of Morgunbladid that I get when I board the plane. over Norway. flow patterns and ripples below. Arctic noon sun to the south. heading west. logging the past. that’s what is happening here in this machine. reorganizing and reconstituting past histories — BORING past histories, that is. Faugh!

already. again. time trips. winter deepens. flights with roaring tailwinds from the north, arriving here in half the time. on the plane again with Juha. talking about Kurosawa and Mifune. can’t tie my hair back like Mifune anymore. short, shorn, shattered. and Kurosawa is dead now. teevee. and waiting for Sanna to get back from work. working late. neoscenes occupation project 1 labors my patience and my brain. technical problems in that nether world of Lappish hot networks. what to do? at least the audio will happen, but what about the video? well, always IRC to play with. as long as the firewall is down! burning bridges and knowing what is happening. Tommi points out that the Chinese look at the world this way — that may you live in interesting times is considered a rather onerous curse. we are then accursed! period. oh hell, I do and don’t consider the whole-ness of the world situation to be interesting and/or dangerous and/or prophetic and/or frightening. what could be done anyway? end life? before it ends anyway? or simply live. Loki and MB go to Manhattan much against my sentiments. next week. well, another story.

another day of three flights. early mornings, and fall is coming here — it is not Light when I get up at 0425.

on hold with an airline. the airline I most like to hate: Icelandair. with the most self-righteous monopolistic attitude of any air carrier I have had the misfortune to deal with. grrrrrrrr. travel arrangements in my face already, scarcely two weeks of so-called vacation down.

upon arrival in Helsinki after a long day of movement, I make a late call to Sanna from Vantaa airport before I make my way into town and thankfully catch her a few minutes before she is about to board a train home to Salo. have a beer with her and Kati, and happen to see Susanna there at Corona Bar. the night is bright, full, and rest-less.

you are away my heart comes undone slowly unravels in a ball of yarn
the devil collects it with a grin our love in a ball of yarn
he’ll never return it
so when you come back we’ll have to make new love. — Björk

I arrange my things in the room that Terhi just vacated, looking forward to six weeks of not too much movement and a fast Ethernet connection only a meter from the bed. ain’t no slackin’ gonna happen! not that it will affect my dreams, memories, but there is something of a fear that I will nerd out here. gotta remember to go out and dance with students some, even though they have hardcore patterns of sleep deprivation and such where bands don’t start ’til one in the morning and people party all night (thank god the nights are shrinking daily!). push-ups, recollections, replays of fragments of this and that memory, and I am not losing my hair except as it is SO long now, longer than it has EVER been, that it gets tangled, and for the past year I rake a handful of it out each couple days. still plenty. how is it at this AGE to have long hair. retro hippie that I never was because I wasn’t old enough to do those hippie things like Free love and stuff. (more …)

One of those long traveling days where the morning comes so soon after one goes to bed that there is no time for the head to slow down at all. Cassis and vodka on ice for an unusual nightcap at the end of an exhausting week. I smile to myself as we begin to land. Back in, Finland! The sun is setting here, as I ride above the land. We pass through a haze at 2000 meters that gives the horizon a rainbow of colors. White blue sky above, black blue land below, in between a band of pink, red, yellow, and green. The night comes and we land. Because of the blizzard in Stockholm, I had been shifted to another flight to Helsinki, and I am not totally surprised that the suitcase I checked does not arrive with me. I spend some time making sure it will be delivered to my flat in Lahti on Monday. Then run outside to catch the bus to Lahti which I make seconds before it departs. It is bitter cold outside. Not quite Arctic, but a cold that makes the snow groan as one walks across it.