ignoble subservient drudgery or honorable exploitation?

As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable, noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit, and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour, as applied either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence in the development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is therefore necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. — Torsten Veblen

In this moment of history, the values of dignity, honor, worth should be examined closely by all members of the political/economic elite (though they would have small care over such things), for it is clear that the situation of the commoner in Amurikan society is one where these attributes are being more or less quickly stripped from their lives of servitude to financial institutions. There are still choices one might make which are liberating to a limited degree, but the pressures to conform to the demands of that fiscal/market system are overwhelming to most.

Is another pathway possible?

In spite of a natural history that was nothing but a set of drearily moralistic symbols, in the teeth of a theology which, instead of regarding words as the sings of things, treated things and events as the signs of Biblical or Aristotelian words, our ancestors remained relatively sane. And they achieved this feat by periodically escaping from the stifling prison of their bumptiously rationalistic philosophy, their anthropomorphic, authoritarian and non-experimental science, their all too articulate religion, into non-verbal, other than human worlds inhabited by their instincts, by the visionary fauna of their mind’s antipodes and, beyond and yet within all the rest, by the indwelling Spirit.

and

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s. — Aldous Huxley, “Heaven and Hell”

To every form of being is assigned
An active principle:—howe’er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures: in the stars
Of azure Heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters and the invisible air.
Whate’er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed:
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the soul of all the worlds.
– Wordsworth. Excursion. Book VI, 1-15.

readying for a perambulation around the cosmos at any moment. readying for the moment of full-on change. readying for now.

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.

With the growth of industry comes the possibility of a predatory life; and if the groups of savages crowd one another in the struggle for subsistence, there is a provocation to hostilities, and a predatory habit of life ensues. There is a consequent growth of a predatory culture, which may for the present purpose be treated as the beginning of the barbarian culture. This predatory culture shows itself in a growth of suitable institutions. The group divides itself conventionally into a fighting and a peace-keeping class, with a corresponding division of labor. Fighting, together with other work that involves a serious element of exploit, becomes the employment of the able-bodied men; the uneventful everyday work of the group falls to the women and the infirm. — Thorstein Veblen

A man gets shot once in the face, and a second time to the head to ensure his demise. Other men are shot. A woman is shot. Why celebrate except in the instance of savagery, with an up-turned face, contorted with suppressed rage, making a vengeful grimace, and declaring the nation-state’s supremacy. An eye for an eye, the context lost on those who do not even know the content of the holy book coming from their own god. Instead, kill and be killed and kill and be killed. (more …)

If you look for the truth outside yourself,
It gets farther and farther away.
Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
Will you merge with the way things are.
– Tung-Shan

Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret in terris oppressa gravi sub religione [...] primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra [...] ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque, unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, [...] quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

(When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of superstition, [...] ’twas a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her, and first to stand forth to meet her [...]. And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole; whence in victory he brings us tidings what can come to be and what cannot [...]. And so superstition in revenge is cast beneath men’s feet and trampled, and victory raises us to heaven.) — Lucretius

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. — Ayn Rand

The modeling approach has an advantage of any mathematical model; it can predict situations that cannot be reached experimentally. If quantitative data obtained from a well designed experiment allow a model to be constructed, the functionality of which is tested by comparison with experiments, the model can serve to investigate an infinite number of different situations such as those caused by mutagenesis, changes in activity of the elements of the system, etc. The model allows the dynamics of the process and the terminal states of the system to be investigated. It can bypass experimental limitations and thus explore biological situations currently restricted by experimental accessibility. It also brings deeper understanding of the nature of the whole process. The simulation capabilities are unlimited and can provide a check on the intuitive understanding of a process. — Vohradsky, J., 2001. Neural Model of the Genetic Network. THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, 276(39), p. 36173.

The first short narrative illustrates a single dimension of Patel’s multi-faceted and very readable treatise that covers the connection between politics, economics, human rights, and democracy. He maps out a set of powerful view points on the blighted and complex landscape of the contemporary social milieu. Somewhat harsh, especially in juxtaposition with conventional ‘wisdom,’ Patel makes a strong argument for a more humane pathway to an egalitarian society.

a Garrison Keillor reading reminded me of this wonderful piece:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
– Bill Shakespeare

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. — Edward Sapir, ‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science,’ Language, Vol. V, pp. 209-210 (1929).

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know every object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” — Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision”

The Press, too, in my opinion, is increasingly becoming a purveyor of orthodoxy than an expression of individual views. The State which in a variety of ways, ranging between subtle pressure and persuasion and unabashed handouts, feeds it with ‘news’, is able more and more to call its tune. The Press…is in process of succumbing to the collectivist zeitgeist. At its obsequies (burials) the mutes are public relations officers, and the service is read by an ordained Minister of Information, with massed choirs provided by the British Broadcasting Corporation…It is in the passion for thinking in terms of categories that I detect the clearest and most ominous symptom of subordination of the individual to the collectivity. A voluntary uniformity, no less than an imposed one, prepares the way for servitude. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live? –- Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

F.A. produced numerous chapbooks and alternative press publications. Not on many radars, but definitely expelling severe electro-magnetic radiation for the time he was around.

Demonic seconds of my history must not stop now. I am sober and writing this alone. No voice touch or folded skin of beings. I cannot remember. My father is a vapor inside a black box buried hundreds of yards behind my house. I have drunk the last of his beer. I have heard the last of his hollow laughter many long nights ago as coyotes joined in erasing tears, excuses, lies. I am left with what I have created of years. My structured words contained in slim volumes as proof that my face will not last. That here are many ways to spell a life. I cannot blame my vocabulary. I cannot blame the alcoholic seizures. I cannot blame the wet and sticky hours I have spent inside a woman. I cannot blame the relentless black night or the sun again. Again. As I still don’t give thanks for the days nor care to court the clock. Because I am owed millions of dollars. Because they don’t make enough damn booze to drink. Because you’re too stupid to understand. I am living here. As the stars punctuate all the past and future lives. I am living here. Possessed. — F. A. Nettelbeck

Prana is an auto-energizing force which creates a magnetic field in the form of the Universe and plays with it, both to maintain, and to destroy for further creation. It permeates each individual as well as the Universe at all levels. It acts as physical energy, mental energy, where the mind gathers information; and as intellectual energy, where information is examined and filtered. Prana also acts as sexual energy, spiritual energy, and cosmic energy. All that vibrates in this Universe is prana: heat, light, gravity, magnetism, vigor, power, vitality, electricity, life and spirit are all forms of prana. It is the cosmic personality, potent in all beings and non-beings. It is the prime mover of all activity. It is the wealth of life. — indigoworld

yet another model of the substrate of all. I find it fascinating that there are configurations of humans who struggle to assemble these models in the face of transitory living. the process relies on a clear insight combined with precise observation of the phenomenal world around. take a breath.

Listening does not mean waiting impatiently, while someone else speaks of things that do not concern you: it means sympathetically identifying yourself with the speaker, his background, his desires, his troubles, understanding them as much as possible, and tactfully suggesting outside points of view, not too alien to his own, which may aid him in whatever problem is being uttered.

Matters of interest only to yourself are never proper subjects of more than passing reference.

Whatever your theme, be good humored. If you can sprinkle wit and humor into your conversation, you disarm almost any ill feeling on the part of others in the group. For laughter, it must be remembered, releases our prejudices. — Lloyd Smith

This advice floats on a surface of socialized presence. Slightly pithy, gendered, with a dated language that suggests quaint and formal relations of the past. Where are we now, in the swirling, mediated, media-saturated present? The opportunity for concentrated face-to-face dialogue seems almost as quaint, though along with the quaintness there is an explicit loss, somewhere behind the fractured and discontinuous surface of modern communications.

Could this explicit loss be the source of a growing and extremely deep angst that underlies wide-spread (and expanding) social insecurity? That the implied dis-connect between a world of hyper-socialization and the world we happen to be within and part of gives rise to …

blah blah blah …

Upon the chaotic flux of waters, flying over the deep, tossed in all directions by erratic waves of fluid movement. No reason to expect anything other than transformative change when exposed to such flow:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

– Shakespeare, The Tempest

If you look for the truth outside yourself,
It gets farther and farther away.
Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
Will you merge with the way things are.
– Tung-Shan

Loss, and the new. Preparing for the forward-fall to engage the conditions that hydrocarbon burning precipitate: back on the road, hydrocarbon flaring, with a slow drive down to Carizzo Plains via the “Petroleum Highway.” Along which are the still-operational fields of California’s early oil boom. Drive by the Kettleman Dome area, a structure that I examined as my first exploration review at Unocal back in 1982. I had to gather all alternative methods data, produce some maps and structural interpretations, and an exploration strategy that correlated seismic and well-log data sets.

Tracking the San Andreas Fault. The knife-through-birthday-cake-icing scar that runs from the here to the there of California. Rupture zone riding. Making images and writing. The usual. Or the unusual. Beginning or Ending.

This after the Solstice lunar eclipse last deep night which hung in a cleared sky slowly transforming eye-socket receivers into Light-cups, catching a burnt sienna flux from every sun-rise-and-set on the limb of the planet, at the moment. Very fine. And gone for this life’s time. On Earth as it is in Heaven.

On this movement, at this time, cars fill Interstate-5 everywhere, all the time. The pavement is uneven and shattered in some places from the heaviness of the truck traffic as well as the bankrupt state of the state of the Union. wads of toilet paper fill the grass at the scenic overlook like albino poppies. Later, I leave the interstate for less travelled roads, much less travelled, I see very few cars at all. But then there are oil pumps and pipes.

Another Eisenhower warning in his address to Congress prior to his leaving office in 1961:

One of the deepest concerns of the framers of our Constitution was to make sure that no military group arose to challenge the civil authority, and that no segment of industry be allowed to develop which was permanently and exclusively concerned with building the weapons of war.

For a hundred and sixty years, our military posture was characterized by a very small regular establishment, quickly bolstered in time of emergency by large contingents of militia and reserves, and just as quickly reduced upon the return of peace. There was no armaments industry. The makers of plowshares could, when required, make swords as well. The Army which I joined in 1911 numbered 84,000 — one-tenth of its present strength.
(more …)

“It’s tragic that this all begins with the apparent mistaking of a camera for a weapon,” said David A. Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University. “But it’s perfectly understandable with what we know now about context and vision. Take the same image and put it in a bathroom, and you swear it’s a hair dryer; put it in a workshop, and you swear it’s a power drill.”

NYT April 7, 2010

The narrative elsewhere in this blog lacks the edge that Thompson eventuated in his published works. Compact bursts of driving prose — the energy of which does not rely on the gonzo subject material — but instead brings directly to life the internal processes of be-ing and places them in direct juxtaposition with the madness of what’s out there. This is the trick: and it is precisely this trick, when the two flows are brought together, synthesized, and ultimately exposed to oxygen to be reduced and transformed into a sustenance for the human spirit.

That spirit is then taken to places it needs to be, not where the mutations of socialized comparison point it to, not where material consumability takes it, not to where fear in all its phantasmal coloration deLights to compress the soul into. The soul needs to be able to expand, not contract. And it should have within itself a means to source for this infinite expansion. Should, would, could. For the infinite, there are no means, there is only the denominated will of the spirit — which, in the end, forces a division by zero.

And that’s an illegitimate operation. As is Gonzo generally.

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere.

They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now.

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good: if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere: but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. — Carlos Castenada

I know now which is the path that I find myself upon…

Today China’s ambitions are as aggressive as those of the United States a century ago, but for completely different reasons. China does not take a missionary approach to world affairs, seeking to spread an ideology or a system of government. Instead, its actions are propelled by its need to secure energy, metals, and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standards of its immense population. Robert Kaplan — NYT

nothing new here. except the astonishing lack of awareness that general populations have for the possible (probable) implications.

Arendt‘s tripartite approach to the sociopolitical — Work, Labor, Action — in “The Human Condition” suggests the expenditure or the flow of energy. All three are intertwined within the do-ing, the be-ing of life, and in the sense that they are all embodied expressions of life-energy, they are equal, divided only by the particularities of the pathways of expression of those energies. She begins, I believe correctly, with viva activa as her source: the active, activated life. However, she does not explicitly posit a connection between viva activa and the source of the possibility for an active life, ones life-energy (sourced in the energized thermodynamic flows of life itself).  These impulses towards the social structures of collective life must have a source, an activated well-spring that drives the cumulative social (and life) dynamic.  The question of the source is perhaps more important than the ultimate expression of the source.

It is in the interpretation of work, labor, and action as mappings of social relation where she initially frames difference as emerging from an expression of material “durability.” She frames the “durability of the world” from this materialistic sense, a durability that “gives the things in the world their relative independence from men who produce and use them.” I think this is precisely where she makes a mistake: a core flaw in Western thinking lies in the fundamental disconnect of that which is ‘out there’ to that which is ourselves. Although those externals of ‘what man hath wrought’ appear to have the “function of stabilizing human life,” it is this precise separation which, while offering an objective relationship with “the environment of nature,” conceptually and perceptually separates us from nature.

Durability is a metric which is immersed in time and related to the structural/material characteristics of an energy configuration. It also relates to complexity and the thermodynamic qualities of the human-constructed configuration. To be durable is must be able to persist in time: to resist change, in Latin durus means “hard.” Change, as the enemy of durability, can only be resisted or counteracted by an influx of the ‘correct’ or reinforcing form of energy. By correct I mean an energy that promotes the persistence of a particular configuration versus the dissolution of the configuration. Energy may cause either or both to occur.

For example, with prototypical techno-social persistence in mind, think of an object, a building, fashioned from stone. The energy necessary to re-configure raw, in situ stone into a building is significant. The intermediate (human) source is embodied energy, or a wide techno-social infrastructure supporting machinic augmentation of the body. It is no coincidence that stone structures are often co-located with the central hubs of significant techno-social civilizations. The high initial pay-out is rewarded by a longer-term persistence compared to, say, wood which requires a smaller initial pay-out of energy. Clearly there is a direct correlation between the durability of human configured situations and the initial and continuing availability of energy input into various configurations of expression.

A ‘separated’ approach to activated life denies what is quantum ‘fact.’ The ‘material’ substance of whatever constitutes the self is completely connected, embedded, not as reified and ordered crystal in a matrix, but as merely another expression of a continuous field of energy. It is perhaps correct to imagine that one of the only things that distinguish ‘us’ from ‘out there’ is the difference in thermodynamic state (negentropic) and state of complexity. Of course, somewhere within that complexity is an intentional consciousness which seems to demand “subjective control over our physical circumstances” (King, 2006), but subjectivity needs to be thought of differently. Or just not thought of at all.

Why?

Instead of hunting for subjective patterns in the flux of energy that is the substrate of everything, maybe it’s better just to experience the flow: to work, to labor, to act.

Ach, so much to read, so much to understand. Fifteen months into the process, and the prospect of applying a metric to progress: just to see, feel, is it doable? Is it worth it? Is this stressful immersion into the removed praxis of paying life-time-attention to the sometimes resonant remains of prior lives a good thing? Can immersion in the past be a good thing? Wallowing, submerged in the resonant archive of other times and places, people.

Thanks for that positive, pragmatic, and ultimately true statement of current affairs. Fifty years later. We can only hope.

There is missing, in the long paragraphs of text that has characterized this work, this labor, there is missing any tacit explication of Self.  That dimension of be-ing is always held behind various structures and impediments, calcifications and reifications. Without any potential for at least mirroring that which is out there, separated from the wet eye and dry skin, reflected constituents of anything true.

So, false or antithetical meanings constantly overtake the possibility of saying (something) profound(ly) that “I am.” Instead there is duplicitous blather. Not that this is rooted in anything internal, actually not at all. The internal as a direct expression of conscious and unconscious presence is always authentic. It is only when that internal state collides with the social, even in the mental articulations of language, where pre-tension arises.

What life can compare with this? –
Sitting alone quietly by the window,
I observe the leaves fall,
the flowers bloom as the seasons come and go.
Do you understand, or not?
– Seccho

It’s hard to brightly imagine that when we decide to retreat to the desert or to the mountains to walk, it is a process deeply colored and, literally, in-formed by relatively recent cultural contingency.

The retreat is steeped in a socially constructed reality that began to emerge around William Wordsworth and J. J. Rousseau’s time and was sparked, in part, by their actual perambulations and especially the writings that welled-up whilst they were on the road (The Excursion, by Wordsworth, for example, and Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker).

But in a completely different sense, walking (and be-ing while walking) is ahistorical. Because the present moment is never to be repeated, nor is a life-time to happen twice, the momentary events of that particular movement are unique, and uniquely inspiring. Embodied movement is a passage through the flux of difference, regardless of the pathway. And although I cannot anymore go to the delicious extremes of span and height and endurance that so many others have done and will do, it is not extremity that brings the timeless essence of movement. When all is change, the senses can be taught to more sense the minute difference of the everyday. In this, the near becomes just as exotic and inspiring as the far and less reachable places.

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).

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands — no. Free empty hands. Back turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade. — Samuel Beckett

The originatory creative act perhaps requires a (painful) level of social isolation — is this the source of the ‘tortured artist’ syndrome? This in contrast to the integrated flow of socialized encounter with the Other which is (also?) the locus of creative action. hmmm…

Life on Earth is driven by energy. Autotrophs take it from solar radiation and heterotrophs take it from autotrophs. Energy captured slowly by photosynthesis is stored up, and as denser reservoirs of energy have come into being over the course of Earth’s history, heterotrophs that could use more energy evolved to exploit them. Homo sapiens is such a heterotroph; indeed, the ability to use energy extrasomatically (outside the body) enables human beings to use far more energy than any other heterotroph that has ever evolved. The control of fire and the exploitation of fossil fuels have made it possible for Homo sapiens to release, in a short time, vast amounts of energy that accumulated long before the species appeared. — David Price

Perhaps this is a clear-eyed look at where we are in the moment, or perhaps a less-than-optimistic view of the future, or perhaps it is completely blind to the possibilities that catastrophic change will be for the overall good of the planet. Who knows what the future brings? Whatever the case, if thermodynamics has anything to do with it (It’s The Law!), then some of Price’s talking-points have full validity. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, but merely the dynamic evolution of this place that we inhabit called Terra and the qualities of all life of which we are merely another expression of. In addition to the small number of other unique characteristics, our species is the only one which causes massive extrasomatic energy (resource) usage at a rate far exceeding the accumulation rate of those same energy sources. On a localized scale, this situation could be faced by any life form, and actually is on a regular basis, the problem with humans is that there is no mobility condition that will mitigate the localized ‘soiling of the nest.’ There’s nowhere else to go.

At this point it is more about numbers than anything else, numbers which are not ultimately knowable: like the quantities of energy reserves available.

Or then there is:

It takes the technical, social, infrastructural, and economic resources of an optimized globalized economy at its peak to extract and use our current energy flows, and even then oil production cannot be maintained. There may indeed be plenty of fossil fuels left in the ground, but following a major systemic collapse, most may remain there as that capacity dies away. — David Korowicz in Energy constraints will collapse global economic recovery

Strangely enough, those who deny all these doomsday scenarios are the same people who, with their stocked arsenals, will be best set to gun for food, water, and whatever Mad Max theater plays itself out on the wide scale of developed-world implosion.

Does any of this matter? Psycho-spiritually, I think not. The flows of energy in the cosmological system will remain the same as they have always been, changeable, changing, yes, and because of a general anisotropy, there are variations in intensity of flows. But we are not separate from all this, and nothing we do will change the trajectory of entropy. eh?

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society. — (Ellul, 1967)

What would poor Jacques think about the ubiquitous constancy of FaceBook and Google and mobile telephony and locative media and RFID chips and biometrics?

After eight weeks of intensive effort, sometimes re-writing almost from scratch a wide range of (English-second-language) articles, essays, and academic papers, the second and final book from the MigAA project is done and at the printers. Bravo to the Alfa60 designers, Joseph and Lina in Vilnius — perhaps this book will win awards like the last one did! And big kudos to El Jefe, miga, without whom, none of this would have come to pass, none of it!

This is the jacket blurb I wrote in ten minutes — the day Lina was sending the book to the printers!

We’ll be providing a pdf file of the book at some future date, after the final symposium and exhibition in Berlin (coming up this week! see info below), and when any sales of the existing print run are over and done with.

Presented by The European School of Visual Arts (EESI), the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM) and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA)

Migrating:Art:Academies:

Conference – 15-16 October 2010, 13:00 – 18:00
Exhibition opening – 14 October 2010, 19:00
Exhibition – 14-16 October 2010
Opening times – daily between 10:00 – 19:00

Collegium Hungaricum, Dorotheenstrasse 12, Berlin

The two-year project Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) comes to a close with its Laboratory V Migrating:Art:Academies:. This exhibition and conference, organized in cooperation with Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, will map the territory around an ensemble of new and innovative forms of creative practice. During MigAA students from the European School of Visual Arts (EESI, FR), the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM, DE), and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA, LT) traveled in Media RVs (recreational camping vehicles) throughout Europe, engaging the local cultural and environmental milieu, and creating art works “on the road.”

“The wealth of Migrating Art Academies was unanimously proclaimed by both the participants and by those who they encountered in the course of the project. This creative experiment was also an excellent educational laboratory and such laboratories undoubtedly play a critical role in a time of European-wide reforms in art education.” says Sabrina Grassi-Fossier, the MigAA coordinator and director of European School of Visual Arts, Angouleme/Poitiers.

The combined MigAA exhibition and conference does not claim to be a full picture but rather a presentation of life-sketches, fragmentary practices, and evolving processes. These active threads together chart a new territory for learning that turns away from most traditional academic strategies. This open event is meant to critically address this new approach and to open it up for public dialogue.

On Thursday, 14 October, Migrating:Art:Academies: will open with an exhibition of works by more than thirty students from the three European art academies at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. The selected projects, developed during the four consecutive MigAA laboratories in Berlin, Vilnius, Linz, and Royan, range from drawings and maps to installations and interactive works.

The laboratory will also present a 300+ page reader as a summary of the two years of distributed and mobile research. The book, divided into three essential parts – Migrating:, Art:, and Academies: – serves as a navigation supplement for the exhibition and the conference as well as the overall project.

The conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, 15 – 16 October and is divided into four panels: Migration, Education, Technology, and a final Round Table session with the participating students.

Friday, 15 October
13.00 : Migration panel
16.00 : Education panel

Saturday, 16 October
13.00 : Technology panel
16.00 : Final Round Table

About Migrating Art Academies

Migrating Art Academies is an ongoing joint educational project of three European higher education institutions: the European School of Visual Arts (EESI, FR), the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM, DE) and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA, LT). Its primary purpose was to research and develop a progressive model of education that combines new and innovative forms of creative practice, collaboration, cooperation, and production. For the duration of the project, students had the possibility to work in an autonomous zone situated between virtual and real worlds, as well as between their normal home environment and new, unfamiliar places. The students investigated and engaged the local environment at the same time as developing creative projects in response to their experiences. The MigAA project is financed by the European Commission Culture Program 2007-2013. For more detailed information, please visit: http://www.migaa.eu/.

The conference language is English. Admission is free.

Migrating Art Academies team:

Mindaugas Gapsevicius (top e.V.), Sabrina Grassi-Fossier (Coordinator, EESI), Jonas Hansen (KHM), Zilvinas Lilas (KHM), Alvydas Lukys (VDA), Sylvie Marchand (EESI), Vaclovas Nevcesauskas (VDA), Martin Rumori (KHM).

ed: This short note is the epilogue for the Migrating:Art:Academies: book. Otherwise because the heavy duty editorial tasks, I didn’t have time to write something more comprehensive on the ideas surrounding movement and learning, maybe next time!

Researching more of Wilhelm’s powerful translation work that continues to widen an opening door into an ultimately livable space. The dorsal/ventral (toku – nin or Circulation of Light) breathing technique elucidated here — even when practiced with flawed concentration — has an immediate and profound affect on the state of the system. I am even surprised with the intensity of change which ensues. The body is straighter, uplifted, and the balance of body heat has shifted drastically — the chronically over-heated head is cooler, the feet and hands warmer. This shift has not yet directly impacted rising gall (yang) in surprise (reactive) situations, but when the breathing becomes first nature, it appears to have the potential to do that. The base-line of calm has shifted for the better. Will have to consult Heiji about these affects. A daily practice of some minutes, with as many reminders shot through the many unconscious moments of non-breathing, seems to be an auspicious start. There is no going back on this discovered knowledge.

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.

Es mag ein Gott auch, Sterblichen gleich
Erwählen ein Tagewerk und teilen alles das Schicksal
Daß alle sich einander erfahren,
Und wenn die Stille wiederkehret, eine Sprache unter Lebenden sei.
Wie der Meister tritt er dann, aus der Werkstatt
Geringer und größer,
Und ander Gewand nicht denn ein festliches ziehet er an.
Und andere sind noch bei ihm,
Und der Vater thront nimmer oben allein.
Viel hat erfahren der Mensch,
Der Himmlischen viele genannt,
Seit ein Gespräch wir sind
Und hören können voneinander.
Die Gesetze aber,
Die unter den Liebenden gelten,
Die schönausgleichenden sie sind dann allgeltend
Von der Erde bis hoch in den Himmel.

– Friedrich Hölderlin, excerpt from “Versöhnender, der du nimmergeglaubt”

The rumbling classic of coming-to-be in the dynamic of encounter with the Other. Buber’s classic work is dense and difficult. Working through it is slow. It may take a month, or perhaps a year. Sentence by sentence, discovering resonant meaning. While preparing for the doctoral assessment arising in a couple week’s time. Strange to have actually bought a copy of I and Thou there in Portland, along with a new copy of Wilhelm’s I Ching. Nothing to be made of it except that mediated energies from the Other are felt, are compelling, and, in the end, are all we have. But does spirit need this mediation, or, as is framed in many systems, is it a task, a challenge, set to our hungry roving ghosts by something greater, or is it merely the nature of it all, of which we are a substantive part?

Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components, which is why, from Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting. The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it. — Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, What is philosophy? p. 15-61

What does the law of maximum entropy production have to do with order production? Given the foregoing, the reader may have already jumped to the correct conclusion, namely, if ordered flow produces entropy faster than disordered flow (as required by the balance equation of the second law), and if the world acts to minimize potentials at the fastest rate given the constraints (the law of maximum entropy production), then the world can be expected to produce order whenever it gets the chance — Rod Swenson

CLUI residency looms on a completely other tectonic regime. Travel to that point will traverse no zenith, instead will follow flat-lying salt-pans after The Canyon and other intense impingements on the eyeballs. While the volcano simmers on Fimmvörthuháls, Ice Land.

“When stars form, they form from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. And in the process of the gas and dust falling in, it doesn’t fall directly in — it sort of spirals in slowly,” Fazio says.

He adds understanding a star’s formation may someday help astronomers understand the formation of our galaxy. “How did we get here, and where are we going? That’s what we are trying to understand.”

Seems to be a basic couple questions. Both which eliminate religion from view when religion posits irrefutable answers to both, without exception. And which suggests the social role of science (what else is there?) approaching the same role as religion. The feigned disentangled observer in science is immersed in such wide pursuit while playing with little bits of material: traces of answer to those questions. Or merely caught in the race that dominates this time — that between religion and science. One proceeding from apparent Truth, the other converging on it.

Upheaving, upheaval. Testing dependence and independence. Just when the path looks stable, where the knowns gradually coagulate to staunch the in-and-out-pouring stresses of un-knowing; the flow is not turbulent, the road is straight and wide, with interesting terrains somewhere up ahead. Then one finds a dip, through a desert wash, unseen just a short distance away. In this dip is a mess of flash-flood debris, and a double-fork in the road: change comes along with deep choices to be made between diverging pathways. One is obscured by the morning fog of oracle’s lack, so that what lies ahead cannot be distinguished; the other way may be seen, but with curves that carry it quickly out of sight. The third apparently climbs out of the one dip, and is the road that one perceived from a distance to be the straight and wide, but turns out that there are many dips, as when crossing a wide alluvial fan spreading out from the base of a mountain canyon.

Then there is the idea of the bush-whack. A process that forgets the roads and launches out into the countryside, a self-determined goal in sight or hinted at by the terrain to cover. The bush-whack presumes a base, often, with measured forays out on a daily basis, rather than a continuous and wearing, un-remitting confrontation of the unknown. It is the frontiersman, one who stays at the edge of stable regions, the fraying or un-formed edges. One foot in, one foot out. Solitary. Progress not determined by forward motion, but rather by the growing determination to remain in motion at all. That is progress, in the Light of how life comes and goes, the determination to continue is a hard kernel around which to wrap the discoveries that occur along the way.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

Ah, my friends, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. — Hermann Hesse

as quoted in Katinka Ridderbos’ book on time:

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 vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line. — Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Momentum. It’s easier to (continue to) follow a prepared pathway, or a pathway that has allowed, formerly, the development of a certain velocity and quality of transit. Shifting pathways requires adjustments in … everything, not just velocity. And change … is … difficult. But why? Is it a force of instinct that keeps track of optimized behavior, deterring one from engaging in potentially non-optimized or energy-intensive experimentation, or is it merely the threat of social dissonance, or dis-position?

Looking for a path to follow. Which one. Well trodden, worn, abandoned, crowded, one-way, two-way, or simply not there.

Make one.

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them. — Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

Make change because all is change anyway. The Prince will guarantee his incremental redundancy by not embracing all the evidences and actualities of change that he may possibly apprehend.

In the Book of Changes a distinction is made between three kinds of change: nonchange, cyclic change (recurrence), and sequent change (non-recurrence). Nonchange is the background, as it were, against which change is possible. For in regard to any change there must be some fixed point to which the change can be referred; otherwise there can be no definite order and everything is dissolved in chaotic movement. The point of reference must be established, and this always requires a choice and decision. It makes possible a system of coordinates into which everything else is fitted. Consequently at the beginning of the world, as at the beginning of thought, there is the decision, the fixing of the point of reference. … The ultimate frame of reference for all that changes is the unchanging.

The question of change is an incremental valuation. All cannot change all the time. Where change can occur and where it may occur and how change will occur is constantly in flux. Social systems seek to attenuate flows of change which are too powerful, and to amplify those which are insufficient, as judged by the momentary contingencies and needs of the system. It is the task of judging the temporal scaling of response to the evolving conditions which will provide auspicious outcomes.

If everything now becomes about the Road: it all falls along that infinitely converging line, that pavement rising to the foot, hard, on occasion scraping the nose, the knees, or the palms; it is both that which is down-trodden, and the means to get there. A path for social flows, climbing, gathering, consuming, dispersing. Freedom, indeterminacy, hydrocarbon wastage, imperial protocols, signage, regulation, safety, danger, possibility, newness. On the road, carrying the old with oneSelf, in a worn knapsack, that which is old, known, important, very important.

So, three or four threads: 1) the Self on the road; 2) the encounter with the Other on the road; 3) the road as an expression of the techno-social context for human relation; 4) what to do on the road that cannot be done elsewhere or under other conditions — what the road proffers to life, how one gets there, that and imagining the end of the road (Oz! to meet the Wizard (or Sorceress) hehe, from the Yellowbrick Road to Oz, now ain’t that whacked!).

In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller, “To Paint is to Love Again”

Writing on the road. The translation of movement and sensual input to text. Learning what filters to apply, what social protocols to apply, what protocols to transcend, what to hold, what to release. Discipline.