wanted to check if a round-about way to get to the top of the bench was possible via heading to Mitten Park, and ascending the end of the bench there. nope, not without some serious bouldering or even technical climbing. got up pretty far, but the as the rocks are severely distressed at the fault itself, everything gets unstable. I quit where the trees stopped growing! good day for just looking around at everything along with a little initial off-road cardio. the cryptobiotic soil is always something to visually decode along with the lichen and other symbiotic expressions.

a short circuit to recall the textures and to reacquaint the senses with the essences of place — sky, rock, earth, plants, former occupants, etc: the basics. starting with a quick overview of Echo Park from the southern wall (a of the first two images), following that complexly eroding wall along to Pool Creek, then across to some nice petroglyphs.

Up at 0400 to make the hugely early flight to eNZed. Had to be totally packed for the US as well, as I’ll have only another 20 hours back in Sydney, in transit between Auckland – Sydney – San Francisco.

A new country, a new place to visit. The national memorial service is happening when we land, so I manage to record a minute’s silence in the baggage claim. Some people were oblivious. People are watching the ubiquitous flat-screen teevees rather intently. The cost of extractives, but only the most obvious one.

The jump flight from Auckland down to Whanganui reveals both sides of possible landscapes. Massive clear-cut forestry in the highlands, and intensive farming in the more level areas — both with the attendant geomorphology of erosion features marring the terrain. Much has changed since colonization, surely. Then there are the remaining highland forests which are not yet decodable, having not met them on the ground.

Finally get into Whanganui, Julian picks me up at the airport in their 1988(?) Honda named Buzzy Bee (?) — a vehicle with a history, too bad I’m writing this in far distant retrospect, or elsewise I could relate the story. It was funny. Great to finally meet Julian, and we immediately start up a substantial dialogue as I am dropped into the whirlwind of family life surrounding the community effort aimed at the Greenbench (Gallery space) and the ADA Symposium. I tell him that I am at his service, and that, officially, my workshop starts now. It’s all about energy, presence, be-ing, and raising these topics in whatever contexts that arise in the next ten days.

The evening starts with a rousing performance of Aladdin by the children of the Brunswick School located in the countryside near Whanganui. Julian and Sophie’s three daughters recently started attending the school. This was followed by some photo-ops — meeting more of Julian’s family and other folks in the community — in the playground, as the soft, mild summer twiLight closed in.

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!

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

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

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

Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.

Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…

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

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

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

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

Start to try making time-lapse sequences from the immediate surroundings. Lousy and/or old equipment, a quasi-functioning power system, and the results show it. Add a portable generator, a better tripod, longer cabling, a 3-CCD camera with chip memory (ah to be free of tape!), and a laptop with a battery that lasts longer than the start-up sequence. I’m ready to cash in some of my retirement piddle to cover it. Maybe $10K I could get away with all of it, including a decent audio recorder? That, along with a better 4WD truck and I’d be part of the pseudo-elite for once. hah. So, anyway, now, marooned in Echo Park by the intense weather, (I was warned, fair enough, but I told the ranger that I wasn’t planning to come out until Friday next at least, anyway, so things should dry up by then, and that I had enough supplies for at least two weeks if not more). Stormy already today, late morning, humidity pulled the clouds up, and while attempting some decent time-lapses, it gets worse. What else is new? Maybe I end up sitting in the car just writing. There are rain filaments across to the north.

Cutting tamarisk growth behind camping site (#7) to feed the fire. Keeps mind busy, with flinging sharp blade biting into hard wood. No help around in case of an accident. This sharpens the wits. (more …)

hike up Pat’s Draw and around the fault area, up a steep talus slope below the high scarps of Harper’s Corner, as far possible, and even some slow trundling down some very unstable and steep terrains. Seeing more 12-16-point elk racks, more mountain lion kills, and the weather is warm.

Transit of Utah. From west to east, along a winding trajectory from desert to forest to desert, oil drilling, wind power, gas stations, Mormon farms, gold mines, high-security military bases, municipal alarm towers scattered across the landscape — for warning the population surrounding the bases where testing of bio- and chemical-warfare devices is ongoing — warning them of impending disaster. Continuing on the isolated Pony Express Trail, then descending into populated areas. Calling ahead to Dinosaur to see about road conditions. Plenty of snow on the Uintahs, plenty! At the last minute after checking out the Green River campground on the Utah side, I get word that the Echo Park road is open. So, gas up, including the extra tank, and head in from Jensen. Excellent weather, and finally arriving, no one else around, very good. Get the pick of the few camp spaces, #5, 7, and 9 are the best for shade, seclusion, and access to firewood — though shade is not the issue at this time of year, more important would be the access to morning sunshine to warm up — but since there’s no one else around, I can use the #6 picnic table in full sun in the morning for breakfast. So, I take #7 and offload/set-up quickly: already charged at being here once again…

Finally depart, making last-minute passes across all the place. Ship-shape, single-wide shape. Good enough for the next artist coming through. Head out by around noon, tired of waiting on the road to Echo Park to open after these repeated waves of late spring storms rolling through. Head south to follow the southern boundary of the Dugway site, through Gold Hill, in that frontier mode, rough, and the mountains have all been dug up, mined out. Some tough looking abodes, apparently there are a few people who live there year-round, it’s gotta be tough. Join the Pony Express Route at Callao, head east to the Wildlife area, windy more or less, mostly more. Callao is really a frontier outpost. About 8-10 ranch families. No store, no gas, no nuthin,’ just the ranches clustered around some arable land at the foot of the spectacular Deep Creek Mountains (which are higher than the Wasatch in Eastern Utah! The Pony Express Route is an even more strange communications artifact, but one that resonated long in the US imagination, though it lasted only a couple years in actuality — made obsolete by the telegraph cable. But the idea of riding across this landscape in 12-mile spurts (a healthy horse has to stop after that distance when running full-tilt), well, it’s something.

Over night at the Dugway Geode Mines, pick around a bit in the gathering twiLight, but am pretty tired after the drive. Quiet night, though there are threatening clouds rolling through from time-to-time. It’s always tough to pick a place out there to camp at there are no accessible trees, nor even vegetation above the knees, hardly the ankles! Always have the feeling of being exposed.

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

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

Aim for the nearest topological features to the south, some small intrusives, an isolated fault block, likely, rhyolitic basalts of some sort (with some peridotites or greenstones possibly?). Lake Bonneville paleo-shorelines are visible, with a prominent one slicing the hills like a poorly-made isometric topo model. The hills are technically on the Air Force test range, but I disregard the signs (parking behind some low hills across the road in order not to attract attention).

Definitely a different regime than, say, the Sonoran desert. Here, the land seems more sterile and has only very low scrub, most less than a foot high. Low or black sagebrush (Artemisia), salt brush (Atriplex), rabbit brush, black brush, tumbleweed (Salsola pestifera), and a handful of other species are thinly scattered, with either desert varnish, pebbly sand, or the occasional small colony of cryptobiotic soil. Can’t really tell if this lack is a direct result from severe overgrazing (this is, after all, BLM land) or just a harsh (colder, drier!) regime here compared to the relatively abundant biota of the Sonoran.

Plenty of evidence of other human intrusions on top of the igneous stuff that these hills are made of. Bullet casings, scraps of glass and metal everywhere, bullet holes in anything worth shooting at. Two mines have burrowed into the earth, leaving debris, holes, and mounds, a refrigerator with major firearm damage, a twisted bike frame, and the shattered glass crunching underfoot.

The hills are much larger than they initially appear, a frequent phenomena in a landscape without the normal metrics for scale (trees and human structures). A great view in all directions from the top.

A lake shore sand deposit in the form of a light tan mudflat attracts my attention on the talus-skiing descent, as it is bisected by the old roadbed which exhibits the typical roadbed riparian affect — with visibly larger brush on either side of the eroding pavement — the direct affect of the slight concentration of runoff precipitation. Walking here in the flats one feels … exposed … as the occasional mining truck speeds by a mile or so away. The only relief among short sage brush are the holes dug by coyotes into smaller varmit holes, now that would be something to watch! Good for spraining an ankle if step is not watched closely. The only other difference are the widely scattered aluminum beer cans, mostly effaced of any markings by the brutal sun, sitting pell-mell in the sand.

I notice later that the Nikon has more crap on the CCD, about which nothing can be done — you can see two spots in the lower left center of the images. My irritation with this camera system increases as the years go by. I am constantly astonished at the poor quality of the lens, along with the dirt accumulation on the CCD — it’s a closed system, for god’s sake, how does it keep getting dirty? I don’t even take the lens off, ever! I think the Canon system is superior both optically and technologically. But nothing to be done about it, unless I decide against getting a new laptop and instead get a new camera. Ach, I get tired of technology!

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

The road-as-pathway is a channel for the flow of energy. It is defined by socially-constructed standards and protocols: a web of socially-applied energies follow the limitations and directedness of those protocols. Roads are a human construct in response to the existence of natural blockages that divert from desired trajectories, that expend communal life-energies and threaten the control of energy resources.

The road is perhaps a synthesized mirror for the human-navigable river, that directed natural space of flow, or the ocean which is the cumulative and spatial confluence-of-all-rivers.

Practically all natural landscapes have some form of blockage as to cause a deviation to even slow and deliberate human passage. So, when there is a lack of free and easy passage, first a foot-path evolves, or is established through troddden effort. This is a trajectory for the body, with the foot leading. Seeking a pathway on foot requires vigilance and concentrated attention in many environments, though this condition is necessarily eliminated from daily life in the developed world — almost completely through the efforts to flatten, level, grade, and pave large swaths of the Terran surface.
(more …)

a much longer ramble with a heavy wind at my back until it’s time to turn around. the dunes are located here for a reason and that reason is the frequency of very intense winds being funneled across the valley into Medano Pass where the sand generated by the Rio Grande out-wash in the (west side of the) valley is dropped in large quantities against the Sangre de Christo mountains. it’s a marvelous phenomena. today, I follow the base of the dunes along Medano Creek which is flowing with copious quantities of chilly snow-melt. the intersection of the dunes with the creek and the mountain terrain is rich with variable riparian regimes and provides shelter from the wind which is carrying plenty of grit up to about 3 feet off the dune surface. the air is charged with particles, it is charged.

He wha tills the fairies’ green
Nae luck again shall hae:
And he wha spills the fairies’ ring
Betide him want and wae.
For weirdless days and weary nights
Are his till his deein’ day.
But he wha gaes by the fairy ring,
Nae dule nor pine shall see,
And he wha cleans the fairy ring
An easy death shall dee.
– Scottish, traditional

solo hiking in the park is discouraged because of the risk of mountain lion attack on lone (prey) animals. this puts a certain edge on movement into more isolated areas. most visitors stick to the dunes themselves and the beach-like intersection of the dunes and Medano Creek that is car-accessible. I didn’t see anyone on the whole hike except on the way back a couple groups of party-ers hanging by the creek in the dunes. a hunting knife on the hip is probably no real protection, nor is a hiking staff. imagining an encounter is difficult and doesn’t simulate the effect of the full-body adrenaline jolt that would surely ensue. recalling the speed of a mature house cat and mapping that onto a 150-pound body evo-tuned for carnivorous ambush-predation survival is, well, uff! the presence of deer is both reassuring and threatening — are they there because there are no lions around, or is their presence an attractant? whatever, eyes stay open, and occasional backward checks, standing silent, scanning with binocs, not much else to be done. how effectively would a lion stalk a single human? they are ambush predators and will wait, hiding, aong known game trails for a quick launch and a specialized deep bite into the cervical vertebra to quickly render the prey helpless. yikes! make it all the way up to the Medano Creek / Little Medano Creek intersection and beyond a mile or two. have to cross the fast-running and deep creek on a large beaver-downed aspen log to continue. the wind keeps me in the trees until the walk back where I cut across a large open park at the base of Medano Pass / Big South Canyon. camera gets stowed because of the grit in the air and the need to hold the hat on. pretty tired by the time I get back to camp, and pushing through the last tree, end up getting smacked right on the bridge of my nose by a branch, getting a nice cut and looking a bit foolish to anybody in the campground who happened to be watching. the Lone Outdoorsman.

a third trip to the Arrastra has yet a different character. no snakes at all this time. I spend one very long and exhausting day making a full bushwhack to the middle segment of Peeples Canyon below Sycamore Spring. this entails a negotiating a 130-meter (400-foot) escarpment of steep and rugged Precambrian trachytes (?) and pyroclastics (?) which are dipping strongly downwards in the direction of the canyon floor making a series of highly inclined planes which end in overhung cliffs. this combined with the presence of loose clasts, and the cacti, and it’s like descending an escalator on ball-bearings in a needle factory. faugh. south-facing, the ascent in the late afternoon sun was brutal but without incident. I was mostly worried about snakes and needles at eye level on the ascent. the canyon at this point is more open with a dry cataract to the west. there are several springs coming in from the sides and a number of pools, one more than ten feet deep which probably persists year-round — no fish, but a number of frogs and thousands of polliwogs, some marooned in pools which will end up shortly as dried-up dust pockets with dessicated gobs of formerly living protoplasm. lunch is taken slowly on the floor of an undercut cliff in rapidly diminishing shade. in the company of ant lions and a few lizards. I am completely startled at one point, while photographing a recently broken Saguaro, I hear the honking rasp of a wild ass (not an ATV-driver, a burro). a thoroughly pissed-off male about 50 meters away, I can’t remember whether they can be aggressive or not, but this one seemed to consider it as an option for a while. I keep moving while scouting for suitable vegetation to keep between us. he may be aggressive, but he can’t plow through a cholla, saguaro, or ocotillo. checking the Google topo when I get back to the house a few days later, I see I didn’t memorize the terrain quite properly, missing a draw that I should have gone up and then I would have found a saddle with an easier access to the middle part of the canyon closer to where I descended to on the second visit to Sycamore Spring. some day, a full (overnight) transit of the entire canyon would be marvelous. next time. take out a number of tamarisk trees in Cottonwood Creek wash, until the blade on the trim saw snaps into three pieces. cheap. wonder what herbicide they were using up in Echo Park for eradicating the non-native pest. and the differences? different plants blossoming, temperature 10 degrees warmer. dryness increased. but the blossoming itself is not only a simply visual phenomena, but one that is registered by that background buzzing which is constant during dayLight hours. no awareness of any crescendos at solar noon or anything like that, though there are spatial variations where the background presence is drowned out when walking (carefully) among the branches of a paloverde or acacia in bloom. there the bees and other flying beasts are in an intoxicated and very loud frenzy all around the ears. otherwise, when transiting the space, the sound is simply there.

today, after that small amount of moisture in the night, the entire place is vibrating. when standing still, there is a loud and continuous background buzzing that is non-specific in source direction. standing near a particular blossoming plant, there is the sensation of particular bees and other insects doing their thing, but otherwise, there is this background humming that has no point source but rather simply is — like the hissing of blood in ear.

on the way in to Sycamore Spring both times, I note the existence of a lone Cottonwood tree growing up in the middle of a lightly sloping alluvial fan below a sizable un-named mesa. the only possibility for a Cottonwood to be there is water, and plenty of it. a good objective for a bushwhack. after the numerous encounters with slithering and rattling things yesterday, attention to movement and especially foot placement becomes aligned with breathing. of course any movement has to be calculated when in such an environment. miscalculated movement will be punished by some extremely sharp and pointed object intersecting and likely penetrating the body wall. I escape these four days with only two of those painful encounters, both arising in the thin slice of time between a visual scan of upcoming terrain and a glance at some specific object within the field of view. then aiiii-shit! as the pain jolts upwards from compromised shin.

this bushwhack takes me to the cottonwood. it looks to be around a hundred years old, there are a few other water-seeking plants, a tamarisk, rooted in a whitish rock ledge. apparently some near-surface water is available. paradise in the shade under the tree. except for the stench of death which I trace to the desiccating corpse of a cow 20 meters away in the scrub. the shifting wind brings eye-watering wafts on occasion, but otherwise I spend an hour or two soaking up the energy of being under the lush green canopy surrounded by hard-core Sonoran desert. it is a singularity like Sycamore Spring on a smaller scale and with no running surface water.

minuscule F/A-18 fighters are frequently dog-fighting in the airspace above. in the day and night. moving in and out of unaided vision, tightly circling each other, dropping flares, and, with afterburners, roaring in such volume that all ambient sound is swallowed. for our nation’s security. so it goes.

otherwise, commercial flight contrails gradually fill the sky with high-level cirrus clouds that soften the terrain and its re-radiative impact, but this effect distorts its being what it is, along with distorting the things living here. they did not evolve with spent jet fuel clouds hanging overhead to shade them from the burnishing sun. this is a problem. just another problem that the human species have applied through their amplification system — this is the waste product, waste energy, which alters the environment.

the rest of the day is a slow and rambling return to base. run across some small mining digs, one trenched into a pegmatite dike that includes some coarsely crystallized black tourmaline with its classic trigonal (rhombohedral hemimorphic) cross-sections. someone has tramped this land, and in the hunt for extractive wealth, has, literally, left no stone unturned. the West is everywhere scarred by these digs from small two-meter test pits to the massive kilometer-wide open-pit gashes. that mineral bonanza, that natural ‘surplus’ regime drove and still drives the development of the West. straight north of here about 15 kilometers, is the Phelps-Dodge copper/molybdenum open-pit monstrosity. without which, as the old Colorado School of Mines bumper sticker proclaimed Ban Mining, Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark the developed world could not exist.

head out to Sycamore Spring earlier this morning to allow for a longer period to explore. four liters of water rather than two. forgot to take the pruning saw to take out some of the tamarisk trees growing in the wash. will do next time out. how the cattle wear ways through the bush: I followed many of those ways, but they are, in fact, infinite in number and go nowhere but elsewhere. leaving spaces where anything edible is gone. and the microbial soil is crushed and eroding. only splattered shit left behind in various stages of dessication. just as all other forms of life process energy and leave waste behind. eating on the move, because there isn’t enough nutrition in one place to really graze and shit one of those classic UFO-shaped pies, those are the product of pastoral abundance. the desert is not abundant in any way except in lack thereof. it takes at least 100-200 acres of this land per cow per year, possibly double, triple that. why even raise cattle here is the loud question I would ask the ranchers. how long does a cowpie last? here they are hard and indeed could be made good use of in a cow-pie-throwing contest. at the immediate moment of exit from the humid gut, the pies fester with flies, the hairy and loud kind with the technicolor backs and eyes. in a frenzied dance likely for the water content alone. fast dessication hardens a crust which keeps a core amply moist for some days. this attracts some kinds of burrowing creatures who build tunnel complexes that riddle the whole-ness. the pie eventually loses it’s bilious green color and grades into a bleached beige of a rag used to wash a car a few times. they seem to persist in this form — dried and digested grasses, cellulose — for a long time, years to be sure, possibly decades? probably a decent fuel source. how many acres used to gain one pound of meat on these beasts?

then there is the presence today of snakes. I see seven. hopefully not prophetic. four were pretty positively rattlers. that based on sound and sight. the other three were not. I got one good audio fragment of one of the rattlers which I shall upload eventually. chilling. the repeated encounters make me wish for a pair of leather snake chaps. it also transforms my attention into a focused exercise of moving awareness. watching everywhere within a couple meters (yards) of the feet. (recalling that a rattler can strike a distance two-thirds of its length) and one of the snakes I saw was easily a six-footer, as fat, as they say, as a man’s arm.

after an alternately adrenaline-pumped and relaxing hike, Sycamore Spring greets with greener trees, the peregrine falcons, the other birds, gurgling water, frogs, dragonflies, cattail, the snakes, and evidence of more — javelina, deer, and such. after a lunch of sardines, avocado, Wasa rye crackers, and nuts, I decide to continue down the canyon as far as seems prudent. the width varies as does the water quantities, as the spring water goes in and out of sandy sections. I have to wend my way around boulders the size of small cars to trucks, worn smooth. at one point a huge Cottonwood has died and fallen across the canyon, immediately below that is a pool cut deep into the rock, it is full of water, and is at least eight feet deep. several frogs are chilling at one side. I scramble my way downstream for about an hour, but decide after a particularly challenging section to begin to head back. any injury here could easily be fatal although if capable of getting back out of the canyon, the cell phone might function, otherwise, it would be days before help would arrive.

the hike back is tiring when I take a bushwhack short-cut which cuts off about a mile, but the trade-off between rougher terrain (very much so!), and that mile is more than paid for by the amount of ravine scrambles and having to carefully scout the way ahead. storm, thunder, a spattering of rain, wind makes the truck tremble; full moon, the waking moon, stand, look, ponder, wander, stand, look, watch, meditate, mind gradually emptying of words and being replaced by the absolute anti-symbolic regime of things-as-they-are. not words for things, not pictures of things, but the simple imbricate truth of thing-as-it-is — immersed, connected, continuous, and very much alive. reductive thoughts purged. and now simply embodying the form of wisdom impressed on the sensory body, not the meaning: where next to place the foot, what not to touch. what looks different, what is the same.

Title

Sonic Presence Within The Networked Regime of Amplification

This research explores the relationship of (sonic)energy to social be-ing, technology, and the consequent possibilities for creative action.

Subject

Sound is energy, sound carries energy. Sonic energy is a product and a by-product of life. It forms one expression of organismic presence. It is one particular energized expression of our band-limited life that developed its particular characteristics through evolutionary processes. These processes are essentially structured around variations in the (spatial and temporal) concentrations and availabilities of energy. As one such expression, sound is employed as one means through which humans enhance their survivability. Amplification represents a particular model for what is essentially a life-process that operates on various energy flows, modulating their basic characteristics. How human collectives generate and interact with sonic energy governs a wide swath of their consequent techno-social interactions. This research is a distributed exploration of sound as a carrier of energy between the Self and the Other — as it is mediated through the globe-spanning network of techno-social amplification systems. Specifically, it will be a critical exploration of our contemporary techno-social terrain through the application of this model in a variety of creatively energized situations.

Outcomes

Formally, outcomes will include the dissertation, live/online performances, workshops, a blog, festival participation, and conference presentations. Through developing an energy-based model that amplification provides an armature for, it is my hope that this research will generate a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding the dynamic affects of technological systems on creative human engagement at all scales. This knowledge will be applied to facilitate actual situations for this engagement to be explored.

Keywords

amplification, sound, (sonic) energy, power, technology, techno-social systems, networks, continuum of relation, dialogue, collaboration, presence, sustainable creativity, social action, entropy, thermodynamics …

tending to my own symbolic annihilation. making agreements with distant others to be there then. when being here now remains contested and thin in execution. and. still, a warm hand-shake and I feel like crying; gracias, gracias por todos, gracias, gracias to the guitar-playing Latino guy (is he my age?), a tenor singing in the L station. his spirit-voice shakes the rusted iron foundations of the city. it quickens autonomous space and heart in the urban subterrain and pushes everyone to the electric forefront of be-ing. the sustained highs transform the state of all things until suddenly I am here now. the I-beams shudder as the train pulls in. my head hangs as I enter the car and slump onto the fiberglass bench. peak experience, and the inevitable deflation.

so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:

The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.

wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance??? when one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. how can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? the web of dependencies is both wide and deep. can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. there is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon. that baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.

the dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. a dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. it consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.

how can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? it is a relative issue. clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to that system. it is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. from covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. it is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the Self in relation to the system.

in the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct likely created by a subset of military technologies. but trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. this is where the Self engages the Other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of what’s out there. trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other critical in the measure of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway which trust must follow to be realized. what is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous Others. what does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?

every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.

more on this in future rants…

Ready to vacate the camp ground: the omens and portents are not good.

Bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.

Nothing like the amplified throb of hydrocarbon explosion to go to sleep by and to wake up by. Camping in a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) OHV (Off-Highway Vehicle) area. The premise is simple, the social system has generated devices, machines, both two-wheeled and four that allow a single driver to mount somewhat like a horse, and to ride at speed on rugged and steep terrain. For entertainment. (Note: three-wheeled machines were banned from production 25 years ago because of the vast toll of injuries and deaths which ensued as a fault of the basic design). The word entertainment is key. It is absolutely true, straddling one of these machines, with hydro-carbon explosions vibrating the body, landscape rushing by a high speed. The body transforms itself into the body of a god (or goddess). (more …)

head hanging, I have the distinct mis-pleasure of missing my godson’s Bar Mitzvah this coming weekend. hmmmm. lack of disposable income to increase carbon foot-print-stamp and head East. that’ll come shortly perhaps. but in the meanwhile, Andrea (Simon’s mum) shares her script for the evening (mind you, the photo above post-dates the beginning of this narrative a couple years — around the Buttinsky-Hoppy-Top & Armpit Dancing Era), that’s dad, Bill with big bro Zander along with Simon in his mother’s arms, lil’ sis Maxie is still in the oven):

Simon Arthur gracefully slid into the world on May 2, 1994. He had a powerful set of lungs, but he didn’t get much chance to talk those first few years. Zander was his big brother, and rarely missed an opportunity to speak on Simon’s behalf. Simon had to learn other ways to capture an audience. Silent, sly, comical ways. He innately understood the power of nudity to gain the spotlight, and used it regularly. It was the rare gathering in our house, or anyone elses house for that matter, that Simon did not make the scene if not fully undressed, then in his tiny little briefs. Whether it was his stunningly fast Ninja moves — which often had the unintended result of landing him on his own back — or his oddly endearing Armpit dance, Simon relished entertaining the crowd his way.
(more …)

Everything depended on geology. Any damn fool could see that the vegetation was directly responsive to the bedrock. Hence birds and wildlife were responsive to it. We were responsive to it. In winter, our life was governed by where the wind blew, where snow accumulated. We could see that these natural phenomena were not random — that they were controlled, that there was a system. The processes of erosion and deposition were things that we grew up with. An insulated society does not see how important terrain is to someone who has to understand it in order to live with it. Much of it meant life or death for the animals, and therefore survival for us. If there was one thing we learned, it was that you don’t fight nature. You live with it. And you make accommodations — because nature does not accommodate. — David Love, to John McPhee in Rising from the Plains

shoving into the month. already moving again. house emptied more-or-less. now out in the Mojave. near Kelso. on the usual overnight stop between Prescott and San Francisco — in the Granite Mountains southeast of Kelso Dunes — perfect temperature, negligible humidity. so, star gazing bare-chested. Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, Antares near the waxing moon. Jupiter ahead. took the back way to I-40 at Seligman — essentially continuing out Williamson Valley Road for 65 miles. deep through isolated ranching territory on the fringe of the Prescott National Forest and something of a soft terrain of limestone, basalt, some red-rock, and green vegetation cover from the recent two weeks of monsoon. even caught a small storm that cleaned the windshield. making virtuality more transparent.

the Mojave as it always is. despite encroaching red-yellow air at sunset from eLAy and other less tangible impacts from humans, bats are winging about, some animals and birds out there — jack rabbits, nothing else seen, but likely there — and the plants, rocks, contributing to the raw being of place. and the ever-consequent silence laying heavy behind any sound. even starting up the computer for a bit of writing is a noisy industrial incursion. and with battery running down very fast. so that words either have to form now or simply dissipate into the real ether! setting the alarm early to have a slow breakfast, tea, before the sun breaks the boulder ridge immediately to the east. want to get on the road in this black car so that at least all the hours of the heavy mid-day sun are not spent inside it. coffin.

back to look at stars as battery dies.

Man’s comparative advantage in energy production has been greatly reduced in most situations — to the point where he is no longer a significant source of power in our economy. He has been supplanted also in performing many relatively simple and repetitive eye-brain-hand sequences. He has retained his greatest comparative advantage in: (1) the use of his brain as a flexible general-purpose problem-solving device, (2) the flexible use of his sensory organs and hands, and (3) the use of his legs, on rough terrain as well as smooth, to make this general-purpose sensing-thinking-manipulating system available wherever it is needed. — Herbert Simon

this is a clear statement of the resultant state of the human-technological system (though it does not consider the relationship between the repetitive motions of the machine (technology) and the social system that surrounds both the human and the machine which supplants the human). and it is precisely this relationship that generates the comparative advantage in favor of the machine. the human (to be supplanted) is a participant in the social infrastructure that generates the machine. this social infrastructure comes about as an emergent system as humans come together. any participant in the system gives their lived bio-energy into the system. the system, as an organized entity, needs this influx of energy to maintain its structure. when enough of this energy comes in, a degree of organization that can produce, for example, a moon landing, is formed. the relative state of advance in a technological product is directly related to the ability and efficiency of the social system to gather energy from its constituent individuals. each specific technology is the product of a equivalent state of social order.

Numbers (1) and (2) above are separable, but it is critical to note that the relationship of the two factors are in the material(object) versus its cognate. [cognate meaning the abstracted (linguistic) re-presentation of that object necessitated through the cognitive problem-solving process that the brain undertakes versus the very real interactions of the body with the surrounding techno-social system. it is not necessary to separate (2) and (3) in this case, as they both relate to the expenditure of applied bio-energy.]

more notes on the time:money:energy issue — a quick read-through of Adam Smith on the subject, the topic of VALUE pops out. where value is the process of tagging (or relating) the object to its cognate in the re-presentative system (this being the system of international finance — where value must be negotiated dynamically in consideration of a plethora of factors — all of which are rooted in material measure and its cognate representative in dualistic relation. (i.e., weapons & politics). this dualistic relationship is “acted out” whenever a consumer consumes — trading money (a multifold cognate for a range of objects) for material(s). however, this act is always preceded by the consumer being a producer — or, more precisely, one who gives in lived bio-energy into the social system in order that there is an organized production mechanism to create the objects to be consumed).

regarding the DVD that I pseudo-released a year ago. feeling for an “explanation” of why it is impossible to make a release of a work that is based in an art form that is performed live, juxtaposed with the wide issue of re-production and re-creation.

A performance of a composition that is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than it was … A recording of such a work has no more value than a postcard; it provides a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the action was a non-knowledge of something that has not yet happened. — John Cage

few stars last night. high clouds move in right after the 1700 sunset. by 1900 there is a massive halo around the moon. there is a mouse in the back of the truck, with me. after several wakeful moments waiting to determine the situation, then, seeing the dang critter in profile against the window, I end up getting out of bed and ripping everything out of the back, piece-by-piece until I find a little brown desert mouse and shoo him out. finally fall asleep.

shifted locations, heading north towards Kelso, after a long detour to check out the fossil beds near at the south end of the Marble Mountains. after some poking around, and dredging up very fragmentary memory of place, engaging a coyote in a call-and-response dance around the steep and rugged terrain, I finally focus in on a rich location for the trilobites, or at least, the right place. finding a complete trilobite is something of luck and persistence. in the end I come up with a few fragments that are interesting, one with a head about 5 cm across, but very fragmentary (inarticulate, that is). all the while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rail line just to the south stays busy as long trainloads of stuff go by every 15 minutes or so. I make a recording at the Cadiz crossing, but find that my microphone is screwed up, between that and the heavy wind blowing. decided not to tour around too much, so, just headed into the Granite Mountains, stopping in a jumble of granitic intrusives something like Joshua Tree. the wind continues, but the altitude here is about 1000 meters higher. it’s COLD. missing a warm hat. the camping spot has sizable cholla cactus, juniper, and mesquite between the huge boulders. but it is north of the mountains, so the sun goes away at 1530. I cook half-a-dozen eggs, eat them for lunch-dinner, make some tea to warm up, but end up sitting in the cab of the truck to keep warm. hoping that the wind breaks enough to start a fire. if not, it’ll be an early night to huddle in the back.

no break. gusting, chilling. bright moon, few stars shining over orderly and neat blobs of buff phenocryst-laden slow-cooled granite. almost stumbled into the cholla tree that I parked too close to. gotta file the location at a high-level memory for night-retrieval in the case of a bathroom run. it would be a sad time to run into one of those in the dark, or anytime. so, no quiet sky-gazing, or fire-sitting. the box of firewood that I have been toting since the Dolores River trip with Loki, Lexie, and Janet will go back in the truck in the morning. and it’ll be up and away to Livermore as soon as I get up and start moving.

a long day starting with a pancake breakfast. Mount Carbon looms over the cabin, 1000 meters vertical and about 3 km. away, a near-conical peak, at least viewed from the cabin. determining the right approach aside from a direct frontal attack was an exercise in reading topology and collaborative human map-reading, but we eventually got to the right starting point, on an old Denver South Park and Pacific railroad grade from mining times, herding the kids was relatively easy, but after a protracted obstacle-course through and around fallen trees on the forest floor of the main approach, a drainage couloir, combined with the mosquitoes, and word from returning hikers that we were just half-way with the steepest ascent ahead, we gave up and returned to the cabin. missing the peak is always a let-down for us strivers, but missing the view was the biggest disappointment for me — just to see the surrounding terrain, from that 360 point-of-view.

after dinner came the Gunnison fireworks, rumored to be quite elaborate. instead of attending the formal spectacle within the Western State College (small) stadium, we decided to just join the rabble situated in the empty lots, and other random locations in the surrounding neighborhood, staking out a stretch of grass near a playground. clearly there was a complex nationalistic happening in the stadium, given the pregnant pauses, cheers, and apparent choreography to the ground-level and aerial fireworks, but it was worth the wait for the big boomers that cut loose directly over us.

workshop continues this morning. after the performances last night at Blå, the state-sponsored club across the bridge from notam.

walking around Oslo, there is the sense of the cosmopolitan that is almost completely lacking in Helsinki. bits of material and social chaos that are hidden or tidied-up in the Finnish system of propriety flutter, clatter, and clash on the streets of Oslo.

workshop ending, I’m not there, had to leave early to catch the plane, not sure how I made the reservation that gets me to miss the last evening of concerts, and the conclusion of the workshop. before leaving Bjarne, Kim, and I sit down to discuss future possibilities.

so many impressions again, and the mapping of these over into the representative space is a immature and delinquent action. another set of human encounters which translate into a viable if unstable future. Norway rises on my terrain map again. not quite sure how it made its original appearance, except through the Icelandic Nordplus connection back in 1992. true, I was quite focused on central Europe, France and Germany almost exclusively. between 1992 and 1994, though, the IT culture was on the rise in Scandinavia. that and the art educational exchange opportunities. hmmmm, how about those histories.

Kim’s work. extreme, lean. subtle, sharp, mapped, choreography of chaotic textures. picked up a couple cd’s to be tracked asap. (they’re mini-cd’s so, can’t run them in the slot drive on the PowerBook). he mentions the Cassette Underground in passing, and, aside from others who were active in that anarchic pseudo-network, like Lloyd Dunn and Bern Porter, I haven’t personally run into any folks from those real tangible and underground US art networks ever. only through the network, not f2f.

so, in the way of human connections. this movement since leaving Boulder is simply evolving, electrically. so good to be back in tech-no-madic form.

packing. sifting, shuffling, tottering. readying for the next shift of realities. talking to folks in Germany today, beginning to peg things down for the spring. moving in directions that have the open, unknown elements. along with terrains of the soul.

so much stimulation. skunks, 8-point bucks, fish, minnows, crayfish, bats, Mormon Locusts, lizards, snakes, sage grouse, sagebrush, the Yampa, the Green, Steamship Rock, the sandstone, the sky, storms, swimming in place in the river, hiking Sand Canyon, waiting for rain. two days in Echo Park is a lifetime of regeneration. will definitely bring Loki here. 14 years ago I was here last. it has changed. the broad park with 20 or so huge cottonwood trees is half gone, consumed by the river, the trees lying like skeletons of monstrous beasts in the low water. that whole area is now closed for camping, and a ‘regular’ campground established at the point where the road exits the canyon on the way down. nicer that way, gives the wildlife a better chance in that area. strange how much the topography has changed, though, I had not expected it. not to mention the colonization by tamarisk. that has changed the shoreline. watching the stars last night, sleeping in the back of the truck, head on the tailgate, waking at regular intervals, seeing the sheer wall above and behind me, changing color, shade, as morning approached. and the rotation of stars silhouetted by the massive cliffs in every direction. no bugs to speak of, but tonight there seems to be many.

Sand Canyon, a long hike starting rather late in the morning, so that when I reach as far as I feel like going, it is in the peak of the heat and Light radiation bath. early on, there were plenty of cool shady spots to catch, resting in the silence, but on the way back down to the river, the heat and Light was searing the eyeballs. pressing down on the head. and making everything stand out in etched presence. (find edge). convolve the edge with a Dirac Delta function to send it to infinity. and it becomes the key value in knowing, at least in the moment. for each manifestation of energy in the universe, the critical point is the edge. how to maintain the energy right to the edge. but not beyond. (an aura is the inability to stop energy at an edge — it suggests a permeability, or that energy permeates everything. spreading to infuse the next manifestation. intertwining with and loving the Other.

a raptor harries me from above: death from above (the calling-card moniker of the Charlie Company 1st Battalion 8th Cavalry), rapacious cawing, echoing off the walls of the canyon, its yearling young joining in short flight or resting on a ledge far above me when I stopped to watch from under a cottonwood tree. I am not a welcome addition to the area. later I covertly watch the same raptor giving the same abuse to a passel of ravens that were coming downriver. ravens are everywhere that I have lived in the last years. there was one raven in Iceland, a huge one, who would come into town in the winter, I would cross his path in the crisp and dark mornings outside the house on my way to the bus stop at the top of the hill. he would greet me in a gutteral “craaaaaaawwwwwk.” I would look up, and wish for the best that spirit can offer to another being. and recall the ravens of Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler’s “Eagles Nest” near Berchtesgaden in the Austrian sub-Alps. the place looking like the home of the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings, in a greasy fog. while down below in the valley, American military officers relaxed and played golf. spoils of war. carrion.

a day so full of unspoken in-press-ons (no other human contact save for a few limited conversations) that spirit simmers at the surface. want to keep it there. will be here again in the near future. even though it is not so easy on the car, but if this is the main thing I do with the car, well, it will be worth it.

A couple days later. With the long-sighted view of memory, and of facilitating this being-in-the-moment. I pass from day to new day. Looking at the Flatirons at least once daily, and looking at the sky carefully each day. How can I kid myself. Having often said to Others, in other lands, that Colorado is a place where I can read and understand the sky. It is no lame metaphor. It is the truth, to me. And what of it? What does reading the sky bring? It brings the opposite of reading a book. Maybe. Or it is the same as … Something else. Quel que chose. Or something else.

If one avoids looking a lot at pre-digested — that is, Light pre-filtered through another human — sensual reality, one would feel less out of balance.

And I have to remember, when looking at the sky, to stop walking.

microscopic living. nothing happening, but time flowing. inexorable. with no possibility of slowing or stopping. damnation. loving and leaving / life. not just using language as a way of saying, but as a tool to mark the space as been there, gone now.

no place here to write anything of consequence. only reduced drivel again. thinking about the different stages of linguistic expression that are available. a diary, private, revelatory; dream journal, internalized and open to interpretation; personal letters, intimate, exploring the shared terrain; email, snatches of conversation, surfaces; the blog, stilted, pseudo; talking at a conference, formal; in a dialogue without interruption, depth; social conversation, again, surfaces, meta-subjects, sports, weather; sermons, monologues.

I have lied about dialogues. somehow have positioned them as a savior of the world, as the crux, the core of being. but it is not so, as I cannot explain why it is so. no demonstration, no confirmation, no experimental results, nothing left over, only the act itself, naked, stripped down, no wallowing in the rich linguistic mud that bring surficial healthy glows and Lights. there is absolutely no thing, no word, only the act. and nothing is really important, no thing, but only the way, the pathway of the Tao.

moving along. with a short stop/lunch with folks at the Computer Science / Media Department of the University of Lübeck who will be involved in the establishment of the International School of New Media that Hubertus has been working on in the last couple years. they will move into a nice new location, the Media Docks, immediately adjacent from the old town. more of the old Hanseatic traditions. so it goes.

heading for Copenhagen via the boat at Puttgarten.

there is no voice that can speak life. but to get into a dance with the Void. I have not changed. at all. no evolution, no learning. only going. parsing input data, but it is routed to the same boxes. as ever. no cross-over networks, re-routed neurons. learning systems. knee-jerking. hard-wired. why no escape?

smoke rising from farm fires in the Danish countryside. and in my gaze there is a reach into the terrain’s history. looking for mounds, barrows, and the “holm gards”: reading the “Heimskringla” epic of the Age of Vikings on my PalmPilot. simulation.

have to write to Marcel to see if he remembers what I said about networks in Zurich — at some point I made a short statement, and in the moment, thought it was very apropos, especially when I observed that everyone in the entire room paused to write it down. but I have since forgotten what it was! “a network is…” or “a network isn’t…” gees.

another one of those junctures where I’ve got to part with a pair of boots. not evident in the photo is the usual horrific slice that spontaneously propagates along the inner right ball where the bottom sole hits the side upper. like somebody did a razor cut. practically every shoe I’ve ever worn down ends up this way. these are/were a fine pair of Asolos acquired from mad-man climber amigo John in Golden, the North American distributor. after many miles/kilometers, they are ready to be buried or sacrificed somewhere, not sure where yet. all the stored up memories acquired across myriad terrains. dogshit, gum, vomit, and piss on the streets, mulch, dirt, sand, gravel, snow, slush, scarred by lava dancing and granite scraping.