the day after the ascent of a 14,000+ footer (Grays Peak, near Silverplume), no sore-ness. remarkable, considering the intensity of the cardio work that such an effort entails. heart-throb rising from chest to throat to head as altitude is gained.

heading back into deep work on the thesis after a string of field research expeditions and dislocations. the gathering of material is continuous, as is the (plodding) process of getting archive material up (see new (old) stuff)

then, back to work.

So human social organizations constantly reconstitute themselves through a flow of members and other adjunct materials, information, and energy. Many of these are selectively favored through a continuing expansion or effort to expand above their original size. Such organizations may reach a point at which further expansion is blocked, and budding off is the only alternative to continue. The blockage may be due to internal structural problems, such as a Marxian internal contradiction, or the appearance of revolutions, and so on; or, to external constraints–such as furious neighboring states, or a strongly competitive market enterprise. — Richard Adams

I would suggest that the enumerated items — members, materials, information, and energy — may be re-categorized into energy, and the embodied and surrounding protocols (flow pathways accumulated through shared (social) information). Materials should be ignored in the sense that they are ultimately manifestations of energy: traditionalists are be encouraged to consider that the concept of ‘things’ and of static ‘materials’ are merely convenient constructs to be transcended or shed in the stead of energy and flow…

Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Ta… impossible, when writing, to accede, to yield tradition to this, eh?

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

verily on the road. but many complexities to solve or let spin away. walking in the High Country clears head, but raises certain questions. as does convocation time with good friends. influence comes from all directions with the flows of ambient energy. some are more powerful than others. subtlety is a factor.

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

jump into the Multi-Platform Story-Telling course to join Jan in the first day of audio work. the students seem quite activated as they continue on the projects that they started in video, moving to four-minute audio pieces, then on to some photographic work, and finally I’m supposed to tie it all together on the ABC Pool site. the intent of the course is to aim at social networking concepts, although I find that the Pool site is a rather generic top-down implementation of contemporary social media. it doesn’t look sustainable except by a back-end maintenance infrastructure (funding infusion), and activities imposed by related institutions (universities) (attention infusion). if there’s time, I’ll make some inquiries on stats, although I doubt that those will be publicly available. most organizations don’t understand that substituting grass-roots impulses with centrally planned deployments simply doesn’t work. we’ll see. I feel like the course is 15 years too late.

by happenstance, walking back from lunch with Jan, note that the Islamic prayer space (split into two sides, one for men and one for women), is open for visitors. the LTU Islamic Students group is holding an Islamic Awareness Week: Islam: The Solution. we go in, and I end up staying for a couple hours, first listening to the general discussion, then jumping in to talk with some of the students. hard to gauge the affect of being an Amurikan in such a situation. there is one other Anglo fellow there, and the rest are from all parts of the Islamic world. interesting field of dialogue follows.

The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — as deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.

The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam.

So: two major mechanisms and the second is responsible for the construction of the first. It takes an energy (depletion) to create these barriers which subsequently carry and direct energy flows as prescribed by their particular socially-mandated configurations.

[This all goes back to the hypothesis about virtuality -- where virtuality is (merely) the presence of a situation of attenuation of 'natural' flows (and here, tool-making is a key component). The question of what is 'natural' may be approached from a couple way, but more on that elsewhere.]

And all the way, Coyote laughs.

The day spent in leisurely absorbing the energy of place. The campground is built under the only trees for miles, (eucalyptus, from Australia!) so there is raptor and other bird activity all the time. The owls at night contribute a fantastic dialogue to the silence.

A short hike west to some low hills, down a wash, ends up, with the recent extreme rains, at a cattle pond full to overflowing. As per usual, I do not do a ‘before’ image (note to self — do a before image next time!). The downstream side of the small embankment dam has been undercut to within a meter of the main body of water which is substantial. With a small stick, I scratch a small line across the top of the dam, gradually increasing its size, using the initial slight flow of water to clear the waste from the cut. After twenty minutes of play, there is a sizable gap in the dam along with a flood of water rushing through, further eroding the dam body. Monkey-wrenching? Nah, this is merely a slight acceleration of what is happening ‘naturally’ — the breaching of the dam will occur eventually unless there is maintenance energy applied into the system. It would have likely occurred with the next substantial rains.

I do take an after image, and then head back to camp circuitously. It is after I see Coyote’s paw-print in the rain-damp soil, walking on a trail, that I cross the wash on which the dam is built. I am surprised that the huge rush of water from the breach is just reaching this spot. It is first a trickle which then ramps up to a full-on rushing creek. Fascinating to see the water fill the bed of the wash, pooling in hollows, flowing over small water-falls. I see immediately this is a perfect audio situation to continue documentation of the ‘changing the course of nature’ or ‘changing the course of history’ project that I have undertaken in the last few years. I lope back to camp, grab the recorder, and race back, downstream, to the wash. The flood is proceeding slow enough that I can run further downstream several times to record the ambient audio and make some images of the process.

Then it’s back to camp for dinner.

Sky-worms bugger the clarity of the atmosphere, attenuation the flux of Light reaching the surface. Obviously this is under a major north-south air-route — the only good thing is that the planes are at 10 km altitude, so the sonic disturbance is minimal. The affect on high-altitude haze, however, is profound. Long vision (at the sky and at the landscape) refocuses eyes through these worn diffracting glass into another focal point. Eyesight goes bad with all the reading and writing. The next year will make all that has gone before (go pale in comparison, argh!) as the PhD takes shape. No life, no sight left.

I have not seen another human the entire day with the exception of a well-armed ranger cruising through the campground. A droll chap, probably 30 or so, from the East Coast, a Federal employee, dislocated.

Around sunset, a car pulls in, first they park in the next slot, but then pull out and park across the campground, 50 meters away. There is a couple, they mill around, looking like they are setting up camp, it’s cold, getting colder, sunset. I’m sleeping on the ground. They turn on a radio playing pop mariachi music. It gets louder and louder as time goes by, getting later and later. They are sitting in the front of the car probably drinking, smoking, whatever. At one point well after 2300 I yell over to TURN IT DOWN. That has no effect. I honk my horn, also to no effect. I contemplate going over, but also realize the odds are that the occupants are armed. I instead pack the car up, fuming, and drive to a side-road further south in the valley and find a spot there. Faugh, why would somebody drive all this way — it’s at least 50 miles from the nearest town — to sit in their car and play loud music? Sorry, I don’t get it. [expletives deleted!]

Later, Orion drags his belt and sword from the sludge of Light pollution that sits to the south: Los Angeles, more than 150 km away or so. To the east, light from Taft and Bakersfield. A strong wind arises late in the night, there are no trees where I have moved to. Uncomfortable night after the luxury last night.

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.

Cycling down the river to first the boat house, then downtown and The Green Bench for more work, stopping to photograph the river in the brilliant sunshine and I see a huge cloud rising from the direction of Taranaki. could it be an eruption? I ask a woman walking down the bike trail, but she looks and seems completely indifferent, seemingly not recognizing that it is a smoke, not weather cloud. Weird. Turns out that it is likely just an agricultural burn.

brutal day, too late to change it: deciding to go out to the closest bush access — the Blue Mountains National Park up at Katoomba to check it out — bad weather, but this is the only opportunity to go before leaving for New Zealand on Friday. I suppose it is the rough equivalent of hitting Yosemite or so (not near the grandeur of Yosemite, but the proximity and intensity of being a tourist attraction, they get three million folks up here every year). a 90-minute train ride from Sydney Central up the hill to Katoomba Station. decide to fuel-up at a cafe in town first, do some writing, pick up on the vibe. then head south from town on foot to the edge of the main escarpment of resistant Triassic Hawkesbury sandstone that Katoomba sits on. pouring rain by the time I get an hour out. thankfully I have full Goretex on which is useless. so, drenched to the point that it makes no difference.

along the escarpment picking up the energy, not seeing a soul. clouds lower before I leave town, so visibility contracts to 1-200 meters or so. dense, rich, empty, wet. a bit taken aback at the emptiness so close to town, but not in a negative way. I decide to make about an 8-mile loop hike, down the Golden Staircase, and along the base of the escarpment through the muck and rain. hang out in a small cave-overhang for a time, meditating on the dripping sounds, and why I hadn’t been up here before now. I had always been reading adverts about travel to the Blue Mountains with tour companies and the prices were prohibitive (for my budget), more than AUD 100 for a day trip, so I simply eliminated it from my list of possible things to do. now I discover that it costs a AUD 5.50 train ticket, and a mile walk to get into the park boundaries. another 5 miles and I’m in pretty rugged country. dang.

wet. continue the long loop, crossing a landslide area which was quite a chore to get across, especially exposed to the now constant pouring rain. unfortunately no decent photos, though the clouds wreathing the escarpment were dramatic. still no sight of any other humans. but absolutely not used to this wetness, since the long climb in the West Elk Wilderness in 2009. continue along, a bit unsure if I’ve taken on too much of a walk after being rather out of practice. eventually get around to the re-ascent point, meeting a couple just off the funicular rail that descends to a touristic overlook — they are in dress shoes and no rain gear. hmmmm. won’t get far in that! finally slog up the long sets of stairs back up to the top, boots sloshing, and with any luck, no damage to my electronic gear. long, tiring walk back into town where I stop for a glacially-served burger, fortunately it doesn’t impact getting to the train. in exchange for lame service, I leave a substantial wet region at one of their tables. back on the city-bound train, I look down after a time to see a leech writhing on the floor. I then discover two bleeding holes in one ankle. hmmmm. wonder if those critters are dangerous, or are just plain old leeches. I leave a sizable wet spot on the train as well. finally make it home after a 14-hour day, finding my boot and sock soaked in blood. so much for the first (and perhaps last) foray into the Blue Mountains, into the Oz bush.

waking up early. so early.

a gap opens in the flow of being. stopping all progress. no forward momentum. inertia scrapes the pavement. heels dragging, eyes on the ground, not the horizon nor the stars.

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

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.

Meet Mauri and Pia in Berkeley for a hike and lunch along with one of their colleagues, Phillip, at the Minerva Foundation. We head out to the Mount Tilden Park and climb through the invasive Sycamore (and poison oak!) to a view of the entire Bay area.

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.

An Outward Bound group rafts in, and are lectured to in the Trex seating arranged for “camp fire talks” here in the campground. I find it really bizarre, when there a thousand ‘natural’ places to sit for a dialogue, they make a bee-line to the plastic composite seats. I guess they got lectured on the tamarisk mitigation work around Echo Park, I didn’t ask, as I was too busy prepping for the day. They later went into the woods between the campground and the river and were doing something. Wonder if they saw the carnage I wrought on the tamarisk behind site #7! (more …)

try a couple more timelapse shots, but they are unsatisfactory with all the technical drawbacks. Stability, resolution, quality, etc. Nothing to be done about it without a 10K investment, or more.

Instead, after the driving rain all night, start a fire in the morning, still raining, but gradually it tapers off, though it is very cloudy. The guy who came in late yesterday in a Ford Explorer with a Rocket Box on top left at some point in the morning. Gah. No place to go! He’ll end up in a ditch somewhere.

I decide to do the traverse from the Pool Creek road over to Sand Canyon since the lower mouth of the canyon is not accessible because the Yampa River spring run-off level. On the way, I decide to drive up to the Bench fork to see where this guy drove — I am stunned to see that he took the branch up to the Harper’s Corner road, with the 18% grade. No way, after a night of rain, and, as I see when I get out of Pool Creek Canyon, snow down to about 6000 feet, so the last two miles of the road would be absolutely impossible. Just the drive to the fork is bad with the red clay sticking in the treads on the tires making them useless aside from the fact this is a relatively level road, so, no problem. I see his tracks, and even the difference of a few hours (time for the road to dry some), he was having more trouble that I was. I could see the difference of a few hours of drying time. I can only hope that there is no additional rain before Friday when I have to head out, south to Glade Park. I imagine that he is stuck somewhere on the road, though, hopefully not blocking traffic! (Of which there will be none, because after that weather, they for sure closed the top of the road for people coming in.)

The traverse the wide and clear bench to Sand Canyon is subtle but effective. Several kills, and between those and the barrel cactii colonies and the Indian Paint Brush (Castilleja linariifolia) flowers, plenty of that counterpoint coloration that is so outrageous in the West. The silver-green-blue of the sage, then these absolute vortices of color with the flowering plants, stimulating in the soft and wet Light. Found another 14-point rack, gah, these animals are big! Wouldn’t want to encounter a mad one! End up on the canyon rim, just across from where Sebastien, Jeff, Chris, Wendy, and I hike to from the old camping place, years ago, there are some extant shots of folks sprawled on a small bench of sandstone, resting, and eating M&M’s. I recall looking across the canyon at that point, thinking how it looked, how it impressed form into eye. Today, climbing down that formerly observed face was steep and tricky. All the while, wondering about cougars. A series of nice overhang/caves at the top under the limestone cap rock, so, continued the series of cave panoramas, hope to have three decent works to perhaps make into large-scale print works.

The psycho-geographic process in this situation, this environment, this weather, is strictly controlled by the contingencies of the total situation. There is little choice, per se, but rather the application of experience, or lack thereof, to the movement through, across, into, and of the essence of the place. Movement is dictated by will throughout the body, but it also immediately comes up against the contingencies of place. Unlike the Sonoran Desert, the actual number of spiny plants is not near as great, but the small size means easily overlooked, heavy boots are a necessity. And care becomes more about the stability of the foot-fall rather than what the foot might intersect. Some time is spent exploring several small side-canyons where there is plenty to absorb.

Sleep difficult, not sure why, whether simple discomfort, though the back of the truck seems very comfortable in the immediate impression, warm, soft enough, but body cannot find a comfortable position, side to side, somehow, problems. Could be that yoga hasn’t been happening in the last days. Hiking is a challenge for the body as well.

Drive up to the head of Sand Canyon, intent on doing a hike, but what looks like bad weather coming in, a heavy front across the whole west, sends me back after a short recon along the Bench Road. It seems doable as an alternative escape route, if this end is the worst, though, in wet conditions, forget it. And it totals thirty miles to Elk Springs, not just the three miles I did on recon. Almost all of it is in the red and yellow clay-sandstone alluvium, and this is precisely this same stuff which sits at the top of the Echo Park Road — from the 2000-foot displacement on the Mitten Park Fault, so, no real solution in heavy and widespread rain. However, this doesn’t seem the case — the rain is sporadic, fast-moving, and interspersed with bright sunshine and the roads are basically still dry after two days of ‘winter storm,’ so fretting about it is a waste of energy. Either I get out on Friday or I don’t and have to wait a few days. Plenty of water, fuel, and food, so that is no problem. The only locked-in point is the flight next Wednesday evening to Portland. But I’d still hate to miss the yurt-raising in Glade Park at Collin and Marisa’s this weekend!

Getting places, visiting friends. This is something I do that others don’t seem to do quite as much. With or without kids, people go on vacation to some elsewhere which is not local. But why this nagging impression that without me making repeat and sustained contacts, that Others have little interest in doing so. Of course, they have a life too, but so do I (I think): what trumps one over the other in considerations of time to maintain contact? It’s my job, perhaps. Is this a general un-sustainability of contemporary social conditions — at least as it sustains social relation beyond the immediate in-your-face people engaged with? Distance, obviously, can increase from there and is measured by the face-time, life-time, and life-energy spent. We do not do well spreading our attentions widely, except for those who crave (are craven) to have the attention of many. There are humans who can capture the attention of millions of individuals. This is only through mediation, however. With increasing numbers roughly equivalent to increasing mediation. Bang for Buck.

Does it matter, this wide-scaled exploration of the apparatus, the anatomy of power relations in the social system I am embedded within? Is it again merely something done to fill the time of being here. And will have little or no use in the long run except as a legacy substitute for being here? Ach, it is all looking towards that eventuality, as far as I can see. And what is that? Whilst reading on a early 20th Century historical treatise on Augustus (Octavius), a paean to the Caesar, successor to Julius Caesar, and master of the Roman Empire for many decades. The understanding must be embedded in a living praxis.

Suit-up later despite the weather for a relatively short but very intense hike to check out the small bench area above the soft red hills that are immediately above Lower Pool Creek Canyon. Dimension is distorted. Small- and smooth- looking becomes large and rugged (as usual). Slow pace, looking for access up the bench face. Strange smell, noted. Noted again about ten minutes later. And five minutes after that, the first fresh, very fresh paw-print the width of my hand. Thank god no overhanging trees of any height or size up here. With the near presence of a sizable carnivore confirmed, looking becomes a multi-dimensional immediacy. But then the sunLight breaks through after a squall, and I race through the juniper around to the west side of the bench trying to find a strategic vantage for some photos without foreground trees. Can’t get to it quick enough to capture sunLight glistening on wet uplifted fault faces of Harper’s Corner. Looks damn nice, though. Didn’t become someone’s dinner at the expense of a couple good photos either.

Back to the east rim, to plot a way back down, I spy a strange sight 200 yards below in the fading Light. A tremendous elk rack still attached to whitened skull apparently hanging in a juniper tree. No easy way down the bench there, I have to back-track to find an accessible egress. Finally make it to the rack. Amazing, 14-point, other bones strewn around. Blood still on some of it, so, not too old. A scattering of the rest of the stripped skeleton on the ground in the area.

Then a few minutes later, stumble on some large chunks of petrified wood which I trace to a deposit in a loosely consolidated conglomerate sandstone layer. Strange that the wood would remain intact in such an environment. The pieces are internally fractured, but exhibit good detail in the re-mineralization of the wood structures.

Finally back to the bike for the two miles downhill back to Echo Park. More severe weather rips through the entire night. The road is definitely closed. No humans in sight.

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 …)

Two days here in Echo Park already. Three nights, one night alone, Friday and Saturday there were a couple of people in, then tonight, Sunday, no one around at all. A bit creepy, especially with the mountain lion kill I just discovered over in the middle of the walk-in camping site. Saw that on the way back from Mitten Park this afternoon. Been thinking of the cougars the whole time I’ve been here. Seeing evidences of kills scattered widely across the entire space. Wondering what the total range in for a single cat? I just don’t want to meet one. Having fantasy imaginations, and on the way back from Mitten Park had composed an Ode to the Puma, not able to memorize it sufficiently to record it, but recite it loudly on the way back.

The trail is choked with small purple flowers where it starts from Echo Park. Then there are the vague petroglyphs, then one set of rafters float by, small against Steamboat Rock. Looking at things great and small, it’s all relative to the eye, and the unfolding context.

Eight years ago, I leave a stone from Iceland in a cavity of the standing carcass of a burned piñon, the stone is now gone. Where?

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.

A nice hike with Neal, his last day before heading back to London (despite the volcano!) into the Toano Raptor Observation Area at the south end of the Toano Range. No big raptors except for a turkey vulture who didn’t fly away from a sheep carcass at the side of the track in until we were just 20 feet away (oi, pew!!). That’s as close as I’ve been from one of those huge birds. The hike in gets into snow pretty quickly, including corn snow coming down. But the sun is warm on the south-facing side of the canyon, and with the elevation gain, the view to the east over the playa and all the way to the Wasatch Range is fine. Apparently in the fall, during migration, more than 50,000 eagles, hawks, and falcons pass through the area.

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!

Morning, mourning notes on encounter, in no particular order.

It is on a pathway, the pathway, in the mode of movement, in the shifting of unknown situations, where encounter occurs. These encounters are traced with the full presence of the body and all aspects where they occur.

There is the general rule on a hiking trail, uphill gets right-of-way: those struggling and straining to make it to the top of whatever heights that you’ve just been on should be given precedence. It’s always a question, though, what the precise character of the encounter will be. Whether you have seen (or heard) the approach of an Other, through dense forest, or whether you round a turn to be confronted by a gaggle of silent walkers. Encounter is a culturally specific regime overlying that of the embodied, the animal. On trails in the West the density of hikers is generally low, except in National Parks which can see crowds as dense any on Fifth Avenue in New York City at lunch-time. This is one criteria on which to judge a trail — not merely the views afforded, but the number of people encountered. Escaping from human presence is as prominent a thought as what other ‘natural’ phenomena might be encountered.

Silence, or the absence of human-created noise, relates to presence of other humans as well as other beasts. While walking in bear country complete silence is not a safe option, so encounters with other humans in bear country usually begin at a distance, either with bells or simply boisterous activity. Encounters with bears are sometimes at a distance, but sometimes not. I have found that the presence radiated by large hairy carnivores with big teeth usually precedes any sight.

Bush-whacking is a situation where encounter with an Other becomes so rare as to evoke a certain fear if only from the statistical improbability of encounter whilst specifically not on a trail. Sadly, it is a probability that rises as the global population increases. Too many folks out there! And one has to be aware of the timing of the off-trail experience: hunting season is not a good time to bush-whack!

Enroute, one suspends the closed-ness of daily routine. The sameness of daily regimen is upset and in its place is the jarring uncertainty of arrival in unknown, medial, places. In between here and there. Starting point, ending point. Suspended animation is an apt term. Animate, moving, but somehow suspended by the vagaries of being someplace in particular, some nameable place, some identifiable locus.

It is in this liminal space, on the thresh keld, thresh hold, the border between the space of known nutrition and the potentialities of the unknown, where all learning and change takes place. As a setting for the encounter with the Other, partaking food, sharing nutrition with a stranger is an exceptionally powerful meeting of ritual.

Of course, there is the argument that says movement can be only in mind, and such mental travel is as efficacious in bringing transcendence as any physical movement. But the movement I write of here is not a simple Cartesian transposition of body, of point-of-view, it is the processural space of encountering the unknown Other. This will precipitate something of a shift in point-of-view, no matter how small in that Cartesian sense — it is the principle of change that matters — and in an open encounter, change occurs. This demands embodied motion. Turning to face the Other.

Over the years, I observe that I take very few photographs in the place where I live. With a few exceptions of concentrated exercise to see the unknown within the known, it is on the road where sight opens and newness brings that rushing tension of encounter. That tension, when unchecked, concentrates in the shoulders and subsequently crawls up the gall-bladder channel to root behind the eyes, migraine. Gotta deal with that. Opening the shoulders, the channel, to allow the movement of difference, the tension of change to simply transit the body without leaving damage in its wake. This will be a theme of movement. To pass through and allow a passing through of the energies of encounter.

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.

When working in Colombia, in the eastern Llanos, for Big Oil, we hired trocha crews who would cut paths in the jungle for the geophone lines to be laid along. Armed with machetes they would hack a one-meter-wide swath along the surveyed lines, leaving short protruding sticks of vegetation cut at an angle — treacherous when struggling along the lines up steep slopes and down. One slip and you would be impaled, and in that country, any break in the protective skin could mean serious infection problems. Walking was never so high-risk: never fall down. It was a choice of absolutely impenetrable jungle on either side, or the possibility of forward/backward movement along these lines. Helipads for extraction were cut in the jungle every 5 clicks or so.

At any rate, the foot is connected to a membered body, so the whole embodied system is implicated in the formation of the pathway. With senses correlating from memorized resonance previous ways taken and the outcomes, choices are made what immediate and final trajectory the body takes. This trajectory is anchored with the planting of the foot and the establishment of balance on that foot. The four corners of the foot root momentarily with the earth. One foot following the other, and that embodied motion precisely driven by the flow of energy entering the senses. Breaking trail can be exhausting, making a way for someone else’s body to pass across the terrain. Following someone else’s path is easier.

Animals make pathways: I am following the cloven tracks of a deer, several of them. I can lope along the game trail at a fair clip, despite the altitude which stretches lungs to a pant, judging how fresh the tracks are by how they desiccate along the edges in the dry western air. But how many hours since passage does half-a-centimeter of crumbled track mean? What happens if I catch up with the deer, if they have stopped to rest or eat? What happens if there’s a mountain lion, an ambush predator, hanging around along this pathway, waiting for an easy mark? I don’t think about it, but keep running as fast as the uneven terrain allows, watching carefully for ankle-twisting roots and rocks. Hooves on a game trail tend to break up the damp soil into loose chunks which make high boots an ankle-saving necessity, though they slow me down, and don’t allow the foot to feel the ground as accurately. I run until I have to stop, sucking the air in with fast but controlled gasps. There they are, 200 yards ahead, traversing a steep slope of piñon, upwind. Okay, today, with a bow, I would have survived a few more days with protein-stuffed belly. The path defined as an enriched flow of food energy.

Willie Wagtails (Rhipidura leucophrys), Minors (Manorina melanocephala) …

that entry stopped there. no time to observe and note things when constantly consuming texts and coping with the daily movements. it is highly inefficient to commute for this kind of work. research is 90% online, and moving between home and the office sucks up at least 1.5 hours a day. strange that it is able to absorb so much time when it’s just a short distance away. walking takes about 40 minutes each way, though, and waiting for the bus and the slow crawl down George Street is tedious. I find that the mind-space that I take on when in that mode is very unproductive and deadening. I observe, while hearing is constantly assaulted, occasionally some energizing encounters, but the locally dominant Asian sense of personal space I find deeply conflicting with my own. and the reflexive sensory protocols I developed through the time in the desert and mountains has been thoroughly destroyed — no stars to see, not even planets, and it is only in the 16th-floor office that its really possible to watch the weather develop albeit through heavy windows that cannot be opened and are filthy on the exterior (I cleaned the large inside pane of the window immediately over my desk, much to the amusement of several of the other grad students). optical clarity — if I’m forced to look at the world through a glass filter, it’s got to be clean!

the best situation would be the office/desk set-up in another room of the living place. productive work depends only on the network connection, the availability of a relatively unobtrusive sonic environment, and a way to make tea. the idea that (school) work and living are separate boxes, or boxes to be separated, is a traditional view which I find to be counter-productive to a holistic praxis. of course, having fun is necessary, and work can be quite fun, depending on the sustenance of a sense of humor about it all. it is an absurd process, after all, gazing at glowing screens, watching the colored Lights, entranced by the causal nature of keystroke and changing configuration of limited sight.

of course, the importance of social relation is key as well. I find that robust encounter: attentive, directed, relaxed, wide-ranging, inquisitive, and playful to be the most rewarding. I probably am lacking some of this here, without any close contacts, but the few folks who I share time with in the program are smart and engaging.

so what now?

it looks like this will work. settling in for the duration. more-or-less. but do have to focus on getting out away from town. I might sublet Nigel’s place about three hours out of town for part of next year. it doesn’t presently have broadband, though they might have that installed. anything to be outside the city. (walked over to Paddy’s Market yesterday afternoon, started down the steps to the fruit and vegetable stalls, and just turned around, the whole place was jam-packed with people elbowing each other over the goods). ach.

I don’t quite fit in Kevin’s shoes. when he passed away, his Aunt Rosemary asked me if I wanted his shoes. Kevin wore 9-1/2, I wear 9. I said yes, why not. so she sent me a box full of maybe eight pairs of shoes.

as I walk around Sydney (too much), I have come to wear his quite comfortable Merrell slip-ons to help ease the stress on the only remaining shock-absorbing L5 disk which, as my neuro-surgeon diagnosed, would accelerate its deterioration following the L2-L4 fusion from the accident. the L5 is the only disk left that cushions the spine in the area between rib-cage and pelvis. else wise the spine in the lumbar region is a solid bolted-together mass. this dictates that I have to wear shock-absorbing shoes. no hard-heeled dress shoes. though I used to like wearing such, I cannot now. Kevin had a great pair of shit-kickers (cowboy boots) that I unfortunately have hardly worn as within five minutes of standing and walking a bit, it hurts the lower back. same with my old Beatle boots which also have the additional effect of torquing the lower back with the heel height. ach!

I think to myself, I’m walking in Kevin’s shoes. I am walking in Kevin’s shoes. they are slightly too big unless I wear fat socks. I don’t quite fit into Kevin’s shoes. but I have walked much more than a mile in his shoes. and I like it that I remember him when I walk around here.

got to weigh in on health care. so sick(!) of the toxic blather going on within the US, although it might just be that it is a spent nation-state, in the throes of becoming less relevant in the world. clearly it is becoming less functional internally which eventually (already) will have an effect on external relations. morally it is tearing itself apart by those who, strangely call themselves Christian but who seem to have zero compassion and limitless zeal for defending against the stranger and killing preemptively when that stranger seems strange. period. I have some understanding of the fear of governmental authority. the media in the US has certainly inculcated so many other nation-states with the blight of the dictator and illustrated that to the US citizens, a situation that reinforces some traditional/historical fear of the government. fine. but why is there almost zero fear of the corporation? how can this be? (a belief that the government will effectively control the corporation?? or what?) it is irrational. but then again, fear usually is, especially the fear exuding from an under-class which is very poorly educated (a result of a very stratified anti-Federal education situation, but that’s another whole story). This under-class seems not to understand the dynamics of power as it happens to be expressed in the particular system they live under — global capitalism — despite being locked into that servile under-class by those same dynamics of power. a dynamics that is expressed in the same way as it is expressed in any other system of power — the elite rule that under-class. whether it is elite politicians-for-life (the Senate) or corporate boards or whatever arrangement of power, it’s all Machiavellian in both intention and execution. doh!

I have had wide experience in numerous socialist (gasp!) countries and with some of their medical systems. I have also had several encounters with fragments of the US system. in different situations I have been either uninsured or insured. I am alive/walking today because of the quality of the US system, a system that took care of me after an accident when I was in an uninsured gap in time. the system (which really isn’t a system, but more a hodge-podge of competing, conflicting, and discontinuous sub-systems), without any paperwork, without even a ID (I’m white), the local hospital ER took me in and diagnosed my severe injury — a shattered vertebra and sent me on for major surgery and hospitalization at a top neurological center a couple hours away in Phoenix, Arizona. a week in post-op ICU and I was sent home (to my sister’s place where she cared for me for some weeks until I could be moderately ambulatory). later, after three months of heavy physical therapy and a deep focus on my part, I am once again healthy and mobile. without that level of technology and expertise I would be either a paraplegic or simply dead.

this particular experience doesn’t preclude any of the criticisms of the overall system which is bleeding people for far more cash than is necessary even when factoring in bureaucratic inefficiencies that might be introduced by governmental oversight.

I didn’t have insurance at that time because it was prohibitively expensive for me as an individual free-lance educator to underwrite, an entrepreneur. surely many potential and practicing entrepreneurs are faced with problem, to what extent does this impede them? I took the calculated risk when visiting the US that nothing would happen to me. I was insured (by the State) when teaching in Finland and in Iceland and that insurance extended by reciprocity to any European state. I would have been covered anywhere in Europe had that same accident occurred there. The ultimate level of care may not have been the same in many less developed Euro-states, but in Scandinavia and most of the states I operated in, the intervention and care would have equaled or exceeded what I got in Arizona.

another prior encounter with the US system, because of a running injury during a period where I was first uninsured then insured saw mis-diagnosis for fractured sesamoid bones in my left foot. on five occasions over a four-year period I had x-rays and a variety of examinations in the US, none of which identified the problem correctly. after I moved to Iceland, my first encounter with that socialist (gasp!) system (never mind the stupid insurance company ploy of pre-existing conditions in the US), the (Swedish-trained) doctor did a focused exam of the foot and without even an x-ray, diagnosed the injury correctly, and scheduled a surgical intervention shortly thereafter. I had several other encounters with the system up there including the complicated birth of my son which was taken care of completely, my wife staying comfortably in the hospital for ten days (and having the option to take off either six months at full pay or one year at half pay from her job for maternity leave; I got to take off the second year at half-pay too). a number of emergency interventions were expertly taken care of as well. all for free. my cumulative tax rate as a university educator there was the same as I paid in the US when you added up all the local, state, and federal rates.

in Finland I had some minor encounters with the system which were expert and professional. and free.

now here in Australia, I paid all of USD 270 per annum for private (state regulated) insurance. I have not tested it out yet, but do plan to explore it for some minor chronic issues.

once, in a meeting with some executives from Ericsson in Stockholm some years back, the conversation turned to health care and I heard them agree that the high taxes that they paid as members of the upper-middle-class were worth it to have a stable society where all were cared for. uff, that sounds like (gasp!) socialism! curses! never mind what the Bible says about the sin of empathy.

although my eating habits are a bit skewed in the direction of consuming too many carbos and dairy than I should, I exercise at a level that most people my age think is extreme. six or seven days a week, I engage in some combination of cardio, strength, or centering exercises for a couple hours. swimming, cycling, yoga, tai chi, weight lifting, resistance exercise, and such. I walk stairs rather than take elevators or escalators. I am walking after that accident partly because I was in better-than-average condition to begin with and I don’t intend that to change radically.

with universal health care in the US I can see one argument against it — who wants to pay the bill via taxes for the HUGE number of morbidly obese over-consuming Amurikans, many who are the same thought-less, compassion-less christian folks righteously ‘defending the constitution’ and their fat slice of pie with weapons? gah.

as is the norm, living someplace, I don’t make many images, that and the backlog into June hanging overhead, and getting on with research instead of data juggling. so, one image from Marrickville in the two weeks I was there. on a short evening wander up the Cooks River.

early rise. mild temps. hearty breakfast. then off, away from the dunes into the foothills of the Blanca massif and the Buck Creek watershed. going up. high-pitched grade, slow walking. piñon, juniper, small prickly pear, and the occasional mountain ball cactus. on up. looking down. stopping, looking up, around. lunch break upon the discovery of a pair of buck horns (14-point!). Buck Creek, well named. after enough vertical and hitting snow in the trees, a rapid, steep, and unstable descent into the creek bed itself, water appearing from springs and disappearing. some snow left in the darker, more northerly slopes. sound recordings of water, snow-melt. a tongue of wild fire burned its way into the lower parts of the creek, towards the dunes, leaving gray and ragged carcasses of aspen and willow to succumb to gravity in time. the campground is completely full, mostly with a huge group of junior-to-senior high school students from Sandia Prep. at each campsite there are three tents, two seniors, and six younger students, a food cooler, stove, tarp, and other campsite stuff. the older students organize the cooking and such. there must be 150 kids, teachers, and parents total. they have a raucous Talent Show this evening. (I am so far behind on audio processing, no clue when some choice samples might show up here…)

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.

Moore knows rivers, wet places, how to feel, how to transliterate feelings, and how to see, but I’m not in consonance with her characterization of the desert. drawing emotion onto that landscapes seems to place the human over that which is not known as though it was known. something like the common personification of animals and the position of pets in the social system. the desert is a transform mapping of the Void. why personify that? seems corrupt to add human stuff(ing) onto it.

Sometimes, in a desert landscape, a landscape without consciousness, emptier of intellect than any other landscape I have ever seen, I think I can feel emotion lying like heat on the surface of the sand and seeping into the cracks between boulders. There is joy in the wind that blows through the spines of the saguaro, and fear in bare rocks. Anger sits waiting under stones. Exhilaration pools in the low places, the dry river beds, the cracked arroyos, and is sucked by low pressure ridges up into storm clouds that blow east toward the Alamo Canyon — Kathleen Dean Moore, Riverwalking

sleep dissolves along with the darkness. full moon is covered with high clouds most of the night. but morning brings full sun breaking over the eastern horizon. in the bed of the truck, it finally finds my eyelids. and brings first a reddening haze, then, with squinted opening, shafts of eyelash-broken brilliance. the five percent humidity has scraped the throat and nose raw. water is the first thing: imbibio. reaching up to unlatch the rear gate which slams open with a thud and lets in the sound and sun of morning desert. impact on body by place is subtle and brutally immediate at the same time. already leaving this particular place, only four days. leaving precisely when there is that draw, that pull to go deeper, longer, to simply become there or at least to completely resonate to its frequency. resonate to rattlers, springs, green stone, slickensides, smaller and larger bursts of psychedelic colors every few centimeters, the dead cow, the lone cottonwood, the humming, the air, the water, the Light; thoughts of other places, other people, and other lives bring mostly a deepening melancholy and turbid state to clear thinking. ants. mosquitoes. snakes, thistles. what did I kill by walking, by being there? there are indeed thousands of tiny flowers scattered on the ground everywhere. the cattle have already destroyed the vast majority of the cryptobiotic soil spanning between the other, larger vegetation. they represent the most damaging influence on the desert environment. specifically they cause the widespread compression of the upper surface which cryptobiotic soil cannot recover from in any short-term way. so, every step taken… life destroys to create. only problem now is the plague species, humans, and how the system will deal with them.

long day with a 12-mile round-trip trek into Sycamore Spring. could not have made the drive in with anything less than a Mercedes Unimog, a Hummer would have been too wide. SUVs don’t have tires with enough bite. so, two-foot-drive it is. better that way. though tiring even when the air temperature is modest. sun was not.

there are cattle being grazed on the BLM land that surrounds the wilderness, and technically they are not supposed to be near the spring or in the wilderness area at all, though I find one gate completely down, and cow shit in some stages of decomposition all to frequently. cattle cause tremendous shifts in the landscape. although it would be hard to tell exactly how or what aside from the obvious disturbances of the soil from the cloven hooves, and the dessicated pies. they re-distribute large quantities of grass and other seeds through the grazing and shitting process.

a frequent thought exercise while making these long walks is to imagine the landscape manifesting as a time-lapse film rewinding back to pre-settlement, and pre-human times. this also purges the frequent song loops that arise while walking — some inane Abba riff will get stuck in head, god knows how (or maybe god places this curse of cultural meme-play on solitary human stragglers). the loop will keep time with the walking pace.

the moment I step off the jeep track and enter the wilderness area beyond the slender fiberglass demarcation signs, up a wash, the energy of the place shifts. walking along another much older jeep trail that has been unused for years one sees the damage as well as the natural regeneration process overtaking the road, destroying it eventually. once the surface is defaced by a vehicle it rapidly erodes with the sparse but often violent rains. sections of the trail now are reduced to a single track or narrow gullies making it easier to bush-whack.

a mile or so down the track is Sycamore Spring, near the head of Peoples Canyon. it is bursting in its place, in this time. at the mouth of a narrowing deep canyon: upstream the dry wash has a trickle of life for at least 200 yards up from the actual spring, a trickle moving across a white bed of welded tuff. shallow pools of tepid and greasy water buzzing with flies, hornets, bees. the spring itself is surrounded by huge sycamores about to leaf out, some substantial cottonwoods, jumbles of downed wood, deep dried leaves, juniper, myrtle, mountain mahogany, segueing within 50 feet on either side back to hard-core desert like all the surrounding space for at least 20 miles to the east and 300 miles to the west, 500 to the south and north at least. saguaro, cholla, teddy bear, barrel, beavertail, mesquite, ocotillo interspersed with short grasses and flowers. the transition is stark and stunning. I am greeted by a pair of Peregrine Falcons who, for a few moments make my presence welcome, but only as an interloper. one sits high in a sycamore screeching occasionally, the other circling on the thermals, they eventually glide down stream to the deeper canyon. there are several deep pools under the trees covered with a yellow skim of pollen, numerous frogs and tadpoles are in the water. this is a wild place.

Bodenlos and Heaven. and the ascent of be-ing as the ground turns to vapor and dissipates beneath the standing feet. how will these thoughts images intertwine? the German, rolling off tongue, with a dropping and slowing lilt. the English, heavy, gravitational in its religious orbit.

walking out of the building where people work at maintaining a certain form beyond hypostasis, Venus is low on the horizon in the irradiated semi-darkness. the semi- arising through the human re-concentration of energies. Licht. Light. Life. das Leben. I look upwards, taking care to stop walking. is this, what I see, is this heaven? it is called the collective signifier: the heavens. what is there to see but the anisotropy of matter revealing its presence? we are coalesced ejecta of novae. Ich fühle mich wie im siebten Himmel. or is it in us? the Empyrean, lifting us, vapors, to the brightness that fills the sky in the days, at the same time as burning in our chests.

and that, though known, is not brought into the path, the way. in ascendant modes, the heart intuits direction.

The foreigner (and foreign) is the one who acknowledges his own being-in-the-world that surrounds him. Thus, he gives sense to the world, and in a certain way he dominates the world. But he dominates it tragically: he does not integrate into the world. The cedar tree is foreign in my park. I am foreign in France. Humankind is foreign in the world. — Vilém Flusser

in deep cold, and emptiness. trees aching. even the Lightest breeze cuts through all layers. a long wander, trekking some mule deer and finding some big cat scat. until feet are too cold to get around. didn’t have a chance to get any firewood on the way through the National Forest, and a fire would hardly help unless large.

it’s so cold in the evening that the electric wires running to the water pump house are buzzing and cracking, even the wooden telephone pole is vibrating and humming. snow underfoot gets that high-pitched crunching whine when walked through. while mind-thoughts drift, reflected off the wide and formative landscape. what to make of all these crossings of path with Others. as time slips. platitudes slip also.

last night it was so cold that almost all my water including the 5 gallon tank froze solid, so, I ended up having to boil a little, pour that into one of the frozen bottles, let it defrost some, boil that, and continue. tonight I boil a liter and pour it into a bottle and put the bottle in the sleeping bag. eventually pushing it down to my feet to stay the night. good idea. much warmer feet. despite some heavy wind and snow. and a fresh liter of warmish water for breakfast.

days spin into the weeks. and time begins to come to an end here already. so, trying to get in touch with folks, Palli, Sara, Magnus, and others. too short. and pathways too long. and there is no time to catch everyone. made it to a big opening at Kling og Bang with some former students and saw a whole slew more from the period of time I taught at the Art Academy between 1990-96. very nice to talk to some of them after this long gap. many are still active.

three years since that crippling accident. still walking, still talking, but still realizing that at any moment it could all stop. happy every morning that I can get up and make some tea whilst listening to construction noises in the neighborhood.

gusts and streamers of corn snow bounce past the windowsill, bringing the imagined shivering anticipation of heading out to shop for groceries. finally finished with the tin of Turkish Tomurcuk Earl Grey tea. it was good, but a disappointment compared to the long-leaf Ceylonese also available at the Turkish supermarket around the corner from Mindaugas’ place. I bought the tin because is was smaller than the huge kilo boxes of long-leaf. can’t decide now whether to pick up a small quantity of finer tea, or what. last month I picked up a stainless steel tea brewer that holds probably three or four regular cups of water. I’ve been brewing a full container each morning for the pre-noon writing session, drinking by the sip the whole time practically, tea with whole milk. necessary practice just to keep hands warm. otherwise I have to wear half-gloves — the relative lack of finger motion (am I not writing enough?) chills the hands. so, it is an integral part of the writing process that seems to be hapapening here. whether or not it is successful, I cannot say until I spin the text out into the wider spaces of network. that’s about to happen as I am working on the conclusions while refining the precursor parts of the overall text.

and in the time I write this, blue sky arrives. squall weather like in Iceland. ripping through. and vanishing without a trace.

I head out for a trip to the grocery. it is cold, but the trip down is with the wind, and I travel between squalls. I’m in a quandary over which tea to get now. bags are three times the cost of bulk, but they have only large 250 gram bags of bulk, so the total price is steep. and also, since I again focus on Earl Grey, though I wouldn’t mind a custom mix with some Lapsang Souchong or Russian, the bergamot in the Earl Grey is very volatile, so a large bag will lose its flavor unless it is used quickly. hmmm. but the price point drives me these days on as tight a budget that I am. so, big bag of Earl Grey. so it goes. looking forward to the first cup after the end of the Turkish stuff.

yesterday, a touristic walk around the Reichstag and Tiergarten area with M-H. clearly a major holiday, most shops closed except for cafes. and hundreds of people out walking despite the chilly weather. the line was too long to go up into the dome, so we wandered down to the HKW to take in Song Dong’s installation, then back to the Holocaust Memorial via the Brandenberg Gate (past the guy dressed in full buckskins and a faux-Sioux war bonnet playing some kind of generic indigenous flute music with a back-up sound system and generator. just too wierd for me. the Euro-obsession with an imagined and imaginary cowboy-and-indian culture in the mythological West of Hollywood is mostly over the top and with no connection to reality.)

I find myself frequently (at least in mind) making the comparison between Washington, D.C., and Berlin. as Imperial centers (in different phases of dominance).

busy day, at home online all the time — a performance to check out with Helen Varley Jamieson as hosted by Annie Abrahams’ Breaking Solitude project. along with some stream testing with the backyard radio people for the moving forests event later this week (part of Transmediale). meeting Loki for the first time in awhile for a decent conversation. and otherwise heavy multi-tasking that characterizes a day like this — sending out to local nodes my new contact info here in Berlin, trying to figure out when to see people where, and on and on. a brief foray out, taking the long way to another grocery store, walking in increasingly long circles to check out the neighborhood. haven’t found the organic food store yet. a bakery, but no organic grocers. no Turkish shops either. this is definitely different than other neighborhoods that I’ve experienced in Berlin — it is in the former East (ever-lingering eau-de-coal-fired-furnaces in the air) — although many of the apartment blocks have been re-furbished, there is a different vibe. hope to more specifically explore that in the next weeks.

I read with interest this reaction from Malawi from Martin Lucas on the recent iDC list discussion about Nicolas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. So I asked Martin if I could permanently host the text on neoscenes:

I have been reading with interest the discussion of the ‘hundred-dollar laptop’ and the One Laptop per Child initiative as I sit in Malawi, a small landlocked Southern African nation lodged between Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. According to Wikipedia, the OLPC effort has its philosophical base in the idea that children with laptops will be able to do a certain kind of thinking that isn’t possible without the computer – exploring certain areas – particularly in math and science where computer access offers a qualitatively superior learning experience. Making such machines available at low prices should allow developing countries to bridge the ‘digital divide’, and leapfrog learning. Countries that have signed on include Uruguay. India has given a definite no. Either way, the OLPC initiative is an aspect of ‘development’ even ‘IT for Development.’ How does the initiative square with the reality of a small African nation? … more

a few more entries. done with the 2007 travelog except for some more sonic remix additions when I get the chance. and some image additions. retrospective work should continue, but what does it mean when the ROI is null.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. — Claude Shannon

no problems here. except for three dead chickens, four by the end of the day. a raccoon open the sliding trap door to the chicken coop and spends the night killing chickens for sport and biting the wood frame trying to get back out. I come in in the morning and the first thing I see is one chicken come walking out with the comb of another in its beak, faugh! I walk in, open the outside door, shoo the chickens out and fail to see the raccoon until I notice a large ball of fur in a dark roost. I immediately retreat and grab a hoe, not knowing what’s up. I prod and poke until the big fat guy moves, but as there is only one way out, he ends up climbing up to the eves of the coop and stays. I close things up and again retreat to figure out what to do. bag one corpse, and then there is a third chicken with half it’s neck eaten through. the other birds are pecking at it in the run, so I isolate it, and shoo the rest out into the yard. long story cut short, the raccoon finally leaves before the ‘wildlife specialist,’ Bill, arrives. no charge, and plenty of advice (like — raccoons can pretty much open any normal latches and doors!). later in the afternoon, Juniper, one of the dachshunds, who in the morning got a bit of chicken blood taste, apparently kills yet another bird, a rooster no less. sheesh! house-sitting carnage.

Zorka, from way back in the Muthesius times and IFKIK, comes by for brunch.

finally meeting the RAUM crew: Karsten, Matze, Jork, and some others. dinner, some openings, and a party at the Humboldt University. hard to imagine being there after walking through that neighborhood before the wall came down — the party was around the corner from the Pergammon Museum. Berlin. spread out. not so densely populated. 1.5 million people shy of it’s pre-WWII population. rents are low, but everybody complains about a lack of jobs, funding, and money in general.

exhibition by Diana Moro — who says about her paintings: as we move towards a new world order — spread your love like a fever and before that, another opening — pixel paintings by Enda O’Donoghue at Gallery Hunchentoot, not particularly interesting.

a skewed palette, perhaps with the idea to match interior design colors. galleries and art events fight for an audience not for the reason of lack of audience, but for the plethora of events and openings. too much going on and not enough people to actually be the audience.

and this

the second anniversary of the accident. while doing yoga, the body muses on the possibility that the technological solution to the shattered spine will fail, catastrophically, one day when in the Warrior One Pose. rendering the body in two halves. one which does not function, and one that might.

There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveler. Therefore wander! — Aitareya Brahman

so, movement beckons, re-reading Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, and recalling the little snippets of antipodal behavior that resonate. going walkabout, as the Aboriginals do, seems to be a highly developed form of psycho-geography with a substantial spiritual element fused into the embodied core.

but two years later, I am calmly ecstatic when I am able to do a six hour bush-whack in a landscape where I recognize most of the elemental features as well as the more universal vibe of the place. to do the same in an unknown place would cause a bit of stress, but with an equal dose of thrill. to see the unknown world, absorb the sounds, colors, the people, the life. what more can one ask in this incarnation?

deep in the shadow of the towering sandstone cliffs, in the dark fracture zone, Pool Creek breathes life into the heat of the mid-summer day.

the Solstice, in Echo Park. what more to ask?

walking upstream in Pool Creek Canyon above the abandoned ranch. cross one branch of that major fault, and there the creek is, totally spring fed, gushing from a sand bank in the center line of that huge fault. continue up the canyon in the dry wash. find a cave with a crude lean-to fashioned in it. hung with clothes, boots, and other items. old, very old. at least 50 years, perhaps 75. on the wall are a couple rock paintings. the clothes are working ranch clothes, the rock paintings appear to be authentic. I do not disturb anything, but am very conscious that my boots are making footprints in the sand floor. continuing up the arroyo, the canyon is defined by subtle and massive structural essences of the rock. on the uplifted side of the fault, the underlying limestone shows in the wash. the down-thrown side is at least 1000 feet lower. dramatic geology, good location for field mapping exercises.

sense a mountain lion at one point, the sage is often taller than my head, so, walking through deep brush, scrambling over rockfalls, peering into the numerous caves formed in the eroded sandstone. shooting many images. this is one of the best walks taken in the area. with plenty of cool places to stop, even in the vibrating mid-day zenith of the Solstice sun — overhangs, caves, some Douglas Fir trees, large old junipers, and areas of over-hung canyon wall, rising a few hundred feet above. the absolute depth is about 800-1000 feet, perhaps a bit more. I do not go as far as I can, but stop for 30 minutes to remove fox-tail burrs from pants, socks, and boot liners, where they are beginning to drill into my skin.

Loki does not accompany me.

we later swim/wade upstream to the Green/Yampa confluence and explore. the Yampa seems a few weeks yet too strong to cross. the current is strong even in the hip-deep areas, making a perfect speed for swimming a hard workout in place. the flow of the Yampa is around 2000 (cubic feet per second, cfs), it was twice that at the beginning of the month (see the USGS water data site). in May it can reach up to 11000 cfs on occasion. the Green is half that, and does not very from around 900 cfs because of the Flaming Gorge Dam. there are a pair of beavers who have found a sheltered cove to hang out in, noshing on aspens up to five inches in diameter which they have cut down and dragged to the river, leaving strange markings in the sand whilst doing so.

the previous day, coming down from the Uinta Mountains, we pass the monstrous phosphate mine which has modified a significant chunk of the south side of the Uintas. I continue work on the Domination of Landscape series to be uploaded later. everywhere in the west is plenty of material for this project. unfortunately.

A fine afternoon hike in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area with a small group of folks that Howard assembled. Fantastic weather, occasional views of the City shimmering south across the Bay, groves of (relatively) small second-growth coastal redwoods, some huge manzanitas (this is their optimal zone) and good conversation.

raining on arrival, raining on departure, missed a huge downpour walking to the hotel where I caught the airport shuttle. Amurikan couple on board, from Portland, returning home after a couple months in Oz, revisiting places where they went as elementary teaching recruits in rural Australia in the early 1970′s.

in the airport. Dr. Phil playing on the plasma monitors. a cleaning lady is hypnotized, looking up into the susserating brightness. between the shopping possibilities, the food options, the sonic and atmospheric environment, and the general ambiance, this place would be as close to hell as one would want to be. the consuming heaven of the first world. active shopping mitigates the alienation. passive looking plunges even the most hardcore resister into a receiver. cracks open an interstitial space by invading the social self and occupying that self, pushing aside any non-social responses. and if that isn’t enough, the high-security regime underlines every possible line of action.

and then onto the plane. no comfort, though there is an empty seat in the row. bulkhead. exhausted. night comes unexpectedly quick. gaining a day. arriving four hours earlier than I depart. listening to Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451. in the air near the Hawaiian Islands. so it goes. I had forgotten that he used this phrase whenever he mentions an individual’s demise.

several projects/groups come up on the radar this week — Woytek sends an announcement about his locating Helsinki blog designed to host psychogeographical activities within the city of Helsinki. Annu sends a note from her residency in Japan about her personal pages which do include some of her image-based art projects. also, the discos invisibles collective in Tijuana, who were part of the remote presence event in Helsinki.

04 2007′, ’23 10927

meet Sophea, from ‘podes to antipodes. three continents in less than a year. shaming our carbon footprints and our inst- & dis-abilities.

earlier wandering around the Opera. and making a 15-minute piece skyline of Sydney along with some sonic work. that should end up being quite good — catching the ambient reflective sonic environment and the microscopic skyline with the video cam zoom on full. slowly and unstably tracing the man-made and natural intersection. earth and sky (back to the infinite half-spaces).

over to Randwick, do the coast walk to Bronte, recording some lawn bowling, eating fish&chips. once a decade enough on that score — last time was in London visiting Joanna in 1996. sitting in the park that adjoins Bronte Beach, twiLight falling, the atmosphere cool, reduced, mellow. somebody playing Bob Marley on a decent sound system, a rasta picnic at the beach. hmmm, pretty nice lifestyle.

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying — Samuel Beckett in Molloy