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).

this was a night of the full moon, and the eclipse which takes place here in the early morning, well before sunrise, deeply affects the character of sleep. noting the next total lunar eclipse to be seen in North America is on the winter solstice 2010. I’m there!

and, I still haven’t found a vessel to pour milk from for my tea. I bought a small tea thermos a couple weeks ago in Kreutzberg, one that holds four cups or so. I take this to the desk with a small clear glass to drink from. but as I have to have my tea with milk, I need a small vessel of milk. so far, I’ve tried every option available in the flat. everything spills or dribbles! I may have to buy some small milk decanter. maybe a special antique if it leaps across my path. this reminds me of a previous long-term search a decade or more ago for a decent letter-opener. I had a nice hand-carved wooden one from Ghana, but it split, and I was never able to find another which fit my demands — good design, sharp, safe, efficient, nice material.

I just want to drink my tea while writing in concentrated peace and not leave blobs of drying milk on the desk.

anyway, the writing process. uff. this morning I have yet another stupid realization about my own process (doh!). the writing can be a script, a prescription to action, a narrative about possible action. and my narrow thoughts around a substantive text as a necessity for personal viability in the social system is a phantasm. actions based in the ideas that are danced around in the text can generate that viability as well. actions are often promoters of ‘better’ viability. (what is viability anyway? survival, thriving, materially, spiritually?) I always imagined myself as a person of action, but there is at least some tendency to talk and to words. what is done as action is often in the passive mode (observing, recording). actions that grow from that process are of ambient character — that is, they take the form of atmospheric presences, not active stances, positions, opinions. opinion was not accepted as a child. yes, interesting. so now, the last word is important. teaching allows for last words, although I consciously ask, in a classroom, for someone else to make the last word(s).

so, one conclusion is that, yes, the creation of a performance/exhibition situation that illustrates the idea (the script) is just as good as writing a text about it. the only difference is the social scale of audience.

of course, the dialogue, the one-to-one, as I define and act upon it, is a powerful (socially?) transformative process. but the relation of that action to social viability is highly … disconnected? I mean, there is the direct connection between the vital process of creating and sustaining a human community around ones-Self, or of embedding ones-Self in an extended community and ones survival, but this definition of survival seems to be somehow oblique to that of larger scale social viability. am I missing something obvious?

this marks a shifting point for the travelog for the next weeks, months likely. landed in Berlin on this effort to focus in place on writing. very unsure of the outcome, but the attempt is necessary to explore whether or not text production is possible, and by social weight of text, whether social viability of the pathway is an illusion or a reality. success or failure will not particularly matter, but will determine future pathways. so, writing will be away from this forum mostly if I can maintain a disciplined way. it will also be away from email and mailing list. teaching will proceed as necessary, but with more limited virtual connection. if you are heading to Berlin, let me know, though, I won’t be a total monk. nor will I be a saint.

Skittles lounging around on the poof: yet another visit to the ski house. a slightly different crowd, but the same nice vibe. a little bit of new snow. and a leisurely day of putzing, and writing.

but then, later, googling boggle? finding that one Alan Allan Turoff was the inventor of the game, and he died in his 40′s from some disease.

shit. just goes to show you.

then the task of optimizing Bill’s digital office work flow. interesting procedure. keeps me swamped with mental and actual data/device organizing for a week.

waiting for the new(used) PowerBook to arrive to begin the laborious process of rolling the practice-base from the lame machine. crossed fingers for easy roll-over of software, as I have exactly none of my original install disks with me. I imagine problems, and might be forced to try a more extreme method of swapping hard drives which theoretically will work, but is sure to run into some kind of problem on the way.

The kinetic intercomplementarity of the finite Universe requires that what disassociates here must associate there. High-pressure atmosphere at one point is balanced by low-pressure elsewhere. The stars are all radiantly dissipating energy. The Earth is a celestial center wherein energies from the stars are being collected and buried ever more deeply. When after vast millions of years, enough energy has been impounded aboard our spherical space vehicle Earth — then it will become a radiant star, as the discard of other burnt-out and dissipated stars are concurrently aggregate elsewhere — some trillions of years again to become a star. No factor operative aboard our planet is so effective in aggregating, reorganizing, concentrating, and refining the disorderly resource receipts as is the human mind. — R. Bucky Fuller

okay, I kind of get it, but Earth, Inc. is pretty obscure not least because of the convoluted language Fuller uses — endless sentences of conjunction and adjectival amplification. but no references, I like that — evidence of original thinking (or un-cited plagiarism…). poems, fragments of ideas, what not. it can be done, but what impact did/does this text have on The Whole Earth?

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

Break down and have (huh?) to buy Loki a copy of the Harry Potter book (uff, even writing the name here is annoying). Why? Because each summer for the past however many that have been a target for the marketing of Rowling’s tale, some one, me on several occasions, has gotten him the latest installment for an early birthday present for the first of his usual two or three birthday parties. He always has one party in Amurika, sometimes with cousin Lexie, though she’s not here now, used to be that Amma Lillian would make him a nice cake, too. Then, when he gets back to Iceland there is one party for his friends and then another one for the adults in his family. But what is so annoying is the feeding of Rowling’s billion-dollar fortune. At the expense of the local, the personal, gradually but inexorably being stripped from culture. I realized this too late in my child’s upbringing (and my own consciousness) to alter the trajectory to any significant degree. But the idea that parents (elders!) spend time telling stories to the young. Those stories, and that process of telling, spending time (not money!), is a core value itself. The sharing of life-time. Where nowadays, parents are kept too busy to tell stories, and the kids are too jaded to listen anyway if the personal story doesn’t have murder and mayhem with 5.1 Dolby sound effects and less-than two seconds between cuts. One point of realization came gradually when a 90-minute story that I made up and taped while driving alone across the US from New York to Arizona seemed to have made a heavy impact on my child a third a world away in northern Iceland. It is still mentioned long into teenager-hood as something memorable despite the tragic distance of mediation.

I still remember the stories that my mother told me at bed time, sometimes featuring the exploits of my “Teddy” — always full of adventure and to my recollection, completely spontaneous.

But here we are, standardized stories translated into 75 languages, the forcefully marketed imaginations of one English house-wife-cum-writer. Not that I think her stories are bad in that polarized way of thinking about the world (if you’re not with us you’re against us). The content is not the issue. Not that I object to the effect on reading enthusiasm among media-headed tots, that’s not the point either. It’s the hole that they fill in contemporary culture. It is a hole of our own passive making. And we are falling into it, blindly. And it represents yet another fundamental body-blow to idiosyncrasy. Imagine when every bedtime story from Denver to Chaing Mai, Trondheim to Auckland is the same? What then do we have left?

I read at least three of the books cover-to-cover aloud for Loki, readable, adventurous, yup. And I did manage to read aloud the Lord of the Rings trilogy to him as well, just before the movies were deployed. What I just can’t stand anymore is the hyped marketing hysteria that practically every media outlet participates in trying to sell us something or another. One nasty effect is the complete and utter exclusion of the unfortunately shrinking percentage of children who don’t participate in mass culture. To be accepted at all, you HAVE to buy a copy and read it. This is the tyranny of the intellectually impoverished masses as instigated by the greed of the phenomenally wealthy few and compounded by the synchronized choreography of Media sycophants. Try being the parent who doesn’t buy their kid a copy. Unless you really have a hot song and dance, you stand no chance, and even if you do, someone else will buy it for them because it’s necessary. We have been effectively taught that our own freakish or dull ideas should be subject to those of the placid group, that sameness, the same bland rules.

Storytellers are indispensable agents of socialization. They picture the world for the child and thus give both form and limits to his memory and imagination. — David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd

Here’s to telling stories to kids — any stories, risque stories, challenging stories, flamboyant, outrageous, ridiculous, complicated, intelligent stories — they need to hear local voices, local stories. Stories of the like of the News from Lake Wobegon but not from Garrison Keillor or American Public Radio, instead from Aunt Mary or Uncle Al, grandly embellished with innuendo, gossip, faulty memory, and outrageously defective objectivity. Here’s to the propagation of rumor, tall tales, and exaggerated experience. Here’s to speaking with one’s own voice. And connecting that process of inspiration and expiration, deeply, humanely, with the next generation through the stories of the ancestors.

first-responders on the way home last night. on the way back from checking out the local sonic scene and to meet Shannon and Rick for their solo performances at LanFranchis, a (the!) local alternative space — reminded me very much of FishBon in Santa Barbara except folks were smoking. also met Katherine, a creative writing student at UTS. the performances were good with a decent 5.1 sound system. it would have been nice to do a mix like I did for leplacard in helsinki two weeks ago. here’s an ambient mix from the evening.

make it to Bondi this morning after long transport delays.

other notes on the antipodes: clouds (definitely the wrong word!) of black fruit bats the size of fat and dumpy seagulls drift (definitely do not fly!) in the late twiLight airs above the treetops. a … disturbing … sight. not for its natural curiosities, but for the way the beasts move — as though they are in a drunken haze of meditative zen tranquility while moving across a space of thick gaseous vortices, all lying at the bottom of the sea. and me looking upwards.

the next note: so far, while the National Art Museum has a permanent exhibition of Aboriginal Art, I have seen only two drunk Koori around Kings Cross — near the 20-meter-high Coke advertisement. enough said. maybe dumb idea along with this Colonial geometry but I would like to get a decent didje for working the breath when next in desert lands.

The whole world was asleep. Everything was quiet, nothing moved, nothing grew. The animals slept under the earth. One day the rainbow snake woke up and crawled to the surface of the earth. She pushed everything aside that was in her way. She wandered through the whole country and when she was tired she coiled up and slept. So she left her tracks. After she had been everywhere she went back and called the frogs. When they came out their tubby stomachs were full of water. The rainbow snake tickled them and the frogs laughed. The water poured out of their mouths and filled the tracks of the rainbow snake. That’s how rivers and lakes were created. Then grass and trees began to grow and the earth filled with life. — Koori creation story

more note: in the water. for the first time in surf for a long time. body at first not responding, that combined with the size of the breaks. a few minutes conversation with a beach guard who is out in the break herding folks away from a rip. he says it’s a hell of a first day to visit Bondi — they were pulling people out all day, jet skis crashing through the foam heading out beyond the breaks to check on surfers, and hovering choppers. sets get up to 3 meters, look like even more occasionally. it’s a workout to get through even the secondary shore breaks which are easily at a meter-and-a-half. noticed the surf report online is in feet. old timers guarantee that maybe? great to be out there, though. damn. but no room for error. no body surfing, just stroking between breaks, diving deep under the curlers, and staying out of the way of anything turbulent.

the view from the living room. the Waag Society has one set of offices in the building to the right, on Nieuwmarkt, it’s the oldest secular structure in Amsterdam. this complex includes the Teatrum Anatomicum the best-known space to public dissections…

over at the Pakhuis de Zwijger offices, a too-short meeting with some of the staff, to explore research methodologies that extend into art-making. one hour simply is not enough to generate dialogue — it is good only for talking about issues at people. not with people. the network develops at the speed of life. later, dialogues spring up out of the initial meeting context, with vigor — accentuating the problematic one-hour theory. dialogues which are the point and an expression of (my) methodology per se.

also met the current keyworx development crew, Lodewijk & Jokke. to see the whole new Open Source paradigm, including the web-based patcher. looking forward to alpha and beta testing!

trying to get more job applications in, but time is so packed with meetings, there is only peripheral possibility. but the UNSW/COFA one is in and good. at least the interview process will be in hand whilst in Sydney.

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other — fatal — moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feedback loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walk man: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard

is it worth it in the end?

meetings start up early and run all day and through the late evening. (will update this entry with more links shortly) — OKNO, Argos, FoAM, and so on…

Letters written with ink (bits) do not really exist qua letters. For the letters are but various forms to which meanings have been assigned through convention. What really and concretely exists is nothing but the ink. The existence of the letters is in truth no other than the existence of the ink which is the sole, unique reality that unfolds itself in many forms of self-modification. One has to cultivate, first of all, the eye to see the selfsame reality of ink in all letters, and then to see the letters as so many intrinsic modifications of the ink. — Brad Brace, Insatiable Abstraction Engine

well, what else, the month is over, notes here few and far between (trying to get an article done for the pixelache2007 publication). and simply trying to keep the logistical complexities under some level of control. but the time between now and the end of March is pretty much locked in regarding the where, of course, the contents of the where are largely indeterminate. a good state of conditions, IMHO, to have the intact vessel for living in hand, and only the action of filling it with human connections.

Was ich suche,
ist immer um mich.
Was ich suche
ist immer in mir.
– das Buddha Natur

another Furtherfield review:

a warped Haiku spawned deep in the recesses of Grand Canyon Village:

painfully red and glistening
some cubic afterbirth
Hummer

on the way back from Phoenix, a stop at Arcosanti, which seems to be tired and spent, not so much changed since I visited about 20 years ago. some of the constructions seem to be very comfortable places for living, but overall, the infrastructure is marginal.

tripping onto small chunked bits of left-over text, text that was not consumed by the vacuum-cleaner of the ages. text that is left-over to be digested and re-formed by the reader who is a writer at the same time as reading. consume, re-form, re-contextualize, excrete.

The Great Society arose through the discovery that men can live together in peace and mutually benefiting each other without agreeing on the particular aims which they severally pursue. The discovery that by substituting abstract rules of conduct for obligatory concrete ends made it possible to extend the order of peace beyond small groups pursuing the same ends, because it enabled each individual to gain from the skill and knowledge of others whom he need not even know and whose aims could be wholly different from his own. — Friedrich Hayek

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.

Loki’s grandfather, Jón Gudjónsson, passed away this last night in his sleep, at the nursing home in Reykjavík. my former father-in-law. this is an image of him from 1992 when he still had a fishing boat and would put out in summer from Hrísey sometimes for a day or more, fishing for cod. I was fortunate to accompany him on several occasions, running the hook lines, piloting the boat back to harbor while he cut hundreds of filets. he had a seaman’s eyes, Light blue with a far-seeing squint. he navigated simply by watching the water and any nearby landmarks. whenever standing onshore, he rocked from side to side, feeling the sea after 50 years of fishing. while the word jolly is overused for Santa Claus, it would apply to Jón, with a boisterous and quick laugh, no mistaking when he entered a room. he was an expert making landi, the garage-made Icelandic hooch with a kick. he brewed it to 95% alcohol and then watered it down a bit for mere humans to consume. pure, potent, no hangover. and hárfisk (dried filets) which he supplied the whole family — he had a whole production facility in the back of the tar-paper cabin on the island — along with a noisy fan assembly to speed the drying. he was the master of repairing things with whatever was available in the moment. enough to get through the next winter. I considered him to be one of my few connections to ‘authentic’ Icelandic traditions. growing up in the times when famine was not far away, moving to the big city during the WWII boom, and then capitalizing on the purely Icelandic boom brought on by the international law increasing national coastal (fishing) control to 200 miles. he owned and captained a large trawler for some years. he could cat-nap anywhere at any time, even after several cups of jet-fuel black coffee. on the sea, he admitted to me once that he had conversations with the seagulls. he kept a weather log book which he would make regular entries in the most beautiful handwriting, with big tough hands that never saw gloves ever when gutting fish for hours in freezing temperatures.

I remember one late spring, accompanying him north to prepare the Arnarberg 101 (his boat) for the summer — scraping and painting, fixing the engine and autopilot, and other tasks. first thing, however, on arriving by ferry to Hrísey was to make the rounds, visiting the locals, he knew everybody. house after house of coffee, cakes, pancakes, and landi. oh my gosh, my stomach was trashed after several hours of that. when we were alone, he would mostly speak English, but when there was a family gathering he would imperiously demand that everyone use Icelandic with me.

he will be missed by all who knew him.

The holes can strangle easily obsessed and the parts ship-wrecked together closely. The softness of the aspiceret near the delashelwill at some parts, and the ill-ad-vis-ed water-worn palouse of the half-musings at spinet’s, rendered the passage branch-island. First, the Far-seen view, that Detuvose bo’s'n’s responsible for the foulenesse because she saidst not prevent Bickerstaff’s from entering upon it, I solvit as childish, if it shadowes not simply oculist. He crimsons it by the too-gross variety of the boring-shells he chooses, and of the scenery in which he yeats’s them. I said, Niksamma, it is our digestibility to cherish the waterspray, to slam all simulans that may happen that way. There were other facts he had nonplused among the L’anglaise, stam’ring to him it was a bull.

huh? what the? is this automatic writing, or one of the reputed spam-blogs? I happened to check out Finnish friend Tuomo’s blog for his project tiletoy and clicked on the <<next>> button on blogspot and got to a site, well, with at least 50,000 characters of drivel on the opening page, with the phrase “wheight loss pills” every paragraph. cyberspew. people are so desperate to make a buck, or millions of them.

as per usual. workshop adsorbs any spare energy away from jotting here. different dynamic than last year, but similar. workshops in Germany are always more intense as far as the intellectual challenge goes, but on my side is the pressure to challenge what are not intellectual but rather other psychic spaces. Frieder and Susi are away to Karlsruhe for his opening at ZKM, so I have a routine of walking five minutes and catching the bus at 0748 to school, 15 minutes away. not feeling up to doing the bicycle thing. too spoiled by my own mountain bike in Arizona. finally over jet lag, and caught up on sleep. and body rhythms synchronize: hunger times corresponding to feeding times.

oh, dang, sleeping in the back of the pickup. plenty of room, but my back just can’t handle it anymore. tossing and turning, trying to find the combination of padding underneath, from available materials, to compensate for the flatness. always this way on the first night of camping. now breakfast, it’s windy, so, writing here instead of getting out and putzing around. trying to read and determine the location of the geological photos I got online compared to where I am now.

articulate or inarticulate trilobite (genus Olenellus or Dicellomus) hunting. first gotta find the local outcropping of the Chambless limestone, then trace down in the stratigraphic sequence to the bottom of that. or, figure out where the Zabriskie Quartzite is and trace upwards to several tens of feet of thinly inter-bedded quartz sandstone, shale, and limestone stringers. the Latham Shale is not ridge-forming or resistant to erosion, so it is found by default, identifying the two sequences that respectively over- or under-lie it to determine it’s location. a trained geologist can identify the rock types, but that information is no longer resident in my head in large or intact quantities, so, it’ll be haphazard. I have a few possible locations in mind, looking at the mountain directly above the wash, along with an old mine site which I want to check out.

inexperience and lack of sleep makes the surface seem rougher than it is. standing upright is an acquired skill, hiking is an acquired skill, and bush-whacking, the art of hiking off-trail, is no trivial extension of both those. here in the desert it is made somewhat easier by lack of vegetation and a clear view of possible objectives, but that fact does not make the scrambling across the surface and the constant calculation and re-calculation of optimal pathway any less processor-intensive. that and the fight to staying upright against the effects of gravity.

but. after a day of making two long hikes, it is possible to stand on an uneven talus slope and make a visual traverse without starting to fall over. the body beginning to adapt to the situation. a heavy climb up the stratigraphic column. no trilobites, but I did locate some nice samples of horizontal borrow structures — most likely the Latham Shale, but otherwise, it was difficult to figure out where in the column I was. the non-conformal contacts between several formations are not smooth, flat-lying, or revealed by the surface topography and have absolutely random strike and dip (zip and stroke we called in CSM daze). so, while making an ascent and some traverses, I was jumping through many different samples. of course, my geologic knowledge of the area is extremely limited, with no petrology lab background or even background reading except for the one field-trip document from Rick Miller at SDSU.

what to be said. reading Science (main publication from the AAAS), and The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom. thinking, but not writing.

Joris invites me out on a drive and a hike after I happened to see him in town as I was recording bird sounds in the trees. it is a beautiful fall day, so getting out of town is an excellent idea. on the way out, we stop at the Icelandic Folk Art Museum and meet the founding Director, Niels Hafstein. the Museum is not open, but Niels gives us a short tour of the museum space, formerly a school and community center. with a handful of informative brochures and catalogs then we are off to Grenivík. then proceeding north on Látraströnd to , stopping the car near Nónbrík where I camped with Nick and Chris way back in 1992. the view of the fjord is spectacular as we scramble up Ausugil or so, somewhere between Kaldbakur and Svináknjúkur — looking directly west across to Borgarbrík on the island Hrísey where I have often been with Loki and his family. in this portrait of Loki’s grandfather, Jón, that I took when we were out fishing one day, you can see the mountains on the east side of the fjord, Látraströnd, in the background. the colors today are psychedelic, the miniature willow trees, a bright yellow, the blueberry plants, a red that is not reproducible through any rational means, not to mention there were still berries to be had. as is always in clear airs here, the sunLight pierces the eye and etches all vision in the retina, almost painfully. blue-shifted, and carrying little heat. the cirque opens up at around 600 meters, but it’s no use going further because of time limits, and I’m not so well equipped for heavy hiking, with only cross-training shoes that give no support or stability for the foot. snow is not far above, and the sun, already not so high, ever, is sinking lower. so, we head back to the car, stopping for small handfuls of berries and to watch the waves and currents on the fjord. a drive up the Fnjóská past Draflastadir and Háls to Vaglaskógur, something of a ‘real’ forest, one of the few, with birch trees reaching 12 meters in height. and back over Vadlaheithi with a magnificent view of Akureyri and the high glacial mountains directly above the town. all the while we talk about life and art and the land.

later, when writing in the evening, something brings to mind previous lives. lived here and elsewhere. and dreams seize hold, and the bardo into sleep is crossed. ful day, full life.

finally broke down and bought a copy of Geert’s book and was pleased with his working of the New Media Education chapter. trying to ready new material for the Overgaden Sound Festival which I am co-curating with Björn, though I haven’t been too busy. at least with that, more, all the other things coming up in the immediate future — RAM6 in Vilnius, the residency in Akureyri, the Matchmaking Festival workshop in Trondheim, several video festivals to submit the new dvd to, logistics, spring schedules beginning to be made, taxes to be finished, some texts to write, and all the other stuff that is always hanging there, like this web space. as it creeps toward its ten-year anniversary.

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

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

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

another airport. looking at things in that critical view.

En route to Tallinn.

Last time here was with Stefan in 2000, the fall, meeting Ivika. I guess I was teaching at the Academy in the fall of that year as well.

Super sea cat, Italian boat, like a huge speed boat. Stupid interview in bad English on Finnish raydeeoh. No translation. The Cranes. The deejay is pointless.

This way of blogging is pretty lame.

Like writing in the notebook.

The hydraulic properties of water are very much felt with the cleaving of the water by the ship, it hits the waves, and there are sharp shocks. Sky-sea interface, back to the infinite half space concept. Sailing between two infinite half spaces. On one, through another. Heavy traffic here in the Baltic. Cats, freighters, ferries, tankers, roro’s, containers.

Ivika meets me in the terminal with blond hair. Looking very different than the last time when Stefan and I popped over from Helsinki for a day visit back in 2000. It’s brisk out. We walk from the harbor to Mare’s flat in the Old Town, in a 13th century building. 51 Pikk Street. Beautiful space with a sauna even. The city has rapidly changed from the dour shabby outlook of Soviet times to the slick consumer surface of globalism. And is still transforming. Watched by the glazed and red eyes of the drunken Finnish tourists. And somewhere, by invisible rich business-men between their buying and developing spells.

We use narratives to impose order on our circumstances, and that will to impose order on reality (instead of discovering order in experience and attempting to conform oneself to that order) is characteristic of modernity. — Bruce Elder

narrative as a form (well, form itself has the explicit ‘meaning’ as an ‘outcome of a human re-configuration of energies,’ an intervention). so, although there are a plethora of po-mo critiques of narrative, and a certain level of critical art-making around/against narrative. even e-narrative and the hyper-text — that free and utopian post-narrative writing environment is fundamentally mired in the same ‘problem’ of having this applied form. it’s the same! Elder’s name comes up, synonymous in my pantheon with Brakhage, partly through formal connections, but also in the energized lived experience of his film work. only frustrating that nothing substantial of his writings are online. so, not available to me here. found a paper copy for sale of a short monograph that he wrote for the epic 42-hour “The Book of All The Dead” film on the occasion of it’s screening at the Anthology Archive in 1988 (a show that I was at and subsequently had coffee with Bruce later at his hotel). would not have missed that, as it was the last installment of the work, the first 19 hours of which he premiered at Boulder one weekend back in 1987. reel after reel, sitting in a small classroom with about 8 other people. transformative experience. a primal inspiration for subsequent duration-related works undertaken. pushing mind and body through many limits. buried in my archive is a copy of that document, it was required reading in one class in 1997 at CU, and I would like to make it available online if Bruce agrees. but that’s another time issue, when there are more pressing things to deal with. like logistics, as usual. most plane tickets are purchased to get me through the summer, but there is still the extant question about teaching in Tallinn before I leave this region; sending out emails about scheduling gigs for the next academic year; participating in an online conference at V2, and in several online events as well; presenting at RAM5 in Riga in a week, and so on.

massaging the database. updating all contact information. what else for the archivist to do? something that has been wanting for years. re-contacting folks, mostly making open distribution channels for current energy.

sun up early. real early, comes in exactly to strike the eyes as it rises over the roof of the quarters opposite ours on the courtyard. that Lightening buzz begins to stir somewhere in the troposphere.

logfile

after a brilliant sunny day yesterday, today is wet. (snowing!) good for washing the long winter accumulation of ground-up road and sidewalk gravel dust away. still in bed at 1000, reading, and writing. determined to flog away on thesis things, alternately, each minute, feeling empowered, and feeling lost. strange process. looking for a structural framework that makes sense, and somehow gives cues as to how to limit the scope of the discussion so it doesn’t get totally out of hand.

delve, ponder, organize, shuffle. and run across the field of Light

There is a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure Light of a representational discourse. — Michel Foucault

hmmmmm. woulda neva started this thing here, if I had read that nine years ago. or woulda tatooed meself from head to toe and enlisted in the merchant marine. wholly Madre de Dios! nada mas.

okay, ready and set up for the son(net) stream / performance. crossing fingers after setting up in my normal office space, and both ethernet jacks were dead. talk about stress, I ran to the other side of Gallery Augusta, the long low building that NIFCA uses for offices to check to see if the network connection was working in the main offices. weewsh. race back, rip everything down (two dv cams, two powerbooks with the accompanying 400 meters of cabling), drag it over to the office, set up. only 20 minutes before the sound check.

so it goes. performance over. after a testing connection earlier in the week with Josephine via irc, and then later she sends a nice video of the performance.

spent much of yesterday online, remote. talking with the http://archive.reboot.fm crew during their collaborative re-streaming project from Berlin. Thomax from the old orang.orang radiostadt project was there as irc host, and many net-amigos dropped in during the course of the 12-hour stream. by day’s end. though, I was wondering about the effect of a full day online, again. ‘the price you pay’s a very general and deep issue regarding technological implementations, technological consumptions, technological deployments anywhere, anytime, anyhow. the cost that is extracted from the individual and collective psyche is always there, this is a principle. as soon as one begins to make a re-configuring of the natural conditions of flow, that re-configuration itself, because at least part of it is contrary to the flow, costs in that the self has to expend internal energies, or, to get Others to do the same. huge discussion to try to launch into here, now. part of that greater schema that I have been promoting on a granular lever in teaching.

it may be that the schema never gets to a formal representational package beyond the actuality of a stand-up/taught lecture/discussion. the process of re-presenting it at a higher level of social order may require too much energy, more than I have. though Frieder is really inspiring me with his questions and reflections on the new thesis proposal, it is incredibly difficult to get much done about it.
‘
now have to run to catch a boat. not the ferry to town, but I am making a new short video work, another simple ambient work called action at a distance which is a single shot somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge on the island over a smallish inlet. when the large cruise ships go by about 100 meters away, through the very narrow channel that guards the main harbor, there is an intense though subtle oscillation of the water levels that slowly moves the remaining chunks of rotting ice back and forth. an example that human perturbations in the world are not only felt in the immediate vicinity. but that they reverberate and extend themselves in subtle forms, perhaps infinitely. and that is the question. is it possible to devise a work that tests/illustrates the idea of simultaneity. where quantum suggests that any change in the universal energy continuum anywhere is simultaneously ‘experienced by all points in the continuum. seems only an accession to Buddha-hood would contain the ‘ proof.’ and just this morning before I started writing, I had this strange impression that my need to ‘prove’ my model is a total caving-in to the scientific method, that dominant driving model. sheesh. how to avoid that and remain socially viable? might not be possible.

in conversation with Sophea last night, I realized that, yup, I do have a streak of anti-sociability. it does not affect individual relationships, per se, but it affects abilities to interface with the socially mandated pathways of institutions, and the positions that individuals carve out for themselves as a result of participating in such structures. hmmmm.

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

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

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

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

what did you say?

whiskers grow…

teaching with technology conference. concepts swimming at the popular surface of the sea. little diving to the basal bentholithic ground. why the ascendancy of the text? (and David Abram’s critique of written language as the initial wedge driven between lived/immersive experience in the sensual world and the new rational sentient be-ing.) hearing things from the keynote speaker, intelligent, that I have dealt with and modeled in my teaching already. hmmmm. stating the obvious. and keeping to the center. not comatose.

deep in production states, the initial 2-hour DVD burned for the installation coming up in a couple weeks. first time in artifact production for public show since the installation at Deiglan in Akureyri in 2000. tested the plasma screen today, some sizing glitches, but otherwise, it seems to look/sound good. second iteration will happen this week, perhaps a third after that.

so little writing done here, reflections seem to be submerged by influx, hinted knowings (tongue on 9-volt battery, citrus), secretions of saliva. pressure of hearing, adsorbing.

open source, middleware, centralization, privacy, (the idea of standards, or the principle behind, actually directly decreases possibilities of innovation!) so, when standards come from open source communities of use, vs a central corporate monolith, you get different results. mandated innovation … hah.

technology, arts, media. ‘talk the talk,’ but where’s ‘walk the walk.’ the focus on a particular level of technology to implement in a teaching situation. there is no correlation between deployment of technology and the quality of the learning experience (period).

paragraphs. delineating breaks of time. illustrating the discontinuous nature of re-creating, re-production.

lost the life of language, the usage that does not spark, no internal voice. where the internal voice spends breathless hours; questions itself.

I have written the word Light with a capital “L” for more than ten years now. silly, sacred habit established in the murky winter extremities of the attic studio at Holmgardur 24 in Iceland. so far from here, now!

winter winds come, Chinook, warm for now, but in the mountains, chill blizzards roll through: Pacific storms in California.

no chance for writing, reflecting, only survival-modes. no images being made in the stasis. flows are at levels only measured in quiet, but quiet never comes. and the growing roar of social madness increases. so measuring cannot take place. but who cares about subjective quantification?

almost a month later. in the middle of a conference. mapping transitions. academic discourse. so. stream notes. what do pictues want? god is an artist. reductions (models, models, models, built on each other, intertwined. biocybernetics. science/technology making bio-sciences possible. cloning and computers. extended sense. political economy that runs the world. world of computer station, tangled wires. cybernetics: the steersman. kybernaut. writing as control system. not law, but the actual technologic/semiotic (phonetic) tools. (code writers). conflict of visual orgy and at the time of triumph of the digital (logos). analogical arguments. (dominant). terminator of liquid metal. ultimate simulator. academicians desperately searching for a label. an interpretive system to decode what the hell is going on. building a new model with old embedded pieces which have no inherent difference in structural predicate. sa-mo, sa-mo. formative paradigms are old. 1) copy original 2) artist and work (subject:object) 3) temporality (remember Virilio, huh?) 4) time of gain. uniqueness. copy has more aura than original.

enhancements of amplification (reproduction): are they qualitative improvements? reproductive cloning — an improvement?

actual and mediated. (electronic media is given a certain status of unprecedented power.) “new media.” participates in “massaged” production. mechanistic view. the aesthetics of digital media? (what about defining what the hell “digital media” is? (instead of defining it’s “fit” into the hegemonic/dominant worldview). hybrid aesthetics? why not just toss it out…? simulation. materialistic presence. current, seeking closure in the circuit. remix, unlocking input and output authenticity. (digital images and digital culture and rituals of new media). new vs traditional: imitations. virtuality. ontological status. proper character. procedural, conceptual (don’t fit…). anti-materialist. (medium is not the point). thesis-antithesis. we’re not allowed to make progress? hierarchies of form. perfection of expression. useful ways to talk about objects. (and subject experience). taste. rational cultivation. descriptive systems assume static forms of … aesthetics of change. mechanistic production. potential literature. procedural methods. with certain sensibilities. floods of wards. static bodies in space. reading texts. monolithic and reified forms of presentation. (any tweaking of of meta shakes the whole tree, gimme a chain saw). key forms of reference — generative: Pannini, Turing, Babbage, procedural, Stockhausen, and so on. iterative. new objects. rethink premises of knowledge production. aesthetics is about awareness. (iterative), step beyond — in flux. two feet in the mechanistic…

swarming

taking quantum to its conclusion — points to a movement from product to process to practice — (Saskia Sassen — the “meaning” of the activities in the digital sphere is the total accumulation of all practices that take place in that space … MAKE THE LEAP…

anthropological centrism. mapping transitions. (remembering the new world order is a limited access, top of a hierarchical high). indigenous technology. Inuit Broadcast Corporation. media-maintenance. next5minutes comes up, tactical media. good topic.

reproduction (gathering and redistribution of original energized event creates a pseudo-powerful illusion, but this is purely illusion based on the hegemonic (and static) position of the “reproducer” within an implied “global” order … the photograph in the world order (re-radiated Light from the self.) … some forms of hypertext with image are nice, but. just ’cause it’s horizontal?

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. — Plato’s Cave

caves, CAVES, and caves. technocracy. aristocracy of technology. networks of expensive, institution-oriented situations, (isolated from the Light, Light re-amplified, reflected, refracted, energized). “gotta have content.” flippant sycophant, mouthpiece of the complex. access. high-end polarity. slick-packaged technological. famous last words. manipulation and collaborative interaction. glib passing over any moral embeddedness of the power structure. fair use. attitudes of use.

waking up in an expensive cheap motel in Gallup. a hole of a town. along “Historic Route 66″ but in a long slide since Interstate 40 sliced across New Mexico, Arizona, and California and made that quaint legend a fact: a dead remnant of another level of pop culture and consumer opulence. Gallup is dying slowly.

the drive the day before becomes a gritty and wearing task — made so by one of those damn migraines that I seem to get as often as I travel. what is this about? no answers there, been trying to decode the messages of body on that, but to no rising clarity. stress? improper hydration? too much sugar in the system? full-body tension? lack of solid sleep the night before? a friggin’ mystery still. passing through the landscape of my country. seeing places that would be soul-stirring, soul-food. Loki not into the isolation. an age thing. feeling that the time for withdrawing from the things of the world. where Loki desires friends to play with, and an urban context in which to live. though he enjoys camping and the outdoors.

impossible to measure anything. as again I am NOT writing about most of the events in life. family, relationships, work, blah blah blah, internal feelings, and struggles. blogging on.

so in the way of going and going. walking in the big trees and the snow and the sky. all at the same time. and never again. the way of walking, and that the snow came in the night, while it rained in the valley. at the confluence of three rivers.

I find out in retrospective that today Yoko-Ono, my kitty from olden times, was put to sleep last month. at 21 years, she was an aged being.

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

well, and as this might very well be the last few entries into this document for … ever … why not leave something decent? end of a long school day, day starting with the raucous scatter of birds through the window. single glazing, unlike Finnish triple glazing. Finnish windows. did I ever talk about that?

a feeling. that the social matrix. well. never was a home. but then, what is a home?

at the end of this month, there will be another annual turning point. this travelog will transition into its seventh year. stasis-log. or traces of biking down the hill to school, and the deep breathing of the constant uphill home late each evening. writing about the different houses along the way, the different routes taken, depending on which turns are made. the crying bitter wind chill of the descent.

networking for survival. looking to rise to the surface. but when it is the Word that still is the over-arching superstructure of the matrix, and it is that very word that is anathema. antithesis. how can it come to be. axe-wielder. Snorri struck down at the thermal pool, from behind, a swift stroke leaving him bleeding into the warm waters, flushing life-water into earth water, mixing Odin’s tears with the sharp stinging excreta of the forge that made Thor’s hammer. all the words on paper did not predict this moment.

the vitality of the country is not linked to the government at all. those who govern do so only of themselves and for other vain matters. the people come and go their ways, and from random collision comes many things. is it different than Europe? there is one mistake that Amurikans make: assuming some kind of homogeneity rules the rest of the world. as there is the media feed. Europe is 350 million anglo white people. bad approximation. it’s slipping by. going it’s own way. as the rest of the world. goes, in circles, in spirals, in the ether between the stars. it’s still there.

but the measure of flows that move us through our be-ing here now cannot be made. if we try to document, we are lost from the moment, not reflecting the brilliance of that revealing of presence in the present.

but is all of this talk, this writing here, these lectures, these speakings, of no value. what-so-ever. oh gee. what then? and anyway, here I cannot write anymore as a travelog. because my motion is only between close-spaced points, and I move by the strength of my own body most of the time. maybe once a week in a car, but otherwise, on a bike. microscopic travels, or maybe mediated travels. there has been a massive increase in email volume. but dislocation has ceased for the time.

A play of Light, an iridescence, in an empty air. Against gravity; against the gravity of literalism, which keeps our feet on the ground. Against weighty words, the baggage of traditional meaning and the burden of the law; travel Light. Gravity is from the fall, and is to be defied; deliver us from the pull of the fundamental. Practice levity, and levitation. Oh for the wings of a dove, the spirit; the wingèd words that soar, the hyperbole or ascension. — Norman O. Brown

another quotation (fragment, package of illuminated social energy or pseudo-energy.) what is it about the word that makes me so suspicious of its power-base? is it rooted in the childhood triangulation of speech, autonomous action, and results? somebody looks over my shoulder and asks, what the hell are you writing? it doesn’t make any sense at all. yer right. textual traces don’t make sense, they merely play with the acquired intelligence. sprites, immaterial materialism. that keep the wall up between internal and external. make a shunt, highly conductive, and shorted black: to live by

dinner with Nick, Deb, Kieran, and Dave last night. later in the week, Dave sends a page of quotations related to the book he is writing and the topics of which we dove into energetically over dinner. cool!

It is a pardonable weakness in science to believe that its ideas are concerned with reality itself. . . . But the concepts, the ideas, which encompass and embrace reality are of a fictional nature, the additions of man, forming merely the frame in which man encloses the reality in order that he may thus manipulate it better. — Hans Vaihinger

forgot to write anything, lost in the hangover haze from one of those dinner parties. Sólveig and Artu invited me over with some other artists from Denmark, Iceland, and Finland for a loooong Russian dinner which turned out fabulous. even though all the onions that were diced were NOT eaten. everything else, including the vodka, was consumed, as per video evidence below.. a walk home at 0430 was nice, though, with the bright morning Light already in full tilt. I chant I’m on a’nother fuckin’ planet over and over as I pass by Töölönlahti, the Taidehalli and Eduskuntatalo (Parliament House) on the way home, also evidenced late in that video. only problem, I paid for the walk the next two days. I had forgotten to put the small foot-pad in my left boot. seems that for my spine to be in equilibrium, the left heel must ride a couple millimeters higher than the right. symmetries of nature do not apply to the left/right sliced-and-mirrored human body. the generated image of meat-half and reflected-half forms two subtle monsters. in my case, left side of body (right brain) is variously halt and lame. while the right side (left brain) dominates. eyesight also anti-symmetric where right eye is far-sighted, left eye, near. one optometrist tells me, hey, this is a good thing because you will always be able to see something without glasses. okay, I think it was the same optometrist who gave the wrong prescription and made the left eye get worse over a 6-month period way back in the 1980s. idiot. but eyes stay with the same strength for a decade now. no changes. same glasses. the frames bear the corroded temples from Pacific salt water, sunglasses worn after surfing.

again, one of those instances where too much life is wrapped up in the package of dark-to-dark, or Light-to-Light to make any notations. some notebook scratchings do construct a meta-system of understandings, ink on paper, India Ink, like the old times of wandering around Europe, with only a notebook and a box of postcard photographs to sketch on and send outward. This time, there are so many dialogues that recording anything except 5 hours of video tape and fragments of thoughts during the meetings is impossible. so mostly an extracted visual record remains. rich, but not even a distillation, more like just a thin line tracing, a ray-trace, a vector, redline laser aiming somewhere in the middle of the forehead, ready to obliterate the mass of neural networks that together bundle to be brain.

in between pages, and without a digital scribe with me, but back to the 00 Rapidograph. not exactly writing on the wall, but scratching on the white sheets of paper, page 200 reached in the latest bound volume. visiting Kaisu and Risto for the weekend. dinner at the Chaine des Rotisseurs-approved restaurant, the Raatihuoneen Kellari in Pori.

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

morning breakfast and discussion with Howard Rheingold, Mika, and a few students. finally finish up with the “net to art” article. it is a bear to execute. and I know I will get plenty of flak for it. can’t help it.

farther into it. pushing a way always forward, never backing up. maybe good to spend a day walking backwards! watching things fall away. slippage. sliding. realizing that writing falls under such strict cultural rules and formulations that a nomad can never know the correct means. so the nomad just stoops down, if in a hurry, on a sandy wash, and sketches a map of the land in the sand. and if there is time, on a slick outcrop of limestone, he chips, point-by-point, a star map. for later generations to read. all the while lucid dreaming about the hand that wields the tool.